Day two of Beowulf is in the can.? Once again I had too much in my notes to squeeze into a seventy-minute class, but that’s an alright embarrassment of riches, as far as I’m concerned.
We started out where today’s section of the poem did, reviewing the Grendel family’s genealogy, which runs back to Cain.? This time the kinship angle was even more pronouned, the poet emphasizing that where Grendel’s hatred was irrational envy of people’s having a good time, his mother came for a very particular act of vengeance.? When she comes to kill ?schere, she does so quickly and leaves quickly, not relishing the act of murder as Grendel does.? As Hrothgar’s thanes mourn the death of the good king’s right-hand man, Beowulf utters the parable that’s the title of this post: “Better it is for each that he avenge his friend, than it is to mourn him much.”? As one particularly bright student noted, it’s at least a little bit ambiguous whether Beowulf is justifying his impending vengeance-journey or the sea-witch’s crime that he’s avenging or both.? At any rate, we had a good conversation about the ethos of revenge and how difficult it is to say what a functioning one would have looked like, given that most of the revenge literature we have comes from Christians and Stoics, neither group being all that keen on revenge.
We then took some time to examine the strange Boethian sermon that Hrothgar delivers before Beowulf leaves Heorot, noting that the same king who was celebrating the glory and pride of Beowulf in other passages had all of a sudden developed an ethics of humility to preach to the younger warrior.? Instead of facing an indeterminate time of death by seeking glory, the sermon-king advises, eternal counsel is ultimately best.? We used this occasion to talk about various theories about the poem’s origin, and I finished that discussion by noting that, although the history of the manuscript will likely always be a mystery, nonetheless one must proceed from one or another of the theories when one does criticism of the poem.
Days like today make me glad I’m more of a generalist than a specialist–I enjoy teaching Milton and Shakespeare greatly, but I could also teach Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon and such works as often as a college asked me, and I’d be perfectly content in either scenario.? I could also teach David Hume, Boethius, Plato, Yukio Mishima, 1 Samuel, Dante, Augustine, Walt Whitman, Heidegger… yeah.? I’m just too much of a generalist ever to amount to much of anything.
