Beowulf and Stigma of the Sword

Something novel always seems to catch my attention in each of my many encounters with the Beowulf poem. Composed between 600-900 CE but transcribed some time later, although this greatest (and only extant) example of Anglo-Saxon epic poetry is clearly medieval in its textual origin, its sensibilities always strike me as equally pagan and biblical. This last statement might strike a reader as platitudinous considering that all of medieval literary culture presents an often uneasy synthesis of the pagan and the biblical. However in considering Beowulf both of these influences are evinced in unique ways.

One salient detail that punctuates the above dynamic is the symbolic place that weaponry in general and swords in particular "wield" (pun intended :)) in the narrative. Upon arriving in Grendel-ravaged Heorot, Beowulf vows to vanquish Grendel without the use of weapons because the monster himself, “waepna ne recceth” (v. 434). As we learn later, Grendel is impervious to blades (vv. 709-802), so this choice was indeed a serendipitous one for Beowulf, but might there be more to Beowulf's choice than mere serendipity? As the text imagines in its own poetic interpretation of biblical events, Cain kills Abel with a sword (though in the Bible, Cain simply "rises against" Abel and "kills him"; see Gen 4:8) and the consequence is the birth and banishment of the Grendelkin to somewhere beneath the surface into the mere. Furthermore, in his battle with Grendel's Mother Beowulf does wield Hrunting, a sword given to him by the deceitful Unferth that ends up failing Beowulf and melting in Grendel's Mother's skin. Beowulf ultimately kills Grendel's Mother only through the use of a sword he finds in her lair itself. The question that seems to arise is whether the scribe/scop seeks to impart a message about the sword as a metonym of pride, or rather perhaps he seeks to convey a similar idea through the very lack of weaponry itself. Like a biblical text, Beowulf is "fraught with background"--to quote our friend Erich Auerbach again, but like the romances that follow it and other texts from the medieval world, swords and chivalry exert a cultural meaning that cannot be overlooked.    

Ultimately, one of the poem's more explicit morals centers around what it means to be a good king (see for example the famous declaration concerning figures from Scyld Shielding to Hrothgar as "god cyning"), nevertheless one of its many implicit excursuses is to contrast a good king with a good thane or warrior. Verse 20-25 contain an injunction that a prince, or retainer, should give freely of himself in battle while his father is a live--that is, when he is young--in order that his men will defend him once he has become aged. One should extrapolate from this passage that a good king knows his limitations and only fights to earn glory earlier in life, or to display his prowess in order to prove his fitness for kingship. For all of its blood, gore, and marrow, Beowulf's world is a vibrantly social one in which the ties of kinship and fealty are paramount. Thus the Grendelkin's outsider status might even be tied to their lack of skill or deliberate choice not to use weapons in battle. Beowulf as the paradigmatic warrior/thane chooses to fight without a weapon for the sake of his fame, but we might conjecture that Hrothgar in his aged and increasingly impotent state would in fact be negligent not to bring a weapon to battle.

I am not quite sure the import of weaponry in this text and, much like the rest of this nebulously beautiful poem, think the question of weapons requires much more reflection and rereading. Perhaps we could make a compelling argument based on further readings in the OE corpus, particularly the Anglo-Saxon "translations" of the Bible. In the meantime, let's ruminate on the quiddity of hwaet.

      

An Odyssey in Fractals?

Like its predecessor the Iliad, the Odyssey contains any number of proto-novelistic elements: its rich description of seemingly trivial phenomena (for example, the description of  Odysseus’ scar along with the backstory as to how he sustained that scar in Book XIX); narrative presented through dialogue; and of course intimations of the psychological state of various characters through understated actions. It is a delicious slip of the tongue when even professional readers of text refer to the narrative as “a novel” or its indiscrete books as “chapters.” To some literary critics these malapropisms are a natural result of the genre of the novel’s fully-formed birth from the thigh of the epic. Nevertheless, as we will see this semester, generic distinctions are much more porous than theorists might like them to be, and this seems especially true when one engages with the psychological sophistication of a familial epic like the Odyssey.        

In her essay “Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents” (2006), Wai Chee Dimock uniquely problematizes the critical tendency of proclaiming rather rigid generic definitions. In response, Dimock offers a nuancing solution to that problem. Beginning by summarizing some of the more compelling views on generic construction since Plato, Dimock notes that this rigidity does a disservice to generic messiness. She summarizes Benedetto Croce’s view that the problem of genre is in its desire to  “only want to label it [i.e. a text]” and not, in Croce’s words ask “before a work of art if it be expressive and what it expresses” (86). Dimock seeks different “lines of differentiation” (86) and offers a few approaches toward avoiding genre’s fault of pigeonholing a text and consequently diminishing it. Drawing on Derrida’s view that generic law is in essence only honored in its breach, Dimock seeks to “invoke genre less as a law, a rigid taxonomic landscape, and more as a self-obsoleting system, a provisional set that will always be bent and pulled and stretched by its many subsets” (86). 

