In Our Time - Beowulf

Episode Date: March 5, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the epic poem Beowulf, one of the masterpieces of Anglo-Saxon literature. Composed in the early Middle Ages by an anonymous poet, the work tells the story of a Scandinavian hero whose feats include battles with the fearsome monster Grendel and a fire-breathing dragon. It survives in a single manuscript dating from around 1000 AD, and was almost completely unknown until its rediscovery in the nineteenth century. Since then it has been translated into modern English by writers including William Morris, JRR Tolkien and Seamus Heaney, and inspired poems, novels and films.With:Laura Ashe Associate Professor in English at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcester CollegeClare Lees Professor of Medieval English Literature and History of the Language at King's College LondonAndy Orchard Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of OxfordProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in Dark Age Scandinavia, a great hero travelled across the sea in order to fight a monstrous creature which had been terrorising the people of Denmark. Having defeated it, he then fought a great battle with its mother in her underwater lair. And later, 50 years later, engaged in a duel with a fire-breathing dragon. He came out of Victoria. but suffered fatal wounds. Such is the story of Beowulf, the earliest and one of the greatest works of English literature.

Written down in Anglo-Saxon by an anonymous scribe around a thousand years ago, though probably composed much earlier. It was virtually unknown until the 19th century when the first modern edition was made in 1815. It's a thrilling tale and a fascinating insight into the heroic culture of the warrior peoples of the early Christian Europe. And it's inspired writers from William Morris to Tolkien

and most recently Seamus Heaney. With me did this bear wolf are Laura Ash, Associate Professor in English at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcester College, Claire Lee's Professor of Medieval English and History of the Language at King's College London and Andy Orchard, Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford. Laura Ash, can you tell us something of the historical setting of the poem

when and where does the action take place? So the poet begins by telling us exactly what we're going to hear and he tells us that we already know it. He says that we're going to hear about the Gardena in Yardagum, the Speer Danes in olden days, in ancient days, and that we're going to hear about the glory of their kings. So this is our history. We've already heard about, he says. We know about this history. But it's not taking place in England, and it's taking place a long time ago. So it's set in the 6th century, broadly speaking, and it takes place in Denmark and in the surrounding Germanic lands. So southern Sweden, northern Germany, that area. And it's concerned with the peoples who inhabit, those lands in the 6th century and earlier.

So that's the Danes, Baye Wolves' own people, the Geitz or Yeats, and the Swedes and the Frisians and the Franks get a look in. Now, some of the figures in the poem have some historical record attached to them, so we're confident that they existed or there are other sources that name them. Beowulf himself, though, seems to have been a hero

just inserted into this known history. and in as much as there are datable events in the poem at all, we have one, we're told that Beowulf's king is killed in a reckless raid into Frisian territory, and this seems to be the same event as recounted by Gregory of Tours in his history of the Franks. So that would have been around 523, which would mean that if Beowulf had lived, he would have been born towards the end of the 5th century and died around 575. But as I say, we don't think Beowulf himself, did live.

The poem is talking about many of the people who came to this country, let's call it England for the sake of ease, in the 5th and 6th century, and were the backbone of the Anglo-Saxons, became the old English Anglo-Saxons. Exactly so, yes. So this is precisely the period. I mean, it's in 540, we think,

when Gildas, the Britain, wrote about the ruin of the Britons as a result of the coming of the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes. And so it is in this period when these peoples that the poem is about are coming over to England, but the poem itself remains in Scandinavia. The only surviving manuscript dates from just over 1,000 years ago, about 1,000 AD. Can you tell us about that and what your guess is as to when it was really composed? Because you've all been guessing.

My colleagues are laughing. Let's talk about the manuscript we have, the only one we have. So the manuscript we have is datable to around 100. It's now in the British Library. It was damaged in the cotton collection fire in the 18th century, but what we have is some people, some transcriptions that were made before, so we have the transcripts, we have what remains of the manuscript. And it's a fine manuscript,

and it seems to have a theme of collecting up stories of monsters, which might explain the survival of the Bayer-Wolf story containing monsters as it does. But the real, I mean, one of the things that has troubled people over the years is why would this heroic poem be preserved in a Christian context? And in lots of ways, I think people have worried too much about this. People have worried that the Anglo-Saxons, they've imagined that they thought in binaries when the poem itself is very clearly a Christian poem writing

with celebration and also melancholy about a pagan past. So in lots of ways, questions that have troubled scholars for a long time, what context could it have been written in, who could it have been written for, actually are not as complex and not as difficult as people have feared. So when do you think it was written? Well, general consensus for a long time was the 8th century. Early 8th century, about the time of Beads death.

