He is the mythical hero of the Norse world.
Locked in an epic battle of Man against Monster.
Destined to confront not one, but three terrifying beasts
in a quest for undying glory.
This is the legend of Beowulf.
But could it be more than just legend?
Prepare to experience the oldest story in the English language
in an entirely new way.
This is the strange truth behind the fiction...
of Beowulf.
The stench of death permeates Denmark's royal hall.
Headless bodies.
Bloody entrails.
A savage beast is on the rampage.
He is Grendel.
A monstrous outcast banished from society
whose rage has turned to violence.
I always compare Grendel to Predator,
you know, sort of hulking and dark and threatening.
Night after night, the monster's vicious reign of terror continues.
He's killing warriors.
He's tearing them apart limb from limb.
He's decapitating them.
There are body parts all over the place.
Denmark desperately needs a hero,
someone strong enough to face off with the monster,
someone who can take him down.
That hero is Beowulf.
Beowulf is the biggest possible hero you could imagine.
He can do anything.
He's not afraid to lose his life.
This is exactly what a hero in his culture has to be like,
willing to lay down his life for honour, for glory.
Beowulf is no ordinary human being.
He really is a heroic figure.
Like the heroes in Greek mythology,
his powers definitely exceed those of an ordinary man.
In a dark age when terror was everywhere and heroes were few,
the myth of Beowulf resonated as the ultimate clash between good and evil.
Between a valiant warrior and a myriad of monstrous enemies.
The legend of Beowulf is a fictional story inspired by fact.
Today experts are still unsure who created it,
but it's believed to have originated in England
in the seventh or eighth century AD,
making it the oldest story in the English language.
The action of the poem takes place in the sixth century in Scandinavia,
but the poem itself was written in Anglo-Saxon England
after the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in 665.
Christianity had recently taken root in England
at the time of the writing of Beowulf.
The poem reflects a society that has a deep pagan background
and that has stories that come from its pagan past.
What the poem does is, it recasts these stories in a Christian mold
so that its listeners would be able to keep touch with their past.
They would reinterpret it in a Christian way.
In the myth, Beowulf's first nemesis, the monster Grendel,
has an intriguing link to the Christian Bible.
The text says that he is descended from the line of Cain.
According to the Old Testament, Cain, son of Adam,
was mankind's first murderer.
He slayed his brother Abel out of jealousy
and came to symbolize the worst of human passions.
Grendel inherits that vile legacy.
Grendel resents and is jealous of the humans
who are feasting in the meet halls.
All of the men in the great hall are having a good time,
and they're telling stories, and they're all together and united,
and he seems to envy that.
He seems that he'll never be part of that kind of thing,
and his reaction to that is to attack and destroy.
In the ancient text, Grendel's physical appearance is left to the imagination.
The only clue is the phrase,
"...a fiend out of hell".
Grendel is described as a demon of the dark, if you like.
Wherever he moves, darkness surrounds him.
In the myth, the monster holds Denmark under siege for 12 years.
He kills 30 people at a time.
You can't see him coming.
He's bloodthirsty and likes to crunch on bones.
After he decimates the king's warriors,
Grendel turns his rage on innocent civilians.
But there is one person he cannot harm,
the Danish king Hrothgar.
Like many real kings of the dark ages,
he is thought to have the power of god on his side.
Strangely enough, Grendel doesn't attack King Hrothgar.
The King is seated on a throne that's protected by god himself,
and so Grendel has to keep his distance.
All of Hrothgar's warriors have failed him.
But in the nearby kingdom of Geatland,
there is one who will stand above all others.
Beowulf comes from Scandinavia.
He is a warrior descended from great warriors,
and he is a man who has a reputation for his strength,
his courage, and his ambition.
He wants to make a great name for himself.
At the outset of the poem, Beowulf is a well-known warrior.
He's a leader of what seems to be a war band
or a group of men who travel together.
He's not really a mercenary, per se.
It's not as if he is looking for pay.
It's merely along the lines of him looking for a good fight.
