In his 1936 lecture, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” J.R.R. Tolkien challenged his colleagues to evaluate the poem as a poem rather than a historical or linguistic artifact, mythology, or any number of other such things. Beowulf had been discounted as a work of art by his own and elder generations of scholars for a number of reasons, one being the monsters: Grendal, Grendal’s mother, and the dragon. Tolkien turned this objection on its head and showed how the monsters are essential to the poet’s aims and the work’s timeless resonance, how what is fanciful in the poem produces the greatest aesthetic and emotional effect, not what is realistic or historical.
Like the monsters, the hero, Beowulf, is fanciful, and this makes him poetically powerful to the audience. Of course, we all understand that Beowulf is not a realistic person. I do not think that even the original Anglo-Saxon audience believed his tale is accurate testimony about a fallen warrior, though I cannot prove or disprove it. He is as fanciful as the monsters he fights. But what critics have rarely discerned in Beowulf – as well as in classical heroes and the heroes of yesterday’s Hollywood blockbusters – is how he is fanciful and how this affects the audience. As an action-adventure hero, he fights the monsters in ways that are ahistorical and inhuman, and it is exactly this fancy that produces an aesthetic excitement and heroic experience in the audience.
By “ahistorical” and “inhuman,” I mean he fights in ways that are both historically inaccurate and outside, or at least exceptional to, human nature. Logically, we realize this, yet it is not something we often speak of. I recall someone on a television show once speaking of how the Jedi in Star Wars “move like ballet dancers.” And I have heard many people joke about the wires that make the impossible, flying kicks in martial arts movies filmable or the way guns in other films never seem to run out of bullets.
I have never heard the analysis run deeper. In the case of Beowulf, the way he fights does not match what we know of Anglo-Saxon or Viking warfare, beyond the historical patina of wielding a shield and sword. Likewise, his warrior prowess is beyond what we know of human physical and psychological capability. In literature going back to the oldest heroic tales, there has been a motif of easy killing. Yet the best evidence we have is that killing another person is extremely difficult.
In On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman details how difficult killing is for people psychologically based on experimental and historical evidence, how militaries have been shaped by this, how humans can be made to kill, and how killing negatively affects the killer, including potentially causing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Throughout history, for example, most soldiers have failed to attack the enemy in battle. The first scientific observation of this was during World War II by U.S. Army Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall who found that only 15-20 of American soldiers ‘“would take any part with their weapons”’, and this was matched by the Germans and Japanese. Of the more than twenty-seven thousand rifles recovered from the Battle of Gettysburg, ninety percent were loaded, half of those more than once. These soldiers were not lacking bravery, only the willingness to kill. Grossman observes how our stories lie:
