Week 4: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

     

    

Here again is a link to the text. An excellent audiobook version is here. Here is the 1931 film (please note that, in the case of Frankenstein, the film is not at all a substitute for the text, but perhaps an interesting supplement to it). 

1) Science Fiction: A few definitions

i) "The writer Nalo Hopkinson once defined science fiction as that branch of literature which deals with the consequences for humanity of the use of tools."

Amanda Rees, Historian of Science at the University of York, from the BBC Radio 4 In Our Time episode on The Time Machine (listen here)

ii) Raffi Khatchadourian, "Dream Worlds," a profile of N. K. Jemisin in the 1/27/20 New Yorker magazine (full article available here):

"On its surface, all science fiction is about change -- technological, scientific, social -- that brings human beings into contact with the unknown or forces a reassessment of the familiar. Nonetheless, the genre remains inextricably tied to the everyday -- the biases and limitations of the writer's time. Jules Verne may have imagined the Nautilus as a futuristic steampunk submarine, but his book expresses a nineteenth-century vision, in which the natural world existed to be dominated by men."

2) Horror and The Gothic

from M. H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed., 1999:

Gothic Novel: The word Gothic originally referred to the Goths, an early Germanic tribe, then came to signify "germanic," then "medieval." "Gothic architecture" now denotes the medieval type of architecture, characterized by the use of the high pointed arch and vault, flying buttreses, and intricate recesses, which spread through western Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.

The Gothic novel, or in an alternative term, Gothic romance, is a type of prose fiction which was inaugurated by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) -- the subtitle refers to its setting in the middle ages -- and flourished through the early nineteenth century. Some writers followed Walpole's example by setting their stories in the medieval period; others set them in a Catholic country, especially Italy or Spain. The locale was often a gloomy castle furnished with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels; the typical story focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent heroine by a cruel and lustful villain, and made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurrences (which in a number of novels turned out to have natural explanations). The principal aim of such novels was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors. Many of them are now read mainly as period pieces, but the best opened up to fiction the realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors that lie beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind. Examples of Gothic novels are William Beckford'sVathek (1786) -- the setting of which is both medieval and Oriental and the subject both erotic and sadistic -- Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and other highly successful Gothic romances, and Matthew Gregory Lewis The Monk (1796), which exploited, with considerable literary skill, the shock-effects of a narrative involving rape, incest, murder, and diabolism. Jane Austen made good-humored fun of the more decorous instances of the Gothic vogue in Northanger Abbey (written 1798, published 1818).

The term "Gothic" has also been extended to a type of fiction which lacks the exotic setting of the earlier romances, but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events that are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states. In this extended sense the term "Gothic" has been applied to William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Shelley's remarkable and influential Frankenstein (1817), and the novels and tales of terror by the German E. T. A. Hoffmann. Still more loosely, "Gothic" has been used to describe elements of the macabre and terrifying in such later works as Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens' Bleak House (for example, chapters 11, 16, and 47) and Great Expectations (the Miss Havisham episodes). Critics have recently drawn attention to the many women writers of Gothic fiction, and have explained the features of the mode as a result of the suppression of female sexuality, also as a challenge to the gender hierarchy and values of a male-dominated culture.

America, especially southern America, has been fertile in Gothic fiction in the extended sense, from the novels of Charles Brockden Brown (1711-1810) and the terror tales of Edgar Allen Poe to William Faulkner's Sanctuary and Absalom, Absalom! and some of the fiction of Truman Capote. The nightmarish realm of uncanny terror, violence, and cruelty opened up by the Gothic novel continued to be explored in novels such as Daphne du Maurier's popular Rebecca (1938) and Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn; it is also exploited by writers of horror fiction such as H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and by the writers and directors of horror movies.


3) Romanticism and The Sublime

(from Margaret Drabble's Oxford Companion to English Literature, fifth edition, 1985)

i) Romanticism (the Romantic Movement): a literary movement, and profound shift in sensibility, which took place in Britain and throughout Europe roughly between 1770 and 1848. Intellectually it marked a violent reaction to the Enlightenment. Politically it was inspired by the revolutions in America and France and popular wars of independence in Poland, Spain, Greece, and elsewhere. Emotionally it expressed an extreme assertion of the self and the value of individual experience (the "egotistical sublime"), together with the sense of the infinite and the transcendental. Socially, it championed progressive causes, though when these were frustrated it often produced a bitter, gloomy, and despairing outlook. The stylistic keynote of Romanticism is intensity, and its watchword is "Imagination." In Britain, Romantic writers of the first generation include Wordsworth and Coleridge (Lyrical Ballads, 1798), Burns, and Blake; though introspective 18th-cent. poets such as Gray and Cowper show pre-Romantic tendencies, as well as Gothic novelists such as Horace Walpole and "Monk" Lewis. Terror, passion, and the Sublime are essential concepts in early Romanticism; as is the sense of primitive mystery rediscovered in the Celtic bardic vers of Macpherson's "Ossian," the folk ballads collected by Percy, and the medieval poetry forged by Chatterton (whom Southey edited). Foreign sources were also vital: Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther(1774); the ghostly ballads of Burger (Lenore, 1773); the verse dramas of Schiller (The Robbers, 1781); and the philosophical criticism of A. W. Schlegel. The tone of Romanticism was shaped by the naked emotionalism of Rousseau's Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloise (1761), and the exotic legends and mythology found in Oriental and Homeric literatures and 17th-cent. travel writers. The second generation of British Romantics -- Byron, Shelley, and Keats -- absorbed these tumultuous influences, wrote swiftly, travelled widely (Greece, Switzerland, Italy), and died prematurely: their life-stories and letters became almost as important for Romanticism as their poetry. They in turn inspired autobiographical prose-writers such as Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Lamb; while the historical imagination found a champion in Sir W. Scott. The Romantics saw and felt things brilliantly afresh. They virtually invented certain landscapes -- the Lakes, the Alps, the bays of Italy. They were strenuous walkers, hill-climbers, sea-bathers, or river-lovers. They had a new intuition for the primal power of the wild landscape, the spiritual correspondence between Man and Nature, and the aesthetic principle of "organic" form (seen at their noblest in Wordsworth's Prelude or J. M. W. Turner's paintings). In their critical writings and lectures they described poetry and drama with new psychological appreciation (the character of Hamlet, for example); they discussed dreams, dramatic illusion, Romantic sensibility, the process of creativity, the limits of Classicism and Reason, and the dynamic nature of the Imagination. Remembered childhood, unrequited love, and the exiled hero were constant themes. The Romantics sense of Liberty also helped the emergence of an influential generation of women writers, including M. Wollstonecraft, D. Wordsworth, M. Shelley, and later the Bronte sisters. Romanticism expressed an unending revolt against classical form, conservative morality, authoritarian government, personal insincerity, and human moderation. The British Romantics had a powerful influence in France after the Napoleonic wars, especially in Chateaubriand, Hugo, De Vigny, the paintings of Delacroix, and the music of Berlioz.