Beowulf is primarily seeking glory, what the old English called "lof".
It's this kind of glory that attends a person of high honour
who's lived up to his obligations under the honour code at the time.
It's the kind of glory and status that noblemen of his time
aimed for that really motivates Beowulf.
Beowulf knows there is one way to achieve everlasting distinction,
to do what no man before him has done.
He must slay Grendel.
Night falls.
The hall comes alive with the sounds of celebration.
But this time, it is a trick designed by Beowulf
to lure Grendel from his lair.
He's not going to wait for an attack.
He's going to make sure that an attack will happen,
and he uses, actually, surprisingly, the scientific method.
He recreates the circumstances of the first attack,
and there is singing, and there is merriment,
and Grendel, sure enough, hears this, and he comes to get his meat.
The beast is thirsty for blood.
But Beowulf is ready.
In the dead of night, as the party dies down,
the hero lies in wait.
He will either kill or be killed.
Finally, Grendel makes his move.
Beowulf and his warriors brace for attack.
All the warriors pull out their swords,
and they start to try and hack and hew at Grendel.
But Grendel is impervious.
No sword can harm Grendel, no metal weapon of any kind.
Grendel has put a curse on all such weapons,
preventing them from affecting him.
He grabs one of Beowulf's warriors,
and he rips him in half, drinks down his blood,
throws the body down, and then goes for Beowulf.
This is the myth, but what is the link to reality?
90 miles north of London, England, is a place called Sutton Hoo.
This area was once ruled by powerful Anglo-Saxon kings.
In the 20th century, archaeologists excavated the ancient burial mounds
and made a startling discovery.
Evidence of bodies mangled and murdered in a very brutal way.
The died violently...
suddenly...
almost as if killed by a monster.
Many of them buried face down
or with the heads lopped off, necks broken,
buried in all kinds of strange positions, so they were buried in a shaming way.
It is shocking evidence of violence in a once-prosperous kingdom
in the same era when the myth is thought to have originated.
Experts theorize that these victims were Anglo-Saxon criminals
sentenced to death for defying the king.
These seem to be criminals who were executed and buried in this place,
which had apparently gone from being a place of worship to a place of terror.
And the connection to Beowulf simply could be
that these kinds of violent public executions
were a way that a king could maintain order within his kingdom.
Could these gruesome deaths have inspired the story of carnage
in the court of King Hrothgar?
The hunt for clues leads back to the myth.
The monster Grendel is terrorizing the blood-soaked hall of the King.
No sword can pierce his skin,
but Beowulf refuses to give in.
He has one weapon left: his bare hands.
It is a classic struggle between David and Goliath,
monster versus man.
The future of Denmark's people hangs in the balance,
and Beowulf is their last line of defence.
It's mayhem in the Danish court of King Hrothgar.
Beowulf and the monstrous giant Grendel are locked in a death match.
Suddenly, our hero gains the advantage.
Beowulf grabs Grendel's arm, and he twists it.
Beowulf, the world's strongest warrior,
pulls at the monster's arm with all his might.
Grendel howls, and, you know, his shoulder is dislocated,
and Beowulf twists it again and twists it again and then pops it right off.
And the bone splits from the sinew. It springs apart.
The muscle rips away.
Agonized cries flood the hall.
Grendel tears off into the night, haemorrhaging blood.
There was Grendel, armless, the life draining out of his arm,
heading back to his marshy home, knowing he has very little time left.
Deep in the woods, the wounded monster stumbles to the ground...
and draws his last breath.
Beowulf has slain the beast.
He holds high his prized trophy, Grendel's bloody arm.
News of Grendel's death spreads fast across the land,
and Beowulf is celebrated as a superhero.
He has achieved the glory and honour he set out to find.
But a grim reality soon sets in.
There are scores of slain warriors to bury.
The Beowulf text describes how the warriors were laid to rest.
The description matches what is now known
about real funerals in the ancient Norse world.
In a ship burial, the person who is going to be buried
and his valuables, gold, silver,
will be put in the ship,
and the ship will be sent out to sea, and it will be burned.
