Beowulf is a really fun poem to teach because there are so many monsters in it. There are also, apparently, allusions to the poem in comic books and video games.  Many of my students--often my male students--really enjoy learning about the "original" poem that they have only encountered obliquely in pop culture. I actually think it's a great idea to incorporate pop culture into your approach to the poem!

I recommend spending a minimum of three days on the poem, one per monster. The best edition to use is Seamus Heaney's translation in the bilingual edition with facing pages of Anglo-Saxon and modern English. I have a wonderful essay prompt that asks students to investigate the Anglo-Saxon through Heaney's bilingual translation along with the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, which I will discuss in an upcoming post.

I also recommend that you send students to this site, where they can listen to Professor Michael C. Drout read the opening 11 lines of the poem out loud in Anglo-Saxon so that they have an idea of what "Old English" sounds like (because many people seem to think that Shakespeare "wrote in that Old English.") It's good to disabuse your students of this fallacy immediately.

Prof. Drout has a marvelous voice, and it's fun to peruse through the other poems from the Anglo-Saxon poetic record on his site, Anglo Saxon Aloud... it's definitely a site worth investigating!

General strategies:
I approach the poem by talking about the ethos of Anglo-Saxon warrior culture filtered through the lens of Kristeva's notion of abjection. I ask my students to think about the poem as presenting evidence (through the various monsters that it presents to us) for what might have counted as "abject" in that society.

Three important points to impress are as follows:

1. The horror that the abject person provokes comes from a mixed sense of connection and distance.  There is a sense of “this is what I came from” (love, or sense of connection) that coexists with “this is what I am no longer” (hate, or sense of distance) that creates horror, repulsion, and disgust because there is always a threat that this abject thing is what “I” could return to.
   
2. For Kristeva, this process of rejection is something that happens at both the individual level and the collective level. The individual connects these feelings to the natural rejection of the mother (i.e. the process of growing up). The collective uses these feelings of rejection to establish boundaries between “good” and “bad”: the sacred and the profane, culture and chaos, us and them, etc.  Society tries to delineate the boundary between “us” and “them” to create a sense of coherent identity in the group.  Abject people get pushed to the margins or the boundaries because they create a sense of horror that the dominant group has more in common with the marginalized group than they would like to think.
3. While twentieth-century French thought does not necessarily apply to tenth-century Anglo-Saxon culture (i.e., the psychoanalytic part about mothers and infants), the basic concept about an outcast group being reviled because of its similarities to the dominate group seems like it could be applicable to groups from many different cultures and time periods.

As we consider each individual monster, I ask my students: why would this monster be threatening to this society? If monsters are a sign of abjection, something to be shunned or outcast because they are a horrifying reminder of something a society would like to forget, then what is it about this particular monster that the members of Heorot don't want to have to see?

In order to talk about warrior culture, specifically in what is (probably) a tenth-century poem written by a Christian Anglo-Saxon poet, but looking back at the pagan past of seventh or eighth century Scandinavia, I turn to JRR Tolkien's famous essay, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics":

In addition to Tolkien's discussion of the tone in this literature, we also discuss the code of honor that obliges a warrior to avenge his slain lord or to die beside him, and how blood vengeance is regarded as a sacred duty. We consider how kingship is connected to a system of gift-giving and rewards and that royal generosity was one of the most important aspects of heroic behavior.  And, of course, we talk about weregild.

After the jump, I've included a set of discussion questions, some of which I have written myself and some of which I have culled from Fran Dolan and Margie Ferguson, professors at UC Davis who have shared their pedagogical strategies for the poem with me.

As promised, here is my philological assignment on Beowulf. In some ways this is a really hard assignment, but my students seem to really love it, because they literally feel like archeologists of the English language. It also helps them to denaturalize language: they almost have to start thinking of language as a constructed system of arbitrary signs.

