
The Old English scholar John Niles charges the immense success of philological scholarship in Beowulf with obscuring more basic questions about the poem's meaning, that “...the success of these forms of criticism… occlude our understanding of [the poem] as a socially embedded creative act.” (Niles 80) That which philology does not address are the “...ontological, not aesthetic…” (ibid) questions posterior to the interpretation of this or that part of the poem’s whole. “Why did the phenomenon of Beowulf happen at all?” (Spitzer qtd in ibid) By locating the causal matrix which is the history of the poem’s composition Niles thinks the meaning of the act of Beowulf will emerge. But emerge as what? To answer he is in search of both an explanation of the way dramatic narratives derive from and are constitutive of cultural milieu, and a way of taking the poem as a creative act. But it’s at these points where Niles’ argument stumbles, punting on theoretical claims[i] that merely assert answers to these questions without proving them.[ii] What follows then is the development of a theoretical backdrop against which Niles can answer these questions, and a reading applying it to the poem. I’ll argue the philosopher of history Alasdair Macintyre supplies the mechanism Niles needs to explain how Beowulf becomes a culture instantiating myth, accounting for its thematic structure. In sketching a theory of reasoning as deriving from epistemological crises which are dramatic in structure at the social level, Macintyre explains myth as a mode of creative thinking about the topics of which Niles takes Beowulf to be concerned. By reading Niles’s historiography as epistemological crisis, the poem emerges as a technology for resolving thorny questions of ethics, politics, and history for the sake of a culturally mixed aristocracy with diverging accounts of the world.
The Unferth Intrigue is a useful demonstration of how this technology works. Critics have been tempted to read Unferth as a literary function which valorizes the hero of the poem in his failed flyt with, and eventual adoration of, Beowulf. But this, I will argue, is an aestheticism which fails to make sense of the political, ethical, and mythological problem Unferth represents. This poem of courtiers for courtiers is very much alive to the social drama of Unferth’s dubious past, portended betrayal, and mythological framing. James Rosier reminds us that Unferth appears or is referred to six times in the poem. That…besides Beowulf and Hrothgar, no other figure in the first part appears so frequently or receives so much attention… This repeated emphasis alone is indicative of Unferth’s importance in the poet’s conception and manipulation of the Heorot matter… (Rosier 4) Indeed, it is by comparing what the poet knows about Unferth with what his characters know that a didactic function emerges, revealing the poem as a kind of reasoning about social problems for a syncretistic, Danish-English aristocracy amid reconciling its cultural logic. By understanding Unferth along Macintyrian lines I hope to join Niles in supplementing philological scholarship with a notion of the poem as a culture instantiating speech act with application for understanding Hrothgar’s enigmatic þyle.
Niles thinks that by “unmasking Beowulf as a socially symbolic act…” the interpretive task is to notice “... two great sources of tension in English culture during the late sixth through the early tenth centuries,” tensions which grew out of the syncretistic[iii] culture of Christianizing Germanic peoples “...living South of Hadrian's wall and East of Offa’s Dyke.” (Niles 106) The success of Christianity, not only among Anglo-Saxons but their Scandinavian conquerors turned neighbors, produced a tension in the lore of their community: “our ancestors were great nobleman; our ancestors are damned.” (ibid) This tension becomes a problem for the poet to solve—how to valorize ancestors whose religion was demonic—a solution for which, among many other things, is the poet's appositive style.[iv] Another tension Niles locates is: “the Danes are murderers and damnable heathens; the Danes are our trusted allies.” (107) This is a result of the assuredly awkward, but not unpeaceful politics of postcolonial Britain[v]. Niles wants to set a stage from which the poem articulates a solution for historically constructed problems which, if understood, are an interpretive key to the ontological structure of the poem.
