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MemorabiliaTVO. 3 of Volume 51 of The Journal of thex ^ Friends' Historical Society (1967) con-tains an interesting address by Charles F.Carter, President of the Society, on " Un-settled Friends". Mr. Carter suggests thatin the later seventeenth century QuakerMeetings were accepting some of the stan-dards of the 1662 Act of Settlement asguidance in giving charity to Friends; andthat " some practical hard 'bargaining " re-sulted " about where the membership cameto rest". " The Removeal of poor friendsfrom one place to another " and the issueof certificates for those desiring to movewere a consequence of this attitude. Anarticle by Douglas G. Lister, " Shorthand asa Seventeenth-Century Quaker Tool" sur-veys the use of early shorthand systems byFriends. There are also articles by AlfredW. Braithwaite on " George Fox's Last Im-prisonment" in 1673-5, by William H.Marwick on " The Glasgow Study Circle "between the two World Wars, and a list of" Meeting Houses and Meetings Settled"between 1688 and 1791, compiled by DavidM. Butler. CHRISTOPHER HILL.

A Blackmore Society is 'being founded,on the occasion of the centenary of LornaDoone (1869). Details from 24 LinhopeStreet, Clarence Gate, London, N.W.I.

The February issue will be principallyconcerned with the early nineteenth century.

NotesTHE FAIRY-TALE STRUCTURE

OF "BEOWULF"TN his book The Singer of Tales A. B. Lord

makes a statement which, though un-deniably true, has since proved a stumbling-block to many applications of the oral-formulaic theory of composition, especiallyin the field of Old English studies. Hewrites:

Formulas and groups of formulas, bothlarge and small, Serve only one purpose.They provide a means for telling a story

in song and verse. The tale's the thing.1Although some fifteen years ago Francis P.Magoun made clear the presence of oralformulae in Old English verse,2 and al-though his article has been followed byseveral others3 which supplement and extendour knowledge of formulaic elements in OldEnglish, attempts to progress from theverbal level to the level of narrative havehad less success than might have beenhoped.

The intermediate stage of conventionalscenes has attracted some attention. In arecent article in Neophilologus4 Donald K.Fry sums up earlier work on the subject of" themes and type-scenes ", and indicatesthe confusion present even in nomenclature.However, at the end his definition of atheme can only be:

a recurring concatenation of details andideas, not restricted 'by a specific event,verbatim repetition, or certain formulas,which forms an underlying structure foran action or description,

a definition which, though judicious, consistslargely of stating what we are not entitledto look for. Of course, examples of thekind of concatenation meant have beengiven, from Lord's own " arming of thehero", (Singer, pp. 87-91), to Crowne's" the hero on the beach ",3 Greenfield's" exile ",6 and the " beasts of battle " studiedby Magoun and Adrien Bonjour.7 But even

1 Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (HarvardStudies in Comparative Literature, XXIV) 1960,referred to hereafter as Singer. The quotationforms the first paragraph of ch. iv, " The Theme ",p. 68.

2 Francis P. Magoun Jr., " The Oral-FormulaicCharacter of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry",Speculum, xxviii (1953), pp. 446-67.

3 Three important ones are: Robert E. Diamond," The Diction of the Signed Poems of Cynewulf ",P.Q., xxxviii (1958), pp. 228-41: Robert P. Creed," The Making of an Anglo-Saxon Poem ", E.L.H.,xxvi (1959), pp. 445-55: Jackson J. Campbell," Oral Poetry in the Seafarer", Speculum, xxxv(1960), pp. 87-96.

4 Donald K. Fry, " Old English FormulaicThemes and Type-Scenes", Neophilologus, lii(1968), pp. 48-54.

5 David Crowne, "The Hero on the Beach: anExample of Composition by Theme in Anglo-Saxon Poetry", Neuphilologische Milteilungen, lxi(1960), pp. 362-72.

'Stanley B. Greenfield, "Formulaic Expressionof the Theme of Exile in Anglo-Saxon Poetry",Speculum, xxx (1955), pp. 200-206.

7 Francis P. Magoun, " The Theme of the Beastsof Battle in Anglo-Saxon Poetry ", M.P., lvi (1955),pp. 81-90, and Adrien Bonjour, "Beowulf and the

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January, 1969 NOTES AND QUERIESthese studies have their limitations. Clearlyno narrative could be composed by merelyassembling meditative or descriptive scenesof this kind. Some other force must comeinto operation, using " themes and type-scenes " in the same way as the themesthemselves use verbal formulae, flexibly,allowing great variation, but still helping thesinger—or writer—-by limiting an otherwiseunmanageable number of decisions. It isnoteworthy that Lord himself has labelledthis force " a tension of essences ", (Singer,p. 97), and has attempted to elaborate theidea by describing the events surroundingthe voyages of Beowulf and Odysseus.8 Theattempt is not wholly successful, primarily,one feels, because the two series are in facttoo closely parallel, leaving little room forthat variation, not on a memorized original,but on an unconscious pattern, whichcharacterizes all levels of formulaic compo-sition, verbal, scenic, or narrative.

Admittedly it is not surprising that wehave been able to discover little of the pat-terns of Old English narrative, in view ofthe paucity of our sources. A certainamount can foe done by paralleling minorpieces, as R. W. V. Elliott does with Maldonand the Hildebrandslied;' but, leaving asidethe religious works, the main target can only•be Beowulf. It is the purpose of this paperto suggest that critics of Old English canusefully borrow a • method of descriptionfrom another field of study, where materialsare much more numerous, and can thenapply it successfully to Beowulf, with resultswhich, firstly, give some idea of the un-known sources of the epic, and secondly,help us to see something of the unconsciousconditioning of the poet's mind, and of hispredecessors', on the level of narrative.

