Is Beowulf a story or a myth? Many of the characters, episodes, and material artifacts poetically mentioned in Beowulf are also presented to us from archaeological and various written sources, especially Scandinavian documents, thus adding credibility to the historicity of the story. poem. But it is obvious that Beowulf, Grendel and the Dragon clearly belong to the classification of “myths”. In his essay "The Digressions of Beowulf", David Wright says: Another effect of the so-called "historical elements" of Beowulf - the subsidiary stories of the Danes and the Geats - is to give the poem greater depth and likelihood. Hrothgar, the Danish king, is a "historical figure", and the site of his palace at Heorot has been identified with the village of Leire on the island of Zealand in Denmark. The great king Hygelac really existed, and his unfortunate expedition against the Franks, mentioned several times in the poem, is mentioned by Gregory of Tours in the Historia Francorum and given the approximate date of 521 AD (127). establish in our minds a solid historical basis for the poem? "I suggested in a previous article that the poet Beowulf's prompting to compose an epic about the 6th-century Scyldings may have had something to do with the fact that, by the 890s at least, Heremod, Scyld, Healfdene and the others had been taken away. being the common ancestors of both the Anglo-Saxon royal family and the 9th-century Danish immigrants, the Scaldingi” (Frank 60). Isn't universal acceptance as truth actually proof that the work's geneologies are factual? With the exception of the hero, this literary scholar seems to agree: "He [Beowulf] appears unknown outside the poem, while virtually all the other characters are found in the early legends" (Chickering 252). Consider the following royal funeral of the Danish king, and how unrealistic it seems: Scyld then departed at the appointed time, still very strong, in the care of the Lord... They laid aside the king they had loved so much, their great donor ring, in the center of the ship, the powerful one near the mast. There was great treasure there, shining gold and silver, precious stones from faraway lands (26-37). But we know from archaeological evidence that Beowulf's royal and aristocratic setting, with its lavish burials and gold-adorned armor, "can no longer be considered poetic." exaggeration or popular memories of a golden age before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in England (Cramp 114).