23 February 2009
Beowulf’s response to Unferth’s challenge continues in this fit. He describes his victory over the sea-monsters and how he eventually washed up on the Finnish shore. He then goes on to question Unferth’s bravery and we find out that Unferth has killed his brothers (the reasons and details are not given). He reiterates his intention to fight Grendel and we are told that Hrothgar is pleased with Beowulf’s response. At this point, Hrothgar’s queen, Wealhtheow enters the hall and ceremonially presents a cup of drink to each of warriors in turn, starting with Hrothgar and ending with Beowulf. She tells Beowulf that she is happy he has come and he again pledges to defeat Grendel. There is more drinking and celebration, until Beowulf announces that he must rest because of the long night ahead of him. The Danes depart the hall, leaving it to Beowulf and the Geats, but before this happens Hrothgar formally entrusts Beowulf with the guardianship of the hall—something he hasn’t done with any warrior since he became king.
There’s a lot going on this section of the poem. Beowulf’s description of the fight on the sea floor is pretty neat. Lines 560b-561 read: “iċ him þēnode dēoran sweorde, swā hit ġedēfe wæs.” (I served them with my dear sword, as it was fitting.” The verb þennan is an interesting choice. It’s often translated here as to serve (it can mean to prostrate oneself before a lord), but it is the root of our modern verb to thin. So one could say, “I thinned them out with my dear sword,” although this sense of the verb, to reduce in number, doesn’t appear to have been used in Old English, not appearing until the 15th century. Instead, the Old English sense was to stretch out, to reduce in depth. So perhaps a modern, idiomatic translation would be, “I stretched them out...” or “I laid them out with my dear sword.”
Another great line from the battle description is in lines 572a-573: “wyrd oft nereð unfæġne eorl, þonne his ellen dēah!” (Fate often saves the unfated warrior, when his courage avails.) It’s presented as a gnomic statement or a maxim, and it nicely encapsulates the conflict in the poem between determinism and free will. From the poet’s use of words like wyrd (the root of our modern weird), he clearly presents the view that the events of the poem are fated, but it seems that this fate is not entirely independent of human action.
Another conundrum is the presentation of Unferth. Beowulf accuses him of cowardice, but this doesn’t seem plausible. Unferth is sitting at the king’s feet and a counselor in such a position could not possibly have been a coward in a Germanic culture. Some of suggested he was a court jester of sorts, but again this doesn’t square with what he know of him, that he is a warrior of some repute. More likely Beowulf is simply engaging in some Anglo-Saxon trash talk.
In lines 587-589a, Beowulf tells us that Unferth has killed his brothers. He is a bana, a murderer, a slayer and will suffer damnation in hell for it. This, besides being a bit of anachronistic Christian thinking, complicates the “trash talking” explanation. This isn’t just trash talk, it’s a serious accusation. The lines, as they appear in the manuscript are:
þēah ðū þīnum brōðrum tō
banan wurde, hēafodmægum; þæs þū in[end of f.143r, beginning of f.143v.]
[helle] scealt werhðo drēogan
(Because you became slayer to your brothers, your near-relatives, you shall suffer condemnation in hell.)
First note that the poem isn’t written out in the familiar half-lines separated by a caesura, that’s a modern editorial innovation. Like all Anglo-Saxon poetry, Beowulf is written out on the page as if it were prose. Second, the word hel does not appear in the manuscript. As you can see from the upper right of the picture of folio 143v, the page is damaged and the word is missing (only the final e remains, and that is covered by the frame that preserves the page). Helle is inserted because both the Thorkelin A and B transcriptions have this word. Evidently, the damage to the manuscript was subsequent to those transcripts being prepared. Some have suggested that Thorkelin and his scribe made an error and it should be healle, instead. So it would read “in this hall,” as opposed to “in hell.” There are other places in the manuscript where Thorkelin and his scribe have made the same transcription error. This would lessen the impact of Beowulf’s accusation from being a mortal sin to an embarrassing incident from Unferth’s past. From an etymological perspective, this is a good example of the need to check original documents to see if the word actually appears. In the case of hel, we have many other citations of use from Anglo-Saxon literature, but one would be on shaky grounds to cite this as an example. (The OED3, for instance, does not include this line from Beowulf in its citations for hell.)
The passage about Wealhtheow and the cup ceremony is interesting, but mainly from an anthropological and cultural perspective—the role of women in a Germanic court. There is also a minor theme in the poem about kingly succession, and Wealtheow plays a role in this, and this passage gives some illumination into her role in Hrothgar’s court.
Coming next, Grendel’s approach…
