Anglo-Saxon Poetry

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 The knowledgeable Notes: Enghons Notes and Tutorial                                           Beowulf

    

Beowulf, The epic of Beowulf, the most precious relic of old English, and, instead, of all early Germanic literature, has come down to us in a single ms ., written about a .d. 1000, which contains ALSO THE OLD ENGLISH POEM OF JUDITH, AND IS BOUND UP, WITH OTHER MSS. IN   VOLUME IN THE COTTONIAN COLLECTION NOW  at the  British  museum .the subject of theorem is the exploit s of Beowulf , son of ecgthew and nan nephew of hygelac ,ig of the “gates , ” i.e. the people, called in Scandinavian records gauter, from whom a part of southern  Sweden  has received  its present name Gotland.  

Anglo-Saxon Poetry

 

                                        The Story 

• The following is a brief outline of the story, which naturally divides itself into five parts.

• 1. Beowulf, with fourteen companion,ns, sails to Denmark, to offer his help to Hrothgar, king of the Danes, whose hall (called “Heorot”) has for twelve years been rendered uninhabitable by the reverses of a devouring monster (apparently in gigantic human shape) called Grendel, a dwellers in the waste, who used nightly to force an entrance and slaughter some of the inmates. Beowulf and his friends are feasted in the long-designed Heoraot. At night the Daneswithdraw, leaving the strangers alone. When all but Beowulf are asleep, Grendal enters, the iron-barred doors having yielded in a moment to his hand. One of Beowulf are friends is killed; but Beowulf, unarmed, wrestles with the monster, and tears his arm from the shoulder. Grendel, though mortality wounded, breaks from the conqueror’s grasp, and escape from the hall. On the morthe row, his bloodstained track is followed until it ends in a distant mere.

• 2. All fear being now removed, the Danish king and his followers pass the night in Herriot, Beowulf and his comrades being lodged elsewhere. The hall is invaded by Grendel’s mother. Who kills carries off one of the Danish nobles. Beowulf proceeds to the mere, and, armed with sword and corslet, plunges into the water. In the vault he finds the corpse of Grendel; he cuts off the head and brings it back in triumph.

• 3. Richly rewarded by Heogther, Beowulf returns to his native land. He is welcomed by Hygelac, and relates to him the story of his adventures, with some details not contained in the former narrative. The king bestows on him lands and honors, and during the regions of Hygelac and his son Heardred he is the greatest man in the kingdom. When Heardred is killed in battle with the  Swedes, Beowulf becomes king in his stead.

• 4. After Beowulf has reigned prosperously for fifty years, his country is ravaged by a fiery dragon, which inhabits an ancient burial-mound, full of costly treasure. The royal hall itself is burned to the ground. The aged king resolves to fight, unaided, with the dragon. Accompanied by eleven chosen warriors, he journeys to the borrow. Bidding his companions retire to a distance, he takes up his position near the entrance to the mound – an arched opening whence issues a boiling stream.   

• 
  The dragon hears Beowulf 's shout of defiance, and rushes forth, breathing flames. The fight begins; Beowulf is all but overpowered, and the sight is so terrible that his men, all but one, seek safety in flight.

• The young Wiglaf, son of Weohstan, though yet untried in battle, cannot, even in obedience to his lord’s prohibition, refrain from going to his help. With Wiglaf’s aid, Beowulf slays the Dragon, but not before he has received his own death-wound. Wiglaf enters the barrow and returns to show the dying king the treasures that he has found there. With his last breath , Beowulf names Wiglaf his successor, and ordains that his ashes shall be enshrined in a great mound, placed on a lofty cliff, so that it may be a mark for sailors for out at sea.

• 5. The news Beowulf’s dear-bought victory is carried to the army. Amid great lamentation, the hero’s body is laid on the funeral pile and consumed. The treasures of the dragons heard are buried with his ashes; and when the great mound is finished, twelve of Beowulf’s most famous warriors ride around it, celebrating the praises of the bravest, gentlest and most generous of kings.   

