KRON 017 02 04-Huisman.Indd

KronoScope 17 (2017) 231-253

brill.com/kron

Facing the Eternal Desert: Sociotemporal Values in Old English Poetry

Rosemary Huisman The University of Sydney [email protected]

Abstract

Time is a singular noun, but includes a multiplicity of temporalities, including what J. T. Fraser has termed sociotemporality. In this paper, I discuss facing the urgency of time in a narrative dominated by sociotemporality, that of the Old English poem Beo wulf, and suggest how criticism of the narrative structure of Beowulf has derived from a monovalent understanding of narrative time. Moreover, in recognizing sociotemporality as dominant in the organization of the poem, the modern reader can gain greater access to what was valued in the social context of its response to “the urgency of time.”

Keywords

Old English poetry – Beowulf – narrative – sociotemporality – J. T. Fraser’s theory of time

When I first read the theme for the 2016 ISST conference, “Time’s Urgency,” I was irresistibly reminded of the words of the seventeenth century English poet Andrew Marvell, in his much-quoted poem “To His Coy Mistress”:

But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near. And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity.

There’s the urgency of time for you, in which Time itself pushes the poet forward. Marvell’s words, despite the impudent intent of their context, led me to think of poetry, English poetry, more generally. How have poets responded

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi 10.1163/15685241-12341Downloaded385 from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:33:26AM via free access 232 Huisman to that urgency, in which their existential presence in present time moves in- exorably towards an absence, which is not future but rather out-of-time? What comfort—if there is comfort—do they find? What values enable such a pros- pect to be faced? As a first exploration of such questions, I turn to a poem produced in a context very different from today’s. Beowulf is one of the great poems in the English language, written down over a thousand years ago in the language of the Anglo-Saxons, referred to as Old English. It survives in one manuscript, now in the British library.1 In spoken Old English poetry, (usually) a so-called verse of two stressed syllables is linked by alliteration to another verse of two stressed syllables (the number of unstressed syllables can vary) but in the manuscript the language is written continuously, not lineated (Huisman 1998/2000, 99-101). However, modern readers are used to seeing poems printed in lines, so modern editions typically print the poem in lines of two verses, as in lines 1-11 reproduced below. In these terms, Beowulf is a long poem of (at least) 3182 lines.

HWÆT: WE GAR-DENA IN GEARDAGUM þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon. Hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon! Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum 5 monegum mægþum meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorl, syððan ærest wearð feasceaft funden. He þæs frofre gebad, weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah, oð þæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra 10 ofer hronrade hyran scolde, gomban gyldan. Þæt wæs god cyning.2

The last verse (with the runic character thorn, “þ,” for Modern English “th,” and the Latin ligature “æ” for the pronunciation of “a,” as in “cat”) is still readily understood as “that was a good king.” The following translation is from Liuzza (2013):

Listen! We have heard of the glory in bygone days of the folk-kings of the spear-Danes, how those noble lords did lofty deeds.

1 British Library shelfmark: Cotton MS Vitellius A.XV. (British Library Collection Items, 2016). 2 Electronic Beowulf (2015). http://ebeowulf.uky.edu/ebeo4.0/CD/main.html. All Old English text quoted is taken from this source.

KronoScopeDownloaded from 17 Brill.com10/02/2021 (2017) 231-253 12:33:26AM via free access Facing the Eternal Desert 233

Often Scyd Scefing seized the mead-benches from many tribes, troops of enemies, 5 struck fear into earls. Though he first was found a waif, he awaited solace for that— he grew under heaven and prospered in honor until every one of the encircling nations over the whale’s-riding had to obey him, 10 grant him tribute. That was a good king!3

It was my interest in the poem Beowulf that first led me to the International Society for the Study of Time and to the work of its founder, J. T. Fraser, in his modeling of time. This was because, although the poem is acknowledged to be the masterpiece of surviving Anglo-Saxon poetry, critics have sometimes found some features sadly lacking, and these “inadequate” features were, I came to think, irreducibly connected to assumptions those critics made about time. A notable criticism of this kind is that by Frederick Klaeber, in the “Introduction” to his edition of Beowulf. Klaeber’s edition of Beowulf was first issued in 1922; it is a work of meticu- lous scholarship and has remained continuously in print. Now, after Klaeber’s death, it is in its fourth edition. The following quote comes from the third edition, the last by Klaeber himself. In the “Introduction,” in section “V. Structure of the Poem,” the fourth sub-section is headed, “Lack of Steady Advance.” It begins:

The reader of the poem very soon perceives that the progress of the narrative is frequently impeded. Looseness is, in fact, one of its marked pe- culiarities. Digressions and episodes, general reflections in the form of speeches, an abundance of moralizing passages interrupt the story. The author does not hesitate to wander from the subject. When he is reminded of a feature in some way related to the matter in hand, he thinks it perfectly proper to speak of it. Hence references to the past are intruded in unexpected places…. No less fond is the poet of looking forward to something that will happen in the near or distant future…. It is not a little remarkable that in the account of the three great fights of the hero, care has been taken to state the outcome of the struggle in advance. Evidently disregard of the element of suspense was not considered a defect in story telling. (lvii)

3 All translations are taken from the second edition of R. M. Liuzza’s Beowulf (2013). In a review of Liuzza’s first edition (2000), Heather O’Donoghue (2001) compares the “scholarly” translation of Liuzza with Seamus Heaney’s “literary” version of the poem, also published in 2000. Both repay reading, if for different purposes.

