jwilzewske: beowulf

Showing posts with label beowulf. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Slings and Arrows of Fortune: Benjamin Bagby’s Beowulf & Epic Chamber Music

H    wæt. We Gardena in gear-dagum
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Literal tr.:
What! We of the Spear-Danes in old days
of the people-kings the power heard
how the princes their brave deeds did.

R. Liuzza tr.:
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.

S. Heaney tr.:
So: The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had
    courage and greatness.
We have heard of these princes’ heroic
    campaigns.”

M edievalist Benjamin Bagby performs the epic Anglo-Saxon poem, ‘Beowulf’, in his one-man drama on Saturday evening in Kansas City. Bagby performs on an historically-reconstructed six-stringed harp, part of which comes from remnants recovered from a medieval gravesite. The poem is the oldest extant complete poem in Old English, a narrative that tells the story of the chieftain, Beowulf, who defeats the monster, Grendel, in battle. The epic/mythical qualities of it are not unlike other Northern European epics, such as the Norse Eddas (sagas) or Kalevala.

B agby hails from a Germanic clan that emigrated from Jutland to northern England in about 630, and subsequently to colonial Virginia a millennium later. In addition to his activities as founder and director of the early music ensemble Sequentia, Benjamin writes about historical performance practice and teaches at the Sorbonne and North America. In 2003, Bagby developed the program ‘Chant Wars’ with Katarina Livljanic at Harvard. Bagby was educated at Oberlin College and at the Schola Cantorum in Basel. Bagby and Glagolitic chant scholar Katarina Livljanic were recently married.

T he ‘auspiciousness’ of the narrative of Beowulf is wonderfully portrayed by Bagby—whether you see him perform ‘live’ or on the excellent 2006 DVD. Having the work performed an old, old stone cathedral with hewn timbers for beams, and minimal central heating on a cold winter’s night helps to reinforce the momentousness of the epic. Beowulf aims to convey something of import to each contemporary listener, clan-member or not. Having the scary, decrepit manuscript projected in front of us adds still more.

T he Grendle ‘fight scene’, I suppose, is what gets the most attention, in almost any casual reading of the text. The mechanics of story-telling and drama: these are what English teachers tend to focus on when teaching Beowulf. The sheer exoticness of a text so old as this tends to limit the serious consideration of why it is the way it is. The ambiguities in the manuscript itself offer prodigious challenges to translators, never mind interpreters or theorists or ordinary readers/hearers.

B ut as we hear Bagby render this in performance today—in this time of widespread terrorism, regime-change and unplanned succession; amid conflicted amity, globalization and disputed sovereignty—what strikes me most is the theme of unrelenting confrontation—the necessity and inevitability of it. The human condition is perilous, no end in sight, and victories are always mixed, pyrrhic ones. Glory is the harbinger of doom. This mortal coil is in fact and above all else a coil—a chute that leads precipitously to our unbidden shuffling off it. No one gets out of here alive.

C oil — (n.) a spiral; tumults, troubles; a noisy disturbance, fuss, ado; the bustle and turmoil of this mortal life; (v.t.) to cull or sacrifice; to thrash; to lay in rings or spirals; to turn; to mound up; to stir.”

T he meaning might be: ‘when we have unwound and worked off this spool of mortality’.”
— Schopenhauer, ‘Parerga & Paralipomena’, Volume 2, §232a.

I n Bagby’s wonderful delivery we hear vocal/musical and stylistic elements of these confrontations. Nothing sung/said is merely a formality. Not all of it is ‘consequential’. But all of it is confrontational. Hwæt! No ‘arrival’ lacks a ‘departure’. What comes in must go out; what goes up must come down. Beowulf ‘confronts’ any and all who would cling to wishful thinking or self-delusion. The end is not ‘tragic’; it just ‘is’.

W hy are there four funerals in Beowulf? Some people make a big thing about thematic repetition and the rhetoric of ‘aftermaths’. Yes, well... As a person descended from Scandinavian ancestors and as one who has read the Eddas since I was about 15, these epics and skaldic ‘lays’ and so on are just profoundly weird. At 3,182 lines length, its epic-oid length does lend to it something of the status of holy scripture—something more canonical and purposefully-structured than a clan fable.

