[Ann Drysdale]

Perhaps the delightful little Welshman in Julie's video was conversing with one of the heroes of the second branch of the Mabinogi, the folk-tales of his people.

Bendigeidfran (Brân the Blessed) was named after the bird, and is reputed to be the reason why there are ravens at the Tower of London.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I love it. Thanks for clarifying the dialect. I thought it was Scots. Ann, a whole new world for me to explore.

[Ann Drysdale]

Merlyn actually lives in Canada, but he's a Welshman, nonetheless. He's from Swansea and a lifelong "amdrammer". He longs to put on a production of Under Milk Wood, which, if he is successful, would probably also feature his brother Roy, who came out to join him in the Northwest Territories.

And, Janice, if you're exploring the Mabinogion, look out for a character called "Efnisien". He's a weird one...

[Janice D. Soderling]

The more I dig into this Beowulf legend, the more I convince myself that it is an old Norse saga that has been Christianized and sanitized. The Cain reference must surely originally have been to Loki (who fathered Fenrir and Jǫrmungandr among other disreputable children), and the good monks did not wish to taint the story with foreign gods.

If I dig deep enough I'm sure to find someone who has documented the same doubt.

The notes to the Benjamin Slade translation (linked in Post #35 above) are a treasure trove.

I am impelled to pass on the following anecdote.

I learned the word "halvdan" early in my Swedish-vocabulary-building: it means "mediocre, middling, not well-done, sloppily made". When I began my first "real job" in Sweden, a large office where I had hundreds of workmates, there was a colleague whom everyone referred to as Halvdan. When I protested one day that it wasn't a very nice nickname, they laughed and said that was his real name. So I shut up but secretly wondered why anyone would give their child such a debilitating name. Well, in the notes to the Slade translation I found this footnote.

Half-Dane is Beowulf-Scyldings's son. "Half-Danes" later appear in the poem (l. 1068) ruled over by Hnaef, apparently part of the Danish forces (or allied with them). Wrinn proposes that they may actually be Jutes in Danish service, hence their strange names.

It isn't hard to understand how the name became (in Swedish) something done only by halves, local humor like the rivalry of two towns with opposing football teams.

Looking further I found this (seeming) confirmation: "In Norwegian, the name Halvdan means - half dane. The name Halvdan originated as a Norwegian name. The name Halvdan is most often used as a boy name or male name." http://www.meaning-of-names.com/norwegian-names/halvdan.asp#ixzz3hjhgiREQ

Re ethnic designations, one must remember the many old and new borders and allegiances. Norwegian Vikings were independent tribes, later Norway was under the rule of Denmark, then Sweden and only in modern times (1905) again became an independent nation, a peaceful transition with no bloodshed.

Related to this word "halvdan" is my former puzzlement over an expression I often heard when the language was still fairly new to me and I was daily trying to make sense of what I heard around me. A new employee who was quickly elevated to a top position was described by everyone as having "arrived and quickly climbed up in the high seat (högsätet)". Later, in the course of reading the Old Norse literature I understood this everyday expression to be another relic, a reference to the elevated position of the king in the great hall, what Murphy-Sullivan translate as "throne" and Heany translates as "platform" (leading me to think of the "high table" at Oxford—though that may be folk etymology on my part).

Such is the pleasure of reading Beowulf—incidentally the latter part of the name, "ulf", means "wolf"—still a common name in Sweden today, like "Björn", bear, and "Tor", Thor, and lots of names with "Gud", indicating a divine connection to the pagan gods. Topdown conversion is not very effective.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Thanks, Ann. I shall have to live for a very long time if I am to read all the books in my list. Duly noted.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Ann, is an "amdrammer" someone involved in amateur dramatic productions? I don't know the expression and can't find it.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Now I have received the two scholarly papers from Matt. Warm thanks for that.

I have read them and am less than lukewarm. IMO, which is perhaps not worth much, the arguments of both can be compared to a half-baked pretzel. They really tried, both of them, to make a case of the blithe-hearted raven. Kinda reminded me of the other pressing question: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

But I'm glad to have the papers and glad to have read them, and Matt was very generous to help me out there. Thanks so much.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I was reminded of this today when I stumbled across (in Kenneth Rexerot's "Classics Revisited") this sentence:

Hrothgar and Hygelac were historical persons, and Beowulf may have actually existed.

The deeper I sink into this, the more convinced I become that the "one and only copy" is a corrupted version of an earlier manuscript or oral tradition in Old Norse. A sanitized version.