Yeah, sure, go with that. You go with that, with you? Well, this is not, I mean, there are people much more learned than me who've gone into deep philological questions, questions of dialect, questions of copying, questions of transmission. For me, I think it's a cultural artifact of huge interest that you can imagine moving through time. I mean, it must have moved through time.

And manuscripts themselves move through time, but also just previous copies. So certainly, I don't imagine that there had been no tales of Beowulf when the 1000 manuscript was written. Andy Orchard, can you follow that up? It was conceded at the end of 735, wasn't it, when B'd die? So would you go along with that?

It could have been about that time. It certainly could have been that time, but in fact, people have dated both every single century from the 7th century right up to, in fact, the 11th, and there have been attempts to date it after the date of the manuscript, which seems a bit hopeful to me at least. Give scholars a bad name, I find out of it. But I think partly it's to do with, as Laura says, it's a cultural artefact. And if you identify it with the age of bead, you're linking it with Sutton Who and you're linking it with Lindisfarne Gospels and with the Franks casket and so on. If you're asking me, my own opinion, I think it's 7.50 or slightly later, and the reason that I'd say that is we just know more about the age of B. So it tends to sort of suck things in, whereas offer and offers mercier and that period

would certainly explain why there seems to be an interest in a different offer who's a namesake for no good reason. As Laura said, it's an innately retrospective poem. It's set over there way back when, and it's pagans. And a Christian poet writing about pagans is incredible. And there's one passage from lines 175 to 188 that Tolkien just said, this sounds wrong to me, this sounds wrong to me. And the more that people have looked at it in philological aspects, he's onto something.

It does sound as if it's a Christianisation. It talks about the heathenra heaths, the hope of heathens. Heathens don't call themselves heathens. This is an external perspective. And it's, you know, it talks about wabitham, the shal thurslead nith, woe for the one who must through cruel distress, soul a beshoven in fear as fathom, shove their soul into the fires embrace

and well betharm the moat, it's good for the one who can end up in the father's fathom, the father's bosom, and Freotho Wilnia, and it sounds a little bit out of kilter with the rest. So if we assume it's a poem that certain people have argued was written down before 750 on certain grounds, it will have had an afterlife. What did it mean in the Alfredian period?

What did it mean in the reign of Athol Reddy Unready? what did it mean to be praising Danes when after 793 the Vikings are around? But you could still praise Danes in the first half of the 8th century, couldn't you? You could. Because they hadn't destroyed things. They hadn't arrived with their axes and lotsets. And there's a very interesting sort of sideline to that.

So that Alfred the great, you know, who was no great lover of Danes, to be fair, but in the Anglican Chronicle for the year 855, he gives his father's genealogy and, of course, therefore his own. And it contains many of the figures that we find in Beowulf. He traces his genealogy and the Queen may not be aware of this but she's ultimately descended from the God Woden. But also they make a connection to the Bible through inventing an Arkborn son of Noah. So Noah's sons, they have to have another one to connect it back. And this is shulch shaving when they come in. So this Christian scribe writer, composer in some cases, inserted Christianity into the pagan stories?

No, no. I think he's innately, innately Christian. It's an innately Christian. It's an innately Christian. It's an innately Christian. poem but I think at certain points in its history you wanted to point up the fact that the Danes are doomed and damned so I don't think there's huge amounts of interpolation myself the poem is clearly Christian from beginning to end

what does it brief tell us about the culture of the place and people it depicts it partly again it depends partly on your dating criteria but what is interesting and it's a historical mistake that Old English is taught in Department of English whereas the Anglo-Saxons and

Anglo-Saxe in England was innately multicultural, multilingual and particularly bilingual. And so there are lots of interesting Latin texts that nobody talks about in this context. And a fantastic one that I think is very important, which was dated around 750, is called the Liber Monstaurum, the Book of Monsters. And it's like the Big Kids Book of Monsters.

It describes 120 monsters, man-shaped, bestial, serpentine. Grendel, Grendel's mother, the dragon. The three monsters are in there. The second monster in the Libermonstorum is Hugelak. Higluckus, the king of the Geats or the king of the Yeats, whichever we're talking today. And he's in there.

And this is the first attestation of a figure in Beowulf. And it's an Anglo-Saxon, clearly an Anglo-Saxon text. And sadly, of course, survives in far more manuscripts than we have of Beowulf itself. Claire, can you give us an outline of the story? I think you've already done that at the beginning. in your preface, but because one of the great things about Bayaw... All right, we'll talk about the main events of the most important events. The most important event, from the plot point of view,

the most important events are the fact that the poem can be seen in either a kind of two-part structure or a three-part structure. If you think of it as a two-part structure, it's the hero, Beowulf, entering the Kingdom of the Danes, killing Grendel. Can you say who Grendel is? Grendel is, yes. So Grendel is...

is the first of the monsters, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. He's a misshapen man. He's large. He's terrorising the central hall of the Danes, Heerot, and has been doing so for several years. Beowulf hears of this over the seas, comes over, thinks has the idea that he will cleanse the throne of Grendel.

