Is there Christianisation of a pagan story in Beowulf?
The answer is no, and yes. There are no specifically Christian elements in Beowulf. However, the bard at Heorot tells the story of creation from a Biblical — or more exactly, Old Testament — perspective. The question used to be asked about what a Christian bard was doing at a pagan court, but the real question should be what is a pre-Christian bard doing at a pagan court? There is no real evidence to suggest that the Beowulf story existed in the sophisticated form it does in the poem before the Anglo-Saxon Christian era. We can certainly assume that the story itself was not new, just as we know that various of the digressions were not new. Equally, we know that Roman script, which was the only way of writing down long streams of text, was introduced with Christianity. We have very scant pagan attestation in Old English. One example is the tantalising glimpse in the runic poem which begins ‘Ing was aerest…’ (Ing was first… the stanza then going on to describe what appears to be a pagan
