![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This article explores areas of productive overlap in the respective fields of oral history and oral tradition, with particular focus on ways that both disciplines have enabled and encouraged engagement with premodern texts. Shared points of inquiry into the vexed concepts of truth, performance, and orality are explored in oral and oral-derived narratives of storytellers from medieval France, Anglo-Saxon England, and mid-twentieth-century Memphis, Tennessee. As an extended illustrative example of analysis drawing from a blended methodology, three versions of the “same” story are examined as they appear in the Old English epic Beowulf. Comparison with modern-day oral history accounts puts into sharp relief the ways that early medieval texts—texts produced in an era of new and emerging literacy—reflect very real patterns of oral narrative seen in interviews recorded quite recently.
The multidisciplinary exploration that follows frequently took me outside the comfort zone of my own specific areas of specialization. I am thus indebted to numerous friends and colleagues from other disciplines for their generosity in sharing knowledge, insights, and advice. In particular, I wish to thank Bill Schneider, Aaron Tate, Scott Garner, Chris Peterson, Brandy Brown, Heather Maring, and Suzanne Bonefas, as well as Editor-in-Chief Kathryn Nasstrom and the manuscript's two anonymous reviewers. All errors, of course, remain my own.
Notes
1 The title of this article is taken from the Lais of Marie de France (“Guigemar,” line 19). Translations of Marie de France are from Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby, trans. and intro., The Lais of Marie de France (London: Penguin Books, 1986). For an original-language edition of the entire work, see Jean Rychner, ed., Les Lais de Marie de France (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1968).
2 As working categories for purposes of this paper, I will be adopting definitions deployed by William Schneider at the 2014 Oral History Association Annual Meeting, at which he organized a special session bridging the two fields. In this session, titled “The Dynamics of Oral Tradition and the Craft of Oral History” (October 9, 2014, in Madison, Wisconsin), Schneider defined oral tradition as “the stories a group of people remember and tell, often to illustrate a point or emphasize a lesson,” stressing “the presence of a group of people who continue to tell the story and find that important to do” (e-mail to panelists, August 8, 2014). Oral history in this inherently flexible model refers to what is “recorded and in some ways cared for, for future retrieval and review.” As an overarching construct that encompasses stories within these two categories, Phyllis Morrow and William Schneider’s generative definition of oral narrative will also be utilized here: “Oral narrative refers to personal stories generated from the experiences of the teller as well as accounts that have been passed on from generation to generation, often referred to as myth, folktale, and legend.” Phyllis Morrow and William Schneider, eds., When Our Words Return: Writing, Hearing, and Remembering Oral Traditions of Alaska and the Yukon (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1995), 6n1.
3 She claims her identity as “Marie” in the opening of the lay Guigemar (line 3). In the Fables she asserts her origins in France, and she seems to have lived in England and Normandy. The specific appellation “Marie de France” is unattested until 1581. Burgess and Busby, Lais, 7.
4 Regarding the poem’s date, the more usual view has been for tenth-century production; for arguments of a later composition, see Helen Damico, Beowulf and the Grendel-kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2014).
5 Eddie Mae Hawkins, interviewed by James Lanier, Memphis, TN, June 6, 2006, Crossroads to Freedom Archive, online. http://www.crossroadstofreedom.org. Additionally, this interview can be viewed on the Crossroads to Freedom channel on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7E3-Al21XTJUw8zNiBY603A3xroF-2p4. For a description and evaluation of Crossroads to Freedom, see Joshua D. Farrington, “Media Review: Crossroads to Freedom,” Oral History Review 36, no. 2 (2009): 253-54.
6 Courtney Brown, “Oral History and the Oral Tradition of Black America: The Kinte Foundation,” Oral History Review 1 (1973): 26-28; David Henige, “Oral, but Oral What? The Nomenclatures of Orality and Their Implications,” Oral Tradition 3 (1988): 229-38. Oral Tradition was founded in 1986 by John Miles Foley.
7 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Henige, “Oral, but Oral What?,” 232.