KronoScope 17 (2017) 231-253 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:33:26AM via free access 234 Huisman

It is obvious that this criticism is based on some assumption of what the “progress of a narrative” should be, how it would not be impeded. Klaeber refers above to the “general reflections in the form of speeches,” but in an earlier section of the introduction he suggests the very subject matter of the many speeches strongly contributes to the poem’s “lack of steady advance”:

Upwards of 1300 lines are taken up with speeches [that is, about 40% of the text]. The major part of these contain [sic] digressions, episodes, descriptions, and reflections, and thus tend to delay the progress of the narrative. (lv)

Overall, Klaeber concludes that typically the poem has a “rambling, dila- tory method—the forward, backward, and sideward movements …” (lviii). In effect, in drawing that conclusion, Klaeber has assumed a particular model of effective narrative and found the poem lacking in terms of that model. The fourth, posthumous, edition, now known as Klaeber’s Beowulf, published in 2008 (Fulk, Bjork and Niles), is much expanded by later scholarship. Its “Introduction” runs from xxiii to cxc, compared to that in Klaeber’s third edition, from ix-cxxiv. As Gillian Overing puts it in a later 2013 publication, “The scope, variety and sheer volume of scholarship focused on this old poem continue to testify to its enduring appeal” (309). Two sections in the “Introduction” to Klaeber’s Beowulf, “VI. Structure and Unity” (lxxix-xci) and “VII. Method of Narration” (xcii-cviii), include comment on matters similar to those in Klaeber’s one section, “V. Structure of the Poem” (li-lviii), discussed above.4 I return to these topics, and the different scholarly concepts of narrative structure, after describing my own approach. Let us assume that the poem itself is effective. What model of narrative could be compatible with the poem’s mode of progress? This requires some considerable excursus from Old English. Narrative theory has many inflections (Nunning 2003). Nonetheless, typically time appears to be of the essence. Thus in “Towards a Definition of Narrative” (2007), Marie-Laure Ryan’s list of statements which “a definition should support, even entail” includes “narrative is about the temporality of existence” (23). More fundamentally, how is the relation between this time or temporality and narrative to be understood? I quote (as I have in previous papers) H. Porter Abbott’s question and answer to this conundrum (2002). He

4 An earlier publication edited by two of the three editors of Klaeber’s Beowulf, A Beowulf Handbook (Bjork and Niles, 1997), describes the accumulating scholarly readings, earlier and later than Klaeber’s, in chapters on “Structure and Unity” and “Digressions and Episodes”; the latter includes a chronology of relevant comment from 1772 to 1990.

KronoScopeDownloaded from 17 Brill.com10/02/2021 (2017) 231-253 12:33:26AM via free access Facing the Eternal Desert 235 asks, “what does narrative do for us?” and answers, “first … many things,” but “if we had to choose one answer above all others, the likeliest is that: narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time” (3; Abbott’s italics). Before 2004, I gave several papers that criticized the inap- propriateness of narrative theory for studying Old English poetry because of its reliance on the centrality of time.5 However, in 2004, I first encountered the work of J. T. Fraser, founder of The International Society for the Study of Time, at the Twelfth ISST Conference in Cambridge (UK). Fraser’s critique of a monovalent understanding of time and his modeling of different temporalities now expanded the narrative possibilities of time’s centrality (2007, 2004).

Table 1 J. T. Fraser’s model of the evolution of temporalities

nested integrative hierarchy of canonical forms of world levels of nature temporalities causation

5. “human minding” sociotemporal collective intention- social world / ality / historical society causation nootemporal individual long-term mental world of intentionality individual human

4. living matter biotemporal short-term physical world of (organic being) intentionality living organism 3. matter eotemporal deterministic inorganic physical (material being) lawfulness world 2. particles + mass prototemporal probabilistic wave-particle (stochastic being) lawfulness world 1. photons no mass atemporal none—chaos electro-magnetic (becoming) radiation

5 In particular, structuralist narratology with its dualisms of content and expression (for example, fabula and sjuzet, l’histoire and discours, story and discourse) assumed one monovalent time—potentially disordered in read expression, but chronologically sequential in understood content. (See discourse and story in Prince 2003.) In narrative studies generally, this “scientific” understanding of time can be contrasted with the “philosophical” understanding of time as typically nootemporal (Huisman 2005; 2013, 52-3).

KronoScope 17 (2017) 231-253 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:33:26AM via free access 236 Huisman

Table 1, above, reflects my reading of Fraser’s modeling of temporalities. He describes five nested integrative levels of nature, with increasing orders of complexity. The upwards arrow signifies the direction of physical change and organic evolution. Each earlier level continues to co-exist with those that have later emerged, but each level is sufficiently stable and differentiated to have characteristic properties of temporality and causation. The gray area describes worlds not scientifically identified until the twentieth century. In this “hierarchy of temporalities,” there are five natural levels. It is, however, misleading to speak of a hierarchy in relation to the temporalities associated with the most recently evolved level of nature, numbered 5. Both the sociotemporal time of the collective human social world and the nootemporal time of the individual human’s mental world belong to this one level, which Fraser has called “human minding.” Fraser has described the human brain as “the boundary of the universe” in terms of complexity (2007, 25). Recent work on the plasticity of the brain suggests how the mental world of the individual human and the environment of its social world interpenetrate each other.6 Rewriting the relation of narrative and time, we can now expand Abbott’s wording of singular time to encompass Fraser’s understanding of plural temporalities, that is: “narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of temporalities.” Since each of these temporalities is associated, in Fraser’s model, with a different world, our description of narrative can allow for the possibility of an overlapping multiplicity of narrated worlds,7 each with a different temporal organization. Fraser uses the term “umwelt” to designate the spatio-temporal “reality” experienced / construed by the inhabitants of each level (2007, 23). In Table 2, below, levels 4 and 5 are those realities traditionally understood as experienced by humans in their life on this earth; the temporal sequences associated with these worlds are relevant to the narrative of Anglo-Saxon experience. In contrast, the gray area of the earlier levels, designated the “extended human umwelt,” describes the modern extension of human understanding through science and technology; the temporalities of these worlds are relevant to the discussion of so-called modern and postmodern narratives (Huisman 2013, 2015).

