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The use of kennings in Beowulf: Wealtheow the Peaceweaver

7/31/2016

One of the literary features of Old English poetry is the use of kennings, or compound words that evoke vivid pictures. Beowulf, an epic written sometime before 750 a.d. and arguably the greatest literary work of Anglo-Saxon culture, is liberally sprinkled with kennings.

For instance, Anglo-Saxon scops, or storytellers, compared the bubbles and foam that form around the prow of a ship as it cuts through the water to a necklace on a woman's throat. They knew that the course which a ship took through the water could also be traversed by swans or whales. Therefore, when the hero takes a boat from the land of the Geats to Denmark, the poet uses kennings and says that Beowulf's foamy-throated ship goes over the swan- road to reach the tide-beaten land.

This Anglo-Saxon love of kennings has persisted in the Germanic propensity to form compound words.

The kenning freodwebbe, or peace-weaver is used to describe Wealtheow, the Queen of the Danes, wife of Hrothgar, and mistress of the great hall Heorot. This term refers to a woman married from one tribe into another in order to secure peace between the two groups. While it is obvious that the Danes are one of the groups Wealtheow's marriage was to unite, we know very little of her original family or clan. In line 620, the poet calls Wealtheow "the Helming woman," but the Helmings are not a tribe that can be historically identified. They show up in no other work of Anglo-Saxon literature. I wonder if they even existed by the the time the Beowulf poem was being written down, or had they succumbed to warfare or disease.

Wealtheow's name further confuses those who want to understand her background. Wealtheow is a compound, a combination of wealh, which means Celt, foreigner or slave, and theow, which means in bondage, service, or not free. Although she moves freely through Heorot, Wealtheow's name suggests that she is not there of her own accord. Several researchers explain that there is not a clear distinction in Anglo-Saxon law between a woman being offered by her tribe as a pledge of good faith between tribes and a woman being taken from her tribe as a hostage. Other precious items such as jewelry and battle gear were exchanged as seals of good faith between tribes, demonstrating that women were treated as commodities in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Although she is a queen, Wealtheow is in a difficult position. She is isolated within a society that may not accept her as one of their own. Stripped of the protection of her own family, she lives among people she may not like or trust because they have, in essence, kidnapped her. Her goal, to weave peace among two peoples, is ultimately in the hands of the men who surround her, and who have already proven themselves warlike in the very act of taking her.

The Wealtheow who appears in my novel The Last Song of the Swan is a quiet and dignified woman who carefully works to keep peace within her household, appease her guests and please her husband. She is resigned to her fate, but if one looks, one can see the shadow of distant and violent events long past in her eyes.

Jennifer Bohnhoff writes historical and contemporary fiction for middle school through adult readers. You can learn more about her at her website.

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Who - what - was Grendel?

7/24/2016

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In the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, Grendel is a frightening creature who sneaks into Heorot, the mead hall of the Danish king Hrothgar, and kills and eats the warriors. But what kind of creature is he?

The original Beowulf poet did not provide an exact description of Grendle, but he does provide some clues. In his 1977 translation, Amherst professor Howell D. Chickering calls Grendle, among other things, an unholy spirit (line 120), a dark death shadow (line 160), an evil monster (433), a dark walker (703), and a demon (706).

By J. R. Skelton - Marshall, Henrietta Elizabeth (1908) Stories of Beowulf, T.C. & E.C. Jack, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11001832

Perhaps one of the reasons why there is not a lot of physical description rests in the fact that the poet calls Grendle a sceadugenga, a shadow walker, or as Chickering translates the phrase, a dark walker. Grendle only goes about at night, and is therefore shrouded in darkness, both physically and metaphorically.

Grendel is usually depicted as a monster, and while the poet does not give the reader a lot of physical details, those he does give are monstrous, indeed.
Grendle has”gigantic fingers,” each topped with a “terrible hand spike” that “glistened like steel.” (Chickering translation, lines 983-985).

In his 2000 translation of Beowulf, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney says that Grendel is vaguely human in shape, though much larger:
... the other, warped
in the shape of a man, moves beyond the pale
bigger than any man, an unnatural birth
called Grendel (lines 1351–1354)

While we are not given a full description of Grendle’s appearance, we are given his background. Grendle is a descendant of Cain, the son of Adam, who, according to the Bible, was the first man, created by God. Cain was the first man to commit murder, killing his brother Abel. The Beowulf poet says that God then drove Cain “out, far from mankind,” and Cain’s children became “every misbegotten thing, monsters and else and the walking dead, and also those giants who fought against God time and again.” (lines 110-114) Fans of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings will be interested to know that the original word for walking dead is not zombie, but orc.)

