Beowulf is considered a classic today because of an early 20th-century Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon literature with a mouthful of a name, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. (Maybe you've heard of him? Nah.)
I have, of course, read The Beowulf, as have most (but not all) of those who have criticized it...I have read enough [Beowulf scholarship], I think, to venture the opinion that 'Beowulfiana' is, while rich in many departments, especially poor in one. It is poor in critcism that is directed to the understanding of a poem as a poem.
It has been said of Beowulf itself that: [...]
It is a half-baked native epic, the development of which was killed by Latin learning; it was inspired by emulation of Virgil, and is a product of the education that came with Christianity; it is feeble and incompetent as a narrative; ...it is the confused product of a committee of muddle-headed and probably beer-bemused Anglo-Saxon (this is a [French] voice); it is a string of pagan lays edited by monks; it is the work of a learned but inaccurate Christian antiquarian; it is a work of genius, rare and surprising in the period, though the genius seems to have been shown principally in doing something much better left undone.
It is a wild folk-tale (general chorus); it is a poem of an aristocratic and courtly tradition (same voices); it is a hotch-potch; it is a sociological, anthropological, archaeological document; it is a mythical allegory; it is rude and rough; it is a masterpiece of metrical art; it has no shape at all; it is singularly weak in construction...it is a national epic; it is a translation from the Danish; it was imported by Frisian traders; it is a burden to English syllabuses.
(25 November 1936)
Let us traverse the centuries--not to the ninth, but the nineteenth. The academic study of literature, and consequently what could be determined a "classic" by the literary elite, was ruled by classics--that is, Greek and Latin. You can read in the litany of criticisms Tolkien catalogues above that the praises due to the poem relate to historical facts it might preserve, its use of meter and language, the value of studying its transmission for understanding history.
It crossed no one's mind that the poem could be art as a poem: in comparison to the heavyweights of ancient literature, 19th and early 20th century scholars saw absolutely no way that Beowulf could possibly measure up on literary merits.
Readers criticized the simplicity of the plot. Sure, Beowulf slays some monsters; so do Theseus and Herakles, but Theseus and Herakles are wrapped up in wider plots of gods and war and myth. Sure, Beowulf hints at the existence of a larger world of either literature or history, as with the Freawaru and Ingeld episode; but it frustratingly sidelines those precious details in favor of a childish, basic main plot. What a waste of philological "genius as astonishing as it was rare" on a "wilderness of dragons."
To be fair to Tolkien's targets, they were predisposed to praise the poem's philological and perceived historical merits on one hand, and deprecate its literary achievements on the other. In the later 19th century, rising nationalism and racist xenophobia in England and America had stirred up a passion for Anglo-Saxon England in academia and wider culture--just at the time that women were punching their way into higher education in significant numbers for the first time.
This mattered because women's secondary schools were notoriously not nearly as good as men's schools at teaching Latin and Greek, especially classical rhetoric and philology. While there are absolutely some amazingly accomplished women classicists from this era, that was a rare specialty. Women at the uni level engaged much more with vernacular literatures, especially their own.
But with all things Anglo-Saxon such an important point of national and racial/racist pride, men wanted to associate themselves with its study as well! In the scientifically-pious climate of the late 19th century, academia settled on a division. The study of vernacular literature for its language, for philology, could be quantitative, scientific, and empirical. The academic critique of vernacular literature as belles lettres, for its literary, character, plot merits, could only be qualitative, soft, subjective--feminine. Only the Latin works from Anglo-Saxon England could be recognized for their literary worth. The deployment of scientific methods on vernacular literature, which is to say language, argued one American professor of English in 1884, gave "our profession dignity and weight."
In 1936, Tolkien would have none of that.
Tapped to give the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture before the British Academy, Tolkien picked as his subject that very much maligned "wilderness of dragons" in Beowulf. Except, he pointed out, there is no wilderness. There are only two dragons in Germanic literature, Beowulf's and Fafnir, and the Beowulf poet gives an offhand mention of the latter. He knew what he was doing, argues Tolkien: the monsters of Beowulf are not folkloric diversions but a key to unlock the poem's significance.
