Keenest to win fame

Goat Rope is all about Beowulf these days, although you will also find links and comments about current events. For more, click on earlier posts.

The Beowulf poet and the society he or she (or they) came from knew nothing about Greek tragedy, but it doesn't take much looking to find some tragic themes there. For many people, especially those influenced by Aristotle, tragic art involves a noble character brought low by some flaw or mistake of lack of insight. That kind of works for Beowulf, although the flaw in question is as much a part of the society it came from as it was of the hero.

Beowulf as a young man was all about winning fame. Hence, the trip to the land of the Danes to kill the monster Grendel. Before all that,

...He had been poorly regarded
for a long time, was taken by the Geats
for less than he was worth: and their lord too
had never much esteemed him in the mead-hall.
They firmly believed that he lacked force,
that the prince was a weakling; but presently
every affront to his deserving was reversed.

He got fame alright, but never quite lost the thirst for it. He eventually became king and ruled well over the Geats for fifty years until someone stirred up the wrath of a dragon, which he vowed to kill single handedly. As the last lines of the poem go,

They said that of all the kings upon the earth
he was the most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.

You could say that the tragic flaw of Beowulf was the conflict between the first part of the sentence and the last four words. Had he been less keen to win fame, he would have delegated the dragon slaying to younger men and continued to rule justly over the Geats and kept them in safety. Instead, he died in the effort, leaving his people to the nasty fate anticipated by a grieving woman, who

...sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement.

As Dylan pointed out in a song, sometimes it's either fortune or fame, though neither are what they claim. Beowulf chose fame. I think I prefer fortune.

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GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The Beowulf cookbook

When pressing events don't intrude, I've been blogging about Beowulf lately. I mean, somebody's got to do it. If you aren't into that kind of thing, you can skip to the links and comments section.

After going over this first major work of English (sort of) literature several times, I think I've got the recipe down. It has four main ingredients:

1. A full cup of Tolkien. Old J.R.R. was a major medievalist and possibly the 20th century's greatest Beowulf scholar. He also got a lot of inspiration and ideas from the text for his fiction, including orcs, dragons sitting on hoards, the term Middle Earth, Rohan, and the whole ambiance thing;

2. An equal amount of the Sopranos. Each little kingdom is like a mob family, with a lord who distributes benefits (or "ring-giver") and loyal retainers. At any sign of weakness, another crew will muscle its way in. It's a culture of honor where violence can break out at any moment and feuds are common;

3. A full cup of pagan warrior ethic, in which the greatest immortality one can have is to live on in legend after death. The Greeks called this kleos; and

4. A tiny drop of Christianity, minus any references to Jesus.

Mix the first three ingredients and coat sparingly with the last one, bake for a few centuries and there you have it.

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GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TWO KINDS OF EPICS

The rage of Achilles was the subject of The Iliad, an epic of kleos. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Aside from links and (occasionally snide) comments about current events, theme here lately is Homer's classic epic poem The Odyssey. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

The Iliad and the Odyssey, both attributed to the bard Homer, are the only two surviving epics about the Trojan War, a major theme of ancient Greek literature and legend. Most historians think that there really was a war between some Greeks and a city in Asia Minor (now Turkey) sometime around 1250 BC, although Homer's epics probably date from much later, probably the 8th century BC.

For that matter, nobody knows who Homer really was or whether the epics should be seen as the collective creation of generations of bards rather than a single individual, although many people incline to the latter view. One semi-serious joke says that the Iliad and Odyssey weren't written by Homer but by someone else with the same name.

Whatever can be said of all that, the Iliad and the Odyssey are two very different kinds of epics. The Iliad, which tells the story of the wrath of Achilles in the last year or so of the war, has been called an epic of kleos or the attempt to gain glory through valor in combat. The Odyssey is an epic of nostos or homecoming.

A word about both:

Kleos is often translated as glory, but it means more than that. Homer's characters had a pessimistic view of life after death. People in the underworld were shades of their former selves--jibbering bats, as one passage puts it. The only meaningful kind of immortality was to live and die in such a way as to be remembered in song and story after one's death. That was kleos.

Achilles in the Iliad is the perfect example of a hero motivated by kleos. He is given a choice between a long and peaceful but unremembered life or early death but lasting glory as a warrior. He chose the latter (although his ghost in the Odyssey regrets that decision).

Nostos (sorry for my horrible efforts at Greek) means homecoming, as in how a veteran of the Trojan War tries with or without success to go home and reintegrate into a peaceful community. It's about going from a state of war to a state of peace--if you're lucky. (Methinks it's also related to the word nostalgia.)

One of the challenges Odysseus faces in his homecoming is leaving kleos and the overwhelming desire for it behind.

But as many veterans and others have found, sometimes surviving war or other ordeals is sometimes less difficult than the homecoming. Many never quite make it home, whether home is considered literally or metaphorically. More on that tomorrow.

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GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED