The old english epic poetry and beowulf as a heroic epic

3-year TS students Dr Natalya Reinhold Autumn semester 2019-20 Thirteen centuries of English Literature: from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf Theme One: Old English Literature (cont.) 10/30/19 6. The Old English epic poetry and Beowulf as a heroic epic References Beowulf. Ed. and trans. by Donaldson, E.T. New York: Norton, 1966. (see the extracts) Beowulf: a Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney. Illustrated by Becca Thorne. London: the Folio Society, 2010. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16328/16328-h/16328-h.htm (translated by L. Hall) Beowulf. With the Finnsburg fragment / Ed. by C.L. Wrenn and W.F. Bolton. 5th ed. Exeter: Exeter of Exeter Press, 1996. Beowulf with the Finnsburg Episode / Ed. by A.J. Wyatt // New Ed. with Introduction and Notes by R.W. Chambers. N.Y.: CUP, Putnam’s Sons, 1914 (see the pdf. file) Tolkien J.R.R. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. Darby: Arden Library, 1978. (e-text) Wrenn, C.L. A Study of Old English Literature. London: Harrap, 1967. http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~beowulf/main.html The Beowulf ms http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/englit/beowulf/large17439.html Heroic epic poetry Beowulf is a poem of 3182 lines surviving in one MS, the British Museum, Cotton Vitellins A.{V, written about 1000 A.D. In the manuscript (ms) there are also a fragment of the poem Judith, a homily and two other prose pieces, The Marvels of the East and Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle. The ms was one of those to suffer in the fire of 1731. It was not as severely damaged as some, but was badly scorched; the edges became brittle, and most pages have lost some characters from the ends of the lines. In 1787, the Icelander G.J. Thorkelin made copies of it. Our text is late, and apparently written in a dialect (late or “classical” West Saxon) different from that of the original. Scholars agree that the poem existed in a form substantially like that of today, not less than two centuries earlier than the Cotton MS, and in one of the Anglian dialects. The exact date and place of origin are impossible to determine. Scholars agree upon the last decade of the 8th century: from this time on (793-794) the ravages of the Danes in this country would have made a poem with the Danes so much in the foreground unacceptable. It was certainly written by a Christian. The Narrative The narrative element in the Beowulf consists of two stories, of separate origin, and unified only in the sense that Beowulf is the hero of both. The first represents an adventure of his youth in combat with two monsters. The second, his victorious but fatal battle in old age against the dragon. A long and prosperous reign over the Geats intervenes between the two exploits. The first episode involves the first 2199 lines of Beowulf, the second, the remainder of the 3182 lines in the poem. The story begins in the land of the Danes (extract 1- lines 1-31, 32-68) in the glorious reign of king Hrothgar, symbolized in the great hall of Heorot. But time brought change. The hall was haunted and ravaged by two monsters, Grendel, the male, and female, of human shape but superhuman size and ferocity. During 12 years Heorot had turned into a place of dread. News of the calamity reached the land of the Geats in Southern Sweden and the ears of Beowulf. Against the advice of Hygelac, his uncle and lord, Beowulf set sail for Denmark with a small band of followers. The voyage of Beowulf to Daneland is a well developed sea-picture in the poem. Hrothgar welcomed Beowulf with royal entertainment in the hall, and he and his band were entrusted with the task of freeing Heorot from Grendel. There was one jarring note in the reception. Unferth, a Danish courtier, jealous and proud, alluded to the swimming match between Beowulf and Breca, in which, he claimed, Breca had proved himself a better man. From this he prophesied an evil fate for Beowulf. (extract 2 – lines 506-542; 543-578). At night Grendel burst out of the mist and darkness upon the warriors. He swiftly seized one of the band and tore him from limb to limb. Beowulf closed with the monster in a grappling struggle. He was able to inflict upon Grendel a fatal wound, wrenching his huge arm and claw clean out of the shoulder pocket. The monster fled to the evil pool in the fen where he had his refuge and, plunging in, sank to the depths. And there, as the poem says, ‘hell received him.’ The narrative of Grendel’s attack on the hall is very vivid and brutal: (extract 3 – lines 766-803; 803-838). In the dawn Hrothgar and the Danes gathered at the hall. They rejoiced viewing the huge claw of Grendel and tracing the tracks that marked his flight. Meanwhile the minstrel sang the lay of the fight at Finnsburg (extract 4 – lines 1064-11591). But the coming of night proved that the terror had not been laid. The female monster avenging the death of Grendel, raided the hall. She slew Aschere, Hrothgar’s counselor, and bore off his body to the fen. The Danes were plunged into woe, but Beowulf prepared again for battle. The forthcoming story of Beowulf’s under-water fight against the troll-wife in a huge cave at the bottom of the pool is marked by a change in narrative mood. In this section, the poem seems to reveal an intrusion of fabulous elements into a scene that was in origin realistic. There is an ovious stress upon miracle and wonder. Hrothgar’s description to Beowulf of the haunted mere with the monsters’ watery lair is one of the finest in OE verse (extract 5 – lines 1500-1534). The Danes and Geats together made their way to the mere. They saw Ashere’s severed head lying upon the brink. Wearing a helmet and bearing his sword, Beowulf plunged into the pool. A day had passed before he reached the bottom. As he swam down, the sea-beasts beset him with their tusks; the water-witch rose to meet him. At last he found himself in a great hall, free of water and lighted with a glow as of firelight. Here he saw a huge water-hag. The troll-wife overthrew him and, kneeling upon him, drew out her dagger. At this moment of impending it was divine aid that Beowulf was enabled to regain his feet, seize an ancient sword lying in the cave and slay the hag (extract 6 - lines 1535-1572) The Danes who watched the surface of the pool, saw the waters suddenly stained with blood and believed that Beowulf had been killed. They went back to the hall. The loyal Geats waited on. At last