Beowulf as Pre-National Epic: Ethnocentrism in the Poem and its Criticism

SELIM, 2020

This paper traces both the scholarly and popular reception of the Old English epic Beowulf from the publication of the first edition of the poem in 1815 to the most recent English novel based on it from 2019. Once the work was first made available to the scholarly community, numerous editions in various languages began to appear, the most recent being in English from 2008; once editions were published, Old English scholars around the world could translate the text into their native languages beginning with Danish in 1820. Translations, in their turn, made the poem available to a general audience, which responded to the poem through an array of media: music, art, poetry, prose fiction, plays, film, television, video games, comic books, and graphic novels. The enduring, widespread appeal of the poem remains great and universal.

In: 'Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent', ed. Hans Sauer and Joanna Story. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011

In this paper I assess the implications for 'Beowulf' studies of the remarkable archaeological discoveries made since the 1980s at the village of Gammel Lejre, on the island of Zealand, Denmark. Attention is given to the possible role of Vikings in the dissemination in Britain of legends pertaining to the ancient Skjolding/Scylding line of Danish kings, with their seat of power at Lejre. Also taken into account are the dualisms involved in the former existence of at least two great halls at Lejre and in the contrastive physical topography of Lejre, with its pleasant fields immediately backing into a strange hinterland. To conclude the paper I offer a conceptual model of how, rooted in that historical site, the 'Beowulf' story eventually took on its extant character as a long heroic poem, imbued with Christian ethics and told in English alliterative verse, about a legendary Age of Gold involving heroes and kings of ancient times.

Pacific Coast Philology, 1982: 16-23, 1982

Studier i Nordisk, 2021

In this article the earliest scholarly reception of Beowulf, namely that produced in Denmark in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, is considered. Humfrey Wanley’s catalogue entry is used as a starting point to then consider how Jakob Langebek and Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin, the first editor, conceived of the poem. In particular, Thorkelin’s claim that the poem is a version of the story of Boe who died in AD 340 is taken up. While many have criticised and rejected this claim (as does this author too), nobody has investigated the full extent of what Thorkelin was proposing by making it or tried to understand how he might have arrived at the date and identification. Thorkelin’s source, Peter Friderich Suhm’s Historie af Danmark, based on Saxo and translated into German by Friedrich David Gräter, tells the story of Boe, son of Odin, born to avenge his brother Baldr’s death at the hands of Höðr. Thorkelin may have been influenced by Langebek’s genealogical linking of Odin and Beav (i.e. Beowulf) and thus accepted Suhm/Gräter’s version of their narrative, assuming that Beowulf represented a garbled version of the same: wishful thinking, misreadings and perhaps conscious obfuscation seem to have played a role in Thorkelin’s being able to see (or at least claim to see) a link between the two texts.

Beowulf in Contemporary Culture, 2020

Beowulf in Contemporary Culture (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2020)

This essay traces a history of Beowulf criticism, specifically focusing on the cultural value and literary merit that are always to some extent opposed in describing the poem's worth. It investigates assumptions about the relationships between language, poetry, and culture that informed, and sometimes continue to inform, Beowulf criticism. On the one hand, Beowulf is taken to represent an essential Englishness, while on the other hand it is linguistically alien to modern speakers. Beowulf thus forms an ideal litmus test for foundational questions such as “what makes language literary?” and “what makes a poem an English poem?” Although Beowulf is often represented as an outlier, a poem which we must learn to understand in its own terms, this survey demonstrates that Beowulf criticism reflects predictable trends in the evolution of thought about the relationship between language, literature, and culture.

For over a century and a half, scholars have worked to establish links between medieval Scandinavian saga material and the Old English alliterative epic Beowulf. The present article investigates connections between the Anglo-Saxon poem and Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar—an Old Norse saga unique for preserving a story about a Geatish monster-killer who, like Beowulf, is active in Denmark and then returns to rule his homeland as king. This investigation is first situated within the broader currents of the research field and some key assumptions about the relationship between Beowulf and its Old Norse analogues are set out. The parallels between the monster-fights of Beowulf and Hrólfr Gautreksson are then considered in detail. Hrólfr’s slaying of Grímarr in Denmark, and of his vengeful relative Grímnir further afield, are compared in turn with Beowulf’s fateful encounters with Grendel and his mother. Consideration is then given to the links between the careers and movements of these two heroes. It is demonstrated that intriguing parallels exist between the early life, fosterage and accession of these figures. The narrative links established in this article between Beowulf and Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar shed new light upon the shape of the folktale from which both texts may ultimately derive. It is argued that the political and geographical connections between these narratives tentatively point to a more significant conclusion: that both Beowulf and Hrólfs saga perhaps draw upon an older narrative concerning a Geatish monster-killer. This allows for a new insight into the relative originality of the Old English epic.