So then, regardless of what Grendle looks like, he is a fallen man, corrupted by the sins of his forebear Cain. He may be monstrous, but he is fundamentally human in nature.

I’d been toying with the idea that Beowulf was not a 6th Century story (even though many of the characters are historical persons from that period) or a 9th Century story (one of the suggested dates for the one existing manuscript) but a much older story. What if Beowulf was a story from the dawn of humankind? A story that had been handed down through countless generations, changing with the times, adapting as new technologies were born and old ways were forgotten?
What creature would have existed at the dawn of humankind that was fundamentally human in nature, yet different enough to frighten and disconcert us enough for us to call it monstrous?

Could Grendle have been a Neanderthal?

Jennifer Bohnhoff's novel The Last Song of the Swan is a double retelling of the Beowulf epic, one story set at the time when Neanderthal and Cro Magnon cohabitated Europe during the Ice Age. The other story is contemporary. The big idea is that, while technology has changed, the basic mind of men has not. You can read more about the author and her books here, on her website.

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Can Run

7/22/2016

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I can count on one hand the times I've gone for a run since my running buddy moved last November. Yesterday was one of them.

I got up before dawn, when the full moon still hung in the sky and the

shadow of the earth lay low and purple on the western horizon. The air was cool and still. It felt good to be out. And I'm proud to announce that I beat my husband. Not in speed, nor in distance, but in the number of cans brought home.

Can runs have been a family tradition for at least twenty years now. It began when I was just beginning to run, and my husband would go with me. He was faster, and grew impatient with me, but I learned a little trick that helped me keep up; I'd point out cans lying on the side of the road, and he's run to them, crush them, then race to catch up with me.

Art follows life in Swan Song, my newest novel. In it, Helen befriends a foreign student whose dark skin and hair have made the other students wrongly label him a terrorist. Gurvinder then helps Helen become a runner. After one particularly difficult day at school, the two of them go on a run:

     That evening, when Gurvinder shows up at my front door for our run I hand him a plastic grocery bag.
     “What’s this?” he asks, holding it up.
     “It’s a grocery bag.”
     He lets out an exasperated sigh. “I know that. Why are you giving it to me?”
     “You know all those cans we always pass? We’re going to pick them up, then throw them in the recycling bin when we run by the grocery store. We’re going to save America, one can at a time.”
     Cans against cruelty. I know it sounds lame, but it is all my brain could come up with. At least I am doing something.
     We head for the dirt road on the north edge of town. It’s where the bonfire was held back during Homecoming Week and I know there are lots of cans there. I see one in the ditch and point it out.
     “Stomp it flat and throw it in the sack,” I say. Gurvinder stops and I take the lead. I see three more cans, so I swerve to pick them up, then drop them on the road and run on. I hear Gurvinder smash each one, then race to catch up with me. This idea is pure genius; not only are we being good citizens, but I love being ahead of Gurvinder instead of huffing and puffing to keep up.
     By the time he finally closes the gap, his bag is clattering loud enough to wake the dead.
     “We’ve got twenty-t’ree, Atalanta,.” He shakes the sack, proving his point quite noisily.
     “Ata who?”
     Gurvinder laughs. “Atalanta. You know, the girl who threw golden apples?”
     “I’m not throwing anything.”
     Gurvinder laughs again. “It’s a Greek myth. Atalanta promised to marry the man who could beat her in a foot race. Hippomenes challenged her, and she really liked him, so she threw golden apples. Then she won and . . . . wait, that’s not right.”
     Now it’s my turn to laugh. “I’m not going to marry you, even if I do beat you.”
     “Why not?” Gurvinder asks. He asks it playfully, but I feel my face go even redder than the run has made it. I’m glad he doesn’t expect an answer, because what would I say? I would never marry Gurvinder. He’s a good friend; he’s just too different from me. It’s not the color of his skin. It’s a cultural thing. Despite what I said to my mother after having dinner at his house, I could never fit into Gurvinder’s family.

