Abstract
While Beowulf lies awake at night in Heorot waiting for Grendel’s arrival, he is described as being on eotonweard, a word that this chapter suggests is perhaps best translated as “cannibal-watch.” Eoten is a word that resonates throughout the poem with a complex of meanings: at various points in the poem it seems to designate giants, cannibals, and humans. With this multiple valence it centers the relationship between Beowulf’s cannibal narrative and its political narrative, insisting that they are two aspects of a single vision. I suggest in this chapter that the reader, too, is asked to watch for cannibals not only in Beowulf, but throughout the Beowulf-manuscript as well, so that the figure of the cannibal becomes a key to reading the essentially political narrative of the poem and of the manuscript. Eotonweard is not just the work of the hero, it is also the work of reception, as watching for cannibals becomes an interpretive stance for decoding the manuscript.
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Notes
Michael Lapidge, “Beowulf and the Psychology of Terror,” in Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period: Studies in Honor of Jess B. Bessinger, Jr, ed. Helen Damico and John Leyerle (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1993), pp. 373–402.
See Kathryn Hume, “The Concept of the Hall in Old English Poetry,” Anglo-Saxon England 3 (1974): 63–74.
Seth Lerer, “Grendel’s Glof” English Literary History 61: 4 (1994): 723 [721-751]. Lerer’s focus on the body argues for the whole and the dismembered body in Beowulf as the site of poetic expression.
The standard edition of these first three is Three Old English Prose Texts in MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv. ed. S. Rypins (Oxford: EETS, 1924). For the Wonders of the East and The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle there is also the more recent Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-manuscript (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995) with translations. For fudith, the edition of Mark Griffith (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997).
There is disagreement among scholars as to whether Judith was originally intended to be part of the collection. The general arguments here are that, while fudith was clearly copied by Scribe B of the Beowulf-manuscript, and while it demonstrates certain thematic sympathies with the rest of the collection, 1) it is incomplete at the beginning, and the loss is difficult to explain if it was intended to have followed Beowulf in the collection; 2) the last folio of Beowulf shows signs of wear and tear, which imply it was at some point the last page of the book; 3) the scribe of Beowulf has relineated the last page of the folio in an attempt to fit the end of the poem on the page without having to start a new folio, an action that he surely would not have needed to undertake if he would need a new folio anyway to copy Judith. The poem’s inclusion in the codex as it has come down to posterity is accounted for, by those who do not believe it to have originally been a part of the compilation, by the fact that Scribe B of the manuscript also copied Judith. It has therefore seemed reasonable to many that an early modern antiquarian noticed this fact and “filed” Judith in the Beowulf-manuscript for that reason. Judith is also noted to be anomalous among the texts of the manuscript for not including monsters, and therefore sometimes excluded from consideration as part of the collection on thematic grounds. For a fuller discussion of this topic, see Kevin Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf-manuscript (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981)
Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies; and Kenneth Sisam, Studies in Old English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953). This study will treat Judith as if it were a planned part of the compilation, but the argument of the chapter would not be affected were this not the case.
Kenneth Sisam, “The Compilation of the Beowulf-manuscript,” in Studies in the History of Old English Literature, 96.
See too, on the tradition of monster-themed manuscripts, William E. Brynteson, “Beowulf, Monsters and Manuscripts,” Res Publica Litterarum 5.2 (1981): 41–57.
Nora Chadwick, “The Monsters and Beowulf,’” in The Anglo-Saxons: Studies In Some Aspects Of Their History And Culture Presented To Bruce Dickens, ed. Peter Clemoes (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1959), p. 199. A good deal of evidence from the manuscript itself suggests that the version of Beowulf that has come down to posterity was copied, as were the other texts in the manuscript. While most scholars agree that these texts were probably all brought together for the first time in the Beowulf-manuscript, there is no consensus on which of the texts might have previously shared an exemplar. For a summary of the scholarship see Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, pp. 2-5. For a radically different view, that Beowulf was composed for the manuscript, see Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf-man-uscript. The assumption of this study will be that whether from a single exemplar, five different sources, or any combination thereof, the planner of the compilation saw the thematic potential in the collection of these texts.
Catherine E. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 manuscript (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 17.
Jill Frederick, “ ‘His Ansyn Wæs Swylce Rosan Blostma’: A Reading of the Old English Life of Saint Christopher,” Proceedings of the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference 12-13 (1989): 137–148
George Herzfeld, ed., An Old English Martyrology (London: Pub. for the Early English Text Society by K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1900), pp. 66–69. Joyce Tally Lionarons sees a “general scholarly consensus” that the missing section of Christopher’s story in the Beowulf-manuscript identified the saint as a cynocephalus (“From Monster to Martyr: the Old English Legend of Saint Christopher,” in Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations, ed. Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 2000), p. 168 [167-182]). And Andy Orchard notes that elements of the version in the Beowulf-manuscript likewise suggest an assumption of Christopher as a cynocephalus: “he is described as ‘twelve fathoms tall’ (twelf fœðma lang) and ‘the worst of wild beasts’ (wyrresta wildeor)” (Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, p. 14).
