A Dark Age Peter Principle: Beowulf’s
incompetence threshold
emed_288
2..25
Oren Falk
Many readers, recognizing the incompatibility of heroism with the duties of
kingship, have argued that Beowulf tells a story of colossal failure. Drawing
on anthropological theory, I propose that the protagonist is more Big-Man
than king and that his heroism, far from a socially dysfunctional flaw, is in
fact the leash by which society yanks him back from establishing himself as
king. Beowulf thus speaks to an aristocracy disinclined to submit to royalty.
The poem shines a light on Anglo-Saxons’ aversion to despotic rule: to protect
its own decentralized political structure, society against the state foredooms
King Beowulf to death.
‘In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.’1
Beowulf is difficult material to work, especially for butter-fingered historians, accustomed to kneading less nimble sources than verse.2 On the
*
1
2
The origins of this paper, in an Early Medieval Europe session at the 38th International
Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, 9 May 2003), should still be evident in its tone and
pacing, which I have not tried to revise radically. I am grateful to Danuta Shanzer for inviting
me to take part in that session; to Edward James, Walter Goffart and other participants for their
comments; and to Paul Fouracre for his patient encouragement. Thanks also to Nimrod Barri
for introducing me to the joys of Old English and to Guillaume Ratel for finding fault with my
French; to John Keane for his suggestive discussion of Clastres (Reflections on Violence (London,
1996), p. 138); to Jennifer Harris and Doug Puett for stimulating my thoughts on the subject;
and to Early Medieval Europe’s anonymous referee for an engaged, critical reading, packed with
helpful pointers.
L.F. Peter and R. Hull, The Peter Principle (New York, 1969), p. 26; see also Peter’s Corollary:
‘In time, every post in a hierarchy tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to
carry out its duties’ (p. 178). All references to the text of Beowulf are by line number, following
Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. R.D. Fulk, R.E. Bjork and J.D. Niles, Toronto
Old English Series 21, 4th edn (Toronto, 2008), except as otherwise noted; diacritical notations
have been omitted. Translations of Beowulf are adapted from R.M. Liuzza’s Beowulf: A New
Verse Translation (Peterborough, ON, 2000).
Cf. J.D. Niles: ‘Paradoxically, studies of the historical elements in Beowulf are likely to be most
productive when they are willing to let history go’: ‘Myth and History’, in R.E. Bjork and J.D.
Niles (eds), A Beowulf Handbook (Lincoln, 1997), pp. 213–32, at p. 229.
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Beowulf ’s incompetence threshold
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one hand, one faces the opacity of the poem itself: there is so little we
know with confidence about it – and so much of what each of us does
know with any degree of certainty is flatly contradicted by what others
fancy they do, no less securely. (One need only pick up the composite
Toronto volume on The Dating of Beowulf to see how this particular song
and dance goes. The subtitle of Eric Stanley’s concluding chapter says it
all: ‘Some Doubts and No Conclusions’.)3 On the other hand, if J.R.R.
Tolkien found it unprofitable ‘to read all that has been printed on, or
touching on, this poem’ by 1936, the rate of publication in Beowulfiana
nowadays literally makes it impossible to familiarize oneself with all of
the secondary literature and (almost as literally) ensures that nothing
really new could be said.4 On the third hand (even merely to gripe about
Beowulf ’s terrific complexity, one needs three hands), certain rules of
etiquette have sedimented around the poem, setting limits to what can be
ventured about it without offending against decorum. Ever since Tolkien
issued a stern admonition against the practice, most readers have come to
reject as Very Bad Form any analysis ‘that is directed [not] to the understanding of [the] poem as a poem’ but seeks, rather, to reduce it to a
historian’s turnstile: a gateway into the early Middle Ages, which must be
traversed, of course, but which hardly constitutes a destination in its own
right. ‘Beowulf ’, rebukes Tolkien, ‘has been used as a quarry of fact and
fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art.’
Critics travelling in his wake have seen fit to heed his call and turn back
from excavating the poem to reading it.5
Another of these ubiquitous rules of etiquette states that any novel
investigation must start out by acknowledging the seminal role Tolkien’s
‘Monsters and Critics’ essay has played in setting the current research
agenda. Since I have already observed this particular custom, I shall for
the rest of my paper take the liberty of flying in the face of propriety. I
shall do so, first, by staying aloof from the kind of close reading that
Tolkien made de rigueur and opting, rather, for the excavational mode.
My concern is not so much with Beowulf the poem as with the historical
3
4
5
See E.J. Stanley, ‘The Date of Beowulf: Some Doubts and No Conclusions’, in C. Chase (ed.),
The Dating of Beowulf, Toronto Old English Series 6, 2nd edn (Toronto, 1997; orig. 1981),
pp. 197–211.
See J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, Proceedings of the British Academy
22 (1936), pp. 245–95; repr. in L.E. Nicholson (ed.), An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism (Notre
Dame and London, 1963), pp. 51–103, at p. 51. On the current state of affairs, see A. Orchard,
A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge, 2003), p. 3: ‘such has been the proliferation of
books and articles on Beowulf (with a new item a week appearing on average over the last
decade), that simply controlling the secondary material has become a near-impossible task’.
Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, p. 52. On the distinction between reading and
excavating texts, see further M. Beard, ‘Re-reading (Vestal) Virginity’, in R. Hawley and B.
Levick (eds), Women in Antiquity: New Assessments (London and New York, 1995), pp. 166–77,
at pp. 171–2.
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reality which underlies it; nor do I balk at handling the specific literary
artefact cavalierly, if need be, in order to get at this submerged history.
Second, I shall impose on Beowulf ’s historical specificity some unabashedly anachronistic matrices. In other words, in my quest for the Dark
Ages, I import alien thought tools, enta geweorc, explicitly fashioned to
make sense of other times, other places and other mores. I wear as my
justification nothing more than the methodological eclectic’s traditional
(indeed, only) ribbon: use whatever works.6 Finally, I shall offend by
suggesting that one of the very few points of consensus we do have about
this poem – that its subject matter is the resolute heroism of a bygone
(perhaps fictive) era, that ‘great contribution of early Northern literature’
(to quote Tolkien one last time), ‘the theory of courage . . . heathen,
noble, and hopeless’ – is, if not outright wrong, certainly misleading.7 Let
me begin, then, with ‘heroism’, which – together with ‘hierarchy’ and
‘honour’ – is one of the watchwords organizing my discussion.
Heroism looms large in most readers’ perception of Beowulf, and
though few are so foolhardy as to offer a restrictive definition, the primary
focus is usually on the martial virtues. Beowulf himself most clearly
embodies the heroic ideal, epitomizing warrior values – bravery and
physical prowess – on an epic, larger-than-life scale. ‘[T]he notions
surrounding the idea of the hero are all associated with battle, war,
prowess, courage, bravery, self-defence, and defence of one’s king or
nation’, summarizes Leo Carruthers, adding: ‘Beowulf is . . . presented as
perfect hero.’8 It is easy to find specific lines in the poem which supply
grist for this perception, such as Beowulf ’s pre-Grendelian boast: ‘I
resolved when I set out over the waves . . . that I would entirely fulfil the
wishes of your people, or fall slain, fast in the grip of my foe. I shall
perform a deed of manly courage, or in this meadhall I will await the end
of my days!’9 Beowulf, whose physical prowess is presented repeatedly in
a variety of settings – contending with the savage Atlantic, tearing limbs
6
7
8
9
Historians seldom speak the word ‘eclectic’ except to disparage, but see N.Z. Davis’s prodigiously inspiring ‘A Life of Learning: Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 1997’, ACLS Occasional Paper 39, pp. 14–15.
Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, pp. 70–1. One can hardly begin to page
through any work of Beowulf scholarship without finding enunciations of this consensus.
L. Carruthers, ‘Kingship and Heroism in Beowulf ’, in L. Carruthers (ed.), Heroes and Heroines
in Medieval English Literature: A Festschrift presented to André Crépin on the Occasion of his
Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 19–29, at pp. 24–5. J. Garde, ‘Sapientia, ubi sunt,
and the Heroic Ideal in Beowulf ’, Studia Neophilologica 66 (1993), pp. 159–73, is slightly more
inclusive (noting, e.g., Beowulf’s ‘gentle nature . . . and spiritual aspirations’), but similarly
privileges martial characteristics: ‘extraordinary strength, size and reckless courage . . . enduring
loyalty . . . consistent boasting . . . poor reputation and persistent desire for praise [and] an
heroic penchant for revenge’ (p. 160).
Beowulf, ll. 632–8: ‘Ic þæt hogode, þa ic on holm gestah . . . þæt ic anunga eowra leoda / willan
geworhte oþðe on wæl crunge / feondgrapum fæst. Ic gefremman sceal / eorlic ellen, oþðe
endedæg / on þisse meoduhealle minne gebidan.’
