The cultural world in Beowulf (review)

258 Reviews presents case histories of how different communities enlisted eternal patrons in the solving of both their temporal and their spiritual problems. While in its earlier parts this book mirrors the debate of the 1960s as to possible differences between 'popular' and 'elite' religions, die author now holds that there is little to support such a 'dichotomous' view of society. Rather, he argues, a complex society was beset with various tensions and contradictions perhaps inevitable amongst the laity oftiiosemixed cultures. Yet they often also formed but a single community with botii the clerics and all the dead. If nothing else is certain, Geary would argue most positively that by reading actions, artefacts, and cultic rituals on an equal footing withtextswe can better perceive and understand the difference of those past societies and then essential cohering organization. Less a metiiodology than a fascinating collection of case histories and regional analyses, Geary's new book shows how, by exploring the network of relations between both living and dead, one can understand more fruitfully various aspects of die interwoven political, devotional, economic, and cultural histories of medieval Western Europe. J. S. Ryan Department of English University of N e w England Hill, John M., The cultural world in Beowulf (Andiropological horizons), Toronto/Buffalo/London, University of Toronto Press, 1995; cloth and paper; pp. x, 224; R.R.P. C A N $ 5 5 (cloth), $19.95 (paper). 'Beowulf dramatizes subtle behaviour in a complex social world—a noncentralized , notably martial, aristocratic world. W e often distort this world by imposing on it our own, ethnocentric biases' (p. 4). These biases, Hill postulates, can be overcome by an ethnological study of the social milieu of the poem which draws comparatively on similarly organized societies, both past and present, in northern Europe, South-East Asia, on the Pacific rim, among North American Indians, and elsewhere. H e examines the jural, temporal, and psychological worlds of the poem, feud settlement and the economy of honour. Given Hill's criticism of culture-bound readings, it is fair to observe that he is attached to the Department of English at the U S Naval Academy and that some of his readings appear to reflect his intellectual engagement Reviews 259 with politically acceptable definitions of the role of the armed forces in the contemporary world. Hill's Beowulf is not really about heroic action and he explores heroism only from a remote Freudian distance. Nor does he explore the demands of honour and the desire for fame, probably because the contemporary Western intellectual finds it difficult to disentangle these from the ethos of hitting the beach. Beowulf is about 'the problem of achieving settlements between previously contending parties' and the protagonist is 'an ethically conscious figure ofjust,rightfulaction, of warfare as law' who embodies the jural sanction of Tyr, 'the Germanic god of war as law, as setdement and the establishing of boundaries' (pp. 7, 63-64). Hill is probably right in claiming that w e misunderstand the poem if we assume that the poet regards all blood revenge as inexorably baleful. He may even beright,in principle, when he asserts that 'acts of revenge can be good and jurally definitive' (p. 29). But he cannot illuminate the Finnsburg lay by presenting it as an illustration of the just setdement that can be achieved through feuding. The Danish victory is definitive allright.It ends the feud because the Danes succeed finally in killing Finn and his Frisian retinue, looting Finn's treasures as they leave. But Frisians as well as Danes were killed in the earlier fighting, Finn's son as well as the Danish leader. The Danes avenge their leader despite Finn's attempts to effect a peace by oaths and sanctions. This is not a just settlement as latetwentieth -century Western readers understand it. And, it is Hill, as a latetwentieth -century Western reader with a particular bias, who defines the terms of the analysis, not the Beowulf poet. Insofar as Beowulf reflects a tragic awareness of the interminability of feuding, w e shall move further towards understanding the poem by pondering the question of why Hengest finds the peace agreement he has sworn with Finn...