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Volume 49:

Beowulf (full text)

The Song of Roland (full text)

The Destruction of Da Dergas Hostel (full text)

The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs (full text)

While reading this volume of Epic and Saga, I found myself thinking how interesting it was that the Classics would essentially end -- the last two volumes are comprised of secondary material -- with some of its oldest works. But of course, these aren't anything like the oldest works in the Classics. Beowulf was written in the ninth or tenth century -- closer to the modern age than to the ancient. So why does it feel older than a work like the Aeneid, written perhaps a thousand years earlier?

In part, I'd guess, because the Aeneid came out of a literary culture, a culture that was modelled on its Greek predecessor, just as the Aeneid itself was consciously modelled after the Iliad and the Odyssey. If anything, Beowulf bears most resemblance to the Odyssey, which is in fact the oldest work in the Classics. Like the Homeric epics, Beowulf is of doubtful authorship and was likely compiled from oral traditions that long pre-dated it. Indeed, the world of Beowulf -- with its epic heroes, its bonds of clan and kin, its sea-faring adventure and its intervention from monsters and giants -- bears a striking resemblance to the world of Achilles and Odysseus. If one ignores the Anglo-Saxon muscularity of the prose, many passages might have come straight from Homer.

A warrior proud
asked of the heroes their home and kin.
Whence, now, bear ye burnished shields,
harness gray and helmets grim,
spears in multitude? Messenger, I,
Hrothgar's herald! Heroes so many
ne'er met I as strangers of mood so strong.
'Tis plain that for prowess, not plunged into exile
for high-hearted valor, Hrothgar ye seek!
Him the sturdy-in-war bespake with words,
proud earl of the Weders answer made,
hardy 'neath helmet:--Hygelac's, we,
fellows at board; I am Beowulf named.
I am seeking to say to the son of Healfdene
this mission of mine, to thy master-lord,
the doughty prince, if he deign at all
grace that we greet him, the good one, now.

Of course, there's another similarity between Beowulf and the Homeric epics. Just as the latter were the national poems of the ancient Greeks, Beowulf was (and remains) the national epic of the English people. While the Greeks form the intellectual foundation for the cultural history compiled within the Classics, the majority of the history itself is Anglo-American. (To be clear, this isn't a value judgment, but simple book-keeping: 26 of 51 volumes were originally written in English.) So it's fitting that the Classics should end here. And that this poem, which seems in so many ways primitive, should have been written centuries after the refinements of Plato or Aurelius says something at once frightening and wonderful about the cycles of human development. It warns us how much can be lost, but also reminds us of culture's incredible power to regenerate.


--CRB, December 27, 2007

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