It was a wanton destruction of valuable goods
in a society that was not awash in goods,
but it's a sign just of the seriousness of the loss
and the prestige and importance of the person who's being buried.
Amazingly, evidence of these ritual burials
the same ones described in Beowulf,
can be found not underwater but underground.
Today there are hundreds of mysterious mounds scattered across northern Europe.
Many are still waiting to be excavated.
At Sutton Hoo in England,
where archaeologists discovered those mysterious mangled bodies,
the burial mounds have yielded more stunning evidence
about the world of Beowulf.
In 1939, excavations turned up a buried ship
dated to the time when the Beowulf myth is believed to have been written.
The wood had completely decayed away,
but you could still see the shapes of all the planks and the ribs
running at right angles across it.
It looked like a complete wooden ship.
But closer examination revealed it was more than just a ship.
It was the tomb of an unknown ruler
teeming with buried treasures.
Sutton Hoo is the richest grave from England and is, well,
the richest grave from the Dark Ages from Northern Europe.
It's telling us about the elite of Dark Age society.
The actual artifacts that were dug out of Sutton Hoo
look like the things that are described in Beowulf.
There are helmets with boar crests on them.
There are swords with decorated, twisted handles and so forth,
and so there seems to be some kind of connection
between what's described in Beowulf and what we've found in Sutton Hoo.
The Sutton Hoo excavation proved, for the first time,
that the legend of Beowulf is more than just a fictional thriller,
but it's not the only site yielding evidence of the truth behind the myth.
In the Danish countryside,
archaeologists have made an unusual discovery:
evidence of a real ancient hall.
The wooden superstructure rotted away centuries ago,
but, based on the location of its post holes,
it once stretched 150 feet long,
making it one of the largest halls of its kind ever found.
Could this be the mythical hall of King Hrothgar?
In the story of Beowulf, the scene of Grendel's attack is called "Heorot",
which means "hall of the stag".
It is both a throne room and a banquet hall
where the King's warriors gather to celebrate victory.
Heorot is described as this great hall
which is comparable to none other in the world.
It's a sign of civilization, a sign of sophistication,
and becomes kind of a wonder of the world of this culture.
The hall recently uncovered in Denmark
is in the same area its ancient kings once called home.
Radio carbon testing dates the site to the sixth century AD,
the same period when the myth was said to have taken place,
but there's more.
Excavations in the area around the ancient hall
have yielded precious artifacts
that could only have belonged to a powerful king.
Some are for daily life - knives, needles, and so on -
but there are also rather beautiful jewelry made of gold and silver,
coins and so on that give the impression
that this is a site of some importance.
But who was the king behind this hall,
and could he be connected to the myth?
An intriguing clue can be found in a series of stories
collectively called the legendary sagas.
They are fact-based accounts about the Norse world
that were written between 1100 and 1400 AD.
Many of the Norse sagas are based on family histories,
and we find this very engaging combination
of historical material and mythological traditions.
The sagas tell of a Danish king named Hrothgar
who lived around the fifth or sixth century AD.
If Hrothgar was a real king, could Beowulf have been a real hero?
Deep in the marshes, a mother mourns the death of her son.
Her son is Grendel.
Her grief becomes rage.
This is the second of Beowulf's three monstrous enemies.
He's defeated Grendel.
Now he must take on Grendel's mother.
She's quick, cunning, and out for blood.
Grendel's mother is a very, very enigmatic figure in the text.
She certainly seems more bestial than Grendel.
Her emotions are more beast-like.
She's just bent on revenge.
Revenge for the death of her son,
whose severed arm has become a trophy, a mockery.
Grendel's mother feels a mother's pain
when her son is killed by Beowulf.
So she enters into a feuding frenzy to attack Heorot,
and she goes without much regard for her own safety.
As the warriors sleep,
Grendel's mother enters the hall.
She pounces, killing with brutal efficiency.
Terror grips the King's court again,
but Beowulf is not there to save it.
He is spending the night away from Heorot, unaware of the unfolding terror.
