Beowulf
"Beowulf" is an Old English epic poem that tells the story of the hero Beowulf and his battles against the monster Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a dragon. The poem is a significant work of Anglo-Saxon literature and provides valuable insights into the language, culture, and society of the time. It is written in a poetic form and is one of the earliest known works of English literature.
7 Key excerpts on "Beowulf"
eBook - ePubBeowulf and Other Stories
A New Introduction to Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures
- Joe Allard, Richard North(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The special poetic register and resolutely antiquarian focus of Beowulf make any dating on purely linguistic grounds difficult: we simply have nothing that is really comparable. The Christian focus of the poet, and the Christian subject matter of at least some of the other texts preserved alongside Beowulf, may well have helped its survival in an age when the production of manuscripts from laboriously prepared animal skins and specially produced ink was a long and costly process and when the Church had a virtual monopoly on literacy. However, it is also clear that Beowulf seems to draw in style and language on a much earlier compositional technique. This was originally oral formulaic, of native Anglo-Saxon rather than learned Latin origins (see later, p. 96). As we shall see in the next chapter, there is relatively little other heroic narrative verse surviving in Old English and Beowulf ’s precise relationship to the four poems which do survive is therefore impossible to determine. Like the manuscript that contains it, Beowulf itself seems a chance survival and a silent witness to a vibrant and ancient world of sound now stilled beyond hope of full recovery. Scholars have, however, worked out that the poem contains enough material to have taken four or more hours for a complete performance. Perhaps, one may speculate, the poem was performed at a feast in a royal banqueting hall. Next on the menu: the Beowulf story If the language of Beowulf is beguilingly, often bafflingly, complex, then we can say the basic plot is simple to the point of bewilderment. Basically, the story gives us three battles in two lands and a hero who is a young champion in the first two and an old king in the third. Between Beowulf’s youth and his age the poet puts a gap of more than 50 years. In his youth, the monster-slayer Beowulf fights for one people, the Danes, whereas in his old age he dies for another, his own, the Geats (of ‘Geatland’ or modern-day Göteland in Sweden)...
eBook - ePubInventing English
A Portable History of the Language
- Seth Lerer(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Columbia University Press(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 2 From Beowulf to Wulfstan The Language of Old English Literature THE SONG OF THE ANGLO-SAXON scop sounded for six centuries. From Caedmon, through Beowulf, to the monastic scribes who copied down the legacy of poetry well into the twelfth century, Old English alliterative forms and formulae filled halls and cloisters with their sound. The techniques of that poetry could be applied to any subject matter: Germanic myths, Christian Creation stories, acts of martyrs, Old Testament narratives, current political conditions. Biblical characters, at times, take on the quality of old Germanic heroes. At other times, figures out of the past seem remarkably like contemporary scholars. How does Old English literature refract the inheritance of pagan myth and Christian doctrine; how does it give voice to a unique perspective on the world and the imagination? These questions can be asked of the whole range of Anglo-Saxon literary life. Not only Beowulf worked according to oral-formulaic patterns and alliterative meter. Poems such as Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel deployed the forms and diction of Old English verse, even when the subject may have seemed far removed from the heroic hall. In Daniel, strikingly, the handwriting on the wall that signals the end of the Babylonian kingdom appears, not in Hebrew but in reddened runes—as if the Anglo-Saxon poet needed to imagine an arresting, enigmatic form of writing and turned to the ancient Germanic system of epigraphy. In the Dream of the Rood, the figure of Christ on the cross comes off as nothing less than a familiar warrior. Ongeyrede hine þa geong Hæleð — þæt wæs God ælmihtig—strang and stiðmod. “Then the young hero disrobed himself—that was God almighty—strong and resolute.” Christ is stiðmod, assured in that mod that is so central to the Anglo-Saxon inner life. Even half a century after the Norman Conquest, poets could still conjure up the formulae of heroism, understanding, travel, fear, and worship...
