An Analogue in II Samuel of the Conclusion to Beowulf

ORCID iD: 0009-0003-6175-3057
ISSN: Print 2754-4575
ISSN: Online 2754-4583
DOI: 10.57686/256204/29

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© 2023 John Shafer
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Introduction

The biblical story of the young, unassuming shepherd David defeating the Philistine giant Goliath by hurling a small stone from his sling and striking the monster on the forehead has long been one of the most widely known narratives in the western world, and the fundamental similarity between David’s story and the story of Beowulf fighting and killing Grendel has long been recognised.¹ In both narratives a young man who is not thought of much account — though he has defeated ravenous beasts before virtually unarmed — leaves home to visit a king whose men are being terrorised by a large, fearsome antagonist.² The young man offers to fight the mighty creature for the king, though the king and his followers fear this young man cannot defeat it. The young man refuses to wear armour or carry a sword, but fights the monster as he has defeated beasts before: without traditional weapons of war, trusting his victory to Almighty God. The young man is victorious, and it is predicted that in time the young man himself will be a king, though his father had not been one; the young man later does indeed become a king. Beyond these broad similarities, certain closer details of David’s story correspond to Beowulf’s: the hero’s speech to the king on his fitness to fight the monstrous warrior based on his previous success in contests against fearsome beasts (I Samuel 17:35–37, cf. Beowulf lines 530–606); his explicit pre-fight refusal to wear armour or carry a sword (I Sam. 17: 39, Beo. 677–87); and his decapitation of the slain opponent using its own sword, or at least a sword in its possession (I Sam. 17:51, Beo. 1584–90).³

The basic correspondence between this biblical episode in I Samuel Chapter 17 and the first part of Beowulf has been explored several times since the poem first began to be discussed in print. Sylvia Huntley Horowitz’s 1978 article noting the correspondences between Beowulf and the Old Testament figures of David and Samson asserts the high probability that the Beowulf-poet knew David’s story.⁴ Andy Orchard’s 2003 critical companion to the poem discusses the narrative analogy between the two giant-fighting stories and also provides a useful table detailing the individual points of correspondence.⁵ Margaret E. Goldsmith compares David and Beowulf in a couple of publications I discuss further below. Once noticed, the similarity between David and Beowulf is difficult to ignore, and furthermore it usefully conveys the importance of recognising Christian contexts of even those texts that apparently celebrate a ‘pagan heroic’ value system.

Neither I nor any of the earlier scholars I am aware of suggest Beowulf’s fight against Grendel is based on David’s against Goliath in the sense that Beowulf is a ‘version’ of David’s story. Rather, if Beowulf’s narrative analogy to David versus Goliath is to be regarded as intentional, it must be the result of a Christian poet or at least a poet with a great deal of biblical knowledge adapting a heroic story inherited from native folklore tradition, using Old Testament narrative as enhancement.⁶ I will return to the Beowulf-poet’s engagement with Christianity in my concluding section below, but my basic interpretation, shared with others, is that the poet re-purposed her or his traditional Germanic narrative as a sort of ‘Old Testament story’ for the Anglo-Saxons: ‘Old Testament’ in the sense that Christian Anglo-Saxons could admire the heroic qualities in their pre-Christian ancestors and tell their stories, just as the Old Testament was read and used in Christian instruction despite being itself pre-Christian. Goldsmith explicitly argues that the Beowulf-poet visualises its Danes as ‘Old Covenant’ rather than Christian, ‘to be judged according to the Old Law as the Israelites were, since they had had no Revelation of God’.⁷ More recently, Malcolm Godden admires the Beowulf-poet’s ‘imaginative response’ to Old Testament material, drawing on biblical stories to create its ‘mythic structure’ in aspects such as the world’s beginning and the ‘archetypal example’ of Cain’s fratricide, which introduces the tribal and familial feuding pervasive in the world of Beowulf.⁸

The idea that the Beowulf-poet enhanced a Germanic heroic tale with elements of David’s story can even make sense of minor inconsistencies in the Anglo-Saxon poem, such as one noted by Kenneth Sisam in which a description of Beowulf as slow and unpromising in his youth (lines 2183–89) conflicts with the accounts of his promising upbringing (lines 2428–34) and successful swimming contest against Breca and monsters (lines 530–89).⁹ The inconsistency troubles us less if we imagine a poet adding to the original, heroic story of Beowulf details from David’s unpromising youth — who when he fights Goliath is, unlike Beowulf, not a warrior at all but the youngest son of seven and seen as fit only for tending sheep — but failing to remove conflicting details of Beowulf’s promising youth.

But what these Davidic interpretations of Beowulf have in common is that they address only the first part of the poem, the part concerning Beowulf’s fights against Grendel and against Grendel’s mother: two connected episodes that together form a self-evidently coherent story. (Grendel’s death is in fact not even fully assured until after the fight with Grendel’s mother, when, in true adherence to the Proppian structure of the Bear’s Son story-type, Beowulf cuts off the giant creature’s head with its own sword.) This makes sense: most scholarly arguments and proposals seeking to identify the story-pattern Beowulf follows address only these fights with Grendel and his mother. Certainly the dragon episode seems naturally detachable from what may be the ‘original’ story of Beowulf, or at least that part that re-creates the Bear’s Son story-pattern.¹⁰ It seems appropriate for the story to end after Beowulf fights and kills Grendel’s mother, or even, as in Michael Crichton’s excellent re-imagining of the story,¹¹ that the hero should both kill the monstrous female and be killed by her, a properly heroic death for a young hero before his warrior credentials decay with time and his battlefield faith in Almighty God gives way to overweening pride in his own prowess, or to greed.

Nevertheless, to progress beyond Beowulf’s and David’s youthful monster-fights on behalf of kings and turn our attention to the later parts of their stories, their final battles as aged kings themselves, we see several more remarkable similarities. In both cases: after defeating the giant warrior — though not immediately — the young man becomes king and rules for many years. He is renowned as a great warrior in battle against human opponents, though he is not called upon to fight any more giant monsters for a long time. About fifty years after defeating the first fearsome antagonist, however, his kingdom is attacked by another. The king goes to battle against this monster, though there are fears that if the king is killed, his people will soon disappear from the earth. This time the king fights the monster using all conventional weaponry of war, but the creature’s power is too much for the king and defeats him. A young kinsman of the king must come to his aid, saving his life and helping him defeat and kill the monster.

