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ANGLO-SAXON CULTURE
and the
MODERN IMAGINATION

EDITED BY DAVID CLARK & NICHOLAS PERKINS

Medievalismȱȱ
AȱnewȱseriesȱeditedȱbyȱKarlȱFugelsoȱandȱChrisȱJones
...
ȱTitlesȱinȱthisȱpioneeringȱnewȱseries,ȱeachȱfocussingȱonȱaȱparticularȱsubjectȱorȱ
topic,ȱȱwillȱexploreȱthisȱphenomenonȱasȱitȱappearsȱinȱandȱinfluencesȱtheȱsocietyȱandȱ
cultureȱofȱlaterȱperiods,ȱfromȱWilliamȱMorrisȱthroughȱtoȱtoday’sȱretellingsȱofȱBeowulfȱ
inȱfilmȱandȱpoetry
...
ȱ
ȱ
TheȱseriesȱisȱeditedȱbyȱKarlȱFugelso,ȱwhoȱhasȱbeenȱinvolvedȱwithȱtheȱlongȬrunningȱ
StudiesȱinȱMedievalism,ȱandȱChrisȱJones
...
ȱ
ȱ
Weȱareȱpleasedȱtoȱmakeȱexcerptsȱfromȱtheȱfirstȱvolume,ȱAngloȬSaxonȱCultureȱandȱtheȱ
ModernȱImagination,ȱavailableȱforȱassessmentȱinȱthisȱelectronicȱform
...
ȱ
ȱ
Weȱareȱsureȱyouȱwillȱwantȱtoȱreadȱmore
...
ȱȱ
ȱ
ȱ
ȱ
ȱ

T

Volume 1

Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination
Britain’s pre-Conquest past and its culture continue to fascinate modern writers and artists
...
The essays here engage with the
ways in which the Anglo-Saxons and their literature have been received, confronted, and re-envisioned
in the modern imagination
...
H
...
R
...

Tolkien, and David Jones, and on contemporary writers such as Geoffrey Hill, Peter Reading, P
...
James,
and Seamus Heaney
...
The early medieval emerges not simply as a site of
nostalgia or anxiety in modern revisions, but instead provides a vital arena for creativity, pleasure, and
artistic experiment
...
Titles within the series will investigate the post-medieval
construction and manifestations of the Middle Ages — attitudes towards, and uses and
meanings of, ‘the medieval’ — in all fields of culture, from politics and international
relations, literature, history, architecture, and ceremonial ritual to film and the visual
arts
...

New proposals are welcomed
...

Professor Karl Fugelso
Art Department
Towson University
3103 Center for the Arts
8000 York Road
Towson, MD 21252-0001
USA
Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9
Woodbridge
Suffolk IP12 3DF
UK

Dr Chris Jones
School of English
University of St Andrews
St Andrews
Fife KY16 9AL
UK

Anglo-Saxon Culture
and the Modern Imagination

edited by
David Clark and Nicholas Perkins

D
...
B R EW E R

© Contributors 2010
All Rights Reserved
...
S
...
S
...

668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
website : www
...
com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any
content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate
...
H
...
R
...
 Tolkien’s Old English Chronicles
Maria Artamonova





‘Wounded men and wounded trees’ : David Jones and the Anglo-Saxon
Culture Tangle
Anna Johnson





Basil Bunting, Briggflatts, Lindisfarne, and Anglo-Saxon Interlace
Clare A
...
Frantzen



vi


Contents
Re-placing Masculinity : The DC Comics Beowulf Series and its
Context, 1975–6
Catherine A
...
Clarke





P
...
James Reads Beowulf
John Halbrooks





Ban Welondes : Wayland Smith in Popular Culture
Maria Sachiko Cecire





‘Overlord of the M’ : The Superlative Structure of Sovereignty in
Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns
Hannah J
...


David Jones, ‘Ongyrede hine’ inscription, reproduced by kind permission of
the David Jones Estate and the National Library of Wales
...


Bronze plaque from Öland, reproduced from Oscar Montelius, The Civilisation of Sweden in Heathen Times, trans
...
H
...





...
F
...
Wood (London, 1888)
...


Vendel helmet, from Beowulf, trans
...





...
William
Ellery Leonard (New York, 1952)
...


Scout Rock, Mytholmroyd
...





...
Photograph by Fay Godwin, reproduced by
kind permission of Collections Picture Library Ltd
...


Peter Reading, Collected Poems 2 : p
...





...
278, reproduced by kind permission of
Bloodaxe Books
...


Peter Reading, Collected Poems 3 : facing p
...





...
182, reproduced by kind permission
of Bloodaxe Books
...
146 and 147

i

Gareth Hinds, ‘Then Beowulf ’s glory’, from his Beowulf (1999), reproduced by kind
permission of the artist
...


iii

Sheila Mackie, helmet illustration from Beowulf, adapted by Julian Glover (Gloucester,
1987), reproduced by kind permission of the artist
...
Photograph
by Robert Millard, reproduced by kind permission of the Los Angeles Opera, with
particular thanks to Mark Lyons
...
Photograph
by Robert Millard, reproduced by kind permission of the Los Angeles Opera, with
particular thanks to Mark Lyons
...

Photograph by Robert Millard, reproduced by kind permission of the Los Angeles
Opera, with particular thanks to Mark Lyons
...
Her
academic interests include English historical syntax, translations from Latin into Old English,
and Anglo-Saxon monastic rules
...
R
...
 Tolkien’s use of Old Germanic languages in his fiction, and translated his medievalist essays into Russian
...
His research interests are in Old English and medieval studies as well as in
nineteenth-century philology and applied linguistics
...

Rebecca Anne Barr is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literature and
Linguistics, Qatar University
...
After finishing her Ph
...
at Cambridge University she taught at Oxford, Royal Holloway,
University of London, and Bath Spa University
...

Maria Sachiko Cecire is completing her doctoral thesis ‘The Oxford School of Children’s
Fantasy Literature : Medieval Afterlives and the Production of Culture’ in the English Faculty
at the University of Oxford
...
She co-founded the
Oxford Children’s Literature and Youth Culture Colloquium, and is currently co-editing the
collection Space and Place in Children’s Literature with Malini Roy
...

David Clark is a Lecturer in Old English at the University of Leicester
...
He is currently working on a book on friendship in medieval literature, a collaborative annotated translation of The Saga of Bishop  orlákr, and co-editing a journal issue
on Blood, Sex, and Malory
...
M
...
Her research centres on earlier
medieval literature and culture, with particular attention to questions of place, power and
identity and an emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches
...
She explores ideas and uses of the medieval past in a number of forthcoming publications, and this interest has also shaped an undergraduate course at
Swansea, ‘Transforming Beowulf in the Twentieth Century’
...
Crawforth is a Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London,
having completed her Ph
...
at Princeton in 2009
...

Joshua Davies completed his Ph
...
in 2009 at King’s College London, where he continues
to teach in the English Department
...
Her most recent book, Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2008),
traces the post-medieval life of medieval British texts
...
Frantzen teaches in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago
...
His new work concerns the food culture of Anglo-Saxon
England
...

He received his Ph
...
from Tulane University in New Orleans, and he has published in Philological Quarterly, Studies in Philology, and Tenso
...

Anna Johnson is completing her D
...
in the Faculty of English, Oxford University
...

Chris Jones teaches English at the University of St Andrews
...

Clare A
...
She has published widely on Old English literature and has particular research interests in gender and sexuality studies, religious writing
and contemporary approaches to medieval studies
...

Nicholas Perkins studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge University; he is
now a Fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in English
...
His current work
focuses on gifts, exchange, and narrative in medieval romances
...
There has, too, been a developing scholarly interest in the
theory of ‘Medievalism’, in studies by Michael Alexander and others
...

Amongst modern poets, even before North, Geoffrey Hill in 1971 had taken the title
of a ground-breaking book from a time-honoured item in Sweet’s Reader, ‘Mercian
Hymns’
...

Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, then, is responding crucially
to the spirit of its moment, and of other moments of intersection between past and
present
...
The conference was organized by the present editors, and it brought together an enthusiastic
gathering of students, writers and academics in lively debate
...
D
...
The line back to the Modernists is traced here too, in
chapters on David Jones and W
...
Auden
...

In pondering the relative familiarity of the classical heritage and the Anglo-Saxon
xi

xii

Foreword

past, Heaney said memorably in the introduction to his Beowulf translation that
‘Achilles rings a bell, but not Scyld Scēfing
...
The editors here in their thought-provoking and wide-ranging
introduction still acknowledge, in reference to Heaney, that ‘this treasure-trove of
linguistic memory is not reached easily’
...
It is abundantly clear in this book that Anglo-Saxon
literature and culture continue to have a vigorous and multi-faceted afterlife
...
Many individuals have also contributed valuable ideas
and suggestions, including Michael Alexander, Chris Jones, Peter D
...
We thank copyright holders who have given permission
for texts and pictures to be reproduced, especially Faber & Faber, and Bloodaxe
...
It
has been a pleasure to work with the book’s contributors, and also with Boydell and
Brewer; our particular thanks go to Caroline Palmer and Rohais Haughton
...
David Clark would like to thank his parents for their
continued support of his medieval and medievalist interests, even if they don’t usually
get too far in reading his research outputs !

xiii

Abbreviations
ASPR

Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records

Bosworth and Toller

An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, based on the Manuscript Collections of
the late Joseph Bosworth, ed
...
Northcote Toller (Oxford, 1898)
...
engl
...
edu/~kiernan/BT/BosworthToller
...
Antonette diPaolo Healey :
http ://www
...
utoronto
...
html

DOEC

Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, ed
...
doe
...
ca/
pub/webcorpus
...
s
...
s
...
s
...
R
...
Fulk,
Robert E
...
Niles, 4th edn (Toronto, 2008)

OED

Oxford English Dictionary, ed
...
oed
...
1

n Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Bone Dreams’, the speaker/dreamer discovers
layers of northern and personal history by delving through the linguistic past
...
27)
...
27, 28)
...
The speaker’s earlier reaction is to ‘wind’ the bone ‘in
the sling of mind / to pitch it at England’ (p
...
‘Bone Dreams’, however, is far from
simply oppositional, at times channelling an unpredictably erotic force through its
responses to language, body, and landscape : here the bone’s fall in the fields of England seems already to have generative potential, echoing classical myths of Cadmus
and Jason, both of whom sowed teeth that sprang up as warriors
...
27–30, at p
...
Subsequent references, by page number, appear in the text
...
28)
...
Heaney’s own short lines and their rhythmic music echo the half lines of
Old English verse, while the variety of sound effects in kenning-rich phrases such as
‘love-den, blood-holt, / dream-bower’ (p
...
2
These virtuosic movements between the linguistic and tactile, through interlaced
histories and mythologies, amongst dreamscape and bogland, and beyond any single reference point in Anglo-Saxon or other ‘northern’ culture, are indicative of the
varied ways in which creative artists have reimagined and reshaped texts, images,
and ideas from the Anglo-Saxon past since the turn of the twentieth century
...

