https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=z48XXFRTerk
So here’s what happens. People read Beowulf, they come across things that don’t seem like they belong to modern Christianity, or even like, let’s say, late medieval Roman Catholicism. And so they say, well, this must be a pagan leftover. Yeah. So my question is, well, is it a pagan leftover, which would be fine. I wouldn’t really be bothered by that. But is it a leftover? Or is it the Beowulf poet using his Christianity, Anglo-Saxon Christianity, right, which was his framework to try to make sense of the world that he had had inherited from both his Christian and his pagan forbearers? This is Jonathan Pesceau. Welcome to the Symbolic World. Good to see everybody. I’m really happy that we’re kind of back into the schedule with Richard. It’s hard because now he’s becoming so busy. And sadly, I’m busy too. But I’m really excited. We’re going to talk about Beowulf. I’ve been looking really forward to this episode. And so Richard, thanks for coming. And you have a few things you also want to announce because as if you don’t, there are too many things you’re doing, but that’s cool. Go for it. That’s right. I just want to announce a couple of pretty cool things. One is some people know that I am publishing a tabletop role-playing game that’s actually set in a fantasy world that I’ve been working on for about 20 years now. And so the role-playing game is called Emborio Role-Playing in the World Under Starlight. It’s coming out from Strange Owl Games in the spring. There will be a Kickstarter in April. And you can go and you can back it. You can get hard copies, PDFs, all this stuff. There are going to be some levels where if you back it, we’ll play a game together and I’ll run a game for you and all this kind of stuff. So the Kickstarter hasn’t lost yet, but if you want to keep up with the project and also get in on like the playtest packets as they come out, there’s a Patreon that it’s not my Patreon. It’s Strange Owl, the publishing company’s Patreon. I do get some of that, but it’s their Patreon. So we’ll put a link to that down in the doobly-doo, as they say. And then, and so if people want to follow along with the project, find out more about like what even is this world? Is this a project that I’m interested in at the higher levels? Like I said, you get playtest packets, character sheets, adventures, setting materials, things like that as we develop it. We just got a bunch of stuff from back from our layout artist. And it looks really cool and official. So people will want to check that out. The other big thing that I do want to announce is that sometime, hopefully around when this video drops or maybe a little bit later, we’ll see. We’re going to be launching a small crowdfunding campaign for Finding the Golden Key. So this is this collection of essays. I know we’ve been talking about it for a while. It’s Finding the Golden Key, Essays Towards a Recovery of the Sacramento Imagination, or I’ll probably just call it Recovering the Sacramento Imagination, because that’s a little easier to say. And the crowdfunding campaign is going to cover a couple of things. I’m not making any money off of this book. I’m just doing it because this is a really important thing to me. Obviously, Jonathan, you’ve got an essay in this book, and a lot of other people in the Symbolic World community do as well. We’re going to be starting a crowdfunding campaign basically to cover the cost of cover art, which is going to be done by Hugh Rose. And he’s got some insanely cool ideas for how we’re going to do this. So he’s going to be doing the cover art. So we want to make sure that we can pay him what he’s worth, and then also raise money to handle things like copy editing and type setting. So it’ll be like a small crowdfunding campaign, and hopefully the Symbolic World community can kind of rally around and we can get that knocked out. So that’s the other thing that I wanted to announce today. I’m sure I’m doing other things that are also fun, but those are the two that I’ll mention. So we’ll have links to both of those. Hopefully we’ll get that crowdfunding campaign. I got to figure out a whole bunch of things that I don’t know about crowdfunding that I need to figure out between now and whenever this video drops. All right. Yeah, we can help you. I can give some advice. Nicholas Cotar is also good on crowdfunding. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, fortunately we have people in the community who know these things now. And my project is going to be way simpler than what Nicholas just did. So yeah. Yeah. All right. So let’s go Beowulf because I’m excited. Oh, should we announce the other thing that we talked about just a minute ago? Which thing? We talked about so many things. Which one are you going to announce? The class. Do we want to go ahead and announce? Oh yeah, sure. Go for it. Yeah, definitely. Okay. So sometime this spring, depending on when we get the new website up and all that stuff, we’re going to be offering a Beowulf course through the Symbolic World. I’ll be teaching it. Jonathan will be involved as much as I can rope him in probably. But the plan will be that we’ll actually read through Beowulf together as a group. It’ll probably take about six weeks to do this. I have a actually a class and a curriculum that I’ve already developed and taught several times, but I’m going to be adding in a bunch more of a kind of material that you’re going to be hearing today. So if you’re interested in the idea of a sort of a book club where we read through Beowulf together and then discuss it. And this will include discussions of the original language. I can’t teach you Anglo-Saxon in six weeks, but I will do some reading from the original language so you can get a taste and kind of like a sense for how it sounded and the rhythm of the poetry in these things. So that’ll be and we’re going to do it and there will be like a live class. And then at the end of that, the lectures will be, I assume, available for purchase. Yeah, so we’ll record them and then we’ll and then we will sell it as a course that will be on symbolic world permanently. Yeah, so this will be on the new symbolic world site and I’m very excited about it. So just stay tuned for more information about that. That was cool. I wanted to mention. Okay, cool. So last time we kind of teased this relationship between Anglo-Saxon culture, right? As we’re making our way through the through universal history in the symbolic world, we tease this relationship between Anglo-Saxon culture and literature and Christian apocryphal Jewish and Christian apocryphal literature. So I wanted to talk a little bit more about that today and give some specific examples. Because it’s very clear. It’s very clear that the author of Beowulf, first of all, is a Christian. Beowulf studies is, I mean, Beowulf is the in some senses, it’s like the most overstudied poem in history, because it’s got so many people who have written about it and studied it and things like this. And the thing is, once you get into it, you start to realize why it’s so attractive, why it’s interesting in this way, because it’s a it’s a it’s been described by, for instance, Professor Michael drought as a textual ruin. It’s like coming across these rune, these ruins, Tolkien use this analogy as well coming across the ruins of this tower, right? And you want to you want to just like pick it apart and try to figure out why did they you know, and what’s