Concerning Beowulf (And My Treatment Of It)

A word should probably be said here concerning the source material for my debut novel. On my publisher website I have posted a lengthy series of notes on the adaptation process that I had initially intended to include as an appendix to the book, but which was excised due to space constraints. I’ve had second thoughts since then about having left it out, as I feel it really does provide an insight into an important aspect of the novel: that of its development from the original poem. I offer here a somewhat condensed variant of that essay, along with further notes concerning the poem itself, drawn in part from my forthcoming publication, The Complete Study Guide To Beowulf.

For those as yet unaware (or don’t remember their Survey of English Lit 101 courses), Beowulf is a nearly 3200 line poem in Anglo-Saxon (Old English) alliterative meter, initially composed orally circa 800 A.D., and existing today in a single version committed to manuscript about the year 1000. That manuscript lay in near obscurity until retrieved from a fire in 1731, after which an ongoing series of scholarly analysis began, which continues in earnest to this day. Unfortunately, segments of the manuscript were irretrievably damaged in the fire, although modern infrared and x-ray technologies have been successfully employed to draw out much of what had hitherto been obscured by smoke and water damage. Beginning in 1815, the poem has seen continual publication in a wide variety of forms, from accurate translations to only vaguely identifiable adaptations.

But in order to evaluate the merits of any successive versions, one must first understand the original. The Beowulf poem, as has been said, was composed orally – that is, without the benefit of a written language in which to concretize it. The oral tradition had, by the time of Beowulf’s composition, lived on for many thousands of years among the Indo-European tribes whose descendants ended up upon the emerald isle of England, the land of the Angles, whose language was employed to tell this tale of their Scandinavian far-fathers. The Danes were then ascendant and dwelling on that Anglo-Saxon island in a region known as the Dane-Law. It is probable that the tale was composed to pay tribute to their success and honor them with stories drawn from the lore of their legendary past.

The story would have been told by a scop, the Nordic bard or minstrel whose function was the retention and dissemination of the cultural knowledge of the clan. Each night before the gathered people he would weave his words together from a common stock known as a “word hoard,” a set of poetic jigsaw puzzle pieces that might be drawn upon and rearranged time and again to tell anew evolving stories, each of which would in this way be new and yet familiar. Together these stories would be interwoven, and in time, as they were passed from one aged storyteller to a younger generation, grow in size and scope until at last some one among them learned to write.

Whether the single manuscript now in our possession was, in fact, the only such commitment of this tale to parchment (or even the first) cannot be known. It is very possible (and, in fact, probable, given certain scribal errors in the manuscript) that this version is a copy of another, now lost, earlier edition. Possibly it was being written down from memory, or even through dictation. All we know for certain is that we are very fortunate to have the single copy that we do. Very easily it could have disappeared in smoke, as so many others must have done.

But although Beowulf himself shows up in only this one manuscript, and nowhere else, many aspects of his story have survived in other places besides this.

For one, there exists the 14th century Icelandic tale known as Hrolf’s Saga Kraka, or The Saga of Hrolf Kraki, whose titular hero is the Hrothulf of Beowulf, albeit in a far more noble role. In this prose saga, penned some four hundred years after our manuscript was composed, the tales of several other notable Beowulf characters such as Yrsa and Eadgils are played out to greater extent than that of the earlier epic, and so we gain additional insight into the story. We also have an additional fragment telling further the episode of the Fight at Finnsburg, only a portion of which is told in the Beowulf poem - and fortunately not the same portion as the Finnsburg fragment! There are also numerous historical documents and legendary chronologies which give us additional (albeit scanty) evidence for the existence of the Danish and Swedish royalty, of Ingeld, and most notably Hygelac, the king of Geats. And although much of this is merely folklore passed along as ancient history, at least in the case of Hygelac it can be held as true.

For this, our prime source comes from the near-contemporary account of Gregory of Tours who, in the ninth book of his Historia Francorum, or The History of the Franks, describes in vivid detail a raid by a fleet of Northmen that sailed down the Rhine and ransacked the land, successfully at first, but who, in the end, were defeated as they approached the ocean by the armies of Theodebert, son of Theodoric, King of Austrasia. The bones of the fallen king are said in another (much later) document to have been buried on an island in the mouth of the river Rhine. Archaeological excavations bear out much of this as well, including three burial mounds in Old Upsala in Sweden, which are said to have belonged to Ongentheow, Othere, and Eadgils.

All of this and more I have taken into account in my own adaptation of the epic poem. My intention from the first was to bring the story of Beowulf in full and as accurately as possible into the modern medium of prose fiction, as it had never been done before. The Beowulf poem is, as with much of poetry in general, a dense work containing much in a very short space. In it are passing references to events well-known to the audience of the day, but now long-since forgotten, save in scattered documents, or only touched on in poetic fashion, but not developed as would be done in the longer prose format. So I took it on myself to piece all this together into a single, cohesive story, written for a modern audience.

It has been a lasting sorrow since my first reading of this first of English epics that so few now know it, and of those few who do, so many come to it through college courses bound to make them hate it as a burden they somehow must make their way through as a bank of fog on rocky shores, with no lighthouse in sight. That Beowulf should prove to be so, rather than the wondrous tale of bold adventure that it is, must surely be among the greatest losses of our age, certainly to those whose blood yet holds the heat that drove those ancient heroes on, but as equally to anyone who loves a well-told tale of epic heroism. It is my hope that I have restored this tale once more to its rightful place beside the fire on winter nights.

For more extensive notes on the development of my novelization, including numerous cruces I encounted in the process, go to www.fantasycastlebooks.com/saganotes01.html.