 In the shill you walk to a sharp wheel, Celebrate warfare on our fair and wide. As far as the swazzlers see us, Swice up the bad end and ward the wild, Win a shilling and a flounder through my lunger. Music on wood force, Averlingus fair, Beggar Briton on bail, Mochippus, Maron of their master. That was something like what Beowulf may have sounded like. The performer there was Benjamin Bagby performing on the type of harp that would have accompanied the original singing or performance of the poem of Beowulf. And just like everything else we've read in here, almost everything else, this would have had a history of oral production before it was ever written down in the manuscript we have today. The manuscript of Beowulf that we have comes from around the year 1000 of the Common Era, and it's the only one we have. It's a really unique document because not only is this the only written record we have of this story of Beowulf, it's also the only type of epic poem like this we have in old English literature. Now we have things that sound similar to this written prose from Iceland and other Old Norse literature. Of course we have Latin literature from the Middle Ages that carried on traditions of the Aeneid from the ancient Romans, but as far as an old English poem, heroic poem, something like an epic, this is the only thing anywhere like what Beowulf is in all of old English literature. And this document barely survived. It was preserved in a book with a few other texts, and that book itself was unrecognized by anyone for centuries. It sat in one library another until the 1700s when it was discovered that it had something like an epic, like an English epic. And even after that was discovered, it didn't get translated into modern English. This is English, it's old English, but it sounds like another language. It's mostly a Germanic language. It doesn't have even the early French and Latin words that we're used to being part of modern English. But nobody could read it, and then finally when somebody could read it, it still didn't get published for a while. And that one document that had, the one book, the one codex that had Beowulf recorded on it almost burned. The library that it was kept in in the 1700s burned, and you can still see the damage around the edges that that document suffered. But after all of that, it's even surprising that Beowulf was ever even written down. The fact is that it's an English poem. It's written by people who spoke English. They were Anglo-Saxons in England around the year 1000. But it's not about English ancestors. It's about a Getish hero or Getish, a Beowulf who's fighting on behalf of the Danes living in Denmark in the 500s. So 500 years before this document is recorded. And it's written down by Christian Anglo-Saxons at a time when the Christian Anglo-Saxons of England were at war with pagan Danes. Polytheistic Danes who were raiding the coast of England. There were also polytheistic Danes who lived in what is today the nation of England in the Dane Law. This area of England had been taken over by people of Danish descent. And a lot of them were still polytheistic. And there was a lot of hostility. I mentioned in another lecture the St. Bryce's Day Massacre would happen around the time this manuscript was written. Where these polytheistic Danes were taking cover from a lynch mob basically of Anglo-Saxon Christians. And they took cover inside a Christian church. And rather than granting them sanctuary, the Anglo-Saxons locked the door, bolted the door and then burned everyone alive inside. Burned the entire church down so they could kill these pagan Danes. So there was a lot of hostility between these two groups. And yet this document records a story that portrays the Danes favorably. And particular pagan Danes, even though there's this ambiguity that I'll talk more about in a minute. As to how the Danes and the Geats like Beowulf recognize the Christian God or do not recognize the Christian God. So the manuscript, the book is written around the year 1000. It describes events that happened in the 500s. The poem itself is probably much older than the book. But it certainly doesn't go all the way back to the time it describes. The scholarly consensus is that it was probably composed in the 700s, the 8th century. But it probably went through a lot of changes before it actually got written down. Whether or not there were previous written versions of this that didn't survive, we don't know. But the language seems to tell us that it came from around in the 700s. It's describing things happening in the 500s. It's not written down until around the year 1000. We can tell the date of its writing based on the writing style itself, the handwriting. And despite barely surviving, despite barely coming down to us today, this poem has become very influential on a lot of modern culture, especially our conception of the Middle Ages. That is a good thing and it's kind of a problematic thing. It's kind of difficult for modern readers to go back and read this poem without all of the cultural baggage, all the modern schemata that we're familiar with that we think is part of this literature. Without projecting all of that back into a poem in which it doesn't really belong. And it's not, this problem isn't made any easier by the fact that a lot of things aren't described. The author of the poem, the poet, seems to assume we know what he means by references to different individuals from history and that sort of thing that we have nothing to really use to fill in other than our modern context, our personal context. This is nowhere more obvious than with the creature Grendel. We don't know what Grendel is. We don't know what he looks like. We're told that he has sharp teeth and that he has glowing eyes. But beyond that we have to sort of imagine what he looks like. The poet doesn't tell us. And of course every film version that we've seen, every comic book version has to come up with a way to portray Grendel. Is he this giant zombie looking thing? Is he this giant shaggy, like Ogre? Is he the most recent version, TV version, Beowulf Return to the Shield Lands? Kind of has him looking like a giant golem from Lord of the Rings. None of these are wrong because we don't know what the right version is. And the same goes for a lot of other elements there. So it's kind of hard for us to distance ourselves from our personal context. It may be that personal context that makes us interested in this sort of thing to start with. I have to confess that that was the case with me. I grew up in the 80s and 90s playing a lot of fantasy video games like Legend of Zelda and Wizards and Warriors. And when it came time to decide what kind of literature I wanted to invest in and spend time reading and that sort of thing, I felt well. And it seems like Beowulf sort of most closely resembles my interest. And it took me a long time to realize how much I was projecting into the poem that wasn't actually there. But remember that psychological experiment I mentioned in the past where someone reads you a list of words that all seem to have something to do with sewing or something we associate with the word needle, but the word needle is not in it. And then when asked later, did you hear the word needle in that list of words? Most people say yes, but actually we heard all these things that co-heared with the word needle, but we didn't hear the word needle itself. We call that associative coherence. So we associate all of these different things from fantasy movies, fantasy video games, and fantasy novels. We associate that with the Middle Ages, but we have to be careful that we don't project too much into this text that's not already there, that's not actually there. But every text leaves a lot of gaps for the reader to fill, and if we're reading for enjoyment, then that's totally fine. We can fill in the images, the assumptions that we're used to. But as scholars in this class, we want to be very careful about what we read and make sure that we're not adding anything that isn't there in the text itself. So that means we have to learn something about the historical context. We have to know something about the world being described in this poem. To be fair, one of the reasons that we have these connections between medieval sort of fantasy creatures and terms and ideas and medieval literature is because of J. R. Tolkien. J. R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings was very influential during the 70s and 80s, the fantasy genre, you know, games like Dungeons and Dragons that were paper-based games that then became developed into video games, novels that followed after him. And Tolkien was a scholar, a scholar specifically of Old English, the language that the poem of Beowulf was written in, and he has written extensively on Beowulf. Most recently, a translation that he made of the poem of Beowulf has come out, a translation into modern English that his son, Christopher Tolkien, edited the way Christopher Tolkien has edited a lot of his father's works that were never published during his lifetime. But actually more importantly is an essay which started out as an academic