Strangely enough, even though I had just as much amateur linguistics lore, Tolkien tidbits, and other distractions in my notes today, our class on Beowulf turned out more focused than did our class on Anglo-Saxon elegies just before spring break.? We covered more of the poetry, got in some discussions of big cultural questions, and really had a good discussion today.? Something must have been off that day.
I started the class with a Beowulf scavenger hunt.? I had the students separate into groups of three or four and find their favorite two compound words (we were using Roy Liuzza’s translation, and he preserves a good many of them), their favorite proverb, their favorite boast, and their favorite insult from the first 1200 or so lines.? I had them read their findings aloud, and that set the table from the outset for a discussion of the conventions of what seems to be some kind of orally-composed-and-later-transcribed poem.? And yes, if any reader runs into any of my students, I did spontaneously utter “Oh Snap!” when one student recited her group’s favorite insult.
We then talked about the pervasive fear of kinsman-betrayal in the poem, from Grendel’s descent from Cain and thus his kinship to the human beings he eats to the stories that the scop sings at the post-Grendel banquet, one about a dragon-slayer betrayed and the other about a king betrayed.? We also talked about the warrior-culture of boasting (we’ll add revenge to that next week) and about the debate that rages about whether the poem is ultimately a critique of the warrior-ethos or a celebration of the same.? We got into the Grendel-sequence’s influence on Tolkien’s The Two Towers, and I ran down some of Tolkien’s place- and character-names that seem to derive from Old English and even from Beowulf particularly.
One of the particularly interesting moments that I’d never paid much attention to before I planned this lesson is how the narrator renders the fight between Grendel and Beowulf.? It occurred to me on this reading that Beowulf does not really have any idea that Grendel is immune to the blades of swords, and Grendel has no idea that he’s about to face a bear-man who doesn’t use swords.? Instead, like Boethius’s buried treasure illustration, the meeting of two lines of causation end in a win for Beowulf and death for Grendel largely because of chance-according-to-Boethius.? Even though I’d not assigned Boethius to this class, they seemed to grab onto the concept easily enough.? But the ignorance of the poem’s hero does give me pause when I think about all of the people I’ve read who would point to Beowulf, for better or for worse, as a poem about the unmitigated goodness of a warrior’s bravery.
We finished the class talking about the Finnsburh digression, and I’m afraid my own confusion on that bit of text did show when I tried to teach it.? I didn’t do a great job explaining the events of the narrative itself, but I did a better job, I think, connecting it to the larger questions of kinship betrayal and to Wealtheow’s swearing Beowulf to be protector of the heirs directly after.
Thursday we take on Grendel’s mother and (if I remember right) Beowulf’s rise to become King of the Geats.? More then.