Macintyre recommends himself to Niles’ project by providing the theoretical structure which makes Niles’ literary thesis possible. As a historicist, he is interested in the ways cultural productions like Beowulf derive from material history. He gives an account of reason—and acts of reason like poetry—for which cultural milieu is a constituting fact, indeed, that which makes cultural reasoning possible as the presuppositions from which reasoning occurs. It’s with this in mind that he asks us to consider what it is to share a culture. He argues it is “to share schemata which are at one and the same time constitutive of and normative for intelligible action…and…the means for [interpreting] the actions of others.” (Macintyre 1988, 453) Tradition operates at the level of reason, the “prescriptions for interpretation,” (454) that calls our attention to this or that aspect of our experience, justifies it, and allows us to reasonably proceed. Conversely, received schemata are how problems of cultural reasoning come into view when a culture is confronted by new narratives. Traditions can fail to explain social experiences, and by their existence express inadequacy to the reality they are supposed to explain. Failures of tradition to reconcile experience gives rise, simultaneously to three phenomena: 1.) to the awareness of a tradition which had, until recently, been implicit in the mind of the culture; 2.) the existence of other accounts; and 3.) the incommensurability of one’s recently recognized tradition with those other accounts. Because tradition is the context in which social reasoning must take place, recognizing the incommensurability of rival traditions forces action on the part of a culture to augment, reimagine, or abandon its cultural justifications.
What is useful for Niles is the narrative structure Macintyre takes epistemological crises to produce. When a culture becomes aware of their tradition in light of its inadequacy, a transition occurs whereby the unquestioned assumptions received in tradition become a history and take on a narrative structure. It is at this point that reasoners become narrators about what justifies knowledge in the first place. Conflicts about cultural knowledge are not characterized merely by different members disagreeing on points of fact,
...they disagree as to how to characterize their disagreements and as to how to resolve them…. a tradition then not only embodies the narrative of an argument, but is only to be recovered in an argumentative retelling of that narrative which will itself be in conflict with other argumentative retellings. (461)
Beowulf commends itself as just this kind of retelling, a technology for synthesizing an aristocratic culture composed of common and divergent accounts of what it means to live in and navigate that culture ethically, historically, religiously, and politically, and thus amounts to the attempted resolution of epistemological crisis.[vi]
The poem’s ethical prescriptions to the cultural ailments personified in Unferth’s intrigue reflects a narrative resolution to epistemological crisis, a poetic meditation on, not just the drama of politics per se, but the ethics of political acts, family loyalty, and royal prudence. This is a function of the poem’s narrative structure, particularly when the poet’s knowledge of Beowulf’s chronology and political environment is compared to that of his characters. This distance consistently reveals an evaluative and didactic poetic which is at its most skillful in the case of Unferth. His role in the poem is subtle, serving to illustrate the difficulty of identifying threats at court. But, by considering the careful irony with which the poet constructs his drama of that treachery, its full force is felt in a careful synthesis of Christian and Nordic lore. It is this synthesis which provides content to the poet’s ethical prescriptions, providing a causal explanation for the poem’s composition. By analyzing the way the poet evaluates Unferth’s acts, cultural milieu becomes part of the poem’s technology of social reasoning.
Beowulf docks his boat in a Denmark fraught with problems of which Grendel is only one. In Hrothgar’s court, the poet is at pains to parallel the terror of trolls to social, and political paranoia at the center of which is Hrothgar’s trusted Unferth. The reader is confronted by him in his flyt with Beowulf and given little room to consider it a jocular exchange.[vii] The poet is explicit: Unferth’s motivation is vain glory. “That brave seafarer sorely vexed him/ for he did not wish that any other man/on this middle-earth should care for glory/ under the heavens, more than himself.” (502-505)[viii] Though Beowulf initially receives Unferth with gentleness, he defends himself, culminating with a withering accusation of fratricide and a condemnation to hell. (586) At this point, Grendel is invoked and Unferth’s courage called into question. In so doing, the poet calls upon central themes established in his introduction which are rooted in the causal matrix of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian society.
The poet frames his narrative in terms of two distinct threats aimed at Denmark. Heorot, the national symbol of Danish heritage, awaits both “the sword-hate of sworn in-laws…” and “a bold demon who waited in darkness…” (83, 84, 86) The proximity of these lines to one another creates a parallel of distinct threats to a particular social order. This order is expressed in the genealogy of Danish kings immediately preceding descriptions of the threats. Hence, both threats challenge the mantle of good kingship the lineage is supposed to have bequeathed to Hrothgar. It is the blessing of this lineage—known by its “pious gifts,” (22) “praiseworthy deeds,” (24) eloquence, (30) and wealth, (36)—to produce a “lordly people who lived in joy…” (99) but a joy disrupted by “one [who] began/ to work his foul crimes.” (100-101) In light of this compromised legacy, both threats raise the specter of an unsavory implication. To what extent is Hrothgar’s kingship considered good if his people are unhappy and his hall destroyed?