this about? And, and, you know, you pick every stone, a single stone you pick up, right? Every little, every little crux that you come across in the text, every little like, clearly, this is not the right word, the scribe got this wrong. So what did it say? Every single example of that, and there are quite a number of them in the Beowulf poem is just sort of endlessly interesting and fascinating. And it’s the kind of at one point in my life, Jonathan, and I’ve totally utterly failed at this, but I really aspired to be like the man of one book. I forget who’s I forget who it was that had this concept, but but basically it was the idea that instead of like trying to read everything, you should just like study one thing. Yeah, go as deep as you can possibly go into that thing. And for a long time for me, Beowulf was that. Yeah, like I said, I’ve, you know, tremendously failed at being a man of one book as my as my my office, which is mostly bookshelves at this point can attest. But there’s something that’s really deeply fascinating and beautiful to me about this poem. I’ll talk more about that in the course. But what I want to kind of argue is that the Beowulf poem is a sort of Rosetta Stone. It’s a Rosetta Stone for it’s a Rosetta Stone for medieval Christianity. And the ways that they interacted both with this much older, weirder Christian and Jewish tradition inheritance that they that they’d inherited and then also try to figure out how do we fit that into the things that our ancestors believed about the world, our pagan ancestors, the things they believed about the world. And if you kind of look at the Beowulf poem, it’s really got all these things in miniature. You have the conflict of Christian and English and like Germanic values. You’ve got the conflict of of, you know, the religions is kind of their underlying things as well. One of the interesting conflicts that I probably won’t talk very much about today that seems to be going on in Beowulf is actually a memory of an even older pre-Christian conflict between kind of the older, let’s say like fertility cults, which were focused around the the Boggs, right, the Boggs and then the the newer kind of Odinic religion, which is focused more around the hall. Right. And focus more on like war as opposed to as opposed to fertility. So there’s a bunch of different interesting things going on in Beowulf, and it kind of just soaks them all up into itself. But as I said, the fact that it’s like this makes it because it’s kind of over studied in a way makes it an incredibly contentious field. So there’s almost nothing in Beowulf that’s not up for debate by somebody. But we’re going to have Beowulf scholars like arguing in the comments and. Yeah, actually, famously at the University of Toronto, there was a fistfight over the dating of Beowulf. This is in Canada of all places. So so there you go. There you go. And up and up there in Canada land. So there’s there’s there’s almost nothing about the poem that’s not debated. But one of the things that isn’t debated is that that the Beowulf poet. Was a Christian. Yeah, probably a monk. I mean, certainly a monk. And then depending on when you think the poem was written, like I said, very contentious question, maybe in the seventh or the ninth or sorry, the eighth or the ninth or tenth, eleventh century, somewhere in there. A lot of different theories. I tend to follow the kind of the more conservative age of be dating, which which for instance, which was the older belief. And then it fell out of style. And now it’s back in style. But anyway, I like it for metrical reasons and other things that I won’t get into today. But it’s not hugely important to our understanding of the poem. So you’ve got this Christian author, but then what people don’t really necessarily agree on is to what degree was the Beowulf poet just telling his own story, making of the story? And then to what degree was he taking older stuff and kind of synthesizing it, working it together? And what I would basically say is that that is a that’s a weirdly modern question. Yeah, about a pre modern work, right? You know, people didn’t think think about originality, the way that we do today in the Middle Ages, they certainly didn’t prize it the way that we do today. So this is, you know, so this is really kind of the wrong question to me. But the the better question to ask is when we when we come across something that doesn’t seem to match with, let’s say, for instance, so here’s what happens. People read Beowulf, they come across things that don’t seem like they belong to modern Christianity, or even like, let’s say, late medieval Roman Catholicism. And so they say, well, this must be a pagan leftover. Yeah. So my question is, well, is it a pagan leftover, which would be fine, I wouldn’t really be bothered by that. But is it a leftover? Or is it is it the Beowulf poet using his Christianity, Anglo-Saxon Christianity, right, which was his framework to try to make sense of the world that he had had inherited from both his Christian and his pagan forebearers? Yeah, so that’s, that’s what I want to kind of show some examples of today, because it’s a great, like I said, it’s kind of a great test case for the way that this was done in in the Middle Ages. Yeah. So, we talked about this a little bit last time about how the Christian apocryphal literature was preserved in Anglo-Saxon England in a way that in a way that maybe it doesn’t hold on so many other places in Western Europe. Part of this is because of course, England and by extension, Ireland is way out on the edge of things. So even though something like the Book of Enoch had already been sort of, I think, officially banned by the Pope by this point in time in history, you know, that is sort of like they might not even have heard about that ban, let alone there have been any way to enforce it, you know, in in in seventh century. Yeah. Yeah, seventh century, eighth century Anglo-Saxon England. It’s interesting because there there’s a lot what you’re saying, for example, the legend of St. Christopher as a dog headed man. It exists both in the east and in England and Ireland because it’s as if they just have access or they have kept certain traditions that have been kind of forgotten and left to the to the wayside. Yeah, and this includes things like names of archangels and other other things that that you know that show up in like old Irish and Anglo-Saxon prayer books. I talked a little bit last time about the Salter Narain, right? The Salter of the Quatrain, which was this collection of 150 poems, basically giving the Irish version of medieval universal history, starting with the fall of the gods, starting with the fall of the devil and his angels and how humanity is intended to take their place in the heavens, right? That there are these empty thrones that we are destined for, right? That’s, you know, right there at the very beginning. And by the way, that same understanding of the fall of the devil is in the Anglo-Saxon Genesis. So there’s an epic poem retelling got it right here on the shelf. There’s an epic poem retelling of the book of Genesis. The Old English were real. They were real keen on the Old Testament. I think that they found a sort of kinship in the stories of the Old Testament in the not just not just because like there’s a bunch of violent stuff that happens in the Old Testament, but really because I think that there, you know, this idea of there’s something really fundamental specifically about