6 For further thoughts on the relation of socio- and nootemporality in the context of modern technologies of communication, see Aultman 2009. 7 It would be another paper to discuss the use of the term “world” by different narrative theo- rists (diegesis, storyworld, text world theory … See Herman et al. 2005). I particularly relate Fraser’s “natural worlds” to the linguistically construed worlds of M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic functional theory (Huisman 2013).

KronoScopeDownloaded from 17 Brill.com10/02/2021 (2017) 231-253 12:33:26AM via free access Facing the Eternal Desert 237

Table 2 Narrative sequence and the temporality of narrative worlds

umwelt = spatio- “hierarchy” of world coherent narrative temporal reality temporalities sequence experienced (Fraser)

5. human umwelt sociotemporal social world / equative society nootemporal mental world of associative individual human 4. human umwelt biotemporal physical world of chronological individual human 3. extended human eotemporal inorganic physical reversible umwelt world 2. extended human prototemporal wave-particle world indeterminate umwelt 1. extended human atemporal electro-magnetic incoherent umwelt radiation

Table 2, above, identifies the characteristic sequential telling of a narrative depicting one world or another; I have called this its “coherent narrative sequence.” It is coherent because this sequence of telling is how this world “makes sense” as a reality to its inhabitants. Thus each narrative sequence enables the organization of one type of temporality rather than another (examples follow in the next paragraphs). In any one narrative text, all of these temporalities may be woven, all of these worlds of the human umwelt may be told, though one sequence or another may dominate the “texture” of the text. I have written elsewhere of the characteristically different textures of English narrative texts at different historical periods of production (Huisman 2013); in contrast to most post-printing fictional narratives in English, the text of Beowulf is dominated by sociotemporality. For level 4 (the human world of Fraser’s organic being) in the physical world, the coherent narrative sequence is that of chronology, one physical event after another as those events would be humanly experienced in the physical world. Thus Beowulf, with other Geats (also called “Weders”), sets off by sea for the land of the Danes:

KronoScope 17 (2017) 231-253 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:33:26AM via free access 238 Huisman

210 Fyrst forð gewat. Flota wæs on yðum, bat under beorge. Beornas gearwe on stefn stigon. Streamas wundon, sund wið sande. Secgas bæron on bearm nacan beorhte frætwe, 215 guðsearo geatolic. Guman ut scufon, weras on wilsið wudu bundenne. Gewat þa ofer wægholm, winde gefysed, flota famiheals fugle gelicost, oð þæt ymb antid oþres dogores 220 wundenstefna gewaden hæfde, þæt ða liðende land gesawon, brimclifu blican, beorgas steape, side sænæssas. Þa wæs sund liden, eoletes æt ende. Þanon up hraðe 225 Wedera leode on wang stigon, sæwudu sældon. Syrcan hrysedon, guðgewædo. Gode þancedon þæs þe him yþlade eaðe wurdon.

Liuzza’s translation: The time came—the craft was on the waves 210 moored under the cliffs. Eager men climbed on the prow—the currents eddied, sea against sand—the soldiers bore into the bosom of the ship their bright gear, fine polished armor; the men pushed off 215 on their wished-for journey in that wooden vessel. Over the billowing waves, urged by the wind, the foamy-necked floater flew like a bird, until in due time on the second day the curved-prowed vessel had come so far 220 that the seafarers sighted land, shining shore-cliffs, steep mountains, wide headlands—then the waves were crossed, the journey at an end. Thence up quickly the people of the Weders climbed onto the plain, 225 moored their ship, shook out their mail-shirts, their battle-garments; they thanked God that the sea-paths had been smooth for them.

KronoScopeDownloaded from 17 Brill.com10/02/2021 (2017) 231-253 12:33:26AM via free access Facing the Eternal Desert 239

For level 5 (Fraser’s world of human minding), humans experience two worlds: in the mental world, the coherent narrative sequence is that of association, events remembered or imagined by the individual; in the social world, the coherent narrative sequence is that of equation, events that are understood to be socially similar or contrastive. Some critics have found psychological realism in Beowulf and so described an associative sequence such as that characteristic of nootemporality (see later footnote 16); but I am unconvinced. What can appear to a modern reader as “internal” to an individual may be the conventional expression of a shared external perspective—that is, not the individual association of nootemporality but the social equation of sociotemporality.8 In commenting on the “disruption” of narrative chronology, Klaeber has already, implicitly, identified the equative sequence of sociotemporality:

When [the author] is reminded of a feature in some way related to the matter in hand, he thinks it perfectly proper to speak of it. Hence references to the past are intruded in unexpected places…. No less fond is the poet of looking forward to something that will happen in the near or distant future …. (lvii)

Klaeber gives many examples, including: “the building of the hall Heorot calls up the picture of its destruction by fire” (lvii). He refers to lines 81b-85 (all punctuation, in transcription and translation, is editorially supplied):

Sele hlifade, heah [ond] horngeap. Heaðowylma bad, laðan liges. Ne wæs hit lenge þa gen þæt se secghete aþum swerian, 9 85 æfter wælniðe wæcnan scolde.

8 This position on a less internalized understanding of mental processes in earlier periods is supported by Leslie Lockett, on Old English, and Monika Fludernik, on Middle English, in “Representing Minds in Old and Middle English Narrative” (Herman 2011). Peter Clemoes, in “Action in Beowulf and our Perception of it,” though relating action in Beowulf to the mental state of the actor, “[making] the narrative ‘psychological,’ ” continues to put “psychological” in quotation marks, relating its use to the shared social world, rather than to the mental world of the individual: “The ‘psychological’ nexus of the doer communicates with the surrounding world through symbols…. The symbols, expressed in traditional language, belong to shared consciousness. They give concentrated form to general experience” (Calder 1979, 166-7). 9 84b: aþumsweoran in the third (1950) and fourth (2008) editions of Klaeber.

KronoScope 17 (2017) 231-253 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:33:26AM via free access 240 Huisman

The hall towered high and horn-gabled—it awaited hostile fires, the surges of war; the time was not yet at hand when the sword-hate of sworn in-laws should arise after ruthless violence.

