Chapter 19 - Transmission and Writing Down in England

Summary

EVEN IN THE Viking Age, Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons were able to communicate fairly freely with one another without an interpreter (Townend 2002, 183, 210). This must have been even truer in the early seventh century, especially if the initial contact occurred with Anglian areas. The small group of people from eastern Sweden who I suggest could hypothetically have accompanied a king's daughter to the southeast of England could therefore presumably have been assimilated quite quickly from a linguistic point of view. Hailing from an oral world, they would have had all their natural linguistic receptivity intact and could have adapted fairly rapidly and seamlessly to the local language.

As the poetic form, social settings, and functions of oral poetry at this time were quite similar in England and Scandinavia, as part of a wider Germanic cultural environment, a Scandinavian bard reciting the songs and stories of his homeland, such as the one about Beowulf, should have been readily understood. With written culture still poorly developed in England, Anglo-Saxon listeners would have been able to reproduce more or less verbatim even a long work of poetry presented in an eastern Swedish dialect. With every subsequent recitation of the story, Scandinavian linguistic features would gradually have been erased and the language would have become increasingly Old English, albeit with some remaining special Scandinavian words and expressions.

Possible Process of Transmission

As the most likely alternative, I have argued here that the core of the pagan tradition of Beowulf was transferred to England as a coherent work of poetry from the outset. A bard from eastern Sweden could of course have recited several separate eastern Swedish poems about Beowulf at the East Anglian court, these then being woven together into a whole by East Anglian bards. But if Anglian audiences perceived them as belonging together, it can only have been because they had been recited in a single context, as if they did belong together, in which case they were in practice already a single entity. I can see no weighty reason not to assume that Beowulf was transferred to England as a poetic work that formed a coherent whole from the outset.