"Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts" develops the theme that all stories - all 'beautiful lies', if one considers them as such - have a potentially myth-like function as they enter and re-enter the stream of human consciousness. In particular, the volume assesses the place of heroic poetry (including "Beowulf," "Widsith," and "The Battle of Maldon") in the evolving society of Anglo-Saxon England during the tenth-century period of nation-building. Poetry, Niles argues, was a great collective medium through which the Anglo-Saxons conceived of their changing social world and made mental adjustments to it. Old English 'heroic geography' is examined as an aspect of the mentality of that era. So too is the idea of the oral poet (or bard) as a means by which the people of this time continued to conceive of themselves, in defiance of reality, as members of a tribe - like community knit by close personal bonds. The volume is rounded off by the identification of Bede's story of the poet Cæedmon as the earliest known example of a modern folktale type, and by a spirited defense of Seamus Heaney's recent verse translation of "Beowulf."
Author(s): John D. Niles
Series: Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 20
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: XIV+374
Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations xi
List of Illustrations xiv
Introduction: Myths and Texts 1
Chapter 1. Locating "Beowulf" in Literary History 13
Footnote: Recent Work on Mythmaking and Ethnogenesis with Some Thoughts on the Normative 59
Query: How Real Are the Geats? And Why Does this English Poem Never Mention the English? 65
Chapter 2. "Widsith," the Goths, and the Anthropology of the Past 73
Footnote: Some New Interest in the Goths 111
Chapter 3. Anglo-Saxon Heroic Geography: How (on Earth) Can It Be Mapped? 119
Chapter 4. The Myth of the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet 141
Excursus: The Refrain in "Deor" 189
Footnote: Calling a Bard a Bard, or Not 195
Response: The "Battle of the Heroic Lay" Rejoined, or Not 199
Chapter 5. "Maldon" and Mythopoesis 203
Response: On Stylized Numbers, Odda's Name, and Propaganda 237
Excursus: On Sacrifice and Atonement 243
Chapter 6. Byrhtnoth's Laughter and the Poetics of Gesture 253
Footnote: Another Look at Byrhtnoth's Laughter 277
Chapter 7. True Stories and Other Lies 279
Chapter 8. Bede's Cædmon, "The Man Who Had No Story" (Irish Tale-Type 2412B) 309
Chapter 9. Heaney's "Beowulf" Six Years Later 325
Afterword 355
Index of Modern Scholars Cited 357
General Index 365