With her hands stained by the blood of Denmark's warriors,
Grendel's mother vanishes into the night.
Beowulf is enraged when he learns of the carnage.
Just days ago, he heroically saved the warriors who now lay dead,
but the King is alive.
He sits protected on his untouchable throne, despondent.
Hrothgar is humiliated by the fact that so many of his men
have been killed by Grendel and also now his mother,
and he is not able to be a shield, and Beowulf says to him,
"It's better to act than to sit in mourning."
Once again, Beowulf knows he must look death in the eye.
He has built his reputation through heroic deeds.
Now he must maintain it.
With Hrothgar and his men by his side,
Beowulf will hunt down Grendel's mother.
They follow the blood trail along a winding path.
Grendel's mother and Grendel live at the bottom of the haunted mere.
The mere is an icy lake swarming with poisonous snakes and sea dragons.
The only way to get to Grendel's mother is to go through them first.
To the early Christian writers who recorded this myth,
these serpents represented something equally threatening in the real world:
pagans.
The hunt for Grendel's mother has led Beowulf
to an icy lake teeming with venomous serpents.
To get to her, he'll have to go through them.
This will be a decisive battle in the fight for Denmark
between a warrior hero and a wicked mother
who is descended from the Bible's most infamous murderer, Cain.
Grendel's mother is never named in the poem.
She just is Grendel's mother,
but she is a very fearsome creature in her own right,
perhaps in some ways even more dangerous,
because now that her son has been killed,
she has the rage of a bereaved mother.
Before Beowulf plunges beneath the ice,
his men give him a special sword.
Its iron blade is tempered in blood
and has never failed in battle before.
Beowulf's comrades cannot bring themselves to go further.
The hero must brace for battle alone.
Under the surface, deadly serpents lie in wait.
Beowulf tries to use his sword against them.
But no human weapon can harm these supernatural beasts.
He manages to break away
and find the entrance to the lair of Grendel's mother.
For a second time, man will confront monster.
Grendel's mother comes in, and she attacks him.
He grabs her hair, grabs her shoulder, throws her down,
and she's up in a shot, and she snags him with her filthy claws,
and he tumbles back on the floor.
Beowulf is in grave danger,
and his sword again proves useless.
It's supposed to be very powerful and very strong,
but it actually has no effect on Grendel's mother at all.
It can't penetrate her scaly hide.
Suddenly, something catches Beowulf's eye.
He sees on the wall or nearby an ancient sword forged by giants,
which is not of mortal making.
It's really a magic weapon.
In one resolute arc,
he strikes Grendel's mother and severs her head.
It is the death of a second evil, dawn of a new hope.
Beowulf has proven his bravery again,
but this is more than a mythical triumph.
It is a reflection of the changing world
in which the Norse people framed the myth,
a world where paganism had eroded and Christ had risen.
We might see the death of Grendel's mother as a religious metaphor.
Just as Grendel's mother dies,
so paganism is dying and Christianity is rising,
and just as Beowulf frees Hrothgar's kingdom
from the threat of Grendel's mother,
so Christianity is bringing light to the world of paganism that preceded it.
600 AD, The British Isles:
A religious revolution is under way.
Roman Christians have come north to convert all nonbelievers.
In the late sixth century, Pope Gregory sent Augustine to England
to convert these Anglo-Saxon pagans.
Augustine was told by Gregory,
"Go to the pagan temples that the Anglo-Saxons already use
"and convert them to Christian use."
Convert the kings so that the people underneath the king will follow him.
The Anglo-Saxons were ultimately converted,
but their pre-Christian legends lived on in the stories they passed down,
including the legend of Beowulf.
Beowulf attempts to update and bring into the Christian present
some of the old-fashioned heroic values
of the early Norse era,
people who are brave in adversity, people who are loyal to comrades.
When the Christians conquered,
they recast the myth of Beowulf as a metaphor of good versus evil.
The story continues.
At the haunted lake of serpents,
Beowulf surfaces victorious.
He heads for the hall of King Hrothgar.
