Interesting as always. Been reading the Iliad lately (Fitzgerald and Lombardo translations), and I believe some mention is made of the heroes being larger then; this is, I think, made more of in Virgil (and even more in other posthomerica, like Quintus of Smyrna), just as Augustine says - and then at random today I turned to the book of Samuel, where I was struck how Goliath behaves like a perfectly homeric hero! So the "pagan hero --> gigant" link seems pretty well established in Homer, the Bible (and other places, if we can take Irish legend and the story of Hygelac's bones, and possibly Wade, as being similar expressions).
The Beowulf-Augustine link is a bit frustrating for the reasons you describe: Augustine is careful to say that the big heroes of (postdiluvian) pagan legend are not *actually* giants, but one wonders then what the relationship is between them (if any), and what the Beowulf-poet would have thought about Augustine's categories (if they are really so neat). I guess Enoch (or something similar) is the most reasonable way to get from the Bible to Beowulf (WRT giant-lore, at least). But I suspect too that some of these associations would have been just vaguely felt. When I was young my grandmother used to amuse us kids by referring to the "little people" who used to hang their laundry out on the dew-covered spiderwebs you could see on the morning grass. Later, wanting to pin down her stories a bit more precisely, I asked her who those "little people" were. She looked a bit taken aback: "Oh, elves, I suppose," she said, not too certainly. Surely Grendel and the biblical giants have a more robust tradition than that behind them, but on the other hand, there was probably a pretty broad grey area too, of people who knew bits and pieces and just lumped together what they had.
Not sure if you've come across a couple of youtube channels with some interesting interviews: the Uppsala Books channel had a discussion between Neidorf and Russom, on the latter's Syntax of Beowulf (which I haven't gotten to reading yet); and Graham Sheper has quite the backlog of interviews with AS scholars. Maybe these will provide some useful listening!
I check Graham Scheper and Uppsala quite regularly; 'Gavin the Medievalist' has some good stuff too, though he seems to be moving more towards Arthuriana. Then there's this interview with Richard Rohlin, which has a lot of relevance to this post (particularly re. the Book of Enoch) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z48XXFRTerk
I do think a lot of this stuff would have been taken more seriously than it is now, albeit with varying degrees of scepticism, by literate Christians; perhaps the closest analogy would not be to the dying remnants of 'folklore', but to religious beliefs as seen through the eyes of the modern intellectual-administrative class. In particular, anything to do with malign supernatural entities seems likely to have clung on with some tenacity; there's that charm against 'ylfa gescot' and 'esa gescot', for example, and then there are the later chronicles and histories that include supernatural tales. William of Newburgh opens his stories about revenants (found here: https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/williamofnewburgh-five.asp#24) with a kind of pre-emptive defence against scepticism, but ends up affirming their truth:
"It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally (I know not by what agency) from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony."
I'm still in the process of trying to figure out whether these revenants are not the "orcneas" mentioned in Beowulf, and what the relevance of that might be to the way in which the other entities like eotenas are conceived by the poet.
Very much looking forward to your thoughts on the orcneas! I have not looked into it myself. I’ve read of the potential “Orcus” link, and I believe someone once suggested some connection to “orcas” i.e. killer whales (but possibly that was in the context of a discussion of the etymology of Tolkien’s own “orc”).
When I first encountered it, the suggested Orcus link seemed far fetched, but at that time I was subconsciously siloing OE lit from classical influence (I just hadn’t read enough yet).
Yeah, the 'Orcus' connection is the strongest one because 'orcþyrs' is found glossed as 'heldeofol'; other choices would be Latin orca 'whale' or OE orc (also from Latin) 'jug, vessel', but neither seems likely. Tolkien assumed orcneas to be synonymous with revenants ('barrow-wights') and as far as I know these are the best candidates for the title.
One of the things that interests me about this is that revenants, according to the chronicles and analogues, are corpses of ordinary people that have been commandeered by evil spirits or devils (sometimes just equated to 'the devil'). If it is the controlling spirits who are supposed by our poet to be descended from Cain, then they would seem to be nothing like his other descendants the eotenas, represented by Grendel and (perhaps) his mother. Is "orcneas" then a conspicuously Latinate odd man out (perhaps shoehorned in because the traditional formula, assuming that one existed, might have had 'esa gehwylc' or some such in its place)? Or are we to conceive of Grendel and his mother – these 'gastas' who shrithe across the land at night and kill men only in their sleep – as being more ghostly and liminal creatures than the lumbering trolls that most Beowulf translators make them out to be? And might spirit-possession by other supernatural beings be alluded to elsewhere in the poem? (I am thinking of the sermon of Hrothgar and, more speculatively, the appearance of the dragon after the death of the last survivor)
These are some of the questions in my mind, but the post will probably take some time to research and write up, because I intend to look into each of the types of being comprising "Caines cyn" and try to understand how the poet and tradition would have conceived of them.
