Monsters and the Long Defeat

Before he began drafting The Lord of the Rings, “the long defeat” was already an important theme to J.R.R. Tolkien. Though it is operative in the writings that would in time become The Silmarillion, it was only implicitly present within them, an ingredient in their sad grandeur but not elaborated upon as a principle. It was in reflecting upon the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf for the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture in 1936 that Tolkien would begin to theorize the concept, though the phraseology itself would still await a few years until the composition of Book II of The Lord of the Rings. With the concept, however, Tolkien would both deepen his legendarium and help modern sensibilities to receive Beowulf as a testament to the human condition and to the need for courage in the midst of fallen history.

Beowulf  is something of an odd classic. There is a long tradition of critical essays asking what a classic is. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve set something of a modern precedent with his answer. A classic, he claimed, is recognized for having “enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; [it] has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered.” It is a product of its time and yet is “easily contemporary with all time.” 

Most of us probably imagine classics along similar lines, understanding them to have furthered us collectively some distance closer to an ideal we can not yet adequately name. We esteem those works that embody an aspiration for which we long and which in their form and in their tone make that aspiration seem, perhaps, attainable. We praise and set apart those works that represent to us a decisive turn, both personally as well as collectively. 

Out of the multitude of classics there are many which, according to contemporary canons of taste, seem to immediately justify their status as classics. But there are others which persist, which are read and reread, are retranslated, adapted, published in new editions, and influence other stories which evade such easy critical recognition. Their significance, that is, is recognized retrospectively, in much the same way as the events that shape our lives. 

Beowulf is an example of the latter. Though it has survived across centuries and spawned many editions and interpretative works it has provoked as much critical bewilderment and ire as it has appreciation, if not more. By the early nineteenth century the poem’s status as a classic was secure, but so was the critical consensus that its lasting significance was something of a mistake.

But Sainte-Beauve could accommodate this fact. Many of the “greatest names to be seen at the beginning of literatures are those which disturb and run counter to certain fixed ideas of what is beautiful and appropriate in poetry,” he wrote. Because classics are only truly recognized retroactively, the classic can lay dormant as another text for some time before an appreciative subjectivity enlarges the public’s sensibilities to receive it as such.

This retroactivity is fitting because narrative itself is a form of understanding that unveils the past. Raw experience always undergoes interpretation in the effort to understand and convey not only what has taken place, but its significance. All histories, whatever their scale, select and organize data so as to narrate an account. No story is isomorphic with reality; a story exceeds whatever is observable about any event because it brings to light what animated that event and what it has to do with us. Narrative identifies the coherence and meaning we cannot ascertain in the moment of our experiences. Understanding is thus never truly contemporary: it is always retrospective. 

Just consider why we conduct investigations even into events in which we directly participated, or why we ask others for their perceptions of how we said or did something. I cannot understand the me that existed prior to my reading of Infinite Jest the way I would now, nor can I understand it apart from that text. It both disclosed something about me that priorly, albeit hazily existed, and shaped me to recognize what was already inchoately present. Is it not, in the same way, difficult now to imagine an America in which Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not written? The stake in the ground a classic represents extends its surplus of meaning beyond its immediate context of production.

Tolkien’s lecture on this disputed classic would be published that same year under the title, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” It was an intervention in Beowulf studies that directly addressed that bewilderment and ire. The problem Tolkien confronted in its very title was that of modern academics mining Beowulf for useful historical data while disparaging the “simplicity” of its plot and the monsters that form its high points. Tolkien argued against the “judgment that the heroic or tragic story on a strictly human plane is by nature superior” and demonstrated the poem’s skill in depicting the beauty and tragedy of humankind in a hostile world precisely through its preoccupation with monsters.

Tolkien was not concerned simply with commending the goodness of Beowulf. His task was also to confront and expose the reductive logic that had stifled appreciation for the poem up to his time. It could hardly be otherwise so long as monsters were viewed as being less “literary” than character and drama. “The proposition,” Tolkien complains, “seems to have been passed as self-evident.” Tolkien’s dissent is intended to unveil how it is not, in fact, self-evident, as the judgment in taste is being taught as a critical a priori without defense.

It would be pointless to argue that a person should prefer tales with monsters over tales without monsters without any consideration for what happens in the individual stories that belong to either category. Dracula and Varney the Vampire are not equivalent in caliber to each other though both are concerned with vampires, and Thackeray’s The Virginians is not superior to Dracula though it has vampires and The Virginians does not. 

