 Remember, all the way back in the beginning of the semester, I introduced the concept of theory of mind. This is the capacity to impute the mental states to self and others, and to predict behavior on the basis of those states. This is according to one of the, two of the earliest psychologists who coined this term. The anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, says that having a theory of mind means being able to understand what another individual is thinking, to ascribe beliefs, desires, fears, and hopes to someone else, and to believe that they really do experience those feelings as mental states. Now, this might seem obvious, but the opposite of this would be just to look at another person as if they were a machine who just, you know, you press the right button, you'll get the right result. But people aren't like that, people are complicated. You know, I might have said something that someone misinterpreted, and I can't just assume, well, this is what I meant, so that's all that person should think. I have to realize, okay, that person doesn't know what I meant, so I have to see, how did she interpret the thing I said, or how did that correspond to something I didn't know at the time that she did, that she think I meant this when I actually meant that. It's very complicated, and it's something that we have to be able to do skillfully in order just to communicate with each other, but also in order to coordinate action, to be on the lookout for people who might be trying to cheat us, or lie to us, or something like that. But of course, to lie, you also have to understand theory of mind. You have to understand what people are thinking, what they know, what they don't know, what they believe, and if those beliefs are right, and then what they'll do under certain circumstances. And when we read, this is something psychologists and social scientists like David Comer-Kid and Manuel Castano have pointed out that when we read literary fiction, we develop that ability to use theory of mind several levels beyond what we would need to do in order to just have a conversation, or to talk about somebody who's not there. We have to understand people as their fictional people that are trying to understand other people who are trying to understand other people. So literary fiction really disrupts our expectations. It doesn't go the way we typically think things ought to go, but we also have to understand how those characters understand what's happening to them and what's going on around them. Now, a scholar who has done a lot to get literary theorists or literary critics to look at how theory of mind works in literature is a scholar named Lisa Zunschein. And she's written a book called Why We Read Fiction that tries to apply theory of mind as a tool for reading fiction. And she points out how well this works when we read 19th century and 20th century novels by Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf where people are trying to understand other people and they're trying to understand how other people understand other people and so forth. But in order to get to this, she seems to need to dismiss the use of theory of mind in older texts, in particular Beowulf. And she says that it may not be possible for the Old English poem Beowulf to embed multiple levels of intentionality. In other words, multiple levels of theory of mind. It may never be able to embed more than three levels of intentionality. In other words, that thing, when I think of what somebody else is thinking that's one level of intentionality, she says that Beowulf probably couldn't do more than three. Well, keep in mind, I first introduced this concept with Atrahasis. This is one of the oldest texts it's ever written and in order to understand how Inky gets the gods to remove the Sarupu disease and get the gods to remove the drought, Inky has to get Atrahasis to get the god Adad to unlock the bolts that are holding back the waters. And so he does that by getting the humans to make sacrifices to the gods and then withhold the sacrifices and then just give a sacrifice to Adad, who's the god who's causing the problem so that Adad feels ashamed and he feels ashamed because these people who he's persecuting are still being good to him. And so he's thinking about what they're thinking but to get them to think that way Atrahasis has to do this but to get Atrahasis to do that, Inky has to do this. So we have at least four levels of intentionality in a 4,000 year old work of literature. But Zunchan doesn't think that Beowulf can get beyond the third. And there's this instance when Freywaru, the daughter of Hajjulakun Waltheo is introduced. She's introduced at a time when Beowulf has already left Hrothgar. He's left Haorat. He's gone back home to the Geatland. He's talking to Hajjulak, his king and he's telling him what has happened. He's sort of giving him the news of, well yeah, I defeated Grendel and I did it this way and oh by the way, here's what's happening in the world right now because they don't have news. They don't have the internet. They don't have newspapers. So he is bringing news of what's going on there in the land of the Danes. And one thing that's going on is that there had been these wars between the Danes and the Heathabards. And the Heathabards live in this area along the coast of modern-day Germany. So the Danes are up here on the island of Zealand. The Heathabards are right here and they've been at war with each other. And this war, they've reached a truce but like any truce, it's liable to fall apart at any time. So Hrothgar gives his daughter Freywaru in marriage to the king of the Heathabards, Engeld. So these are the two enemy kings, Hrothgar and Engeld. And Hrothgar thinks, okay, we can keep this peace, make it last if Engeld marries my daughter and she can become a peace weaver. She can have an influence over Engeld and make sure that Engeld doesn't overreact to things that the Danes and Heathabards do and so he doesn't fall back into fighting. So Hrothgar is thinking, I'm gonna send Freywaru to be a peace weaver with the Heathabards. And Beowulf is explaining this to Heijulat. So in line 1785 to 93, Hrothgar's daughter, Defroda's fair son Engeld, that maiden is sworn. This match seems meat to the Lord of the Shieldings who looks to settle his Heathabard feud. So that's what's happening in those lines. Beowulf wants Heijulat to understand that Hrothgar thinks