Beowulf,The Monsters and The Critics

VIP免费

2024-12-16 0 0 254.52KB 22 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

SIR ISRAEL GOLLANCZ LECTURE 1936

BEOWULF: THE MONSTERS AND THE CRITICS

BY J. R. R. TOLKIEN

Read 25 November 1936

IN 1864 the Reverend Oswald Cockayne wrote of the Reverend Doctor Joseph Bosworth,

Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon: 'I have tried to lend to others the con-viction I have long

entertained that Dr. Bosworth is not a man so diligent in his special walk as duly to read the books

... which have been printed in our old English, or so-called Anglosaxon tongue. He may do very

well for a professor.'1 These words were inspired by dissatisfaction with Bosworth's dictionary, and

were doubtless unfair. If Bosworth were still alive, a modern Cockayne would probably accuse him

of not reading the 'literature' of his subject, the books written about the books in the so-called

Anglo-Saxon tongue. The original books are nearly buried.

Of none is this so true as of The Beowulf, as it used to be called. I have, of course, read The

Beowulf, as have most (but not all) of those who have criticized it. But I fear that, unworthy

successor and beneficiary of Joseph Bosworth, I have not been a man so diligent in my special walk

as duly to read all that has been printed on, or touching on, this poem. But I have read enough, I

think, to venture the opinion that Beowulfiana is, while rich in many departments, specially poor in

one. It is poor in criticism, criticism that is directed to the understanding of a poem as a poem. It has

been said of Beowulf itself that its weakness lies in placing the unimportant things at the centre and

the important on the outer edges. This is one of the opinions that I wish specially to consider. I think

it profoundly untrue of the poem, but strikingly true of the literature about it. Beowulf has been used

as a quarry of fact and fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art.

It is of Beowulf, then, as a poem that I wish to speak; and though it may seem presumption that I

should try with swich a lewed mannes wit to pace the wisdom of an heep of lerned men, in this

department there is at least more chance for the lewed man. But there is so much that might still be

said even under these limitations that I shall confine myself mainly to the monsters—Grendel and

the Dragon, as they appear in what seems to me the best and most authoritative general criticism in

English—and to certain considerations of the structure and conduct of the poem that arise from this

theme.

There is an historical explanation of the state of Beowulfiana that I have referred to. And that

explanation is important, if one would venture to criticize the critics. A sketch of the history of the

subject is required. But I will here only attempt, for brevity's sake, to present my view of it

allegorically. As it set out upon its adventures among the modern scholars, Beowulf was christened

by Wanley Poesis—Poeseos Anglo'Saxonicæ egregium exemplum. But the fairy godmother later

invited to superintend its fortunes was Historia. And she brought with her Philologia, Mythologia,

Archaeologia, and Laographia.2 Excellent ladies. But where was the child's name-sake? Poesis was

usually forgotten; occasionally admitted by a side-door; sometimes dismissed upon the door-step.

'The Beowulf', they said, 'is hardly an affair of yours, and not in any case a protégé that you could be

proud of. It is an historical document. Only as such does it interest the superior culture of to-day.'

And it is as an historical document that it has mainly been examined and dissected. Though ideas as

to the nature and quality of the history and information embedded in it have changed much since

Thorkelin called it De Danorum Rebus Gesfis, this has remained steadily true. In still recent

pronouncements this view is explicit. In 1925 Professor Archibald Strong translated Beowulf into

verse;3 but in 1921 he had declared: 'Beowulf is the picture of a whole civilization, of the Germania

which Tacitus describes. The main interest which the poem has for us is thus not a purely literary

interest. Beowulf is an important historical document.'4

I make this preliminary point, because it seems to me that the air has been clouded not only for

