Beowulf exercise

It focuses in particular questions relating to terminology, the history of science and language, the theory of language acquisition, and sociolinguistics. The author argues that, in their day-to-day communications, the multilingual global elites do not necessarily experience greater multiculturalism.

Read the following extract from an essay. What title would you give to the essay?

How would you divide them into paragraphs?

What is the thesis statement of the essay?

How would you paraphrase or summarize the thesis statement of the essay?

The Old English poem Beowulf has been receiving a great deal of popular attention in recent

years. Long the scourge of English undergraduates, the recent cinematic adaptations, notably

the 2007 version directed by Robert Zemeckis and authored by Neil Gaiman, have brought the

story to a whole new audience. If that film, and other adaptations, take great licence with the story,

the more literary merits have also been discussed in the wake of Seamus Heaney’s verse translation

of 1999.3 Whatever the problems of the films in terms of the story, or Heaney’s supposed errors

of, or interpretations in place of, translation, they have undoubtedly raised the profile of a

difficult and problematic text.

The concern here is with what Beowulf can tell us of the politics of land and the symbolism of place. This focus is one that has a solid textual basis and historical purpose. The last book of Nicholas Howe, a renowned medievalist, is entitled Writing the map of Anglo-Saxon England and bears the subtitle Essays in cultural geography. In this book, Howe makes the claim that ‘Beowulf is profoundly a work about place’. Although Howe makes a number of suggestions about how that might be the case, the analysis is of some very particular passages, rather than the poem as a

whole. Indeed, while his claim concerns place in general terms, the explicit analysis, as will be discussed later, is of the notion of eþel, homeland. Here, in distinction, the focus is not just on places

as sites, but on their political aspects, the question of land. While there have been a number of

important monographs and edited collections looking at geography and space generally in the

Middle Ages in recent years, with some exceptions this is not a period that has received much

attention from geographers.

In taking Beowulf as the focus here the interest is thus as much with the indications of the text as with its literary merits. In a pioneering piece of scholarship in 1936 Tolkien made a convincing argument that ‘so far from being a poem so poor that only its accidental historical interest can still recommend it, Beowulf is in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite overshadows the historical content’. While this may be true, the text does offer some very valuable insights into the particular politics of land that can be found in the period of the early

Middle Ages, sometimes known as the DarkAges.