Beowulf and the Grendel-Kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England available in Paperback, eBook
Beowulf and the Grendel-Kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England
- ISBN-10:
- 1938228715
- ISBN-13:
- 9781938228711
- Pub. Date:
- 10/01/2014
- Publisher:
- West Virginia University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 1938228715
- ISBN-13:
- 9781938228711
- Pub. Date:
- 10/01/2014
- Publisher:
- West Virginia University Press
Beowulf and the Grendel-Kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England
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$44.99Overview
Damico offers incisive arguments that major historical events and personages pertaining to the reign of Cnut and those of his sons recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, and major continental and Scandinavian historical texts, hold striking parallels with events and personages found in at least eight vexing narrative units, as recorded by Scribe A in BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, that make up the poem’s quasi sixth-century narrative concerning the fall of the legendary Scyldings.
Given the poet’s compositional skill—widely relational and eclectic at its core—and his affinity with the practicing skalds, these strings of parallelisms could scarcely have been coincidental. Rather, Damico argues that examined within the context of other eleventh-century texts that either bemoaned or darkly satirized or obversely celebrated the rise of the Anglo-Danish realm, the Beowulfian units may bring forth a deeper understanding of the complexity of the poet’s compositional process.
Damico illustrates the poet’s use of the tools of his trade—compression, substitution, skillful encoding of character—to reinterpret and transform grave sociopolitical “facts” of history, to produce what may be characterized as a type of historical allegory, whereby two parallel narratives, one literal and another veiled are simultaneously operative.
Beowulf and the Grendel-Kin lays out the story of Beowulf, not as a monster narrative nor a folklorish nor solely a legendary tale, but rather as a poem of its time, a historical allegory coping with and reconfiguring sociopolitical events of the first half of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon England.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781938228711 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | West Virginia University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2014 |
| Series: | WV MEDIEVEAL EUROPEAN STUDIES |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 215 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
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Beowulf and the Grendel-Kin
Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England
By Helen Damico
West Virginia University Press
Copyright © 2015 West Virginia University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-938228-71-1
CHAPTER 1
The Severed Head: Poetic Image and Historical Text
* * *
"Ne sorga, snotor guma! Selre bio aehwae,
bæt he his freond wrece, bonne he fela murne." (Bwf 1384–85)
["Wise man, do not grieve! It will be better for each of
us to avenge his kinsman than to mourn overmuch."]
The poetic image of the title refers to a pair of severed heads — that of Æschere, "the most exemplary atheling" ([æbeling] aergod, 1329a), and that of Grendel, the "notorious stalker (or strider) of the boundary (or borderland)" (maere mearcstapa, 103a) and ruler of the fen. The beheading sequence in which these two events occur occupies over four hundred lines of the poem's center (1232–1650) and contains the beginning and end of a feud narrative. It begins with the poet's encomium to the sleeping warrior band and the surprise night attack of Grendel's mother, progresses to the subsequent decapitation of Æschere, and ends with the decapitation of Grendel's corpse and the display of his head, Beowulf's "sea-booty" (saelac, 1624b, 1652a), before Hrothgar's court. First identified as a feud narrative by the poet at the close of Grendel's mother's attack — "Ne wæs bæt gewrixle til, / bæt hie on ba healfa bicgan scoldon / freonda feorum!" (That was not good bartering, that both sides should forfeit the lives of kinsmen! Bwf 1304b–6a) — this characterization of the dramatic action is reinforced four times within the space of some eighty lines; the action is so defined by Hrothgar (Bwf 1333b, 1340b, 1380a), and finally by Beowulf in the lines quoted in the epigraph. Beowulf's speech (Bwf 1384–96) functions as a turning point in the sequence, for it is here that he accepts the role of the avenger and calms Hrothgar's savage spirit (ba wæs frod cyning ... on hreon mode "then was the wise king ... savage in his mind," Bwf 1307b–8). Hrothgar's reaction to the abduction of Æschere is uncharacteristic; earlier when faced with the near destruction of his hall-troops, he was not so moved. Rather, the old king sat "joyless" (unblioe, 130b) in patient "suffering" (bolode, 131a), "enduring the loss of his thanes" (begnsorge dreah, 131b). Here, upon hearing of Æschere's abduction, he is propelled into action, demanding vengeance. The poet's observation (repeated by Beowulf) that Hrothgar's loss is that borne by a kinsman explains the king's passionate response, which matches that of Grendel's mother, faced with the loss of Grendel.