8 Henige, “Oral, but Oral What?,” 231. See also Paul Thompson, who has noted that the “extensive modern use of the term ‘oral history’ is new, like the tape recorder… . But this does not mean that it has no past. In fact, oral history is as old as history itself. It was the first kind of history.” Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988), 22.
9 Henige, “Oral, but Oral What?,” 235.
10 Henige, “Oral, but Oral What?,” 236.
11 Amy Shuman, “Oral History,” Oral Tradition 18 (2003): 130-31. On Myerhoff’s work in particular, see, for example, Barbara Myerhoff, with Deena Metzger, Jay Ruby, and Virginia Tufte, in Marc Kaminsky, ed., Remembered Lives: The Work of Ritual, Storytelling, and Growing Older (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992) or her earlier and perhaps best-known work, Number Our Days (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979).
12 Shuman, “Oral History,” 130.
13 Shuman, “Oral History,” 130. Ten years later, in a 2013 Oral Tradition article by Laura Gauvin, we continued to see productive approaches linking oral tradition and oral history in an effort to understand the power of story and narrative, even in effecting social healing for trauma survivors. Based on her work in northern Uganda with displaced persons transitioning back to their homes in postconflict Acoliland, Gauvin uncovered ways that “oral tradition shapes social relations” in “life as it is actually lived.” Lara Rosenoff Gauvin, “In and Out of Culture: Okot p’Bitek’s Work and Social Repair in Post-Conflict Acoliland,” Oral Tradition 28 (2013): 36. See further Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” in The Oral History Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 32-42.
14 Michael K. Honey, “‘Sharecroppers’ Troubadour’: Can we Use Songs and Oral Poetry as Oral History?,” Oral History Review 41, no. 2 (2014): 217. Honey invited readers to consider how “songs and oral poetry pass on history, knowledge and cultural power,” not as direct voices of history but as a “‘way in’ to the emotional history of civil rights and labor struggles in the American South.” Honey, “‘Sharecroppers’ Troubadour,’” 218, 219. As we will see, recollections embedded within oral-derived works such as Beowulf can provide a similar “way in” to emotional truth.
15 See, for example, Alistair Thomson, “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History,” Oral History Review 34, no. 1 (2007): 57.
16 Alistair Thomson, “Anzac Memories Revisited: Trauma, Memory and Oral History,” Oral History Review 42, no. 1 (2015): 18.
17 Thomson, “Anzac Memories,” 22.
18 John Miles Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999), 23. Nouri Gana has noted metonymy as a particularly common literary device employed in narrative depicting trauma; see “Trauma Ties: Chiasmus and Community in Lebanese Civil War Literature,” in The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, ed. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone (London: Routledge, 2014), 79.
19 Here and throughout, I use the term trauma somewhat guardedly. The growing field of trauma studies has a fascinating and complex history of its own. As Michael Rothberg reminded readers in his preface to The Future of Trauma Theory, “Not all violence and suffering are best described by trauma,” and we should thus resist any “attempt to subsume all forms of violence, dislocation, and psychic pain under its categorical singularity.” Buelens, Durrant, and Eaglestone, The Future of Trauma Theory, xii-xiii. In their introduction to this volume, Buelens, Durrant, and Eaglestone asserted that “trauma theory is perhaps, at root, an attempt to trace the inexhaustible shapes both of human suffering and of our responses to that suffering.” Buelens, Durrant, and Eaglestone, The Future of Trauma Theory, 7. Of special importance to the present discussion of oral and oral-derived trauma narratives is the ultimately unbreachable gap between the lived experience of trauma and its verbal representation, what Cathy Caruth has called the “historical enigma betrayed by trauma.” Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 6. Such “enigmas” challenge and often subvert conventional notions of truth and historicity and call for alternative interpretive methodologies.
20 Even the phrasing, which echoes Paul Thompson’s The Voice of the Past, suggests links with groundbreaking work in oral history.
