Be a Man, Beowulf : Sentimental Masculinity and the Gentleness of Kings

Abstract

While early critics of Beowulf, almost exclusively male, projected their gender expectations onto the poem and found their protagonist “manly,” it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the gentleness ascribed to early medieval English kings attracted close consideration. This essay makes a small contribution to the feminist recovery of the diversity of ways to be male by examining the Old English discourse of gentleness, and rereading in the context of a crisis of masculinity. Yet, while Old English didactic texts distinguished between meekness and anger, duty and “slackness,” all such ideas about courage became emphatically gendered only in their reception. It is clear, in other words, that though Beowulf was always male – criticism made him “a man.”