As the above points indicate, the story of David continues to match the later story of Beowulf in several remarkable ways. Though many people know of David defeating Goliath, fewer are familiar with this story of David’s second and final contest with a giant opponent towards the end of his long reign as king of Israel, in which his nephew Abishai comes to his aid to defeat the antagonist; this episode is related in II Samuel 21:15–17. Like the similarities between David’s and Beowulf’s early careers as monster-fighters, once these parallels are seen they are difficult to ignore. As far as I know, however, the only scholarly reference to these parallel episodes previous to this article is Fred McFarland’s 2016 MA thesis in which he twice briefly notes the similarity between the II Samuel episode and the end of Beowulf. Once McFarland observes how Abishai’s heroic intervention to save his king may have been interpreted by Anglo-Saxons according to the comitatus principle, a pagan Germanic warrior-culture ethic they may have found readily adaptable to Old Testament narratives, and later McFarland comments on the relative strength of fate (wyrd) and God’s providence when interpreting Beowulf’s heroic outcome, and the blending of these concepts in this episode.¹²

In the following, I assess the similarities between these stories in more detail, along with what the comparison can add to our understanding of Beowulf.

Lines 2312–3155 of Beowulf and verses 15–17 of II Samuel 21

Table 1 enumerates similarities between David’s story and Beowulf’s, the first section substantially based on similar comparisons by Andy Orchard and Sylvia Huntley Horowitz;¹³ the second part is my own, itemising the close analogy between the structure of Beowulf’s final fight against a dragon and the biblical David’s final battle as warrior-king of Israel, against a giant.

Table 1: Narrative correspondences between Beowulf and David

The monster-fighting hero’s story	I & II Samuel	Beowulf
Youth	Chapter and verse	Lines
There is a king whose men were being terrorised by a giant	I Sam. 17:3, 23	115–93
The king offers a fine reward for killing the giant	I Sam. 17:25	384–85, 660–61
The hero, a promising youth, leaves home (elsewhere) to visit the king	I Sam. 16:12, 17:20	247–51
As a young man the hero has not been thought of much account by his family	I Sam. 16:11, 17:15	2183–88
The hero's capacity to fight the giant is challenged	I Sam. 17:28, 33	506–28
The hero narrates his previous experiences fighting other monsters and beasts	I Sam. 17:35–37	530–606
The hero's coming is thought to be heaven-sent, and his offer of help is accepted	I Sam. 17:37	381–84
The hero removes helmet, breastplate and sword, refusing to wear or carry them into battle	I Sam. 17:39	669–74
The hero boasts of victory with God's help	I Sam. 17:46	677–87
The hero fights the giant alone, without a sword	I Sam. 17:39, 42, 50	710–836
After defeating the giant, the hero decapitates him with a sword belonging to the giant or his family	I Sam. 17:51	1584–90
The hero returns with the giant's sword and severed head	I Sam. 17:54	1612–17
Though he is not in line for any throne, it is predicted that the hero will one day be a king	I Sam. 16:1–13	856–61
Maturity
The hero does rise to the throne and rules for many years	II Sam. 5:4–5	2200–08
A monstrous creature attacks the hero’s land, and he battles against it	II Sam. 21:15	2312–27, 2535–49 and following
The hero fights using traditional armour and weapons	Implied by context	2538–41, 2575–80
The creature vanquishes the hero	II Sam. 21:16	2580–95
The hero’s younger kinsman comes to his aid, killing the monster for/with the hero.	II Sam. 21:17	2602–30, 2694–709
Immediately the hero’s followers express concern regarding their nation’s downfall due to the king risking his life in battle and losing it	II Sam. 21:17	2911–13, 2999–3007, 3148–55

To see if there is a little more than simple narrative coincidence between these two tales of a formerly mighty warrior-king’s last fight, a nearly disastrous contest with a monster, we may explore the details further. A normalised Vulgate text of the relevant Old Testament passage, II Samuel 21:15–17 (Latin: II Regum), reads as follows:

factum est autem rursum proelium Philisthinorum adversum Israhel et descendit David et servi eius cum eo et pugnabant contra Philisthim deficiente autem David. Iesbidenob qui fuit de genere Arafa cuius ferrum hastae trecentas uncias adpendebat et accinctus erat ense novo nisus est percutere David. Praesidioque ei fuit Abisai filius Sarviae et percussum Philistheum interfecit tunc iuraverunt viri David dicentes non egredieris nobiscum in bellum ne extinguas lucernam Israhel.¹⁴

The correspondences between Beowulf’s dragon-fight and David’s battle with Ishbi-Benob are not as numerous as those between Beowulf’s fight with Grendel and David’s with Goliath. It is also true, of course, that Beowulf dies at the end of his last monster-fight, and David does not. But leaving aside for the moment this crucial difference, which I will return to, what happens next in both narratives is notable. Immediately after his nearly fatal fight with Ishbi-Benob, David’s men forbid him from ever going into battle again, ‘lest the lamp of Israel should be extinguished,’ as the Authorised Version expresses it. Spoken in the context of a nearly unsuccessful battle against Philistines, who have threatened the kingdom of Israel throughout the narrative of David’s life and most of the time of the Judges before it (cf. again Samson, who also fought Philistines), this statement clearly expresses the Israelites’ anxiety about being overrun by more powerful neighbouring nations if their mighty warrior-king dies. This is the correspondence between II Samuel and Beowulf that seems truly key to me, as this is precisely the fate the Geat men and women fear upon Beowulf’s death, which they explicitly state three times in the closing parts of the poem (lines 2911–13; 2999–3007; and 3150–55, quoted below). The Geat woman who wails a lament at the death of Beowulf seems to be mourning the loss of her people’s life and liberty as much as of her king:

swylce giōmorgyd Gēatisc meowle
æfter Bīowulfe bundenheorde
sang sorgcearig, sæde geneahhe
þæt hīo hyre heregeongas hearde ondrēde,
wælfylla worn, werudes egesan,
hȳnðo ond hæftnȳd.¹⁵

So, the downfall of the Geat nation as a result of Beowulf’s strict adherence to his warrior code despite all consequences — and the downfall, perhaps, of what the Geat nation represents — is a crucial point, maybe the central point of the last part of Beowulf.¹⁶ Thus the final, elegiac lines of the Anglo-Saxon poem and the biblical verses describing David’s last battle share a concern with the warrior-king failing to reproduce as an old king what he once achieved as a young warrior armed only with his faith and his God-given strength, with the threat of his nation’s obliteration looming large as a consequence.

