Beowulf as Pre-National Epic: Ethnocentrism in the Poem and its Criticism

Abstract

Beowulf as Pre-National Epic:Ethnocentrism in the Poem and its Criticism Leonard Neidorf The publication in 1815 of the first edition of Beowulf posed a pressing question that would resonate in antiquarian and philological circles throughout the nineteenth century: to whom does this monument of early Germanic literature belong? The Nibelungenlied would be claimed as the German national epic, the Cantar de Mío Cid was Spain's property, and the Song of Roland belonged to France, but did Beowulf belong to England? An Old English poem focusing on Danes, Geats, Swedes, and their interactions with Frisians, Franks, Wulfings, and other minor continental Germanic peoples did not look much like an English epic. Because Beowulf never mentions England and ostensibly fails to provide its homeland with a foundational myth, scholars who identified with the various peoples or places mentioned in the poem felt it was only right to claim it as an epic for their particular group. Indeed, T. A. Shippey observed in his magisterial survey of the poem's critical heritage that nineteenth-century scholarship brims with "attempts to annex or appropriate the poem, and make it personal, local or national property on which trespassers are not allowed."1 This impulse is evident even in the first edition of Beowulf, the subtitle of which describes it as "a Danish poem in the Anglo-Saxon dialect" [Poëma danicum dialecto anglo-saxonica].2 The editor responsible for this designation, Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín, was an Icelander working for the Danish government, who came across the hitherto unknown poem while searching the British Library for manuscripts relevant to the history of Denmark.3 A territorial struggle over Beowulf broke out in the reviews of Thorkelín's edition. One reviewer, Nicolaus Outzen, rejected Danish claims to the poem and held that it originated in the Schleswig-Holstein area, the ancestral homeland of the Angles, where he also happened to be born. Outzen's interpretation amounted to a claim that the poem and the territory from which it came belonged ancestrally to the Germans rather than the Danes—a politically charged claim at the time, with sentiments anticipating the Austro-Prussian annexation of [End Page 847] Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark in 1864.4 In the decades following Outzen's literary annexation, scholars with varying ethnic and national loyalties would go on to claim Beowulf for Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Frisia, and England, among other locales.5 Jacob Grimm held that Anglo-Saxon poems in general "belong to all Germany as much as to England."6 Karl Müllenhoff, another native of Schleswig-Holstein, developed a mythological interpretation in support of Outzen's position.7 Gregor Sarrazin dissented, arguing on the basis of landscape details that Beowulf was originally a Danish poem that had been translated into English.8 Daniel H. Haigh, however, maintained that the historical Heorot lent its name to the coastal town of Hartlepool, thereby localizing the poem's events not in Scandinavia, but in northern England.9 John Earle, meanwhile, situated Beowulf in the English midlands by reading it as a political allegory composed for King Offa of Mercia.10 Even the United States of America made a claim to Beowulf in the nineteenth century, with one American translator characterizing it as "the most ancient epic of our race."11 What generated this babel of conflicting voices was the inability of critics to resolve an interpretive problem "for which we still have no accepted solution," namely: "why does this English poem never mention England or any English event?"12 Beowulf became embroiled in national, ethnic, racial, local, and linguistic politics during the nineteenth century because scholars assumed that an epic poem must have an ethnocentric thrust and they were prepared to rewrite the poem so as to make its ethnic affiliations more intelligible. Some readers would change its language to Danish, while others would revise its geographical orientation, and still others would interpret it allegorically and construe particular heroes or peoples as stand-ins for ones that it never mentions. Twentieth-century critics have been less eager, however, to appropriate Beowulf or discern proto-nationalism in its text. In addition to two world wars that quelled nationalist...