ANCIENT PRIVILEGES: "BEOWULF,LAW, AND THEMAKING OF GERMANIC ANTIQUITY"

Conclusions: Law and the Archaism of Beowulf

149 Conclusions Law and the Archaism of Beowulf Iwould like to conclude this study with some remarks concerning the “archaism” of Beowulf, an issue that should be distinguished from the problem of the poem’s date. I believe that it is in discussions of the degree to which Beowulf exemplifies “archaic” attitudes characteristic of early Germanic-speaking peoples that we encounter one of the most persistent legacies of nineteenth-century legal-historical scholarship—one whose relevance to the state of present-day scholarship on Old English is considerable. It is useful to keep in mind that, due to the dominance of the Liedertheorie and allied theories of composite authorship throughout much of the nineteenth century, questions of dating had a kind of fluidity in the first several decades of Beowulf’s reception that one does not find in most scholarship of the twentieth century. Proposed dates of composition varied widely, and the question of dating itself involved situating all of the poem ’s components into an imagined chronology. Consequently, while contemporary arguments for an early date would place the poem somewhere during the eighth century, scholars of the early nineteenth century often held that many of the poem’s components had circulated (perhaps independently) in the earliest phases of Germanic prehistory.1 This complicated picture—familiar to all students of Beowulf’s reception history—was made more complicated by a development discussed in chapter 1, Grimm’s use of the poem to demonstrate the poetic origins of all Germanic legal observances. The ensuing arguments that Beowulf contained traces of early 1 See Chase, “Opinions on the Date of Beowulf,” pp. 3-4. 150 Ancient Privileges Germanic lawmaking in effect placed parts of the poem having to do with law beyond the scope of chronological analysis. The fundamental assumptions of Grimm and his followers about the institutional setting of Beowulf were passed on to twentieth-century scholars even as the theories of composite authorship that made these assumptions possible fell out of favor. One of the legacies of Grimm’s “discovery” that can thus be found in most editions of Beowulf and a fair amount of the scholarship as well is the tendency to resolve questions concerning the poem’s legal setting not with sources that are chronologically closer to the poem (such as Bede’s “Letter to Egbert”) but with references to Tacitus’s Germania. Discussions of law in our major editions frequently show little interest in the question of whether Germanic institutions display chronological change, since for most of the poem’s major editors, Germanic law remained as it had been for Grimm and Brunner, “a system inherent in society’s soul.”2 Law was implicitly held to be unchanging in its most essential aspects from the earliest to the latest surviving evidence. Legal matters in Klaeber’s edition, for example, are more frequently explained with allusions to abstractions such as “Germanic custom” and the “heroic code” than to any record of Anglo-Saxon legislation or dispute settlement. The dominance of Klaeber’s edition ensured that later scholarship would adopt this approach in a nearly uncritical fashion when addressing legal-historical problems within the poem. Little interest was shown in relating the contents of Beowulf to the legislative records of the various Germanic-speaking peoples because, as I have argued in chapter 1, this legislative record was widely seen as already having been corrupted by the influence of Christianity and the remains of Roman law. Beowulf was supposed to bear less of this taint, and it was for this reason that scholars like Brunner made legislative evidence subordinate to that of literature in determining the legal status of accidental wrongs in Germanic society. 2 Wormald, Making of English Law, p. 23. 151 Conclusions The critical habits described above are similar to those identified by Allen Frantzen in his wide-ranging discussion of how present-day medieval studies reproduce the ideology of nineteenth -century scholarship. Frantzen has observed that among the most significant problems facing contemporary scholarship on Old English are its habitual “[a]ppeals to consensus and authority ,” a tendency that has “badly . . . served the subject.”3 In place of such appeals, Frantzen urges specialists in Old English “to examine the cultural and social constructions excluded by narrow documentary analysis . . . to situate texts in a timely rather than timeless sense.”4 Though Frantzen does not discuss the legacies of early legal history specifically, it is clear that...