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The authenticating voice in Beowulf
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2008
Extract
Two major concerns of recent Beowulf criticism have been (1) to establish the extent to which the poet used his pagan heroic narrative to shadow forth Christian meaning and (2) to establish the exact attitude of the poet towards his hero and towards the social institutions and mores of his hero's day – which, as we know, was several centuries before the poet's own. A nexus of such considerations has been the last word of the poem, lofgeornost: in the concluding lines the poet reports that the mourning Geats said that
…he wære wyruldcyning[a]
manna mildust ond mon(ðw)ærust,
leodum liðost ond lofgeornost. (3180–2)
There have been arguments on the basis of other contextual uses of lofgeorn that this word for ‘most eager for praise’ must have an unfavourable connotation here in Beowulf and hence carry the implication of a moral flaw in the hero, though these arguments have not, in my opinion, been convincing. But even if we accept a favourable connotation in this instance, since Beowulf's warriors would hardly be speaking ill of their fallen chieftain during his funeral rites, we still have the problem of deciding whether the poet himself was being sympathetic towards the warriors' view, or whether he was taking an ironic stance or attitude towards that praise from his undeniably Christian outlook.
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References
Page 51 note 1 But hardly antediluvian, as Nicholson, L. E. suggests (‘The Literal Meaning and Symbolic Structure of Beowulf’, Classica et Mediaevalia 25 (1964), 151–201)Google Scholar.
Page 51 note 2 All quotations are from Klaeber's, Fr.3rd ed. of Beowulf (Boston, 1950)Google Scholar.
Page 51 note 3 See my discussion in The Interpretation of Old English Poems(London and Boston, 1972), pp. 39–43.
Page 51 note 4 ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’, Proc. of the Brit. Acad. 22 (1936), 244–95, n. 20.
Page 51 note 5 This paper, substantially in its present form, was delivered as a lecture at the University of Cambridge under the sponsorship of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic on 7 March 1975. Footnotes have been added.
Page 52 note 1 ‘The Beowulf Poet’, PQ 39 (1960), 389–99; the passage is cited from the reprint in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. L. E. Nicholson (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1963), p. 356.
Page 52 note 2 Whitelock, Dorothy, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford, 1951)Google Scholar; Magoun, Francis P. Jr, ‘Oral-formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry’, Speculum 28 (1953), 446–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Robertson, D. W. Jr, ‘Historical Criticism’, English Institute Essays 1950 (New York, 1951), pp. 3–31Google Scholar, and ‘The Doctrine of Charity in Medieval Literary Gardens: a Topical Approach through Symbolism and Allegory’, Speculum 26 (1951), 24–49.
Page 53 note 1 Beowulf, ed. C. L. Wrenn, rev. W. F. Bolton (New York, 1973), p. 87.
Page 54 note 1 On this formula, see Rumble, Thomas C., ‘The Hyran-Gefrignan Formula in Beowulf’, Annuale Mediaevale 5 (1964), 13–20.Google Scholar
Page 55 note 1 Studies in the Narrative Technique of ‘Beowulf’ and Lawman's ‘Brut’ (Åbo, 1968), p. 18.
Page 55 note 2 Ibid. p. 26.
Page 56 note 1 ‘Inner Weather and Interlace: a Note on the Semantic Value of Structure in Beowulf’, Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, ed. R. B. Burlin and E. B. Irving, Jr (Toronto, 1974), pp. 81–9, at p. 83.
Page 57 note 1 Peter Clemoes has recently called attention to the contemporizing effect of the Beowulf narrator's references to permanent values and to permanent conditions of human life such as the seasons or God's power (‘De quelques articulations entre présent et passe dans la technique narrative Vieil-Anglaise’, Actes du Colloque de l'association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'enseignement Supérieur sur les Techniques Narratives au Moyen Âge, ed. André Crépin (Amiens, 1974), pp. 5–21. at pp. 17–19). Professor Clemoes's essay appeared after I had written this paper.
Page 58 note 1 On the significance of this verse, see my The Interpretation of Old English Poems, pp. 19–20.
Page 59 note 1 Hill, Thomas D., ‘“Hwyrftum Scripa∂” Beowulf, line 163’, MS 33 (1971), 379–81.Google Scholar
Page 60 note 1 Respectively, Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’; Nicholson, ‘Literal Meaning and Symbolic Structure’, as summarized by Bolton, in his revision of Wrenn's ed., p. 87; and Burlin, ‘Inner Weather and Interlace’, p. 84.
Page 61 note 1 Leyerle, John, ‘The Interlace Structure of Beowulf’, Univ. of Toronto Quarterly 37 (1967), 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Page 61 note 2 Cf. the remarks of Bennet A. Brockman on Genesis A (‘“Heroic” and “Christian” in Genesis A: the Evidence of the Cain and Abel Episode’, MLQ 35 (1974), 115–28, esp. 117), that even with a religious poem of this type, the concrete, secular, social meaning probably dominated the audience response, and that the poet had a ‘concrete, human interest in legendary material’ rather than an ‘intellectual interest in theological allegory’.
Page 62 note 1 A similar observation by Derek Brewer in connection with Chaucer (‘Towards a Chaucerian Poetic’, Proc. of the Brit. Acad. 60 (1974), separate reprint, p. 7) came to my attention after this was written.