With the exception of Fred McFarland in his MA thesis, referred to above, previous scholars, including those who have pointed out similarities between Beowulf and I Samuel, have not observed the narrative elements shared by the Old English poem and II Samuel.¹⁷ In this context, it is worth clarifying my thesis. I am not arguing that Beowulf is or is intended to be an Old English poetic ‘version’ of David’s story, nor, strictly speaking, am I suggesting that the Anglo-Saxon poet closely modelled the account of Beowulf’s last battle on David’s. There are too many clear differences between the two narratives, not least that the creature Beowulf fights is a dragon and, again, that unlike David Beowulf does not survive the contest but dies. What I am proposing is

1. that a poet intimately familiar with the Old Testament — certainly the stories of Creation, Cain, and the Flood, and likely the entire biography of David — recognised the inherent, organic correspondences between David’s fight against Goliath and the traditional ‘Bear’s Son’ or ‘Hand and Child’ narrative s/he knew and wished to re-tell in Beowulf;
2. that this poet then enhanced the folklore-derived portion of Beowulf’s story — that is, his fight against Grendel and his mother — with details from David’s fight against Goliath; and
3. that, having a larger literary purpose than simply repeating the traditional material, the poet carried the hero’s story to a heroic, meaningful end by drawing inspiration from an episode near the end of David’s life, of which s/he was also aware, or possibly from a Davidic motif itself based on that episode.

The other major detail of Beowulf’s final extended episode that does not match the II Samuel episode is that the monster Beowulf fights is a dragon, not the giant or giant-like creature David and his nephew Abishai defeat. This does not conflict with my proposition that the biblical episode could have served as the basic inspiration for the episode in the Anglo-Saxon poem; a poet could easily take the fundamental idea of the episode — an older king who fought a giant warrior as a youth makes a poor decision to fight a later monster threatening his people, and a younger kinsman comes to his aid to defeat it — and simply replace the giant with a dragon for reasons of her/his own. As Tolkien puts it: ‘Beowulf’s dragon, if one wishes really to criticize, is not to be blamed for being a dragon, but rather for not being dragon enough’.¹⁸

My proposition, then, also does not fundamentally conflict with previous Beowulf scholarship that addresses the questions of the dragon episode’s origin and how it came to be attached to the clearly separate, coherent tale of the first two fights in the first two-thirds of the poem. In her authoritative 2000 book on parallels and analogues of the Beowulf dragon, Christine Rauer, who though concerned with the narrative’s underlying structure does not connect the dragon-episode with David, ultimately illustrates its analogy with both Germanic dragon episodes (such as we can know them) and dragons in classical Latin texts and hagiography; the Beowulf-episode shares a number of details with various ‘saint defeats dragon’ accounts, and especially notable may be the first-century example of Capaneus and Hippomedon confronting a serpent or dragon-like creature in Statius’s Thebaid, a text popular in the Middle Ages and perhaps the only European dragon-story before Beowulf in which two people fight a dragon at once.¹⁹ If the dragon-fight in Beowulf is more directly based on any of these narratives Rauer examines (or a related one that no longer survives), there is even the alternative possibility that details from David’s story, such as the kinsman coming to the rescue, may have been adapted to the existing dragon narrative, very much as details from David’s fight against Goliath enhanced the poet’s existing Bear’s Son narrative.

Other scholarly interpretations of the Beowulf dragon-episode focus less on its structure and more on what the creature represents. Sonya R. Jensen, for example, asserts that the dragon represents an invading human force, the Swedes feared by the Geats.²⁰ Scholars have long discussed the use of the word aglæca to refer to both Beowulf and the monsters he fights, including the dragon (line 2958) — as if the type of fearsome creature described is not as important as whatever mighty, deadly quality the word represents, a quality the poem’s problematic hero shares.²¹ Similarly, in his thorough and highly linguistically-focused analysis of mythic paradigms of Indo-European dragon fights, Calvert Watkins notes that Old English bona (also bana, ‘killer’) applies to both the hero and the dragon, and he comments wryly on the ‘bidirectionality’ of dragon-slaying, in which killer and killed are linguistically conflated, and obscured.²² Along the same lines, William Whallon notes that the tone and action of Beowulf make small separation between Grendel, his mother, and the dragon, remarking that Grendel and the dragon belong to ‘essentially the same race’ and calling them ‘variants’, like Circe and Calypso in the Odyssey.²³ In her book on the medieval Germanic dragon generally, Joyce Lionarons tellingly observes: ‘the Beowulf dragon confusingly offers evidence to confirm all the commonplace yet conflicting views on the general character of dragons while denying none’.²⁴ If Beowulf’s dragon is indeed a rag-bag of well-known characteristics of different dragons from disparate traditions — if its ‘dragon-ness’ is not integral to its own story but has simply been assembled from what is known to be ‘dragonish’ — this is consistent with the episode being based on no previous dragon-story analogue, but simply invented for the purpose of the poem. According to my interpretation, then, the dragon element has been added to the basic story underneath, in which that figure can be any daunting antagonist suggested by David’s final, superhumanly strong opponent Ishbi-Benob.²⁵

Echoes of David elsewhere in Beowulf: Psalms

The biblical David is of course not identified by name in the text of Beowulf, but there are some indirect indications (beyond the narrative similarity of the Grendel-fight to the Goliath-fight) that the Old English poet may have drawn inspiration from David, specifically in occasions of the poem’s rhetorical similarity with psalms. David’s primary identity in Anglo-Saxon Christian culture was the composer of their psalter, and manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon psalters often include as a miniature or illumination an image of David as the psalmist, always holding or playing his harp.²⁶

