Why 'Beowulf?'

That English lit mainstay 'extends our horizons, stretches the imagination'

By Rose McIlveen

David recalls a Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall, in which Annie (played by Diane Keaton) is leafing through a college catalog and mentions the literature courses. "Just don’t take any course where they make you read Beowulf," Woody tells her.

David, who has taught the poem for many years, thought he was through with it when he retired in 1994. Not so. In the mid-1980s, W.W. Norton & Company asked Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney to replace the prose translation of Beowulf in the Norton Anthology of English Literature with a new translation from the Old English.

IU's David, who edits the Middle Ages section for the Norton Anthology, agreed to act as a consultant to Heaney, whose translation was long in coming. It was first published in 1999 in Britain and in the seventh edition of the Norton. That year, Heaney's Beowulf won the prestigious Whitbread Prize in Britain, selling 50,000 copies and edging out the latest Harry Potter novel by one vote. It then came out in an American edition and hit the top 20 sales on the Amazon.com Web site.

So what could possibly stir that many Britons out of their reading ruts?

"Beowulf is a saga that includes a hero and his battles with monsters. The poem also opens a window on pre-literate Germanic culture some 1,500 years ago," said David.

He explained to a standing-room-only Mini University class this past spring that Beowulf derives from a tradition of oral heroic poetry that the Anglo-Saxon invaders introduced to Britain in the 5th century. Although some scholars believe that much of the text reproduces oral sources, most now, including David, believe that the poem is the work of a single literate Christian poet who imitated the style of heroic poems he had heard. David pointed out that the formula "We/I have heard" occurs frequently in the poem.

"I think that the poet was a third or fourth generation Christian who could still remember pagan ancestors. A Biblical touch is the description of Grendel, the monster, as a descendant from the clan of Cain. Although Beowulf and the other characters are pagan, they often refer to God as 'the Lord' and'‘the Almighty,'" David said.

He warned the class that not every single line is entirely clear. "Some lines are inexplicable and scholars have argued over their meaning," he said. Beowulf, according to David is the saga of a heroic warrior who conquers fearsome foes and ultimately dies in his last battle with a dragon.

The poem begins with the description of the last rites of a king whose body is sent out to sear in a treasure-laden funeral ship.

"Beowulf scholars have connected this episode with a great treasure, contained within the remains of a ship excavated in 1939 from a mound near the Suffolk coast at a site called Sutton Hoo, said David.

In another lecture during Mini University, Robert D. Fulk showed slides of the Sutton Hoo treasure to packed audience on the previous day.

What is the attraction of Beowulf for 21st-century readers?

"Why does the academy think the poem is so important? Why read literature at all and just take business courses, instead?" he asked and then answered his own questions, "Literature humanizes us. It extends our horizons in time and stretches our imagination."

During his lecture David read passages from Beowulf in Old English to give his audience an opportunity to hear what it sounded like.

Hear David read selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English at:

http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/chaubib.htm

Beowulf read by Heaney is also available.