The 'basic work to which I wish to referis a long article by a Russian scholar,Vladimir Propp, first published in 1928 andcalled Morfologija Skazki, "The Mor-phology of the Folk-tale". Though thisstudy has attracted a certain amount ofattention in the West, and has been trans-Beasts of Battle", P.M.L.A., Ixii (1957), pp. 563-

8 Albert B. Lord, " Beowulf and Odysseus",Mediaeval and Linguistic Studies in Honor ofFrancis P. Magoun Jr., edd. Jess B. Bessinger Jr.and Robert P. Creed, London 1965 (published inNew York 1965 as Franciplegius), pp. 86-92.

» Ralph W. V. Elliott, " Byrhtnoth and Hilde-brand: a Study in Heroic Technique ", Comp. Lit.,

. xiv (1962), pp. 53-70.

lated into English,10 its methods haveseemed more suitable to anthropologists11

or to students of African material12 than tothose concerned with Old English. Yet thevery title of the work indicates that it hassome bearing on our problem.

Propp's first, and basic point is that it isa mistake to try to analyse fairy-tales, orfolk-tales, from the standpoint of motifs, ashas been done most determinedly by theschool of Aantti Aarne. The tales changetheir characters and settings too easily. Iftwo similar tales are told with, in one ver-sion, a bear as the villain, and, in another,the Devil, are we then entitled to call themdifferent stories? Or if it is agreed that thetwo are similar, how are we to take themany stories which involve, e.g. a king giv-ing an eagle to a hero, a sorcerer giving alittle boat to Ivan, an old man giving a horseto Sucenko, the gift, in each case, carryingthe recipient off to another kingdom?Everyone can recognize that there is some-thing similar about these parts of a story,tout any conventional classification finds ithard to express the common ingredients anddegree of common relationship. This, Proppinsists, is why we need a " morphology ",a scheme which concerns itself with thelimits of a form rather than with individualexamples; and his insistence surely reflectsthe situation in the study of themes informulaic epics, where there are persistent,nagging similarities, but where there is nopossibility of defining one single " con-catenation of ideas " or of explaining whatit is that holds them together, and where,moreover, the very attempt to do this in-volves the risk of falling into what Lord{Singer, p. 101) called " our greatest error ",i.e. " to attempt to make ' scientifically'rigid a phenomenon that is fluid ".

As soon as he begins to set out his schemeof analysis Propp makes it clear that he isnot going to be trapped in that way. Herejects the tempting clarity of the characters,

10 Vladimir Propp, " The Morphology of theFolk-tale", ed. S. Pirkova Jacobsen, trans. L. Scott,Int. Journal of American Linguistics, xxiv (1958),No. 4. part in. This translation has been usedthroughout.

11 See C. Levi-Strauss, Anthropologie Structural,Paris 1958, pp. 227-55, where the story of Oedipusis treated in a " mythemic " way, though Propp isnot cited.

12 Jan Vansina, De la Tradition Orale, Tervuren1961. Propp is cited on p. 56, in the explanationof a Burundi story.

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the " dramatis personae" themselves, fortheir very ease of definition makes it asimple matter for any narrator to replaceone figure by another. He stresses also thateven actions are not significant in them-selves, tout only in their context, resisting thetemptation to pull out " plums" of indi-vidual occurrences, as, perhaps, Old Englishscholars have not done. The real 'basis ofhis scheme is " the functions of the dramatispersonae ", what the characters actually per-form, expressed for the most part byabstract nouns.13 These acquire stabilityonly in sequence, showing the folk-tale tobe essentially an indivisible unit, a wave-form denned by real but indivisible forces,not a construction consisting of units to beadded or subtracted. As a result, the bestway of defining " functions " is to list themin order, or to use them to look at examples,as Propp does with the first hundred talesof Afanasev's Russian collection. But be-fore they are listed, and before they are thenapplied, as an example, to Beowulf, it maybe as well to mention briefly the conclusionswhich Propp draws from his study. Theyare:

1. " Functions serve as stable, constantelements in folk-tales, independent of whoperforms them, and how they are fulfilledby the dramatis personae. They constitutethe components of a folk-tale."

2. " The number of functions known inthe fairy-tale is limited." (About thirty.)

3. " The sequence of functions is alwaysidentical" (though some functions may bemissed out). And therefore:

4. " All fairy-tales, by their structure, be-long to one and the same type."The last conclusion especially seems amaz-ing. But it is not dissimilar to the claimof the oral-formulaic theorist, that no songis the property of any man, and that alloral epics in the same language belong, bytheir technique, to one and the same type.In this way also " functions " seem to re-late to the narratives of oral tales, and Iwould suggest of oral epics, very much asoral formulae do to the half-lines or hexa-meters of those epics.

13 One might note here the difficulty which M.Rychner, has, and which Donald K. Fry mentionsin the article cited, in defining the " motif ". M.Rychner also goes so far as to use at least oneabstraction, " ingratitude royale", correspondingperhaps to parts of Propp's " function" O, un-recognized return of the hero.

