Jottings on Beowulf and fragmentation of the body/nation

As I've not posted anything in a while, here's a note-form version of something I'm working on at the moment. This is the seminar paper I delivered a couple of weeks ago, and which I am currently working on expanding into a full-length paper (c. 20-22 pages, if I can keep it down to that length!). I'm keeping it in note form, because I am, sadly, beginning to get a little chary of copyright on the internet.

Not that I expect to publish this. I am not going to make my first major analytical publication on Beowulf.

A - General outline: Fragmentation or unity of the body as reflective of (and a site for exploring anxieties about) that of the nation.

- Lerer calls beowulf ‘a poem of the body’ (723). [1] Poem’s focus on the physical deeds and prowess of the warrior body often excludes the use of ornamentation, weaponry or armour. Every conflict with a monstrous opponent results in not merely the death of one party but in the fragmentation or destruction of their body: Grendel rends and eats his victims, Beowulf relies on muscle rather than weapon and tears off Grendel’s arm, Grendel’s mother tears off Aeschere’s head and discards it far from civilisation, Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother and cuts off Grendel’s head then displays head and arm as tokens of his victory. He cleaves the dragon in two; the sea monsters try to make a feast of him, but he scatters their bodies on the shore. All of the most dramatic moments of conflict with an outside force, Lerer concludes, draw attention to the maintenance of the intact body of the victor over the broken body of the defeated.

B - ‘Nation’ (for this purpose) as defined not by maps or land but as the people and culture.

- Spatial imaginaire, but not the physical boundaries on which Michelet[2] focusses. Not particularly useful for Beowulf (partly for reasons Hiatt points out, but also simply because the rest of the land is not very interesting, with the partial exception of its coast-boundaries).

- Instead, nation is centred on / symbolised by the vivid image of the hall and the bodies within - as Michelet does point out, it is the hall in each instance (whether human or monstrous) that is under the threat of invasion. The invasions into the hall (by Grendel or the dragon) lead to a breakdown in unified social function (Michelet 79).

- Within the hall, imagery is centred on the body and the cultural actions of the body, esp. re. gift-giving (and the throne, the centred position of the leader, is a particular point of threat from both Grendel and dragon). Proximity to the central figure as crucial element in ordered and functioning social space - cf movements of queen within hall bearing cup to guests, etc. (May not be spatial centre if one were to draw a floor plan, but is imagined/conceptual centre.) The absent leader provides space for his replacement with Grendel (Hroðgar leaves the hall in the night, Michelet 92). (note that the den of dragon and Grendel provide a negative image of this)

- Image of nation therefore as the body (esp. that of the leader) within the communal space.

- But centre and boundaries are defined against each other: centre implies boundaries, boundaries necessitate centre (Michelet 10, then 24). Anxiety about definition and establishment of secure boundaries, the point where in becomes out, us becomes them, at which they touch by necessity, the point farthest from centre. How do we define the boundaries? ... monsters!

C - Jeffrey Cohen’s work on the idea of the giant in Anglo-Saxon literature/mythology[3] as a starting point from which to examine the nature of the threat presented by Grendel and his mother. [Firstly: giant tears and eats, is a threat to the body, but also, in its violent exaggerated human form, a threat to unified society] Especially:

- The giant as inhabiter / transgressor of boundaries, of both society and human bodies. Cohen 1-2 re. giant as psychological and cultural delineator of boundaries - extend this to spatially, to the temporal boundaries of beginnings and endings, and also culturally taboo-boundaries like cannibalism: in each instance the physical body and its physical effects are important.

- The giant as originary or causative, particularly in their body, inhabiting some distant past on which the present is built. The broken body of the giant provides origins (cf Gog/Magog, who are thrown into the sea as the dragon is) (p. 9 for Ymir). The giants’ violent acts and boundary-breaking, the damage they visit on bodies and landscape (17), form the origin both of cultures (imaged in the body) and cultural space.

D - Fragmentation of that body

- By consumption or mutilation.

- Maintenance of the intact body = success, vs. consequences of defeat = dismembered body (Grendel, Aescere’s head, etc) - see Seth Lerer. What is at stake in the conflicts, then, is unity vs fragmentation, as conceived in terms of the body.

- He does not point out, however, that each conflict (even Beowulf vs. sea monsters) has one party transgressing the boundaries of the other’s space - one enters to the other and the result is a dismembered body within a violated space. The space itself often shows signs of this violence - the blood bubbling to the surface of the mere is an irrefutable sign of the violence within, and is read as such, although Hrodhgar’s men misread the results of that violence. Crossing the boundary is a defining moment that, like the passage of the Rubicon, commits the intruder to a battle for control of the integrity of the space and the body. Attention is thus drawn to the boundaries and the moment of breaking them.