21 John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 48. It is important to remain aware, however, of not overstating such connections. As Foley went to great pains to convey, while certain poetic features may “signal a background in oral poetry … they don’t magically reveal the precise story behind any given text. In the case of Voices from the Past, we usually can’t say whether this or that poem was actually an oral performance. We just can’t confidently stretch things that far.” Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem, 48.
22 Applying this line of thinking to an Old English poem in which an oral singer named Widsith catalogues the failures and victories of generations of leaders, John Foley argued that “the Old English poet who composed Widsith was making oral history as well as oral poetry.” Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem, 28.
23 Dennis Tedlock, “Learning to Listen: Oral History as Poetry,” in Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History, 2nd ed., ed. Ronald J. Grele Ronald J. Grele (New York: Praeger, 1991), 106; originally published in Boundary 2 3 (1975): 707. In Tedlock’s transcription, bold type indicates a louder volume, and a line change indicates a brief pause, less than 1 second.
24 We must be very cautious about overstating any posited connections, however, especially for ancient texts; as Tom Pettitt astutely observed, we can never directly access the oral traditions from which our medieval texts derive. Tom Pettitt, “Textual to Oral: The Impact of Transmission,” in Oral History of the Middle Ages, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Michael Richter (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001), 20. Alexander Freund has also cautioned against “collapsing oral tradition, personal memory, and oral history.” Alexander Freund, “‘Confessing Animals’: Toward a Longue Durée History of the Oral History Interview,” Oral History Review 41, no. 1 (2014): 1-26. In a follow-up interview, Freund further warned against conflation of categories in “the broad label ‘storytelling.’” Troy Reeves and Caitlin Tyler-Richards, eds., “‘Confessing Animals,’ Redux: A Conversation between Alexander Freund and Erin Jessee,” Oral History Review 41, no. 2 (2014): 317, 322. In suggesting that a shared methodology can be productively applied across different kinds of oral and oral-derived narrative, we need not conflate the very different kinds of materials and resources across traditions, media, and time periods. On the contrary, careful employment of comparative approaches can potentially enable a richer appreciation of the diversity of oral narrative and a better understanding of each individual narrative on its own terms. See, for example, John Miles Foley’s discussion of “genre-dependence” and “tradition-dependence” in Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song (Berkley: University of California Press, 1990).
25 “Les contes ke jo sai verrais, / Dunt li Bretun unt fait les lais, / Vos conterai assez briefment./
El chief de cest comencement, / Sulunc la lettre e l'escriture, / Vos mosterai une aventure / Ki en Bretaigne la Menur / Avint al tens ancïenur” (“Guigemar,” lines 19-26).
26 Trans. Burgess and Busby, Lais, 60: “Issi avient cum dit vus ai,” line 311.
27 Trans. Burgess and Busby, Lais, 67: “Quant l'aventure fu seüe / Coment ele esteit avenue, / Le lai del Freisne en unt trové,” lines 515-17.
28 Trans. Burgess and Busby, Lais 72: “L'aventure ke avez oïe / veraie fu, n'en dutez mie,” lines 315-16.
29 Trans. Burgess and Busby, Lais 85: “issi avint cum dit vus ai; / li Bretun en firent un lai,” lines 243-44.
30 See, for example, Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature (Springfield, MA: Merriam Webster, 1995), 171.
31 It would of course be naïve to read Marie’s description as an uncomplicated reflection of the reality of the lays in actual performance contexts. As Howard Bloch compellingly argued, Marie “is among the most self-conscious, sophisticated, complicated, obscure, tricky, and disturbing figures of her time.” Bloch, The Anonymous Marie de France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 19. What is most important for the subject at hand is the ideal that Marie sets forth, an ideal that promises true insight through a merging of performed story and written history.
32 Trans. Burgess and Busby, Lais, 55: “Quë humm fait en harpe e en rote: / Bonë est a oïr la note,” lines 885-86.
33 Trans. Burgess and Busby, Lais, 108: “Issi fu li lais comenciez / E puis parfaiz e anunciez,” lines 231-32.
34 “Ke ne sunt pas del tut verais.” Trans. and text taken from Bloch, The Anonymous Marie de France, 13. The impulse of Marie de France to preserve the ancient lays in writing is one shared by many modern scholars in oral tradition and oral history. See further Logan E. Whalen, Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 55: “Faced with the potential threat of oblivion of the adventures in question, the Bretons composed a lai to assure their preservation,” and Marie herself continues the work “to guard against a loss of memory.”
35 Howard Bloch, for instance, persuasively argued that we “must renounce … certainty” with regard to her identity, origins, and social connections, because, in spite of being given a name and point of origin, “Marie de France comes as close as one can imagine to being anonymous.” Bloch, Anonymous Marie de France, 19, 7. Nonetheless, Marie’s depiction of this relationship between performance and history provides keen insight to the range of potentials in her own time. Bloch notes that “Marie de France was acutely aware not only of her role in the preservation of cultural memory but of the transforming effects of writing, and written poetry in particular, upon and within oral tradition.” Bloch, Anonymous Marie de France, 19. Like the identity of Marie herself, the claims of verity cannot be taken purely at face value. On notions of “truth” in Marie’s work, see Jeanette M. A. Beer, Narrative Conventions of Truth in the Middle Ages (Geneva: Droz, 1981). Beer aptly noted that “the assertion of truth was made in the most paradoxical of circumstances.” Beer, Narrative Conventions, 10. During Marie’s time “truth separated history from fable. History was the narration of events,” and “the eye-witnessing of events was the best source and the best guarantee of historical truth.” Beer, Narrative Conventions, 10. A similar situation emerged when Julie Cruikshank shared her experience of recording life histories of Yukon women, a project that she said began with “a very different model of life history” from her own. Her own expectation, she explained, had been to document the impact of specific events in Alaska’s history. However, the women’s accounts “included not only personal reminiscences of the kind we normally associate with autobiography, but detailed narratives elaborating mythological themes. Also embedded in their chronicles were songs, sometimes moving listeners to tears and other times to laughter.” The more Cruikshank tried to reign discussion in to personal remembrances, the more each woman “explained that these narratives were important to record as part of her life story.” Julie Cruikshank, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 2. While Marie de France is of course not relating life stories, she does blend legend, myth, and social history in similarly profound ways.
36 Stephen G. Nichols, “Marie de France’s Commonplaces,” in “Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature,” special issue, Yale French Studies, 1991: 134-148.
37 “Pur ceo començai a penser / D’aucune bone estoire faire / E de latin en romaunz traire; / Mais ne me fust guaires de pris: / Itant s’en sunt altre entremis,” lines 28-32.
38 “guaires de pris,” line 31.
39 “Des lais pensai, k’oïz aveie. / Ne dutai pas, bien le saveie, / Ke pur remambreance les firent / Des aventures k’il oïrent, / Cil ki primes les comencierent / E ki avant les enveierent. / Plusurs en ai oï conter, / Nes voil laissier ne oblier,” lines 33-40.
40 Trans., Burgess and Busby, Lais 41: “Rimé en ai e fait ditié, / Soventes fiez en ai veillié!” lines 40-41.
41 Trans., Burgess and Busby, Lais 110: “Pur la joie qu'il ot eüe / De s'amie qu'il ot veüe / E pur ceo k'il aveit escrit, / Si cum la reïne l'ot dit, / Pur les paroles remembrer, / Tristram, ki bien saveit harper, / En aveit fet un nuvel lai,” lines 107-13. Compare with the famous Tristran of the romance popularized as Tristan and Iseult in medieval French tradition and eventually memorialized in Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. On performance and Marie de France, see Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 1999). Vitz has noted that “Marie is heavily in debt to the tradition of oral story-telling and song” and that there is “much here that comes from folklore.” On her innovation of these themes, Vitz goes on to explain that “Marie’s way of using oral material is virtually always unexpected … hardly the attitude of a traditional storyteller.” Vitz, Orality and Performance, 43.