Genesis that this is how it all came together. And that’s what it’s meant to be, right? In fact, in the in Beowulf, this is the song, right? This is the song that the Shope sings, the scald or the bard. This is on that the Shope sings in the Hall of Herod, which anger is Grendel. It’s the song of the creation of the world. It’s the song of Genesis. You can think about how did they tell the story of Genesis, right? How did the Anglo-Saxons tell it? Well, it starts out with the tale of the fall of the devil. The devil falls. And now there are these empty thrones. And that’s the story of the creation of the world. That’s the story of Genesis. That’s why we’re made is to is to sit on those thrones, right? So then you can start to see why Grendel who as we’re going to see in a moment is somewhere between a demon and a man. You can see why he would be angered by that kind of a song, right? So there’s lots of really interesting stuff like this. And of course, there’s an old English poem called Solomon and Saturn, which has a bunch of details for which the Book of Enoch is probably the ultimate source. Maybe or maybe not the original source. But I’m just saying all this to say I think there’s every reason to believe that the author of the Beowulf poem either had access to the Book of Enoch or just a kind of access to this homiletic tradition based on Enochian and apocryphal literature. That was really common in really common in England during the Middle Ages. So I’ll give a couple of examples of that. Right. First of all, we’ve got Grendel. So for people who don’t know the story of the Beowulf poem come to my class. But if people don’t know the story, there are three monsters. There’s Beowulf or not. Sorry, there’s actually Beowulf is the fourth monster. That’s kind of the actually the story. But he’s the fourth monster. But he’s the good monster. Right. In fact, sometimes the poem will in old English will use the same language to refer to Grendel on one page and then you turn a couple of pages. And now that same monster language is being used to talk about Beowulf. Right. I should say that Beowulf himself probably has an origin in something like a fairy tale or folklore as a character. There’s a very kind of common folkloric trope in European stories called the Bear’s Son tale. Right. And so the Bear’s Son tale is basically the idea that this woman has relations with a bear. And the resulting child is a man, but also kind of bear like. Right. He’s way too big. He’s a little too hairy. He sleeps a lot. He eats too much. And basically, he’s just a nuisance to everyone. Nobody likes him. Nobody wants to. And he sleeps too close to the fire. And just this idea of this big, slow, stupid, hibernating bear. And then one day a monster shows up that nobody else can kill. Nobody else can fight. And the Bear’s Son saves everybody. And then they’re like, oh, now I kind of I see your worth. I understand your worth now. And there are relics of this kind of story in the Beowulf poem. So after Beowulf has killed Grendel and Grendel’s mother, for instance, he goes back home and we’re told, and this is the first time we’re told this because the Beowulf poet doesn’t he doesn’t give us information in a linear fashion. He’s a very careful storyteller. And so when he goes back home, we find out that actually before he left, everyone kind of thought, well, you know, glad we’ve gotten rid of him. Like, you know, because because he was such a nuisance. And now he comes back and he’s this big hero. And everybody kind of realizes maybe we were wrong about this guy. So there’s that kind of a thing going on in the story, hence all the kind of monstrous language that’s used about Beowulf. Interesting. But go ahead. But there are three, three monsters. You said there are three monsters. Yeah, so there are three monsters. The first is Grendel. The second is Grendel’s mother. And the third one is the dragon. The dragon. Now, modern retellings. I’m looking at you, Grand Morrison. This, no, it’s not Grand Morrison. Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman wrote that. Why did I confuse those two weirdos? I don’t know. Like, how could you? Yeah, how could I? Yeah. Yeah. So modern retellings. Look, here’s looking at you, Neil Gaiman, but not just his others as well have tried to connect these monsters by, you know, like saying, oh, there were relations and then the dragon is Beowulf’s son or Hrothgar’s son or, you know, all this stuff. But it’s not like that in the poem. And I don’t obviously I don’t like that retelling. But but for a couple of reasons, not just because it’s not, you know, the original or something, but because it really mistakes what the monsters are and what they do in the story. But in any case, so there are three monsters. Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon. Grendel and Grendel’s mother are probably one of the closest connections that the Beowulf poem has to the book of Enoch. So they are, first of all, giants. They are referred to frequently throughout the poem as being giants, like normal words for giants. Eotin, which is normal anglo-saxon word for giant, fierce, which is kind of like means like a troll or a marsh troll or, you know, like, what’s the difference between a troll and giant? Well, not not really a whole lot for purposes of the story that we’re talking about here. But also Grendel is frequently referred to as a demon. The language that’s used for him is the language that is used to describe that language that is used to describe demons and evil spirits and other anglo-saxon literature. Grendel, of course, is a he eats humans, but he doesn’t just eat humans. He drinks blood. Yeah, he likes to rip the head off of rip the heads off of people. And he’s also famously Beowulf’s retainer, Han Shou, which, by the way, means glove. Glove is a hand shoe. So anyway, some guy that some guy with the name Glove, he gets gets his head ripped off and Grendel drinks his blood. And, and this but this this sort of cannibalistic blood drinking activity is one of the attributes, one of the things that is described about the giants in the book. Yeah. So, so there’s there are similarities there, but the similarities go beyond this. So when when Beowulf is is meditating on the fate of Grendel and the doom that he’s going to, you know, the eternal torment that he’s going to experience, he quotes this passage that is basically just a few lines which are basically a line from the Book of Enoch paraphrased into Anglo-Saxon verse, right? Talking about talking about the the the eternal judgment that will fall upon this evil soul. And so it gets even a little more complicated because, first of all, in the Book of Enoch, or sorry, in the Beowulf poem, we’re told that Grendel is the descendant of Cain. But one of the major themes of the poem is this idea that the flood. This is also an idea very clearly found in the Book of Enoch, for instance, the idea that the flood was sent to the world, primarily to destroy the giants, right? Everybody, the old Scandinavian old Germanic peoples had this memory as well, this memory of the war between the gods and the giants, right? And and so the the Beowulf poet is able to take this this knowledge that as Germanic people they have that there was this war with giants and is able to take that and combine it with his his knowledge of the same war with giants from the scriptures. But of course, it’s not explicitly spelled out in Genesis. It’s like you said, it’s in the Enochian