Strong, but for other more authoritative critics, by the dust of the quarrying researchers. It may well

be asked: why should we approach this, or indeed any other poem, mainly as an historical

document? Such an attitude is defensible: firstly, if one is not concerned with poetry at all, but

seeking information wherever it may be found; secondly, if the so-called poem contains in fact no

poetry. I am not concerned with the first case. The historian's search is, of course, perfectly

legitimate, even if it does not assist criticism in general at all (for that is not its object), so long as it

is not mistaken for criticism. To Professor Birger Nerman as an historian of Swedish origins

Beowulf is doubtless an important document, but he is not writing a history of English poetry. Of

the second case it may be said that to rate a poem, a thing at the least in metrical form, as mainly of

historical interest should in a literary survey be equivalent to saying that it has no literary merits,

and little more need in such a survey then be said about it. But such a judgement on Beowulf is

false. So far from being a poem so poor that only its accidental historical interest can still

recommend it, Beowulf is in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this

quite overshadows the historical content, and is largely independent even of the most important

facts (such as the date and identity of Hygelac) that research has discovered. It is indeed a curious

fact that it is one of the peculiar poetic virtues of Beowulf that has contributed to its own critical

misfortunes. The illusion of historical truth and perspective, that has made Beowulf seem such an

attractive quarry, is largely a product of art. The author has used an instinctive historical sense—a

part indeed of the ancient English temper (and not unconnected with its reputed melancholy), of

which Beowulf is a supreme expression; but he has used it with a poetical and not an historical

object. The lovers of poetry can safely study the art, but the seekers after history must beware lest

the glamour of Poesis overcome them.

Nearly all the censure, and most of the praise, that has been bestowed on The Beowulf has been

due either to the belief that it was something that it was not—for example, primitive, pagan,

Teutonic, an allegory (political or mythical), or most often, an epic; or to disappointment at the

discovery that it was itself and not something that the scholar would have liked better—for

example, a heathen heroic lay, a history of Sweden, a manual of Germanic antiquities, or a Nordic

Summa Theologica.

I would express the whole industry in yet another allegory. A man inherited a field in which was

an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in

building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest

he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to

climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed

the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to

discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting

a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: 'This

tower is most interesting.' But they also said (after pushing it over): 'What a muddle it is in!' And

even the man's own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been

about, were heard to murmur: 'He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to

build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.'

But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.

I hope I shall show that that allegory is just—even when we consider the more recent and more

perceptive critics (whose concern is in intention with literature). To reach these we must pass in

rapid flight over the heads of many decades of critics. As we do so a conflicting babel mounts up to

us, which I can report as something after this fashion.5 'Beowulf is a half-baked native epic the

development of which was killed by Latin learning; it was inspired by emulation of Virgil, and is a

product of the education that came in with Christianity; it is feeble and incompetent as a narrative;

the rules of narrative are cleverly observed in the manner of the learned epic; it is the confused

product of a committee of muddle-headed and probably beer-bemused Anglo-Saxons (this is a

Gallic voice); it is a string of pagan lays edited by monks; it is the work of a learned but inaccurate

Christian antiquarian; it is a work of genius, rare and surprising in the period, though the genius

seems to have been shown principally in doing something much better left undone (this is a very

recent voice); it is a wild folk-tale (general chorus); it is a poem of an aristocratic and courtly

tradition (same voices); it is a hotchpotch; it is a sociological, anthropological, archaeological

document; it is a mythical allegory (very old voices these and generally shouted down, but not so

far out as some of the newer cries); it is rude and rough; it is a masterpiece of metrical art; it has no

shape at all; it is singularly weak in construction; it is a clever allegory of contemporary politics

(old John Earle with some slight support from Mr. Girvan, only they look to different periods); its

architecture is solid; it is thin and cheap (a solemn voice); it is undeniably weighty (the same voice);

it is a national epic; it is a translation from the Danish; it was imported by Frisian traders; it is a

burden to English syllabuses; and (final universal chorus of all voices) it is worth studying.'

It is not surprising that it should now be felt that a view, a decision, a conviction are imperatively

needed. But it is plainly only in the consideration of Beowulf as a poem, with an inherent poetic

significance, that any view or conviction can be reached or steadily held. For it is of their nature that

the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture,

flitting from one tum-tum tree to another. Noble animals, whose burbling is on occasion good to

hear; but though their eyes of flame may sometimes prove searchlights, their range is short.

