What? This is entirely untrue, and I feel bad that you had a teacher or reading experience that did not focus on how much inner life, motivation, and emotion are in this poem. I have had the exact opposite experience: people think of Beowulf as a monster-fighting action poem and are disappointed or surprised when they read it and discover most of the content is songs, conversation, historical reminiscences, and not-fighting.

Take as just one brief example these passages from XXXIV lines 52-7 and XXXV lines 5-7 [0]:

So to hoar-headed hero ’tis heavily crushing

To live to see his son as he rideth

Young on the gallows: then measures he chanteth,

A song of sorrow, when his son is hanging

For the raven’s delight, and aged and hoary

He is unable to offer any assistance.

Every morning his offspring’s departure

Is constant recalled

...

So the helm of the Weders

Hrethel grieves for Herebald.

Mindful of Herebald heart-sorrow carried,

Stirred with emotion, nowise was able

To wreak his ruin on the ruthless destroyer

This is a description of an experience almost (but not totally) unknown in modern American/western culture. To dmreedy's point, this captures the duality that on the one hand, these were humans just like us, and fathers who have lost sons violently in war or crime who are weighed down with the burden of that grief and the inability to do anything, to take any vengeance, can probably identify with this ancient father. These words can be a foil that gives voice to their own hearts. On the other hand, we can consider how different Anglo-Saxon society was by looking at the culture of vengeance and reciprocal warfare that resulted in this son's death. Very few of us even experience war, much less can imagine a life in which we expect every spring/summer to be attacked by, or to go out and attack, some neighboring city.

What forces shaped society to develop those systems? How can we prevent returning to that? What was good about life then - what did the people enjoy, and what was evil? These are all questions that are worth asking and trying to answer. But we only get to explore those questions if we approach these texts, as the article's author states, as texts with presence in time and place, creations of real people from a certain time, encoding their particular moment with all its similarities and differences to ours.

Lastly, it does sound better in Old English [1].

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16328/16328-h/16328-h.htm#XX...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROghKY1jmuE

(edit for formatting)