Michael Wood - In search of Beowulf

listen there's a poem it speaks in the voice of England's past like a flame beyond the language of the living it's more than a thousand years old and yet it still speaks to us it's called Beowulf I'm going in search of the roots of this great poem and the barbaric splendor of the world it depicts it is not fantasy this shows what a what a golden reality it was it's a world caught between the pagan and the Christian it's a landscape inhabited by monsters if you see this monsters read sorcerer like burning eyes yagate it's the tale of a hero Beowulf who confronts a dragon in its mysterious learn the dragon came raging spat death fire war flashes blazed in the distance its language has seduced a Nobel prize-winning poet marvelous to be reminded of the heft of words for the first time on television we're allowed to examine the priceless original manuscript Beowulf and anglo-saxon poetry are at the root of the great tree of English language and literature which has spread across the whole of the planet to my mind it's our nation's greatest gift to the world Beowulf is a work of the anglo-saxons the Germanic tribes who came to our shores in the fifth century so my journey in search of Beowulf starts on the east coast of England where these tribes first settled in the Dark Ages the anglo-saxons were impoverished pagan immigrants who came to Britain the time of the fall of the Roman Empire is economic migrants seeking new life new lands they failed up these Esther is the star the deepen the oil well and created their little kingdoms they were a minority they made little influence on our DNA our DNA as Britons is in general much older but they had a profound effect on our society in our culture and especially our language and hence on our thought what language is thought the English we speak today is descended from their speech our most commonly used words of Aires green red hand body words that describe key concepts mother father friend love paint forgiveness life death God core words that still define our beliefs our emotions and our relations as human beings now though bear wolf is the earliest great work of English literature it's not set in Britain it's set in Denmark with a little bit in Sweden and in that sense it's a post migration tale you think of the Irish or the Italians in America and the tenacity and affection with which they hold on to the memories of their European home the anglo-saxons were like that for centuries they clung on to the myth of their coming take the famous 10th century poem the Battle of brunnen boo sip an angle on Saxon opah common offer Bradbury move since the angles and the Saxons came up over the broad waves but if Danis often a bigot they were seeking Britain taking the land part of the appeal of poetry to the anglo-saxons lay in the power of those ancestral stories and though many centuries separate us from the original audience poetry like Beowulf can still be compelling like so many great Hollywood adventures Beowulf is the perennial story of the hero's quest the hero who fights monsters saves his people and finds himself now the very best way to experience Beowulf is to see it spoken live and I've come to Kent to see it performed in a fantastic full-scale recreation of an anglo-saxon royal Hall it's been built here in wick Hurst by the members of a historical reenactment Society Reggie and Lauren were all hooked on the anglo-saxons and their world can see you again fantastic absolutely look at this what's not to love when you get to wear this fantastic yeah today the group have come to hear a performance of Beowulf by actor Julian Glover for the last 30 years in between roles in Star Wars and Harry Potter he's been doing a one-man show of the poem to get in the mood his audience are preparing a Saxon feast the poem starts not with Beowulf himself but with a flashback to another mythic hero shield sheathing a magic boy cast up on the shores of Denmark wait yeah listen we have heard of the thriving of the throne of Denmark was it not shield shipping who found in childhood lacked clothing yet he lived and prospered grew in strength and stature under the heavens that was good Kooning he was a good game to be a good king it's a key idea in the poem now one of shield's descendants that Danish King Hrothgar builds a great golden Hall called Herod but in the darkness outside lurks a malevolent spirit Grendel the fiends name grim infamous wished landstalker master of the moor and the Fen fortress he found in Herat the nobles after carousing slept after supper mad with rage he struck quickly this creature evil grim and greedy savage and unsparing grasps 30 warriors and away he was homeward the lusty with booty laden with the slain when the day broke and with the Dawn's lights Grendel's outrage was openly to be seen to the anglo-saxon audience Grendel's rampage was not just a random act of terror in attacking the mead hall he was attacking society as a whole for here the rituals were enacted which bound their society together so the whole is a center of not only social order but moral order and when the monster comes in the night and starts to tear the Kings