On Beowulf and Clergy

Which Beowulf should YOU read? - Three Editions Compared
Gavin the Medievalist | 23 Aug 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-mWVY-xc54

How old is Beowulf?
Gavin the Medievalist | 30 Aug 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY2sLgDGq04

5:59 If the Beowulf poet's native language wasn't (Old) English, the linguistic argument could be somewhat moot, right?

Because, Apollonius of Rhodes didn't speak and Old Ionic two centuries younger than Homer, he spoke Koiné, and learned Homeric Greek as a foreign language.

So, if for instance ex-Patriarch Photius, once he had retired to a monastery, learned the English to write Beowulf, he could pretty easily have learned it from texts that were two hundred years older, and imitated them much more successfully than an actual Englishman, given that 200 years is pretty close in language development, and avoiding intereference from one's own contemporary language would have been harder.

Meanwhile, Photius' own version of Koiné Greek (some 1000 years after Apollonius, but very attached to models like LXX and NT in his class) would not have interfered at all ... except, he could have used an objective genitive, unaware that this didn't exist in Old English.

soðfaestra dom ... based on purely English models, a scholar has argued, the poet spoke of Beowulf's subjective hope to be judged by true and steady men in posterity.

If Greek was the underlying language, the poet could actually have been arguing against what is now known as Feeneyism: Beowulf (ultimately) died in the hope of receiving the judgement bequeathed on the true and the steady, i e, we hope he was saved.

Even if this would not painting Geats as being quite as much in danger of damnation for being non-Christians, a) the danger could have increased in the meantime, because of Odinism presumed to not have been as prevalent in Beowulf's lifetime, b) it did inspire St. Sigfrid (the time for the Beowulf manuscript is a very good match for when St. Sigfrid came to Sweden:

In his hagiography, Saint Sigfrid of Sweden is problematically described as having held the office of Archbishop of York.[48] It is possible basis that Sigeferð of Lindsey could have been elected to that office in the late Spring of 1002, following the death of Archbishop Ealdwulf, but because of a call to evangelize Sweden, resigned before enthronement, whereupon Wulfstan, Bishop of London, took his place at York. One seeks in vain for an Archbishop of York signing English royal charters in the summer of 1002)

[Above comment disappeared]

Is Tolkien's Beowulf ANY GOOD? A Review by a Medievalist
Gavin the Medievalist | 12 Sept. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN4QkyTmtqE

[Links to the three essays given, but disappeared]

7:48 I would say, in the Ludwigslied, you do find a pretty chivalric atmosphere.

It's from the 880's so, while well after the "700 — 750" date, well before the actual manuscript.

The Inklings were themselves sure that Beowulf as much as Homer and Virgil dealt with warriors of an essentially chivalric tradition.

Confer the knights of the ... Carolingian ... table (in Aachen). A few decades before Lewis III of France or of West-Francia, with whom the Ludwigslied deals ...