ii) The Sublime: An idea associated with religious awe, vastness, and natural magnificence, and strong emotion which fascinated 18th-cent. literary critics and aestheticians. Its development marks the movement away from the clarity of Neo-classicism towards Romanticism, with its emphasis on feeling and imagination; it was connected with the concept of original genius which soared fearlessly above the rules. Sublimity in rhetoric and poetry was first analysed in an anonymous Greek work, On the Sublime, attributed to Longinus, which was widely admired in England after Boileau's French translation of 1674. The concept was elaborated by many writers, including Addison, Dennis, Hume, Burke, and R. Blair and discussion spread from literature to other areas. Longinus had described the immensity of objects in the natural world, of the stars, of mountains and volcanoes, and of the ocean, as a source of the sublime, and this idea was of profound importance to the growing feeling for the grandeur and violence of nature. The most widely read work, and most stimulating to writers and painters, was Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful(1757). Burke put a new emphasis on terror: "Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger . . . or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." Burke saw the sublime as a category distinct from beauty. With the former he associated obscurity, power, darkness, solitude, and vastness and with the latter smoothness, delicacy, smallness, and light. These varied ideas were brought together, and discussed with greater philosophical rigour, by Kant in the Critique of Judgement (1790). Burke's theory was popular, and stimulated a passion for terror that culminated in the Gothic tales of A. Radcliffe and the macabre paintings, crowded with monsters of Barry, Mortimer, and Fuseli. The cult drew strength from Macpherson's Ossianic poems; Ossian took his place beside Homer and Milton as one of the great poets of the sublime, whose works were frequently illustrated by painters. The sublime of terror kindled the enthusiasm for wild scenery and cosmic grandeur already apparent in the writings of Addison and Shaftesbury, and of E. Young and James Thomson. Many writers making the Grand Tour dwelt on the sublimity of the Alps; they contrasted them with the pictures of Rosa, whose stormy landscapes provided a pattern for 18th-cent. descriptions of savage nature. By the 1760s, when picturesque journeys in England became popular, travellers sought out the exhilarating perils of the rushing torrent, the remote mountain peak, and the gloomy forest. Many published their impressions in "Tours," and sublimity became a fashion, pandered to by the dramatic storms shown by de Loutherbourg's Ediophusikon, a small theatre with lantern slides, and later by J. Martin's vast panoramas of cosmic disaster. The Romantic poets rejected the categories of 18th-cent. theorists and yet these writers on the sublime were moving, albeit clumsily, towards that sense of mystery of natural forces that is so powerful in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, in the paintings of Turner.

4) More Sublimity (extremely optional material): Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

Below is German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer), painted in 1818. It is perhaps the most well-known visual representation of Romantic sublimity in the European tradition, and, incidentally, the clear source of this promotional image for the 2009 BBC2 Hamlet.  

"Wanderer above the Sea of Fog," has been taken up as a song title by black/astral/ambient/ecological metal band Wolves in the Throne Room; you can listen to it here if you are so inclined. Writing for Slate, Erik Davis argues that the black metal subgenre broadly exhibits "a powerful dark-side Romanticism, perhaps the most unalloyed descendent of old-school Sturm und Drang that we have." Davis goes on to say about Wolves in the Throne Room in particular: "This is disturbing stuff, and it's supposed to be. I mean, aren't you a bit disturbed? Lots of people who open their souls to today's seemingly relentless assault on wild creatures and wild places find themselves gripped by bitterness, melancholy, and misanthropy. For the Wolves, black metal just makes sense; it's melodramatic Satanism transformed into an angry lament for human folly. But the band doesn't just mourn. It also aims its epic melodies toward the old Romantic sublime, drawing the listener into the dream of a vital and resurgent earth." The specific material Davis writes about can be heard here. Writing on the same subject in The New Yorker, the critic Sasha Frere Jones describes moments in a Wolves in the Throne Room concert as "harmonically astonishing," and concludes his piece this way:  "'Death to false metal!' is a phrase that has circulated through various metal communities for years, often presented as a knowing joke, an acknowledgment that the seriousness of the project is rarely recognized by the mainstream. But if you’re going to be mocked for looking funny or singing in an odd voice, better to do it in the service of something verifiably remarkable."   