Mark Atherton demonstrates in his chapter how much Sweet’s Reader responds to the
romantic traditions of nineteenth-century literary taste and contemporary pedagogical concerns, in turn providing material for scholarly and creative responses including those of Ezra Pound, while Chris Jones suggests that before scoffing at Robert
Zemeckis’s movie as the shallow distortion of a great work of Literature, we should
look more carefully at what the writers and director thought they were doing, how
the film responds to ideas shaped by scholarly and pseudo-scholarly debate, and how
this new version of the story of Beowulf takes its place in a lengthy performance history, including that of the Nowell Codex itself — the manuscript in which Beowulf has

For
Assessment
Only
2 For a reading of ‘Bone Dreams’ in the context of Heaney’s deep engagement with Old English,
see Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006),
pp
...
H
...

See also Heather O’Donoghue, ‘Heaney, Beowulf and the Medieval Literature of the North’, in The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, ed
...
192–205, and on
Heaney’s medieval interests as a whole, Conor McCarthy, Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry (Cambridge, 2008)
...

Scragg, ‘The Nature of Old English Verse’, in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed
...
55–70, and G
...
Lester, The Language of
Old and Middle English Poetry (Basingstoke, 1996)
...
150–69; Fred C
...
Robinson, ed
...
Baker and Nicholas Howe (Toronto, 1998), pp
...
Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge, 2000)
...

Heaney’s ‘Bone Dreams’ uses the buried tools of language history to gain access
to visceral and embodied memory : the ‘love-nest’ which philology both obscures
and opens up
...
Seamus Heaney
touches on this dynamic in his own translation of Beowulf, itself commissioned for
the Norton Anthology of English Literature (and so a staple of US undergraduate literature courses), but also a book widely acclaimed and read independently :
I tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or
conditions rather than both/and […] Luckily, I glimpsed the possibility of
release from this kind of cultural determination early on, in my first arts year
at Queen’s University, Belfast, when we were lectured on the history of the
English language by Professor John Braidwood […] The Irish/English duality,
the Celtic/Saxon antithesis were momentarily collapsed and in the resulting
etymological eddy a gleam of recognition flashed through the synapses and
I glimpsed an elsewhere of potential […] a region where one’s language would
not simply be a badge of ethnicity or a matter of cultural preference or an official imposition, but an entry into further language
...
Despite continuing antiquarian interest in the Anglo-Saxon period as a point of origin for national
character, political structures, or religious tradition, and the growing popularity of
mythic narratives surrounding King Alfred, King Arthur, and the Vikings, it was
not until the nineteenth century that sustained editorial and scholarly work on Old
English texts made the literature of Anglo-Saxon England more directly and reliably
available
...
5 This understanding

4 Beowulf, trans
...
xxiv–xxv
...

5 See for example Anglo-Saxon Scholarship, the First Three Centuries, ed
...
Berkhout and Milton McC
...
A survey of medievalist ideas across the arts in this period is

4

Introduction

was, however, deeply entangled in the politics of racial, national and imperial identity,
making the Anglo-Saxons a complex point of departure for any claims of belonging
or continuity
...
7 In England, it was London University that led the way in the nineteenth
century
...
In a pamphlet against
the proposals, Thomas Case warned that ‘[a]n English School will grow up, nourishing our own language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans but
from the savagery of the Goths and the Anglo-Saxons
...
’9 Having eventually established a School of English in 1894, the Oxford
provided in Michael Alexander’s richly illustrated Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England
(New Haven, 2007)
...
hertford
...
ac
...

For the eccentric scholar whose energy gave impetus to the OED and Early English Text Society, see
William Benzie, Dr F
...
Furnivall: Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, OK, 1983)
...


For
Assessment
Only
6 See Clare A
...
Leslie J
...
202–14; T
...
Shippey, ‘The Undeveloped Image: Anglo-Saxon in Popular Consciousness from
Turner to Tolkien’, in Literary Appropriations, ed
...
215–36; Ananya Jahanara
Kabir, ‘Analogy in Translation: Imperial Rome, Medieval England, and British India’, in Postcolonial
Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed
...
183–204
...
Kathleen Davis and
Nadia Altschul (Baltimore, 2009), and see also Seth Lerer, ‘“On fagne flor”: The Postcolonial Beowulf,
from Heorot to Heaney’, in Postcolonial Approaches, ed
...
77–102
...

Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick,
NJ, 1990), pp
...

8 See The Nineteenth-Century History of English Studies, ed
...
The pioneering Scottish role in the development of English literary studies is discussed in The Scottish Invention
of English Literature, ed
...
Many thanks to Peter D
...

9 ‘An Appeal to the University of Oxford against the Proposed Final School of Modern Languages’
(Oxford, 1887), p
...
F
...
It is a classic School’, and, tongue only partly in cheek, assured dons that ‘[i]t is not the fruit of an
insidious secret plot, the accursed machination of a vile band of “Early English” conspirators’ (‘A Brief
Statement of the Case for the Proposed Final School of Modern Language & Literature’ (Oxford, 1887),
pp
...
Many thanks to Susan Usher for facilitating access to this and other material in the English
Faculty Library, Oxford
...
The 1896 Honour School paper on ‘Beowulf and other
Old English Texts’, probably set by A
...
Napier, includes passages for translation and
comprehension ; questions on grammar, metre, and dialect ; and material about the
geography and contexts of the poem, such as ‘What various peoples are mentioned
in Beowulf ? What was the probable geographical position of each ?’10 As Siân Echard
shows in her essay, this concern with the ‘placing’ of the poem has a long reach in
editions and readings of Beowulf
...
J
...
R
...
In her essay, Maria Artamonova details Tolkien’s serious play
with his own compositions in Old English, modelled on the densely written, variant
texts of pre-Conquest annals
...
As
Heather O’Donoghue notes in her chapter, W
...
Auden described a sense of potential
analogous to Heaney’s ‘etymological eddy’ while listening to Tolkien recite Beowulf
in a lecture hall in Oxford : ‘I do not remember a single word he said, but at a certain
point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf
...

This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish
...
12
The gravitational pull of Old English and Old Norse verse forms and early medieval

For
Assessment
Only
linguistic purity and continuity, for instance in Edward Augustus Freeman’s monumental The History of
the Norman Conquest of England: Its Causes and its Results, 6 vols
...
197–200
...
Papers 1896–1910
...
26
...

11 W
...
Auden, ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’, inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, 11
June 1955, reprinted in The Dyer’s Hand and other Essays (London, 1963), pp
...
41–2
...
H
...
22
...
23–4) a translation by Michael Alexander of the Old English poem Deor
...
13
This sense of the text as embodied history — personal and transnational — is at work
in several of the other writers and artists discussed in this book
...
Here the foreboding Old English poetic motif of
the beasts of battle, signified in Jones’s imagination by the eagle, the ‘speckled kite of
Maldon’, and the crow, is transformed little by little into the ‘whiskered snouts’ of the
Western Front’s rats
...

David Jones took the wording of his inscription from the Old English poem now
titled The Dream of the Rood, part of whose text appears as a runic inscription on
the Ruthwell Cross
...
Siân Echard, in her chapter about Beowulf editions and
translations, demonstrates how the desire to place Beowulf alongside early medieval
artefacts — helmets, swords, ships — has important implications for our reading of
the poem, its significance as an object amongst other historical and cultural materials,
and our continuing desire to ground Beowulf in space and time : filling lacunae in our
knowledge of the poem and its material contexts, but also creating new disjunctures
or mysteries
...
H
...
Edward Mendelson, rev
...
830
...
The reception of Old Norse literature and myth are addressed in Andrew Wawn, ed
...
, Old Norse made New:
Essays on the Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture (London, 2007)
...
Apart from giving fleeting prominence
to Anglo-Saxon historians and archaeologists, the media coverage of the find touched on exactly those
paradoxes of awe and surprise at the richness of objects from a supposedly dark age, and the desire to
make connections, especially with Beowulf
...
An accompanying column by national finds advisor Dr Kevin
Leahy quotes lines 3166–8 of Beowulf in Seamus Heaney’s translation, a passage describing the hoard of
treasure consigned to the earth in Beowulf ’s barrow
...


Introduction

7

presence is only indirectly felt, or sensed as an absence ; an object whose survival
paradoxically intensifies a sense of loss
...
They are also at work in Rebecca Anne Barr’s chapter on
Peter Reading, whose poems stage an anti-elegiac, apocalyptic disenchantment, but
(sometimes literally) draw on Old English text as a prophetic, crumbling survivor of
previous declines, previous endings
...
15 In another conversation between arts, cultures, and forms, Clare A
...
Like Auden and Jones, Heaney and Hughes,
Bunting forged a personal sense of connection with the ‘northern’ past that deeply
informed his poetic
...
16
Throughout this collection, the unpredictable effects of remaking mythic narrative for new audiences are uncovered
...
M
...
Published contemporaneously with Heaney’s North, the
Beowulf : Dragon Slayer series allows for escapist play with sexuality and heroism,
while its paratexts speak to the uncertainties of a generation emerging from the Vietnam War
...
In her chapter on
Wayland Smith, Maria Sachiko Cecire traces over a much longer period the shifting
grounds of class and national mythology that have helped shape this legend’s use in
fictions of identity, especially those written for children
...
Also reflecting on the problematics of

For
Assessment
Only
15 For a discussion of imagetexts, see W
...
T
...
83–107
...
Foys, Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the
Late Age of Print (Gainesville, FL, 2007)
...
Frantzen and John D
...
, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social
Identity (Gainesville, FL, 1997)
...
Frantzen analyses the ways in which Elliot Goldenthal’s
opera Grendel : Transcendence of the Great Big Bad stages the relationship between
monster and people through, round, and across the wall that dominated the set of the
first production in 2006
...
In this sense,
Frantzen’s account resonates strongly with Chris Jones’s reading of Seamus Heaney’s
poem ‘Helmet’ as a text whose hard-won, unironic acknowledgement of the heroic
stands in contrast to the 2007 Beowulf film’s weary hermeneutic of suspicion
...
In John Halbrooks’s chapter on Death in Holy Orders by P
...
James, the crime-thriller’s inevitable
focus on ethics, guilt, and (anti)heroism is extended by a meditation on the workings
of institutional Christianity across the centuries, and through an intertextual relationship with Beowulf
...

