Four dramatic funerals punctuate the tenth- or eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf; two involve the burning of the dead. While a Christian work to its core, the poem draws upon far older stories and at its very conclusion the poet provides a striking vision of an early medieval open-air cremation ceremony. Having died by the fire and poisonous bite of a dragon dwelling in a stone mound, the king of the Geats is cremated with treasures: helmets, swords, and coats of mail (Owen-Crocker 2000: 89). Before the raising of a burial mound upon a headland overlooking the sea, Beowulf ’s cremation is a focus of more than personal loss by mourners. Burning his body and then raising a mound containing the dragon-guarded treasure marks the end of the king’s protection for his people and foreshadows their own doom. As such, the cremation constitutes the scorching and fragmentation of body and things with fire. Cremation is a memorable spectacle created at a prominent location between land and sea, between earth and Heaven. The burning is also an emotional outpouring: grief and fire are intermingled (Owen-Crocker 2000: 91). Furthermore, as the culmination of the hero’s life and the poem, the burning is the lynchpin between the poetic past and the poet’s present and manifest in an ancient landscape populated with prominent earthen and stone monuments (Williams 2015a). The hero’s cremation in Beowulf is thus heroic, performative, emotive, and apocalyptic: linked to the changing of the world, times past, mourning, and the creation of memory. This description might seem diametrically opposed to the experience of cremation in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in the world today. Cremation as a widespread modern means of disposing of the dead is a process of technological transformation which is usually concealed from mourners. Moreover, the dual process of cremation means that burning the body is followed by the machine-grinding of the bones in a ‘cremulator’, reducing the ashes still further to grains of comparable size and shape (McKinley 1994a). In the poem, we find cremation as public, spectacular, and ritualized; today, it might be caricatured as secular and secretive. However, this contrast between early medieval poetry and modern practice is a false one.
The Rise and Fall of Anglo-Saxon Runic Stone Monuments: Runic Inscriptions and the Development of Sculpture in Early Medieval England