Few of us enjoy reading Beowulf.
It’s okay to admit that. Even most medievalists, if you get them by themselves in quiet corners of Kalamazoo, with a tall bottle of something potent under their belts, will eventually admit that, no, not really, it’s not a fun read, at least not the first time through. And if you’re not a medievalist, you’re a lot more likely to have hated it. I suspect no small number of students in Survey of English Lit classes only pretended to read Beowulf, and maybe read around it, but didn’t read the thing itself (I’d put money on an equal number doing the same for Milton, although for Milton you can’t claim the language barrier).
So why do teachers insist on subjecting students to Beowulf? A lot of them will say: because it’s the first. It’s the beginning of English Literature (capital E, capital L).
The beginning of English Literature. Although it’s really not. It’s a one-off. It has no literary descendants. There is nothing else quite like it in English literature. And it was lost and forgotten until after English Literature (capital E, capital L) conceived of itself as a tradition both national and continuing.1
Beowulf survives in one manuscript: British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv: housed now in the British Library. From the collection of Sir Robert Cotton, a famed antiquarian and manuscript collector who catalogued his books by the emperor’s bust on top of the bookcase. Beowulf sat directly under the Emperor Vitellius on the top shelf (A), fifteenth from the left (xv). Cotton left his entire library to the British people, and after coming through a fire in 1731, where some of Cotton’s books were destroyed, the manuscript containing Beowulf was badly singed. It’s very fragile and parts have been severely degraded. You can see it here or here if you like.
Cotton Vitellius A.xv was not considered important for a long time, and for a long time nobody knew Beowulf was part it. The manuscript is mostly other works: a sermon about Saint Christopher, The Marvels of the East, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and Judith, another Old English poem. A first printed edition of Beowulf wasn’t published until 1815 and that was in Danish. It wasn’t printed in an English edition until 1833. Tennyson was writing poetry before England knew Beowulf existed.
It’s not the beginning of English Literature (capital E, capital L). Sorry.
A few (mostly medievalists) will give a different reason for teaching it: it’s a great poem, but one most of us can only read through modern translations. Last week I wrote about Pangur Bán, partly because it’s an awesome poem (seriously, who doesn’t adore cats?) but mostly to start a discussion about translation and how hard it is to translate a poem from one language and culture to another and carry even a shadow of its depth and nuance across the language divide.
So, it’s a great poem — yes, even though most of us hate reading it. It’s too remote, too strange, it assumes knowledge readers just don’t have. All true. I would venture to say that there’s another, more important reason: most translations are awful. They focus on the remoteness, the strangeness, the distance between the poetry of then and the aesthetics of now, and so they themselves are barely approachable.
Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, Beowulf was less a poem than a mine for scholars whose ambitions were decidedly less than literary (cue the philologists!) The language of the poem dates roughly from 1000 CE, and the two scribes who wrote the manuscript of which Beowulf is a part wrote in East Anglian dialect.2 So we’re looking at roughly the court and time of King Aethelred the Unready. The East Anglian dialect became so dominant in England that our language itself descends primarily (but not entirely) from it. If Beowulf survived in a different dialect, it would be even harder to read. And although the date is generally around 1000, the poem itself uses language and diction that’s older, maybe by a few centuries, in the same way that some writers today use archaisms to make their writing more formal and dignified.
I wasn’t kidding in the last paragraph about the philologists — later 19th century German and English language historians saw Beowulf ‘s value in helping to restore both the language and culture of the Anglo-Saxons and here I need to take a breath. Because what these medievalists did reverberates to today, and to pass this by lightly reinforces the racist uses to which the words and this scholarship have been put.
Extremely Important Side Note
“Anglo-Saxon” is the umbrella term for a collection of Germanic tribes, some of whom invaded England and established themselves sometime around the 5th century. “Anglo-Saxon” is the name of the common language these populations spoke. “Anglo-Saxon” has come down to us today to mean racially-pure white in the parlance of White Supremacists.
See where I’m going with this?
It doesn’t help that, until recently, medieval studies have been the purview of old white men. Or that, in using Beowulf as a lens to reconstruct a “pure” Germanic language and culture, the medievalists of a century ago played right into the propaganda needs of a certain paper-hanger and aspiring artist from Austria. And a fair number of those medievalists saw Beowulf as a pagan poem that had been written down and emended by monks — if they could only remove those Christian influences, they would have a purely Germanic and pagan mythology — and we all know how well that ended when Richard Wagner tried it.
Therefore, mindful of the use to which the term “Anglo-Saxon” has been put, the knowledge that race as racists understand it is a false construction, and knowing that medieval people and their forebears did not see race and culture the same way we’ve been taught to see3, and especially since both terminology and symbols of early medieval cultures have been adopted by a bunch of flippin’ idiot racists, most medievalists don’t use the term “Anglo-Saxon” anymore. It’s “Old English.” And the only time I’ll use “Anglo-Saxon” is when I’m quoting someone else. Because medieval studies is old and white enough, more than forbidding and discouraging to women and scholars of color, and we all have to do better, both in terminology and in promoting each other’s work.