Harps and court singers certainly figure throughout Beowulf, but there are closer correspondences between particular psalms and certain sections of the poem. Margaret Goldsmith’s ‘The Christian Perspective in Beowulf’ discusses how an attitude expressed by Hrothgar echoes the sentiment of Psalm 118 (Authorised Version 119), in which God-sent afflictions and His law are more valuable to the psalmist than silver or gold; that the poem’s interpretation of the Danes’ idol-worship as a falling away from the one true God is reminiscent of Psalm 77 (AV 78); and how Psalm 18 (AV 19) — specifically Augustine’s interpretation of it — answers Beowulf’s concern that he has sinned in ignorance, lines 2327–32.²⁷ In a later work Goldsmith indicates how Beowulf’s pre-Christian attitude in his dying speech on going to his people is similar to attitudes expressed in a Vita of St Anthony and Psalm 48 (AV 49).²⁸ In ‘Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf’, Klaeber devotes a good deal of discussion to a Christian mindset appearing in Beowulf’s wordings, comparing its Old English word-choices to the Latin of the Vulgate Psalms.²⁹ Jane Toswell discusses how the ‘reflective and ruminative approach’ in Beowulf aligns with the poetic style of ‘psalmic contemplation’.³⁰

The clearest correspondence to a psalm that I have found is Beowulf’s promise to hunt down and kill Grendel’s mother:

Ic hit þē gehāte: nō hē on helm losaþ,
nē on foldan fæþm nē on fyrgenholt
nē on gyfenes grund, gā þær hē wille.³¹

To this compare Psalm 138:7–10 (AV 139):

Quo ibo ab spiritu tuo et quo a facie tua fugiam
Si ascendero in caelum ibi es tu si iacuero in inferno ades
Si sumpsero pinnas diluculo habitavero in novissimo maris
Etiam ibi manus tua deducet me et tenebit me dextera tua.³²

This is probably no direct allusion. The similarity here is more in the list-like rhetorical figure used than in diction or direct verbal correspondence, though the notable image of ineffectively hiding beneath the depths of the sea is used in both. Note too that in this verbal echo of the psalm the voice speaking is Beowulf’s, casting him in the role of David.

Ultimately, there is no definitive evidence that Beowulf drew directly on the psalms. Yet it is also plausible that the psalms did influence the language of the poem, and this at least does not discourage the idea that the Beowulf-poet might have had an interest in stories about David himself.

Anglo-Saxon knowledge of David’s fight against Ishbi-Benob

The argument as presented so far is a conjecture depending on narrative correspondences, and one of the narratives in question, though in the Bible and thus reasonably accessible to Anglo-Saxon authors and poets, is a small episode within a much larger narrative and quite obscure, then and now. II Samuel and the other Old Testament history books will certainly not have been as widely available and read in Anglo-Saxon England as, say, the Gospels and the psalms. We might reasonably ask if an Anglo-Saxon writer would even have known the story of David’s late-reign fight against a giant.

Biblical commentaries are a natural place to look for evidence of textual attention to this episode, and it has certainly been thoroughly argued by Marie Padgett Hamilton, Dorothy Whitelock, Albert Brodeur, Margaret Goldsmith, and Paul Cavill among others that the Beowulf-poet was affected by and willing to incorporate into the poem early medieval Christian ideas and ideology as expressed by commentators such as Bede, Augustine, and Gregory the Great.³³ However, the only late antique or early medieval commentator I know of who definitely writes about David versus Ishbi-Benob is Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan, in his Apologia Dauid. One of the original four doctors of the Church, Ambrose enjoyed great influence within medieval Christianity, but he mentions the giant-fight of David’s mature years only briefly, hardly saying more than that it happens.³⁴ Bede wrote a complete commentary on the first book of Samuel, and it is not unlikely that he would have continued and written a commentary on II Samuel if he had lived longer. Certainly Bede’s interest in this part of the Old Testament was not limited to I Samuel; another of his exegetical works, In Regvm Librvm XXX Qvaestiones (‘thirty questions about the books of kings’), includes material from II Samuel.

There is one Anglo-Saxon literary figure who certainly knew the story of David’s late-career giant-fight, as attested by one Old English text which not only refers to this story, but also uses it to make precisely the same point I have suggested attracted the Beowulf-poet to the episode. This is the prolific Anglo-Saxon homily-writer Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, and the work is a fragment of ambiguous purpose beginning ‘wyrdwriteras us secgað ða ðe awritan be cyningum’ (‘historians who wrote about kings tell us’).³⁵ Though this excerpt lacks unity and its precise purpose is difficult to assess, it is nevertheless clear that it concerns the government of the kingdom and its defence against invaders. John C. Pope describes the beginning of the text this way:

the first eighty-six lines are designed to show by the example of history that some of the most successful rulers have delegated their military power to carefully chosen generals, thus lightening their own burdens and greatly extending the range of their defence against enemies (lines 3–5), while they have avoided the risk of depriving the people of leadership by an untimely death (47–49).³⁶

The lines Pope refers to relate to David’s part in the text, where Ælfric summarises the biblical episode and the conclusion it draws concerning the danger to the nation:

Eft wæs geworden wið Israhel gefeo[h]t;
on ðam gefeo[h]te wæs sum wundorlic ent
se wolde ofslean þone cyning Dauid,
ac him gehe[a]lp sona Abisai his ðegen,
Ioabes broðor, and he þone ent ofsloh,
for þon ðe he geseah hu he syrwde embe Dauid,
wolde hine forstelan betwux his þegenum.
Ða sworon sona ðæs cyninges ðegenas ealle,
and sædon him þus to: Ne scealt ðu næfre heonon forð
mid us to gefeohte, þinum feore to plyhte,
þelæst þu adwæsce Israhe[l]a leohtfæt:–
þæt wæs Dauid him sylf be ðam ðe hi sædon swa.³⁷

