“How do the pagans in Beowulf differ from the pagans in The Song of Roland?” If the aim of the course is to examine the other within texts from the Middle Ages, then this question seems an apt topic to explore. Within these texts are two dissimilar constructions of difference within the same generalized “non-Christian” category. Yet, the treatment of the two groups of pagans is entirely different considering the pagans are characterized by a Christian author.
In The Song of Roland, the pagans are portrayed in no uncertain terms as Other. Although some Saracens are described in begrudgingly complimentary terms, the poet takes pains to ally their descriptions with condemnatory rhetoric. Saracens often speak with “evil” words, and the fate of their souls is in no way ambiguous. “The Paynim falls flat down with all his weight. / Then Satan comes and hales his soul away.” (laisse 96)
The poet of The Song of Roland tells the Franks how to view the Paynims, whereas in Beowulf, the author makes less effort to shape Beowulf’s morality based on his religious identity. Beowulf’s heroic actions shape his character, but the Saracens already exhibit vile characteristics, which their actions reinforce. While the Saracens are surely going to hell according to the poet of The Song of Roland, Beowulf’s poet does not go into the gritty details of Beowulf’s afterlife. The poet praises Beowulf's accomplishments, and it's clear that the poet is aware that the funeral pyre is a pagan ritual. The poet offers no negative or condemnatory commentary on Beowulf's funeral. As opposed to the death scenes of The Song of Roland, there is no devil to take Beowulf’s pagan soul to hell.
Roland’s infamous battle cry “Pagans are wrong and Christians are right” (laisse 79) constructs the terms of difference in The Song of Roland, and the language used to describe the vile infidels reinforces our hero’s axiom. However, morality in Beowulf is no where near as explicit. While the poet acknowledges that Beowulf and Hygelac are pagan kings, he describes them in hero’s language. Which begs the question, are pagans wrong in Beowulf? With no organizing binary, morality is vaguer and more debatable in Beowulf, whereas there is no debating who is right and who is Other in The Song of Roland.
As an aside, considering the Beowulf manuscript and how this text is the only known text of Beowulf, I thought about this episode of RadioLab that talks about the other versions of the Bible and other versions of the Trojan war. Listening to this story, it makes me wish archeologists could find other versions of Beowulf.
2 comments:
Nicely put comparisons between these texts, Janel. If you wanted to apply a Roland-style binarism to _Beowulf_, you could try something like "Monsters are wrong and people are right!" Even then, however, the poet takes pains to humanize and sympathize with the monsters on occasion--even the dragon, who would seem to be the most inhuman and wicked of the lot.
Sticking with the pagan people of the poem, though, it's fiendishly difficult to sort out "the good guys" from "the bad guys," not least because the numerous "digressions" that refer backwards and forwards in the history of the Danes, Geats, and Swedes expose how completed intertwined the groups are (through marriage, kinship, and the like). Consider poor Hildeburh: which side is right in the conflict that claims her son, her brother, and her husband?
Regarding the depiction of Beowulf's death and burial, the poet does offer some commentary on these occasions, although it is subtle and resists neat interpretation. Beowulf, in dying, "chose the fire, / the hot surging flames" (2818-2819) - but are these the flames of the Hell to which, in the eyes of a Christian like Alcuin, a pagan like Beowulf would be condemned, or simply the flames of the funeral pyre to which Beowulf's body will shortly be committed? The description counterpoints Beowulf's own account of the death of his grandfather, wherein Hrethel "chose God's light" (2469). This seems like a (vague and hesitant) gesture towards Heaven, but Hrethel is every bit as much of a pagan as Beowulf. What's the difference? Is there one? Does Hrethel, in his anguish over the death of one son at the hands of the other, renounce the fallen world and seek solace elsewhere in a sort of a proto-Christian manner?
Such speculations aside, I agree completely that the binarism of The Song of Roland is barely operative here on any axis (pagans and Christians or even monsters and humans) and that the poet bases morality on religious identity, if at all, only in the most muted way. In fact, in the terms of Roland's construction, the pagans in Beowulf are not really "wrong" at all. Any Christian would share the core premises of their worldview: that all human endeavor and all life ends inevitably in suffering, defeat, oblivion. "The glory of your might / is but a little while....in one fell swoop / death, o warrior, will overwhelm you" (1761-1762, 1767-1768). The pagan outlook on life is entirely correct as far as it goes (so we can imagine a sympathetic Anglo-Saxon Christian poet thinking - the "pagan outlook on life" being, of course, largely an imaginative construction of his own), and the response of the best pagans to this vision of life deserves honor and admiration. They did the best they could with the knowledge and beliefs they had. The fires that consume or will consume all of their works in the poem are not eternal fires but earthly ones, reflections not of divine justice but of the self-contradictions and limitations of their own society. Fundamentally, "pagans" in this case may just mean something like "unaided human beings," trying to get by on their own resources, without the transcendent assurance and assistance which, from the poet's perspective, Christianity would provide, and failing inevitably but (again from the poetic perspective) tragically and honorably.
Beowulf may be able to so reconfigure the pagan-Christian binary because it orients itself in a different dimension than Roland: in time rather than space. Rather than a Christian France and a Paynim Spain, we have a Christian present and a pagan past, itself opening up on still further pasts. This naturally gives the questions of morality, right and wrong, an entirely different spin. The distinction between Christian Self and pagan Other, like so much else in this poem, may be an inimical consequence of time.
Post a Comment