The " functions" of the Russian fairy-tale can, then, be listed in the followingorder, with the appropriate sigla attached tothem by Propp. (It should be rememberedthat this paragraph is a summary of some36 pages in the original study, without ex-amples, and with no mention of some com-plicating factors.) The story begins •with anintroduction to the members of a family (a),one of whose members is absent (j3). Aninterdiction is placed on the hero iy), whichhe violates (8); or else an order is given andcarried out (y & again). The villain thenappears (e), gets information about his vic-tim (0, and attempts to deceive him («/). Thevictim unwittingly helps his enemy (0). Thevillain then begins the main action by injur-ing some member of the family (A).11 Thehero is then informed (B), decides tohelp (C), and sets out ( t ) . He then meetsanother character, the " donor " who testshim, talks to him or attacks him (D), in aseries of events designed to lead up to theproduction of a magical agent. The heroreacts, favourably or unfavourably, rightlyor wrongly (E), and gains, or fails to gain,magical assistance (F).15 The hero somehowreaches his object of search (G), andstruggles with the villain (H). The hero ismarked (J), but the villain is defeated (I),and the original harm is undone (K). Thehero returns ( I ) , but is pursued (Pr) andrescued (Rs). There the story may stop; orit may begin again, with a new action, per-haps consequent on the unrecognized arrivalhome (O). A further half-dozen " func-tions " are listed, covering such matters asthe possible recognition of the hero, (see J),the replacement of a fight with the villainby the carrying out of a difficult task, andthe complications caused by having a falsehero as well as a true one. But the permu-tations of these do not need to toe dealt with.The nature of the " functions " should toereasonably clear already, and it should alsobe apparent that a framework of this type,though limiting, still allows very great varia-tion of characters and settings at everystage, permitting any story-teller free scope

14 This is one possible start. Another (a) occurswhen a member of the family feels some over-powering need, hunger, thirst, love, etc. Theaction then continues in the same way. There aretwo or three other alternative lines of development,which have been omitted.

15 Propp shows that D, E, F are in fart asequence, and that to accept one form of D is,naturally, to rule out several variants of E and F.

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for skill and invention, a liberty of which,one might add, Afanasev's tales make gooduse.

It remains to apply the scheme of the" functions " to Beowulf. In doing this, itseems that one goes through three stages.Firstly, admiring the elegance of Propp'ssolution of the structural problem, onemight consider that a system of the kind heindicates would toe valuable, though a dif-ferent system of actions would need to toeworked out, perhaps by comparison withsuch other Old English material as we have,in the same way as has been done for verbalformulae. Secondly, some of the particularmotifs cited by Propp toegin to look familiar.

Bear's Son in its many forms. Still, Propp'sexplanation, with its curious similarity tothe principles of oral-formulaic composi-tion, does help us to recognize how evenThe Bear's Son could last, as a recognizablestory, for so long and over so great an area.Moreover, the " functional " structure castslight on some anomalous features which donot emerge from Panzer.

I propose, therefore, to set out a descrip-tion of Beowulf in Propp's sigla, which,though as yet unclear, may at least make•more vivid the complexity of the plot andsuggest that we are not dealing with achance accretion of motifs; and then to re-late these letters to the actions for whichthey stand.

y" 82 A14r D 2 E2 pos.

B3 C f 1 D 2 E2 pos.U>2 E2 pos.

Gs

G3 D2 E2 neg

Y?A"[Pr4?Rs8T B1 C fA18 Bs C f

. [Fj H> I1 [R] G' \I 7

F? GsF1 H1 I1

H1 I1K4

K4 neg.

Thus, he comments on the strange pros-perity which often serves as a prelude and acause of the first misfortune, and one thinksof the early luck of Hrothgar:

I>a waes Hroj'gare heresped gyfen,wiges weorSmynd, pset him his winemagasgeorne hyrdon, o8S ("set seo geogoS geweox,magodriht micel. (64-7)16

Only as a third stag'e does one come torealize that in fact the whole of Beowulf canbe set out in the sigla of the " functions ",in the right sequence, and without selectionof particular incidents. Yet this appears tobe so. It is true that all the " disgressive "material and all the elegiac or moralisticmaterial remains uncovered, so that nojustice is done to the poem's thematic com-plexity; tout it can still toe said that, in spiteof its vast geographical and historical dis-tance from the Russian tales, Beowulf, by itsstructure, 'belongs to their type. At thisstage one could argue that by reading Proppone does no more, indeed rather less, thanby reading Friedrich Panzer,17 who demon-strated long ago the resemblance of Beo-wulf to a particular fairy-tale, that of The

18 All quotations and line-numbers are fromBeowulf, ed. Fr. Klaeber, 3rd edition, Boston 1950.

17 Friedrich Panzer, Studien zur germanischenSagengeschichte, I " Beowulf ", Munich 1910.

(The numbers by some of the letters arethose used by Propp to indicate particularmotifs, though he agrees that these are un-stable and can toe multiplied almost in-definitely; the boxes show apparent " trans-ference " of functions.)

To go through the description: in theGreek letters at the start, one sees three ofthe seven possible " functions' of the fairy-tale's introductory action. P is the functionof " absence ". The parents are at work,the king goes off to fight or the merchant totrade, and while they are absent, harm fallson their families. A normal development is" absence and death ". It is characteristicof the fairy-tale to have a widow's son as ahero, or else a child who has only a step-mother. Is this what we have in the Scyldepisode? For not only does this describe afuneral, it also stresses physical departurein the drifting out of the tooat, {lines 48-9),so that a sense of loss and abandonmenthangs over the poem from then on. Earlycomplaints of the irrelevancy of the pas-sage1* at least indicate its peculiarity. Andthe convincing statement of its artistic andsymbolic links with the rest of the poem,

11 Henry Bradley, article on Beowulf in Encyclo-paedia Britannica, Vol. Ill, 1910, pp. 758-61, alsocited by Bonjour below.