Note that though the biblical Vulgate text identifies Ishbi-Benob only as ‘of the race of Arafa’ or ‘a Rephaite’, leaving the reader to make the connection with the giant inhabitants of Canaan from other Old Testament books (Genesis 15:20; Deuteronomy 2:11 and 3:11; Joshua 17:15; and especially I Chronicles 20), Ælfric, like Ambrose before him, unambiguously calls David’s opponent a giant: ent. With Ælfric’s use of the Ishbi-Benob episode to support his thesis concerning kings who put their nations at risk with their decisions in battle, we see that David’s life is prime material for illustrating Anglo-Saxon writers’ messages about kingdoms and their precarious positions — whether in a heroic, poetic idiom, as in Beowulf, or with religious and very likely contemporary political significance, as in Ælfric’s writing. Jane Toswell observes that this text by Ælfric, which she calls a ‘treatise’ and ‘an extended statement’ about David’s kingship, ‘may well be a polemical statement about how kings need to be kept under control and need to delegate and share authority’. Though she considers the portrait of David and his importance the more significant purpose of this treatise, Toswell joins Pope in acknowledging that here (as in his homilies) Ælfric uses biblical analogy and spiritual illustrations to critique English ‘regnal behaviour’ of his time, expressing concern about the enclosing threat of the Danish aggression against late tenth- and eleventh-century England, as well as frustration at the English rulers’ poor decisions in response to this threat.³⁸ In this case Ælfric proves his thesis with a series of royal exempla, and he uses David’s fight against Ishbi-Benob as the first of these.

That Ælfric was almost certainly writing in a later and different setting from the Beowulf-poet (though consensus on when and where exactly Beowulf was written remains elusive) does not materially disrupt the basic point that Anglo-Saxon writers familiar with II Samuel, from early eighth-century Bede exploring theological questions that book raises to late tenth-century Ælfric explicitly referring to David’s fight with Ishbi-Benob, could and did draw on the biblical episode for their own purposes. There is no reason the Beowulf-poet could not have done the same.

Conclusions

To reiterate the basics of this article: not only are many of the details of Beowulf’s fight against Grendel similar to those in the I Samuel account of David’s fight against Goliath, but several details in Beowulf and Wiglaf’s confrontation with the dragon are similar to those in the brief but significant account in II Samuel of King David and his nephew Abishai fighting the powerful antagonist Ishbi-Benob. The analogue itself is clear. The poet’s probable knowledge of David’s story is suggested by the finer details in Beowulf’s preparations to fight Grendel that recall David preparing to fight Goliath and perhaps also by echoes of psalmic language in Beowulf. This leaves tantalisingly open the possibility that the Beowulf-poet could have drawn inspiration either from the II Samuel episode directly or from a Davidic motif based on it. Ælfric’s direct reference to this biblical episode to illustrate very much the same point that both Beowulf and II Samuel make, that the poor decisions kings make when fighting foreign threats can put their own people in danger, reinforces the plausibility — if not the likelihood — of this possibility.

There remains one crucial difference between the narratives of David and Beowulf that invites attention: David lives on after his final battle, but Beowulf dies. To me this difference is not irksome, but relates directly to how a poet with knowledge of both a Bear’s Son narrative and David’s biography may have drawn inspiration from the later biblical episode to construct a meaningful end for his pagan hero’s story. I conclude with a few brief words about this significance.

Goldsmith classifies the Danes in Beowulf as ‘Old Covenant’ rather than Christian (see above), and elsewhere she expands on the idea of the admiration of Beowulf’s heroism being recognisably similar to admiration of David — who is not a perfect exemplum of behaviour, like Christ, but who is nevertheless, in a heroic mould, admirable all the same. She writes:

many notable scholars have convinced themselves that Beowulf is presented as the saviour of his people, like a Christian knight, or even like Christ himself, in spite of the fact that even in the final eulogy there is no hint of this. Beowulf is presented as a noble hero, but not as the complete paragon of kingly virtue. One can imagine a comparable Christian poem about King David: there would be much to praise in the hero, but no-one would suggest that his every act was held up for imitation by the poet’s patron.³⁹

Far from holding up its hero’s every act for imitation, the concluding episode of Beowulf explicitly calls into question the heroic values by which a king will put his entire nation at risk to seek personal martial glory; perhaps it also implicitly critiques a value-system by which the king’s personal success is so bound up with his nation’s success that it can live no longer than he. Tolkien’s 1936 reading of the poem makes its theme the certainty that all men and all their works must pass away from the earth, and this is certainly one good reason why Beowulf must die at the end of his last battle rather than live to pass his kingdom on to a strong successor, as King David does.⁴⁰

But there is another reason Beowulf dies, a reason connected with Christian belief about what David’s true role is. David is the king of Israel from whose line Christ will descend — Jesus is the king who rules with David’s authority, and when Jesus gives up his life on the cross he cries out David’s words.⁴¹ There are many New Testament references connecting Jesus Christ with King David, generally interpreting Jesus as the Messiah descending from David or his father Jesse, referred to in various Old Testament passages (e.g. Isaiah 11:1). Examples include the genealogies of Matthew 1 and Luke 3, and genealogical comments in Romans 1:3 and Revelation 5:5 and 22:16. The book of Hebrews repeatedly quotes psalms as prophetic statements referring to Jesus Christ, and in verses 30–37 of Acts 13 Paul both quotes psalms as prophecy and explicitly connects David’s death after serving his purpose in God’s plan with Jesus rising from the dead to fulfil his. For Christians, the fear expressed by David’s men that his death will result in the destruction of Israel is, by extension, a threat to Christianity itself. David must live for Israel to go on and ultimately for Christ to be born in Israel, in David’s line.

In Beowulf, however — where Beowulf and his kingdom may be seen to represent the pre-Christian, heroic order and beliefs of the north — the warrior-king does not need to live to preserve his nation and ensure the advent of Christ: he needs to die. To Anglo-Saxon Christians looking back on their heathen, heroic past, there was no more natural belief than that what had gone before must die out to give way to the correct, holy faith in Christ. The ancient pagan heroes could fight giants like David, be mighty in battle like David, be blessed with the Lord’s success like David, and even echo his life with theirs: but ultimately they were heathen, and the English knew that the rise of their Christian beliefs had depended on the decline and death of the old ones. As Tolkien memorably remarks of the Beowulf-poet’s perspective: ‘the wages of heroism is death’.⁴²

And so Beowulf dies, and in his poem is realised the specific dread vocalised by David’s people, that their king continuing to fight monstrous creatures who threaten their nation could destroy them. But the words Beowulf’s people express after his death are not dread, but at first a statement of undeniable fact and finally a sorrowful but awestruck elegy for the greatness that had to pass away for righteousness to rise.