And the first episode then would become the first monster fight against Grendel, which he is successful. Well, yes, well, he's a young hero. He says he will use no weapons and you'll strip himself naked and you'll still take on this monster. That is because Grendel doesn't himself use a sword. So, yes, they have a kind of an arm wrestling. Okay. And during the course of that, Grendel's arm is ripped off and it will ultimately be pinned on the wall of Herod as the manifestation of the successful battle.

So that's the first episode. The second episode would be Grendel's mother who, um, correctly or juridically has the right to exact vengeance for the death of her son, comes to Herod to enact revenge, seizes one of the warriors, kills him, takes him back to her underwater hall or lair, as you described it. Beowulf then follows the tracks to the water, to the hall, to the lair, and a second battle ensues.

That battle this time, bear wolf can use a sword, but his sword fails. So magically, at the crucial moment in the fight, fate, fate intervenes, and he is able to identify a sword on her wall, and he is successful in that battle. So that's the first two episodes. The poem then skips 50 years. Bear wolf now is a king in his own kingdom. The second part of the poem will tell the backstory of how Beowulf got to be king

but the major plot event in that third part of the poem is his encounter with the dragon the battle scene where this time he needs all his armour because the dragon is fire breathing and he needs... He scales, yes, he's scaly he's very serpent-like, he's sinuous he's a fire breathing flying through the air dragon

and he needs assistance to kill him he does succeed in killing him but he's killed in that battle Can you give us some idea what it sounds like Can you start the language Just give the listeners and myself being your first listener as well nearest listener Can you just give us an idea? Well as the poem is known as Beowulf

And so our attention is usually concentrated on the men in the poem, but because it's International Women's Day coming up this weekend and because King's College London is celebrating International Women's Day today, I thought I'd read a section describing the Queen of the Danes, Well, Theo.

So this is the moment where the Queen enters the court to give Beowulf his Golden Cup in congratulations in celebration for the first, for killing Grendul.

Sprake Tha Ides Schudinger Which means Fulaheufthirthirthin-miner Sintes Britter Thou on Salam-Wess Goldwinna gumina unto Gartum-Sprach Mildum-Wordom

Which shall mondeu Which says Which is So spoke the lady of the shillings Receive this cup My gracious Lord Treasure-giver May you be joyful, my gold giver,

and speak mild words to the Geets or the Yeats, as we're calling them, as every man must. A little bit of a politician and a diplomat is our queen. Laura Ash, can you give us some idea of the themes, if such as they are, in the poem? Sure. I think some of the main themes you might group as a set of three. So I'd say memory, glory and contraryly futility. So the whole poem is about memory, commemoration,

what our history is, why we should remember it, how we should remember it, that we should celebrate it. And then the senses that this is a glorious past, a warrior past of men of superlative courage and strength and brilliance. And Beowulf himself particularly says that the greatest thing for a man to do is to gain glory before his death. And at the very last line of the poem, he's described as the man Lofjornos,

to the man most eager after fame and glory. But with that glory comes a pervasive sense of futility and loss, because it is when Beowulf gives these pronouncements about how you want Dormu's their death, you want glory before death. He says this because he says, well, every man dies and everything comes to an end and all will be lost.

And whenever something glorious happens, in the poem, we're already told about how it's going to go wrong later. I mean, before Beowulf has even saved Heerot from Grendel and Grendel's mother, we've already been told that Heerot will one day be burnt to the ground because of internecine strife. And these patterns come through again and again. So there's this sense of we must remember this, we must remember the glories, but we also see that they are continually falling to destruction.

It's very set, isn't it? The aims and the structure of the warrior elite in civilisation after set, you could be talking about the Greeks and the Trojans, you could be talking about the British in their imperial splendor. You could be talking about, well, anyway, never mind. Andy Orchard, can you tell us a bit more about Beowulf? He's a very special kind of hero. I think he's a new kind of hero in a way, as we've spoken about.

It's a very retrospective poem, but King Cothgar of the Danes, when he's praising Beowulf, says, the word may in a strangen on mold of old wees ward quidda which means you're strong in might and wise in thought and a clever speaker of words and this thought word deed triad distinguishes him from Achilles is just a killing machine Ineus you get the idea of sapientiae

at 42-do wisdom and power and then with Bayolf you get the introduction that the hero must be able to speak well I find this interesting because again in some of these Latin texts including B talks about St Cuthbert and specifically says exactly that. He was good in thought and word and deed.