Since the beginning to the Christopher text is lost, it is possible that another text, or texts, originally preceded it in the manuscript. Peter Lucas argues that Judith may originally have stood at the beginning of the manuscript. Peter J. Lucas, “The Place of Judith in the Beowulf-Manuscript,” Review of English Studies 40.164 (1990): 463–478.
John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races: In Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 23.
This, at least, is the most commonly accepted interpretation of the events. As Tolkien described it, “in less than ninety lines a full-length story is told in terms so allusive that it could have made immediate sense only to those already familiar with the sequences of events” (Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode, ed. Alan Bliss [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982]). This is the generally, although not universally, accepted understanding of the plot of the larger story that the episode in Beowulf refers to. Donald K. Fry, however, has argued that Hengest planned his revenge all along (“Finnsburh: A New Interpretation,” The Chaucer Review 9 [1974]: 1-14). The Fight at Finnsburg episode is especially interesting because a fragment of another version exists: “A single manuscript leaf containing a fragment from another Old English poem concerning the same event survived long enough for a transcript to be printed in 1705 (after which the leaf was lost).” Later editors have identified it by a number of names, including “The Finnesburg Fragment” (Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment, ed. C.L. Wrenn [London: Harrap, 1958], pp. 213-215), “The Battle of Finnesburh” (R.W. Chambers, Beowulf; An Introduction to the Study of the Poem With a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1921], pp. 212-215), and “The Battle of Finnsburg” (Klaeber, pp. 231-238). “The forty-eight lines that comprise the fragment are enough to show it is clearly an episode from a single poem” (Donoghue, Old English Literature, p. 36). Robinson notes that the Fragment highlights the extent to which Beowulf recasts the plot as Hildeburgh’s personal tragedy (“Beowulf and the Appositive Style” p. 26).
R.E. Kaske, “The Eotenas in Beowulf,” in Old English Poetry, ed. Robert P. Creed (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1967), p. 299 [421-431].
Jane A. Leake, The Geats of Beowulf: A Study in the Geographical Mythology of the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 105. In the opening section of the Historia Ecclesiastica, however, where Bede describes the tripartite division of the island of Britain among the three most important German tribes—the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes—the Old English redactor translates Bede’s “Jutes” with “Geata” (The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England, 1.15, J.A. Giles, [1859], p. 24; Leake, The Geats of Beowulf, p. 99). Leake argues, however, that the substitution of Geats for Jutes reflects not a Beowulf legend, but rather the translator’s own conflation of Geats and Goths.
Signe M. Carlson, “The Monsters in Beowulf. Creations of Literary Scholars,” Journal of American Folklore 80 (1967): 360 [357-364].
Brian McFadden, “The Social Context of Narrative Disruption in The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle,” Anglo-Saxon England 30 (2001): 91 [91-114].
David Chamberlain, “Judith: a fragmentary and political poem,” in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation for John C. McGalliard, ed. Lewis Nicholson and Dolores Warwick Frese (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), p. 158 [135-159]. Also Hugh Magennis notes, “The poem celebrates Judith’s unswerving resolution and determination against an external threat, a message whose currency would not be lost on a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon audience” (Hugh Magennis, “Contrasting Narrative Emphases in the Old English Poem Judith and ÆElfric’s paraphrase of the Book of Judith,” Neuphilologie Mitteilungen 96 [1995]: 62 [61-66]).
Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, “Inversion and Political Purpose in the Old English Judith,” English Studies 63.4 (1982): 289–293. See also Estes, “Feasting With Holofernes.”
Ælfric, “Treatise on the Old and New Testament,” ed. S.J. Crawford, The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, EETS os 160 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922) p. 48.
Neil Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. xx.
David Dumville, “Beowulf Come Lately: Some Notes on the Paleography of the Nowell Codex,” Archiv für das Studium der neurern Sprachen und Literaturen 225 (1988): 49–63.
See too, John Niles, “Locating Beowulf in Literary History,” Exemplaria 5.1 (1993): 79–109, for a discussion of the cultural situatedness of Beowulf in this Anglo-Scandinavian context.
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© 2007 Heather Blurton
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Blurton, H. (2007). Eotonweard: Watching for Cannibals in the Beowulf-Manuscript. In: Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11579-9_3
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