1 - From Heorot to Hollywood: Beowulf in its Third Millennium

Summary

To make a beginning is to miss things out; we are never ‘from the egg’, but always launched in medias res. And the middle of things is where we pick up the story of Beowulf, by which I mean the story of the poem, not the story in the poem. What this essay assumes is that Beowulf, as it is enacted in its sole surviving manuscript, the Nowell Codex, now part of London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv, is not the beginning of the story of the work we call Beowulf, but already an adaptation, a refraction. Even in the first glimpse we have of Beowulf, an early eleventh-century performance of narrative material from the first millennium, the poem is already in movement, transitory (læne) and in transition. As the Nowell Codex Beowulf is not only writing, but also a reading, as all writing must be, this essay argues that subsequent creative responses to Beowulf are not, therefore, different in essence from the manuscript text itself. Consequently, although the Nowell-Beowulf marks the opening out of a story in medias res, it is not itself a point of origin against which the authenticity of other uses of the Beowulf material are to be benchmarked. Subsequent performances of the Beowulf material, acts which literary criticism has traditionally labelled ‘reception’, are rather an integral part of the narrative of Beowulf-the-work. We should see the work not as an object, fixed in a web of written text and in need of atomizing analysis of its linguistic parts, nor even as an event in time, requiring historical contextualization, but rather as a process through time.

After developing some of these introductory statements about Beowulf as always already in motion, this essay then reads two very different imaginative responses to Beowulf made early in the twenty-first century: Seamus Heaney's poem ‘Helmet’, published in 2006, and the film Beowulf (dir. Robert Zemeckis), released in 2007. I hope to show that Beowulf continues to have cultural ‘use’ (something all works must possess if they are not to atrophy) across three millennia, and that Anglo-Saxon poetry continues to be productive in contemporary imagination, where it is as political as it was in the late tenth/early eleventh centuries.