The Nordic Beowulf

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 have

been 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.

-- Craig R. Davis * Speculum 99, no. 1 (January 2024): 222-