Many of these threads are drawn through the texture of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian
Hymns, the subject of Hannah J
...
A text called ‘Mercian Hymns’
appears in Sweet’s Reader : an Old English interlinear gloss in the Mercian dialect,
added in the ninth century to an eighth-century Latin text of psalms and hymns, now
London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian A
...
Sweet’s ‘Mercian Hymns’ provide
a richly inflected model not only for Hill’s poem but for imaginative responses to
the Anglo-Saxons throughout the last century or so
...
Crawforth’s essay focuses on the dynamics of sovereignty and sacrifice that inhere in Hill’s work, casting altered light via
the immanent figure of Offa onto more recent, disastrous dreams of power, and onto
the separation of ruler from subject : ‘He divided his realm
...

An / ancient land, full of strategy
...
XV
...
They show how powerfully Anglo-Saxon culture
works its way into the dreams and landscapes of the modern arts in ways neither to be
ignored as obscurantist nor dismissed as cliché-ridden
...
Inevitably, there are many
instances of this exchange that do not find a place here : Tennyson and William Morris ; Jorge Luis Borges meditating on his distance and closeness to a Saxon poet’s voice ;
retellings and new myths for young readers by Rosemary Sutcliff or Kevin CrossleyHolland ; Bruce Gorrie’s Glaswegian Wanderer, ‘freezin’ an’ pished wie nae mates’ ;
films such as The 13th Warrior (1999, dir
...
Sturla Gunnarsson), along with a tide of Tolkien-inspired material ; Neil
Gaiman’s story ‘Bay Wolf ’ (the dyspeptic offspring of Beowulf and a futuristic episode of television flesh-fest Baywatch) ; shifting hybrids of Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and
Arthurian motifs, narratives and ‘wikimation’ via websites, chatrooms, and gaming
...
19 For this reason we hope that this book
will engage not only scholars or students of Anglo-Saxon culture, modern literature
and arts, and medievalism, but also those concerned with various kinds of cultural

For
Assessment
Only
18 On Tennyson, see most recently Damian Love, ‘Hengist’s Brood: Tennyson and the AngloSaxons’, Review of English Studies n
...
60 (2009), 460–74
...
J
...
On translations
from Old English, including Morris’s, see Eric Stanley, ‘Translation from Old English: “The Garbaging
War-Hawk”, or, the Literal Materials from which the Reader can Re-create the Poem’, in Acts of Interpretation: The Text in its Contexts, 700–1600
...

Talbot Donaldson, ed
...
Carruthers and Elizabeth D
...
67–101
...
D
...

On Spanish and French versions of Old English see Fernando Gálvan, ‘Rewriting Anglo-Saxon: Notes
on the Presence of Old English in Contemporary Literature’, S E L I M : Journal of the Spanish Society for
Medieval English Language and Literature 2 (1992), 70–90
...
Bruce Gorrie’s ‘The Wanderer’ was published in Agenda 35 (1997), 54–7
...
2005), pp
...
Parodying the opening of Beowulf, the story introduces
Gar Roth, chief among Venice Beach’s pimps and pushers; ‘ æt wæs god cyning’ is memorably updated
as ‘He had the shit’ (p
...
Ubisoft’s Beowulf: The Game (issued 2007) is a spin-off from Zemeckis’s film,
receiving mixed reviews on retail and gaming websites and competing with numerous other medievaland especially Viking-themed games
...
Stephen Heath (London,
1977), pp
...
159
...
Two final examples of such interplay from public art projects in the UK show how the idea of the pre-Conquest continues to work its way, sometimes circuitously, into our sense of time, place, and self
...
The sculpture is 6 metres tall : a stainless steel, tapering
obelisk with a star-shaped cross-section, resting on a stone plinth, its glittering form
reminiscent of 1950s comic-book rocket ships, or to an Anglo-Saxonist, a Ruthwell
Cross de nos jours
...
The shiny fins, with steel balls at the base of each
opening, create a hall-of-mirrors effect
...
21 The starkly geometric form of the sculpture makes
no apparent allusion to medievalism or ‘heritage’ art, but its teasing indirectness
nicely stages the processes of deflection and reflection that the riddles themselves
involve
...
22 The
City Council had originally suggested that Fairfax design a clock, but he discovered
the riddles because his father John Fairfax had contributed to a lively collection of
contemporary ones, The New Exeter Book of Riddles
...

The size and prominence of the Exeter riddle sculpture are significant in its context, but are dwarfed by Mark Wallinger’s design for a white horse, fifty metres (164
feet) tall, to stand in a field at the newly created development of Ebbsfleet in North

For
Assessment
Only
20 See http://www
...
co
...
html, accessed 15 September 2009
...
Kevin Crossley-Holland, rev
...
The
riddles are numbers 4 (bell); 7 (swan); 24 (magpie); 28 (ale); 35 (coat of mail); 37 (bellows); 46 (Lot and
his daughters and their sons); 50 (fire)
...
In this context, the incest motif of
riddle 46, while scriptural, seems a surprising inclusion
...
Passers-by pause to smile at their distorted reflections, puzzle
over the texts or perch on the plinth to wait for a friend
...
See The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, ed
...
Muir, 2 vols
...

23 Personal communication from Michael Fairfax
...
Kevin
Crossley-Holland and Lawrence Sail (London, 1999)
...

Outside Exeter Guildhall another riddle from this book, by Richard Skinner (number 81, solution ‘the
river Exe’), is written in metal lettering, embedded as a curving trail on the pavement
...
24 A white horse marked on chalk uplands is, of course, a feature of the English
landscape stretching back far beyond the Anglo-Saxons, and Wallinger’s personal
fascination with equine art and form (in both senses) plays a large part in the project,
described by one enthusiastic journalist as ‘a mesmerising conflation of old England
and new, of the semi-mythical, Tolkien-esque past and the six-lane, all-crawling
present’
...
The Anglo-Saxons,
led by Hengest and Horsa, did so in the fifth century
...
27

For
Assessment
Only
24 See for example http://news
...
co
...
stm, accessed 18 September
2009
...
telegraph
...
uk/culture/art/4613060/Mark-Wallinger-the-inspiration-behindmy-horse
...
The proposal has had reactions ranging from admiration
to incredulity, and has inevitably invited comparisons with Anthony Gormley’s huge ‘Angel of the North’
sculpture in North-East England
...

26 The Kentish emblem is gules a horse forcene argent, with the white horse said to be the symbol
of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent
...
and trans
...
edn (London, 2000), p
...
In fact, that Ebbsfleet
is in East Kent, just south-west of Ramsgate, and is marked in Gothic type on the Ordnance Survey
Explorer map ‘Canterbury and the Isle of Thanet’ (Southampton, 2007) as ‘Traditional site of the landing of the Saxons 449 and St Augustine 597’
...
bbc
...
uk/1/hi/magazine/7215206
...

27 Gayford, ‘Mark Wallinger’
...
See Bosworth and Toller, s
...
‘hors’; ‘hengest’
...
Steven Bassett (London, 1989), pp
...
59 for what
Brooks calls the ‘surely fictitious doubleton Hengist and Horsa’)
...
R
...
Tolkien, Finn
and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode, ed
...
pp
...
65–77
...
in his Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Past (Cambridge, 2000)
...
Likewise,
the mixture of (pseudo-)history, etymology and identity-formation at its core is a telling indication of the roles that Anglo-Saxon culture continues to play in our fragile
but inventive stories of what it means to be English, British, northern, or none of
those, and how we communicate with the past in the present
...


For
Assessment
Only


From Heorot to Hollywood :
Beowulf in its Third Millennium
Chris Jones

For
Assessment
Only
T

o make a beginning is to miss things out ; we are never ‘from the egg’,1 but
always launched in medias res
...
What this essay assumes is that Beowulf, as it is enacted in its sole surviving manuscript, the Nowell Codex, now part of London, British Library MS Cotton
Vitellius A
...
Even in the first glimpse we have of Beowulf, an
early eleventh-century performance of narrative material from the first millennium,
the poem is already in movement, transitory (læne) and in transition
...
Consequently, although the Nowell-Beowulf
marks the opening out of a story in medias res, it is not itself a point of origin against
which the authenticity of other uses of the Beowulf material are to be benchmarked
...
We should see the work not as an object, fixed in a web of written text and
in need of atomizing analysis of its linguistic parts, nor even as an event in time, requiring historical contextualization, but rather as a process through time
...


1 Horace, Ars Poetica, lines 147–8
...
, Horace Epistles Book II and Epistle to the Pisones
(‘Ars Poetica’) (Cambridge, 1989), p
...


13

14

Chris Jones

to Beowulf made early in the twenty-first century : Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Helmet’,
published in 2006, and the film Beowulf (dir
...

I hope to show that Beowulf continues to have cultural ‘use’ (something all works
must possess if they are not to atrophy) across three millennia, and that Anglo-Saxon
poetry continues to be productive in contemporary imagination, where it is as political as it was in the late tenth/early eleventh centuries
...
It is for this reason
that I refer here to ‘the Beowulf material’, as meaning those narrative elements that
can be deployed in re-performance, and ‘Beowulf-the-work’, by which I mean that
entire process, in which the Nowell-Beowulf is not privileged as origin, for indeed, it
is not origin — something the poem tells us explicitly in its first sentence, co-opting
our participation as it claims its place in relation to earlier transmission : ‘Hwæt, we
[…] gefrunon’ (‘Listen, […] we have heard’, lines 1–2)
...


For
Assessment
Only
That Beowulf travelled from the first millennium into the second is not, I hope, a contentious proposition
...
3 Indeed, it is entirely possible that the manuscript celebrated
its millennial anniversary in the year of the present volume’s publication, an occasion
that would be marked fittingly by this collection of essays on the longevity of Old
English in the modern imagination
...

For there is near universal agreement (a rare phenomenon in Beowulf studies) that
scribes A and B copied Beowulf into the Nowell Codex from some pre-existing text
...