Underlying the feud narrative — and anticipating the diptych of severed heads — is a complex network of cranial imagery that repeatedly points to and encompasses both literal and metaphorical meanings of heads: the warrior bands' setting their shields above their heads, the atheling's towering helm, the hart's refusal to save his head by diving into the mere, Æschere's severed head on the mere's edge, Beowulf's glistening helmet, Grendel's head being dragged along Heorot's floor — these are but some examples of the image pattern that permeates the passage. As James L. Rosier and Stanley B. Greenfield argued some years ago, this associative cluster of images — heafod (head), hafela (head), helm (as protection and ruler) — carries a physical and metapolitical resonance, especially in the context of the poet's emblematic use of other body parts that allude to Æschere's martial importance to Hrothgar. Thus, in image pattern and in feud structure, the twin beheadings are causally linked: it is the abduction and beheading of Æschere (a person of some political importance if we accept the symbolic significance of the cranial imagery) that throws the Danish court into a renewed state of feud with the Grendel-kin (1338-42, 1381-82) and culminates in Grendel's decapitation (1590).
Typically, however, the spectacle of Æschere's bloodied head and Grendel's waterlogged cranium has taken second billing to what has been judged as the main event, the wrestling match with Grendel's mother, where Beowulf annihilates the savage and corrupt merewif (sea-wife, 1519). In this context, Grendel's beheading may be mistakenly seen as an anticlimax, so violently does Grendel's mother attack the prince as she pins him to the ground, her knife held in readiness to kill him. Yet in the context of the feud structure, Beowulf's destruction of Grendel's mother functions as narrative retardation, a repetition and reversal of Beowulf's earlier fight with Grendel (as noted by J. R. R. Tolkien and, more recently, by Andy Orchard), and is the first step toward his final act of revenge. For it is not until Beowulf has tracked down Grendel (whom he has previously mortally wounded and whom he indeed finds dead in the underwater niosele (battle-hall, 1513a) and beheaded his corpse, an action that takes place a line away from the exact center of the poem, that he achieves satisfaction, so profound is his need to make full restitution for Æschere.
Within Beowulfian scholarship, moreover, Beowulf's retaliatory decapitation of Grendel has been viewed as a refashioning of folktale figures, with parallels that describe heroes battling and overcoming ghoulish beings, an association that further obscures the essential feud structure of the sequence. However, these folkloric units are usually isolated cameo events depicting supernatural conflicts with no particular consequence in narrative structure. Their objective lies solely in illustrating the physical strength of the hero. The beheading sequence, on the other hand, functions as the climax of the monstrous Grendel's repeated nocturnal onslaughts on Heorot and his systematic feasting on its hall-troops. Beowulf's decapitation of Grendel brings to closure the main narrative of the first two-thirds of the poem, the unsuccessful struggle to possess Hrothgar's kingdom by the Grendel-kin, for the motif of the night attack on a hall is absent from the rhetorical design of the rest of the poem. Thus, the folkloric elements in Beowulf function as counterpoints to the underlying feud narrative essential to the Beowulfian sequence and its unique political, martial, and regal tone and concerns.
The historical text of my title refers to two political events that took place in Anglo-Danish England in 1036 and 1040 and are recorded in a number of Anglo-Saxon and Norman texts from the mid-eleventh and twelfth centuries. These, I argue, have been appropriated and allusively fictionalized into the Beowulfian beheading sequence, providing an allegorical dimension to the poem's narrative structure similar to that found in Bede, the biblical epic Exodus, and Ælfric's saints' lives, as discussed in the Introduction (above, 21–24). Even though the dates of the events postdate even Kiernan and Dumville's late scribal datings of the manuscript, the historical parallels discussed below are too compelling to dismiss, especially since the beheading sequence (Bwf 1232–1650) lies solidly within the province of Scribe A (Bwf 1–1939), the date-range of whose hand has yet to be established. My discussion is structured in two parts: the first re-examines the medieval Icelandic literary analogue to the beheading sequence (a folkloric episode found in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar) in order to demonstrate how distant it is in narrative texture from the Beowulfian beheading sequence. I then address (and examine in the context of the Beowulfian sequence) the contemporary events recounted in the historical texts, which I conclude may have been poetically reconstituted into the poem's fantastical monster narrative; thus, the prototypical folktale motif may have been used to encrypt political reality, producing the multitiered narrative of historical allegory.