- Therefore the body (society or the body of its leader) defined / celebrated by challenge to it.

E. Grendel and his mother inhabit and transgress the boundaries of body and nation and thus help to delineate them (Michelet 94-5). The image of the broken body of the giant + intact body of hero (alive or celebrated in his tomb) provides origin, projected back into the past?

- Cohen: fragments of Grendel’s body are elevated as symbols of “a public validation of the control and acceptance of structured society whose antitheses Grendel represents” (24). So the fragments are not only a result of victory, but a sign of it, signalling triumph over the other and a society (and heroic body) whose unity has been affirmed.

- Michelet points out that “The demon’s footsteps provide the spatial transition between the two places” (Heorot and the mere) (80) & treading the grounds defines the limited (107-08). He does not point out that Grendel’s footprints are not merely impressions in the dirt, but marked in blood, signs of the damage to his body and his consequent defeat. Cannot break the boundaries of his space until his body is broken - and once he does, Beowulf breaks his body again.

- Walkers in the wasteland: with their feet, especially the bloody footprints, they mark out and define the boundaries of civilisation.

In expanding this to a proper paper, I'd like to explore further the idea of temporal boundaries - the beginning and ending of nations / things / memory / knowledge. Beowulf and Wiglaf are the last of their people, Beowulf says, and this is signalled by the breakdown of society after Beowulf dies, as if his death and the sundering of social ties shown by the earls’ failure to help him signal the actual end of the Geats as a whole. Beowulf’s body, however, remains: he says that his cairn is to be a signal to later generations, or later ages, far into the future. But there is very little human history, only a few generations back, as if the past can only be accessed by the monsters.

Drawing again on Cohen: the hilt of the sword that Beowulf takes from the mere depicts the giants before the flood, which is where they’re usually found, in some legendary but foundational long-ago. They build, yes, and old stone ruins are often referred to semi-metaphorically in Anglo-Saxon poetry as ‘the work of giants’ (Cohen 11), but other landscape features are also attributed to them. They and their brute strength are used to explain the presence of mountains, lakes, ancient cities, broken rocks, changes wrought long ago before the human nation arrived. In Germanic cosmogonies they predate the material universe, which is fashioned from the corpse of one of them (7).

So giants are originary or causative, particularly in their body, inhabiting some distant past on which the present is built. The broken body of the giant provides origins - Gogmagog is dashed into a thousand pieces and thrown into the sea so that Brutus can found Britain. The dragon, incidentally, meets the same fate - but I don't think we can equate the dragon and the Grendelkin so easily. He seems to me to be a very different creature, especially in terms of how he relates to the beginnings and endings of human civilisations.

Grendel’s fragments possibly provide, for the poem’s audience, a similar imaginative origin in the defeat of the previous inhabitants of the land. The giants’ violent acts and boundary-breaking, the damage they visit on bodies and landscape (Cohen 17), form the origin both of cultures (imaged in the body) and cultural space, but they also demarcate a boundary in time that cannot be crossed by human knowledge: once again, they demarcate the unknowable.



[1] Seth Lerer, ‘Grendel’s Glove’, English Literary History 61 (1994): 721-751. (The glove Grendel wears – ie, the monster as symbolised by his hand and his mouth, Beowulf’s removal of these; Norse traditions of giants’ gloves; Beowulf is ‘a poem of the body’, and victory results in destruction of the body of the defeated.)
[2] Fabienne Michelet, Creation, Migration and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. (Anglo-Saxon conceptions of space; Grendel’s mere and the dragon’s den compared and contrasted to Heorot, Beowulf’s hall, Beowulf’s cairn; demarcations of land boundaries in Beowulf.)
[3] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Old English Literature and the Work of Giants’, Comitatus 24 (1993): 1-32. (Figure of the giant in Old English literature; debts to Germanic and Latin/Old Testament traditions; psychological function of the monster; figure of Grendel within this tradition.)

A brief thought on forms of memory.

If we can say that there is a time (say, the first two centuries after the Norman Conquest in England) when collective and individual memory shifted from being recorded aurally to written record. And that this involved not just a change of habits and accepted forms (though those are not to be underestimated in their effects on society) but a fundamental change in the way individual memories were shaped from childhood to be used, and therefore the capacity of each individual (generally speaking) to record and retain certain types of information. Then what are we to make of the current shift from the written to the digital, to the tendency to carry most information around on an external hard drive? More to the point, what will historians and sociologists make of it in a century or two? If, you know, we still exist by then.