So the hall is “the matter in hand,” and the features of its building and of its destruction are textually juxtaposed in antonymic equivalence. It is also noticeable that, descriptively, the physical destruction of the hall (Heaðowylma: “hostile fires”; laðan liges: “surges of war”) is conflated—equated—with the destruction of social order (se secghete: “sword-hate”; wælniðe: “ruthless violence”), that is, with disruption within the social group. In the Old English, the identification by social roles, the sworn in-laws of son-in-law and father- in-law, rather than by individual names, tells us of social cohesion constructed in the past through family relations, which, like the hall, in the future will not survive.10 Using Fraser’s critique of a monovalent understanding of time and his modeling of different temporalities, it is now possible to revisit critical questions about the narrative structure of Beowulf. In his book-length study, Beowulf, The Poem and Its Tradition (1983), John Niles devotes a chapter, “The dimension of time,” to the poem’s narrative and temporal complexity. Niles lists the “categories” (also “modes”) of time in the poem, that “form a continuum” though “the distinction between these categories is not as neat as might be assumed”; “narrative movement between them is rapid.” His list includes the mythic past; the legendary past; the historical past, which includes a narrative past, a narrative present, and a narrative future; the present of the poem’s performance, real or imagined; the present of reading the text; the mythic future (181-2). Though Niles represents his terms as categories of a monovalent time (later discussed), his terms, with some reordering, can be mapped onto Fraser’s multiple temporalities. It is then possible to consider where on this mapping the concepts of other scholars have been situated. In tracing the complicated tellings in Beowulf, Gilliam Overing heads a section, “Time: when and whose is the now of the poem?” (2013, 311). In the evolution of time, the concept of “now,” the present time, first emerges with biotemporality: it is the time in which the organic being feels or satisfies its

10 Much later in the text, ll 2047-2069a, Beowulf speaks of this future enmity between Ingeld of the Heathobards and the Danes, despite their in-law relationship through Hrothgar’s daughter. Andy Orchard suggests verbal echoes with the earlier passage on the hall’s destruction (2003, 241).

KronoScopeDownloaded from 17 Brill.com10/02/2021 (2017) 231-253 12:33:26AM via free access Facing the Eternal Desert 241 needs.11 There are three “presents” in Niles’ list: the present of the human reader (reading the text); the present of the performer/narrator (who takes up the narrative “I” of the text) in performance, real or imagined; the present of the characters in the text, as in the character of Beowulf himself. It is these humans, in their experience of a physical world, who experience events in the chronological sequence of biotemporality. Consider the world of the characters in Beowulf. The biotemporal time of any individual human begins with their birth and ends with their death (using their as an ungendered singular pronoun). So analyses of the poem’s narrative structure that focus on the events in Beowulf’s life understand time as biotemporality. Klaeber looked for the chronological sequencing of events characteristic of biotemporality. J. R. R. Tolkien responded to Klaeber’s comments by turning attention from a chronological progression to a chronological “contrast between youth and age,” a bipartite structure: “But the poem was not meant to advance, steadily or unsteadily. It is essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings” (1936, 34). This is still an understanding of time as biotemporal; so also are those tripartite structures which focus on “Beowulf’s three great fights” (Fulk, Bjork, Niles, 2008, lxxix). Fights, from beginnings to outcomes, take place in the physical world, the world of chronological sequence from birth to death. Yet Klaeber’s comment on these fights implicitly recognizes that a temporality different from biotemporality may be valued in the narrative sequencing:

It is not a little remarkable that in the account of the three great fights of the hero, care has been taken to state the outcome of the struggle in advance. Evidently disregard of the element of suspense was not considered a defect in story telling. (lvii)

A focus on the present of the human reader reading the text is more noticeable in more recent studies. For example, in “Lyric Time in Beowulf,” Howell Chickering studies what could be called “aesthetic time,” the reader’s perception that Chickering relates to reader-interpretation: “The rhythm [of the contrast between transient human time … and God’s eternal existence outside of time] … chiefly expresses a lyrical awareness of time, by which I mean three things: an intensified awareness of how time and characters pass, an ironic delight in precisely how they move, and a meditative musing on how we hear

11 “The level-specific causation of the biological Umwelt is short-term intentionality in the service of organic needs. For those who must breathe, it is a demand for air, for all organ- isms, the need for nourishment” (Fraser 2007, 43. See also 2007, 91.).

KronoScope 17 (2017) 231-253 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:33:26AM via free access 242 Huisman time passing in language” (Chickering 1992, 493). Such close involvement in responding to the text implies that the nootemporal and biotemporal times of the individual reader are closely aligned in this experience. Awareness, delight, musing—these words locate the activity within nootemporality, the cognitive experience of the reader, coordinated with the biotemporal “now” of reading. I turn now to the present of the narrator/performer. It is within this biotemporal present that the complex temporalities of the narrated text come into being. These include, in addition to the biotemporality of Beowulf’s life, the sociotemporalities of two social worlds: a Christian world primarily transmit- ted through literate sources, a Germanic world primarily experienced through oral transmission. Though Alcuin famously asked, “What has Ingeld to do with Christ?,”12 it is clear that, by the (indeterminate) date of the composition of the Beowulf poem that we have, the Christian and the Germanic worlds were inter- twined for its composer.13 Thus, in his biotemporal “now” of telling, the narrator could conflate a Christian and Germanic past—in Niles’ terms: Mythic past (biblical: Creation, Cain and Abel, Flood) -> Legendary past (Germanic: heroes, such as Sigemund, Weland) -> Historical past [biotemporal past, present and future of Beowulf and Germanic pagan people]—and project a Mythic future (biblical: Doomsday). This conflation was, influentially, described by John Leyerle as “the interlace structure of Beowulf.” Leyerle conventionally equates “time” with chronological sequence: “Beowulf is a poem of rapid shifts in subject and time. Events are fragmented into parts and are taken with little regard to chronological order” (1967, 1). But, unlike Klaeber, for him the interweaving of events contributes to the rich texture of the poem: “[The interlace structure]

