Beowulf in the digital age
Beowulf: a digital hero from England’s lost culture
The 3-D blockbuster will redefine what it is to be English
Anglo-Saxon civilisation is England’s submerged culture and it tends to be interpreted in the light of the conquest that followed. The idea of a ‘Norman yoke’ that had introduced feudalism and thereby destroyed a primitive English egalitarianism is a feature of republican debate in the 1640s. But at a less propagandist level Henry Spelman, one of the greatest historians of English law, had already been at work in the preceding 20 years arguing that the Conquest had transformed Anglo-Saxon society by importing feudal tenures on the Continental model. Spelman struck a serious blow against the nationalist mythology which maintained that England’s legal and constitutional system had a continuous history extending to the imagined tribal assemblies of the Germanic forests. 1066 was a break — whether one liked the consequences or not.
David Hume, in writing his History of England, was up against a personal problem. The Conquest involved a usurpation of established rights — something that went against all his Tory instincts. But the historian was also a philosopher who knew that abstract rights had to be weighed against human nature’s truths. The fact that the new arrangements had lasted such a long time generated their own justification in terms of lived experience. Besides which the smoothly enlightened Hume was hardly likely to warm to Anglo-Saxon tribes — a social grouping he would have found distressingly reminiscent of his compatriots’ Highland clans.
English Victorians, however, embraced the idea of an Anglo-Saxon heritage and therefore named their children Alfred and Edith, Edgar and Agnes. And their historians could detect a blessed synthesis for were not the Normans — the Nortmanni — originally quite as Germanic as the Anglo-Saxons? Bishop Stubbs warmed therefore to the Norman ‘rod of discipline which was to school England to the knowledge of her own strength’. And the very bracing E.A. Freeman revelled in how these men of the North got rid of their ‘slight French varnish’ and revealed their true Teutonic stock once they arrived in England.
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ian skidmore
November 22nd, 2007 1:46pmWelsh grew out of Old English? Whisper it not in Blenau Ffestiniog. Hopkins will never dare cross the border again. I must say it sounds dreadful. I think I will stick to Heaney's version and it won't get the chance to redefine anything for me
Nicholas Millman
November 24th, 2007 12:27amIt looks dreadful too. There is nothing worse than the machine-created computer animation that bleeds the imagery of any humanity and force-feeds a singular, cloned "style" in everything. I'd rather watch Noggin the Nog - there was style! Having said that there does seem to be a rekindling of the Old English about. A welcome trend, especially if more folk thump the table with common law and challenge Nu Labor barmy law a bit more.
Paul Myers
November 24th, 2007 1:07pmMass immigration has already redefined what it is to be English. The bottom of the heap, a dispised and destroyed people. And the film is garbage.
DB Hart
November 24th, 2007 4:59pmFor God's sake, not Heaney's horridly bland version. Better to get out the old Gummere translation, which at least retains the rhythm, aliteration, and vigour of the original. The only good thing in the Heaney edition is the facing Old English text.