| Paper 217-a | The Blade of Fortune: The Rich and the Poor in Beowulf
(Language: English)
Yung-Chih Cheng, Department of English, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan
Index terms: Folk Studies, Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Old English |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
In Beowulf, rich are those who own wisdom, bravery, and strong will. Influenced by Christianity, people tend to condemn fortune as something evil. However, it is Germanic tradition that fortune comes with a real hero with the capability to keep it. The construction of Heorot shows Hrothgar's achievement, but both Grendel and his mother put into test whether Hruthgar and his thanes are good enough to maintain it. After having bravely fought with the dragon, old Beowulf, before dying, wants to have a look at the treasure the dragon possesses not because of his covetousness but because of confirming his effort.
Paper -b:
The semantic field poverty was very well represented in Old English, with over 30 lexemes enumerated in the Thesaurus of Old English (http://libra.englang.arts.gla.ac.uk/oethesaurus/menutoe.html). Only four of the lexemes made their way into Middle English. The other words were replaced by loanwords, mostly of Anglo-Norman, but also Latin and Scandinavian origin. The plenitude of borrowed words for 'poverty' in Middle English contributed to further obsolescence of the native element, which resulted in a complete restructuring of the Old English picture of the field. The present paper aims at an analysis of the changes which affected the semantic field poverty in the Old and Middle English periods.
Paper -:c
The story of Judith created difficulties among the Church Fathers. She defends the faith against dangerous heathens but does so in a manner that almost flouts Christian doctrine. Judith in the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition is no different. In his De Virginitate, Aldhelm uses the figure of Judith as an example of two opposing representations of woman: the chaste widow and the dangerous seductress. It is her seduction of Holofernes that allows him to progress into a diatribe against vanity within the secular and religious spheres. Ælfric continues this pattern by turning the Liber Iudith into a homily of warning for unchaste nuns (ll.429-35).
Curiously, the Old English Judith does not expound the traditional, medieval function of the Judith story. Her role as a seductress does not exist in the extant text. Holofernes orders she come to him adorned in jewellery (ll.34b-37a); it is not a deliberate action on Judith's part. Instead of the jewels representing moral corruption and sin, they become her armour, which she wears as a sort of miles christi when returning to Bethulia (ll.138b-41a). It is this unique portrayal of her ornamentation and how it compares with Aldhelm and Ælfric’s rhetoric.
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