About this Event
Title-picture above: The unique copy of Beowulf is preserved in the Nowel Codex, now British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.XV (©image Ken Eckart 1998 / Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0). The open codex shows Folios 178v (BL 181v) and 179r (BL 182r), lines 2189-2231 of the poem.
The Old English epic of Beowulf is structured around the hero's great fights against three supernatural monsters. Into this tale of wonder the author weaves heroic legends deriving mostly from peoples and events in southern Scandinavia and beyond during the first half of the sixth century.
The distinction between the supernatural and the historical content is made within the poem itself. When the venerable Danish king Hrothgar played his lyre, "Sometimes he recited verse, true and tragic, and sometimes that great-hearted king rightly recalled tales of wonder" (2108b-2110). Prominent among the “true and tragic” legends woven into Beowulf are tales of three royal families of early sixth-century southern Scandinavia:
1. the Scyldings (ON Skjǫldungar), who rule the Danes on and around the island of Sjælland, defeat the Heruli and the Heathobeards, and who have close affinities with the Wulfings and Wuffings of East Anglia;
2. the Hrethlings, who rule the hero’s own people, the Geats, in what is now south-western Sweden, and whose king, Hygelac, is mentioned in sixth-century Frankish sources; and
3. the Scylfings, who rule the Swedes in what is now eastern-central Sweden.
It is these legends which, along with related Old English and Scandinavian sources, enable us to begin to chart the geographical and historical framework of the poem, into which the tales of wonder are dovetailed.
Then there are references to the even older legends of King Offa the Old, Finn Folcwalding, lord of the Frisians, and Hengest himself, which take us back into the fifth century. Through these, we can see something of the dramatically personalised wars in northern lands that preceded the English settlements in Britain.
Above: Lord and Ladies in the World of Beowulf (©Dr Sam Newton 2021)
Below: People and Places in the World of Beowulf , also showing the approximate location the last battle of Beowulf's uncle Hygelac(©Dr Sam Newton 2019).
Provisional Timetable for the Day
10.15 –11.15: Beowulf and the Old English Heroic Age.
11.15 - 11.45: Coffee-break.
11.45 – 12.45: King Offa the Old and the Kingdoms of England.
12.45 - 13.45: Lunch-break.
13.45 - 14.45: Finn, Hengest, and the Beginnings of England.
Above: The legend of Offa the Old as described in the related Old English poem Widsith (edition & translation ©Dr Sam Newton 2024).
Below: Fífeldore, 'Giant's Door', the estuary of the River Eider , the river by which Offa the Old won his great victory (©Google Earth 2016).
Some Suggestions for Optional Background Reading
Alexander, M., The First Poems in English (Penguin Classics 2008).
Bjork, R.E., & J.D. Niles (eds), A Beowulf Handbook (Nebraska University 1997, 1998).
Chambers, R.W., Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn (3rd edition, University of Cambridge 1959).
Fulk, R., R.Bjork, & J.Niles (eds), Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th Edition (Toronto 2008).
Garmonsway, G., & J. Simpson (ed. & tr.), Beowulf and Its Analogues (Dent Everyman 1968, 1980).
Heaney, Seamus (tr.) Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, ed. J.Niles (Norton 2007).
Hyams, E.R., & S.T.Samples, Heroic Legends of the North: An Introduction to the Nibelung and Dietrich Cycles (Garland 1996).
Lee, S.D., & E. Solopova, The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien (Palgrave Macmillan 2005).
Neidorf, L. (ed.), The Dating of Beowulf – A Reassessment, Anglo-Saxon Studies 24 (Brewer 2014).
Newton, S., The Origins of Beowulf and the pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia (Brewer 1993).
Shippey, T.A., The Road to Middle-earth (Allen and Unwin, 1982; rev. edn HarperCollins, 2003).
Shippey, T.A., Beowulf and the North before the Vikings (Arc Humanities Press 2022).
Sims-Williams, P., “The Settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle”, Anglo-Saxon England 12 (1983), 1-41.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (tr.), Beowulf – A Translation and Commentary, ed. C. Tolkien (Harper Collins 2014).
Turville-Petre, G., The Heroic Age of Scandinavia (London 1951, 1976).
Wilson, R., The Lost Literature of Medieval England (Methuen 1952, 1970).
Woolf, A., “Imagining English Origins”, Quaestio Insularis: Selected Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic 18 (2017), 1-20.
Online Resources
Professor Tom Shippey’s three-part seminar series on J.R.R.Tolkien and Beowulf was delivered at Signum University in 2017. Since then, Signum University has kindly made the seminars available on YouTube:
1. The Monsters and the Critics
2. The Origins of England
3: The Glamour of Poesis
n.b. There is some slight technical awkwardness on some of these recordings, but they are still well worth following. If readers find these links as useful as I have, you can make a donation to Signum University.
About Dr Sam Newton FSA
Sam Newton was awarded his Ph.D at the University of East Anglia in 1991. He published his first book, The Origins of Beowulf and the pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia, in 1993, and his second, The Reckoning of King Rædwald, in 2003. He has also published several papers, some of which are available on his website or on Academia.
He has lectured widely around the country and abroad for over thirty years and has contributed to many radio and television programmes, especially Time Team (now back in business as Time Team Digital). He is Director of Wuffing Education and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
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Event Venue
Online
GBP 30.00 to GBP 45.00