And arrives triumphant.
Beowulf's return shocks the King's court.
He had been given up for dead.
Hrothgar hails him as the ultimate hero and stages a great celebration.
Beowulf has achieved the glory and honour he came to Denmark to find.
Now he is eager to return to his own kingdom to the north, Geatland.
There more danger awaits.
In the story of Beowulf, the Geats were not a mythical tribe.
They were real warriors from the southern tip of Sweden
well-known to the writers of the myth.
The poem refers to the Geats, and it refers to Swedes.
What we are looking at are two different dynasties.
It is a deep-rooted split that you see actually last
all the way to the end of the Viking age.
This real-life rivalry between the Geats and the Swedes
comes to a head in the next chapter of Beowulf,
and it is up to Beowulf to lead his people to victory
in one epic battle on a giant lake of ice.
This is Lake Vanern.
It is the largest body of water in Sweden,
covering some 2,200 square miles.
In harsh winters, it freezes over,
forming a land bridge between two distant territories.
Today it is peaceful,
but 15 centuries ago, according to the myth of Beowulf,
it was the setting of a bloody battle,
the Swedes against the Geats.
On his return to Geatland, Beowulf discovers
that the Geats are embroiled in the middle of a Swedish feud.
A civil war between members of the Swedish royal family
has spilled over into Beowulf's homeland.
The hero must confront death once again,
but this time, not against monsters but against his fellow man.
Beowulf's forces prevail, and in return for his heroism,
he is granted the throne of Geatland.
His quest for glory is now complete.
It is a decisive moment in the myth,
but could this epic battle have really happened?
According to old Norse sagas which are thought to be based on real history,
a violent battle did occur
on a frozen lake around the year 530 AD.
The battle of Lake Vanern is the decisive battle between the Geats and the Swedes,
and it happens on the frozen water of an enormous fresh water lake.
It's one of the first known giant cavalry battles in the north,
and many, many warriors are slain on both sides.
This real battle was said to have happened near Earnaness, Sweden.
Modern scholars believe Earnaness was a real settlement
right on the shore of Lake Vanern.
Once again, the historical record seems to match the myth,
a real battle in a real location.
Could there also be evidence of a real hero?
The search for clues leads back to the myth.
After the ice battle,
Beowulf rules Geatland in peace for many decades.
He's no longer that young hero that he was
when he was fighting Grendel and then Grendel's mother.
He's much older. He's no longer in his prime,
but still, he's exemplary.
As a young man, Beowulf had quenched his thirst for glory.
As an aging king, he has no desire for more,
but 50 years after his heroic conquests in Denmark,
the old warrior must face one final showdown with a terrifying monster,
the Dragon of Earnaness.
It stretches 50 feet long and guards a gargantuan hoard of gold.
Dragons represent human greed but really,
you know, amplified, because this is this monstrous creature
whose only interest is in gathering gold and keeping it.
The trouble begins after a young slave escapes from his master
and hides in a cave.
He doesn't realize he's entering the lair of the dragon.
As the monster sleeps,
the slave spots the hoard of gold and succumbs to temptation.
He steals the cup from the dragon's treasure.
Not knowing that this cup is, in fact,
the favourite item of the dragon.
The dragon stirs, finds the golden cup missing,
and sets off for revenge.
So he starts setting farms and fields on fire,
creating much destruction in a very short time.
The dragon wreaks havoc across the land.
Then, the ultimate insult.
Beowulf's own home is burned,
and he prays for restoration of his loss
and seeks some kind of redress and begins to think about revenge.
Once more, the old warrior is called to defend a nation's honour.
It will be his last stand against evil.
He's the kind of hero who's gonna be willing to go out and face,
at this point, certain death.
Beowulf leads his men into battle
with his kingdom and honour hanging in the balance.
This will either be the hero's final triumph
or his tragic end.
A fire-breathing dragon is devastating the kingdom of the Geats.
Beowulf the aging hero-king, dons his battle gear one more time,
and the hunt for a third beast begins.
The bravest soldiers ride alongside Beowulf.
