ENG505 - Beowulf, Cultural Memory, and War

Spring 2004

OUR BEOWULF BLOG*

(natterings, chatter, dialogue, and other bits and pieces of intellectual and lower forms of discourse flung across national and cultural borders between students at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville and Université Laval in Quebec City, Quebec)

Map of Edwardsville, Illinois/Map of Quebec City, Quebec

*All interested queries and submissions to weblog should be directed to Eileen Joy via e-mail: ejoy@siue.edu

Figures 1 & 2. Replica of a helmet found at Sutton Hoo ship burial site & Russian soldiers returning from Chechnya

I N D E X   O F   P O S T I N G S

22 Jan. 2004

B. Rable on Simone Weil's "The Iliad, or The Poem of Force":

Of the Achaean warriors, Simone Weil states, “At the outset, at the embarkation, their hearts are light [. . .] they go off as though to a game, as though on holiday from the confinement of daily life.” Weil’s image of the lightheartedness of warriors “with nothing but space to oppose” them is relevant to modern armies that believe themselves physically and morally superior to an untested enemy. Take for instance the following poem by Bob McDowell, a member of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, titled “The Hill Street Tommies,” which speaks of the men from the Lurgan linen mill, some of whom perhaps sought adventure if not flight from Ireland during World War I:

 

                        There’s big Bob Lunn and Donaldson,

                        Who could make boots with any other,

                        And the Blizzard Boy, his mother’s joy,

                        Who could never keep out of bother.

                        There’s Bobbie Gordon, solid man, old

                        Tom Black and Campbell.

                        When these lads brave cross o’er the waves

                        The Germans in their boots will tremble.

 

Further, there is evidence that at least some World War I English soldiers dealt with battle as a sort of game. For example, in The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell notes that on the German’s first use of chlorine gas, Sgt. Reginald Grant remarked, “It is a new device in warfare and thoroughly illustrative of the Prussian idea of playing the game.” Fussell also recounts instances in which “the sporting spirit was to kick a football toward the enemy lines while attacking.” Most notable was one Capt. Nevill, a company commander in the 8th East Surreys, who offered a prize to the platoon which, at the jump-off of the Somme attack, first kicked its football up to the German front line. Capt. Nevill, who kicked a ball apparently to signal the attack, was killed instantly. The following revealing poem resulted from this event:

 

                        On through the hail of slaughter,

                           Where gallant comrades fall,

                        Where blood is poured like water,

                           They drive the trickling ball.

                        The fear of death before them

                           Is but an empty name.

                        True to the land that bore them—

                           The SURREYS play the game.

 

One wonders how the bitter realities of trench warfare might have changed the author of this poem. One also wonders how the realities of modern warfare, in which the only thing between the combatants is space—for example, bombs dropped from 40,000 feet and missiles launched from hundreds of miles—have changed the rules of the “game” forever.

3 Feb. 2004

J. Olson on Tolkien's ideas re: myth and allegory:

I was reading over the Tolkien essay again, and found myself at the passage we discussed in class: "Folk-tales in being, as told—for the ‘typical folk-tale’ of course, is merely an abstract conception of research nowhere existing—. . ."   From this quote in class, we ventured into the unexplainability of the origins of folk tales, in that if one traces its origins back, one always reaches a vanishing point.  However true this maybe, I think Tolkien is talking about something different.  He puts stress around the words “typical folk-tale” because, for him, a “typical” folk tale does not exist; folk tales, by their natures, cannot be typical.  Each tale is rich in its independence from other such tales of other such people.  The classification of folk tales, and thus the "typification," only arises within academia, only within "an abstract conception of research."

Just below this explanation of the impossibility of typical folk tales, he talks of the interconnectedness of myths and folk-tales and how both escape analytical reasoning.  Then he writes, "Its [myth’s] defender is thus at a disadvantage: unless he is careful, and speaks in parables, he will kill what his studying by vivisection and he will be left with a formal or mechanical allegory."  What strikes me about this passage is that Tolkien suggests that the critic, or the "defender" of myth, must talk in parable, which is an allegory with moral implications, if he is to keep the myth from turning into a poorly functioning allegory.  Tolkien uses allegory in explanation/investigation of myth to avoid the myth from becoming an allegory.

Eileen Joy's response to J. Olson:

That "folk-tales," by their very nature, cannot be typical--I agree with you. I think, in fact, that you are right about what Tolkien meant there--it makes sense. It's still connected, too, to why, when you search for a folk-tale's supposed "origin," you always reach a vanishing point, because these stories are so rich in their multiplications and transformations (always evolving, etc., and changing, too, along different cultural lines). As regards his comments about how a critic should "speak in parables," or else he will kill what he is studying--myth--while also degrading it, I guess, into an allegory (and here we can see Tolkien puts "myth" above "allegory" as a genre of tale-telling)--what he's really doing, in a way, is defending the important cultural role of the creative artist, while also insisting that "criticism" itself be more artistic, or metaphoric (which is what he himself is doing in his essay). There's a danger in all this, I think (although I have to say I *love* Tolkien's essay for many different reasons), in believing that "myth" can never really be "explained" without simultaneously destroying it, because it means that, ultimately, for Tolkien, "myth" stands in a realm "above and beyond" criticism, which means it is also not subject to cultural critique or to political inquiry, and cannot be investigated via ethics, philosophy, etc. In that sense, Tolkien seems to be treating myth in a religious way, as a form of mysticism, almost. But I *do* think Tolkien is ultimately right to point to the fact that, in certain times and places, art (broadly speaking) has its own rules and effects (aesthetics), and has to be judged, at some level, "on its own terms."

One other comment about allegory (which means, in the Greek, "to speak otherwise"--Joanne e-mailed me this definition, and I also realized I have a new website link for allegory, which you can access here): it appears Tolkien, gives a higher status to myth over allegory, perhaps because, for Tolkien, myth possesses a certain power whereby it can never be reduced to just one pat meaning, whereas an allegory almost always refers to something specific outside of itself; in other words, an allegory, once "solved," is thereby also "reduced." Of course, I might argue that allegory can be far richer than that, and certainly, medieval writers and the early Church fathers (like Dante and Augustine) read and interpreted texts, like the Bible, allegorically in a way that was productive of richly diverse and multilayered meanings (mainly spiritual, of course). For an explanation of the allegorical method early Church authors used to interpret the Bible (called "patristic exegesis"), go here.

5 Feb. 2004

Random thoughts of Eileen Joy on a snow day:

Realizing that we would probably have a snow day today, and feeling a bit insomniac, I undertook an experiment last night and watched the entire Godfather trilogy on DVD . . . backwards. So, I watched The Godafther--Part III first, then The Godafther-Part II, then the first film. [Never mind that The Godfather-Part III is awful--it's practically camp, especially the parts where an older and ill "godfather," Michael Corleone (Al Pacino, with a bad buzz haircut) is hatching nefarious deals with Catholic bishops at the Vatican--but the first two films are American classics.] Watching these films backwards is really kind of extraordinary because you're looking at a kind of "family history"/American mafia history "in reverse," with sometimes illuminating results. When you consider that the second film incorporates flashbacks related to the past of the "godfather" from the first film--Don Corleone, Michael's father (played by Marlon Brando in first film and by Robert DeNiro in second film)--then, in a way, watching the films backwards is really watching them "forward," too. But the reason I bring this up at all, is that I was struck, watching these films, how much the American mafia culture of the 1940s through 1960s was really very much like the tribal culture of Beowulf--"cosa nostra," they called it, or "our thing." In this world, even though "family" (as in blood relationships) obviously matters, what matters even more are the relationships formed between the strongest and most powerful members (always men) of the different crime families, who then also become "like blood." In the famous ending of the second film, Michael authorizes the murder of his own brother, and in the first film authorizes the murder of his sister's husband, because "business"--which is itself a "family" operation--always comes before "kin." A lot of the aspects of a kind of "machismo" Sicilian culture that are portrayed in the films (and also in the HBO series, The Sopranos), where the relationships between the men are always more important than the relationships with the women, and where all business activities exist in a realm somewhere "outside the law" but also always within a kind of family/tribal "code of honor," also resonates, I think, with the world portrayed in Beowulf. Just some thoughts.