42 See, for example, Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001). Howe argued that Beowulf “may be read as a model to apprehend and interpret the historical process by which Anglo-Saxon culture was transformed from its origin in pagan Germania to its converted state in Christian England.” Howe, Migration and Mythmaking, 17. The poem, as a manifestation of the “myth of migration,” “demands that its audience venture back to the continent as missionaries.” Howe, Migration and Mythmaking, 177. See also Renée R. Trilling, who demonstrated ways that Beowulf “reminds readers of the fragile and complex link between history and memory.” She has noted that “the poet locates his story in a web of interrelated narrative, where historical figures like Hygelac exist alongside mythical ones like Sigemund, and the line between history and myth is deliberately blurred.” Renée R. Trilling, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 10, 13. For a more general discussion of Beowulf in relation to historical events, see R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds., Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), li-lxvii.
43 John D. Niles, “Reconceiving Beowulf: Poetry as Social Praxis,” College English 61, no. 2 (1998): 159.
44 Niles has argued that such stories of Old Germanic heroes produced and housed in monasteries “offered lessons in life to an aristocracy whose interests were not always served by education through the church,” members of the warrior class who felt more was needed than a conventional education through the church. Niles, “Reconceiving Beowulf,” 151.
45 Julie Cruikshank, “‘Pete’s Song’: Establishing Meanings through Story and Song,” in When Our Words Return, ed. Morrow and Schneider, 64.
46 “Þryðswyð beheold / mæg Higelaces, hu se manscaða / under færgripum gefaran wolde. / Ne þæt se aglæca yldan þohte, / ac he gefeng hraðe forman siðe / slæpendne rinc, slat unwearnum, / bat banlocan, blod edrum dranc, / synsnædum swealh; sona hæfde / unlyfigendes eal gefeormod, / fet ond folma. Forð near ætstop, / nam þa mid handa higeþihtigne / rinc on ræste; He hi(m) ræhte ongean, / feond mid folme; he onfeng hraþe … ,” lines 736-748. Translations are by R. M. Liuzza, Beowulf (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2000). Old English text from R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds., Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).
47 “Hwilum cyninges þegn, / guma gilphlæden, gidda gemyndig, / se ðe ealfela ealdgesegena / worn gemunde, word oþer fand / soðe gebunden; secg eft ongan / sið Beowulfes snyttrum styrian / ond on sped wrecan spel gerade, / wordum wrixlan,” lines 867-74.
48 “Welhwylc gecwæð / þæt he fram Sigemunde[s] secgan hyrde / ellendædum … ./ Sigemunde gesprong / æfter deaðdæge dom unlytel, / syþðan wiges heard wyrm acwealde, / hordes hyrde,” lines 874-77; 884-887. The parallel in the Nibelungenlied can be found in Burton Raffel, trans. Das Nibelungenlied: Song of the Nibelungs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 16. Interestingly, the version of the dragon-slaying in the Nibelungenlied is not a part of the main narrative, but instead is related as an inset story, shared by the noble vassal Hagen with the Burgundian brothers immediately before Sifried (who corresponds to Sigemund in Beowulf, Sigemund instead being the name assigned Sifried’s father) at their court. See Raffel, Das Nibelungenlied, 16. Such placement indicates the power of inset stories and vocalized memories in the medieval Germanic tradition more widely.
49 As Trilling has explained, through this poem-within-a-poem, the epic “depicts the use of heroic verse to commemorate a current event, to turn into history the deeds of a contemporary hero.” Trilling, Aesthetics of Nostalgia, 127.
