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Niles interprets "Beowulf" as a song performed before an audience, not as a text to be read by clerics. Showing its art to be formal, tradition-bound, and highly stylized, he maintains that much of its character derives from the oral heroic verse-making heritage of Anglo-Saxon poets. Distinguishing Beowulf from Old English poems of clearly monastic origin, Niles finds in it little evidence of Christian symbolism of Latin learning. Instead, it affirms, without irony, the value of heroic action in a world in which even heroes must die. Postulating a tenth-century date for "Beowulf", he offers an integrated view of this masterpiece as expressing a sophisticated poetic tradition of the post-Viking age.
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BeowuLF
Beowulf The Poem and Its Tradition JOHN D. NILES
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 1983
Copyright © 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
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Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Andrew W . Mellon Foundation This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Niles, John D. Beowulf: the poem and its tradition. Includes index. I. Beowulf. 2. Oral tradition. 3. Anglo-Saxon literature—History and criticism. 4. Anglo-Saxons. I. Title. PR1585.N54 1983 829'.3 83-4308 I S B N 0-674-06725-8
PREFACE a view of the first great work of English literature as a poem whose methods are grounded in an oral tradition, whose style is formal and nonrepresentational, and whose values reflect those of the Anglo-Saxon aristocrats who patronized songs of this kind. In Part I, I discuss the poem's oral, traditional background, chiefly in a chapter on the art of the early Germanic singers; in Part II, its formal artistry; and in Part III, its aristocratic and communityoriented values. Looking at Beowulf this way can be likened to three ways of looking at a blackbird: (i) in its landscape, of wide horizons; (2) under a lens, with attention to its fine anatomy; and (3) as a living thing, with a potential for song, and unlike anything else. The impression I have gained from reading other studies of Beowulf is that their authors have sometimes been swayed by a consensus of earlier authors who have also simply repeated what had been said by persons of authority. My strong feeling is that less is known about the conditions of composition of much Old English poetry than is sometimes thought. The question of dating is a case in point. The question of the possible relation of extant texts to Anglo-Saxon oral tradition is another. In the first part of this book I have tried to take nothing for granted. T o a large degree, the history of Old English literature remains to be written. Several of my views about the context of Beowulf will therefore appear heretical, but only because an opposing orthodoxy has grown great from rather slight beginnings. In Part II, I have tried to read the poem from the inside out, by examining the inner mechanisms by which it operates. I view the poem's diction, structure, and style as parts of a finely wrought aesthetic system that developed largely from the Germanic milieu in which the poem's verse-making tradition arose. In the last chapters I have used both contextual and textual approaches, added to common sense, to try to resolve a number of interpretive issues. In general I have read the poem as a culturally central T H I S BOOK DEVELOPS
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work that expresses an entire vision of life, in both its material and spiritual aspects. In my view, the poem affirms without irony the