B. Rable on Beowulf and the "Dating Controversy":

From Prescott, Kiernan, and Bjork and Obermeier, we deduce that scholars cannot agree as to when Beowulf was written, where it was written, by whom it was written, and why it was written. We also construe from Liuzza that in all probability none of these questions will ever be answered—Alain Renoir is quoted as saying, “I readily confess that I should be at a loss to tell when, where, by whom, and under what circumstances, this greatest of all early-Germanic epics was composed.” Following further discussion of the importance of answering the when, where, who, and why [4 W’s] of the poem—and the frustration of not being able to do so—Liuzza concludes, “When we talk about the dating of Beowulf we are talking about nothing less than the philosophical foundations of our discipline.”

 

Why is it so important to determine the origins of Beowulf? If there is little chance that the 4 W’s will ever be answered to everyone’s satisfaction, why do so many continue to invest so much in the problem? Indeed, it can be argued that even lacking the context of the 4 W’s, Beowulf treats many enduring aspects of the basic human condition, such as the concepts of honor, courage, loyalty, and immortality, not to mention the constant struggle of good versus evil.

 

I believe that the primary reason for the unrelenting quest for the origins of Beowulf (by scholars and readers alike) lies in the fact that the poem speaks to Everyman, and in doing so, it appeals to Everyman’s issues of authenticity and authority. I believe that further complicating the matter is yet a fifth question: is the text being studied either the original or at least an accurate copy? While common sense might suggest that such truths, regardless of their context, are immutable, and therefore, worth studying for themselves, the quest for answers may be the function of the modern reader’s need to ensure the legitimacy of the message.

 

Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, says, “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. [. . .] The presence of the original is the prerequisite of the concept of authenticity. [. . .] The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.”

 

Consequently, the modern reader wants assurance that the noble ideals that he or she is preparing to embrace from reading Beowulf spring from a truthful author, from a text written under honorable circumstances, and from a text that remains unaltered (for personal or political gain) over time. As the modern reader learns to sort fact from fiction in the glut of information he or she receives and ultimately accepts or rejects, his or her demand for assurances of authenticity and subsequent authority of the text will only increase. Beowulf will always be questioned; the stakes are too high for the modern reader who too often has been duped into accepting lies packaged as noble truths.

 

The issues of authenticity raises another interesting question: what if somehow it was determined that Beowulf was written to honor individuals who had actually committed gross atrocities, or that the poem had been altered to serve some sort of political or religious purpose that was considered totally dishonorable? These are judgments made routinely in an increasingly pluralistic world. Would the poem be banished from the Western canon to the first ring of the inferno? Or, would it receive a qualifying asterisk and continue to be studied? My question then is can a work, particularly its origins, be studied too much?

 

J. Olson on R.M. Liuzza, "On the Dating of Beowulf":

 

Liuzza ends his article, “On the Dating of Beowulf,” with the claim that the dating of Beowulf reflects the “philosophical foundations of our discipline” (Liuzza 295).  Now if the discipline is literature, I am not exactly sure how the date of Beowulf could be consider essential to its philosophical foundations.  When Liuzza says at the beginning of the article, “Few would nowadays consider the branch of Beowulf studies concerned with dating to be ‘most clearly serviceable to criticism’” (Liuzza 281), I believe this to be the end of the matter of the dating of Beowulf.  But, he continues to reflect upon the dating methods and the inability to date the text, and then proclaims its necessity.  He writes, “Without a doubt, the date of Beowulf matters; imagine the confusion that would result if some critic placed Paradise Lost in the late seventeenth century, others in the early sixteenth, still others in the middle of the nineteenth” (Liuzza 283).  This specific example is tainted with understanding and knowledge.  He is right to point out the misunderstandings that may arise out of the incorrect dating of Paradise Lost, but let me stress, Paradise Lost is not Beowulf.  The scholars of today have an enormous amount of information about Paradise Lost, the time it was written and the social context into which it fits.  We also know much about the surrounding centuries of its completion.  This amount of knowledge is lacking in relation to Beowulf.  Thus, the fact that the date of Beowulf is unfixed, varying within three centuries, has very different implications than if Paradise Lost was wrongly dated.  If we had a complete picture of 8th to 10th century England, the dating of Beowulf would also be as important as that of Paradise Lost; but the simple matter of fact is that we do not.

 

Another issue that makes the dating of Beowulf secondary is the problem of measurement.  Neither Liuzza nor Bjork attempt to talk about the philosophical nature of this problem.  For any measurement to occur, (the dating of a text is a type of measurement) one must be able to fix one element upon which to measure the other.  The problem is apparent in Quantum Mechanics.  One cannot know the position while fully knowing the momentum of a quantum particle.  If one does not know the momentum or the position, one cannot know the where the particle is, and thus cannot measure it.  Measurement requires an “artificial” fixing of one element, on which to judge the other.  In relation to the issue at hand, dating, time must be fixed.  Usually, this fixing is not a problem because knowledge of chronological events makes it easy for one to do.  But in relation to Beowulf, the knowledge is missing, thus the chronology is shady.  Liuzza, in his analysis of the methods of dating and their drawbacks, always comes to this problem, but instead he does not attempt to think about it an abstract manner; he does not extract the philosophical problems, but instead names the concrete phenomena that occur.  For example, he talks about the metrical analysis of the dating of Beowulf, and concludes that editorial acts of Anglo-Saxon scribes destroy the ability to date the text via metrical analysis.

 

The most problematic method of dating which Liuzza brings up is the “external evidence of historical context both in explicit references to historical events and implicit attitudes towards man and society” (284).  Within historical methods of dating, the problem of measurement is most apparent.  One who uses historical methods of dating engages in a circular reasoning.  One of the main reasons to fix the date of Beowulf is to be able to extract an understanding of the historical and social context which the poem was written in and responding to.  But if one uses outside knowledge of the historical happenings of 8th -10th century Anglo-Saxon England to date the poem, one is also prescribing the historical implications which will be drawn from the text.  In other words, one wants to establish a fixed date to understand the content and implications of a text, but uses historical context as a method to attempt to date it.  The activity invalidates itself.  Liuzza mentions this, “Literary and cultural historians in increasing numbers have come to realize that there is often, sometimes inevitably, a circularity in historical argument when it comes to literary subjects” (285).

 

The solution to this problem, as it appears to me, is to look at Beowulf’s date in a general way.  Why isn’t the current state of uncertainty satisfactory?  Are we not drawing many interesting conclusions and doing much scholarly work within the limits of uncertainty?  Does not uncertainty give Beowulf dominance as a piece of scholarly literature?  Knowing the general date of Beowulf gives much room for interpretation and exploration—that is, it gives it scholarly motivation and perpetuation.  And, what will we finally learn from fixing the date that we have not already hypothesized and obliquely considered?

 

P. Heyen on Beowulf and the "Dating Controversy":

When I read Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monsters and The Critics” last week, I was at once impressed by what seemed to me the particularly well-placed position of this article in the reading syllabus, and at the same time, gratified that someone was actually putting into words the feeling I had had since first beginning study of Beowulf.  While the various articles were interesting of themselves, the entire time I perused them I wondered why everyone wanted to discuss the poem as history rather than poetry and consequently, felt an immediate affinity with Tolkien.  While I understand the historical significance of a rare medieval document to historians, the questions always in my mind are why literary scholars would place so much emphasis on the dating, the author, and the provenance of this work of literature and how any of these can be definitively decided in the absence of all.  

The more I read about the research that has been done to determine date, author, and provenance, the more I believe that the task is impossible.  After reading Prescott’s and Kiernan’s descriptions of the digital processes involved in creating the The Electronic Beowulf, I recognize the significance of the project in preserving the document and helping to improve its legibility. (Although I have to confess that the project seems an exorbitant expenditure of time and money for an infinitesimal gain in knowledge.  After all, the enhanced images are still indefinite and open to interpretation.)  Liuzza makes some excellent points as to the relevance in having a historical background from which to analyze the poem and in knowing the various methods by which scholars have attempted to provide a date for Beowulf. (I use the term loosely in respect for Liuzza’s argument as to the ambiguity concerning “what we mean when we speak of Beowulf.”)  His discussion of the problems with the methods and the ambiguity of the results e.g. analysis drawn from shaky information such as reconstructed language rules and metrical measures that may indicate a specific time period or simply a poet’s use of creative license suggest that the effort is moot.  Likewise, the contradictory theories explained by Bjork & Obermeier and the seemingly weak foundations on which some of them are based, such as Walter Goffart’s assessment of a late date for the poem based on the appearance of two words (Hetware and Hugas) in the text, increase my sense of the futility of a historical pursuit of the poem’s origins. If few written works exist from this period, is it possible to make the assured determination that these terms were not used prior to a certain date?  That these issues have been studied and debated for almost two hundred years with relatively no conclusive results makes me think that establishing a specific time and place for Beowulf is a dragon against whom, like Beowulf, the persistent scholar will meet “his inevitable overthrow in Time” (Tolkien 67).  I just wonder if it would be more productive to ask questions such as, What can Beowulf teach us about the human condition at any time rather than, What can Beowulf teach us about the human condition at such and such a time?  I also wonder if this opinion makes me a poor student of Beowulf?