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1 In this article I consistently use the versions of biblical names the Authorised Version and most English translations use: Ishbi-Benob, Abishai, Zeruiah, etc. Research for this article was facilitated by a grant from the Lynne Grundy Memorial Trust. I also benefited from early encouragement and suggestions from Dr Roberta Bassi (Bloomsbury Publishing), Professor Éamonn Ó Carragáin (University College Cork), and Dr Helen Appleton (Oxford), as well as additional critique and suggestions from those hearing earlier versions of this research presented at the Universities of Leicester in 2011 and Nottingham in 2013. I gratefully acknowledge the contributions of all these parties, and I also thank my former students at Durham (2006–12), whose active engagement in tutorials provided the context in which I first originated these ideas.

2 Though in this article I refer to Grendel, Goliath, and other creatures as ‘giant’ or ‘large’, and sometimes as ‘giants’, I do not classify any as a ‘giant’ according to either Anglo-Saxon concepts such as ent or eoten or Latin ones such as gigas, colossus, or titanus. The classification is unnecessary in this article. What is important is that all these characters are textually described as large, superhumanly strong, and antagonistic in battle against the texts’ heroic main characters. Goliath, for example, is not called gigas or titanus in the Vulgate, but he is said to be six cubits and a span high; to wear armour that weighs 5,000 shekels; and to carry a spear ‘like a weaver’s beam’ with a head weighing 600 shekels. See I Samuel Chapter 17 for these details. Grendel is in Beowulf sometimes referred to as eoten and eotena cynnes, but the comparisons drawn in this article do not depend on how closely either Grendel or the biblical characters match whatever Anglo-Saxons understood by these terms.

3 Throughout this article I cite Friedrich Klaeber’s edition of the poem, Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 4th rev. edn by R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

4 ‘Beowulf, Samson, David and Christ’, Studies in Medieval Culture, 12 (1978), 17–23.

5 A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2003), p. 145. I provide a similar table below, partly based on Orchard’s but with some refinements of my own.

6 A thorough treatment of Beowulf and its analogues is given in J. Michael Stitt, Beowulf and The Bear’s Son: Epic, Saga, and Fairytale in Northern Germanic Tradition, Albert Bates Lord Studies in Oral Tradition, 8/Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 1402 (New York: Garland, 1992), in which he uses written analogue comparison and folk narrative research to address the possibilities of the folktale origins of the Grendel episode in Beowulf. The two primary contenders are the Germanic ‘Bear’s Son’ tale (now designated ATU301 ‘The Three Stolen Princesses’ in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale type index) and the Irish narrative tradition known as ‘The Hand and the Child’. Though I subscribe to the Germanic interpretation, it is unimportant to my argument which particular story tradition provided the basic material for the Grendel episodes in Beowulf; it is only important to acknowledge that this portion of the poem is based on an earlier heroic narrative.

7 ‘The Christian Perspective in Beowulf’, Comparative Literature, 14 (1962), 71–90 (pp. 78, 79 fn. 27); Goldsmith devotes an extended footnote to arguing this ‘highly controversial point’. See also J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 22 (1936), 245–95 (pp. 19–28, esp. 27–28). Like Horowitz, Goldsmith also (briefly) compares Beowulf with the mighty biblical hero Samson: ‘The Christian Theme of Beowulf’, Medium Ævum, 29 (1960), 81–101 (pp. 100–1).

8 Pages 215, 222 and 223 of ‘Biblical Literature: The Old Testament’, in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. by Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, 2^nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 214–33 (pp. 215, 222–23).

9 ‘Beowulf’s Fight with the Dragon’, Review of English Studies, nw sries, 9 (1958), 129–40 (p. 130). Though northern Germanic heroes can often have an unpromising youth — cf. the kolbítr tradition of Norse legendary stories — the inconsistency here still seems notable, given that when Beowulf’s youthful heroic exploits are described in Heorot they are clearly well-known to everyone already, including his detractors.

10 Sisam, ‘Beowulf’s Fight’, begins with a lament over the general scholarly disinterest in the dragon-slaying episode, writing ‘I have always wanted more about the fight with the Dragon’ and calling it the heart of the adventure (p. 129). Christine Rauer, Beowulf and the Dragon: Parallels and Analogues (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), which I return to below, does to an extent discuss the dragon episode in terms of what goes before.

11 Michael Crichton, Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan Relating His Experiences with the Northmen in AD 922 (New York: Knopf, 1976), and its film adaptation The 13th Warrior, dir. by John McTiernan (Touchstone Pictures, 1998).

12 Fred McFarland, ‘The Warrior Kings and their Giants: A Comparative Study of Beowulf and King David’, East Washington University Masters Collection, 356 (unpublished MA thesis, Eastern Washington University, 2016), pp. 23, 44–45, accessible at http://dc.ewu.edu/theses/356. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of this article who first brought this reference to my attention. As my first footnote states, I presented earlier versions of this argument at conferences in 2011 and 2013, but those papers did not appear in print.

13 ‘Youth’ section partly based on Orchard, A Critical Companion, p. 145 and Sylvia Huntley Horowitz, ‘Beowulf, Samson, David and Christ’, Studies in Medieval Culture, 12 (1978), 17–23 (p. 19).

