And now for something completely different, I would like to introduce readers to Benjamin Bagby. Mr. Bagby is a medievalist, musician, composer, and performer. Among other things, he has memorized and performed the epic poem Beowulf. At the bottom of this post is a video of Bagby performing Beowulf at the 92nd Street Y in August 2020. Bagby’s performance begins at about 1:50 of the video.
I read Beowulf in translation in college and then in Old English in graduate school. I am rereading the poem in an online class on Old English poetry taught by Professor Peter Travis, from whom I took courses on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde many years ago. Professor Travis was a great teacher then and he remains one now in retirement. He attracts a class full of appreciative students in Dartmouth’s Osher program. This is the third one I have taken from him.
Beowulf is is one of the great surviving epics in the Western canon. Aristotle was the first to consider the genre of the epic. In his Poetics he assessed Homer the great epic poet. The Iliad and The Odyssey have come down to us as Homer’s handiwork. Harvard’s Albert Lord was the professor of Slavic and comparative literature whose scholarship helped uncover the tradition of oral poetry and oral composition out of which The Iliad and The Odyssey emerged.
Folk singer Tom Rush was Lord’s student at Harvard. Lord’s classic The Singer of Tales was published in 1960, while Tom was an undergraduate. When I interviewed Rush a few years back, he recalled that he had taken every course Lord taught. You can see why a guy who took folk music seriously, as Rush did, would have been drawn to Lord. “Lord explained how Homer managed a seemingly impossible feat,” Rush explained. “The poems weren’t memorized; they were composed.”
The literary critic M.H. Abrams defines what we mean by epic poetry in A Glossary of Literary Terms. He holds that the epic or heroic poem is a long narrative poem on a serious subject, related in an elevated style, and centered about an heroic figure on whose actions depend to some degree the fate of a nation or a people.
I would add that the heroic figure and his enemies illustrate the virtues and vices inherent in human nature — courage in the face of evil and resourcefulness against it, the implacability and wiles of evil, the fragility of the good, the persistence of mortality, and the urge to be remembered for good deeds in the face of evil.
We have a continuing need for epic heroism in the real world — the virtues that Harvey Mansfield has the “courage” to label “masculine,” even when exhibited by women, if I may resort to the forbidden binary.
Old English poetry is powerfully metrical and alliterative. Each line has four beats divided by a pause (caesura) with alliteration on both sides of the caesura.
This brings me to Beowulf, an epic poem in the oral tradition. Written down in the tenth century, it was probably first composed in the eighth century. The poem itself describes or depicts the poet — the scop, in Old English — performing at three places in the poem. The Old English scop performed with a medieval harp.
Beowulf proceeds with a number of formulaic phrases and motifs — three performances by a scop, three monsters, three battles, three monuments, no weddings and three funerals. One line that recurs three times is: “þæt wæs gōd cyning!” (“That was a good king!” or “He was a good king!”). The last time around it refers to Beowulf. He was a good king because he was a brave man who protected the people and had their welfare at heart.
Professor Travis first asked us to watch Bagby’s performance of the opening of the poem. I dug up the video below to show Bagby getting down to work. The last sentence of the opening passage reads: “lofdædum sceal / in mægþa gehwære man geþeon” (literally, per Howell Chickering: “In every tribe a man must prosper by deeds of praise”). This may be more than enough for you. The poem opens with “Hwaet!” (Listen!). Listen!
Professor Travis asked us to watch the video of Bagby’s 92nd Street Y performance below from 46:55 to about 57:00, lines 499 et seq. The Danes are celebrating Beowulf’s arrival together with his warriors. The Danish King Hrothgar’s retainer Unferth speaks in a drunken stupor. Unferth is an envious, evil, ungrateful, and unreliable warrior for the tribe of Danes that Beowulf has traveled from Sweden to save, first from the monster Grendel and then Grendel’s mother. Bagby does an amazing job.
I’m sorry the 92nd Street Y video occasionally scants on the overhead translation. The Poetry Foundation has posted Francis Gummere’s 1910 translation here. Please excuse my own inadvertent errors in this post, of which there must be several.
Biblical belief is overlaid on the warrior ethos that permeates Beowulf. Rereading it at this point in my life, I was reminded of Leo Thorsness’s Surviving Hell. In the first chapter of his memoir Leo recounts the unbelievable acts of courage and skill for which he was recognized with the Medal of Honor. Ten or 11 days after his Medal of Honor mission he was shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese, who tortured him for the first three years of his six-year imprisonment.
Leo concludes his memoir on a grace note. When he left for combat, his brother John had been running a garage in Storden, Minnesota. While Leo was in captivity John had decided to become a minister, finishing four years of college and Lutheran seminary. When he met up with his brother at the Scott Air Force Base hospital upon his return to the United States, Leo asked John to give him communion. “As I took the wafer into my mouth,” Leo wrote, “I thanked God once again for having brought me home to this country, these people, and this life.” That was a good man!