Beowulf :: Критика
Творчість |
Біографія
|
Критика
Authorship and date of the poem
The author did not sign and date the manuscript, and no records were kept of when the poem was written. Given the lack of information pointing to the origins of the poem, scholars must deduce the text's history by the artifact that exists.
The date of Beowulf, debated for almost a century, is a small question with large consequences. Does the poem provide us with an accurate if idealized view of early Germanic Culture? Or is it rather a creature of nostalgia and imagination, born of the desire of a later age to create for itself a glorious past? If we cannot decide when, between the fifth and the eleventh centuries, the poem was composed, we cannot distinguish what elements in Beowulf belong properly to the history of material culture, to the history of myth and legend, to political history, or to the development of the English literary imagination.
The quickest and easiest assumption about the origins of the poem is that it was an oral poem that was eventually transcribed and has since been passed down in the form of the manuscript. Scholars have presumed to study the poem as if it were Classical, and find much difficulty in the non-continuous narrative and the unfamilliar form. Allen Frantzen, in `Writing the Unreadable Beowulf', is uncomfortable with the way a tradition may be imposed by `canonical' editions such as the Norton Anthology; he is also critical of the quest to find a single author of the `pure' poem. Instead, he is looking for the gaps in the text that indicate to him that it had been constantly rewritten to suit the culture of that time. In effect, there may have been so many authors spanned the six centuries that the authorship remains in question/
Source: http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~beowulf/main.html
|