5) More Gothic/Horror (optional material): James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff

This classic of the horror genre can be seen its entirety here. 

Poems of the Day: Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" (1818) & Walt Whitman's "When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer" (1865)

      

Shelley portrait by Alfred Clint,1891

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Walt Whitman photographed by Samuel Murray (1891)

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;  

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;  

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;  

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,  

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;          

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,  

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,  

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.  

(Elsewhere, Whitman wrote: "After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains." ["New Themes Entered Upon," Specimen Days and Collect, 1882.]) 

Curiously enough, both of these key Romantic poems have figured in the television series Breaking Bad: here and here)

Week 3: William Shakespeare, Hamlet

          

Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in 1948

Here is another link to the text; the 1996 Branagh film is available in three parts at the following links: part one, part two, part three.  

(I) Hamlet as Facebook timeline

Click here for the plot of Hamlet as a (very dated!) Facebook News Feed (written by Sarah Schmelling for McSweeneys and Photoshopped by Angela Liao)

(II) Literary Terms

from M. H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed., 1999: 

soliloquy: The act of talking to oneself, whether silently or aloud. In drama it denotes the convention by which a character, alone on the stage, utters his or her thoughts aloud. Playwrights have used this device as a convenient way to convey information about a character's motives and state of mind, or for purposes of exposition, and sometimes in order to guide the judgments and responses of the audience.

from J. A. Cuddon's Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th ed., 1999: 

objective correlative: A term first used apparently by the American painter Washington Allston in c. 1840 and subsequently revived and made famous by T. S. Eliot in an essay on Hamlet (1919). The relevant passage is: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." Eliot goes on to suggest that in Lady Macbeth's sleep-walking speech and in the speech that Macbeth makes when he hears of his wife's death, the words are completely adequate to the state of mind; whereas in Hamlet the prince is "dominated by a state of mind which is inexpressable, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear." These observations have provoked a good deal of debate.

(III) Criticism

(i) J. W. von Goethe (1796):

"The time is out of joint, O cursd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!

"In these words, I imagine, will be found the key to Hamlet's whole procedure. To me it is clear that Shakespeare meant, in the present case, to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it. In this view the whole piece seems to me to be composed. There is an oak-tree planted in a costly jar, which should have borne only pleasant flowers in its bosom; the roots expand, the jar is shivered.

"A lovely, pure, noble and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away. All duties are holy for him; the present is too hard. Impossibilities have been required of him; not in themselves impossibilities, but such for him. He winds, and tums, and torments himself; he advances and recoils; is ever put in mind, ever puts himself in mind; at last does all but lose his purpose from his thoughts; yet still without recovering his peace of mind."

(ii) Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1818):

"In Hamlet [Shakespeare] seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our meditation on the workings of our minds, -- an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed: his thoughts, and the images of his fancy are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. This character Shakspere places in circumstances, under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment: -- Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve. Thus it is that this tragedy presents a direct contrast to that of "Macbeth;" the one proceeds with the utmost slowness, the other with a crowded and breathless rapidity.

"The effect of this overbalance of the imaginative power is beautifully illustrated in the everlasting broodings and superfluous activities of Hamlet's mind, which, unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly occupied with the world within, and abstracted from the world without, giving substance to shadows, and throwing a mist over all common-place actualities. It is the nature of thought to be indefinite; -- definiteness belongs to external imagery alone. Hence it is that the sense of sublimity arises, not from the sight of an outward object, but from the beholder's reflection upon it; -- not from the sensuous impression, but from the imaginative reflex. Few have seen a celebrated waterfall without feeling something akin to disappointment: it is only subsequently that the image comes back full into the mind, and brings with it a train of grand or beautiful associations. Hamlet feels this; his senses are in a state of trance, and he looks upon external things as hieroglyphics. His soliloquy --

"O! that this too too solid flesh would melt," &c.

springs from that craving after the indefinite -- for that which is not -- which most easily besets men of genius; and the self-delusion common to this temper of mind is finely exemplified in the character which Hamlet gives of himself: --

"It cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter."

He mistakes the seeing his chains for the breaking them, delays action till action is of no use, and dies the victim of mere circumstance and accident."

Coleridge argued that Hamlet's delay "not from cowardice, for he is drawn as one of the bravest of his time – not from want of forethought or slowness of apprehension […] but merely from
that aversion to action, which prevails among such as have a world in themselves."

Coleridge also writes: “all that is amiable and excellent in nature is combined in Hamlet, with the exception of one quality. He is a man living in meditation, called upon to act by every motive human and divine, but the great object of his life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve.”

(iii) Sigmund Freud, from The Interpretation of Dreams (1899):

“In the Oedipus the child’s wishful fantasy that underlies it is brought out into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed; and – just as in the case of a neurosis – we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences[…]. Hamlet is able to do anything – except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his childhood realized.”

Elsewhere, in a letter, Freud wrote:

“Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy, and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfillment here transplanted into reality, with the full quantity of repression which separates his infantile state from his present one.

"Fleetingly the thought passed through my head that the same thing might be at the bottom of Hamlet as well. I am not thinking of Shakespeare’s conscious intentions, but believe, rather, that a real event stimulated the poet to his representation, in that his unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero […]. How does [Hamlet] explain his irresolution in avenging his father? … How better than through the torment roused in him by the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against his father out of passion for his mother . . . And is not his sexual alienation in his conversation with Ophelia typically hysterical? . . . And does he not in the end, in the same marvelous way as my hysterical patients do, bring down punishment on himself by suffering the same fate as his father of being poisoned by the same rival?”