For Dimock, classification becomes more about “interconnection” or “kinship” than affinity. She explains this as  “a remote spectrum of affinities, interesting when seen in conjunction, but not themselves organically linked” (86). Although this may seem like a moot point, what it suggests for the literary critic and genre theorist is that, real or not, the supposed linearity of genre is less interesting than the overlapping twists and turns of generic conventions. Borrowing metaphors from fractal geometry and Wittgenstein’s idea of kinship (first applied to the commonalities of games) Dimock offers a less rigid definition of what genre might be that in fact thickens the web of interconnection that might be viewed between Dante’s Commedia and Gilgamesh--beyond the mere assertion that each text is an example of "epic."

Dimock’s point is easily applicable to a text like the Odyssey in its relation to other narratives in the western canon, as well as the many rewritings and subsequent iterations of the Odysseus narrative in world literature. What is the relationship between the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Fitzgerald’s translation of the epic poem that we have been reading in class? Sure, they are examples of different media but is there an illocutionary level that unites the two? When asked about the film in various interviews, the Coen Brothers have replied that they did not in fact seek to rewrite the Odyssey in their telling the story of Ulysses Everett Mcgill, but as the parallels serendipitously became more and more pronounced in making the film, they played those parallels up as best they could. (Of course, strikingly absent from the film is Telemachus, an important “co-star” in the Odyssey’s narrative, if not the equally central protagonist.)

How might you apply some of Dimock’s ideas to the Odyssey itself or that narrative’s relationship to other texts and narratives? How might Dimock’s unique employment of the  concept of a “fractal” to literature and genre theory be applied to the rewriting of such narratives? The questions posed by Dimock's essay will be particularly important when we begin to turn our focus to the "contamination" found in medieval epic and the related romance.

(Dimock, Wai Chee. “Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents.” Narrative 14.1 (2006): 85-101. Print. )

Ulysses Books I and II: Who Is the Real Hero of the Odyssey?

As the narrative of the Odyssey begins (in medias res as is typical for epic poetry), ten years have already passed since the ten-year war waged by the Greeks against Troy had ended. This means that Odysseus has been absent from his home of Ithaca for a total of twenty years, plenty of time for his household to presume him dead. If you recall, the Spartan Helen's abduction by Paris precipitated the Greek siege of Troy. By the time at which the  Odyssey is set, Helen is already at home with her husband Menelaus when Odysseus' son, Telemachus, visits them (in Book IV) during the Bildungsroman that forms the early books of the text (often referred to as the "Telemachiad"). In fact, all of the Greek survivors except for the crafty Ithacan Odysseus have long since returned to their homes. Since he is assumed dead, suitors arrive at his palace in order to court Penelope, thus threatening the position of Telemachus, Odysseus’ young son. But we should note that Telemachus is no child at this juncture of the narrative; rather he is a young man who has not yet seized his adulthood. I would suggest that the Odyssey is as much concerned with Telemachus development into a man worthy to be Odysseus' heir as it is concerned with its eponymous yet frequently absent hero.
This point is underscored by the frequent comments regarding Telemachus' physical or aural resemblance to his father.

The Odyssey not only begins with the traditional Invocation to the Muses but it also summarizes both the preceding narrative of the Iliad, of which this text is a sequel, and certain important and specific character traits about Odysseus. We learn three things about him through the poem’s first ten lines alone: Odysseus’ skill in battle and argument (the common Homeric epithet being "Wily Odysseus"); his longstanding wandering; and his dedication to his men and desire to bring them home as well. His men are fools who eat of the sheep of Lord Helios resulting in their destruction. Still as a modern reader I cannot help being somewhat skeptical of Odysseus stated desire to return to Ithaca. Perhaps my reading of Odysseus as a figure is anachronistically colored by Dante's medieval rewriting of the hero as an mad wander seeking knowledge without a telos ("il folle volo di Ulisse" from Inferno XXVI, et passim).   