lecture that he gave for other academics, which he called Beowulf the Monsters and the Critics. And this lecture that was later published is one of the earliest and most influential academic works on the poem of Beowulf because it really made people take Beowulf seriously as a work of literature and told them to, you know, not just use it to sort of mine this information about ancient or medieval history, but to actually look at it as literature for its own sake, not as a sort of a clue to the different Germanic tribes that were around during the early Middle Ages, but something that was written in order to be enjoyed as a work of literature. And of course, a lot of Tolkien studies in Old Norse literature, Old English literature and other medieval literature made its way into Lord of the Rings, and then from Lord of the Rings it was then adopted by other fantasy writing. Things like Bayorn, the bear in The Hobbit, you may recognize as this sort of bear figure very similar to Bodvar Bjarke. Now, we don't see Bodvar Bjarke actually change into a bear, but he has control of this bear while there's this final battle of Krokkiesmen and Queen Skuld's army. So there's this connection between Bodvar and the bear. Of course, his father was named Bjarne, spelled a little bit differently than Tolkien's character, but Bjarne actually does turn into a bear by day. And of course, we've got the dragon Smog that sits on this horde of gold. This is a very common theme in Old English, but you know, it's one of many different themes about dragons, but it becomes really well known to us today because of Tolkien serving as that bridge. Other things that are less obvious are Tolkien's use of the word orc. Now orcs show up in all sorts of games like World of Warcraft and that sort of thing, but the word never really was used before it was used for the orcs in the Lord of the Rings novels. And that word seems to come from this line in Beowulf. It's lines 98 to 101 if you're using the Longman cultural edition of Beowulf. The line numbers are a little problematic because they don't quite match most of the standard line numbers, but if you have the Sarah Anderson edition, the Longman version, if you look at line 99 to 101, you'll see that there's this line that says, from that horrible progeny from Cain, these are the descendants of the biblical Cain, from that horrible progeny all awoke, the Jotuns or Jotuns, these giants and elves and orcs and also giants, another kind of giant. The Jotuns are the Old Norse version of Frost Giants and then we have the Gagantus in Old English which seems to be borrowed from the Latin referring to giants. But all these are creatures that strove with God for a long time. Well, that word orc neus, we have no idea how to translate that. It doesn't really correspond to anything that we know of before this time, but of course once Tolkien takes that word and turns it into the orcs of the Uruk Hai in the Lord of the Rings novels, then we sort of assume we know what that means. But before Tolkien sort of created this creature, no one really knew how to translate that word orc neus. Now, you recognize the word Ilpha there as the origin of the word elves. Ailtuns corresponds to the Old Norse Jotuns which are the Frost Giants that are enemies of the gods. But actually Ailtun is where Tolkien got the word for the Ents, these giant tree people. But of course what Tolkien is doing with this is a creative reinterpretation. Tolkien has written a lot of scholarship on Beowulf and other medieval literature, but when we access these things through Lord of the Rings we're actually taking his 20th century adaptation which may have some correspondence, but we don't want to then take that 20th century adaptation and project it back into the past, back into the original text. We have to come across this reference to orcs and just sort of wonder, well what is this rather than having an assumption that our modern schemata fits that. So just like cross saga, Beowulf looks back across 500 years. Looks from the high Middle Ages back into the time of the Great Migrations. At the time, right about the same time that the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes were invading the island of Britain. We have the writing coming after probably a couple of centuries of oral tradition and that oral tradition coming probably after a couple of centuries of just sort of legend. And keep in mind when I say oral tradition I'm talking about the composed poem. Every line being remembered more or less as it was heard by the bard or the shop, someone who would have sung it the way Benjamin Bagby sang it at the beginning of this presentation. It would have had a certain coherence, a certain fidelity across decades, maybe even centuries in oral tradition. But before the oral tradition it would have been just a story somebody remembered their grandfather or their grandfather's grandfather telling. So the time that Beowulf is looking back to, Beowulf the poem is looking back to is around the same time or shortly after the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes come from the Jutland Peninsula. This is what we call the modern nation of Denmark or at least this particular peninsula. As the Romans are retreating from Britain they're going back to Rome to help defend Rome against the invading Visigoths around the year 410 and shortly after that. And when they do the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes start to invade Britain. So this is the beginning of this connection between the Anglo-Saxons of the time the Beowulf manuscript was written around the year 1,000 and the people in this Jutland area of northern Europe. And about this same time, shortly after this, around the year 520 according to the Frankish author Gregory of Tours, we have someone who's referred to as a yit or a guit or a got or a got named Kohilakis or Hohilakis. This is someone who corresponds to the figure of Heijilak in Beowulf. And because Gregory of Tours is writing a historical account, this seems to be somebody who actually existed. And in particular, Gregory of Tours is writing about the history of the Franks. But as part of the history of the Franks he's talking about these battles that the ancient Franks have won. I remember the Frankish Kingdom is a few centuries after this time be the Kingdom of Charlemagne. But the Franks go to Frisia in order to fight on behalf of the Frigians against this invading or raiding army, this army of geets that's coming from Geetland. So we can pinpoint the year of this raid is around the year 520, I'm saying 521. And we know from Beowulf from lines 1059 to 69 that Heijilak, when he was king of the geets, actually raids Frisia just like in Gregory of Tours accounts. And he's defeated by the Franks and he's killed. Beowulf is the only survivor of this battle. And it's after this that Beowulf goes back to Geetland. He doesn't become king yet, but after Heijilak's sons are dead then Beowulf becomes king. But this correspondence at least helps us pinpoint something like a historical time period. Just like with the Iliad, we might have these other stories referring to characters or historical figures that lived centuries apart that have just been sort of combined into one time period. And so we might not be able to really pinpoint everything in Beowulf into around the year 520. But we can at least say that this character corresponds to this time. We know also though that there, according to the archeological evidence, there was a great hall in Denmark on the island of Zeeland between the Geetland Peninsula and the Swedish Peninsula at the location of Lyra, L-E-J-R-E. And that seems to correspond to Herorat in Beowulf or Hlydar in Hralfkrakis saga. There was this great hall that was sort of maybe the wealthiest and richest and most famous in this area at this time. And we do have archeological evidence that around the time of Heijilak, around the year 520, there does seem to have been a great hall at this location that would correspond to Herorat or Hlydar. So all of this is toward the end of the era of the Great Migrations. After the Angles and Saxons invade the island of Britain, they're converted to Christianity starting around the year 600. So the English sort of have become a different identity group than the Angles from whom they took their name. They're Christians, they live on an island, they have a connection to Rome and to the Holy Roman Empire that people living in the area of the Saxons and up into the Scandinavia don't have the same sort of connection to the larger Christian Europe. But they're the ones that started invading during the Viking Age, starting with the raid at Lindisfar in around the year 793 starting with the year 865 we have a large number of people from somewhere in Scandinavia attacking the coast of Britain and actually moving in and taking over the city of York in Northern England. And this is usually referred to as the Great Heathen Army. These are the guys that call themselves the sons of Ragnar Lodbrok. Now whether or not they were actual genetic sons, we don't know. There are so many people coming from Scandinavia and