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- The Nordic Beowulf
The Nordic Beowulf
by Bo Gräslund
Translated by Martin Naylor
Series: Medieval Media and Culture
286 Pages, Trim size: 6 x 9 in
- Hardcover
- 9781802700084
- Published: April 2022
In such a wide-ranging, long-standing, and international field of scholarship as Beowulf, one might imagine that everything would long since have been thoroughly investigated. And yet as far as the absolutely crucial question of the poem’s origins is concerned, that is not the case.
This cross-disciplinary study by Bo Gräslund argues that the material, geographical, historical, social, and ideological framework of Beowulf cannot be the independent literary product of an Old English Christian poet, but was in all essentials created orally in Scandinavia, which was a fertile seedbed for epic poetry.
Through meticulous argument interwoven with an impressive assemblage of data, archaeological and otherwise, Gräslund offers possible answers to the questions of the provenance of the Geats, the location of Heorot, and many more, such as the significance of Sutton Hoo and the signification of the Grendel kin and dragon in the sixth century when the events of the poem, coinciding with cataclysmic events in northern Europe, took place.
Prefaces
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. The Origins of the Poem
Chapter 3. Some Unproven Premises
Chapter 4. Dating of the Poem
Chapter 5. Archaeological Delimination
Chapter 6. Results of Primary Analysis, Step 1
Chapter 7. The Name Geatas
Chapter 8. Other Links to Eastern Sweden
Chapter 9. Elements of Non-Christian Thinking
Chapter 10. Poetry in Scandinavia
Chapter 11. The Oral Structure of the Poem
Chapter 12. Results of Primary Analysis, Step 2
Chapter 13. Gotland
Chapter 14. Heorot
Chapter 15. Swedes and Gutes
Chapter 16. The Horsemen around Beowulf’s Grave
Chapter 17. Some Linguistic Details
Chapter 18. From Scandinavia to England
Chapter 19. Transmission and Writing Down in England
Chapter 20. Allegorical Representation
Chapter 21. Beowulf and Guta saga
Chapter 22. Chronology
Chapter 23. Retrospective Summary
Bibliography
Bo Gräslund is professor emeritus in archaeology at Uppsala University.
Gräslund has offered a substantial body of archaeological evidence and argumentation for his judgment that the Geats of Beowulf are ancient Gotlanders and that the poem’s origin as an “oral history” of this people can be traced to this “large, well-populated island,” which in the Middle Iron Age “enjoyed considerable material wealth, reflecting extensive and independent relations with the Roman Empire and its provinces and with the Gothic and Hunnic regions” (231). The author’s findings are to be taken seriously, though he regrettably skirts or downplays the question of how this oral history might have been transmitted to migrants living closer to Britain in Jutland and northern Germany and why they would have
been keen to preserve this poetic account of another people’s past when they took so little interest in their own pre-Christian heritage. Tom Shippey addresses this question in his recent book published in the same year, also by Arc Humanities Press: “Beowulf” and the North before the Vikings (2022). Shippey’s thesis is that the poem preserves many authentic memories of life and times in southern Scandinavia from the later fifth to the mid-sixth centuries. [...] Together, these two new studies make an interesting case for the possible historical roots of the fantastic tale of monster-fights that came to be imagined in Beowulf.
~Craig R. Davis, Speculum 99, no. 1 (January 2024): 222-24
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