followers limb from limb it's time for the hero Beowulf he was a main strength for most of all the men that trod the earth at that time Greek trained great heart this prince picked his men from the flower of his folk the fiercest among number might be found 14 sees skilled their wolf led them down to the beaches Fringe they will say young man at this point he leaves his native Sweden and sails with his war band to Denmark their mission to boldly go and rid Hrothgar's hall of its demonic invader not far back in time the story originated in oral tales so how was the poem handed down to us across a distance of more than a thousand years how did it become a literary classic to find out I've got an appointment at the British Library the poem survived by sheer chance in a single manuscript it's usually kept in the library's treasures room or in a security vault deep underground some would say it's our nation's most precious literary relic now the Beowulf story looks back to the late 5th century it was reworked and retold by the bards as bards do at some point it was written down and finally took the form we have it around the yo 1000 this is a big thrill for me to say the least I first studied the anglo-saxon manuscripts in the old British Library when I was a student I never worked on the Beowulf manuscript you simply weren't allowed to it was too fragile and it's never been filmed before so this is quite an exciting moment the Beowulf manuscript was one of many medieval books in a private library the cotton collection which was devastated by fire in the 18th century fantastic look at this this is amazing isn't it what immediately becomes apparent is the fire of 1731 doesn't it in 1731 the manuscripts were housed in a burning house in London faithfully named 500 counts many of our manuscripts have damaged a few unfortunately destroys em Aaron's heresy I've report to save us fragments of manuscripts we seen floating of a windows like baaah supplying some fruits yes I remember working on one of these years ago as a student and the really badly burned ones of the vellum the sheepskin is just kind of crumpled up like that doesn't burn can be fragile in the 19th century the damaged Beowulf manuscript was rebound keeping it in its original form as part of a compilation of stories written by the same two anglo-saxon scribes I mean it the compilation has all sorts of other things and it doesn't mean actually you're turning that of monster pictures on unis yeah here we have it sure was created from attacks and models of the east yeah and the top we have a headless man with his face in his chest yeah we have two jägers 150 foot long aha I knew had two camels I call them comedy camels but actually meant to represent elephants the answers mr. hummus interesting is that these strange dragons and monsters you can see the connection available well exactly the scribe is the same as four parts of a bell with permanent self so although this particular text doesn't have any relationship with the poem it does signify that the scrolls were actually interested in monsters itself its small wonder then that a tale of creatures like Grendel should find a place in this medieval monster miscellany beginning to build manuscripts itself here we go what the opening words listen up listen listen we Gardena in year damn they are de Kooning US premiere through non that's the the beginning of the tale that's the coup rage here's the passage where Beowulf and his 14 companions spend the night in Hrothgar's Hall knowing that Grendel will return screed on shadow Ganga gliding through the shadows came the Walker in the night the Warriors slept all except one and this man kept an unblinking watch he waited pent heart swelling with anger against his foe from off the moorlands misting fells came Grendel stalking the comb of Mura under Miss Lee autumn glendale gong gong he moved through the dark so with perfect clearness the gold paneled Hall Mead drinking face of men the door gave way at a touch of his hands rage inflamed wreckage spent he told the halls jaws hastening onwards angrily advancing from his eyes satellite in an lovely form of fire he saw in the hall the host of young warriors and in his heart exalted horrible monster all his hopes swelling to a gluttonous meal as a first step he set his greedy hands on a sleeping soldier savagely for him gnashed of his bony joints bolted huge gobbets sucked at his veins and a sunni doll of the man to his fingers and feet then he moved forward which to seize our warrior bear wolf stretched out for him with his spite film fist but the faster man for story rose up over his arm and quickly grip that sickening hand he thought which was the breath of the other in the giant flesh frame showed then shoulder muscles sprang apart a snappy of tendons bone locks burst the arm of the demon was severed from his side Grendel flu death sick to his toilet in where he knew that the end of his life was in sight bear wolf had cleansed hair not save the whole from persecution and as a signal to all the hero hung the hand the our internal shoulder the entire limb Grendel's whole grip beneath the soaring roof and so the first part of the poem