Tolkien placed the poem's ethos in a Christianized but distinctly Northern register. Beowulf's monsters are simultaneously a Christian symbolic "adversary of God" and a Northern mortal creature stalking the Earth. Beowulf himself is likewise a man; and this leads Tolkien to a key insight. The true tragedy underlying the story is just that--humanity. We die.
He argued for a structural division of Beowulf into two halves: one a traditional triumph of the hero; the other, the inexorable march towards mortality. The imbalance of the halves is not a flaw, and it resonates on a fundamental level with the poem's, yes, philological traits. The individual lines of the poem are likewise divided in two, but "they do not go according to a tune...They are more like masonry than music." One searches for rhythm or pattern in vain, but there is a phonetic and content balance between the different halves. This was a revolutionary a metric for analyzing poetry--the balance of imbalance.
Tolkien thus claims for Beowulf a territory of its own--it shouldn't be judged against classical heroic epics or high medieval romances. And as he said:
Beowulf is indeed the most successful Old English poem because in it the elements, language, metre, theme, structure, are all most nearly in harmony...It is a composition, not a tune.
As one can observe from bits and hints even in Tolkien's lecture, Old English scholarship was ready to receive Beowulf as a text worthy of full appreciation; the baby-steps are evident. But Tom Shippey and other leading Tolkien scholars agree that whatever small spark existed before turned into a bonfire after Tolkien's lecture. His arguments helped sketch out a course for generations of scholarship not just on Beowulf but on Old English literature more broadly.
And, I dare say, not many people today would find the poem, in all its glory as a poem, on an English syllabus to be a burden.
So your question really depends on how you want to define "long" and how you want to define "Old English literary work".
Let's first look at how we want to define "long". Beowulf is just over 3,180 lines long, taking up around 138 pages in the Nowell Codex portion of Cotton MS Vitellius a.XV. That is undeniably a long work, especially for a poem. To put things in perspective there are a total of a bit over 30,000 lines of surviving Old English alliterative verse meaning Beowulf accounts for 10% of that total. So yes, there aren't very many poetic works that even approach being that length. Really, the only one that comes close is Genesis A,B which is arguably two poems (hence the A,B designation). This conglomeration clocks in just shy of 3,000 lines. But that is not to say that there aren't any other poems that couldn't be considered long:
| Poem | Length (in lines) |
|---|---|
| Andreas | 1722 |
| Christ A,B,C | 1664 |
| Guthlac A,B | 1379 |
| Elene | 1322 |
| Daniel | 764 |
| Juliana | 732 |
| Christ and Satan | 730 |
| The Phoenix | 677 |
(Please note this is not meant as a comprehensive list. I possibly/likely missed a poem or two but I am just trying to demonstrate that there are other lengthy Old English poetic works)
There is also Exodus (my favorite Old English poem) which currently clocks in at 590 lines but we are missing 6 pages of text, so it was likely somewhere around 140 lines longer originally, putting it around the 730 line mark.
So compared to Beowulf, they all (besides Genesis) pale a bit in comparison. But even at just 590 lines, Exodus takes up 28 pages of the Junius 11 manuscript (and that's excluding the counts for the missing pages, so with those it would have been 34). That is still a pretty substantial length for a poem to my eyes, but others are free to disagree.
And that doesn't even get us into the prose works. The Old English translation of Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care clocks in at around 300 pages. The Old English Boethius is somewhere in the region of 180 pages. The Old English version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History is another long prose work, that I am sadly currently unable to find a page count for. A translation I found was over 200 pages though, for what that's worth. And there are dozens of various sermons and hagiographies that have a somewhat substantial amount of text. All of this number crunching is to say that Beowulf is not the only long work in Old English. If you include prose, it isn't even the longest work, not by a fair margin.
