Neal Stephenson and Beowulf
Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite authors, was interviewed by Slashdot. Stephenson is best known for his
SF, especially for Snowcrash
and The
Diamond Age. His recent work, including a mammoth trilogy
The
Baroque Cycle, has brought him to the attention of people who
might not ordinarily read SF. Stephenson has also written In the Beginning was the
Command Line, a very readable treatise on the nature of computer
interfaces.
In the Slashdot interview,
Stephenson draws a distinction between two types of modern writers and, in
an extended analogy, compares them with Dante, who had wealthy aristocratic
patrons, and to the Beowulf poet. Regarding the
Beowulf poet Stephenson says:
But I doubt
that Beowulf was written on commission. Probably there was a collection of
legends and tales that had been passed along in an oral
tradition—which is just a fancy way of saying that lots of people
liked those stories and wanted to hear them told. And at some point perhaps
there was an especially well-liked storyteller who pulled a few such tales
together and fashioned them into what we now know as Beowulf. Maybe there
was a king or other wealthy patron who then caused the tale to be written
down by a scribe. But I doubt it was created at the behest of a king. It
was created at the behest of lots and lots of intoxicated Frisians sitting
around the fire wanting to hear a yarn. And there was no grand purpose
behind its creation, as there was with the painting of the Sistine Chapel.
I take Stephenson’s point about the difference between
modern “commercially successful” fiction writers (Beowulf writers like
Stephenson) and the Dante-like “literary fiction” writers who do something
else to earn a living. But I think his underlying model is wrong—and
Stephenson is definitely wrong about Beowulf.
The scop who first
created the work in something like the form we have today was a
professional poet. He composed for pay, in the form of beer, gold, horses,
and a place by the fire. A lot of what he wrote would have been the kind of
oral formulaic stuff that only the subject of the praise liked to hear;
typical praise poems meant to honor a king or lord, like Widsith refers to. The
scribe who created British Library,
Cotton Vitellius A.15 (the only Beowulf manuscript) was also a professional, though likely his
profession was that of a monastic scribe, and he copied an earlier
manuscript, one we no longer have. The basic plot of Beowulf and his fights
with Grendel, Grendel’s mom, and a dragon—sure, that’s the stuff of
oral legend, but Beowulf is a lot more than that. In fact
Beowulf was a lot more than that at least from the first time it was written
down. Beowulf is a highly self-conscious work for all its
traditional memes and formulae.
Even if we ignore what we know of
scribal practice and the function of the scop, and the transmission
of tales oral and textual, and just look at Beowulf itself,
Beowulf is a thematically coherent and carefully structured
work, though it sometimes seems to have more in common with the modern
anthology than the epic. Beowulf is not something
“created at the behest of lots and lots of intoxicated Frisians sitting
around the fire” for a number of reasons—among them the fact that
the Frisans are the villains of the piece, and, that while the poem features
Denmark and parts of the Netherlands, it was definitely composed for an
Anglo-Saxon (English) audience.
I’d also take exception to Stephenson’s
statement that “there was no grand purpose behind its creation,” since I
suspect that there was, given the thematic constants. The poet is making a
point about the nature of life and the idiocies of feuds. I should also
probably point out that as much as I personally like Beowulf,
we have no proof (other than the fact that someone wrote it down at least
twice, a time consuming and expensive practice not engaged in lightly),
that the poem was similarly valued by the Anglo-Saxons. We don’t really
know what value the poem had to the scribe who first copied it, or the
scop who created it. It may have been seen as arty, rather than “a
good read,” though the two are not mutually incompatible—as
Stephenson’s own work demonstrates. We only have one very damaged
manuscript of Beowulf.
Stephenson’s analogy really
doesn’t work if you think about it closely because it’s based on a flawed
model. If you look at the poets who had patrons, they tended to have other
sources of income. Chaucer was the Customs Inspector (and likely worked in
various other secret capacities for the crown), yet had to send begging poems for
payment. Gower was a wealthy property owner, trained in the law courts,
with close ties to court. Lydgate was a monk at Bury St Edmunds. Spenser was a
civil servant, and was given the paltry sum of 100 pounds for Fairy
Queen, only after requesting the
promised payment a second time. Shakespeare, who would seem to have had
patrons royal and monied, was primarily a business man; he was a part owner
of the theater his plays were performed in, and a litigious landowner. The
first professional writer I can think of was Christine de Pizan, who
supported herself and her son by her writing after the death of her
husband. In other words, Stephenson needs to look towards post-printing-press writers for his models—I’d suggest Dickens and Ruskin, perhaps. And
I’d like to point out that the canon changes with time (and The
Norton Anthology) so it’s likely that Stephenson will be in the 2050
edition, just as Dickens has been in all of them.
digitalmedievalist.com
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