12 A much quoted question from the letter of Alcuin, Anglo-Saxon scholar and teacher at Charlemagne’s court, to Higbald, bishop of Lindisfarne, “in the context of a discussion about what should be read and heard in the monastic refectory” (Irvine 1994, 332). Ingeld is the son-in-law referred to in the previously quoted lines Beowulf 81b-5. 13 Studying the desire for the “definitive” text that can motivate scholarly work, Allen Frantzen comments: “editors respond to texts, and to manuscripts, as if they were univo- cal…. The implications of the multiple layers of the manuscript for approaches to narrative in Beowulf are too frequently missed…. An obvious, and probably the most important example in Beowulf … is the mixture of pagan and Christian perspectives. It is usually ap- proached as a compromise between a Christian world view, with its promise of redemp- tion, and the fated universe of Germanic paganism. But this cultural theme is an event: it becomes a conclusion … only through the lexical process of determining how words, including references to fortune, fate, and divinity, will be translated. As Fred C. Robinson has shown, editors and translators juggle the balance of these elements according to the version of Anglo-Saxon culture they have chosen” (1990, 173).

KronoScopeDownloaded from 17 Brill.com10/02/2021 (2017) 231-253 12:33:26AM via free access Facing the Eternal Desert 243 allows for the intersection of narrative events without regard for their distance in chronological time and shows the interrelated significances of episodes without the need for any explicit comment by the poet” (1967, 8). The term “interlace” is variously taken up by other scholars (Fulk, Bjork, Niles 2008, lxxxiii).14 In the model of temporalities earlier described, the sociotemporality of the social world is coherently told in equative sequence. Events that are similar or contrastive are juxtaposed or, in Leyerle’s words above, “interrelated.” Leyerle persistently uses “temporal sequence” to mean biotemporal chronological sequence, yet he implies the dominance of sociotemporal equative sequence in Beowulf:

To the Beowulf poet, as to many other writers, the relations between events are more significant than their temporal sequence and he used a structure that gave him great freedom to manipulate time and concen- trate on the complex interconnections of events…. There are no digressions in Beowulf. (1967, 13)

Niles also intuitively recognized the sociotemporal dominance in Beowulf, even while still assuming a monovalent time for narrative to “advance”:

Mythic time, legendary time and historical time are all present simultaneously in potentia from the beginning of the poem to the end. At any moment, as a way of making the involutions of the text more dense, the poet may allude to persons or actions that pertain to any of these three modes of time. Thus a given moment is not exactly a narrative event, for nothing much may happen in it to advance the plot. It is rather a kind of narrative “crossroads” for the intersection of lines drawn from significant points in and out of time. (1983, 195)

That last singular time appears to be biotemporal: being plotted chronologically on it an event is “in time,” whereas intersections from other “modes of time”

14 Edward Irving (1989) criticizes Leyerle for not developing his concept of “interlace” further; Irving devotes much of a chapter (“Style and Story: Narrative Modes”) to its use in Beowulf. Gillian Overing, studying Beowulf, like Frantzen (fn 13), “places more emphasis on the interpreter of signs as a functional, contributing element in the process of translation/interpretation” (1990, xx), describing “metonymy, interlace and gender” as the “verbal strands” in the “web of interpretation.” See the discussion of sociotemporality, weaving, and the construal of female gender in Beowulf (Huisman 2008).

KronoScope 17 (2017) 231-253 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:33:26AM via free access 244 Huisman are “out of time.” Yet Niles has readily identified the sociotemporal sequence of equivalence that dominates the narrative: “Mythic time, legendary time and historical time are all present simultaneously in potentia from the beginning of the poem to the end.” To reiterate: the telling of Beowulf is dominated by a sequence telling what is socially similar or contrastive. Its dominant “steady advance” being the equative narrative sequence of sociotemporality, the narrative of Beowulf is primarily organized to tell its story of a social world. Again, Klaeber has, implicitly, provided supporting evidence:

The distinctly allusive character of a number of [the digressions and episodes] shows that the poet assumed a familiarity with the full story on the part of his audience. (liv)

Compare this (as in Table 1) with Fraser’s characterization of the canonical form of causation of the social world: collective intentionality and historical causation, causation understood as the inter relation of known events. That the equative narrative sequence of sociotemporality dominates the narrative texture of Beowulf is implicit in the work of other scholars. Whereas Tolkien saw a contrast between youth and age on the biotemporal timeline of the Beowulf character, Fred C. Robinson saw a narrative structure more generally based on both repetition and contrast, what he termed “the appositive style” of the poem: “a style more suggestive than assertive, more oblique than direct” (1985, 13). The “appositive style” aptly describes the equative sequence. Robinson associates this style with the intent of the poem:

A poet who, in a deeply Christian age, wants to acknowledge his heroes’ damnation while insisting on their dignity must find and exercise in his listener’s minds the powers of inference and the ability to entertain two simultaneous points of view that are necessary for the resolution of poi- gnant cultural tensions.

For Robinson, the style conveys a “complex attitude” to the past, of “admira- tion and regret” (11-14).15 This link of narrative structure to meaningful intent

15 In a recent chapter, “Time,” Kathleen Davis takes a contrary view, arguing, from her interpretation of Alfredian texts, for a more positive and future-oriented understanding of “temporal processes” in Anglo-Saxon culture (2012).

