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<i>Ongitan</i> and the Possibility of Oral Seeing in <i>Beowulf</i>

2011; University of Texas Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tsl.2011.0010

1534-7303

Robin Waugh,

Travel Writing and Literature

Ongitan and the Possibility of Oral Seeing in Beowulf Robin Waugh Much scholarly work has been done already concerning the oral-traditional aspects of Beowulf; as the only Old Germanic heroic epic to come down to us almost complete, and as a fairly lengthy work containing recognizable formulas, it would seem to be the most likely candidate among compositions of its period for the detection of residual oral influences. Francis Magoun and others have discovered and touted various kinds of oral formulas in it (Magoun 446–67; Foley 204–39; Amodio 63–77; see also Orchard 85–99), while Jeff Opland has examined depictions of oral performances in the poem (192–207; see also Niles 31–32, 120–45). The giants’ sword hilt, looted from the sea cave of the Grendel family, has been put forward as a representation of a clash of literate and oral tradition, with several variant arguments concerning the supposed orality or literacy of Beowulf (e.g., Lerer 169–81; Near 320, 329). Nevertheless, turning the tables on supposed orality, or “oral thinking,” and examining instances of seeing in the poem produce some surprising results. Grendel’s mother, who unlike her son might be imagined to be literate because she has a text hanging on the wall of her lair1 (1557–62, 1687–98a; Acker 708–9; Near 323–25), never explicitly uses her sense of sight in the course of the poem. Grendel uses his sense of sight only once, though this instance is both elaborately described and extensively quoted in critical works as particularly demonstrative of his monstrous nature: during his last attack on the Danes, he enters the hall of Heorot with a fiery gleam in his eyes, sees the many warriors lying before him, and his mind laughs with joy at the prospect of a luxuriant feed upon human corpses (726b–34). During the section of Beowulf concerning Grendel’s mother, on the other hand, she simply onfunde, “discovered” Beowulf as an invader in her mere (1498a): many translations translate the term with something like “sensed” (Heaney, line 1499); it is possible that she does not see him at all. To complete this pattern of diminishing emphasis upon powers of seeing for the monsters, the dragon searches (2287–88a, 2293b–95) but never explicitly sees anything during Beowulf ’s description of this monster in the text as we have it—not even during the dragon fight, [End Page 338] when it seems to direct its attacks at Beowulf’s and Wiglaf’s voices (2550– 58; 2661–77a). Just like the mere-woman, the closest the dragon comes to seeing is when it onfand, “found” the tracks of a thief (2288b-89a), and onfand, “realized” that some man had been tampering with its hoard of gold (2300–2302). The obvious conclusion is that human characters in the poem are associated with acts of seeing and therefore with light, often associated in turn with intelligence, truth, and reasoning powers. The monsters, on the other hand—primitive, instinctual, and barely capable of intellectual processes such as planning—are associated by the poet, as critics have noted, with darkness (Wright 4–7). But the divisions between humans and monsters with regard to the senses in Beowulf are not so extreme or as simple as a light-darkness polarity suggests. Important distinctions between the Old English verbs for observation in the poem, particularly between ongitan and the other common ones such as starian, sceawian, and seon, demonstrate that there are oral aspects to acts of seeing—just as one might expect in a poem of oraltraditional origins. Through an examination of the uses of ongitan in the poem, I shall assess the possibility of meta-sensuous or multisensory acts in Beowulf, together with the possibility that such acts relate to a greater valuation of oral abilities as compared to visual ones in the time before the dominance of literacy in early medieval societies.2 To begin quite generally, it is easy to allegorize Grendel’s attack upon Heorot as an attack upon the Danes conceived as a speaking body. As Old English terms such as wordhord suggest, the Anglo-Saxons would seem to exemplify Walter Ong...