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Navigating Beowulf

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Title: Navigating Beowulf


1
Navigating Beowulf
  • Modern Readers

2
Difficulties for the Modern Reader
  • Style is allusive
  • Ideas seem remote and strange to modern
    perspectives
  • Text corrupted during transcriptions

3
Understanding the Culture
  • Not the English, but Germanic forbears
  • Danes who lived on island of Zealand
  • Geats who lived in southern Sweden
  • Follows Anglo-Saxon invasion of 449 but before
    migration is complete
  • Arrival of the ancestors of the audience being
    sung to

4
Understanding the Culture
  • 1st-5th century, as a province, was called
    Britannia for its Celtic-speaking Britons
  • Roman withdrawal to protect Rome against Germanic
    conquest (Vandals and others)
  • Britannia left open to sea-faring Germanic
    invaders (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), area of
    Germanic settlement becomes Angle-land
  • Britons forced to mountainous region of Wales
  • Origin of Arthur fought valiantly against A-S
    invaders descendants of the invaders later adopt
    hero as their own

5
Understanding the Culture
  • Britons became Christian in 4th century
  • Christianity maintained in remoter regions where
    Anglo-Saxons failed to penetrate
  • 9th century Christian Anglo-Saxons were subjected
    to new Germanic invasions by Danes (Vikings)
  • Literature were oral stories until conversion
    literacy starts to increase

6
Cultural Influence on Literature
  • Because literacy was mainly restricted to
    servants of the church, bulk of Old English
    literature deals with religious subjects and
    mostly drawn from Latin sources
  • Secular literature remained primarily an oral
    medium

7
Understanding the Culture
  • Poets materials must have been alive in the
    audience as the elliptical way it alludes to
    events not directly concerned with the plot and
    demanding the listener have a wide knowledge of
    traditional Germanic history

8
Understanding the Values
  • Roman conversion was more conciliatory, not so
    much uprooting paganism in order to plant
    Christianity, but rather planting Christianity in
    the faith

9
Understanding the Values
  • Christian influences are of the Old Testament,
    none from New Testament
  • Although Christian is the correct term for the
    poet/audience it was a Christianity that had not
    yet by any means succeeded in obliterating older
    pagan tradition, which still called forth
    powerful responses from the hearts of men and
    women

10
Understanding the Values
  • In the warrior society the values of which the
    poem constantly invokes, the most important of
    human relationships was that between the warrior
    and his lord
  • Not subject to anothers will, but mutual trust
    and respect
  • Good king described as protector of warriors and
    ring giver Bad king ascribed to ill temper and
    avarice
  • Spiritually fulfillingcongenial and successfully
    united with one another
  • Relationships between kinsmen
  • Wergild man price vengeance not monetary, but
    right

11
Understanding the Values
  • Evident need for vengeance would create
    never-ending feuds and marrying daughters did
    little to mitigate, but did replace hostility
    with alliance
  • Beowulf, a Germanic hero, curiously is free of
    these feuds
  • The potentialityinevitabilityof sudden attack,
    sudden change, and swift death is omnipresent in
    Beowulf
  • Men seem to be caught in a vast web of reprisals
    and counter-reprisals with little hope of
    escapeDOOM

12
Understanding the Style
  • Germanic heroic poetry, as represented in Old
    English poetry, shares many characteristics with
    the Hellenic heroic world described by Homer
  • Nations are reckoned as groups of people related
    by kinship rather than geography
  • Kinship is the basis for the heroic code
  • Blood vengeance is sacred duty in poetry
    everlasting shame to those who do not observe it

13
Understanding the Style
  • Christian poets were fascinated by the culture of
    their pagan ancestors
  • Involved the heroic code as an ideal in fighting
    to the death against the pagan Vikings
  • Despite Christian influence, poet remains true to
    older tradition, when, at the end, audiences are
    left with the impression that Beowulfs chief
    reward is pagan immortality

14
Understanding the Style
  • The world of Old English poetry is predominantly
    harsh
  • Hardly strays from the glory of God and his
    champions and the pain and sorrow of this world

15
Understanding the Style
  • Poetic language is created out of special
    vocabulary (synecdoche and metonymy common
    figures of speech, also kennings)
  • Because these are among the chief poetic effects,
    the verse is constructed to show off terms by
    creating a series of them in apposition

16
Understanding the Style
  • The use of parallel and appositive expressions,
    known as variation, gives the verse, which is
    highly structured and musical, a peculiarly
    halting and repetitive quality in prose
    translations
  • Overall effect of language is to formalize and
    elevate speech
  • Instead of being straightforward, it moves slow
    and stately pace with steady indirection (ie.
    Irony) fighting called The cared not for battle

17
Understanding the Style
  • All poetry of OE is the same verse form
    alliterative verse
  • Verse unit is the single line because rhyme not
    used to link one line to another (except in late
    OE poetry)
  • The organizing device is alliteration
  • OE lines contain, on average, four principal
    stresses and is divided into two half lines of
    two stresses each by a strong medial caesura
  • Oft Scyld Scefing sceapena preatum

18
Understanding the Style
  • These two half-lines are linked to each other by
    the alliteration
  • At least one of the two stressed words in the
    first half-line, and often both of them, begin
    with the same sound as the first stressed word of
    the second half-line (the second stressed word is
    generally nonalliterative)
  • Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum
  • sc has value of sh þ runic symbol with value of
    th
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