Al Quinn picks it up in the next century and says the same thing, in fact, about his teacher. And Beowulf, the poet is very careful to praise him, but not overpraise him. When he dies, he says he's going to seek this Sothfastra dome, the judgment of the righteous, which is a double-edged thing. Does it mean somebody righteous is judging him, or is he going to receive the judgment that the righteous people do? And the lines that, or the word that Laura said at the end of the poem,

the poem is poet is very careful to distance himself. These are by all men. Quaida natiwara, world ginniga, man, mildest on Montuerres, leodum lithest, on lofiyan. They said that he was of worldly kings, another distancing motif, that he was the mildest of men and the one with the best customs,

the kindest to his people, and the keenest for fame. And keenest for fame is the only time that was, word appears in old English poetry, it occurs in old English prose, always in a negative context, a Christian context. Pride from a heroic point of view, and as you say, heroic culture is fairly uniform, is a very negative Christian value. So I think the poet is saying, for those of you who like this kind of thing, what a great guy. For those of us coming in a later dispensation, maybe there's a little bit more to it. Claire, Clans, can you, you've talked about the three

monsters. Do they signify more than being monsters? Well, if you take one interpretation of monsters in the Middle Ages, early Middle Ages or later Middle Ages, one of the functions of monsters is to reveal or advise to show, to teach us about wonders or to warn us off wonders. So that would be one way of thinking about these three slightly other worldly beings or alternative beings, people that live on the edges of society or the edges of the Danish, yachtish societies. That's one way of looking at them.

But also to pick up Laura's point, I mean, the poem is a very profound investigation of death. And what better way to narrate and explore death, but through three different encounters with death, where you are pitted against forces that are on the edge of your known understanding. So Grendel, the misshapen man, Grendel's mother, who has the skills of,

she's as good as Grendel, her son, but inflected through gender, okay? And then the dragon who is so holy of another world and therefore the most profound encounter that you could have. I mean, that dragon is a fire-breathing, terrifying, destroys Bear Wolf's own hall, it burns it up. So there are three different ways of thinking about encountering death.

One with the son, the male through wrestling, one through killing by swords, and then together, fighting together. Laura, is there any traction in looking at it as an opposition between kings and heroes? Yeah, so I think that this is quite an undercurrent throughout the poem and it's something that is inflected also by the change between the time the poem is set,

and the time of the manuscript and that changes on its way when it might have been written. And that's a change in the way that kings are viewed because in the world of Beowulf, this is a world where the most powerful man becomes king and he retains his followers by bringing them success in battle

and giving them treasure spoils. And of course, then if he stops being successful in battle and bringing them spoils, then his followers will follow someone else. And the problem with this structure, therefore, is that it means that you can never have peace. You can never, ever stop. And it also means that any king is only as good as his own lifetime because ultimately he is the best warrior will fall.

So the pattern that needs to develop for a society to develop any kind of stability is a pattern where you have a king and a champion, you know, the king's champion, the warrior hero. And of course, one of the strange things about Beowulf is that he does his best to be that person. He goes to fight for another king. against Grendel. He resists taking up kingship himself, but ultimately has to. It's made to take it up. There's no one left. And then when he dies, his people are going to be destroyed. And it's

striking to think of the difference by the time we get to the 10th and 11th century. I mean, the Anglo-Saxon king's coronation oath, its first part of it was, I swear, to keep the peace. So it's a profoundly different world that they're trying to construct out of a world that was built on endemic constant feuding and warfare. And Yachtard, we've heard a very good example of the language from you and from Claire, but can you tell us more about the regionality of the language, if that's the most striking point of it, or its main literary features? It's a highly, highly, highly creative form.

Bay all stands out from all other Old English poems, in fact, by the creativity of it. There's about 3,182 lines, there's about 4,000 different items of vocabulary, but nearly 600 compounds don't occur anywhere else in Old English except in Beowulf and some of the Simplex forms don't occur elsewhere either. And you can see this, I think, reflected in the difficulty the scribes have because sometimes they clearly don't understand what they're copying and they get the letter forms slightly wrong and we have to reconstruct them.

And a good example when we're talking about Grendel's mother avenging her son, it says that she came on a sortful nassiz, Sunnu deoth Reckon, and on a sorrowful trip to avenge the death of her son. And the words that we would spell deoth is a mercian form. It's a, sorry, a Northumbrian form. And the scribe writing in West Saxon doesn't understand it and messes up the word. What's interesting, though, is both scribes, there are two scribes in the Behoff manuscript, go back and correct their own work as if it's important.

