Beowulf (Civ6)/Civilopedia

The story of Beowulf was written in Old English around 1000 AD, making it one of the very first surviving works in that language. Beowulf is a hero of the Geats, a people that inhabited a part of what is today Sweden. He arrives in the hall of Hrothgar, a king of the Danes, whose lands are under assault by a monster named Grendel – a cannibal beast perhaps thematically related to the trolls of Scandinavian myth, but whom the poem identifies as a cursed descendant of the Biblical Cain.
Beowulf sets a trap for Grendel. He pretends to go to sleep in the hall, just as the monster’s victims have done. That night, a chill fog creeps in and, with it, the monster. Beowulf abandons his weapons, wanting to test his strength against the beast as equals. The two lock arms and, after a fierce grapple, Beowulf rips one of Grendel’s arms off with his bare hands. The troll, mortally wounded, hobbles back to its home. Back there, Grendel’s bog-witch mother receives her dying son and is consumed with anger, and Beowulf must again do battle.
Beowulf returns to the land of the Geats in triumph, where he rules for many years, but a new, and deadlier evil awakens. A dragon emerges from its lair, setting the countryside alight with its breath. Beowulf, prideful as always, insists on battling the beast alone, but a young warrior, Wiglaf, seeing that the old king is going to his death, disobeys and remains by the king’s side. In the fight, the dragon is slain, but Beowulf is bitten by its poisonous fangs and dies. Wiglaf buries the king in a tall barrow at the sea’s edge.
Beowulf wasn’t always considered to be the classic that it is today. None other than J. R. R. Tolkien advocated that the poem be taken seriously as an epic, and not simply as a folktale. It carries with it both a valorization of a warrior’s strength and cautions against pride – both Hrothgar’s pride at his riches, and Beowulf’s pride in his own power. Historically, Beowulf remains an artifact of a moment in time when a population that had nominally Christianized struggled with its pagan past, and an icon of England’s Scandinavian legacy.