The Interlace Structure of Beowulf

THE INTERLACE STRUCTURE OF BEOWULF JOHN LEYERLE In the time since Norman Garrnonsway' died I have reHected about what I could say that would not embarrass the spirit of the man I wish to honour. He was reticent about himself and I shall be brief. I rarely heard him refer to his distinguished career at King's College, London, for when he spoke of his work, it was always of what lay ahead. His characteristic manner was understatement, like that of the early literature of the north that he knew so well and loved. He was a man who preferred to listen rather than to talk, but he was quick to praise and encourage . He had the virtues of Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford mixed with a gentle humour. Noght 0 word spak he moore than was neede, And that was seyd in forme and reverence, And short and quyk and ful of hy sentence; Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche, And gladly wolde he Ierne and gladly teche. Toronto is a better place for his having lived and worked among us. This paper concerns material he was teaching this year, the relation between early art and poetry in England. I should like to dedicate it to his memory. I Beowulf is a poem of rapid shifts in subject and time. Events are fragmented into parts and are taken with little regard to chronological order. The details are rich, but the pattern does not present a linear structure, a lack discussed with distaste by many.! This lecture will attempt to show that the structure of BeotllUlf is a poetic analogue of the interlace deSigns common in Anglo-Saxon art of the seventh and eighth centuries. Beowulf was composed in the early eighth century in the Midlands or 'On February 28, 1967, Norman Garmonsway, Visiting Professor of English at University College in the University of Toronto, died suddenly. This paper, in a slightly different form, was read on March 30 in West Hall of the College in place of a lecture on Canute that Professor Garmonsway was to have delivered on that day. Voz'ume XXXVII, Nmuber 1, October, 1967 2 JOHN LEYERLE North of England, exactly the time and place where interlace decoration reached a complexity of design and skill in execution never equalled since and, indeed, hardly ever approached. Interlace designs go back to prehistoric Mesopotamia; in one form or another they are characteristic of the art of all races.2 The bands may be plaited together to form a braid or rope pattern, a design that appears, for example, on borders of the Franks Casket, a whalebone coffer made in Northumbria about the year 700. Interlace is made when the bands are turned back on themselves to form knots or breaks that interrupt, so to speak, the linear How of the bands. The south face of the Bewcastle Cross from Cumberland has three panels of knot work; this cross is dated before 710.' The bottom panel (Plate!) has two distinct knots formed by two bands and connected together, a pattern that is identical to that on folio 94' of the Lindisfarne Gospels (Plate VII!).' There are about a thousand separate pieces of stone surviving from pre-Norman Northumbrian crosses. One need only leaf through W. G. Collingwood's Northumhrian Crosses of the Pre-Norman Age (London, 1927) to be struck by the appearance of one interlace design after another, despite the fact that such patterns are relatively difficult to execute in stone, especially when there is any undercutting. When the bands are cut, the free ends are often elaborated into zoomorphic heads, seen in a very simple stage of development on the Abingdon Brooch ( Plate II) , dated in the early seventh century.' In more complex designs the stylized heads take on a pronounced zoomorphic character, often derived from eagles or wolves; the bodies of these creatures extend into curvilinear ribbon trails that form the interlace design. The heads often bite into the bands or back on to a free end, as on the seventh-century Windsor dagger pommel which has an open design with clear separation between the bands ( Plate III). When the bands are drawn together...