B ut the monster slaying and fight scenes are playful—not unlike modern fantasy lit, if you ignore the extreme agèdness of the manuscript.

T he repetitions in Beowulf might be thought to be driven by the poetics or vocality of the thing. But the repeats have meta-linguistic effects, too. There is a normative fugue-like texture—which makes us notice the variations or ‘counterpoint’. These come alive in Bagby’s performance, whereas they are likely otherwise to remain mute on the printed page. You have to experience the thing ‘live’ to really ‘get it’.

T he epicness of Beowulf is conveyed by many aspects of its style—for example, the namelessness of many of the speakers. We don't know the messenger’s name; we don’t know the name of the mourning woman at the end of the poem; we don’t know the names of the retainers who ride around Beowulf’s funeral pyre. We’re not meant to know them; their names aren’t important to the story-as-epic. In fact, selective anonymity is part of what makes us know it’s an ‘epic’.

T he poet’s point of view is one recalling some much earlier time—and Bagby’s performance, a reenactment of that recall. He brings that recalled world “forward”, into the Present, just as the poet did into his own Present.

I ask myself, ‘Why?’ Why would anybody want to do this, as a performative sort of social or collective memory? For what purposes? What good would it do?

F or the poet, this wasn’t a clannish or courtly entertainment—nor, for us, is it some minor amusement to be consumed quickly and forgotten. It has real substance—weight. It’s a timely political statement—according to John Hill. He notes that the medieval world was “institutionally more complex... church and clergy, king and court. It was socially stratified for different levels of nobility and landholdings, including slavery, and was economically organized for both mundane and prestige trade... Wessex and Mercia and other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms are in a world of sometimes-hostile arrivals and departures, of aetheling tensions and assassinations... Perhaps the narrative pulse of Beowulf ... might be taken by Anglo-Saxons as a model, for their times, of good customs, heroic/fame-enhancing behaviour, and great kingship in at least two forms: the two-generational Danish model and the Beowulfian model of sovereignty, enlarged to include broader kinship amity.”

A rrivals, especially unanticipated ones, are electric with possibilities—with unexpected surprises ranging from the pleasant and desired, to the tense and potentially dangerous, to the terrible and unwished-for... Departures are often auspicious, full of promise and hope, although they also signify terror's monstrous flight... Each human departure involves an enlargement of possibility, with Beowulf's departure from the Danes being the most expansively promising one in the poem... In those moments, either positive or negative outcomes are possible, indeed sometimes intertwining or sometimes just lurking as potential. They inform the social action of the poem even as the many arrivals and departures create its overall and variable narrative pulse.”
— John Hill, p. 5.

I n comparable fashion, the globalized world of 2009, torn by conflict and economic recession as it is, is institutionally still more complex. More complex, even, than just one year ago. Traditional governance and sovereignty are seriously disrupted in several parts of the world—including, so it seems, here in the U.S. Regulatory institutions seemingly have been co-opted by the very people and organizations who they were intended to regulate, with catastrophic results.

I n other words, Beowulf is way more than a ‘creative anachronism’ or medieval ‘curio’ or museum-piece. It’s a parable for—oh, say, now.

K ennings’ are a significant feature in Beowulf. They’re evocative phrases that stand for everyday things. They’re not cute euphemisms/amphilogisms, nor are they comedic sarcasms. They’re not coy ways to avoid saying an ‘unlucky’ word—like ‘death’—thereby to avoid inadvertently inviting the thing-that-shall-not-be-named into your midst (as the Tlingit and other traditional peoples believe).

Y es, the kennings are alliteration- and meter-appropriate “fits” for the contexts where they occur in the text. But they’re far more than that—and it’s ‘cool’ to hear Bagby perform these gems and pour into them their real, full-blown meaning.

F or example, the skald calls the clan ‘Spear-Danes’—evoking a bellicosity that maybe Danes aren’t so famous for anymore. He calls the sea a ‘whale-road’—this evokes a liveliness and interspecies danger that we scarcely think of anymore, in the era of modern ships, and commoditized human-centric seaway-as-inanimate-resource, and GPS nav. A king is called a ‘ring-giver’ or, at other times, a ‘breaker-of-rings’—evoking not only autocratic privilege but merit-based social generosity and, alternately, unjust/capricious renunciations by those who wield power. The king as ‘guardian-of-hoards’ suggests not only personal wealth and power but a devotion to the public interest and the commonweal—far more public-centered than current or recent notions of a ‘Strong Unitary Executive’.