Picking up a few cans may not change the world, but every little bit helps. My run ended well, with four cans and no one hurt. Helen and Gurvinder's did not end so well. Other students made sure of that.

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How authentic is too authentic?

7/20/2016

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I'm working on a contemporary/historical dual narrative novel right now. That means it has two different stories: one set today and one from a long time ago.

The historical story line is based on the Old English epic Beowulf, a poem believed to have been written about 750 AD.

Beowulf is written in 6,359 verses. Each verse has two accented trochee syllables, a pause, and then the second hemistitch of two accented syllables. There is no rhyme, and instead the Beowulf scop (bard) used allliteration, repeating consonant sounds.

If none of that last paragraph meant anything to you, relax. You're normal. Not many people except English professors care about trochees or hemistitches. Here's a brief example, which might help you understand. It is Old English, which is barely recognizable to us, so I've included a translation as well.

God mid Geatum Grendles daeda
(God amidst the Geats Grendle's deeds)
wlanc Weders leod word aefter spraec
(The proud Weder lord Words after spoke)

Most of my novel is written in contemporary English prose. However, I felt I needed to give the flavor of the original work, and so whenever Maenan, the scop (bard) in my story tells a tale around the campfire, I wrote it in alliterating troachaic half-lines:

            When the world was new whelped from the blue mother’s womb
            Beautiful to behold it was, full of fulsome wonder
            Heavy the herds on the plains Bounteous the berries beneath the forest

My critique buddies hated Maenan's tales. I argued long and loud how important it was to include at least a bit of the original form, but they argued that it was difficult to read and hard to understand. They were tempted to just jump over the sections written this way. That finally got my attention. I rewrote Maenan's stories this way:

When the blue mother gave birth to the earth
It was beautiful to behold, and full of wonder
Huge herds roamed the plains, berries filled the forest

My rewritten stories were easier to understand, and that led to my critique buddies understanding why they were included and how Maenan's stories related to the larger story. Success!

Sometimes it's good to sacrifice some authenticity for the sake of meaning.

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From conjecture to memory

7/11/2016

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A children's book once made me consider that perhaps the idea of the cyclops came from conjecture about an elephant's skull found by someone who had never seen an elephant.

The person who found the skull thought that the nasal cavity in the center must be an eye socket, and the legend of a one-eyed giant was born.

Scientists have found mammoth fossils in Greece. Rather than an elephant's skull, it could have been a fossilized mammoth skull that inspired the cyclop's story.

By Patrick Gruban from Munich, Germany (Algerien_5_0039) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

But what if the story of the cyclops came into being another way? What if the story came into being at a time when mammoths still trudged the rocky coast and islands of the Aegean? Perhaps the original story was not about a one-eyed giant, but about a tribe of ancient Greeks using their spears to kill a frighteningly large and clever woolly mammoth.

"A Monster Born of a Ewe". In: "Journal des Observations Physiques, Mathematiques et Botaniques ...." by Louis Feuillee, 1660-1732.

The tale was handed down generation to generation along with the skull. Details changed over the millennia as each generation forgot some of the original story and added some parts relevant to themselves. In time, the people forgot that the mighty beast had a trunk, They improvised an eye to explain the cavity in the center of the skull.

public domain

In time, the Greek storytellers anthropomorphized the mammoth. They made him to stand on two legs. They gave him a voice and allowed him to argue with Odysseus.

Because really, isn't man the most monstrous of all creatures?

We may be afraid of saber-toothed tigers, but it is man who truly terrifies us.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is the author of three middle grade historical novels. Swan Song, her first YA novel, a retelling of the Beowulf story, is due out August 20th. You can preorder the Kindle version here and the paperback here.

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Who Wrote Beowulf?

7/7/2016

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Many people complain that Shakespeare and the King James Bible are hard to read because they are in Old English. They are wrong. Old English, the language spoken in Anglo-Saxon England before the Norman Conquest, is much more difficult to read.

Just looking at the first page of Beowulf, the longest epic poem in Old English, should convince most readers that reading Shakespeare is a piece of cake in comparison.

Were it not for a single medieval manuscript housed in London's British Library, we would not even know the story of Beowulf. The manuscript is undated, but based on an analysis of the handwriting is guessed to have been made somewhere between the end of the 10th century and the death of England's Danish King Canute in 1035.