ends to us the basic arc of narrative in Beowulf is quite familiar but around the manuscript itself there's still a real mystery we don't know when or where the poem was initially composed and performed and we don't know where the successive oral retellings were finally shaped into this written version but within the poem there are clues to its origin so first of all to find out where the original oral poem and its poet might have come from I'm heading to one of the earliest anglo-saxon kingdoms in East Anglia this is the town of Woodbridge on the River deepen in Suffolk like most places around here its roots lie over a thousand years ago in the anglo-saxon period all around us are signposts to the anglo-saxon past down river is Kingston that tunnel farm of the kings of the east angles and upriver is offered the Ford of wolf are the wolf one of their sixth century kings and on the other shore is the site of the greatest archeological discovery ever made in the British Isles but it goes this is the return of the football hero the sunburn beowulf expert dr. Sam Newton like me is fascinated by the story of Sutton Hoo a place with old legends of royal tombs and hidden gold you've got so many stories of buried treasure in this corner of Suffolk no doubt people would have would be imagining all sorts of treasure buried there but in this particular case Elizabeth the first astrologer dr. John Dee is said to have dug here and then the great lady who owned the land here in the 1930s oldy that's pretty she was certainly a lady who was interested in legends and we know she took part in the would be speechless congregation across the river here and on the basis of all that she became convinced that there was gold in her hills and which is what of course led it was exactly talk about dreams come true edith british dreams centered on several mysterious mounds scattered around the area known as sutton whoo-hoo meaning promontory in anglo-saxon in 1938 she finally approached local archaeologist basil Braun to investigate when I came over I met mr. siffredi and walked down to the Mount and I said which would you like excavated he said what about that one in May 1939 Brown began excavating helped by the local gamekeeper and by mrs. pretties gardener driving a trench from the east end of the mound they traced rows of ship rivets still in position soon they uncovered the ghost of a great ship with an undisturbed burial chamber they'd found an Anglo Saxon ship burial and it lay beneath the exact spot where mrs. pretty had told brown to dig and look you can see the the post there marking the site of the prow of the ship oh yeah and the stern right out there so this is the ship length here exactly the line of the keel is something like 90 feet that's a massive ship even by today's standards on the river yeah yeah yeah yeah and this beautiful ship what a way to go and of course it brings with it the notions of death is but a point of embarkation in a journey you know it must meant so much to them hence the effort of bringing this massive ship six and six tons at least we're light all the way up here and of course this is where very wolf comes in because the opening movement of the poem culminates with a magnificent account of a royal ship funeral a boat with a ringneck road in the Haven and there they laid out their Lord and Master give her a round gold in the waist of the ship in majesty by the mast a mound of treasures from far countries will fetch the border and it is said that no boat was ever more bravely fitted out with the weapons of a warrior war accoutrement swords and body armor high overhead they hoisted and fixed a gold Signum gave him to the flood let the Seas take him and around him the ancestral treasures yeah and that's in the poem isn't it in barrel filled yes three order the folk the folk treasures fantastic the crown jewels if you like no trace of the body of the dead King was ever found but the extraordinary treasures buried with him caused a sensation rewrote English history almost yes because this is opened up a lost chapter of English history about golden age but had a had an extraordinary impact on the study of Beowulf - it is not fantasy this shows what a golden reality it was yeah I mean the poet the poet describes these kind of talismanic artifacts after the room that's been downed with a kind of magical power on the other gifts between kings and their their warrior heroes and you think it's just a poet talking and under this mound there they are the most magnificent find was a ceremonial helmet when reconstructed this literally fabulous piece revealed more close connections with the Beowulf poem this awesome face you see the boy yes head fair with the boars tusks exactly what located as in the bow of description yah Felix sheared on over Leo Bergen the bore shape shown over the cheek guards it protected the lives of though of the war minded warriors you know in other words what was is an inanimate metal decoration for them is a an animate agent of protection you get the impression that no helmet without of all hell was would be considered safe so $64,000 question Sam um whose helmet was this good question on the present