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off nocturnal intruders, gripping with the strength of thirty men – here
commits to exerting himself to his fullest extent in Hroðgar’s service,
underscoring that he means to die before he fails in his task. Fifty years
on, neither his courage nor his commitment waver: before confronting
the dragon that will, indeed, end his days, he reiterates his vow that he
‘will do heroic deeds with daring . . . or grim death and fatal battle will
bear away your lord!’10
Critics also sometimes stress elements like loyalty to one’s lord, camaraderie among brothers at arms and generosity towards one’s subordinates as components of heroism. Beowulf’s touching devotion to his ‘dear
Hygelac’, Hroðgar’s lament for Æschere, his ‘shoulder-to-shoulder companion’, or Beowulf’s (misguided, as it turns out) munificence towards
his retainers in later life can all be cited as examples.11 But these latter
elements have received less attention in the portrayal of heroism, it seems
to me – note their absence from Carruthers’s recipe – because they
concern not so much the heroic individual in solitary relief as the hero
fully embedded within a societal matrix. And in the view of present-day
scholarship, genuine heroism demands a great man’s abstraction from
any communal context, to tower alone above a blank social horizon. The
poem, in Roy Liuzza’s estimation, ‘celebrates the warrior in heroic isolation – fighting for honor and fame rather than hearth and home . . . rootless, unmarried, without progeny’. Other critics likewise find the hero’s
relationship with society to be of secondary interest, at best. ‘Beowulf ’,
pronounces James W. Earl, ‘is a hymn to the individual hero as much as
to the group he belongs to – and which he transcends.’12
Heroism in Beowulf is thus chiefly a matter of individual martial
aptitude, a distillation of manly prowess.13 What, then, does it mean for
10
11
12
13
Beowulf, ll. 2535–7: ‘Ic mid elne sceall [eorlscype efnan] . . . oððe guð nimeð, / feorhbealu frecne
frean eowerne.’
Beowulf, l. 2434: ‘Hygelac min’; l. 1326: ‘eaxlgestealla’; ll. 2865–74 for Wiglaf ’s assessment of the
futility of Beowulf ’s gift-giving.
Liuzza, ‘Preface’ to his translation of Beowulf, pp. 9–48, at p. 29, and J.W. Earl, Thinking about
Beowulf (Stanford, 1994), p. 185. Cf. K. O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Heroic Values and Christian Ethics’,
in M. Godden and M. Lapidge (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature
(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 107–25, who begins by stating that ‘[t]he touchstone of [the heroic] life
– as represented in Old English literature at least – is the vital relationship between retainer and
lord, whose binding virtue is loyalty’, but then goes on to argue that ‘a warrior’s paramount goal
is the achievement of a lasting reputation’, a quest for personal glory rather than imbrication in
a web of fidelity (pp. 107–8).
R.W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999), makes the same claim
for the chivalric literature of the High Middle Ages more generally, noting ‘the utterly tireless,
almost obsessional emphasis placed on personal prowess as the key chivalric trait. Not simply
one quality among others in a list of virtues, prowess often stands as a one-word definition of
chivalry . . . Prowess was thought to bring other qualities in its train . . . and these qualities may
have more appeal for most modern readers than prowess itself; but we will radically misunderstand the medieval view and the medieval reality if we push the bloody, sweaty, muscular work
done with lance and sword swiftly and antiseptically to the side’ (pp. 135, 138–9).
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George Clark to declare that ‘[t]he poem’s theme and the hero’s goal are
one’?14 What, in other words, is at stake in insisting on the absolute
centrality of heroism? Clark is navigating, I think, among several crosscurrents of incompatible opinion, concerned with the dating, religious
outlook and moral thrust of the poem, whose consensual core is simply
this: that Beowulf, whatever its original context and ultimate message,
depicts a world in which heroic ideals possess an urgent reality. By
lumping together the many contested aspects of interpretation, I do not
mean to make light of the issues under debate. Surely it matters enormously for our understanding of the poem, and of the history encoded in
it, whether Beowulf originated in the seventh century or in the eleventh;
whether it expresses an essentially pagan world-view or a Christian critique (perhaps even parody) of such a world-view; and whether the poet
means to extol Beowulf and his world or damn them. For the purpose of
the present discussion, however, it suffices to point out that the many
contested interpretations all tie back to our understanding of the individual protagonist’s warlike stature within the poem. Clark’s formulation
should be acceptable to most, perhaps all, commentators on Beowulf:
correctly interpreting the image of heroism, of which Beowulf is the
ultimate representative, amounts to discovering a skeleton key to the
poem as a whole.
Beowulf ’s first 2200 lines seem relatively unproblematic in this respect;
they sing the praises of an abundantly successful overachiever. The question is what to make of the last 1000 lines, where scholars have perceived
mounting tension between Beowulf’s two roles, that of hero and that of
king. The final third of the poem sees the protagonist die in an apparently
futile heroic exertion against a dragon. His suicidal readiness to lay down
his own life for his people could doubtless be excused, were it not that
both he and his achievements seem to go up in a thin plume of smoke: not
the grand exit we usually expect from our heroes,15 and especially troublesome for those of us who have become accustomed to Hollywood portrayals of heroism. (One can but wonder what might have happened if
Ken Loach or any other Kitchen Sink director had got his hands on Neil
Gaiman and Roger Avary’s script, casting an undigitally enhanced
Michael Caine perhaps in the title role, and Lynne Perrie as Grendel’s
mother.)16 A wide variety of ‘solutions’ have been offered for the seeming
‘problem’ of Beowulf’s inauspicious demise, all of which retain a focus on
14
15
16
G. Clark, ‘The Hero and the Theme’, in Beowulf Handbook, pp. 271–90, at p. 290.
Cf. Liuzza, ‘Preface’, p. 36: ‘For all [his praiseworthy heroism], Beowulf dies, and his death has
none of the triumphant sanctification of the death of a martyr like King Edmund, or a
Christian hero like Charlemagne’s champion in the French Chanson de Roland ’; cf. N. Kroll,
‘Beowulf: The Hero as Keeper of Human Polity’, Modern Philology 84 (1986), pp. 117–29, esp.
pp. 120, 129. See also Klaeber’s Beowulf, p. 270, n. to l. 3155b.
Cf. Beowulf: (Director’s Cut), dir. R. Zemeckis (Warner, 2007), DVD.
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the individual hero and king. Listen, for instance, to the tone of the
following quotations: Beowulf’s ‘decision to fight [the dragon] was not
the expression of selfish or misguided individualism which lightly put the
realm in jeopardy, but sprang from the consuming desire for that arete
characteristic of the hero and not easily understood by lesser men’.17 Or
again, ‘the parallel between the circumstances surrounding Beowulf’s last
hours and those surrounding Christ’s would . . . have sufficed for the
identification of [the dragon] episode with the Christian story of salvation. But a climactic detail is added in this third allegorization of the story
which emphasizes the kind of savior – a savior who saves by losing his own
life.’18 Finally (and conversely), ‘Beowulf [illustrates] unforgettably how
prodigious pride can make monsters of men’.19 Each of these critics (like
dozens more I might have cited) locks in violent disagreement with the
others on how we should evaluate Beowulf; but all agree that our evaluation of his heroic singularity is paramount to our decoding of the poem.20
The de-emphasis on the social aspect of heroism emerges most clearly
from analyses like John Leyerle’s and those of others who have either
elaborated his thesis or objected to it. Leyerle does address the ‘problem’
of Beowulf ’s death as a social rather than merely personal issue, but his
conception of society remains so staunchly focused on individual action
that the collective dimension recedes:
The hero follows a code that exalts indomitable will and valour in the
individual, but society requires a king who acts for the common good,
not for his own glory . . . Heroic society inevitably encouraged a king
to act the part of a hero, yet the heroic king, however glorious, was apt
to be a mortal threat to his nation . . . [H]eroic society was inherently
unstable, for men who had been accustomed to conduct suitable to an
individual hero could not adjust to a rather different conduct suitable
to a king.21
17
18
19
20
21
G.N. Garmonsway, ‘Anglo-Saxon Heroic Attitudes’, in J.B. Bessinger, Jr and R.P. Creed (eds),
Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun (New York,
1965), pp. 139–46, at pp. 142–3.
M.B. McNamee, SJ, ‘Beowulf – An Allegory of Salvation?’, Journal of English and Germanic
Philology 59 (1960), pp. 190–207; repr. in R.D. Fulk (ed.), Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical
Anthology (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1991), pp. 88–102, at p. 100.
A. Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript (Cambridge,
1995), p. 171.
On this point (if hardly on any other), I am thus in full agreement with G.V. Smithers, who
declares that ‘[t]here is probably no reader of Beowulf today who does not think of it as a heroic
poem’; see ‘Destiny and the Heroic Warrior in Beowulf ’, in J.L. Rosier (ed.), Philological Essays:
Studies in Old and Middle English Language and Literature in Honour of Herbert Dean Meritt
(The Hague and Paris, 1970), pp. 65–81, at p. 75.
J. Leyerle, ‘Beowulf the Hero and the King’, Medium Ævum 34 (1965), pp. 89–102, at pp. 89,
97–8. Cf. R.W. Hanning, ‘Beowulf as Heroic History’, Medievalia et Humanistica, ns 5 (1974),
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The society Leyerle imagines is rigidly hierarchical. The requirements it
makes of those who occupy the middle rungs, those who have significant
responsibilities both upwards and downwards, are categorically different
from the demands placed on the one and only office-holder at the apex.
But far from analysing the interplay among different positions within this
structure, Leyerle focuses on the personal obligations of men placed
amidships and opposes them to those of the captain on the bridge. The
contrast he sets up between heroism and kingship is thus really a contrast
between two modes of individual conduct, rather than between the
singular and the plural.
