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

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 tradition of undead intruders and home invasions in the sagas, but they're all different in their own way, and there's no way to know whether or not it was cobbled together from other stuff and what and whence, like you can do to a great extent with the Arthurian corpus and elements thereof.

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.

When Anon wrote down his version of Beowulf (and yes, very probably there was a story along those lines circulating beforehand), he may have been (1) a devoutly religious convert tidying up the old tale by putting in the real God and Devil (2) a bit cynical, just tacking on Approved References to get it past the critics (3) adding in the cultural references he was familiar and comfortable with, to put his own individual spin on the tale, without any propaganda or moralising intentions.

After all, we only have pieces of the originals to go by, handed down by copyists each in their generation:

"The poets of Ireland one day were gathered around Senchán Torpéist, to see if they could recall the Táin Bó Cuailnge in its entirety. But they all said they knew only parts of it." Thomas Kinsella (trans., 1969), The Táin, Oxford University Press.

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.