But that sort of superficial analysis was the norm in Beowulf studies prior to Tolkien. Many critics of that period would offer a highly condensed, abstracted summary of the poem that focused on its three fights between Beowulf and a monster. Embarrassed by the sparsity of the result, they then judged the poem inferior to works of, for instance, classical Greece.
Beowulf’s fate in such circumstances, then, was simply to serve as a mine of data for illuminating the period in which it was composed or redacted. This was an acceptable outcome for many scholars who assumed that stories such as this did not and could not ascend to the dignity of the Hellenistic and Latin traditions.

But of course such a bare summary is uninteresting! Stripped of its particulars, any story sounds drearily dull, but especially, perhaps, a Ulysses or a Herzog: “A man takes a full day to wander through Dublin and make it back home”; “A man writes a series of letters.” Monsters, contrarily, are anything but dull, and the supercilious literary-minded who wave away “typical folk-tales” probably never afforded them a real chance or a close reading. 

In contemporary terms it might be akin to allowing the distinction between literary and genre fiction to become a boundary marker that screens out the possibility of fantastic fiction or a horror novel being a quality work. The sublime drama of the Oedipus cycle may seem more realistic than a Dark Ages adventure saga, and yet the plot of the Theban plays is propelled by curses, prophecies, and a sphinx. Beowulf‘s monsters had the audacity, though, to stay center-stage rather than serving as ciphers of something “deeper” or “more profound.” Even now, adults often qualify their love for a work like The Lord of the Rings or admit their appreciation of it while offering a “serious” work of fiction to counterbalance it.

What is it, though, that supposedly makes the substance of the naturalized tragedy or the modern drama more profound than that of the heroic story? There seems to be an assumption that monsters rule out the possibility of profundity or moral weight. But in enshrining this principle, the contradiction in this position is projected onto other works which then bear the condemnation the critic will not allow to taint their own preferred fantastic work. Thus it is that for many contemporary critics, “Doom is held less literary than hamartia.” Is it not, at least in part, because the critics enshrine literary representations of their own self-deception? 

Having heard the complaint, Tolkien rejects the hypothesis that it is the number of monsters in the poem that presents the problem. The suggestion that one less monster would balance the story’s structure or theme is an absurd one, as the critic who complains of any monster’s presence will not be convinced of the poem’s worthiness simply through subtraction. They will disregard the story all the same as the former complaint—that “the heroic or tragic story on a strictly human plane is by nature superior”—will still hold. Furthermore, the poem itself would suffer through such a cowardly revision. To remove Grendel or his mother from the tale in favor of another foe or obstacle, such as war with another Northern tribe, would produce an asymmetry that would imbalance the poem’s conclusion where an older Beowulf contends against the dragon. 

The symmetry is vital as it includes the inversion of ideals represented by each of the three monsters. In time, Jane Nitzsche, in her “The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother,” would show that Grendel’s mother is as important a figure as Grendel himself. Her role is not simply to add another foe to the tale. Rather, she represents a diametrically opposed figure to the women the poem has introduced, each of whom act as “weavers of peace,” binding their communities together. Grendel’s mother, by contrast, behaves like a lord demanding vengeance for the death of her son, just as Hrothgar or any other chief would. 

This is a contradiction that provokes great fear in Hrothgar’s hall. Her monstrousness lies in her assumption of a role she, a lady (she is described as an “ides” which is used elsewhere in the poem to characterize a queen or noblewoman) is not meant to bear and in the prowess she shows in fighting those who are “meant” to bear it. Though she comes to avenge a monster and murderer, she nevertheless reflects Beowulf’s mores and commitments back to him and his world. Nitzsche’s analysis came later but Tolkien is similarly attuned to how the poem’s monsters externalize threats that are much more proximate to its hero and to its audience.

Similarly, to remove the dragon would diminish the significance of the elder Beowulf’s final days. Beowulf fights the dragon as the champion of his people because he is the one who has proven himself in battle against monsters as a young man. The dragon is the negative image of the king, hoarding treasure for himself, rather than distributing it to others. There is thus a trajectory that moves from Grendel, the individual warrior, to the dragon as lord of prizes, to portray the dark inversion of the values and norms which animated the world of Beowulf. The evil which Beowulf fights is already embryonically present in the human world and its overflow into exterior threat must be kept at bay. The poem, then, truly cannot be any other way. There is no Beowulf that does not concern itself with monsters, just as there is no Beowulf that seizes the imagination or inspires courage that is not the story of a monster fighter.

