Help


from Wikipedia
« »  
Scholarly discussion about Beowulf in the context of the oral tradition was extremely active throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
The debate might be framed starkly as follows: on the one hand, we can hypothesise a poem put together from various tales concerning the hero ( the Grendel episode, the Grendel's mother story, and the firedrake narrative ).
These fragments would be held for many years in tradition, and learned by apprenticeship from one generation of illiterate poets to the next.
The poem is composed orally and extemporaneously, and the archive of tradition on which it draws is oral, pagan, Germanic, heroic, and tribal.
On the other hand, one might posit a poem which is composed by a literate scribe, who acquired literacy by way of learning Latin ( and absorbing Latinate culture and ways of thinking ), probably a monk and therefore profoundly Christian in outlook.
On this view, the pagan references would be a sort of decorative archaising.
There is a third view that sees merit in both arguments above and attempts to bridge them, and so cannot be articulated as starkly as they can ; it sees more than one Christianity and more than one attitude towards paganism at work in the poem, separated from each other by hundreds of years ; it sees the poem as originally the product of a literate Christian author with one foot in the pagan world and one in the Christian, himself a convert perhaps or one whose forbears had been pagan, a poet who was conversant in both oral and literary milieus and was capable of a masterful " repurposing " of poetry from the oral tradition ; this early Christian poet saw virtue manifest in a willingness to sacrifice oneself in a devotion to justice and in an attempt to aid and protect those in need of help and greater safety ; good pagan men had trodden that noble path and so this poet presents pagan culture with equanimity and respect ; yet overlaid upon this early Christian poet's composition are verses from a much later reformist " fire-and-brimstone " Christian poet who vilifies pagan practice as dark and sinful and who adds satanic aspects to its monsters.

2.302 seconds.