Hrothgar's ‘sermon’ in Beowulf as parental wisdom

Abstract

Until fairly recently modern commentators seem to have agreed that the gnomic sayings in Beowulf carry us away from the main current of the poem into the ‘doldrums of didacticism’. Now, however, at least two critics have suggested that these apparently trite old saws are in fact central to the epic and that they reflect a way of thinking about the aims and methods of literary composition that we no longer share. Instead of merely cataloguing their appearances, as earlier readers had done, Robert B. Burlin has persuasively shown us how the Beowulf poet uses at least some of the gnomic sayings effectively and skilfully to ‘give both shape and scope to his utterance…relating the actuality of his fiction to familiar universals in the appreciation of which his audience can easily concur’. Burlin himself does not set out to question the prevailing assumption that the gnomic sayings are ‘not in the same artistic league with the obliquity of the “digressions”’, but T. A. Shippey has gone on to point out that ‘they have power and beauty in their own right’. He also argues that the Beowulf poet was not especially original in his use of the gnomic sayings but in fact depended on their traditional function: ‘the poet was rightly but only exploiting…qualities incomprehensible to those who see them as linguistic phenomena devoid of social content’. Building on his own earlier work and on Burlin's analysis, Shippey suggests that the maxims in Beowulf reflect cultural ideals and that ‘they bind the characters, the poet, and the audience together in common assumptions too precious to be threatened, establishing what Professor Burlin calls “societal interdependence”, a theme very close to the heart of the poem’.

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