Okay, back to the main feature
When you look at scholarship of Beowulf today (and it’s voluminous), most translators and critics start with J. R. R. Tolkien’s seminal 1936 lecture, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” It’s a logical place to start, because it marks the beginning of scholarly consideration of Beowulf as not an archaeological dig or a relic, but real literature.
Using Tolkien as a starting place, however, implies there was no scholarship before Tolkien; in fact, the state of Beowulf scholarship inspired Tolkien to lay down more than a few snarky and wry markers.
Before Tolkien, scholarship agreed that, if Beowulf was an epic, it was a badly flawed one. In 1922, J. Duncan Spaeth wrote,
...Beowulf, in many ways stands curiously apart from the common Germanic epic tradition. The only adventures of the hero that are fully narrated are romantic rather than epic, i.e. purely imaginary events made to appear real, rather than real events heightened and colored by the imagination.... In Beowulf the main strand of the narrative is purely imaginary (fights with monsters and a dragon) and the historic tradition is episodically and loosely introduced and confusedly handled. It is not the action in Beowulf that gives it its epic dignity, but the manner of life portrayed in the character of the hero unfolded from youth to age. The Nibelungenlied is infinitely richer in human and dramatic interest, and its close rises to heights of great epic poetry. In Beowulf there is nothing of the tragic conflict that makes the Nibelungenlied so moving. The Beowulf is much more moralized, deliberately and consciously didactic in aim, then the Nibelungenlied. (p. 193)
Spaeth, it should be noted, is looking for a Germanic hero, another Siegfried. Other scholars compared Beowulf to the heroes of Greek epics — oh, it has the right elegiac tone and all, but there’s too much fantasy, too much focus on the monsters. Still others called it misshapen, emphasizing the trivial (monsters) and giving too little focus to the important (who was Wiglaf related to and how can we put him into a genealogy?) In all, though, there is nobody better to sum up pre-Tolkien Beowulf scholarship than Tolkien himself, early in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.”
[W]e must pass in rapid flight over the heads of many decades of critics. As we do so a conflicting Babel mounts up to us, which I can report as something after this fashion. "Beowulf is a half-baked native epic the development of which was killed by Latin learning; it was inspired by emulation of Virgil, and is a product of the education that came in with Christianity; it is feeble and incompetent as a narrative; the roles of narrative are cleverly observed in the manner of the learned epic; it is the confused product of the committee of muddle-headed and probably beer-bemused Anglo-Saxons (this is a Gallic voice); it is a string of pagan lays edited by monks; it is the work of the learned but inaccurate Christian antiquarian; it is a work of genius, rare and surprising in the period, that the genius seems to have been shown principally in doing something much better left undone (this is a very recent voice); it is a wild folktale (general chorus); it is a poem of an aristocratic and courtly tradition (same voices); it is a hotch-potch; it is a sociological, anthropological, archaeological document; it is a mythic allegory (very old voices these and generally shouted down, but not so far out as some of the newer cries); it is rude and rough; it is a masterpiece of metrical art; it has no shape at all; it is singularly weak and construction; it is a clever allegory of contemporary politics (old John Earle with some slight support from Mr. Girvan, only they look to different periods); its architecture is solid; it is thin and cheap (a solemn voice); it is undeniably weighty (the same voice); it is a national epic; it is a translation from the Danish; it was imported by Frisian traders; it is a burden to English syllabuses; and (final universal chorus of all voices) it is worth studying." (pp. 8-9)
Before Tolkien, most scholars agreed Beowulf was important, but they tended to yoke the poem to their own agendas and use it to demonstrate whatever point they wanted to make, however far afield it might be (Spaeth is the “thin, cheap, and weighty” dude). Tolkien is the first to look at the poem as a poem, not as an example of something else, and that’s where we’ll start next time: having dispensed with the critics, we’ll go with Tolkien and the monsters.
* ”Ða com of more | under mist-hleoþum / Grendel gongan | Godes yrre bær,” Then came from the moors, through shrouding mists, Grendel going, bearing God’s wrath , lines 710-11, describing Grendel’s approach to Heorot and his impending battle with Beowulf. All the o’s in the lines are long. If you want to read it aloud, Ð and þ both sound like “th,” while æ is a broad open “a,” like the a in apple.
1There are a number of reasons for this, most of them related to the Norman Conquest. After 1066, the official languages spoken in England were French and Latin. Condemned mostly to orality, the English language changed radically, so radically that within 200 years Middle English emerged. Even if 13th century scribes and scholars knew about the poem, they couldn’t read it. Therefore, it had no imitators, no tradition, no literary progeny.
2Let me know if you want to know more about how we know generally who scribes were, where they were from, who copied from whom, etc. It’s fascinating but also kind of specialized.
3Again, more about this if you want it.