(In this context, consider, perhaps, the way Olivier stages the "closet" scene, from 1h28min30s through 1h35m15s here.)

Finally, Freud again from The Interpretation of Dreams:

"The prince in the play, who had to disguise himself as a madman, was behaving just as dreams do in reality; so we can say of dreams what Hamlet says of himself, concealing the true circumstances under a cloak of wit and unintelligibility: 'I am but mad north-by-north-west.'"

(IV) The Seven Soliloquies

(i) Act 1, Scene 2

 

O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead!--nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother,
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month,--
Let me not think on't,--Frailty, thy name is woman!--
A little month; or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father's body
Like Niobe, all tears;--why she, even she,--
O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn'd longer,--married with mine uncle,
My father's brother; but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month;
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married:-- O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not, nor it cannot come to good;
But break my heart,--for I must hold my tongue!
[Enter Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo.]

(ii) Act 1, Scene 5

  


O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else?
And shall I couple hell? O, fie!--Hold, my heart;
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up.--Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven!--
O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables,--meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least, I am sure, it may be so in Denmark:

[Writing.]

So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word;
It is 'Adieu, adieu! remember me:'
I have sworn't.

(iii) Act 2, Scene 2



Now I am alone.
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wan'd;
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba?
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech;
Make mad the guilty, and appal the free;
Confound the ignorant, and amaze, indeed,
The very faculties of eyes and ears.
Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat
As deep as to the lungs? who does me this, ha?
'Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter; or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal: bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance!
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A scullion!
Fie upon't! foh!--About, my brain! I have heard
That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ, I'll have these players

Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle: I'll observe his looks;
I'll tent him to the quick: if he but blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,--
As he is very potent with such spirits,--
Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds
More relative than this.--the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

(iv) Act 3, Scene 1

Branagh (1996):

Olivier (1948) :

Richard Burton (1964):

 

Gibson (1990):




Gibson, for Monsterpiece Theatre:




Stewart, also for Sesame Street:



Hawke (2000):





Tennant (2009):

To be, or not to be,--that is the question:--
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?--To die,--to sleep,--
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,--'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die,--to sleep;--
To sleep! perchance to dream:--ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,--
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns,--puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia!--Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.

(v) Act 3, Scene 2

(please go to 44:15 of this link)

'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on. Soft! now to my mother.--
O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom:
Let me be cruel, not unnatural;
I will speak daggers to her, but use none;
My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites,--
How in my words somever she be shent,
To give them seals never, my soul, consent!

(vi) Act 3, Scene 3



Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I'll do't;--and so he goes to heaven;
And so am I reveng'd.--that would be scann'd:
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
He took my father grossly, full of bread;
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands, who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought,
'Tis heavy with him: and am I, then, reveng'd,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season'd for his passage?
No.
Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep; or in his rage;
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed;
At gaming, swearing; or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't;--
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven;
And that his soul may be as damn'd and black
As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays:
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.

(vii) Act 4, Scene 4



How all occasions do inform against me

And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus'd. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,--
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward,--I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;'
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do't. Examples, gross as earth, exhort me:
Witness this army, of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince;
Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff'd,
Makes mouths at the invisible event;
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake. How stand I, then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds; fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain?--O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

Poems of the Day: "Paths and Thingscape," Margaret Atwood (1970,) "The Mower," Philip Larkin (1979)

      

Those who went ahead

of us in the forest

bent the early trees

so that they grew to signals

the trail was not 

among the trees but

the trees

and there are some who have dreams

of birds flying in the shapes

of letters; the sky's

codes;

          and dream also

the significance of numbers (count

petals of certain flowers)

          In the morning I advance

          through the doorway; the sun

          on the bark, the inter-

          twisted branches, here

          a blue movement in the leaves, dispersed

          calls/ no trails; rocks

          and grey tufts of moss

          The petals of the fire-

          weed fall where they fall

  

          I am watched like an invader

          who knows hostility but

          not where

          The day shrinks back from me

When will be

that union and each

thing (bits

of surface broken by my foot

step) will without moving move

around me

into its place 

  

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Week 2: Beowulf

       

A map of Scandinavia in Beowulf's day (Beowulf: A Critical Companion, 2003)

"Correct and sober taste may refuse to admit that there can be an interest for us—the proud we that includes all intelligent living people—in ogres and dragons; we then perceive its puzzlement in face of the odd fact that it has derived great pleasure from a poem that is actually about these unfashionable creatures." -- J. R. R. Tolkien, "The Monsters and the Critics" (1936)

"Just don't take any course where they make you read Beowulf" -- Woody Allen, Annie Hall (1977) 

The text is available here; Seamus Heaney also offers us a near-complete reading of his translation in two parts.  

Perhaps the best way to approach Beowulf is to simply listen. There is substantial (though inconclusive) evidence that indicates that the poem existed for generations as a tale that was told and retold before it was ultimately transcribed in the lone manuscript that now contains it; listening to the poem read aloud grants us a window into that experience.   

However, I think it's probably for the best that we also have access to the written document as well. As you listen to the poem, you might very well want to follow along with the written text. It will help you keep the names straight, if nothing else. We are not going to concern ourselves with the intricacies of the Old English language (also called "Anglo-Saxon"), but do have a look at a few lines of the poem in its original language, if for no other reason than to see just how foreign it is, and yet at times how strangely familiar, too. You can hear the opening lines read here.

