Navigating Beowulf

1
Navigating Beowulf

• Modern Readers

2
Difficulties for the Modern Reader

• Style is allusive
• Ideas seem remote and strange to modern
  perspectives
• Text corrupted during transcriptions

3
Understanding the Culture

• Not the English, but Germanic forbears
• Danes who lived on island of Zealand
• Geats who lived in southern Sweden
• Follows Anglo-Saxon invasion of 449 but before
  migration is complete
• Arrival of the ancestors of the audience being
  sung to

4
Understanding the Culture

• 1st-5th century, as a province, was called
  Britannia for its Celtic-speaking Britons
• Roman withdrawal to protect Rome against Germanic
  conquest (Vandals and others)
• Britannia left open to sea-faring Germanic
  invaders (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), area of
  Germanic settlement becomes Angle-land
• Britons forced to mountainous region of Wales
• Origin of Arthur fought valiantly against A-S
  invaders descendants of the invaders later adopt
  hero as their own

5
Understanding the Culture

• Britons became Christian in 4th century
• Christianity maintained in remoter regions where
  Anglo-Saxons failed to penetrate
• 9th century Christian Anglo-Saxons were subjected
  to new Germanic invasions by Danes (Vikings)
• Literature were oral stories until conversion
  literacy starts to increase

6
Cultural Influence on Literature

• Because literacy was mainly restricted to
  servants of the church, bulk of Old English
  literature deals with religious subjects and
  mostly drawn from Latin sources
• Secular literature remained primarily an oral
  medium

7
Understanding the Culture

• Poets materials must have been alive in the
  audience as the elliptical way it alludes to
  events not directly concerned with the plot and
  demanding the listener have a wide knowledge of
  traditional Germanic history

8
Understanding the Values

• Roman conversion was more conciliatory, not so
  much uprooting paganism in order to plant
  Christianity, but rather planting Christianity in
  the faith

9
Understanding the Values

• Christian influences are of the Old Testament,
  none from New Testament
• Although Christian is the correct term for the
  poet/audience it was a Christianity that had not
  yet by any means succeeded in obliterating older
  pagan tradition, which still called forth
  powerful responses from the hearts of men and
  women

10
Understanding the Values

• In the warrior society the values of which the
  poem constantly invokes, the most important of
  human relationships was that between the warrior
  and his lord
• Not subject to anothers will, but mutual trust
  and respect
• Good king described as protector of warriors and
  ring giver Bad king ascribed to ill temper and
  avarice
• Spiritually fulfillingcongenial and successfully
  united with one another
• Relationships between kinsmen
• Wergild man price vengeance not monetary, but
  right

11
Understanding the Values

• Evident need for vengeance would create
  never-ending feuds and marrying daughters did
  little to mitigate, but did replace hostility
  with alliance
• Beowulf, a Germanic hero, curiously is free of
  these feuds
• The potentialityinevitabilityof sudden attack,
  sudden change, and swift death is omnipresent in
  Beowulf
• Men seem to be caught in a vast web of reprisals
  and counter-reprisals with little hope of
  escapeDOOM

12
Understanding the Style

• Germanic heroic poetry, as represented in Old
  English poetry, shares many characteristics with
  the Hellenic heroic world described by Homer
• Nations are reckoned as groups of people related
  by kinship rather than geography
• Kinship is the basis for the heroic code
• Blood vengeance is sacred duty in poetry
  everlasting shame to those who do not observe it

13
Understanding the Style

• Christian poets were fascinated by the culture of
  their pagan ancestors
• Involved the heroic code as an ideal in fighting
  to the death against the pagan Vikings
• Despite Christian influence, poet remains true to
  older tradition, when, at the end, audiences are
  left with the impression that Beowulfs chief
  reward is pagan immortality

14
Understanding the Style

• The world of Old English poetry is predominantly
  harsh
• Hardly strays from the glory of God and his
  champions and the pain and sorrow of this world

15
Understanding the Style

• Poetic language is created out of special
  vocabulary (synecdoche and metonymy common
  figures of speech, also kennings)
• Because these are among the chief poetic effects,
  the verse is constructed to show off terms by
  creating a series of them in apposition

16
Understanding the Style

• The use of parallel and appositive expressions,
  known as variation, gives the verse, which is
  highly structured and musical, a peculiarly
  halting and repetitive quality in prose
  translations
• Overall effect of language is to formalize and
  elevate speech
• Instead of being straightforward, it moves slow
  and stately pace with steady indirection (ie.
  Irony) fighting called The cared not for battle

17
Understanding the Style

• All poetry of OE is the same verse form
  alliterative verse
• Verse unit is the single line because rhyme not
  used to link one line to another (except in late
  OE poetry)
• The organizing device is alliteration
• OE lines contain, on average, four principal
  stresses and is divided into two half lines of
  two stresses each by a strong medial caesura
• Oft Scyld Scefing sceapena preatum

18
Understanding the Style

• These two half-lines are linked to each other by
  the alliteration
• At least one of the two stressed words in the
  first half-line, and often both of them, begin
  with the same sound as the first stressed word of
  the second half-line (the second stressed word is
  generally nonalliterative)
• Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum
• sc has value of sh þ runic symbol with value of
  th