And the whole poem IS tonally weird? It’s an odd mix of Viking saga “BROS! BROS! BROS!” and more classical, like, Odysseyish tableaus in more baroque prose. This translation captures that incredibly well.
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Replying to @scottreuwho @sargoth
And then "and then for THIS two page span Beowulf is a Christian, no this part wasn't added by the monks that transcribed this why would you say that" sorry no i'm not bitter
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Replying to @mcclure111 @sargoth
lmao yeah there’s a lot of “AND THEN HE GAVE THANKS TO JESUS, WHO IS THE CHRIST AND ALSO THE GOD, METODES MILDSE, JSYK”
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Hate to be that guy but the extent to which Beowulf was an oral poem then committed to text isn’t known, and no one can even agree on a date (7th to 11th c???) but while it may be about a pagan past doesn’t mean it wasn’t also created by Christians.
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @scottreuwho and
There was a lot of valourization of the “ancient” past among the early English kings. They maintained a descent from Woden for a long time. But the dichotomy between “pagan” and Christian isn’t so clear cut.
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @scottreuwho and
And it’s not a Viking poem, it’s quite definitively English, although the English claimed descent from peoples who were also the ancestors of the Vikings.
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @scottreuwho and
But as someone who studies conversion-era England, I really bristle at this perpetual idea that monks are sitting in their cells cackling while they make the innocent pagan stories Christian. That isn’t at all how texts were formed.
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This is a good response!! But (1) the distinction between viking and anglo saxon isn't really so clear cut, is it? There was cross pollination and I thought it was during the exact period Beowulf was being composed
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Replying to @mcclure111 @AdmiralHip and
& (2) the way my professor described it, the assumption those sections were added later is rooted in a sudden shift in writing style? which seems to imply someone (not necessarily the transcriber) added them after the rest of the poem (surely because they thought it improved it)
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To my understanding it’s not that cut and dry. Another debate is on the language and style. But almost assuredly a Christian monk wrote the whole thing. The idea of the pagan sections being different from the Christian ones tends to elide the fact that oral stories are highly 1/
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subject to change, but it is unlikely in my view that someone wrote down the “non-Christian” sections and someone added in the Christian stuff after. It may have happened but whoever wrote it in the first place was still likely Christian.
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