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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1996-07 > 0836465376


From: Stewart Baldwin <>
Subject: Re: Beowulf (was DFA: possible pre-Arsacid link)
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 07:29:36 GMT


Jared Olar <> wrote:

>On Tue, 2 Jul 1996, Stewart Baldwin wrote:

>> It is true that scholars once believed that a vague outline of sixth
>> century Scandinavian history could be gleaned from the pages of
>> Beowulf, but modern scholarship has pretty much shot that idea to
>> pieces.

>I suppose it depends on which scholars we're talking about. Last I heard
>it was still quite viable to posit that "vague outline." And recently an
>interesting argument (I don't like certain parts of it) has been made for a
>date of composition in the latter part of the 700's, in East Anglia. Plus
>there is that nice overlap of archaeological evidence. The alternative--
>that the Hrethlings, Scyldings, and Ynglings mentioned in _Beowulf_ and
>_Widsith_ never existed--is highly unlikely given what we can know of these
>legends.

"Beowulf" survives in a single manuscript, which nearly everyone
agrees was written ca. 1000, so the poem was written no later than
that. Some believe that the poem was composed very shortly before
that (based on certain erasures and other indications that the current
manuscript was still a work in progress), and I think that the
evidence is strong that it was composed in the tenth century. The
reason is that the poem contains several anachronisms which can be
reasonably well dated. Such anachronisms are the best way of proving
that something was composed after a certain date, and need to be
explained away if an earlier date is to be argued. I will list three
such anachronisms, in chronological order.

(1) Because of similarities which do not appear in the original
account of Hygelac's raid in Gregory of Tours, it can be shown that
the account of Hygelac's raid was borrowed by the author of Beowulf
from a Frankish chronicle which was not written until the eighth
century, and thus "Beowulf" could not have been written before that
time. (Although not as relevant for dating "Beowulf" as the next two
items, I mentioned this item because it proves that knowledge of
Hygelacs raid was not from the oral or written tradition, but was
taken from Frankish sources, and therefore has no independent value.)

(2) The genealogies of the West Saxon royal line are a complete
fabrication prior to Cerdic, as the landmark studies of Kenneth Sisam
showed, but he did more than that. He was able to prove to some
extent when the various layers of the fake genealogy were concocted,
and the evidence is pretty solid that the part of the genealogy which
includes Sceaf-Scyld-Beo and variants (with several generations
inserted between Sceaf and Scyld in a probably later version) was
fabricated in the late ninth century, probably in the reign of Alfred
the Great. These are the first three generations of the West Saxon
genealogy in some versions, such as Aethelweard's. Since the author
of Beowulf attached the first three generations of the official West
Saxon genealogy to the front of the Danish line in "Beowulf" (probably
to be read as a statement by the author that the Danes and West Saxons
had a common ancestry), the poet shows knowledge of this official
genealogy, and the poem can therefore not have been written earlier
than when this genealogy was invented in the late ninth century.

(3) "Beowulf" refers to the "Hugas," in a context which indicates the
Franks, and the use of the name "Hugas" for the Franks is in fact
found in other sources, but only in the tenth century, when Hugh the
Great and his son Hugh Capet were the leading powers in France, and
the obvious conclusion is that "Hugas" is a term for the Franks (as
the context of Beowulf seems to indicate) and that the name came from
the two famous men named Hugh who controlled France in the tenth
century. The fact that this term appears in Beowulf makes it very
difficult to date the composition of the poem earlier than the tenth
century.

The above arguments came out in 1981, in the book "The Dating of
Beowulf" (University of Toronto Press - a collection of articles
giving widely varying opinions), the two relevant articles here being
"Hetware and Hugas: Datable Anachronisms in Beowulf" by Walter
Goffart (pp. 83-100) and "Beowulf, the Danish Invasions, and Royal
Genealogy" by Alexander Callendar Murray (pp. 101-112). I have seen
no response to (2) and (3) above, and it seems to me that anyone who
wants to hold onto the early dating of "Beowulf" needs to find a way
to explain away the anachronisms which appear in (2) and (3).