Folkloric Parallels and the Mere
The nearly universally accepted analogue to the Beowulfian beheading sequence comes from fifteenth-century Icelandic manuscripts, the Sandhaugar incident in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar (chaps. 63–67), in which Grettir chops off the arm of a she-troll in the course of their wrestling and then swims to the bottom of a pool and behind a waterfall to do battle with a draugr (giant spirit), a living dead, seated by a fire, whom he decapitates. The argument rests on some compelling details found in both sequences — the light in the underwater cave, the sword on the wall, the rune staff retrieved as booty, the decapitation of the draugr, the blood on the water seen by an accomplice — and on a similarity they both share with a basic folktale plot, the "Bear's Son Tale," first discussed in Friedrich Panzer's 1910 study of Germanic narrative, volume 1 of which was devoted to Beowulf. Panzer's theory — which posits Grettis saga and Beowulf as two independent versions of a folktale of some two hundred variants — was and continues to be accepted in part or in whole, for as one of its early adherents, W. W. Lawrence, wrote, it provides "something tangible upon which to base conclusions as to the history of the materials in Beowulf."
What appealed to Lawrence (and in part to R. W. Chambers, who, though approving of a popular tale as a source for Beowulf, nonetheless argued for the differences between the folktale and the Beowulfian sequence, to be noted below) must have been the relative indestructibility of the folktale plot, what Lawrence called the "popular" essence of the plot, around which all the other narrative elements were arranged. That a basic folktale pattern exists in the Beowulfian narrative may be taken as a given, as has been shown in the works of Thomas A. Shippey, Richard L. Harris, and others; yet it is a critical commonplace that the Beowulf-poet demonstrates sophisticated skill in layering his narrative, in weaving together folkloric and mythological elements and events from the distant and historio-legendary Scandinavian past with contemporary Anglo-Danish concerns. None of these has been, or would be, understood as the determinate core that drives the poem's narrative. Thus, it is difficult to accept the folkloric pattern as the distinguishing characteristic of the poem, the "tangible" presence that Lawrence seeks. The formulaic plot pattern common to the epic, the saga, and the folktale is so "universal" that it loses its specific relevance to the plot, as Theodore M. Andersson noted in his recent survey of the analogues for Beowulf, and as exhaustively demonstrated by Magnús Fjalldal in his recent monograph, and by Anatoly Liberman in his survey of the scholarship dealing with the relationship of Grettis saga and Beowulf. It is possible the poet appropriated the folktale element and imaginatively refashioned it as a patterned counterpoint for his contemporary political narrative.
Separate from his argument for the individual debt that the beheading sequences in Beowulf and the Grettis saga Sandhaugar incident owed to the tested and useful folktale structure, Lawrence also strove to link the topographical features in the two narratives; the stark Icelandic landscape of the Sandhaugar episode, with its inland pool and waterfall, he argued, was similar to the misty marshland of Beowulf's second adventure. Lawrence's Icelandic landscape thesis produced a number of critical responses, the fullest of which were the correctives by W. S. Mackie and Kemp Malone. Instead of Lawrence's murky "inland pool" surrounded by cliffs and a waterfall, both scholars, through lexical studies of the Beowulfian passage, concluded that the "mere" was in reality a "sea" or a "land-locked arm of the sea," some aspect of a large expanse of water, which in fact is one description of the realm of the Grendel-kin (floda begong, "the expanse of sea," 1497). Augmenting their argument in part, some years later Roberta Frank stressed the critical uncertainty that surrounds the meaning of mere. In poetic usage, she notes, the simplex mere (ON marr, "the sea") does carry the meaning of an expanse of water, with a connotative force associated with sea and salt water as, for example, in the Finn episode; in prose, however, where one might encounter the term in charters or in homilies, mere signifies either local inland landmarks of enclosed bodies of water (perhaps similar to Lawrence's pool) or the confined and emblematic stagnant pools associated with hell. The Beowulf-poet merged the two meres, a stylistic characteristic, Frank suggests, that reflects "his sophisticated balancing of the roles and registers of Christian homilist and northern scop."
Mackie and Malone took issue with other topographical features that Lawrence claimed were characteristic of the saga episode and the Beowulfian sequence. Lawrence's waterfall, Mackie argued, the fyrgenstream — literally translated by Lawrence as "mountain stream" — was inconsistent with the use of the word in other Old English poetic works (Andreas 390; Riddle 10, 2; Maxims II, 47), where the term invariably means "sea" or "flowing sea." Malone expanded the argument: based on his survey of all the sea terms in their simplex and compound forms, he argued that the fyrgenstream should be understood metaphorically as a "stream that is a mountain (of intensity)," the first element functioning here as an intensifier, as it does in fyrgenbeam, "mountain tree, or a tree that is a mountain in size, gigantic tree," and in fyrgenholt, "a conflated term for fyrgenbeamholt 'a grove of giant trees.'"