3 On palaeographical evidence, Dumville judges it ‘in the highest degree unlikely that the Beowulfmanuscript was written later than the death of Æthelred the Unready (1016) or earlier than the midpoint of his reign (which fell in A
...
997)’, and writes of the ‘apparent necessity of dating the book very
early in the eleventh century’
...
63
...
X/XI’
...
R
...
281
...
Bjork and Anita Obermeier, ‘Date, Provenance, Author, Audiences’, in A Beowulf Handbook, ed
...
Bjork and John D
...
13–34
...
xxvii–xxxv
...
6 Even if one dates the manuscript
to very late in the tenth century, this does not negate the fact that it would have
been read and used during the early years of the second millennium
...
8
Nevertheless, scholars have cast much type on the ‘original’ Beowulf, the Beowulf
which no longer exists, but the existence of which seems inescapable
...
This asterisk-Beowulf is important to us because, as moderns, we prize originality as much as we do origins, and
frequently locate the value of originality in the very originary moment itself
...

If this were not reason enough to search for and attempt to fix the asteriskBeowulf, there are also disciplinary imperatives for doing so
...
There
endures a widespread assumption, by no means universal or unchallenged, but nonetheless pervasive, even among critics who would not necessarily align themselves

For
Assessment
Only
5 Leonard E
...

Colin Chase (Toronto, 1981), pp
...

6 Michael Lapidge, ‘The Archetype of Beowulf ’, Anglo-Saxon England 29 (2000), 5–41
...
4 and
18–23; also idem, ‘The Eleventh-Century Origin of Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript’, in The Dating
of Beowulf, ed
...
9–22
...
Niles, ‘Beowulf ’ and Lejre, featuring contributions by Tom Christensen and Marijane
Osborn (Tempe, AZ, 2007)
...
Said, ‘On Originality’, in his The World, the Text, and the Critic (London, 1984),
pp
...


16

Chris Jones

with historicism, that a work means whatever it meant when it was created
...
In all these formulations meaning is
located at, or immediately contiguous with, the moment of origin
...
It is for this reason that as teachers we spend much of our time in the
classroom trying to disabuse our students of the various culturally and historically
situated expectations they have of the text : expectations which we label anachronistic
...

To attempt to read Beowulf in a chronistic way, then, to historicize it — one of
the ways we are most trained to read a poem — we need first to locate the asteriskBeowulf
...
10 Thus we have, for example, persuasive handling of detailed
evidence that places the asterisk-Beowulf in the early eighth century in East Anglia,
allowing the poem to be historicized as part of a legitimization of the dynastic claims
of King Ælfwald (c
...
13 This is to
summarize but three of the many attempts to locate the asterisk-Beowulf, and each
displays a committed scholarly engagement with a range of different types of evidence
in order to put forward hypotheses which are, in their own ways, highly compelling,
the most significant objection sometimes seeming to be that they cannot all be right
at the same time
...

11 Sam Newton, The Origins of Beowulf and the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia (Cambridge,
1993)
...
Donald
Scragg (Cambridge, 2003), pp
...

13 Richard North, The Origins of ‘Beowulf ’: From Vergil to Wiglaf (Oxford, 2006)
...
Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of ‘Beowulf ’ (Oxford, 1951), p
...


From Heorot to Hollywood

17

never going to be a wholly satisfying activity while there is so little consensus over its
asterisked moment of birth
...
Nevertheless, the impulse to fix and historicize the poem’s moment of composition is an understandable one, which we share with Beowulf ;
the poem is as fascinated with its own origins as we are
...
What the poem purports to be giving
us here is its own creation myth, its genesis : the first occasion on which heroic poetry
about Beowulf was composed
...
Here the Nowell-Beowulf reaches back to
Heorot in search of its own Ur-text, but what it actually returns with are pre-texts
...

While I do not wish to suggest that the project of searching for the poem’s origins
in order to historicize the text, now fixed in the past, is in itself misguided, or should
be abandoned, we should be cautious about privileging such an historicized reading
of the asterisk-Beowulf above readings of the work as it subsequently passes through
history : above those stories and responses that accrue around the work as it continues
to move from that invisible asterisk moment, through time, in forms that visibly witness the ongoing story of Beowulf the work, and which constitute a proper part of the
process, not object, that we call Beowulf studies
...
Some of those stories, and a part of that process,
are manifestly visible around, perhaps soon after, the turn of the first millennium
in the Nowell Codex ; indeed, there are some grounds for thinking of the NowellBeowulf as a millennial poem, although that need not extend to literal belief in apocalypse at one of the putative thousand-year dates
...
What I wish to emphasize again, is that in Cotton Vitellius A
...
Risden, Beasts of Time:
Apocalyptic ‘Beowulf ’ (New York, 1994)
...
pp
...


18

Chris Jones

see Beowulf already in a moment of reception and transmission
...
16
If one is willing to accept a definition of the literary work as the ongoing transmission
of the poem through history, then recent uses of Beowulf in both popular and highbrow art indicate that the process of the poem is now in its third millennium, and that
what we might properly call the story of Beowulf has travelled from Heorot and asterisk to Hollywood and the Zemeckis Beowulf of 2007 : the most visible of the twentyfirst-century responses to the poem so far, its screenplay penned not by scribes A and
B, but by Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman
...
18
In terms of film-making technique, Zemeckis’s Beowulf can make strong claims
to ground-breaking status ; it is the first full-length motion picture to use performance capture technology entirely from beginning to end
...
Its blending of live film-making techniques and digital animation creates an
effect of blurring the realistic with the fantastic, analogous to the blurring of heroic
or mythic history with factual history in the poem
...
20 Once again, the poem will be made
to stand as an origin myth, just as it does in the publicity and press release material

For
Assessment
Only
16 Roy Liuzza incisively deals with many of the conceptual, as well as methodological, problems,
calling the poem before the manuscript ‘a changing complex of variant versions’, and the Nowell Codex’s
date ‘the only meaningful date for the “effective composition” of Beowulf ’
...
Peter S
...
281–302, at p
...

17 Beowulf, dir
...
, 2007)
...
Also http://entertainment
...
co
...
ece, accessed 7 June 2009
...
Evan Ricks and Alan Jacobs (Trimark Pictures, 2000)
...
John D
...
30–43, at p
...
See also John D
...
50–55
...
21 There are, then, pragmatic reasons for Anglo-Saxonists to get involved
with this response
...

While there are no excuses for those with an investment in the poem to ignore
the film, any temptation to patronize it as inauthentic or vulgar must also be resisted
...
However, to criticize the film for lack of authenticity
is misguided ; the film-makers have no duty to treat the poem authentically, and in
any case, this essay has sought to demonstrate that ‘the authentic’ Beowulf is an idea
even scholars of the poem have found (or ought to find) rather slippery
...
23 We would also do well to bear in mind that much of what we
study reverentially on medieval literature courses in universities now was once the
popular culture of the Middle Ages
...
Anglo-Saxonists must be careful
not to hoard their capital possessively, like the dragon in the poem
...
beowulfmovie
...
Almost all
the online reviews of the film picked up on the phrase earlier used in interview by Gaiman: ‘the oldest
story in the English language’; see http://www
...
com/nw/9584-beowulf-neil-gaiman, accessed 7
June 2009
...

23 See, for example, Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York, 2006), pp
...

24 The best guide to this story is T
...
Shippey and Andreas Haarder, eds
...



Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the
Twentieth Century :
J
...
R
...
However, the following opening of an Old English book may well be unfamiliar to most AngloSaxonists :
Her onginne² séo bóc Àe man Pennas nemne², ٔ héo is on Àréo gedǽled ; se
forma dǽl is Valinórelúmien Àæt is Godé²les géargetæl, ٔ se óÀer is Beleriandes géargetæl, ٔ se Àridda Quenta Noldorinwa oÀÀe Pennas nan Goeli² Àæt is
Noldelfaracu
...
And Àás béc Ælfwine of Angelcynne geseah on Ánetége, Àá Àá he æt sumum cerre funde híe ; ٔ he geleornode híe swa
he betst mihte ٔ eft geÀéodde ٔ on Englisc ásette
...

The first is ‘Valinórelúmien’, or the Annals of the Land of the Gods ; the second is
the Annals of Beleriand, and the third ‘Quenta Noldorinwa’ or Pennas nan Goelith, which means the Tale of the Noldoli
...
2

1 The Annals of Valinor, in J
...
R
...
History of Middle-earth
[hereafter HOME], IV, ed
...
339
...
R
...
Tolkien’s Middle-earth
legendarium
...
Quite characteristically for
Tolkien, these Old English fragments were quickly drafted in the early 1930s and then
left unfinished, just like their much more extensive Modern English counterparts
...
This combination of chance and dedicated effort has resulted in a situation which
is peculiarly reminiscent of original Anglo-Saxon texts, many of them now extant
only in scattered notes or fragments, or surrounded by writings in a different, more
prestigious language (Latin)
...
Moreover, Germanic scholars from the time of
Laurence Nowell were also occasionally known to write ‘mock’ Anglo-Saxon and Old
Norse, for purposes ranging from private amusement to the need to demonstrate the
affinities between related languages, and with results ranging from fairly persuasive
to frankly feeble
...
This is how he himself
describes this reaction to ancient languages in his essay ‘A Secret Vice’ :

For
Assessment
Only
Certainly in the case of dead languages no scholar can ever reach the full
position of a native with regard to the purely notional side of the language he
studies, nor possess and feel all the undercurrents of connotation from period
to period which words possess
...
Thus, even seen darkly through the distorting
glass of our ignorance of the details of Greek pronunciation, our appreciation
of the splendour of Homeric Greek in word-form is possibly keener, or more
conscious, than it was to a Greek, much else of other elements of poetry though
we may miss
...
It is one of the real arguments
for devoted study of ancient languages
...
4

of the Annals, HOME IV, p
...
Elsewhere, all translations from Old English are my own, unless otherwise specified
...

4 J
...
R
...
Christopher
Tolkien (London, 1983), pp
...
206
...
Some of the verse is associated with his own
mythology, and some attempts to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of the transmission
of ancient Germanic legends
...
H
...
7 However, it is his less prolific (and
less well-known) Old English prose that is the focus of the present essay
...
The Old English and Old Norse
‘sources and analogues’ of the Middle-earth legendarium have been explored in great
detail — from Tom Shippey’s seminal book The Road to Middle-earth to the excellent
recent collection edited by Stuart Lee and Elizabeth Solopova
...
9 The original
identification of England with Faërie, the Lonely Isle of the Elves, also known as Tol
Eressëa, was eventually abandoned, but the pivotal role played by the Anglo-Saxons
remained
...
R
...
Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and
Gudrún, ed
...