traditions. Right, yeah, yeah. And so you, you get the question and somebody, somebody sent me this question in an email recently and I said, well, you have to listen to the next episode and the question was, well, if the giants were destroyed by the flood, then how is Grendel the descendant of Cain? And how is this is Grendel a like, how is he like a giant? How is he like one of the Nephilim or whatever? Like if he’s if he is a harder question than that, which is why in the Bible, like, right, there’s two places where the word Nephilim is used. One is used in Genesis and one is used in in the I think it’s in Deuteronomy when they come up to the land of the of the of the at the when they come up to with the two spies. Right. Yes, right. Yeah. In front of Jericho. The sons of Anak and yeah. And it says they are of the Nephilim. Those are the two places. So it’s like the same question. And all these other giants are said to be Nephilim. So how do you say same question? Like, how do you how does this work? Why are there still giants after the flood? Why are there still giants over the flood? And then are the are the descendant of Cain thing is the descendant of Cain thing is that mutually exclusive with the idea of being like a Nephilim or a giant like, you know, like the two like the Sethite hypothesis versus the Nephilim hypothesis or whatever. So we actually find pretty good answers to both of these questions in the Beowulf poem. Oh, really? Okay. So first of all, first of all, we’re told that all these different monsters descend from Cain. Very common kind of a medieval theory about the origin of like fairies, elves, orcs, goblins, you know, all these things. They’re all bad guys. As far as the Beowulf poet is concerned, he’s a hardliner. As an old professor of mine might say he’s a hardliner when it comes to fairies. But the the way that they but the way that then that this this similarity to or this descent from Cain is used in the Beowulf poem, if you start to pay attention to it, you start to realize that it’s not really a question of like lineal, let’s say, genetic descent. Yeah. Right. But the way that it’s used and the reason that it’s important to the poem. Is because Cain was a kinslayer. Mm hmm. Yeah. So in Anglo-Saxon society and like the society, let’s say the Germanic Iron Age. To be a kinslayer. Is the worst possible sin. Right. You know, in a very similar way, and I think for a very similar reason. That for Dante in the Inferno, the worst possible sin. And I, I mean, I lead a book club through Inferno every Friday night for like several years now, or not necessarily through Inferno through the whole comedy. The comedy. And we just finished Inferno a couple of weeks ago. And what we see for Dante in Inferno is that the worst possible sin is betraying your Lord betraying your master. And what both of these things have in common is that for their respective societies for Dante’s and for the Germanic Iron Age. These relationships are the are the relationships through which society coheres. If you cannot trust the bonds of kinship. Right. If if you can’t even trust your brother or your cousin or your uncle. Right. If you if you can’t even trust the bonds of kinship. Then really, how are you going to survive as a people? How are you going to survive as the civilization? This is actually one of the big questions, you know, that is raised at the end of the poem. As Beowulf is the last of the, yeah, it’s right. He’s the last king of his people. Right. And, and, you know, the, the, the woman, you know, singing his funeral dirge. One of the things she sings about is like, well, now who’s going to fight for us? Who’s now now who’s going to, you know, defend us? And so if you don’t, if you can’t trust kinship, and then what that does is it makes like things like succession and things like that really unstable and really uncertain. Then society, human society simply ceases to cohere. So for this society, that and then ungenerosity being ungenerous, you know, hoarding, in other words, like a dragon. This is why the dragon is dragons don’t always hoard gold. They hoard gold in Anglo-Saxon Germanic society because gold is the thing that you need to you give to your retainers. Right. A king gives gold to his things and his things give service to him in return. And it sounds the same as saying I’m paying you for a service, but they didn’t think of it that way. And actually they thought about it very differently than that. Right. It was always the idea that, you know, the king is an Anglo-Saxon literate language. He’s the ring giver. He’s the one that, you know, breaks off the gold rings from his chain and gives it. And the idea is he’s supposed to be giving it with an open hand. And if he doesn’t, he starts hoarding the gold. Then society starts to collapse. So these are kind of the two worst things. And these are basically the two kinds of evil that we see exemplified by the giants or by the monsters. Right. We’ve got the giants or the trolls or whatever you want to call Grendel as mother who exemplified this kinslaying. Right. And also the kinslaying and the idea of the blood feud, which was just tearing through Germanic societies at this time. And then with the dragon, you have the idea of hoarding. Right. The hoarding that. And Grendel, how are they? You mean in the sense that they’re cannibals? Is that what you mean by their kinslayers? Like, do they do it? You mean, say kin. Do you mean that they’re killing humans like in that way? So they’re there. They are called the kin of Cain. And then they’re compared to and sometimes explicitly, sometimes in a subtle way to other famous kinslayers in the story. So there are a number of human kinslayings and also men betraying their masters and things like this in the background that are so that when we read those stories and when we see these things happening, sometimes it’s foreshadowing. Hrothgar is the king of the Danes. His hall is eventually going to be destroyed by a civil war. And which is a thing that really happened. And people reading the poem knew it had happened, but this poem is set before it happens. And so there’s like all this ominous foreshadowing later on. There’s this awful war that involves kinslaying and betrayals of alliances and all these other things with the Swedes and the Yates and all these different people. So the point is that, you know, C.S. Lewis, when he talks about fairy tales, he says that they wear their insides on their outsides. And so Grendel and his mother are in a way they’re manifesting. They’re bringing to the surface the kinslaying, the blood feud and everything else that’s really like the big evil or represents one of the great evils that has to be dealt with in Germanic society. And so when we look at this, the other question is, well, how are there more? So to answer the question, like, how is there still a line of Cain after the flood? Right. Well, it’s very simple. If you the way that you become from the line of Cain, the way that you become a monster is by doing what Cain did. Yeah, like him, right. You know, becoming a monster, right. The way that you become like demons is to participate in their works. It’s really interesting because there’s other Germanic literature, for instance, Old Norse sagas, in which you literally have people actually become a monster in a very literal, transformative sense. Yeah, by, you know, for instance, this one guy abandons his comrades because they’re being attacked. And so he just takes all the treasure