Among them is the young son of a fallen warrior.
His name is Wiglaf.
He's immature.
He's inexperienced.
He's the one that you would probably say
is gonna contribute the least to the actual fight against a dragon.
The men come upon the dragon's lair in the middle of a dense forest.
Beowulf steps cautiously inside...
and finds the monster asleep.
But before the hero can strike, the dragon awakens and attacks.
Beowulf yells to his other warriors for help.
All of Beowulf's other fellows have run away to hide in the woods,
'cause they're too terrified of the dragon.
All except for one, young Wiglaf.
Once mocked for his youth, he now stands out for his bravery,
risking his life to fight alongside the hero he idolizes
as Beowulf confronts his greatest enemy.
So goes the myth, but what is the connection to reality?
The dragon is mythology's ultimate monster.
Within a sort of Christian tradition,
dragons often represent the super serpent,
a gigantic manifestation of Satan.
But if you go back before Christian tradition, dragons seem to represent
something like an ultimate embodiment
of power and ferocity and mystery.
But the great fear that people have always had is that,
despite all of the seemingly regular patterns that you see in nature,
there might also be fantastic, chaotic unknowns,
the monsters that could suddenly leap out.
Dragons play a central role in myths throughout the world.
And despite the thousands of miles and thousands of years that separate them,
the similarities between the stories are more striking than the differences.
Most of them have hard scales,
have these long serpentine bodies with long pointed tails,
long necks ending in a horned head.
Many breathe fire. Many have wings.
Are these shared traits coincidence,
or did ancient storytellers have some common real-world inspiration?
Many wonder whether there were actual dragons.
Given how prevalent the stories about them are in the world's myths,
it would seem that they must be based on something real.
My own theory, which is - other people have it too -
was that at some point, someone was walking through the Gobi desert
or parts of Central Asia where dinosaur bones are exposed,
and they saw a T-Rex-rex skeleton and said,
"Wow, if those are the bones, can you imagine what the thing looked like?"
And from there, you could imagine the creature.
So they're large. They're scary. They're fierce.
Dinosaur fossils have been discovered around the globe
since mankind's earliest days.
In a time before science,
could they have inspired mythology's ultimate monster?
The myth concludes.
Beowulf charges the dragon with his sword.
The dragon strikes back,
wounding Beowulf
but there is still one more chance for victory.
The belly is the beast's Achilles heel.
As Wiglaf looks on, Beowulf manoeuvres his way underneath the dragon
and thrusts his sword into its stomach.
The monster is defeated,
but Beowulf has paid the ultimate price for this final moment of glory.
Beowulf is bitten in the neck by the dragon,
so even as he slays the beast, he himself knows he's going to die
because the wound begins to swell and to burst.
He says, "At least bring me some of the dragon's treasure
"so that I can see what we fought for and what we've won
"and look once more upon the glorious treasure."
Beowulf says, "I am the last of my line.
"I have no heir. My fathers before me are all dead,
"so because you were brave, Wiglaf,
"I'm giving you my famous chain mail and my sword and my helmet."
An old hero dies, and a new one is born.
The final stanzas of the epic describe Beowulf's funeral,
his body placed on a pyre...
and set alight.
Beowulf's death at the end of the poem
represents the idea that all men and all their works shall die.
A great hero, the icon of northern warriors,
is dead, but his legend is just beginning.
Today hundreds of ancient burial mounds
still dot the landscape of Scandinavia.
Some have yielded evidence of truth behind the myth,
but many are still unexcavated.
Could one of them be the gravesite of a real Beowulf?
Is it possible that Beowulf was a real person?
Yes, of course it is.
The history surrounding him fits with history,
and the reason why we tend to say
yes, it's possible that he was a real person,
is the very simple fact that there were legends that were kept orally,
that were the basis for this poem,
that tells us there should be some truth to it.
Whether real man or myth, Beowulf is bravery personified.
To the ancients, he embodied the best in Man.
A warrior's life...
and a hero's death.
Transcription and synchronisation by Fry