Fantastic article. I've never been convinced that anything as insipid as Sellic Spell could have been the immediate inspiration for Beowulf, but hadn't considered that Beowulf itself, while much more exalted than its Germanic myth-cognates, might be regarded as a less soðe gebunden form (on an image-symbolic if not necessarily a verbal level) of something far more exotic and elemental.
My quibble is with the three-stage degeneration model. First, subjectively, I don't agree that heroic poetry is strictly a downgrade from ritualistic/primitive mythic poetry. It's probably true that it corresponds to a social demotion of the poet from divine conduit to propagandist, entertainer, and the like; and insofar as one's enjoyment of Beowulf does not depend on participating in or even deeply appreciating the poet's religious milieu, it resembles folklore more than it does an accessory to ritual. But I'm not such an elitist that I consider popular (or courtly) appeal to be an ipso facto indictment of the aesthetic quality of a work. Beowulf is bound to be by some objective measures subtler and more complex than its earliest sources; more importantly, its overriding purpose can be loosely described as artistic, which gives it an obvious advantage over genres where any "merely" artistic appreciation is incidental. I too am happy to punt on questions like why Beowulf found Grendel's mother harder to kill than Grendel himself, not because I don't think the poem deserves to be taken seriously due to its ostensibly vulgar origins, but because it forms a coherent enough whole that I can tolerate some shadowy psychologization or even outright arbitrariness. And as you conceded in passing, the hypothetical ancestral form probably also had its share of arbitrariness. If deep-primitive parallels like the Australian ritual-myths documented by Joseph Campbell are anything to judge by, either artistic mediation a la Beowulf, anthropological voyeurism a la Campbell, or direct participation would be necessary to make it palatable. I don't expect I would derive any deep spiritual edification merely from knowing the prehistory of Beowulf's armlock on Grendel, even if it happened to have a very satisfying explanation.
Second, although there is a sense in which heroic poems are intermediate between ritual/mythic poetry and folktales, it goes too far to position them as a necessary causal link. In the Stone or Bronze Age communities you seem to have in mind, there would be little to stop the priestly/shamanic version of the tale from percolating into the broader community, being recycled for whatever didactic/pedagogical/recreational purpose, and then taking on a life of its own. Also, the transmission could just easily have gone in the opposite direction. It's not as if myths spring full-formed (verse and all) into the mind of the shaman and immediately graft themselves onto a ritual which arises co-dependently. Moreover, base folktales must be more portable than their esoteric ritual counterparts, and so might preferred in cases where one needs to invoke horizontal cross-cultural transmission to explain the patterns of diffusion. Heroic poetry generally presupposes a more complex society than do either of the other modes, so it seems a bit of a stretch to make it the intermediate step in a degenerative process.
Good points. I have no problem with the notion that 'degeneration' as I define it, at least from the first hypothesized stage to the second, may well have involved an increase in artistic quality that would nevertheless have obscured the original symbolism (like a stark melodic line becoming embellished, or encumbered, with lots of added harmony – note by way of analogy that the polyphonic church music so beloved today was often opposed by late-medieval/early modern church authorities, for the very good reason that it obscured the words of the hymns, as was not the case with traditional plainchant).
With regard to what you say about problems with heroic poetry as the second stage, a better degenerative schema might be: 1. the verbal art of the cult -> 2. the verbal art of the rest of preliterate society -> 3. the verbal art of residual illiterates in a literate society. The third of these is still folklore as moderns know it; the second includes the lore of common folk, but also that of anyone else outside the initiatic circle of trained knowledge-bearers. The point I am trying to make here is that the category of 'folklore' as defined by moderns depends on the conversion of the higher reaches of society to a literate culture, pushing oral lore down the social scale; before this time, and especially in preliterate societies, gradations of that lore would be subscribed to by most of the 'elites' as well, and there would obviously be differences in complexity and artistic quality and so on.
Beowulf's armlock on Grendel is one of those details that I would assume to have no deep significance; but the question of why Grendel's mother was harder to defeat despite being weaker than her son is a bit more intriguing, and might connect to some detail of the tradition that was lost in the folktale analogues. Might she be stronger than Grendel at the bottom of her mere and weaker outside it? Or does her 'niðsele' (hostile/netherly hall) sap Beowulf's strength? Might that give us cause to suspect that she is conceived as a different sort of creature, closer to a Nix or water-spirit than an 'ettin' or troll like Grendel? Note also that the folktales (whether Bear's Son or Celtic ones) do not show the second adversary making a trip outside the underground lair, which clues us into the likelihood that the Beowulf-poet was deviating from the oral tradition (I have some ideas as to why, but they shall have to wait for a much later post...)
