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 Gades yrr baer

– God cursed Grendel Came greedily loping

• Use of Apposition- a construction in which separate words have the same reference- creates 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 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 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 Beowulf may 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 HelmetShield Mount

Anglo Saxon Necklace

Anglo Saxon Ring Boar Crest

Reconstructed Helmet

• Ubi Sunt- taken from a Latin phrase– Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt – meaning –

“Where are those who were before us?”

• Common theme 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”