evidence the unavoidable conclusion is a king called rad Wald not just a king of East Anglia from one of the first overlords have written and it's in the family tree of red world and the East Anglian Kings that we find the next clue that may connect the Beowulf poet to this corner of England the woe fiends the name of these dangling royal family named after their eponymous hero woofer these little wolf laughing czar wulfings and of course the wulfings are quite big in the world available what's more we can identify the Danish Queen well foul as an East Anglia dynastic ancestor and the name of one of her children namely Crossland is listed in the upper reaches of the east and the oil and as a royal name you don't get it in any other early source Wow this suggests the author was well aware of the pedigree of the East Anglian royal family well yeah it's great isn't it and might suggest that Beowulf at some stage went through a stage of composition yeah here in East Anglia and if so we're very appropriately we're just crossing the parish boundary to Rendlesham the known site of East Anglia royal authority this is in the olden between a coolican tuner a kingly town a kingston no less I think these links that Sam argues are persuasive and exciting here in Suffolk you feel you can almost touch the world of the Beowulf poet the area by the later medieval church of st. Gregory at Rendlesham is the most likely site for the Royal Hall where the East Anglian Kings might have listened to their court poets so when we talk about a royal residence in the 7th century we're talking about all the service industries being here as well and we I mean the metal workers the cross we may be the people who made the jewelry at Sutton Hoo panicles most central of all the great golden hall that the focus for assembly for for royal audiences a great barn like structure nothing less than the Camelot of the north this great ideal at which this would be a reality and in it the poet's entertain the king and his warriors absolutely entails no feast is complete without the poet's telling the stress their entertainment and we can imagine that well almost on this spot I mean within this immediate areas absolutely all the indications are here now it came into his mind that he would command the construction of a huge mead or a house greater than men on earth have I've heard of and share the gifts God had bestowed on him upon his floor with folk young and old there was music of the heart sweet minstrel singing perfect in telling of the remote first making of the race of man a possible East Anglian origin for the poem is hinted that not only in the Sutton Hoo treasure and the family tree of the Kings it's also suggested by the landscape itself the brooding fans of the poem are still to be found here in Suffolk on a frosty morning you can easily imagine ochres emerging from the mist but there's a twist from the 7th century the Kings here were Christian and in those days the fens were the scene of spirit wars 1 missionary saint saint bottle founded his monastery in these marshes from here he would go out and fight fen demons with prayer just as pagan heroes like Beowulf fought to rid Hrothgar's kingdom of monstrous marsh dwellers like Grendel their weapons were different but the saint and the hero inhabit the same landscape don't forget anglo-saxon England the England of Beowulf was a wild and under populated land there were no real towns forests were full of wolves and the isolated farms and settlements lonely monasteries like the one that stood on that primary there I can were little centres of human life amidst a vast untamed nature their mental world was surrounded by monsters and the unseen to them was palpable and always threatened to burst over the threshold into the real and in the story of Beowulf after the killing of Grendel the next eruption from the demonic calf phonic watery depths of the Muir was to the early medieval miner maybe two hours still - even more threatening because it was female Grendel's mother Grendel's mother now purposed black-hearted gluttonous on a Roth bearing visit of vengeance for her son she descended on Herat and fate swept on its wheel when the mother of Grendel found her way among those men she grasped the man quickly the Kings good friend a sharer clutched him to herself and was away to the pen bare wolf was not there Herat was enough raw Grindle's hand had gone whether from Beowulf to the alien the mother Monster has an honored place in horror stories Grendel's mother may be fearsome but she still feels a mother's bond to her child and to the poet that's even a source of imaginative sympathy it makes her more than just a scary monster she's a perverse mirror to mankind and the poet strengthens that connection for his audience by giving his demons of biblical origin in the poem Grendel and his Kenna described as the seed of Cain that's the son of Adam in the Bible who'd committed the primordial crime of brother killing for which he and his descendants would be cast out forever exiled fated to wander fated always to fight their battle against humanity and goodness and in the poem Grendel is described as aldea winner the