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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Replying to @mcclure111 @AdmiralHip and
I did say I was bitter but not at christianization per se!! I am bitter at the Cotton library fire*, and the fact that Beowulf implies an entire corpus of oral stories we have only this tiny distorted window into, and like how do we know there were only 3 Beowulf stories
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Replying to @mcclure111 @AdmiralHip and
* I thought the Cotton library fire destroyed more than it did. I checked on Wikipedia and only 1/4 of the collection was lost
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It’s hard to say how widespread the stories were. They do refer to other legendary figures we know from elsewhere but how similar they are to what Beowulf was is unclear.
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