The judgment that deems the monsters to be “sad mistakes” does not reckon adequately with the world of which it is a part. Our world is only ever haunted by darkness, death, and doom. They are natural, in one sense, yet wholly unnatural in another. They are here and active, but in the truest and most profound sense they do not belong here. They are aspects of human beings’ environments, but they present themselves as actants with something akin to agency. The monsters are instantiations of the elemental hostility and intransigence of the world against which the human race has always contended and with which they will always contend. Perhaps the creature, Grendel, never existed in Scandinavia in the early medieval period: this is little consolation, as he is metonymic for all monsters. The monstrous is not simply an alien ontology as it is also an ethical category. It confronts us from within and without, surrounding the human race at all times in the senseless ravagings that pervade the cosmos and undermine our own best efforts. 

This means that the historical rootedness of Beowulf is not a ballast to counteract the strangeness of its monsters, as though history and geography lent the tale a verisimilitude of which its monsters would otherwise deprive it. This was the mistake of previous scholars. Though these facets that ground the poem in time and space and people present themselves for investigation towards understanding the story as a whole, to focus upon them to the exclusion of Beowulf’s three fights is to strip the story of its significance. Beowulf is a tale of humankind’s perpetual fight against chaos and its monsters, and in this instance, it looks like this. “It is possible,” Tolkien thinks,

to be moved by the power of myth and yet to misunderstand the sensation, to ascribe it wholly to something else that is also present: to metrical art, style, or verbal skill. Correct and sober taste may refuse to admit that there can be an interest for us— the proud we that includes all intelligent living people— in ogres and dragons; we then perceive its puzzlement in face of the odd fact that it has derived great pleasure from a poem that is actually about these unfashionable creatures. Even though it attributes “genius”... to the author, it cannot admit that the monsters are anything but a sad mistake.

“The proud we” have a difficult time rationalizing the enjoyment of a work that places such “sad mistakes” as Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon at the very heart of the story. That “we” feels they ought not to enjoy Beowulf for so blatantly ignoring the strictures modern literary discrimination has put in place. But the poem itself has no compunction whatsoever against structuring its plot around fighting monsters and is not embarrassed to allow its themes to derive from those actions rather than present its action as scaffolding for something supposedly more “profound.”

This seems to be precisely that with which the older critics had taken issue. The monsters of the Odyssey, for instance, were semi-divine through parentage from such figures as Poseidon or Zeus, so their roles in these stories could be assimilated to the conditions of the world over against the nobly flawed individual. It seems, then, the problem this school of critics had with Beowulf was that it did not present a classically structured agon of a tragic hero-type. It seems they were disappointed that Beowulf was not the story of the self-actualization of a complex yet fundamentally good character set into motion by his misdeed, and as such they judged the poem deficient. Accordingly they could not allow there to be much substance in a story that did not meet this highly selective criteria.

The monsters of Beowulf, however, are neither structurally nor thematically peripheral. They are present as representatives of the pervasive enemies of God that threaten the fragility of mankind’s place in the world. Beowulf takes on distinction and significance, becomes the Beowulf of the poem, in his fights against these creatures and in no other way. Whatever is in the man Beowulf, whatever contours of character that may be of interest to a reader or listener, emerges in his resolve to battle the children of Cain. Beowulf, in Tolkien’s estimation, succeeds because the monsters portray the world’s entrapment within hamartia of another sort. “It is just because the main foes in Beowulf are inhuman that the story is larger and more significant than [an] imaginary poem of a great king’s fall,” Tolkien writes; “It glimpses the cosmic and moves with the thought of all men concerning the fate of human life and efforts.” To rightly understand the poem the audience must grasp that no one, nor even Beowulf, mighty hero that he is, can keep the monsters at bay forever.

In the struggle with Grendel one can as a reader dismiss the certainty of literary experience that the hero will not in fact perish, and allow oneself to share the hopes and fears of the Geats upon the shore. In the second part the author has no desire whatever that the issue should remain open, even according to literary convention... By now we are supposed to have grasped the plan. Disaster is foreboded. Defeat is the theme. Triumph over the foes of man’s precarious fortress is over, and we approach slowly and reluctantly the inevitable victory of death.

The poet does not stumble in this portion of the poem. This is not a deviation from what preceded it, but its completion. It is the poet’s intention that his audience understand what Beowulf’s kin do not. Beowulf is doomed. He will not suffer so much as the result of hubris, however, but because this is the doom of humankind. “He is a man,” Tolkien writes, “and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy.” The evil against which he contends envelops him. It is internal to his existence. It is a part of him, and yet it must be fought. Victory over it can only therefore ever be local and provisional. Tolkien focuses on the poem’s Christian gloss on the old Northern Theory of Courage—“the creed of unyielding will,” the tenacity that refuses to see defeat as a refutation of what is right—to insist that provisionality is worthy in and of itself as that is the only theater in which moral courage can ever triumph on any scale. 

