In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • “Breme Beowulf” and “Inclite Pelagi”: Colonizing the Comitatus
  • Holly M. Wendt (bio)

The Middle Ages witnessed the expansion of Latin Christianity, in terms of both religious conversion and physical territory, in a variety of theatres, from crusading interests in the Middle East to the establishment of bishoprics in the northernmost reaches of Scandinavia. One frontier of expansion of particular interest is Saxony, the land containing not only the monastery of Gandersheim, founded in 852, but also the lands that, centuries earlier, gave rise to the Germanic warrior code by which much of pre-Christian Europe was governed as well as Old English literary traditions as we know them. Those literary traditions, beyond alliteration, litotes, and kennings, include foregrounding the language of the comitatus. The basic tenets of the comitatus, as described by John M. Hill in The Anglo-Saxon Warrior Ethic, are

reciprocal loyalty between retainer and warlord, as especially enacted by the exchange of gifts for services and services for gifts; revenge obligation regarding injury or death, on behalf of kinsmen as well as for one’s lord; and fame-assuring battle courage, especially if a successful outcome—battlefield victory—seems impossible.

(1)

The language of the comitatus ripples through texts both overtly Christian, such as “The Dream of the Rood,” and texts primarily—perhaps murkily—pagan, such as Beowulf, our fullest, richest exemplar of the genre. Beowulf’s treatment of secular morality and warrior ethos, coupled with its historical dating and geographical connections, offers a unique lens through which to consider medieval Christian expansion, which stood to benefit from that particular overlap of potentially incongruous elements.

Though the dating of Beowulf has proven almost epically difficult,1 many scholars acknowledge the tenth century as its latest possible date of composition, as is elucidated in Donald G. Scragg’s “The Nature of Old English Verse” and Colin Chase’s collection, The Dating of Beowulf. Kevin Kiernan’s persuasive technologically informed study, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript, dates the manuscript itself to the early eleventh century, possibly to the reign of Canute the Great (4). Regardless of the finer temporal particulars of the poem’s composition and recording, the date-range for Beowulf coincides with the evolution of a Latin Christian proto-national identity in England as evidenced in the kingdom-creating projects of Alfred, ninth-century King of Wessex, and Canute. These cohesions, and [End Page 39] similar efforts through the rest of western Europe, solidify further through the conversion and orthodoxy efforts that culminate in the Crusades.

Within the same temporal context of Beowulf, too, in the late tenth century, canoness Hrotsvit of Gandersheim penned a verse account of the martyrdom of Saint Pelagius. The Pelagius is, in many ways, a text significantly different from Beowulf: the poem recounts the martyrdom of a young Christian in Muslim-controlled Córdoba, and the account is written by a canoness, in the Latin of the church, in the confines of a monastery. However, there are meaningful comparisons as well, and these connections are the heart of my thesis: Beowulf and Pelagius present their heroes as both moral champions in the warrior tradition and as martyrs while using the language of enmity as a way to foreground a Christian center in the medieval expansion of Latin Christianity. The Christian center finds itself changed in the wake of Germanic conversion, appropriating and colonizing the values of the pagan comitatus for its own goals and drawing strength from deliberately embracing—and subverting—the disadvantaged position. I look to Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” for a portion of the vocabulary necessary to this analysis.

To begin, positioning Beowulf beside a hagiographic text may appear odd in light of the diverse opinions regarding Beowulf’s Christian elements. Investigating each instance of Christian influence in Beowulf is not my project here, though, because many scholars have thoroughly undertaken that task before to a variety of conclusions.2 While some scholars continue to maintain that the Christian passages in Beowulf were added to the “original” poem at some stage in its recording, C. Tidmarsh Major accounts for the poem as an organically syncretic work acknowledging the gradual...

pdf

Share