[gothic-l] Beowulf and the Geats

[Bertil Häggman]

Philip,

There is of course reason to treat Beowulf on this
list as he might well have been Geatic/Gothic.
But I think you are correct. The connections
between the personalities in the poem are
mainly Danish/Jutish. There is plainly no
relation to East Germanic.

I guess the dating of Beowulf has always been
up for discussion. The latest translation is by the
Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939 -      ).
He is a great admirer of ancient Denmark.
Am thinking of for instance the poem "The
Tollund Man" beginnig with the strophes:

Some day I will go to Aarhus
to see his peat-brown head.
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach

Gothically

Bertil




> I know this is not a Beowulf or Anglo-Saxon list, but both of these
> statements should be corrected.  First, Beowulf is not the son of the King
> of the Geats, but the nephew until he becomes king himself. Also, there is
> no evidence that Beowulf was a real person, so that can hardly make the case
> that the poem was originally written for Geats, not to mention Goths, since
> most scholars do not treat the two as identical.  Although story lines in
> the poem appear in other Germanic cultures, the poem itself gives no
> evidence that it was translated from an earlier Gothic poem or from any
> other language. (Compare this with the portion of the poetic Genesis that
> was identified as a translation from Old Saxon from metrical evidence before
> the Old Saxon original was even found).
>
> As for when Beowulf was written down, few people today would make the
> statement that it belongs to 8th-century Anglia.  Ever since around 1980,
> the dating has been completely up in the air, with perhaps more people
> favoring a later date, perhaps 10th century.  The manuscript itself was
> copied around 1000 in Old English, not Old Saxon.



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