Thoughts on Beowulf

First of all, thank you so much to anyone who stopped in! I am very grateful to every and any reader. This being my first blog post ever (welcome to the 21st century, Michael), I'm sure I'll get a lot wrong on the format and such, so I beg forgiveness in advance from you old pros out there. That being said, I welcome suggestions and constructive criticism. Now, on to the main event.

Here's a fun way to start a blog on pop culture: a post on a 1000-year-old epic poem. Yeah, the one that high school English curricula make everyone read in the 12th grade (apologies to anyone who came looking for thoughts on Angelina Jolie's 2007 flirt with the uncanny valley, which, at the time of this writing, I have not seen). Well, a funny thing happened on my way through high school, and an even funnier thing happened during my four years of pursuing an undergraduate degree in English--long story short, nobody ever made me read Beowulf. I mean, I knew the basic plot (Anglo-Saxon hero slays three monsters), but I had never actually laid eyes on a single line of the poem. So, since I have bountiful amounts of downtime this summer, I decided to catch up with the rest of the Western world and make myself read Beowulf.

One reading of Beowulf doesn't make an expert, especially of me, who generally sticks to English literature penned after the Great Vowel Shift, so I am hardly prepared to write some great exegesis of the text anything, or even a fully fleshed out essay. Instead, I'll just give a few observations that struck me as I read the text. A lot of people much, much smarter than I am have already spilled gallons of ink on this epic, so I can't say that any of this contributes a lot to the world. Still, here it is.

Note: I read Seamus Heaney's translation, which seems to be the gold standard nowadays.

• I joked earlier that everyone who went through a traditional American high school has read Beowulf, but I was surprised to find out just how many people seem to have read it, or at least seem to benefit from its influence. The story of a kingdom plagued by a villain until a traveling hero arrives and kills said villain reads like a how-to not only for high fantasy but also for the modern myth of the Western gunslinger, a la Shane or the ubiquitous John Wayne hero. And then there are video games, particularly the fantasy ones, which adopt entire sections of the Beowulf story wholesale for their own conventions, right down to the Dark-Age, Northern-European setting and weaponry. The first three Ultima games, as close to founding texts for computer RPGs as there are, follow Beowulf's story almost verbatim, even down to its three-episode structure, having the hero save an afflicted kingdom by killing first the rampaging monster Mondain, then his angry female relation Minax, and finally the villain Exodus, who appears on the Ultima III box cover as a dragon-like demon not unlike Beowulf's final foe. On the other hand, Richard Garriott, Ultima's creator, based the games on his Dungeons & Dragons experiences, and D&D was in turn based on the fantasy writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, who is one of the preeminent Beowulf scholars of all time, so maybe the Beowulfian influences on video games shouldn't be so surprising to me.
   
• I realize the "stranger comes to town and saves everyone from a monster" story is pretty archetypal, right up there with the Joseph Campbell-defined hero's journey. That being said, I was legitimately taken aback by how single-minded the Beowulf poem is in telling only that type of story, as if it's trying to be the definitive take on such a story. Compared to the other epic poems I have read (which, admittedly isn't many, although I hit the highlights of Gilgamesh and the Homeric epics in college), Beowulf is remarkably straightforward and simple in its storytelling. Epics tend to rely on dense mythologies and sprawling casts of characters in their plots, which results in a variety of story modes encompassed by the epic. For example, you get love stories, political intrigue, battle tactics, and inter-familial conflict in Homer's Iliad, all derived from the the audience's understood knowledge of the Greek pantheon. A main plot exists (the siege of Troy), but a lot of the poem deals with subplots and intersections with other elements from Greek mythology, to the point where modern readers must acquaint themselves with the basics of Greek mythology to follow the narrative. Not so with Beowulf. Outside of a few references to Christianity and some pre-Christian pagan traditions, the story of Beowulf is free of cultural or mythological context complicated enough to baffle modern readers. It is completely focused on moving the story from point A (monster attacking) to point B (kingdom celebrates hero killing monster) with barely any attention to developing tangential characters or subplots. The poem progresses with a strong-armed efficiency that in a way reflects its one-dimensional hero, too focused on the job at hand to indulge in the weird storytelling cul-de-sacs that give some other epics their human depths, but a lot more fun moment-by-moment.

• For all my talk about how influential Beowulf's plot is on modern storytelling types, though, I can't shake how unsettling the end of the poem is and how starkly it contrasts the conclusions of stories influenced by Beowulf. That Beowulf dies from wounds received in his final battle is nothing out of the ordinary; the sacrificial hero is one of the oldest mythological tropes there is. What is unusual is how little Beowulf's sacrifice accomplishes. Sure, the dragon is dead, and the Geats are safe for the time being, and this is right where most versions of this story would tie a neat happily-ever-after bow and call it a day. But Beowulf instead intersperses the elegies at Beowulf's funeral with murmurs of the Geat people worrying that they will be overtaken by enemies now that their hero is dead. In short, the hero is dead, and the kingdom the hero died to protect will probably be conquered anyway. Going back to video games, Ultima is a brilliant series of games that wrestles with some tough questions, but even Richard Garriott lets you feel heroic when you beat the game. Not so in the world of Beowulf, where one danger follows another until eventually there won't be a hero to defeat it. Bleak, man.

That's about all I have to say for now. Feel free to discuss, correct, chastise, etc. in the comments. This first post got a lot longer than I thought it would be, so sorry about that if you stuck it out until the end. Anyway, my plan is to post on here at least once a week. Some posts will definitely be shorter; others may be longer, but hopefully not ramblingly so.

Until the next time.