and he jumps overboard and they never see him again. But there’s this big sea serpent like a dragon like that haunts that bay from that point forward. Well, that’s that’s a guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that kind of thing. As far as what’s interesting about about this, like, and I’ve been because I’ve been pondering that I knew that some of these traditions, like I know the Bay of Poem well enough, not in any way close to you. But because I was always interested about the way in which because Cain is both is a Kinslayer, but he’s also a civilizational figure like he brings civilization. And so there’s an interesting there’s a weirdness about Cain and there’s also a weirdness about giants themselves, which is that there’s a duality to the giants. One is the giant as an image of the of the civilization, the tyrannical civilization or the this kind of oppression from above. You know, the demons kind of come and rape women or or impose their order. But then there’s also the degenerate aspect of the descendants of Cain, which is the hybridity, monstrosity, chaos, cannibalism, broken causality. You know, in some ways it does represent in general when I talk about how the modern world is it is like a separation of heaven and earth. So the extremes manifest together at this kind of extreme of tyranny and the extreme of chaos and broken reality having together. But in the Grendel poem, there isn’t a sense that the that the giants represent an old civilization or that they represent, you know, a civilization that was there before us or something like that. I mean, that’s definitely there. It is there. OK, when when when Beowulf goes to goes goes into hell, actually, maybe talk about that in a moment. But when he goes down into the the the lair, right, the underwater of of Grendel’s mother, the troll wife of Grendel’s mother, he finds in there, he finds this sword. And the sword was forged by the giants. OK. And it was like this. It’s like this huge sword. It’s better than any sword that Bill has. One of the one of the sort of tropes of the Bear’s son tale is that the weapons always like his weapons always break because he’s too strong. Yeah. And they will like throughout the story just constantly break swords. It’s like three or four times. But it’s but it’s bigger than any sword that he’s ever held. And but what’s really interesting is that is that actually sort of inscribed on the sword. Right. Or is the is the actual legend of the giants in their war with God from the Book of Enoch. So so it’s the idea that, you know, this is a technological marvel, a technological wonder, which is actually a result of giantish civilization. But that’s what actually allows Beowulf to kill Grendel’s mother is when he uses that sword, which he himself had made. He uses it to cut off her head, whereas his own sword hadn’t been up to the task. Yeah. I mean, that’s interesting also because it’s interesting because if you think of the whole problem that I always talk about this problem, like the idea of how death. How death fights death and how death kind of stands at that limit and to understand Noah as also a civilizational figure. Right. Noah builds the ark. And so it’s like if if technique comes through Cain’s descendants, Noah appears as this strange figure that seems to be able to bridge Cain and Seth because he takes technique and he uses it to survive the flood. And often it’s there’s all these weird ways and legends that you find that they try to bridge it. You know, they’ll say that he married Nama, triple cane sister. There are ways to try to show that Noah bridges the two sides in some ways, and he has to in order to survive. But it’s interesting to think that he uses the giant sword to kill Grendel’s mother. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s what he uses. And then, of course, like her blood eats away at the blade. So there’s nothing but the hilt left there when he when he comes back up to the surface. So this is I mean, there’s there are a lot of other interesting similarities that go deeper on the connection between Grendel and his mother and the giants of the Old Testament. So maybe one question when you say on the sword, it says that it is the story of the Giants revolt against God, as in the Book of Enoch. How close is it to the Book of Enoch? So glad you asked, Jonathan. I’m so glad you asked because I can reach out and grab this book. So actually, this is my own translation of Beowulf. Oh, wow. I wrote this out by hand. Along with the it’s actually that’s the see if I can show you here. I mean, this is how fanatic I am about studying this. I’m basically it’s like it’s like an inner linear thing. But then I have like notes about the facing page because there’s like two different passages. I should have had these ready to go. But in one of them, Krohgar kind of like contemplates he’s looking at it way after the fight and he kind of like looks at it and contemplates the blade. And like remembers the blade. Yeah. Yeah. So it says on them was written. So on that sword was was the origin and written or engraved of ancient strife when the flood slew and the flood offslough when the flood destroyed with with the rush of the ocean, the race of the Giants. They terribly they fared terribly. That was an estranged race that race was a strange to the eternal Lord. That was their final reward when the waters surge the ruler game. So like the the the ruler of heaven that is God gave them their final reward with a surge of the waves. So, and there’s some references to it elsewhere in the poem. I don’t want to like spend the whole day just getting around through this. But I mean, I do, but not on camera. But you know, the point of this, the point of this is that the the Beowulf poet very clearly understands the flood as being mainly God’s judgment against the race of the Giants, which is a very common ancient Christian understanding pretty much everybody regardless of whether or not you believe in a satellite hypothesis. Yeah, you don’t totally need the Book of Enoch to have. Yeah, you don’t totally need the Book of Enoch to have this to kind of to kind of show out like like draw a couple of other similarities, though I think the really strong linking. There are a couple of strong links to to the Book of Enoch from the Beowulf poem, either either proof of the direct link or maybe as I’m going to talk about in a moment. This may be like a case of vernacular apocryphal literature, which the Beowulf poet had access to that doesn’t survive, but the Beowulf poem does. There’s some other examples of examples of this I’ll talk about in a sec. So there’s a couple of things there’s the name of Grendel himself. So the Grend is a pretty easy thing to explain. It’s a perfectly good Germanic onomatopoeia sounds like grind. Not hard to understand the L at the end of Grendel’s name. Oh, right. That it’s Michael, it’s Gabriel Grendel. Yeah, it’s not just them. I mean, like you’ve got every pretty much every single one of the the the the the leaders of the fallen angels who mate with mortal men in the Book of Enoch. They’re all like Tamiel and Ramiel and Danel and Ezekiel and Barakiel and all those different. Yeah. So, I mean, that’s a that is a difficult there’s no way to prove that association without like a bit of linking like a missing link that doesn’t exist for us. But it’s not a normal Anglo-Saxon ending for a name. It doesn’t. And in some ways without without the without the notion of the Book of Enoch where