Date of Award

2011

Type

Thesis

Major

English Language and Literature - Literature Concentration

Degree Type

Bachelor of Arts in English Literature

Department

English

Abstract

Old English religious verse - born out of a productive fusion between pre-existing Germanic ideals and Christian value-systems brought to England at the end of the sixth century - grapples energetically with the question of how people ought to live morally upright lives pleasing to God. In Beowulf, Judith, Juliana, and The Dream of the Rood, a model for the believer/God relationship is constructed from a common pattern of the Germanic thane/lord relationship, but, like garments cut from the same cloth by different tailors, each poem crafts its subject differently. Still, each is constructed around a core conception of the relationship in which the heroic believer must independently merit God's favour and in which God must obtain a worthy believer in order for either to succeed in accomplishing their shared goals.

Investigating this connection provides valuable insight into the most important aspect of medieval English society: how people viewed (or wanted to view) themselves. Little is known about religious belief and practice in England before its Christianization because the church men who held a monopoly on writing were uninterested in preserving documents detailing the preChristian ideas that they were attempting to supplant. However, the evangelists of England did not attempt to convince converts to abandon their value-systems entirely, but rather to merge them with Christian teachings. This means that the clues the poems provide not only pertain to the pre-Christian and Christian eras, but also present a fascinating picture of a society in flux. As values were changing with the rise of Christianity, the most durable of the old and new ideas fused to create the model-figure who features prominently in spiritual-heroic didactic verse. As literature (supported and preserved by the church) was seen as a medium to instruct readers as Ross 2 well as to entertain them, it is unsurprising that we find many tales of boldly pious warriors whose physical and spiritual courage and strength of character enable them to do literal as well as figurative battle with the forces of evil. What is surprising is the depth of the connection between the secular, heroic, physical, Germanic values and the religious, God-dependent, spiritual, Christian values that jointly inform the character of the model English believer. This figure's agency is intimately connected with God's in a mutually dependent thane/lord relationship that depends on the possibility of shared defeat as well as victory.

Comments

Honors Thesis

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