None the less, paths of a sort have been opened in the wood. Slowly with the rolling years

the obvious (so often the last revelation of analytic study) has been discovered: that we have to deal

with a poem by an Englishman using afresh ancient and largely traditional material. At last then,

after inquiring so long whence this material came, and what its original or aboriginal nature was

(questions that cannot ever be decisively answered), we might also now again inquire what the poet

did with it. If we ask that question, then there is still, perhaps, something lacking even in the major

critics, the learned and revered masters from whom we humbly derive.

The chief points with which I feel dissatisfied I will now approach by way of W. P. Ker,

whose name and memory I honour. He would deserve reverence, of course, even if he still lived

and had not ellor gehworfen on Frean wære upon a high mountain in the heart of that Europe

which he loved: a great scholar, as illuminating himself as a critic, as he was often biting as a critic

of the critics. None the less I cannot help feeling that in approaching Beowulf he was hampered by

the almost inevitable weakness of his greatness: stories and plots must sometimes have seemed

triter to him, the much-read, than they did to the old poets and their audiences. The dwarf on the

spot sometimes sees things missed by the travelling giant ranging many countries. In considering a

period when literature was narrower in range and men possessed a less diversified stock of ideas

and themes, one must seek to recapture and esteem the deep pondering and profound feeling that

they gave to such as they possessed.

In any case Ker has been potent. For his criticism is masterly, expressed always in words

both pungent and weighty, and not least so when it is (as I occasionally venture to think) itself open

to criticism. His words and judgements are often quoted, or reappear in various modifications,

digested, their source probably sometimes forgotten. It is impossible to avoid quotation of the well-

known passage in his Dark Ages:

A reasonable view of the merit of Beowulf is not impossible, though rash enthusiasm may have made too

much of it, while a correct and sober taste may have too contemptuously refused to attend to Grendel or the

Fire-drake. The fault of Beowulf is that there is nothing much in the story. The hero is occupied in killing

monsters, like Hercules or Theseus. But there are other things in the lives of Hercules and Theseus besides

the killing of the Hydra or of Procrustes. Beowulf has nothing else to do, when he has killed Grendel and

Grendel's mother in Denmark: he goes home to his own Gautland, until at last the rolling years bring the

Fire-drake and his last adventure. It is too simple. Yet the three chief episodes are well wrought and well

diversified; they are not repetitions, exactly; there is a change of temper between the wrestling with Grendel

in the night at Heorot and the descent under water to encounter Grendel's mother; while the sentiment of the

Dragon is different again. But the great beauty, the real value, of Beowulf is in its dignity of style. In

construction it is curiously weak, in a sense preposterous; for while the main story is simplicity itself, the

merest commonplace of heroic legend, all about it, in the historic allusions, there are revelations of a whole

world of tragedy, plots different in import from that of Beowulf, more like the tragic themes of Iceland. Yet

with this radical defect, a disproportion that puts the irrelevances in the centre and the serious things on the

outer edges, the poem of Beowulf is undeniably weighty. The thing itselfis cheap; the moral and the spirit ofit

can only be matched among the noblest authors.6

This passage was written more than thirty years ago, but has hardly been surpassed. It remains,

in this country at any rate, a potent influence. Yet its primary effect is to state a paradox which one

feels has always strained the belief, even of those who accepted it, and has given to Beowulf the

character of an 'enigmatic poem'. The chief virtue of the passage (not the one for which it is usually

esteemed) is that it does accord some attention to the monsters, despite correct and sober taste. But

the contrast made between the radical defect of theme and structure, and at the same time the

dignity, loftiness in converse, and well-wrought finish, has become a commonplace even of the best

criticism, a paradox the strangeness of which has almost been forgotten in the process of

swallowing it upon authority.7 We may compare Professor Chambers in his Widsith, p. 79, where he

is studying the story of Ingeld, son of Froda, and his feud with the great Scylding house of

Denmark, a story introduced in Beowulf merely as an allusion.