And an example of how the Beowulf poet makes up words, they're usually quite transparent the compounds. But a good example is when Grendel arrives in a three-webary, part, Korm, Korm, Korn. He comes to the hall. First one. Korm on Wander, next three, than Shadow Ganga. There came from the dark night a shadow ganger, a shadow walker, sliding, stalking. And shadow genders never occurs elsewhere in Old English. Seems obvious. Is it a walking shadow? Is it someone who walks in the shadows?

A little bit later on. There come of Mora under Misclayl, Grendel, Grendel gongen, God, Azuraba. Then there came Grendel walking under the misty slopes. He bore the wrath of God. Is he the object of God? Is he the object of God? or is he bringing God's wrath to the Danes? And then he's described as a manshada, which means crime ravager, but is he a criminal ravager or is he a ravager of crime? So, and the Nekers-Hepsterlis just described as a rink,

come natura etherensid and drehermann bedel. A man, a rink, it's a warrior word. He came, but then we're told he's deprived of joys, which immediately makes us sympathetic towards him. He's a man that we can understand. So the Bayolf is playing on multi-layers all the time and that's really why Bayolp is impossible to translate, I'd say. Well, there's some people, I mean, Shamish had a good...

You know, yeah, because he had a good go at it, yeah. And I think in fact that the Hini translation, or Hini wolf, as we call it in the trade, is fantastic for any number of reasons, but one of which is, of course, there's a recording and you can hear him. And I think it does have to be perceived in some sense through the ears rather than just reading it in a book.

Claire, did you want to come in? I want to ask you a question anyway, but I thought you wanted to... Oh, right. Can you give us... Can we go into detail about any one episode just to show how vividly it is constructed? Yeah, I think what's helpful when just picking up from Andy's point about how important it is to be able to listen to the poem and also the earlier point about how this is a hero who is also a good talker. One of the most remarkable things about Beowulf the hero is that he keeps telling the story of his own exploits. So a good example of that is when he first succeeds in killing Grendel,

we get one account as he goes back to Frothgar to the court and says, I've successfully killed Grendel and here's the arm. And you hear about the man-to-man hand wrestling. The second time is to his own king. So this is Hujulak, back in southern Scandinavia, in southern Sweden. and that time when he tells the story, we discover that Grendel has some kind of spiked claw and a pouch made out of dragon skins.

So Beowulf himself as a hero is as creative as the poem that he's put into. And each time he retells the stories of his exploits, we get a little bit more detail, which makes us have, as readers or as listeners, have to attend to the poem very, very carefully. And I think that's part of its great creativity, whether it's on the level of the line,

or of an episode or a detail. So in a sense, to summarize the plot is the easy bit of the poem. The more interesting bit is the ways in which the poem describes the arrival of bear wolf's ship to the shore, from the shore to the Coast Guard, from the Coast Guard into the entry of the hall of Heerot in Denmark, from the entry of the door of the hall to the king. Very, very staged descriptive elements.

that we as readers and listeners and the original audience would have picked up on and you're very much alert and aware to the nuances of it. But in this story, can I come back to something you said earlier? In this storytelling, one of the things is you're told what will happen

out in one way, in a simplistic way, out of sequence. But adds to the plot and adds to the storytelling. Can you just develop that? Give us an example of that, one of you anyway. Sure, yeah. I mean, the plot in lots of ways, I mean, amusingly when Beowell was first rediscovered, it was accused, it was thought of as a primitive piece of rubbish that couldn't manage a linear plot.

And it doesn't have a linear plot, but I think we now realise this is a mark of some sophistication and that it has quite impressive effects. So there's, as we are told the story, we also have continual flashes forward and flashes backwards. And sometimes the effect is to create this terrible irony. about destruction that is to come even while we now have glory. And at other times the effect is just to give us a sense of how meaning and value are transferred through time. I mean, there's a question about what carries meaning through this society. You know, the society where kings rise, kings fall,

and the best you can say of someone is that he gave out a lot of treasure before he died. That was good king. That was a good king. And one of the answers to that is the way that objects move through the narrative. So swords, for example, or gifts or the golden neck ring that the Queen Wealtheo presents to Beowulf, which we're then told, we're told immediately it was presented to Beowulf, and then much later it was lost by his king, Hugulac, in a reckless raid on the Frisians. So this is an event happening years later,

which informs us that this golden neck ring must have been given by Beowulf to his king or perhaps to his queen who then gave it to the king, who then loses it in this raid. So in this sense, objects carry memory and value, and the exchange of objects is another, I mean, it's the exchange of tales, the exchange of stories is part of the exchange of objects. And can you, do you want to come in on that, Anna? And you want to develop the idea of objects because there are a great number of words for sword, I'm told, by, for instance, can we just develop that a bit? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, as Laura said, some of the early critics,

I mean, the famous quote is Bayolf lacks steady advance. And in fact, Beowulf isn't named till line 343 when he channels Ray Winston and goes, Beowulf is me Nama. And we're told 900 lines before the end of the poem that he's going to die. And we're told four times he's going to die. I mean, I was teaching the students only last week. And I was, you know, there's not exactly a lot of suspense here. You know what's going to happen.