(I) Literary Terms

epic: An epic is a long narrative poem, on a grand scale, about the deeds of warriors and heroes. It is a polygonal [multi-sided], ‘heroic’ story incorporating myth, legend, folk tale, and history. Epics are often of national significance in the sense that they embody the history and aspirations of a nation in a lofty or grandiose manner.

alliteration: a figure of speech in which consonants, especially at the beginning of words, or stressed syllables, are repeated. It is a very old device indeed in English verse (older than rhyme) and is common in verse generally. It is used occasionally in prose. In OE poetry alliteration was a continual and essential part of the metrical scheme and until the Middle Ages was often used thus. However, alliterative verse becomes increasingly rare after the end of the 15th C. and alliteration […] tends more to be reserved for the achievement of the special effect. 

archetype: Archetype (Gk ‘original pattern’) A basic model from which copies are made; therefore a prototype. In general terms, the abstract idea of a class of things which represents the most typical and essential characteristics shared by the class; thus a paradigm or exemplar. An archetype is atavistic and universal, the product of ‘the collective unconscious’ and inherited from our ancestors. The fundamental facts of human existence are archetypal: birth, growing up, love, family and tribal life, dying, death, not to mention the struggle between children and parents, and fraternal rivalry. Certain character or personality types have become established as more or less archetypal. For instance: the rebel, the Don Juan (womanizer), the all-conquering hero, the braggadocio, the country bumpkin, the local lad who makes good, the self-made man, the hunted man, the siren, the witch and femme fatale, the villain, the traitor, the snob and the social climber, the guilt-ridden figure in search of expiation, the damsel in distress, and the person more sinned against than sinning. Creatures, also, have come to be archetypal emblems. For example, the lion, the eagle, the snake, the hare, and the tortoise. Further archetypes are the worse the paradisal garden and state of ‘pre-Fall’ innocence. Themes include the arduous quest or search, the pursuit of vengeance, the overcoming of difficult tasks, the descent into the underworld, symbolic fertility rites and redemptive rituals. The archetypal has always been present and diffused in human consciousness.

(all of the above definitions taken from J. A. Cuddon's Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th ed., 1999)

(II) Translating Beowulf: A Few Examples

The first page of the Beowulf manuscript, and a transcription.

Lesslie Hall (1892):

Lo! the Spear-Danes’ glory through splendid achievements

The folk-kings’ former fame we have heard of,

How princes displayed then their prowess-in-battle.

Oft Scyld the Scefing from scathers in numbers

From many a people their mead-benches tore.

Since first he found him friendless and wretched,

The earl had had terror: comfort he got for it,

Waxed ’neath the welkin, world-honor gained,

Till all his neighbors o’er sea were compelled to

Bow to his bidding and bring him their tribute:

An excellent atheling!

Howell Chickering (1977):

Listen! We have heard of the glory of the Spear-Danes

in the old days, the kings of tribes --

how noble princes showed great courage!

Often Scyld Scefing seized mead-benches

from enemy troops, from many a clan;

he terrified warriors, even though first he was found

a waif, helpless. For that came a remedy,

he grew under heaven, prospered in honors

until every last one of the bordering nations

beyond the whale-road had to heed him,

pay him tribute. He was a good king!

R. M. Liuzza (2000):

Listen!

We have heard of the glory in bygone days

of the folk-kings of the spear-Danes,

how those noble lords did lofty deeds.

Often Scyld Scefing seized the mead benches

from many tribes, troops of enemies,

struck fear into earls. Though he first was

found a waif, he awaited solace for that --

he grew under heaven and prospered in honor

until every one of the encircling nations

over the whale's-riding had to obey him,

grant him tribute. That was a good king!

Seamus Heaney (2000):

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by

and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.

We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,

a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.

This terror of the hall-troops had come far.

A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on

as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.

In the end each clan on the outlying coasts

beyond the whale-road had to yield to him

and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.

J. R. R. Tolkien's prose translation (1926, published 2014)

Lo! the glory of the kings of the people of the Spear-Danes in

days of old we have heard tell, how those princes did deeds

of valor. Oft Scyld Scefing robbed the hosts of foemen,

many peoples, of the seats where they drank their mead, laid

fear upon men, he who was first found forlorn; comfort for

that he lived to know, mighty grew under heaven, throve in

honour, until all that dwelt nigh about, over the sea where the

whale rides, must hearken to him and yield him tribute -- a 

good king was he!

Thomas Meyer's experimental translation (1974, published 2012):

HEY now hear 

 what spears of Danes 

 in days of years gone 

 by did, what deeds made 

 their power their glory — 

 their kings & princes: 

SCYLD SCEFING, 

 wretched foundling, 

 grew under open skies & in him glory thrived 

 & all who threatened his meadhall ran in terror 

 & all neighboring nations brought him gold 

 following whaleroads. 

Here is how I read it:

Now, we have heard the yore-day glory

of the ancient Spear-Dane kings,

how the noble-blooded boldly flourished.

Scyld Scefing threatened enemies,

ripped tribes from mead benches,

frightened brave men. At first

a foundling, he awaited comfort;

glory-minded, he strengthened under skies

until all who held the lands 

beyond the whale-road heard him,

yielded tribute. That was a good king.

A complication: maybe literally everyone has misread the poem's very first word until now.


(III) Totally Optional Reading for Beowulf Enthusiasts

Fenrir and Odin as depicted by Tore Knutsen

(i) RAGNAROK from Kevin Crossley-Holland The Norse Myths (1981), also published as The Penguin Book of Norse Myths: Gods of the Vikings:

An axe-age, a sword-age, shields will be gashed: there will be a wind-age and a wolf-age before the world is wrecked.