Also, the change to written record had an obvious and fundamental effect on what information and how much of it is likely to survive to the next generations. The methods and platforms with which electronic information can be accessed are far more susceptible to change. Floppy disc, USB, bluetooth? Will we be able to access daily and personal records in ten years, or only the official ones that have been perforce updated as time went by? And how will this affect our perception of the past? Particularly as digitised information may prove to be more or less democratic than the book - potentially more generally and easily accessible, but literacy becomes even more essential and more complex, and more monolingual at that. The book is more lasting than the spoken word, but will the row of 0s and 1s be more or less enduring, and access to it more or less restricted by social parameters?

Edward the First, rex Edwardus quartus

It's interesting, while reading Adam Murimuth's account of 1307-09, to see him struggling with the necessity of repeatedly comparing two men, both kings of England named Edward. Though the convention of numbering popes was clearly well-established (he refers to them readily as Bonifacius octavus, Clemente quintus, etc), he doesn't apply this apparently obvious solution to the Edwards. Even referring to Henry III, Edward I's father, he calls him simply "re[x] Henric[us]"- perhaps because there had been a generation neatly separating each Henry from the next, reducing the possibility of confusion. Context also helps Murimuth there: King Edward is "fili[us] regis Henrici", therefore the Henry in question is the one who fathered King Edward, the one in most recent memory. It's possible that in other places, where necessary, the Henrys are distinguished by number at this period.

But the odd "primus" or "secundus" would certainly come in handy for Murimuth when he has to discuss two Edwards at once; so why not use them? Well, the obvious answer is that the convention didn't exist, as it applied to English kings. Even if it was being used for the Henrys (and I'll have to look into that, because I don't know), that's only one precedent, and one point does not make a line. Since the Conquest, there had only been one Matilda, one Geoffrey, one Richard, one John; though there had been two Williams, they were well in the past, and easily distinguished by descriptors: "the Conqueror" and "Rufus".

So someone writing about Edward I and needing to distinguish him from other Edwards (which was, of course, not a necessity at all until his son became king) could have done so by a descriptor - say, Edward Longshanks - or by a number - Edward the First. The problem was, of course, that he wasn't. His namesake, Edward the Confessor, died months before William became the Conqueror; Edward the Martyr was easily confused with him, having similar mutable stories of sainthood and invasion hovering around his mild-mannered, ineffective and above all brief reign in the late 900s; and Edward the Elder had reigned 899-924.

Marc Morris has this to say on the subject, in the preface to his recent biography of Edward I:

At the time of Edward's accession in 1272, even his most recent royal namesake, Edward the Confessor, had been dead for more than two centuries. Everyone in the thirteenth century remembered the Confessor, for by then he had become the patron saint of the English royal family. But when it came to the other King Edwards, people were altogether more hazy. Towards the end of Edward I's reign, for example, some of his subjects felt compelled to chronicle his remarkable deeds, and decided that they needed to distinguish the king by giving him a number. Unfortunately they miscounted, including in their tallies the Confessor ... and also the celebrated tenth-century king, Edward the Elder (899-924), but overlooking entirely the short and unmemorable reign of Edward the Martyr (975-78). For this reason, at least two thirteenth-century writers referred to Edward I as 'Edward the Third'. Had they counted correctly, they would have called him 'Edward the Fourth'.
Fortunately for us, such early and inaccurate numbering schemes did not endure. In general, when his contemporaries wished to distinguish Edward, they called him 'King Edward, son of King Henry'. The need for numbers arose only after his death, when he was succeeded by a son, and then a grandson, both of whom bore his illustrious name. By the middle of the fourteenth century, Englishmen found themselves having to differentiate between three consecutive, identially named kings, and so unsurprisingly they started referring to them as the First, Second and Third. Anyone troubled by the recollection that once upon a time there had been other kings called Edward could salve their historical conscience by adding 'since the Conquest'. Thus the Norman Conquest became the official starting point for the numbering of English kings. [1]

Murimuth should have read that passage, because he uses neither of those methods to distinguish Edward I. Writing some decades later, he must not have noticed - or perhaps chose to disregard - Edward's contemporary chroniclers who did give him a number, and apparently was not writing late enough for the presence of a third Edward to have solidified the need for ordinals. And so far, he's only referred to Edward I as "son of King Henry" once: not to distinguish him from any other Edwards, but simply on his first introduction, on page 2.