I have checked your first long quote in the original, everything seems fine except for the "vat" Trita is in. The original here is "Kufe", which I know a the bottom part of sleighs, ice-skates, water-planes, and such. I looked it up and wiktionary has a regional meaning as "vat". I suspect someone in the chain before Panzer made a mistake here.
Reading the post I did anticipate the ending in general terms, but it came up a lot more specific, and not in ways especially supported by the rest of the post. I dont think the alternative needs to be this specific. It certainly seems plausible for stories to end up as folklore, regardless of how they got their start or how they fell in that original role.
How do you think this compares to Alexander the Great, and how stories of his life spread and changed? This happened in already literate cultures, and often these stories are preserved in writing, but they follow many of the mechanisms usually associated with oral transmission.
Thanks for doing that; I checked two translations of Rig Veda I.105.17, and in both Trita is in a 'well', which makes more sense. Apparently the Sanskrit word is 'kupa' (कूप॑), meaning a well or hole, which according to Wiktionary is cognate with a Latin word cupa 'tub, vat' that is in turn perhaps the source of German Kufe. A lesson not to translate by etymology!
The hypothesis at the end of this post is intended to go well beyond the available evidence; it is an alternative wild guess based on the 'top-down' idea of caste degeneration, though at least this has the merit of not relying on anything of dubious possibility such as communal artistic creation. One caveat that I neglected to make is that all three of these forms of oral lore (cultic, heroic, folkish) would coexist at one and the same time, albeit at different 'power levels' of authority, so that e.g. even during the hypothesized early period a tale based on the life of a king could find its way into the 'pot' of story (to use Tolkien's term). And in a semi-literate period, a written work can be mixed in, as with the Alexander Romance or Geoffrey of Monmouth's history of Britain; at this point, I would assume, the process of transmission is still very similar to that of oral tradition, and the changing of the stories is comparable to what would be found in an oral culture with a work possessing a high degree of authority.
Fantastic article. I've never been convinced that anything as insipid as Sellic Spell could have been the immediate inspiration for Beowulf, but hadn't considered that Beowulf itself, while much more exalted than its Germanic myth-cognates, might be regarded as a less soðe gebunden form (on an image-symbolic if not necessarily a verbal level) of something far more exotic and elemental.
My quibble is with the three-stage degeneration model. First, subjectively, I don't agree that heroic poetry is strictly a downgrade from ritualistic/primitive mythic poetry. It's probably true that it corresponds to a social demotion of the poet from divine conduit to propagandist, entertainer, and the like; and insofar as one's enjoyment of Beowulf does not depend on participating in or even deeply appreciating the poet's religious milieu, it resembles folklore more than it does an accessory to ritual. But I'm not such an elitist that I consider popular (or courtly) appeal to be an ipso facto indictment of the aesthetic quality of a work. Beowulf is bound to be by some objective measures subtler and more complex than its earliest sources; more importantly, its overriding purpose can be loosely described as artistic, which gives it an obvious advantage over genres where any "merely" artistic appreciation is incidental. I too am happy to punt on questions like why Beowulf found Grendel's mother harder to kill than Grendel himself, not because I don't think the poem deserves to be taken seriously due to its ostensibly vulgar origins, but because it forms a coherent enough whole that I can tolerate some shadowy psychologization or even outright arbitrariness. And as you conceded in passing, the hypothetical ancestral form probably also had its share of arbitrariness. If deep-primitive parallels like the Australian ritual-myths documented by Joseph Campbell are anything to judge by, either artistic mediation a la Beowulf, anthropological voyeurism a la Campbell, or direct participation would be necessary to make it palatable. I don't expect I would derive any deep spiritual edification merely from knowing the prehistory of Beowulf's armlock on Grendel, even if it happened to have a very satisfying explanation.
