The Geats of "Beowulf": A Study in the Geographical Mythology of the Middle Ages

A revision of the author's thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1963. For almost as many years as the poem "Beowulf" has been known, the identity of the hero and his tribe, the Geatas, has been problematical. This valiant and powerful people, who according to the poem play such an important role in northern history, are scarcely mentioned in other works. In view of the vagueness and the inconsistency of the few existing sources that bear on the problem, it is not difficult to see why conflicting proposals in regard to the nationality of the Geatas can be made. The thesis presented here is that a solution to this problem is available, not in the remote and largely unrecoverable Germanic past, but in the classical and Christian traditions so widely diffused and so highly respected in England after the conversion. Rather than being sought within a pagan and Germanic framework, the Geatas will be sought within a Christian and Latinate one, where it is a simple matter to set eyes upon copious materials concerning a people called the Getae. These Getae, or Getes, had only a make-believe existence based on misinterpretations of Latin works of literature, geography, and theology dating from the classical and early Christian periods. These sources were continually blended and amplified and confused by generations of medieval writers to produce a legend of a northern Getic people with a location, with a name, and with traits so remarkably like those of Beowulf and his tribe that they deserve to be seriously considered as identical to the Geatas.