they were all being referred to as Danes even though they probably weren't all from Denmark. They were referred to as Danes, they start settling, they start making so much headway, their army starts pushing the English powers back. They defeat the kingdoms of Mercia in East Anglia and Northumbria and they're basically able to set up their own little country within the island of Britain. And they're able to maintain rule over that until around the year 937 when there's a famous battle of Brunabur when the English sort of retake the Dane law. There continues to be Norwegian kings that come and rule over from York like Eric Bloodaxe, but he is defeated and killed in 954. So after that the English has sort of retaken the island but we still have this population of quote unquote Danes. These people that are, some of them are probably Christian but a lot of them are probably polytheistic. Some of them are Anglo-Saxon or of Anglo-Saxon descent but a lot of them are of Norwegian, nor Swedish, Ghedish maybe and Danish descent. And that means we have another sort of Scandinavian culture coming and overlapping this older Anglo-Saxon culture and a non-Christian culture overlapping or contending with a Christian culture. So this is the world, this is the political, social, sort of ethnic identity world that Beowulf is emerging in. It's emerging in an area ruled by Christians but sort of threatened or permeated by non-Christians. It's ruled over by Anglo-Saxons who speak Old English but it's sort of threatened by these Danes on the periphery. And so we might imagine that Beowulf was very interesting to people of this mixed heritage and people who had interest both a Christian audience and a polytheistic audience or a sort of in-between audience. It was probably interested to people of Anglo-Saxon descent whose ancestors had been there for several centuries and also interesting to people of Danish or Norse descent who'd only been there a generation or two. So it's the kind of thing you could imagine being very popular among the common people. Somebody wrote it down and as I mentioned, this is a very unique manuscript because there's nothing else like this written from this time in English history. And writing isn't as simple as it might seem at first. There's no paper at this time. For one thing, most people are illiterate. The people who are the most literate are going to be the clergy. Not just the people who are Christian but the people who have dedicated their entire lives to becoming monks to taking a vow of celibacy and setting themself apart from the common people. And they're the ones who know how to write. They're the ones who know how to read and they have access to the resources that you need to actually do this writing. And there's no paper at this time so if you want to write something down you have to, for every single page you have to kill a calf or a sheep. And you have to stretch that calf out in this long arduous process of stretching it and then smoothing it down over a long period of time until it's smooth enough to write on. You can imagine this is an expensive process and most people don't have the resources to do this sort of thing. The church has the resources to do this sort of thing but if you read Alcuin's letter about asking the question what has Ingeld to do with Christ? Why are these clergymen wasting their time listening to stories about people like Ingeld who we now know from Beowulf when this is not their duty? Why should they be wasting their time? You can imagine what he would say knowing that they were wasting resources. Church resources. Every page of Beowulf and you see how large the writing here although the book itself is still preserved today in the Cotton Vitellius manuscript that I mentioned at the beginning. It's really small. It's not much bigger than the book that you were actually reading it from but it's still a lot of pages and it still takes a long time to produce. So the fact that these resources are being used to tell a story about a pagan people at a pagan time and who ordains most of them nonetheless besides Beowulf the very people that England is at war with and still considers themselves at war with and in fact these resources and this labor is being dedicated to telling this secular story about these foreign people is tells us that this is a very this document almost didn't make it. It would have had to justify itself in religious terms as well as in terms of cultural identity or entertainment or something like that. So that is probably why we can see a certain element of syncretism. Remember the syncretism is combining elements from two different world views especially religious or cultural schematic from two different groups that wouldn't normally interact that wouldn't normally tell the same story. And you see a lot of things in Beowulf like the creation account from lines 84 to 90 and again I should mention that if you're using the Longman cultural edition of Beowulf these line numbers correspond to this book. They do not correspond to the standard line numbers in most translations of Beowulf. So sometimes you'll have to usually it's between 100 and 200 lines ahead. These lines will be you'll have to add look 10, 20, 30 lines ahead if you're using it a different translation and you should be able to find the thing I'm describing. But there's a creation account that sounds very much like the Genesis account. There's direct reference to Cain. Now of course Cain is the figure from the book of Genesis but something's been added that is there's this belief by the time that Beowulf has been written that Cain had descendants these descendants weren't all killed off in the flood. Some of them survived and they survived as monsters like what I mentioned before the orcs the elves, the giants these were all descendants of Cain and this is what Grindel is. Grindel and his mother described as descendants of Cain and because they descended from Cain they inherit his sin which is that he killed his brother killed his brother Abel and that sort of left a mark on all his descendants. There is what's frequently described as the Christian excursus that is a sort of an addition or a an aside where at this time after the narrator tells us that after Grindel starts attacking Herot that the Danes go to worship devils in order to get rid of Grindel, that they remembered hell. This was their heathen hope. This is a sort of odd digression because it's it's something where the narrator is stopping to condemn something that the characters are doing and he doesn't usually do that he doesn't do that very often. An interesting thing about these lines is they don't match the sort of the meter or the they don't use the usual sort of vocabulary that the rest of the poem does and this has led people including J.R. Tolkien to speculate that these lines that sort of seem like this interjection of this sermon in the middle of a narrative that this is an interpolation that is something that's been added later because at this point in the narrative you have this demon this monster Grindel shows up, kills people and then you have people praying to idols to presumably the polytheistic gods and then just a few lines after that Beowulf gets the message and shows up and comes to kill Grindel. Now it's very possible that there was a past version where these prayers go directly to some other god and that other god is the one that sends Beowulf but for whatever reason there are these lines that seem to have been added in are sort of there to remind the Christian Anglo-Saxon that paganism is devil worship they did this back then they had this heathen hope they trusted their souls to hell so don't be like them but now let's continue with the story that's an interpolation, that's adding something that may or may not really fit but you add it for to make it fit the later culture the culture of the year 1000 in Anglo-Saxon England. Other familiar elements from a biblical world view, a Christian world view would be the flood after Beowulf kills both Grindel and Grindel's mother he brings back the sword that he used to kill Grindel's mother and of course the blade has melted away where he cut into her blood but he's still got the hilt and he brings that hilt back and it's got these inscriptions on it he brings it and he gives it to Rothgar Rothgar looks at it and then starts to describe a time of before a flood when God sent this flood to kill the giants now the flood narrative in Genesis you know very well by now we've read three different flood narratives Genesis being the latest one and in Genesis it's not a race of giants that's being killed by the flood it's all the humans that have been wicked, that have turned against God and it's only Noah and his family that are saved from that flood but there is, we know from Old Norse texts from Iceland that there was a story about the God Odin and his two brothers killing the race of giants that lived in the beginning of the world by killing the father of all the giants, Ymir and from Ymir's gigantic carcass they used his body to build a place to live in but when they cut open his body the blood that flows out of his