English 211 - Beowulf
Craig R. Davis
MWF 10:00-10:50

A continuation of English 210, Old English.  Our goal will be to read aloud, translate and discuss all 3, 182 lines of the most powerful and significant poem in Old English, the fullest expression in any language of archaic Germanic tradition in song.  The setting of Beowulf is ancient Scandinavia, the lands from which the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries AD; it survives in a single fire-damaged manuscript from around the year 1000.  The Beowulf poet imagines in a subtle and allusive style the career of the last kind of a lost tribe once living in southern Sweden.  We will explore the interlaced structure of the narrative as its several levels of organization, especially the way in which the poet enmeshes the life-story of his hero in a whole world of dark tribal prehistory stretching back to the beginnings of human life on earth.  We will be particularly concerned to discover the meaning of the monsters in Beowulf: the cannibalistic Grendel, his vengeful mother, and the dragon who inhabits the grave of an even more ancient people.  We will finally try to understand why Beowulf failed to achieve the kind of cultural authority enjoyed by other early epics of comparable ambition and artistic quality, but also examine the ways in which the poem anticipates emerging institutions and social values.

Prerequisite:  English 210 or its equivalent.

Requirements:  Daily oral translation and discussion in class; a final project.

Texts:  Beowulf: A Student Edition, ed. George Jack (Oxford, 1994);

           Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Fr. Klaeber (Lexington, 1950)