Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon: Beowulf as Metaphor (review)

Abstract

222 Reviews of all those earlier male authors' (p. 153). But these are minor problems, and the book as a whole is well presented and well argued. To conclude with one of Jagodzinski's connecting points: 'In an uncanny prefigurement of today's transformation of the world into machine-readability, the technology of printing combined text and image to change the way people thought about and imagined themselves . . . The results now, as in the seventeenth century, are '"individuation and separation"'. Kim Walker School of English, Film and Theatre Victoria University of Wellingto Lee, Alvin A., Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon: Beowulf as Metaphor, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xi, 280; R.R.P. US$50.00,£37.50; ISBN 080204378X. Alvin Lee's The Guest-Hall of Eden: Four Essays on the Design of Old Poetry (Yale UP, 1972), explored Anglo-Saxon verse within the framework of Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism, focusing upon four dominant myths that blend Biblical and Germanic elements: cosmogony, fratricide and crime, the heroic redeemer, and the return to chaos. The book culminated in a reading of Beowulf as a poetic myth of h u m a n society dominated by two symbols: the Hall, representing civilisation, and the Monsters, signifying the chaos that overtakes society. Lee's new study of Beowulf further explores this theme and other aspects of the poem. Terry Eagleton portrays Frye's criticism as a failed experiment in fusing liberal humanism with structuralist and formalist 'scientificity', and asks 'how many students of literature today read it?' (Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford, Blackwell, 1983). Lee, however, is confident that the Anatomy of Criticism (1957) remains potent. H e draws additionally upon a theory of language that Frye developed later in The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982) and Words with Power (1990). Lee discusses other theorists citing, for example, O n g on narrative and generic issues, and de M a n on the self-referentiality of language; but consistently he prefers Frye's theoria. Gold-hall and Earth-Dragon encapsulates the lifetime's work of a dedicated Beowulf-scholar engaging passionately with his subject. Reviews 223 Adopting what he calls 'an evocative, even incantatory style of writing' (p. 3), in which broad theoretical discussion alternates with close reading in New Critical m o d e , Lee reiterates that Beowulf is a work of the imagination, which the modern reader should experience imaginatively. He echoes Tolkien: Beowulf must he read as a poem; it is not a historical source, nor an object for historicist analysis; it is symbolic and imageladen , but not an allegory. Chapter One examines Beowulf'in relation to Frye's five narrative modes (myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, ironic). The poet deliberately creates a romance world of extraordinary events and actions, tending to the mythic, in which the hero is superior in kind. Lee finds the language of Beowulfheavily metaphoric, and in Chapter T w o focuses upon the kenning as a mechanism for metaphor. A footnote listing only six of many published kenning-studies exemplifies the book's light scholarly apparatus. Furthermore, Lee does not provide his o w n definition of the kenning or its companion the kend heiti. Here as elsewhere some complex concepts are treated sketchily. Lee's discussion of sword kennings in the poem is illuminating as he proceeds to close readings of context. Similarly, his discussion of garsecg ('spearman' = 'ocean') brims with fresh ideas, but tends to the subjective and passes over some facts: the word occurs in prose as well as poetry; its etymology is disputed; and if O E poets perceived its component parts as gar-secg (spearman ), they nevertheless avoided ringing the morphological changes by varying i t with other potential synonyms (*ord-secg, *gar-mann, etc.). More interesting is Chapter Three on Beowulf'as a case of what Frye terms 'first-phase' language, which is characteristic of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern literature, including m u c h of the Old Testament. Such language has 'relatively little emphasis on a clear separation of subject and object: the emphasis falls rather on the feeling that subject and object are linked by a c o...