Classics and the Western Canon discussion

Although only two people expressed an interest in discussing Tolkien’s Sellic Spell, I have set it up as a separate thread in case others may be interested. Please confine your comments about Sellic Spellto this thread as we do not want it detracting from the main discussion of Beowulf.

I will be reading this one, out of curiosity. I have never read old English except for some fragments in Sir Walter Scott’s novels.

Tamara wrote: "Although only two people expressed an interest in discussing Tolkien’s Sellic Spell, I have set it up as a separate thread in case others may be interested. Please confine your comments about Selli..."

Wonderful, thank you Tamara for opening this thread!

For a better understanding of the relationship between Sellic Spell and Beowulf, I will post a rush note Tolkien wrote on his tale:


“This version is a story, not the story. It is only to a limited extent an attempt to reconstruct the Anglo-Saxon tale that lies behind the folk-tale element in Beowulf – in many points it is not possible to do that with certainty; in some points (e.g. the omission of the journey of Grendel’s dam) my tale is not quite the same.

Its principal object is to exhibit the difference of style, tone and atmosphere if the particular heroic or historical is cut out. Of course we do not know what precisely was the style and tone of these lost Old English things. I have given my tale a Northern cast of expression by putting it first into Old English. And by making it timeless I have followed a common habit of folk-tales as received.

As far as Beowulf goes I have attempted to [?draw] a form of story that would have made linking with the Historial Legend easiest – especially in the character of Unfriend. And also a form that will ‘explain’ Handshoe and the disappearance of the companions in the tale as we have it. That the third companion ‘Ashwood’ is in any way related to the coastguard is a mere guess.

The only daughter comes in as a typical folk-tale element. I have associated her with Beowulf. But here the original process was evidently actually more intricate. More than one tale (or motive of tales) was associated with the Danish and Geatish royal houses.”

I ordered this book and it's expected to arrive next week but might be delayed. Hope it gets here soon.

I am ashamed to say I have never heard of this, I will immediately have to check in with my friend who is a Tolkien fan.

"Sellic Spell" is included as an appendix to Tolkien's translation (with commentary) of "Beowulf," so you may have heard of the book without remembering that it also contains a short story. This is based on Tolkien's sense of what a proto-Beowulf would have been like, before it was was taken from the genre of wonder tale (German märchen, often misleadingly rendered "Fairy Tale"), and inserted into a context of heroic legends.

It is something of a response to complaints/accusations by earlier scholars that "Beowulf" proper was "just a wild folktale," showing that such a form might be a good story -- a demonstration that Tolkien was uniquely qualified to provide. (He also remarked that, by the same token, "King Lear" was just a "silly" folktale.....)

This attitude has persisted, with weaker terms of condemnation, such as "a simple folktale," a term which suggests that the critic has not taken into account the enormous complications and artistry revealed by modern folklore studies -- but I don't have the energy to go into that.

Ian wrote: ""Sellic Spell" is included as an appendix to Tolkien's translation (with commentary) of "Beowulf," so you may have heard of the book without remembering that it also contains a short story. This is..."

Thank you so much for the explanation, Ian, it's wonderful to learn more about literature outside my areas of knowledge.

Our discussion reached "Week 6: The Dragon", so it's safe to discuss the Sellic Spell without risking spoilers.

In my opinion "Sellic Spell" should be mandatory reading for anyone studying this poem. Tolkien successfully proved not only how beautiful a proto-Beowulf might have been, but also how different our Beowulf is from it. Saying that Beowulf is "just a folktale" is just like saying that a house is just a pile of bricks. At the same time, I think the folktale element is the core of Beowulf and everything was built on it.

Does everyone agree that Beowulf evolved from a "proto-Beowulf"? If so, how did it happened? How about this:

Stage 1: Several folktales like "Bear's Son Tale", "The Companions", "The Wise King", "The Hidden Treasure", "The Swamp Monster"

Stage 2: The folktales merged into a proto-Beowulf.

Stage 3: This proto-Beowulf was orally transmitted for some decades/centuries.

Stage 4: A poet wrote the poem we now call Beowulf.

Stage 5: The poem was transcribed from an original by two scribes.

I'm not sure about when the historical and Christian elements were added. Did it happened slowly during Stage 3 or did the poet added them at Stage 4?

How long do you think it took for the proto-Beowulf to become Beowulf?

Sorry to take a day to answer this: I've had ISP interruptions, and a power outage to deal with, plus bouncing e-mails, and fielding complaints that my comments are too long and detailed. Instead of just contradicting people on my unsupported authority. I hope no one will complain if I explain my reasoning here.

Yes, "Sellic Spell" is a pretty convincing exposition of what the pre-epic Beowulf might have been like, covering some of the "blind motifs" that crop up in the poem, like the original functions of the hero's companions.

