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Bo Graslund - Nordic Beowulf, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2022

Nordic Beowulf

Av Bo Graslund

Del i serien Medieval Media and Culture

2375 kr

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Beskrivning
In such a wide-ranging, long-standing, and international field of scholarship as Beowulf, one might imagine that everything would long since have been thoroughly investigated. And yet as far as the absolutely crucial question of the poem’s origins is concerned, that is not the case.This cross-disciplinary study by Bo Gräslund argues that the material, geographical, historical, social, and ideological framework of Beowulf cannot be the independent literary product of an Old English Christian poet, but was in all essentials created orally in Scandinavia, which was a fertile seedbed for epic poetry.Through meticulous argument interwoven with an impressive assemblage of data, archaeological and otherwise, Gräslund offers possible answers to the questions of the provenance of the Geats, the location of Heorot, and many more, such as the significance of Sutton Hoo and the signification of the Grendel kin and dragon in the sixth century when the events of the poem, coinciding with cataclysmic events in northern Europe, took place.
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Bo Gräslund is professor emeritus in archaeology at Uppsala University.

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Gräslund has offered a substantial body of archaeological evidence and argumentation for his judgment that the Geats of Beowulf are ancient Gotlanders and that the poem’s origin as an “oral history” of this people can be traced to this “large, well-populated island,” which in the Middle Iron Age “enjoyed considerable material wealth, reflecting extensive and independent relations with the Roman Empire and its provinces and with the Gothic and Hunnic regions” (231). The author’s findings are to be taken seriously, though he regrettably skirts or downplays the question of how this oral history might have been transmitted to migrants living closer to Britain in Jutland and northern Germany and why they would havebeen keen to preserve this poetic account of another people’s past when they took so little interest in their own pre-Christian heritage. Tom Shippey addresses this question in his recent book published in the same year, also by Arc Humanities Press: “Beowulf” and the North before the Vikings (2022). Shippey’s thesis is that the poem preserves many authentic memories of life and times in southern Scandinavia from the later fifth to the mid-sixth centuries. [...] Together, these two new studies make an interesting case for the possible historical roots of the fantastic tale of monster-fights that came to be imagined in Beowulf.

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