Music, multimodality, and narrative viewpoint: Beowulf in performance

Abstract

Abstract This article examines a solo musical/dramatic performance of the Old English poem Beowulf. Drawing on recent literature on multimodal communication, conceptual blending, and music cognition, it specifically discusses musical means of constructing and manipulating narrative viewpoint, exploring how sound and embodied performance influence and create the meanings of verbal narrative. Blending analysis, focused as it is on the integration of disparate input concepts into one blended space and the meaning-making potential of this process, lends itself naturally to the interaction of various modes of communication. In Benjamin Bagby’s Beowulf, the embodied, preformative resources of oral storytelling—particularly musical sound—structure narrative viewpoint in ways not afforded by the text alone, and thus support the process of story-construction. The famously ambiguous “Unferð Episode,” a dialogic exchange incorporating complex viewpoint phenomena and embedded narratives, exemplifies how such manipulation of viewpoint constrains and guides interpretation. As this article demonstrates, Bagby’s storytelling tools—verbal delivery, musical organization, gesture, posture—do not merely communicate a sequence of events but define the ways characters, narrators, and audience members negotiate, view and construe the stories constituted by those events.