old enemy and even better fee and mana Kunis hardly needs translating does it the fiend of mankind those ideas and images come all the way down to Shakespeare and his contemporaries and out in the landscape today you can still find their traces here in East Anglia the name of Grendel is still applied to marshy pits and watercourses today they call them Grindle's and the idea of a Grendel like fen monster as an enemy of Christianity is one that has also hung on here I've come to the medieval church of Blythe breh to meet a local folklore expert Peter Jennings take a look at this Cathedral of the marshes there was never more than 100 houses employed bro I get this fantastic big place of course there was a monastery seven finches 7/7 reason time a bear wolf yes so so what's the legend of this place then well the the the tale goes that's 4th of August 1577 huge thunderstorms of course the thunderstorm is when you expect Walton he's wild hunt to descend with these devil dogs black shook this is an ancient anglo-saxon word actually peace so is a devil dog yes black and Shaggy salsa like burning eyes it's very it's just like just like Grendel's with delight the baleful light yeah yeah doesn't like the sound of singing all this Christian stuff just like bottles demons and the fans yes exactly and black short comes down and down the arm a man and a boy getting it away they die because the belief is is if you look into those fiery saucer-like eyes your date if not then within a 12 months people get out of the way and of course each other charges through this is a bit I've really got to show you you're gonna love this so a black short goes to this door the north door now right the north door belongs to the devil of the church as far as these faintly folklore goes and this is where his call marks bullets their way into that door I've I have been there for a very long time so the East Anglian Torah students really got to work here yeah fantastic believe it or not as you look by Tudor times bogies like black shook were fading into folklore but the anglo-saxons believed in the reality of supernatural forces that could only be defeated by magic whether by the cross of the saintly Exorcist or by the sword of the hero in the poem when Beowulf pursues Grendel's mother to her lair it's a magic sword that pulls him through then he saw among the armor on the wall a giant sword from former days this wonder was so enormous that no other man would be equal to bearing it in battle play whether it was a Giants Forge that had fashioned it so well the gaya champion shaking now with war rage caught it by the rich hilt and careless of his life brandish his circles and brought it down in fury the catcher full unfairly biting into the net the blade sheared through the backbone the sword was going he was glad at the deed for the anglo-saxons weapons like beowulf's blade had supernatural power and the very process of forging them must have seemed like a kind of spell working hectare coal is one of the very few people today who know how to forge weapons as the anglo-saxons did it's a magic process and you can see why ancient societies thought the Smith was somehow a magician oh absolutely goes back into the early iron working when the iron was a gift from the gods because it literally came from the heavens in the meteors and manners captured that and he can work it and he's using earth he's using fire is using wind he's using water he's using all the elements and then his skill to actually create these magical pieces of work and they saw the process from a shapeless lump of what looks like rock yes to a beautiful deadly and extraordinary artifact it's a secret isn't it a mystery it is it is a mystery in creating his blade the swordsmith would first make several separate rods and then twist them weld them together and Hammer them flat and he was the twisting of the rods which gave each anglo-saxon sword its individual personality creating intricate patterns in the beaten blade Wow look at that and you see the pattern in it there's the strange poisoned branches Sunday in it's just great it is like waves exactly as the anglo-saxon says the way of sway ordered yes you see something into their world then you when you look into these patterns all yes then health Dennis son presented bear wolf with a gold standard as a victory gift an embroidered banner also breast mail and a helmet and a sword carried high that was both precious object and token of honor so the poems world and it's honored heroes were pagan and yet the poet himself was Christian after all even the monsters are seen in biblical terms as Cain's kin and that cultural tension between the pagan and the Christian lies at the very heart of the poem but what does that tell us about Beowulf and its audience to find out I'm travelling to the Northeast to what was once the ancient kingdom of Northumbria in early anglo-saxon times the area around Newcastle was the intellectual powerhouse of Christian England this journey is a kind of pilgrimage to me if that doesn't sound too corny whenever I'm up in the Northeast I was trying to make the trip across to a small former mining and shipbuilding village on the