50 “Þær wæs Hondscio hild onsæge, / feorhbealu fægum; he fyrmest læg, / gyrded cempa; him Grendel wearð, / mærum maguþegne to muðbonan, / leofes mannes lic eall forswealg. / No ðy ær ut ða gen idelhende / bona blodigtoð, bealewa gemyndig, / of ðam goldsele gongan wolde, / ac he mægnes rof min costode, / grapode gearofolm. Glof hangode / sid ond syllic, searobendum fæst; / sio wæs orðoncum eall gegyrwed / deofles cræftum ond dracan fellum. / He mec þær on innan unsynnigne, / dior dædfruma, gedon wolde / manigra sumne ,” lines 2076-2091. Regarding this most common translation of glove, unless we accept the possibility that Grendel’s hand is as huge as a large man’s body, the sense of glove in this context is implausible, though the possible hand/glove wordplay of “Hondscio” has been offered as a logical explanation. Because of the difficulties, as early as 1922 Fr. Klaeber proposed that glof “appears here in the unique sense of ‘bag.’” Fr. Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg (Boston, MA: Heath, 1922), 195. The most recent update to Klaeber’s edition (Fulk, Bjork, and Niles, eds.) offered the possibility with a bit more caution, indicating this secondary definition only within quotations marks and with a question mark: “glof, f., GLOVE, (pouch?),” Klaeber, Beowulf, 386. The various ways the term—as well as the surrounding scene—has been interpreted will be discussed in more depth below.
51 Liuzza, trans., Beowulf, 116.
52 John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem, 18, 101. See also Elsie Mather, “With a Vision Beyond our Immediate Needs: Oral Traditions in an Age of Literacy,” in Morrow and Schneider, eds., When Our Words Return, 13-26. Drawing examples from her own Yup’ik traditions, she has conveyed the appreciation for oral storytelling, noting that “part of this appreciation comes from the way these stories take on variation, depending on the experiences of the storyteller … . When stories are written down, they lose a kind of fluidity.” Mather, “With a Vision,” 15. In Mather’s view, it is not variation that presents problems but rather literacy itself, a phenomenon she refers to as a “monster” because of the “distance it puts between us and our sources.” Mather, “With a Vision,” 20.
53 Marilynn Desmond, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Tradition,” Oral Tradition 7 (1992): 276.
54 Jack Santino, Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 61.
55 Santino, Miles of Smiles, 61.
56 Porters Alan C. Speight, Fred Fair, and William Harrington, quoted in Santino, Miles of Smiles, 62.
57 Santino, Miles of Smiles , 63, as told by Homer Glenn, a porter from New York.
58 Santino, Miles of Smiles, 63. In making this point, Santino drew from oral-formulaic theory, out of which developed the concept of a “type-scene,” seen in the Marilynn Desmond’s discussion above. In particular, Santino cited Albert Lord’s Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), a foundational work within the field of oral tradition.
59 Dell Hymes, “Folklore’s Nature and the Sun’s Myth,” Journal of American Folklore 88 (1975): 345-69.
60 Susan M. Kim, “‘As I Once Did with Grendel’: Boasting and Nostalgia in Beowulf,” Modern Philology 103 (2005): 4-27.
61 Neil Gaiman explained, for instance, how the screenplay writers drew from this line of thinking in their conception of the 2007 Beowulf adaptation, directed by Robert Zemeckis: “It’s the concept of the unreliable narrator. So we liked the idea that … people can lie. Especially in these wonderful sagas where people are forever standing up and going, ‘I am Beowulf, and this is just what I did! I killed the mighty beast, and I killed the evil hag!’ We had enormous fun doing that, and still trying to play fair as if it was some kind of peculiar game that we were going to be playing with English professors all around the world.” Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, interviewed by Jeremy Smith, July 7, 2007, http://www.chud.com/11232/interview-neil-gaiman-and-roger-avary-beowulf/.
62 William Schneider, ed., Living with Stories: Telling, Re-Telling, and Remembering (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008), 11.
63 John Miles Foley, Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 124.
64 On the formalized oath, or beot, within the context of the Anglo-Saxon comitatus (lord with his loyal band of retainers) and its gradual loss of force within the poetic idiom across the post-Conquest period, see Mark Amodio, Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), especially the subsection titled “Lexical Loss and Oral Poetics: Beot’s Last Stand,” 146-56. Klaeber’s Beowulf offered the following note on the word beot: “The key term for the pledge is beot ‘heroic oath,’ a word that is mistranslated if taken to mean ‘boast.’” Fulk, Bjork, and Niles, Klaeber’s Beowulf, lxxiv. While it is less certain whether the beot would have been understood as unequivocally positive within Anglo-Saxon monastic culture, it is clearly a heroic act within the immediate narrative context of the poem itself.