First of all Midgard will be wrenched and racked by wars for three winters. Fathers will slaughter sons; brothers will be drenched in one another's blood. Mothers will desert their menfolk and seduce their own sons; brothers will bed with sisters.

Then Fimbulvetr, the winter of winters, will grip and throttle Midgard. Driving snow clouds will converge from north and south and east and west. There will be bitter frosts, biting winds; the shining sun will be helpless. Three such winters will follow each other with no summers between them.

So the end will begin. Then the children of the old giantess in Iron Wood will have their say: the wolf Skoll will seize the sun between his jaws and swallow her -- he will spatter Asgard with gore; and his brother Hati will catch the moon and mangle him. The stars will vanish from the sky.

The earth will start to shudder then. Great trees will sway and topple, mountains will shake and rock and come crashing down, and every bond and fetter will burst. Fenrir will run free.

Eggther, watchman of the giants, will sit on his grave mound and strum his harp, smiling grimly. Nothing escapes the red cock Fjalar; he will crow to the giants from bird-wood. At the same time the cock who wakes the warriors every day in Valhalla, golden combed Gullinkambi, will crow to the gods. A third cock, rust red, will raise the dead in Hel.

The sea will rear up and waves will pummel the shore because Jormungand, the Midgard Serpent, is twisting and writhing in fury, working his way on to dry land. And in those high seas Naglfar will break loose -- the ship made from dead men's nails. The bows and the waist and the stern and the hold will be packed with giants and Hrym will stand at the helm, heading towards the plain Vigrid. Loki too, free from his fetters, will take to the water; he will set sail towards Vigrid from the north and his deadweight will be all that ghastly crew in Hel.

Then the brothers Fenrir and Jormungand will move forward side by side. Fenrir's slavering mouth will gape wide open, so wide that his lower jaw scrapes against the ground and his upper jaw presses against the sky; it would gape still wider if there were more room. Flames will dance in Fenrir's eyes and leap from his nostrils. With each breath, meanwhile, Jormungand will spew venom; all the earth and the sky will be splashed and stained with his poison. 

The world will be in uproar, the air quaking with booms and blares and their echoes. Then the sons of Muspell will advance from the south and tear apart the sky itself as they, too, close in on Vigrid. Surt will lead them, his sword blazing like the sun itself as they, too, close in on Vigrid. And as they cross the Bifrost, the rainbow bridge will crack and break behind them. So all the giants and all the inmates of Hel, and Fenrir and Jormungand, and Surt and the blazing sons of Muspell will gather on Vigrid; they will all but fill that plain that stretches one hundred and twenty leagues in every direction.

The gods, meanwhile, will not be idle. Heimdall will leave his hall, Himinbjorg, and raise the great horn Gjall to his mouth. He will sound such a blast that it will be heard throughout the nine worlds. All the gods will wake at once and meet in council. Then Odin will mount Sleipnir and gallop to Mimir's spring and take advice from Mimir there. 

Yggdrasill itself will moan, the ash that always was and waves over all that is. Its leaves will tremble, its limbs shiver and shake even as two humans take refuge deep within it. Everything in heaven and in earth and Hel will quiver.

Then all the Aesir and all the Einherjar in Valhalla will arm themselves. They will don their helmets and their coats of mail, and grasp their swords and spears and shields. Eight hundred fighting men will forge through each of the hall's five hundred and forty doors. That vast host will march towards Vigrid and Odin will ride at their head, wearing a golden helmet and a shining corslet, brandishing Gungnir.

Odin will make straight for the wolf Fenrir; and Thor, right beside him, will be unable to help because Jormungand will at once attack him. Freyr will fight the fire against giant Surt. And when Surt whirls his flaming blade, Freyr will rue the day that he gave his own good sword to his servant Skirnir. It will be a long struggle, though, before Freyr succumbs. The hound Garm from Gnipahellir will leap at the throat of one-handed Tyr and they will kill one another. The age-old enemies Loki and Heimdall will meet once more and each will be the cause of the other's death. 

Thor, Son of Earth, and gaping Jormungand have met before too; they are well matched. At Vigrid the god will kill the serpent but he will only be able to stagger back nine steps before he falls dead himself, poisoned by the venom Jormungand spews over him.

Odin and Fenrir were the first to engage and their fight will be fearsome. In the end, though, the wolf will seize Allfather between his jaws and swallow him. That will be the death of Odin.

At once his son Vidar will stride forward and press one foot on Fenrir's bottom jaw -- and the shoe he will wear then has been a long time in the making; it consists of all the strips and bits of leather pared off the heels and toes of new shoes since time began, all the leftovers thrown away as gifts for the god. Then Vidar will take hold of Fenrir's other jaw and tear the wolf apart, so avenging his father.

Then Surt will fling fire in every direction. Asgard and Midgard and Jotunheim and Niflheim will become furnaces -- places of raging flame, swirling smoke, ashes, only ashes. The nine worlds will burn and the gods will die. The Einherjar will die, men and women and children in Midgard will die, elves and dwarfs will die, birds and animals will die. The sun will be dark and there will be no more stars in the sky. The earth will sink into the sea.

The earth will rise again out of the water, fair and green. The eagle will fly over cataracts, swoop into the thunder and catch fish under crags. Corn will ripen in fields that were never sown.

Vidar and Vali will still be alive; they will survive the fire and the flood and make their way back to Idavoll, the shining plain where palaces once stood. Modi and Magni, sons of Thor, will join them there, and they will inherit their father's hammer, Mjollnir. And Balder and Hod will come back from the world of the dead; it will not be long before they, too, tread the new green grass on Idavoll. Honir will be there as well, and he will hold the wand and foretell what is to come. The sons of Vili and Ve will make up the new number, the gods in heaven, home of the winds.