south bank of the time it's because it was there in the early 8th century that the northumbrian monk bead was a Sunderland man wrote his famous book he called it the ecclesiastical history of the English nation it's a kind of defining text to the anglo-saxon Age but it also it seems to me throws a fascinating light onto the context of Beowulf and he wrote it in Jarrow are to imagine isn't it but this is one of the most resonant landscapes in British history it's a typical anglo-saxon monastic site a bit like I can in Suffolk on a promontory between two rivers just look the river tyne flowing down to the sea at Tynemouth and right below us the river dawn now a blackened industrial stream a really sad sight and behind me where the petrol storage terminal is and the serried ranks of nissan cars was a huge tidal pool Jaros lake comes from a good old english word slay qian to fill up as in to slake your thirst looking at the slake today you might think that beads landscape is gone forever but the remains of his monastery are still here this is one of the route places of Englishness so there you are this is what survives of the anglo-saxon Monastery of gr Oh built in 681 this is where bead spent his whole life from the age of seven there's a wonderful story of him at the age of 14 as the only survivor along with the abbot of a terrible outbreak of plague still managing to keep the services going and this is where in old age he wrote his great book the core idea of the narrative his conversion the way beed tells it the conversion of the pagan English was pretty straightforward great Kings would see the divine light and be converted and their nobles and their people would just follow but in reality the conflict between Christianity and paganism was long drawn out and never conclusively won and in the cultural battles and spirit Wars of the eighth century perché was a key medium and it was fought over just look at this this is a letter from a a northumbrian cleric and he's talking about what went on are the monks feasts inside monasteries and the popularity of poems like Beowulf they're barred a leg on tour in saco totally convivial the Word of God should be read in the communal feasts of the monks not the pagan poems the pagan songs quid in Yale Descamps Christo what does Engel to do with Christ Engel it's a hero mentioned in Beowulf it almost sounds as if it's an attack on Beowulf itself doesn't it and here's the punchline Angostura s Thomas the house of Christ is narrow and cannot include both the works of the church fathers and the poems of the pagan poets but as so often in history the old ways are tenacious they never swept away overnight and the old poetry the very voice of the early English found a new subject we come to this remote corner of Dumfriesshire in Scotland in what was the kingdom of Northumbria in anglo-saxon times to find one of the most interesting monuments from that age it's in the church here at ruff well and it's got quite a story to tell in a later time of Spirit wars the Protestant Reformation this monument was deemed idolatrous and of 17th century was broken up by zealous Presbyterians and pieces were thrown into a pit but later still it was reassembled it's a great stone cross from the age of Beowulf here it is this is the cross today isn't that fantastic it's an anglo-saxon preaching cross nearly 18 feet high when it was made you've got to imagine bright colors reds and purples yellows White's guilt for the halos on Christ and the Saints and on it texts and images from the Christian story they're just great honey this is Mary Magdalene washing Christ's feet and drying it with her hair come and have a look around the site it's amazingly well-preserved given that it was smashed into bits isn't it now look at this wonderful image here of Christ standing on the head of what one can only call monsters it's an allusion to the Psalms that triumph over the devil through the treading down of serpents and Dragons and dazzle ESCs Lyons very pale wolf I mean isn't it now here's the most fantastic element of this amazing Monument you see running down the side in the two strips bit one but you can see these in rooms these are the script of the ancient Germanic peoples the runes quote from a poem which after Beowulf is one of the greatest works of anglo-saxon literature it's called the dream of the Rood and it shows how the old pagan themes in poetry were carried down to enrich the Christian imagination and even to help conversion poem takes the form of a dream vision the poet is the dreamer he has the vision in the middle of the night and it's an incredibly archaic idea it's like the ancient shamans or spirit mediums who ascend to the gods to gain their secret knowledge and bring it back for the benefit of humankind it's an idea that's thousands of years older than Christianity the poet's vision is of Christ's cross listen he says I will tell the best of dreams which I had at midnight when all the world sleeps I dreamt I saw a wondrous tree towering in the sky above me suffused with light the brightest of beams and then that most beautiful of trees spoke these words long ago it was I still remember it I stood