Like A Sparrow, or, Sing With Me, If It's Just For Today--

[bellatrys]

Apropos of - not nothing, but the new Beowulf film which I haven't seen and don't know if I will out of sheer masochistic duty (it would be one thing, if y'all and I could go MST3K it together IRL) and someone in comments somewhere around wondering just how plausible it would be to have a bunch of Viking warriors sitting around drinking beer and

Comments

[therealsherbs]

I studied the poem in the original at Uni and the general consensus of opinion is that the Christian elements were added later.

Later than what?

[bellatrys]

There's only one MS of it in existence (and I doubt you actually got to study the Cotton MS! tho' if you did you were very lucky), which is a heck of a little to try to hang a framework of its development on to, and the very age of that one lonely original is highly debated.

There may well have been an existing story of Beowulf vs. Grendel hanging around, that someone in one of the AS kingdoms finally wrote down, with updated pop culture refs, somewhere between 700 CE and 1066. Or it could be an Original Story that some fan created to fit into their cultural heritage of Scyld and Finnsburgh and so on. We just don't have anything to go on. I mean, there's external *and* internal textual evidence for "The Song of Roland" being an updated version of a much older story - about an entirely different war against entirely different enemies, but Beo. just sits out there by itself, there's no historical chronicle we can factcheck it against of real Scandinavian kings being harrassed by critters aqueous and firebreathing, there's a strand of

Re: Later than what?

[therealsherbs]

Fair point, maybe I didn't phrase it particularly well. What I meant was, that the references to The Almighty were probably not in the original oral tradition story. Whether the nature of the passage was much the same, but without any Christian reference is up for debate. Its just that Beowulf, Like Gawain & the Green Knight and countless other early tales probably predate the widespread popularity and power of the church that would have seen them altered to fit.

Re: Later than what?

[deiseach]

Mmmm - but that makes it sound much more like conscious propaganda than what probably went on, which is that people hung on to their favourite stories/music/customs and added in or on the Christian elements

Re: Later than what?

[therealsherbs]

you're right of course, speculation on the motives of the person who wrote it is only ever going to be speculation.