Teaching “Beowulf” comes out of an NEH summer seminar of 2016 at Western Michigan University. The seminar concerned the Old English (OE) poem Beowulf, which was composed in Britain sometime between the years 725 and 1025, and survives in a single, singed copy. Beowulf tells the story of a fictional Scandinavian king who interacts with historical figures, defeats three otherworldly creatures, and dies from his contest with a fire-breathing dragon. Set during the early Middle Ages, the events take place primarily in Denmark and Sweden. While the seminar focused on Beowulf in the context of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, this volume ranges much further afield. Seventeen essays are arranged into three sections: “The Basics,” “Classrooms & Circulations,” and “Teaching Topics.” Teachers of the poem will find much worth consulting by inter-library loan: $126 seems a bit steep for a book aimed at teachers. Swain and Hostetter deliver on their subtitle by offering practical hints, lesson plans, guides, bibliographies, and lists of links, movies, translations, online resources, and more. After reading Teaching “Beowulf,” I revised my syllabus for a semester-long undergraduate Beowulf class that I’ve taught for 25 years. High school and college teachers at all levels will find very useful advice.
The field of Beowulf guides is crowded. OEN (a.k.a. the Old English Newsletter), which I edit, has published a bibliography of Beowulf studies since 1967. (Anyone interested in a free copy can email me.) OEN’s Years Work in Old English Studies includes an annual narrative description ofBeowulf-related scholarship, translations, and art works published every year throughout the world--now available for free on our website. The scope and volume of the YWOES is overwhelming, and finding a guide or a handbook suitable to one’s needs is no small challenge.
For teachers who want to revisit the poem before teaching it, the best guide to Beowulf is widely held to be the 190-page introduction to the fourth edition ofKlaeber’s Beowulf, edited by R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John Niles (Toronto, 2008). Printed in nine-point font, it summarizes virtually every major topic one might want to cover in a classroom, all keyed to a bibliography in the back. It also includes a 177-page commentary on each line of the poem, also keyed to the bibliography. There are sources and parallels in the original languages with translations and a complete glossary. Also essential is Kevin Kiernan’s Electronic Beowulf, an extraordinary (and free) online resource that includes full-color images of the manuscript and a great deal more. Users can click on an OE word and a window appears with Klaeber’s definition and grammatical information. Those looking for fuller definitions can turn to Toronto’s Dictionary of OE, an outstanding and unsurpassed resource, which allows users some free lookups. Their website lists freely available “research tools.” In addition, the formidable Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary is now available for free online thanks to a project led by Ondřej Tichý at Charles University in Prague. Its sleek redesign by Martin Roček works well on a smartphone. Of course, all or some of these resources can also benefit students in the classroom.
To these bedrock resources for preparing lectures or classes, one can add two books most necessary for all instructors to know: Bjork and Niles, A Beowulf Handbook (University of Nebraska, 1997) and Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (D. S. Brewer, 2003). The Handbook appears in the bibliographies of most of the contributors to Teaching “Beowulf.” There are dozens of guides for teachers, but the one most cited in the volume is Howell Chickering, Allen J. Frantzen, and R. F. Yeager, eds. Teaching Beowulf in the Twenty-First Century (Tempe, 2014). One contributor cites seventeen of its essays. All of the contributors were directed to use Seamus Heaney’s translation of the poem, although some prefer Roy Liuzza’s more literal translation, not least because of its very useful appendices (sources and parallels). Superb translations by J. R. R. Tolkien, Howell Chickering, and Rob Fulk were not widely discussed, and virtually no mention was made of those by Maria Dahvana Headly, Jack Spicer, Stephen Glosecki, and other poets. Translations are the subject of OEN Subsidia volume 31, edited by Mary K. Ramsey (Kalamazoo, 2002).
The first section promises to help instructors prepare themselves with the “basics”-- text, language, and structure. The most useful of these in my view is Mae Kilker’s essay on the structure of the poem. Kilker describes the division of the poem into “fitts” or episodes, and provides a detailed appendix containing all of the fitts and their major events. Kilker has terrific teaching suggestions and describes other means of dividing the action of the poem by fights, by funerals, and so on. Stephanie Opfer gives some helpful hints on the OE language. (A very good short introduction to the language by Helmut Gneuss can be found in the Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature [2013]. The Companion contains essays ideal for preparing a class on the poetry and culture of Anglo-Saxon England, including a chapter on Beowulf by Andy Orchard.) Also in this section, Nancy Michael describes interesting classroom exercises in transcription and dating. Instructors might also consider spending class time on a brief overview of manuscripts and paleography using free images from St. Gall, the Bodleian Library, or Parker on the Web. To research such an overview, instructors will find that the British Museum is not alone in hosting wonderful videos about how to prepare, inscribe, and decorate manuscripts.
