Where to Start With Research: A Beowulf Example

In Anglo-Saxon Lit, one of our weekly assignments was to consider the words of Beowulf's comfort to Hrothgar: "Do not sorrow, wise man, for it is better that each man avenge his friend than deeply mourn." The professor asked us to answer a couple of questions: Was the poet portraying Beowulf negatively in this passage? How did it relate to the larger themes in the poem and/or the Anglo-Saxon notions of revenge?

Trundling happily along in my reading, I started underlining all the references to vengeance, and I noticed a cluster of them around this section. The conversation in question is directly preceded by the report of Grendel's Dam, who is first and foremost described as an avenger. You're almost clubbed over the head with it - she's the Avenging Vengeful McVengypants. Surely, I thought, it was no coincidence that this description comes RIGHT BEFORE Beowulf slapping Hrothgar on the back and saying "Bah, don't worry. I'll avenge him for you."

What, I asked myself, was up with that?

I skimmed the rest of the poem and formed a quick hypothesis (bad idea): The monsters in Beowulf were symbolic of Evil with a capital E, and the poet was deliberately associating his characters with them in order to show how far his culture had sunk into Badness. Was that hypothesis, I asked myself next, borne out by a closer examination of the text?

It wasn't. It was, in fact, a rubbish hypothesis. I raised the question in recitation and realized in the ensuing discussion that it was unclear, oversimplified, and hard to prove from the text, so I ditched it for a much more fruitful question: HOW were the monsters related to the other characters in the poem?

When I read with THAT question in mind, I made all kinds of discoveries. Before Grendel comes along, Scyld and Unferth are described in the same way he is. Before Grendel's Dam, we have the fight at Finnsburg, which is all about revenge for a fallen kinsman and the grief of a bereft mother. Before the dragon, there is the story of Ingeld and the Lay of the Last Survivor, both of which have to do with gold-lust. There was obviously a deliberate juxtaposition going on; I just had to find out more about it.

Armed with this evidence from the text, the questions I eventually took into my research were something like these:

Is there scholarly support for the idea that the digressions and the monsters are connected?

What is the nature of that connection and how does it relate to the larger structure of the poem?

What is Beowulf's role in this structure? Is he part of the connection, or outside it?

My initial question of "Huh. What's that all about?" came up as a direct result of a question the professor asked the class. I made the initial mistake of jumping to a conclusion before asking questions, which wasted time and frustrated my attempts at research. But a fruitful discussion with other people helped me discard my wild hypothesis in favor of better open-ended questions, so by the time I hit the library, I knew exactly what I was looking for.

I asked my professor for good leads on sources, and boy was I glad I did. He told me to find a copy of "A Beowulf Handbook," which (among other things) gave a very thorough overview of basically everything that had ever been written on Beowulf, divided up into different chapters by subject. All I had to do was find the chapter on "Digressions and Episodes," and there at the beginning was a beautiful annotated timeline telling me that A had thought this, B had thought that, C had said the other thing. I could look up a little paragraph on each entry with a short summary on each work's main point. It was the perfect way to get a broad picture of what had already been said by whom, and when.

It also gave me a great idea of where to go next. Certain works had been quoted, argued with, or written about far more than others - so I made a list of the big players and their books. Klaeber, Tolkien (obvs), Brodeur, and Bonjour seemed to be the most widely recognized on the topic of the digressions and structure of the poem, so I hit the library looking for them.

As I read them, I read their footnotes. Yes, I actually read the footnotes. These were important scholars, so who were they quoting? What had influenced their opinions? What books were in their bibliographies? What articles had they cited? I found several more interesting leads just from chasing the footnotes.

This required trips to several libraries (one of them in another town), but getting the right sources made a big difference. I knew I was on the right track, was listening to the right people, and was keeping track of what each of them said. Making these notes as I went along  got me to well over my word limit before I had even started on the paper itself!

As I listened to the people I had identified as the most important, a couple of different arguments came into focus. The pre-Tolkien scholars had been divided into two main camps - those who thought the historical digressions intruded on the important monster bits, and those who thought the monster narrative intruded on the important historical material. Both were looting the poem for what they thought was the truly valuable stuff. Tolkien (all hail!) single-handedly revolutionized the approach to the poem by suggesting very sensibly that it should be approached...as a poem. As a hale and hearty and complex work of art, in and of itself, not as a chest to be raided for historical or mythological material, though of course those were both present. The scholars who followed him were as a result much more unified in their approach to the work, if not in their conclusions about it.

I was listening to Klaeber, Tolkien, Brodeur, and Bonjour in particular, and I sticky-noted the dickens out of those four books, taking research notes as I went along of how each author fit into the big picture and how their material related to my questions. Some ideas that popped up along the way had to be discarded based on their scholarship (not EVERY tiny digression fit into the pattern, however badly I wanted them to), and others had to be kept on a provisional or cautious basis (The connection between Scyld and Grendel, although arguable, was definitely more tenuous than the one between Unferth and Grendel, despite my efforts).

Klaeber and Tolkien gave me some great background information, which gave me a foundation to start with. Bonjour and Brodeur had some fascinating and detailed arguments about the interpretation of specific digressions, which usually served as support for my own argument, although a few of their observations provided some complications I had to address. They forced me back to the text and made me wrestle with it.

This made me notice my final question, which I answered in my thesis statement - if the digressions serve as foreshadowings of the monsters (which I established in the body of the paper), why did the poem end on a long digression? Was it hinting at a fourth and final monster? And if so, WHAT WAS IT?

Sorting through those materials took time, effort, and concentrated thought, but by the time the books were stickied and my notes organized, I was already almost done. I knew what the question was that I wanted to answer. I knew who had been talking about the issue already, and I knew how all their arguments fit together. All that remained was to assemble the material coherently around the structure of my own argument.