Let’s face it.
Between English classes, Lit classes, World Culture classes, and History classes, there’s
no escaping The Epic Poem.
THE ODYSSEY, THE ILIAD, THE AENEID, THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH, BEOWULF.
At some point, we’re going to have to confront the lyrical beauty of big strong men in big
strong armor fighting big strong monsters, saving their kingdoms, and loving on their
ladies.
Or loving their male best friend —but that’s another poem.
Today we’re going to take a look at one particular Epic Poem and follow its long,
winding journey from way, way, way long ago allllll the way to the present day, and we’ll
interrogate its relevance to our lives in the here and now.
Come now, Geats and Danes, to the violent, bloody, mythic, mysterious world of BEOWULF.
[INTRO]
To see BEOWULF’s malleability in action, look no further than the very first word of
the poem.
BEOWULF has a sort of “once upon a time” structure, wherein the narrator is telling
us a tale.
He has to get our attention somehow, so he starts off by exclaiming, “Hwæt!”
A lot of older versions use stuffier translations like “Lo!” or “Hark!” but you gotta
party like it’s 1999, so Seamus Heaney begins his translation with “So.”
It’s Friday afternoon and your Lit teacher assigns you a five-page book report due Monday
on Jimmy Squibbles’s most recent magnum opus, HYPE HOUSE BLOOD BATH.
And you start with the basics.
HYPE HOUSE BLOOD BATH by…
Jimmy Squibbles.
Author, okay, check.
Some historical context now: Written at Jimmy’s Salton Sea lakehouse in the summer of 2018.
Check.
Hey, this book report stuff ain’t so bad after all!
Okay, hotshot, now try that with BEOWULF.
BEOWULF… written in… uh…
When was BEOWULF written anyway?
Okay, let’s try a softball.
Who wrote BEOWULF?
Wait a minute… was BEOWULF even written at all?
While scholars agree on all things HYPE HOUSE BLOOD BATH—and how could they not, it’s
such a tightly-written piece of work—they really don’t agree on much when it comes
to BEOWULF.
Except one thing—the plot!
Pagan Scandinavia, 6th century.
King Hrothgar’s mead hall.
Mead is an alcohol made with fermented honey, and a mead hall is a big building with one
big room where… you guessed it—much mead is enjoyed.
Rowdy places, those mead halls.
Hrothgar is King of the Danes, a North Germanic tribe in southern Scandinavia, an area that
today includes Denmark proper and Skåneland, which is the southern tip of the Scandinavian
Peninsula.
One night, a monster named Grendel comes to crash Hrothgar’s mead hall festivities and
ends up killing most of Hrothgar’s men.
Enter Beowulf, a mighty warrior charged with killing Grendel.
Beowulf is a Geat, another North Germanic tribe that resides in the Land of the Geats.
And Beowulf does what anyone would do before they fight a fearsome monster—he gets into
his birthday suit.
The way Beowulf sees it, if Grendel doesn’t have weapons or armor, why should he?
Beowulf slays Grendel, and there is much celebration and even more mead.
But Grendel’s mother is having none of this.
Beowulf killed her boy, y’all.
So she attacks Hrothgar’s mead hall, Beowulf kills her, and there is much celebration.
And much mead.
So much mead.
Beowulf bids Hrothgar and his Danes farewell, returns home to Geatland, and becomes King
of the Geats.
Fifty years go by.
Then one day, boom, a dragon attacks!
By this time Beowulf is old and isn’t as spry as he once was.
Plus it’s a dragon.
I feel like this is a job for that Hiccup kid he trains dragons.
He defeats the dragon—I mean, this is Beowulf we’re talking about—but not before the
dragon mortally h-wounds him.
Beowulf’s body is cremated, a tower is built in his honor, and I assume much mead is also
had.
Beowulf, the mighty warrior, will live on in our memories, and his legend will be told
for generations.
Now… how that story is told is up for much debate.
Here’s the opening line of Seamus Heaney’s introduction to his 1999 translation of BEOWULF:
“The poem called BEOWULF was composed sometime between the middle of the seventh and the
end of the tenth century of the first millennium, in the language that is to-day called Anglo-Saxon
or Old English.”
Right off the bat, we’re dealing with a window of 300+ years as to when BEOWULF could
have been composed - that’s like comparing today to 1821.
We were only five US presidents deep by then.
And to further complicate matters, we don’t even know what form that composition took.
It very well could have begun as a story passed down through oral tradition, perpetually evolving
and changing only to then be later written down.