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by Adrien Bonjour,1* perhaps makes it evenstranger. For the extraordinary obliquityof the approach to the main action, begin-ning with a dead king, tracing out his de-scendants, flashing for a moment to themonster that haunts one of them, and onlythen bringing in a (for the moment name-less) hero, makes even Virgil appear almostunsophisticated. Could this complexity bethe result of invention alone, with no modelof any kind? It is at least possible thatthough the poet makes good use of the factthat this is Scyld who is dispatched, founderof an ill-fated dynasty, he in fact began withthe need for a departure of any kind, andonly then hit on the brilliant idea of choos-ing someone more useful thematically thanBeowulf's father—though he, Ecgtheow, ismentioned three times, and we are told thathe is dead.

y and 8 stand for an interdiction and itsbreach; or else for an order and its carryingout. Again one of the characteristic ele-ments in fairy-tales is the giving ofapparently purposeless orders, and theautomatically disastrous responses. Onerarely know why the servant should notlook in the king's dish, or why the mothermust be 'buried under the juniper-tree, andprobably no reason is ever given. Butwhether the order is " Do this " or " Donot do that", one knows that some actionwill be taken, and that it will come to noimmediate good. In Beowulf the strangeorder is of course Hrothgar's sudden de-cision to build a hall, duly carried out byhis subjects, and coming immediately afterthe statement of his greatest prosperity,(lines 64-79). No reason is ever given forthis. Admittedly the idea is not unreason-able; but it has not 'been sufficiently re-marked that it is this order which precipi-tates the whole action. Grendel's hostility isaroused by Heorot, and, as far as we know,by Heorot alone. The poet gives, perhaps,two hints at a reason, one in the very faintsuggestion of Hrothgar's pride in lines 69-70, and one in the beautiful passage of theminstrel's song of Creation in lines 90-98,where an elemental opposition seems to beset up between the world of the hall andthe lurking monster in the darkness. Butthis could again 'be a brilliant afterthought

"Adrien Bonjour, The Digressions in Beowulf(Medium Aevum Monographs No. V), Oxford1950, pp. 1-11.

or reworking, glossing over the essentialirrelevancy of the fairy-tale.

The " functions " surrounding the villain'sfirst reconaissance are then missed out, forBeowulf goes straight on to the first overtaction, the " act of villainy" (A) whichbegins the story proper. Grendel's killingof the thirty thanes is in one way atypicalof the fairy-tale for in most examples begunby a hostile act20 there is a stress on theftrather than murder. The villain carries offsomething or somebody, who has to besought out and recovered, and if anyone iskilled, as Propp remarks, it is " usually acomponent of other kinds of villainous actsor crimes, and serves to intensify them".Murder, on the other hand, receives grue-some emphasis in Beowulf, with the simplemotive of cannibalism, and there is no sug-gestion that the dead thanes will be re-covered. Still, it is the more striking that,as the story is retold by Beowulf to Hygelacin lines 2069-2100, the hero speaks of themysterious glof of Grendel, in which victimsare carried off. It has been noticed before81

that the troll's glove is a folk-tale property,and, though the poet uses it only to enlivena thrice-told tale, it may be that there is atleast some hint of a version in which thebasis of the action was kidnapping ratherthan murder, even though the grave andrationalistic leanings of epic poetry havetransformed desire for profit on both sidesinto simple hatred on the one, and a nobledesire for glory and revenge on the other.

" Functions" B, C, and t , are of lessinterest, covering the informing of the hero,his response and departure, lines 194-228 ofthe poem. The only faintly curious feature,apart from the remarkable postponing ofthe hero's entry, is the double mention ofthe snotere ceorlas in lines 202 and 416, whodo not object to Beowulfs journey. Shouldthey object? If not, it seems a slightlyroundabout way of expressing the hero'spopularity, and may reflect either the par-ental blessing given to the adventurer, or,more possibly, parental disapproval, whichthe poet knows of, but feels obliged to re-fute, rather like his hero's ingloriousyouth."

2 0 Stories can also be begun by a " need ", seefn. 14. In that case the hero's motive is even moreclearly to gain something, rather than to regain it.

2 1 E. D . Laborde, " Grendel's Glove and hisImmunity from Weapons", MJLJi., xviii (1923),pp. 202-4.

" Mentioned in lines 2183-88, a tantalizing

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that cannot be explained in " functional"terms, there has also been nothing generallyagreed to toe inexplicable in any other way.But we come, after this, to a long sectionof the poem containing several featureswhich still demand an explanation in termsof narrative.

To toegin with, there is the approach ofthe hero to his field of tattle, againstrangely long drawn-out. Beowulf ischallenged, first toy the coastguard (lines237-57), then by Wulfgar the herald (333-39), and finally recognized by Hrothgar him-self (372-89). In every encounter he answerspolitely, and in the first two he receives guid-ance to Hrothgar and Heorot itself. Thesepassages of dialogue and description couldquickly 'become tedious, as Beowulf ischallenged twice in rather similar terms,introduces himself twice, and is twice dis-cussed, with his father, by Hrothgar. It iseven possible that the poet realized this andtried to palliate it by the gradual unfoldingof Ecgtheow's career, by the delay over thehero's name, and the comparatively shortresponse to Wulfgar. But still, what are allthese passages for? They have no very clearuse in the poem, and occupy more than 250lines (229-490)."