That's not the point. With regard to swords, it's extraordinary, and there's a fantastic resource, the the Thesaurus of Old English, which has been compiled, not least at King's College, where you can go through and you can find all the words for sword that exist in Old English. And the truly staggering thing is that most of them are in Beowulf, and most of them are uniquely in Beowulf. And it's as if Beowulf has a particularly, something like 29, 30, something. like that. There are far more words

for ship, but there, and again, maybe this is just the geeky boy in me, but Bayolf's really interested in swords. He's not very interested in ships. And there's another poem called Kuna Wolf, and he rides off into the distance on all sorts of

sea steeds and sea stallions and wave horses and this and that. So that's why I think this element of creativity that is in Bayowulf is then picked up by later poets. and there's been debate about how much this is an oral poet. I think it's a very literary poem. And therefore, there's a poem called Andreas about St. Andrew

going into the country of the cannibals where he has unique parallels with Beowulf 89 times. This is not a mistake. And he's channeling Bayalph and he's twisting Beowulf and he's pretending. So the audience must have known. And there is evidence that Beowulf is, as it were, known outside its immediate manuscript context and we just have the one manuscript but it does seem to have made it

impact in this time. Clarley's Beowulf's being described in epic poem and I think there's been mentioned or allusion to the Iliad and in the aid so far do you have any sense that the person who wrote it was self-consciously in that tradition? I think that's been argued in the past

personally I'm not really convinced by it I think the term epic these days is used so loosely that it can mean any long narrative poem with men fighting with a military intent, with something about the fantastic, perhaps, in it. And perhaps, in the case of bail, you know, some modulation and nuance of it. So, but this is, again, an old debate, you know, is it an epic?

How does it fit into epic? There's certainly the case that in Anglo-Saxon England, Virgil was known of and quoted from and used as a teaching resource within Christian texts. So the great epic story of Ineard would be... The whole of the epic story of Ineard, possibly not... We don't have a whole complete manuscript from Anglo-Saxon England, but that there is enough to suggest that the epic has been mediated through to it. So it's tempting, isn't it, to pair these two great poems

that are to do with the ends of civilisations or familiar civilizations. You could also look forward and think about other great epic or romance or chanson, kinds of poems that are popular throughout the early and middle-middle ages. So I'm thinking of the Chanson de Roland, for example, or the epic, the Cid. Both, again, three great poems, all of which deal with kings, heroes and rulers, all coming towards the end, or at least copied down in transitional moments of their own cultures. Laura? Yeah, I just wanted to come in on that and say that.

of course a striking difference between, on the one hand, the Iliad and the Aeneid, and on the other hand Beowulf, is that the Iliad and the Ineer Neid are setting out to be foundational histories, celebrating the beginnings of things, whereas, as you've said, Beowulf is about an ending, but what connects it, I think, to the Chances de Roland, which is very similar to Beowulf in the sense that it has a legendary figure inserted into history, written around 1,100 about an event that took place in 778. And the Roland is much more optimistic because it's heroes are Christian. But what connects the Roland and Beowulf is their Christian ethos,

this sense that they balance the glory of warriors against the Christian truth. And in the Roland, Christian truth is in support of the warriors and in Beowulf course with melancholia, Christian Truth is not on their side. I think picking up those points about heroism and heroic poetry, they all do sound a bit the same after a while. What's really interesting, though, is the earliest Welsh poem, the Gododdin,

which is certainly much earlier than Beowulf, has many of the same tropes when it says, A Quedi Eluk, Toalukvu, and after feasting there was silence. In other words, every time you have a party, somebody's going to die. Diffunum Lion Vun Medadalé, he was breathless before a maiden, but he repaid. his mead, and so this is the warrior culture. And the ineared point specifically,

one of the best editors of Beowulf, a man called Kleiber, pointed out a long time ago, that there's this extraordinary bit, and Laura's alluded to it, where Beowulf does the heroic creed, or Ewell, shall end of your bed and world, as wifers, workers of the mortars, daumas, dao, mafters he,

death, of that bit trick come and only end him after cells. Each of us is going to die, and what we have to do is to gain glory before death, and for a noble warrior, and a unique word in Beow, by the way, It's a poetic word, that we must get that and that's the best thing that you can do. And there's an exactly parallel bit in Book 10 of the Aeneid 467. Statsu, a quikidae, bravitio, parable it tempest, vitu, tis, farmam extenderifactes,

the last bit is the most important. We're all going to die. But for a brave person, you have to, farmam, extenderifactis, extend your fame by deeds. And that's the creed. Yeah, just as a kind of PS to that point is interesting, Basil Bunting in the 1950s when he's writing his great modernist poem Brigflux, he does associate the Godotin with Beowulf.