Nevertheless, Leyerle helps articulate the Problemstellung, the manner
in which the tension tugging at heroism is usually articulated: as a strain
of individualism not quite commensurable with the social good. A hero,
the argument goes, is a radical free agent; a king, in contrast, is the
lynchpin holding society together. ‘The question remains whether it is
the duty of a king to die in the heroic manner’, Carruthers muses
rhetorically, ‘or whether Hrothgar acted in a wiser fashion by inspiring a
younger and stronger warrior to fight for him.’ He hastens to answer his
own question, chiding ‘King Beowulf [for] insist[ing] on acting the hero
– to relive his youth, in a sense – thereby placing his people in danger’.22
Considered from a systemic point of view, modern students of Beowulf
find no enduring value in heroism (even if some praise its virtue from
other perspectives). Harry Berger and Marshall Leicester express this
point clearly:
Beowulf’s [reign suggests] the double bind that confronts the great
hero as ruler: if by his excellence he holds fearful aggressors in abeyance . . . he erodes the Geat warrior ethos; if, on the other hand, he
wages continual warfare[,] every trophy he wins creates new enemies
22
pp. 77–102, at pp. 86, 97: ‘[Beowulf is] a “chosen” individual, uncompromisingly dedicated to
his destiny and endowed with powers and virtues that make him unique . . . In the last part of
Beowulf . . . cohesion gives way to isolation, disjunction, and impotence. Beowulf ’s obligations
as king come into conflict with the heroic imperatives still operating within his old frame.’
Other interpretations that, in paralleling, following or resisting Leyerle, isolate Beowulf the king
from his social context, include J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s
Son’ (orig. 1953); repr. in Tree and Leaf; Smith of Wootton Major; The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
(London, 1975), pp. 147–75, at pp. 168–75; J. Halverson, ‘The World of Beowulf ’, ELH 36
(1969), pp. 593–608; H. Berger, Jr and H.M. Leicester, Jr, ‘Social Structure as Doom: The
Limits of Heroism in Beowulf ’, in R.B. Burlin and E.B. Irving, Jr (eds), Old English Studies in
Honour of John C. Pope (Toronto, 1974), pp. 37–79; J.D. Niles, Beowulf: The Poem and Its
Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 235–47; Earl, Thinking about Beowulf, pp. 175–87; C.R.
Davis, Beowulf and the Demise of Germanic Legend in England, Albert Bates Lord Studies in Oral
Tradition 17 (New York and London, 1996), pp. 147–50; K.J. Wanner, ‘Warriors, Wyrms, and
Wyrd: The Paradoxical Fate of the Germanic Hero/King in Beowulf ’, Essays in Medieval Studies
16 (1999), pp. 1–15; and Liuzza, ‘Preface’, pp. 37–9.
Carruthers, ‘Kingship and Heroism in Beowulf ’, p. 28.
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and lust for vengeance; in both cases . . . his people become losers. The
hero becomes the only winner.23
In proclaiming Beowulf a victor for having fallen in battle, the two are
evidently adopting a point of view internal to heroic culture – the dying
Geatish king is only ‘the only winner’ inasmuch as he attains glory
through his doomed action – and in so doing, they privilege the individual’s take on the warrior ethos over any collective assessment. The
hero actively chooses death before dishonour; his people, a huddled mass,
must passively endure any fate to which his action consigns them.
The Beowulf poet seems to provide abundant justification for such a
focus. The voices he quotes glorify the hero consistently for his singular
daring: ‘Now by yourself you have done such deeds that your fame will
endure always and forever’, marvels Hroðgar, and Beowulf himself boasts:
‘always on foot I would go before [Hygelac], alone in the vanguard’. Even
when he takes his position in formation, then, the hero cannot but pull
ahead of the multitude, as also happens when Beowulf wrestles with
Grendel at Hroðgar’s hall and with Grendel’s mother in her mere.24
Likewise Sigemund, the archetypal dragon slayer, ‘alone assayed a bold
deed’; and Wiglaf – once he is done berating Beowulf’s do-nothing
retainers – assimilates his dead lord to Sigemund’s paradigm, modestly
editing his own role out of the narrative: ‘God, the Ruler of victories,
allowed that he, alone with his blade, might avenge himself.’ Even
Grendel, a ‘fearsome solitary prowler’, earns some measure of heroic
respect by striving ‘one against all’.25
In contrast, the poet has Wiglaf complain that society at large gets the
short end of the stick: ‘Often many men must suffer misery through the
will of one, as has now happened to us.’ Wiglaf’s comment is one of
23
24
25
Berger and Leicester, ‘Social Structure as Doom’, p. 65. Cf., e.g., M. Puhvel, ‘The Concept of
Heroism in the Anglo-Saxon Epic’, in T. Pàroli (ed.), La funzione dell’eroe germanico: storicità,
metafora, paradigma. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studio, Roma, 6–8 Maggio 1993 (Rome,
1995), pp. 57–73. Puhvel discerns in the Germanic hero’s ‘obsessive-seeming concern with
attainment of maximum glory at every turn and at any cost’ (p. 67) a motivation of personal
salvation in the afterlife; he is utterly unconcerned with the fate of the hero’s society.
Beowulf, ll. 953–5: ‘Þu þe self hafast / dædum gefremed þæt þin dom lyfað / awa to aldre’; ll.
2497–8: ‘symle ic him on feðan beforan wolde, / ana on orde’; ll. 794–805 for the ineffectiveness
of Beowulf’s companions in the fight at Heorot; and ll. 1602–5 for the Geats’ watch at the mere.
See also ll. 424–32, 696–700, 2532–5, 2538–41, 2642–4, and perhaps even 2367–8 (where
Beowulf, ‘earm anhaga’ ‘wretched loner’, is the sole survivor of the disasterous campaign against
the Frisians).
Beowulf, ll. 888–9: ‘ana geneðde / frecne dæde’; ll. 2874–6: ‘him God uðe, / sigora waldend, þæt
he hyne sylfne gewræc / ana mid ecge’; ll. 165, 145: ‘atol angengea . . . [wan] ana wið eallum’. We
may note in passing that Grendel’s dam initially attacks Beowulf accompanied by ‘sædeor
monig’ (‘many a sea-beast’, l. 1510), but she, too, ends up grappling with the invader of her
‘ælwihta eard’ (‘alien homeland’, l. 1500) in single combat. K.S. Kiernan argues that she should
be counted ‘among the great Germanic heroines’: ‘Grendel’s Heroic Mother’, In Geardagum 6
(1984), pp. 13–33, at pp. 13–14.
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several sombre notes sounded towards the end of the poem,26 which have
been taken as confirmation of a dark future awaiting the Geats. Apparently, society is unable to weather the storms ahead of it without heroic
Beowulf at the helm. It should be noted, however, that the evidence for
Geatish collapse, though it has been accepted at face value even by so
sceptical a reader as Eric Stanley, is in fact rather wispy. ‘The destruction
of the Geatish nation is foretold; and in Beowulf disasters foretold are
disasters come true’, writes Stanley, reinforcing readers’ inclination to
mistake hypothetical prediction for affirmation of fact. Stanley himself
offers reason to dismiss portions of the gloomy forecast: in his opinion,
lines 2884–90 ‘refer to [the cowards and] their families within the tribe
rather than to the tribe as a whole’, and he rightly declines ‘to accept . . .
the woman’s lament (lines 315[0]–55) as evidence for anything, since the
manuscript is so badly damaged here’. Other passages certainly anticipate
strife from Franks and Swedes, but hardly anything that should be
considered (in the words of another arch-sceptic) ‘an unprecedented and
inexplicable cataclysm’, in excess of ‘normal Dark Age activity’.27 Even the
lines that, to Stanley, provide ‘the firmest evidence in the poem of the
subsequent destruction of the Geats’ – ‘[let the] fair maiden have no
ring-ornament around her neck, but sad in mind, stripped of gold, she
must walk a foreign path, not once but often, now that the leader of our
troop has laid aside laughter’ – are enigmatic enough to sustain more than
one possible interpretation.28 Certainly a generic maiden, intimately associated with the Geats, is depicted as enduring exile; but whether she is
supposed to stand in for all Geatish women seems less clear-cut. Given
the realities of intertribal sexual unions, be they peace-weaving marriages
or hostile ravishments, the woman who must now depart from the Geats,
golde bereafod, may well be a foreigner herself, like the wife Ongenþeow
had once rescued, golde berofene, from Hæðcyn’s clutches.29 We should
also note that the prophecy comes from the mouth of the herald
announcing Beowulf’s death, hardly a disinterested soothsayer. His
lengthy peroration (ll. 2900–3027) harps repeatedly on the theme of the
26
27
28
29
Beowulf, ll. 3077–8: ‘Oft sceal eorl monig anes willan / wræc adreogan, swa us geworden is’; and
cf. ll. 2884–90, 2910–13, 2922–3, 2999–3007, 3015–27, 3150–5.
E.G. Stanley, ‘Hæthenra Hyht in Beowulf ’, in S.B. Greenfield (ed.), Studies in Old English
Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur ([Eugene], 1963), pp. 136–51, at pp. 141, 142 n.5; P.H.
Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings, 2nd edn (London, 1971), pp. 202–3.
