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Bee-Wolf and the Hand of Victory: Identifying the Heroes of Beowulf and Vǫlsunga saga

Like all names in Beowulf, the name beowulf may be either meaningless or intensely meaningful, depending upon the reader’s disposition toward the poem. the protagonist’s name can be part of the poet’s carefully wrought allegorical schema, in which characters are given names that reflect an encoded judgment about their narrative function, personality, and ethics: this is Andy Orchard’s position, when he writes that “if the Beowulf-poet did not invent the names . . . he certainly makes capital of their transparent meaning.”1 there has recently been a move against allegorical readings of personal names in Beowulf, however, by scholars such as tom Shippey, Leonard Neidorf, and Stefan Jurasinski.2 because Beowulf is an oral-traditional work, these critics propose that the poem’s characters are normally inheritances from a pre-existing tradition rather than the product of an author’s imagination, and, thus, are unlikely to owe their place in the poem to the meaning of their name. As R. D. Fulk summarizes the argument, “[P]alpable difficulties arise from the application of such an interpretative method to ‘beowulf’ since it is demonstrable that many of the names derive from a long legendary tradition.”3 this move against reading personal names as bearing potential meaning seems unnecessary. the ultimate origin or derivation of a character’s name—whether it was created bespoke by an author to meet the needs of a narrative under construction or borrowed from a textual source or the