> ...horror leaves readers or viewers with...a sense that, even though the story is over, we still have something to be afraid of.
Unlike in the horror genre, Beowulf depicts danger coming from a well defined source, and conclusively eliminated by the hero's actions.
Horror evokes existential dread, a [quasi-]supernatural threat against an unwilling [relatively] impotent protagonist, often with an ambiguous ending. The monsters may be terrifying to the Danes in general, but they are not the protagonists.
Action evokes willing combat, antagonist(s) viewed as challenger or threat to vanquish by a duty/honor-bound protagonist. Beowulf travels far to engage the heard-of horror, as challenge for pride and later protecting his people.
Beowulf sees the first monster as a voluntary challenge, the second an obligatory follow-up, and the third a duty. Any subsequent vague threats are just the way of humanity; this is not "and they lived happily ever after."
The third section (the dragon) reads so differently to me that I can't imagine it was assembled around the same time, by the same person. Maybe one of those two things, but not both. And I don't get any horror out of it whatsoever, personally. A kind of apocalyptic-melancholy, maybe, but not horror.
But really, read the first couple of pages and tell me that it's horror. It's a hero story, and it's not horror -- he's just up against a good villain. It's more of a western -- drifter pulls into town on his horse, gets deputized to take down the out of town rancher demonizing the good people of the town.
But overall, yes, it's not really horror because of the figure of Beowulf, who's basically Superman, and has the exact same effect on the story that introducing Superman to many horror stories would.
Pretty heavy horror motifs, imagery, et c., but structurally and viewed as a whole, not really horror. I agree that it's not best-characterized as horror, but absolutely see why someone would make the connection, and even think it might be useful to do so. Taking it as a horror-flavored hero tale isn't too far off, I'd say. "Superman wanders into a remote town terrorized by actual demons, and, predictably, easily wrecks their shit and saves (almost) everyone", maybe. The settings and premise are pretty solidly horror and are presented as such, but the story, not so much.
Though, again, I get little or none of that from the third act, which is totally disconnected narratively from the first two anyway, aside from also starring Beowulf. It seems far more straightforward to me, and reads a lot like, say, a biblical hero-tale—there's a monster terrorizing the countryside and murdering away much like Grendel, but we don't get the horrifying descriptions of wanton murder, but instead Beowulf's followers holding back and quaking in their boots while he saves the day. Though that one's hard to read with fresh eyes if you've read The Hobbit and/or LOTR, because it has so much influence on them, and I'm sure being familiar with them colors one's reading of that section, with the result that it's hard not to read it as proto-fantasy. The very voice of it even reads more modern and like something from that genre, in sharp contrast to the prior two sections.
> The very voice of it even reads more modern and like something from that genre, in sharp contrast to the prior two sections.
I've read criticism that the whole thing is closer to the modern novel than virtually anything else for centuries. And it really rang true on my most recent reading of it, unfortunately many years ago. I'm going to need to revisit.
Demonstrated well by The 13th Warrior (which excludes the third section.)
>>The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether due to its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate.
That's NOT what you wrote....
> in limited use
Which is supported by the article you cited. My only point was that its presence wasn't necessarily reason to decide the author doesn't know what they're talking about.
I also think the "poetic" sense of it, in context, is wholly enough to defend its usage here against such out-of-hand dismissal of the author over it. Since I did provide two reasons someone who's not unqualified to write on this topic might choose to use it.
In general I find that fans of fields tend to be more pedantic about this kind of thing than practitioners, sometimes to the point of being wrong from the perspective of those in the field (see: "the US isn't a democracy, it's a republic!")