In Beowulf, how does the poet create distance between the characters and himself, and how does he express their own sense of a distant past?

bemmer,

In the epic poem "Beowulf", the author or authors created a world which was very distant from their own. Distance is created through the use of events such as feasts and celebrations, symbols representing a dark and unknown forces, and by only alluding to other events gone by.

Beowulf seems to have come from southern Sweden to England with the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who started arriving in the 5th century C.E. It seems to have survived orally for several centuries before being written down somewhere between the 8th and 10th centuries C.E. It survives in a single manuscript which was damaged in a fire.

The plot of the poem has three climaxes with each featuring a great fight between Beowulf and a monster; but the poem includes a great deal of other material as well. A great portion of the poem is given over to feasts and celebrations. Beowulf digresses off into about 10 other stories from Germanic history and legend—stories which are only allusively referred to, so footnotes are needed to sort them out.

Beowulf is essentially a pre-Christian poem with a few inadvertent Christian details, unavoidable because the poem was written by a Christian looking back at a pre-Christian past with admiration and some nostalgia. The poem’s definition of a “good king” is solidly Germanic, emphasizing fighting, winning treasure, and being remembered after one’s death. Beowulf’s principal enemies—trolls and dragons—are creatures from Germanic mythology associated with cold, darkness, and the wilderness; they are enemies of human values and achievements, and they reflect the hostile environments from which Germanic people came.

Beowulf’s death during his battle with the dragon is no surprise; for these Germanic peoples, all stories end in death and destruction, as does their mythology about the world itself. What makes Beowulf a hero is that he takes the dragon with him when he dies. Beowulf’s death means the destruction of his people—another reminder of the gloomy Germanic world view that is underscored by a favorite device of the poet: understatement. This creates more distance in showcasing the end of a society.

Beowulf, like all good literature, creates distance by demonstrating its richness in the number of different readings it can support. It can be a poem about humankind’s losing battle with the universe. It can be a meditation on the futility of a culture that defines itself in terms of war. It can also be an analysis of the uses and misuses of heroism within the human community.

These all support the idea that the poem creates distance.