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So seeing as this is the first in this series of talks called
Great Writers Inspire, I'm going to talk about what's often regarded as
the first great text in English literature.
The long Old English poem that we now call Beowulf.
I'm going to ask a few questions about what we mean when we say a writer
in the Anglo-Saxon period, and
whether we can really talk of the Beowulf poet in the way we talk of say, Swift or
Blake or some of the other writers who'll be discussed later on.
Beowulf survives today in just one manuscript copy.
This was made by two scribes, we call them rather unimaginative scribes A and
B, they were working around the year 1000, we know that from the handwriting.
And the manuscript is now in the British Library, you can go and see it,
it's on public display most of the time.
And as you can see from the slide, the manuscript's not in very good condition.
It's 1000 years old, and it's something of a miracle that it survives at all.
A lot of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were destroyed in the Norman Conquest.
The few that survived that didn't survive the dissolution of the monasteries,
Beowulf also survived a fire in 1731.
It was thrown out of a library window.
So we're really very lucky to have it,
some of the leaves of the manuscript are actually singed around the edges,
not this one, in fact, but it's still in pretty bad condition.
Of course, the scribe who wrote these particular lines of Beowulf,
scribe A, wasn't the poet, although he might be said to be the author or
editor of the text that we now read in that.
This scribe provides us with our own new version of his part of the Baewolf story.
There could of course,
be as many versions of this story as there were Anglo-Saxon poets to tell it.
Each poet could've amplified or
embellished parts of this story to suit his audience.
In fact, as we'll see in the poem that we now have,
there are several examples of oral poets or
shops as they're called in old English, shaping or adapting traditional tales.
If we look at the first few lines of Beowulf, then, it says on the next slide,
we can see how the poet presents himself in the role of a traditional narrator.
He's engaging a listening audience in a collective act of remembrance, and
I'll just read that for you in Old English.
[FOREIGN] So if I translate that word for
word it means something like watch or
listen, we of the spear Danes in days of
your people kings might or strength have learnt about.
So we have learnt about the might or strength of Danish kings in days of Yule.
How those earthlings achieve glory.
So the narrator wants us to think of him as part of a group,
we have heard these things.
He's someone who mediates cultural memory through story.
He's not an original artist in the modern sense, but
rather a guardian of tales which are part of a common inheritance.
The inherited nature of this story is emphasized throughout the poem.
He keeps using phrases like [FOREIGN] I have learned, or [FOREIGN] I heard.
And the narrator often refers to Germanic legends in a very allusive and
sometimes even cryptic way, which certainly implies that his
audience was already familiar with much of this material.
But how traditional is Beowulf and
to what extent is the poet engaged in creating a new original text?
So ,the Old English word for poets or is related to the Old English verb,
to shape or create.
Anglo-Saxons are very interested in the myth of the oral poet,
Bede tells the story of Caedmon,
who was an illiterate cow herd who received the gift of poetry from God.
This is a sort of origin myth then for English poetry.
In another 10th century or early 11th century manuscript called the Exeter book,
you've got two poems called Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer, which described all poets
lamenting the fact that they don't now have a status in society or jobs.
In Beowulf, there are several passages where a Danish shop
is carefully described in the act of shaping old tales into new forms.
One effect of these performances is to give us a kind of interpretive gloss for
the events of the main narrative.
So for example, the building of the Great Hall Heorot is marked
by [FOREIGN] shoppers, the sweet or clear song of the shop.
And this shop or poet paraphrases Genesis one, telling us how [FOREIGN] so
how the almighty shaped or created all of life.
So this pun on [FOREIGN] and
[FOREIGN] identifies the act of poetic shaping with that of divine creation.
And in fact in Old English, [FOREIGN] is a common word for God.
The shop's ability to explain human history in terms of biblical story
also aligns in with the narrator
who consistently grounds his tale in the mythical patterns of the Old Testament.
So Grendel's exile from Heorot, and his assaults on the newly created hall,
echo the falls of Lucifer and Adam and Eve in fact.
And Grendel's status as an exile is explained by the narrator in terms of
a genealogy which traces his ancestry back to Cain.
During the feasting in Heorot,
after Beowulf's defense of the hall against Grendel, Hrothgar sings
an abridged version of a story called the [FOREIGN] the Frisian slaughter.
This story was well known to the Anglo-Saxons,
it's featured in another poem that we call the Finnesburg Fragment.