body creates this flood and it kills all his descendants the giants except one who is able to build a boat, one giant is able to build a boat and survive so that's, you know, he's the one who gives birth to the giants that live after that flood so it's very clear that the the Beowulf poet is referring consciously to Genesis but it's also one of those elements where Ymir may not have its roots in a Germanic pre-Christian narrative and be one that sort of merged with the Christian, the Genesis flood either way it's, we've gone one more step in our flood narrative from Atrahasas to Gilgamesh to Genesis and now we've got one more flood in Beowulf after he reads about this flood on the Hilt of the Sword what follows is Rothgar's sermon it's frequently called the sermon because it's, he's telling Beowulf to remain humble and he tells him about this king named Haramod who was not humble and he was a terrible person and he talks in the abstract about how sin invades the mind and so the mind has like this guardian that sits, you know to sort of keep sin out of it but then the guardian goes to sleep and that's when sin is able to sneak in like sin is this attacking enemy is able to sneak into the mind and corrupt the soul. Beowulf himself refers to God a lot when he says that, you know, God will decide the outcome, he says he's not going to use weapons against Grendel, he's just going to go in and fight and then God will decide who's going to win but he also refers to fate in the same way he uses the word weird W-Y-R-D very often so Beowulf shows deference to God, he gives thanks to God in a sort of literal sort of way especially when it comes time for him to brag for him to say, here's this great thing I've done he conspicuously doesn't brag he doesn't try to focus on himself he just says, you know God allowed me to to accomplish this feat or something like that. We have a lot of phrases that are referred to as so shall statements these are sort of proverbs that are sort of moral instruction about how someone should act what we should do in certain situations so for instance in line 1358 we're told of Beowulf that he would trust in the strength of his mighty hand grip so shall a man unmindful of life win lasting renown and frequently this is here's how a person should be Shil Shefing in the beginning of the poem has a son named Beow and in the manuscript it's actually written Beowulf but to avoid confusing most translations just translate his name as Beow but he's described as acting a certain way and that we're told so shall a prince do if he hopes to win feigns, retainers, people that will follow him in battle there are so shall statements for women as well like the description of Queen Heed whose name means like mind around line 1717 where it's said you know so shall a woman do in order to weave peace among her kin so this sort of moral instruction is something we may expect to see in a sort of a Christian sermon or a Christian moral teaching of the time and so there's quite a few of these that where the narrator sort of stops telling the story just long enough to say see what that guy did that's what you should do we also have this sort of meditation on impermanence in what's frequently called an Ubisunt passage now the so shall statement is in the Old English is so shall that S C E A L that's the way it's written in Old English Ubisunt is actually Latin but because this is a common motif in a certain poetry that's written in Latin it's referred to that even when it's in Old English and it just means where are in other words where are these things that used to exist are no longer around all these things that we celebrate in our world that are now decaying so in the poem the wanderer the wanderer asks when he looks at this crumbling wall you know he says this work of giant stands withered and still and he knows these you know men lie buried underneath it because it was the location of these ancient battles that you know no matter who won and who lost that battle you know they're all dead now where are they all gone and so he asks where is the warsteed where is the warrior where is his warlord where are now the feasting places where now the mead hall pleasures alas bright cup alas brave night alas you glorious princes all gone lost in the night as if you had never lived and all that survives you these serpentine walls wondrously high worked in strange ways mighty spirits have slain these men greedy weapons have framed their fate so he's asking where now are these glories of the past that leave only ruins we have that same sort of ubi suit lament in Beowulf starting around line 1969 in the Longman cultural edition you know many of these goblets had gone to the earth house had gone into the ground been buried legacies left by lordly people in an age someone unknown had cleverly covered these costly treasures hold now earth what men may not the horrid of these heroes the earth gotten wealth when at first was one war death has felled them an evil befalling each of my people gone are the brethren who brave many battles from the hard helmet this hand wrought gilding drops into dust a sleep of the smiths who knew how to burnish the war chief's mask or mend the mail shirts mangled in battle shields of mail shirts molder with warriors and follow no foes to far away fields no harp rejoices to herald the heroes no hand fed hawks swoops through the hall no stallion stamps in the strongholds courtyard death has undone many kindreds of men so this recognition of the impermanence of this world and everything we can achieve in this world is something that fit very well with the the christian emphasis on the next world with you know say storing up treasures in heaven rather than treasures on the earth so this this much fits with this drive to sort of syncretized the syncretism between the christian and the ancient germanic polytheistic world view and it's quite likely that this sort of syncretism this sort of emphasis on the parts that fit the christian world view and de-emphasis on the parts that do not fit the christian world view this is probably what convinced the people who actually did write this down on this expensive parchment convinced them that this is something that can fit into our christian mission whichever monk or groups of monks whichever monastery or church or wherever wrote this down could justify this as something that had something of a christian lesson in it but that doesn't mean that this is a perfect fit there are still references to elements of the polytheistic world view now there's no reference to any gods other than the christian god oddly you may have noticed there's no reference to jesus or anything else specifically christian the only name from the bible were given is cain so there's a reference to cain and then there's reference to god and the reference to god are usually words like metode which means the weaver someone who weaves the fates of the world who orchestrates the the way things are going to happen and in that regard he's very similar to this old germanic anglo-saxon as well as Norse idea of weird this is where we get the word weird I wouldn't have expected this but that actually comes from a word for fate and it was a goddess in old Norse it's u-r-d u-r-d is one of the norns one of the women who weaves the fates of mortals but also of the gods in anglo-saxon old english it's weird w-y-r-d and this word actually shows up in the old english in beowulf for example lines 508 to 510 404 2715 just like beowulf sort of defers credit for the things he does like defeating grendel he defers that credit to god in some passages he also defers credit to weird he'll say that you know weird goes as it must i'm going to you know fight these these monsters but i don't know what's going to happen i don't know if i'll win weird will go as it must fate will go as it must so a lot of ink has been spilled by scholars trying to say well this fits into the christian idea of provenance and a lot of other scholars saying well no it's also a theory over this idea of fate and the truth is it does both it's syncretism it fits both and if you believed in a sort of non-christian idea of fate then you could see okay that's what's happening here and if you believed in the christian idea of fate you could say okay that or the if you believed in the christian idea of provenance you could say okay that's what's happening here but strangely most of the passages that refer to god if you didn't believe in the christian god but believed in another god like odin or something you could probably say well there's a word to there remember that odin is known by many names and a lot of them are really ambiguous references but it does seem that the poet is trying to make this a christian story even though it doesn't always work very well and so we run into this problem of over determination i've mentioned this in the past in talking about the greek and roman gods and their role especially in the iliad and in the anid there will be a description of something like two people are fighting and one of them wins but it's because of this god there's a reference to someone shooting an arrow at