Stanley, ‘Hæthenra Hyht’, p. 142; Beowulf, ll. 3016–20: ‘ne mægð scyne / habban on healse
hringweorðunge, / ac sceal geomormod, golde bereafod / oft nalles æne elland tredan, / nu se
herewisa hleahtor alegde’. Cf. Klaeber’s Beowulf, p. 263, n. to l. 3018f.: ‘Indeed, some have seen
a bright future for the [Geatish] nation.’
Beowulf, ll. 2928–32: ‘Sona him se froda fæder Ohtheres . . . bryd ahredde, / gomela iomeowlan
golde berofene, / Onelan modor ond Ohtheres’ (‘Immediately the ancient father of Ohthere . . .
rescued his wife, the old man his bride of yore, bereft of her gold, Onela’s mother and
Ohthere’s); I here follow Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, ed. F. Klaeber, 3rd edn (Boston,
1936).
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great loss the Geats have suffered in the death of their king; he, like
present-day critics, sees the fate of society as hanging by the single thread
of individual prowess, be it Hygelac’s, Eofor’s or Beowulf’s. The narrator
later gives the herald’s speech his endorsement, saying that ‘he did not lie
much’, but even this litotes leaves open the question of whether we are to
take the herald’s every word as literal truth – not to mention the question
of whether we find the narrator himself entirely trustworthy. Historians,
trained to query the objectivity of their sources, should no more accept
the narrator’s praise of Beowulf on faith than we do Eusebius’s laudatio
of Constantine or Einhard’s of Charlemagne.30
This brief and unquestionably partial survey of the scholarship has
shown a consensus, then, on some key points: that heroism is at the core
of Beowulf ’s poetic enterprise, unproblematically celebrated in the first
two thirds of the poem; that this heroism is an individual endeavour; and
that kingship, the individual office at the head of the social hierarchy,
is fundamentally incompatible with heroism. The poem’s final third,
recounting Beowulf’s personal downfall and intimating the communal
grief to which the Geats allegedly come, has been taken by many critics,
from Tolkien on, as confirmation of this incompatibility. Even those who
defend Beowulf’s conduct, such as John Niles, do so on grounds other
than that the personal prowess he pits against the dragon serves society’s
best interests. 31
But what if heroism, rather than a mortal malady afflicting the body
social, were an adaptive social strategy? What if it were a product not just
of individualist vainglory but also of rational collective culture? I should
like to broach the possibility that heroism in Beowulf is of fundamental
utility to society at large. At one level, I have no quarrel with the picture
Leyerle and others have brought into sharp focus: the individual hero’s
single-minded striving for glory is indeed incommensurable with the
stability of royal government. Must we, then, accept that Dark Age men
and women were either blind to this contradiction or, at least, powerless to
address it? This seems to be the only possible conclusion if, with Leyerle
and others, we assume that the contradiction posed a crippling problem for
the kind of society envisioned in the poem. But the core values of heroism,
30
31
Beowulf, l. 3029: ‘he ne leag fela’. The trustworthiness of the narrator is a complex issue that
cannot be adequately dealt with here, especially as there is no consensus about the Christian
poet’s attitude towards (or even agency in shaping) his pagan subject matter. In ‘Beowulf ’s
Longest Day: The Amphibious Hero in his Element (Beowulf, ll. 1495b–96)’, Journal of English
and Germanic Philology 106 (2007), pp. 1–21, at pp. 15–18, I hint at reasons for thinking that the
poem occasionally says things other than the poet presumably meant it to; contrast Niles,
Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition, pp. 237–8.
See Niles, Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition, pp. 243–7. Niles argues that Beowulf demonstrates heroic concern ‘for the safety of his people’ and ‘the welfare of society’, but these are, as
he says of the king’s death and the fate of the dragon’s hoard, ‘incidental . . . not the point’
(pp. 246, 244).
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which clash with those of kingship, only appear problematic if kingship is
assumed to be in the best interest of the collective. Despite the Beowulf poet’s
moralizing protestations and despite the unexamined royalist prejudice of
modern readers,32 I maintain that the poem actually shows a social system
which has little use for kings. In the world of Beowulf, heroism and the
honour code that propels it trump hierarchy not because individualism
overwhelms social responsibility but because the community rejects hierarchy, dooming its most otiose member – the king – to perdition. Heroic
individualism is socially responsible, helping to immunize the community
against hierarchy. We need not fall back on discredited fictions of Germanic sacral kingship to explain such readiness to dispose of crowned
heads. Instead, we need to shift the focus from the individual to the group;
as Marshall Sahlins long ago pointed out, ‘we have been too long accustomed to perceive rank and rule from the standpoint of the individuals
involved, rather than from the perspective of the total society . . . And then
the breakdowns too . . . have been searched out in men, in “weak” kings or
megalomaniacal dictators.’33 As seen from the community’s vantage point,
Beowulf ’s political programme springs from the prosaic sociological
imperative of a relatively undifferentiated society to defend its traditional
liberties against newfangled oppression.
To establish this point, I need to take a detour by way of both Sahlins’s
sunny Oceania and the humid murk of the Amazon jungle. In the 1960s
and 70s, anthropologist Pierre Clastres did fieldwork among some of the
most remote Indian tribes in the world, such as the Guayaki, the Chulupi
and the Ya˛nomamö. The societies Clastres describes in the Paraguayan
and Brazilian rainforest are reminiscent of those which, in Melanesia,
have been characterized as Big-Man societies (in contradistinction from
chieftainships). Sahlins defines the categories:
A petty chieftain is a ‘duly constituted authority’, the official headman
of a community . . . [I]t is an office position: the chief does not make
his preeminence so much as come into it, and his followers are not
so much personal subordinates as they are subject to the office as
32
33
See, for instance, Davis, Beowulf and the Demise of Germanic Legend, p. 99: ‘The Beowulf-poet’s
bias . . . is plainly royalist.’ The same bias informs Leyerle’s view of the poem: ‘Beowulf ’s action
as king combines Sigemund’s exploit with the result of Heremod’s. He kills a dragon, not as a
young champion, but as a mature king and loses his life; his people, left without mature
leadership, suffer terrible affliction from their enemies . . . The poem presents a criticism of the
essential weakness of the society it portrays . . . Such excess was inherent in the heroic age’
(‘Beowulf the Hero and the King’, pp. 93, 97). Wanner’s interpretation, articulated in opposition
to Leyerle’s, likewise sees the poem as a whole, and the dragon fight in particular, as a ‘[mythic]
expression of a seemingly insoluble paradox that has been generated by contradictions inherent
in the central ideologies and customs of [Germanic] culture’ (‘Warriors, Wyrms, and Wyrd ’, p. 2).
M.D. Sahlins, ‘Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and
Polynesia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1963), pp. 285–303, at p. 300.
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members of the group . . . [In contrast,] the more spectacular ‘bigman’ . . . makes himself a leader by making others followers: a fisher of
men, inducing compliance by the strength of his personality, by
his persuasiveness, perhaps by his prowess as a warrior, magician, or
gardener, and often by calculated disposition of his wealth, which puts
people under obligation to him and constrains their circumspection
. . . Though he holds no office or ascribed power, he does hold a grip
on others and a superior reputation – by consensus he is, in the
Melanesian phrase, a ‘big-man’.34
Clastres does not apply the term Big-Man to the leaders he describes,
retaining instead the traditional nomenclature of chiefdom. But the
vagaries of terminology must not be allowed to mislead. His Amazon
chiefs are unmistakably closer, typologically, to what in Melanesia and
elsewhere have been termed Big-Men.35 ‘[I]ndependent political bodies
in the region typically include seventy to three hundred persons’, writes
Sahlins, with proportionate differences in territorial extent. (The
Guayaki with whom Clastres lived numbered fewer than one hundred.)
‘[C]haracteristic . . . tribal [organization] is one of politically unintegrated segments’, adding up to a ‘scheme of small, separate, and equal
political blocs’.36 Leadership in these groups ‘is transient, moving from
person to person with context’, and always marked by
34
35
36
M.D. Sahlins, Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs, 1968), pp. 21–2 (and cf. pp. 20–7). Cf. K.F.
Otterbein, Comparative Cultural Analysis: An Introduction to Anthropology, 2nd edn (New York,
1977), pp. 129–33. For further elaborations of the concept, see, e.g., M. Godelier, La Production
des Grands hommes: Pouvoir et domination masculine chez les Baruya de Nouvelle-Guinée (Paris,
1982), esp. pp. 157–210 (in English: The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power
among the New Guinea Baruya, trans. R. Swyer, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 56
(Cambridge and Paris, 1986), pp. 96–134); M. Godelier and M. Strathern (eds), Big Men and
Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia (Cambridge and Paris, 1991); P. Brown, ‘Big
Man, Past and Present: Model, Person, Hero, Legend’, and eadem, ‘Big Men: Afterthoughts’,
Ethnology 29 (1990), pp. 97–115 and 275–8 respectively, at pp. 97–100 and 276. See also H.