Even more in need of an explanation isthe often-mentioned challenge delivered byUnferth the pyle and replied to by Beowulf,which takes up a further hundred lines (499-606). It seems at first sight to toe unjusti-fiably arrogant, and this in itself has pro-duced several diverse theories. Bonjour andKlaeber suggest, with, as in the Scyld epi-sode, a certain reliance on psychologicalcomplexity, that the challenge leads up to

reference in itself, but long since recognized tohave a connection with the traditional laziness orclumsiness of the Bear's Son. This is as good anexample as any of the way in which the poet canbe aware of folk-tale material and feel bound toinclude some of it, while apparently trying tosuppress what he considers to be unfitting.

23 Robert E. Diamond, " Themes and Ornamentin Anglo-Saxon Poetry", P.M.LA., Ixxvi (1961),pp. 461-68. This article sees the problem in sug-gesting that the " ceremonious greetings and recep-tion of strangers in Beowulf (so strongly reminis-cent of The Odyssey) seem to be a subtheme of thegreater theme of court scenes", while the coast-guard is made a subtheme of the sea-voyage. How-ever, division into themes and subthemes stillleaves the problem of correlating themes into anarrative ; it is better to tackle the narrative as awhole. This is not to deny that the challenges ofthe folk-tale have been made more courteous!

the story of Breca and so gives us " confi-dence in Beowulf's ability to cope with thefearful monster " ;" R. W. Chambers pointsout that, as a wicked counsellor, Unferthcould toe a stock-figure in the Scyldingstory;25 Morton W. Bloomfield says that heis a character emblematic of Discord and socannot help but toe impolite." Any of thesetheories is acceptable so far. But we go onto observe what appears to be a total dicho-tomy in Unferth's character which is ex-tremely hard to explain psychologically oremblematically. After the Grendel fighthe is referred to unflatteringly in lines 980-84, and in the hypermetric lines 1162-68 isunmistakably connected with the theme ofmurder between near-kin, of which Beowulfhas already accused him flatly. Then, asBeowulf prepares to dive into the monsters'lake, Unferth suddenly leaves his normaldisagreeable nature to lend the hero hissword Hrunting, to which the poet referswith definite favour, ntes past ponne msetostmsegenfultuma. This digression in fact takesup a further seventeen lines (1455-71) at acrucial moment, and without any of the im-mediate thematic relevance that we see, forexample, in Wiglaf's sword, Eanmundes laf(2611-25). Why should Unferth so strangelychange his tune? And why should Hruntingattain such importance when, after all, itfails to bite on the ogress, a service whichcould have been fulfilled toy a commonsword, or even, as happens later, byBeowulf's own Naegling? Not thatHrunting is forgotten even then, for Beowulfmentions it in his recital to Hrothgar (1659-60), and we have what seems to toe the re-turn of the sword to Unferth some 250 lineslater." There has been, so far, little com-

2 4 Beowulf, ed. Klaeber, p . 148, cited also byBonjour, Digressions, p . 22.

2 5 R. W. Chambers , Beowulf: an Introduction,3rd edition with supplement by C. L. Wrenn, C a m -bridge 1959, p . 27.

2 8 Morton W. Bloomfield, " Beowulf andChristian Allegory: an Interpretation of U n f e r t h " ,Traditio, vii (1949-51), pp . 410-15. The articleclaims to be concerned only with Unferth as heappears in the p o e m ; no mention is made of thescene in which the sword Hrunting, " symbol ofhis m i g h t " , appears t o be handed back to Unferthor " Discord " .

2 7 Lines 1807-12. This is a difficult passages, thequestion being whether Beowulf return the swordto Unferth, or whether Unferth hands over thesword as a gift t o Beowulf. Klaeber prefers thelatter, though it involves a very abrupt change ofsubject, not only in line 1809 but also in line 1806.It also implies that Hrunt ing had at some time on

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ment on the importance of the sword, andwith regard to Unferth, few critics have goneany further than to suggest, as K. Sisamdoes,28 that the " generous loan and return "is an instance of " magnanimity on bothsides ". Yet there are strong suggestions thatthe poet does not intend us to approve ofUnferth in any way, for he takes the troubleto remark ironically, in line 980, pa wsesswigra secg sunu Ecglafes, and to repeat thecharge of early boastfulness and latercowardice in lines 1465-71:

Huru ne gemunde mago Ecglafeseafopes craeftig, pst he ser gespraecwine druncen.

adding, lest anyone should take this as anexample of " forgetting and forgiving ", theovertly critical pxr he dome forleas,ellenmxrpum. I labour these points con-cerning Unferth because they provide thebest example of a character and a series ofincidents which have no clear explanationas they stand, and which therefore force usto consider the poet's and his audience'sideas of narrative.