minalaeus and it hits minalaeus but it hits his buckle and so it doesn't kill him he's just wounded briefly but in the iliad we're told that it's because athena pushed the arrow so that it hit his buckle rather than killing him elsewhere athena will guide someone's arm as they throw a javelin and they hit an enemy so we have the person throwing the javelin and we have athena both of them are sort of apparently necessary causes to this event happening we have the buckle blocking the arrow but we also have athena blocking the arrow well this happens a lot in beowulf there's a lot of descriptions of god taking part in the action but he's taking part by having beowulf take part so over determination means we have beowulf doing something and god did it too and curiously this idea can be used to describe the way a king takes responsible for what his warriors do so remember that in a chieftain the king leads his army into battle the army themselves they beat the other army they take their treasures but then all that treasure goes to the king and the king redistributes that treasure among his things his warriors and frequently we have references that you know when I do this you will receive credit whether he's talking to Rothgar or to Heijelak when his king's warriors do something the king gets credit for that and we have that sort of thing happening when a Rothgar puts beowulf in charge of hailroth the night that they expect Grendel to come and attack and we're told that Kinningwilder the sort of king of wonder king of glory places beowulf as the protector of hailroth do us whether this is a reference to the Christian idea of God or maybe even a reference to Rothgar your translation if you're using the longman cultural edition translates it as God God Almighty places beowulf as the protector of hailroth against Grendel but Kinningwilder could mean the king of glory and that would sound like God or it could be the glory king the king who has won glory and that could be Rothgar a lot of other instances like in line 623 to 28 we're told that the lord lent them aid in their anguish weaving their war luck for one man alone had the might and main to fight off the fiend, to crush him in combat proving who ruled the races men then and forever God Almighty so what God is doing here is not directly intervening in order to defeat Grendel he's sending beowulf so beowulf does it and God does it and in that we're told God's wisdom and one man's courage changed that fate in lines 1370 to 78 we have a description of Grendel's mother attacking beowulf knocking him on the ground getting on top of him and stabbing him in the chest with her knife but his mail shirt deflects the blow and we're told that Weyland the legendary smith made it and I'll talk more about him in a minute but we have this sort of ancient heirloom the spectacular piece of armor with this knife blow that's exactly what armor's supposed to do but yet the narrator follows that by saying that God did it the armor did it and God did it everything that God does in the poem is something somebody else or something else does so it's this natural obvious cause cause the effect but God did it too and these seem to be more interpolations these seem to be more more of a need to take a secular story a story that doesn't really have anything about christian providence in it and add just enough of that to make it fit this sort of test of religious faith so that it can be justified this text can be justified not as just a heroic story the kind of thing that Alcuin condemned and said don't waste your time with these stories but to take it from that and make it into something with just enough of a christian message to justify reproducing it retelling it and writing it down now one of the most interesting things that seems to be a point of syncretism is the idea of judgment and the word for judgment here in Old English for the most part is dome dome is where we get our modern english word doom and that's usually because the dooms day the day of dome which a phrase which actually appears a couple times in Beowulf is the day when God will separate the wheat from the chaff separate the good from the evil and say these go to hell and these go to heaven that's the day of judgment and we still sort of have use it with that connotation a lot of times today but it also means glory it also means the way people judge you after you have done something great and then after your life is over how people remember you there are two concepts here one is loaf which is fame like how well known you are but then there's also dome so it's not just enough to be remembered you want to be remembered well you want the judgment on you to be good whether it's by God at dooms day or by people who remember you and remember you well so there's God's judgment that Beowulf refers to when he says in lines 391 to 2 and then again in 978 and a few other places this is usually Dreatnes Dome which means the Lord's judgment now I mentioned in a previous lecture that Dreaten could be your Lord like your king, the chief somebody like Rothgaard or Heijelak or it could be God it's very frequently ambiguous as to who this is referring to there's a lot of reference to sin in Beowulf Grendel is described as the shepherd of sins Beowulf is described as not wanting to die in sin accusing unfurth of being guilty of sin but the only sins that are referred to there's really three but one of them seems to be the main one being arrogant, being prideful that could be considered a sin although we're going to see that wanting to achieve fame and glory that's not a sin there's the reciprocal relationship between a king and a thane a thane is supposed to be loyal to his king and fight bravely in battle and never abandon his king on the battlefield and all this sin has to give treasure to his thanes, never mistreat his thanes and anybody whether it's the king or the thane that fails this relationship that is a problem but the one thing that's really sort of described as a sin is killing a member of your own family this is something that obviously Cain does this seems to be why Cain is such an important figure as such an evil figure that his sin is so bad that his all of his descendants bear this mark of sin on the mark of this Cain slayer and that's the way he's described in line 97 but also when Beowulf meets Unfirth and Unfirth insults Beowulf he says you were too prideful and you lost the swimming race to Brecca Beowulf says I wouldn't be boasting of my bravery if the only people I'd ever killed were my own Cain and that seems to be what Unfirth has done this references that he's killed his own Cain and then after Beowulf is mortally wounded by the dragon starting in line 24-21 he says that I've done good I've won treasure for my people he got the dragon's treasure and he wants to leave that to his people like a good ringgiver a good king is supposed to do but he also says that I rejoice though sick with my death wound that God may not blame me for baseless bloodshed or killing of Cain when breath quits my body so this is the main thing that he's looking at he doesn't have our idea that you need to confess your sins and ask for forgiveness for your sins and all this he's not asking for forgiveness all he's saying is I feel good that I'm about to die the fact that I've never committed this one real sin I haven't killed any of my own Cain I haven't killed anybody that didn't really have it coming so I'm good no need for praying for forgiveness or last rites or anything like that but if we have this version of sin then we might assume when we read that word our modern schemata and frankly the the schema of sin in the Middle Ages wasn't much different than ours but that's not the one we see in Beowulf now arrogance is considered sinful over weaning over thinking too much of yourself and this is frequently used in old English it's described by words like overheed which is like overthinking not thinking too much but thinking too much about yourself or for a mode having too much pride too much usually being too pushy being a bully, being someone who's more of a threat to other people remember in Hrauff's Saga the Berserkers that serve King Hrauff are kind of pushy they even threaten King Hrauff indirectly they say do you think you're man enough to fight with something like this and then some of Hrauff's other retainers before Bodvar gets there they're more abusive to people they're weaker than them people like Hjalte and that's the kind of over mode that's the kind of you know mode can be a word for bravery but over mode is bad overhigged is the name of one of the queens the queen of the geese at one point that's good having mind having thoughtfulness is good but overhigged is bad and this is something that Unferth and Beowulf sort of contend with Beowulf being arrogant but Beowulf says this is all I did and I'm not bragging about it he wants to dissociate himself from boasting now that's not to be confused with eagerness for glory the very last lines of the poem say that the Beowulf's men grieve for him, grieve for Beowulf great among kings mildest in his mean most gentle of men kindest to