Sleep-of-the-sword—Death
Mighty-wanderer-of-wastelands—horror, Death (Grendel)
Raven-harvest—battle-field corpses
Battle-sweat—blood
War-friend—sword
Mind’s-worth—honor, valor
Horse-of-the-whale-road—ship
Foamy-necked-floater—ship
Gold-friend—retainer, loyal knight
Gannett’s-bath—sea
World-candle—sun

T here are these many fantastic kennings in Beowulf. To me, the devices seem less ‘formulaic’ or prosodical or circumlocutory than they are ‘out-of-the-box-thinking-compelling’. Benjamin Bagby confronts us and helps us to constructively absorb this deeply disturbing tale and derive new contemporary meanings from it. Beautiful performing art, yes, it is that. But, in the same spirit as J.R.R. Tolkien once argued that Beowulf is the poet’s elegy for (and warning from—) a culture long-gone, Bagby exhorts us to hope and strive in order that our own cultures survive the epic challenges that we presently face.

T    he dyers of the wolf’s fangs
squandered the Reddened Swan’s meat;
The hawk of the sword’s dew
fed on the heroes of the field—
The serpents of the Geats’ moons
fulfilled the Will of the Irons.
   ... by Egil Skallagrimsson, warrior/embedded-journalist at Brunanburh.”
  — Jorge Luis Borges, The kenning. New Yorker, 26-JAN-1976.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Bagby’s Beowulf: Musicological Sci-Fi, or Sound Historiography?

CMT: Benjamin Bagby is a singer, composer, harpist, and renowned performer of medieval music. Educated at Oberlin and the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Bagby co-founded the ensemble Sequentia with Barbara Thornton in 1977. This group takes an innovative approach to medieval repertoires. Sequentia has released many fine recordings, of course. During the 1990s, the group specialized in the music of Hildegard von Bingen. Bagby’s new 2007 DVD performance of Beowulf is truly groundbreaking.

DSM: We were all sorry that illness prevented Benjamin Bagby’s travel to participate with Sequentia in the Boston Early Music Festival last week. I agree – this new DVD of his is phenomenal!

CMT: Although the Beowulf story does not take place in the future, and although the surviving Beowulf text is one of the foundations of Old English literature, I think this Beowulf production might qualify as science fiction (or perhaps speculative fiction would be more accurate) because at the heart of the performance lies the question “What if...?”

DSM: Only in this case, instead of a question like “What if we had faster-than-light travel?” all the questions revolve around alternative historical events.

CMT: What if Beowulf’s people had colonized Europe? As in science fiction, questions can be the seeds from which Bagby extrapolates a future and a wild narrative.

DSM: So, in the epic poem, Beowulf battles three antagonists: Grendel, who’s destroying Heorot and its inhabitants in Denmark; Grendel’s mother; and, later in life (after he’s King) ,the dragon. He’s mortally wounded in the final battle with the dragon. The dragon’ll get you every time.

CMT: The novel presence of an enemy in Beowulf’s territory was elevated into a major grievance that eventually is the undoing of Beowulf. It’s not obvious that it need have been elevated to such prominence, nor is it obvious that the outcome need have been what it was—with Beowulf dying, that is.

DSM: This Bagby DVD production opens our minds to alternative outcomes, and to the possibility that Beowulf contemplated these in advance of his historic conflict. The suspense and the angst that Beowulf probably felt are brought to life convincingly in this production.

CMT: The minimal presence of Beowulf’s warriors is maybe non-controversial. They attempted to stay out of politics. They didn’t interfere in colonial elections. Only with reluctance did they take on police roles, to establish civil order. They didn’t engage in nation-building or other hubristic adventures.

DSM: The flashpoints, the moments of Beowulf’s friction with the civilian population, were few.

CMT: The word ‘history’ is usually simplistically understood to mean a “rigorously” accurate account of past events. Yet the writing of history inherently depends on differing values-laden assumptions and inevitably leads to differing interpretations of events and processes.