   

   

  

  Anglo-Saxon English Poetry
  

• The Hero

The Hero, - Those portions of the poem that are summarized above – that is to say, those which relate the carrier of the heroin progressive order – contain a lucid and well- constructed story, told with a vividness f imagination and a degree of narrative skill that may with little exaggeration be called Homeric. 

                      And yet it is probable that there are few readers of Beowulf who have not left – and there are many who after repeated perusal continue to feel – that the general impression produced by it is that of bewildering chaos. The effect is due to the multitude and the character of the episode. In the first place, a very great part of what the poem tells about Beowulf himself is not presented in regular sequence, but by way of retrospective mention or narration. The extent of the material thus introduced out of course may be seen from the following abstract.   

 

                      When seven years old the orphaned Beowulf was adopted by his grandfather king Hrethel, the father of Hygelac, and was regarded by him with as much affection as any of his own sons. In youth, although famed for his wonderful strength of grip, he was generally dispised as sluggish and unwarlike. Yet even before his encounter with Grendel, he had won renown by his swimming contest with another youth named Breca, when after battling for seven days and nights with the waves and slaying many sea-monsters, he came to land in the country of the Finns. In the disastrous invasion of the land of the Hetware, in which Hygelac was killed, Beowulf killed many of the enemies, amongst them a chieftain of the Hugas, named daghrefn, apparently the slayer of Hygelac. In the retreat he once more displayed his powers as a swimmer, carrying to his ship the armor of thirty slain enemies. When he reached his native land, the widowed queen offered him the kingdom, her son Heardred being too young to rule? Beowulf, out of loyalty, refused to be made king, and acted as the guardian of Heardred during his minority, and as his counselor after he came to man’s estate. By giving shelter to the fugitive Eadgils, a rebel against his uncle the king of the “Swain”(the Swedes, dwelling to the north of the Gauter), Hearderd brought on himself an invention, in which he lost his life. When Beowulf became king, he supported the cause of Eadgils by force of arms; the king of the Swedes was killed, and his nephew placed on the throne.   

Historical Value

Now, with one brilliant exception – the story of the swimming-match, which is felicitously introduced and finely told – these retrospective passages are bought in more or less awkwardly, interrupt inconveniently the course of the narrative, and are too condensed and allusive and allusive in style to make any strong poetic impression. Still, they do serve to complete the portraiture of the hero’s character. There are, however, many other episodes that have nothing to do with Beowulf himself but seem to have been inserted with a deliberate intention of making the poem into a sort of cyclopedia of Germanic tradition. They include many particular of what purports to be the history of the royal houses, not only of the Gauter and the Danes but also of the Swedes, the continental Angels, the Ostrogoths, the Frisians, and the Heatobeards, besides references to matters of the unlocalized heroic story such as the exploits of Sigismund. The Saxons are not named, and Franks appears only as a dreaded hostile power. Of Britain there is no mention; and though there are some distinctly Christian passages, they are so incongruous in tone with the rest of the poem that they must be regarded as interpolations. In general, the extraneous episodes have no great appropriateness of their context and have the appearance of being abridged versions of stories that had been related at length in poetry. Their confusing effect, for modern readers, is increased by a curiously irrelevant prologue. It begins by celebrating the ancient glories of the Danes, tells in allusive style the story of Scyld, the founder of the “Scylding” dynasty of Denmark, and praises the virtues of his son Beowulf. In this Danish Beowulf had been the hero of the Poem, the opening would have been appropriate, but it seems strangely out of place as an introduction to the story of his namesake.

However detrimental these redundancies may be to the poetic beauty of the epic, they add enormously to its interest for students of Germanic history of the legend. If the mass of traditions which it purports to the early history of the peoples of northern Germany and Scandinavia. Bat the value to be assigned to Beowulf in this respect can be determined only by ascertaining its probable date, origin and manner of composition. The criticism of the Old English epic has therefore for nearly a century been justify regarded as indispensable to the investigation of Germanic antiquities.

