Marking Boundaries in Beowulf: Æschere’s Head, Grendel’s Arm and the Dragon’s Corpse

2017 ◽  
Vol 77 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 521-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thijs Porck ◽  
Sander Stolk
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
English Poem

Abstract In the Old English poem Beowulf, several body parts are put on display, including Grendel’s arm at Heorot and Æschere’s head on top of a cliff. The first instance has been widely discussed by various scholars, who have tried to find out why and where the arm was hung. By contrast, scholarly treatments of the second instance are relatively scarce. This article places the exhibition of Æschere’s head by Grendel’s mother in the context of similar practices of decapitation and display in Anglo-Saxon England. It will be argued that the placement of the head of Æschere on top of the cliff towering over Grendel’s mere resembles the Anglo-Saxon heafod stoccan, ‘head stakes’, which acted as boundary markers. The monster’s act, therefore, would not strike as foreign to the Anglo-Saxon audience, but would be familiar. As we will show, the identification of Æschere’s head as a boundary marker, placed at the edge of the monsters’ domain, also has some bearing on the interpretation of other potential boundary markers in the poem, including Grendel’s arm and the dragon’s corpse. Lastly, we will argue for a new reading of two textual cruces in Beowulf’s speech prior to his fight with Grendel.

Sepulchral Jews and Stony Christians

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy Lavezzo
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Old English ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
English Poem ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Temple

This chapter examines the unstable geography of Christian and Jew during the Anglo-Saxon period through an analysis of Bede's Latin exegetical work On the Temple (ca. 729–731) and in Cynewulf's Old English poem Elene. It takes as its starting point how Bede and Cynewulf tackle a material long associated with Jewish materialism, stone, in comparison with Christian materialism and descibes their accounts of the sepulchral Jew as well as the stony nature of Jews. It also considers how Bede and Cynewulf construct Christianity by asserting its alterity and opposition to an idea of Jewish carnality that draws on and modifies Pauline supersession. The chapter concludes with an assessment of how Bede's and Cynewulf's charged engagements with supersession and “Jewish” places contribute both to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon material culture and to the important role that ideas of the Jew played in such materialisms.

The prefix un- and the metrical grammar of Beowulf

1981 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 39-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Calvin B. Kendall
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Old English ◽  
The Other ◽  
Wide Area ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
English Poem ◽  
The Battle Of Maldon ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Considerable Period

Two rules of the metrical grammar of the Beowulf poet are the subject of this paper. One concerns the variation of stress on the prefix un-; the other pertains to the alliteration of compounds. The two are correlated. The paper rests on the premise that the ‘metre’ of an Old English poem is only one function of a set of regularities that make it something we call verse rather than prose. Separately these regularities may be described as ‘rules’; taken as a group, the rules comprise a metrical grammar. Each Anglo-Saxon scop absorbed such a grammar during the course of long immersion in the poetic tradition of his culture. No two scops' metrical grammars could have been exactly alike; in addition to individual differences, there must have been regional and dialectal variations, although the poetic tradition ensured remarkable uniformity over a wide area and a considerable period of time, and only at the end of the Old English period, with let us say The Battle of Maldon, are significant changes manifest. Further investigation would therefore be needed to determine to what extent the rules here described apply to other grammars.

Junius's knowledge of the Old English poem Durham

2001 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 231-245
Author(s):  
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old English ◽  
British Library ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
English Poem ◽  
University Library ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Original Manuscript

Until recently, the late Old English poem Durham was known to have been copied in two manuscripts of the twelfth century: Cambridge, University Library, Ff. 1. 27 (C) and London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xx (V). C has been transcribed frequently and serves as the basis for Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie's standard edition of the poem in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. V was almost completely destroyed in the Cottonian fire of 1731. Its version is known to us solely from George Hickes's 1705 edition (H).In a recent article, however, Donald K. Fry announced the discovery of a third medieval text of the poem. Like V, the original manuscript of this ‘third’ version is now lost and can be reconstructed only from an early modern transcription - in this case a copy by Francis Junius no win the Stanford University Library (Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Misc. 010 [J1]). Unlike V, however, Junius's copy is our only record of this manuscript's existence. No other transcripts are known from medieval or early modern manuscript catalogues.

