Depictions of male grief in Anglo-Saxon poetry

Poetry: Beowulf

A series sharing Anglo-Saxon poetry, with the hope of revealing the untold lives and tales within them: the shared experiences we have with their emotions as they journeyed through lives over a thousand years ago.

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We find it very important today to share our experiences, often as a way of validating and healing. Social media encourages us to bring our feelings into the light, when we are comfortable and with trusted people: we find that a problem shared really can be a problem halved.

My social media echo-chamber is filled largely with other millennial women. Journalling prompts, affirmations, and self-help books promise to help me work through my feelings in a productive way, just as they have helped those sharing them. The algorithm feeds me the pages of other women because it sees similarities between us - but this openness to sharing our emotions is not just restricted to women.

Men are beginning to open up to each other about how they are feeling, perhaps in response to sky high rates of male suicide (in 2015 in the UK, it was the leading cause of death for males age 5-49).¹ I was struck listening to a podcast with my husband a few years ago, in which two men talked about the pressures often faced by men in the lead up to Christmas. Debt, being able to provide adequately, others’ perceptions of them as husbands and fathers, work, alcohol consumption… I’d been married for a long time at this point - but this was the first time I had ever heard from a man some of the reasons why their mental health can be adversely affected.

But did you know that medieval men felt and shared their emotions too?

Check out this extract from the epic poem Beowulf, in which the graveside grief of a group of warriors is described:

Then twelve warriors rode around the tomb, chieftains' sons, champions in battle, all of them distraught, chanting in dirges, mourning his loss as a man and a king. They extolled his heroic nature and exploits and gave thanks for his greatness; which was the proper thing for a man should praise a prince whom he holds dear and cherish his memory when that moment comes when he has to be convoyed from his bodily home. So the Geat people, his hearth-companions, sorrowed for the lord who had been laid low.²

Another translation describes the same scene in the following way:

Then twelve brave warriors, sons of heroes, rode round the barrow, sorrowing; they mourned their king ... Thus the Geats, his hearth-companions, grieved over the death of their lord.³

Did you notice the words used to describe the way these ‘brave warriors, sons of heroes’, ‘champions in battle’, felt when faced with the death of their lord?

Distraught. Mourning. Sorrowful. Grieved.

Note too the very public nature of this grieving ritual. This was twelve men on horseback wailing as they circled the tomb. This wasn’t a private moment of grief behind closed doors; far from it.

This reminds me of a section of The Wife’s Lament, another Anglo-Saxon poem I shared recently, which suggests that even when men couldn’t be public about their feelings, they still felt them:

Young men must always be serious in mind and stout-hearted; they must hide their heartaches, that host of constant sorrows, behind a smiling face.⁴

I mean, that really could have been written today couldn’t it? It feels so contemporary, the idea that men should maintain an appearance of stability even if they are falling apart inside - while recognising that men do experience ‘heartaches’ and ‘sorrows’. The suggestion is, perhaps, that that despite appearances to the contrary men were feeling big feelings, that the poet in no way implies are wrong.

Yet this was written more than a thousand years ago, just like the extract from Beowulf. Medieval men cried too, just like men do today (and should feel comfortable to do so publicly). Sometimes they poured out their grief; sometimes they felt compelled to hide it ‘behind a smiling face’.

Sometimes, as in these two extracts, they preserved it in poetic form.

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1. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/health-profile-for-england/chapter-2-major-causes-of-death-and-how-they-have-changed, §3.6.

2. Beowulf, tr. Seamus Heaney (1999), 263-4.

3. Beowulf, tr. Kevin Crossley-Holland (1982), 154.

4. The Wife’s Lament, tr. Kevin Crossley-Holland (1982), 57.