S. Kollbaum on Beowulf and the "Dating Controversy":

I am absolutely sure I am not alone in my reaction of “wow” when reading all the different theories that exist for the date, provenance, author, and audience of Beowulf that Bjork and Obermeier provide so amply in Chapter 2 of The Beowulf Handbook.  I do not doubt the impossibility of the task of correctly identifying these elements; I understand very clearly why scholars arrive “at a cautious and necessary incertitude,” and yet I am still in awe of the number of theories present (33).  While intrigued by so many of the theories that Bjork and Obermeier share, I find myself captivated the most by the question of audience for two reasons.

 

First, I too question Baum’s two audience prerequisites of having “an interest in the ‘exploits of a heathen hero’ and in Germanic history and lore and must be attentive enough to comprehend and enjoy a difficult and often cryptic narrative” that disqualify a lay audience (31). Like Mitchell, I wonder why an audience would need “specialized knowledge” to recognize heroics.  Perhaps an audience would need background to recognize historical references but not necessarily all historical references depending on who the audience in fact was.  It seems that a lay audience would have more stake in the meaning of the Beowulf story than a monastic audience because of the ideas of honor, loyalty, and courage that the story fosters.  The second reason for my interest in the audience questions stems from Bjork and Obermeier’s concluding statement concerning audience: “The question of audience, even in the presence of a firm grasp of who wrote the poem and when, is in the end exceedingly slippery, the most difficult of all such questions to answer” (33).   Obviously, as they have related earlier the authorship and dating are impossible tasks facing Beowulf scholars, but I am confused as to why audience would be the “most difficult” question facing scholars.  Would not the firm grasp of the author and the date aid the scholars in determining the existing audience then as the scholars would understand the world in which Beowulf was written?  I am just wondering if I am missing something there.

J. Bosomworth on R.M. Liuzza, "On the Dating of Beowulf":

The first thing I found interesting about this work was the author's way of pointing out that Beowulf's considered composition date of some time from the 8th to the 11th century is ironic in that "the most historically-minded branch of English literary studies cannot place its most important poetic text more securely than in a range of three centuries" (283).  This problem of finding an accepted date and the flaws in the main types of dating methods are the subject of this work.

 

According to Liuzza, there are problems raised even by trying to date the poem. What, for example, do we mean when we speak of Beowulf?  Who was it written for?  What, specifically, was the writer's main purpose for writing the poem down?  For me, I think this is a key point. As was mentioned in class, it's not a standard epic as it doesn't really describe the foundation of anything. Indeed, it is arguably more similar to an elegy or tragedy, as it describes the eventual downfall of a noble man and race.  If it was written as history, should it be critiqued along with literature?  Does it even matter if it includes historical facts?  Is it a classic because it defies classification, enabling endless discussion of its merits/faults due to these questions?

 

Liuzza writes that there are two main methods used to date the poem: "beauty of inflections," which focuses on internal evidence of meter and language, and "beauty of innuendoes," which focuses on external evidence in historical context using references in the poem to historical events and social attitudes.  He refutes the argument by Ritchie Garvin that as Beowulf is an English work, there must be something in it that will give away its origin date, arguing that this would be accurate only if it was a typical poem, not one that is considered to have been written by a more worldly, educated person. He also points out that dating it from historical context clues is faulty, especially for those who date it prior to the Viking raids due to its praise of the Danes. This, he describes, is as much prejudice as fact, and says that there is no reason to believe that a person who lived through Viking raids, especially an educated person, would be unable to think of them reverently.  Liuzza mentions that there were still Englishmen who accepted the talents of Beethoven and Goethe even during WWII.  In the United States, this example could be expanded to say that in the distant future, a book such as Gone With the Wind could logically be thought of as 19th century literature, just because it speaks glowingly of southern culture in a specific, cultural era (not something I think most of us would find acceptable).       

 

Liuzza also describes the problems inherent in linguistic methods used in trying to date Beowulf by word usage and metrical evidence.  He describes the problems as stemming from the debate on when certain patterns first appeared, then to questions regarding rules of Old English meter and the chronology of Old English sound changes.  Unfortunately, he points out, unlike other peoples, the "Anglo-Saxons left no text . . . to help us understand their poetry" (286).  Even if they had, the propensity of writers to not always follow strict guidelines would make it problematic.  What if it was a writer who was ahead of his time, or one who was intentionally trying to write in an antiquarian style?  Another problem develops when a critic considers that the poem was originally performed orally, then was eventually written down, passed along, and rewritten.  As described here, it is logical to assume that stuctural (metrical, etc.) and content changes were made as it went from an oral to a written work.  Still more changes would have been made as it was recopied (he mentions a number of known mass-copied works which have variations ranging from minor to fairly major) and are being made today as it is interpreted by translators.  Because of all of this corruption to the text, as well as questions regarding who its main audience was it what its main point likely was, it is unlikely that the debate over the date Beowulf was written in will end soon.

 

J. Moy on The Electronic Beowulf:

 

I found the article by Andrew Prescott, “The Electronic Beowulf and Digital Restoration,” as well as the article by Kevin Kiernan, “Digital Image Processing and the Beowulf Manuscript” to be both interesting and thought provoking in their assessment of the impact that digital image processing has had and will continue to have on the legibility and long term preservation of the Beowulf manuscript. In particular, Andrew Prescott’s article lays out both a brief historical overview of the Beowulf manuscript as well as the different attempts made over the years to decipher and restore the aging work.  The focus of the article is the process of digital imaging as done by Kevin Kiernan beginning in 1993. Most interesting about Kiernan’s work was his use of the digital camera to identify images “in areas of damaged and obscure text.” His original intent in this process was to hopefully clarify mistaken letters, identify lost faded lettering, and minutely scrutinize severely damaged areas with this special imaging technique in hopes of finding traces of text or font. Kiernan was able to fulfill some of these tasks, but unfortunately his primary hope of being able to “establish [an exact] text of Beowulf” had to be discarded. Nonetheless, the advantages to this system are numerous and as Kiernan notes: “the possibilities of digital restoration may yet bear larger […] fruit than […] hitherto […] imagined.”

 

I was impressed by Kiernan’s concept, his dream of any person being able to take the text of Beowulf and view it alongside the “later transcript by Thorkelin, as well as the collations by Conybeare and Madden.” Not only does this make perfect sense for anyone wishing to analyze the Beowulf  text historically or linguistically, but in addition it is also a wonderful way of conserving all of these related text in one location. Perusing the detail that Kiernan uses to describe the painstaking process required to photograph just one frame, it is astounding that he has achieved such a phenomenal task. The importance of this work will only become more magnified over time as the Beowulf manuscript itself continues to disintegrate.

 

Remarkably, even as early as the 1880’s the idea of photographing the Beowulf transcript as a means of identifying obscured parts of the text had already been established. Over the years the technological advances in both lighting techniques and photography equipment has aided tremendously in the greater exploration of Beowulf. As a supporter of the view that the Beowulf manuscript is, in fact, the original text, both written and composed by the same person as opposed to an older piece that had experienced numerous additions and changes, Kiernan has found some satisfaction in noting that certain areas, once thought to be water damaged, under the high-resolution lens of the digital camera appear now to be multiple erasures, and in some instances overwritten text of the same hand. And now the principal question that obviously comes to mind is: if this newly discovered evidence lends support to Kiernan’s theory that indeed the Beowulf manuscript was written by one man without numerous additions and changes, then does this necessarily change the dating of Beowulf to a later time period, making it a more contemporary piece than previously imagined? I believe only with improved technology and intense research, will an answer to this question possibly surface. It does now appear to Kiernan that even with technological advances, the hopes of ever fully recovering the whole and unchanged text of Beowulf are lost along with the fringed edges of the manuscript that turned to dust on the floor of the British Museum. Nevertheless, we can still hope that with further technological advances researchers will continue in their search for a more historically correct Beowulf translation and bring us toward a more nuanced understanding of the text.

