What are the values of Beowulf the Geat?

What are the values of Beowulf the Geat, in youth and age? To what extent does the poet interrogate these values by introducing other and problematic stories such as the Finn episode, and by Christian asides?


At the end of Beowulf, the hero of the poem dies. His death is tragic, but he has died protecting the values and beliefs he has held throughout the poem and has saved his own people from a terrible monster. Yet, despite all this, the poet manages to end the poem on a dark and melancholic note. How is this possible when Beowulf has done nothing but what he feels and knows is right throughout the poem?
It was the scholar J.R.R Tolkien who was responsible for elevating the Beowulf manuscript above simply being a valuable historical document. As he rightly points out:
"It (Beowulf) is poor in criticism, criticism that is directed to the understanding of the poem as a poem."
Indeed as Tolkien shows in his essay ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,’ the poem works on man...