Lesson 1.8 · Unit 1 · RL.9-10.9, RL.9-10.4
The same form in a colder country
Beowulf is an epic written in Old English about Scandinavian heroes, by a Christian poet, about a pagan world. Every one of those tensions shows up in the text, and reading it after Homer makes the differences legible.
- Beowulf survives in a single manuscript that was damaged by fire in 1731 and is now in the British Library.
- The poem is in Old English, which is a different language from modern English rather than an older spelling of it.
- Its line is alliterative rather than rhymed, with four stresses to a line and a pause in the middle.
- A kenning is a compound metaphor used in place of a noun, such as whale-road for the sea or ring-giver for a king.
- The comitatus is the warrior band, bound to a lord by gifts in exchange for loyalty to the death.
- Wergild, the man-price, is compensation paid for a killing, and the feud resumes when it is refused.
- The poem has three fights across two time periods: Grendel, Grendel's mother, and fifty years later the dragon.
- Francis Gummere's 1910 verse translation is public domain and preserves the alliteration, which is why it is quoted here.
Where students lose marks: treating the dragon fight as a repeat of the first two. Beowulf is old, he is a king rather than a retainer, he dies, and his people are left undefended. The third fight reverses the first two.
The text. Beowulf, in Francis Gummere's 1910 verse translation. Public domain.
Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
So lived the clansmen in cheer and revel
a winsome life, till one began
to fashion evils, that field of hell.
Grendel this monster grim was called,
march-riever mighty, in moorland living,
in fen and fastness.
Step one: hear the line. "March-riever mighty, in moorland living" has four stresses and three of them alliterate on m. The organizing sound is at the start of stressed syllables, not at the end of lines.
Step two: compare with Homer's opening. Homer asks a Muse to tell him. Beowulf begins "we have heard", claiming communal memory rather than divine transmission. The authority is the tribe's, not a goddess's.
Step three: identify the kennings. "March-riever" means border-raider. Elsewhere the sea is the whale-road and a king is the ring-giver. Each names a thing by its function or its relation rather than directly.
Step four: state what a kenning does. It forces a small act of interpretation and it supplies alliteration on demand, since a poet needing an m-word for the sea has several available. The device serves the meter and the meaning at once.
Step five: read Grendel's introduction for what it emphasizes. He lives in moor, fen and fastness, outside the hall. The poem's geography is binary: inside the hall there is light, mead, poetry and gift-giving; outside there is darkness and a creature. The monster is defined by exclusion.
Step six: connect that to the comitatus. A society organized around a lord distributing gifts in a hall makes the hall the whole of civilization. Grendel attacks the hall specifically and for twelve years, which is an attack on the social order rather than on individuals.
Step seven: compare the value systems. The Odyssey's organizing value is xenia, the obligation between strangers. Beowulf's is the comitatus, the bond between lord and retainer. One imagines a world of travelers who must be protected; the other imagines a world of warbands that must hold together.
Step eight: state what the third fight does. Beowulf kills the dragon and dies, all but one of his retainers run away, and the poem ends with a woman predicting the destruction of his people. The comitatus fails at the exact moment it is most needed, which makes the ending a judgment on the system the poem has spent three thousand lines describing.
Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.
- What is the metrical principle of Old English verse?
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Alliteration, with four stresses to a line and a pause in the middle
- What is a kenning? Give an example.
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A compound metaphor used for a noun, such as whale-road for the sea
- Define comitatus and wergild.
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The warrior band bound to a lord by gifts, and the man-price paid as compensation for a killing
- Name the three fights.
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Grendel, Grendel's mother, and fifty years later the dragon
- How does the poem's opening differ from the Odyssey's?
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It claims communal memory, "we have heard", rather than invoking a Muse
- What does a kenning accomplish beyond naming?
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It forces a small act of interpretation, since the reader must work out that the whale-road is the sea, and it supplies alliteration on demand. A poet needing an m-word or an h-word for the same object has several compounds available. The device serves the meter and the meaning simultaneously, which is why the poetry is full of them rather than merely decorated with them. Interpretation for the reader and alliteration for the poet
- What does Grendel's location establish?
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The poem's geography is binary. Inside the hall there is light, mead, poetry and gift-giving; outside, in moor, fen and fastness, there is darkness and a creature. The monster is defined by exclusion rather than by any particular evil, which is why he attacks the hall specifically rather than picking off travelers. A binary geography in which the monster is defined by being outside
- Why is attacking the hall worse than attacking individuals?
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Because in a society organized around a lord distributing gifts to retainers in a hall, the hall is the whole of civilization: it is where loyalty is created, poetry is performed and the social order is enacted. Grendel attacks it for twelve years and empties it. That is an attack on the system rather than on the people who happen to be inside it. The hall is where the social order exists, so emptying it destroys it
- Compare the organizing values of the two epics.
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The Odyssey's is xenia, the obligation owed between host and stranger, which imagines a world of travelers who must be protected by rules operating between households. Beowulf's is comitatus, the bond between lord and retainer sealed by gifts, which imagines a world of warbands that must hold together or be destroyed. Both are answers to the question of what holds people together without law. Obligations to strangers against loyalty within a band
- What does the third fight do to the poem's argument?
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It reverses the first two. Beowulf is old, he is a king rather than a retainer, he kills the dragon and dies of it, and all but one of his own comitatus run into the woods. The poem then ends with a woman predicting the destruction of his people. The system the poem has spent three thousand lines describing fails at the moment it is most needed, which makes the ending a judgment rather than a lament. The comitatus fails when it is most needed, so the ending judges the system