In "Beowulf and the Grendel-kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England, " Helen Damico presents the first concentrated discussion of the initiatory two-thirds of "Beowulf's" 3, 182 lines in the context of the turbulent years that composed the first half of the eleventh century in Anglo-Danish England
Damico offers incisive arguments that major historical events and personages pertaining the the reigns of Cnut and his sons recorded in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, " the "Encomium Emmae Reginae, " and major continental and Scandinavian historical texts, hold striking parallels with events and personages found in at least eight narrative units, as recorded by Scribe A in BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, that make up the poem's quasi sixth-century narrative concerning the fall of the legendary Scyldings.
Given the poet's compositional skill-widely relational and eclectic at its core-and his affinity with the practicing skalds, these strings of parallelisms could scarcely have been coincidental. Rather, Damico argues that examined within the context of other eleventh-century texts that either bemoaned, darkly satirized, or obversely celebrated the rise of the Anglo-Danish realm, the Beowulfian units may bring forth a deeper understanding of the complexity of the poet's compositional process. Damico illustrates the poet's use of the tools of his trade-compression, substitution, skillful encoding of character-to reinterpret and transform grave sociopolitical "facts" of history, to produce what may be characterized as a type of historical allegory whereby two parallel narratives, one literal and another veiled, are simultaneously operative.
"Beowulf and the Grendel-kin" lays out the story of the poem, not as a monster narrative nor a folklorish nor solely a legendary tale, but rather as a poem of its time, a historical allegory coping with and reconfiguring sociopolitical events of the first half of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon England.