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[CROSSTALK]

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[MUSIC]

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So seeing as this is the first in this series of talks called

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Great Writers Inspire, I'm going to talk about what's often regarded as

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the first great text in English literature.

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The long Old English poem that we now call Beowulf.

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I'm going to ask a few questions about what we mean when we say a writer

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in the Anglo-Saxon period, and

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whether we can really talk of the Beowulf poet in the way we talk of say, Swift or

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Blake or some of the other writers who'll be discussed later on.

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Beowulf survives today in just one manuscript copy.

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This was made by two scribes, we call them rather unimaginative scribes A and

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B, they were working around the year 1000, we know that from the handwriting.

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And the manuscript is now in the British Library, you can go and see it,

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it's on public display most of the time.

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And as you can see from the slide, the manuscript's not in very good condition.

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It's 1000 years old, and it's something of a miracle that it survives at all.

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A lot of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were destroyed in the Norman Conquest.

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The few that survived that didn't survive the dissolution of the monasteries,

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Beowulf also survived a fire in 1731.

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It was thrown out of a library window.

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So we're really very lucky to have it,

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some of the leaves of the manuscript are actually singed around the edges,

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not this one, in fact, but it's still in pretty bad condition.

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Of course, the scribe who wrote these particular lines of Beowulf,

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scribe A, wasn't the poet, although he might be said to be the author or

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editor of the text that we now read in that.

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This scribe provides us with our own new version of his part of the Baewolf story.

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There could of course,

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be as many versions of this story as there were Anglo-Saxon poets to tell it.

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Each poet could've amplified or

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embellished parts of this story to suit his audience.

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In fact, as we'll see in the poem that we now have,

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there are several examples of oral poets or

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shops as they're called in old English, shaping or adapting traditional tales.

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If we look at the first few lines of Beowulf, then, it says on the next slide,

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we can see how the poet presents himself in the role of a traditional narrator.

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He's engaging a listening audience in a collective act of remembrance, and

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I'll just read that for you in Old English.

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[FOREIGN] So if I translate that word for

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word it means something like watch or

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listen, we of the spear Danes in days of

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your people kings might or strength have learnt about.

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So we have learnt about the might or strength of Danish kings in days of Yule.

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How those earthlings achieve glory.

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So the narrator wants us to think of him as part of a group,

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we have heard these things.

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He's someone who mediates cultural memory through story.

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He's not an original artist in the modern sense, but

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rather a guardian of tales which are part of a common inheritance.

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The inherited nature of this story is emphasized throughout the poem.

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He keeps using phrases like [FOREIGN] I have learned, or [FOREIGN] I heard.

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And the narrator often refers to Germanic legends in a very allusive and

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sometimes even cryptic way, which certainly implies that his

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audience was already familiar with much of this material.

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But how traditional is Beowulf and

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to what extent is the poet engaged in creating a new original text?

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So ,the Old English word for poets or is related to the Old English verb,

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to shape or create.

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Anglo-Saxons are very interested in the myth of the oral poet,

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Bede tells the story of Caedmon,

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who was an illiterate cow herd who received the gift of poetry from God.

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This is a sort of origin myth then for English poetry.

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In another 10th century or early 11th century manuscript called the Exeter book,

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you've got two poems called Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer, which described all poets

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lamenting the fact that they don't now have a status in society or jobs.

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In Beowulf, there are several passages where a Danish shop

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is carefully described in the act of shaping old tales into new forms.

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One effect of these performances is to give us a kind of interpretive gloss for

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the events of the main narrative.

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So for example, the building of the Great Hall Heorot is marked

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by [FOREIGN] shoppers, the sweet or clear song of the shop.

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And this shop or poet paraphrases Genesis one, telling us how [FOREIGN] so

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how the almighty shaped or created all of life.

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So this pun on [FOREIGN] and

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[FOREIGN] identifies the act of poetic shaping with that of divine creation.

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And in fact in Old English, [FOREIGN] is a common word for God.

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The shop's ability to explain human history in terms of biblical story

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also aligns in with the narrator

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who consistently grounds his tale in the mythical patterns of the Old Testament.

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So Grendel's exile from Heorot, and his assaults on the newly created hall,

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echo the falls of Lucifer and Adam and Eve in fact.

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And Grendel's status as an exile is explained by the narrator in terms of

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a genealogy which traces his ancestry back to Cain.

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During the feasting in Heorot,

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after Beowulf's defense of the hall against Grendel, Hrothgar sings

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an abridged version of a story called the [FOREIGN] the Frisian slaughter.

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This story was well known to the Anglo-Saxons,

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it's featured in another poem that we call the Finnesburg Fragment.

