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

Jakob Grimm, Legal Formalism and the Editing of Beowulf

I Jakob Grimm, Legal Formalism and the Editing of Beowulf Until the early twentieth century, Beowulf scholarship was largely dominated by the view that the poem was an amalgam of independent and sometimes highly archaic compositions . As T. A. Shippey observes, this assumption, known as the Liedertheorie, was ultimately abandoned on both philological and critical grounds: Sievers’s analyses found no metrical variation of the sort that would be expected from a composite poem, while the ascendancy of formalist literary criticism made any approaches that suggested the poem’s disunity less appealing .1 Given the sweeping rejection of Liedertheorie methods in contemporary Old English studies, it is surprising to observe the unabated influence of an important if largely ignored subcategory of Liedertheorie scholarship on the editing of Beowulf. I refer to the suggestion made first in Jakob Grimm’s Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer (1828) that Beowulf occasionally preserves Germanic legal formulas, i.e., formalized speeches and phrases that once were recited during legal proceedings. Eric Gerald Stanley remains the only contemporary scholar to comment on 1 The excesses of Liedertheorie scholarship are most apparent in Karl Müllenhoff’s famous article of 1869, which rejects all but 1,788 lines of Beowulf as interpolations and attributes the poem to six different authors. See Müllenhoff, “Die Innere Geschichte des Beowulfs,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 14 (1869), pp. 193–244. A superb overview of Liedertheorie scholarship remains that of Thomas Shippey, “Structure and Unity,” in Bjork and Niles, eds., A Beowulf Handbook, pp. 149–74. 24 Grimm’s use of Germanic legal formulas as a means of elucidating passages from Beowulf.2 But Stanley’s account is for the most part descriptive, and does not attempt to evaluate the effects of Grimm’s ideas on later scholarship. Grimm’s Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer and its comments on Beowulf cannot be ignored by those interested in how the modern text of the poem began its evolution in the early nineteenth century. Though now as neglected as his Deutsche Grammatik is celebrated, the Rechtsalterthümer dominated research into the social history of the Germanic peoples for well over a century, and its conclusions had lasting effects on literary as well as historical scholarship. In the notes to his edition of Beowulf, Klaeber alludes to the Rechtsalterthümer almost as often as he mentions Grimm’s better-known Deutsche Mythologie.3 Yet references to the Rechtsalterthümer are scarce in contemporary Old English scholarship . Any mention of the text is wholly omitted even from the recent Beowulf Handbook, most likely because the Rechtsalterth ümer was never translated for English audiences as was the Mythologie .4 As the following chapter will demonstrate, modern editors have defended a number of emendations—some of them quite drastic—which have their origins solely in the attempts of Grimm and his followers to recover the Germanic legal formulas allegedly underlying various passages within the poem. Before dealing with the emendations themselves, however, it Ancient Privileges 2 E. G. Stanley, “The Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of Anglo-Saxon Records in Prose and Verse: A New Bibliography,” ASE 9 (1981), pp. 223262 at p. 234; see also idem, “The Continental Contribution to the Study of Anglo-Saxon Writings Up To and Including That of the Grimms,” in Towards a History of English Studies in Europe: Proceedings of the WildsteigSymposium , April 30-May 3, 1982, eds. Thomas Finkenstaedt and Gertrud Scholtes (Augsburg: Universität Augsburg, 1983), pp. 9-39 at p. 22. 3 See Klaeber, ed., Beowulf, pp. 192, 212, 213, 222. 4 A sound overview of the Rechtsalterthümer in English can be found in Dobozy, “The Brothers Grimm,” pp. 103-104. 25 will be necessary to sketch briefly the network of scholarly assumptions that once made them seem plausible to nineteenthcentury editors of Beowulf. Grimm’s Rechtsalterthümer began as a response to the claim made famous by Friedrich Carl von Savigny (a teacher and correspondent of Grimm’s) that law is above all a reflection of the Volksgeist, and that for this reason legislators should resist the temptations of the codification movement then ascendant in France and instead encourage the preservation of Germany’s native tradition of Roman law.5 Grimm assented to Savigny’s belief that law was an element of culture, an expression of the peculiar habits and manners of discrete populations. But Grimm rejected the argument that Roman law was a...