Beowulf, The Heliand, and the Formative Epic

The contribution of this work is to suggest that Beowulf was written with the purpose of converting Vikings and their descendants, living in and ruling over the Danelaw region of northern England during the tenth century, to Christianity. In order to make such an argument I

have shifted the discussion of Beowulf’s origin to the dating of the existing manuscript, in the 990s CE, which coincides with the English Benedictine Reformation. Also, in support of this contribution, I have suggested that when we read Beowulf in tandem with the early ninth-century Germanic epic The Heliand, we see a tradition of using epics in the conversion process of northern Europe. The second contribution presented here is the recognition that there are certain epics written with propagandistic intentions that are used to form and inform collective identities — I call them “formative epics.” In this work we will study both Beowulf and The Heliand through the lens of the “formative epic,” which we will simply define, at this point, as an epic written with propagandistic intentions, used to form and inform collective identities.