his kinfolk and that last line keenest for fame, the Old English word is luff giornost the word there is luff which means sort of the kind of fame where you're known widely but frequently throughout the poem he's also described as looking for dome, looking for judgment not necessarily God's judgment but the judgment of people after him so remember you want both you want to be known widely you don't want people to forget about you but then when they remember you you want them to judge you favorably and say you did right when you were alive and so along that line Rothgar when he's trying to motivate Beowulf to be strong against Grendel when he fights him he says in 590 be mindful of fame make your might known so fame here is good, earn that fame earn that judgment and the word there is actually dome and then when Beowulf is killed Grendel but then Grendel's mother comes and kills Asherah Rothgar's closest lieutenant his closest thing Beowulf says do not be sorry wise man this is 1384 do not be sorry it's better for everyone that he avenge his friends rather than mourn for them too long each of us must expect an end to the life in this world he who can should gain glory and that's domes before death this is what is best for a warrior after his death and that's the quotation I put up here on the top left let he who can gain glory before death that is best for a warrior after death in other words there is judgment at death and after death that much sounds like it fits with Dreatness Dom with God's judgment but in this case it's people's judgment it's the judgment of the people who remember you after your death that is what you're left with after you're dead and it's sort of one of these moments where it's clear that Beowulf isn't looking forward to life after death like actually going to heaven or something like that but he's looking forward to being remembered well he's looking forward to dome from the people who remember him rather than God's judgment and this should sound familiar we've encountered this quite a bit this is Cleos Amphitan in the Iliad but it's also the word used in the Havimal I remember this Old Norse collection of sayings of aphorisms which are attributed to Odin the Norse pagan God and Odin is supposed to have said cattle die, kinsmen die you yourself will die but I know one thing that will never die judgment on every man dead and the word in the Old Norse there is Domer which is the cognate of the Old English Domas so again this is not looking at actually experiencing life after death but it's enough that when everything you've built up is gone when you know the Ubisuit lament recognizes that everything you achieve is going to be gone everything you build is going to go away you and everybody you know are going to die but there may be one consolation that is if you've earned dome if you've earned good judgment the judgment of people after you're dead that is the one thing that survives you it's not looking forward to an afterlife in heaven or Valhalla or anything else like that passages like this seem to be focused on just being remembered just becoming a story that lives on after your physical body is gone so a few other elements of Old English poetry that we see happening in Beowulf Old English poetry is known for what we call kinnings these are figures of speech sometimes they're metaphors sometimes they're metonyms remember when you describe one thing for the whole thing like if I said that Hrothgar went to Frigia with 50 swords well that doesn't mean he just had 50 swords he had to wield himself he had 50 men carrying swords that would be a metonym so a kinning might be a metaphor it might be a metonym that refers to something indirectly and usually in some sort of compound word so one way of describing the sea is the Rondrada and we actually have that on the first page of Beowulf when Shil Shifing as a child put in a boat and sent over the whale road the Rondrada, the sea swords are frequently described as battle lights not something that is metal it's described as if it was something that immediate light so of course the metal would be reflecting light but the swords themselves are described as battle off light your body and specifically your rib cage is described as your bone locker a bonlaka so if you pierce your enemies bone locker that's actually pretty hard because you have to get through the ribs in order to do that the ships that sail over the Rondrada, the Sulwuru the sea wood sometimes are referred to as stallions of the water or something like that a poet is someone who unlocks his word horde as if like all the poetic diction, the vocabulary he has to describe this story in other words his ability to give that story a narrative comes from this treasury he has where the treasures inside are words and he's presumably got more than the average person but sometimes somebody like Beowulf or the wanderer will unlock his word horde and speak in sort of poetic or stately manner shield sheafing is described as the helm of shieldings and Hrothgar later is called the helm of shieldings so the king is the helmet that protects the people he's not just sort of the head he's also the protector and these are words this word horde of kennings would be used by a soap now the modern English word is bard or poet I'm going to distinguish between the word poet and a soap or bard because the poet might be somebody who actually composes the poem the soap is going to be someone who sings the poem the way Benjamin Bagme did at the beginning of the video but sometimes the soap and the poet may be the same person because the soap could make variations when he sings when we've seen this in the text that we've read since at least Homer there is a lot of room for independent variation another characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry that I wish we had more of today is the technique of understatement this is something you'll see not just in old English poetry but also old Norse poetry, old Norse prose you'll see it if you've read the assigned chapters from Greta Saga but there is this tendency to in a world where everything is dangerous and everything is extreme we live in a world of extreme extreme darkness in the summertime extreme darkness in the wintertime because it's so far north it's a world of extreme cold especially in the wintertime but you get to Iceland, you're around volcanoes, there's extreme heat it's a world of extremes but the language doesn't reflect that the language actually tries to understate everything which is exactly the opposite of the way we do things today today everything is awesome think about the word awesome it's sort of this awe is this feeling of how small you are in front of this giant sort of thing that changes your experience and it could also be terror we say something's awful it fills you with awe fills you with terror or massive amount of respect or something like that but now just somebody brought me a beer that I wasn't expecting I'll say awesome it's all that I've got this one little trifling thing and of course we've gone this far to say that oh my god I'm literally dying I use the word literally just to mean like well, kinda rather than being literally these things are the greatest things that happen to you ever they're the worst thing that happen to you ever and then tomorrow you'll have another worst thing that ever happens to you we use hyperbole all the time we typically use these words that just exaggerate out of all proportion you know, people understand it they get the joke, they get that it's not really awesome or terrible or literally anything but it's exactly the opposite in these old Germanic languages the old Germanic literature when Beowulf kills Grindel and hangs his arm up from the rafters in Haerot people come from all over the place to see it and your translation or the Longman translation really, I don't like the way they translated it because they sort of lose that understatement they say that people were happy to see that Grindel was killed but actually what the old English says is that Grindel's departure from life did not seem mournful to any man in other words people didn't grieve when Grindel was dead he didn't have the usual mourners at his funeral that is a major understatement this is a monster that's been ripping people apart for years that nobody's been able to do anything about until now finally he's dead so it's not just relief and of course it is joy but the poet just sort of understates it by saying there were a few people who mourned his passing later when Rothgar is talking about the mirror the swamp where Grindel and his mother lived it's this terrible place it's got these serpents and monsters in the water and he says that when a deer the heathstriding heart when the heart the deer is hunted by hounds this strong outlawed stag is seeking a thicket trying to hide trying to get away from these hunting dogs attacking it and it runs for cover but it would rather be killed at bay on the bank before hiding its head in that water in other words the stag would rather be ripped apart by dogs it's just going to give up running if the only direction it can run is