I happened upon an Orcus reference in Waltharius yesterday (the Murdoch/Neidorf version from Uppsala, but there's an online version here: https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/waltarius2.html). At l. 913, we have:
Silvestrique ferae corpus, animam dedit Orco.
Murdoch translates:
and Hades had his soul, the forest-beasts his corpse.
I wonder if the division into physical and spiritual elements (the latter going to Orcus) could be taken to reinforce what you're saying above. That is, if orcneas are linked to Orcus, then maybe the understanding of Orcus as receiving souls (rather than bodies) suggests that orcneas are more "spiritual" than physical monsters. (With the usual caveats about neatly-observed categories, etc.)
Another (maybe the only) Orcus reference in Waltharius is at 1327:
Quem quoque continuo esurienti porgeret Orco
Murdoch has:
Walthari would have sent him straight to hungry Hell
I don't know whether "hungry" is quite right here, or whether it indicates physical hunger as opposed to a more general desire; but it's maybe another piece of evidence to consider.
Lately I'm convinced of an early Beowulf, which Waltharius would postdate, so again, not sure how useful this would be.
Rafael Pascual has an article on 'thyrs' becoming understood as gradually less "physical" over the AS period - could be useful (I think he takes the position that the monsters in Beowulf are primarily physical): Material Monsters and Semantic Shifts (2014).
WRT the dragon, a long time ago I read Raymond Tripp's book "More About the Fight with the Dragon", which radically reinterprets the last third of Beowulf. Maybe it's not considered so radical anymore, but IIRC he was arguing that the Last Survivor *became* the dragon.
Cheers for those recommendations as always. The Tripp book, which I didn't know about, will come in useful because I am fast approaching the dragon fight right now (on my third and final run through the text, going slowly and consulting multiple editions).
In Book VII, Sextus Pompeius 'the unworthy son of Pompey' seeks the help of a witch named Erichtho to predict the outcome of the war with Caesar, which requires her to raise a corpse from the dead. This witch practices black arts against the will of the gods, she lives on the outskirts of society like one of the 'helrunan' (possibly 'sorceresses') inhabiting the moors near Heorot, and the place where she performs her ritual rings quite a few Beowulvian bells (p.351-3):
"There the ground fell in a sheer descent, sinking almost to the depth of the invisible caverns of Pluto. A dim wood with forward-bending trees borders it, and yew-trees shade it – yew-trees that the sun cannot penetrate, and that turn no tops towards the sky. In the caves within dank darkness reigns, and the colourless mould caused by unbroken night, the only light there is due to magic. Even in the gorge of Taenarus [believed to be a gateway to Hades] the air is less dead and stagnant; it is the gloomy boundary between the unseen world and ours; and the Rulers of Tartarus would not fear to let the dead travel thus far. For, though the Thessalian witch tyrannises over destiny, it is doubtful whether she sees the lost souls because she has haled them to her cave, or because she has gone down to Hell herself."
'Hell' in this instance is not 'Orcus' in the Latin, a word that fails to appear throughout most of the chapter despite its several references to Hell and the underworld, but the witch does say it at the moment of raising the corpse from the dead: "I ask not for one who lurks in the depths of Tartarus and has long been accustomed to the darkness, but for some soul that is just going down and leaving the light behind him; he still lingers at the entrance of the chasm that leads to gloomy Orcus, and, though he obey my spells now, he will go down but once to the shades. Let the ghost of a Pompeian, who but lately was alive, foretell all the future to Pompey's son, if ye owe gratitude to the civil war."
Following this, she raises a corpse animated by a human soul, which proceeds to make its prediction before being given the gift of a second death. This of course is no *orcne(o) according to the Beowulf-poet's definition. But there are obvious differences of theology and supernatural cosmology between Lucan and the Anglo-Saxon Christians who read him, one of which could be the idea that there is no way for necromancers to actually retrieve souls from Hell, and that the reanimation of a corpse simply entails its being possessed by a demon (which, I think, would more or less agree with those stories of revenants in which the chronicler attributes their reanimation to the Devil). Another investigative rabbit hole to go down.
Very interesting! Recalls the “Witch of Endor” scene with Solomon. (A history of how that bit of necromancy was understood by subsequent Christian thinkers would be interesting.)
I’m curious how you’ll find Tripp - in both senses: i.e., what you’ll think of his points, but also how accessible his book is. The edition I read was in very poor shape, and I’ve hesitated to buy the version on amazon because it looks like all the other questionable print-on-demand stuff that’s out there.