65 Amodio, Writing the Oral Tradition, 156; Robin Barker’s “Seeing Wisely, Crying Wolf: A Cautionary Tale on the Euro-Yup’ik Border” powerfully speaks to this issue. Here Barker related how the story, “How Crane Got His Blue Eyes,” told by Maggie Lind, was often understood by Euro-American audiences as a fable parallel to the “Boy Who Cried Wolf,” encouraging truthfulness. In the context of Yupik tradition, however, Barker concluded that the story was “not about lying… . Instead, it is about vision and the importance of using one’s senses wisely.” Barker, “Seeing Wisely, Crying Wolf,” in When Our Words Return, ed. Morrow and Schneider, 89. Even though Beowulf and other oral-derived medieval texts develop out of a shared linguistic heritage, it is still important to see any interpretation of the work as a cross-cultural reading, allowing for significant differences in meaning based on cultural context.
66 E. D. Laborde, “Grendel’s Glove and His Immunity from Weapons,” Modern Language Review 18 (1923): 202.
67 Seth Lerer, “Grendel’s Glof,” ELH 61 (1994): 721-51. See also Latin analogues proposed by Earl R. Anderson, “Grendel’s Glof (Beowulf 2085b-88) and Various Latin Analogues,” Medievalia 8 (1982): 1-8.
68 Lerer, “Grendel’s Glof,” 722, 742.
69 Andrew M. Pfrenger, “Grendel’s Glof: Beowulf line 2085 Reconsidered,” Philological Quarterly 87 (2008): 209-235. This reading seems quite natural, given the Anglo-Saxons’ obvious interest in metaphor seen in such texts as the Anglo-Saxon riddles, where objects in nature are frequently described in terms of man-made items—river water rendered as the “hall” of a fish, the membranes clinging to the inside of recently hatched eggs described as garments hanging from a wall. For translations of the riddles, see Craig Williamson, trans. A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle Songs. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982) and the Old English texts in The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. Craig Williamson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977).
70 Elsie Mather, “With a Vision Beyond Our Own Immediate Needs,” 15.
71 Howell D. Chickering Jr., trans. and intro., Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition, (New York: Anchor Books [1977] 2006), 16; Alain Renoir, “Point of View and Design for Terror in Beowulf,” in The Beowulf Poet, ed. Donald K. Fry, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 166.
72 Jack Lule. Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 81, 93-94; New York Times, May 26, 1998, C1; New York Times, August 18, 1998, C1; New York Times, July 1, 1998, C2; New York Times, September 25, 1998, D2.
73 I would like to note that the connections that follow did not result from careful searching and selection; rather, I noticed the parallels quite accidentally when I happened to be teaching Beowulf and this interview on the same day in two very different classes, quite surprised to realize that the two narratives—as stories of human trauma narrated by firsthand participants—shared important and telling features. The Crossroads to Freedom oral history archive was part of a unit on Memphis Civil Rights in an “Oral History and Oral Tradition” writing seminar, and I was teaching Beowulf as part of a course on Old English language and literature. I am grateful to the students in these courses—both taught in Fall 2014—for sharing their insights on these important narratives.
74 On the “unrepresentability” of trauma, for instance, see Yvonne Sabine Unnold, Representing the Unrepresentable: Literature of Trauma under Pinochet in Chile (Pieterlen, Switzerland: P. Lang, 2002). As Nouri Gana has suggested, the frequent use in trauma narratives of such tropes as metaphor and metonymy—which by their very nature offer only indirect access to narrated events—arises in part because the immediate perception of trauma is often fragmentary and cannot be wholly “experienced during its actual occurrence”; thus, much of the experience becomes perceptible “only belatedly and through the work of remembering,” Gana, “Trauma Ties,” 81.
75 Chickering, Beowulf, 17.
76 Julie Cruikshank, in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 14.
77 Alessandro Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” History Workshop Journal 12 (1981): 99. See also Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” in The Oral History Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Routledge, 2006), 32-42.