In the fragment, you get the focus on the defense of the hall.
But in Beowulf the shop focuses instead on the themes of maternal grief, and
the impulse towards revenge.
The shop's choice of material turns out to be prophetic.
As Grendel's mother is soon going to attack Heorot,
in fact the same night in revenge for the killing of her own son.
Another example of the art of the oral poet occurs when another shop
celebrates Beowulf's victory over Grendel by way of allusion to two
figures from earlier poetic traditions and this is the next slide.
[FOREIGN]
So sometimes
the kings deign,
a man laden
with stories,
remembering
songs.
He who had great many of old sayings remembered from a far.
He found other words truly bound together.
The man afterwards began to recount Beowulf's tale skillfully.
And successfully to recount a story to change with words.
He said a great deal that he had heard said about Sigmund's famous deeds.
Many unknown things about the exploits of son far travels.
Things which the sons of men did not readily know.
So, I think this account of a Danish oral poet creating a new poem about Beowulf,
from existing materials can give us a useful way of thinking about the Beowulf
poet's own compositional technique.
Both poets possess knowledge of old tales beyond the memories of their audience, and
both locate this original material in a traditional context,
by referring to what they've heard said.
Another story which the audience of Beowulf probably did not readily know
is that of Beowulf the three monster fights.
This story doesn't survive in Scandinavian tradition and
most critics think it was probably an English edition to Scandinavian Legends.
So for the final part of this talk, I'm going to briefly discuss how the poem
invites us to think critically about just how traditional Beowulf actually is.
On his entrance into Heorot, this is his first real entrance in the poem,
Beowulf declares his reputation as the binder of five Giants and
an unspecified number of sea monsters.
But this story soon question by Hrothgar's his kind of advisor who's called Unferth,
Unferth claims to have heard tales about Beowulf losing a swimming competition
with a guy called Breca.
And this is the next quotation.
Unferth says to him, I'll just translate this for you.
Are you the Beowulf, who competed against Breca in a swimming contest
across open water, where in your arrogance,
you tried the waves and for a foolish boast risked your life in deep water?
He out swam you, he had more strength.
In support of this case against Beowulf,
we learned much later in the poem that the had considered Beowulf lazy and cowardly.
But the budding hero denounces Unferth's version of events and
cast himself as the the greatest swimmer of the two.
And brave vanquisher of nine So we can see Beowulf here
performing a role equivalent to that of the traditional narrator and his shops.
He's amplifying a version of his own tale before a listening audience.
These same rhetorical skills are on display later, when Beowulf returns to
Hygelac's court and embellishes his tale of his adventures among the Danes.
He adds all kinds of new details, he describes Grendel's glove,
a kind of pouch in which he puts these corpses that he's going to eat, and
he starts talking about Hrothgar's daughter, Freawaru.
None of this was mentioned before.
Is he telling the truth?
So Beowulf shares with the poet and his fictional shops a taste for
poetic license, embellishment and amplification.
He declares before Unferth, that he had the greater [FOREIGN] sea strength.
And in his speech to Hygelac,
he praises the company in Heorot as the most joyous under the heavens.
So Beowulf invites its audience to consider the complex role of oral poets,
in this case Beowulf himself, as mediators of stories,
which they must reshape with each new performance.
Of course, Beowulf is not in its present form and oral poem, but
it's a written text whatever its origins may have been.
After the conversion in the sixth and seventh centuries,
Anglo-Saxon England underwent a transition from a state of primary orality,
where the technology of the word was as yet unknown, to one of residual orality,
where literacy is the preserve of an educated elite.
Stories about Hrothgar or Hygelac must have originally circulated
in oral form, given the illiterate nature of Southern Scandinavia in this period.
It's likely that some of these stories were also the subject of oral poems in
Anglo-Saxon England.
But as these tales encountered the literate culture of Christianity,
they came to be copied into manuscripts and thereby fixed to some extent.
It's impossible to say whether the interest in orality in Beowulf
was inspired by the poet's first hand experience of the performance of shops.
When we talk about the Beowulf poets were really speaking of the individual or
individuals who shaped these traditions into the text that we now read.
So perhaps we should think of the term The Beowulf poet as a collective noun.
So I hope that I've shown you some ways in which the Beowulf poet, or
rather Beowulf the text, engages in an instructive, metafictional discourse,
about the inherently unstable nature of oral storytelling.
Thank you.
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