eBook - ePub- Tiffany Beechy(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Tolkien’s basic claim was that criticism on the poem should treat it as a poem, describing its unique contours and aesthetic concerns, and not primarily as a repository of ideology, history, or language. If Beowulf is, in fact, a poem, it should be read as a poem. For Tolkien this implies a set of assumptions about poetry that have, since the decline of New Criticism, been called into question. For instance, unity and internal coherence justify the poem’s poetic status and illustrate its literary merit. For other Anglo-Saxonists, the different criteria of metrical regularity and specialized diction license the treatment of a text as a poem, though Beowulf has become the standard of “classical Old English verse” in part because Tolkien’s defense of the poem’s literary (and even lyric) quality remains so compelling. But the uneasy secret of the Old English corpus is that it presents a spectrum rather than a single standard of metrical regularity, which Old English scholars have long dealt with using terms like “rhythmic prose.” Wulfstan’s homilies are rhythmic and repetitive and evince an “oral style,” according to Andy Orchard. Thomas Bredehoft considers Ælfric’s style in many homilies a kind of late Old English verse. Many of the laws use rhetorical techniques common to verse and to the homilies just mentioned. Angus McIntosh devised a graded system of “verse-likeness” to account for various concentrations of poetic techniques. Numerous scholars treating texts from the anonymous vernacular homilies (Samantha Zacher) to Alfred’s prose translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (Nicole Guenther Discenza) note the poetic qualities of these texts and challenge traditional distinctions between such prose and canonical verse. The list of genres and sub-genres that have been characterized, often glancingly, as poetic or rhythmic or verse-like could go on and on...
eBook - ePub- Derek Pearsall(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Even though we may conclude fairly firmly that a poem like Beowulf comes out of a monastic cultural background, the same background in fact that produces virtually all, if not all, Anglo-Saxon poetry, we know nothing of actual provenance, date and place of composition and can prove little. Linguistic evidence is dubious: Sisam has shown that the convenient assumption, based on the presence of Anglian forms, that Anglo-Saxon poetry is Northumbrian, or at least Anglian, in origin, but transmitted in West-Saxon texts, is not tenable, and concludes that the extant poetry is written in ‘a general Old English poetic dialect’ and could come from any of the Kingdoms. 92 Other kinds of evidence, external and internal, produce a multitude of sometimes conflicting theories, though there is a general consensus that most of the poetry, including Beowulf, was written in the eighth century. It is dangerous to make too close an association between political stability and literary productivity, but certainly not much would be possible until well after the defeat of the heathen Penda at Winwæd in 654, while the sack of Lindisfarne by Norwegian raiders in 793 looks like the beginning of the end of things—‘It partly seems that the happiness of the English is nearly at an end’, says Alcuin. 93 For Beowulf, 793 has maybe a special significance, since it is a human enough assumption that a poem glorifying Scandinavian heroes would not be popular when their descendants were plundering the country. It would be hard to go much beyond this. Eighth-century Northumbria retains most of one’s favour as a speculative home for Anglo-Saxon poetry, but it may be partly because the culture of the kingdom in this period is so richly documented...
eBook - ePub- Robert D. Fulk, Christopher M. Cain, Robert D. Fulk, Christopher M. Cain(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...It is the most substantial piece of writing in the language that does not derive from a Latin source, and thus it is a rare window on an unfamiliar world. Its allusive and digressive qualities present to view a mass of half-concealed meanings and allusions that beg explication. The poem held a place of particular importance in nineteenth-century scholarship, with its nationalist preoccupation with Germanic origins, because it is the most substantial and informative work within the Germanic heroic tradition outside of Scandinavian sources, and it antedates the earliest Icelandic manuscripts by several centuries. But even after the decline of scholarly interest in Germanic antiquities (see below) it has retained its appeal, and it has even, in recent years, provoked considerable popular interest, most notably in the translation by the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (1999). No doubt this is in part because its many indeterminacies have invited successive critical movements to see mirrored in the poem their own hermeneutic concerns, as detailed below. And yet the general consensus that this is the finest work of Old English literature surely is not unfounded. Despite early critics’ dissatisfaction (see especially W. Ker 1908 and the response of Tolkien 1936, as discussed below), the structure of the poem is most appealing, presenting to view complexities of design at both the micro- and the macrostructural levels; and the hero’s character is quite original, resembling less the characters of the fierce heroes of the Icelandic family sagas than those of God’s pious champions in the Old English verse saints’ lives, given his tactful dealings with the watchman on the Danish coast (260–85), his good will toward Unferth, who earlier insulted him (1488–90, 1807–12), and his refusal to take the Geatish throne from the minor Heardred (2369–79; see Wieland 1988). The story of Beowulf may be summarized profitably in some detail...
