Welcome back to "Words About Words". We continue our literary travels by looking back to "Beowulf", the thousand year old manuscript and even older tale. We look here at some of the reasons why should continue to study and enjoy this dynamic epic that encompasses heroism, history, exaggerations, inconsistencies, monsters, battles, men (and some women), and the causes that lead to the fall of nations. And so, without further ado...
Why should we continue reading Beowulf?
Beowulf the manuscript, Beowulf the poem, and Beowulf the character have been studied for hundreds of years both in its original Old English and in translations. Beowulf’s story is even available to a wider audience through loose adaptations created for alternative media forms, such as children’s books, art, film, blogs, websites, twitter stories, and even video games. But why is this thousand-year old (and possibly even older) tale of Anglo-Saxon heroism still applicable to our daily lives, and why should it be? The Beowulf manuscript continues to aid medieval manuscript studies, while its original text continues to teach us about the history of the Anglo-Saxons and the intricacies of the Old English language. But perhaps there is something more Beowulf has to offer to modern readers, even if we are not all academic medieval scholars.
Only one manuscript copy of the poem that critics have titled Beowulf, when in fact the manuscript itself is untitled, has survived and that survival was most likely an accident. The Beowulf manuscript includes a few other texts in addition to the Beowulf poem itself: “a poetic treatment of the Old Testament story of Judith, a prose life of St. Christopher, and two treatises of fantastical geography known as The Wonders of the East and Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle” (Black, pp. 44). Two scribes copied this manuscript down, probably in the decade following 1000 AD, and in a monastery somewhere in the south of England. Lying disregarded for centuries, the vellum (animal skin) pages narrowly escaped destruction by fire in 1731 and are now preserved in The British Library under the shelf-mark Cotton Vitellius A.xv.
And so, by studying the history of the Beowulf manuscript, we gain valuable information for medieval and manuscript studies. The fire burns, bookworm holes, and century-old ink bleeding through the animal skin pages allow scholars to analyze how these elements degrade a physical text such as the Beowulf manuscript and how we might continue to preserve similar finds for another thousand years to come.
The longest surviving poem in the Old English language, Beowulf consists of 3,182 alliterative verse lines divided into forty-five sections called “Fitts”. Although its language style is embellished and allusive, and its narrative winding and complex, its relatively straightforward plot touches upon familiar folkloric tropes: when “a young hero who fights in isolation from friends and family engages in fabulous battles against monstrous foes, faces three challenges in ascending order of difficulty, and in the end wins glory and fame” (Black, pp. 44). However, despite the poem’s interests in historical events, we cannot study Beowulf with modern expectations of historical accuracy. Like many examples of medieval literature, Beowulf is difficultly ambiguous: not exactly mythical enough to read separate from the history is proclaims to contain, and yet not historical enough to offer concrete evidence for the ancient past it poetically represents.
Through studying Beowulf, from context clues we can learn about the Danes, Geats, and their culture through the objects, animals, foods, and technologies they posses. If we itemize the creatures and material possessions inhabiting the world of the text, we can deduce that the scribes, poets, and perhaps historical figures mentioned in the narrative also had access to these as well. For instance, the presence of ships, horses, battle gear, and mead convey information that these were sea-faring, horse-riding peoples with either access to the processes to make armor and mead or the means to trade for such prevalent items. The names of places that still exist to this day, such as Dane, Frank, and the North Sea, help to geographically place the narrative in reality. However, we must still take the more fantastical elements with a grain of salt; just because Beowulf fights Grendel, then Grendel’s mother, and finally a dragon does not mean that these figures exist in real life. Similarly, we can perhaps imagine certain elements of Beowulf’s story—such as how long he swam for when competing against Brecca or how much armor he can carry at one time—as being exaggerated by the poet and/or scribes for audiences in order emphasize how “There was no one else like him [Beowulf] alive./In his day, he was the mightiest man on earth,/highborn and powerful” (Heaney, pp. 8; lines 196 – 198).
Even though there are numerous translations and editions of the Beowulf text, there are still ongoing debates surrounding how we are to understand and justify amending differences between what the scribes have written and what scholars argue they meant to have written. The Beowulf poem continues to teach us the intricacies of the Old English language by demanding appreciation of its complexities whenever any individual attempts to translate and understand that translation. There is no perfect translation because every translator must choose their own narrative (comparable to those “choose your own adventure” books) with each decision between a variety of word definitions available, and with every line translation they must battle with the difficulty with attempting to replicate a similar alliterative verse style in a separate language. Because these aspects continue to be debated, we must continue to analyze and contribute to these debates in order to more fully understand the text holistically. Perhaps the only way to truly comprehend multitude of possibilities is to read a collection of comprehensive editions, such as Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th Edition, Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf: A Verse Translation, and George Jack’s Beowulf: A Student Edition, side by side. Understanding the Old English constructing Beowulf is far from a “closed case”, and should not be treated as such.