Grendel, the external, spiritual threat is introduced as the foul disrupter of a noble lineage of good kings, but also as paralleling the internal threat posed to Heorot. Just as the aristocratic community soon to be destroyed by internal “sword-hate” is given almost mythic genealogy, Grendel’s treachery is explained in mythic terms as well. We meet him sitting outside Heorot, eavesdropping on scop songs about God’s creation of the world. This infuriates him as
…the Creator had condemned him
among Cain’s race—when he killed Abel…
from thence arose all misbegotten things,
trolls… (106-107, 111-112)
The effect of this is to highlight the internal threat to good kingship in terms of the external threat of spiritual evil. Just as a lineage of noble Danes can be subverted from within by the treachery of family members, so the spiritual order can be, and indeed has been, presumably by the fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, but, for the poet, in the treacherous consequences of Cain’s murder—monsters and their mothers. In explaining both threats chronologically, the poet creates rhetorical space in which to erect an ethical scaffold upon which moral questions are presented. John Hill, developing Bronislaw Malinowski’s work on myth, sees the poet’s historicizing as an assertion that Beowulf is “…accepted or else modified and posed as truth bearing the sanction of righteousness and ‘preterity in universality; and thus possessing the normative power of fixing custom, [and] of sanctioning modes of behavior.’” (Hill 264) In this case, it is a syncretized myth, a dramatic reinterpretation by the poet for the sake of a blended society, that Beowulf takes on this ethical posture. Thus, by accounting for both temporal and super-natural threats by the same syncretized mythology, the poem becomes a way of reasoning about ethics: how is good kingship recognized and what are the maladies which compromise it?
This is brought out when Beowulf engages Unferth in his flyt. Hrothgar is in a pathetic state of defeat, “unhappy…” having “suffered greatly,” (129-130) Thus, the lineage is flickering, its blessing, joyful people, absent. Grendel is the spiritual threat which has brought this about, but given the poet’s parallelism, we should ask where the temporal threat is, “…the sword-hate of sworn in-laws.” Unferth, he who has committed the sin of Cain, is a good candidate. By linking Grendel and Unferth in terms of his syncretized mythology, the poet accounts for “all misbegotten things…” (111) with a pseudo-Biblical narrative integrating Scandinavian trolls with English sinners. This also serves the broader, ethical framework which structures the narrative so far by drawing the readers attention to the virtues of kingship. Afterall, in Grendel’s introduction we have been warned that “…men do not know/whither such whispering demons wander about” (163) and Hrothgar, in the case of the internal threat to his kingdom, is an example of such a man. Hence, in the flyt with Beowulf, Unferth serves a critical function in this dramatic evaluation of Kings: as parallel to Grendel, he becomes the terrestrial counterpart to his threat, a warning that Grendels prowl around in plain sight. This narrative argument is made by appeal to a dramatic reimagining of ethical tradition in terms which synthesize two cultures, and thus demonstrate the poem’s utility as a solution to epistemological crises.
Reading Unferth this way reveals predicaments that drip with irony, comparing what Unferth really is to what Hrothgar takes him to be. In the flyt, Beowulf, an emissary from a foreign kingdom, enters court and is insulted by a thane with no repercussion from his lord. What accounts for Hrothgar’s failure to rebuke him? Arthur Brodeur has speculated this relates to Unferth’s mysterious title. The original audience “knew better than we what the duties of a þyle were,” (Brodeur 147) that it possibly entailed an official role in which Beowulf contextualized Unferth’s insults. This is difficult to prove as the etymology of þyle is elusive. But the idea that Unferth acts in an official capacity is not impossible. Beowulf’s arrival threatens Hrothgar just as much as it benefits him, the king compelled to artfully reinterpret Beowulf’s offer as if, “for past favors, my friend Beowulf/ and for old deeds, you have sought us out.” (457-458) Hrothgar had helped Beowulf’s father, and it is allegedly in repayment that Beowulf comes to his aid. This need for wordplay is practical. Beowulf’s troop arrives with “bright shields/ full battle-gear.” (231-232) Hrothgar’s Kingdom is vulnerable to such men, and he needs assurance as to Beowulf’s intentions. This is brought out when Hrothgar withholds his consent to allow Beowulf to fight Grendel, and it’s not until Unferth publicly attacks Beowulf that Hrothgar is “greatly pleased…” and “…had faith in his helper.” (607,609) Therefore, there is something in the utility of Unferth’s behavior, something in which Hrothgar “recognized Beowulf’s firm resolution.” (610) Given this utility, it is reasonable to ask whether Unferth is not on official business.