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In the fragment, you get the focus on the defense of the hall.

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But in Beowulf the shop focuses instead on the themes of maternal grief, and

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the impulse towards revenge.

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The shop's choice of material turns out to be prophetic.

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As Grendel's mother is soon going to attack Heorot,

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in fact the same night in revenge for the killing of her own son.

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Another example of the art of the oral poet occurs when another shop

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celebrates Beowulf's victory over Grendel by way of allusion to two

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figures from earlier poetic traditions and this is the next slide.

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[FOREIGN]

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So sometimes

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the kings deign,

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a man laden

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with stories,

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remembering

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songs.

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He who had great many of old sayings remembered from a far.

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He found other words truly bound together.

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The man afterwards began to recount Beowulf's tale skillfully.

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And successfully to recount a story to change with words.

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He said a great deal that he had heard said about Sigmund's famous deeds.

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Many unknown things about the exploits of son far travels.

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Things which the sons of men did not readily know.

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So, I think this account of a Danish oral poet creating a new poem about Beowulf,

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from existing materials can give us a useful way of thinking about the Beowulf

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poet's own compositional technique.

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Both poets possess knowledge of old tales beyond the memories of their audience, and

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both locate this original material in a traditional context,

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by referring to what they've heard said.

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Another story which the audience of Beowulf probably did not readily know

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is that of Beowulf the three monster fights.

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This story doesn't survive in Scandinavian tradition and

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most critics think it was probably an English edition to Scandinavian Legends.

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So for the final part of this talk, I'm going to briefly discuss how the poem

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invites us to think critically about just how traditional Beowulf actually is.

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On his entrance into Heorot, this is his first real entrance in the poem,

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Beowulf declares his reputation as the binder of five Giants and

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an unspecified number of sea monsters.

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But this story soon question by Hrothgar's his kind of advisor who's called Unferth,

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Unferth claims to have heard tales about Beowulf losing a swimming competition

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with a guy called Breca.

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And this is the next quotation.

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Unferth says to him, I'll just translate this for you.

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Are you the Beowulf, who competed against Breca in a swimming contest

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across open water, where in your arrogance,

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you tried the waves and for a foolish boast risked your life in deep water?

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He out swam you, he had more strength.

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In support of this case against Beowulf,

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we learned much later in the poem that the had considered Beowulf lazy and cowardly.

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But the budding hero denounces Unferth's version of events and

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cast himself as the the greatest swimmer of the two.

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And brave vanquisher of nine So we can see Beowulf here

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performing a role equivalent to that of the traditional narrator and his shops.

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He's amplifying a version of his own tale before a listening audience.

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These same rhetorical skills are on display later, when Beowulf returns to

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Hygelac's court and embellishes his tale of his adventures among the Danes.

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He adds all kinds of new details, he describes Grendel's glove,

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a kind of pouch in which he puts these corpses that he's going to eat, and

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he starts talking about Hrothgar's daughter, Freawaru.

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None of this was mentioned before.

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Is he telling the truth?

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So Beowulf shares with the poet and his fictional shops a taste for

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poetic license, embellishment and amplification.

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He declares before Unferth, that he had the greater [FOREIGN] sea strength.

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And in his speech to Hygelac,

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he praises the company in Heorot as the most joyous under the heavens.

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So Beowulf invites its audience to consider the complex role of oral poets,

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in this case Beowulf himself, as mediators of stories,

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which they must reshape with each new performance.

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Of course, Beowulf is not in its present form and oral poem, but

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it's a written text whatever its origins may have been.

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After the conversion in the sixth and seventh centuries,

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Anglo-Saxon England underwent a transition from a state of primary orality,

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where the technology of the word was as yet unknown, to one of residual orality,

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where literacy is the preserve of an educated elite.

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Stories about Hrothgar or Hygelac must have originally circulated

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in oral form, given the illiterate nature of Southern Scandinavia in this period.

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It's likely that some of these stories were also the subject of oral poems in

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Anglo-Saxon England.

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But as these tales encountered the literate culture of Christianity,

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they came to be copied into manuscripts and thereby fixed to some extent.

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It's impossible to say whether the interest in orality in Beowulf

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was inspired by the poet's first hand experience of the performance of shops.

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When we talk about the Beowulf poets were really speaking of the individual or

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individuals who shaped these traditions into the text that we now read.

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So perhaps we should think of the term The Beowulf poet as a collective noun.

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So I hope that I've shown you some ways in which the Beowulf poet, or

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rather Beowulf the text, engages in an instructive, metafictional discourse,

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about the inherently unstable nature of oral storytelling.

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Thank you.

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>> [APPLAUSE]