Annotation: Richard Burton - "Woman in Old English Poetry"

One of the pleasures of working on a text as well-studied as Beowulf is that the body of scholarship has had time to grow and change over time. Feminist scholarship of recent years has done much to expand the possibilities of reading gender in literature, but there's something almost quaint about looking to 19th century examinations of the representation of women in the poem. Beowulf is an almost relentlessly masculine text, so it makes sense that anything that stands out from that would be subject to analysis even at an early point.

At this early stage in my project, I'm honestly just picking articles from my list and reading them in random order as I work on the annotations. My bibliography currently stands at 39 editions, translations, and adaptations; 24 translation prefaces; 3 book reviews; and 222 articles, books, and book chapters. There's no other way, really, to organize my reading than to just pick articles and read. And so here I am, reading an article from 1895.

Burton's article is, aside from Thorkelin's preface to his laughably incorrect Latin translation of Beowulf, the oldest piece currently in my bibliography. Why include it at all? I include it in part because it is the earliest article on the poem that I could find which is both literary analysis and should discuss Grendel's Mother. It does not discuss Grendel's Mother at all, but it certainly appears that it should. The fact that a paper on women in Old English poetry that focuses largely on Beowulf but never once mentions Grendel's Mother is itself significant, and helps reveal some of the major shifts the field has undertaken in the past 125 years. It's a mildly interesting footnote that in 1895 an analysis of the presentation of women in Old English poetry had nothing to say of Grendel's Mother while I am today preparing a book on her.

My annotation is, as always, below.

Burton, Richard. “Woman in Old English Poetry,” The Sewanee Review 4.1 (Nov. 1895): 1-14.

Burton’s is quite possibly one of the first articles to focus on the representation of women in Old English poetry. Tonally the essay feels patronizing but well-intentioned in a 19th century way, as Burton undertakes the survey because after Nature and man, woman “in all the manifold and winsome connotations of the word” is one of the ideals that has motivated a great amount of poetry (1). Overall, though, he finds the role of women “scant” (2) in Old English poetry. Burton goes over the understanding of women from his time period, citing Christianity and chivalry as civilizing the Germanic tribes enough for woman to become an ideal fit for poetry (2). Beowulf represents the most sustained presentation of women in the poetic corpus, and so the majority of Burton’s analysis focuses on Beowulf. The bulk of Burton’s treatment of Beowulf focuses on the presentation of the queenly humans – Wealtheow, Thrytho, Hygd, and Hildeburh. Grendel’s Mother is never once mentioned, indicative perhaps that scholars did not even think of her in the category of women at the time. Probably the most interesting, though utterly irrelevant to my project, find is the older title for Deor that Burton uses: The Minstrel’s Lament. Someone should probably do something with the history of how these poems got named. Not much here for me, except the absence of Grendel’s Mother. And the argument ultimately finds that there is little description that tells us anything of what the women mentioned looked like. They are of indefinite “personal characterization or portraiture” and little of definite value can be extrapolated (13).