The poem is organized from Olympus, that is to say that it is presented as divinely structured and ordained. The Muses themselves are divine and the poet's invocation of them is not only formulaic but also religious. This betrays an aspect of the epic of which we will see this semester. Epic in many ways is the synthesis of human and divine desire and production. The human poet calls upon the divine Muses in order to become their mouthpiece, their vessel that transmits the story of a semi-divine being to the realm of men. Zeus and Athena favor Odysseus, thus he has divine aid, but on the other hand, Poseidon is against him. Poseidon is the god of the sea and the Odyssey is an epic of the sea, whereas its predecessor, the Iliad is a story of the land. The question of divine providence versus human free will is paramount in the opening lines as the question is posed by the gods as to why people take them to task for bad things that happen to them. This is the problem of theodicy that confronts us in all literature and perhaps all of life, but it is posed here as a theological (in the literal sense) debate. 

Notice Zeus’ monologue (Book I, vv. 45-59). The poet's placing of this fundamental question of who is to blame for the bad things in the world in the soliloquy of a god is important as it underscores that fortune, fate, and will all play equal parts in human destiny. Again, we have a partnership between the mythic, the historical, and the individual that is forged in epic narratives. And what about Telemachos? What is the relationship between father and son in the Odyssey and what does it imply about the relationship between the divine and man? Notice that Telemachos reluctance to claim his own role as Odysseus' successor comes from a belief that everything--good or evil--comes from the gods and must be ordained by them. Nevertheless, later in the text Telemachos comes to learn that human destiny is forged through a combination of fate (i.e. forces outside of human control), and will. It is then, and seemingly only then, that the epithet "godlike Telemachus" begins to be used in his regard.

Among other things, the Odyssey presents a narrative that seeks to answer the question of how a hero is forged. Many of the suitors are the children of valiant and noble men, but they themselves largely lack those qualities (Amphinomos being an exception, though it doesn't really serve him; as an aside etymologically his name means "both mores" suggesting he has a more bifurcating sense of morality than his counterparts). The text implicitly questions whether Telemachos can will himself to become a man of his father's strength, wiles, and courage, or whether he much like the suitors is doomed by fate. In the end, we learn the answer. But Telemachus is only able to complete the task with the help of Athena and his father. Does this suggest the limitation of will in human action and the supremacy of fate or the contrary? That is to say, does the text suggest that will and fate have a certain reciprocal relationship in forging individual destiny? 

The Epic Quest for a Definition of the Epic

Does the handsome hero always vanquish the fierce dragon, save the princess, and found a new empire, or does he sometimes die ignominiously in a ditch? Is a story “epic” in its essence, scope, or form, or does it merely become epic after years of retelling and exegesis? While some might wonder as to how King Arthur’s Excalibur was forged—a question indeed worthy of investigation, this semester we will seek out the origins of the epic through the study of ancient and medieval epic poems and their successors, romances and novels.    

Perhaps we could begin our exploration with the word. “Epic” most plausibly entered English via the French épique—derived from Greek epikos, meaning a “word, story, or poem.” It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that the word began to be used in a similar adjectival way to that in which English speakers do today (“Dude, that was an epic game!”). As a genre the epic poem often contains a number of specific elements: the recounting of a mythic and/or national narrative that takes place in ancient history; the heroic exploits of larger-than-life figures whose greatness in some area is contrasted by a tragic flaw; the inclusion of unrelated episodes and anecdotes and similarly ekphrasis or the intricate and painstaking description of details that might be deemed unnecessary when considered alongside the full scope of a story’s narrative. In contrast and much more simply, a romance is a fictional story written in the vernacular (that is, not Latin!). However, is language the only factor in defining genre or are there other considerations as well?

This class has two distinct objectives. Our primary aim will be the study and consideration of various texts and tales considered as epic within their respective traditions. Though we will focus on medieval epics, we will also spend some time on ancient narratives in order to learn the literary conventions of the genre (why are the Odyssey, Beowulf, and La Chanson de Roland clearly examples of epic poetry while the chivalric narratives of Chretien de Troyes are seen as a related but differing genre, i.e. romance?). We will consider stylistic questions as well as the role played by literacy and/or orality in forging the epic tradition and investigate whether there are different types or subgenres of epic, or whether the genre is in fact monolithic. As exegesis played a much more important role in the Middle Ages than it does today, we will look at the role of exegesis in creating epic narratives and study some of the accretions to traditional tales (including those of the Bible) added by subsequent authors and learned interpreters of literature, philosophy, and theology.

Later in the semester our focus will depart from simply scrutiny of the genre per se and embrace the periphery of the epic. We will contemplate the ways in which epics and romances change through the translation of language, culture, and medium and ultimately evolve into the modern novel. We will also think about the ways in which epics are rewritten and survey related genres in written and other media such as film.