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Debates over the role of Christianity in Beowulf have not fully taken into account hagiographic models. Although saints' lives were among the first written materials to flourish in early medieval England, relatively little has been done to examine the influence of hagiography on Beowulf. After considering some of the reasons for the lack of such approaches, this essay examines Beowulf in light of hagiographic conventions and concepts, arguing that the Beowulf-poet invests the traditional warrior identity of the hero Beowuf with conceptions of sanctity found in saints' lives composed by Bede, Felix, and others. In the process, this essay challenges the prevailing "dramatic irony" view of the poem that divorces the religious understanding of the narrator from that of the characters. A thorough analysis reveals that characters and narrator speak a shared theological language and that the religious perspectives of narrator and dramatis personae are indistinguishable.
1. INTRODUCTION
Despite two centuries of scholarship on the topic, there is still no consensus on the role Christianity plays within Beowulf. While religious language pervades the poem, it remains a matter of debate how integral this religious dimension is to the characters and narrative. How is the presumably pagan (or at least secular) warrior ethos of the characters and main action to be reconciled with the presumably Christian outlook of the poet? With the exception of the debate over the dating of Beowwf, the question of the poem's "Christian elements" remains its most intractable interpretative challenge.
The simplest solution has been to bracket off the religious aspects of the poem from the main narrative. Nineteenth-century scholars tended to dismiss the religious elements as, in E A. Blackburn's phrase, "Christian coloring" added by a pious scribe or redactor to what was "essentially a heathen poem."1 The religious language was thus understood as extraneous to the narrative and could therefore be ignored. This attitude was characteristic of the major scholarly figures of the nineteenth century.2 In the early twentieth century, the "Christian coloring" thesis was dismantled by Frederick Klaeber, whose systematic analysis of the poem's Christian language and ideas demonstrated conclusively that the ideas are embedded within the structure of the text and cannot be later interpolations.3 In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, a new understanding...