If I were teaching Beowulf to my 131 students, I'd probably start off by having them list all the binaries they can find in the poem: monster/hero; hall/wilderness; night/day; celebration/mourning; traveling/being at home; cultural/natural; lord/retainer; et cetera. Of course all these binaries deconstruct somewhat upon closer prodding, but they still seem very present and significant in the structure of characters and themes -- Grendel is associated with night and with the wilderness, while Hrothgar acts in the day and in the hall; Beowulf is triumphant as a stranger and a retainer, while he loses the battle he fights as a king at home. The binaries that have to do with space are particularly interesting for our ecocritical take on things, and especially the moments where those binaries are transgressed -- when a character leaves the hall and goes into the wilderness, or when a monster leaves the wilderness and enters the hall, or when a character leaves one national space and travels to another. Are spaces/places defined, Saussure-style, to some extent by what they're not? How does movement from place to place (esp. type of place to type of place) confuse or complicate that?
How do we read the monsters? Grendel comes to the hall (civilization, the home of Hrothgar's clan) from the wild. But the monsters are also given homes; Grendel has a "lair," the dragon a cave (with a treasure-hoard) and Beowulf confronts Grendel's mother in the mere, in a hall of her very own. Do the monsters have a culture or are they only projections (maybe abjections) of nature? Can monsters inhabit? What does their monstrosity mean for the attitudes about nature portrayed in the poem?
Traveling is a marked behavior here. When Beowulf and company come to Denmark, the Danish coast-guard claims to have never seen anything like their arrival, and Beowulf emphasizes later how far he's come to fight Grendel. Since identity is to some extent clan-identity (Beowulf introduces his cohort saying they they "belong" to Hygelac and the Geats), what happens to identity as characters -- mostly Beowulf -- move among clans and their associated geographies?
I've been struck this time through the poem by the profusion of guards, sentries, checkpoints, even just doors -- points at which one type of political/cultural space abuts another. What function do these figures play, especially in relation to the background of space divided into different types of place? Related to this, how do we read the sea? It's clearly more a wild space than an inhabited one, but it's also a particular site for travel -- it's called the "whale-road" the first time it's referred to.
There's a great deal in Beowulf about renown, fame, the spreading of news and the telling of stories. Can this be read as a kind of travel? Beowulf has to hear about the monsters before he sets out to defeat them, and Hrothgar has to have heard about Beowulf before he'll let him into his hall, and Beowulf is regularly described in world-wide superlative terms -- the strongest man in the world, the hardiest warrior anyone's ever heard of, etc. How do news and renown connect (or divide?) the various spaces in which the poem takes place?
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