Chapter 6 - Results of Primary Analysis, Step 1

Summary

HISTORICAL DATING PLACES the events of Beowulf in the late Migration Period, the decades leading up to the middle of the sixth century, entirely in keeping with the archaeological assessment of the material setting of the poem.

Numerous and wide-ranging linguistic elements combined with orthographic and palaeographic features of the manuscript show that the story was circulating in England no later than just before or after ad 700, most probably in Anglian territory.

The poem is considered to have been created by an Old English poet on the basis of traditions circulating in England about the hero Beowulf and about events and individuals in eastern Scandinavia during the sixth century. This assumption is contradicted by the fact that no such traditions are known in Old English sources, despite a rich body of texts apart from Beowulf. They can, though, be found in Old Norse and other Scandinavian sources, a clear indication that the poem was conceived in Scandinavia.

From the first line to the last, Beowulf exhibits an abundance of features typical of oral literature, on a scale that is difficult to reconcile with the idea that the poem was composed in writing. Nor is any other major early Germanic poetic work that was indisputably composed in written form known to us.

The abundance of neck and arm rings, other objects of solid gold, and shirts of mail, which was characteristic of Scandinavian elite circles in the Migration Period and which lends a particular ideological charge to Beowulf, was not to be found in England in the early Anglo-Saxon period. An Old English poet cannot possibly have painted this picture on the basis of his own contemporary environment or Anglo-Saxon antiquarian tradition.

The conventional view that the large ship burial in Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo in East Anglia, from around ad 625, and the Staffordshire hoard, from later in the seventh century, reflect the material setting of Beowulf is incorrect. Chronologically and in other important respects, it is directly misleading.

In earlier Beowulf literature, the material world of the poem has often not been satisfactorily delineated, with the result that the poem has frequently been illustrated in a misleading way, with motifs drawn from the Merovingian/Vendel and Viking periods.