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Digressions in Beowulf 6932 Views
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Transcript
- 00:01
We speak student!
- 00:04
Beowulf a la Shmoop
- 00:06
Digressions
- 00:09
After the defeat of Grendel,
- 00:11
Hrothgar throws this big party to celebrate Beowulf's success.
Full Transcript
- 00:14
And during the feast, a poet tells the story
- 00:16
of Hildeburh, a woman caught
- 00:18
in between the war of Danes and Frisians.
- 00:21
And I hope I'm pronouncing that
- 00:23
in my fine Old English style here.
- 00:25
So, the poem takes quite a while to tell.
- 00:27
And what's the idea behind giving all of this information
- 00:31
about all these people in the middle of Beowulf?
- 00:33
Like, what does that do for us
- 00:34
other than make us yawn every now and then?
- 00:36
Yeah, it will make us yawn.
- 00:37
Epic poems are long.
- 00:39
This is part of the reason they're long,
- 00:40
is that there's these digressons.
- 00:41
But they're not necessarily digressions
- 00:44
in the way that we might think of it.
- 00:46
There's a point.
- 00:46
First of all, again, we're shown the cultural value
- 00:50
of celebrating and feasting and gift-giving.
- 00:53
After Beowulf does his heroic deed,
- 00:56
they have a huge party.
- 00:57
And that tells us something about society.
- 00:58
It's like violence and revenge are valued
- 01:02
enough to celebrate.
- 01:04
He gives -- Hrothgar gives Beowulf tons of gifts
- 01:07
and they eat lots of food
- 01:08
and there's goblets everywhere.
- 01:10
But, on top of just kind of showing us a little bit more about society,
- 01:14
these stories that might seem like digressions,
- 01:17
almost always comment on the main storyline itself.
- 01:21
So the story we hear,
- 01:22
the story that's told by a poet at the party
- 01:26
is basically about this woman
- 01:27
who is caught between, as you said,
- 01:30
the Danes and the Frisians.
- 01:32
She has loyalties to both sides.
- 01:35
And then some of her relatives are killed during --
- 01:38
when there's a war.
- 01:40
And she's kind of torn between the two sides.
- 01:42
And what happens is that Hrothgar's wife,
- 01:44
whose name I definitely can not pronounce,
- 01:46
comes out and really relates herself to this story
- 01:52
because she sees Hrothgar
- 01:54
giving Beowulf all these gifts
- 01:57
and all this, you know, amazing stuff.
- 01:59
And meanwhile, Hrothgar has sons. He has two sons and
- 02:02
he stands there and he says,
- 02:02
"Beowulf, you're like a son to me."
- 02:04
So Hrothgar's wife is like,
- 02:06
"Well, you know, you have sons.
- 02:08
Beowulf is an outsider."
- 02:11
And so she kind of is a little bit worried
- 02:13
and sees Beowulf as coming in from the outside
- 02:15
and maybe causing trouble
- 02:17
and she wants to protect her sons' rights to the throne.
- 02:20
So, these little stories that come in between
- 02:23
sometimes are the most morally complex parts
- 02:27
of an epic poem.
- 02:28
They're the parts that we kind of tend to forget
- 02:30
'cause we're reading along and we're like,
- 02:31
"Aw, shoot, I gotta get a hundred on the quiz.
- 02:33
I don't need to know what happens in this offshoot
- 02:35
of the story. I just need to know if Beowulf dies."
- 02:37
But if we really pay attention, we can get a lot more
- 02:41
out of these kind of side stories
- 02:44
that seem like they might not fit in,
- 02:45
but in reality, they're commenting on the cultural values
- 02:48
and on the plot of the story itself.
- 02:51
Why is the story of Hildeburh
- 02:53
told in the middle of Beowulf?
- 02:55
What can the party tell us about Hrothgar's society?
- 03:00
How does Hrothgar's wife relate to Hildeburh?
- 03:04
What role do digressions play in an epic poem?
- 03:11
Yeah, it will make us yawn.