8 - ‘Give the People What They Want’: Historiography and Rhetorical History of the Dating of Beowulf Controversy

Summary

In 1958, the movie mogul Harry Cohn died. Seeing the huge crowds that turned out for the funeral, one actor expressed his bewilderment: “But everyone in Hollywood hated Harry!” he exclaimed. “Why are all these people here?” In 1981, after a conference in Toronto and the publication of a proceedings volume, a no-less-surprising throng began to gather, in books, journals and conferences, for the scholarly funeral of a dateable Beowulf. We have no record of anyone exclaiming in surprise: “But the evidence for an early date of Beowulf is relatively consistent, convincing and well-established! Why would people be happy to replace it with speculation and uncertainty?” But the words of the comedian Red Skelton, who had worked for Cohn, explain both seeming paradoxes: “Give the people what they want and they'll turn out for it.”

Even when I was a graduate student at my first significant Anglo-Saxon conference, ISAS 1995 at Stanford, I heard the rumors about that Toronto conference. Sometimes they were sotto voce, sometimes louder (especially when there was an open bar), but always they said a version of the same thing: the famous Dating of Beowulf conference at Toronto and the subsequent proceedings volume were not entirely on the level.