on the edge of the forest when they came to cut me down strong foes carried me away and set me on a hill and then the young hero Christ firm and unflinching stripped himself brave in the sight of all minded to save mankind and I am bold when the hero clasped me and they pierced me with dark nails all creation wept lamenting the Kings death Christ has become by now the Germanic hero victorious even in his defeat and the tree takes on the persona of a loyal member of the war band I could have killed them all the tree says those Findus the same word as in Beowulf but the tree out of loyalty to the Lord must become the instrument of his death by equating the pagan Tree of Life with Christ's cross the Christian poet created something uniquely English which could reconcile people to the new religion so there's a fabulous blurring of theological boundaries if I can put it that way between the pagan and the Christian in the dream of the Rood you've got Christ as the leader of the warband speaking trees and cosmic magic just as in Beowulf you've got holy God the creator of the world and the sins of the seed of Cain and maybe that helps us understand how the poem actually worked for an anglo-saxon audience it's been said that the Christianity in Beowulf is just a veneer but in its vivid portrayal of the pagan past the poem honored the ancestors and allowed the old world to live on in the new after all to them the pagan past like the Christian future was still god-given the minstrel told how long ago the Lord formed earth exalting the Lord established the Sun and the moon as lamps to illumine the land dwellers loaded the acres of the world in the jeweler branch and leaf bringing them to life each kind of creature that creeps and moves and so we come to the poems final act in a few lines the poet jumps 50 years Beowulf is the king of his people the Gertz but now he's an old man 50 winters he ruled grew gray in guardianship of the land till one began a horde guarding dragon to put forth his power in the pitch-black night time he guarded a gold hoard in a towering stone burial mound men knew not his entrance but one day a slave on the run from a flogging felt his way in when he saw the dragon there he was struck with great terror but even so stole from thence a solid gold cut his treasure hoard violated the enraged dragon lays waste to Beowulf's Kingdom even the Royal Hall is destroyed before the dragon retreats to his lair and it's the dragon's lair which is the scene of beowulf's final battle the anglo-saxons had a vivid sense of living in an old landscape with prehistoric long barrows and standing stones all around them the great stone circle to their poets were the work of giants wondrous work of wall stones and the ancient stone age burial mounds were heathen of burials places where the ancestral treasures were stored up and guarded by dragons this is one of them it's still known as Wayland smithy Weiland was the anglo-saxon divine blacksmith the man who created the magical swords and coats of chainmail for the gods and even on a bright day under a cloud flecked sky it still feels like a place of mystery to the anglo-saxon mind these standing stones were like entry points to the underworld and local legends have hung around this Oxfordshire Long Barrow for many centuries it was said that if you left your shoes here with a silver penny Weiland would shew them for you and this is the kind of place the anglo-saxon audience imagined the location for Beowulf final struggle he's like the old gunslinger in a western movie who must face one last deadly enemy and of course he knows what will happen because as the poet says although his fate is unknowable it's still certain the war season King sat down on the headland spoke encouraging words to the Friends of his half but gloom his spirits death eager wandering he knew that fate waited to seek his Souls hoard him was so merciful Efrain well furs were redundant met on a access turn Naga Merlin great Tennessee oldest a console haunt his fate hovered near are knowable about certain that ruminative fatalistic quality I think is the key to Beowulf in 1999 a new translation appeared that caught that field better than any before incredibly Beowulf topped the bestsellers and won the Book of the Year captured the imagination of a new generation of readers and it was written by the Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney for Heaney even the dragon itself must act according to its fate the way the dragon is described was kind of he's full of the sinuous energy he is the worm as they say in in in the anglo-saxon he has been attacked himself he has been provoked and he just has to follow his nature as dragons do that when they won't quicken up they corrode and burn villages so there's no sense of him being a malignant figure coming to do damage to bail of their both caught in this web they are encountering a destiny encountering their fate the poem is about tests in many ways I mean bailiff was tested three times and the first two are warrior tests but I do feel that the third one is somehow more than what as a spiritual test of a different sort and that calls I think to something in the