KronoScopeDownloaded from 17 Brill.com10/02/2021 (2017) 231-253 12:33:26AM via free access Facing the Eternal Desert 245 becomes a critical given. By 2008, in the “Introduction” to the fourth edition of Klaeber’s Beowulf, in a section headed “Non-Linear Narration,” the editors comment:

The complex, stop-and-go manner in which Beowulf is related—what Klaeber famously called its “lack of steady advance”—is consistent with the broad aims of this work. Rather than presenting an account of events in a straightforward, linear sequence, the poet uses certain key moments in a great life as the occasion for a meditation upon the human condition. (xcv)

What, then, is the poem about? Can this discussion of temporality contribute to an understanding of the poem’s subject matter? As long ago as 1980, Barbara Hernstein Smith published an instructive ar- ticle, “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories.” In it, Hernstein Smith spells out how a plot summary of a narrative is not objective but is motivated by the in- terpretative focus of the summarizer. The monovalent understanding of time in most narrative theory is typically comparable to Fraser’s biotemporality; a biotemporal summary focuses on meanings of doing in a physical world, in the individual lifespan from birth to death. Thus, for Beowulf, a biotemporal summary might read as follows:

The poem tells of Beowulf’s three fights. In the first two thirds of the poem: the monster Grendel has been attacking Danish warriors in the hall of King Hrothgar; Beowulf comes to Denmark from Geatland, kills the monster; then Grendel’s mother attacks the hall. Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother. He returns home to Geatland. In the last third of the poem, Beowulf, now old and King of the Geats, kills a dragon but is himself killed.

At its on-line website on Beowulf, the British Library summary of “The Story of Beowulf” is similar to this (British Library Collection Items, 2016). In more detail, the first sections in the “Introduction” of the third (Klaeber, 1950) and fourth (Fulk, Bjork, Niles, 2008) editions of Beowulf give a comparable summary of the poem. Yet a summary can also take what, on the face of it, looks like a nootemporal perspective, focusing on Beowulf’s state of mind as inferred from his actions. The following is an example from the “Introduction” to Michael Alexander’s Penguin translation of Beowulf. (Words related to mental states are in italics.)

KronoScope 17 (2017) 231-253 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:33:26AM via free access 246 Huisman

Beowulf is a heroic poem in the simple sense that it celebrates the actions of its protagonist. Beowulf, son of Edgetheow, is the type of a hero in that it is his eagerness to seek out and meet every challenge alone and unarmed that makes him glorious in life and brings him to his tragic death. (2003, xxii)

When he is at the mercy of Grendel’s mother, or of the dragon, Beowulf thinks of his glory; he is mærtha gemyndig, “mindful of glorious deeds.” This is the primary theme of heroic poetry: the prowess, strength and courage of a single man, undismayed and undefeated in the face of all adversaries and in all adventures. As he surpasses other men, his moment of excelling, his aristeia, is rewarded by fame, the ultimate human achievement in an heroic age. Though he must die, his glory lives on. (2003, xxii, preceding the previously quoted paragraph)

The socially comparative emphasis is on one man who “surpasses other men,” but the inner life described here is scarcely that of an individual. And Alexander’s words do make this explicit: Beowulf is the type of a hero. This character is a social construct, a social role in an exemplum of the ideal, the ob- ject of collective desire. This is not a personal history of one man’s actions and thoughts but a narrative type produced in a particular sociotemporal context. For these reasons, I would argue that a nootemporal summary of the Beowulf narrative is anachronistic.16 As early as 1938, Joan Blomfield observed this kind of narrative construction of the hero’s “character”:

16 Antonina Harbus (2012) assumes the monovalent biotemporal understanding in which “normal” narrative sequence is chronological: “the most noticeable component of [Beowulf’s] complexity is temporal: the narrative time sequence is disjointed, a textual feature that can be mapped.” At the same time, her resolution of this complexity appears to be nootemporal, a sequence of association in the “mind” of Beowulf: “the reader is called up to project their viewing position onto the sub-worlds that spring from Beowulf’s memory. His audience is similarly reliant on him for the sequencing and organization of information” (82-3). A surprising (implicit) focus on nootemporal sequencing was given by Michael Lapidge (2001), comparing the narrative technique in Beowulf to that in two modernist novels of William Faulkner: “I shall argue that this non-linearity was wholly intentional and is a reflex of the poet’s concern with the mental processes of perception and understanding” (62). Huisman (2013) discusses the inter-weaving of associative and reversible narrative sequences of nootemporality and eotemporality in the texture of modernist narratives.

KronoScopeDownloaded from 17 Brill.com10/02/2021 (2017) 231-253 12:33:26AM via free access Facing the Eternal Desert 247

The setting out of the material is not in Beowulf an evolution following one main line or connecting thread. Instead, the subject is disposed as a circumscribed field in which the themes are drawn out by a centre of attraction—in this case the character of the good warrior. Far-flung tales and allusions, apparently scattered material and discontinued events are grouped in a wide sweep around the hero’s character. In fact these are his character…. (57)

And in the 2006 collection, The Postmodern Beowulf, James Earl augments this opinion in his assessment of all the characters in Beowulf:

Not only is the poem insistently social, it repels individualism. For example, it is impossible to identify closely with Beowulf’s characters, because they have virtually no inner lives, no psychologies to which we might connect our own. They are like Greek tragic characters declaiming their lines—no matter how moving—through rigid, larger-than-life masks. They are less personal and more thoroughly social than even Homer’s characters (690)