Whitehouse, ‘Leaders and Logics, Persons and Polities’, History and Anthropology 6 (1992),
pp. 103–24, for a searching critique of Godelier, and cf. P. Clastres’s blistering comments in his
‘Les marxistes et leur anthropologie’ (orig. 1978), repr. in his Recherches d’anthropologie politique
(Paris, 1980), pp. 157–70 (in English: ‘Marxists and their Anthropology’, in Archeology of
Violence, trans. J. Herman (New York, 1994), pp. 127–38). On Clastres’s career, see S. Moyn, ‘Of
Savagery and Civil Society: Pierre Clastres and the Transformation of French Political Thought’,
Modern Intellectual History 1 (2004), pp. 55–80, esp. pp. 58–62.
As L. Lindstrom points out, the term chef ‘has survived much longer [as a generic catch-all] in
French anthropological usage’ than its English cognate ‘chief ’: ‘ “Big Man:” A Short Terminological History’, American Anthropologist, ns 83 (1981), pp. 900–5, at p. 901. For ‘the wide
applicability of the [Big-Man] concept of achieved leadership’ beyond Melanesia, see Brown,
‘Big Man, Past and Present’, p. 100; F. Curta, The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology
of the Lower Danube Region, c. 500–700 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 328–29, adapts the terminology
to an early medieval European context.
Sahlins, ‘Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief ’, p. 287. Clastres himself calls attention to the
generalizability of the Melanesian Big-Man type; see ‘L’Économie primitive’, written as a
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the indicative quality of . . . personal power. Big-men do not come into
office; they do not succeed to, nor are they installed in, existing
positions of leadership over political groups. The attainment of bigman status is rather the outcome of a series of acts which elevate a
person above the common herd and attract about him a coterie of
loyal, lesser men. It is not accurate to speak of ‘big-man’ as a political
title, for it is but an acknowledged standing in interpersonal relations
– a ‘prince among men’ so to speak as opposed to ‘The Prince of
Danes’.37
The Big-Man, according to Lamont Lindstrom, is ‘a verbal metonym:
shorthand for a . . . typologic distinction (that opposition between big
man and chief ) and for a set of associated cultural characteristics. These
include achievement of leadership status; small, short-lived polities;
group members linked by kin and residence ties; competition for and
uncertainty of authority; political consensus; economic ability; individuality and strength; shell valuables; pigs; etc.’38 Setting aside hogs and
cowries, much of this sounds suspiciously similar to the world of Beowulf
in some important particulars – recall that Scyld, Beowulf and Wiglaf are
all novi homines, whose status is achieved rather than ascribed – though
perhaps distinct in a few others. I return to these differences presently.
Clastres, in turn, is especially interested in the mechanisms of Big-Man
power acquisition (and dissolution). He observes that in the small-scale,
acephalous tribes of the Amazon headlands, where centralizing institutions are entirely absent and all contestants enjoy parity in principle,
competition for relative political pre-eminence becomes incessant. The
situation is similar to the honour-driven competitive culture of medieval
Iceland, where feuding, scheming and manipulation of þingmenn allegiance made for the burbling, lively play of mutual political predation. In
such societies, the shifting sands of political alliance undermine any
consolidation of centralizing power.39 Where Clastres goes beyond most
sagas and straight to the heart of Beowulf is in maintaining that such
unremitting competition creates an escalating mechanism of testing for
37
38
39
preface to the 1976 French translation of Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics (Chicago, 1972), repr. in
Recherches, pp. 127–45 (in English: ‘Primitive Economy’, in Archeology of Violence, pp. 105–18).
On the number of Guayaki, see P. Clastres, Chronique des Indiens Guayaki: Ce que savent les
Aché, chasseurs nomades du Paraguay ([Paris], 1972), p. 347 (in English: Chronicle of the Guayaki
Indians, trans. P. Auster (New York, 1998), p. 345).
P.K. Wason, The Archaeology of Rank (Cambridge, 1994), p. 42, and Sahlins, ‘Poor Man, Rich
Man, Big-Man, Chief ’, p. 289 (emphasis original).
Lindstrom, ‘Big Man’, pp. 900–1.
J.L. Byock, Viking Age Iceland (London, 2001), explicitly speaks of Icelandic goðar as Big-Men
(see, e.g., p. 66). For an extended discussion of the operation of sociological imperatives that
limited the ascendance of aspiring rulers in medieval Iceland, see Ch. 4 of my forthcoming
study, This Spattered Isle: Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland.
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the individual. To gain a political edge over one’s rivals, every contestant
must perform feats with an ever-rising threshold of difficulty. Unless one
opts out of the political race altogether, the only way to end this cycle of
self-proving is to exceed the limit of one’s competence: to assay that feat
which one is doomed to fail. For a Big-Man whose power base is martial
achievement, this apex is crested at a sharply defined moment. His
political pre-eminence is maximized at the same instance and through the
same gesture that his ability to retain it is permanently minimized:
A warrior has no choice: he is condemned to desire war. It is precisely
here that the consensus by which he is recognized as [Big-Man] draws
its boundary line. If his desire for war coincides with society’s desire
for war, society continues to follow him. But if the [Big-Man]’s desire
for war attempts to fall back on a society motivated by the desire for
peace . . . then the relationship between the [Big-Man] and the tribe is
reversed: the leader tries to use society for his individual aims, as a
means to his personal end . . . What may happen in such situations?
The warrior will be left to go it alone, to engage in a dubious battle
that will only lead him to his death.
Death – in general, a rather grave hindrance to any individual’s capacity
to participate in politics – finally secures for the contestant the reputation
needed to exercise hegemony.40
What Clastres further makes clear, however, is that this min-max
seesaw, whereby the infinitely maximized credit of reputation equals
infinitely minimized ability to cash it in the hard coin of political utility,
is no accident. It is a socially sanctioned machinery for preventing any
individual from establishing himself firmly as a permanent, dynastic
ruler:
The politics of the savages is, in fact, to constantly hinder the appearance of a separate organ of power, to prevent the predictably fatal
meeting between the institution of [Big-Man]ship and the exercise of
power . . . Primitive society is society against the state in that it is
40
P. Clastres, La Société contre l’état: Recherches d’anthropologie politique (Paris, 1974), p. 179: ‘Un
guerrier n’a pas la choix: il est condmané à désirer la guerre. C’est exactement là que passe la
limite du consensus qui le reconnaît comme chef. Si son désir de guerre coïncide avec le désir
de guerre de la société, celle-ci continue à la suivre. Mais si la désir de guerre du chef tente de
se rabattre sur une société animée par le désir de paix . . . alors le rapport entre le chef et la tribu
se renverse, le leader tente d’utiliser la société comme instrument de son but individuel, comme
moyen de sa fin personnelle . . . Que peut-il alors se passer? Le guerrier est voué à la solitude,
à ce combat douteux qui ne le conduit qu’à la mort’ (in English: Society Against the State: Essays
in Political Anthropology, trans. R. Hurley (New York, 1987), p. 210, quoted with minimal
adaptation). Cf. Brown, ‘Big Man, Past and Present’, pp. 105–10; and L. Lindstrom, ‘Big Men
as Ancestors: Inspiration and Copyrights on Tanna (Vanuatu)’, Ethnology 29 (1990), pp. 313–26.
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society for war . . . There is an exchange between society and the
warrior: prestige for exploit. But . . . the ultimate exchange is that of
eternal glory for the eternity of death. From the outset, the warrior is
condemned to death by society . . . But why? Because the warrior
could [become] a separate organ of power . . . Primitive society is, in
its being, a society for war; it is at the same time, and for the same
reasons, a society against the warrior.41
The circles in which Beowulf moves appear to follow this logic of
centrifugal political free-for-all. Unferþ is not merely drunk and cantankerous when, as the narrator explains, ‘he did not wish that any other
man on this middle-earth should care for glory under the heavens more
than he himself ’; he is simply saying what is on every warrior’s mind.
Beowulf confirms this when he retorts in the same idiom that, on the
contrary, he ‘had greater strength on the sea, [overcame] more ordeals on
the waves than any other man’.42 Like an Amazon forest tribesman,
Beowulf must perpetually vie for political distinction with men who are
his rough equals, like him suspended in a soupy political solution where
stable leadership is ultimately unattainable. In order to stand out from
the crowd, he must perform feats of arms whose level of difficulty
escalates continuously: from ‘the fishes of the sea’, to Grendel, to Grendel’s dam, to the ‘fierce firedragon’.43 Beowulf grasps the political capital
to be gained by venturing on his own against any and all foes. He is
doubtless not alone in understanding this (as Grendel’s own solitary
heroism confirms); he is just more successful at it than others.
Until, that is, the dragon comes, as come it must. This final challenge
is calibrated at just a hair above Beowulf’s threshold of incompetence:
enough to break him, and at the same time to secure his political
41
42
43
P. Clastres, ‘La Question du pouvoir dans les sociétés primitives’ (orig. 1976), ‘Archéologie de la
violence: La Guerre dans les sociétés primitives’ (orig. 1977) and ‘Malheur du guerrier sauvage’
(orig. 1977), all repr. in Recherches, pp. 103–9, 171–207 and 209–48, at pp. 107–8, 206, 239
respectively: ‘La politique des Sauvages, c’est bien en effet de faire sans cesse obstacle à
l’apparition d’un organe séparé du pouvoir, d’empêcher la rencontre d’avance fatale entre
institution de la chefferie et exercice du pouvoir . . . La société primitive est société contre l’État
en tant qu’elle est société-pour-la-guerre . . . Il y a échange entre la société et le guerrier: le
prestige contre l’exploit. Mais . . . l’ultime échange, c’est celui de la gloire éternelle contre
l’éternité de la mort. D’avance, le guerrier est condamné à mort par la société . . . Mais
pourquoi en est-il ainsi? Parce que le guerrier pourrait [devenir] organe séparé du pouvoir . . .