So there is that sense of a kind of collective northern past that's being reworked in the mid-20th century that I think is a very productive way of thinking about how this poem is picked up by creative writers after the 19th century. Did we deal with the idea of whether it was orally translated

because you said very firmly that it was a literary piece of work and that's that. So we can move on from that. That's it, is it? It uses formulas that we find elsewhere. And, I mean, one of the interesting questions about Bayel's scholarship is what's the relationship with things like Cadman and Cadman's Him and Cadman's Poetry.

And there's a bit of Bayolf when it's Beowulf himself talking, where he uses very similar formulas that you find in Cadman's Him. And ultimately... Not the 7th century? Yeah, 680. I mean, and the...

What you find is, ultimately, old English poetry, must go back to an inherited oral formulaic system. But we don't have that. What we have is what's written down. This is a very long poem. There is even the Latin poems that nobody reads

from English, X, and England, there's only one which is longer than Beowulf. This is, I think, it's the structural complexity of it, the echoes that are going through it. I think you need to, you hear it, so maybe that's oral, but is it oral?

I don't think so. What, player, come in, please. I think the crucial distinction to make here is between oral composition and oral style in a literate poem. So this poem is designed for the ear. It's clearly literate. It's extremely sophisticated,

but we can't prove oral composition. So I think we've laid that one to rest. What influence has it had on future writers? It was dormant for a very long time, wasn't it? So let's pick it up when it starts to influence. Who wants to take that on? People are... Hands are going in all directions.

The manuscript is signed by the Dean of Litchfield. Handily, he signs it 1563. So that's the earliest thing we know about the manuscript, 1563 after 500 years later. Then you get cotton collected in his library. He dies 1631. Then some fool decides to store it in a place called Ash Burnham House. Guess what happened on the 23rd of October, 1731?

And then the first notation of it is 1705. Humphrey Wanderie. writes about it and he just says it's a history of the wars between the Swedes and the Danes, which totally misses the monsters, totally misses the heroism. And then Torkelene in Icelander produces the first edition in 1815, and he only does it. It's not called Baeroyal for that point. It's called the Wars of the Danes from the Third Century onwards.

Can I bring it to Tolkien? Because Tolkien lectured about it, well, we were running out of time. And Tolkien had a big influence on bringing it to the attention of a lot more people. Bayolphe, the monsters and the critics. That's it. And in a summary, that's it. Beowulf the monsters and the critics is exactly what we've been discussing today. The ways in which we're still trying...

In fact, we've not moved from the Tolkien moment in many ways. We're still identifying the poem in terms of how do we handle the monsters in it. You know, Laura's made a spirited defence of moving beyond the Christian non-Christian. It's a secular aristocratic poem in a very sophisticated world. but Tolkien set the agenda in that essay. And I think what's also very important about that essay is that it was written on the eve of the Second World War and so the death-centredness of the poem

is being picked up through and resonates through war poetry. And I think that's a very, very important contribution, though there are many fine critics after Tolkien. Well, we like to take that on. Well, I think the real question that this poem poses is how long can you keep out the dark and the answer is not forever and therefore that's the future.

of it. But one interesting thing about the way in which this poem resonates more recently is so obviously, as you say, Claire, the Second World War, the sense of death and destruction, humanity will always destroy itself with feud, with war. But if I can be forgiven, the recent film with Ray Winston made some dramatic plot changes. And I think this is a post-Froidian Beowulf that it produced, where the darkness comes not from the outside, threatening from a hostile environment, but comes from weasel. where Grendel turns out to have been Rothgar's son and the dragon turns out to be Wehrel's son

and actually I think that's quite a useful modern reading for where we now think darkness lives. Do you think, Andy, sorry, do you think Andy that it's having an influence on writers? I mean, it has been translated by Shane McSinies, we've said once or twice, but that it's having an influence on writers. Today, I think the problem is Bayolf is a very polarising poem.