Brodeur thinks he is. As Hrothgar’s spokesman (þyle), Unferth vets Beowulf to determine if he is equal to the task of defeating Grendel. Brodeur imagines Unferth hearing “a version of the swimming exploit which represented Beowulf as soundly beaten in a foolhardy undertaking.” (Brodeur 147) Such a story would compel him to “bring the matter into the open and force Beowulf either to prove his competence or to confess himself guilty a second time of undertaking what he could not perform.” (148) But it’s also possible that, given Hrothgar’s anxiety about Beowulf’s intentions, Unferth tries to expose ulterior motives in the hero on behalf of his lord. This could perhaps explain Beowulf’s culminating response. In it, Hrothgar is the victim of weak and cowardly thanes from whom Grendel “need fear no feud,” (595) that Beowulf is there to vindicate the glory of the Danes with the “strength and courage/ of the Geats in war.” (608-609) It is in immediate proximity to these lines that Hrothgar is relieved, recognizing Beowulf’s “firm resolution.” (610) In either case, given the poets connection of Unferth to Grendel in the sin of kin-killing and the parallels he has made to the internal and external threats against good kingship, Hrothgar’s utilization of Unferth is tragically ironic.
The effect is to signal Unferth as an internal threat unbeknownst to Hrothgar who is unfortunately suspicious of his true deliverer, the hero of the poem. The poet’s warning that “…men do not know/whither such whispering demons wander about” (163) is fulfilled before our eyes and this irony fits the didactic function of the poem’s cultural reasoning. Evil threatens good kingship silently when one is not sensitive to its signs—the sin of Cain, that which spawns “all misbegotten things.” (112) Beowulf sees this clearly and interprets it correctly, whereas Hrothgar is distracted, unable to recognize the Grendel’s which lurk inside, not outside, Heorot. This irony, and its ethical function, is repeated in the latter stages of the Unferth intrigue, again by Hrothgar, but also by Wealhtheow who, in her anxiety over Beowulf’s perceived threat, also misevaluates true threats to her noble lineage.
It is these anxieties that dominate the politics of the banquet celebrating Beowulf’s victory over Grendel, and it’s the value of Hrothgar’s kingship which is a dramatic flashpoint leading up to it. Upon hearing of Grendel’s defeat, Thanes return to Heorot, celebrating Beowulf’s courage as that of Sigemund, a Norse monster slayer. The Thanes are effusive in their praise, the poet noting “…it was often said/ that South or North, between the two seas/ across the wide world, there was none/ better under the sky’s expanse… more worthy to rule.” (857-861) The thanes remark suggests an awkward comparison of Beowulf to Hrothgar and sounds seditious enough for the poet to quickly add, “…though they found no fault with their own friendly lord/ gracious Hrothgar/ but said he was a good king.” (862-863) This awkwardness is magnified by the Sigemund digression. A few lines after the poet draws his comparison of Beowulf to Hrothgar, he compares Sigemund, the counterpart of Beowulf, to Heremond, a Danish King who “was betrayed into his enemies’ hands…a deadly burden/ to his own people.” (904-906) Heremond, a prince who had “received his father’s rank…” his “hoard,” his “fortress… a kingdom of heroes, and “the Scylding homeland,” (911-914) became possessed by sin and “was betrayed into his enemies’ hands.” (903) This nested narrative which compares heroic monster slayers to well-endowed yet imprudent kings is understated but unavoidable in its implication as a mythical evaluation of kingship. With the external threat to Danish noble lineage thwarted, the reader’s attention is now drawn to the question of the internal threat, that to which Heremond was susceptible.