to Grindel's mirror into Grindel's swamp and he follows that you get how terrible a place this is that Bale was about to have to go into it's so bad that a deer would rather be torn apart than go into it and then he follows it by saying it is no peaceful place well that's a bit of an understatement after this long description about how terrible a place it is he just says it's not a happy place not a peaceful place I'm going to see a lot more of that if you look further into Old English and Old Norse literature if you read the Iliad and the Odyssey you probably came across a lot of references to people that you didn't recognize and you probably wondered do I need to know who this person is do I need to know what's happening here do I need to know who Heromode is do I need to know who Sigmund is do I need to know who Ermaneric is do I need to know what happens to Herot later because we're told that that was before the timbers of Herot had burned and you're probably thinking is that something that's going to happen later these are digressions these are sort of descriptions that are off-topic for the immediate narrative but there are things that the audience of the poem would have recognized the poet would have assumed that his hearer when it was an oral tradition and then a reader presumably once it was written down would assume that the reader knew who these people were and knew why these were important things and so I might say that this was before Luke Skywalker found out that Darth Vader was his father well presumably you already know that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father but I might be telling you a part of the story and it's important that you know that this is before that happens this is why we have some of these references to you know this is why Herot this is when Herot was still standing he presumes you know that Herot would later be destroyed so it's a digression, it goes off-topic and it's an allusion if it's a reference to another story that you're supposed to know so one of the references here I mentioned already the code of mail that Beowulf is wearing that preserves him when Grindel's mother stabs him with her knife we're told that Weyland made it and he makes another couple of objects and described in Beowulf the poet expects that you know that Weyland is a smith he's the sort of legendary smith that's made some of these legendary weapons and armor he's got his own sort of cycle of legends about him some of them still come down to us if you read the Old English poem Deore you hear a little bit about Weyland that you know he knows a lot about sorrow because he suffered long hardship, sorrow, longing for his companions ice cold, exile he often found woes after Nithud put compulsion on him supple bounds of sinew on a better man so this king, Nithud captured Weyland and tried to force him to make these treasures for him and he actually hamstrung him hamstrings in the back of his legs so that he was lame but he eventually steals this sort of magical swan cloak that allows him to you know fly and he gets revenge on Nithud later on but these things are just very obliquely referred to in poems like Deore and in Beowulf but they add significance to those poems because in the case of Deore Deore is saying well people have been through worse things than I've been through they got over it so I'll get over it too and in Beowulf it's just important to know that these this armor that Beowulf has is really really sort of legendary armor so this is something that no ordinary person would have and clearly he's using it for a very legendary purpose I'll just you know this is a picture of the Frank's casket this box it has these runes and images on it and the picture on the top right the left half of that picture shows Wailand in his Smithy with his tools around him making treasures and then it shows him capturing that swan cloak immediately after that these are parts of the larger fabric of stories that are woven together in a narrative like Beowulf you probably notice a lot of the same sort of ethos from a froth saga that determined how a warrior was supposed to be you know that is characteristic of the chiefdoms of the time of the great migrations not so much by the time Beowulf is written when the poem of Beowulf is written we are in a time of nation states you know England has been sort of unified after the Battle of Bruneberg we have something more like what we think of a king ruling over a nation now where you're born into that nation that's where your citizenship is my country right or wrong or whatever but before that we had these chiefdoms where there was a lot of fish and infusion you could leave if your chieftain wasn't treating you right if you were fighting hard for your chief and he wasn't rewarding you you could pick up and leave if you were a noble if you had the means to do that but that meant that the chief needed to be generous needed to give arm rings this is the way you carried your wealth around with you you couldn't go deposit your payment in the bank most of the time whatever you had was what you carried with you wherever you went so if you want to carry gold around you can put it in a bag and it'll just be this thing hanging on your belt but the easiest way to carry it is through one of these arm rings you just put on your arm and there it is and not only is that easier to carry but you can also show somebody here's how important I am here's how many battles I've fought in and if you're going to be that king you have to be sure that this economic system keeps moving that you can keep redistributing wealth that means you keep conquering new territories or defeating other kings but getting new treasure, giving that treasure in turn back to your warriors and so that they will protect you and this is another strategy of the Hall of Hale Rock it was described as the greatest of all halls the most famous of all Meade Halls of this time is the same thing, the same place being described as Lidar in Hroth Saga this is something that would draw in some of the best warriors and we really see this in Hroth Saga because it draws, you know, Shvip Dair and it draws Bodvar and these other champions to come to that place because that's where you know they'd rather serve that king rather than be kings themselves that's a very important thing for Athena remember Bodvar could have been king when his grandfather reigned after he killed Viet the lap sorceress his grandfather reigned said stay here and become king, he said no I'm not going to then he goes to the land of the Goths or the Geats and where his brother Thorir Hounsfoot is king and Thorir says I'll make you a co-ruler with me and I'll give you all this treasure and Bodvar says no I don't want to do that what he wants to do is go to Lidar and be one of Hroth's champions rather than be a chief himself something very similar with Beowulf after he defeats Grendel and Grendel's mother Hrothgar almost basically offers him the throne he says you know you would make a good king and a good protector of the shieldings of the Danes and Beowulf says no that's you know I'm not going to accept that I'm going to go back to my king Heijelak in Gietland after Heijelak dies in that raid in Frisia he's got two sons and Beowulf could push them out of the way but he chooses not to even though Heijelak's sons are very young Beowulf refuses to displace them until they've also been killed and only then will there's nobody else to take over that's when he becomes king and rules for 50 years so you want a thing who could be king who's that good, who's that great a warrior but also that intelligent diplomatic strategic you want that kind of person to be your thing to actually take over to displace you and this is also why Beowulf is a bit of a threat when he first comes to a hail rot it's very clear there that he's more powerful there especially after he beats Grendel than Hrothgar is so Beowulf has to overtly show humility before Hrothgar and Hrothgar you know is full of reminders that please be humbled don't be like these bad guys specifically Hrothgar tells Beowulf don't be like Haramud this ancient king who was abusive to his things and was stingy and he would inflict violence on people when he was in a bad mood and he's remembered his dome is negative he's remembered badly don't be like him don't be a bad ruler a bad chief and also we see what it means to be a thing not just the way Beowulf acts among his to Hrothgar but also when Beowulf is a king and he goes into battle against this dragon remember he goes into battle against the dragon because he's trying to get this treasure hoard for his people he's trying to defend the people from the dragon but also he wants that treasure hoard to give to his people he wants to be the ring giver he wants to have wealth to distribute to his people in addition to protecting them and when he goes to fight that dragon his thanes abandon him he's accustomed to well he's the one that does all the fighting I'm just going to let him do that but the one thing that is loyal to him Wieloff or Wigloff chastises them and says that it's because you abandoned your