“Hweat we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum” is the way the brilliant and dark Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf launches us out into its tale. “So. The Spear Danes in days gone by. . .” Casually, we start in mid-stream, as if we’ve joined a narrative already in full swing whose birth we did not witness, but here we are; the time is upon us. Who knows what has gone before, who knows what follows once this particular narrative fades. How did we come to this point? The Beowulf poet knows that wherever we are, we are always in mid-stream, trying to hold on to what seems endlessly passing, unsure of how we came to be here. What do we do about it?
Beowulf is atmospheric in the extreme—the product of a culture with few pleasures beyond celebrating what brief stability it could force upon an unrelenting world of change.“Men were drinking wine/ at that rare feast; how could they know fate,/the grim shape of things to come,/ the threat looming over many thanes/ as night approached. . .. “ Dark days, few lights, little warmth but what they generated around their necessary fires. They struggled to preserve what they made, what they had kept back from the sweep of men’s doing, what they had pulled out of the perpetual erosion of nature and time. The Angles had more immediate concerns than preserving the wilderness, home of Grendel and his more fearsome mother; these two, and others like them, were keepers of the fens and outcasts from the circle of warmth cast by men’s hearths. In fact the forest itself is forbidding, its wetlands threatening and haunted. It is to be cut back, cleared, or avoided:
“A few miles from [the hall]
a frost stiffened wood waits and keeps watch
above a mere; the overhanging bank
is a maze of tree-roots mirrored on its surface.
At night there, something uncanny happens:
The water burns. And the mere bottom
Has never been sounded by the sons of men.
. . . .That is no good place.
When wind blows up and stormy weather
Makes clouds scud and the skies weep
Our of its depths a dirty surge
Is pitched towards the heavens.”
(trans. Seamus Heaney)
Yet the Danes whom Beowulf rescues, and the Angles who produced the poem about that rescue are indeed like us; they strove to preserve their way of life, their joy. When we hear that plaintive note—“So”—it tells us more than we want to know about our efforts. We start right where we are; here, now. We can’t change what’s gone before but we can play our part in what comes next; this has always been our horizon.
So. Beowulf arrives to deal with the threat to the great hall, a threat to the very lives of its tribe. After his success and the hall is once again safe, “Happiness came back, the hall was thronged, and a banquet set forth; black night fell and covered them in darkness.” We imagine the scene—the warm hall, the company, the food and wine. . . and once again hear the note of elegy this poem is known for; it celebrates the sense of something passing, something we do not fully grasp but which we register all the same, and the joyful but temporary restoration of that which we would retain if only we could. Cherish what is worth preserving—it may not last. We’re prepared to learn that this hall will burn and its tribe will be scattered, as others have been.
Now, I am certainly not the type to dwell on morbid thoughts, least of all at the onset of another New Year, but when members of Greenbelt were gathered recently at my house for our annual holiday party, quite literally around the fire—the thegns and ealdormen represented by the board and staff, the king obviously being Ethan or Michael (or their wives—if you know Beowulf you’ll know what I mean) . . . – I won’t finish that particular pathway –but the point here is that we, in some way a representative body of the greater Greenbelt tribe were gathered around a fire with dinner and wine and conversation. Passing the mead-horn, thumping our shields, tossing orts to the dogs. All was wonderfully convivial- -if such harmony of persons and purpose should prevail elsewhere we’d all be swimming in warm surf. What heroic talk flew through our particular hall really took wing after Michael’s invitation for us—the staff and board and their spearmen—to reflect on the moment, to celebrate what has happened in the past year and to peer forward into the unlit future and say how some of this plays out in the next few years. We all wanted to say thank you for the warmth, for the success we have now before us, for the particular brilliance of the staff in transforming Greenbelt into the brightest star in the constellation.
The future is, as always, pretty unfathomable and while it holds no Grendels it has already thrown down challenges we have not yet fathomed. We, like Hrothgar and the Danes, aim to preserve what we have here. And our territory grows. So far our hall remains warm and bright—we’re closing in on Bald Hill Farm, and have already closed on a number of signature properties with others in the offing. Beowulf ran it alone, fought his monsters alone and in the end, died alone (sniff. . . that part always makes me pause, as they raise on the headland a monument so large sailors could see it from far at sea.) All very heroically– Grendel is vanquished, his mother too, and the dragon to boot. But time carries all away; the era of solitary heroes has ended. More to the point, unlike Beowulf, we have allies and hundreds and hundreds of unsung spearmen from other watersheds and distant drainages. We go on. Our efforts at pushing back the darkness (which we did very effectively that night) are perhaps less martial than Beowulf’s wrestling with Grendel’s mother yet are nonetheless part of that epic we all seem so deeply invested in: making this place fit for us and our kind. In a wonderful twist, we now struggle to preserve the very fens and dark pools that so terrified the Saxons and Danes. If only they knew what later folks would do to this earth, they might have set up a conservation easement or two themselves.
Hweat. So.
