Nordic Beowulf

Bo Gräslund is professor emeritus in archaeology at Uppsala University.

Gräslund has offered a substantial body of archaeological evidence and argumentation for his judgment that the Geats of Beowulf are ancient Gotlanders and that the poem’s origin as an “oral history” of this people can be traced to this “large, well-populated island,” which in the Middle Iron Age “enjoyed considerable material wealth, reflecting extensive and independent relations with the Roman Empire and its provinces and with the Gothic and Hunnic regions” (231). The author’s findings are to be taken seriously, though he regrettably skirts or downplays the question of how this oral history might have been transmitted to migrants living closer to Britain in Jutland and northern Germany and why they would havebeen keen to preserve this poetic account of another people’s past when they took so little interest in their own pre-Christian heritage. Tom Shippey addresses this question in his recent book published in the same year, also by Arc Humanities Press: “Beowulf” and the North before the Vikings (2022). Shippey’s thesis is that the poem preserves many authentic memories of life and times in southern Scandinavia from the later fifth to the mid-sixth centuries. [...] Together, these two new studies make an interesting case for the possible historical roots of the fantastic tale of monster-fights that came to be imagined in Beowulf.

• PrefacesChapter 1. IntroductionChapter 2. The Origins of the PoemChapter 3. Some Unproven PremisesChapter 4. Dating of the PoemChapter 5. Archaeological DeliminationChapter 6. Results of Primary Analysis, Step 1Chapter 7. The Name GeatasChapter 8. Other Links to Eastern Sweden Chapter 9. Elements of Non-Christian ThinkingChapter 10. Poetry in ScandinaviaChapter 11. The Oral Structure of the PoemChapter 12. Results of Primary Analysis, Step 2Chapter 13. GotlandChapter 14. HeorotChapter 15. Swedes and GutesChapter 16. The Horsemen around Beowulf’s GraveChapter 17. Some Linguistic DetailsChapter 18. From Scandinavia to EnglandChapter 19. Transmission and Writing Down in EnglandChapter 20. Allegorical RepresentationChapter 21. Beowulf and Guta sagaChapter 22. ChronologyChapter 23. Retrospective SummaryBibliography