On Beowulf

HUM 2051: Civilization IFall 2009

Dr. PerdigaoNovember 2-4, 2009

Contextualizing the Text• Late Anglo-Saxon period, around 1000 CE, when scribes

copied the poem onto the manuscript (that survived) , believed to be composed around 850 CE, detailing events around 520 CE (with death of Hygelac, Beowulf’s lord)

• Question of “indeterminable date” for the study of its contexts, attitudes

• Time and place of the poem: late fifth and early sixth centuries in Northern Europe; Germanic tribes of South Danes (Denmark), Geats (southern Sweden)

• English poet constructing a heroic poem about ancestors (like Homer)

• Questions as to whether or not the Beowulf poet was influenced by Celtic literature, if he knew and used Virgil . . . Is this oral improvisation or written composition?

• How is the Beowulf poet constructing (or reconstructing) the hero? What does his society value?

Cultural Values• Notion of how art represents the historical and social contexts of

the works

• Art as “the product of a particular cultural milieu, sometimes embodying a society’s most deeply held convictions, sometimes questioning these values, sometimes disguising an artist’s own ambivalence with regard to these matters, but never disengaged from the claims of time or social order” (qtd. in Olsen 151).

• Cultural attitudes/ideologies within the poem, as countering our modern world: ritualistic revenge, public esteem of giving gifts, emphases on artifacts, idea of fate

• Place of religion within the world?

• “[scholars] devoted themselves to a consideration of the world-view behind the poem, asking to what extent (if at all) the newly established Christian religion, which was fundamental to the poet’s intellectual formation, displaced him from his imaginative at-homeness in the world of his poem—a pagan Germanic society governed by a heroic code of honor, one where the attainment of a name for warrior-prowess among the living overwhelms any concern over the soul’s destiny in the afterlife” (Heaney xxiv).

Text and Contexts• Is Beowulf a “secular English poem written for an audience

knowledgeable about Christianity but not concerned exclusively with religion” (Solo 114)?

• “The characters in the story are obviously pagan, but the poet narrating the story is manifestly Christian” (Solo 115).

• “It has often been observed that all the scriptural references to Beowulf are to the Old Testament. The poet is more in sympathy with the tragic, waiting, unredeemed phase of things than with any transcendental promise.” (Heaney xxxi)

• “It was put into its final form by a Christian, but one who is both careful to preserve the distinction between his Christian present and the pagan past and unusually tolerant of the culture of his forebears.” The characters commit the error of pagan sacrifices because they “do not yet know of the true, Christian God whom the poet himself worships, just as they cannot know that the monsters are of the race of Cain. They do indeed live in a world ruled over by the Christian God: as the poet says, ‘Past and preset, God’s will prevails’ (1057). But while the audience knows this truth, their pagan forebears cannot” (Lawall 1177). “Indeed in its respect for the past the poem participates in its own central theme. . . How can one celebrate one’s own cultural past while admitting that it must be left behind?” (Lawall 1177-78)

History + Literature=???• “The illusion of historical truth and perspective, that has made

Beowulf seem such an attractive quarry, is largely a product of art. The author has used an instinctive historical sense—a part indeed of the ancient English temper (and not unconnected with its reputed melancholy), of which Beowulf is a supreme expression; but he has used it with a poetical and not an historical object. The lovers of poetry can safely study the art, but the seekers after history must beware lest the glamour of Poesis overcome them” (Tolkien 105).

Narrative Frames• According to Tolkien, what it is not: “primitive, pagan, Teutonic, an

allegory (political or mythical), or most often, an epic” (Tolkien 105).

• “Beowulf is a half-baked native epic the development of which was killed by Latin learning; it was inspired by emulation of Virgil, and is a product of the education that came in with Christianity; it is feeble and incompetent as narrative; the rules of narrative are cleverly observed in the manner of the learned epic; . . . it is a wild folk-tale (general chorus); it is a poem of an aristocratic and courtly tradition (same voices); . . . it is a sociological, anthropological, archaeological document” (Tolkien 106).

• “In Beowulf we have, then, an historical poem about the pagan past, or an attempt at one—literal historical fidelity founded on modern research was, of course, not attempted. It is a poem by a learned man writing of old times, who looking back on the heroism and sorrow feels in them something permanent and something symbolical . . .” (Tolkien 123).

Self and the World • Beowulf as heroic poem, “focusing on a male hero as he

matures from youth to age and promoting masculine values” (Olsen 150).

• Tripartite structure of the poem: three “agons.” What are they?

• “three struggles in which the preternatural force-for-evil of the hero’s enemies comes springing at him in demonic shapes; three encounters with what the critical literature call ‘the monsters’—in three archetypal sites of fear: the barricaded night-house, the infested underwater current and the reptile haunted rocks of a wilderness” (Heaney xxv).

• “Thus the monsters can be understood, at least in part, as embodiments of the feuding principle that is inevitably destroying Germanic society. Yet in killing them Beowulf is involved in a paradox: violence can be controlled only by violence, a circle from which no one in the poem is able to escape” (Lawall 1176).