In Beowulf
and the Grendel-kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England, Helen
Damico presents the first concentrated discussion of the initiatory two-thirds
of Beowulf’s 3,182 lines in the context of the sociopolitically turbulent years
that composed the first half of the eleventh century in Anglo-Danish England.
Damico
offers incisive arguments that major historical events and personages
pertaining to the reign of Cnut and those of his sons recorded in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, and major continental
and Scandinavian historical texts, hold striking parallels with events and
personages found in at least eight vexing narrative units, as recorded by
Scribe A in BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, that make up the poem’s quasi
sixth-century narrative concerning the fall of the legendary Scyldings.
Given the poet’s
compositional skill—widely relational and eclectic at its core—and his affinity
with the practicing skalds, these strings of parallelisms could scarcely have
been coincidental. Rather, Damico argues that examined within the context of
other eleventh-century texts that either bemoaned or darkly satirized or
obversely celebrated the rise of the Anglo-Danish realm, the Beowulfian units
may bring forth a deeper understanding of the complexity of the poet’s
compositional process.
Damico
illustrates the poet’s use of the tools of his trade—compression, substitution,
skillful encoding of character—to reinterpret and transform grave
sociopolitical “facts” of history, to produce what may be characterized as a
type of historical allegory, whereby two parallel narratives, one literal and
another veiled are simultaneously operative.
Beowulf
and the Grendel-kin lays out the story of Beowulf, not as a
monster narrative nor a folklorish nor solely a legendary tale, but rather as a
poem of its time, a historical allegory coping with and reconfiguring
sociopolitical events of the first half of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon
England.