6 J
...
R
...
V
...
, Songs for the Philologists (London, 1936)
...
R
...
Tolkien, ‘Henry Bradley, 3 Dec
...
H
...
’, Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review 18
(1967), 96–7
...
R
...
Tolkien (New York,
2005)
...
R
...
Tolkien, The Book of Lost Tales, HOME I and II, ed
...
Christopher Tolkien (London, 1977)
...
HOME I–V and X–XII present these stories in the fullest
possible form, following the order of their conception and development
...
268–72
...
In Tolkien’s earliest writings, the narrator and reporter
was a fifth-century Anglo-Saxon mariner known as Ottor Wǽfre or Eriol, father of
the legendary Hengest and Horsa
...
In a subsequent
reworking of the Book of Lost Tales and in other writings associated with the Middleearth legendarium, the mariner was given the very appropriate name of Ælfwine (‘elffriend’) and transferred to a later period of Anglo-Saxon history, after the settlement
of Britain
...
11 But whatever the name or exact
origin of the messenger, two things remained constant until the whole ‘Anglo-Saxon’
framework was dropped late in Tolkien’s life : (1) that an Anglo-Saxon sailed beyond
the Sea and recorded the Elvish legends which were the ‘true’ version of what now
survives in garbled form as ‘Germanic’ or even ‘English’ mythology ; and (2) that this
character was a speaker of Old English, and that he used Old English to write down
what he heard or even to converse with the Elves
...

If an Anglo-Saxon and an Elf were to meet, they would have to learn (and while doing
so, explore and comment on) each other’s languages
...
12 But Ælfwine the traveller was also credited with learning and recording
the language of the Elves themselves
...
By this time, Tolkien had already created two interrelated
and highly elaborate Elvish languages, complete with grammars, etymologies and
place names, not to mention a number of dialects
...
A useful short summary with further references is available in Christina Scull and Wayne G
...
R
...
Tolkien Companion and Guide, Vol
...
244–8, and ‘Eriol or Ælfwine’, pp
...
Christopher Tolkien discusses the character in
his notes to the Book of Lost Tales, HOME II (London, 1984), pp
...

12 HOME II, p
...

13 The literature on Tolkien’s invented languages is extensive, and a short summary would not do it
justice
...
R
...
Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other
Writings: Language and Legend before ‘The Lord of the Rings’, ed
...
168–98; 341–400; as well as the sections on languages in HOME IX, XI and XII (J
...
R
...
Christopher Tolkien (London, 1992,

Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century

75

extant was very impressive
...

And so Tolkien set out to provide the authentic Old English versions of these
accounts — but he never got very far
...
They were eventually published together with their Modern
English analogues in Volume IV of the History of Middle-earth edited by Christopher
Tolkien
...
16 Many mythological equivalents can indeed be found for a trip to
the underworld or otherworld in search of information or wisdom
...

A reading of Ælfwine’s Old English accounts immediately reminds one, not so
much of the contact with the world of the gods, but rather of the contact between the
Anglo-Saxon culture and the sophisticated and refined world of Latin learning, which
encompassed the tradition of Classical mythology, poetry and philosophy, the body
of knowledge about the world, and, of course, Christianity
...
17
Tolkien’s notes show that he was very interested in the correspondences between
Latin and Anglo-Saxon culture — for instance, the appropriation of pagan Roman

For
Assessment
Only
1994, 1996 respectively)
...

14 HOME IV contains all the material extant by the early 1930s, including the Old English fragments
which are the focus of this discussion
...
251–61, 334–50, 406–11
...
Verlyn Flieger and Carl F
...
183–97
...
D
...
Ogilvy, Books Known to the English, 597–1066 (Cambridge, MA, 1967); Nicholas Brooks, ed
...
Herren, ‘The Transmission and Reception of Graeco-Roman Mythology in Anglo-Saxon England,
670–800’, Anglo-Saxon England 27 (1998), 87–103; Mechthild Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of
the English Benedictine Reform (Cambridge, 1999); Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, eds, The Old
English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English versions of Boethius’s ‘De consolatione Philosophiae’, 2
vols (Oxford, 2009)
...
18
Typically, he was also contemplating Anglo-Saxon equivalents for the characters
and places from his own emerging mythology (for example, Fëanor, the great smith of
his world, was associated with Wayland, and his sons were associated with the Brósingas of the Brósinga mene, a legendary necklace named in Beowulf and associated
in Tolkien’s writings with the necklace Nauglafring or Nauglamir)
...

One of the major stumbling blocks, which would have been just as puzzling for
an Anglo-Saxon as it is to this day for some of Tolkien’s readers, is that his mythology
contains gods, or the Valar, who are angelic beings ruling the world under the One
God, Ilúvatar
...
Once again, Tolkien contemplated
an association between Wóden and Manwë, the chief of his Valar,20 and the Book of
Lost Tales contains multiple associations between the Germanic myths and the divine
hierarchy of Tolkien’s own mythology : thus, the sea-god Ulmo was also described as
Neorth, the equivalent of Scandinavian Njƕrðr,21 and other associations are also present in the sketched outlines of the plot :

For
Assessment
Only
It is then said, somewhat inconsequentially (though the matter is in itself of
much interest, and recurs nowhere else), that Eriol told the fairies of Wóden,
 unor, Tíw, etc
...
22

Real Anglo-Saxon writers were in fact trying extremely hard to portray the pagan
gods either as demons worshipped by the heathens in their gedwyld, or, at best,
euhemeristically — as mortal rulers falsely claiming divine origins
...
Smith, ‘Early Runic Documents’, Parma Eldalamberon 15 (2004), 89–122, p
...
The
notes in question refer to the years 1918–1920, when The Book of Lost Tales was being written
...
96, and HOME IV, p
...
Beowulf, lines 1197-201
...
96
...
331–2
...
290
...
93–6
...
Thus, in the Old English translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Jove,
Apollo and Circe appear as presumptuous royals pretending to be gods :

Àa wæs Àær Apollines dohtor Iobes suna ; se Iob was hiora cyning, & licette
Àæt he sceolde bion se hehsta god ; & Àæt dysige folc him gelyfde, forÀam²e he
was cynecynnes ; & hi nyston nænne o²erne god on Àæne timan, buton hiora
cyningas hi weorÀodon for godas
...
Àa was
hiora an se Apollinus Àe we ær ymb spræcon
...
24
Now a daughter of Apollo, son of Job (Jove), dwelt there
...
Job’s father was also said to be a god ; his name was
Saturnus, and each of his sons likewise they accounted a god
...
Now Apollo’s daughter was, men say, a goddess whose name was Kirke (Circe)
...
For
instance, the association of Mercury with Wóden noted by Tolkien appears in the following passage in Ælfric’s Life of St Martin :
Mid Àusend searocræftum wolde se swicola deofol Àone halgan wer on sume
wisan beswican, and hine gesewenlicne on manegum scinhiwum Àam halgan
æteowde, on Àæra hæÀenra goda hiwe ; hwilon on Ioues hiwe, Àe is gehaten Àor,
hwilon on Mercuries, Àe men hata² oÀon, hwilon on Ueneris Àære fulan gyden,
Àe men hata² Fricg, and on manegum oÀrum hiwum hine bræd se deofol on
Àæs bisceopes gesihÀe
...
26

24 Walter John Sedgefield, ed
...
115–16
...
133–4
...
Skeat, ed
...
s
...
in 2 vols (London, 1966), II, 264–5
...
27 Of the three Old English prose fragments he
ascribed to his traveller Ælfwine, two open with a concise account of the creation
of the world
...

These compounds are not recorded in the extant corpus of Old English, but they are
immediately recognizable as analogues of the existing Old English compounds used
to describe God, such as wuldorfæder or ealwalda
...
 ás gǽstas nemdon Àá Elfe Valar, Àæt is Àá Mægen, Àe men
oft si²²an swáÀéah nemdon Godu
...

(Quenta Noldorinwa, HOME IV, p
...
)
After the making of the World by the Allfather, who in Elvish tongue is named
Ilúvatar, many of the mightiest spirits that dwelt with him came into the world
to govern it, because seeing it afar after it was made they were filled with delight at its beauty
...
Many spirits they brought in their
train, both great and small, and some of these Men have confused with the […]
Elves : but wrongly, for they were before the world, but Elves and Men awoke
first in the world after the coming of the Valar
...
94–5
...
, The
Letters of J
...
R
...
H
...
355)
...

29 The Modern English text is by J
...
R
...


Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century

79

even in its choice of vocabulary to passages from Old English homiletic and hagiographical writings, in which a description of pagan gods is often accompanied by
a commentary denouncing such false and dangerous beliefs which are apt to confuse
weak human minds
...
30
Then the Jews said that our Lord worked miracles in the name of the devil
called Beelzebub, but this was completely untrue
...
But the verbal correspondences are noteworthy : both the
phrase ac hie lugon ‘but they lied’ and Ælfric’s favourite word gedwollice ‘erroneously,
heretically’ occur in the Tolkien excerpt quoted above
...
One solution would be to use synonyms associated with
earthly lords and earthly power : thus, at different points the Valar are referred to as
godu ‘gods’, frean ‘lords’, brega ‘rulers’, or mægen ‘powers’
...
Old English cognates of Old Norse words for such
beings sometimes survived as elements of personal or place-names, often deprived
of any mythological associations
...
31
All the gods of Tolkien’s pantheon are given Old English compound names ending in
-frea ‘lord’, a cognate of the names of Scandinavian gods Freyr and Freya
...

These names are closely modelled on the existing compounds like liffrea (‘life-lord’,
an epithet of the Christian God) or manfrea (‘evil lord’, an epithet of the devil used in

For
Assessment
Only
30 John C
...
, Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, 2 vols, EETS o
...
259–60 (London, 1967–8), I, 265, line 12
...
Upto-date information on Anglo-Saxon personal names is provided by the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon
England Project: http://www
...
ac
...