And so, you know, in lots of universities, Old English is known as Old Anguish, you know, and famously Larkin and just hated it. And, you know, Woody Allen never do a course where they make you read Bell. But those who love it, love it. And John Gardner's novel, Grendel, seeing it from the Monsters' point of view, I think has been hugely influential. And I think it's one of those things... I wish I believed as many people had read it as claimed to have read it.

And its influence lives on. There's a rock opera. There's a series of Marvel Comics. there are other things. If you Google Beowulf, you'll get 11 million hits. If you Google Chaucer, you'll only get 9 million hits. I did it yesterday. Nine million seems quite a lot to me, but never mind.

Well, thank you all very much indeed. Next week we'll be talking about dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up most of our galaxy. But thanks to Claire Lees, Laura Ash, and Andy Orchard, and that's it. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. We could have done it on the languages. Back in the 8th century, please.

Well, the thing is, what we needed to do was to explain what the poem was doing, being copied down on the cusp of the millennium. That's what we needed to explain a little bit more, and we didn't get time to do that. You had time, you just didn't do it. You're talking about other things. Don't blame time. I mean... I can't blame time.

It's a good point, it's a good point, absolutely. Ethel read the oven ready. It was just, you know, the Danes were quite big in his day and you want to pander to them. Well, but, you know, there were scaldic poets at the court of Ethelred. I'm ready. So I think it's much more sophisticated.

We can be as sophisticated in our readings of the audience as we can. It won't scan as it's written down. And it will scan if you transfer the language back. That to me is the big clincher. But one thing I wanted to ask, and I didn't ask, because obviously I don't know much. I didn't read English or history. Didn't, wasn't the Scandinavian traditions of their own

without looking to Greece and Rome and this, and the other? I mean the sagas and so on. Were they in existence then, couldn't they, the poet, had borrowed from that? Well, there are Scandinavian analogs like Gretti sagas, one of the classic ones that's always being referred to, particularly for the monster fights, but the butt is that the evidence is later.

Okay? That is the book with the Goddothin as well, of course. The evidence is later. Well, I guess the write the manuscript is later. The manuscript is much later. But nobody has a problem with the early date of it. Yeah, I know. I completely agree.

I completely agree. We need to recalibrate our dating. I mean, Granta Sag is 14th century. I mean, it's way, way later. But there's a lot of poetry and Scaldic poetry, and what's interesting for me there, is that the Scaldic poets make up compounds, make up words in the same way

that the Beowulf poet is doing it. So there's an inherited vocabulary, but there's also a generative vocabulary. One of the ones I loved was Bonehouse. Bonehouse is, yeah. One of Hines' favourites as well. He wrote a little poem about it as well, he included in a poem. Yeah. But, see, bonehouse, we all understand what a bone house is.

Yeah. I mean, and that's what's great about the both. Most of his compounds are relatively transparent. Yeah. Whereas when you get to Kynilf, it's like, oh, we need to make up a word. They sound fake in a way that Tolkien's language. language. Elvish sounds like a reasonable language. Do you miss out anything vital and important, as I'm usually told after the...

We didn't really talk about women. Well, I got... You've got your women plug in. I got whale. We didn't talk about Hildeberg. Well, I was going to use Hilderberg as an example, but we just couldn't quite squeeze. The thing about Hildebo... The boys club, the heroic world.

It's Robert de France. You could have done it. I mean, you could have just said there's women in it as well and talked about the women, couldn't you? We were just being back. We were being very well-behaved. We were going to our script. We've been on before you. No, you don't have to be well-behavior. I'm not having it.

There wasn't time. You had all the time there was, and you chose not to do it. Take responsibility. I think we did. I got We Elthiaw in there, and we got Grendel's mother in there. You read a bit about a woman to start. I kick the whole thing off. Right.

Exactly. So there you were. We could have done more, but the Hilderboe episode is quite hard to do short because that's a very leisurely complicated telling of a story that's inserted into. the poem and you have to reconstruct the plot there and I didn't think it could possibly be done within a couple of minutes. A little thing on objects and swords. I wanted to but we had to move on. There's an astonishing moment when Beowulf is telling the story of where he's just been and his adventures

and then he starts predicting what will happen in future for Throthka and he says and I think he's going to marry his daughter off to this man and it's all going to go horribly wrong because they're going to try and make a truce and then when they have the party in the hall, suddenly one man will see his father's sword on the belt of one of his enemies and then it will all kick off. So this thing of objects just bringing feud with them. That's really good. The best swords have names.

Niling, they have names. Well, they do their scalybils and they are. Yeah, exactly. So swords carry their own names. The bouncer's here. Well, no, this is the, Tom Morris is announcing, Well, he's announcing nothing. He's going to tell us whether I thought was any good, and then we might have a cup of tea. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free.

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