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Introduction to the Poem Beowulf





Overview

Who wrote Beowulf? It's hard to say. In fact, there's even debate over whether Beowulf is primarily the work of one poet or many. When was Beowulf written? That also is hard to say. Does one mean "When was it first formed as a poem?" or "When was it first written down?" The poem Beowulf as we know it today was produced in many stages of creative expression.

Oral Tradition: Legend and Myth

Germanic peoples of Scandinavia craeted myths and legends of great gods and heroes, which they shared and passed on by oral story-telling and recitation. They preserved genealogies of their royal families in this way also, often intertwining them with their myths. For example, the Germanic god of war and death, Wodan, known in Norse as Odin, was later transformed, or euhemerised, into a human being in the family tree including Beow, Scyld, Scaef, and Heremond. These names can be traced to that period of time. The name Beowulf cannot be, but his legend may well have been one of those the story-tellers and history tellers told.

Beowulf Premiers

We have no means of telling who the poet's first audience was: perhaps in some royal hall, where the lord and his men still delighted in the ancient nobility of the dynasty; or perhaps in some monastery to which a king retired, as we know King Sigeberht of East Anglia did when he gave up his throne in the second quarter of the seventh century, and as King Ethelred of Mercial did i9n 704, and Ceolwulf of Northumbria in 737, and Eadberht of NOrthumbria in 758. Kings like these proved by their abdication that they thought the pagan glory of pledging in the hall, of victory in the field, of treasure-giving and of loyalty to an earthly throne, a vain ideal. A poet may have written a poem like Beowulf for one of the many courts, to teach a king wisdom, or for some monastery whose refectory contained a man descended froma line of Spear-Danes and not contemptuous of that ancestry. It is only a guess; but that is the kind of original audience that would have heard Beowulf with understanding.

E.G.Stanley, full citation in bibliography, site page

Composition of the Poem

Much later, escendents of Germanic Danes who had invaded England in the fifth and sixth centuries CE still preserved memories of this heroic past. With their conversion to Christianity and their change to a more settled life in more stable monarchies, old traditions were not usually abandoned but were often blended with newer interpretations and elements.

Somewhere, sometime someone in this period apparently brought together oral traditions--stories, songs, or memorized poetic tales--shaped them artistically, and wove them together into a single work for oral and musical performance. The way to "do" poetry in those days was not to read it from a page but to sing or chant it with accompaniment on the harp, and the poem was probably not written down at this time. When did this happen? Modern scholars used to set the date as between 750 and 800, but currently many argue that it could have been later, perhaps even the late 900's.

However, there is still debate over the "legendariness" or the "literariness." of Beowulf--how much the work in its final form (usually conceived as the Cotton manuscript) was shaped and produced by gradual, collective processes of folk oral tradition, and how much it is the work of an anonymous and individual artist. There are debates over the "historicity" and "literariness" of its account of the past as well. These debates are similar to debates about the origins of many other early works from other cultures, including the Odyssey and Illiad of Homer and the Pentateuch. It will not be explored here, but E.G. Stanley provides interesting images of how the poem might have crossed the line from folklore to formal art.

First Manuscript

Just as we know that Beowulf was made into a formal poem out of oral traditions, but we know little of when, by whom, or how, so also we see that somewhere, sometime someone wrote the poem down by hand. Sometime must have been by the early eleventh century CE, since the only manuscript still existing dates from that time. There is no way to know whether other manuscripts had been written or who wrote this one, called "the Cotton manuscript", but it has an interesting later history

Around the beginning of the seventeenth century CE, this document was owned by Sir Robert Cotton, and in 1731 it was damaged by fire badly enough that some of its passages are unreadable. Parts of the poem will forever be a mystery. Since that fire, the manuscript has been kept in the British Museum. You can see an image of it, and read about efforts to restore it, on the Electronic Beowulf web site reachable through the internet page of this site.

Modern Study and Translation

The work Beowulf, as encountered by modern readers, has undergone yet another layer of interpretation and writing by scholars, editors, and translators. Some have made "correctioins" to the text--best, rational guesses at what confusing words in the manuscript should have been. Typically they do this where words seem enough out of place that they might be the result of a "error"--someone's mistake in copying the manuscript down. Editors have prepared Old English editions, more recent printings of Beowulf as they think it was meant to be read by its original artists. Translators have made every effort to convert the "real" meanings or words and passages to modern English verse or prose translations. They too add their interpretations as they go. It is unavoidable as they sift among the many connnotations of Old English and modern English words, as Donaldson explains.

A Translator's Quandary

One sentence will illustrate the kind of difficulty the translator of Beowulf constantly encounters. It occurs during the hero's fight with Grendel's mother in her under-water hall. The sword Hrunting has failed him; he has grappled with the monster=woman and thrown her to the floor; then he himself stumbles and falls. At this point the poet says, "Ofsaet �a �one selegyst": "Then she sat upon the hall-guest." This is a reasonable action, for she is much bigger than he, and is preparing to stab him. Yet if one is using a consistently heroic style, the simple verb "sat"--expecially in juxtaposition with the seemingly "epic" epithet "hall-guest"--will simply not do; in order to preserve the translator's and the hero's dignity, Grendel's mother must throw, hurl, fling, or otherwise precipitate herself upon her adversary. If, on the other hand, one is using the colloquial style, then "hall-guest" is an embarrassment, and one is apt to go through the semantic process of hall-guest = hall-visitor or hall-stranger = visitor or stranger in the hall = intruder. And "intruder" is in many ways quite satisfactory, but it lacks whatever poetential for quick, grim humor the expression "hall-guest" has. Surely something specious has been added if Grendel's mother acts more dramatically than just sitting upon Beowulf, and something good has been lost if he becomes other than a hall-guest

E. Talbot Donaldson, full citation in bibliography on site page.

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