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!
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