 

E. Joy's thoughts re: students' comments on "Dating Controversy":

 

Bill raises an interesting point viz. the quotation from Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"--that many scholars (and perhaps readers like us, too) are very interested in getting at what might be called the "authenticity" of Beowulf as an "original" work of art: we want to believe that there is such a thing as "the ORIGINAL, unaltered Beowulf," because such an "animal" would give us a kind of window into, or mirror of, some kind of unadulterated culture, or *mind*, that might have produced a work such as Beowulf. It's a little bit like discovering a "dead sea scroll" that begins, "I, Jesus, here commit my teachings to writing," as opposed to having a gospel written by someone *purporting* to have walked around with Jesus and later written down, from memory, what Jesus purportedly said and taught. [And obviously, for scholars of Christianity, the quest has always been to "discover or "deduce" what Jesus *really* said from the mass of written documents that exist, many of which are copies of copies of copies, and even the earliest Gospels were written a certain number of years after Jesus's death.] There is a kind of mysticism, then, that attaches to the idea that we could have in front of us an "original" manuscript, untouched by the ravages of time or the inkwells of monk-copyists and editors. If only we had this "original" with us today (an oral song, perhaps, or the "first first first first" version of the written poem), then we could better understand what the text was intended to "say" to us, before history got a hold of it and took words away here and there (fire, water damage, crumbling edges of manuscript before it was re-bound in 19th century), and added other words (the emendations--suggested text--of textual scholars and editors, and maybe even the added language of monk-copyists).

 

I should note here that, increasingly, contemporary literary studies have been putting a heavy emphasis on the "historicism" of literary texts as a mechanism for interpreting those texts' possible meanings (this is sometimes called "new historicism," a sub-field of literary theory whose most visible proponent is the Renaissance literature and Shakespeare scholar, Stephen Greenblatt; see his book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From Shakespeare to More, and go here, also, for a general explanation of the basic tenets of "new historicism"). Basically, "new historicism" (which shares some precepts with the kind of "historicism" practiced by early Beowulf scholars that Tolkien derides and criticizes in his essay), believes that the "expressive content" of a work of art cannot be separated from the "material history/culture" in which it is originally "embedded." Basically, you cannot really understand a work of art, this theory dictates, unless you understand how it functioned/"performed" within a specific historical context. Further, there is no such thing as a work of art that could possibly express "unchanging truths" or certain ideas about a transcendental "human nature"--in other words, works of art do NOT possess "universal meanings." They can really only express (or, reveal) the social, cultural, and political dynamics ("networks of power," so to speak) of the time periods in which they were originally produced and re-produced. One example of how this might work in Renaissance literary studies would be to look at how a particular performance of Shakespeare's Richard II played a part in the Earl of Essex's rebellion against Queen Elizabeth in 1601, and then to extrapolate the play's possible meanings within this specific historical context (since today, Feb. 7th, is the anniversary of the rebellion, the example is somehow apropos; go here for Salon.com's description of the event in their "Literary Daybook"). This kind of scholarship owes an obvious debt to the French philosopher Michel Foucault (go here for a really cool site on Foucault that will also introduce you to his ideas in a way that you can glean a "basic" understanding).

 

But wait a minute--am I saying you *have* to adopt this viewpoint when thinking about Beowulf's possible meanings and/or value for us today? Absolutely not (although we *will* read examples of this type of criticism when we get to Frantzen, Howes, and Niles). Several of you raised concern about what you see as the "reductivism" inherent in what might be called the scholarly obsession in determining Beowulf's supposedly "original" provenance, date, audience, etc. As Jim points out, perhaps Beowulf endures somehow, as a "classic," precisely because it defies generic categorization and precise historical dating. Therefore, its very historical elusiveness helps it to escape the possible "trap" of historicizing that would reduce the poem to nothing more than the "emblem" of an age (and I loved Jim's example of how Gone With the Wind might be viewed, later on, when we're all long gone, in this scenario). Sara K. points out that almost *any* audience can recognize the "heroic" story in Beowulf (although this does beg the question of whether or not what is "heroic" is defined radically differently in different times and places--for the characters in the poem itself, Grendel is not "heroic" even though he is basically Beowulf's only true "match" as a fighter, and when his mother kills thanes, she does so out of a need to revenge her child's death, but still, she is not a "hero," but Beowulf, in seeking her out in her own territory/home and killing her, *is* a hero; further; who is a "hero" today: is a Chechen suicide bomber a hero? an American soldier in Iraq? an Iraqi Republican Guard insurgent who lobs a grenade at American soldiers? the firemen who rushed, heedlessly, into the Twin Towers on Sep. 11th and didn't come back out? the workers sitting at their desks in the Twin Towers that day? the German men, women, and children killed in the fire-bombing of Dresden during World War II? the Allied Forces pilots who dropped the bombs on Dresden? etc. etc.). Patti writes (rather beautifully and lucidly, I think), "That these issues have been studied and debated for almost two hundred years with relatively no conclusive results makes me think that establishing a specific time and place for Beowulf is a dragon against whom, like Beowulf, the persistent scholar will meet 'his inevitable overthrow in Time' (Tolkien 67).  I just wonder if it would be more productive to ask questions such as, What can Beowulf teach us about the human condition at any time rather than, What can Beowulf teach us about the human condition at such and such a time?" What an excellent question. Joanne also raises the point that the very "uncertainty" surrounding Beowulf's date of composition has given rise to much rich scholarship that ponders all the different possibilities for different meanings. How true, I think. I also want all of you to know that you stand in very good company, as "New Historicism" has not been without its critics, who have raised these, among other, critical points:

9 Feb. 2004

B. Rable on the narrator of Beowulf:

Why does the poet refer to himself/herself at all? It seems unnecessary, for example, "I never heard ...", "I have heard"? What does saying this add to the poem?

Eileen Joy's response to B. Rable:

Bill raises an interesting question regarding what the purposes might be behind the narrator of Beowulf occasionally using the first-person perspective ("I have heard," etc.), a question to which I cannot give a pat answer, because it raises complex questions, like: what might an 8th, 9th, or 10th-century author have seen in the 4th to 6th-century past that he thought was somehow relevant to his times? What is the attitude of this author to the characters in the poem? Does he admire them, feel they are justly damned, regret their damnation, etc.? By inserting the "I" of himself into the poem, we have a "narrator"/"author" who adds extra layers of socio-cultural/psychological/historical perspective to the narrative, and makes the poem that much more interesting. Which also raises the question: are the author and narrator to be automatically assumed as being one and the same person? Is there an author, say, in a 10th-century monastery somewhere inventing a narrative persona (i.e. a "mask") for himself as, say, "one of the gang" of the world of the poem (after all, the poem begins, "Listen! We have heard . . .", etc.)? Or perhaps, his persona is that of one of the supposed descendants of the "gang" of the world of the poem. Or, perhaps that "we" he invokes includes everyone in his present, contemporary culture as those who have "inherited" and already "know" (or should know) this story--therefore, his narrative persona is saying, "listen everyone, we've heard about these people before, but let me tell you, again, why it's important to remember this story." Where do we, in the "present present" stand in relation to this "we" the narrator invokes (?)--this, too, is an interesting question: is its message still relevant to us, and do you think the author was looking to the future at all? Further, what if the person who either "wrote" or merely "copied" (or maybe "wrote/added" while "copying") this poem believed that he was mainly preserving an earlier narrator's "voice"/"persona," and how does that complicate out understanding of the author's relationship, as it were, to the subject matter of the poem (when we understand the "author" to be separate from the "narrator")? In other words, imagine a 10th-century writer imagining an earlier oral poet "speaking/singing" the poem, and in his writing/copying, he is trying to preserve this earlier, oral culture that he believes is embedded, somehow, in the writing (the author, therefore, might have believed he was invoking what this poem would have sounded like when it was being "sung" in the beer halls of the heroic past, and he mainly thinks of himself, therefore, not so much as an author as a preservationist-curator). The poem itself, is filled with singers ("scops") who also say to characters within the poem, "Listen! We have heard . . .," etc. Ultimately, the poem contains multiple layers of "narration" and "voice" that complicate our understanding of what we probably would like to believe is the main perspective, or point of view. For an interesting reading related to all this, go here for a summary of Michel Foucault's famous essay, "What is An Author?"