king and now he's dead now we're going to be overtaken everybody's going to hear that Beowulf is dead they're going to come attack us and we're all going to die because you guys abandon your king your chief at the moment he needs to repay this treasure all the weapons that he gave you he gave you those weapons so that you would stand by him in this moment of need this was that time you did not stand by him so now our whole kingdom falls apart we have those sort of grim lines in Wieloff's speech toward the end of Beowulf it's not just that now that Beowulf our protector is dead we're in danger but not only is our protector dead but the center that held us all together is gone and this fission, this sort of breaking apart has weakened us to the point where the Geats are not going to be around anymore and of course as I mentioned Geatland is in modern day Sweden rather than in modern day Geatland because there's no more Geats and it seems clear that by the time Beowulf was composed it seems that the Geats no longer existed as a people especially not as a nation state they would never make it from chieftain the way Sweden and Norway and Denmark would it might seem like there's not a lot for women to do in Beowulf in this sort of, you know, feign, king relationship and there's, we don't have powerful female figures represented in Beowulf the way we do to some extent in Rolf Krakisaga where we have, you know, the sorceress Fitt or White the lap princess but also Queen Skuld the half sister of Rolf Krakisaga who is descended from elves and she's someone who can raise the dead and you know, she's the only one it seems who could put together this army that could defeat Rolf Krakisaga we don't have women quite that prominent in the narrative of Beowulf but in the background we do have three examples of women who are doing something that is every bit essential to this society as this exchange between Thanes and Kings this sort of ring giving and fighting on the battlefield that takes up most of the narrative you need somebody who's going to do the opposite of fighting, that is you need somebody who's going to keep keep allies together help kingdoms make allies with other kingdom somebody who can be diplomatic so one of my mentors, my thesis advisor getting my master's degree Alexandra Olsen has written a lot about the roles of women in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature and she lays out these five roles that are easy to overlook especially in a narrative that's focused on martial conflict fighting and that sort of thing but the role first of all of cup bearer this is something we see in the art a lot this pendant here at the bottom of the screen shows a woman carrying and holding out a cup in the top right this is from a rune stone that depicts Odin riding on his eight legged horse Sleipnir and there's a valkyrie walking out and holding up a mead horn for him this is a very important role that we know a little bit about but only a little bit, it seems to be more than just a sort of serving role, she's not just a waitress this is someone who has to maintain this piece when you have a hall full of warriors a hall full of egos contending with each other she's someone to whom this place belongs so if you go into this mead hall it is as much Walfeo's hall as it is Rothgar's it is as much Higgs Hall as it is Hygelax and she's the one that sort of determines who drinks, what order where they sit, things like this and that way if you let the woman decide then it won't be an issue of men fighting over who gets to drink first and who gets to sit where connected to this is this role of a peace weaver someone who can figure out how to get these egotistical males to listen to each other long enough to not kill each other and maybe even coordinate their efforts and this is maybe the most important role but I'm going to come back to it there's the role of the mourner this is someone who remembers the people from earlier in her life precisely because the women are going to live longer than the men in a world like this the mortality rate where every man's sort of dome judgment is determined by how good he is in battle well he's not going to be that great forever so the men probably aren't going to live as long as the women the women are the ones who are going to remember the way things were in the past remember the people who have died but also the customs of the past and the stories of the past frequently the the woman will play a role as instigator we have this happen with the sort of contrast or the foil to the queen Heed on lines 1705 we have Heed, the queen of the the Hygelax queen, the queen of the geese the sort of good queen a good piece weaver and cut-bearer and a post to her is this other queen, the Maud Thrift who's sort of an instigator so starting in line 1705 we hear that a queenly Heed Hierith's daughter dwelt there as well wise and refined though her winters were few she housed in the stronghold in other words she's really young but she's very smart this is why she's known as Heed open-handed she granted generous gifts to the geese most unlike Maud Thrift a maid so fierce that numbered her father dared venture near the brave man who gazed at Maud Thrift by day might reckon a death rope already twisted in other words he's going to be hung for something because she's been annoyed by him he might count himself quickly captured and killed a stroke of a sword prescribed for his trespass in other words she has told someone else she has incited someone else to fight him and kill him and now for a queen to proclaim though peerless a woman ought to weave peace not snatch away life for illusory slights so what a queen has the power to provoke fights to provoke to instigate her will by getting someone else to do it but she also has the power to be a peace weaver we see Waltheo the wife of Rothgar acting in these roles as a peace weaver and she does it also in the role of a counselor especially around lines 1023 to 86 where she basically tells Rothgar in front of all these other people she gives him advice but she does it in a way that's very subtle that's sort of designed to make sure everybody there is friendly toward each other she speaks to Rothgar about Rotholf who remember is Rothcracke who is Rothgar's nephew she's also there with her own sons and they are sitting with on either side of Beowulf so Beowulf is there he's just accomplished what Rothgar and no other Dane could so he's a very powerful presence in the hall right now Rotholf for reasons we'll get to in a minute is also a very powerful presence in the hall right now they're both potentially threatening presences to her sons Hrathric and Rothman because Hrathric and Rothman are the ones who are supposed to inherit the kingdom after Rothgar and so Waltheo has to decide how to get this potential conqueror this person in Beowulf who is now more powerful than anybody there who has saved them from Grendel but yet now seems to be have the potential to at least sort of step in and take over in Herod on his own we also have Rotholf who is older than the sons of Rothgar and his father was king before Rothgar was so he has the potential to step in and take over the kingdom so Waltheo is trying to make sure that everybody that's friendly to each other right then remains friendly to each other especially in the case that Hrathgar might not live as long as Rotholf and in doing this this role of peace weaver resembles the role of using this term weaver might seem sort of sexist it's like oh the woman's role is to weave textiles and that was something the women had spent a lot of time doing because you can't just go to the store and buy these things everything you wear has to be woven by somebody probably somebody close by and it's something that all women were trained to do and this was the case in the ancient Greek society of the Iliad and the Odyssey we see Penelope weaving the shroud for laertes the father of Odysseus and it's like only she can do it women spend a lot of time weaving but in this it's not just sort of a very basic menial chore it connects them to the fates the Norns these supernatural women who literally wove the destinies of people so every thread your lifetime is this linear thread but it's not just off on its own it's interwoven with these the threads the lifetimes of other people and you have to sort of put them together in this really complicated fabric the way a weaver would so this idea of a weaver of peace this is somebody who has a lot of loose ends to deal with and these guys especially the hot headed sort of self interested guys trying to win glory in the world and win treasure are going to be a consistent threat to each other and to the piece of the world around them so they're all loose ends that these piece weavers have to successfully weave together and this brings us to Freowaru who is the daughter of Rothgar and Walfail where we're introduced to her around line 1786 and her story is going to be important not in the narrative but as a sort of way for us to look at the social intelligence of this time period and the social intelligence of Beowulf and this type of literature