[L]a société primitive est, en son être, société-pour-la-guerre; elle est en même temps, et pour les
mêmes raisons, société contre le guerrier’ (in English: ‘Power in Primitive Societies’, ‘Archeology
of Violence: War in Primitive Societies’ and ‘Sorrows of the Savage Warrior’, in Archeology of
Violence, pp. 87–92, 139–67 and 169–200, at pp. 91, 166, 193 respectively, quoted with minimal
adaptation).
Beowulf, ll. 503–5: ‘he ne uþe þæt ænig oðer man / æfre mærða þon ma middangeardes / gehedde
under heofenum þonne he sylfa’; ll. 533–4: ‘ic merestrengo maran ahte, / eafeþo on yþum, ðonne
ænig oþer man’.
Beowulf, l. 549: ‘merefixa[s]’; l. 2689: ‘frecne fyrdraca’.
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apotheosis. The dragon serves as a flashpoint for crystallizing society’s
countervailing resistance to Beowulf’s kingly might. The Geats’ censure
of their king is ambivalent, to be sure: the retinue of thanes stay behind,
allow Beowulf to perish, and only the overly ambitious Wiglaf (who
exerts himself ‘beyond [his] capacity’)44 steps forward to the battle. But
the retainers, far from corroding the heroic code, as both the narrator and
many modern commentators charge – ‘craven oath-breakers’, the narrator brands them for having obeyed Beowulf’s command that they hang
back45 – embrace this code and uphold it. Theirs is a proactive social
choice, an (all but) unanimous vote for the preservation of honour-driven
society and, in the same breath, against kingship. They treasure Beowulf’s
heroism no less than they rankle at his royal pretensions. Similarly,
among the Baruya of Papua–New-Guinea, Maurice Godelier notes that
there were limits to [a great warrior’s] power and it was dangerous to
overstep them. There were many cases of [great warriors] who lost all
sense of proportion and, confident in their fighting abilities, gradually
gave themselves up to the pleasures of despotism . . . Many Baruya
began to hope that some enemy would rid them of their great man,
and their wish finally came true . . . Sometimes the Baruya did not
wait for their enemies to mete out justice by chance in some battle.
They carefully arranged the tyrant’s murder, supplying the enemy with
all the information necessary [to kill him]. Needless to say, the plotters
acted in the greatest secrecy, and were still at the future victim’s side,
smiling and joking, a few hours before the murder.46
It may well be objected that the society Beowulf imagines (let alone the
Anglo-Saxon society which did the imagining), unlike that of the
Guayaki or the Baruya, is one in which kingship is firmly established as
a permanent institution. If one insists on an anthropological label under
which to file Beowulfian kingship, paramount chiefdom may seem a
better fit than context-dependent Big-Manhood. Whatever we call this
44
45
46
Beowulf, l. 2879: ‘ofer min gemet’.
Beowulf, l. 2847: ‘tydre treowlogan’ (cf. ll. 2529–30). For examples of modern critical opinion of
Beowulf’s retinue, see Halverson, ‘World of Beowulf ’, p. 606; Niles, Beowulf: The Poem and Its
Tradition, pp. 241, 251; and Earl, Thinking about Beowulf, pp. 47–8, 122–3, 133, 178.
Godelier, Production des Grands hommes, pp. 174–5: ‘ce pouvoir avait des limites qu’il était
dangereux d’outrepasser. Les exemples sont nombreux [des Grands guerriers] qui perdirent
toute mesure et qui, assurés de leur supériorité au combat, glissèrent peu à peu dans les plaisirs
du despotism . . . Beaucoup de Baruya commencèrent à espérer que des ennemis les débarrasseraient de leur Grand homme, ce qui finit par se produire . . . Parfois les Baruya n’attendaient
pas que la justice vienne des ennemis, au hasard d’une bataille: ils organisaient soigneusement
avec ceux-ci l’assassinat du tyran, leur fournissant toutes les informations nécessaires pour qu’ils
[le tuent]. Bien entendu, ceux qui organisaient le complot le faisaient dans le plus grand secret
et étaient encore aux côtés de la future victime, souriants, complaisants, quelques heures avant
le meurtre’ (in English: Making of Great Men, pp. 109–10, quoted with minimal adaptation).
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office, moreover, the poem expresses a consistently positive attitude
towards it, which seems to call into question the aristocratic push-back I
have hypothesized: ‘that was a good king’, we hear the narrator exclaim,
again and again.47 Neither Danes nor Geats voice any doubt about the
propriety of rule by a single sovereign. Furthermore, this ruler’s office is
depicted as ideally hereditary rather than transitory: Wealhþeo’s moving
appeal to Beowulf to help preserve her sons’ access to Hroðgar’s throne is
predicated on just such an ideal.48
Yet the queen’s concerns about the viability of the ideal afford us a
good initial clue that a significant gulf may yawn between the overt
ideology expressed in the poem and the unexamined assumptions built
into the reality which it depicts. Like all texts, after all, Beowulf serves as
a vehicle for a consciously crafted message, but also captures a record of
those truths which its author(s) held to be self-evident. Craig Davis
helpfully amplifies both the overt message and its incidental background
noises; drawing on Tacitus for his terminology, he observes a competition
within the Anglo-Saxon world-view between two principles of personal
sovereignty. On the one hand is the ‘rex ex nobilitate, the tribal patriarch
whose authority was based upon blood-line’; on the other, the ‘dux ex
virtute [is] innocent of any hereditary or consanguineous claim to preeminence. [He] comes from nowhere [and] has no family, no pedigree’,
an upstart outsider who emerges during times of crisis to eclipse the stirps
regia.49 Davis’s impersonal principles may be further mapped over two
distinct social strata. An ambitious aristocracy embraces the ideology of
dux ex virtute. Meritocracy allows each nobleman to imagine himself
clawing his way to the political summit, bootstrapping himself away from
the undifferentiated mass of his peers. The occupants of this political
pinnacle, in contrast, have every reason to pledge allegiance to the ideal
of rex ex nobilitate, which conserves the status quo that favours them.
Where you stand on political ideology depends on where you sit on the
political totem pole.
The narrator’s ideological sympathies are clearly with the crown, but
the poem he narrates resists him. This need not be a matter of a hypothesized, archaic oral (or even historical) substratum refusing to yield to
the revisionary agenda of a latter-day poet. As John Lennon and Paul
47
48
49
Beowulf, ll. 11, 2390: ‘þæt wæs god cyning’. The second occurrence of this assessment may refer
to Beowulf himself; see Klaeber’s Beowulf, p. 244, n. to l. 2389f.
See Beowulf, ll. 1219–20, 1226–7. The precise political import of Wealhþeo’s appeal is disputed
(see Klaeber’s Beowulf, pp. 192 and 195, nn. to ll. 1169ff and 1219b–20, 1226b–7); but however it
is interpreted, the queen’s speech presupposes a principle of hereditary succession.
Davis, Beowulf and the Demise of Germanic Legend, p. 98 (and cf. pp. 18, 70, 144).
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McCartney rightly insist,50 there’s nothing you can sing that can’t be
sung; the Beowulf poet could only express himself in the idiom available
to him, and that idiom knew how to rhyme ‘crown’ only with ‘cut it
down’. The poem proves so inhospitable to the narrator’s royalist leanings
because the society it portrays (and – on the level of an inarticulate
subconscious, at least – the society from which it sprang, too)51 champions the contrary ideological vocabulary of heroism. Heroism simultaneously motivates the nobility ahead, dangling before it the carrot of
promotion to princely rank, and curtails its advancement, bludgeoning it
with the stick of untimely death and untenable dynasty. In recounting the
meteoric rise of brawny self-made men like the eponymous hero and
Scyld Scefing (who ‘seized the mead-benches from many tribes, troops of
enemies, struck fear into earls’),52 Beowulf depicts a society in which the
aristocratic principle of meritocracy ultimately prevails over the royal
principle of heredity. The leader who uses his powers to promote peace
may gain a temporary respite – ‘I held this people fifty winters’, the dying
Beowulf reminisces, ‘held well what was mine, I sought no intrigues, nor
swore many false or wrongful oaths’ – but he too must fall, as surely as the
despot.53 Having made Beowulf, the busy principle does not subside into
50
51
52
53
J. Lennon and P. McCartney, ‘All You Need Is Love’, on Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles
(Capitol, LP record, SMAL 2835, 1967).
