2 - Beowulf’s Foliate Margins: The Surrounding Forest in Early Medieval England

Summary

BEOWULF IS NOT accompanied by illustrations in the sole surviving manuscript of the poem, and the text on the page has no foliate margins, yet the edges of its world teem with arboreal life. Though I have recently noted that in certain respects Beowulf is ‘uncommonly treeless for an Old English poem’, this chapter challenges that view by arguing that the tendrils of trees and other plants are in fact entangled in its borders. In this role they operate as a complex extended metaphor for human life in the wilderness east of Eden, where Adam and Eve were driven after the Fall, and the garden of Paradise to which humans may one day return. To begin, I will address the main appearances of trees in Beowulf, with those found in the song of creation, at Grendel's mere, and at the forest of Ravenswood. In addition to recognising the woodlands of the early medieval material world as an element of Beowulf's landscapes fully integrated into the symbolic world of the poet, my argument will then consider these trees in light of other marginal arboreal presences in early English material culture. Here, in considering the foliate margins of various objects, including the Newent Cross, the Franks Casket, and several brooches decorated with foliate designs, I will argue that when considered in concert, these artistic productions reflect a complex set of understandings about the place of the cultural world of humans within the ‘surrounding forest’, with the forest in this context serving as a capacious metaphor for the material world and everything in it.

Creation Songs

Trees make their first appearance in Beowulf not long after the poem has begun, in the first song sung in Heorot. This song of creation perhaps reflects the creation of a world in the poem itself, but also the manner in which the building of Hrothgar's hall is comparable with the timbering of the cosmic hall – a parallel also found in Bede's commentary on Genesis, as Jennifer Neville has noted.