James Earl has noted how “sceaft”, denoting “nature” or “fate,” is used with modifiers to link Grendel and his mother with the overall shape of human life. For “wonsceaft wera” (the dark fate of men) conceptually meets “geosceaft grimme” (grim ancient fate) in the form of Grendel’s mother coming to claim vengeance for the death of her son. This particular event, as singular as it is, is nevertheless of a piece with the universal state of things after the Fall. Grendel and his mother are not the entirety of “the darkness of the human condition,” but they are facets of it, emerging from and contributing to its darkness. 

Tolkien notes that “the symbolism of darkness is so fundamental that it is vain to look for any distinction between the þystru [darkness] outside of Hrothgar’s hall in which Grendel lurked and the shadow of Death, or of hell after (or in) Death.” This darkness, this condition is within the structures he defends. His civilization provides some of the templates for the dark fate of men. The monsters may be descended from Cain, but he was a son of Adam, as all of us are. The monsters are more related to us than we allow ourselves to believe. 

But while we must not forget that we share a genealogy, we must remember we are not the same, or that we must not allow ourselves to become so. We cannot pretend the monsters are wholly other, but there is a distinction. Grendel and the world’s monsters plague our race as their “main function is hostility to humanity (and its frail efforts at order and art upon earth).” Human order must be defended not because it is perfect—far from it—but because it is a bulwark against this outer darkness. But because it is also within us, the structures by which we order the world are perpetually in need of repair, reform, and sometimes even death. What is the point of repelling the darkness now, knowing it will arise again? Because it is present now, in the time we are given to be, in the time that the bonds that constitute our shared life and that preserve what we hold dear are threatened. 

To deny the long defeat is to invite another and more dreadful doom. In a footnote to the passage in which he states that defeat is the poem’s theme, Tolkien soberly reflects:

That the particular bearer of enmity, the Dragon, also dies is important chiefly to Beowulf himself. He was a great man. Not many even in dying can achieve the death of a single worm, or the temporary salvation of their kindred. Within the limits of human life Beowulf neither lived nor died in vain—brave men might say. But there is no hint, indeed there are many to the contrary, that it was a war to end war, or a dragon-fight to end dragons. It is the end of Beowulf, and of the hope of his people.

Tolkien’s subjectivity seizes this opportunity—whether consciously or unconsciously we cannot be sure, but it is there, regardless—to yank the global and historical through the eye of Beowulf’s needle. For it is simply impossible that Tolkien wrote and spoke that phrase, “a war to end war,” without the grim assonance of World War I rhetoric in his mind or more poignantly, without the deaths of his friends flaring into his mind’s eye. Tolkien’s appreciation for Beowulf surely deepened as he pondered the intractability of darkness and defeat at the heart of the poem. Its pathos no doubt resonated with his experience as one of only two survivors out of a close-knit group of friends, to say nothing of the virtual destruction of his unit twenty years earlier. Tolkien was already familiar with the monsters of modernity: he had witnessed them firsthand in the death drive that gripped his civilization, one that had prided itself on supposedly surpassing the barbarism of the past. If he was not already allergic to hollow rhetoric regarding war and civilization, the bitter run-in with futility that was the Battle of the Somme certainly disabused him of such grandiose ideas.

The intervening years between the first and second world wars only reinforced how foolish such triumphalist narratives were. Not that he ever abandoned a deep commitment to truth or the need for courage or even the necessity, at times, to fight, but he would insist on the importance of smaller aims, of recognizing the inevitability of the return of the Shadow and the gravitational pull of Nothing within historical time. 

The need to defend “man’s precarious fortress” would never cease; crisis would emerge yet again, and then again, exhaustingly, until the end of the age. Tolkien had no patience for defeatism, but he knew at the same time that the dragon-fight to which any of us, the descendants of Adam, are summoned, will not be the last. And if it is branded the “dragon-fight to end dragons,” the vendors of that narrative will consign many hopeful young persons to the bleak fate of having failed. We cannot hope to root out Evil from the soil of the cosmos entirely. All we can do is confront its promulgation so far as we are able to in our weakness. This is the responsibility entrusted to human beings in the time they are given. If we neglect this, we will discover, each and every time, that the cost of our crusades is unbearably high.