What would we expect to find if we con-tinued to analyse Beowulf in the terms ofthe " functions", after the setting out ofthe hero (lines 205-28)? We should see themost characteristic feature of the folk-tale,the series of " functions" D, E, F, G.Heroes of folk-tales rarely succeed withoutmagical help; if it were possible to do with-out it, the action would quickly seem thin.But the means by which the hero acquireshelp lend themselves to variation morereadily than anything else, and are especi-ally liable to the phenomenon of " inadver-tency ". The hero may be tested, orquestioned, or attacked, but the attitude ofhis opponent does not make much dif-ference. An animal or spirit may 'be friendlyif it is helped; but help may also come froma villain who " accidentally " drops or givesaway something of magical power. To givea familiar example, in Jack and the Bean-the previous evening been returned to Unferthwithout comment by the poet; and if Beowulf isto keep it it is strange that he is using anothernamed weapon. Naegling, in line 2680. I prefer totake suna (dat.) for sunu, and Isen (loan) for lean(gift), as indeed Klaeber suggests himself. Thesubject then remains the same from line 1805 toline 1812, Beowulf returning the sword, thankingUnferth for it, and praising it. The balance ofmagnanimity then remains clearly on his side,except for the incident of the loan.

28 K. Sisam. The Structure of Beowulf, Oxford1965, pp. 14, 41.

stalk, Jack meets the pedlar or the butcherwho gives him a handful of beans for hiscow. This is almost always represented asa proof of Jack's stupidity, his being gulled•by an enemy. But of course the beans arethe gateway to the giant's castle and riches.Does the wicked tradesman realize this?Where did he get the beans from? We neverask or answer these questions in practice.29

It is enough that the magical property istransferred to the hero, often with guidance.

Is this series not recognizable in thesequence of events in Beowulf leading upto Heorot and Unferth? Though Wulfgarand the coastguard are not by any meanssupernatural, they do accost Beowulf, attimes with a hint of menace,30 they aremollified by his answers and appearance,and they do as a result clear his path to theking's seat in Heorot. These actions couldwell be represented as D, E, G (positive).The order is reversed for Hrothgar, asBeowulf speaks first, and the king perhapsremains neutral until after Unferth's chal-lenge. Unferth, as in several folk-tales,31

obliges the hero to prove himself in a wayopposite to his earlier behaviour, over-powering an assailant with insult and rough-ness instead of courtesy, i.e. D, E negative.And then, strikingly, this new challengerprovides the only element still missing, F,the magic property which should help thehero; moreover, he does it " inadvertently ",contrary to his own apparent nature. Ofcourse Hrunting is " transferred" to thesecond " move " of the story and plays nopart in the fight with Grendel. However,it is not uncommon for a hero to reachpartial success by his own efforts, only tofind himself in need of something else tosucceed fully, as the Brothers find inComus. Again, Hrunting is in the end use-less, even if still treated with odd considera-tion. It is worth noting here its description

2 9 Though in Andrew Lang's Victorian versionin The Red Fairy Book (1890), both these mattersare resolved by the overt mediation of a fairy—whose moralizings on the subject of Jack 's lack ofrespect to his mother suggest, however, a certainmodernity.

3 0 E.g. lines 256-7, ofost is selest to gecySanne,hwanan eov/re cyme syndon.

3 1 Strange reversals of any kind a re common,one of the charms of the fairy-tale being its habitof surprise. One could look a t the Gr imms 'Marchen Von einem, der auszog das Fiirchten zulernen, where the hero asks even monsters t o getwarm at his fire, but beats or kills them at the firstsign of unsociability.

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as a hxft-mece, a word only used in OldEnglish of this sword, and, as R. W.Chambers pointed out,32 perhaps to be con-nected with the Old Icelandic nonce-wordhepti-sax, used only in the analogous situa-tion of Grettir's fight with the giant in thewaterfall-cave. This survival might implythat Hrunting once had a considerable im-portance, though its functions here, both ofkilling the immediate enemy and strikingthe final blow to the dead one, have beentaken over by the giant's sword on the wall,as happens also in Icelandic analogues. Onecan only say that Beowulf in the nidseleis provided with almost a superfluity ofmagic aids, including the ray of light likethe sun (lines 1570-2), which, in similarstories, paralyses or disturbs the ogress atthe crucial moment." Possibly severalversions have at some time been conflated,and there would be no advantage in search-ing for an " original" version, since, as hasbeen said, individual elements can bechanged easily by any inventive narrator.

The important point is this. The writerof our poem may very well have been aliterate artist, and not just a scribe. Still,he was clearly acquainted with and affectedby the techniques of formulaic compositionat a verbal level. From the example aboveit seems that he was also affected, in someway, by an unconscious, variable patternon a narrative level. Certainly he was try-ing, deliberately and consciously, to writea poem containing many reflections on thethemes of feud and kingship and the heroiclife, and equally certainly he succeeded.But even when it would have 'been to hisadvantage to do so, for example by explain-ing the ill-fate of Heorot or removing theincident of Unferth's loan, he could notentirely shake off the structure of hissources or models, any more than he couldbegin to compose in a poetic diction all ofhis own. So, though one can agree tosome extent with Larry D. Benson" whenhe writes that Beowulf has " qualities con-trary to what oral composition .might leadus to expect", and indicates the " sophistica-tion of its diction and structure", one

32 R. W. Chambers, Introduction, pp. 472-5. [cf.G. Vigfusson and F. York Powell, lcel. ProseReader, 1879, p . 404. E D D . ]

3 3 R. W. Chambers , Introduction, p p . 466-8.3 4 Larry D . Benson, " The Literary Character of

Anglo-Saxon Narrative P o e t r y " , P.M.L.A., Ixxxi(1966), pp . 334-41.

should still remember that in some placesBeowulf is less than a miracle of construc-tion in our terms. Its excellence, after all,does lie in the area of some other formulaicepics, perhaps in what Gilbert Murraycalled the " genius of attitude " of the Iliadand Odyssey." Moreover, as so often withtraditional compositions, when it does reachan effect of particular subtlety, such as theScyld prologue, this can partly be explainedas a virtue of the genus rather than the indi-vidual, the technique rather than the ex-ample, especially as, we must remember, thetechnique itself allows and encourages varia-tion on the basic pattern.

