Chapter 2 - The Origins of the Poem

Summary

RESEARCH INTO OTHER early European epic poetry, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Nibelungenlied, was long marked by a controversy between “Unitarians,” who primarily regarded these works as composed by great poets, and “Analysts,” who viewed them chiefly as the result of a long oral poetic tradition. In the case of Beowulf, that controversy was relatively short-lived. While Thorkelín (1815) and Ettmüller (1840) took it virtually for granted that the poem was a direct translation into Old English from ancient Norse oral tradition, as early a writer as Grundtvig believed it to be the work of an Old English poet (Grundtvig 1820). One of the last scholars to argue, chiefly on linguistic grounds, that the poem essentially reflected a Scandinavian oral tradition was Gregor Sarrazin (1888, 1897).

For a long time, then, Beowulf has generally been considered to have been composed in writing by an Old English Christian poet, working on the basis of Scandinavian narrative traditions he had come into contact with in some unknown way (Chadwick 1912; Chambers 1932; Magoun 1953; Farrell 1972; Bruce-Mitford 1974, 1975, 1986; Sorrel 1992; Newton 1993; Hill 2002; North 2007; Fulk et al. 2009, clxxxi–clxxxiii).

This premise is generally considered so self-evident, however, that it is rarely put into words. An evaluative survey of two hundred years of Beowulf scholarship (Fulk et al. 2009) reports no modern-day research expressing a fundamentally different opinion. The same view prevails in Scandinavia. The Swedish Nationalencyklopedin is in no doubt at all: “The poem was composed by an unknown Old English poet” (Frykman 1990).

Opinions on the subject are not entirely uniform, however:

It is likely that the poem’s composition had more than one oral stage and more than one written stage. The poem has a decided unity, but the argument from design does not prove the existence of a single designer. Although it is by no means required that we renounce the idea of a single author, to talk of “the Beowulf-poet” is to oversimplify […] much of the poem may have been available in oral verse tradition before a monk dipped his quill in ink. (Alexander 2005, xi)

As one of several possibilities, Kenneth Sisam has suggested that the poem was originally composed orally in England and recited orally for a time, before being written down (Sisam 1965, 67). John D. Niles, for his part, speaks of a complex background of oral poetry and various scenarios for the poem's preservation in writing (Niles 1997).