DSM: But what the heck is ‘rigor’. It’s in the eye of the beholder! The phrase ‘alternative histories’ is itself a ‘loaded’ and ‘dismissive’ one in that it implies that there’s just one validated, bona fide history that has standing, to which all other accounts have secondary, inferior or dissenting status.

CMT: Yes, who decides what’s bona fide and conventional? Who decides what’s canonical? If I don’t accept the assumptions of convention, if I don’t subscribe to its interpretations, is my nonconformity grounds for censorship?

DSM: And if my heresy and wishful thinking are so radical and self-absorbed and refractory to evidence and reason, am I not backhandedly asking to be rejected by sane society and its norms?

CMT: While counterfactual questions are a routine part of how we learn as individuals (“What if I’d obeyed the speed limit?”), there remains a great deal of resistance—even hostility—to such musings among professional historians. In the dismissive phrase of E.H. Carr, ‘counterfactual’ history is a mere parlor game, a red herring. E.P. Thompson is even less charitable, calling counterfactual histories “Geschichtswissenschlopff, unhistorical shit.” And ‘Secret’-type mystical questions like “Was my speeding ticket predestined, or the fruit of my negative thoughts about Paris Hilton?” are way below that, totally off the conceptual shit-scale.

DSM: In fact, the answers to counterfactual questions can’t really be considered on their historical merits, because the evidence is so scanty. But if a certain highly conservative historian/musicologist elite arrogate to themselves the right to specify what criteria shall be used to determine the sufficiency of evidence, then that elite effectively serves as a censor and suppresses dialogue. Ah, but then there’s your ‘speculative fiction’—that catch-all category first used by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein in 1947. Not even trying to be history.

CMT: But virtual or speculative historiography can be honest. It doesn’t have to slide into speculative fiction or sci-fi. Speculative historiography can be valuable and illuminating, provided that it discloses its assumptions alongside its evidence. Yes, the First World academy tends to run roughshod over Third World and non-Western historians and archaeologists. Think about China! Musicology in China is hot now, a far cry from what it was 20 years ago. Enhancing the diversity and textures of historical analyses and narratives we create about other cultures by incorporating and honoring the richness of local histories matters! It’s essential for us to discover concerns and expose assumptions that have become entrenched in our Western canon. Archaeology and musicology are, after all, more than a set of practices and techniques. They’re historical social sciences that relate the study of past societies to the present and incorporate the historical value of oral and other non-written accounts, as well as the written record.

DSM: Without doubt, there are peripheral, marginal, and disenfranchised histories that may be as valid as the canonical history that holds sway. And it’s not just the Western canon! Think of the East! Think of the Chinese canon, for example! The work of official state historians under repressive political regimes can effectively erase evidence and suppress parts of the narrative. Speculative or virtual history then becomes a ‘recovery’ operation, to restore threads of the story that have been destroyed. Critical examination of musicological methods has the potential to demystify the practices of archaeology and history as well as to create ideological “space” for the practice of careful archaeology in (re-)constructing alternative histories. Such examination has at least three components: (1) an inquiry into what kinds of empirical evidence are uses and suppressed within the dominant historiography; (2) an analysis of the concepts used in interpretation; and (3) a critique of the power relation between those who have produced and maintained the evidence and those who interpret it and package it for public consumption.

E verything must have a beginning. And that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindus give the World an elephant to support it. But they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise.”
— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1831

CMT: So Beowulf eventually becomes king of his own people. But late in Beowulf’s life, a slave steals a golden cup from a dragon’s lair at Earnaness. When the dragon sees that the cup’s been stolen, it leaves its cave in a rage and torches everything in sight. Beowulf and his warriors come to fight the dragon, but only one of the warriors, a brave young man named Wiglaf, stays to help Beowulf—the rest are too afraid. Beowulf kills the dragon with Wiglaf’s help, but Beowulf dies from the wounds he’s received.

DSM: The Beowulf poem’s purpose is, obviously, unclear. Arguments have been made for a naturalistic mythic allegory, a Christian allegory, a criticism of heroic culture, a mourning for the loss of heroic culture, a Germanic ‘Old Testament’, an allegory concerning contemporary politics in one or other of the Saxon kingdoms – just to mention a few. The title Beowulf itself is an editorial convenience – the manuscript copy of the poem is untitled. We also know almost nothing about Beowulf’s place in English literature in the Anglo-Saxon period – we don’t know what popularity, if any, the poem enjoyed.