>> To my knowledge, the only verifiably historical characters in Beowulf
>> were Eormenric (king of the Goths, mentioned only briefly),
>> Hygelac/Chocilaicus, and Hnaef/Hnabi (the maternal grandfather of
>> Charlemagne's wife, who was plucked out of the eighth century and
>> turned into a sixth century Dane in the poem), and the only verifiably
>> historical event in the poem was the battle in which Hygelac/Chocilaicus
>> fell.

>True enough--although I believe that Hildegard's ancestor "Hnabi, son of
>Huoching," was rather named after the Hnaef Hocing ("Hnaef son of Hoc")

This seems rather far-fetched to me. The idea that the character
Hnaef in Beowulf was based on the historical Hnabi can be explained by
a natural error, in which the "ing" on Huoching's name was
misinterpreted as the Anglo-Saxon ending meaning "son." The fact that
the author of Beowulf had access to Frankish sources has been
sufficiently demonstrated. On the other hand, Huoching naming his son
after Hnaef cannot reasonably explain the "ing" coincidence. (To my
knowledge, "Hnaef" does not appear in any source which can be
conclusively shown to predate Huoching and Hnabi. In fact, I know of
no non-English source which mentions Hnaef, so there is no evidence
that a hero named "Hnaef" was known in the eighth century Frankish
kingdoms.)

>mentioned in the poem. Hnaef is a figure of the Frisian stories, and
>allusions to the Frisian stories appear in parts of _Widsith_ which almost
>surely date to the 600's and earlier 700's.

There is no evidence for such an early date for these stories. The
manuscript of "Widsith" is early 11th century, and there is little
evidence which would allow the composition of the poem to be dated
with any accuracy.

>We shouldn't expect outside confirmation of the existence of Hrothgar,
>Hrothulf, Ingeld, or Eadgils--but the alternative is to claim that this
>whole complex of Scandinavian legends was generated in England (of all
>places) out of air within two or three centuries of the probable time when
>the persons were reputed to have lived.

Generation of the legends in England is not the only alternative. It
seems to me that the most likely source of the Scandinavian legends
which appear in Beowulf and Widsith is that the English got them from
the Viking invaders who appeared in England in the ninth and tenth
centuries. After all, that is when the West Saxons added the Danish
legend Scyld to their ever-growing fake pedigree, and there is no
evidence that the Anglos-Saxons knew about Scyld before the Viking
invasions. This is another good reason for dating both "Beowulf" and
"Widsith" to the ninth century or later, for the Viking invaders make
a much more credible source for all of the Scandinavian legend that
appears in "Beowulf" than the assumption that it was remembered by the
Anglo-Saxon invaders several centuries earlier. (If the latter were
true, you wouldn't expect the sagas and "Beowulf" to tell such similar
legends.) As to whether ninth-century Danish legends have anything
accurate to say about sixth century history and genealogy, I am
skeptical, but there is probably no way to be sure one way or the
other.

>> Let's see, since you didn't like my first example, how about this one:
>> It would be analogous to using "Braveheart" as a source to prove that
>> king Edward III of England was the son of William Wallace. ;-)

>I don't remember exactly what Zuckerman said about the French romances
>about William of Gellone (or rather, about a figure named William derived
>from the historical William), but I recall a curious trace of Jewishness
>in William's actions--abstaining from warfare on days that turn out to be
>Jewish holydays and sabbaths--something like that. He didn't put very
>much emphasis on genealogical details in the romance--as though they were
>"proof." Anyway, I don't think the romances did anything like flatout
>make William the son of a Jewish exilarch!

>But your point is very valid. In the realm of Arthuriana, there's Norma
>Lorre Goodrich (Bane of Arthur lovers!), who uses the Arthurian romances to
>reconstruct precise history for sixth century Britain and Scotland (for which
>she also relies on ***gag!*** Hector Boece). I trust all of us here are
>agreed that such "scholarship" hardly warrants the name.

You'd better be careful! Some of those Arthur threads in other
newsgroups seem to be immortal (and cross-posted to a ridiculous
extent), and we don't want that to happen here, do we? ;-)

Stewart Baldwin

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