Beowulf and Typological Symbolism

Abstract

<p>In view of the prevalence of Christianity in England throughout what we can consider the age of the Beowulf poet, an exploration of the influence of typological symbolism would seem to be especially useful in the study of Beowulf. In the Old English period any Christian influence on a poem would perforce be of a patristic and typological nature. I propose to give evidence that this statement applies also to Beowulf, and to bring this information to bear particularly on the inter-pretation of the two dominant symbols, Heorot and the dragon's hoard. To date, no attempt has been made to look at the poem as a whole in a purely typological perspective.</p> <p>According to the typological exegesis of Scripture, the realities of the Old Testament prefigure those of the new dispensation. The Hebrew prophets and also the New Testament apostles consciously made reference to "types" or "figures", but it was left for the Fathers of the Church to develop typology as a science. They did so to prove to such heretics as the Mani-cheans that both Testaments form a unity, and to convince the Jews that the Old was fulfilled in the New. In this thesis we are concerned mainly with the sacramental typology which, being derived from Scripture, shows an essential consistency that is not affected by the whims of allegorizing exegetes. Since the typological symbolism of the baptismal rite is commonplace in the hexameral and paschal writings of the early Church, the extent to which typology was influenced by extra-biblical allegory as well as the complexity· of the variations in the early liturgy both lie beyond the scope of our present investigation.</p> <p>The following technical points should be noted. All quotations from Latin authors are given first in the original and then in English; wherever no indebtedness is indicated, the translations are my own. Greek writers are quoted only in English translation. All Scripture passages are from the Vulgate; the Authorized or King James Version is the usual source of the English text because it provides the most familiar rendering. Significant divergences are pointed out, and on occasion the Revised Standard Version is used to supply a closer parallel. In the references to the Psalms, the numbering of the Vulgate precedes that of other translations; the latter is shown in parentheses. Old English quotations are taken from The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, unless otherwise acknowledged.</p>