Two New Approaches to Exploring Monstrous Landscapes in Beowulf and Blickling Homily XVII

The many similarities in the descriptions of the monstrous landscapes in Blickling Homily XVII and Beowulf have long fueled debate among scholars about the nature of their connection. Blickling Homily XVII, also called To Sancte Michaheles Mæssan, is part of one of the largest and oldest collections of anonymous homilies composed in Old English prose.¹ The last 200 words of Blickling Homily XVII offer a vivid description of St. Paul’s vision of hell as a dark and frosty wilderness populated by menacing trees, water monsters, and diabolical wolves roaming in hell’s icy environs. Similarly, Grendel’s mere in Beowulf is a place of punishment haunted by water serpents, moss-covered trees, icy rocks, and steep cliffs. Richard Morris, the first scholar to note phraseological and thematic similarities in Blickling Homily XVII’s hell and Grendel’s mere, called the sermon’s description of hell a “direct reminiscence” of the Anglo-Saxon epic, a judgment which has sparked an ongoing discussion among scholars about whether one text borrowed from the other, and the direction of any possible borrowing.² Certain words and phrases that appear in both the monster-mere passage and Beowulf’s final speech in lines 2794–2820, however, may suggest that the vivid language describing Grendel’s mere was not borrowed from Blickling Homily XVII or from any other outside source, but was drawn by the poet from a shared body of traditional language in the Anglo-Saxon period.

In this paper, I examine the relationship between the descriptions of hell in Blickling Homily XVII and Grendel’s mere in Beowulf using a twofold approach. First, my application of the so-called lexomic method compares lexical patterns in Blickling Homily XVII’s description of hell and Beowulf ’s monster-mere passage in order to determine whether any similarities in the distribution and frequency of words suggest a textual relationship between those sections. Second, I identify formulaic language in the monster-mere passage and compare it with other passages within Beowulf in order to track shared lexical units and record shifts in formulaic density that indicate whether or not the monster-mere passage in Beowulf differs from its surrounding text in a way that might be suggestive of an outside source. Ultimately, I will argue that while it is possible that the Beowulf poet borrowed the imagery of the monster-mere from Blickling Homily XVII, or that the homilist borrowed from Beowulf, or that one or both texts borrowed from the Visio Pauli, it is more likely that the imagery was drawn independently from a shared set of ideas concerning monstrous landscapes. My argument, and the methodology upon which it relies, will unfold as a series of trials using both the lexomic method and a more traditional formula density analysis. Since I combine digital and traditional methods in this paper, I will explain each step of the process in detail in order to provide a clear understanding of the lexomic method and its application to selected passages in Beowulf and Blickling Homily XVII, before moving on to the formula density analysis in the final section.

Little is known about the dates of composition of Beowulf and the Blickling Homilies. Differing opinions about Beowulf ’s date obviously influence any argument about which text may have derived its imagery from the other. Many scholars of an earlier generation, in keeping with a then-universal view of the poem’s great antiquity, have simply assumed the chronological priority of Beowulf vis-à-vis Blickling Homily XVII. Richard Morris, for example, set Blickling Homily XVII’s date of composition after Beowulf and postulated that the homilist would have been familiar with and was likely influenced by the epic poem.³ Frederick Klaeber asserted that both the Beowulf poet and the homilist may have drawn from the Visio Pauli, as their nightmarish landscapes recall the Visio’s conception of a Christian hell with “moors and wastes, mists and darkness, the cliffs, the bottomless deep, the loathsome wyrmas.”⁴ Carleton Brown added that the homilist’s description of hell is much closer to the...