Beowulf’s Singers of Tales as Hyperlinks

Abstract

Beowulf’s Singers of Tales as Hyperlinks Peter Ramey (bio) This short essay is written in appreciation of John Miles Foley, who has done more than any other contemporary scholar to probe the analogy between oral tradition and more recent Internet technology. He has explored this correlation both theoretically (most fully in The Pathways Project [2011–] and Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind [2012]) and methodologically (in, for instance, his 2004 electronic edition of The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey), and in so doing he has opened up fresh perspectives on oral traditional aesthetics. In light of his contributions, I would like to build on his work in this area to consider an important feature of Beowulf, the recurring scenes of poetic performances by a singer (or scop), interpreting these moments as non-linear hyperlinks that connect the heroic narrative to a wider network of poetic tradition and thus help the audience navigate the thread of that heroic tale through a web of alternate songs and stories.1 These performance scenes have not lacked for commentators. Early Oral-Formulaic approaches generally viewed such scenes as straightforward depictions of the process of oral composition (Lord 1960:200; Opland 1980; see also Magoun 1955), whereas more recent work has emphasized that, far from being simple ethnographic descriptions, these scenes of performance are themselves idealized poetic images that form part of the epic fabric of the poem as a whole (Frank 1993; Niles 2003; Amodio 2005). Yet despite their marked poetic stylization, these scenes can still offer valuable clues for how their generative oral tradition was understood to work. By examining the affinities between oral traditional poetry and cloud computing in his The Pathways Project, Foley (2011–) draws out some of the ways such performance scenes in Beowulf and other oral-derived poems display an understanding of oral tradition as a dynamic network that, much like the Internet, can be navigated by different routes according to the exigencies of the particular performance situation.2 In this brief essay I would like to press Foley’s point further by exploring the way in which these scenes of performance not only depict the tradition as an active network but are also used to enact this network in terms of poetic structure. Much like embedded hyperlinks, these scenes of performance function as portals that lead out from the main narrative, allowing for sudden shifts in time and place, offering alternative narratives and themes, and as a whole helping to situate the story of the hero Beowulf within a wider poetic web of traditional song. While descriptively these performance scenes may not portray the actual practice of oral performance in Anglo-Saxon England with ethnographic precision, structurally they activate an oral traditional poetics that, even in written form, positions Beowulf as an ongoing performance event rather than a finished or fixed text. In short, singers recur throughout Beowulf because they are figures around which this traditional interconnectivity is centered; through them the greater traditional network is activated and carried within the epic itself. Let me briefly summarize these scenes of performance that permeate the poem. In the first half of Beowulf they frequently occur at key junctures, intervals of relative calm following or preceding the dramatic action.3 The first of these is the scop’s creation song, which, along with the other sounds of revelry at Heorot, first provokes Grendel’s ire (86–92). The singer’s clear song (swutol sang scopes [89b]) and the sound of his harp (hearpan sweg [90a]) are crucial components of the traditional “Joy in the Hall” theme (Hume 1974). While there are other elements to this theme (laughter, pouring drink into shiny cups, and the like), when Anglo-Saxon poets wish to invoke metonymically the joy of community, they almost inevitably mention singing and harp-sounding. The song of the scop is not merely an element of the poetic image of dream (OE: “mirth, joy”) but the very culmination of it, the moment where, at the height of communal delight, members of this heroic society achieve a kind of union through collective dreaming. It is this communal meaning of the scop’s song, naturally, that...

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