Research project for next Monday:

In last week’s introduction, I emphasized the importance of historical and cultural context to the work we will be doing in this class. Beowulf presents interesting challenges in this respect: not only is there considerable ambiguity surrounding its authorship and even the century in which it was composed, but it is a historical epic, set in another time and place altogether. Furthermore, unless you are a scholar of Old English, it is only available to the modern reader in translation, and the translations differ greatly, reflecting conflicting theories about the poem and its composition.

Certainly this complicates the process of “digging,” of finding ways to shed historical light on this poem. But it also creates multiple possibilities. For Monday, I want each one of you to do some exploratory research and come up with something—a manuscript, a document, a law, an artwork, an artifact, a story, a crucial bit of historical information—that helps to ground this poem in the real world and thereby illuminate it. You could approach this by looking at the actual early Scandinavian setting of the poem, or the Germanic literary tradition the poem seems to align itself with; you could look at the period in England during which it was written, which is not represented in the poem itself but must surely inform it; or you could even focus on the Seamus Heaney translation, looking at Heaney’s Ireland or the controversy surrounding his translation.

You may use the internet or the library. Consider scholarly sites dealing with medieval England, museum sites, online archives, art books—be creative, adventurous. This assignment does not require you to write anything: merely to bring to class a copy or printout of your “artifact.” You’ll be asked to speak about it briefly, explaining what you see as its significance and how it might enrich our reading of the poem.