Having said so much, it remains only tolook at the points of interest in the remain-ing sigla. H and I represent the strugglewith and victory over Grendel, here a simplefight rather than a test or an impossible de-mand. Victory ought to be followed by K,achievement of the object of search, liquida-tion of the original lack or misfortune. Infact, as has been said, this cannot happenin Beowulf except in so far as revenge isa compensation for injury, and even this ispartially put off till the second fight is over.It is striking that Beowulf does then returnto Hrothgar with something, namelyGrendel's head and the hilt of the giant'ssword, and we are also told that he had theopportunity to take more, in lines 1612-15.The head especially, though it may seem anatural enough trophy, recalls the " lay-ings " of ghosts by decapitation, and makesthe adventure under the lake more essentialthan Hrothgar seems to think immediatelyafter Grendel's flight; as perhaps an Anglo-Saxon audience would dimly have sensed.

G6 represents a particularly good exampleof the use toy a skilled narrator of conven-tional patterns, to round off one section andlead into another. It stands for " guidance(by following bloody tracks)", a commonmotif, and refers to lines 837-924, sectionXIII of the manuscript. In this some ofHrothgar's companions follow Grendel'strail to the mere and ride back singingBeowulf's praises. It is obvious that thissection could be omitted almost without anygap being visible, as only the last few linesfrom -Da wses morgenleoht on are necessarylinks between the setting down of Grendel'sarm and the speech of praise by Hrothgar.

35 Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic,Oxford 1907, esp. pp. 209-31.

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K. Sisam has commented on this, indicatingit as an example of parallel narration;3' andno doubt one should admire tooth the wayin which the poet works in his importantlegendary digressions, as well as the cir-cular, " enveloping " motion which, as withWealhtheow's actions in lines 611-41, re-lieves us after a period of tension. Still,the section remains " functional" in two orthree ways. Firstly, though Beowulf hasbeen guided so far toy the coastguard andWulfgar, he has still not reached his finalgoal, the monsters' den, and so has to re-ceive the indirect guidance of Grendel'strail. Moreover, it is very common in fairy-tales for the hero, having escaped with hisobject of search, to toe pursued toy the vil-lain, or, as Propp notes, toy the villain'sfemale relations. So, though the attack ofGrendel's mother serves mainly as a secondact of hostility (A), beginning a second" move ", it is also characteristic that thisshould arise from a kind of pursuit, theogress actually following people who havebeen to her lair. The letters Pr representthis " function", -while Rs indicates thatBeowulf is rescued, not by any magic power,but by 'being absent, as the poet tells us inlines 1299-1301. These critics who havesuggested that at some time there was noday's delay between the two fights" maywell have some truth; still, the point is thatour poet, or some predecessor of his, hasused an effective, tout still traditional seriesof incidents to gain the pause he required.

Perhaps significantly,38 there is little in thesecond and third episodes that requiresfurther elaboration, and no extra " func-tional " sigla appear in the description ofthem. The fight with Grendel's mother fol-lows a pattern similar to that of the fightwith Grendel, and is connected with it ashas toeen explained. Nor is the dragon fightvery far different. The absence at the startis that of "the rightful king", for toothHygelac and Heardred are dead, the dragonis provoked and answers in a normal way,while the hero is guided to it, fights it, andwins treasure equally conventionally. Theonly dubious features are that there isnothing useful to toe gained toy the hero, F,

3 8 K. Sisam, Structure, pp. 28-32.3 7 R. W. Chambers , Introduction, pp . 64-5.3 8 See G. V. Smithers' Inaugural Lecture, The

Making of Beowulf, Durham 1961. where it is alsosuggested, from a study of the Icelandic analogues,that the three parts of Beowulf, including thedragon-fight, follow a similar pat tern.

except perhaps his iron shield, and thatthere is a general thinness to the action,which is enriched by many allusive refer-ences to the Swedes, but which contains fewcharacters except Beowulf and Wiglaf.There is no victorious homecoming at theend, either. In contrast to the vast majorityof fairy-tales, which end with the hero'smarriage and prosperity, Beowulf leaves uswith the hero's death, his failure to return,J. negative. Nevertheless, this is in a waynot a difficult change to make, and it is stillimportant that even in the dragon-fightthere is a recognizable " functional" struc-ture with no extraneous elements, and onequite close to the two that have gone before.

What can be concluded from this kind ofexposition? After all, to analyse Beowulf inPropp's terms is of little help for literarycritics, while that there is a fairy-tale elementin the poem has been admitted at least sincethe study of Panzer. To begin with, the tech-nique seems valuable in showing a kind offormulaic, controlled structure in the poem'snarrative. Moreover, the sequence of " func-tions " seems to explain well the mysteriousScyld episode, the fabulous prosperity ofHrothgar, and the whole subtle, indirect, de-laying approach to the main action, as wellas clearing up the puzzle of Unferth's per-versity of character and several other minorpoints. And in addition, we learn from thegaps in the structure as well as from thosethat happen to be filled. Propp's analysis,bringing a clearer understanding of thenature of folk-tales than could be gainedfrom analysis of any one type, does remindus that fairy-tales are not adventures en-riched and complicated by magic, but storiesabout magic, with their illogical and " in-advertent " nature always a part of them, nota corruption. So, one insight that we gaininto Beowulf is that it is this magical elementthat .the poet likes least, for he can be seen,not only disguising his hero's bear-nature"and converting waterfall-caves into sub-marine halls,40 but also trying to blot outthe typical features of the magical object ofsearch and the magic property that helps inthe search. The poet's Christianity may havesomething to do with this rationalization;but it seems more likely to come from thefact that he is an epic and elegiac poet, con-cerned above all with human problems andtragedies, wanting no fantasy to degrade his

3 8 R. W. Chambers, Introduction, pp. 365-81.4 0 R. W. Chambers, Introduction, pp. 460-65.