Nothing [Chambers says] could better show the disproportion of Beowulf which 'puts the irrelevances in

the centre and the serious things on the outer edges', than this passing allusion to the story of Ingeld. For in

this conflict between plighted troth and the duty of revenge we have a situation which the old heroic poets

loved, and would not have sold for a wilderness of dragons.

I pass over the fact that the allusion has a dramatic purpose in Beowulf that is a sufficient defence

both of its presence and of its manner. The author of Beowulf cannot be held responsible for the fact

that we now have only his poem and not others dealing primarily with Ingeld. He was not selling

one thing for another, but giving something new. But let us return to the dragon. 'A wilderness of

dragons.' There is a sting in this Shylockian plural, the sharper for coming from a critic, who

deserves the title of the poet's best friend. It is in the tradition of the Book of St. Albans, from which

the poet might retort upon his critics: 'Yea, a desserte of lapwyngs, a shrewednes of apes, a raffull

of knaues, and a gagle of gees.'

As for the poem, one dragon, however hot, does not make a summer, or a host; and a man might

well exchange for one good dragon what he would not sell for a wilderness. And dragons, real

dragons, essential both to the machinery and the ideas of a poem or tale, are actually rare. In

northern literature there are only two that are significant. If we omit from consideration the vast and

vague Encircler of the World, Miðgarðsormr, the doom of the great gods and no matter for heroes,

we have but the dragon of the Völsungs, Fáfnir, and Beowulf's bane. It is true that both of these are

in Beowulf, one in the main story, and the other spoken of by a minstrel praising Beowulf himself.

But this is not a wilderness of dragons. Indeed the allusion to the more renowned worm killed by

the Wælsing is sufficient indication that the poet selected a dragon of well-founded purpose (or saw

its significance in the plot as it had reached him), even as he was careful to compare his hero,

Beowulf son of Ecgtheow, to the prince of the heroes of the North, the dragon-slaying Wælsing. He

esteemed dragons, as rare as they are dire, as some do still. He liked them—as a poet, not as a sober

zoologist; and he had good reason.

But we meet this kind of criticism again. In Chambers's Beowulf and the Heroic Age—the most

significant single essay on the poem that I know—it is still present. The riddle is still unsolved. The

folk-tale motive stands still like the spectre of old research, dead but unquiet in its grave. We are

told again that the main story of Beowulf is a wild folk-tale. Quite true, of course. It is true of the

main story of King Lear, unless in that case you would prefer to substitute silly for wild. But more:

we are told that the same sort of stuff is found in Homer, yet there it is kept in its proper place. 'The

folk-tale is a good servant', Chambers says, and does not perhaps realize the importance of the

admission, made to save the face of Homer and Virgil; for he continues: 'but a bad master: it has

been allowed in Beowulf to usurp the place of honour, and to drive into episodes and digressions the

things which should be the main stuff of a well-conducted epic.'8 It is not clear to me why good

conduct must depend on the main stuff. But I will for the moment remark only that, if it is so,

Beowulf is evidently not a well-conducted epic. It may turn out to be no epic at all. But the puzzle

still continues. In the most recent discourse upon this theme it still appears, toned down almost to a

melancholy question-mark, as if this paradox had at last begun to afflict with weariness the thought

that endeavours to support it. In the final peroration of his notable lecture on Folk-tale and History

in Beowulf, given last year, Mr. Girvan said:

Confessedly there is matter for wonder and scope for doubt, but we might be able to answer with

complete satisfaction some of the questionings which rise in men's minds over the poet's presentment of his

hero, if we could also answer with certainty the question why he chose just this subject, when to our modern

judgment there were at hand so many greater, charged with the splendour and tragedy of humanity, and in all

respects worthier of a genius as astonishing as it was rare in Anglo-Saxon England.