S. Bédard on Beowulf in Quebec City:

So your students wonder why francophone students in Laval would want to study Beowulf? I never felt like being a French Canadian would prevent me from learning about any other language or culture. My origins are so diverse, there’s no reason to favour one over the others (I’m part French, Irish, Scot, and Native). English literature is not all that interests me; I admit I am fond of Japanese literature also. Some would say that’s distinctly Canadian, all this mix of cultures and having no culture maybe to call your own except for that very excellent confusion. Although at this point you can think there’s no sense in trying to understand any of that, I still found some sensible reasons to explain why I’m interested in Beowulf.

Every student of English literature knows what a haiku is, even if only vaguely. Chaucer was familiar with works from Dante or Jean de Meun and they were Italian and French. Learning about the literature of another culture or of a different time helps to get a fuller picture of what can be literature. Many are probably familiar with Latin or Greek authors already and do not find that unusual. It should not be any more unusual that people would study ancient texts in Chinese, Japanese, Anglo-Saxon, Sanskrit, or the like. It is not because some people consider a few works “classics,” and seem to extend this quality to languages or cultures; that this should become a bias and prevent others from reading works from other cultures. You say Beowulf is culture; isn’t it rather a blend of cultures? As for culture and origins, if some people think Beowulf is part of their origins, I think it is a question of just how far people want to look back in time; the English, the French and the Sanskrit language share a common past after all.

For my part, I have found a new reason to study Beowulf since classes started. Because French is my mother tongue, I have one more reason to study it. I know people who can not read books in English, people who can only read English literature in French, even if what they know of English literature is Lord of the Rings. I realised this because of my father who shows a surprising interest in Beowulf and tries to relate it to other works that he knows. Once I told him perhaps I should not tell him too much, in case he would like to read it, and he had to remind me he would never be able to read it. Language should not hinder learning and inquiry; Beowulf not only deserves a good, readable and enjoyable translation in Modern English, it deserves one in many modern languages. And studying Beowulf is the first step to making a good translation.

Here I guess you can add many of the reasons you have for studying it too. I noticed the words “culture and war” in your course title, also that you question the heroism of Beowulf with respect to terrorism and that you try to relate Beowulf to our time, “our” culture, to provoke a debate that can have more meaning for people now? Isn’t this a way to find more reasons to study Beowulf yourselves?

Best regards from Quebec, Sonia Bédard

Eileen Joy's response to S. Bédard:

Sonia raises a very interesting point, I think, when she writes, "As for culture and origins, if some people think Beowulf is part of their origins, I think it is a question of just how far people want to look back in time; the English, the French and the Sanskrit language share a common past after all." Sonia emphasizes, a little earlier, that she is interested in all types of literature, not just those literatures that come from traditions closest to what might be called her "ethnic" background (which she describes as "French, Irish, Scot, and Native"), and therefore she is naturally interested in Beowulf, just as she might also be naturally interested in Chinese poetry or The Song of Roland (a medieval French epic). This is true, I think, for SIU-Edwardsville students as well, although we would have to be honest and also admit that ours is a department of "English Language & Literature," and for us, that usually means we mainly study the "canonical" texts of American and British literature, beginning with the medieval period and extending to the contemporary period (and if we go back further, it is usually to read "classic" Western texts, such as the Bible or the plays of Sophocles, which we believe important English texts "speak to" or "draw upon"--i.e. Milton's Paradise Lost, by employing classical epic forms, refers itself, rather purposefully and explicitly, to Vergil's Aeneid and Homer's Iliad, and it also draws, obviously, upon the Bible as an "authoritative" foundational text), and therefore, we are really reading and studying, as it were, within what I would call a "closed cultural system"--a system, moreover, that assumes there is important value in a "shared heritage," as that "shared heritage" is expressed in art and literature. Keep in mind, too, that this "shared heritage" can often be contested, such that, at various times in its history, the text of Beowulf has been claimed as an "authentic" cultural document by the Germans, the Dutch, and the British.

Which brings me to Sonia's important point, I think--aren't our ideas about what constitutes, say, an "authentic," "original," "English" culture somewhat tied to "how far back" (as Sonia puts it) we are willing to look? And I would add to this that the very notion of how we LOOK at things, period, shapes what we see. Therefore, a Danish scholar sees only what is "Danish" in Beowulf (its Northern geography, for example, and its Nordic spiritual allusions to Wyrd/Fate and to heathen idols) and a British scholar sees only what is "English" (the language in which the poem is written, for example, and the inescapable fact that the text was found in an English library and was likely written in an English monastery). Ultimately, for me, the really intriguing question is why determining cultural origins is so important to so many people, and why it is that whole programs of study at colleges and universities are often pre-determined by national culture--therefore, at most American universities and colleges, you will find countless departments of "English," but you won't find many departments of "Literature" (and when you do, "Literature" often denotes Western literature only). Programs devoted to "comparative literature" are far and few between. Why do we value what is "native" over what is "non-native"? Why do we value the teaching of a "shared literary heritage" as an integral component in a liberal arts curriculum over the teaching of "different" and "foreign" literary heritages? What do we mean, really, when we use the word "foreign"? Isn't "foreign" a word whose meaning derives, partly, as Sonia points out, from how we "look" at the past, and where we think we come from in that past? How do we ultimately determine our "borders"--linguistic, cultural, historical, as well as those lines we draw on maps? Think of what is happening right now in Iraq where the U.S. government has put together a council to decide Iraq's future as a country (a country, moreover, whose present borders were demarcated by European countries in the 1950s), and how different ethnic groups within Iraq are jockeying for a voice in this process, and are also highly suspicious of one another. How one defines what it means to live in an "authentic Iraq" will have a lot to do with where one is standing when "looking" at this question: am I Shi'ite, Sunni, or Kurdish, and how does that affect my answer? How will American understanding (or lack of understanding) of these cultural issues affect the outcome of this debate, and even, the future of a country (which is also the future of the different "cultures" that make up that supposedly "one country")? If recent work in anthropology is to be trusted, we all have one common ancestor, her nickname is "Eve," and the remains of her "collective corpse" have been dug up in Africa. [If you are interested in this subject, see the recent article in American Scientist, "We Are All Africans."]

I am not going to answer any of the questions I am raising here (that wouldn't be any fun), but what I am going to do is leave you with some words from the eminent professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, Martha C. Nussbaum, from her recent (and I think, important) book, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Harvard University Press, 1997):

"In ethics, in historical knowledge, in knowledge of politics, in literary, artistic, and musical learning, we are inclined to be parochial, taking our own habits for that which defines humanity. In these areas as in the case of language, it is reasonable to immerse oneself in a single tradition at an early age. But even then it is well to become acquainted with facts of cultural variety . . . . As education progresses, a more sophisticated grasp of human variety can show students that what is theirs is not better simply because it is familiar" (62).

"The study of non-Western cultures is extremely challenging. Cultures are not monolithic or static. They contain many strands; they contain conflict and rebellion; they evolve over time and incorporate new ideas, sometimes from other cultures. It is not surprising, then, that many difficult questions should arise when we add the study of other cultures to the curriculum. When we decide to teach 'Chinese values' in a course in comparative philosophy, what should we be studying? The Confucian tradition? The Marxist critique of that tradition? The values of contemporary Chinese feminists, who criticize both Confucianism and Marxism (often by appeal to John Stuart Mill, whose The Subjection of Women was translated into Chinese early in the century)? Much depends on our purposes, in the course in question. But we should not fail to ask these questions. To make things still more complex, we must remember that even 'the Confucian tradition' was itself not monolithic . . . that much of what we now think of as the 'traditions' of ancient China (and ancient Athens) was really the work of subversive antitraditional intellectuals, engaged in argument with their surrounding societies. Similarly . . . be aware of the radical challenge posed by Buddhism to people's everyday ways of thinking and speaking about the self. . . . Non-Western cultures are complex mixtures, often incorporating elements originally foreign. This is true of our own traditions as well . . . . Cultural influence does not flow only, or even primarily, in a single direction" (117).