80

Maria Artamonova

the Old English poems Juliana, Andreas and Elene in the form mor²res manfrea ‘the
evil lord of murder’)
...
G
...
33 There are several references to the Onomasticon in his works, including the research on the name Ælfwine undertaken by a character in the unfinished
Notion Club Papers who is trying to establish a connection between Anglo-Saxon
England and an older mythical world : ‘But it was while I was rummaging in the Onomasticon, and poring over the list of Ælfwines […]’
...
Much of the evidence for
the Anglo-Saxon word ælf, ‘elf ’, comes from the collected glosses to the passages in
influential Latin texts, such as the Etymologiae by Isidore of Seville and De Virginitate
by Aldhelm of Malmesbury, which mention the nymphs, muses and dryads of Classical mythology
...


For
Assessment
Only
nimphae aelfinni
...

driades uuduaelfinne
...
ۍ‬
maides feldaelfinne
...

Castalidas nymphas dunælfa36

Country-dwelling Muses : land-elves
Castalian Nymphs : mountain-elves

Castalidas nymphas dunælfa
...

Nymfae wæterælfenne
...

33 William George Searle, Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum: A List of Anglo-Saxon Proper Names
from the Time of Beda to that of King John (Cambridge, 1897)
...
243
...
, Old English Glosses: A Collection (London, 1945), no
...
78–9
...
Quinn, ‘The Minor Latin-Old English Glossaries in MS
...
See also Hall, Elves in
Anglo-Saxon England, p
...


Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century
Naides sæælfenne
...
37

81

Nayads : sea-elves
Oreads : wood-elves

This classification of ælfe with regard to their favourite haunts is very similar to
Tolkien’s classification of his own Elvish kindreds that he chose to translate into Old
English :
§1
...
Ingwine : lyftelfe, héahelfe, hwítelfe, Líxend
...
Éadwine : goldelfe, eor²elfe, déopelfe, Rǽdend
...
Sǽwine : sǽelfe, mereÀyssan, flotwine, Nówend
...
38
§1
...
Friends of Ing : elves of the air, high elves, white elves, the Shining ones
...
Friends of bliss : gold-elves, earth-elves, deep-elves, the Wise ones (?)
...
Friends of the sea : sea-elves, sea-rushers, sea-friends, Mariners
...


For
Assessment
Only
Linguistically, these lists of names for different Elf-kindreds are placed into a context which is very similar to that of the genuine Old English glosses
...
But it should be noted once again that original Anglo-Saxon writings dealing with elves or nymphs nearly always have a strong connotation of danger
and denial of pagan beliefs, from the association of the elves with the devil and Cain
in Beowulf to Aldhelm’s invocation to the Carmen de virginitate where he explicitly
claims, at great length, that he is definitely not invoking any muses or nymphs and
specifically does not want Apollo to bless his song
...
40 Far from yearning to meet the elves, the Anglo-Saxons were anxious to escape
their evil influence
...
Stryker, ‘The Latin-Old English Glossary in MS
...

38 Quenta Noldorinwa, HOME IV, pp
...
Christopher Tolkien provides a useful commentary
to the Old English words and their use in poetry
...

39 Beowulf, lines 111–14; Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England, p
...

40 Hall, ‘Meaning of Elf and Elves’, pp
...
Michael Lapidge and Peter S
...
s
...
134
...
M
...
1 Only six issues were ever published, with the final issue appearing in March 1976
...

Yet, alongside these creative divergences, there are also points of striking resonance
with the Old English Beowulf, and the authors of the series discuss self-consciously
their engagement with their medieval source and other literary influences
...
This essay represents an experiment
in exploring how the Beowulf story is used in this one particular historical moment, and the ideological work which it might do for a set of audiences within the
specific cultural context of 1970s America
...
Clearly, the context of
the DC Beowulf series is one in which questions of gender roles and relations and
masculinity are acutely prominent
...
This paper was
completed with the generous assistance of an Everett Helm Visting Fellowship at the Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, where I was able to consult material in the Michael E
...


165

166

Catherine A
...
Clarke

I will show to be strongly present in the comics’ paratextual material — as well as the
rise of second-wave feminism and reactions to feminist movements within American
society
...
2
I want to reflect upon these re-negotiations of gender relations in 1970s America
through their traces in the ambivalent, divided masculinities presented by the DC
Beowulf comics
...
Despite the asymmetry of these
sources in their perceived literary status, can a reading of the DC Beowulf comics in
any way extend or nuance our understanding of this canonical Anglo-Saxon text ?
Medievalists are good at thinking about reception
...
3 Rather than representing any kind of perfect ‘original’, the Beowulf of the Nowell Codex (London, British
Library MS Cotton Vitellius A
...
4 The DC Comics Beowulf series is simply one other re-appropriation
and re-making of the narrative, again reflecting the concerns and agendas of one particular historical moment
...
I have brought this approach to the DC comics, considering the full syntagmatics of publication rather than
simply excerpting the Beowulf narrative frames themselves
...
Clearly, the context and placing of advertisements
throughout the text contribute to the comics’ presentation of the Beowulf narrative
and models of masculinity, as well as offering evidence for the kinds of audience reading the material and social expectations of their roles
...
xv
...

Colin Chase (Toronto, 1997), or the shorter discussion in Klaeber 4th edn, pp
...

4 Compare Chris Jones’s essay in this volume
...
5 By engaging with the full range of material within the Beowulf
comics — as a typical comic-book reader would do — it is possible to develop an
analysis of the deeply conflicted, divided masculinities presented by the DC series
...
The DC Beowulf series, too, can be seen
to ‘image the ambiguous functions of the masculine world’
...

When the earth was no more than a few tribal lands cast in the darkness of
mystic lagoons, fog-cloaked swamps and devil-haunted castles !
A time of villains, demons, spirits of evil — and the blood-beast Grendel !
A time of heroes, kings, warriors of good … and the noble savage … Beowulf !7

For
Assessment
Only
The text and imagery here firmly position the Beowulf narrative within all the visual,
linguistic and thematic conventions of the comic-book medium
...
In the upper
section of the frame, the red face, yellow eyes and fangs of Grendel leer out of the
darkness and at the right edge of the image crouches the bikini-clad figure of NanZee, Beowulf ’s female accomplice — an addition to the Anglo-Saxon myth which
I discuss in more detail below
...
The Beowulf narrative
is necessarily re-shaped in order to fit within the generic framework of the comicbook super-hero adventure
...
As is
typical throughout the series, there is heavy use of hyphenated adjectives and nouns
(‘fog-cloaked’, ‘devil-haunted’, ‘blood-beast’), which are apparently intended to replicate the compound forms, or even kennings, conventional to Old English poetic

5 See the influential volume Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing
and Reading Practices, ed
...
Jordan and Robert L
...
156)
...

6 Clare A
...
Clare A
...

Fenster and Jo Ann McNamara (Minneapolis, 1994), pp
...
144
...
1 issue 1 (April–May 1975), p
...


168

Catherine A
...
Clarke

diction
...
9
From the start, the comic evokes a particular version of the popularly-imagined
mythic early-medieval past, where ‘all-mighty Wyrd, the God of Fate’ meets ‘Satan’,
himself a conflation of vaguely Judaeo-Christian allusion and other unspecific mythological dimensions (‘dragon-lord of the underworld’)
...
But here there is interesting evidence of a thoughtful engagement with the Old English text, as well as with
other relevant literary sources
...
11 As the first tier of frames
shows us Grendel emerging from the waters of the mere, the text continues :
Does he reek of vile swamp putrescence — or is it more the scent of chopped
bones and age-old blood ?
Is Satan’s hell-spawn man or beast … dragon or God of Death ? No — it is
much worse …
… It is Grendel !12

The emphasis on the grotesque and macabre here is undoubtedly well-judged to appeal to the comics’ younger male readership
...
A
...
Robert D
...
Cain (Oxford, 2003), pp
...

9 DC Beowulf, 1
...
18
...
1, p
...

11 Klaeber 4th edn
...

12 DC Beowulf, 1
...
2
...
In issue 2 of the DC series, a speech by Grendel’s mother
also alludes to the discussion of ‘Caines cynne’ (‘the kin of Cain’, line 107a) in the
Old English poem, which is suggested as the origin of Grendel and of all creatures
corrupted and demonic
...
And then came Grebnel
[sic] !13

For
Assessment
Only
These frames certainly recall the genealogy of ‘untydras […] eotenas ond ylfe ond
orcneas, / swylce gi(ga)ntas’ (‘corrupted things […] giants and elves and evil spirits,
and also ogres’, lines 111–13a) which are said to derive from Cain’s crime in Beowulf
...
These early lines offer an insight into the range of literary
influences which are drawn on by Michael Uslan in his narrative :

The noise … again the noise ! Men singing — men laughing ! Men ! Men ! Stop
them ! Shut them up ! Tear their faces off ! Make them stop !
The sound of life — man’s life ! Light … happy … turn it off ! Kill the light ! End
the life ! To the castle … Castle Hrothgar … the mead-hall … spill the blood !

These lines evidently recall lines 86–101 of the Old English poem, which tell of Grendel’s anguished response to the sound of feasting and song in Heorot :
Ða se ellengæst earfo²lice
Àrage geÀolode, se Àe in Àystrum bad,
Àæt he dogora gehwam dream gehyrde
hludne in healle
...

(lines 86–90a)

Then the fierce spirit who dwelt in the shadows suffered a long time, that every
day he heard the sound of joy loud in the hall
...

The poem goes on to describe the song of the poet, which celebrates the creation
of men (‘frumsceaft fira’, line 91a) and the delightful landscape of an Edenic world
(‘wlitebeorhtne wang’ or ‘gleaming plain’, line 93a)
...
2 (July 1975), p
...


170

Catherine A
...
Clarke

of this pre-lapsarian paradise with the experience of fellowship and joy in the hall
before the beginning of Grendel’s attacks, maintaining deliberate ambiguity as to
whether the ‘feond on helle’ (line 101b) is the serpent of the biblical Genesis narrative,
or the character of Grendel within the Beowulf story itself
...
In the back-matter to issue 2 in the series, Uslan discusses the literary influences which shape his depiction of Grendel in the text
...
In the latter,
a group of children lost on an island become savages
...
The savage
kids chanted : ‘Kill the pig ! Bash him in ! Slit his throat ! Spill his blood !’ Grendel’s calling became ‘Shut them up ! Tear their faces off ! Make them ST O P’,
referring to Grendel’s intense frustration at being forced to listen to the happy
sounds of feasting coming from nearby Castle Hrothgar
...
In
each issue, this single page of solid texts represents a reflection on the comic-book
material, including in issue 1 the essay ‘Beowulf : an epic comes home’ by Allan
Asherman, in issue 2 ‘The Source of the Saga’ by Michael Uslan, and in later issues the
inclusion of a page of ‘Legendary Letters’, often including a surprising level of serious
engagement with the text and its source materials
...
15 The response on the same page by Allan
Asherman, Assistant Editor, deals playfully with the issue of authorship and the
debates surrounding the origins of the Old English Beowulf, remarking that ‘if you
happen to know who D I D W R I T E the original poem B E OW U L F, we’d appreciate
hearing from you so we C A N credit him’
...
16
14 DC Beowulf, 1
...
18
...
5 (January 1976), ‘Legendary Letters’, facing p
...

