2. Beowulf 1

Read "The Middle Ages" and "The Germanic Invasions," and from Beowulf, "Grendel" and "Grendel's Mother" (lines 1-1934), That's Longman 3rd ed Vol. 1A, pages 3-7 and 27-74.

If the anthology is unavailable, Beowulf can be found online. Versions include Beowulf, tr. Francis B. Gummere at Bartleby, and --better-- an annotated Beowulf translated by Benjamin Slade at Beowulf on Steorarume. A Microsoft ebook version is available at the University of Virginia's Beowulf EBook. There are lots of paperback versions. A popular one currently is the 1999 Seamus Heaney translation for Faber & Faber.

"Just don't take any course where you have to read Beowulf" (Woody Allen, "Annie Hall").

NOTES AND COMMENTARY
Adapted and enlarged by Dr. G from David Damrosch, et al.,
Teaching British Literature (New York: Longman, 2003)
from the Sutton Hoo burial ship, a helmet thought to have belonged to an Anglo-Saxon king

DREAM HERO. Why waste time with literature? What use is it? Yes, it's entertaining, but so what?

Entertainment has physiological function. It helps to regulate our bodies by unwinding our autonomic nervous system (ANS), a peculiarly human neural network that both increases and decreases stress. The stress-increasing half of the ANS (the sympathetic nervous system) starts our emergency pumps in a fight or other dangerous situation, or whenever we need increased blood pressure for immediate muscle power. However, this basic animal machinery can be harmful to those who think. The pumps of the thoughtful tend to stick in the "on" position due to imagined dangers, even though there's no present emergency or immediate need for heightened blood flow. Excess stress leads to sleeplessness and irritability, and it can cause heart attack and a variety of dangerous conditions, including inability to digest food and other problems of the gastrointestinal tract, such as ulcers. We switch the stress "off" only by stimulating the stress-reducing half of the ANS (the parasympathetic nervous system). Our conscious minds can flip this switch. All we have to do is stop worrying.

Like sleeping pills, narcotics, yoga, bathing, massage, prayer and meditation, fictional literature and other fine arts are tools for shifting into the relaxed parasympathetic state, temporarily. It's no accident that fiction tends to flourish in high-stress settings, such as the seats of empires (imperial Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Castile, Versailles, London, etc.), often when the military or economic forecast looks threatening. It's well known that recession, depression and war are good for Hollywood movie ticket sales--and especially when the film makers produce light-hearted, upbeat or fantasy films.

This medicinal use of literature can be traced back to at least as far as the Greeks of old. In its earliest form we know, Greek literature was a popular custom of after-dinner story-telling that absorbed the mind in surreal myths, legends, ancestral tales and pseudo-histories. Through monotonous rhythms, and artful manipulation of tensions and emotions, this wonderful fiction helped distraught banqueters physiologically to digest dinner and to relax into pleasing drowsiness. So literature brought happiness, as the archaic Greek poet Hesiod wrote:

Happy is the one whom the Muses love. Sweet flows the speech from that mouth. For though we suffer sorrow and grief in freshly-troubled spirits, and though we live in dread because our hearts are distressed, yet when the servant of the Muses sings the glorious deeds of people of old with their blessed gods of Olympus, at once we forget all of our heaviness and sorrows. The gifts of the goddesses soon turn us away from these cares. Theogony 90-103

The scops' recitals of Beowulf's exploits in Saxon mead halls followed by as many as 1500 years after the fall of Troy was sung by the bard Demodocus in Homer's Odyssey. Yet the purposes of the singing are the same. Droning on and on, it distracts and eases the mind between one day of terror and the next, so that dinner is digested and cares are forgotten long enough to doze. Whatever Grendel and his mother may be, they are terrors of the night. Beowulf is the sleep-protector, the destroyer of the enemies of our rest. If he were really there in the bedroom with us, he presence would not be restful at all, but in story form he is only real enough so that he saves the night. So please don't argue that he is not realistic enough. The fictitiousness of the fantasy is what makes him our hero.

