The conclusion of Beowulf offers the tragic element that, it seems, is essential to the heroic epic in almost any language and culture, and forms a symmetrical end to the tale of a man whose strength and courage, when in his prime, were second to none. We open with Beowulf fighting a monster to aid a friendly nation; now he must engage a dragon to save his own. It would seem to be an ideal candidate for such sweeping surveys as Joseph Campbell's
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and yet, in its particular economies of form, it may represent something even finer. J.R.R. Tolkien, whose professorship at Oxford was in medieval English language and literature, once took up this issue with his essay "
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," which Seamus Heaney has credited as having a great influence on his translation. Tolkien, in particular, rejected the notion of Beowulf as "primitive"; far from that, he regarded it as a "late" poem of a great but declining culture:
For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote. If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo.
It's not hard to hear in this a resonance with Tolkien's own fantastic works, in which the people known as the Elves are, as was Beowulf, the inheritors of an ancient culture whose time is passing, and will soon have passed entirely from the circles of the world.
Chaucer, in contrast, was very much a poet of the present -- his present -- a time when dragons and monsters had removed themselves pretty thoroughly. He did, it's true, translate some of the classics, including the heroic-mythological
Troilus and Criseyde and the chivalric
Roman de la Rose -- but his greatest work, the
Canterbury Tales, is framed by portraits of the ordinary people of his time, complete with all their warts and shortcomings. His frank and bawdy Wife of Bath, his greasy Pardoner, flush-faced money grubbing Summoner, and smug self-satisfied Man of Law, are people that we might very well still recognize today. Unfortunately, as English evolved considerably after his time, his language was only very poorly understood by his latter-day successors; the poet John Dryden even held that Chaucer's verse was not consistently metrical -- after all, he lived in the "infancy" of our language! -- rather than realizing that the "silent" e at the end of so many words was meant to receive a beat.