the names of the fallen angels follow the structure of the biblical names for the angels. It’s like there’s a bit of a there’s a bit of a missing gap where you would be hard to jump from naming your fallen angel with an L and understanding that this is related to archangels or the different names of angels in the Bible. So this is a this is a connection which it would be difficult to absolutely prove. Yeah. But but I think like my intuition is that there’s something here. But the even stronger association is probably Grendel’s mother. Right. So if Grendel is associated with the Old Testament giants, we would sort of maybe reasonably expect that his his mother is going to be associated with like the daughters of men. Right. What’s really interesting is that in the Greek translation of the Book of Enoch, we are told that the the daughters of men who interbreed in this way are turned into sirens. Right. Well, a siren, as it was certainly understood by people in the Anglo-Saxon world, is a water monster, right, a solitary monster who, you know, this is probably related to like the the the the Hebrew word that’s associated with Lilith. You know, that’s King James translates it like a screech owl. It’s that kind of a word. But in the sort of understanding, you know, of, you know, let’s say medieval England by the time by Anglo-Saxon time, this the idea of the siren was this sort of this sort of cannibalistic, solitary female water monster siren is. Yeah. And you find this you find this like, for instance, you know, some of the Church Fathers reference sirens in this in the same kind of a context. Right. So there’s a there’s there’s some support to this in the Beowulf poem, because in the Beowulf poem, she is referred to as a mere with like a mere wife, literally a sea maiden or sea woman. Right. Which is exactly how you would try to express the idea of a siren in Anglo-Saxon. And so there is a. Yeah, for sure. All our imagery is related to water. So you have to go down into the water. And so you can you can like you can kind of keep teasing this thread and chasing the thread. And maybe we’ll look at this more in the class. Yeah. But there is a very strange there’s a very strange passage that refers to, you know, the Danes get really desperate. They can’t fight Grendel. They can’t get rid of him. They pray to God. Nothing seems to be happening. And so they revert to demonic sacrifice. They start sacrificing to the demons. They fall back into idolatry, which is a very interesting thing, because, of course, the Beowulf poet knows perfectly well that this is happening in pre-Christian times. Christianity hasn’t come to the north when this homo set. Hrothgar is a historical person. We know pretty much right where he lived, where he lived, all that kind of stuff. So and of course, the Beowulf poet knew that as well. So to set the events in his court, right, that’s, you know, that’s kind of nailing down a date to when the story is supposed to be happening. And and it’s before way before any of the Germanic people started to convert to Christianity. And but what’s really interesting is that the Beowulf poet wants to present them as kind of virtuous pagans, right, in this in this way that there’s not going to be room for in Western Christian theology later on. But maybe at this early point, there is this idea that that, you know, there there were sort of virtuous, you could say, like monotheistic pagans who were, you know, they’re before the time of Christ, but they’re still worshiping God. You know, they’re trying to, you know, trying to seek God, trying to worship him in the best way that they know how. Yeah, right. I mean, you see images of that in the early Christian apologists, right? That’s how they talk about it. Right. Yes. I mean, yeah, this is this is a pretty it’s a pretty common Christian idea. And this is how the Beowulf poet tries to portray Hrothgar and the Danes, except that as a result of this, they fell back into idol worship and sacrifice to demons. Because they can’t beat Grendel, basically. Yeah, because they can’t beat Grendel. And the interesting thing is that in the Book of Enoch, this transformation of women into sirens is immediately followed by a prophecy that giants would somehow lead men or cause men to start sacrificing to demons in this way. So this same kind of a pattern that unfolds in in Beowulf is established there in the Book of Enoch, but it’s not explained how it’s, you know, I have a question like when before they fall to demon worship. You know, it’s a they pray to God and nothing doesn’t work. What is the term they’re using for God in this case? Like what is the what is what are they what’s it got? What’s God to them? There’s a really robust vocabulary that’s used to refer to God in Anglo-Saxon literature. Typically speaking, he’s usually called like the Lord, the eternal Lord, the Lord Almighty, Almighty God. You know, there’s there’s like there’s like this is pretty robust vocabulary, but but it’s it’s very, you know, it’s you can look at the is using church words basically in the it’s unambiguously the okay of the of the scriptures and of like like the Old Testament scriptures in particular. They like they like using Old Testament terminology to refer to God, even when you’re talking about Christ, especially like Lord of hosts, Lord of our right that kind of stuff. Very unambiguously, you know, Christian language. Yeah. So this is this is just something. So there are some some ties here. Now, there are some other examples of of apocryphal literature coming up in the Beowulf poem. The other one that I’ll just kind of talk about real quick and maybe tease a little bit comes up in comes up in the depiction, the description of hell or really the lair of the of the of the mere wife, the lair of the she troll of Grendel’s mother. And it’s very famously there’s this description of how it’s really graphic. It’s really scary. It’s really it’s really, you know, dark, really beautifully written out in Really, really beautifully kind of written out in a literative verse in a Beowulf poem. And people have noticed for a long time, they’ve noticed that this description of hell is almost the same or identical to the one that’s given in one of the Blickling homilies. So I talked last time about the idea of the homilary, right, that most people, most priests in medieval Europe were not expected to be great homeless or great preachers themselves. I sometimes think it’d be maybe good to go back to this model, like take a little pressure off of Of the priests, you know, and this will sound weird to Protestants who are listening to this because like your pastor’s main job is to prep a sermon. But actually, that wasn’t the main job of the priest. The main job of the priest was to say the mass and comfort the sick and the dying. And, you know, he had, you know, preside over baptisms and weddings. He had a lot of sacramental duties. And so for him, being a great preacher was not the main thing you were looking for in a pastor. And, you know, many of these men didn’t have a very high level of education. And so what they, the way that they handled this was that they had, they were called homilaries and homilary was basically a collection of homilies structured usually around the church year. So it’d be like a homily for every Sunday that you’ll have to preach this year. And then also a homily for like major feast days when people would be coming to church, and you would want them to hear a good sermon. And in one