Beowulf—A Poem

The back cover copy of Andrew Scheil's Beowulf—A Poem states that the Past Imperfect series “presents concise critical overviews of the latest research” on its chosen topics, meant for interested readers who need an engaging, introductory-level treatment in “accessible language.” The second part of this objective, focused on audience, accurately describes Scheil's book, but the first part of the series description is explicitly not Scheil's goal. Rather than providing an introduction to the current state of knowledge, thinking, and discussion around Beowulf, Scheil explains that “My purpose here is simple: I want you to love Beowulf” (p. 3). He will offer “a personal and appreciative literary introduction” to the poem (p. 5) meant to answer the question, “Why bother to read it?” (p. 6).Scheil's thesis about Beowulf is that it can and should be read as a “humanist” work. By applying this term, Scheil means that Beowulf shows attentiveness to real human conditions, human ways of knowing the world, personal and social ethics, and the relationship between individual human lives and institutions or other larger frameworks (including metaphysical), and that the poet approaches these topics with curiosity and intelligence rather than rigidity (p. 11–12). Through four thematic body chapters, each meant to be readable as an essay in isolation from the others, Scheil demonstrates Beowulf's engagement with the chapters’ successive themes in a humanist manner: “Doubt,” “Contingency,” “Tragedy,” and “Art and the Cunning of Form.” In “Doubt,” Scheil points out that there are multiple instances in Beowulf in which the same event is narrated differently, or always only partly, creating ambiguity around what has happened and what it means. He connects this tendency to rhetorical features of the poem that emphasize uncertainty or limited perception, and finally to the account of Beowulf's death, with its famously cryptic statements about the hero's posthumous fate and legacy. The “Contingency” chapter builds on these observations to set them into a context of unexpected events: time and again the Beowulf poet brings characters into encounters with things they cannot anticipate or understand, and seems to like working out different modes of response to such occasions. This topic leads naturally into “Tragedy,” and here Scheil chooses to focus mainly on the poem's female characters: Freawaru, Hygd, and Wealhtheow. I wished for a little more attention to Hildeburh and Grendel's mother, both of whom Scheil uses in the chapter mainly to make the point that the poet is not interested solely in the business of masculine heroism. Finally, “Art and the Cunning of Form” presents what is, in Scheil's view, the Beowulf poet's answer to tragedy: the recognition, and fashioning, of wondrous beauty. The poem's many lingering descriptions of artifacts and marvelous works of ingenuity, even the poem itself in its intricate artifice, provide “a counter to its [own] darker imaginings” (p. 79), albeit one with limits; Scheil ends on this note with a meditation on the Last Survivor and the treasure he leaves.Scheil's fellow experts in Old English literature who have thought deeply about Beowulf for years may not encounter much in this brief book that has never occurred to us before, although we may take some cues from Scheil's organization of themes. The work Scheil is doing here is more like what takes place in our classrooms—at least ideally—than it is like most scholarly publication, which necessarily emphasizes discovery, whether of new facts or of new perspectives that require systematic exploration. For those whose training and careers follow the same model as Scheil's own, it is important, in fairness, to remember that we are manifestly not his desired audience for this book. The question of audience is an important one. Scheil's project, as he defines it in the book's opening pages, imagines perhaps an educated general reader who has struggled to understand why anyone cares about Beowulf but will make an effort to do so, or a dedicated student who has read the poem in translation, or part of it, and wants to supplement this reading by taking a further step in thinking deliberately through its themes. Both creatures exist, and if Beowulf—A Poem comes into their hands, they will benefit.But I was struck, throughout my reading, by awareness of another audience to whom Scheil's book would be a gift. Many, many educators find themselves expected to teach Beowulf, or portions of it, without a foundation of advanced (or any) specialized training in Old English literature. Intelligent people with literary savvy may still find themselves at a loss in the face of Beowulf's unfamiliar stylistic devices, speech-heavy narration, and (especially in the second half of the poem) indirectness. I can imagine many a small college, community college, or even high school instructor, assigned to teach early British literature, finding Scheil's book a helpful and pleasant investment of two or three hours, one that might aid immeasurably in finding ways to bring difficult material to students in a way they will find appealing. I hope the ARC Humanities Press is finding this readership.As he tells us at the outset, Scheil's project is highly personal, and I conclude in a similar mode. Is it all right to “love Beowulf,” and to encourage others to do so?I do both, and so do many others who have in recent years, through the critiques of our colleagues, become more perceptive of the political dimensions of the poem's modern history and study. Some who have spearheaded those very critiques also, no doubt, love Beowulf. But informed love of this text, within the contexts in which it now exists for scholars and students alike, necessarily involves recalibration and rethinking along lines that few of us considered even a decade ago. If we can continue to love Beowulf, this is partly because of Beowulf's own sophistication on matters of group identity, heritage, and the boundaries of the human: sophistication which we must read, and teach, as able to falsify a blunt view of it in modern centuries as a monument to white Englishness or Northern Europeanness. If we want to explain our love of Beowulf to audiences like those Scheil envisions, we need to do so in part by showing them the myriad ways the poem insistently—even surprisingly, given its time and place of origin—escapes too-simple dichotomies of selves and others, of those who matter and those who don't. Beowulf's refusal to oversimplify these categories is fully in line with Scheil's perspective on its humanistic themes of doubt, contingency, tragedy, and fashioning. If his book should be issued in a new edition, an additional chapter, or sections within chapters, foregrounding this topic would be an enrichment in itself, and would help to situate the poem for a new reader in the ways it is being thought about, right now

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