13. The Geats and the Swedes.

The poem itself is set in the southern Scandinavia of the fifth and sixth centuries, and contains no reference to the British Isles or to New Testament Christianity. The events narrated in the poem don not describe primitive English life, but primitive Scandinavian life. However, as a finished literary work it is almost universally held to be the product of a relatively sophisticated and Christian Anglian court - though one that had evidently not yet repudiated its ancestral links with the Germanic Peoples across the North Sea.
As it is, Beowulf is taken from the communal word-hoard of Continental chronicle and legend dealing with the northern Germanic peoples, and it is obvious that, among the Anglian settlers, the story of the poem, and the tales involved with it, must have circulated and developed orally for a long time before they were sorted out and set into their present arrangement and could receive their present focus and ultimate literary form. Names and incidents in the poem tell of the ruling House of the Danes and the disastrous expedition against the Franks of 516, in which Beowulf's uncle, Hygelac, was slain.
Beowulf is the Old English song of a hero who lived in Sweden. The last third of the poem is not only a lament for the death of the hero but also a prophetic elegy for the end of Beowulf's people as a separate nation. The English singer seems to have known that the Geats, whose name is preserved in the name of two great provinces of southern Sweden, Västergötland and Östergötland, were defeated, probably during the latter part of the sixth century, by their traditional enemies, the Swedes from the district around Lake Mälar.

The beginnings of the the defeat of the Geats are told of in the following lines from which we learn that Beowulf's people certainly lived, as a powerful and independent tribe - at least during the reign of King Hygelac and before - in southern Sweden.

"Nor can we expect peace from the Swedes"

"Nor can we expect peace from the Swedes.
Everyone knows how their old king,
Ongentho, killed Hathcyn, caught him
Near a wood when our young lord went
To war too soon, dared (1) too much.
The wise old Swede, always terrible
In war, allowed the Geats to land
And begin to loot, (2) then broke them with a lightning (3).
Attack, taking back treasure and his kidnapped (4)
Queen, and taking our king's life.
[...]
To the sound of Higlac's horns and trumpets,
Light and that battle cry coming together
And turning sadhearted (5) Geats into soldiers.
Higlac had followed his people, and found them.
"Them blood was everywhere, two bands (6) of Geats
Falling on the Swedes, men fighting
On all sides, butchering (7) each other.
[...]
"These are the quarrels, the hatreds, (8) the feuds, (9)
That will bring us battles, force us into war 20
With the Swedes, as soon as they've learned how our lord
Is dead, know that the Geats are leaderless, (10)
Have lost the best of kings, Beowulf--
He who held our enemies away,
Kept land and treasure intact, who saved 25
Hrothgar and the Danes--he who lived
All his long life bravely." (11)[...]

(Beowulf, lines 2922-2931, 2941-2948, 2999-3007, N.A.L., Translated by Burton Raffel).

Notes:

1. dared: was bold enough (to), ventured, challenged.
2. to loot: to steal, to plunder.
3. lightning: a flash of light in the sky, caused by electricity beings discharged from thunderclouds.
4. kidnapped: stolen for ransom.
5. sadhearted: with sorrowful heart, with the heart full of sorrow.
6. bands: groups.
7. butchering: murdering, killing.
8. hatred: hate.
9. feud: enmity, hostility, fight.
10. leaderless: without their leader.
11. bravely: heroically, courageously.