Chapter 23 - Retrospective Summary

Summary

IN SUCH A wide-ranging, long-standing, and international field of scholarship as Beowulf, one might imagine that everything would long since have been thoroughly investigated. And yet as far as the absolutely crucial question of the poem's origins is concerned, that is not the case.

“Books have their destinies,” habent sua fata libelli, could perhaps be a fitting quotation for a work with as complex a history as Beowulf, all the more so given that both the only manuscript of the poem and its two transcripts came close to going up in smoke. But if we also take into account the opening words of the phrase—Pro captu lectoris—by which Terentianus stressed that literary works are understood differently according to the capabilities of their readers, then the quote is less apt. Traditionally, Beowulf has been interpreted from a very one-sided point of view, namely that it was composed by an Old English poet.

To have been able to compose the story independently in as historically and factually plausible a way as we find in the poem, such an author must have had access to a whole array of Scandinavian traditional material. And yet the only material of that kind that survives in Old English is the poem Widsith, which consists of unsorted lists of peoples and rulers of northern Europe and elsewhere, but contains no information about the various historical contexts that make up the narrative of Beowulf. There is hardly a trace of such information, either, in the rest of the rich corpus of Anglo-Saxon writings, or in any other type of source. This premise, so fundamental to the axiom of an Old English poet, thus evaporates at first sight, like a morning mist lifting with the first rays of the rising sun. The idea of such a poet having composed Beowulf guided by Scandinavian traditions preserved in England is based entirely on an argumentum e silentio and has to be judged accordingly. And since, as my analysis in the second half of this book has shown, far too much of the narrative can be interpreted in a plausible Scandinavian geographical, topographical, and historical perspective, it equally cannot be regarded as a work of pure fiction by an Old English poet.