Hwæt!

Beowulf Challenge, Week One

An illustration from The Marvels of the East, another text from the Beowulf manuscript, BL Cotton MS Vitellius A XV. Source: British Library.

1. An Introduction to the Poem: the Manuscript and Poetic Form

The hall towered,
its gables wide and high and awaiting
a barbarous burning. That doom abided,
but in time it would come: the killer instinct
unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant.

—Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney, lines 81-85

. . . Speaking of barbarous burnings, on October 23rd, 1731, a fire broke out in Ashburnham House, where the legendary Cotton collection of manuscripts was held, next to the Westminster School in London. Librarians doused the manuscripts with water and flung them out of windows in order to save them. The fire completely consumed some of them, but among the survivors, though badly singed around the edges, was a curious book known as the Nowell Codex, which formed part of a volume labeled “Cotton MS Vitellius A XV.” (Robert Cotton, who had collected the manuscripts a century before, categorized his books with the busts of Roman emperors, which sat atop his shelves—hence, “Vitellius.”)

Included in this book was the only extant copy of the poem that we now call Beowulf, though no one in 1731 knew much about it, because scholars pretty much ignored it until later in the century. The poem was written out in two distinct hands some time around the year 1000 C.E., and it is clearly a copy of an earlier text, though no one knows how much earlier. Here is what the first page of the poem looks like in manuscript form:

Note the damage around the edges. When punctuated, lineated, edited, and presented in modern typeface, the opening lines look like this:

Hwæt! We Gardena      in geardagum,
þeodcyninga,      þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas     ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing     sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum,      meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas,      syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden,      he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum,      weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc þara      ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade      hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan.      þæt wæs god cyning!

—Lines 1-11

You may notice that in the manuscript, the poetic lines are not lineated, which is typical of Old English poetry. You may also notice that there is no title on the manuscript page, which is also the case with most Old English poems; Beowulf is an editorial title. The poetic form is quite different from what we are used to: rather than using meter and rhyme as organizing principles, our poet here uses stress and alliteration. The caesuras in the middle of each line indicate a division between the first two stresses and the last two stresses, which alliterate with each other in varying patterns. What does it sound like? Here is my approximation of the first three lines:

Or, in Heaney’s rendering:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

Hwæt has been translated any number of ways, but Heaney has captured something essential with his choice of “so”: it suggests the continuation of an ongoing conversation. “Oh, hello. Where were we? So . . .” And this is perfect because, as we discussed in last week’s post, it seems that with this poem we are getting just a fragment of a vast tapestry of narratives, most of which we do not know. It’s as if we had a piece of the Iliad but didn’t know much about the contextual mythology. The choice of “so” also invokes the oral traditions from which this poem apparently springs—though this is the source of much scholarly debate. Is this an oral or a literary tradition? Or is it something in between?

I think it’s probably something in between. To illustrate this liminal space between the oral and the literate, here is an illustration from the Vespasian Psalter, a manuscript from the late eighth century, that depicts King David singing the Psalms:

David is accompanying himself with a harp, and there are horn players and a couple of people apparently clapping along with the beat. But there are also two scribes behind him, who are writing down his song. Here we have a representation of a culture in a transitional stage between oral and literate transmission of poetry—the oral performance of a poem and the written transmission of the same poem are both present in the image.

This image resonates with the earliest description of an English poet, which we find in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in the year 731. Bede, a prolific monk and scholar from the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria, provides an account of a certain Caedmon, an illiterate brother at the abbey at Whitby, who is visited by God and taught to sing beautiful poetry. Caedmon remains an oral poet, but his literate brothers write down his poetry for him.

While this is a compelling story, Beowulf, because of its length and complex structure, while it draws upon oral traditions, seems to be an imitation of an oral form.

2. Origins

So, who wrote the thing, and when? This is a fraught topic. Our poet is anonymous but was likely clerical and male, simply because the source of most Old English writing is monastic. Various proposals for the dates of composition have stretched from the age of Bede in the early eighth century to the early eleventh century, which is roughly contemporary with the manuscript. There is no consensus on the matter.

Does the poem give us any internal evidence? Well, not really, except that you might have noticed that it takes place in an entirely Scandinavian world, though it was written in English. This may be evidence of a sort, and to my mind makes the earlier date range unlikely. During the age of Bede, the Danes were inveterate raiders of the English coast (Bede’s own monastery was sacked), and so it seems a stretch to imagine an English poet singing their praises. By the early tenth century, however, many Danes had been integrated into the English population, especially in the northeast, and so, as Roberta Frank has argued convincingly (to my mind, anyway), this gives us a likely approximate date, as the poem’s apparent nostalgia for pagan Scandinavians suggests a poet with Danish leanings. (You can find Frank’s essay on the subject, “The Beowulf Poet’s Sense of History,” in the back of the Norton Critical Edition.)

Another fraught topic is the relationship between Christian and pagan elements in the poem. Is this a pagan story that has been Christianized? Or was the poem conceived by a Christian poet attempting to make sense of his pagan ancestry? These questions are not answerable definitively; however, as we work our way through the poem, we might formulate some ideas. Some characters, especially Hrothgar and Beowulf himself, use a metaphysical vocabulary that sometimes strikes quite close to a Christian sensibility, though the characters themselves never make explicitly biblical references, which are reserved for the narrator. And the biblical references that appear are derived from the Old Testament only. There are no references to Christ. The poet, at least to some extent, seems concerned with avoiding obvious anachronism.