Hrothgar is almost humorously ignorant of these dangers which stalk him. His celebration of Beowulf is excessive. With his court assembled about the severed arm of Grendel, Hrothgar adopts the hero, promising all “the worldly goods I can bestow.” (950) His initial reticence abandoned, Hrothgar all but gives his kingdom away in front of the assembly. It’s at this point our attention returns to Unferth in a silent but dramatic moment. Undoubtedly still vain-glorious and resentful of the hero, the internal and external threats to Heorot meet in Unferth’s gaze as he beholds Grendel’s arm. His boasting is silenced as he meditates, his eyes taking in “the end of each nail.” (984) Here, multiple themes of the poem are related by proximity. The monster spawned by the sin of Cain is beheld by the committer of that sin; a potential threat is considered by an actual one, as if the Eoten traitors of Heremond were to behold Sigemund’s dragon. That Hrothgar virtually makes Beowulf an heir before Unferth’s eyes, should call our attention to Unferth’s jealousy, that “…he did not wish that any other man/ on this middle-earth should care for glory/ under heavens, more than he himself.” (503-505) Thus, it is the relationship between Grendel and Unferth which the poet wants his reader to keep in mind as the banquet scene unfolds and Unferth’s designs become explicit.
This manifests in a tension sustained by the poet in his preoccupation with the future of Danish kingship. Just as Unferth contemplated Grendel, this tension is observed rather than expressed. When Hrothgar enters the banquet and sits with Hrothulf, the poet ominously clarifies that “…no false treacheries/ did the people of the Scyldings plot at that time.” (1019) After Beowulf is given gifts and the song of Finnsberg is sung, Wealhtheow approaches the king and his nephew. Again, the poet interjects to remind us that “their peace was still whole then,” (1164) alluding to a feud about which the poet’s audience apparently knows and reads into these lines. Importantly, Unferth is there too at the king’s feet. He receives his own ominous explainer: “everyone trusted his spirit/ that he had great courage.” However, this trust is earned despite his sin, that “to his kinsmen he had/ not been/ merciful in sword play.” (1166-69) This use of the adverb þeah is a subtle condemnation of the Danes prudence, preeminently of Hrothgar himself. The poet makes clear, in contrast to Beowulf, the Scylding aristocracy does not count Unferth’s kin-killing against him, giving those who have thrown their lot in with Cain a place of honor. It is this tolerance which undergirds the ominous tone pervading the banquet scene suggesting a fulfillment of the internal threat framing the narrative at the beginning of the poem.
The poet’s identification of internal threats is formalized in Wealhtheow’s speeches at the banquet. Entering with the cup, she turns to the King where he sits with Unferth and Hrothulf. She attempts to shore up Hrothulf’s loyalty toward her sons, Hrethric and Hrothmund, saying, “I know that my own/ dear gracious Hrothulf will hold in honor/ these youths… I expect that he would wish to repay/ both our sons kindly, if he recalls all/ the pleasures and honors that we have shown him.” (1180-1186) Rosier points out, “this concessive clause is parallel” (Rosier 5) to the one describing Unferth. The conditional gif occurs a few lines after Unferth’s conditional þeah, such that the two men’s loyalty is represented as contingent: i.e. despite Unferth’s sin, and only if Hrothulf remembers Hrothgar’s kindness. Wealhtheow then turns from this group toward Beowulf and her sons who are sitting together in a different part of the hall, emphasizing both Beowulf’s spatial and ethical proximity to them, “the good man/ Beowulf the Geat, sat between the brothers.” (1188-1191) The effect is to create a spatial and ethical organization to the Queen’s audience. The poet’s ironic distance and use of foreshadowing has darkened the corner in which Hrothulf and Unferth sit with their King, whereas “the good man/ Beowulf the Geat” (ibid) sits with the rightful heirs to the throne. Here we find a direct use of irony for the sake of moralizing character. The distance the poet creates serves the ethical function for which the whole Unferth episode likely operates in terms of syncretized history and myth.