Consider these lines from the on-line Old English and the Benjamin Slade translation :
Him ðá Scyld gewát tó gescæphwíle
Then Scyld departed at the destined time,

felahrór féran on fréan waére·
still in his full-strength, to fare in the protection of the Lord Frea;

The footnote to the underlined part:
[27]usually translated 'into the keeping of the Lord'. Frea is used both to designated the Christian god as well as the pre-Christian 'heathen' Saxon god Frea, Old Norse Freyr- lit. 'the first one', and often associated with the harvest and prosperity. Schneider takes wære (with a short vowel) as 'water' and translates '...into the water of Frea'.

Some thoughts on this:
felahrór féran on fréan waére is translated in the Heaney ms. as
and he crossed over into the Lord's keeping

and in the Murphy-Sullivan ms. as Scyld went to dwell with the World's Warder

which seems to me a diplomatic solution. Because I find it hard to believe that footnote claim that Frea was used to designate the Christian god. This Norse god was sometimes worshiped as a male, with the name Frej, and sometimes as a female, his sister Freja. "Frej" means "lord".

Both Frej and Freja were fertility gods and the horse-drawn sun was their symbol. Frej was represented in the temple in Uppsala with a prominent phallus (as documented by the early church representatives; no visual representations of the temple or its contents remain). But a little statute of Frej (which well might have been a copy of this temple statue was found in archaeological digs and is on display at Stockholm's Museum of History. http://www.denstoredanske.dk/Nordisk...ogi/Guder/Frej
A statuette of the sun chariot is on display in the Danish national museum https://www.google.se/search?q=denma...w=1137&bih=692
This was found as recently as 1902 when a stretch of peat bog was plowed. It is not a small model.

These lines raise two questions in my mind.

Firstly. Why was "Lord Frea" not censored out of the manuscript when the monk transcribed it. One might speculate that some other manuscript was being sanitized, and the transcriber wasn't aware of who Frej was. But then when he got into the manuscript and started finding references to the pagan religion and its gods he altered the text to fit into the traditions of the new religion, Christianity. Sort of like the Stalinist airbrushing of Trotsky et al out of the photographs. http://iliketowastemytime.com/2012/0...-regime-5-pics

Or Ramses II who at Luxor (and elsewhere) changed dates on works and statues of his predecessors to glorify himself. History is full of such hubristic hoodwinking.

Still speculating, but it seems plausible that as the transcriber got further into the ms. he replaced the heathen references with Christian ones, perhaps removing or rewriting. Which brings me back to the strange raven symbolizing joy or blitheness or glad-heartedness.

the guest slept inside
oþ þæt hrefn blaca heofones wynne until the black raven, the joy of the sky
blíðheort bodode. Ðá cóm beorht scacan 1802
declared glad-heartedly. Then came bright hurrying,
scaþan ónetton
fighters hastening;

Sól (Old Norse "Sun")[1] or Sunna (Old High German, and existing as an Old Norse and Icelandic synonym: see Wiktionary sunna, "Sun") is the Sun personified in Germanic mythology. One of the two Old High German Merseburg Incantations, written in the 9th or 10th century CE, attests that Sunna is the sister of Sinthgunt.
Freja had a falcon-skin cape that allowed her to travel as a bird.

Still speculating, of course, but it isn't too much a stretch to wonder if this passage is a revisionist text and the original bird and Sunna or Frej or Freja were consigned to literature's dustbin. Suppose this passage about the sun going up had a reference to something so obviously pagan that the censor board understood that it had to be changed.

Oh, it would be lovely if a real ms. should turn up some day. There is no end of manuscripts hidden away in the Vatican and museum collections. Even today old fragments turn up here and there and throw new light on old mysteries.

For instance the Dead Sea Scrolls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls and fragments of manuscripts used to embalm old mummies http://www.livescience.com/49489-old...ummy-mask.html

The Swedish king, Gustaf Vasa, tore down monasteries and nunneries to use the stone in his castles. He was equally frugal to recycle other items. He ordered confiscated pages of illuminated manuscripts should be reused to wrap the royal butter.

On the other hand, Sweden has a good collection of wooden statues from the churches and monasteries because there were no iconoclast mobs to destroy them. The change to Christianity (like the change from paganism to Catholicism) was a top-down activity, by royal degree. The people didn't like it, but then they certainly didn't like giving up Frej and Thor either.

It is interesting to ponder how many have "the faith of their fathers" simply because their forefathers were forcibly converted to a new religion.

[Bill Carpenter]

Hi Janice,
This is a strange quest you are on. "Frea" is used to mean lord in Old English, not only in Beowulf. In Dream of the Rood, which is even less likely to be based on pagan materials, you find it in these lines: "Geseah ic þā frean mancynnes / efstan elne micle, þæt hē mē wolde on gestīgan." ("I saw men’s Sovereign strive to scale me...") Of course, that is not an obstacle to the word ultimately coming from Frea the God, or Frea the God being named so because he is a/the lord.

What you may be finding is the various tendrils and threads that made Christianity welcome to Scandinavians, at least not wholly foreign. Check out the Heliand, the 9th century Saxon poem that converts Jesus into a northern chieftain. In Njal's Saga, a pagan is appointed to arbitrate the religious controversy in Iceland ca. 1000, and he decides in favor of Christianity. Snorri's Saint Olaf's Saga in Heimskringla is subtle and inquiring with respect to forcible conversions.

You'll find Hrothgar and other Danes from Beowulf in both the Hrolf Kraki Saga and Saxo Grammaticus' History of the Danes, both written long after Beowulf. "Bjovulf" figures in Poul Andersen's novel based on the former, Hrolf Kraki's Saga. There is zero chance of Beowulf being based on a lost Scandinavian manuscript, but an Angle writing in the 8th or 9th century must have learned 6th century Danish and Swedish stories from somewhere.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Bill, thank you so much.

It is true that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" and this is probably not the place to babble on about my explorations.

Before I go on to thank you (and others who have kindly supplied me with various papers and thoughts) I want to say that I don't suspect that there is a lost Scandinavian manuscript, because the runic alphabet wouldn't be capable of such flowery language. But possibly (speculation) there might be earlier manuscript versions of Beowulf.

I also want to make it clear that I'm not in any way dissing the translations of Tim and Alan or Heany or the new one with the parallel or the ones I hope to read. (I learned from the Rexroth text, that Edward Morgan has done a translation as well). I share what I think is the orthodox one, that it is an oral tale conserved in England and written down there.

With the caveat "a little knowledge" and all that, I have long been interested (as an amateur) in the Christianization of Scandinavia and the influences back and forth in several directions. As I mentioned earlier (I think) I live in a part of Sweden where this history is still very much alive, although the tourism is doing its very best to muddle it beyond recognition. (I won't digress on that, but am sorely tempted.)

Apart from that Disneyish muddying of the waters, several excellent books (in Swedish history and in history of religion) written by academic researchers for the most part and none of them the hyped-up "popular history" kind of book.

I have read Dream of the Rood and forgotten it, but I have it here somewhere. The Edward Morgan translation might be available "used book" in the UK. You seem to be getting rid of your libraries and I am acquiring them.

I have the other sagas you mention (as you know) in Swedish. I'm always acquiring interesting books I find in antiquarian shops and book sales, thinking to read them in due time. So I've pulled those on this topic into a little stack, some read and several, perhaps many, unread. Among those (I located and added yesterday) is a "translation to Swedish" of a 6th century bible known here as Codex Argenteus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Argenteus . It was brought to Sweden after the Thirty-year war as war spoils. It is (or so says the blurb) the oldest of all Germanic bibles and still half-heathen). It is on display at Uppsala University. It was probably plundered for its silver encasement. I've viewed it way back when I didn't know what I was looking at.

The other one I found yesterday is a translation of Rimbert's "Life of Ansgar" and a number of essays about Rimbert and about his book.

Thank you for pinpointing Hrothgar et al. Rexroth's short text gave no reference to how he arrived at their being "historical figures". The time reckoning is, of course, important.

In closing, I'll say again that I am just piddling around. I don't expect to make any substantial contributions to literary history. It all started when that happy raven pulled me up short and then I got hooked. There are worse pastimes.

All this Bill, before I've had my morning coffee. Thanks again for your wise comments and for taking the time.

PS. About Frey being a word for Lord. In the above link about the statue of Frej, this Danish text, which I'm quickly translating.

Frej, Freyr, central gud for frugtbarhed. Han tilhører vanerne og er bror til Freja; begge er børn af Njord. (...) Hans navn betyder "herre" eller "hersker" og gengives i mange former, fx Frey, Frø og Frøj.

Frey, Freyr, main god of fertility. He was one of the Vanir gods, a brother of Freja; both are children of Njord. (...) His name means "lord" or "master" and is found in many forms, such as Frey, Frø and Frøj.