They will sit down in the sunlight and begin to talk. Turn by turn, they will call up such memories, memories such as are known to them alone. They will talk over many things that happened in the past, and the evil of Jormungand and the wolf Fenrir. And then, amongst the waving grass, they will find golden chessboards, treasures owned once by the Aesir, and gave at them in wonder. 

Many courts will rise once more, some good, some evil. The best place of all will be Gimli in heaven, a building fairer than the sun, roofed with gold. That is where the rulers will live, at peace with themselves and each other. Then there will be Brimir on Okolnir, where the ground is always warm underfoot; there will always be plenty of good drink there for those who have a taste for it. And there will be Sindri, a fine hall that stands in the dark mountains of Nidafjoll, made wholly of red gold. Good men will live in these places.

But there will be another hall on Nastrond, the shore of corpses. That place in the underworld will be as vile as it is vast; all its doors will face north. Its walls and roof will be made of wattled snakes, their heads facing inward, blowing so much poison that it runs in rivers through the hall. Oath breakers and murderers and philanderers will wade through those rivers. Nidhogg, too, will outlive the fire and the flood and under Yggdrasill he will suck blood from the bodies of the dead.

The two humans who hid themselves deep within Yggdrasill -- some say Hoddmimir's Wood -- will be called Lif and Lifthrasir. Surt's fire will not scorch them; it will not even touch them, and their food will be the morning dew. Through the branches, through the leaves, they will see light come back, for before the sun is caught and eaten by the wolf Skoll, she will give birth to a daughter no less fair than herself, who will follow the same sky-path and light the world.

Lif and Lifthrasir will have children. Their children will bear children. There will be life and new life, life everywhere on earth. That was the end; and this is the beginning.

(ii) THE DEATH OF KING ARTHUR from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur (1485):

"Then the king gat his spear in both his hands, and ran toward Sir Mordred, crying: Traitor, now is thy death-day come. And when Sir Mordred heard Sir Arthur, he ran until him with his sword drawn in his hand. And there King Arthur smote Sir Mordred under the shield, with a foin of his spear, throughout the body, more than a fathom. And when Sir Mordred felt that he had his death wound he thrust himself with the might that he had up to the bur of King Arthur’s spear. And right so he smote his father Arthur, with his sword holden in both his hands, on the side of the head, that the sword pierced the helmet and the brain-pan, and therewithal Sir Mordred fell stark dead to the earth; and the noble Arthur fell in a swoon to the earth, and there he swooned ofttimes. And Sir Lucan the Butler and Sir Bedivere ofttimes heaved him up. And so weakly they led him betwixt them both, to a little chapel not far from the seaside."

For more Arthur (much more: 4346 lines more) here is Arthur Is Your Enemy Forever, my translation of the fourteenth-century Middle English Alliterative Morte Arthure, available at the following address: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6u4ciCfddnzN3BPU0pjVjhQZEU/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-MPPPTiAJ5iOArHvY-e4WpA

(iii) THE MUTUAL KILL trope as described at the great TV Tropes site:

"Two characters commit fatal damage against each other in the same confrontation.

Particularly heart-tugging when it appears the hero has won, it's over. . . and then they slowly drop to their knees, blood trickling from the side of their mouth." 

Much, much more here.

(iv) BEOWULF VS. KING ARTHUR as debated on a Naruto forum, of all places. 

Some highlights:

"Arthur wins due to excalibur haxx."

"Arthur got manhandled and thrown down from his horse by Sir Bors, Lancelot's cousins.Beowulf would take the sword out of Arthur's hand and proceed with beatdown."

"Beowulf defeated a dragon while being old."

"Beowulf is far too much of a pimp for king Authur."

"Depends, does Beowulf have clothes on? This is very important."

"[Beowulf defeated a dragon while being old] With help and he died, while doing so. I would still root for him due to being physically more impressive ripping Grendel's arm off, wrestling his mother, hitting the dragon so hard his magic sword breaks."

"Beowulf has massive stamina. He swam a race in the sea for like a week, and killed multiple sea monsters on his own, in the water, during bad weather. Way too badass."

"Beowulf is pre-christian. Arthur is Christian. Though Geoffery of Monmouth he was very bloodthirsty. In early Malory's work, Arthur was slaughtering hundreds till the blood went up to his knee while he was sitting on his horse. Merlin had to literally come down and say, "Thou hast never done." translation: Haven't you killed enough This was Pre-Retcon Arthur when he got Excalibur from the stone instead of the Lady of the Lake. Pre-Retcon King Arthur would be a better match than post-retcon moron imbecile cuckold."

"I don't see why is Arthur portrayed as an honest man in the media. His most known enemy, Mordred, is also his illegitimate son in one of his portrayals."

"Mordred is not just Arthur's son. He is Arthur's Nephew/Son. Morgause was his sister hence Mordred was both nephew and son."

"Beowulf rips his arm off like he did with Grendel. Then beats him with it."

"Beowulf had the strength of 30 men. Galahad the greatest of knights had the strength of 10. But then again Galahad was known for slaying dragons, while Beowulf only tied. It would be a good fight."

"I wouldn't powerscale from dragons, they can be pretty inconsistent. Look at Fafner(ok a dwarf transformed by Odin) from the Sigurdlegend and than compare him to dragons in some other myth that just get fodderized."

