DATING BEOWULF Series editors: Anke Bernau, David Matthews and James Paz Series founded by: J. J. Anderson and Gail Ashton Advisory board: Ruth Evans, Patricia C. Ingham, Andrew James Johnston, Chris Jones, Catherine Karkov, Nicola McDonald, Sarah Salih, Larry Scanlon and Stephanie Trigg Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture publishes monographs and essay collections comprising new research informed by current critical methodologies on the literary cultures of the Middle Ages. We are interested in all periods, from the early Middle Ages through to the late, and we include post-medieval engagements with and representations of the medieval period (or ‘medievalism’). ‘Literature’ is taken in a broad sense, to include the many different medieval genres: imaginative, historical, political, scientific, religious. While we welcome contributions on the diverse cultures of medieval Britain and are happy to receive submissions on Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Latin and Celtic writings, we are also open to work on the Middle Ages in Europe more widely, and beyond. Titles available in the series 15. The Scottish Legendary: Towards a poetics of hagiographic narration Eva von Contzen 16. Nonhuman voices in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture James Paz 17. The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture Laura Varnam 18. Aspects of knowledge: Preserving and reinventing traditions of learning in the Middle Ages Marilina Cesario and Hugh Magennis (eds) 19. Visions and ruins: Cultural memory and the untimely Middle Ages Joshua Davies 20. Participatory reading in late-medieval England Heather Blatt 21. Affective medievalism: Love, abjection and discontent Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg 22. Performing women: Gender, self, and representation in late-medieval Metz Susannah Crowder 23. The politics of Middle English parables: Fiction, theology, and social practice Mary Raschko 24. Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry and Melissa Raine (eds) 25. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry: Spolia in Old English verse Denis Ferhatović 26. Rebel angels: Space and sovereignty in Anglo-Saxon England Jill Fitzgerald 27. A landscape of words: Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250 Amy Mulligan 28. Household knowledges in late-medieval England and France Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten (eds) 29. Practising shame: Female honour in later medieval England Mary C. Flannery 30. Dating Beowulf: Studies in intimacy Daniel C. Remein and Erica Weaver (eds) Dating Beowulf Studies in intimacy Edited by DANIEL C. REMEIN AND ERICA WEAVER Manchester University Press Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors. This electronic version of this book has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, and of the UCLA Library, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the editors, chapter authors and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 3643 5 hardback ISBN 978 1 5261 3644 2 open access First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Front cover— Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands and Thimble (photograph), 1919. The Art Institute of Chicago. Public Domain. Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Contents List of contributors vii Acknowledgements xi List of abbreviations xiv 1 Getting intimate 1 Daniel C. Remein and Erica Weaver Part I: Beowulf in public 2 Community, joy, and the intimacy of narrative in Beowulf 31 Benjamin A. Saltzman 3 Beowulf and the intimacy of large parties 54 Roberta Frank 4 Beowulf as Wayland’s work: thinking, feeling, making 73 James Paz Part II: Beowulf at home 5 Beowulf and babies 97 Donna Beth Ellard 6 At home in the fens with the Grendelkin 120 Christopher Abram Part III: Beowulf outside 7 Elemental intimacies: agency in the Finnsburg episode 147 Mary Kate Hurley 8 What the raven told the eagle: animal language and the return of loss in Beowulf 164 Mo Pareles vi Contents Part IV: Beowulf’s contact list 9 Men into monsters: troubling race, ethnicity, and masculinity in Beowulf 189 Catalin Taranu 10 Sad men in Beowulf 210 Robin Norris 11 Differing intimacies: Beowulf translations by Seamus Heaney and Thomas Meyer 227 David Hadbawnik Part V: Beowulf in bed 12 Beowulf and Andreas: intimate relations 257 Irina Dumitrescu 13 Beowulf, Bryher, and the Blitz: a queer history 279 Peter Buchanan 14 Dating Wiglaf: emotional connections to the young hero in Beowulf 304 Mary Dockray-Miller Index 319 Contributors Christopher Abram is a member of the English department and a Fellow of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. He works on Old English and Old Norse literature, with a special interest in poetry, religious culture, and ecocritical approaches. His most recent book, Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2019), looks at the resonances between the Norse apocalypse of Ragnarok and our own ecological crises in the twenty-first century. Peter Buchanan is Assistant Professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University, where he teaches courses on linguistics, medieval literature, and composition. He also spends his time thinking about the relationship of the present to the past in twentieth-century literature. He lives with his wife amid a clutter of more books than can reasonably fit inside a single apartment and an impressive array of hedgehog-themed bric-a-brac. Mary Dockray-Miller is Professor of English in the Humanities Department at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, where she teaches undergraduate literature and humanities classes and advises the English Majors’ Honor Society. She is the author of Public Medievalists, Racism and Suffrage (Palgrave, 2017), The Books and the Life of Judith of Flanders (Ashgate, 2015) and Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England (Palgrave, 2000) as well as editor of the Wilton Chronicle (Brepols, 2009). Irina Dumitrescu teaches Old and Middle English literature at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. She is the author of The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge, 2018) and the editor of Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (punctum books, 2016). She viii Contributors and Eric Weiskott have edited a collection of essays dedicated to Roberta Frank entitled The Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History (Medieval Institute Publications, 2019). Donna Beth Ellard is Assistant Professor of English at the Uni- versity of Denver. She is the author of Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures (punctum books, 2019) and has published in journals such as Exemplaria, postmedieval, and Rethinking History. Her work focuses on the haunting presence of race and empire in Anglo-Saxon studies and on the interspecies and interdisciplinary relationships between birds and humans, literary studies and the biosciences. Roberta Frank, Marie Borroff Professor of English emerita at Yale University and University Professor emerita at the University of Toronto, has taught and written on Old English and Old Norse literature for half a century. She is now working, like Penelope at her loom, on a book about the art of early Northern poetry. David Hadbawnik is a poet, translator, and medieval scholar. His Aeneid Books 1–6 was published by Shearsman Books in 2015. In 2012 he edited Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf (punctum books), and in 2011 he co-edited selections from Jack Spicer’s Beowulf for CUNY’s Lost and Found Document series. He has published essays on poetic diction in English poetry from the medieval to the early modern period, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. His latest book, Holy Sonnets to Orpheus and Other Poems, was published by Delete Press in 2018. Mary Kate Hurley is Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University. Her research focuses on time, translation, and community in medieval literature, and has appeared in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology and Review of English Studies, as well as in The Politics of Ecology (ed. Schiff and Taylor) and American/ Medieval: Nature and Mind in Cultural Transfer (ed. Overing and Wiethaus). With Jonathan Hsy and A. B. Kraebel, she was the co-editor of the autumn 2017 special issue of postmedieval, ‘Thinking Across Tongues’. Robin Norris is Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University, where she teaches courses on Old English, history of the language, and grammar through Contributors ix sentence diagramming. Her research interests include saints’ lives and the litany of the saints, and with Johanna Kramer, she was one of the co-founders of the Anglo-Saxon Hagiography Society. With Rebecca Stephenson and Renée Trilling, she was one of the co- founders of the Feminist Renaissance in Early Medieval English Studies, which has been fostering new work on gender in Anglo-Saxon England since January 2016. Mo Pareles is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, where she holds a Hampton New Faculty Fel- lowship and is a member of the Oecologies Collective. She researches the mutual construction of species, sexual, and ethnic difference in medieval English religious literature.