The episode of Beowulf's fight with Grendel is
followed almost immediately by brief accounts of two very different heroic
careers – those of Sigemund and
of Heremod – sung by a minstrel-thegn of Hrothgar,
apparently in praise of the hero, as the celebrating Danes race their horses
back from Grendel's mere. This narrative sequence invites us to contextualize
Beowulf's first great exploit in a broader frame, but the poet does not make
explicit the precise nature of the comparisons between these three figures. The
critics, however, have broadly agreed that the link with Sigemund compliments
Beowulf, whilst the parallel with Heremod contrasts with the hero and with
Sigemund. E. G. Stanley comments that the poet ‘perhaps
… perceives the hero of his poem at this point as being
all that, in descriptions known to him, made Sigemund glorious and all that
Heremod was not’. F. C. Robinson agrees that the
meaning of this section ‘is never spelled out, but the
implication is clear: Beowulf is like Sigemund, unlike Heremod’. The contrast between the ‘sustained heroic
exploits’ of Sigemund and the downfall of Heremod is,
for R. E. Kaske,. ‘the basic theme of the whole Sigemund-Heremod
passage’, and this interpretation is, he thinks, ‘hardly open to question’. The purpose of
this article is to re-open the question of the nature of the relationship
between Sigemund and Beowulf.
Some difficulties in Beowulf,
lines 874–902: Sigemund reconsidered
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