The second section is entitled “Classrooms and Circulations.” The editors describe it as focusing “on the pedagogical challenges and opportunities ofBeowulf experienced at several levels” (10). It seems to be the section dedicated to classroom teaching, and to my mind it is the most successful part of the book. Especially good are the essays by Jeffrey Susla, David Pecan, and Rebecca Straple-Sovers. Susla teaches Beowulf in high school, and directs his lessons to meet the aims of the Common Core State Standards. It is an informative, clearly written essay that college instructors would find very useful, too. Pecan’s essay offers practical advice for teaching “close reading and study skills” (69). He lists pedagogical goals, considers student needs, offers very useful exercises and questions, and describes different teaching methods, including how to introduce students to theory withBeowulf. Straple-Sovers provides a very good collection of digital resources covering basics and new ideas. In thirty pages, Straple-Sovers covers all you need in an introductory survey class that includes Beowulf. I was especially struck by her thoughtful concern for students’ means: “I would not recommend requiring an assignment to use a digital resource...unless you can be sure that all of your students have easy access to technology” (109). It is a salutary reminder to all instructors. Perry Harrison describes some Norse analogues for specific fitts and Mary Leech discusses popular culture.
The third section is entitled “Teaching Topics.” Readers will find chapters on various topics relevant to the poem: oral-formulaic poetry, archaeology, paganism, heroism, gender, sexuality, and so forth. These chapters tend to express contributors’ viewpoints rather than to describe the contours of a debate, something that the Beowulf Handbook does extremely well. Instructors who wish to brush up on a topic may want to start elsewhere. Some of the chapters offer terrific suggestions for classroom exercises and questions students might consider. Lynn Wollstadt describes archeological work relevant to the poem and offers ways to engage students. One that I found compelling was to assign artifacts (swords, cups, banners, helmets, etc.) to students to research and track throughout the poem. Wollstadt’s chapter is also very informative for those new to archaeology. Melissa Mayus writes about syncretism between paganism and Christianity in the poem, although perhaps a better term than Christianity is her “non-New Testament.” After all, the poem is set in a mythical time (geardagas) before the advent of Christianity among the Norse and contains no church, Mass, Eucharist, Trinity, nor mention of Jesus. Richard Carter Fahey and Larry Swain claim that “the Beowulf poet broods upon the ideals of heroism” (183). I’m not convinced that she does. The OE word hæl,‘safety, luck, health, holiness,’ is related to hæleþ,‘man, healer, savior, hero,’ and it isn’t obvious that it means anything like present-day English (PDE) hero. Christ is called a hæleþ but so are soldiers, scribes, and humans in general. In books of medical recipes and in OE glosses to Psalms, it means “to heal.” I would also caution readers to suspect their claim that the Spanish writers Paulus Orosius (d. ca. 420) and Prudentius (d. ca. 413) “regard the heroic figures of antiquity as monstrous” (186). Prudentius does not characterize “heroic virtues and warrior ethics as monstrous vices” (188). Alcuin of York (d. 804) considered the chief Christian virtue to be fides,“faith, loyalty,” also the chief virtue of the so-called heroic code, and the root of fidelitas, the second word, first allegorical figure, and main theme of Prudentius’s poem. Military bravery and economic ambition were not commonly demeaned as moral deficiencies, as Fahey and Swain erroneously claim (see also their equation of popular depictions of heroism with “toxic masculinity,” p. 185). I agree with their conclusion that Beowulf is not to be considered an unqualified hero, which dozens of critics have argued for a very long time. A description of critical debates (Kritikgeschichte) would have been more useful to instructors than arguing a viewpoint.
Fahey’s other contribution, “Teaching the Beowulf-Monsters,” has a very good discussion of the word monster, of words depicting the three otherworldly creatures, and some excellent classroom exercises. Melissa Ridley Eames considers the cultural use of reliquaries. Jill Hamilton Clements offers an extended and very helpful consideration of the poem’s gender constructions--her classroom exercises and lists of issues and themes are extremely good. Christopher Vaccaro discusses homoeroticism in an effort to teach “against a heteronormative tradition” (247). In his clear and informative chapter, he describes the difficulty of amassing evidence “to formulate a theory of medieval sexuality” (249) and some of the challenges that Beowulf poses. Donna Beth Ellard invites instructors to consider ecocriticism and the environments imagined in Beowulf. Gorgeous color photographs illustrate meres, mounds, and barrows. There is no cumulative bibliography or index. Every teacher of Beowulf will find something useful in this volume. Incidentally, the volume documents the state of Beowulf studies nation-wide in high schools and colleges between 2016 and 2024. I suspect it will one day serve as an archive of Americans’ growing interest in the strangest and most beautiful of OE poems.