But the story told in Beowulf is much older than this thousand year old manuscript. Scholars believe the poem must have been passed down orally over many generations. There could have been as many version of the story as there were Anglo-Saxon poets (scops, prounounced 'shop') to tell it, each storyteller modifying it to suit the court in which he sang. In a period of time when few people could read, scops maintained history and upheld or enhanced the ancestry of their patrons.

In my novel Swan Song, I take the position that the original story is much, much older. You can read more about my theory of how old Beowulf is here.

Many of Beowulf's characters, including the Geat king Hygelac, and Hrothgar, the Lord of Heorot Hall, are mentioned in other manuscripts and accounts from the period, which means they are most likely historical personages from 6th century Denmark and Sweden. Some scholars assert that the poem must have been written soon after its historical figures lived, else the scop would have forgotten them. I wonder if the story predates these people, who were added in later by a scop eager to use the age-old story to flatter his patrons.

The story is about the hero Beowulf, who hears that a monster named Grendel is terrorizing a community in Denmark and sails his warriors there to stop Grendel's rampage. Beowulf kills the monster by ripping off its arm, but then must deal with Grendel’s revengeful mother, whom he follows to an underwater lair and finally defeats. The story is clearly pagan in origin. However the scribe who wrote the one remaining copy was likely a monk and clearly a Christian, and his remarks lay a veneer of the new religion atop the old myth.

Beowulf continues to be changed and reshaped by every performance, translation and adaptation. The poem has inspired films, plays, operas, graphic novels, TV miniseries, and computer games. The film The 13th Warrior (1999), was adapted from the novel Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton, who, like me, made the monster Grendle into a Neanderthal, but set his story in a much later period than I did.

Swan Song will be coming out on August 20, 2016, but you can preorder it for Kindle here, and as a paperback here.

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How Pennsylvania Cherries Tried to Win the War

7/1/2016

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Robert E. Lee on Traveler By Michael Miley (1841-1918) [Public domain]

In June, 1863, Confederate General Robert E. Lee decided to invade Pennsylvania, a decision that led to the Battle of Gettysburg. Preparatory to the march, Lee sent Richard Stoddart Ewell's Corps ahead on a foraging expedition.

According to Philip S. Klein and Ari Hoogenboom's A History of Pennsylvania,
(2010: Penn State Press, pg 283), Ewell tookChambersburg, Carlisle, York and Gettysburg, sending Lee 5,000 barrels of flour, 3,000 head of cattle, and a trainload of ordnance and medical supplies. That was enough to convince Lee that his army could live off the land if they headed north.

Ewell's soldiers were such successful foragers because the farmland of Pennsylvania had not yet been ravaged by two years of war. The rolling hills of Pennsylvania was filled with fresh fruit,something the Confederates had not been able to get for some time. The foragers also found barnyards filled with chickens, pigs and cows that they happily liberated from their owners.

Ewell's men and the Confederate army that followed found the cherry trees that lined the roads irresistible. Many soldiers grabbed handfuls of the luscious fruit to eat as they marched. Some diaries tell us that many suffered stomachache. Some suffered worse. Those who recovered in time went on to fight at Gettysburg.

It wasn't only enlisted men who suffered from eating too much fresh fruit. On page 49 of his book High Tide at Gettysburg, Glen Tucker suggests that General Robert E. Lee's partial indisposition on the second day of the battle of Gettysburg might have been caused by an overindulgence of cherries and raspberries.

Enjoy this pie in moderation. You don't want to overindulge and suffer the same consequences as the Confederate Army.

Cherry-Raspberry Pie
1 10 oz. pkg. frozen red raspberries, thawed
1 1lb. 4 oz. can tart red cherries or 2 cups fresh cherries, pitted.
3/4 cup sugar
3 TBS cornstarch
1/4 tsp salt

Drain raspberries and cherries, reserving 1 cup syrup. Blend sugar, cornstarch and salt in saucepan and add syrup, stirring until smooth. Cook until smooth, then add fruit.

Pour into a prepared 9" pie crust, add top crust and seal. Cut slits for steam.
Bake at 425 for 30-35 minutes until golden.

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The use of kennings in Beowulf: Wealtheow the Peaceweaver

Who - what - was Grendel?

Can Run

How authentic is too authentic?

From conjecture to memory

Who Wrote Beowulf?

How Pennsylvania Cherries Tried to Win the War

ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

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