16 DC Beowulf, 1
...


Re-placing Masculinity

171

Although the bold pseudo-scholarly claims of this back-matter may not always
be entirely persuasive, there are indeed moments of resonance with the Anglo-Saxon
poem throughout the Beowulf series
...
In a close-up image of his face as
he travels by ship to Denmark, Beowulf says :
‘Lof ’, or fame as some call it, is the most permanent of all things in an impermanent world ! That fame will keep the ‘spirit of Beowulf ’ alive centuries after
I am dust !
Clearly, this quest for ‘lof ’ echoes the well-known final lines of the Old English Beowulf, which reflect on Beowulf ’s ambivalent nature as
wyruldcyning[a]
mannum mildust ond mon(²w)ærust,
leodum li²ost ond lofgeornost
...


In the comic-book image here, Beowulf looks up defiantly from under his horned
helmet, his long red hair swept by the wind, his huge fur wrapped across his shoulders
and his square jaw set in determination
...
Throughout the DC Beowulf series, the narrative
presents a masculinity based on physical strength and size, competition with other
men, combat roles and skills and physical superiority
...
Issues 1 to 3 include
full-page advertisements for Karate (‘Destroy any attacker with Super Self-Defense
Techniques !’),17 ‘The Physio-Mental Powers of the Ninja’,18 the new ‘Daisy’ ballbearing gun (‘Outgrown your old Daisy ? Maybe Dad can help you pick a new one’),19
and, facing the page showing Beowulf ’s sea-voyage to Denmark, ‘Catch more fish,
bigger fish’
...
21 In
general, these advertisements suggest a young male audience, perhaps of Junior High
17
18
19
20
21

DC Beowulf, 1
...
4
...
3, advertisement facing p
...

DC Beowulf, 1
...

DC Beowulf, 1
...
5
...
2, small advertisements facing p
...


172

Catherine A
...
Clarke

or High School age (that is, around 12–18)
...
The full-page advertisement inside the back
cover of issue 3 shows ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots of a man whose physique has been
transformed by ‘the super bodybuilding system’
...
The text reassures its readers that the ‘super bodybuilding system’ can make this physique a reality, urging readers to ‘be better than
the best, be dynamic !’ Again, despite its explicit address to ‘men’, this advertisement
seems to play on the emergent desires and possible insecurities of an adolescent male
reader, observing that :
Very few men are satisfied with the way they look at present
...
22

For
Assessment
Only
The text notes specifically that ‘regardless of your age, height or present build, we’ll
help you build a fabulous body’, and returns again to the assurance that subscribers
will develop the kind of body ‘girls love to be held in’
...
Yet, as I will discuss later, these masculine activities are located
within clearly-defined spheres of leisure, sport, play, and pre-maturity
...
With her exaggeratedly curvy physique, long
blonde hair and revealing costumes, she obviously fulfils a function as the object of
the sexual desires acknowledged in the ‘super bodybuilding’ advertisement
...
At her initial
meeting with Beowulf she is mocked for her martial ambitions (‘You ? ! ? A warrior ?
A woman warrior ?’) and punches him into the mud
...
In the back-matter of issue 2, Michael Uslan reflects
on the introduction of Nan-Zee and her role in the adapted Beowulf narrative
...
The poem showed a general disdain for
women, giving the only female role of importance to Hrothgar’s Queen
22 DC Beowulf, 1
...

23 DC Beowulf, 1
...
14–15
...
Even the Queen’s role as a peace-maker was only a minor one
...
And so
was born Nan-Zee, a beautiful female warrior (named after the author’s wife,
Nancy), who could wield a sword as well as her compatriot, B E OW U L F
...
24
Whilst subsequent feminist criticism of Beowulf would challenge the notion that
female roles are marginal and ‘minor’ in the poem, Uslan clearly regards the addition
of Nan-Zee as a concession to the growing women’s movement in 1970s America
...

The inclusion of Nan-Zee might be interpreted as a ‘necessity’ for the comics’ readers
on many levels : the (hetero)sexual dimension which she represents mitigates possible
anxiety about the intensely homosocial world of the Old English poem, and deflects
potential concerns about the close attention invited by the DC narrative (as well as its
paratextual material) on naked, muscular male bodies
...
25
The US withdrawal from Vietnam is an implicit presence throughout these DC
Comics, and the heroic warrior setting which they evoke perhaps represents a response to the troubling politics of war and social division which colour their immediate historical context
...
26 Successful ‘Sword and Sorcery’ series such as the
various Conan and Kull lines (Marvel Comics, from 1970 and 1971 onwards), Savage
Tales (Marvel, 1971–5), and many others, construct imaginative worlds which assimilate an eclectic range of mythologies and historical allusions, but which are predominantly influenced by popular notions of Europe’s early-medieval past
...
2, back-matter facing page 18
...
III, ed
...
3–6, 159–66, and 370–4
...
33
...

Howard
...
See for example Kull the Conqueror 1
...
M
...
Their heroes live by brutal and simple tenets : Conan the
Barbarian declares, for example, that ‘we of Aesgaard have a saying : “If the wolf be
not at home when you come to call … Then slay its pups !”’ and the narrator remarks
that ‘Revenge is the life-song of the bleak north !’28 Throughout these series, gender
roles and physical attributes are clearly defined : muscular, hyper-masculine men
encounter barely-clad, highly-sexualized women who are variously seductresses, enchantresses or ‘play-things’
...
30 Whilst many of these advertisements suggest a younger readership, some
are clearly directed at older adolescents or men (for example, ‘Live and work in “Man
Country”’ or advertisements for correspondence courses and opportunities to finish
High School at home)
...
Indeed, many of these advertisements are marked with a circular
badge stating ‘Approved for G
...
’s and Veterans Under New G
...
Bill’
...
In issue 1, an advertisement for ‘A Big Income Career in Accounting’ presents
a montage of photographs and drawings of men in office situations and announces
‘Accounting — The Most Direct Road To High Level Positions in Business’
...
In the slightly later series The Saga of Thane of Bagarth
(Charlton Comics, 1985), Beowulf himself features as a central character, along with a re-imagined heroic world of the Geats and Swedes
...
1 (October 1970), p
...
20 (November 1972), p
...

A Conan ‘collectors medallion-coin’ advertised in Kull the Destroyer reads on the reverse ‘Barbarism is
the natural state of mankind … And barbarism must ultimately triumph
...
14 (June
1974), advertisement before p
...

29 See for example Kull the Destroyer, 1
...
3; Kull the Destroyer, 1
...
15 (August 1974), pp
...

30 Conan the Barbarian, 1
...
14, small advertisement after p
...

31 From an advertisement for training to become a park ranger or similar, Kull the Conqueror, 1
...
14, advertisement before p
...

32 See for example the advertisement for the ‘High Pay Job in Drafting’, DC Beowulf, 1
...
13, discussed below
...
1, half-page advertisement facing p
...


Re-placing Masculinity

175

vertisement for training in drafting includes the heading, in red capitals, ‘High Pay
Job in Drafting’, and, alongside an image of a smiling draftsman at his work, states
‘Coast-to-Coast Shortage of Trained Draftsmen Opens Thousands of Big Salary Jobs
for Beginners !’34 Other advertisements include ‘Now you can Finish High School at
home’35 and ‘Learning Electronics’
...
With the bold heading
‘Look who’s smiling now !’, the advertisement presents a large photograph of a beaming man in a collar and tie
...
But
how often he gets the last laugh ! One outstanding LaSalle graduate writes : ‘At
the time I started studying with LaSalle, I was working as a factory clerk
...
Now, having completed the course, I’m in charge of
the department and on my way
...
’

For
Assessment
Only
This case study resonates with the paradigm of male rivalry and competition in
the main Beowulf narrative and transposes it from the mythic heroic past into the
modern professional world
...
37 Below this
testimonial, the list of diverse courses offered by La Salle includes ‘Business Management’, ‘Interior Decorating’, ‘Computer Programming’, ‘Dental Office Assistant’,
‘Motel/Hotel Management’ and ‘Secretarial’
...
The pictures of successful applicants are almost all male, and the badge
for ‘G
...
’s and Veterans’ obviously seeks to attract this particular group
...
On the one hand there are the alluring images of traditional warrior
masculinity constructed by the main narrative and by one set of advertisements (for
body-building, karate and so on), and on the other there is the aspirational image of
the mature, professional, modern working male — at his desk or busy in the hospitality industry — promoted by the education and training advertisements
...
1, half-page advertisement facing p
...

35 DC Beowulf, 1
...
12
...
2, advertisement facing p
...

37 See for example Beowulf ’s confrontation with Unferth (DC Beowulf, 1
...
17–18), loosely based
on lines 499–606 of the Old English poem
...
M
...
The conservative social commentator,
John Wheeler, at the time Chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, writes
in his influential 1984 study Touched with Fire : The Future of the Vietnam Generation,
Part of the price of women’s progress has been a new double standard
...
Under it, America has learned to celebrate both the femininity and the professional accomplishments of women
...
38
Wheeler’s comment reflects, perhaps, his own implicit resentment of the women’s
movement and the changes affecting gender roles in 1970s America
...
40
The DC Beowulf comics do offer evidence of changing masculinities and the
changing ways in which male identities are legitimated and affirmed in the postVietnam period
...
In post-Vietnam society it appears that the professional lives within which men are affirmed, validated and rewarded — the desk jobs,
clerical and manual work — present a stark disjunction with the hyper-masculine
world offered in the Beowulf narrative and the advertisements for leisure pursuits and
recreational activities
...
For its adult male readers, the Beowulf narrative
offers an escapist, nostalgic world of traditional gender roles which contrast with
contemporary social reality
...
To make such an observation, however, is not necessarily to support the
views of commentators such as Wheeler who argue that masculinity in 1970s America

For
Assessment
Only
38 John Wheeler, Touched with Fire: The Future of the Vietnam Generation (New York, 1984), p
...