reader there's a sense of having to live up to your own best possibilities not not failing something and bill is full of comprehension facing in now old Beowulf enters the Dragons Den accompanied by Wickliffe the one young warrior who has the courage to stand by his king the dragon came raging attacked once again terrify a flashing rushed in on our King crystal his neck between bitter pangs wiglet then disregarding the head struck below its aim true and the fire quickly slackened in consequence that bear wolf recovering reached for his stabbing knife huge mightily down hatched the dragon in half so daring drove out life there Ellen a wreck and the King saw the last triumph of his works in the world his wound burned and swelled the bane boiled in his chest he walked away thinking sat down on a Ledge and surveyed the old earth all Wiglaf took water and washed his good lord fade away battle blood loosened his helmet he talked about the pony rising and setting and I think that that is rather beautiful in bills as the poem proceeds there is the development of the central character of Beowulf himself who comes own as a young man a brave cowboy coming into town to win glory and as it proceeds to use of something else that Keats said he isn't intelligence who is schooled by the pains of the world into being a soul and I think something like that happens in the course of the poem and there is a beautiful transformation occurs from from young valor to old intuitive sympathy and Virgil would say lacrimarum the tears of things the anglo-saxon melancholy merges with the whole European sense of tragedy and that that's what I loved about it we've almost reached the end of the tale but before that there's one last question where might the poem have been finally committed to writing at the end of the 10th century the poem remember was originally composed in the Anglian dialect of anglo-saxon but in the form that we've got it in that manuscript it's gone through a final versioning by a scribe writing in West Saxon and where that might have taken place the clues lie not in Beowulf itself but in the other items in the manuscript in London the book of monsters Alexander's letter to Aristotle with its fabulous tales of antlions and weird tribes across to the sunset the wonders of the east with its story of peoples whose heads were in their chests now there's only one anglo-saxon monastery which is known to have possessed all the Latin sources for those stories and it's this one mom's burry in Wiltshire on the borders of Wessex and Mercia a place with an ancient long tradition of vernacular and Latin poetry in a lot of which there's a healthy interest in dragons too and if I had to place a small bet I would guess that it was here that the story reached its final point in its long journey handed down from the mouths of the bards finally to the pen of a scribe it's a miracle it survived like all of anglo-saxon poetry it's astonishing to think that the very root of our literary heritage only just got through a faded ink the singed vellum the crumbling margins carrying the word hoard down to us and the poem itself ends in flames with Beowulf's body taken to a headland by the sea in his gaffed kingdom the gate race then raised up a funeral pyre shining mail and shields of war and helmets hang upon it they laid out in the middle the body of their chief and on top there then kindled the biggest funeral fire roaring flames mingled with weeping as the fires red heart consumed the house of bone heaven swallowed the smoke this was the manner of the morning of the ghats they said he had proved of all kings in the world the gentlest of men the most gracious kindest to his people the keenest for fame so Beowulf lives and dies as a noble pagan ancestor should but with virtue and a morality that his Christian descendants could admire he was a good king he was gold Kooning who ruled wisely wisdom held ethel sinner are now in the 21st century with wars on terror and clashes of civilizations the poem can still speak to us with its pagan humanism the refinement of its manners its generosity of spirit and it's in our voice that however great a distance it's our speech ironical self-deprecating quite tough minded and it's safe to say that the poem will be remembered as long as there's poetry in these islands until the dragon comes coming up next tonight here on bbc4 comedy as we joined the walking club in the great outdoors

Channel: The Onoclus

Views: 526,970

Rating: 4.8343267 out of 5

Keywords: Beowulf (Poem), British Broadcasting Corporation (Business Operation), Documentary (TV Genre)

Id: 1C0sFXU0SLo

Length: 59min 14sec (3554 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 11 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/KriegerClone]

Side note... a few times the Youtube CC translated Beowulf to "Bear Wolf." Which is damn near close enough.

[u/Meraxees]

Micheal Wood is always excellent. In addition to this I would recommend In search of the Trojan War (first ep. here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkbUQKyie_w ) and In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great (first ep. here http://vimeo.com/45275170)