                                                                         VS 

(IV) Racists Will Ruin Beowulf if We Let Them (Let's Not Let Them)  

The Mighty Thor, tragically co-opted by Nazis

In an article titled "Beowulf: Prince of the Geats, Nazis, and Odinists," Richard Scott Nokes tells us of the viciously racist on-line attacks leveled against a low-budget film adaptation that depicts Beowulf as the son of an African explorer. Nokes argues that this is regrettably not the first time the poem has been taken up by racists and misused in support of their abhorrent views: 

"Those of us who deal with Beowulf in the relatively sanitized conditions of academia might do well to remember that the poem has an ardent readership among those who find in it support for ideologies most scholars would find ridiculous or repugnant. Their response to the poem must be acknowledged as part of the 'cultural heritage' of Beowulf; their arguments, however offensive, can reveal some of the ways that popular audiences read medieval texts."

Nokes also writes:

"Beowulf is by no means unique in medieval literature in serving the interests of nationalism. In Inventing the Middle Ages, Norman E. Cantor traced the deep interest in and profound impact of the Nazis upon medieval studies, particularly in the ways in which they promoted the use of history, linguistics, and folklore as tools for shaping a myth of pan-Germanic identity. Though they used medieval studies for their own purposes, the Nazis were part of a long tradition of underwriting national identity through medieval literature [. . .].  Scholars and teachers of Beowulf tend either to ignore or downplay this aspect of Beowulf’s critical reception, or they may work actively to challenge such readings through more sophisticated analysis of the poem’s origins and history. Unlike many other medieval works, however, Beowulf has a life beyond the academic world and a place in popular culture, where the nuances of scholarly caution and restraint have little effect."

J. P. Zmirak (whose political views, broadly, I do not wish to endorse or promote) tells us:

"As a teenager, J.R.R. Tolkien neglected his Latin and Greek to study Norse. And Finnish. And Anglo-Saxon. Tolkien thrilled at studying medieval eddas and sagas, and mastering dusty grammars to decode half-forgotten tales. At Oxford, he made himself the university’s expert in Nordic literature, and won a prestigious chair which he’d hold for the next four decades.

What attracted Tolkien to these tales was their unique, heroic ethos. Written down by recently Christianized barbarians, stories such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight intertwined the old, pagan values of individualism, courage and promise-keeping with Biblical themes of self-sacrifice, defense of the helpless, and piety towards the One God. Thus were the warriors of the North civilized, and urged to restrain their swords by the codes of Hebrew prophets and Christian theologians. The grandsons of the Viking raiders began to bind themselves to the Ten Commandments and Augustine’s 'just war' theory."

Zmirak continues:

"It is ironic that even as Tolkien wrote to immortalize the great synthesis of Northern heroism with Biblical morality, modern barbarians labored to reverse it. The proto-Nazi 'Völkisch' movement, born in the blood and humiliation of Napoleon’s conquest of Germany, had for a century agitated against Judaeo-Christian 'softness,' in favor of pagan ruthlessness. (Peter Viereck’s Metapolitics [Capricorn, 1961] traces this re-barbarization of German thought in the 19th century.) Völkisch boosters of Nordic literature ignored its heroic individualism in favor of its residues of pagan tribalism, 'deconstructing' the Judaeo-Christian elements as 'inauthentic' overlays on the 'pure' originals. The artistic pinnacle of this project appeared in Wagner’s grand operas, based on 'pure' pagan sources. Its political apogee came with the victory of a Völkish-socialist demagogue in Germany.

"While Adolf Hitler was careful at first to conceal his neo-pagan agenda, his followers were not: Heinrich Himmler created the SS explicitly as a pagan parody of the Society of Jesus, conducted extensive research attempting to rehabilitate medieval witchcraft, and held torchlit liturgies to Odin and other Norse gods. Hitler’s ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, issued tracts denouncing the Gospels. Josef Goebbels aspired to wipe out 'after the last Jew, the last priest.' Hitler’s ally, General Erich Ludendorff, called for the abolition of Christianity in Germany. By 1936, Hitler was suppressing Catholic trade unions, movements and schools, and forming amongst Protestants a militaristic 'German Christian' church that would sanction the regime’s savage anti-Semitism."

In this context, here is J. R. R. Tolkien's response to an inquiry from a German publisher (who wished to translate The Hobbit) as to whether or not the great Anglo-Saxon scholar was "Aryan," given his Germanic name: 

"I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is, Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people."

Here is a letter Tolkien, a veteran of the First World War, wrote to his son Michael in 1941: 

"Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge — which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light."


Finally, from Twitter:



















(V) BBC Radio 4 In Our Time: Beowulf

Illustration by Charles Keeping, from Rosemary Sutcliff's Beowulf: Dragonslayer (1961)

The BBC Radio 4 Series In Our Time has a remarkable episode on Beowulf. This 43-minute broadcast touches on (and indeed expands upon) many of the key points relevant to our study of the text. Here is a description from the BBC: 

"Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the epic poem Beowulf, one of the masterpieces of Anglo-Saxon literature. Composed in the early Middle Ages by an anonymous poet, the work tells the story of a Scandinavian hero whose feats include battles with the fearsome monster Grendel and a fire-breathing dragon. It survives in a single manuscript dating from around 1000 AD, and was almost completely unknown until its rediscovery in the nineteenth century. Since then it has been translated into modern English by writers including William Morris, JRR Tolkien and Seamus Heaney, and inspired poems, novels and films.

With:

Laura Ashe

Associate Professor in English at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcester College

Clare Lees

Professor of Medieval English Literature and History of the Language at King's College London

Andy Orchard

Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford

Producer: Thomas Morris."