An explicitly sociotemporal summary of Beowulf is now quite possible. The initial quotations from Klaeber—if we remove the negations and the assumed deviation from a desired chronology in the term “digressions”—describe some features of a steady sociotemporal advance, in which the poem accumulates the complex details of a social world, understood in its web of spatial and temporal relations: sociotemporally relevant “digressions” and episodes; general reflections in the form of speeches; an abundance of moralizing passages; references to the past and [near or distant future]; the already mentioned disregard of the element of suspense … (lvii). The web of that social world includes the past and present interactions of:

the Danes the Geats the Heathobards the Frisians the Franks the Swedes

KronoScope 17 (2017) 231-253 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:33:26AM via free access 248 Huisman and the many complicated feuds, marriages, treacheries, that have happened, or have been told of, in the past and that are predicted in the future.17 This is not the biotemporal time of one human being, but the sociotemporality of the continued life and death of different social groups. Moreover, much of this— as Klaeber had noted—is told in the speeches of characters, in the external exchange of shared community. The physical world of action, reconstrued se- miotically in language by an individual speaker, is now a currency of the social world, and the values in its exchange can vary from one social context to another (Huisman 1989). It is unsurprising that books and films based on the text of Beowulf have typically focused on the first two thirds, Beowulf’s fights with Grendel and Grendel’s mother. The biotemporal advance of the narrative there is more ac- cessible to modern conventions of action heroes, especially in relation to vi- sual storytelling with the mimesis of acted characters.18 However, in the last one third of the text, the biotemporal story of Beowulf’s last fight and death, the narrative texture becomes more complex. Irving attributes this narrative structure to an “oral” form:

from line 2200 to the end, the narrator recounts a number of incidents of Geatish and Swedish history…. These historical incidents … appear as dis- crete and self-contained narrative units or anecdotes, but never as lists of events or progressive chronologies…. No attempt is made to put them in any rational chronological order or to see them as historical background in our present way of thinking.

Irving then contrasts this presentation with that of the “literate mind,” in the form of “documents and lists” (1989, 21-22). However, though Germanic poetry undoubtedly developed in a pre-literate social context, the written text of Beowulf reaches us from a literate context. What is evident in the last third

17 Robert Bjork, discussing “Digressions and Episodes” in Beowulf, records the historical trends, still unresolved, of scholarly opinion and finally comments, “The cumulative effect of all the possibilities inherent in each digression is to affirm both the mercurial, polyse- mous nature of each and the non-Aristotelian character of the early medieval world … In an aesthetic sense, the individual episode seems a microcosm of the poem, with a dazzling complex depth that renders it prism-like, reflecting variegated light and layered meaning with each twist. In concert, the episodes partially account for what might best be described as the kaleidoscopic effect of Beowulf” (Bjork and Niles 1997, 211). 18 The 2007 film Beowulf, directed by Robert Zemeckis, does include the dragon fight but, throughout the film, the focus on action is heightened by 3D computer animation. For a book length study, see Beowulf on Film (Risden and Haydock, 2013).

KronoScopeDownloaded from 17 Brill.com10/02/2021 (2017) 231-253 12:33:26AM via free access Facing the Eternal Desert 249 of the surviving text is the texture of its narrative structure: in the weaving of the text, the equative sequence of the sociotemporal story of the Germanic social groups becomes noticeably more dominant in its entwining with the chronological sequence of the biotemporal story of the individual hero. After the dragon fight, Beowulf is near the biotemporal and nootemporal end of his life, that is, the death of him as an individual, but in that life he has acted so as to protect the life of his people. He speaks, after the dragon fight (lines 2732b-2743a in Klaeber; 2733b-2744a in the Electronic Beowulf, below):

Ic ðas leode heold fiftig wintra. Næs se folccyning 2735 ymbesittendra ænig ðara þe mec guðwinum gretan dorste, egesan ðeon. Ic on earde bad mælgesceafta, heold min tela, ne sohte searoniðas, ne me swor fela 2740 aða on unriht. Ic ðæs ealles mæg feorhbennum seoc, gefean habban, forðam me witan ne ðearf Waldend fira morðorbealo maga, þonne min sceaceð lif of lice.

I held this people fifty winters; there was no folk-king, nor any of the neighboring tribes, who dared to face me with hostile forces 2735 or threaten attack. The decrees of fate I awaited on earth, held well what was mine, I sought no intrigues, nor swore many false or wrongful oaths. For all that I may have joy, though sick with mortal wounds, 2740 because the Ruler of men need not reproach me with the murder of kinsmen, when my life quits my body.

Overing writes of the “death-centered, masculine economy of Beowulf” (1990, xxiii), and the militarist values of this economy are certainly evident in Beowulf’s speech above. But, she writes, “even as [Beowulf] functions as an epitome of the binary heroic standard, he is also calling it into question and pointing out its limitations” (84). In this complex narrative texture, there is no

KronoScope 17 (2017) 231-253 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:33:26AM via free access 250 Huisman simple resolution, as the weaving of biotemporal and sociotemporal demands juxtaposes life and death, giving and taking away. Thus Niles, in his chapter “The Controlling Theme,” concludes:

Throughout Beowulf, interest centres not on man as solitary hero but on people and what holds them together…. [The poet] gave us a document every part of which either stresses the joys of harmonious living among the group, or brings out the gloom of life lived apart from the group, or develops the way in which people can contribute to the stability of the group by leading lives free from arrogance and threats. The poet’s ethical concerns surface constantly, not only in speeches and gnomic comments but in the main narrative as well. Thus Beowulf fulfills its author’s purpose of illustrating, in manifold ways, how societies are held together and how they fall apart. (1983, 233)

The life of the social group, rather than the individual, is at the heart of these sociotemporal values—the text has given us many examples where these values were not, or will not be, preserved. And indeed the poem ends badly for Beowulf’s people. All except one (Wiglaf) do not support him in the dragon fight; news of the Geats’ cowardice will encourage old enemies to attack, it is predicted (lines 2886b-2890a). After Beowulf’s funeral, the Geats build a high barrow on the headland; men then ride round the mound: “they wished to voice their cares and mourn their king, / utter sad songs and speak of that man; / they praised his lordship and his proud deeds / judged well his prowess” (Liuzza ll.3171-3174a). The poetic text ends with an elegy, replete with superlatives—and again, these values of the ideal are centred on social relations, of internal harmony as well as external protection.

swa hit gedefe bið þæt mon his winedryhten wordum herge, ferhðum freoge, þonne he forð scile of lichaman læded weorðan. 3180 Swa begnornodon Geata leode hlafordes hryre, heorðgeneatas. Cwædon þæt he wære wyruldcyning, manna mildust [ond] monðwærust, leodum liðost, [ond] lofgeornost. (Electronic Beowulf 3176b-3184; Klaeber 3174b-3182)

KronoScopeDownloaded from 17 Brill.com10/02/2021 (2017) 231-253 12:33:26AM via free access Facing the Eternal Desert 251

As it is proper that one should praise his lord with words, 3175 should love him in his heart when the fatal hour comes, when he must from his body be led forth, so the men of the Geats lamented the fall of their prince, those hearth-companions; they said that he was of all the kings of the world 3180 the mildest of men and the most gentle the kindest to his folk and the most eager for fame.