Left: Helmet now in the British Museum unearthed from the Scandinavian-style Sutton Hoo treasure ship unearthed in Suffolk, England, which is believed to be the burial vessel of a Saxon King, possibly King Raedwald of the East Angles, who ruled c 599-c 624 AD .

Image left: from an ancient Greek vase, Penelope dreams that her husband Odysseus is coming home. She's been grieving for ten years since the war ended and he failed to return. Their son Telemakhos doesn't know what to do about his mother's grief. Homer's story makes her dream appear to be real by bringing Odysseus home. The surrealism in Homer and later imitators provides the listener with a simulated dream state.

MALE FANTASY? Men and women may have different responses to Beowulf. Are women presented in this poem as heroic or as victimized? Are women shown as hopeful “peaceweavers” in an otherwise catastrophic male world? Or are women presented as mere property of that world, as one feminist writes: “the system of masculine alliance allows women to signify in a system of apparent exchange, but there is no place for them outside this chain of signification; they must be continually translated by and into the masculine economy” (Gillian Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (1990), xxiii). Is this feminist criticism correct? Is female experience slighted in the poem? Are the women present only to lament for the dead men and to fear for the safety of their children? Is Beowulf "men's literature"? Should it be banned from the canon or modern reading, as some propose?

Consider Wealtheow (548, 1019-1088, Hildeburh (l.931-1018), Grendel's mother (1088-1431), Freaware (1784-1822). Is one of the poem's moral points that women suffer tragically due to male feuding?

Beowulf's ship from the rather goofy feature film "Beowulf and Grendel" (2005).

SAXON HISTORY AND MYTH The Saxons and related tribes came to Britain in the migration period of Germanic peoples, at the darkest point of the dark ages. Reliable literary records of this period do not exist. As the newcomers are mentioned briefly by the British monk Gildas, writing in about 540 CE, they are pagan destroyers of Christian Britain, "a race hateful to both God and men." Archaeological evidence, however, has yet to show that destructive warfare took place at this time. It seems likely that any invaders in Gildas' day would have met little resistance due to the devastation of Britain by Justinian's plague and horrendous famine caused by the extreme events of 535-536. For political reasons, these true causes of the dark ages would later be masked by Christian missionary stories of Saxon barbarity and by Norman legends of King Arthur tragically failing to defend Britain from Saxon aggressors. Similar political myths reverberate in British world war fantasy of the twentieth century, most famously in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.

Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain was completed by about 600 CE. The area of occupation, like that of the Romans before, did not extend to the Scottish north, or to the Welsh and Cornish west, but elsewhere the Saxons and Angles established separate kingdoms (as shown left). Having morphed into a church, Rome struck back, beginning with the mission of Augustine of Canterbury from Pope Gregory the Great in 597, and the barbarian kingdoms in Britain had been Christianized by 800 CE. Under threat of extinction by Viking invaders, most of these kingdoms united briefly under Alfred the Great (849-899) and his daughter Aethelflaed and grandson Aethelstan, but at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the last Saxon king was defeated by Norman invaders under William the Conqueror.

The Norman Conquest is the terminal point for the Saxon language, which we call Old English. The new language at court was French, and as the influence of the church in Rome grew stronger Latin also assumed greater importance. The melding of French and Latin into English eventually produced the rich Middle English dialects that were to become the language of Chaucer and English poets of the high middle ages. Despite its often stunning quality, very little old English literature survived the transformation.

POLITICS: The Anglo-American world is indebted to its Saxon heritage for much more than the basics of English. Beowulf, like the ancient Greek Iliad, portrays social relations among men as democratic. As Homer's angry Achilles is no pawn of King Agamemnon, so Beowulf similarly is no slave of Hrothgar or Hygelac. In these poems the king does not hold much more than nominal power, for he is dependent on his fighting men. Indeed, Hrothgar's job seems to be, like Agamemnon's, to dish out generous rewards to the deserving warriors who have served the group well, even when they are not kin or fellow tribe members. Similarly, the role of Queen Wealthow is to make the hall hospitable to all.