14 All Vulgate passages in this article are quoted from Biblia Sacra Latina (London: Bagster, 1977). The English of the Douay-Rheims translation reads: ‘and the Philistines made war again against Israel, and David went down, and his servants with him, and fought against the Philistines. And David growing faint, Jesbibenob, who was of the race of Arapha, the iron of whose spear weighed three hundred ounces, being girded with a new sword, attempted to kill David. And Abisai the son of Sarvia rescued him, and striking the Philistine killed him. Then David's men swore unto him, saying: Thou shalt go no more out with us to battle, lest thou put out the lamp of Israel.’ The biblical ‘race of Arapha’ or the ‘Rephaites’ are Canaanite antagonists of the Israelites set apart in the narratives they are mentioned in by great height, great strength, and/or physical characteristics presented as monstrous (eg six fingers on each hand and foot); for examples of all these, see I Chronicles Chapter 20, in which, as here, ‘sons of Rapha’ oppose David and his men in battle. Like David’s earlier giant Philistine opponent Goliath, here the brief characterisation of Ishbi-Benob focuses on the marvellously heavy weight of the spear he is able to wield. Abishai is David’s nephew, the son of David’s sister, the Zeruiah (Sarvia) referred to here (and see I Chronicles 2:13–16). The biblical historical books frequently refer to Abishai and his brothers as the ‘sons of Zeruiah’, never by their father’s name, possibly indicating narrative emphasis on their family connection to David.

15 Lines 3150–55a: ‘So too a song of mourning did a Geatish woman, | with hair bound up, for Beowulf | sorrowfully sing, saying repeatedly | that she greatly dreaded army invasions, | heaps of slaughter, terror of troops, | humiliation and captivity.’ Old English translations throughout are my own. An alternative reading of heregeongas ‘army invasions’ is hēofungdagas ‘days of mourning’.

16 See esp. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf’, pp. 31–36.

17 Though it is difficult to confirm fully that an idea has never been proposed at all, this one certainly does not appear in scholarly sources where it would be expected. It certainly seems likely that if Tolkien had noticed this analogy, which is not unlikely given his rigorous, intellectual Christianity and voluminous knowledge of Germanic narrative, he would at least have mentioned it in his landmark analysis of Beowulf. The other articles above that do connect Beowulf and David — Horowitz, Goldsmith, and Orchard — simply do not mention David’s late-reign fight against Ishbi-Benob. Sisam, ‘Beowulf’s Fight’ does not connect the dragon-fight with David. Jo Ann Pevoto, ‘An Inquiry into the Possibility that the Unknown Poet of the Anglo-Saxon Poem Beowulf May Have Been Influenced by the Scriptures, Particularly Viewed from a Typological Method of Interpretation’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Houston, 1967), accessible at https://hdl.handle.net/10657/12729, investigates the extent to which the Beowulf-poet was influenced by scripture and does mention Ishbi-Benob among a list of five giants David and his men defeat (p. 82), but she does not connect the episode to Beowulf’s dragon-fight in any way. I have found no reference to the connection either in scholars commenting on the Christian elements in Beowulf, such as Friedrich Klaeber’s extensive treatment of the subject, ‘Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf’, Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie, 35 (1911), 111–36, 249–70, 453–82; 36 (1912), 169–99; Arthur R. Skemp, ‘The Transformation of Scriptural Story, Motive, and Conception in Anglo-Saxon Poetry’, Modern Philology, 4 (1907), 423–70; and William Whallon, ‘The Christianity of Beowulf’, Modern Philology, 60.2 (1962), 81–94; or in those on the origins and dating of Beowulf, such as Fred. C. Robinson, ‘History, Religion, Culture: The Background Necessary for Teaching Beowulf’, in ‘The Tomb of Beowulf’ and Other Essays on Old English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 36–51; Sam Newton, The Origins of ‘Beowulf’ and the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994); and the editorial material in Klaeber’s Beowulf, ed. by Fulk, Bjork and Niles.

18 Tolkien, ‘Beowulf’, p. 16.

19 Beowulf and the Dragon, pp. 134–42 and (for Statius) p. 46; the latter example is also highlighted by Klaeber’s Beowulf, ed. by Fulk, Bjork and Niles. Relevantly to my own research into this area, Rauer here also remarks: ‘no surviving literary sources of Beowulf have hitherto been identified consensually. Particularly problematic factors in this regards are perhaps an unusually idiosyncratic method of composition of a poet who may have displayed great independence from surviving literary material, and the uncertainty which surrounds the date and place of composition of Beowulf’ (p. 134).

20 Beowulf and the Swedish Dragon (Narrabeen, NSW: ARRC, 1993), p. 9 et passim.

21 For a recent discussion of this addressing and citing much of the relevant scholarship, see Jane Roberts, ‘Hrothgar’s “Admirable Courage”’, in Unlocking the Wordhord, ed. by Mark C. Amodio and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 240–73 (pp. 242–47). Roberts refers to an interpretation of the dragon as an embodiment of the destructive fire of Judgment Day (p. 248).

22 How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 418, 422.

23 ‘The Christianity’, p. 91.

24 Joyce Tally Lionarons, The Medieval Dragon: The Nature of the Beast in Germanic Literature (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press, 1998), p. 28. In Chapter 2, ‘Beowulf and the Beowulf Dragon’, Lionarons interprets the Beowulf dragon in an explicitly Christian way, as a synthesis of Christian and pagan heroic values (see esp. pp. 45–47, 18), but like other scholars she does not connect it with David.

25 I do not suggest that the inspiration for the dragon itself was drawn from David, whom no biblical book or later story-tradition I am aware of describes fighting a serpent or dragon, and this is certainly not fundamental to my argument, which simply identifies as an analogue to Beowulf the basic Davidic story motif of fighting a monstrous opponent and needing a younger kinsman’s help to defeat it. There is, however, a tantalising Anglo-Saxon connection between David and a dragon in a full-page miniature in an eighth-century Northumbrian manuscript, a copy of Cassiodorus’s commentary on the psalms (Durham Cathedral Library B II 30, fol. 21v). The illustration portrays a male, robed figure holding a spear and standing on a double-headed, scaled beast without limbs, perhaps a serpent or dragon. The man has a halo around his head, and within a similar circle held aloft in his hand is the clear label ‘dauid’. Alternative interpretations to an otherwise unknown Anglo-Saxon story of David slaying a dragon are 1) that the figure is not supposed to have slain the serpent he stands upon, 2) that the figure is not David and has mistakenly been labelled so by a later scribe, and 3) that the figure is an amalgamation of David and Christ, who according to a Christian interpretation of Genesis 3:15 will crush the head of the serpent who strikes at his heel. The latter interpretation blending the figures of David and Christ has the weight of scriptural support, on which see my concluding section below. The manuscript, illustration, and interpretations are discussed in Richard Gameson, Manuscript Treasures of Durham Cathedral (London: Third Millenium Publishing, 2010), pp. 34–37, where the miniature appears as a full-page colour plate.

