Friday
Since I’m expected to be non-partisan in the poems I submit each week to the Sewanee Mountain Messenger, for my election-related selection this week I chose two passages from Beowulf to capture opposing moods. I offer the first to voters despondent over Tuesday’s results, the second to those elated.
Since I freely share my political leanings on my blog here, I can report that the experience that Wiglaf feels after walking into the dragon hoard—this after he has helped Beowulf slay the beast—is what it felt like to survive the predicted Republican “red wave.” Despite facing a dragon threatening to burn down everything around us, we are still standing.
First, however, here’s the passage the describes how I would have felt had that red wave actually materialized. I would have related to Grendel after having had his arm torn off:
Then an extraordinary
wail arose, and bewildering fear
came over the Danes. Everyone felt it
who heard that cry as it echoed off the wall,
a God-cursed scream and strain of catastrophe,
the howl of the loser, the lament of the hell-serf
keening his wound.
After losing his battle with Beowulf, Grendel stumbles back to his underwater cave. That’s often where we want to be at such moments. For instance, it was where I wanted to be in 2016 when I learned that Donald Trump had been elected president.
Slaying the dragon, by contrast, involves pushing through depression and rediscovering hope. In Beowulf, dragons are associated with people within whom the life energies have ceased to flow. They hunker down in caves, or in cranky old age, refusing to recognize the riches all around them. Beowulf, like other figures in the poem associated with dragons (Heremod and the last veteran), is in danger of shutting down until the youthful Wiglaf helps him tap into the treasures within. This is symbolized by the liberation of the dragon’s treasure hoard:
[Wiglaf] went in his chain-mail
Under the rock-piled roof of the barrow,
Exulting in his triumph, and saw beyond the seat
A treasure-trove of astonishing richness,
Wall-hangings that were a wonder to behold,
Glittering gold spread across the ground,
The old dawn-scorching serpent’s den.
…
And he saw too a standard, entirely of gold,
Hanging high over the hoard,
A masterpiece of filigree; it glowed with light.
(trans. Seamus Heaney)
As Republican election deniers have experienced one defeat after another, I find myself glowing with light. Democracy appears to have been saved to fight another day.
