My name is Frances Leneghan, I am university lecturer in Old English, and I'm a fellow of St Cross College here at Oxford,
and I work on old English literature by which we mean literature that was written in England between about 650 and the 11th century.
It's what we call the Anglo-Saxon period.
And I'm interested in all aspects of old English literature, poetry and prose, particularly the poem Beowulf.
SP2 -What first attracted you to the study of old English?
Well, I studied English studies at university in Trinity College, Dublin, and like here at Oxford's, old English was part of the syllabus.
We did it in the first year. And I have to admit, I struggled with it. I struggled with the language and I found it very alien and strange.
And in fact, it was this that actually appealed to me. I ended up studying a lot of middle English literature and my third and fourth year,
and this sort of led me naturally back to the roots or the origins of English writing and English literature.
And I think in particular, the fact that at school level in England, in the UK, we often start with 1066
We start with the end of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom and the beginning of the Norman Kingdoms.
We trace the history of our kings and queens back to William the Conqueror. And this always puzzled me.
And I was rather ignorant of what happened before the Norman conquest. And I suppose that's what got my attention.
This sort of strange, seemingly very foreign literature that the more you look at it begins to emerge as English.
So I believe that at Cambridge they're not studying old English within the English undergraduate.
Why do you think Oxford has decided to keep this on? Well, it's a contentious issue.
Even today, the Anglo Saxon referred to their language as English, English,
and there's no reason to cut old English off from middle English or early modern English except out of a sense of convenience.
Really, it is difficult. It's challenging.
And undergraduates do find it difficult, but I don't think that's a reason to cut it off from the rest of English literature.
I think it's very difficult to read middle English literature if you don't know old English literature, particularly the alliterative poetry.
Some of the great poems of the 14th century are written in a style that harks
back to the Anglo-Saxon alliterative styles so Sir Gawain and the Green knight
For example, we're all familiar with this poem. If you don't know any old English, it's very, very difficult to understand this stuff.
So by cutting off old English, you're also cutting off much of middle English.
So it makes sense to start at the beginning. So do you think the old English should be introduced before undergraduate level?
Do you think that would be useful? I think there are many modern translations of old English poetry that are appealing to younger readers.
When people come for interview here at Oxford, they've often read Seamus Heaney is Beowulf, for example.
And I think that's a good way of familiarising yourself with at least the themes and some aspects of the style of old English poetry.
Heaney, to some extent, imitates the alliterative style of old English and other modern poets have tried that.
I think there's a lot to be said for introducing sixth formers to some aspects of the early history of the English language as well.
If they're interested in linguistics, just to get a sense of where the English language comes from,
most of the words we're using now come from old English. You only have to look at the OED to see that.
And I think there's a lot to be said for at least introducing it in small doses.
I know that some people do Chaucer at a level now, but in some ways Chaucer is the beginning of what I would call modern English literature.
It's a sort of halfway point in English literary history, and it's good to get people at least interested in what was happening before Chaucer.
I mean, the style of old English poetry to some extent dies out in the late 14th century.
Deliberative style goes into decline, but there are still traces of it to this day.
You'll find it in the works of Hopkins, for example, or Auden and Heaney,
not only in his translation of Beowulf, but in his own poetry often uses old English poetic style.
So it's still around us, even though we might not be directly aware of it.
So I know that you spent a lot of time studying Beowulf. Why do you think it's still really important to study this epic poem?
Why should we read Beowulf? Woody Allen says to Annie Hall that you should never take any course that requires you to read Beowulf.
There is a sort of perception that Beowulf is this difficult obstacle to be overcome maybe in the first year of an English degree.
And the Norton Anthology, it's at the very beginning. You read that first and you move on to romance or stuff that's more familiar.
It's a sort of Quarrie to be overcome. Balfe is a difficult work, I think self consciously difficult and complex.
It's far and away the most sophisticated poem in any European vernacular, modern European vernacular before Danti.
And if you're interested in literature, that's a good enough reason to study it.
But if you're interested in English literature in particular, Beowulf perhaps doesn't cast a shadow so much of a middle English literature.
But in old English literature it seems to have influenced other works.
There's a life of St.
Andrew, for example, in verse which seems to borrow heavily from Beowulf, and it may also have influenced other forms of writing,
like royal genealogies and so on, which might borrow from Beowulf as a poem in its own right.