78 Portelli, “Peculiarities,” 99.
79 Portelli, “Peculiarities,” 100.
80 She explains her journey as follows: “But that was the first time I had ever been in, really involved… . I just never thought it would come to that kind of stuff, you know? That somebody would get killed.” Hawkins, interview, Part 9.
81 Lanier was interviewed regarding his own experiences during the 1960s and 70s. James Lanier, interviewed by Katherine Pennington, Memphis, TN, April 17, 2006, Crossroads to Freedom Archive, online, http://www.crossroadstofreedom.org. Lanier taught courses in Southern history and twentieth-century United States cultural and intellectual history, and he brought to his interview with Hawkins factual information that she sometimes had trouble recalling.
82 Steve Estes, I am a Man!: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 131.
83 The Memphis World was a leading African American newspaper, published from 1931 to 1973.
84 “Strike Settlement Sought,” Memphis World, April 6, 1968, 1. http://www.crossroadstofreedom.org/view.player?pid=rds:4844.
85 “Strike Settlement Sought,” 1.
86 “A Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Memphis World April 27, 1968, 4. http://www.crossroadstofreedom.org/view.player?pid=rds:7150. While the scop in Beowulf does not make explicit reference to the hero Sigemund’s lineage, within the larger Germanic tradition this dragon-slayer ultimately descends from Odin himself. In the Saga of the Volsungs, the dragon-slaying Sigurd (who corresponds to Sigemund in Beowulf) is said to descend from Sigi, who “was the son of Odin.” Jesse L. Byock, trans., The Saga of the Volsungs (Penguin, 2000).
87 Lule, Daily News, 6.
88 Lule, Daily News, 7. It is important to remain aware that this mythologizing does not always function to reinforce positive ideals but can serve grim purposes as well. Alessandro Portelli’s work on the “creation and function of myth” during the Nazi occupation of Rome demonstrated ways that “public memory manipulates the events into contrasting morality tales… . Indeed, one story is openly pitted against the other: myths do not live in isolation but combine in systems and structures.” “Myth and Morality in the History of the Italian Resistance: the Hero of Palidoro,” History Workshop Journal 74 (2012): 212.
89 “More Tributes to Dr. King,” Memphis World, April 20, 1968, 3.
90 “Marchers Move into Houses,” Memphis World, May 18, 1968, 4.
91 “King’s Widow Addresses Rally,” Memphis World, June 28, 1968, 3.
92 The sections quoted here can be found in Hawkins, interview, Part 6.
93 Hawkins, interview, Part 6. Hawkins is referring here to a march led by King, originally scheduled in collaboration with the AFSCME (American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees) for March 22 but cancelled due to record snowstorms and rescheduled for March 28.
94 Hawkins, interview, Part 2. Though Hawkins did not always recall dates, she frequently described memorable episodes in her life in relation to these very events: “I moved to LeMoyne Gardens after the assassination” (Hawkins, interview, Part 2); “After the assassination, that [activity on Beale Street] all just, look like, kind of disappeared” (Hawkins, interview, Part 3); “After the assassination of King, the hotel business sort of went down too” (Hawkins, interview, Part 11). While Lanier did not march on March 28, he followed events closely and did participate in the civil rights demonstration following King’s assassination. He described these experiences in his own Crossroads interview, which showed the trauma from yet another perspective: “It was a memorial march to him [King], and the National Guard was there in very obvious ways; there were tanks at every street corner; there were guys and weapons on the top of every building at all the corners,” (Lanier, interview, Part 2). Later in the interview Lanier shared his fears in participating in the march as a new junior faculty member and his admiration for his dean, who also attended this demonstration (Lanier, interview, Part 5). From these experiences and his own study of the period, he was able to relate to Hawkins and also supplement her incomplete recollection of dates.
95 Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 10.
96 Caruth, Trauma, 10 (italics in original).
97 Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 1992.
98 Thompson, “The Voice of the Past,” 21.
99 Thompson, “The Voice of the Past,” 28.