B. Rable on Overing and Osborne, "Mapping Beowulf":

In “Mapping Beowulf,” Gillian Overing describes her efforts to “reinvent” Beowulf’s voyage. She explains her aims as attempts “to locate the poem in our imagination” and “to act out and through conceptual maps.” But what is most interesting about this essay is the unstated, and perhaps unconscious, purpose of her journey. Indicative of her intention, and crucial to our understanding of her quest, is her selection of the words of Claude Gandelman: “All the great narratives of world literature contain maps, maps that we can read.”

 

In his book Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts, Gandelman discusses the links between viewing and touching. Janez Strehavoc, writing in the journal Afterimage, notes that Gandelman "invokes the figurative interpretation of this relationship in important symbols of the sixteenth century, drawing particular attention to Julius Wilhelm Zincgref’s Renaissance emblem Emblematicum Ethico-Politorum, which depicts an eye that is laid into an open palm. Here we are witnessing a unique eye-embodiment in the form of its insertion into touch, symbolizing the hand’s active role in the conception of discernible objects. On this subject Gandelman wrote the following: ‘In the emblem, the eye is merely a pilot guiding the hand toward its objectives.’"

 

I think that Overing’s endeavor to reinvent Beowulf’s adventure, to see and to touch what the poet describes, is an attempt to reify the poem, that is, to convert the abstraction of the poem into something concrete, something to grasp and hold on to despite its fiction. In effect, to read the map, not create the map, of Beowulf.  We see this time and again in her “travelogue,” which seems to slip in and out of wistful musings of places visited or inhabited by monsters and kings as if they really existed.

 

An additional motivation behind Overing’s mapping effort might be connected to the basic human need to order an environment in order to make sense of it or, as in Overing’s case, to map a theory of the poem. David Turnbull, in his book Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas, discusses a map as a metaphor for a theory, but cautions, “There is no clear understanding amongst scientists, philosophers or cartographers as to what either a theory or a map is.” I think Overing is caught up in the vagaries of trying to make sense of a fictional narrative with a technique that itself is, in this case, fictional. On the other hand, it could be argued that Overing is merely employing another tool to try to understand the poem. Turnbull quotes Harley and Woodward: “Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of thin concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.” In support of Overing’s argument, we might add, “and events in but not of the human world.”

 

C. Liu on Overing and Osborne, "Mapping Beowulf":

 

It really shocks me a lot whenever people not only take Beowulf as a “literary work” but also as “history,” though Tolkien says it is the least thing related to Beowulf.  Scholars try their best to figure out where Beowulf is from and how he sails to Heorot.  For me, it is also the “imaginary dream” of scholars, for they believe there should be some factual history in the poem.  But I just wonder why it can’t be merely a tale, without any historical background.  For instance, when Sutton Hoo was first discovered, many scholars abruptly related Beowulf to Sutton Hoo,  although this relation is not acknowledged fact anymore.  Why do people always assume there is “ONE” fact or truth in the world?  Why can’t it be an imaginary creation of the poet?  Though the poem, to some extent, shows similarities to history, yet I still think there is probably no distinct answer to it. . . . In ancient China, we had a history official who would write everything about the present dynasty he was in.  In doing so, lots of literary works can be proved to belong to a certain dynasty and its historical remains can be proved by the official history books.

 

P. Heyen on Overing and Osborne, "Mapping Beowulf":

“Mapping Beowulf” turned out to be nothing like I expected.  Judging from the title and length of the essay, I anticipated another article exploring the critical landmarks of what seems to me the incredibly vast territory of Beowulf.  Instead, I discovered a somewhat whimsical recreation of Beowulf’s voyage from Geatland to Heorot.  I liked the idea of getting a feel for the land and establishing a connection between the real world now, the real world then, and the poet’s fictional world, but I found myself thinking that the project seemed a little frivolous, academically speaking.  It wasn’t until I reached the section in which the writers acknowledge E.G. Stanley’s admonishing reminder that literature is not fact, while offering a valid retort with the Huck Finn analogy, that I could actually appreciate the venture they had undergone.  This analogy had a personal impact on me because, although I have never traced Huck’s journey myself, I have done so second-hand through the lecture and slide presentation of a man who has canoed it.  That presentation gave me a better understanding of Twain’s descriptions, making the geography more “real.”  Thus, the Huck reference enabled me to recognize the value in the Beowulf expedition.

E. Joy's thoughts re: "enduring aspects of basic human condition":

In an earlier posting, Bill wrote that "Beowulf treats many enduring aspects of the basic human condition, such as the concepts of honor, courage, loyalty, and immortality, not to mention the constant struggle of good versus evil." For some reason, I'm returning to this now (partly because I think it's a sentiment we all might share and have even expressed in different contexts), partly to play the devil's advocate, and partly because I think ruminating on this statement a bit might also help us to continue thinking about how we finally judge Overing's and Osborn's trip up and down those Northern waters and territories in their "quest," as it were, to "map" Beowulf's imaginary voyage (and therefore, although they are very smart scholars, they also want to believe that something somehow endures in that landscape that they could see and connect with their imaginings of the time period and place they believe Beowulf would have moved within, if he were real). I also think there's a segue in here somehow, too, between Overing's and Osborn's essay and the essays we just read by Frantzen, Bjork, and Niles, all of which deal with what we might call the issue of "cultural appropriations." I suppose I should first admit that I share Bill's sentiment here (otherwise, I'm not sure why I would want to teach ancient literatures at all), while at the same time I distrust, and even fear it. You see, I feel we need to be somewhat wary of those ideas or values often referred to as "basic" and "enduring" and "transcendental," because that implies that certain concepts, feelings, aspects of human nature (or the human condition), and social and cultural beliefs are static over long periods of time, and furthermore, that in different times and in different places, love is always love, courage is always courage, justice is always justice, God is always God, blood is always thicker than water, mothers always love their children, rolling stones always gather moss, evil is always evil, etc. In order to believe this, we would have to believe that for certain words--such as good or evil--there are very concrete, discrete, and distinct meanings that are attached to those words that are always "true" (or, let's say explicitly "evident") in all times and places. Are the meanings denoted and connoted by our language, though, really that stable? And further, aren't the meanings of abstract  concepts, such as love or good or evil or justice or reason, especially susceptible to how different individuals and groups of individuals want to define those concepts in relation to either their experience/interpretation of them, but also to what they think they need those concepts to do for them at a particular moment in history? So, for example, to a French revolutionary in late 1700s France, justice means beheading the king and queen, but for Queen Elizabeth during the Essex Rebellion of 1601, justice means beheading the Earl of Essex. How does the concept of romantic love differ between 12th-century Persia and 14th-century France, and then again, between these periods and 1960s America? Yanomami villages in the highlands of Brazil? How did we devise the term human, and what are the attributes that attach to this term that signify our difference, as it were, with every other living creature, such that we are human, and they are not? The category "human" obviously has biological connotations, but what are its other connotations, and what is at stake in these--socially, historically, politically, ethically?

As we well know from the philosophy of Jacques Derrida (especially in his 3 books published in 1967: Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference), there is no fixed distinction between a word and the supposed "thing" or "concept" that word signifies. [For a brief primer on Derrida's theory of deconstruction, go here.] As Madan Sarup writes in his theory primer, Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism (2nd edition):

"If one answers a child's question or consults a dictionary, one soon finds that one sign leads to another and so on, indefinitely. Signifiers keep transforming into signifieds, and vice versa, and you never arrive at a final signified which is not a signifier in itself" (33).

Okay, here's an example: I look up justice in the Oxford English Dictionary, and I get, variously, uprightness, equity, righteousness, just dealing, and integrity. Hmmm . . . now, what do those words mean? Chances are, if I look up any one of them, I'm going to get . . . yes, justice (in addition to even more words like virtue). Sarup writes further:

"Derrida argues that when we read a sign [a word], meaning is not immediately clear to us. Signs refer to what is absent, so in a sense meanings are absent, too. Meaning is continually moving along on a chain of signifiers, and we cannot be precise about its exact 'location,' because it is never tied to one particular sign. . . . In each sign there are traces of other words which that sign has excluded in order to be itself. And words contain the trace of the ones which have gone before. All words/signs contain traces. They are like the reminders of what has gone before" (33-34).

