Material Monsters and Semantic Shifts

Abstract

This article argues that the semantic history of Old English words referring to monsters provides significant evidence for the early dating of Beowulf. Focusing on the nouns scucca and þyrs, it demonstrates that in the poem these terms retain their pre-conversion meanings, denoting material monsters of Germanic folklore rather than purely spiritual Christian devils. Since the poet consistently differentiates between the Christian narrator’s theological knowledge and the pagan characters’ limited understanding, these words cannot yet bear their later, exclusively diabolical sense. A survey of early Anglo-Saxon glossaries, especially the Épinal-Erfurt and Corpus glossaries, alongside ninth-century prose texts such as Wærferth’s translation of Gregory’s Dialogues, shows that both scucca and þyrs had acquired explicitly Christian meanings by the late eighth or ninth century. The poem’s semantic usage therefore provides plausible termini ad quem for its composition. Situating this linguistic evidence within the broader cultural transformation from material pagan monsters to spiritualized Christian devils, the article concludes that Beowulf most plausibly belongs to an eighth-century milieu in which this semantic and conceptual shift was not yet complete.