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Beowulf
• Many dimensions
– Heroic narrative
– Folklore
– Incorporates
• Creation hymn
• Gnomic verse
• Heroic beats
• Sources
– Oral
– Bible
• Problems
– Old English takes some time to understand
– Written in half lines not iambic pentameter
(dominant verse pattern since 13th century)
• ex-. Grendel gongan
– God cursed Grendel
Gades yrr baer
Came greedily loping
• Use of Apposition- a construction in which
separate words have the same referencecreates synonyms and many of these
words are hard to translate
– Use of kennings and epithets create the same
problem
– Conjunctions rarely used so the syntax of
sentence is lost
• But, Anglo-Saxon audiences were able to
understand how the poet manipulated
conventions and it is wrong to assume that
a society that appears primitive to ours is
primitive in every way.
Apposition
• Ealdre berafod bereft of life
• Beabue gebaeded afflicted by aggression
– Both connote “evil”
– So dragons death was justified because its
violence was evil
• One rhetorical advantage of apposition is
its open-endedness for the “aggression” in
this case can be Grendel’s or Beowulf’s
• Today, the repetition of words and phrases
with the same referent, even the kind of
elegant variation once favored by so many
Victorian writers is actively discouraged. A
• A student paper that included passages
like “the killer, the terrible earth-dragon,
deprived of life, afflicted by evil
aggression” would be savaged in red ink…
by Miss Briggs
Kennings
• Sword= remnants of hammers (homera lofe)
• Since highly compressed it can be expanded
to what remains after the blacksmith’s
hammers have finished their work= sword.
• Beowulf’s name= bee-wolf, where the wolf or
foe of the bee is the honey-seeking bear
• God=Lord of life= the Glorious Almighty
• Manuscript of poem now in the British
library in London
• Over 60 translations of the poem
• Poem is written in England but the events
are set in Scandinavia
Basic Plot
• Prince Beowulf (from Southern Sweden- Geats
pronounced Ye-ats) comes to help Hrothgar,
king in the land of the Danes rid the country of a
terrible man- eating monster, Grendel. From this
expedition, he returns in triumph and rules for 50
years as king of his homeland. Beowulf must
confront it. Grendel’s mother. He manages to
slay the dragon but loses his own life in the
battle. He enters the legends of his people as a
warrior of great renown.
• Scholars treated this poem as history and
folklore (date?) until 1936 J.R.R. Tolkien’s
“Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics”
treated the poem as a work of literature.
• “Readers get caught between a shield wall
of opaque references and a word-hoard
that is old and strange, and feel a certain
shock of new. In between is what W.B.
Yeats calls a phantasmagoria.”
– Seamus Heaney
Poem as art-
The Exeter Book
• Pages bound together between boards made of
birch- from the German word for which we call
the word book.
• Given to the Exeter Cathedral in 975 by the first
Bishop of Exeter, Leofric, who died in 1072.
Probably was written by a single scribe.
• Contains “The Seafarer” “The Wanderer” “The
Wife’s Lament” and Old English Riddles, among
other poems
• Survived because the Exeter Cathedral
library resided in a building that escaped
the dangers of the fire, civil war, and two
world wars. Even so, it was ravaged by
time.
• Collected during the time of Alfred the
Great- loved literature and learning.
“The Seafarer”
• Believed to be written somewhere
between 450-1100.
• Provides an accurate portrait of the sense
of stoic endurance, suffering, loneliness,
and spiritual yearning characteristic of Old
English poetry
• Divisible into two sections- elegaic and
didactic
• First Section
– Painfully personal description of the suffering and
mysterious attractions of life at sea
• Second section
– The speaker makes an abrupt shift to moral
speculation about the fleeting nature of fame, fortune,
and life itself, ending with an explicitly Christian view
of God as wrathful and powerful.
– The speaker urges the audience to forget earthly
accomplishments and anticipate God’s judgment in
the afterlife
• The poem addresses both pagan and
Christian ideas about overcoming this
sense of suffering and loneliness
• Pagan- being buried with treasure and
winning in battle
• Christian- Fearing God’s judgment
• Allegory- life as a journey and the
metaphor of life at sea
Welcome to the Sutton Hoo Room
Burial site of a 7th century Anglo-Saxon king,
found near Woodbridge, in Suffolk.
Sutton Hoo is an estate near Woodbridge, Suffolk, England, that is the site of an early grave of an
Anglo-Saxon king. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, "The burial, one of the richest Germanic
burials found in Europe, contained a ship fully equipped for the afterlife (but with no body) and
threw light on the wealth and contacts of early Anglo-Saxon kings; its discovery, in 1939, was
unusual because ship burial was rare in England" (Brtannica).
In the burial site there were 41 items of solid gold, now held in the British Museum. The ship also
contained 37 coins, three unstruck coin blanks, and two small ingots, all of gold. According to the
Voyage to the Other World, "The gold coins and jewelry, the silver utensils, preserved in the sand,
of an exceptionally large ship, as well as other valuable items, were intended to accompany a
powerful individual on his final journey" (Schoenfeld 15). The Sutton Hoo ship further displays both
master craftsmanship and major technical innovations such as a fixed steering position and shorter
and narrower planks for more flexibility.
Sutton Hoo played an important role in the recording of Beowulf. According to the Voyage to the
other World, "Beowulf and Sutton Hoo are related in the rather simple way, that the description of
Heorot in Beowulfmay fit some early Anglo-Saxon buildings for which evidence still survives
elsewhere in England" (Creed 67).
Priceless objects found in the
Sutton Hoo burial ship
Iron Helmet
Shield Mount
Anglo Saxon Necklace
Reconstructed
Helmet
Anglo Saxon Ring
Boar Crest
• Ubi Sunt- taken from a Latin phrase
– Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt – meaning –
“Where are those who were before us?”
• Common them in poems
• Used as a motif in “The Wanderer”
Beowulf – Anglo-Saxon poetry expressed
a considerable feeling of doom and
sadness – symptomatic of a ubi sunt
yearning
•
May have come out of the fact that by
conquering Roman Britain they were
faced with massive stone works that
seemed to come from lost era
• “The Wanderer” specifically when it starts
out - reminiscent of Tolkien from The Two
Towers
• Comitatus – Germanic friendship structure
that compelled kings to rule in consultation
with their warriors
– Bond existing between the lord and his
warriors – direct source of the practice of
feudalism
• Love – according to the Romans and
coming from them would have been
– Country – lord, general, etc…
– Friends – platonic relationships
– spouse
• Had a profound effect on women. A man
would leave his wife to be with his lord
• Women were considered possessions
• “The Wife’s Lament”