The element of religious tension is quite common in Christian Anglo-Saxon writings ( The Dream of the Rood, for example), but the combination of a pagan story with a Christian narrator is fairly unusual. The Beowulf that we read today is therefore probably quite unlike the Beowulf with which the first Anglo- Saxon audiences were familiar. The Beowulf poet is often at pains to attribute Christian thoughts and motives to his characters, who frequently behave in distinctly un-Christian ways. Though still an old pagan story, Beowulf thus came to be told by a Christian poet. Originally pagan warriors, the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian invaders experienced a large-scale conversion to Christianity at the end of the sixth century. Many of the characters in the poem-the Swedish and Danish royal family members, for example-correspond to actual historical figures. The action of the poem takes place around 500 A.D. Elements of the Beowulf story-including its setting and characters-date back to the period before the migration. The Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian peoples had invaded the island of Britain and settled there several hundred years earlier, bringing with them several closely related Germanic languages that would evolve into Old English. By the time the story of Beowulf was composed by an unknown Anglo-Saxon poet around 700 A.D., much of its material had been in circulation in oral narrative for many years. Though it is often viewed both as the archetypal Anglo-Saxon literary work and as a cornerstone of modern literature, Beowulf has a peculiar history that complicates both its historical and its canonical position in English literature. 'Heaven swallowed the smoke,' 3155b) and in human actions(.'until a word's point broke through a breast-hoard,' 2791b-2a). It is pervaded by an animism that finds numerous interconnections between the human and the non-human, both within created nature (.'winter locked the waves in ice-bonds,' 1132b-3a. A radically anthropocentric ontology informs its mode of language. The world of the poem is intensely alive emotionally. Whatever imagination fashioned Beowulf, it is clear that it did not feel a need to spell out or grammatically announce for prosaic, analytic, descriptive minds the host of metaphorical identities that are established by the interconnections which exist in the verbal patterns of this text. There is a large difference between explicit metaphor, which announces its presence by a 'this is that' predication ('the ship is a bird'), and implicit metaphor, which is based on juxtaposition, association, and intensified uses of language. It is a main contention of this book that Beowulf belongs to an area or mode of language in which metaphor is both functional and pervasive. Beowulf is both an unsurpassble battle-king and an ideal social king for all times his death and the subsequent plight of his Geats are poignant aspects of life, not part of a doomed past from which Christians have miraculously escaped through Christ's intervention. But the world goes on in its changeable and violent ways there is no clear view in the poem that times have got better since those days. Thus Grendel is not simply an evil-minded, misbegotten creature he is of the lineage of Cain by association, of devils in some way, and thus of mankind's enemy in the cosmic sense. If the poet's theistic Christianity has done anything for him in his view of the heroic past it has extended ultimate truth to the rightly oriented perceptions of his noble characters. Instead, I have argued, he everywhere underwrites the essential values of that world, which he owns as well, and which he sanctions by every means available to him. The poet's double-perspective on the world of his noble characters might have led him to a Christian distancing from his material.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |