Beowulf: Story, Characters, and Old English

Beowulf, Beowulf, we're gonna talk about Beowulf. We're gonna talk about Beowulf, and he's super exciting. We're gonna talk about the form of the poem, we're gonna talk about what happens, and we're gonna talk about why we care, because it's old. It's so old, oh my god, this is like the oldest thing ever. Scholars are like, fight about whether it was composed in the 8th century or the 11th century, but it doesn't really matter for us because either one of those things is still really, really old. It's a story, it's basically written by this anonymous old English poet, don't know who he is, and it's about some Scandinavian guys who go on some adventures, and it's actually, it's called an epic poem. And epic, it doesn't just mean like totally awesome, and you know, that was epic, like oh my god, it was so epic. It's just a long, it's a long poem about kind of adventures and deeds. You know, so that night that like your friends got drunk and pushed each other around shopping carts until the cops showed up, like that's not epic. Beowulf is epic, and just, you know. But so it's written in old English, which is not the same thing as Middle English, which comes later. Old English is spoken from around maybe like 450 AD to 1150, I mean it gets a little murky, that's about right. And even though it has the word English in it, so you might think that it would be comprehensible to you, you really can't understand it. So I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna put up on the screen the opening lines of Beowulf, and just, you know, just take a look at it, just try to figure that out, right. You can't, you can't do it. It doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. And don't, and you're not going to be expected to to be able to translate that. You're only going to have to read that in translation if you do have to encounter it. But the important thing to know is that it is in something called alliterative verse, which is a really, really typical thing for old English poetry. I promise you, like, we're going to get to the fun battles and all the exciting stuff soon, but I do have to tell you about alliterative verse first, because it's really important, and it is something that might, like, come up, you know, at some point if you have to talk about Beowulf. And so you've probably heard, like, the term alliteration, which basically, it means things like, you know, an angry aunt, or the beautiful butterfly, and, you know, a bunch of words that all start with the same letter, basically. And, and so instead of, instead of rhyming, what old English poets like to do, as a kind of way to structure their poetry, was to have a line that, not, maybe not every word, because that would be kind of difficult, but a lot of the words start with the same letter. And, you know, so, so people who've sort of, you know, translations of Beowulf do try to preserve this, and so we can kind of take a look at a line and see how this really plays out in a practical kind of way. And here's, you know, a line, a translated line is, the folk king's former fame we have heard of, how princes displayed their prowess in battle. So in the first line, we get, we get lots of F's, and in the second line, we get lots of P's, you know, princes, displayed, prowess. And so the other important thing is that the lines are kind of divided in two by something that's called a caesura, which, which just means break. And basically how it's organized is you have two kind of strong accents before the break, and two strong accents after the break in each line. And this can be, sometimes can be harder to see in translation, but if we look at the second line, again, that we read before, how princes displayed their prowess in battle, you know, how princes displayed their prowess in battle, there's, there's two accents before, and there's two accents after, and there's that break that you can do kind of naturally in the middle. And the alliteration is kind of supposed to help us, in a way, bridge that gap. So there's things on either side that all start with that same letter. And that's sort of the basic structure, you know, form and structure of how Beowulf is formed and structured. So what happens in Beowulf? And it's a lot of awesome adventuring. You know, first, we're introduced to the, to the, the Danes, who are just a people. They live in what's now Denmark. They're descendants of Skild Skeffing, who's, that's kind of an awesome name. And he's, he's dead. But, so we're really looking at one of his descendants, whose name is King Hrothgar, and his wife, Welthio, and all of his knights. I think that Hrothgar would be, like, the best cat name, personally, but that's neither here nor there. And so, so Hrothgar and his people, they, they have a monster problem, basically. There's this horrible beast named Grendel, who is terrorizing their mead hall, Hroth. Scholars kind of fight a little bit about what Grendel really looks like. It's not totally clear from, you know, what they've translated. A lot of them think he's kind of human-like with, you know, but really big, and maybe has, like, scales. That's kind of the, maybe the consensus. I like to kind of think of him as sort of an ancient day Oscar the Grouch, when I picture him. Sometimes I also think of him, there's a cover, John Gardner wrote a book called Grendel about sort of the monster's point of view. On the cover of that, he looks kind of like a furry cat monster. You know, there's an animated movie, but I love the title of it. It's called Grendel, Grendel, Grendel, where he is just sort of a sad-looking green monster. Then there was a 2007 movie with, like, a whole bunch of CGI, where he kind of looks, I don't know, like a gross, I don't know how to describe that, gross person. But so however you picture him, he's ferocious and weird. He's supposed to be kind of disconcerting and strange, and he keeps killing the Danes. That's really the salient point, and they don't know what to do. He also lives in a swamp. Oh, that's important. I think that also might be why I think of him as Oscar the Grouch, because it's kind of like, you know, trash can swamp. You can blame him for being upset about things. But so Beowulf comes in, because he's sort of like, he's kind of like a professional good guy, and he hears about this situation, and he comes in to help. And he's a gate, which means that he's from what is now Sweden. It doesn't mean that he opens and closes to let you through. You know, and Hrothgar had helped out a long time ago, had helped out Beowulf's dad. So he's sort of like repaying the favor a little bit, coming and helping out with this. And so, you know, Beowulf gets there, and they have a big feast. And some of Hrothgar's warriors are like a little skeptical of Beowulf's accomplishments. One of them named Unferth kind of brings up this embarrassing swimming contest that Beowulf had like back in the day that he lost. Beowulf says that he lost because he had to like defeat a bunch of sea monsters on the way, which I think might be supposed to be true. It's the kind of thing, you know.