The Welsh borderlands in the Lives of St Guthlac1

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindy Brady
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
English Poem ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Military Life ◽  
Ethnic Division ◽  
Land Control ◽  
Ethnic War

Chapter Two focuses on a corpus of Old English and Latin works about the popular Anglo-Saxon saint Guthlac of Croyland (673-714) whose Mercian youth and later career as a hermit in the fens of East Anglia link him indelibly to two of Britain’s most nebulous geographical spaces. This chapter argues that the various Lives of Guthlac depict the borderlands as a locus of military advancement for Mercian and Welsh elites. As in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, this region is a place where a young Mercian warrior can advance his career by living among the British and leading a multi-ethnic war band, features of military life in the borderlands that are also evident in contemporary Welsh and Cambro-Latin texts. The geographically fluid nature of this region is also evident in this chapter’s second significant argument: that even within this Anglo-Saxon saint’s life, the politics of land control are much less clear-cut than has been assumed. While St. Guthlac’s battles with demons have been understood to reflect Anglo/Welsh ethnic division, this chapter argues that the Old English poem Guthlac A is far more conflicted towards land ownership, reflecting the fluid boundaries of Mercia itself.

scholarly journals The Historical Side of the old English Poem of ‘Widsith’

1915 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 123-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Anscombe
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
English Poem ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
Great Mass

Nearly ninety years have passed away since J. J. Cony-beare prepared the first edition of the Old English poem of ‘Widsith,’ or ‘The Traveller's Song,’ for inclusion among his ‘Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry,’ a work published in 1826. ‘Widsith’ is the oldest Germanic poem we have and its imprint excited immediate attention. The student of legend was attracted to it by the close connexion it shows with Germanic saga, and the historian timidly acknowledged the appeal it made to him to honour it as a genuine source of information. The characteristics of the poem have combined to place it in the forefront of that great mass of dubious documents which are found written in sundry western languages and which purport to deal with the story of the legendary heroes of Germanic race from the time of Constantius Chlorus to the middle of the sixth century.

Hands and eyes, sight and touch: appraising the senses in Anglo-Saxon England

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 105-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The World ◽  
The Senses

AbstractThe archives of knowledge through which Anglo-Saxons understood the senses ranged from vernacular to patristic. Quotidian understanding of the senses treated them as functions of their corresponding bodily organs, as the injury tariffs of Æthelberht and Alfred illustrate. Old English learned prose catalogues the senses from sight to touch with an order that bespeaks a set of understandings about bodies, materiality, souls and salvation. There the differing appraisals of sight and its lesser sibling, touch, track their perceived mediations between the world and the soul. The Old English Boethius, Wærferth's Dialogues and a range of Ælfric's writings illustrate understandings of these senses’ mediation between the material and the immaterial, the corporeal and the incorporeal. The meaning of Wulfstan's legislation on friðlice steora must thus be sought in a crossing of archives of appraisals – the legal valuation of body parts and the patristic understanding of senses as channels between the flesh and the spirit.

A context for the sexualization of monsters in The Wonders of the East

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 79-99
Author(s):  
Christopher Monk
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Sexual Behaviour ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
English Poem ◽  
Sexual Deviancy ◽  
Poetic Imagination ◽  
A Performance ◽  
Genesis A

AbstractThe belief that monsters had a human genealogy originating at a point of transgressive sexual behaviour is something attested to in early medieval texts that either circulated or were written in Anglo-Saxon England. The Hiberno-Latin Reference Bible, a widely known text of the period, and the Old English poem Genesis A both suggest that the sexual deviancy of the progenitors of monsters is perceivable as reiterated stigmata on the monstrous bodies of their progeny. It is within this context of theological exegesis and poetic imagination that the Anglo-Saxon drawings of monsters in The Wonders of the East were produced. What one sees in the depiction of monsters therein is a performance of sexual monstrosity that links monsters to their human forbears; but also, by means of the illustrated interaction of monster and human, the monster is brought perilously close to the here-and-now of the Anglo-Saxon reader-viewer's imagined world.

THURETH: A NEGLECTED OLD ENGLISH POEM AND ITS HISTORY IN ANGLO-SAXON SCHOLARSHIP

2001 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 359-b-370
Author(s):  
CRAIG RONALDS ◽  
MARGARET CLUNIES ROSS
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
English Poem

Wulf and Eadwacer: all passion pent

1986 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 5-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley B. Greenfield
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
English Poem ◽  
Poetic Translation ◽  
Mind Set ◽  
The Mind

The nineteen-line Old English poem known as Wulf and Eadwacer has proved a notorious lodestone and analytical trap for critics; and still another interpretation of it may seem futile, if not presumptuous. Nevertheless, I believe no more firmly in my interpretation than others have believed in theirs: that is, I am no less confident that it will clear up most of the verbal and situational mysteries the poem presents; that it will enable us to see the lyric as structurally whole; that it will help us appreciate even more its aesthetic qualities; and that it will gain a critical consensus. To achieve such modest goals, I shall have to consider assumptions about the mind-set of the Anglo-Saxon audience as well as the poem's structure, diction, tone and imagery. It will thus be well to have the poem before us, and I venture a poetic translation which I shall comment on in due course.

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