Interesting as always. Been reading the Iliad lately (Fitzgerald and Lombardo translations), and I believe some mention is made of the heroes being larger then; this is, I think, made more of in Virgil (and even more in other posthomerica, like Quintus of Smyrna), just as Augustine says - and then at random today I turned to the book of Samuel, where I was struck how Goliath behaves like a perfectly homeric hero! So the "pagan hero --> gigant" link seems pretty well established in Homer, the Bible (and other places, if we can take Irish legend and the story of Hygelac's bones, and possibly Wade, as being similar expressions).
The Beowulf-Augustine link is a bit frustrating for the reasons you describe: Augustine is careful to say that the big heroes of (postdiluvian) pagan legend are not *actually* giants, but one wonders then what the relationship is between them (if any), and what the Beowulf-poet would have thought about Augustine's categories (if they are really so neat). I guess Enoch (or something similar) is the most reasonable way to get from the Bible to Beowulf (WRT giant-lore, at least). But I suspect too that some of these associations would have been just vaguely felt. When I was young my grandmother used to amuse us kids by referring to the "little people" who used to hang their laundry out on the dew-covered spiderwebs you could see on the morning grass. Later, wanting to pin down her stories a bit more precisely, I asked her who those "little people" were. She looked a bit taken aback: "Oh, elves, I suppose," she said, not too certainly. Surely Grendel and the biblical giants have a more robust tradition than that behind them, but on the other hand, there was probably a pretty broad grey area too, of people who knew bits and pieces and just lumped together what they had.
Not sure if you've come across a couple of youtube channels with some interesting interviews: the Uppsala Books channel had a discussion between Neidorf and Russom, on the latter's Syntax of Beowulf (which I haven't gotten to reading yet); and Graham Sheper has quite the backlog of interviews with AS scholars. Maybe these will provide some useful listening!
I check Graham Scheper and Uppsala quite regularly; 'Gavin the Medievalist' has some good stuff too, though he seems to be moving more towards Arthuriana. Then there's this interview with Richard Rohlin, which has a lot of relevance to this post (particularly re. the Book of Enoch) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z48XXFRTerk
I do think a lot of this stuff would have been taken more seriously than it is now, albeit with varying degrees of scepticism, by literate Christians; perhaps the closest analogy would not be to the dying remnants of 'folklore', but to religious beliefs as seen through the eyes of the modern intellectual-administrative class. In particular, anything to do with malign supernatural entities seems likely to have clung on with some tenacity; there's that charm against 'ylfa gescot' and 'esa gescot', for example, and then there are the later chronicles and histories that include supernatural tales. William of Newburgh opens his stories about revenants (found here: https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/williamofnewburgh-five.asp#24) with a kind of pre-emptive defence against scepticism, but ends up affirming their truth:
"It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally (I know not by what agency) from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony."
I'm still in the process of trying to figure out whether these revenants are not the "orcneas" mentioned in Beowulf, and what the relevance of that might be to the way in which the other entities like eotenas are conceived by the poet.
Very much looking forward to your thoughts on the orcneas! I have not looked into it myself. I’ve read of the potential “Orcus” link, and I believe someone once suggested some connection to “orcas” i.e. killer whales (but possibly that was in the context of a discussion of the etymology of Tolkien’s own “orc”).
When I first encountered it, the suggested Orcus link seemed far fetched, but at that time I was subconsciously siloing OE lit from classical influence (I just hadn’t read enough yet).
Yeah, the 'Orcus' connection is the strongest one because 'orcþyrs' is found glossed as 'heldeofol'; other choices would be Latin orca 'whale' or OE orc (also from Latin) 'jug, vessel', but neither seems likely. Tolkien assumed orcneas to be synonymous with revenants ('barrow-wights') and as far as I know these are the best candidates for the title.
One of the things that interests me about this is that revenants, according to the chronicles and analogues, are corpses of ordinary people that have been commandeered by evil spirits or devils (sometimes just equated to 'the devil'). If it is the controlling spirits who are supposed by our poet to be descended from Cain, then they would seem to be nothing like his other descendants the eotenas, represented by Grendel and (perhaps) his mother. Is "orcneas" then a conspicuously Latinate odd man out (perhaps shoehorned in because the traditional formula, assuming that one existed, might have had 'esa gehwylc' or some such in its place)? Or are we to conceive of Grendel and his mother – these 'gastas' who shrithe across the land at night and kill men only in their sleep – as being more ghostly and liminal creatures than the lumbering trolls that most Beowulf translators make them out to be? And might spirit-possession by other supernatural beings be alluded to elsewhere in the poem? (I am thinking of the sermon of Hrothgar and, more speculatively, the appearance of the dragon after the death of the last survivor)
These are some of the questions in my mind, but the post will probably take some time to research and write up, because I intend to look into each of the types of being comprising "Caines cyn" and try to understand how the poet and tradition would have conceived of them.