In this English proto-democracy there is debate and, as the Unferth episode indicates, freedom of speech, so that policy and personal merit both are open to question. Ultimately, as the final episode of Beowulf's fight with the dragon shows, it is possible eventually for the warrior who plays the game correctly to be chosen as king. To be king, however, is not to be able to command followers to run through fire or face down dragons: the men can pick their fights.

In all of these respects, and in its raw delight in treasure, the society depicted in Beowulf is far more capitalist and less hierarchical than anything we will see in post-Saxon British literature until the eighteenth century. Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and other creators of the American way looked back to Saxon culture for inspiration in their revolt against Britain.

MANUSCRIPT: The historical Beowulf, as will be discussed in the next lesson, may have been Gildas' contemporary, and it seems likely that a narrative on his life originally was composed at the time of his death (cir. 575 CE). However, the Anglo-Saxon manuscript on which the poem is preserved for us probably dates from about 400 years later. Parchment having a limited life, the story probably underwent several copyings or revisions through these centuries. We can only speculate on how how closely the poem we know today resembled the original.

Beowulf is by far the longest piece that survives from Old English. Were there many other poems like Beowulf in its day? If so, is Beowulf best of breed, average, or in any way representative? Nobody knows. It is miraculous that this poem survives at all. It is preserved in a single British Library manuscript known as Cotton Vitellius A (named for manuscript collector Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, who lived from 1571-1631), a manuscript particularly hard to decipher because of burn marks from a fire at the library on October 23, 1731.

Cotton Vitellius A contains a compilation of tales that emphasize the exotic and the monstrous. It has been argued that Beowulf itself is a compilation of earlier literature woven together in novel-like fashion. The poem contains genealogical verse, a creation hymn, several elegies, a lament, a heroic lay, a praise poem, historical poems, a flyting (boast contest), gnomic verse, a sermon, and more. Maybe this compilation method of construction may explain why, to many modern readers, the poem does not feel unified, but to a medieval bard it may have seemed a virtuoso piece demanding a great range of performance skills. You see page, but the play's the thing.

Left: reconstructed Anglo-Saxon cottage at West Stow near Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, UK.

Is it appropriate to bring our present-day values to bear when reading the literature of a distant time and place? Can it be avoided?

OTHER RESOURCES & AMUSEMENTS

Beowulf Read Aloud - audio renderings:

Benjamin Slade reads Beowulf in Old English - selected passages, my own readings in the original language [@ Jagular.com-Beowulf]

Peter Baker reads Beowulf in Old English - selected passages in the original language [Uni. Virginia]

Stephen Pollington reads Beowulf in Old English (Scyld Scefing's funeral) - selected passage in the original language [Ða Engliscan Gesiþas]

Other links

Paul Butler's The Anglo Saxon Lyre at Rutgers reconstructs the instrument and provides links.

Beowulf on Steorarume site by Benjamin Slade. Includes explanatory notes to Beowulf and other resources.

Very cool indeed--the northern myth and legend web site: http://www.northvegr.org/main.php
Northvegr Foundation (has all kinds of literature of the northern peoples: Icelandic, Viking, German, etc.)

Students are not examined on these "other resources and amusements." However, if you know of an excellent website that would wonderfully complement this lesson, please send it to Dr. G. If he adopts it in his list, extra course credit will be awarded.

ASSIGNMENTS FOR THIS LESSON

The only assignment for Lesson 2 is to read carefully. The quiz and journal on Beowulf appear in the next lesson, Lesson 3.

For journaling a longer work like Beowulf, when a summary is not feasible, try outlining or mapping the general structure of the text. See Dr. G's sample outline of Beowulf.