On Beowulf
HUM 2051: Civilization I
Fall 2014
Dr. Perdigao
November 5-7, 2014
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)
• Germanic and Scandinavian peoples who “overran the Roman empire”
(Lawall 1174)
• 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?
Narrative Frames
• “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).
Defining Characteristics
• Loyalty
• Kinship
• Fame and glory
• Vengeance
• Bond holding society together is loyalty between lord and his warriors, or
thanes (Lawall 1174)
• Lord as “ring-giver,” with offerings, loyalty and good counsel in return by
the thane (1174)
• Loyalty as giving meaning to the world
Cultural Values
• Art representing the historical and social contexts of the works; bards
(scops) representing literature and history
• 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
• Threat to that culture—presence of outlaw, outsider, limit of worldly
pursuits, treasures
• Poem concerned with feuding, inability to make peace with the past,
inability to move into the future (Lawall 1178)
• “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)
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”
• “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).
Interlace Structure
End of an Era?
• Facing death, Beowulf “understand[ing] at some level the futility of the
entire world of Germanic heroism that he himself so fully represents”
(Lawall 1177).
• “Trolls and dragons can be killed, but how does one eradicate the violence
that serves to constitute society itself? The monsters are, finally, instances
of social sickness that infects the culture as a whole: they may be killed, but
the violence they represent will continue unabated. Perhaps Beowulf’s
greatest act of heroism is found not in the physical courage he displays in
his battles against human and superhuman foes but in his spiritual capacity
to persevere despite knowing that his efforts are futile” (1177).
Modernizing the Text
• “The role of woman in Beowulf primarily depends on ‘peace-making,’
either biologically through her marital ties with foreign kings as peacepledge or mother of sons, or socially and psychologically as a cup-passing
and peace-weaving queen within a hall” (Chance 156).
• “And even the mere itself, approached through winding passageways,
slopes, and paths, and in whose stirred-up and bloody waters sea monsters
lurk and the strange battle-hall remains hidden, almost projects the
mystery and danger of female sexuality run rampant” (Chance 162).
Monstrous Women?
Pagan and Christian
• “[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).
• 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)
Text and Contexts
• “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” (Lawall 1177).
• 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).