Engeld will feel less hostile if he marries the Danish princess Freywaru or Freywaru could be a peace weaver. So we've got four levels of intentionality right now just in this description. Now it could stop there. We've got, if Beowulf was this sort of simple-minded in the poem as he is in the movies and the TV shows if we had like the action-packed CGI Beowulf, he might say that, well, I think Hrothgar's trying to set up peace but I don't think it's gonna work. I think Engeld might change his mind. Engeld might marry Freywaru and he might go to war anyway. That would be an explanation but it wouldn't be a very complex explanation. Instead, what Beowulf in the poem does is he says, yet, despite Hrothgar's plan, the best of Bride's seldom has stilled the spears of slaughter so swiftly after a sovereign was stricken. Engeld and his earls will be rankled. Watching that woman walk in their hall with high-born Danes doing her bidding, her escorts will wear ancient heirlooms. Heathabard's swords with braided blades, weapons once wielded and lost in war along with the lives of friends in the Frey. In other words, we're not just gonna send Freywaru when she marries Engeld by herself. She's gonna have a sort of a guard, several guards, several Danish warriors who are gonna go with her and those are some of the same warriors who have been fighting against the Heathabards so they're now going into enemy territories. People who used to be fighting now they have a truce and remember when you fight this other group and you kill somebody, you take their weapons and armor and this was true in the Iliad, this true in the Aeneid, it's true now in Beowulf. So they're still wearing that armor, they're still carrying those weapons that they took from the dead Heathabards and now they're going into the Heathabard court. That could make some people angry. And specifically, Beowulf says this, I'm the ring hilts, the swords. An old ash warrior, ash being the wood in a spear, so this is an old spear warrior, will brood in his beer and bitterly pine for the stark reminders of men slain in strife. So you've got this one Heathabard who's watching this new Danish princess and her honor guard come in and they're wearing these weapons that he recognizes and he's angry and he wants to get revenge on them but he's just an old man, he can't do anything by himself. So he will grimly begin to go to young soldier testing and tempting a troubled heart. His whispered words making war evil or waking war evil and he says, this old Heathabard says to this young man, this young Heathabard, my friend, have you spotted the battle sword that your father bore in his final foray? Wearing his warm ask, wither guild fell when Foman sees the field of slaughter. Wither guild was one of these Heathabards who was leading this charge and it was cut down and this young man's father would have also been cut down as well and his sword, his priceless blade became battle plunder. Today, a son of the shielding, one of the Danes who slew him struts on our floor, flaunting his trophy, an heirloom that you rightly should own. And so this old man talking to this young man pointing to this Dane who's carrying this young man's father's sword. This old man will prick and peek with pointed words time after time till the challenge is taken. The maiden's attendant is murdered and turned, blade bitten to sleep in his blood, forfeit his life for his father's feet. Another will run, knowing the road. So on both sides, oaths will be broken and afterward, Ingell's anger will grow hotter, unchecked as he chills toward his wife. So notice what's happened here. That he concludes here by saying, hence I would hold the Heathabards likely to prove unpeaceable partners for the Danes. In other words, he could just say that Hrothgar is trying to set up his daughter with Ingell so that they'll be peaceful, but I don't think it's gonna work. I mean, they've been fighting all this time with each other. Maybe they'll just start fighting again. That would be too simple. He's thinking about how this hypothetical Heathabard, this old man, is going to manipulate this other hypothetical Heathabard, this young man, whose hypothetical father was killed by the father of this hypothetical Dane who's attending Freowaru. Here's our old Heathabard. He has to figure out a way to get Ingell, the king, to turn against the Danes so that they can kill these Danes who are now there guiding Freowaru into their hall. So how does he get Ingell to turn against these Danes with whom he's got this truce? Well, he's not gonna do it directly. He's gotta get them to do something like try to kill one of his own Heathabards. So that means he's gotta get this young Heathabard to attack this Dane. In particular, it's a Dane that has his father's sword. Now the implication is, this isn't even maybe the Dane that killed his father. This is the son of the Dane that killed his father and has inherited this sword, but the sword came from this Heathabard who's not dead and he's the father of the young Heathabard. So notice, this old Heathabard has to keep in mind what Ingell's thinking, what the Danes would think under a certain situation to get them provoked. He has to provoke this young Heathabard and he does that by saying that this Dane with your father's sword thinks he's better than all the rest of us. Look how he's strutting around the hall. So he's gotta get the young man to think of his father, to think of the Dane who has the sword to kill this guy and then run so that the Danes will pursue him and then when the Danes want justice against this young Heathabard, then the Heathabard king, Ingell, is going to then turn against the Danes and then go back to fighting. Now that's a lot to keep in mind. That's a lot of levels of theory of mind right there, but remember, this is Beowulf trying to get Hygelac to understand that Ingell is gonna turn against the Danes because of this old Heathabard who's doing all this. And add to that, that Hrothgar doesn't see this coming. So remember theory of mind isn't just knowing what other people know, it's knowing what they don't know. So we have to think that this is the kind of thing that could happen, but Hrothgar is still thinking, oh, as long as Ingell marries my daughter, everything's gonna be fine. Beowulf has to get Hygelac to bypass Hrothgar, to keep in mind, here's what Hrothgar thinks, but here's why Ingell might think something