The Reckless Ring-Giver

Is Beowulf a hero?

Beowulf vs. Grendel, TheFool432

Sometimes you just need to ask the blunt question. Even when it sounds incredibly stupid. By any definition, of course Beowulf's a hero. He fights monsters! He kills dragons! He trash-talks with class! He's right up there with Hercules for perhaps the classic heroic archetype. Is Beowulf a hero? What meds, exactly, am I on to ask that question?

First off, what on earth do we actually mean when we say "hero"? By the Anglo-Saxon code under which he should properly be judged, Beowulf is as close as you can get to perfection. He is a valiant fighter whose prowess commands the respect of the men he leads. He never falls victim to false modesty; his boasts are always justified by his feats, and he isn't shy about explaining his worth. He jumps at the chance to win glory, even - especially - embracing the danger by which that glory can be had. And when he comes into wealth and power, he shares it out among his friends and thanes, as a good lord should.

Beowulf Battles Grendel's Mother, John Howe

Beowulf also passes the classical Greek definition with flying colors. He's no coward, shying away from danger and fate; he, like Achilles, wants nothing more than to be remembered well. He upholds the honor of the noble house into which he was born. He charges headlong into treacherous situations, winning free by equal virtue of his strength and his wits. He always keeps one eye on posterity. The Greeks would have loved this guy almost as much as the Anglo-Saxons did.

And what do we mean now, when we talk about heroes?

It's a considerably more complicated question than it used to be. Modern myth-readers are less inclined to give heroes a pass on their brutality or their stupidity simply because of their divine birth or their astonishing strength. Hercules is superhuman; he also murdered his first wife and all their kids in a fit of temporary insanity. Achilles is a self-absorbed whiny one-man killing machine. And Beowulf is a glory hound.

Beowulf's Funeral, John Howe

On one hand, it's his story; we'd feel cheated if he went around offering his thanes the chance to do something awesome. On the other hand, even we know that he is very overmatched when he takes on a dragon alone. Beowulf's end is classic Greek hubris: his pride forbids him to enlist the help of the able-bodied men who accompany him to the dragon's lair. And when they all desert him except for valiant and loyal Wiglaf, it's hard not to wonder if Beowulf monopolized everyone else's chance to become a hero and made himself great by making his contemporaries cowards.

Beowulf's Funeral, Virgil Burnett

In that sense, he himself contributes tremendously to the fall of his kingdom, built mainly on his own reputation. The crone who cries his funeral lament at the end of the poem foresees no defense of her homeland now that its hero has fallen. Why were there no young Beowulfs ready to take their dead king's place? Well, maybe because that king took their shots at glory for himself. Unwilling to follow in the well-meaning but ineffectual footsteps of Hrothgar, Beowulf goes out in a blaze of aged glory. But Hrothgar at least kept his people together until a hero could arise. Beowulf's death is actually rather selfish, seen in that light. By risking his life as a hero should, Beowulf robs his people of their greatest protection. His wholehearted embrace of the hero's role leads him to ignore the role in which his people need him most: that of guardian, guiding hand, and arbiter of justice. His betrayal (or worse, ignorance) of that need is hardly a heroic act.

Beowulf, Olga Falinskaya

But all the same, it's impossible to discount his astonishing deeds. He rips off a monster's arm with his bare hands. He fights a she-demon underwater for hours on end. He takes on a dragon with the help of one young retainer. And throughout his story, he retains a nobility of spirit. When he makes mistakes, he makes them with the best intentions. It's hard to blame him for always betting on himself when he always wins through. Beowulf knows himself. He knows who he is and what he's capable of. It's a blunt kind of wisdom, one that heroes like Theseus and Lancelot - other heroes with grave single flaws - often display.

Is Beowulf problematic? Yes. He's too proud, too reckless, too overconfident. But he commands admiration in spite of his flaws. He is a hero, but not a divine one. Despite his supernatural foes, Beowulf is heroism at its most human: endangered by its weaknesses, but always capable of surpassing greatness.

The Coward's Weapon

Say I handed you a weapon. It was something completely unlike anything you'd seen before: a device that could take out an attacker before he even knew you were there. It could be wielded in complete stealth, with excellent accuracy, and it wasn't expensive to make.