This oral tradition theory opens up a whole can of worms for scholars and is—you guessed
it!—”up for much debate”!
See, if BEOWULF began as a story told around the campfire, it would be nearly impossible
to trace it back to a so-called “author” because it probably wouldn’t even have one.
Detractors of the oral tradition theory cite a number of issues, not the least of which
is the sheer complexity of BEOWULF.
To them, the sophisticated language, structure, and themes are so complex that had they somehow
been verbally passed down, they would have had a nearly impossible chance of surviving
the messy game of telephone that is oral tradition.
Regardless of how BEOWULF came to be written down, we do have a manuscript.
Says translator Seamus Heaney: “We know about the poem more or less by chance because
it exists in one manuscript only.”
And boy oh boy is she a scrappy survivor, barely making it through a fire in the eighteenth
century.
Our dating for the manuscript is between 975 and 1025, a window of only fifty years, which,
for BEOWULF is like a dang bullseye.
And whatever mysteries already surrounded BEOWULF, they ballooned exponentially when
the text was “then transcribed and titled, retranscribed and edited, translated and adapted,
interpreted and reinterpreted, until it has become canonical.”
And even though BEOWULF is fantastical as all get-out, it is deeply interwoven with
real-life elements that not only muddy the waters as to what aspects of BEOWULF are historical,
but also give levity to some of the more outrageous stuff.
These historical figures,…
...clans,...
...and events...
...certainly make it tough to untangle the historical from the fantastical.
All this talk of monsters and dragons and the use of historical elements as a way to
lend believability to fantasy… guess it’s only a matter of time before we talk about
the man himself: J.R.R Tolkien.
BEOWULF was a huge influence on Tolkien and his work.
So much so that he’s widely regarded as the man responsible for kickstarting modern
criticism of BEOWULF.
Tolkien’s argument was that scholars had been so wrapped up in the historicity of BEOWULF
that they were neglecting its value as a piece of literature.
In his 1936 lecture “BEOWULF: The Monsters and the Critics," Tolkien noted that BEOWULF
“is in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite
overshadows the historical content…”
Indeed, the allure of BEOWULF is so powerful that it can transform a bored student into
a bonafide translator.
Maria Dahvana Headley, whose vibrant 2020 translation of BEOWULF views the poem and
its characters through a modern lens, admits that even she didn’t really take to BEOWULF
at first.
After reading an old translation, pre-Seamus Heaney’s 1999 version, she reflected,
“I’m not going to lie to you.
I read it, and I thought, “All of the elements are here for this to be thrilling.
And instead it feels just kind of flat.”
Headley’s experience with BEOWULF is a prime example of the now self-perpetuating legacy
of the poem.
It’s been studied and translated so often that younger generations continue to discover
different ways of connecting with the material.
While the poem has been translated into thirty-eight other languages, the number of translations
and adaptations varies.
True BEOWULF style, we can’t even agree on the number of translations.
In British academic Andy Orchard’s 2003 A Critical Companion to Beowulf, he cites
thirty-three "representative" translations in his bibliography.
Also in 2003 An annotated list from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
that cites more than 300 translations and adaptations.
The BEOWULF's Afterlives Bibliographic Database online lists an ever-growing number of translations,
and adaptations.
As of the time of this recording, the number’s at 743—
[Princess touches her earpiece] Wait, what’s that?
Ah, 744.
Great.
BEOWULF is so popular I’m -- 745- going to have to remake this video every month,
aren’t I?
BEOWULF is the gift that keeps on giving, continually evolving as each of us brings
our own experiences to it.
We change the text and the text changes us.
BEOWULF scholar Chris Jones likens BEOWULF to other poems, which “move through time,
being kept alive by readings, misreadings, re-imaginings, and accruing stories and significance
around themselves as they go.
They are stories, as well as telling stories.”
BEOWULF, he says, “is not an object fixed in the past.”
Even if we never ever EVER find out anything more about BEOWULF—who wrote it, where it
came from, when it came from—we still have BEOWULF.
So of course, historical context matters, cultural context matters, religious context
matters, but it’s not everything.
So, there is clearly something accessible here for audiences: especially when you break
it down to “cool dude fights monsters”.
I mean that’s just anime.
Which means-don’t be scared of BEOWULF.
Yeah, it’s old.
But it’s precisely because of its oldness that it’s so incredibly fascinating.
It’s been studied to death, and yet its origins still remain so mysterious.
And because it’s so old, its influence over the stories we read, watch, and tell today
is so deep-rooted, that we’ve all already experienced BEOWULF and its legacy whether
we know it or not.