39 In another article, Wheeler includes ‘the ascendancy of the women’s rights […] movement’ in the
category of ‘traumatic changes at home’ during the Vietnam period
...
747
...
7–24, Anthony W
...
124–42
...
Instead, the DC Beowulf comics offer evidence, as
we might expect, that the performance of different masculinities is legitimated and
valued at different historical moments, at different points within the individual life
cycle, and in different social spheres
...
41
Jordan and Cowan outline the social contract through which boys mature into adult
masculinity :
Although they learn that they must give up their warrior narratives of masculinity in the public sphere, where rationality and responsibility hold sway, they
also learn that in return they may preserve them in the private realm of desire
as fantasy, as bricolage, as a symbolic survival that is appropriate to the spaces
of leisure and self-indulgence, the playground, the backyard, the television set,
the sports field
...
Traditional warrior masculinity
is associated with pre-maturity and play, or spheres which allow the re-enactment
of pre-adult activities such as leisure and recreation — including reading of the fictional Beowulf narrative itself
...
Vietnam veterans, returning from a brutal conflict and the real
performance of warrior roles, must go through the difficult process of ‘maturing’ once
again into validated professional roles and working lives
...
‘Masculinity went
into eclipse in the Vietnam era’, Wheeler protests
...
’43
In the final part of this essay, I want to return to the Old English poem Beowulf
...
727–8
...
There is a tradition of such narratives, stretching from Hercules to Beowulf
to Superman and Dirty Harry, where the male is usually depicted as the warrior, the knight-errant, the
good guy
...
, p
...

43 Wheeler, ‘Vietnam: The Retrospect’, pp
...
In The Remasculinization of America, Susan Jeffords argues that conservative reactions to Vietnam and the women’s movement led to the construction
of a new mythology of warrior masculinity in popular culture, for example in the Rambo film series
(pp
...
For further discussion see Evan Carton, ‘Vietnam and the Limits of Masculinity’, American
Literary History 3 (1991), 294–318, esp
...
296–7
...
, 24, 31, 94, 136,
137, 139, 259
Alfred the Great 3, 7, 33, 34, 76, 202, 206 ; see
also Boethius : Consolation of Philosophy
(Old English version)
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 86–8, 94, 98,
219–20, 222–3, 232
Cynewulf and Cyneheard episode 33, 34,
55
Anglo-Saxon language ; see English, Old
Armitage, Simon 257
Artamonova, Maria 5
Arthur, King 3
Asherman, Allan 168, 170
Athelstan, king of the English 16, 93
Atherton, Mark 2
Auden, W
...
5–6, 51–69, 73, 89, 269, 270
The Age of Anxiety 59–69
Paid on Both Sides 53–9
Avary, Roger 18–26
Baldr 57–8, 61, 62, 196
Baring-Gould, Sabine 60 n
...
A
...
108

Beowulf narratives, places and protagonists
in :
Beowulf 19, 20, 22–6, 123, 142–3, 148,
149–50, 153–5, 158, 161, 163, 165–82,
191–4, 196–9, 239, 250–51, plates I, II
dragon 19, 24, 153
Grendel 19, 23–4, 150–63, 168–9, plates
IV, VI
Grendel’s mother 19, 22–3, 26, 54, 152, 157
Heorot 17, 20, 21, 149–50, 151–4, 156–7,
161, 188
Heremod 17, 22, 179
Hrethel 59, 186–8, 196–9
Hrothgar 19, 20, 25, 26–7, 151, 155–8, 178–9
Hygelac 21, 148, 149, 180
Nan-Zee 167, 172–3
scop(s) of Hrothgar 17, 148, 152, 154, 156–7,
169–70, 251–2, plate V
Scyld Scefing xii, 21–2, 156, 183, 190, 250,
plate IV
Unferth 21, 25, 156, 157
Wealhtheow 21, 156, 157–8, 172–3
Wiglaf 25, 142, 179–80, 193
Beowulf (Old English poem) 2–3, 5, 8, 13–29,
33, 34, 36–7, 53–4, 58–9, 76, 81, 82, 98,
113–16, 120, 121, 123–4, 126, 148–52, 155,
165–73, 177–82, 183–95, 196–9, 204, 248,
250–52, 256, 257, 258–9, 260, 264–6
and archaeology 6, 131–41
authorship and date 14–17, 117–18, 170
editions of 129–42
Beowulf (2007 film) 2, 14, 18–26, 28–9
Beowulf and Grendel (2005 film) 9
Beowulf : Dragon Slayer 7, 24, 165–82
Beowulf (graphic novel) ; see Hinds, Gareth
Bewcastle Cross 4 n
...

Clarke, Catherine A
...
7
Clark Hall, John R
...

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 45
Cooke, Barrie : ‘Then Rain’ 129–30
Cooper, Susan 7
The Dark is Rising 212–13
Corcoran, Neil 101
Cork, Job 208
Cowan, Angela 177
Crossley-Holland, Kevin 9, 10, 134, 136–7,
213
Cynddylan, lord of Pengwern 229
Cynewulf : Elene 193
Cynewulf and Cyneheard ; see under
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Dafydd Benfras 95
Davies, Joshua 7
Dawson, Christopher 102–4, 107
DC Comics 7, 165–82
Deor 5 n
...
, 101, 102
Discenza, Nicole Guenther 204–5
The Dream of the Rood 6, 33, 36, 90, 105–7,
121, 123
Dumville, David 14 n
...
S
...
: Faerie Tale 214–15
Fenellosa, Ernest 276
The Fight at Finnsburg 150
Flieger, Verlyn 75
Frank, Roberta 135–6, 144
Franks Casket 203
Frantzen, Allen J
...
1, 13
...
3, plates I, III
Hengist/Hengest and Horsa 11, 74, 94
heroism 7–8, 20, 26, 142, 93–4, 98–9, 142,
143–5, 152, 155–61, 165, 171–82, 185, 190,
191, 194–5, 207, 211, 213–14
Hiatt, Charles 162
Hill, Geoffrey 48, 257, 270, 276
Mercian Hymns xi, 8, 219–35, 267
Hinds, Gareth : Beowulf (graphic novel) 142–
4, plates I, II
Hirschman, Albert 205–6
historicism 15–17, 21, 28
Hodgkin, R
...
96, 99, 107
Hopkins, Anthony 2, 20
Horn (Auchinleck version) 204
Howe, Nicholas 221, 266
Hrafnkels saga freysgoða 55–6
Hughes, Ted 238–9
Elmet (and Remains of Elmet) 7, 237-53,
figures 13
...
2
Wodwo 240 n
...
H
...
D
...
7, 180
Lejre 15
Leonard, William Ellery : translation of
Beowulf 132–5, 139, 141
Leyerle, John 112, 113–19, 139
Lindisfarne Gospels ; see under manuscripts
Liuzza, Roy M
...
, 141–2
Locke, John 41
London University 4
The Mabinogion 94
MacBeth, George 268
Mackie, Sheila 139–40, plate III
MacKinnon, Lachlann 258
MacLean, Simon 17 n
...
) :
London, BL MS Cotton Nero D
...
I (The Vespasian Psalter) 8, 85, 220 n
...
XV
(incl
...
D
...
S
...
20 n
...
1, 7
...

Oxford University 4–5, 52

Paolini, Christopher 214
Paulin, Tom 256
The Phoenix 36
Pippin/Pepin, Carolingian king 233
Podhoretz, John 160–61
Pope, Alexander 269, 277
Pound, Ezra 2, 31–2, 89, 259 n
...
York 4 n
...
1–14
...
31
Rosen, David 180, 181
The Ruin 256, 264, 266
runes 106–7, 143, 203, 211, 271–3, 277, figures
14
...
4
Ruthwell Cross 4 n
...
G
...
, 23, 35–6
Stenton, F
...
222
Stjerna, Knut 134, 141
Stock, Brian 206, 211
Stewart, Mary : The Hollow Hills 213
Strickland Brooch 136
Sutcliffe, Rosemary 9

Index

283

Sutherland, John 208
Sutton Hoo 28, 115, 136
Sutton Hoo helmet ; see helmets
Sweet, Henry 31–49
Anglo-Saxon Reader xi, 2, 8, 31–49, 98,
220, 233
‘Shelley’s Nature Poetry’ 44–8
‘Words, Logic, and Grammar’ 37–8, 40, 41
Swift, Jonathan 256, 269–70

Vietnam War 165–6, 173–7
Vikings 3, 9 n
...
R
...
5, 8, 11, 51–2, 71–88, 114,
130–31, 144
Annals of Beleriand 75, 82–8
Annals of Valinor 71–2, 75, 82–8
Elvish languages 73–4, 78, 81–6
Notion Club Papers 88
Quenta Noldorinwa 75, 82, 87
Trench, Archbishop Richard 41
Tuan, Yi-Fu 237, 238
Tylor, Edward Burnett 37–8, 41

Wallinger, Mark 10–12
The Wanderer xi, 33, 35, 39, 52, 74, 193, 248,
256, 260, 261
Ward, Lynd 134–5
Wayland (the) Smith 7, 76, 201–17
Wayland’s Smithy 11 n
...
L
...

Wulfstan the homilist 75, 76

Þiðreks saga 204
Yeats, W
...
62, 68–9
Uslan, Michael ; see Beowulf : Dragon Slayer
Vespasian Psalter ; see under manuscripts
Victoria and Albert Museum 3–4

Zemeckis, Robert 2, 18–26 ; see also Beowulf
(2007 film)
Zukovsky, Louis 113

Britain’s pre-Conquest past and its culture continues to fascinate
modern writers and artists
...
The essays
here engage with the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons and their
literature have been received, confronted, and re-envisioned
in the modern imagination
...
H
...
R
...
Tolkien, and
David Jones, and on contemporary writers such as Geoffrey
Hill, Peter Reading, P
...
James, and Heaney
...
The early medieval emerges not
simply as a site of nostalgia or anxiety in modern revisions,
but instead provides a vital arena for creativity, pleasure, and
artistic experiment
...
boydellandbrewer
...

Bone taught at St John’s College,
Oxford, where his students included
Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis
...




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