CMT: Provenance of the Beowulf manuscript is, you realize, problematic in its own right. The author of Beowulf is totally unknown, as is the exact date of the composition of the poem. In its present form, Beowulf was possibly composed as early as the seventh century or as late as 1025. Beowulf survives in a single manuscript codex in the British Library. This codex is a composite codex assembled in the first half of the 17th century, itself consisting of two Old English codices: the first, the Southwick Codex; the second, the Nowell Codex.

DSM: The Beowulf MS in the Nowell Codes was written around 1000 C.E. by two scribes in late West Saxon (the posh dialect of the period). The first scribe writes in an Anglo-Saxon rounded insular minuscule hand with some carolignian features. The second scribe writes a more conservative Anglo-Saxon square minuscule hand.

CMT: And ‘orality’ affects even the written transmission of poems, you know. The Old English poems known as Cædmon’s Hymn and Bede’s Death Song are two instances of poems recorded in a number of manuscripts appearing over a sizeable span of time. In these multiple copies: (1) we find evidence for high levels of scribe accuracy over long periods of time; and (2) when we do find variation, it generally involves variations of “formulas”. We do sometimes observe significant scribal corruption in these and other poems. But in the cases of formulaic variations, what we see is that a scribe will substitute a semantically equivalent word or formula: “a scribe [may] consciously or unconsciously improve a received text from his own knowledge of the formulaic tradition...which has been described as the result of what is termed as ‘residual orality’ ” (Orchard, p. 117).

DSM: So, in the end, what can be known about a poem in a manuscript like this? What do we know about the circumstances of its composition? Is it literary, oral, or something in-between? What can we never know? To us, Beowulf is both strange and familiar: it has some links with ancient classical poems like Homer’s. Nineteenth century ideas of it have been received and reworked in the course of the 20th century in academe and in popular culture. And yet it remains an ancient artifact of a culture whose world we can never fully or confidently share.

CMT: The manuscript and its editions always present us with a linguistic obstacle: Old English has a different kind of grammar from Modern. Old English is like Latin or Russian, or many other languages whose grammar is expressed by inflection.

DSM: And can we agree that translation of a language removed in kind and in time is a process of exploration—not a neat matching of word and idiom to sense, or the grammar of one language to the grammar of another? What kind of overlap can be found between our written, literary, or DVD experience of the poem, and its earlier “live” oral delivery, which may have been memorized and reconstituted in different ways each time? Memory functions in different and often enhanced modes in oral cultures rather than written cultures, especially when supported by verbal patterns that evolved through centuries in a poetic or sung medium. When such poetry is written down or recorded on a DVD, it’s neither strictly oral nor textual.

A bove all, (speculative) fiction is about what happens to us when we run into places and situations that just aren’t Kansas.”
— C.J. Cherryh, “Where Science is Taking Us”, www.sffworld.com/authors/c/cherryh_cj/interviews/200001.html

CMT: There are comparatively few historical documents to tell us about the period, and even extensive study and analysis of the extant wills, charters, diplomas, laws, and chronicles often lead to sparse results: information about what happens between humans, what values determine actions, and what objects and events are signiﬁcant seems more readily available through literature. As a result, in addition to the literary scholars and general readers who over the years have absorbed from Anglo-Saxon literature what it expresses as art, archaeologists and historians have for generations turned to editions and translations of such works as Beowulf to discover new perspectives. One example is Simon Keynes’s ‘Diplomas of King Æthelred “the Unready” (978–1016): A Study in Their Use as Historical Evidence’ (Cambridge Univ, 1980). Keynes reassessed “the alleged incompetence of the king and the ineptitude of his military advisors” by studying the more than one hundred royal diplomas preserved from Æthelred’s reign. Keynes’s premise was that the literary sources from the period (most notably the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) have given us only very negative impressions of Æthelred’s reign—impressions that might be changed if we examined the diplomas collectively. Keynes believes that these diplomas reveal “political developments within the kingdom which are barely hinted at in the literary sources.” So, too, Beowulf inadvertently advises us about politics, even if it wasn’t the author’s intention to do this. Hermeneutics/philology, stood on its head!