eBook - ePubBeowulf
The Critical Heritage
- Andreas Haarder, T A Shippey, T. A. Shippey, Andreas Haarder, T A Shippey, T. A. Shippey(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...First of all, at the end of the 9th century (see p. 365 above), we have to do with that peculiar mixture of Anglo-Saxon with Scandinavian culture, in which the Scandinavian lords of Northumbria and parts of Mercia and East-Anglia often appear to adapt to the native as the superior style. This would therefore be the first possibility chronologically for a quite unforced explanation of the origin of Beowulf, and thus give a terminus a quo for the poem. It is quite conceivable, without being able to find closer indications, that in the subsequent period a Scandinavian prince in this area could have invited a famous English poet whom he had got to know to compose an epic for his court, possibly especially in view of his children, who were to be instructed in the Anglo-Saxon language. That this should be set for the most part with a Danish background would according to this cause no surprise. If on the other hand the hero himself is presented as a Geat and Geatish history takes up so much space in the poem, this would be an indication of relationships at the court of the commissioning prince, which because of the poverty of our knowledge of the conquerors’ ethnography can, however, only be feebly illuminated by the supposition of old but here still continuing relations with the nations which had always been close by. It might suggest itself against such an approach that one could raise the same or similar objections as those raised above (p. 366 ff.) against the early approach to Beowulf, namely that the atmosphere of civilisation and gentleness which permeates Beowulf would not suit the rough and warlike one which one might presuppose at the court of a Viking prince. But it follows from what has been said above, that it is exactly the Anglo-Saxon culture which speaks from the poem and is meant to speak from it.—Some outlines have been given for the personality of the poet through what has been said above (p. 392 ff.)...
eBook - ePubThe Mediaeval Mind (Volume 1 of 2)
A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages
- Henry Osborn Taylor(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
...“Wondrous is this wall-stone, fates have broken it, have burst the stronghold, roofs are fallen, towers tottering, hoar gate-towers despoiled, shattered the battlements, riven, fallen. · · · · Earth’s grasp holdeth the mighty workmen worn away, done for, in the hard grip of the grave.” But the noblest presentation of character in pagan Anglo-Saxon poetry is afforded by the epic poem of Beowulf, which tells the story of a Geatic hero who sets out for Denmark to slay a monster, accomplishes the feat, is nobly rewarded by the Danish king, and returns to rule his own people justly for fifty winters, when his valiant and beneficent life ends in a last victorious conflict with a hoard-guarding dragon. Here myth and tradition were not peculiarly Anglo-Saxon; but the finally recast and finished work, noble in diction, sentiment, and action, expresses the highest ethics of Anglo-Saxon heathendom. Beowulf does what he ought to do, heroically; and finds satisfaction and reward. He does not seek his pleasure, though that comes with gold and mead-drinking; consciousness of deeds done bravely and the assurance of fame sweeten death at last. [176] A century or more after the composition of this poem, there lived an Anglo-Saxon whose aims were spiritualized through Christianity, whose vigorous mind was broadened by such knowledge and philosophy as his epoch had gathered from antique sources, and whose energies were trained in generalship and the office of a king. He presents a life intrinsically good and true, manifesting itself in warfare against heathen barbarism and in endeavour to rule his people righteously and enlarge their knowledge. Many of the qualities and activities of Alfred had no place in the life of Beowulf. Yet the heathen hero and the Christian king were hewn from the same rock of Saxon manhood. Alfred’s life was established upon principles of right conduct generically the same as those of the poem...