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January, 1969 NOTES AND QUERIES 11hero with easy assistance. Beowulf is a fairy-tale with all the magic removed, as far aspossible—a paradox worth considering.

Moreover, there are a few points whichmay cast a glimmer on .to that indeterminateperiod before the story of Beowulf reachedthe stage of our manuscript, " this age ofdark riddles of culture ", as C. L. Wrenn callsit.41 The unwritten laws of narrative struc-ture, as elucidated by Propp, make it easierto conceive how a story could be transmittedfor centuries, and even millennia, by illiteratepeoples, but the discovery does raise onequestion very obviously. If so many folk-tales have the same structure, what is theattraction, or the meaning of that structurerather than another? Propp, though he thinksthe question is in the historian's province,suggests tentatively that the magic horses,ships, etc., that take the hero to the en-chanter's lair correspond to the traditionalmethods of reaching the land of the dead,as the stress on theft or abduction seems tocorroborate. The folk-tale would then be astory about the attack and defeat of death,a theory also partly borne out by the " livedhappily ever after" formula, and thecuriously prevalent atmosphere of joy inhighly morbid stories.42 This is a guess thatcan hardly be definitely substantiated, butagain, it fits well with some of the vestigialfeatures of Beowulf, the bear-hero. RhysCarpenter has recently produced a good dealof evidence to indicate, as is after all notimprobable, that to primitive peoples thebear is remarkable chiefly because it canhibernate, i.e. it appears to die and come tolife again.43 Was the Beowulf-figure then atone time an opponent of death? Are the OldEnglish epic and the Russian fairy-tales bothdescendants of mythical narratives? Thatthis is not inherently unlikely is indicated byF. P. Magoun's remarks about the conceptof mana in Germanic peoples and Beowulf sown msegen.1' But to say more it would be

4 1 C. L. Wrenn, " S o m e Earliest Anglo-SaxonCul t -Symbols" , pp . 40-56 of the Magoun fest-schrift, edd. Bessinger and Creed.

4 2 One example being the Gr imms ' MarchenMachandelboom, where a young girl, after appar-ently decapitating her step-brother and seeing himeaten by his father, buries the bones, w h e n :" Marleenken awerst woor so recht licht un vor-gnoogt, recht as wenn de Broder noch leewd.'

4 3 Rhys Carpenter , Folk-tale, fiction and saga inthe Homeric epics, Berkeley 1946, esp. ch. v i , " TheCult of the Sleeping B e a r " , p p . 116-35.

4 4 Francis P. Magoun Jr., " On the Survivals ofPagan Belief in Anglo-Saxon E n g l a n d " , HarvardTheological Review, xl (1947), pp . 33-46.

necessary to examine other points, notablythe nature of Beowulf's enemies and thecurious resemblance to each other of thethree main episodes.

Of course the grave, thoughtful, dignifiedhero of the poem that we know bears littletrace of the shaman. However, if Propp'sanalysis of structure does anything for us, itshould give us some idea of the way inwhich story-tellers, even Christians andwriters of epics, could be conditioned verystrongly, over long periods, not so much bythe overt features of their stories, as by theirenduring if insubstantial patterns of narra-tion. We can never be sure of the chain oftransmission that precedes our manuscript.But we can at least hope to refine our theoriesas we grow to understand more of the possi-bilities of poetry and narrative outside theboundaries of our own literary culture.

THOMAS ALAN SHIPPEY.University of Birmingham.

SOME SIXTEENTH-CENTURYANTEDATHNGS OF THE O.E.D.

TIN the course of reading the seven Englishlogic books published before 1600, many

earlier instances and words not found in theO.E.D. have come to light. Where these arenot specifically logical, they are included inthe present collection. The logical words Ihope to publish later, as part of a largerproject.

Antedatingsabruptly. [O.E.D. 1590—.] 1588 FRAUNCE

Lawiers Log. 10b. It were against Platoesprecept and all Arte to iumpe abruptly fromthe highest and most general!, to the lowestand most speciall.

Academic, sb. [O.E.D. 1. 1586—.] 1570EVANS Abridg. logique C vi b. The judge-ment of the Academikes: who doe alleageall things to be uncertaine.

adjudging, vbl. sb. [O.E.D. 1689—.] 1570EVANS Abridg. logique Epistle p. 10. TheArte of reasoning . . . doth conteine thewhole skill of thorowly seeing and adiudg-ing, what both is, and ought to be in euerymatter.

adjuvant, a. [O.E.D. a 1614—.] 1574 tr.Ramus" Logike 21. The instruments also arenombred amongest the causes adiuuantes.

application. [O.E.D. 1. 1632—.] 1599BLUNDEVIL Logike 33. The thing whereunto

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