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keyword: Old English

Old English

  • An Analogue in II Samuel of the Conclusion to Beowulf
    Issue:
    John Shafer

    The last third of Beowulf is recognisably distinct from the first two-thirds, the first part long acknowledged to derive from one or more traditional, pre-Christian narratives such as the ‘Bear’s Son’ or ‘Hand and the Child’ story-pattern. The concluding episode of Beowulf fighting and being killed by a dragon vividly expresses the Geat people’s fear that it cannot maintain its autonomy among larger and more militarily powerful neighbours following the heirless death of its leader. This article identifies an earlier analogue for this last portion of Beowulf from the biblical book of II Samuel, a narrative of King David fighting a giant that shares both this concern and a number of key plot points. Beowulf’s theme of heroic heathenism defiantly, victoriously — but also inevitably — ending to make way for Christianity is not only seen intrinsically to relate to the clear similarities between Beowulf’s dragon-fight and its earlier parallel, but is also shown to motivate clear differences between Beowulf and the earlier narrative.

  • Crying Out for Two Lords: Sex and Supplication in Wulf and Eadwacer
    Issue:
    Thomas Morcom
    This article provides a significant reinterpretation of Wulf and Eadwacer, departing from a new understanding of the function of the word eadwacer as an apt compound to refer to the Christian God. This is demonstrated through a survey of compounds that take ead-as their first element elsewhere in the Old English corpus, alongside a discussion of the possible pastoral implications of wacer. The concluding lines of the poem can, consequently, be understood more positively as a prayer of supplication on the part of the speaker, who repudiates her wretched relationship with the inconstant Wulf in favour of intimacy with God, providing the poem with a moment of consolation at its close, as is typical of the Old English elegies more generally. The article concludes with an extrapolation of the argument advanced up this point, in testing this soteriological reading’s productivity in relation to Wulf and Eadwacer’s ambiguous opening lines.