Inspired by adaptations of Beowulf by John Gardner, Meghan Purvis, Maria Dahvana Headley, Roger Reeves, and Laura Varnam, this paper examines the possibilities of a creative critical approach to the objects of Beowulf. Scholars have long noted the importance, even agency, of key objects in the epic: Heorot hall, the sword’s hilt, Grendel’s glove, the stolen cup, are just a few of them. While other recreations of the epic have given voice to various marginalized living creatures in the poem, rarely have they shifted the perspective to that of its crafted things.
This is surprising, because taking on the voice and perspective of a thing was a core practice in Old English poetics, as is visible in the Riddles and the Dream of the Rood. Early medieval riddles (in English and Latin) bridged the creative critical divide: they taught pupils how to interpret scripture and were prompts for poetic making. Indeed, descriptions of crafted objects in Old English tend to be one of the period’s key ways of thinking about art making.
I propose to reread Beowulf through a series of “critical fictions,” poems spoken by its things. I will ask what can be learned about the epic through such voicings, but also what is at stake in using a quintessentially medieval genre of critical fiction.
Irina Dumitrescu is a writer and the Professor for medieval English literature at the University of Bonn. She is the author of The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge, 2018) and the editor of Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (Punctum, 2016). She has published poetry, short prose, essays, criticism, and memoir in a wide variety of publications. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays 2016, Best Food Writing 2017, Wine Reads: A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing, Longreads, The Rumpus, The London Magazine, and elsewhere. Her work was shortlisted for the James Beard Foundation’s MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, and received the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for nonfiction. She is a columnist at the Times Literary Supplement, and co-hosts a podcast at the London Review of Books.