Does Beowulf show us the Anglo-Saxon belief that human life is shaped by fate?
Beowulf is not a fatalistic poem in the sense that Norse sagas and Eddic poetry are. This is to some extent because Beowulf always triumphs — we misread the poem if we see Beowulf’s eventual death as defeat, since it would be defeat indeed if such a great hero died in any other context than battle. The poem is, however, written with an enormous amount of hindsight, so the poet knows, for example, that Heorot is to be destroyed by fire. We do not have anything like the fatalism of the Wanderer, who states ‘Wyrd bið ful aræd’ (fate is fully decided), although the actual outworkings of this are not made clear in the that poem. A much weaker version is present in Beowulf in lines 572-3: “Wyrd often saves an undoomed hero as long as his courage is good” This is quite a different perspective from the better known and understood Norse view of fate, where even the gods are subject to the spinning of the Norns, and where, in the central human epic the Volsung saga, the curse of the dwarf Andvar
Beowulf is not a fatalistic poem in the sense that Norse sagas and Eddic poetry are. This is to some extent because Beowulf always triumphs — we misread the poem if we see Beowulf’s eventual death as defeat, since it would be defeat indeed if such a great hero died in any other context than battle. The poem is, however, written with an enormous amount of hindsight, so the poet knows, for example, that Heorot is to be destroyed by fire. We do not have anything like the fatalism of the Wanderer, who states ‘Wyrd bið ful aræd’ (fate is fully decided), although the actual outworkings of this are not made clear in the that poem. A much weaker version is present in Beowulf in lines 572–3: “Wyrd often saves an undoomed hero as long as his courage is good” This is quite a different perspective from the better known and understood Norse view of fate, where even the gods are subject to the spinning of the Norns, and where, in the central human epic the Volsung saga, the curse of the dwarf Andvar