But now we have to get into the question of what counts as "Old English literature". Is it simply based on if the work is written in Old English? Does it have to be a purely original work, not based on anything from Latin or Greek? How much Christian influence is acceptable?
As you can see from the list up there, most of the surviving poems of substantial length are translations/adaptations of bible stories. It is similar with the prose works. Excluding the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, most of the surviving prose works are hagiographies or sermons written in Old English or translations of various Latin (usually religious) works. One of these is the translation of Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae, which is notable (in the original) for being very influential to Christianity without making any actual references to the Christian faith. But even that is not a straight translation and the Anglo-Saxons added in overt references to Christianity. But Beowulf isn't really any different. Even if it was originally composed before Christianity completely overtook England, it wasn't written down until well after. There is no removing the Christian influence because by the time Beowulf was written down the influence was sunk into the fabric of the poem.
And we can look at things in the other direction as well. Exodus is originally a biblical passage (heh). The Anglo-Saxons took that story and made it their own though. The obvious thing of course is that it is written in alliterative verse, as all Old English poetry is (that I'm aware of). While the Israelites are traveling through the desert and the Egyptians start to chase them, beasts of war show up (wolves and ravens). Moses is described as if he was a war chief leading his people to battle. As the Israelites enter the red sea, very vivid battle imagery is used (leading to some scholars arguing that the Anglo-Saxons believed that the Egyptians and Israelites fought between the waves of the Red sea). Even though this is an indelibly Christian story the Anglo-Saxons load it up with the imagery they know, that they are familiar with, turning it into something new and uniquely theirs. And that is how most of their translations/adaptations are, even the prose works. They add their own spin, their own imagery, their own descriptive powers to make the works more pertinent to themselves. That is why I think that anything (from that time period) written in Old English falls under "Old English literature".
So if there are (relatively) so many substantial "Old English literary works" surviving, why is Beowulf the popular one? Why is it the classic? Well u/sunagainstgold has a point about the racial/racist tones surrounding Anglo-Saxon scholarship at the time. Beowulf would have been seen as the purest long form Anglo-Saxon work. While there are poems approaching the same length and prose works that are longer, they are nearly all based off Latin or Greek exemplars. They are not actually Anglo-Saxon, no matter how the authors dressed them up with Germanic imagery. While I may consider anything written in Old English as being Anglo-Saxon literature, the original philologists would likely have not agreed.
Just as an addendum to the excellent answers from u/sunagainstgold and u/bloodswan, I’ll add that there’s a small amount of evidence to suggest that Beowulf was indeed something rare and special in its own time.
The manuscript we have dates from around 1000AD, but Beowulf is generally agreed for reasons linguistic, stylistic and historical to be much older. Generations of scholars have spilt oceans of ink on the date of the poem’s composition, and an unhappy few have even tried to date it to later than the manuscript in which it survives! But all things considered a date in the region of c.750 is (currently!) a pretty uncontroversial estimate for a non-Anglo-Saxonist like myself to adopt.
Consider what this means. 250 years after it was first put to parchment, Beowulf was still being copied anew. The poem itself is plausibly Mercian, but the scribes copying it are more southern; they have a Late West Saxon orthography. Note that I say scribes, not scribe. The manuscript was not some personal project, but the product of two trained monastic copyists working in tandem. Both scribes correct themselves, and the older scribe fastidiously corrects the younger. Beowulf is not in the most stunning manuscript of the period, but it receives a careful and professional technical treatment.
The manuscript is also very cunningly arranged. It doesn’t just contain Beowulf, but a homily on Saint Christopher, an illustrated guide to The Marvels of the East, a supposed Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and the parabiblical poem Judith. All of these texts concern things wonderous, things from afar, things monstrous even. Beowulf, a poem about three terrible monsters and a number of monstrous people, set in an ancestral land and a distant past, fits right into this cluster of texts. It has not been copied at random, nor preserved out of some antiquarian interest, but carefully selected to supplement a brand new themed textual compilation. Clearly the scribes, or somebody else involved in the project, knew exactly what they were doing. Was Beowulf chosen because it had the status of a famous or superlative text on the subject? Was it simply a work on the subject that was available at the point of copying? Impossible to say. At the very least the poem survived by more than pure chance.
There’s potentially a little more to delve into here. If the poem was indeed composed in or around the eighth century, then it harks back to something of a golden age of Anglo-Saxon textual production: to Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and his account of Cædmon’s Hymn; to Aldhelm and the height of Anglo-Latin learning; to the enigmatic Franks Casket and its macaronic use of runes; to the Liber monstrorum, which cites Beowulf’s father Hygelac among its monsters. Generations of Anglo-Saxon kings claimed to trace their lineage back through this period and further, through the period described in Beowulf to its fictional figures like Sycld Scefing, Hengest and Horsa, and Woden. Beowulf came with a great deal of cultural baggage, although we cannot know whether the people reading and copying it in 1000 had any cause beyond the text of the poem itself to attach Beowulf to that culture.
Last but not least should come some consideration of the poem itself, on literary-philological grounds. Beowulf contains a large number of hapax legomena (words, compounds and kennings that only appear once in the whole corpus), and this list grows longer if one allows the usage of words that are unique to it in the poetic corpus but not the prose corpus (like that infamous final word lofgeornost), or words that are used in Beowulf multiple times but nowhere else. One has to be careful with this sort of analysis because the Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus is relatively small and unevenly distributed in all sorts of data-skewing ways, but the Beowulf poet seems to stand out as something of a poetic innovator. They were a genius for putting together common simplex elements into compound terms to express and re-express all sorts of ideas. Andy Orchard, in his Critical Companion to Beowulf (pp. 70–72) totals up all the Beowulf compounds stemming from the five terms for war/battle (wig, hild, guð, beadu, heaðo-) and finds 103 distinct forms of which no fewer than 75 are unattested outside of the poem. Of the 24-odd Old English words for sword, the majority are in Beowulf. With the caveat that a potentially large amount of the related poetic tradition has been lost, the Beowulf poet stands out on their own terms as a skilful literary innovator.
We also have just the whisper of the suggestion that Beowulf may have contributed to an ongoing poetic tradition. Andreas is a poem about the tribulations of St. Andrew composed around the ninth century and surviving in the late tenth-century “Vercelli Manuscript”. It may owe some literary debts to the poet Cynewulf, although we had no evidence to suggest that it was his work. Significantly, it has substantial, concrete literary links with Beowulf. In her 2002 doctoral thesis Verbal Parallels in Andreas and its relationship to Beowulf and Cynewulf, Alison Powell identifies 89 instances in the Andreas’s 1722 lines of what appear to be more-or-less direct borrowings from Beowulf. This seems too many to be put down to formal diction or coincidence, and starts to suggest some concrete literary inheritance over a period of at least a century and perhaps rather more. There are other echoes of Beowulf elsewhere in the poetic corpus, of course, but the well-documented importance of conventional forms to Old English alliterative verse somewhat muddies this evidence. But Andreas is unequivocal; its poet was able to read Beowulf (or some sort of descendant text) long after its composition.
I wish I could offer firmer conclusions than that, but this early in the manuscript corpus evidence is inevitably rather thin on the ground. There is the whole connected question of Beowulf’s literary merit, but that’s something I’m reluctant to get into in this setting. What we can say for certain, however, is that in the centuries that followed the poem’s composition there were at least a few people in Anglo-Saxon England who could access the poem, appreciate its qualities, and repurpose it to new ends. For all that it dropped off the literary map until its modern scholarly recovery, I think we can see this scant pre-Conquest evidence as the foundations for Beowulf’s present status as English literary classic. After all, were it not for the interest and labour of two scribes in c.1000, there would have been no Beowulf text left for us to recover.