It's a very rewarding text to study. It's very rich, it's very dense.
It contains many genres within it. It's not simply heroic poetry or epic poetry.
It contains elements and sermons and all kinds of other genres within it.
And by reading Beowulf, you really get a sense of the range. Of styles available in old English poetry.
We think of prospective undergraduates, what skills can they gain in the process of examining this classic book by reading Beowulf?
You not only learn about early English history and culture and the way the Anglo-Saxon is understood,
their own history, their pre migration history on the continent.
But you also learn the skills of close reading that you need as part of an English degree.
When doing old English, you're looking at morphemes and phonemes. You're looking at language very, very carefully.
It's probably the closest close reading you'll ever do in your English course,
and it teaches you to look at style and to look as poetic devices in sort of microcosm the commentary aspect of the old English paper.
It's very important in that respect, I think. But it also teaches you to to seek to place the text within a context.
Beowulf is famously a text without a context. We don't know when it was composed.
It could be any time between about seven hundred and eleven hundred. Ten hundred is the date of the manuscript.
But some people have insisted on an early 11th century date for the poem, which is controversial.
But even by trying to date the poem or locate it within a historical context, it introduces students to the problems of contextualising literature,
the importance of it, and also the difficulties that we have with the text that doesn't really have a context.
So in light of that, are there any echoes of Beowulf in modern literary works?
Can you see, in other words, they adopt similar narrative devices or stylistic techniques?
The narrative style of Beowulf is something that's always posed problems.
Klaiber, who is the great editor of the poem in the early 20th century,
said that the poem lacks steady advance as if the poem was meant to advance steadily.
It doesn't move from one thing to the next in any linear fashion.
It's constantly moving backwards and forwards.
But this is something that modern readers are familiar with, in fact, and we're familiar with it from television, from radio.
It's what we might call a polyphonic narrative or an interlaced narrative.
It's constantly zooming backwards and forwards in time.
And this confuses some readers who are looking for something different, looking for a straightforward tale about monster slaying and so on.
They're often disappointed when they come to Beowulf and find that it's as much about the
history of fifth and sixth century Scandinavian kings as it is about Grendel or the Dragon,
and that style of telling a story of not really beginning at the beginning and proceeding to
the middle and proceeding to the end of things that we find throughout modern literature.
In fact, modernist literature, postmodern literature is often described in those sort of terms.
So these are things that we might be familiar with in modern writing or storytelling in terms of the style choices passing in the late 14th century,
dismisses alliterative verse and says, I'm a Southern man, I can't run around rough, I don't do that sort of thing.
But many poets in the 14th century were still using that technique. I've mentioned the go in poet already, Langoulant, etc.
In more recent years, modern poets have engaged with the stylistic aspects of all English poetry.
I've mentioned Hopkins already who uses what he calls spring rhythm, which is influenced by his reading of old English poetry,
the sort of densely alliterative style and also the use of compound diction.
Old English poetry is characterised by compounding.
Will you stick two words together to create a new word like railroad, which is a compound for the sea?
And you'll find this in Hopkins's works. Others have attempted sort of retellings of old English poetry that avoid the style of old English poetry,
but try and update the ideas to some extent.
So, for example, Bernard O'Donohue has a translation or a reworking of The Wanderer set in a modern context that avoids old initial iterative style,
but uses those ideas of exile and wandering and isolation and puts them in a sort of modern context.
These are ways of getting people interested in old English, perhaps, but also of re-engaging with old English literature as literature.
So we're talking about the way in which we could no echoes of Beowulf.
In modern times, there's been multiple adaptations, including the two thousand seven computer animated film.
What's your take on these modern interpretations? Yeah, well, Beowulf is more popular now than it ever has been.
I mean, between the copying of the poem in the manuscript that we have in around the year 1000 and the 19th century,
it hardly seems to have been read at all.
And yet now you walk into any bookshop and you can see ten different translations of it and you've got films and video games and all sorts of things.
In some ways, the twenty seven film is a very sophisticated response, I think,
to the problems that critics have encountered in trying to make sense of the film.
In some ways, it smooths out many of those problems that we have with Beowulf.
Why doesn't the poem begin with the hero Beowulf?
