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Dr. Gary Gutchess |
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Course Lessons 2. Beowulf 1 3. Beowulf 2 4. Middle Ages 5. Romance 6. Sir Gawain 7. Malory 9. Wife of Bath 11. Biblical Drama 12. Play of Mankind 14. Thomas More 15. Philip Sidney 16. Print Culture 17. Walter Raleigh 18. Twelfth Night 1 19. Twelfth Night 2 20. Civil War 22. Aphra Behn 23. Reading Papers 24. Gulliver 25. Rape of the Lock 27. New God 28. Revolution
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*** 3. Beowulf, Part 2 *** |
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READINGS FOR THIS LESSON "Pagan and Christian," 1A 7-8. Beowulf, "The Dragon," 1A 74-92 (lines 1935-end). "The Wanderer," "Wulf and Edwacer and The Wife's Lament," and "Riddles," 1A 153-162 Beowulf also can be found online. Versions include Beowulf, tr. Francis B. Gummere at Bartleby, and 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. |
Other Musings |
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Beowulf is episodic and digressive. Readers have noted the relevance of apparent digressions to the main thread of the narrative, by way of comparison and contrast or foreshadowing and echo. For example, the scop's song of Finn and Hildeburh (lines 931-1018) disrupts Beowulf's story but serves as a thematic transition from the Grendel episode to the episode of Grendel's mother. The two episodes broadly show that two things are rotten in Beowulf's Denmark: males are unable to contain their rivalries, and females are unable to keep the peace. Hildeburh is the female counterpart to Cain and Unferth in her responsibility for the death of her brother Hnaef. The sometimes puzzling interwoven strands of narrative in Beowulf are often compared to the busy, interlace designs common in Anglo-Saxon manuscript illumination, metal work, and stone carving. Illustrations of this style include the gold belt buckle from the Sutton Hoo ship burial (image below) and the so-called carpet pages from the Lindisfarne Gospels.
The Ardagh chalice (color plate 3 in your book) and the Book of Kells are other examples of the “Insular” or “Hiberno-Saxon” interlace style of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon arts. Interlacing continued to be used in Renaissance fiction (e.g.. Malory's Morte Darthur and Spenser's Faerie Queene; cf. the Shakespearean multiple plot), and it is still in use today. As James Joyce writes of Ulysses and the Book of Kells, “you can compare much of my work to the intricate illuminations.” HOMERIC QUALITIES. Beowulf shares thematic and structural attributes with the Homeric songs and their progeny, composed about 1500 years earlier, such as:
What is effective about these attributes? What might account for their longevity of use? RELIGION? One challenge for modern readers in Beowulf arises from references to both Christianity and Germanic polytheism. How Christian is the poem? Interpretation has ranged from the contention that the Christian “coloring” contaminates the pagan Germanic purity of the epic to the opposite argument that the poem is a full-fledged Christian allegory, with the hero either a figure of Christ or a deeply flawed materialist, unaware of the transience of earthly wealth and glory. The majority view today seems to be that Beowulf is thoroughly Christian, but not allegorical, with the poet looking back several centuries at pre-Christian ancestors who are admired for their nobility while also lamented for their false beliefs.
TECHNOLOGY: Prior to mechanical printing and mass production of copies, stories freely changed from one reteller to the next, transforming history into fantasy. Part of the intrigue in the study of ancient and medieval literature is piecing together how a legend may have originated and become the text which is left for us to read. Imaginative fascination with literary works can grow in proportion to the darkness of the age in which they were produced.
AND LISTEN ON CD:
Maybe it can be assumed that the original Beowulf-poet's
audience was illiterate, that the poem was published to more people by
performance than by manuscript copy. The poem's language is oral in this
sense: its formulaic features help the words to be memorable. For
instance, the structural use of
alliteration,
which Alan Sullivan and Tim Murphy’s translation attempts to capture,
would have been a mnemonic aid for the singer and the hearers. Students
can hear Tim Murphy read the poem’s concluding dirge, both in
Anglo-Saxon and in their translation, on the
audio CD
that is packaged with the Longman Anthology. It's sound is surprisingly powerful.
Imagine hearing it around the fire on a dark and stormy night. |
Anglo-Saxon and Celtic designs are often very similar. The style is referred to as Hiberno-Saxon.
Left: a barrow grave in England, the Anglo-Saxon version of a pyramid. Is there a dragon inside? If you go in there, don't steal anything!
Left: Lindow Man, a bog body from northern England who was brutally murdered sometime in the first century BCE. Is he a ritual sacrifice victim of a nasty heathen religion, or is he an executed criminal or traitor? What stories can be told about him? |
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OTHER RESOURCES & AMUSEMENTS
Beowulf
text available online:
Beowulf EBook Other versions online include Beowulf, tr. Francis B. Gummere at Bartleby and Beowulf, adapted and modernized by David Breeden. 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 [Đa Engliscan Gesiţas] A splendid performance recording in Old English (with subtitles) and Anglo-Saxon harp is available on CD from www.bagbybeowulf.com
Beowulf the Cartoon (2007) The new Robert Zemeckis film animation (screenplay by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary) unifies the three episodes of Grendel, Grendel's Mother, and the Dragon in a most unheroic way. Hrothgar mates with Grendel's Mother producing Grendel; then Beowulf mates with Grendel's Mother producing the dragon. Lust for glory destroys both of these kings and their people. For the screenplay and the story of its development see Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, Beowulf: The Scriptbook. Harper Entertainment: New York 2007. Zemeckis regards the Beowulf poem as a boring lie produced by Christian monks who sought to suppress the real Beowulf story. The lead actor is quoted as stating that he "had the beauty of not reading the book." The film contains Viking, Norman, Arthurian, and other anachronisms, including echoes of Lord of the Rings. "We men are the monsters now," Beowulf remarks.
Other Resources Heroic literature and hero cults on this web site. Paul Butler's The Anglo Saxon Lyre at Rutgers reconstructs the instrument and provides links. The burial of Saxon King cir. 625 CE in southeast Suffolk was excavated in the 1930's providing new clues about the Saxons. See Sutton Hoo Society web site, National Trust Sutton Hoo site, and Sam Newton's Sutton Hoo: Burial Site of the Wuffings. Bog Bodies of the Iron Age from PBS Nova.
Very cool indeed--the northern myth and
legend web site:
http://www.northvegr.org/main.php Editions of great Anglo-Saxon poems: The wanderer, The Sea-farer
Specimen pages from the Lindisfarne Gospels
are provided by the British Library's
Online
Gallery. |
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.
She was the first to speak Old English with an faux east European accent while wearing only high heels! |
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ASSIGNMENTS FOR THIS LESSON The lesson includes both a quiz and a journal writing assignment to be submitted on the interactive course site at SUNY Learning Network. See General instructions on Journaling for this course. For a sample journal, see Dr. G's 2007 Brit Lit 1 Journal.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. Journal Write for most of an hour (or more if you have time). Summarize or outline the readings from Lesson 2 and 3-- or some part of the readings that interests you. If you have time after summarizing or outlining, respond to a question that your summary raises. If the summary has not raised questions, respond instead to one of the questions listed below.
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You
may have heard of The Hobbit
and The Lord of the Rings?
Their author,
THE
DRAGON
The
interaction of the old pre-Christian world with the new Christian one is
especially interesting in "the dragon" which guards buried treasures in
an ancient 
A
theory of Christian revision in Beowulf can be extended to the Grendel and Mother-of-Grendel
episodes. These monsters may be Christian characterizations of pagan
deities that inhabited lakes and required human sacrifices of the sort
that produced 