***
This reading of Unferth has a debt to what Thomas Shippey has identified as the post-Leyerle school of “fatal contradiction” critics. (Shippey 170) These identify the dramatic irony with which the poet characterizes Hrothgar’s court and so make much of Hrothulf as a key but silent character. Shippey notes Kenneth Sisam as the most effective critic of this view who argues that far too much is made of a character with nothing to say. (Sisam 39) However, Unferth dominates the first half of the poem and takes the lion’s share of the poet’s ironic suggestion. Therefore, it is arguable that whatever the audience knows about Hrothulf is used by the poet to emphasize Unferth and his part to play in Hrothgar’s failing lineage. Briefly mentioning Hrothulf serves to reveal Unferth’s motivation and his part to play as a credible internal threat, linked to the external threat of Grendel by his act of kin-killing. This makes use of the “fatal contradiction” tradition for the sake of John Niles’ poetic ontology project, an answer to the question: “why did the phenomenon of Beowulf happen at all?” (Spitzer qtd in Niles 80) By locating the cultural milieu from which the poem arises, Niles echoes John Hill’s insistence that Beowulf is part of “an Anglo-Saxon culture’s social myth,” (Hill 208) a myth which explains Unferth as a threat by simultaneously associating his moral failings with Biblical narrative and Scandinavian folk-religion. But how does this explain the creative act of the poem? It’s by resourcing Alasdair Macintyre and his theory of cultural reasoning via narrative through the epistemological crises of syncretizing cultures, that Beowulf emerges as a way of thinking about ethical and political problems. The dramatic irony upon which his character is developed creates a rhetorical space for ethical and political theorizing. As Macintyre argues, narratives like Beowulf “…did provide the historical memory, adequate or inadequate, for the societies in which they were finally written down,” (Macintyre 2015, 121) and its by virtue of those narrative’s adequacy that “…schemata which are at one and the same time constitutive of and normative for intelligible action…” become “…the means for [interpreting] the actions of others.” (Macintyre 1988, 453) Considered this way, Unferth becomes a complex technology of explaining and evaluating political acts in a mixed aristocratic community composed of Anglo Saxons and Scandinavian neighbors.
NOTES:
[i] He makes brief reference to Foucauldian discourse in search of a “corporate means for dealing with a subject and authorizing views of it,” (Niles 79) suggesting that Beowulf “did much ideological work in its time,” (108) presumably the work of blending Danish and English society and history. But we should take this as a misapplication of Foucault. Foucault’s development of discourse is antagonistic toward the idea that creative acts perform an interpretive function. Discourse “...gives us the opportunity to say something other than the text itself, but on condition that it is the text itself, which is uttered and, in some ways, finalized.” (Foucault 221) So, the notion of discourse is the establishment of an epistemological approach which allows us to discuss the text for the price of knowing it directly. Hence, the notion of acts is obscure in any text if discourse is operative in our interpretation; facts about the text are really facts about the discourse of the text, and therefore can’t be grounded in the notion of creative acts per se. Yet this is the nature of Niles’ project. If “ontology, not aesthetic[s]…” (80) is what Niles is looking for, discourse will not guide him to it. Other than Foucault, Niles appeals to Jay Mechling and Umberto Eco, but these theorists simply reassert the necessity of context and its baring on interpretation (107)—a far cry from the kind of theoretical grounding Niles needs.
[ii] To some extent, this is a problem to which Niles is alive. He says, “a task still facing Beowulf scholars is to define more exactly the nature of the syncretistic system of thoughts that underlies this narrative and lends it ethical and spiritual significance.” (Niles 108) However, even in this concession, the theoretical question remains: how are facts about creative action derived from facts about text and history, and how, if such a connection can be established, do those facts bear on individual acts of interpretation?