I happened upon an Orcus reference in Waltharius yesterday (the Murdoch/Neidorf version from Uppsala, but there's an online version here: https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/waltarius2.html). At l. 913, we have:
Silvestrique ferae corpus, animam dedit Orco.
Murdoch translates:
and Hades had his soul, the forest-beasts his corpse.
I wonder if the division into physical and spiritual elements (the latter going to Orcus) could be taken to reinforce what you're saying above. That is, if orcneas are linked to Orcus, then maybe the understanding of Orcus as receiving souls (rather than bodies) suggests that orcneas are more "spiritual" than physical monsters. (With the usual caveats about neatly-observed categories, etc.)
Another (maybe the only) Orcus reference in Waltharius is at 1327:
Quem quoque continuo esurienti porgeret Orco
Murdoch has:
Walthari would have sent him straight to hungry Hell
I don't know whether "hungry" is quite right here, or whether it indicates physical hunger as opposed to a more general desire; but it's maybe another piece of evidence to consider.
Lately I'm convinced of an early Beowulf, which Waltharius would postdate, so again, not sure how useful this would be.
Rafael Pascual has an article on 'thyrs' becoming understood as gradually less "physical" over the AS period - could be useful (I think he takes the position that the monsters in Beowulf are primarily physical): Material Monsters and Semantic Shifts (2014).
WRT the dragon, a long time ago I read Raymond Tripp's book "More About the Fight with the Dragon", which radically reinterprets the last third of Beowulf. Maybe it's not considered so radical anymore, but IIRC he was arguing that the Last Survivor *became* the dragon.
Cheers for those recommendations as always. The Tripp book, which I didn't know about, will come in useful because I am fast approaching the dragon fight right now (on my third and final run through the text, going slowly and consulting multiple editions).
With regard to occurrences of 'Orcus' and possible 'orcneas' in Latin literature, Lucan's Pharsalia (or at least specific parts of it) is well worth a look: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Lucan_The_Civil_War_%28IA_in.ernet.dli.2015.184584%29.pdf
In Book VII, Sextus Pompeius 'the unworthy son of Pompey' seeks the help of a witch named Erichtho to predict the outcome of the war with Caesar, which requires her to raise a corpse from the dead. This witch practices black arts against the will of the gods, she lives on the outskirts of society like one of the 'helrunan' (possibly 'sorceresses') inhabiting the moors near Heorot, and the place where she performs her ritual rings quite a few Beowulvian bells (p.351-3):
"There the ground fell in a sheer descent, sinking almost to the depth of the invisible caverns of Pluto. A dim wood with forward-bending trees borders it, and yew-trees shade it – yew-trees that the sun cannot penetrate, and that turn no tops towards the sky. In the caves within dank darkness reigns, and the colourless mould caused by unbroken night, the only light there is due to magic. Even in the gorge of Taenarus [believed to be a gateway to Hades] the air is less dead and stagnant; it is the gloomy boundary between the unseen world and ours; and the Rulers of Tartarus would not fear to let the dead travel thus far. For, though the Thessalian witch tyrannises over destiny, it is doubtful whether she sees the lost souls because she has haled them to her cave, or because she has gone down to Hell herself."
'Hell' in this instance is not 'Orcus' in the Latin, a word that fails to appear throughout most of the chapter despite its several references to Hell and the underworld, but the witch does say it at the moment of raising the corpse from the dead: "I ask not for one who lurks in the depths of Tartarus and has long been accustomed to the darkness, but for some soul that is just going down and leaving the light behind him; he still lingers at the entrance of the chasm that leads to gloomy Orcus, and, though he obey my spells now, he will go down but once to the shades. Let the ghost of a Pompeian, who but lately was alive, foretell all the future to Pompey's son, if ye owe gratitude to the civil war."
Following this, she raises a corpse animated by a human soul, which proceeds to make its prediction before being given the gift of a second death. This of course is no *orcne(o) according to the Beowulf-poet's definition. But there are obvious differences of theology and supernatural cosmology between Lucan and the Anglo-Saxon Christians who read him, one of which could be the idea that there is no way for necromancers to actually retrieve souls from Hell, and that the reanimation of a corpse simply entails its being possessed by a demon (which, I think, would more or less agree with those stories of revenants in which the chronicler attributes their reanimation to the Devil). Another investigative rabbit hole to go down.
Very interesting! Recalls the “Witch of Endor” scene with Solomon. (A history of how that bit of necromancy was understood by subsequent Christian thinkers would be interesting.)
I’m curious how you’ll find Tripp - in both senses: i.e., what you’ll think of his points, but also how accessible his book is. The edition I read was in very poor shape, and I’ve hesitated to buy the version on amazon because it looks like all the other questionable print-on-demand stuff that’s out there.