There is something irritatingly odd about all this. One even dares to wonder if something has not

gone wrong with 'our modern judgement', supposing that it is justly represented. Higher praise than

is found in the learned critics, whose scholarship enables them to appreciate these things, could

hardly be given to the detail, the tone, the style, and indeed to the total effect of Beowulf. Yet this

poetic talent, we are to understand, has all been squandered on an unprofitable theme: as if Milton

had recounted the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in noble verse. Even if Milton had done this (and

he might have done worse), we should perhaps pause to consider whether his poetic handling had

not had some effect upon the trivial theme; what alchemy had been performed upon the base metal;

whether indeed it remained base or trivial when he had finished with it. The high tone, the sense of

dignity, alone is evidence in Beowulf of the presence of a mind lofty and thoughtful. It is, one would

have said, improbable that such a man would write more than three thousand lines (wrought to a

high finish) on matter that is really not worth serious attention; that remains thin and cheap when he

has finished with it. Or that he should in the selection of his material, in the choice of what to put

forward, what to keep subordinate 'upon the outer edges', have shown a puerile simplicity much

below the level of the characters he himself draws in his own poem. Any theory that will at least

allow us to believe that what he did was of design, and that for that design there is a defence that

may still have force, would seem more probable.

It has been too little observed that all the machinery of 'dignity' is to be found elsewhere.

Cynewulf, or the author of Andreas, or of Guthlac (most notably), have a command of dignified

verse. In them there is well-wrought language, weighty words, lofty sentiment, precisely that which

we are told is the real beauty of Beowulf. Yet it cannot, I think, be disputed, that Beowulf is more

beautiful, that each line there is more significant (even when, as sometimes happens, it is the same

line) than in the other long Old English poems. Where then resides the special virtue of Beowulf, if

the common element (which belongs largely to the language itself, and to a literary tradition) is

deducted? It resides, one might guess, in the theme, and the spirit this has infused into the whole.

For, in fact, if there were a real discrepancy between theme and style, that style would not be felt as

beautiful but as incongruous or false. And that incongruity is present in some measure in all the

long Old English poems, save one—Beowulf. The paradoxical contrast that has been drawn between

matter and manner in Beowulf has thus an inherent literary improbability.

Why then have the great critics thought otherwise? I must pass rather hastily over the answers to

this question. The reasons are various, I think, and would take long to examine. I believe that one

reason is that the shadow of research has lain upon criticism. The habit, for instance, of pondering a

summarized plot of Beowulf, denuded of all that gives it particular force or individual life, has

encouraged the notion that its main story is wild, or trivial, or typical, even after treatment. Yet all

stories, great and small, are one or more of these three things in such nakedness. The comparison of

skeleton 'plots' is simply not a critical literary process at all. It has been favoured by research in

comparative folk-lore, the objects of which are primarily historical or scientific.9 Another reason is,

I think, that the allusions have attracted curiosity (antiquarian rather than criешcal) to their

elucidation; and this needs so much study and research that attention has been diverted from the

poem as a whole, and from the function of the allusions, as shaped and placed, in the poetic

economy of Beowulf as it is. Yet actually the appreciation of this function is largely independent of

such investigations.

But there is also, I suppose, a real question of taste involved: a judgement that the heroic or

tragic story on a strictly human plane is by nature superior. Doom is held less literary than άμαρτία.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

SIRISRAELGOLLANCZLECTURE1936BEOWULF:THEMONSTERSANDTHECRITICSBYJ.R.R.TOLKIENRead25November1936IN1864theReverendOswaldCockaynewroteoftheReverendDoctorJosephBosworth,RawlinsonianProfessorofAnglo-Saxon:'Ihavetriedtolendtoothersthecon-victionIhavelongentertainedthatDr.Bosworthisnotamansodiligentinhisspec...

展开>> 收起<<

Beowulf,The Monsters and The Critics.pdf

共22页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Beowulf,The Monsters and The Critics

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: