The Beasts of battle is a poetic trope

Trope (literature)

A literary trope is the usage of figurative language in literature, or a figure of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning...

 in Old English and Old Norse

Old Norse

Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....

 literature. It consists of the wolf, the raven

Raven

Raven is the common name given to several larger-bodied members of the genus Corvus—but in Europe and North America the Common Raven is normally implied...

, and the eagle

Eagle

Eagles are members of the bird family Accipitridae, and belong to several genera which are not necessarily closely related to each other. Most of the more than 60 species occur in Eurasia and Africa. Outside this area, just two species can be found in the United States and Canada, nine more in...

, traditional animals accompanying the warriors to feast on the bodies of the slain. It occurs in eight Old English poems and in the Old Norse Poetic Edda

Poetic Edda

The Poetic Edda is a collection of Old Norse poems primarily preserved in the Icelandic mediaeval manuscript Codex Regius. Along with Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda is the most important extant source on Norse mythology and Germanic heroic legends, and from the early 19th century...

.

History of the term

The term originates with Francis Peabody Magoun

Francis Peabody Magoun

Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. MC was one of the seminal figures in the study of medieval and English literature in the 20th century, a scholar of subjects as varied as football and ancient Germanic naming practices, and translator of numerous important texts...

, who first used it in 1955, although the combination of the three animals was first considered a theme by Maurice Bowra

Maurice Bowra

Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra was an English classical scholar and academic, known for his wit. He was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1970, and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1951 to 1954.-Birth and boyhood:...

, in 1952.

History, content

The beasts of battle presumably date from an earlier, Germanic tradition; the animals are well-known for eating carrion. A mythological connection may be presumed as well, though it is clear that at the time that the Old English manuscripts were produced, in a Christianized England, there was no connection between for instance the raven and Huginn and Muninn or the wolf and Geri and Freki

Geri and Freki

In Norse mythology, Geri and Freki are two wolves which are said to accompany the god Odin. They are attested in the Poetic Edda, a collection of epic poetry compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, in the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson, and in...

. This mythological and/or religious connection survived for much longer in Scandinavia. Their literary pedigree is unknown. John D. Niles points out that they possibly originate in the wolf and the raven as animals sacred to Wōden

Woden

Woden or Wodan is a major deity of Anglo-Saxon and Continental Germanic polytheism. Together with his Norse counterpart Odin, Woden represents a development of the Proto-Germanic god *Wōdanaz....

; their role as eaters of the fallen victims certainly, he says, accords with the fondness of Old English poets for litotes

Litotes

In rhetoric, litotes is a figure of speech in which understatement is employed for rhetorical effect when an idea is expressed by a denial of its opposite, principally via double negatives....

, or deliberate understatement, giving "ironic expression to the horror of warfare as seen from the side of the losers."

While the beasts have no connection to pagan mythology and theology in the Old English poems they inhabit, such a connection returns, oddly enough, in Christian hagiography

Hagiography

Hagiography is the study of saints.From the Greek and , it refers literally to writings on the subject of such holy people, and specifically to the biographies of saints and ecclesiastical leaders. The term hagiology, the study of hagiography, is also current in English, though less common...

: in Ælfric of Eynsham

Ælfric of Eynsham

Ælfric of Eynsham was an English abbot, as well as a consummate, prolific writer in Old English of hagiography, homilies, biblical commentaries, and other genres. He is also known variously as Ælfric the Grammarian , Ælfric of Cerne, and Ælfric the Homilist...

's Passio Saneti Edmundi Regis (11th c.) a wolf guards the head of Saint Edmund the Martyr

Edmund the Martyr

St Edmund the Martyr was a king of East Anglia, an Anglo-Saxon kingdom which today includes the English counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.D'Evelyn, Charlotte, and Mill, Anna J., , 1956. Reprinted 1967...

, and in John Lydgate

John Lydgate

John Lydgate of Bury was a monk and poet, born in Lidgate, Suffolk, England.Lydgate is at once a greater and a lesser poet than John Gower. He is a greater poet because of his greater range and force; he has a much more powerful machine at his command. The sheer bulk of Lydgate's poetic output is...

's The Life of Saint Alban and Saint Amphibal (15th c.), "the wolf and also the eagle, upon the explicit command of Christ, protect the bodies of the martyrs from all the other carrion beasts."

Occurrences in Old English poetry

• Battle of Brunanburh
  Battle of Brunanburh (poem)
  The Battle of Brunanburh is an Old English poem. It is preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a historical record of events in Anglo-Saxon England which was kept from the late ninth to the mid-twelfth century. The poem records the Battle of Brunanburh, a battle fought in 937 between an English...
  
  (61-65)
• The Battle of Maldon
  The Battle of Maldon
  The Battle of Maldon is the name given to an Old English poem of uncertain date celebrating the real Battle of Maldon of 991, at which the Anglo-Saxons failed to prevent a Viking invasion...
  
  (96-97; 106-107)
• Beowulf
  Beowulf
  Beowulf , but modern scholars agree in naming it after the hero whose life is its subject." of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature.It survives in a single...
  
  (3024-27)
• Elene
  Elene (poem)
  Elene is an Old English poem, sometimes known as "Saint Helena Finds the True Cross." It is translated into Old English from a Latin text and is the longest of Cynewulf's four signed poems...
  
  (52-53; 110-113)
• Exodus
  Exodus (poem)
  Exodus is the title given to an Old English alliterative poem in the Junius manuscript . Exodus is not a paraphrase of the biblical book, but rather a re-telling of the story of the Israelites' flight from Egyptian captivity and the Crossing of the Red Sea in the manner of a "heroic epic", much...
  
  (162-167)
• The Fight at Finnsburgh
  Finnesburg Fragment
  The Finnesburg Fragment or Finnsburh Fragment is a fragment of an Old English heroic poem about a fight in which Hnæf and his 60 retainers are besieged at "Finn's fort" and attempt to hold off their attackers...
  
  (5-7)
• Genesis A (1983-1985)
• Judith
  Judith (poem)
  The Old English poem "Judith" describes the beheading of Assyrian general Holofernes by Israelite Judith of Bethulia. Various other versions of the Holofernes-Judith tale exist. These include the Book of Judith, still present in the Roman Catholic Bible, and Abbot Ælfric's homily of the tale...
  
  (204-212; 292-296)
• The Wanderer
  The Wanderer (poem)
  The Wanderer is an Old English poem preserved only in an anthology known as the Exeter Book, a manuscript dating from the late 10th century. It counts 115 lines of alliterative verse...
  
  (80-83)