fragment of BEOWULF'S ROWING-MATCH by James W. Earl
The idea of a swimming-match is so deeply embedded in Beowulf scholarship, of course, that it can never be revoked, even if proved groundless; but here I present my little anyway, if only to discover its weaknesses.
This is no small issue. If by any chance my skepticism should prove justified, our reading of the whole poem would be affected. For the style of the poem has always seemed contradictory: on the one hand it is characterized throughout by typically Germanic understatement, much like the sagas; but on the other hand a certain few episodes display a more hyperbolic Celtic style. In fact, these hyperbolic episodes all have to do with Beowulf s awesome swimming abilities: not only do he and Breca swim on the ocean for seven days and nights with full armor and weapons (without food or water?); he also swims home from Frisia carrying thirty coats of armor, and he appears to be able to hold his breath for hours underwater in Grendel's mere. I for one would be pleased to find these universally accepted interpretations' mistaken, so that the poem might be more consistently Germanic in tone, the style more harmonious with the sobriety and realism of the poem's dark themes.
Though the marvelous and the supernatural abound in heroic literature generally, hyperbole does not, and it would certainly be hard to find such obvious and absurd exaggerations as these in the other heroic tales of Northern Europe (though some of the mythical stories of gods and giants in Snorri's Edda qualify as tall-tales). Among the Germanic peoples, litotes is not so much a literary style as a style of life, the natural ethical outcome of the stoical and tragic view of the world expressed so powerfully in Beowulf. A Germanic hero may occasionally be expected to kill sea-beasts and dragons among his other adversaries, as Othin and Sigurth (or Sigmund) do, but he is not expected to display grotesque or superhuman powers like a Cuchulainn. Briefly, the Germanic hero is macho, he is not Superman; Superman is definitely not macho. So Beowulf's alleged swimming powers could not be more untypical. They could only be explained as an Irish influence upon the style of the poem, and not a happy one in my view. If we read lines 506-581 of the poem carefully, but without the preconceived notion of a swimming-match, we will not find a swimming-match there.