On the textual subconscious, see P. Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, Théorie
4 (Paris, 1966), p. 115: ‘[On doit] mettre en évidence ce qu[e l’œuvre] est obligée de dire pour dire
ce qu’elle voulait dire, parce que non seulement l’œuvre aurait voulu ne pas le dire (c’est une
autre affaire), mais certainement parce qu’elle ne l’a pas voulu dire. Il n’est donc pas question
d’introduire une explication historique plaquée sur l’œuvre de son extérieur. Il faut montrer au
contraire une sorte d’éclatement à l’intérieure de l’œuvre: ce partage, l’inconscient qu’est pour
elle l’histoire qui se joue à partir de ses bords, et qui la déborde, est son inconscient dans la
mesure où il la possède; c’est pourquoi il est possible de faire le chemin qui va de l’œuvre
possédée à ce qui la possède. Encore une fois, il ne s’agit pas de doubler l’œuvre d’un
inconscient, mais de déceler dans ce geste même qui l’exprime ce qui n’est pas elle. Alors,
l’envers de ce qui est écrit, ce sera l’histoire’ (emphases original; in English: ‘[One should] shed
light on what [the text] is obligated to say in order to express what it wanted to say, because not
only would the text have preferred not to say it (that is a different matter), but certainly it did
not choose to say it. It is therefore not a question of plastering an historical explanation onto the
text from the outside. On the contrary, it is necessary to show a kind of fissure within the text;
this split, the subconscious that is the history which unfolds at the margins of the text and
extends beyond it, is [the text’s] subconscious, to the extent that it possesses [the text]. For this
reason, one can trace a path from the possessed text to that which possesses it. To repeat, it is
not a matter of pairing the text up with a subconscious, but of discerning in the very gesture of
its expression that which it is not. Thus, the reverse of what is written – that would be history.’
For a different translation, cf. A Theory of Literary Production, trans. G. Wall (London, Henley
and Boston, 1978), p. 94).
Beowulf, ll. 4–6: ‘Scyld Scefing . . . monegum mægþum meodosetla ofteah, / egsode eorlas’.
Beowulf, ll. 2732–9: ‘Ic ðas leode heold / fiftig wintra . . . heold min tela, / ne sohte searoniðas,
ne me swor fela / aða on unriht.’ Cf. Godelier, Production des Grands hommes, p. 174: ‘En temps
de paix, [le Grand guerrier] mettait . . . sa violence virtuelle et son prestige au service non plus
de la guerre, de la lutte contre les ennemis extérieurs, mais de la paix, de la lutte contre les
fauteurs de troubles intérieurs’ (in English: ‘In peacetime, [the great warrior] used his potential
for violence and his prestige not for war but for the sake of peace, in the struggle against
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idleness; once one virtuous warlord has been installed on the throne, the
same impulse continues to toil, inexorably working to unmake him. The
dragon is the meritocratic principle incarnate.
To describe the dragon in such terms is, of course, to slip from the
historian’s discourse into the literary critic’s; and, at the level of literary
construction, Sahlins’s Big-Man and Clastres’s society-against-the-state
models fit the Anglo-Saxon poem only imperfectly. Kings in Beowulf sit
on their thrones less securely than Wealhþeo might have wished, but the
poem certainly does not show us leadership roles flitting among warriors
and economic entrepreneurs, orators and shamans according to
contingent circumstances. Dark Age monarchy appears fixed, contextindependent, and acceptable without question to Danes, Geats and other
nations. Nor is Beowulf left to ‘go it alone’ as soon as he first comes close
to forming ‘a separate organ of power’; indeed, his stable reign lasts longer
than an average human lifespan. ‘Those who condemn the king for
dying’, Niles scoffs, ‘seem to assume that he was going to live forever’.54
But to get caught up in such contrary evidence is to linger at the poetic
turnstile, privileging literary detail over structural constraint. It is hardly
a coincidence that kings who have ‘spent most of [their] life doing
everything right’, as Berger and Leicester comment of Hroðgar, ‘now
fin[d themselves] suffering for it’. The Danish ruler, too, may testify to
the way accomplished heroism defeats itself: ‘Then success in war was
given to Hroðgar, honour in battle, so that his beloved kinsmen eagerly
served him’, but their very justified exultation, ‘the joyful din loud in the
hall, with the harp’s sound, the clear song of the scop’, encites the enmity
that threatens to destroy them.55 If Beowulf the poem – a tendentious,
biased, programmatic narrative – endorses kingship, Beowulf the historical document does not.
54
55
mischief-makers within the tribe’, Making of Great Men, p. 109). Also Brown, ‘Big Man, Past
and Present’, pp. 107, 109: ‘As a youth he showed the big man capacity for aggression as a
daredevil fighter . . . [As a mature Big-Man,] Kondom campaigned for peace, stopped fights,
adjudicated quarrels and took disputants to the government court. He promoted a new
standard of behavior, forbidding fighting and stealing . . . In the legend, Kondom helped
everyone, not just himself and his local group. He was generous, unselfish, brought [modernization] to all the people.’
Niles, Beowulf: The Poems and Its Tradition, p. 245. Personal immortality is indeed an unfair
benchmark against which to measure any king’s success; cultivating an heir apparent would
have been a more reasonable goal, which Beowulf also fails to meet (cf. Davis, Beowulf and the
Demise of Germanic Legend, pp. 148–50).
Berger and Leicester, ‘Social Structure as Doom’, p. 44 (cf. pp. 44–5, 50–7); Beowulf, ll. 64–6,
88–90: ‘Þa wæs Hroðgare heresped gyfen, / wiges weorðmynd, þæt him his winemagas georne
hyrdon . . . Þær wæs [dream hlud in healle,] hearpan sweg, / swutol sang scopes’. Berger and
Leicester, like many other critics, see Grendel as a product of tensions internal to Danish
society; cf., e.g., Earl, Thinking about Beowulf, pp. 74–5: ‘Grendel is Heorot’s shadow . . .
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and Grendel is its symbolic embodiment.’
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This distinction has nothing to do with the composition of the text
and everything to do with how this text is read. Beowulf as we now have
it in the Cotton Vitellius A.XV manuscript may or may not have had
earlier antecedents, some of them, for all I know, going back as far
perhaps as Migration Era legend. To have spoken to a turn-of-themillennium Anglo-Saxon audience, however, the poem need not have
borne any resemblance to the actual society of the ancestral homeland; it
does need to have encoded the expectations and presumptions that its
contemporary readers and listeners carried around in their heads, what
they unselfconsciously assumed to be the way of the world. The Beowulf
poet’s depiction of heroism suggests that, in spite of himself, he shared
with them a habit of thinking about individual ambition as simultaneously self-destructive and socially constructive. As so often happens,
force of habit proved more tenacious than conscious ideology.56
Neither particularly pagan nor subversively Christian, the heroic code
in Beowulf is not immediately helpful in dating the poem.57 Despite
earlier generations’ chronological optimism, there is no calendrical
Heroic Age to which we might assign Beowulf.58 Heroism, rather, is
simply the code of a politically centrifugal society, in which kingship is a
motivating ideal but a practical impossibility. It is certainly instructive for
the historian to speculate on when, where and by whom such an ideal
might have found expression in pre-Conquest England. Did the social
logic espoused by fictive Danes and Geats resonate with the political
sensibilities of (some) real Anglo-Saxons? And, if so, would it have
appeared most appealing to (some) subjects of a Hengest, an Alfred or a
Cnut? The controversy between maximalist and minimalist views of the
Anglo-Saxon state59 has tended to obscure from view the probability that
both options may have struck certain segments of the English populace in
56
57
58
59
Cf. L. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’
(orig. 1968), in his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (London, 1971),
pp. 121–73, on what he calls ‘obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which
we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the “still, small voice of
conscience”): “That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!” ’ (p. 172, emphasis original; cf.
pp. 171–3, and, on the difficulty of finding a vantage point from which obviousnesses become
visible, pp. 127–8).
Cf. Earl, Thinking about Beowulf, pp. 17–18; Davis, Beowulf and the Demise of Germanic Legend,
pp. 159–64 and 165–73; Wanner, ‘Warriors, Wyrms, and Wyrd ’, who insists on the resurgence of
a pagan, Germanic sentiment in Beowulf ’s portrayal of the heroic king; and Liuzza, ‘Preface’,
pp. 28–9.
Cf., e.g., H.M. Chadwick, The Heroic Age (Cambridge, 1912), pp. 29–30, speaking of a
‘ “Teutonic” Heroic Age’ that ‘extend[ed] over about two or possibly three hundred years, and
[came] to an end in the latter half of the sixth century’.
For the maximalist view, see the essays collected in J. Campbell’s The Anglo-Saxon State
(London and New York, 2000), esp. ‘The Late Anglo-Saxon State: A Maximum View’ (orig.
