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Playlist Beowulf: Shmoopversations 11 videos

1
All About Beowulf's Historical Context
17083 Views

Who is it about? Who told it? Who wrote it? Who are we? What’s the meaning of life? Do you know the Muffin Man? All these answers and more can be...

2
All About Beowulf as a Translated Piece of Literature
6760 Views

Old English is just English, right? Can’t be more difficult than reading Shakespeare, right? Hah. Yeah...no. Click on the video to find why tra...

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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.

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.