Mind your language
Although a badger does not hibernate in the true sense of the word, it lies low for long periods in winter, just as my husband does, stirring only (in his case) to fetch the whisky bottle. He is, I have long suspected, a sort of shape-shifter, but turning neither into anything alarming like a werewolf or into anything too energetic, such as a hare.
There are strong hints in the poem that Beowulf is a shape-shifter or skinchanger too. They've made a film of Beowulf, which is strange, because hardly anyone finds the poem of any interest whatsoever. And one gets the feeling that whatever good things there are hidden in the poem do not make it to the screen.
For all its computer effects, the film does not bring out the shape-shifting aspect. Beowulf is meant to be a courteous but fierce warrior. His name is literally 'bee-wolf , or 'bees' enemy'. This is merely a kenning, or poetic name, for 'bear', since bears seek out honey, destroying bees' nests as they go.
As the joint authors of The Ring of Words (Oxford, 2006) point out, J.R.R. Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings, has Treebeard listing creatures that include 'bear bee-hunter, boar the fighter'. Tolkien makes one of his characters a bearish shape-shifter and a fighter too, in the person of Beorn, encountered in The Hobbit. His name also simply means 'bear', and by night he takes the form of a bear, fighting like a berserker at need.
A berserker, someone who goes berserk, is just a 'bear-shirt', for our Anglo-Saxon ancestors had the general notion that we act within a body as if it were a shirt or cloak. Beowulf's name suggests that he takes after his totem animal in a fight.
The wolf itself was known by the kenning of greaghama, a `grey-hame' or 'grey-skin'. It is instructive to note that perfectly respectable AngloSaxons were named after the wolf. An Archbishop of York, who died in 1023, was called Wulfstan, or in Latin simply Lupus, 'wolf', the author of a sermon that made life miserable for generations of undergraduates 900 years or so later. In fact about 22 of his sermons survive and they are of some interest if you are interested in that sort of thing.
Slightly later comes a saint called Wulfstan, whose brother was Aelfstan, 'elf-stone', also an ecclesiastic. These pagan names were Christianised by the very men who bore them. Only by an accident of history do we lack a St Beowulf.
Dot Wordsworth
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