I am speaking, of course, of the bow.

As long as there have been bows, there have been legends associated with them. It makes perfect sense: at heart, the bow is an impossibly miraculous weapon. It puts the rich man in armor on the same playing field as the peasant with good aim and access to a yew tree. It ensures a certain amount of protection for its wielder - a good archer can get rid of a lot of foes before they get close enough to hit him back. Legends can't ignore the bow; they're full of archers, most of them crack shots. But no one can quite make up their mind about what the weapon says about the wielder.

Mostly, anyway. There is one true cowardly archer: Paris of Troy. In a culture where courage is measured by risking life and limb in a chariot melee, the pretty boy who shoots arrows from behind his city walls is never going to get much respect. When Paris and Menelaus fight their duel over Helen, it's implicit that the bow is not an allowed weapon: real men fight face-to-face, not bow-to-shield. Paris's slaying of Achilles is hideously ironic - the greatest warrior of the age, a man who physically attacked a river and won, is killed with the weapon of a coward. It's deliciously karmic that the Greeks turn Paris's own weapon against him; his killer, Philoctetes, inherited from Heracles the bow and poisoned arrows he uses to take out Paris. But that very act takes some of the sting out of the taunting of Paris as a fraidy-cat archer. He may sleep around with another man's wife while his brothers die in the dust, but his archery was something not only to be feared, but to be emulated. Even when it's the coward's weapon, a good bow is worth having on your side.

Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, Warner Bros.

Things could only get better for the bow, and did they ever. From the moment Robin Hood shot his first arrow, the bow was enshrined in legend as the weapon of the underdog. So you can't afford a sword or chain mail or a war horse? No problem! You can go them one better. For a few hours of labor, you can make yourself an armor-piercing weapon that keeps you out of reach of a sword's edge or a horse's hooves. Rebels from William Tell to Katniss Everdeen embrace the bow's practical and symbolic value. Armed with bows, the oppressed masses are no longer defenseless. Singlehandedly, an archer can start a rebellion; get a group of Merry Men together, and you've got a full-scale coup on your hands. The sheer nature of the weapon - requiring forethought and planning - also seems to influence its wielders: legendary archers tend to be far more strategically minded than swordsmen.

Eventually, nobility is allowed to use the bow. One of the engagement challenges for the hand of Princess Yasodhara requires her suitors to string and bend a massive bow. Siddhartha, the future Buddha, calmly fires off an arrow as well, when no other suitor had even managed to string the weapon. Similarly, Odysseus is the only man who can use his own personal bow; his reclamation of kingdom and queen truly begins when he completes Penelope's impossible challenge. But the nobility is still weird about archery; both instances are the only times we see either hero use a bow, and they're relegated firmly to the arena of showmanship, with no practical side in evidence. Rama is rarely depicted without a bow, but Rama is in a strange fix: undeniably royal, he's also a prince in exile. He may be the only noble to escape without censure from the practical wartime use of a bow.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, Lionsgate

Most recently, the bow has become an oddly gendered weapon. In an unfortunate modern transposition, the "cowardly" archer has become "feminine." The two best-known archers in pop culture are Katniss and Legolas. One's a girl, one's played by Orlando Bloom. Women in stories set in or influenced by the Middle Ages have a choice of two weapons: the knife, for close work when her protection has failed, or the bow, to keep her out of danger but still enable her to please a modern audience by fighting. It's the same stigma that Paris dealt with: men don't fight from a distance, ergo men don't use bows. And the complexity of Katniss, currently the most visible archer around, means that while we admire her incredible aim and accuracy, we are always horrifyingly aware of what it costs her to use her skill to kill. She's not a good-versus-evil hero, and while her weapon represents rebellion, she's not one with it in the same way that Robin Hood is.

It's a weird full-circle situation, with the bow slipping off its rebellious pedestal into, if not ill repute, certainly a loss of luster. And it's hard to predict exactly where the bow will wind up next. But it will probably always be the weapon of revolution; its equalizing nature will never change. It will circle back around to pure uncomplicated heroism, and then around again as we remember what long-range weapons do to a gallant charge of heroes. It's a complicated weapon, and it'll probably always make us a little bit nervous.