For the last few weeks we’ve been looking at scholarship around Beowulf, the Ur-Daddy of English Literature (really, not really. But it has the distinction of being the late-to-the-party-earliest-major-poem-in-the-English-language). We’re up to 1936 and J. R. R. Tolkien’s all-important essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” which, in addition to showcasing Professor Tolkien’s dry brand of snark, turned the study of Old English in general, and Beowulf in particular, on its head.
This time I proposed to bring the state of scholarship up to the present and, twenty minutes after posting last week, realized I had seriously over-promised. (Many) volumes have been written about Beowulf since 1936; you could build a house with the critical essays and overviews that have been produced by fine and brilliant scholars in the generations since. I’m a retired academic without access to a university library, or databases, abstracts, and publications — what was I thinking?
Then Kurt came to the rescue, recommending Michael Drout’s scholarship on Scribd, which has its limitations but is affordable and accessible for anyone who wants to read up on literary works on the cheap. Drout is the fellow I quoted last week about how Tolkien would be a giant in literature even if he hadn’t written the Middle Earth legendarium, but just on the basis of the “Monsters and the Critics” essay. He’s right. And, because he’s engaging, writes well and accessibly (a rare combination for a critical scholar), and did much of the summarizing work for me, he’s a great person to center post-Tolkien critical history on. I found Drout’s essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” Seventy-Five Years Later,” first published in Mythlore, 30: Fall/Winter 2011, pp. 5-22, on Scribd, and you can get it either place if you want to read it yourself — which I recommend. It’s always better to go to the source text when you can.
The upshot of Drout’s essays “Seventy-Five Years Later,” and “The Brilliant Essay that Broke Beowulf Studies” is that Tolkien was too successful in turning the study of Beowulf from a historic document to a literary work. Subsequent scholars were so tired of history and loved the idea of the monsters so much that we stopped looking at the human beings in the poem (might be a bit of an overstatement). It is true though that, with one stroke, Tolkien unseated the historian/genealogists, folklorists, and philologists, and set in their place, the reader of literature.
Tolkien saw the poem as falling into two parts: Beowulf as young hero on the rise, and Beowulf as wise old king. In “The Monsters and the Critics” he likens the structure of the poem to the structure of the poetry itself — the famous (and feared by undergraduates) structure of the Old English alliterative half-line:
Ðām wife þā word | wēl līcodon
gilp-cwide Gēates | ēode gold-hroden
frēolicu folc-cwēn | tō hire frēan sittan.1
If you remember, Old English verse is based on alliteration, and many Old English poems turn on the half-line structure, with a pause in the middle marked by “|” and called a caesura. There are complicated stress patterns in the half-lines that determine how the poem is constructed (and we don’t need to get into that; it’s prosody and technical and beside the point of what we want to talk about). Tolkien called the Old English poetic line “more like masonry than music.”2 The point, and one which Drout calls a failing of Tolkien’s analysis, is that he sees the half-line structure of the poetry reflected in the two-part structure of the poem, with Grendel and his mother being the first half of the line, the dragon being the second.
This is way too simple and far too clever, but it hardly matters, according to Drout, because scholars ignored this one weak point in the essay. Instead, they all went, “Yippee! Monsters!” and we were off to the races. It was an explication extravaganza: Is Beowulf two parts or three? Do we consider Grendel and Mom as a single episode? Or are they separate? Was Beowulf an arrogant hero-on-the-make because he went abroad from Geatland to save the Danes when he should have stayed home and looked after his own people? What is the purpose of the formal boast? Just what kind of a weenie is Unferth? And of course we can wrap in the perennial arguments about just how Christian a poem is Beowulf, when was it written, and what does it say about the Old English?
The one thing, Drout notes, that Tolkien’s successors lost is any interest in the people side of the poem.
Tolkien’s great contribution to literary studies is his insistence that we look at Beowulf as a poem. As literature. Before Tolkien, Beowulf had been studied primarily as a historic document (and certainly there are historic elements as well as mythic/folkloric ones as well) but it was not considered “literary.” Tolkien’s essay elevated Beowulf to literature, and its study as worthy of critical assessment. In fact, according to Drout, Tolkien accomplished his goal too well; his focus on the monsters meant that subsequent critics focused only on the monsters, and that was certainly not what Tolkien intended. Psychology fixed its gaze on Grendel’s pathology, and the anti-hero rose.
Especially he notes that “it seems that critics [from the 1990’s forward] are very relieved that they are free to avoid exercising any judgment at all about the poem” (p. 17). This is part, I think, an implied indictment of literary theory — that literature is reduced to “text” and “text” exists to support theory. (This is also known as modern critical theory trying to keep its privileged [old/white/male] status as superior to (take your pick): feminism, gender studies, textualism, New Historicism, etc. etc. etc.) Drout wisely lets these specific sleeping dragons lie even as he shoots arrows in their general direction.
His essay contains points about Beowulf and the nature of fantasy as an art form that I want to circle back to eventually (this is a hint if you want to read ahead) but for the present I want to get to what Drout thinks Tolkien was trying to teach in the “Monsters” essay:
[M]ainstream literary criticism, and a lot of mainstream writers, never learn the lesson and so keep making the same mistakes. Scholars and writers keep wanting either/or: it’s either the history and legend and complex societies or the monsters. Tolkien was trying to say was that it’s both [sic].