Fame is not just an attribute of the individual hero. The possibility of fame un- derwrites the continued existence of the social group in which that fame will be celebrated. This is the communal exchange in which the hero will be spoken of, will sociotemporally continue to exist even after the biotemporal and nootemporal death of the individual. The possibility of fame is a paradox of the human umwelt, a reconciliation of life and death at the natural level of “human minding”—that confusing conflation of worlds and temporalities which Fraser identified as the most complex level of natural evolution.

References

Abbott, H. Porter. 2002. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, M., trans. Revised 2003. Beowulf, A Verse Translation. London: Penguin. Aultman, M. 2009. “Nootemporality, Sociotemporality, and the Internet.” Kronoscope 9 (1-2): 129-145. Bjork, R. E. & J. D. Niles, eds. 1997. A Beowulf Handbook. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Blomfield, J. 1938. “The Style and Structure of Beowulf. ” Review of English Studies XIV: 396-403. British Library Collection Items Beowulf, September 2016. http://www.bl.uk/collection- items/beowulf Calder, D. G., ed. 1979. Old English Poetry, Essays on Style. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davis, K. 2012. “Time.” In A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, edited by J. Stodnick and R. R. Trilling, 215-234. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Earl, J. W. 2006. “Afterword: Reading Beowulf with Original Eyes.” In The Postmodern Beowulf, edited by E. A. Joy & M. K. Ramsey, 687-704. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.

KronoScope 17 (2017) 231-253 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:33:26AM via free access 252 Huisman

Electronic Beowulf, 2015. Online Fourth Edition, edited by K. Kiernan, programmed by I. E. Iacob. Sponsored by the British Library and the University of Kentucky. http:// ebeowulf.uky.edu/ebeo4.0/start.html. Frantzen, A. J. 1990. Desire for Origins. New Brunswick & London: Rutgers University Press. Fraser, J. T. 2004. “List of Publications.” Kronoscope 4 (1): 185-196. Fraser, J. T. 2007. Time and Time Again: Reports from a Boundary of the Universe. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Fulk, R. D., R. E. Bjork and J. D. Niles, eds. 2008. Klaeber’s Beowulf. Fourth edition. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press. Harbus, A. 2012. Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Heaney, S. 2000. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company. Herman, D., M. Jahn and M-L. Ryan, eds. 2005. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London & New York: Routledge. Herman, D., ed. 2011. The Emergence of Mind, Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press. Hernstein Smith, B. 1980. “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories.” Critical Inquiry 7: 209-18. Huisman, R. 1989. “The Three Tellings of Beowulf’s Fight with Grendel’s Mother.” Leeds Studies n.s. 20: 217-48. Huisman, R. (1998) 2000. The Written Poem: Semiotic Conventions from Old to Modern English. London and New York: Cassell/Continuum. Huisman, R. 2005. “Narrative concepts” and “From structuralism to post-structuralism.” In Narrative and Media, H. Fulton et al., 11-44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huisman, R. 2008. “Narrative sociotemporality and complementary gender roles in Anglo-Saxon society: the relevance of wifmann and wæpnedmann to a plot summary of the Old English poem Beowulf. ” Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association 4:125-37. Huisman, R. 2013. “The Origins of Language and Narrative Temporalities.” In Origins and Futures: Time Inflected and Reflected, edited by Raji C. Steineck & Claudia Clausius, 49-76. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Huisman, R. 2015. “How Do You Write about What Is Not There? How Do You Record What Is Absent? Scraping the Temporal Palimpsest in Auster’s Fiction.” In Time, Narrative, and Imagination: essays on Paul Auster, edited by A. Misztal, 271-91. Gdansk: Gdansk University Press. Irvine, M. 1994. The Making of Textual Culture, ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, 350- 1100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

KronoScopeDownloaded from 17 Brill.com10/02/2021 (2017) 231-253 12:33:26AM via free access Facing the Eternal Desert 253

Irving, E. B. 1989. Rereading Beowulf. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Klaeber, Fr., ed. 1950. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. Third Edition. Boston: D.C. Heath & Company. Lapidge, M. 2001. “Beowulf and Perception.” Proceedings of the British Academy 111:61-97. Leyerle, J. 1967. “The Interlace Structure of Beowulf.” University of Toronto Quarterly 37:1-17. Liuzza, R. M. (2000) 2013. Beowulf. 2nd Ed. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Marvell, Andrew. (First published 1681) 1996. “To His Coy Mistress.” In The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th ed, edited by M. Ferguson, M. J. Salter and J. Stallworthy, 435-6. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company. Niles, J. D. 1983. Beowulf, The Poem and Its Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nünning, A. 2003. “Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Development, Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the Term.” In What is Narratology?, edited by T. Kindt and H.-H. Müller, 238-275. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. O’Donoghue, H. 2001. “Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by R. M. Liuzza.” Translation and Literature 10:250-254. Orchard, A. 2003. A Critical Companion to Beowulf. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Overing, G. R. 1990. Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Overing, G. R. 2013. “Beowulf: a poem in our time.” In The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, edited by C. A. Lees, 309-331. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Risden, E. L. and N. Haydock. 2013. Beowulf on Film. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. Robinson, F. C. 1985. Beowulf and the Appositive Style. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Ryan, M-L. 2007. “Towards a definition of narrative.” In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman, 22-35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1936. Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics. London: Oxford University Press.

KronoScope 17 (2017) 231-253 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 12:33:26AM via free access