Beowulf swam up from the depths, bearing the ghastly head of Grandel and the great sword whose blade had melted in hag’s venomous blood. (extract 7 – lines 1572-1610; 1613-1645). Hrothgar celebrated the victory with a feast, ceremonial speech and rich gifts. At the end of the feast the weary Beowulf was taken to sleep. With the sunrise there came the time for Beowulf to return to his country. The description of the return voyage to southern Sweden runs parallel to the account of the earlier voyage to Denmark. Welcomed by Hygelac, Beowulf recounted his adventures among the Danes and shared Hrothgar’s gifts. In return Hygelac gave an ancestral sword to Beowulf, together with a stately hall and a piece of land. So ends the first section of the narrative. Many years passed between the slaying of the monsters and the killing of the dragon; more than fifty, if we take literally the poet’s statement that Beowulf ruled for fifty winters. Rather, the word ‘fifty’ is to be interpreted as a round number implying a long reign. So, the years are scanned and the dragon motif is introduced again. It is the nature of dragons, so the poet tells us, to hunt out buried treasure and guard the heathen gold. The dragon in Beowulf conforms to this tradition, having guarded a burial treasure for 300 years. But when the hoard was plundered and a precious cup carried off by the thief, the dragon was roused. The account of the plundering of the hoard is not very clear, for the text at this point is quite corrupt. Anyway, roused by the plundering of his barrow the dragon began to ravage the land with flames and fury. Beowulf prepared for battle. Armed with his sword Nagling, and the iron shield, the king with a small band was guided by the thief to the dragon’s earth-hall. Standing near the stone entrance of the barrow, Beowulf shouted his challenge. The dragon, roused by the voice of man, came forth to the attack. The struggle is described in vigorous detail: the action is divided into 3 stags conventional in description of such a battle. Once more, as many years ago, the sword of Beowulf failed him – Nagling broke. His companions turned their backs and fled to the forest to save their lives. Only the youthful Wiglaf, son of Weohstan, remained to fight. In his third rush the dragon inflicted a deadly wound on Beowulf, but the hero’s rapidly ebbing strength was barely sufficient to deal the dragon the deathblow (extract 8 – lines 2683-2718; 2718-2754). The king received his death-wound, and the end was near. He gave his armor to Wiglaf implying that he should succeed to rule over the Geats. It was a lonely death. Beowulf had no son. It was Wiglaf who sat alone with his fallen leader. It was Wiglaf who pronounced the curse upon the cowards for their black disloyalty. A messenger proclaimed the news of Beowulf’s fall, the dark foreboding of war and disaster now that the tribe had lost their king. The body of the dead dragon was tumbled over the cliff into the sea. In accordance with Beowulf’s dying wish, a funeral pyre was built upon the headland and a barrow constructed, from this time on known to sailors from distant lands as Beowulf’s Barrow. On the cliff a great funeral fire was kindled, and the body of Beowulf burned. A sense of Fate broods over these final scenes. A great and noble king has fallen. The future looms dark and insecure. Scandinavian and Icelandic analogues The word Grendel can be associated with the OE grund, i.e. ground, bottom, or watery depths. English place-names preserve records of localities known as grendles mere (the grendel’s pool), grindles bec (the grendel’s brook), and gryndeles sylle (the grendel’s swamp). In these place-names the word grendel seems to be used as a generic term for a ‘grendel’, or water-monster. It is probable that the water-demons of the Beowulf have been derived from the waterfall trolls of Scandinavian myth. More directly, the male and female monsters of the poem, and the narrative of Beowulf’s victories over them, are traceable to the patterns in a familiar type of European folk-tale. Beowulf’s narrative conforms to a recurring type which has come to be known as the tale of ‘The Bear’s son’. Cf. the bear-like attributes of the hero, his being in some versions of the tale actually the son, or the fosterling of a bear; also, his superhuman strength of the hero. Structure and Theme Nowadays it is recognized by the scholars that both poet and audience were Christians, so no need to contrast pagan original portions of the poem with Christian accretions. It is also acknowledged that the poem is a unified whole, except for the three passages which are possible interpolations. These are: a) ll.180-188; b) 168-69; c) 1740-60. The first of these passages is the latter description of the Danes falling to the worship of devils. Tolkien doubts the genuineness of thee lines in his Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics (Sir Israel Gollancz memorial lecture, Oxford: 1936), saying that the passage sounds more Christianly homiletic than w could expect. The question of multiple or composite authorship, - the poem had as its author either a folk-singer, or a literate poet composing with books and writing materials before him. Allegory and Theme: Interpretations a) Some German scholars, alert to folk traditions of Northern Europe, saw the poem as an agricultural legend in which the threat of the North sea met opposition from land-dwellers. b) Other continental scholars recognize echoes of the garden of Gethsemane in Beowulf’s disloyal companions at the dragon’s barrow, or the influence of a Boethian notion of wyrd . c) Some scholars (McNamee) place the poem in a larger context of the allegory of Salvation (the Danes as humankind; Beowulf as a saviour, the monster as Satan, etc.). d) Historical interpretation focuses on the fact of King Hygelac being an actual personage of the early 6th century A.D. e) Margaret Goldsmith’s comprehensive treatment of Beowulf in Beowulf and Christian Tradition (1965): she finds the subject to be the nature of the human moral life, in a society outside the realm of revealed Christian truth. To this end, much of the conceptual organization of the poem is drawn from the book of Job, particularly as the Middle Ages understood it through Gregory’s huge commentary, Moralia. Beowulf is just, but his battle against the evil powers was lost because. Without Christian revelation, human nature is unequal to such a conflict. The pessimism of the poem is doctrinal: those without grace are without help against the devil.