different. He's gonna think something different because this guy is gonna get this guy to do something to this guy so that these guys will wanna kill him and then he'll turn against them and then Ingell turn against Hrothgar. And of course, all this is happening in a literary text which was written by a poet who's trying to get his readers or his audience to understand that all of these things are happening. And then when we go back and read this, we know that the poet is trying to get us to think that Beowulf is trying to get Hygelac to think that the Heatha Bards, you know, on and on. So once we factor in the audience and the poet, we have 10 tiers, 10 levels of meta-representation, levels of intentionality or levels of theory of mind here. So just because this is an old text and just because it frequently gets the sort of, the movie version portrayed Beowulf as this stupid jock because that's a modern stereotype and they just project that back into this thousand-year-old text. Beowulf is not a stupid jock. Beowulf is strong and he is someone who can kill a monster by ripping his arm off, but he's also somebody who can think ahead and who understands how other people think. And in order to understand that, we have to follow his thinking as he gets Hygelac to think about how King Hrothgar might not see this discontent among the soldiers, among the Heatha Bards and among the Danes that could erupt and it could erupt in this particular fashion. He sort of sets up all these dominoes and says, this is how the first domino is gonna knock down the rest of the dominoes. This is how this whole fabric of theory of mind is interlaced and you pull one thread and it's gonna pull loose everything else. So this is, I know, an extremely difficult part to sort of figure out when you're reading this, especially when you're reading it in this sort of alliteration. But keep in mind, if you take a college class in Old English and you try to learn to translate Old English, you've gotta figure out, okay, what's the subject of the sentence and what's the verb? This is one of those passages that's very difficult, but it also tells us something about people at this time. Theory of mind, understanding how other people think, understanding how entire social groups are woven together and can be unraveled and re-stitched together and sometimes with positive or negative effect, that takes a lot of social intelligence. And this is a type of text that really does push us to try to push our own social intelligence to its limits a lot of times. Now I mentioned that Wallpheo is trying to weave peace when she's there with Beowulf and Rothgar but also Rothulf, who is Rolf Krocky. We have her trying to weave peace that the audience knows. This is an allusion to the fact that something bad is going to happen. So let's look back at these lines. Look at the first line, 891. Many a mead cup, those masterful kinsmen, Rothgar and Rothulf raised in the hall, all within friends who filled Harorot, treason and treachery not yet conceived. Well, that last line lets us know that treason and treachery will, at some point, be conceived. There's going to be a problem between Rothgar and Rothulf. The poet doesn't explain this, he just expects that we already know that. Then wearing her circlet, Wallpheo walked where uncle and nephew, Rothgar and Rothulf were sitting in peace, two soldiers together, each still believing the other was loyal. So again, a little bit of theory of mine, a little bit of foreshadowing of something bad that's going to happen. Somebody's going to turn disloyal and we're not even really sure who it is at this point. But each one thinks the other is loyal. We don't have really an implication that it's Rothulf that's going to be the problem or it's Rothgar that's going to be the problem. And Wallpheo says to Rothgar, with Rothulf right there, so everybody can hear her saying this, she's trying to act as peace weaver, she's trying to maintain this friendship. She says, I know that Rothulf will honor our trust and treat these youths well, her sons, who stand to inherit the throne. If you have to leave this life before him, in other words, if Rothgar dies before Rothulf, I'm counting on Rothulf to recall our kindness. When he was a child and I'm counting on him to repay our children for the presents we gave and the pleasures we granted. In other words, I'm hoping he's not going to take over the throne and harm our children in order to do that. So she sees a problem coming. She's acting as a counselor, she's acting as a peace weaver, she's acting as somebody who sees something that maybe even Rothgar doesn't see the potential for. Rothgar believes that Rothulf is loyal, he doesn't conceive of any treason or treachery. Wallpheo does, she sees danger coming, she's trying to stop that danger hopefully before it starts. But unfortunately, as the poet sort of implies, the audience knows that unfortunately that's not gonna work out, something's going to happen. Now, this is the same guy that is Rothkraki in Rothsaga. We know he's going to become a king over Herorat or Lidar. He's going to have his champions, he's going to eventually himself be defeated. But we don't really know the difference here, we don't really know the disparity, what actually happens between the two. That all is sort of lost in the text that we've lost and we don't have to sort of fill in those gaps. But that is our connection to, between Beowulf and Rothsaga, that's one of these. We have this character in common and once we've identified that similarity, we can identify some disparities. For one thing, Rothgar is mentioned in Rothkraki's saga, his name is Rohr and he's actually king in Northumbria in Northern Britain. So there is no treachery seemingly in Rothsaga, but then again, there's a lot of time and space separating Rothsaga from Beowulf. So do they both point back to the same time period? Yes, they seem to point back to the sixth century of the common era. Do they tell exactly the same story? Well no, not exactly, there are some differences here. So we can't totally reconcile the two things. But we can see them as part of this larger tradition and that's what I'm going to talk about next time when we look at these, Rothsaga, Beowulf and the other Icelandic saga that I asked you to read, six chapters from Greta's saga, all of these being part of the Bear's Suntail or at least a descendants of that Bear's Suntail.