1994), ‘The United Kingdom of England: The Anglo-Saxon Achievement’ (orig. 1995), and
‘Some Agents and Agencies of the Late Anglo-Saxon State’ (orig. 1987), pp. 1–30, 31–53 and
201–25 respectively. The minimalist position is articulated clearly by P.R. Hyams, Rancor and
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the first millennium as equally odious. Kingship of any stripe need not
have seemed legitimate to those whom its nimbus of privilege did not
envelop, especially if they had not been acculturated over generations immemorial to endure its yoke. Alcuin’s remark, ‘the death of
kings signals suffering, and discord is the font of captivity’, need not
have expressed the views of anyone outside a narrow circle of courtly
privilege.60
The subcultures of those who subscribed to more regnophobic sentiments are, naturally, more difficult to glimpse in the surviving record
than those of royalty’s cheerleaders. Nonetheless, we may spy traces of
such populations here and there – for example, in the Danelaw in the
early tenth century. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the deaths in 911
of two otherwise unknown Norse kings (alongside a host of lesser potentates), battling against Edward the Elder’s expansionist Wessex: ‘and there
King Eowilisc was slain, as well as King Healden [Hálfdan] and Earl
Ohter [Óttarr] and Earl Scurfa [Skúfr?] and Yeoman Aþulf [Auðúlfr] and
]’.61 The stature of the two men named here
Yeoman Agmund [Ogmundr
as kings can only have been decidedly modest. Aside from this momentary role as gilded minims in an Anglo-Saxon body count – blink and you
might miss them – they have left no impression on the written record,
nor are any material monuments (most importantly, coins) associated
with them. Their low profile may hint that they were hardly acknowledged as kings at all, except perhaps in their own eyes and in the eyes of
those who, having suppressed them, found it convenient to elevate their
status posthumously. The vagaries of terminology must not be allowed to
mislead, but if these men’s royal titles do not reliably reflect the realities
of sovereign power, still they may give the measure of a gap separating
their aberrant ideological goals from the sociological context in which
60
61
Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca and London, 2003), esp. Ch. 3, pp. 71–110 (e.g.,
pp. 72–3, 84–7, 98–101, 108–10).
Alcuin’s 796 letter to Eanbald, Archbishop of York: ‘mors regum miseriae signum est; et
discordia captivitatis origo’ (§116 in MGH Epistolae 4, ed. E. Dümmler (Berlin, 1895), p. 171).
On the capacity of education to knuckle under and dislocate any ideological instincts in those
subjected to it, see Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, esp. pp. 131–3, 151–7.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle [D] 911: ‘7 þær wæs Eowilisc cyng ofslægen. 7 Healden cyng. 7 Ohter
eorl. 7 Scurfa eorl. 7 Aþulf hold 7 Agmund hold’ (in Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, ed.
C. Plummer and J. Earle, 2 vols, rev. edn (Oxford, 1892–9; repr. 2000), I, p. 97). Other
manuscripts have the forms Eowils (B and C, p. 97 n. 1) and Ecwils (A, p. 96) for Eowilisc.
Plummer plausibly notes that, though none of these forms readily corresponds to any known
Norse name, Eowilisc cyng may suggest a conflation of some original phrasing like Eowel Wilisc
cyng, ‘Hywel the Welsh king’ (II, p. 126). For hold (Old Norwegian hauldr), which I translate
‘yeoman’, see P.G. Foote and D.M. Wilson, The Viking Achievement (London, 1970), pp. 84–5.
For the reconstructed Old Norse name forms, see E.H. Lind (ed.), Norsk-isländska Dopnamn
ock fingerade Namn från Medeltiden (Uppsala and Leipzig, 1905–15).
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they operated. Put another way, Eowilisc and Healden look more like
overextended Big-Men whose ambitions outran their resources than like
fallen monarchs.62
Around the same time, some Norse magnates in the southern Danelaw
did feel exalted enough to mint their own coinage – but, curiously, they
did not deem their pedigree sufficient to do so in their own names.
Unlike their renowned predecessor Guthrum (whose pennies from the
880s, under his baptismal name Æþelstan, survive), these unidentified
rulers issued, from perhaps as early as c.895 and right up until the
subjugation of their last strongholds in eastern Mercia and East Anglia in
917–18, coins commemorating the Anglo-Saxon king of East Anglia, St
Edmund, martyred by vikings a generation earlier.63 Minting is an
unequivocally regal act; it traces the arc of such magnates’ high-flung
aspirations. Yet anonymous minting, as oxymoronic as military intelligence, undercuts its own premise. Coins which fail to identify those who
issued them all but concede that the nameless sponsors’ royal ambitions
were overblown and unsustainable.64
The confluence of anonymous currency, on the one hand, with
ephemeral kings, on the other, suggests something of the political climate
in the Scandinavian-dominated eastern shires around the turn of the
tenth century. It hints at a political culture not unlike that which the
sagas document in Iceland (and which Sahlins drew attention to in
Melanesia), a culture of fierce competition for honour coupled with
engrained antipathy for hierarchy. Many in Anglo-Norse lands may have
entertained high hopes of gain and glory, for themselves, but would have
eyed overwrought claims to authority by any and all others with suspicious disdain. An audience drawn from such a tough crowd might well
have applauded the Clastresian futility of Beowulf’s ascendence. Were
Beowulf performed to an aristocratic Anglo-Norse audience c.900, in
other words, they should have had no difficulty recognizing the social
logic the poem presupposes and appreciating the ideological tensions it
explores. They may, indeed, have identified parallels to both in their own
lived political experiences.
62
63
64
Cf. Sahlins, ‘Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief ’, pp. 291–3, for the self-defeating imperative to extend a Big-Man’s sphere of influence.
See M. Blackburn, ‘Expansion and Control: Aspects of Anglo-Scandinavian Minting South of
the Humber’, in J. Graham-Campbell, R. Hall, J. Jesch and D.N. Parsons (eds), Vikings and the
Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and
York, 21–30 August 1997 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 125–42, at pp. 132, 136.
Cf. Campbell’s comments: ‘A special, but a very solid, demonstration of the power of the
[eleventh-century] English state is the coinage . . . The coins themselves were powerful messengers of royal authority. They always bore on one side the name and portrait of the king’
(‘United Kingdom of England’, pp. 32–3).
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It is tempting to attribute such localized ambivalence towards monarchy to Scandinavian immigrants – perhaps even to resurrect hoary
hypotheses of Beowulf ’s origin in, or transmission via, the Danelaw.
There is solid evidence, however, that at least some of the customs
prevailing in the region in the early 900s manifested local continuities
from pre-viking Anglian practices and attitudes, often articulated in the
face of West Saxon imperialism.65 We may not, therefore, pin anti-royalist
campaign buttons securely on Norse lapels. My point is not to deny that
Norse men of substance, whose brethren were at about this time setting
up a government by goðar in kingless Iceland, may have preferred BigMen to absolutist rulers and may have found the centrifugal ideology of
Beowulf refreshingly congenial to their own political inclinations. I wish
merely to suggest that there could also have been many other such
populations in Anglo-Saxon England, whose signature in the record is
probably even less traceable than that of conjectured royal antipathizers
among the Danes. We must not too hastily glom onto a convenient
identification when so many other potential candidates’ faces are irretrievably lost in shadow.66
Though an histoire totale of Anglo-Saxon England will never be written
– we simply do not have the sources for reconstructing the bottom-up
portion of such an Annaliste ideal – reading the surviving elitist sources
against their ideological grain may offer us new insights into the cultural
attitudes that made up the totality of an Engla cyn. This cyn cannot be
summarized in the person of the cyning, much as the latter sought to
project a myth conflating his own interests with those of the nation;
inexorably, maverick heroes rose to challenge this narrative.67 The Heroic
Age may never have existed in historical reality, but we sell the countervailing force that honour exerted on hierarchy short if we discount the
impact heroism had on flesh-and-blood political contenders in early
medieval Europe.
For laterally minded Anglo-Saxon (or Anglo-Norse) Big-Men and
their supporters, the levelling mechanism that disposes of Beowulf the
king would have appeared not as the structural, personal or moral flaw
that many modern commentators on the poem have seen, but as the cool
and rational guillotine of social responsibility, methodically lopping off
any head raised too high. Kings, in such a view, are sacrificial, not sacral:
65
66
67
See, for instance, Blackburn’s discussion of Danelaw coin weights, which preserved an older
Anglian standard while mimicking Alfredian iconographic design; ‘Expansion and Control’,
pp. 129–30.
Cf. J. Campbell, ‘Bede’s Reges and Principes’ (orig. 1979), repr. in his Essays in Anglo-Saxon
England (London and Ronceverte, 1986), pp. 85–98, sifting the evidence for early Anglo-Saxon
‘kings’ (who may have gone by various titles) beyond and below the better-attested rulers of the
major Anglo-Saxon realms.
Cf. W.T.H. Jackson, The Hero and the King: An Epic Theme (New York, 1982).
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they embody an excess of the individual ambition which, in a tempered
hero, serves society well, but in an aspiring despot must be amputated
before it endangers the autonomy of the body social. At least as far as the
Peter Principle is concerned, then, Beowulf may propose the hypothesis
(testable, perhaps, also in other early medieval societies) that the differences between bureaucratic and charismatic polities are far less pronounced than Max Weber would ever have suspected.68 The politics of
the savages – be they Melanesian, Amazonian or Germanic – are to
promote individuals to the level at which they are no longer equal to the
challenges facing them. Having reached this threshold, men like Beowulf
are sent out to meet their dragons, to go over the top and undergo the
ultimate ‘ “percussive sublimation” (commonly referred to as “being
kicked upstairs”)’.69 Golden parachutes and ghost-written autobiographies aside, plus ça change.
Cornell University
68
69
On the Weberian apparatus, see the various essays reprinted in R.M. Glassman and W.H.
Swatos, Jr, Charisma, History, and Social Structure, Contributions in Sociology 58 (New York,
1986). For a stimulating recent treatment in a medieval European context, cf. R.E. Barton,
Lordship in the County of Maine, c. 890–1160 (Woodbridge, 2004), most explicitly at pp. 7–9.
Peter and Hull, The Peter Principle, p. 27 n. (and cf. pp. 37–9).
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