Literature Compass, 2007

This overview of late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century literary criticism charts the kinds of ongoing approaches diverse readers bring to the Old English masterpiece-approaches likely to be mainstays into the near future. The post-structuralist Beowulf has many faces: there is the archaic Beowulf, containing a dramatized social world from an anthropologically remote time and place; the feminist Beowulf, where the center of contention is over the marginality or not of female figures; the psychological Beowulf, replete with one dynamic or another of the unconscious or of the projected, monstrous Other, which in turn yields a monster-studies Beowulf. We also have the oral-traditional Beowulf with its political and ethnogenetic implications, the moral Beowulf, the comical Beowulf, and finally the dragon-inhabited Beowulf. Dozens of studies have been organized to illuminate these categories, while the survey ends on suggestions that the poem may in fact be formed deeply according to some arithmetical or geometrical scheme. By far among Old English poems Beowulf attracts the largest number of philological, metrical, textual, and literary-critical studies in any given year. One can hardly survey objectively the wealth of intelligent, provocative commentary in any discrete number of years, let alone in years characterized by upheavals in scholarly commentary. The curious reader should consult the annual bibliography published in the Old English Newsletter (OEN), with the Beowulf section's recent reviewers including Roy M. Liuzza, Susan E. Deskis, and Craig R. Davis. Also one should consult the extensive bibliographies of Victorian, modern, and contemporary scholarship accompanying A Beowulf Handbook, edited by Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (1997), along with Andy Orchard's A Critical Companion to Beowulf (2003). My modest aim is this: a review of the literary-critical work I have found most influential in the past fifteen years or so, work likely to stimulate further study along the many lines reviewed below and thus become the key inspirers of Beowulf criticism into the near future. This review has two parts: an overview with brief mention of the work that seems most important, followed by more detailed accounts of numerous studies including many of those mentioned in the general overview. However, before proceeding further, I should note some recent publications in textual and metrical areas within my time constraints, as well as

Cerae, 2024

This paper discusses some of the earliest Modern English translations of Beowulf to assess how these authors have affected scholarship surrounding masculinity. By assessing the violent and emotional elements of early Victorian translation, I am able to unveil how English nationalism is injected into the poem wherever possible. Such behaviours have been carried forth as the pinnacle of Anglo-Saxon or Germanic masculinity, with little room left to assess the contradicting behaviours such as Hrothgar’s shedding of tears or his settlement of feuds with gold instead of brute force. By conducting a close reading of the selected translations, namely John Mitchell Kemble and Benjamin Thorpe, I can identify elements of masculine-coded behaviours that translators have attempted to alter in order to construct a more consistently violent rhetoric in critical male characters, such as Beowulf, Hrothgar, and Wiglaf. This has had a profound effect on scholarship which, until the 1990s, excluded any major studies of masculinity, having been deemed too obvious to merit attention. By considering translation choices, we can further explore how masculinity is constructed within the poem and how these choices shape such identities. These translations are compared to one another using Bosworth-Toller online, as, by using a dictionary that was first published in the nineteenth-century, we can contrast translation choices within the confines of their contemporaries where possible, revealing the translators’ own self-interests and political ideologies that continue to bleed into twenty-first-century reception and scholarship.

Literator, 2003

This article defines a hypothetical late Anglo-Saxon audience: a multi-layered Christian community with competing ideologies, dialects and mythologies. It discusses how that audience might have received the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. The immediate textual context of the poem constitutes an intertextual microcosm for Beowulf. The five texts in the codex provide interesting clues to the common concerns, conflicts and interests of its audience. The organizing principle for the grouping of this disparate mixture of Christian and secular texts with Beowulf was not a sense of canonicity or the collating of monuments with an aesthetic autonomy from cultural conditions or social production. They were part of the so-called “popular culture” and provide one key to the “meanings” that interested the late Anglo-Saxon audience, who would delight in the poet=s alliteration, rhythms, word-play, irony and understatement, descriptions, aphorisms and evocation of loss and transience. The poem provided...

Beowulf gives us a vivid, realistic and factual picture of the Germanic life and manner. A vista of the social and cultural background of the first half of Six Century opens before our eyes when we read this epic. To say in brief, Beowulf is an experiment on Anglo-Saxon human conduct, an exhibition of Anglo-Saxon human motives. Beowulf is a fusion of folk-tale and history. Beowulf seems to have been a historical personage, nephew of Hygelac, the Chochilaicus whom Gregory of Tours mentions as raiding the Frisian shore, and slain by its defenders. Beowulf was present at the battle and avenged his "lord's death-Hygelac died in 520. Beowulf placed Hygelac's son on the throne and after his death reigned fifty years. This brings the historic Beowulf up to about 570.

Essays in Medieval Studies

On the surface, the Old English Beowulf seems neither modern nor modernist, given that Beowulf is one of the oldest works in the English language. Yet, the connection is far less paradoxical than it seems, not only because of the fascination that high modernists, such as Ezra Pound, had for the medieval era engaging with it frequently through their own translations, but also because medievalism is itself modernist. 1 Medievalism is born out of the desire to remake or recreate the medieval, both in how it truly was, as well as how we like to imagine it. 2 However, due to the impossibility of true recovery, medievalism is not centered solely in the past, but is instead created by the collision and combination of the medieval and the modern, the exact sort of amalgamation that stands at the heart of the modernist genre. As such, engaging with a medieval texts and its translations through a kind of modernist medievalism helps us to understand how the text also lies on this collision point, existing across multiple modernities as its own kind of amalgamation. To expand on that, I will be examining the translations of Seamus Heaney and Maria Dahvana Headley to consider and define modernist medievalism. 3 While both works exemplify the translation of a medieval work into a modernist piece, they do so in rather different ways. Heaney translates Beowulf through a focused form of spatial modernity, in which his use of regionalisms and dialect allows him to ground the work in his native land of Northern Ireland. Whereas, Headley works within a more strictly temporal modernity with her use of diffuse contemporary dialect that calls upon not only poetic turns of phrase but slang terms as well. Finally, I will use these works to construct a kind of Beowulfian palimpsest, in order to examine how Beowulf is not just Beowulf, the original text, standing alone a singular static object anchored in the past. Beowulf, as an object of study, is also a Of Bawns and Bros: Beowulf Translations and a

Translation and Literature, 2021

Co-authored with Charles Tolkien-Gillett.

2002