The basic strategy is for them to mark up the modern English language side of the text as they would normally, and then look at the Anglo-Saxon in the lines that correspond with the modern English lines that they find interesting. After discovering a selection of Anglo-Saxon words that they find interesting, they look them up and put some pressure on their translator.

Because this is pretty challenging, I offer an alternate assignment wherein students can compare and contrast modern translations; however, this assignment is less popular, because students inevitably want to know which translator got it "better," so they end up going to the Bosworth-Toller anyway. What can I say? I am a pretty sneaky teacher.

Like the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Bosworth-Toller Online offers examples of the word in context. This helps students to locate the primary meaning; however, students are quick to discover that there are often multiple possible meanings.  For example, one student found in her research that the Anglo-Saxon word un-nyt, which Seamus Heaney translates as useless, could also mean harmful.  She argued that Heaney’s translation obscures the narrator’s increasingly critical view about gold over the course of the poem, culminating in a pun at the end when the narrator declares that gold is un-nyt to man. 

Her discovery, however, extended beyond the particular text of Beowulf; in the process of preparing for the paper, my student came to see me in office hours, frustrated with fact that she could not determine the author’s intention through the filters of time and language.  We not only talked about the intentional fallacy but also discussed Stephen Greenblatt’s famous line from the opening of Shakespearean Negotiations: “I began with the desire to speak with the dead.”  It was as if a light bulb went off in her head as she recognized this same motive in herself. 

The assignment helped her to understand that she had to learn to negotiate between understanding the past as coming from a single, clear voice of the author (a voice that she would never be able to hear fully) and conceptualizing the past as a discourse of voices that can be tenuously understood despite enormous differences in culture and language.  Although this discovery is one of particular importance for medievalists and early modernists, I believe that this lesson is an important lesson for any student of literature.

The Close Reading Assignment:
In a close-reading exercise, you are expected to make an argument about a text by drawing attention to textual evidence.  The close-reading paper is not a theory-based paper, nor is it a paper based on historical research; rather, your evidence will be based on the structure of the poem, the literary devices that an authors uses to produce a certain response, and the connotations of the author’s diction. 

In the last instance, you will need to use a reliable dictionary as a tool.  Because Beowulf is an Anglo-Saxon poem that we are reading in translation, you will have to go an extra step in order to be a word detective.  Either 1) find a version of the poem in Anglo-Saxon, such as Seamus Heaney’s dual-page bilingual edition or the digital bilingual edition, which is maintained by Benjamin Slade and uses the Klaeber translation, and then use the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary as your dictionary, or 2) find another modern translation of the poem, such as Burton Raffel’s edition, and use the OED to discuss the differences between the two translations.  Although your argument does not need to hinge on diction, I expect that everyone in the class will demonstrate the ability to do sophisticated philological research.

Choose one of the following prompts:

1.     How does Beowulf grow over the course of the poem, if at all?  Trace his response to the three monsters and see if he develops as a character or remains statically good in opposition to the evil that he faces.  Consider the implications of your argument.

2.     Focus on a single monster that Beowulf faces.  What kind of monster emerges?  How does facing this particular monster make Beowulf a good man?  Does the monster stand for something larger than itself; that is, is the monster an allegory or a symbol for either a social ill or a sin that Beowulf must conquer?  How do you know?

3.     Why does Beowulf have to fight Grendel’s mother in the poem?  In other words, why does the poet insist on her female gender?  How does her maternity add to the poem?  How does she compare to other mothers or wives in the poem?

4.     What is the status of gold and gift-giving in the poem?  Does this change over the course of the poem? Are the modern concepts of wealth, payment, monetary worth and greed appropriate for the world of Beowulf? 

5.     Why are there so many stories-within-the-story in the poem? What is the relation between these so-called “digressions” and the main narrative in Beowulf?  For this prompt you may focus on one digression to consider why it is particularly important for the poem.

You may develop your own prompt to this paper if there is something you want to explore.