I was reminded of this today when I stumbled across (in Kenneth Rexerot's "Classics Revisited") this sentence:
Quote:
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Hrothgar and Hygelac were historical persons, and Beowulf may have actually existed.
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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.