of the Blickling homilies, there are a bunch of beautiful ones. I’d love to mention, I probably mentioned it before, but it bears mentioning again. For instance, one of the Blickling homilies refers to the Mother of God as God’s own arkenstone, which if you’ve read The Hobbit, the arkenstone right is this precious stone at the center of the mountain. But in Arkenstone, in Old English means it can mean a pearl. It’s very often used to translate Latin margarita, you know, pearl. And then it’s also sometimes used to, it’s also sometimes used to refer to religious relics, right? So the idea of the Mother of God as like a pearl, you can understand, but also the idea of her as like a reliquary, right? God’s own reliquary, right? Which, you know, so like it’s easy to understand that. Pretty beautiful, but it’s a beautiful connection to The Hobbit. So anyway. So yeah, so but in one of these homilies, Blickling homily number 16, you get this description of hell. I’ll read it real quick because it’s not very long. Well, the homily is kind of long, but I’ll just read the end. But now let us bid the high angel St. Michael. So this is a homily for Michaelmas, for St. Michael’s Day. Now let us bid the high angel St. Michael and the nine orders of the holy angels that they may be an aid for us against hell foes. Hell foe, by the way, very common term that’s used throughout the poem for Grendel and his mother. They were holy ones. They were the holy ones for the taking of the souls of men. So St. Paul was looking in the northern region of the world. So this is now referring to an apocryphal work known as the Vizio Polly, the vision of St. Paul or the apocalypse of St. Paul. So St. Paul was looking at the northern region of this world where all the waters drop down and there he saw over that water a certain whore stone. Remember that they put the Germanic people put hell in the north, in the extreme north for obvious reasons. Over that water a certain whore stone and north of that stone very frosty woods had grown and there were dark mists. And under that stone was the dwelling place of Nycors and Wyrgs. Nycors is a kind of a sea monster. And Beowulf fights like a bunch of Nycors in the Beowulf poem. I said there were three monsters. There’s really like three big monsters and just a bunch of little ones. And he saw that on the cliff hung on the icy trees many black souls bound by their hands and their enemies in the likeness of Nycors were grasping at them just like the greedy wolf. And that water was back was black down under the cliff and between the cliff and the water was about 12 miles. And when the branches broke, then those souls that had been hanging on those branches fell and the Nycors seized them. These then were those souls who had unjustly sinned here in the world and did not wish to stop before their life’s end. But now let us bid St. Michael eagerly eagerly that he lead our souls into joy where they might rejoice always without end in eternity. So what’s being referred to here is that in the Visio Polly, at least in this particular version of it, there’s actually a few different versions of it circulating. And ultimately, it’s connected to the life of Adam and Eve and all this other literature. But in the Visio Polly, St. Michael, the Archangel, is the one who is leading St. Paul through the afterlife. Right. And it’s actually I mean, this is a proto text for the Divine Comedy. There’s no divinity about this kind of literature. So St. Paul is the Archangel Michael is leading Paul through and showing him hell and showing him the tortures that await the wicked. And you’ll notice it’s not fire here. It’s being frozen and frosty icy cliffs and being eaten by water monsters and all these different things. This is a very distinctly kind of northern Germanic vision of hell. So what’s really interesting about this is that in this and in a couple of other places, the Beowulf poet will reference this homily or reference other things about St. Michael, the Archangel and never explicitly. Because, of course, because, of course, the people he’s writing about the Danes at the point, they’re not Christians. They don’t know anything about Archangel Michael. And the Beowulf poet is pretty careful about not allowing his characters to know things that they wouldn’t know if without without the revelation. That’s it. Yeah, right. And so he’s like very careful about this, even like very mundane things. Right. He’s very careful about the flow of information. He’s he’s he’s I mean, really artistic, really, really good storyteller. But so this is the thing. There are these little Archangel Michael references throughout the poem. But but he never can can mention him specifically. And so for a long time, people thought just thought, oh, well, he’s doing this thing here where he’s referring vision of hell from a homily he had heard. And now he’s putting it into his poem. Well, maybe that’s what happened. But actually, the more recent evidence, for reasons I won’t go into right now, they have to do with textual findings and things like this, is that is that actually probably both the Blichling homily and the Beowulf poem are referencing the same vernacular translation of the Vizio Polly. So there was an English action translation in the vernacular that they were both borrowing from. And later on, later on, it’s lost. And so all we have is these borrowings, but we don’t have the vernacular version itself. But you can go on and look at the the connections that are being drawn. And there’s a really brilliant essay that basically posits without just reading the whole essay to you here. There’s a recent essay that’s come out really beautiful that basically suggests that the reason that the Beowulf poet is making all of these subtle Archangel Michael references in the poem, which his audience would certainly have understood. So at the same time that he’s making these references to the Archangel Michael, he is also making references to to the the the dragon slaying of Fafnir, which is like the great typical Germanic dragon slaying story. Okay, so he is consciously drawing this connection between the great Christian dragon slayer, which is, of course, St. Michael, or at least he’s one of them, and then the great pagan dragon slayer, right, which varies a little bit depending on the vision of the story, Sigurd or Sigmund depending on how old the story is. But point is, point is that he’s he’s drawing these connections between a great Christian dragon slaying story or serpent defeating story, and then the great pagan serpent defeating story. And he’s he’s drawing connections in the minds of his audience to Beowulf, to the to his main character, to his protagonist, who is not quite a pagan. Yeah, but also not quite a Christian. You know, and he gets the end of his life. Beowulf has this sort of speech where he’s, you know, at the very end of his life, he’s he’s been, you know, fights the dragon spoilers kills it with some help. But it’s poisoned, and it’s about to die. So as he’s, as he’s dying, he kind of, he’s talking to Wiglaf, his, his young kinsmen, and he’s kind of going over, you know, his life and talking about the things that he did the wars that he’s fought the monsters he’s killed. The way that he’s ruled his people into his old age, all these different things. And he’s kind of like contemplating basically whether or not he’s going to make the cut. He’s got no certainty of salvation, you know, through the sacraments or through Christ or through the confession of his sins. But what he says is, I never fought against my kin. I never betrayed any of my loyalties. I never write, you know, I was never stingy with my things, right? All these things that we talked about that are like these are the worst possible sins in this context. This is the work of Kane. Beowulf, who is, you know, sometimes the sort of monstrous or ambiguous figure, especially early on in his life, comes the end of it and says, he rejected all of those things. And so because of this, the King of Heaven will have no need to punish him. So that’s the King of Heaven. It’s the King of Heaven or Lord of Heaven. I mean, yeah, something like that. Yeah. Like I said, there’s there’s a lot of but I mean, it’s very clearly, you know, for both the poet and the for both the poet and also for the audience. Yeah, they know who they’re referring to. Yeah, it’s very clearly. It’s probably. Yeah, and it’s an interesting it’s an interesting like if you understand it subtly like this, this this subtle poem where people could both let’s say, nostalgically participate in the ancient stories, but then also have a kind of a grip of sadness to see like he’s not like he’s on the. And because of the lack, his lack of because he’s not a Christian, it’s like, what does it mean? You know, how what how do how can we understand this? Like there’s a there’s a kind of a deep, very, very deep sentiment there that’s happening. So this is what’s so interesting and complex and beautiful to me about the Beowulf poem. And I think why I’m so deeply attracted to it is because the Beowulf poet is I mean, the story that he tells is very sensitive. It’s very it handles this question of like our righteous pagan ancestors and all these different things, right? Handles it all with a great deal of delicacy. It seems like sometimes maybe he’s trying to make a like to censure or condemn certain aspects of like the old Germanic paganism, right? The the blood feud and the wear guild and all this different stuff. But he’s not he never comes out as far as like totally condemning it to end to this day. You know, students read the poem like if they really read the poems, half of them will come away thinking this is a celebration of these old heroic ideals. And the other half will come away thinking that he oh no, he’s condemning these things. Actually, he’s not really doing either. He is maybe kind of pointing out some of the problems. But also it’s clear that he’s passed the test of love that he loves the thing that he’s writing about. He loves the kind of story that he’s telling. And so he never he never comes out quite as like condemning the old ideal of northern courage, but maybe also ultimately says but this isn’t really it’s not enough. You’ve got to got to move on from this now. So it’s a really beautiful poem. And I think like I said, you know, I’ve given just a few examples here. There’s a lot more. And if some of the stuff is murky, I apologize to the audience. Some of the stuff is like, well, if you gave me two hours, or I could give you like 20 pages to read, then then then you know I could I could get you all the way there. But hopefully this will be enough to kind of tease connections for people. And they can start to see a way in which, you know, a lot of the stuff I’m saying is only groundbreaking in that. In the past when people have read the Beowulf poem, they come across things like sort of like a plurality of divine beings, you know, which you find at the beginning of the poem mentioned in the same breath as kind of this idea of a monotheistic biblical God. And this is the come across stuff like that and say, well, Christianity doesn’t have anything like this in it because they’re thinking in terms of modern Christianity or sometimes like really late medieval Catholic Roman Catholicism Christianity. And so they say, well, Christianity doesn’t have this terminology and it doesn’t have this vocabulary, it doesn’t have these ways of thinking about the world. So this has to be paganism that’s still like lurking somewhere in the poem. And if you believe that, then basically the poet doesn’t know what he’s doing because because then it’s just like a really bad stitch job. And my argument is that that’s not the case that the poet is actually a supremely careful and gifted poet. He’s striking this really delicate balance between, you know, paganism and Christianity, this apocryphal literature, the Old Testament scriptures, all those things come together beautifully in this poem. So if that sounds like your thing and you’d like to know more about it and specifically to hear the reading of Beowulf from this particular perspective, which really not a little. There’s scholarship out there, but as far as like in a classroom setting, you’re not going to get that pretty much anywhere. Set it for a class. Definitely. I mean, I definitely I want to be for sure. I want us to do it together if we can, because I find it very exciting. You know, I read Beowulf a long time ago and I remember exactly the problems that you’re saying, which is, you know, because you can’t it was hard. You read it in your 20s. You always start to read it with a commentary because it’s so difficult. And so you end up with that perception, which is that this is some. But I remember when the very first time I read it and I read this idea of description of of Cain and the Giants and the flood and thinking, you know what? I think this guy, he knew what he was doing. And so it’s like as we kind of understand more and more, you know, the mythological language of Christianity and we’re kind of rediscovering it. I think that that that it’s going to be clear and clear. So thanks. Thanks for doing the work, man. It’s just so amazing to have you. Thanks for having me. I like I said, I sometimes I come to the end of these things. I’m like, man, that was kind of muddled. And I hope people are able to kind of piece that all together because, you know, I’ve I mean, I literally this whole shelf right here to my right is about half just either commentaries on Beowulf or translations of it or like different versions of the original text. I mean, I just you know, for years and years I just collected the scholarship on the poem and deeply interested in it. And sometimes my my brain gets ahead of my mouth and, you know, I don’t say everything I intended to say, but hopefully this is a good introduction to the poem and people will check out the class. So, yeah, definitely. So everybody pay pay attention. And and of course, our discussion with Richard will continue. So thanks, Richard. All right. Thanks, Jonathan. This episode is part of a series of discussions I’ve had with Richard Roland on universal history. You can find a list of all these episodes on my YouTube channel, or you can find them also in my podcast stream from the symbolic world on your different podcast platforms. Make sure to check out Richard’s second podcast, which he hosts in collaboration with Father Andrew Damick called Amon Sule, which looks at the relationship between Tolkien and orthodoxy. This podcast has also inspired in me some ideas for creating some images, whether it be the king under the mountain, whether it be the grail or beautiful Ethiopian traditions. I’ve created some products which you can find on my store, the symbolic world dot store, and there will probably be more of those to come very soon. So stay tuned. This conversation is ongoing and there is still very much to explore in the universal history.