The beginning stage of all Beowulf analysis is the reality (found by N. F. S. Grundtvig in 1815) that one of the scenes of the lyric has a place with bona fide history. Geology of Visits, who passed on in 594, relates that in the rule too Theodoric of Metz (511-534) the Danes attacked the kingdom, and carted away numerous prisoners and much loot to their boats. There lord, whose name shows up in the best MSS, as Chlochilaicus (different duplicates read Chlochilaicus, Hrodolaicus, &c.), stayed on shore planning to pursue a while later, yet was assaulted by the Franks under Theodobert, child of Theodoric, and executed. The Franks at that point crushed the Danes in a maritime fight and recuperated the goods. The date of these occasions is esertained to have been somewhere in the range of 512 and 520.A mysterious history composed right off the bat in the eighth century (Liber Hist. Francorum, cap.19) gives the name of the Danish ruler as Chochilaicus and says that we was killed in the place that is known for the Attoarii. Presently it is connected in Beowulf that Hygelac met his demise in the battle against the Franks and the Hetware (the early English type of Attoarii). The types of the Danish lord's name given by the Frankish students of history are debasements of the name of which the crude Germanic from was Hugilaikaz, and which by standard phonetic change moved toward becoming in Old English Hygelac, and in Old Norse Hugleikr. The facts demonstrate that the attacking ruler is said in the chronicles to have been a Dane, while the Hygelac of Beowulf had a place with the "Geatas" or gauter. Be that as it may, a work called Liber Monstrorum, protected in two MSS. Of the tenth century, refers to for instance of unprecedented stature a certain "Huiglaucus" lord of the Doors," who was slaughtered by the Franks, and whose bones were saved on an island at the mouth of the Rhine, and displayed as a wonder. It is along these lines clear that the character of Hygelac, and the undertaking where, as per Beowulf, he kicked the bucket, have a place not with the district of legend or lovely development, however to that of notable actuality.

This imperative outcome recommends the likelihood that what the sonnet recounts Hygelac's close to relatives, and of the occasions of his rule and that of his successor, depends on the notable certainty. There is actually nothing to restrict the supposition; nor is there any impossibility in the view that the people referenced as having a place with the regal places of the Danes and Swedes had genuine presences. It tends to be demonstrated, at any rate, that few of the names are 1 imprinted in Berger dexivrey, Conventions Teratologiques (1836), from an MS.  In private hands. Another MS., presently at Wolfenbittel, peruses "Huiglaucus" for Huiglaucus, and (ungrammatically) "gentes" for Getis.derived from the local convention of these two people groups. The Danish lord Hrothgar and his sibling Halga, the children of Healfdene, show up in the Historia Danica of Saxo as Roe (the originator of Roskilde) and Helgo, the children of Haldanus. The Swedish privence Eadgils, child of Ohthere, and Oneal, who is mentioned in Beowulf, are in the Icelandic Heimskrigla called Adil's child of ottarr, and Ali; the correspondence of the names, as indicated by the phonetic laws of Early English and Old Norse, being carefully typical. There are different purposes of contact between Beowulf from one perspective and the Scandinavian records on the other, affirming the end that the Early English Ballad contains a significant part of the verifiable custom of the Gauter, the Danes and the Swedes, in its most perfect open structure.

Of the saint of the lyric no notice has been found somewhere else. In any case, the name (the Icelandic type of which is Bjolfr) is really Scandinavian. It was borne by one of the 'early settlers in Iceland, and a priest named Beowulf is remembered in the Liber Vitae of the congregation of Durham. As the verifiable character of Hygelac has been demonstrated, it isn't preposterous to acknowledge the authority of the ballad for three sonnets for the explanation that his nephew Beowulf succeeded Heardred on the position of authority of the Gauter, and meddled in the dynastic squabbles of the Swedes. His swimming endeavors among the Hetware, remittance being made for beautiful distortion, fits astoundingly well into the conditions of the account of the story told by Gregory of Visits; and regardless of whether it was initially related of some other.

 

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