[iii] Niles, though acknowledging the violence of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, thinks this peaceful period between the initial invasion and the reign of Ethelred (978-1016), was “no less significant for having occurred without the clash of arms.” (Niles 1983, 103) According to archeological evidence, this was a time marked by the burial of Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons side by side; (ibid) an apparent enthusiastic reception of Christianity on the part of Danish colonists, indeed the election of a Danish Archbishop of Canterbury; (104) a standing army composed of Danes and Englishman; (105) and the common use of the word heathen to refer, not to Danes in general, but only those Danes outside of the syncretistic community which, according to Niles, is the most likely candidate for the poet’s audience. (ibid)
[iv] Robinson, for instance, shows the poet’s development of an “artfully ambiguous terminology for the pagan characters to use…” (Robinson 43) He marks how “specifically Christian terms for Christ, The Holy Ghost, and the Trinity (which are ubiquitous in the poetry of Cynewulf…) are scrupulously avoided…” (ibid) The poet trades terms combining the genitive engla with the theologically ambiguous nominative Waldend, Among other similarly traded or omitted terms, Keiser notes the omission of the word milde, a common epithet for the Christian God. There are many other examples which, in the same manner Dante made noble the theology of Virgil, the Beowulf poet imagines his heroes as monotheists anticipating but yet unable to receive Christianity.
[v] This period commends itself, first for its treatment of the Danes. The poet goes to great lengths to frame their narrative within a Danish perspective in the genealogy of Hrothgar and the foregrounding of Danish politics surrounding the Grendel affair. That this is done would not make sense if the English understood the Danes as enemies merely, what they almost certainly would have if the poem was written earlier during the invasion. Evidence of a post-colonial, blended society are present in references in the genealogy itself, the poet listing a Danish King Scyld Scefing. Niles shows this is part of an extant pseudo-genealogy adopted by King Alfred under Viking influence, showing that “by the late ninth century…genealogies of both Anglo-Saxon and Danish royal lines had been made to converge.” (Niles 95) Literary convergences occur in the text as well. Analogues from Old Norse mythology abound, showing an inside knowledge on the part of the poet of the culture of Danish myth—Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the adventures of “Bopvarr” from “Gautland” who travels to the court of “Hrolfr Kraki,” defeating a monster described as “the worst of trolls” is one glaring example among many. (96) But these are blended with allusions from English mythical history: tales are told of Hengest (1083) and Offa, (1945-62) and later on a future King named Wiglaf is introduced, the dragon hero of the latter section who shares a name with a real-life King of Mercia whose grandsons shared names with the sires of the fictional character.
[vi] In the time of Beowulf’s composition, the conflicting traditions which needed narrative synthesis were the cultural folkways of Scandinavian colonists and the roughly Christian and Germanized society of post-Roman Britain. What Nicholas Howe has termed the “Myth of Migration,” that one of the Anglo-Saxon “...controlling political ideas…was the projection of a desire…for a non-Roman racial past,” (Niles 82) are reflected in the biases and historicizing of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. However, it is in the constitution of a Germanized mythological history by court poets in the late 8th and early 9th centuries, that “eventually found complex literary expression in Beowulf, Waldere, and the Finnsburg Fragment.” (84) The abrupt introduction of Scandinavian culture to the development of these ruling class origin myths, the apparent embrace of Christianity by Scandinavian colonists, and the pragmatic syncretism it all required, burdens literary works like Beowulf with the task of resolving the epistemological crisis Macintyre argues is part of cultural difference and interaction.
[vii] Traditionally, scholars took the public dispute on Beowulf’s swim with Brecca, that which introduces Unferth, as a dramatic device, giving the poet “an opportunity to give an account of Beowulf’s youthful exploits.” (Olrick 58) This reading gives short shrift to a character who dominates the first half of the poem, Unferth being only one of four (the other three being Beowulf, Wealhtheow, and Hrothgar) who speak regularly and are named. For example, see Chamber, R.W. Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed. 1959) ans Hughes, Geoffrey. “Beowulf, Unferth, and Hrunting: An Interpretation.” ES 58: 385-95 Other traditionalist readings have seen a moral failing in Unferth’s interrogation and therefore a Christianizing influence on the poem’s theme. Still others have developed the episode as an example of Germanic flyting, casting it in terms of dramatic performance. See Rosier, James L. “Design for Treachery: The Unferth Intrigue.” PMLA 7: 1-7. and Eliason, Norman E. “The Pyle and Scop in Beowulf.” Speculum 38: 267-284.
[viii] All citations from Beowulf are from Liuzza, R. M., ed. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Broadview Literary Texts. Peterborough: Broadview Pr, 2000.
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