Bjork/Obermeier: Date, Provenance, Author, Audiences page

As with date, provenance, and author, opinions on the audiences of Beowulf inscribe an arc of waxing complexity from Thorkelin to our contemporaries. Scholars who agree on Mercia or Northumbria as the poem's provenance naturally try to locate an audience for the poem within that large geographical area. Some use internal and external evidence to establish something as simple as the poem's having been composed for Angles, not Saxons (Kier 1915, 12), others to show that the audience was secular or monastic, and yet others to prove that the audience lived at a particular time and the poem served a particular purpose.

Of the studies addressing the secular or monastic nature of the audience, more favor the former than the latter, a fact of mild curiosity since most scholars view the author as a cleric. Ten Brink (1888), for example, asserted that the cultural background of the audience must have been one of both a temperate heathendom and a temperate Christianity coupled with a positive nationalistic feeling (223). This mixture could have flourished best in Mercia after 650. The paucity of clergy and Christian institutions there at that time and the absence of Christian scholarship and poetry, ten Brink asserted, were favorable to keeping ancient tradition and ancient popular poetry alive and to maintaining a balance that would have been tipped toward a more radical Christianity in other parts of England (224). In 1906, taking the opposite view, Morsbach suggested that Beowulf could have been a literary reaction against the flourishing religious epic and the church's dogmatic stance against pagan traditions (276). Girvan, too, believed that the epic's audience had to be secular. The poet presents both traditional heroic material, such as ship burials, and glimpses of his own contemporary courtly life, alluding perhaps to the failed peaceweaving efforts of Oswiu's daughters (1935, 37, 47 48). Whitelock envisioned a Christian audience with enough knowledge to follow the biblical allusions and with an experienced ear for poetry (1951, 5 8). According to Whitelock, the poet wrote his "literature for entertainment" (20) for a lay audience of novice and veteran Anglo Saxon warriors, who would also be sportsmen, listening to familiar things (19, 44). The poet, Whitelock presumed, would be "subtle and sophisticated," the audience "alert and intelligent" (99).

Expanding on Whitelock's notion, Baum maintained that such an audience must fulfill two prerequisites: it must have an interest in the "exploits of a heathen hero" and in Germanic history and lore and must be attentive enough to comprehend and enjoy a difficult and often cryptic narrative (1963, 360). Baum concluded that poet and audience had to be alike, and so the audience could not be the broad lay one of Whitelock but had to be a select and highly trained audience of a few [p.32] ivory tower listeners/ readers (360 65). Both Mitchell and Storms rejected this idea. Mitchell pointed out that the depiction of "the ideal of Germanic heroic life" in the poem does not require specialized knowledge to recognize (1963, 128). Storms argued that a lay scop and lay audience in Northumbria would have a greater personal interest in the vicissitudes of political power than a more highly trained monastic writer and audience would have (1974, 22). For Busse and Holtei, too, the targeted audience was laymen, this time the thane class during Æthelred's reign, because thanes could appreciate the comitatus ethos in the poem (1981, 328 29). In 1981, contra Whitelock, Page argued for the possibility of a heterogeneous audience not necessarily in the Danelaw, and, in 1993, Newton favored a pre Viking audience "already familiar with tales concerning the renowned Scyldings" (54 55).

Mostly because of the heroic content of the poem, monastic audiences have found less favor than secular ones. Wormald, however, gave considerable reason to doubt that the poem was designed for a royal court (1978, 52 58). Examining the amalgamation of spiritual and secular elements in the church during the age of Bede, he emphasized the phenomenon of Eigenkirchen, family minsters founded by, designed for, and controlled by aristocratic households. These minsters, Wormald argued, were places in which the boundaries between monastic and secular life became blurred (53). He suggested that such intertwined conditions could have fostered the composition of the epic. In 1982, Lapidge connected Wormald's Eigenkirchen theory with Liebermann's conjecture (1920) that Beowulf was written by a poet in the service of Cuthburg, the Northumbrian queen presiding over an Eigenkirche in Wimborne (156 57). Liebermann speculated that the poet may have returned to Wessex with Cuthburg, entered Wimborne with her, and finished the epic there. This view, Liebermann added, with its implications of the mixed tastes of a half secular, half monastic noblewoman, would explain why the epic contains court banquets, battle scenes, and biblical allusions (1920, 275; but see also Kendall 1991,2 6).

Three other scholars, on the other hand, favored a more purely monastic audience for the poem. Dumville (1981) emphasized the literate nature of the work, assumed a monastic audience, and repudiated Whitelock's argument that literature of entertainment would be reserved for a lay audience. Cassidy proposed that the poet was a monk writing solely for a monastic audience and in such a rarified mode "that [the poem] was little understood" (1982, 10) and was probably "saved by benign neglect" after the poet's death (11). Horst Weinstock, commenting on Cassidy, posited a learned and well read poet whose monastic audience would have been more "alert intelligent, and congenial" than the lay audience at a secular court (1982, 23). He theorized that the poet may have written the epic for a monastic community engaged in missionary work to the Continental Saxons (23). Weinstock conjectured further that the manuscript copy was kept in the refectory for lections and recopied in the tenth century when it started to disintegrate (25).

None of the above interpretations of audience can be proved, and it is possible that all are wrong. As Baum observed in 1963, the poet may have written "a quasi-heroic poem to please himself, in the quiet expectation of pleasing also just that 'fit audience though few...'" (365). Conversely, he or she may have gathered enough of everything into the poem to please everybody, making everyman its destined consumer. The question of audience, even in the presence of a firm grasp of who wrote the poem and when, is in the end exceedingly slippery, the most difficult of all such questions to answer.

From the intrepid certitude of Thorkelin in 1815 about the date, provenance, author, and audience of Beowulf then, we arrive arduously at a cautious and necessary incertitude. Although we can discern a general trend in scholarship from early to late dating, from favoring northern to entertaining southern provenance, even from viewing the audience as secular to considering it monastic, reasoning about all four questions is based largely on probability, not on established fact. Until new facts surface, all we can say with assurance when asked when, where, by whom, and for whom the poem was composed is that we are not sure. The quandary we thus find ourselves in with these first, essential questions about the poem, of course, has serious ramifications for most, if not all other, interpretations of it. This, as Thorkelin would cavalierly have phrased it, "will be clear to anyone" who reads on in this handbook.

Notes

For their many invaluable suggestions for improving this chapter, we thank Theodore M. Andersson, R. D. Fulk, and John D. Niles. Bjork is primarily responsible for date and provenance, Obermeier for author and audiences.

1. On this issue, see Busse (1987, 9 140, 277 80).

2. Several German scholars stubbornly refused to see anything Scandinavian or British about the poem (Haarder 20 n.10). Heinrich Leo, for example, considered Beowulf the oldest German epic but preserved in the Anglo Saxon dialect. He argued that since Hygelac died between 512 and 530 and Beowulf reigned after him for 50 years before his own death, the poem originated in Germany after 580 [p. 34] during the earliest German migrations to England (1839, 19). Cf. Karl Simrock's 1859 translation entitled Beowulf: Das älteste deutsche Epos and P. Hoffmann's 1893 translation entitled Beowulf: Aeltestes deutches Heldengedicht.

3. C. Davis (1992) concurs; but see Dumville (1977, 80   81), who marshals evidence that the genealogies were compiled as early as the seventh century.

4. For an explanation of Sievers's system, see chapter 4 below.