Beowulf and Tolkien’s dragon-sickness

From an appendix to Tom Shippey’s Beowulf translation, an article entitled Tolkien and Beowulf – A Lifelong Involvement. It is singularly appropriate to Tolkien to bury substantive thoughts in an appendix.

… The first visible sign of [Tolkien’s] involvement with the poem indeed comes from 1923, when he published a poem in The Gryphon (a Lees University journal), with the title “Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden.” These four words form line 3052 of Beowulf, and Tolkien translated them later as “the gold of bygone men … wound about with spells.” Tolkien was not strictly accurate here, for galdre is singular, not plural. More interesting is the question, “what kind of spell was meant in Beowulf?”, and this had already caused scholars some uncertainty.

Tolkien was, however, different from other scholars, both earlier and later, in two respects. One is that while they considered issues like line 3052 as purely textual problems, Tolkien tried to probe deeper to find both mythical meanings and real-world meanings. The other is that he found solutions of this kind not only in the poem itself, but in the scholarship which had built up over many years, rarely if ever providing definite answers, but creating a range of possibilities.

Setting the line in context, it occurs late in the poem, and the gold is the hoard of the dragon, which Beowulf has just killed at the cost of his own life. But that is not what the line says: it says the gold is “the gold of bygone men,” and earlier on there has been a scene in which a man, usually described as “the Last Survivor” of a fallen people, commits his people’s gold to the earth, since he no longer has the power to guard it. How, then, did it pass to the dragon? And since the “spell ” was clearly put on the gold by the “bygone men,” what was it supposed to do? If it was meant to shield the gold from discovery, it didn’t work. So it must have been a curse, laid on whoever should take the gold. Did it work on the dragon? Did it work, or would it have worked, on Beowulf, who lived long enough only to see the gold? These are not scholarly questions, being purely speculative, but they are suggestive ones.
One further complication (unless it is in fact a clue) is that while it is very clear that the Last Survivor commits the treasure to the earth (line 2247), before wandering off in some way to die (2269-70), the dragon immediately comes upon it and finds it “standing open,” opene standan….

The thought struck scholars very quickly that perhaps (in some earlier version of the story), the disappearance of the Last Survivor and the appearance of the dragon had been one and the same thing: the Last Survivor became the dragon. Old Norse sagas contain hints of the idea that if a man “lay down on his gold,” lagdisk a gullit, in his own funeral barrow, then he would turn into a dragon. That would explain,; for one thing, why dragons are to be found in mounds or barrows, as declared firmly by another Anglo-Saxon poem, draca sceal on hlawe, “dragon must be in mound,” and also where their gold comes from: it has been buried with the dead man, or rather, the not-dead man.

What does the spell or curse do, then? This is the question Tolkien answered in his poem of 1923, an answer which remained consistent through several minor and major reworkings of the poem all the way to its appearance as “The Hoard” in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in 1962. Briefly, just as the Last Survivor is the dragon;, so the curse is the hoard itself. What it does is destroy successive owners morally, and eventually physically, cursing them with avarice and blindness.

In the 1923 version – Tolkien tinkered with details for nearly forty years, without losing the main shape and point of the poem – the gold was originally elvish, until the fall of the elf-kingdoms. It then passed to “an old dwarf,” who became a miser, counting his hoard, and not noticing the dragon who found his cave. In turn the dragon became old and failed to hear the approach of a “fearless warrior,” who called him to come out and fight for the gold . And the warrior became “an old king,” brooding on his riches and neglecting his kingdom, until he too was displaced and killed. Now the hoard is lost, and will remain so till the elves return: if they do, for the 1923 version ends with the word “awake,” the 1962 one with the world “sleep.”

The “spell” which winds inextricably round the hoard is, then, what Tolkien in The Hobbit would call “the dragon-sickness.” At the end of the story this affects first Thorin, though “the power that gold has upon which a dragon has long brooded,” and then kills the Master of Laketown, who flees with the gold he has been given and (like the dwarf, dragon and king of the poem) dies miserably, in his case “of starvation in the Waste, deserted by his companions.” “Dragon-sickness,” then, began as an interpretation of a difficult line in Beowulf …