7 - Ancient Myths for the Modern Nation: Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf

Summary

Abstract

Maria McGarrity examines Seamus Heaney's rendering of Beowulf in the context of the poet's probings of the interface between the Irish and English languages, and that between the British and Irish registers of English itself. Heaney's choices of vocabulary and phrases, ranging from the subtle to the conspicuous, are shown artfully to recast the Old English masterpiece in a contemporary dialogue, not at all free from tension, among neighboring cultures of the Irish Sea Cultural Province.

Keywords: Scandinavians/Vikings, Heaney; Grendel, Cú Chulainn, James Joyce, bog, sea

As several of the essays in this collection show, any modern national and/or ethnic identif ication of cultures that border the Irish Sea are often too limiting or merely projected into the historical past as reflections of contemporary political ideologies. In Ireland, from the latter half of the nineteenth and through the twentieth century, writers continually returned to a striking series of ancient myths drawn from the most-famed narratives of the Irish archipelago, identified these as original manifestations of the indigenous peoples, and deployed these constructs as a means of defining national identity. This interest in ancient Ireland partially results from the dramatic surge in archaeological discoveries that took place in Ireland between 1840 and 1860. The sudden exposure of early material cultures in Ireland from bog and field captured the public imagination and brought Ireland's prehistory, particularly that preceding British incursions from the Norman kings of England descended from William the Conqueror, termed in modern Irish Studies, the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1159 onward, to the forefront of public discourse. This striking preoccupation with the indigenous seems to mark Irish writing and serves to separate this national form from other modern configurations. In fact, what I examine in “Ancient Myths for the Modern Nation” is not simply a momentary recognition of Ireland's primitive indigenous history but a striking gesture that serves to define the long emerging Irish nation, through an imagined connection with its ancient lineage(s) and the recognition of a more encompassing Irish past that provocatively emerges in the twentieth century.

In a discussion about the categorization of Manx crosses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the noted archaeologist, former head of the British Museum, David Wilson notes the increasing cultural interest in designating artifacts as Celtic rather than Scandinavian (what are more popularly considered Viking, though this term more clearly evokes a profession rather than an ethnic group or affiliation).