26 I am grateful to Éamonn Ó Carragáin for suggesting this idea. The Vespasian Psalter, London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A I, a Latin text of the Psalms with interlinear Old English glosses from the second or third quarter of the eighth century, provides quite a handsome example on folio 30 verso, with a harp-playing David surrounded by other musicians.

27 ‘The Christian Perspective’, pp. 78–80, 86. When in a footnote to ‘The Christian Theme’, p. 101, Goldsmith refers to an upcoming paper on echoes of the Psalms in Beowulf, she is probably referring to this 1962 article. I have not found another article devoted exclusively to the poem’s echoes of the Psalms.

28 The Mode and Meaning of ‘Beowulf’ (London: Athlone, 1970), p. 240.

29 E.g. pp. 119–20, 121, 131–32, 133–34, and 464–65. Paul Cavill, ‘Christianity and Theology in Beowulf’, in The Christian Tradition in Anglo-Saxon England: Approaches to Current Scholarship and Teaching, ed. by Paul Cavill (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 15–39, engages with both Klaeber’s exploration of Christianity in Beowulf and others by Bruce Mitchell and by Kenneth Sisam, but does not mention either the Psalms or David.

30 The Anglo-Saxon Psalter, Medieval Church Studies, 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 358–59, 362–63. Toswell does not discuss any specific instances in Beowulf of wording similar to individual psalms, and she also does not explore any narrative parallels between the characters of David and Beowulf.

31 Lines 1392–94: ‘I promise you this: [she] will not escape to any refuge, | neither in the bosom of the earth nor in mountain forests | nor at the bottom of the sea, go where [she] will.’ The Old English in fact says ‘he’ will not escape, but the reference is clearly to Grendel’s mother, and the scholarly discussions around why the manuscript refers to her with the masculine pronoun are not relevant to my argument here.

32 The Douay-Rheims translation reads: ‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy face? If I ascend into heaven, thou art there: if I descend into hell, thou art present. If I take my wings early in the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea: Even there also shall thy hand lead me: and thy right hand shall hold me.’

33 Marie Padgett Hamilton, ‘The Religious Principle in Beowulf’, PMLA, 61 (1946), 309–30; Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), e.g. pp. 39–45; Albert G. Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), esp. pp. 207–10; Goldsmith ‘The Christian Theme’ and ‘The Christian Perspective’, esp. p. 75; and Cavill, ‘Christianity’ , pp. 15–39.

34 Ambroise de Milan, Apologie de David, ed. by Pierre Hadot, trans. by Marius Cordier, Sources Chrétiennes, 239 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1977), p. 114 [VII.33]. Ambrose was furthermore not widely read in Anglo-Saxon England. Dabney Bankert, Jessica Wegman and Charles Wright observe in their survey of Ambrose’s works in Anglo-Saxon England that though his influence has been plausibly traced in some Old English poetry, Ambrose ‘was not a major source for later vernacular authors’: ‘Ambrose in Anglo-Saxon England with Pseudo-Ambrose and Ambrosiaster’, Old English Newsletter: Subsidia, 25 (1997), 9–18 (pp. 12, 17).

<35 Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, Being Twenty-one Full Homilies of his Middle and Later Career for the Most Part not Previously Edited, with Some Shorter Pieces, Mainly Passages Added to the Second and Third Series, ed. by John C. Pope, Early English Text Society, 259–60, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1967–68), II 725–33. In that volume this work immediately follows Ælfric’s most widely-read homily, ‘De falsis diis’.

36 Homilies, ed. by Pope, II 725.

37 Though I do not assert that Ælfric’s text is verse, for simplicity I preserve Pope’s editorial lineation. Lines 39–50: ‘Again there was battle in Israel; | in that battle there was a marvellous giant | who wanted to kill David the king, | but Abishai his thane, Joab’s brother, quickly came to his aid, | and he killed the giant, | because he saw what he intended for David, | how he wished to carry him off from among his thanes. | Then straightaway all the king’s thanes made an oath, | and spoke to him thus: Henceforth you shall never | go to battle among us, at the risk of your life, | lest you should extinguish Israel’s lantern:— | it was because of David himself that they said this.’ A marginal gloss in the manuscript notes that OE leohtfæt translates Latin lucernam (Homilies, ed. by Pope, II 730), and in Ælfric’s text the passage is headed by the first few Latin words of the scriptural episode: ‘Factum est autem rursum prelium | aduersus Israhel Philistinorum, et cetera.’ Jane Toswell, The Anglo-Saxon Psalter, p. 88 explores the importance of this gloss in a footnote.

38 Toswell, The Anglo-Saxon Psalter, pp. 86–88.

39 ‘The Christian Theme’, p. 81. With this speculation on a Beowulf-like Anglo-Saxon poem based on the life of David, Goldsmith comes closest of any previous scholar I am aware of to making the connection McFarland does in his MA thesis and I do in this article. Goldsmith, however, never connects Beowulf’s dragon-fight with David’s fight against Ishbi-Benob, even when she discusses the dragon and more generally what Beowulf’s fights represent (pp. 90–96). In other respects, Goldsmith’s analysis goes into great depth showing how Christian themes are handled in Beowulf.

40 To this we might compare various Anglo-Saxon writers’ emphasis on the excessive pride of Alexander the Great, a portrayal explored and explicitly compared to Beowulf’s portrayal by Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the ‘Beowulf’-Manuscript (Cambridge: Brewer, 1995), pp. 116–39, especially pp. 135–36, 139. Like other scholars exploring the monsters of Beowulf, Orchard does not in this book connect King David’s fight against Ishbi-Benob with King Beowulf’s against the dragon.

41 ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ according to Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34, quoting Psalm 22. This is the only statement by Christ on the cross appearing in more than one gospel.

42 Tolkien, ‘Beowulf’, p. 27.