It is possible to carry out this responsibility with a hope that is both robust and limited precisely because of Beowulf’s Christian reinterpretation of the Danes’ history. Tolkien calls it an admirable achievement that the poem creates “the illusion of surveying a past, pagan but noble and fraught with a deep significance—a past that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of sorrow.” He appreciates that the Christian poet has not, as many of his contemporaries did, “consign[ed] the heroes to the devil,” but retroactively situates these heroes within the new history opened by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This history acknowledges the gravity of sin, death, and the monstrous, and reckons with the import of humanity’s fight against them. And yet this acknowledgment of the possibility of defeat and destruction recognized that they were not ultimate.

In older tales, hope cannot exceed the valor of the heroes who go to fight. Hope is a possibility because heroes hopefully sufficient to the looming threat arise to confront it. It survives, then, so long as they do. In the event of their defeat, however, hope gives way to resignation. For while it may be true that defeat does not invalidate the justness of their cause, it nevertheless spells the doom of those on whose behalf they fought. Beowulf, through its Christian reinterpretation, evidences the same acknowledgment of doom but situates it within God’s economy, ensuring that all victories and all defeats are framed within God’s lordship and care. The salvation of the world is not lost through Beowulf’s death, as he was never responsible for such a burden. The consequences of this or that fight are serious, and yet none of them are the hinge upon which the history of Adam’s race turns. 

Possibly the greatest gift the Beowulf poet provides posterity is this consolation, as its comfort never nullifies the darkness and pain of our embattled existence on this plane. Instead, every victory and every unyielding defeat, however small, is a part of the whole of Christ’s victory over Sin and Death, disconnected historically from one another, perhaps, but united to the Son of God’s triumph by his Spirit.

The monsters of the poem bore witness to this element of existence in a way that consoled Tolkien. He lived the rest of his life deeply wounded by the nightmarish loss of life he endured, “just when I was full of stuff to write, and of things to learn; and never picked it all up again,” he would later write to his son, Michael. He attributed the peace and perseverance he experienced to God’s grace sustaining him over a long life, but it is no less true that there was a John Ronald Reuel Tolkien who did not survive the war.

The version who did survive would distill the glimmering sadness of lives irrevocably shattered into a modern mythology that never allows its readers to forget the toll that courage and heroism exact. Beowulf nourished the hope against hope which informed his own fiction which has in turn sustained thousands of other readers in the darkness of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. King Lear magnificently manifests the pain woven into the fabric of the world, but if we impose an arbitrary rule that all tragic art must mimic it then we will never penetrate to the heart of what makes our world tragic.

The monsters and the monstrous in Beowulf apprehend reality in a way that the merely prosaic cannot. Censoring monsters leaves us with only an absurd world where fighting the darkness and standing to the last is as meaningless as the peace the fight is meant to recover. There is no nobility in death in a world without monsters. It should not surprise us that the repressed always returns. The monster we would deny now prowls about the periphery of our awareness, unrecognized in its denial.

Stories such as Beowulf ground its readers in the reality of this particular world, one inhabited by monsters, one for which we are responsible. These stories provide models for emulation, yes, but they also show how their protagonists are entangled within the problem of evil. They are not less morally sophisticated than the works the critics have admonished us to prefer, but equally so. The heroism they commend recognizes the split in human subjectivity, that while our heroes may fight monsters, it is also possible that they would become monsters. These stories therefore refuse to allow us to forget that we will never extirpate evil entirely as it is already within us, shaping our mortality.

The history of our species isn’t one of onward and upward progress: it is one of chaos and desperate rearguard actions, punctuated by all too short gasps of peace. We try to hold the dark but it’s never a single, concentrated line of defense holding across time, united by the same allegiances or the same threats. It is fragmented clumps of contention putting themselves in the way of the dark’s machinations, and the fact that they are often overwhelmed by it is no discrediting of the effort.

And it is the eschaton that is the final retroactive judgment that will unveil everything’s hidden significance and the obscured connections they bear to one another. Then the seemingly isolated, disparate string of defeats will be revealed to be episodes in the long campaign against the darkness, from a cup of cold water to rescuing a persecutor to a doomed last stand. The Beowulf-poet illuminated Tolkien’s instinct to see eschatological reversal as a source of hopeful activity. We, their unpromising descendants, can likewise contend for the present with the hope that the eschaton will vindicate and resurrect its good within its upheaval, but without triumphalism or presumption. Instead, we can adhere to Beckett’s like-hearted maxim, “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This is our doom and our challenge: to fight the long defeat, the only fight in which there is real integrity due to its small aims and its recognition of human frailty. We may be summoned to many fights, to end this wrong or that evil, but the end of the evils and afflictions that characterize our existence will always asymptotically evade our reach. But if we would not be monsters, then we must strive all the same and leave their ultimate defeat to God.

Originally published in the spring 2025 Mere Orthodoxy print journal. To become a member and receive future issues, join today.