Death and Nostalgia: The Future of Beowulf in the Post-National Discipline of English (original) (raw)
Related papers
Beowulf, the Critical Heritage: Introduction
This introduction to a volume of mostly-translated excerpts from early Beowulf scholarship gives an overview of reactions to the poem in Germany, Scandinavia and Britain from its first mention in 1705 to 1935 - at which point Tolkien's famous essay is generally thought to have begun a new era. The poem's involvement with European politics is a major theme.
“An Unfollowable World”: Beowulf, English Poetry, and the Phenomenalism of Language
This essay traces a history of Beowulf criticism, specifically focusing on the cultural value and literary merit that are always to some extent opposed in describing the poem's worth. It investigates assumptions about the relationships between language, poetry, and culture that informed, and sometimes continue to inform, Beowulf criticism. On the one hand, Beowulf is taken to represent an essential Englishness, while on the other hand it is linguistically alien to modern speakers. Beowulf thus forms an ideal litmus test for foundational questions such as “what makes language literary?” and “what makes a poem an English poem?” Although Beowulf is often represented as an outlier, a poem which we must learn to understand in its own terms, this survey demonstrates that Beowulf criticism reflects predictable trends in the evolution of thought about the relationship between language, literature, and culture.
Locating 'Beowulf' in Literary History
Exemplaria, 1993
What work did the poem 'Beowulf' do in its own time? This paper attempts to reconstruct a social context within which the making of a poem of this character makes sense. The story is traced over a period of some few hundred years, with 'Beowulf' approached as a response to changes that affected a complex society during a period of major transformation. A point of special interest is the poet's depiction of the Danes, seen as an indication that the poem in its present form post-dates the first Viking Age. This essay was reworked as chapter 1 (pp. 13-58) of my book 'Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts' (2007). Here it appeared along with a 'footnote' on 'Recent Work on Mythmaking and Ethnogenesis' and a query relating to the 'Geatas' of Beowulf.
A Critical Companion to Beowulf and Old English Literature
Lulu Press, 2017
This book is the end result of my extensive researches carried out on and into the lone survivor of a genre of Old English long epics, Beowulf—a painstakingly laborious, yet pleasurable task through the journey of which I discovered, unearthed, gleaned, and absorbed a great wealth of previously-unknown-to-me information about Old English Literature in general and Beowulf in particular.
PARADOX AND BALANCE IN THE ANGLO-SAXON MIND OF BEOWULF
As a result of Tolkien's influence, Beowulf remains relevant to the study of English literature, and it continues to fascinate the scholars who persist in finding new angles for examining the poem. What might be more surprising is that Tolkien's lecture "The Monsters and the Critics" also retains its relevance, despite being now over seven decades old. The secret to Tolkien's longevity seems to be, in part, the sheer impudence that he had in challenging the status quo and in encouraging the academic community to enjoy Beowulf for its worth as an English poem, belonging to the uniquely English tradition of poetry. In addition to this, Tolkien approached the poem with a great deal of respect, letting Beowulf reveal itself to him, rather than deciding on a theory about it and then attempting to force the poem into conformity with this theory. In the final words of "The Monsters and the Critics," he makes the following remark:
Current General Trends in Beowulf Studies
Literature Compass, 2007
This overview of late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century literary criticism charts the kinds of ongoing approaches diverse readers bring to the Old English masterpiece-approaches likely to be mainstays into the near future. The post-structuralist Beowulf has many faces: there is the archaic Beowulf, containing a dramatized social world from an anthropologically remote time and place; the feminist Beowulf, where the center of contention is over the marginality or not of female figures; the psychological Beowulf, replete with one dynamic or another of the unconscious or of the projected, monstrous Other, which in turn yields a monster-studies Beowulf. We also have the oral-traditional Beowulf with its political and ethnogenetic implications, the moral Beowulf, the comical Beowulf, and finally the dragon-inhabited Beowulf. Dozens of studies have been organized to illuminate these categories, while the survey ends on suggestions that the poem may in fact be formed deeply according to some arithmetical or geometrical scheme. By far among Old English poems Beowulf attracts the largest number of philological, metrical, textual, and literary-critical studies in any given year. One can hardly survey objectively the wealth of intelligent, provocative commentary in any discrete number of years, let alone in years characterized by upheavals in scholarly commentary. The curious reader should consult the annual bibliography published in the Old English Newsletter (OEN), with the Beowulf section's recent reviewers including Roy M. Liuzza, Susan E. Deskis, and Craig R. Davis. Also one should consult the extensive bibliographies of Victorian, modern, and contemporary scholarship accompanying A Beowulf Handbook, edited by Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (1997), along with Andy Orchard's A Critical Companion to Beowulf (2003). My modest aim is this: a review of the literary-critical work I have found most influential in the past fifteen years or so, work likely to stimulate further study along the many lines reviewed below and thus become the key inspirers of Beowulf criticism into the near future. This review has two parts: an overview with brief mention of the work that seems most important, followed by more detailed accounts of numerous studies including many of those mentioned in the general overview. However, before proceeding further, I should note some recent publications in textual and metrical areas within my time constraints, as well as
editing the nation's memory, 2008
The poem Beowulf proved to be, from its first publication, a contested site for nationalist scholarship. Though written in Old English, it dealt exclusively with Scandinavia and its nearest neighbours. Was the poem, then, in essence a poema danicum, as its first editor called it? Or did it emanate from the disputed borderland of Schleswig, where Low German speakers were still in the nineteenth century under Danish rule? Interpretation of the poem was affected at every level by nationalist sympathies, but even more by sub-national and supra-national sentiments expressed by scholars of divided loyalties, including pro-German Schleswigers, pro-Danish Icelanders, and Englishmen such as Stephens and Kemble (respectively pro-Danish and pro-German, but outstripping all others in intemperate chauvinism). The poem's early politicisation continues to affect scholarship to the present day.
The reception history of Beowulf
SELIM, 2020
This paper traces both the scholarly and popular reception of the Old English epic Beowulf from the publication of the first edition of the poem in 1815 to the most recent English novel based on it from 2019. Once the work was first made available to the scholarly community, numerous editions in various languages began to appear, the most recent being in English from 2008; once editions were published, Old English scholars around the world could translate the text into their native languages beginning with Danish in 1820. Translations, in their turn, made the poem available to a general audience, which responded to the poem through an array of media: music, art, poetry, prose fiction, plays, film, television, video games, comic books, and graphic novels. The enduring, widespread appeal of the poem remains great and universal.