Beowulf is over, and so my semester of experimental literature survey wraps up with it. ?I was dog-tired when I taught today, impending events having robbed me of some sleep, and I felt like the lesson suffered somewhat, but Beowulf?is a strong enough poem in its own right that, despite my own fatigue, the material carried me. ?Honestly, that’s part of why I tend to stay away from anthologies that are filled with recent stuff: some days I just don’t have the fuel in the tank to make things interesting, but a strong enough text in the syllabus can make even those days worthwhile.
So ends my sermon on syllabi.
I don’t know why I never before this year noticed the obvious Boethius riff at the beginning of the dragon tale in Beowulf. ?Only a few lines after Beowulf ascends as king of Geatland, the narrator begins a tale, and the tale begins as a man in ancient times, fleeing a heathen land (I assume his side had just lost a war), stops to bury his treasure, knowing that he wouldn’t be alive for much longer. ?After the heathen dies, a dragon, seeing a mound of treasure in the ground and being the sort of creature who sits on mounds of buried treasure, sets to sitting on the buried treasure. ?All is going fine until a ceorl, some sort of working man, happens upon the hoard and the sleeping dragon and steals a cup from it. ?Sensing that his treasure has been touched, the dragon begins a rampage across the land, getting the attention of the former monster-slayer Beowulf, who sets the precedent for entirely too many Rocky movies by deciding to fight a grand battle despite his being past his prime.
The Boethius riff comes in book five of?The Consolation of Philosophy?when Lady Philosophy explains the nature of chance to Boethius. ?In the eyes of heaven, she teaches, there are no chance occurrences, just the totality of cause-effect relationships. ?Contingent beings experience chance because, not knowing the totality of cause-effect relationships, a contingent being can encounter a conjunction of two chains of causes, only knowing one, and experience the moment of conjunction as chance. ?As an example, Philosophy tells a story of someone burying a treasure and someone else, plowing the field where the treasure is buried, uncovering it. ?The first man did not know that a man would come by later to plow, and the man plowing did not know that a man had hidden the treasure. ?So one loses and the other gains the treasure by chance, though Providence does not experience either as chance.
Later in the poem’s final battle and funeral, the prideful Beowulf falls to the fiery breath of the dragon (sorry to ruin it for those of you who haven’t read it), and somewhat surprisingly, his loyal thane Wiglaf, the only one of his twelve warriors to stand by him against the wyrm, criticizes the fallen hero, saying that the old man’s prideful insistence that he fight the dragon alone and gain glory for himself has resulted in a situation wherein neighboring kingdoms, knowing that the ferocious king had died, would certainly start massing armies for an invasion. ?We had a good discussion today about whether whatever monk transcribed what seems like a previous oral-tradition poem had made that and other moves to undermine the ancient warrior code, and a very good discussion of the ethics of storytelling ensued. ?I probably should have led the conversation better, but my students, being the bright group that they are, managed quite nicely.
On a vocabulary front, our translation happily provided a footnote that highlighted the poet’s use of??gl?can, a word that normally connotes monsters and demons,?to name Beowulf and the dragon as they waged battle, explaining that in other places in the poem, that word names mainly Grendel and the dragon. ?The Beowulf poet, in other words, has a sense that, in a world of monsters, Geatland could only hold fast because it had a monster of its own. ?As with Malory earlier this semester (though later on a timeline), the Beowulf?poet seems to have a sense that the means of violence do not always themselves come without danger. ?Beowulf?is no pacifist poem, but it’s also not uncritical about the presence and reliance upon men and monsters more capable of destruction than one’s neighbor’s men and monsters.
I’m out of town Thursday, but next Tuesday, we go a bit lighter and dig into Bill the Bard’s As You Like It. ?That should be a nice change of pace.
1. Hope Thursday goes well—I talked with them earlier. It was probably that time when your ears were burning and the air seemed to glow.
2. Missed you at the Honors Day celebration when you were named as one of the finest TAs at UGA. Yeah!
That’s it–we should probably chat soon before you disappear into the summer.
I was sorry to miss it as well, but with everything happening so fast, I was frantically preparing my lessons that I’m giving in lieu of a job talk. I also missed EMUS lunch despite needing my EMUS friends sorely on the eve of my great test.