(p. 6)
It’s worth noting that most Old English studies programs don’t teach Beowulf as a literary work, but as an opportunity to study prosody (the dreaded Old English alliterative half-line) and language (want to decline kennings, anyone?) Now, these are essential exercises for medievalists in training, but they erase the literary appreciation of the poem as a poem, and we often don’t get past the nuts-and-bolts phase of Beowulf studies. Rarely do we get to talk about the culture and settings — why, for instance, is a poem set in Denmark and Sweden written in Old English and what does it say (or not say) about the relationship of the Norse and the English, which we otherwise tend to think was rather chilly? It usually takes a motivated independent scholar to investigate the formal tone, the deep sense of grief, the awareness of lost glory and past time, the structure such as it is, and finally — what is the poem telling us? How does it reach across 1000+ years and all the changes in culture and still compel us to read it, to meditate upon it? In many ways, Beowulf is still locked up in amber, a curious relic from another age, and far removed from the average reader.
Drout’s essays contain a lot of fun and pithy observations about the state of academia in general and Old English in particular. He dunks on New Criticism and its insistence that we look at nothing outside the poem to interpret it, which might work with some poems but is really silly with Beowulf, and has way too much fun with the Post-Modernists and their ironic detachment. I generally agree with his assessment about trying to shoehorn an Old English poem into a post-structuralist straitjacket, but I do part company when he says that theory has nothing to contribute to Beowulf (especially feminism as Headley handles her translation, but more about that in the future).
In general, and in both essays, Drout pleads for balance. He argues that we need to pay attention to the whole poem, and not chop it up to cleverly support whatever theory we’ve devised to prove everyone else misguided. This means the digressions are as important as the monsters: Hrothgar’s sermon, Ingeld’s treachery, Wealtheow’s political maneuverings and Heorot’s burning, the revenge of Grendel’s mother, Grendel’s own grievance, Wiglaf’s reproaches and the old Geatish woman whose lament presages the demise of her people. Beowulf is not purely about Beowulf as an archetypal hero, but is about the little pauses of peace, how fragile peace is and what unmakes it. In that, it has much to tell us about the world.
There’s a story that Bede relates in Ecclesiastical History of the English People where Edwin, king of Northumbria, is weighing the pros and cons of converting to Christianity when one of his thanes tells him,
[T]his present life of man on earth, in comparison to that time which is unknown to us, is as if you were sitting at table in the winter with your ealdormen and thegns, and a fire was kindled and the hall warmed, while it rained and snowed and stormed outside. A sparrow came in, and swiftly flew through the hall; it came in at one door, and went out at the other. Now during the time when he is inside, he is not touched by the winter's storms; but that is the twinkling of an eye and the briefest of moments, and at once he comes again from winter into winter.
When I read Beowulf, Bede is often lingering there in the back of my mind. In Beowulf, that time in the safety and light, the warmth and music of the mead hall, is all too fragile, and outside in the dark there are not only monsters, but men, ambitious men who nurse grudges and demand blood-feuds, and it’s only a matter of time before the darkness and the storm come again.
Next time, let’s talk about the poem as a poem: what it says, where it goes, what it accomplishes.
Previous Bits of This Discussion
NB: Thanks again to Kurt: Drout’s essays gave me a shorthand way into post-Tolkien Beowulf studies that I could condense down into one short essay. In the language of my people: tusand takke.
1 A rough and literal translation of these lines (639-641) runs thus: “These words that woman | pleased well / (from the) boast-speaking Geat | went, her cloak gold-laden [as in richly-embroidered] / freely the people’s queen | to sit by her king.” Heaney translates it: “This formal boast by Beowulf the Geat / pleased the lady well and she went to sit / by Hrothgar, regal and arrayed with gold.” Chickering renders it: “These words well pleased | the royal lady, / the boast of the Geat. | The gracious queen, / her cloak gold-laden, | then sat by her lord.” Tolkien, using a different lineation, translate it as prose: “These words well pleased that lady, the proud utterance of the Geat; with gold adorned she went, fair queen of the people, to her seat beside her lord” (lines 518-520). Finally, Headley translates the lines as “The hostess was impressed by Beowulf’s boast. / Brass balls, if nothing else. She posted up / beside Hrothgar, queenly, her gold glinting.”
One plain literal translation and four far more artful renderings: this should illustrate some of the problems in translating in general and translating Old English verse in particular. As in German, subject, object and verb often can’t get far enough away from each other. Then add the formulaic phrases that fill and embroider the lines, and it can get pretty muddled. Remember, we started by talking about translations?
2J. R. R. Tolkien. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Harper-Collins, 2006, p. 30. I don’t think Tolkien was serious in his criticism of Old English poetry, but was making a point about micro- and macro-structures, one that Drout calls “overargued” and “weak.” He’s right. Old English verse possesses a majesty and gravity that’s incomparable, and nothing like cement.
Translations Cited
Chickering, Howell D. Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition. NY: Anchor, 1977
Headley, Maria Dahvana. Beowulf. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf. NY: Norton, 2000.
Tolkien, J. R. R. Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. NY: Houghton-Mifflin, 2014.