And what is also both present and absent, of course, are all the psychic and cognitive energies (both individual and collective, I would argue), that go into inventing and defining language in different times and places. Language is psychological, social, cultural, and historical, and as such, is highly complex and always evolving. How then, can we speak of "enduring aspects of basic human nature," or of human meanings that are transcendental? Obviously, language works, right (?), or otherwise we couldn't communicate at all, but we need to be careful, I think, to assume that what we, in modern Western culture (or, more narrowly, in an SIU-Edwardsville British literature classroom) believe is the "enduring" value of something like "heroism" may not look (or feel) the same to persons situated in different places. For the members of the "Ayran Brotherhood" (a "gang" formed by inmates incarcerated in maximum-security federal prisons across the United States), heroism is killing anyone who "snitches" on or "offends" anyone in the Brotherhood, and these killings are brutal, hands-on affairs that often leave the victims with fifty to sixty stab wounds and the gang member exulting in the blood he's drenched in. Members of the Brotherhood have a strict code of honor they live and die by, and it runs so counter to what most of us "on the outside" conceive of as "honor" and "integrity" that we would have a hard time fathoming how these men could do what they do on a daily basis. For my own part, I find myself in awe of their psychopathology, but I also understand that, given their situation as "lifers" who are never coming back out, that Nietzsche and Sun Tzu's The Art of War are more appealing to them as "ethical" texts than the New Testament or the statutes of the U.S. Department of Justice or the U.S. Constitution. [For those of you who are curious, check out the article in the recent New Yorker by David Grann, "The Brand: the most violent prison gang in America," 16 & 13 Feb. 2004.] The men who flew their planes into the Twin Towers on September 11th are considered martyrs by some, but as "evil" terrorists by others. Because my grandfather was a commanding officer in the Irish Republican Army from 1915 to 1923, I know very well the broad gulf that can open up between the words "soldier-hero" and "terrorist," between "martyr" and "murderer." I also know how these "binary" terms are also sometimes the two "faces," as it were, of the same coin.

But, does all this mean that certain concepts, such as (again), love and heroism, don't have some kind of meaning or important value that could be (and needs to be) transported, in powerful ways, across cultural, national, and chronological borders? Of course not. But how to carry them and protect them and wield them in socially productive and ethically valuable ways? Now, that's the hard part.

S. Barclay on Kiernan's Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript:

I suppose it’s because we just can’t resist a good mystery. Certainly, no one would read Kevin Kiernan for his literary merits. If Ker prompted us to work on our defence and Tolkien brought out the poet in us all, Kiernan appeals to that part of us that refuses to scoff at Oliver Stone’s theories, no matter how many experts refute them. The notion of the "second scribe" obviously wasn’t new when Kiernan set to work, though his findings are probably the most shockingly conclusive to date. However, the best thing about him is that he got me fascinated by the same questions I had been willing to dismiss about Beowulf. Who wrote it? When? Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone? In the end, I had figured, Beowulf exists, Kennedy is dead, the rest is just a series of accidents and incidents. Yet reading Kiernan, I was unable to resist his enthusiasm. Every time he writes that this or that finding leads to so many "exciting" possibilities, I get giddy. He is the prefect example of how people’s passions are highly infectious. So while a lot of his proof went admittedly flying over my head, his conclusions were about as satisfying as finally finding out that the butler did it, with some help from the cook. Elementary, my dear Kiernan.

There was also the thrill of finding out that the manuscript was probably an unfinished draft (the answer to why it doesn’t look like all those beautiful books we looked at) and that poet and scribe may well have been one and the same. I remember being bewitched the first time I saw John Donne’s handwriting. I was fascinated to see that we draw the letter "d" the same way, starting with the loop at the bottom and ending at the top, like a backwards "6". Kiernan’s statement made me stare at the various folio pages in awe. And for the first time, the pages whispered: "Hwæt, the wielder of words was here". Suddenly, this leather had meaning. And there he was, the image of this second scribe: copying other people’s texts for a living while his imagination turned a bunch of smoke into a dragon. The first scribe was there, too: A poet, but like most poets, he had to endure some tedious job in order to pay the rent. In my mind, he was a mentor; what Dante (and consequently, Eliot) called Il miglior fabbro. Then I couldn’t even focus on Kiernan anymore. My imagination was too busy traipsing through medieval libraries, inventing conversations between these two scribes. Do you like my poem? I think it’s brilliant! You’re too kind. I just wish it didn’t have to end there. And then came the death of the first scribe, the political times a changin’, and a thousand-line tribute to the end of an era. All this speculation, all because of Kiernan’s curiosity.

That has to be the kicker: that Kiernan could answer so many questions and still leave us full of wonder. Through the whole reading, I thought he was laying the brickwork for a solid conclusion. Turns out he was building a mystery. It seems to me that he must have accomplished what he had wanted to do. Just like Oliver Stone, he gave us the facts, minimal speculation, and plenty to think about. Just who was that scribe over in the grassy knoll? Why did he shoot Beowulf out to us? Was it one man’s desperate act or did he speak for a whole nation? I’m not really unpleased that Kiernan didn’t tell us more; I like to think that there are some mysteries that won’t be solved. As the saying goes, perhaps some things are better left to the imagination.

Best regards, Sarah Barclay (Université Laval)

S. Kollbaum on Sutton Hoo, Sailing Voyages, and Niles's "Appropriations: A Concept of Culture":

After the readings from last week, 2/12/04, I was feeling a bit disturbed by all the attempts to connect Beowulf to true historical facts, e.g. the reenactment of the sailing voyage and the word connections based on Sutton Hoo discoveries.  As I was reading these articles, I could not help but think of Emerson’s 1836 Nature and his opening questions concerning our need to connect to the past: “Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition [. . .] and not the history of theirs?” and “ [. . .] why should we grope among the dry bones of the past [. . .]?”  Why do we need to know that Beowulf was written in a certain time period and place?  As these thoughts were swirling in my head and still churning early this week, I really appreciated reading Chia-Hui’s response to Overing and Osborne’s “Mapping Beowulf” in which she eloquently questions “why [Beowulf] can’t be merely a tale, without any historical background,” “why do people always assume there is “ONE” fact or truth in the world,” and “why can’t it be an imaginary creation of the poet.”  I wasn’t alone in my queries concerning the past; my classmates obviously were questioning these attempts to historicize Beowulf. 

 

Two things have happened since these thoughts last week that have got me thinking contrary to my original questions.  First, I had written my response for last week about Roberta Frank’s “Beowulf and Sutton Hoo: The Odd Couple” article and my astonishment at the extent that people would go to find those connections, i.e. changing the word liðe/leow to hoh to connect to hoo of Sutton Hoo.  However, during our class discussion, I got to thinking about a fact that Professor Joy related – we do not have all of the Old English poetry that was ever written. Based on that truth, I was set back in my response as I had been using  Klaeber’s 1941 statement that hoh “occurs nowhere in Old English poetry” to convince myself that these historical connections were completely unfounded (56). 

What has since and secondly made me question my disillusionment with historical connections was John D. Niles’ “Appropriations: A Concept of Culture.”  Niles relates that “every civilization has built on what it has found already in place as well as what it could invent or borrow from outside sources” because it is a natural process.  Niles contends that “[s]ooner or later, a time comes in the life of many people when they feel they must lighten the burden of their education, discarding other people’s stories in favor of their own,” and “[w]hen such moments arrive, then one task that presents itself is to search out elements of past eras that have long been ignored or forgotten,” for, “[l]ike stones that have tumbled in a heap, buried with shards and dung, the elements of past civilizations may be waiting patiently for someone with sufficient clarity of vision to discern their features and mark out their possible use” (221).  At this point, I can see that our Beowulf scholars, those we have been reading and those we have yet to read in the future, are exactly those “someone[s]” who are trying to discern the connections.