Second, although there is a sense in which heroic poems are intermediate between ritual/mythic poetry and folktales, it goes too far to position them as a necessary causal link. In the Stone or Bronze Age communities you seem to have in mind, there would be little to stop the priestly/shamanic version of the tale from percolating into the broader community, being recycled for whatever didactic/pedagogical/recreational purpose, and then taking on a life of its own. Also, the transmission could just easily have gone in the opposite direction. It's not as if myths spring full-formed (verse and all) into the mind of the shaman and immediately graft themselves onto a ritual which arises co-dependently. Moreover, base folktales must be more portable than their esoteric ritual counterparts, and so might preferred in cases where one needs to invoke horizontal cross-cultural transmission to explain the patterns of diffusion. Heroic poetry generally presupposes a more complex society than do either of the other modes, so it seems a bit of a stretch to make it the intermediate step in a degenerative process.
Good points. I have no problem with the notion that 'degeneration' as I define it, at least from the first hypothesized stage to the second, may well have involved an increase in artistic quality that would nevertheless have obscured the original symbolism (like a stark melodic line becoming embellished, or encumbered, with lots of added harmony – note by way of analogy that the polyphonic church music so beloved today was often opposed by late-medieval/early modern church authorities, for the very good reason that it obscured the words of the hymns, as was not the case with traditional plainchant).
With regard to what you say about problems with heroic poetry as the second stage, a better degenerative schema might be: 1. the verbal art of the cult -> 2. the verbal art of the rest of preliterate society -> 3. the verbal art of residual illiterates in a literate society. The third of these is still folklore as moderns know it; the second includes the lore of common folk, but also that of anyone else outside the initiatic circle of trained knowledge-bearers. The point I am trying to make here is that the category of 'folklore' as defined by moderns depends on the conversion of the higher reaches of society to a literate culture, pushing oral lore down the social scale; before this time, and especially in preliterate societies, gradations of that lore would be subscribed to by most of the 'elites' as well, and there would obviously be differences in complexity and artistic quality and so on.
Beowulf's armlock on Grendel is one of those details that I would assume to have no deep significance; but the question of why Grendel's mother was harder to defeat despite being weaker than her son is a bit more intriguing, and might connect to some detail of the tradition that was lost in the folktale analogues. Might she be stronger than Grendel at the bottom of her mere and weaker outside it? Or does her 'niðsele' (hostile/netherly hall) sap Beowulf's strength? Might that give us cause to suspect that she is conceived as a different sort of creature, closer to a Nix or water-spirit than an 'ettin' or troll like Grendel? Note also that the folktales (whether Bear's Son or Celtic ones) do not show the second adversary making a trip outside the underground lair, which clues us into the likelihood that the Beowulf-poet was deviating from the oral tradition (I have some ideas as to why, but they shall have to wait for a much later post...)
I have checked your first long quote in the original, everything seems fine except for the "vat" Trita is in. The original here is "Kufe", which I know a the bottom part of sleighs, ice-skates, water-planes, and such. I looked it up and wiktionary has a regional meaning as "vat". I suspect someone in the chain before Panzer made a mistake here.
Reading the post I did anticipate the ending in general terms, but it came up a lot more specific, and not in ways especially supported by the rest of the post. I dont think the alternative needs to be this specific. It certainly seems plausible for stories to end up as folklore, regardless of how they got their start or how they fell in that original role.
How do you think this compares to Alexander the Great, and how stories of his life spread and changed? This happened in already literate cultures, and often these stories are preserved in writing, but they follow many of the mechanisms usually associated with oral transmission.
Thanks for doing that; I checked two translations of Rig Veda I.105.17, and in both Trita is in a 'well', which makes more sense. Apparently the Sanskrit word is 'kupa' (कूप॑), meaning a well or hole, which according to Wiktionary is cognate with a Latin word cupa 'tub, vat' that is in turn perhaps the source of German Kufe. A lesson not to translate by etymology!
The hypothesis at the end of this post is intended to go well beyond the available evidence; it is an alternative wild guess based on the 'top-down' idea of caste degeneration, though at least this has the merit of not relying on anything of dubious possibility such as communal artistic creation. One caveat that I neglected to make is that all three of these forms of oral lore (cultic, heroic, folkish) would coexist at one and the same time, albeit at different 'power levels' of authority, so that e.g. even during the hypothesized early period a tale based on the life of a king could find its way into the 'pot' of story (to use Tolkien's term). And in a semi-literate period, a written work can be mixed in, as with the Alexander Romance or Geoffrey of Monmouth's history of Britain; at this point, I would assume, the process of transmission is still very similar to that of oral tradition, and the changing of the stories is comparable to what would be found in an oral culture with a work possessing a high degree of authority.