"Beowulf" and Other Old English Poems

INTRODUCTION TO BEOWULF

INTRODUCTION TO BEOWULF PROEM Over a millennium ago, an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet—or poets— wrote a long poem about a hero named Beowulf who fought two monsters, Grendel and his mother, ruled a kingdom with courage and wisdom, and killed a dragon in his last battle. Today, in an electronic age when most people cannot read this poem in its original tongue, people still flock to watch movies about Beowulf, read modern retellings of the ancient story in science fiction novels, attend musical versions about the heroes and their monstrous passions, and laugh at a New York Times editorial about a political convention in which a past president who can’t keep away from the spotlight is compared to Grendel. This is a story we refuse to forget. John Gardner has recast the tale from Grendel’s point of view. Neil Gaiman has written several Beowulf parodies and coauthored the script for the Beowulf film in which Grendel’s mother is a sultry seductress played by Angelina Jolie. Benjamin Bagby travels the world, chanting portions of the poem and playing his reconstructed version of the Sutton Hoo lyre. We have seen a Star Trek Voyager Beowulf episode, a Swedish film Beowulf and Grendel, an Irish rock recasting, an operatic Grendel, and several salacious comic book versions. And this is only a small sample of the modern reshapings (see Osborn for more). Beowulf still speaks to us across the bridge of time, inviting us to appreciate a foreign culture and to recognize some of our old linguistic and storytelling roots. It reminds us of a shared humanity across a stretch of centuries. The old cultures of the Geats and Danes, celebrated in the poem, are gone. 22 | BEOW UL F The audience of Anglo-Saxons who read or listened to the poem centuries later is gone. The scribes who wrote the poem in the manuscript a thousand years ago are gone. The history of Beowulf begins to sound like an ubi sunt passage from “The Wanderer.” Where have the warriors gone? Where have the monsters gone? Where is the sound of the harp? Where is the joy of the telling? At the end of the poem, Beowulf’s bānhūs, his “bone-house,” is given to the flames, but his story lives on. Grendel literally loses both life and limb in this poem, but his ferocity is not forgotten. The story has survived the passage of time and the transformation of telling for more than a thousand years. It will probably be recounted in some unimaginably beautiful and terrifying form after another thousand. DATE, ORIGINS, AUDIENCE As is the case with most Old English poems, the authorship and composition date of Beowulf are unknown. It was composed sometime between 500, when the historical events in the poem occurred, and 1000, when it was written down in a manuscript now known as British Library Cotton/Vitellius A.xv (Klaeber 4, clxii; see “Note on Editions” at the beginning of the book for an explanation of this source). There is evidence that it was copied at least once from an earlier manuscript. Most recent editors favor a composition date after 685 and before 800, but some argue for a much later date. The dialect is mainly West Saxon with evidence of other predominantly Anglian forms, which has traditionally argued for an Anglian origin, but the most recent editors note that “seemingly no part of Anglo-Saxon England can be ruled out conclusively” (Klaeber 4, clxxix). The question of the audience of Beowulf has often been debated. Some critics favor a court culture, while others support a clerical audience. Some combination of these audiences seems most likely. Mitchell and Robinson surmise that “any of the secularized monasteries in which aristocrats gathered and which had close ties with royal courts would provide the kind of setting where Beowulf could be produced and appreciated” (1998, 13). Klaeber 4 argues for a variety of possible audiences: Attempts to identify the poet’s audience are complicated by the likelihood that the poem was performed aloud, in one setting or another, in addition to being written down. Even as a written text, preserved (one assumes) in a monastic library, Beowulf could have had multiple INTRODUCTION | 23 audiences, including readers of various degrees of literary competence as regards vernacular poetry. (clxxxviii) Whatever the real audience, the poem itself assumes and represents an audience of like-minded...