Both the origins of Beowulf’s content and manuscript publication are largely unknown, although scholars have made educated guesses down through the ages. Most assume that the single surviving manuscript, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, was written around 1000 – 1020 AD and is a copy of an earlier text that in turn was probably the last in a long chain of copies. Because we only have this latest copy, it is impossible to determine both when the chain of Beowulf texts began or what cultural and/or literary inspirations gave birth to the poem; various scholars have argued for dates ranging from 700 – 1000 AD, and most years in between. “The poem seems to arise from a world in which such stories were common, and it presupposes our own position in this world” (Black, pp. 44).
So, how we reconcile the complexities of the original context in which our surviving Beowulf manuscript exists with modern re-printings of this Old English text? The fourth edition of Frederick Klaeber’s Beowulf was published in 2014, over a thousand years after the poem it acclaims was constructed, and yet Andy Orchard of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto claims it to be, “A monstrous endeavor, heroically achieved”. Mark Amodio with the Department of English at Vassar College asserts that, “Klaeber’s Beowulf will immediately eclipse all the other fine editions of the poem that are in print and… it will remain the critical edition of the poem for many years to come”. Beowulf is not going anywhere, and over the hundreds of years since the manuscript survived Cotton’s library fire, just as many printed copies of the poem have been made.
In retrospect, even if an individual seeks to refute the importance of Beowulf as a work justified being given critical in-depth study, they would first have to read and analyze the text themselves in order to make a sound argument. One has to know their adversary’s location and weaknesses in order to properly take them on. Like how Unferth needed to know aspects of Beowulf’s contest against Brecca in order to criticize him about it, and even how Beowulf needed to know that Grendel was going to come to Heorot that night in order to prepare for their battle, so too does a Beowulf critic need to study Beowulf in order to accurately criticize.
And as cultural and social priorities shift over time, readers can find newfound importance in certain aspects of the poem that may have been overlooked or under-analyzed in past years. J. R. R. Tolkien’s well known argument in his lecture, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, for instance, is essentially that scholarly work focusing on the historical information regarding Anglo-Saxon peoples and cultures is off-point because “the monsters… are essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem, which give it its lofty tone and high seriousness” (Heaney, pp. 115). Similarly, those preoccupied in gender studies could analyze the female’s role both in the poem and in Anglo-Saxon society as represented in the poem, the ambiguous gender nature of Grendel’s mother, or even the possibility of Beowulf as homosexual due to the lack of women present in his kingdom until his death.
We can continue consulting Beowulf for its physical manuscript’s properties, its Old English language, and what it teaches us about the historical past. We must study Beowulf if we are to refute its own importance. And lastly, we should continue to analyze Beowulf because as the times change, we find new meanings and importance in previously unexplored regions of this thousand year old tale. I look forward to discovering how we understand this greatest and longest of Old English poems in the next ten, fifty, and hundred years.
References:
Black, J. et al. (Editors). 2009. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Volume I: The Medieval Period, Second Edition. Broadview Press. Print.
Heaney, Seamus (Translator), and Daniel Donoghue (Editor). 2002. Beowulf: A Verse Translation. A Norton Critical Edition. W. W. Norton & Company. Print.
Jack, George (Editor). 1995. Beowulf: A Student Edition. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Print.
Klaeber, Frederick. 2014. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. Fulk, R. D., Bjork, R. E., and Niles, J. D. (Editors). Fourth Edition. University of Toronto Press. Print.
Tolkien, J. R. R. 1936. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, Proceedings of the British Academy, pp. 245 – 295. Harper Collins. Print.
Now that we know why we can and should continue reading and engaging with the "Beowulf" poem, we can look over the next few posts to different aspects throughout this grand and deep Old English tale for literary analysis and points of interest.
In the meantime, do you agree with these reasons to read "Beowulf"? If not, then what are some of the reasons explaining why we should not continue reading this story? Are there other Old English texts that deserve the serious attention that has hitherto been awarded "Beowulf"?
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