J. Olson on Niles's "Appropriations: A Concept of Culture"

John Niles article “Appropriations: A Concept of Culture” is provocative and interesting.  He has suggested and argued that appropriations from and by other cultures is the “controlling element in the production of culture” (220).  These appropriations form our “historical present” and Niles argues that this is the aim of appropriations.  What makes me uncertain when reading Niles article was the blurring of history and culture.  Our present culture is no doubt formulated by our history as well as our appropriations past and present.  But what happens to history per se in the formulation of culture?  When I say history per se, I am talking about undeniable events and happenings.  Towards the end of his article, Niles makes the claim that this sort of history is unimportant.  He writes, “In a sense, despite all one’s passions for accuracy in sifting through the annals of the past, it no longer matters what ‘really happened’ in history.  What’s done is done. . . .  What does matter greatly is what people believe happened in history, what they say happened, for such beliefs and claims can have a passionate relation to rivalries of which the outcome is still in doubt” (220).  What about historical events such as the bombing of Hiroshima or the Holocaust?  Or the genocide which occurred in Rwanda?  Or, even a social event like landing on the moon, or the invention of the internet?  Yes, people interpret these acts and events in history differently, but how does that negate the importance of their occurrence?  For Niles, an account of culture cannot reach beyond that which can be appropriated—that is, of ideas, trends, technology, customs.  The historical past cannot be appropriated in the same way, and I would argue that it greatly influences culture.  One just needs to think about revolution, but even this example is not sufficient because the ideas behind revolution can be “appropriated” by others.  But the idea of guilt cannot be.  A culture which carries “guilt” with it from its actions in the past cannot be shared in the same way.  It seems as if the appropriation that Niles talks about is not simple “stealing” from others, but stealing from oneself.  A culture can remember its past or certain parts of its past if it is beneficial to the present culture.  I am really stuck over this because I agree with Niles, but question my agreement at the same time.

I think my uncertainty arises from the fact that Niles seems to say that culture is something a certain group in the present can choose through their appropriations. Who is culture determined by? The present self?  The other, or outside collective, the past? Culture, in some sense, is created by a people, but it is also recognized and evaluated by others. If a culture goes unrecognized by others is it really a culture, for does not culture imply difference from another? Maybe, instead, Niles is saying that one can understand his or her culture by looking at what it has appropriated. But how is one to know exactly what it has taken and from whom and when.

D. Krisinger on "Anglo-Saxonism" and Social Identity:

I find it ironic that the English scholars (most notably Benjamin Thorpe) pursued a path similar to the Swedish/Norwegian/Danish scholars when it came to the claiming of the language and poem of Beowulf.  There is no question that Anglo-Saxon is related to German and the Nordic languages, but most probably a fear or anger of German aggressive posturing along with English and Nordic nationalistic fervor led to this behavior.  Even the German federations trying to unite into one Germany had their issues about a Germanic identity and Prussia was the power and thorn to be dealt with in their situation. One cannot ignore that same nationalistic fervor rocked all of Europe during the turbulent period of the 19th century.  Everybody wanted their own national identity to go along with their freedom.  It is a shame Thorpe eliminated the reference to Danish scholarship [in his 1830s edition of Rasmus Rask's Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue] as he did, but the behavior was typical of that time. [This erasure is referred to in Robert Bjork's essay, "Nineteenth Century Scandinavia and the Birth of Anglo-Saxon Studies."]

Part of English antipathy to Nordic scholarship/claims (besides nationalism) could be based on Rask’s penchant for preferring heathenism instead of Christianity.  After all, Christianity came to the British Isles (spreading from Ireland to England as well as coming from France) before it truly affected Nordic culture, and Beowulf definitely has more Christian-like behavior. Frantzens’ discussion [in a chapter from Desire for Origins, "Origins, Orientalism, and Anglo-Saxonism in the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries"] of the Church as the protector of social order holds merit in English thinking. The English have always been proponents of order.  (Just look at the international process of ‘queing,’ which despite its French name is most definitely an English accomplishment.)  Note that while the Reformation led to the dissolving of the Catholic Church in England, that void was filled by something very similar and definitely un-heathen, the Anglican Church.

While there is no question language plays a major role in the definition of a country and its history (Hans Gram quote, Bjork 216), England has always been isolated due to natural boundaries and I believe language’s role was more limited.  The easiest example available is there was no Austro-Hungarian Empire refusing to let go of English speaking peoples in England.  Another example is the ‘roman-ization’, or lack thereof, of the British Isles compared to the continent.  Britain and Ireland were always the farthest from the epi-center of what was happening and thus they always received a ‘watered down’ version and in many ways were left to do their own thing.  Thus language was not necessarily used to set boundaries as much as it was used on the continent.  After all, crossing the Channel, while not a major feat, can still be dangerous even today depending on the weather/ time of the year.  The Norman invasion was the last real invasion of England, both physically and mentally.  England exported its ideas and the only question of invasion came a la Belle Epoque from its former colonies which spoke English. 

I would mildly protest Nile’s suggestion that “England owe[s] more to the Germanization of a resident Romano-British population than to invasion from across the North Sea” (Niles 211).  While there is no question that the two groups eventually settled together somewhat peacefully as Athelstan’s history shows, the original Viking excursions were not ‘socially’ oriented.  They were young men looking for ways to make money and obtain land when their homeland had too many limitations.  After all, they were landlocked and trading was good but a man needs his own ‘castle.’  Some of them would see the logic in ‘you get more flies with honey’ and seek to live in a more hospitable land, making their own villages in a non-occupied area and sometimes (probably rarely) joining a village already in existence. This does not make it less of an invasion, just a different kind. Germanization only came about after the invasion. 

But I have to go in a different direction.  These three scholars [Bjork, Frantzen, and Niles] are preoccupied with the idea of a Germanic influenced English culture and this I cannot dispute. However, it brings up the question of Celtic influence in the creation of an English identity.  Celtic culture honored the individual (women had a more equal status), and Celtic religion assimilated Christianity more effectively.  While Germanic culture honors the exceptional person, I believe they retained more of a ‘herd’ mentality.  And as part of a collective on the continent, they were exposed to more ‘group’ cultures as a whole than the isolated community of the British Isles.

J. Bosomworth on Frantzen, "Origins, Orientalism, and Anglo-Saxonism":

In this work, I saw a number of ironies and parallels with the ongoing efforts on the part of many to make English the "official" language of the U.S. based on this country's origin as a group of English colonies. Obviously, this is not an accurate representation of the origin of the U.S., as any educated person knows, but neither is English the "original" language of either the U.S. (or Britain, for that matter). While this isn't necessarily what the article was about, it is what the article made me think of.

One thing that connects America with England is its stated connection to religion. Another is its inability to accept any one religion as a complete unifier. True, Christians make up the largest stated religious group, but fractures in the Christian society as a whole have traditionally kept believers in general from being believers of a whole (Christian = Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, etc., each of which disagrees with each other on specific matters) in both countries. Likewise, the language in their religious texts differs, even though they would argue that they are all thematically the same. Nonetheless, each would argue that they, not the others, have the idea right.

This same idea of rightness is seen in our languages. Frantzen describes the overall aversion to and dismissal of value of Oriental literature by English critics, and I think that there is still a great deal of Anglo-superiority in the scholastic world. As a reader, I think it is interesting to note the differences in structure in writings from other "world" societies, and I also think it's interesting to note the differences in structure in writings from within our own "world" (urban, etc.). I also admit I have some biases towards or away from some types of writings, but it irritates me to think that scholars (which I do not classify myself as) could degrade other cultures' literature and dismiss it as primitive simply because it was different.

Frantzen is obviously trying to make a statement about the value of Anglo-Saxon and Oriental cultures as vibrant things worthy of study and criticism, refuting the assertions of English and other writers that later Western literature was intrinsically superior. This narrow-mindedness seriously limited, and still limits, honest assessments of early and Oriental works due to the fact that so many early critics were so obviously biased to their religious and/or national beliefs. I think a goal for the current generation of critical writers and researchers should be to keep these biases in mind, working toward a more neutral, hopefully more balanced, stance.

C. Liu on Frantzen, "Origins, Orientalism, and Anglo-Saxonism":

Frantzen’s “Origins, Orientalism, and Anglo-Saxonism” elucidates the concept of “otherness” for Anglo-Saxon scholars in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.  It is amazing for me to learn how Frantzen relates Edward Said’s Orientalism to Anglo-Saxonism, for the subject of both "isms" is a western cultivated country—England (either Orientalism that exploits and suppresses the East or Anglo-Saxonism that glorified West as England is represented, at least for me, as hegemony).

Though most of the English thinkers and scholars think it is a national identity of England, yet for me, it sounds like England both in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries had her own political consideration to claim herself as civilization's origin of the