Still other terms describing Grendel's domain evoke topographical features more common to marshy floodplains, separating it further from Lawrence's inland Icelandic landscape and aligning it closer to a southeastern English cultural setting. Margaret Gelling's studies of settlement place-names in Anglo-Saxon England, which define a settlement by reference to its chief topographical feature, for example, reveal that the landscape features describing Grendel's habitat are consistent with settlement place-names in southeastern England, conveying images of wetness and of boggish wasteland (e.g., OE fen, mor, mersc, næs). In topographical place-names, OE næs, for instance, which Klaeber glosses as "headland, bluff" and characterizes as neowle (precipitous), evokes an image of a high projecting coastal promontory. In OE settlement place-names, a næs is indeed a coastal feature, but what distinguishes it is not so much its height as its peninsular shape. In southeastern England, in East Anglia, for example, næs most often describes a "flat, murky" promontory or peninsula projecting into a lake or marsh. Peterborough (Medeshamstede), as one example, stood on a næs, a flat promontory of "dry ground jutting out into the fen." The næs onto which a Geatish man (or prince) deposits the slain wundorlic waegbora (wondrous wave traveler, Bwf 1440a) dragged out of the mere harmonizes with a description of a flat, raised peninsula jutting out into the water. Further, with Gelling's topographical feature in mind, the neowle næssas (dangerous promontories) that Beowulf and Hrothgar pass on the uncuo gelad (translated by Gelling and Dennis Cronan as "perilous water crossing") to Grendel's habitat (Bwf 1410-11) likewise could be seen as elongated banks of dry ground that project into the East Anglian marshland, these being anywhere from three (March) to eight (Thorney) to twelve (Soham and Wicken) to twenty (Littleport) meters in height. The danger connected with the næssas, then, would have to do with their murkiness, the precarious nature of their surface, and the difficulty of the water crossing. In settlement placenames, gelad signifies "water crossing," a structure akin to a causeway, a topographical feature especially found in the eastern fenlands and in the southern half of England. Thus, when Beowulf sets out on the uncuo gelad to avenge Æschere (Bwf 1410), he traverses, Gelling suggests, a "difficult water crossing liable to be rendered impossible by flooding." The narrow and hazardous water crossing that gelad signifies in Beowulf is, as Dennis Cronan has argued, consistent with its use elsewhere in Old English poetry.
Thus, Lawrence's second argument — that the Sandhaugar episode in Grettis saga and Beowulf's second fight take place on similar terrain — when examined proves to be somewhat untenable, for what emerges from the comparison is a striking difference in the geographical space. The examination by Mackie, Malone, Frank, Gelling, and Cronan of the terms used to describe Grendel's dominion distances its horrific space from the setting of the Sandhaugar episode. Rather, what is evoked is a vast expanse of marshland, where, to use Malone's phrase, "earth and water are mysteriously mingled," and whose waters are peopled with serpent-like aquatic creatures, a physical setting that is unlike the stark landscape of the farmstead at Sandhaugar.
The final argument against a connection between the Sandhaugar episode and Beowulf was put forth by Chambers. Chambers saw in the Beowulfian episode certain characteristics that were incompatible with the saga's folkloric narrative. In particular, he noted the heroic and courtly setting absent from the Icelandic work, but so prominent in Beowulf, and the theme of vengeance, an essential element in Icelandic sagas, present in Beowulf but curiously missing from the Sandhaugar episode. Even Chambers, who was a supporter of Lawrence's theory and who saw Beowulf as an interweaving of popular tale and historical matter, was nonetheless highly ambivalent about connecting the two sequences.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beowulf and the Grendel-Kin by Helen Damico. Copyright © 2015 West Virginia University Press. Excerpted by permission of West Virginia University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: From History to Vernacular Epic 1
1 The Severed Head: Poetic Image and Historical Text 41
2 The Gifstol and the Grendel-kin 102
3 Álfifa in ríka and the Beowulfian Konungamóir 152
4 Emma and Wealhtheow: Female Sovereignty and Poetic Discourse 204
Afterword 285
Bibliography 298
Index 333
About the Author 346