As for your questions, I suspect that the fusion of the heroic Beowulf with the folktale Beowulf came fairly late in the day. The early years of the Beowulf that we hear about when he returns to Geatland suggests to me that the folktale about an unpromising youth was still in circulation, and likely to be known to an audience, and so had to be fitted in somehow. (I've also dealt with that issue on the Week 6 thread.)

But I'm open to the argument that the combination may have been earlier. On other evidence, the stories of the Geats seem to have attracted folktale elements.

For example, in the "Liber Monstrorum" (Book of Monsters), which is possibly contemporaneous with the poem, and might have been compiled or expanded in England, King Hygelac is a giant, whose huge bones can still be seen on an island in the Rhine.

(The "Gesta Francorum," from the same period, knows him as only a human king. But its source may have been a continental written document, excluding oral traditions.)

For Hygelac as a giant, and a variety of monsters similar to those found in Beowulf, one can now consult Andy Orchard's Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript, which includes the relevant Old English and Latin texts.

(Unfortunately, the Icelandic texts mentioning "Hugleikr" aren't helpful here. They don't seem to have known an old story, but derive one from a -- probably false -- etymology of his name as "Light-Minded.")

Ian wrote: "and fielding complaints that my comments are too long and detailed. Instead of just contradicting people on my unsupported authority. I hope no one will complain if I explain my reasoning here...."

Thanks for your answers, Ian. This is a side discussion and I guess here we can take a deep dive into the genesis of Beowulf and the historical context without hampering the general discussion or boring other members to death.

Ian wrote: "As for your questions, I suspect that the fusion of the heroic Beowulf with the folktale Beowulf came fairly late in the day. "

Do you think it's possible that this fusion was not a long process but it was made by a single poet?

Emil wrote: "Do you think it's possible that this fusion was not a long process but it was made by a single poet? ..."

I think it is a distinct possibility: or at least that it was a single poet who had the brilliant idea to combine two sorts of stories to form a greater whole, rather than a matter of a few motifs or hero stories being drawn in here or there.

This meant a new story, in which, as Tolkien pointed out, the emphasis was not on killing other human beings, although that happens, but cleansing the world of non-human menaces, with the "historical" (or "true and painful") parts mostly left to foreshadowing or flashbacks.

With a couple of exceptions, nineteenth-century critics had missed that point, and were upset at the way the story was conducted.

However, it is (in my opinion, anyway) quite uncertain whether the long, unified "Beowulf" was a product of oral poetry. If it was, the combined story, and the way of arranging it, would have been remembered by other poets, but the phrasing would differ in each performance, and so would other details.

On the other hand, there is a possibility (now in more favor than at the height of Oral Formulaic Theory) that it was written down to begin with, by someone who used oral techniques because that was the only kind of vernacular poetry he knew.

(And, if he was a monk with adequate Latin, he would know well the Psalms, a regular part of the weekly liturgy, which also use oral techniques, so that might be another influence. But that gets speculative, since most readers of them never notice such devices.)

In that case, there is a good chance that it went through some literary expansion and revision, depending on how many times it was copied before we reach the existing manuscript -- which is unknowable.

(I think the theory that what we have is the first manuscript is completely untenable, although the main proponent made a remarkably close study of the physical manuscript while preparing a digital edition.)

I suspect this, not because we have examples of it in differing manuscripts in Old English -- most poems, and even much of the prose, exist in unique examples -- but because the ability of medieval scribes to compose verses to fill in missing pieces of vernacular poems is attested elsewhere, where there are multiple copies, often of different ages.

To choose a relatively simple example, from a text distantly related to the Sigemund episode in "Beowulf": this is very likely the explanation why sometimes a manuscript of the Middle High German "Nibelungenlied" contains plausible-looking verses not found in the manuscript from which it ultimately descended: which fact gave no end of trouble to nineteenth-century scholars drawing up family trees of manuscripts (stemmata), assuming that the variations were due to scribal error.

This assumption avoids the anachronistic notion of a scribe stopped copying, and searched out other manuscripts, whenever he believed his copy-text was defective. Instead, it has been argued, some scribes already knew the story, from hearing it told or read, and knew how to compose in the relatively simple verse form well enough to fill in apparent gaps, even if it wasn't precisely what was in other, more complete, copies.

So far as medieval German poetry is concerned, that practice came to an end when German had changed enough that free composition in the old style was no longer easy, or possible, due to changes in the pronunciation and the pace of the spoken language.

(There was an attempt to carry on the old poetic tradition, in its more more complicated forms, using fixed rules for 'correct' verse that no longer had much to do with spoken German, a practice which is in the background of Wagner's "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.")