So, how does Murimuth refer to Edward I, after the accession of Edward II? He can't call him "rex Angliae" anymore, or "rex Edwardus". He can't call his son "Edwardus de Carnervan" now that he's king; nor can he call the man who was king "Edwardus de Wyntonia". The solution is to refer to him as Edward II's father, handing the title from one to the other in a sentence in which each is referred to by their familial relationship to the other:

Cui successit Edwardus de Carnervan, filius suus, statim post mortem ejusdem patris sui. (11)

The odd thing about the way Murimuth uses "pater suus", however, is that as Edward II takes over the signifiers "rex Angliae" and "rex Edwardus", "pater suus" becomes so closely associated with Edward I that Murimuth will use it in sentences where Edward II, the target of "suus", never actually appears, where grammatically "suus" could refer to Archbishop Robert, to Boniface VIII, to William Langton, Piers Gaveston, Robert Bruce or any of several people named in the course of a convoluted paragraph. And yet, even in the absence of his son, it retains its meaning: Edward I.

It never becomes quite dissociated from its technical meaning, not quite enough to be called a proper noun in its own right; but it does edge in that direction. And at the same time, the meaning of "Edward I" moves - naturally enough - from the actual king and his historical actions to an exemplar of fatherly almost-perfection against which to judge the actions of "filii sui".

Perhaps I'm reading too much if I see hints of "Pater Noster" there; but that is the main traditional use of "pater" as a proper noun, and makes even common-noun "pater" a very laden word; especially, surely, when used of a king.



[1] Morris, Marc. A great and terrible king: Edward I and the forging of Britain. London: Hutchinson, 2008. xv-xvi.

Three new facts for today

Well, now that everything is handed in, I have leisure to concentrate on my own projects, and simultaneously to be less concentrated - ie, read up on all those bits and pieces of English history that I'm not too familiar with. Such as... er... everything before 1066.

So, among other things, I'm reading Christopher Brook's From Alfred to Henry III, 871-1272 (Edinburgh: T. Nelson, 1961). It's latently patriotic in style, and mildly amusing in its assumptions about our views of English history - even I know that his attitude towards Vikings are out of date, and he's far too inclined to speculate on motives and call it fact - but informative enough, and covers the span broadly enough that it gives a sense of the whole 'story', which will let me jump in at any point with more detailed studies and not feel lost.

Here are the three interesting facts I've learned this morning, over coffee and Brook:

Cnut, the first Danish king of England, married the young widow of his conquered English predecessor. So, Havelok is actually utilising bits of history to weave its non-confrontational, non-invasive story of a Danish king of England. His own entry into England is not at the head of an army, but as a harmless child, and he is raised in England and therefore presumably has some legitimacy as an inhabitant. The waves of Danish invasion/settlement are replaced by an innocuous fisherman and his family fleeing from completely unwarranted oppression to help save the rightful king of Denmark, and they completely fail to slaughter anyone or even take anyone's land - instead, they quietly build their own little village on the coast and call it Grimsby. And the innocent, fair young woman with a claim to the throne of England is incorporated into the story's justification of his rule as well - only this is the new improved version, and instead of being a widow she is the rightful heir herself, wrongfully dispossessed, and therefore a) there is no other possible male heir who could more legitimately rule England than Havelok, b) England is being OPPRESSED by an EVIL EARL and must be saved and c) Havelok is honour-bound to help his wife to her rightful inheritance, and once there - well, honey, you don't want to have to actually manage the day-to-day RULING, do you? Let me take that off your hands for you.

"William had give [his invasion of England] a coat of respectability by winning papal support. He had claimed at Rome that England was rightly his, that Harold was a perjurer and usurper.... The idea was gaining ground in papal circles that even apparently aggressive wars, if fought in a just and holy cause, could be blessed...." (87) So the Norman invasion was, in a way, a forerunner of the Crusades? It seems odd to think of a Crusade against England, and naturally there would have been enough crucial differences in motivation, propaganda and the complicity of the army to not justify calling it one. But it does sound, from this description, rather like this and possibly other similar papally sanctioned campaigns laid the grounds for the Crusading mentality. I'm going to have to study the Crusades more closely too, aren't I?

"Like all English kings of the twelfth century, [Henry I] was a feudal king in a feudal age." (163) This, of course, is the most astonishing fact of all. Though it is closely followed by the assertion that William I "had nothing of chivalry in the modern sense" (155). I am deeply shocked. This implies that he had only eleventh-century chivalric ideas. How barbaric of him.