Why does it begin with someone else who seems to be called Beowulf, who doesn't have any obvious connexion with our hero?
And Beowulf travels to the court of King Growth and kills a monster Grendel.
There is a debate over the succession in Rothko's court. Beowulf is a perfect candidate for the throne.
In many ways, the people seem to want him to become king. It would make sense for him to become king, and yet he doesn't.
He returns home to his own kingdom, where later he becomes king of his own tribe.
And this sort of bipartite structures has troubled. Critics, but in the film, he does become king of the Danes and he does marry Rothko's daughter.
And so the hero gets the girl. The film turns it into a sort of modern family drama, in a sense, a sort of psychodrama.
It's about the king as a fatally flawed individual who lies about his own achievements, in fact.
And this is also something that I think is there in the poem, the sense of telling tall tales about yourself.
There are different versions of burbles fight with Breker, for example. Beowulf tells one version of invertors another.
And in the film in the 2007 film, the Robert Zemeckis film Babel doesn't in fact, Paul Grendel's arm off.
It's ripped off by chain that's tied around a door. And I think Beowulf is almost surprised by that.
But later in the film, when he's become king, a poet recites the account of Beowulf pulling Grendel's arm off from the old English poem, in fact.
And the king looks rather sheepish. So I think there's something interesting going on there.
I think all the tensions within the palm of the structure, the many of the themes are resolved in this film.
But if we focus on those things that they've actually smoothed over, those are some of the most interesting things in Babel, I think.
Do you think it can be useful to use some of these modern interpretations when trying to understand?
What do you think it's important just to start with the text itself?
Yeah, I think a lot of people that teach Beowulf now say you shouldn't look at the film because it's all wrong, but I think they will.
The poem that we call Beowulf is simply one version of a series of stories that must have circulated from the time.
If you go back and forth, go from the sixth century all the way up until the date of the manuscript.
And within the poem itself, there's a sort of commentary on this tradition of storytelling.
People tell stories about each other within the poem and then they're often contradicted.
So I think Balfe itself opens up this idea of their not being one version of a tale.
Every poet tells his own story and uses traditional stories to create a new story.
And the story of Beowulf then doesn't end with the Beowulf manuscript.
I think these modern interpretations tell us much more about our society than they do about the Bible.
But that in itself is very interesting and that's something I always get my
students to look at as modern translations or interpretations of the Bible.
But we have to put the poem itself at the centre of our study because our principal interest in old English literature.
So do you ever forget that you're reading something that's between the 8th and 11th century?
No, because to read Beowulf is very challenging and you're constantly having to look words
up and think about grammar and think about complex problems of interpretations.
So there's a real sense of otherness about it, which is in a way very appealing.
So there's no danger that you're ever going to just flick through very naturally.
Having said that, the more familiar you are with the poem, the more you can appreciate its complexity and subtlety.
But it's a challenge worth taking.
Yeah, it's a challenge that I think if you want to come to university and read English literature, you want to be challenged.
You don't just want to read stuff that you can read for fun at home.
So it's probably the most challenging material that you might read as part of an English degree.
But many students find it the most rewarding, I think, in that respect. So to sum up, why should we keep studying?
For the first time I ever went to an academic conference and people asked me what I was working on and I said Beowulf.
And many people said, hasn't that already been done?
And this puzzled me really, because every time someone comes to read Beowulf, they find something new in it.
And there's a whole industry of academic writing on the poem.
But every student who reads it, everybody who reads the translation of it, find something new in it.
I think this is because Beowulf is a poem that throws up questions and it doesn't provide easy answers.
One of the main themes of the poem is Warfare is fighting. It begins with a king attacking his neighbours and winning the respect of the poet.
He says that was a good king because he terrifies his neighbours.
But soon we find that his descendants are then terrified by a monster who seems to be doing very similar things to the king himself,
destroying whole terrifying things in the hall.
And at the end of the poem, we have a tribe faced with invasion who've lost their own king because of his decision to go to war.
And so the poem is constantly throwing up these questions about when we should fight, what are the consequences of fighting,
what it means to fight in a society where war is is endemic, is necessary for the survival of the people, but also has consequences.
And Will keeps throwing up these sort of questions and critics keep debating them.
But these are exactly the questions that I think the poem is designed to foreground.