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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Hm. Surely the *composer* (or at least the composer of the first version) was not a monk? Like, the source "text" surely must have been oral. It's got *ads* in it
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Not necessarily. Plenty of texts do not need an oral source. People can just...come up with stuff. Or they may have based them loosely on many different folk tales. But whoever was circulating these stories were Christian at any rate, or most likely.
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The dichotomy of oral vs written text is a difficult one. People who study early medieval Ireland have been having that debate for decades. It’s very probable that these texts hold older traditions, but we cannot know the extent to which the text remains “true” to those.
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @mcclure111 and
And as for all oral texts there is rarely ever one composer.
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