What does at least seem clear is that this is a poet who is looking back elegiacally to what he considers an ancient past, and so, like Homer’s Iliad, the poem powerfully creates a layered sense of antiquity for the modern reader—what Tolkien called “an echo of an echo.” And this profound effect, I think, may be responsible for much of the poem’s continued appeal.

3. Language

Sometimes in a survey course, I will speak a few lines of Old English and ask students what language they think it is. Guesses range from German to Hebrew to Gaelic. No, I tell them, this is what your language sounded like a thousand years ago. Most of them are in a state of confusion about the term “Old English.” They think that Shakespeare is Old English and are surprised when I tell them that Stratford’s favorite son wrote in Modern English. The term covers the language roughly through the eleventh century, though there was no particular morning when everyone woke up speaking Middle English. Like all linguistic change, it was gradual, but it was accelerated by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which made a form of French the language of government, law, and the aristocracy. English became essentially a peasant language, and it did not reemerge in any official capacities for a long time. Parliament was held mostly in French until the second half of the fourteenth century. So, when English did reemerge, it was both transformed and fragmented into numerous regional dialects. And, as a result, Old English manuscripts were not readable except by antiquarians and scholars.

This change is why we generally teach Chaucer (fourteenth century) to undergraduates in his original Middle English (though amply glossed), but we must teach Beowulf and other Old English texts in translation.

Old English differs from modern English syntactically as well: like Latin and German, it has an elaborate declination system, as opposed to Modern English, in which word order does much of the syntactical work. For example, in the passage above, the word after “we” in the first line is “Gardena,” which means “Spear-Danes.” But “we” are not the “Spear-Danes”; the declination in the passage indicates that we “have heard” of the “Spear-Danes,” but the verb (gefrunon) doesn’t come until the end of the second line. Heaney chooses to move that verb to a different clause entirely in order to render the passage in idiomatic Modern English.

To make matters even more complicated, the dialect of Old English in the poem is mostly late West Saxon, but there are elements of other dialects, especially Mercian, which has led some scholars to suggest that the original poem was Mercian and has been transcribed into West Saxon. (Mercian, incidentally, is the dialect that Tolkien uses for the language of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings—“The Mark” derives from Mercia—probably because he subscribed to this Mercian origin theory for Beowulf.)

4. Tone and Genre

The poem begins and ends with the funeral of a king, and there is one other prominent funeral described in the middle. Indeed, despite the crowd-pleasing monster fights, the poem spends much more time contemplating mortality and death, which led Tolkien to describe its tone as “heroic-elegiac,” which is as good a label as any. It has been called “epic,” but this is appropriate only if we use the term fairly loosely. Neither is it a saga (since it is in verse rather than prose) or a “lay” (since it is too long). I prefer to think that it is one of a kind, that it defies any easy categorization. (Duke Ellington said that the greatest compliment was to be called “beyond category.”)

It is a poem about the youth, old age, and death of a great man, a rise and a fall. It is a poem about what we fear in the night. It is a poem about monsters and about the monstrous that is in humanity. It is a poem about how difficult it is for people to live together without killing each other.

It is a poem about what it means to live as a human being in the world without knowledge of what follows the darkness of death. It is a poem that refuses to supply easy answers.

In these senses, though we are not the original audience, the poem speaks to us just as profoundly as it did to medieval readers.

---

The Beowulf Challenge: Week One

Now that we have gotten introductions out of the way, let’s read the poem!

Reading for Week One, and Reading Tips

1. For this week, read about the first third of the poem, through line 1061 or so. This will take you through the fight with Grendel.

2. As you read, don’t get bogged down in all of the names and side-narratives. Be prepared for the poem to go backwards and forwards in time at the drop of a hat. This is simply how our poet rolls.

3. Read with a pencil in hand, and mark any passage that you find particularly confusing, interesting, or strange. We’ll discuss.

“Assignment”

I put “assignment” in quotation marks, because you should do it only if you like, and certainly no one is going to be grading you. Find a particularly interesting passage, anywhere from ten to thirty lines, and read it closely several times. Write down what you find interesting or confusing or strange. Write down any questions that you might have about the passage, along with any of your own analytical ideas. Post your ideas and questions in the comments, and we will discuss.

Close Reading

In next week’s post I will provide close readings of a couple of the passages that you mention in the comments, and I hope that this will give you a model for various ways in which we might approach the poem. Then perhaps in subsequent weeks, you may respond with close readings of your own.

Questions for your Consideration and Discussion

1. What is the significance of the opening funeral of Shield Sheafson? What sort of tone does it set for the poem? What sort of ontological perspective does it suggest? In other words, what sort of world do our characters imagine that they inhabit?

2. What do you make of the “Christian” elements of the poem? We clearly have a Christian poet looking back at a pagan past. How does he reconcile these worlds?

3. What sort of effect does Grendel have on the reader? What sort of context does the poet provide for understanding him?

4. Does the fact that we know that Heorot will burn make us read Beowulf’s efforts to save it any differently? How so?

Until next week, please consider the comment section below our open discussion thread. I will keep the comment section chronological so that I (hopefully) won’t miss any. I will do my best to respond to everyone.

Enjoy the poem! I’m looking forward to discussing it with you.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Dim Hou on Unsplash