Since serious study of Beowulf and Old English poetry began in the nineteenth century, scholars have recognized that the poem repeats itself, repeats and is repeated by other poems, retells and is retold in other traditions, genres, and forms. The scholarship devoted to studies of the poem’s repetitions and relationships is almost impossible to control. The word that most often appears in this kind of analysis is “formula,” but the term has been applied to such a wide variety of concepts in such a wide variety of fields that what it means for Beowulf is, even for most Beowulf scholars, uncertain, even while few would disagree with a statement such as “the form of Beowulf is generally and basically formulaic” (Haarder 1975, 166). This chapter (and this book) will not offer one definition of formula, either generally or for readers of the poem, but what I hope to demonstrate is that the loose concept of formula is the best way to analyze the poem that we have and to imagine what systems and structures lie hidden beneath and before the words on the page. In other words, formula helps us to understand the compositional processes that generate the poem and, perhaps obviously, also provides an approach to reading the poem, an approach that will be modeled in subsequent chapters. This chapter, therefore, attempts to survey what we know about formula and Beowulf, moving from the most widely accepted notion of formulaic composition at the level of the half-line all the way to the poem as a whole, where recognition and discussion of formula becomes rare, all while demonstrating the impossibility of isolating any one level of composition from the others.
1.1 The Formula and Formulaic System1
The concept of the formula and its extended definitions, everything from the half-line to the full story-pattern, has been part of the discussion of Beowulf almost from the beginning.2 As early as 1840, Jacob Grimm, in suggesting how fitting the “legends” behind Judith, Andreas, and Elene were for conversion into Old English poetry, uses the phrase hergebrachte epische Formeln (traditional epic formulas) in his description of how ecclesiastical material is transformed into Old English (1840, vi). Grimm suggests these formulas are so much a part of the tradition that poetry could not be composed without them (“ihre verfasser konnten sich dieser formeln, die damals nach gäng und gäbe waren, nicht überheben”; their authors could not do without these formulas, which were common at the time), and he identifies several formulas across early Germanic literatures (1840, xl–xliv). Grimm is effectively looking at more or less verbatim repetition: for example, he lists gode þancode (with slight variation in Andreas, Beowulf, the Heliand, and the Ludwigslied) and ne wæs hit lenge þa gen (again with slight variation in Beowulf, the Heliand, the Ludwigslied, and Parzival). In the same year, just as influentially as it turns out, Ludwig Ettmüller, influenced by contemporary study of the Nibelungenlied and basing his conclusion first on the introductory material on Scyld, which he sees as having very little connection with the poem as a whole, concludes that Beowulf is the work of more than one poet: “Das Beowulflied nicht von einem Dichter organisch gebildet, sondern aus einzelen Volksliedern zusammengesetzt ward” (the Beowulf-poem was not composed organically by one poet, but rather was assembled from individual folk-poems; 1840, 7).
Grimm’s recognition of repeated and similar half-lines is explored more fully by Eduard Sievers in his 1878 edition of the Heliand. Sievers, under the heading Formelverzeichnis, offers over a hundred pages of synonyms (a synonymischer Teil, with notes to how they relate to works other than the Heliand, most often in Old English) and expressions organized by part of speech and inflection (a systematischer Teil, classifications by syntax that anticipate later Old English ideas of formulaic systems based on syntax). Around the same time, building on Ettmüller’s sense of the poem’s composition, Karl Müllenhoff detects different strands in the composition of Beowulf, dividing the poem into an introduction and four parts (fight; fight; homecoming; fight) and then finding two old songs from different sources (the fight with Grendel and the fight with the dragon) and two bridges or continuations (the fight with Grendel’s mother and the homecoming) between those old songs, a theory of composite authorship that becomes known as Liedertheorie. All told, Müllenhoff identifies the work of six different poets (1869, 193–4).3 Müllenhoff’s theories are the inspiration for the first sustained studies of variation and formulas in Beowulf. The synonyms of the poem (including features such as epithets) are first gathered by Karl Schemann in 1882, explicitly to support Müllenhoff’s divisions of the poem (1882, 1); in 1886, Adolf Banning, acknowledging Schemann and suggesting that his aims are to do for Beowulf what Sievers does for the Heliand and to confirm Müllenhoff’s findings by looking at how formulas relate across Müllenhoff’s divisions of the poem, gathers Die epischen Formeln im Beowulf; in 1889, Richard M. Meyer starts to gather and classify different kinds of repetition across Germanic poetry, including sections on Parallelverse; technische Satzformeln; ceremonielle Satzformeln; andere Satzformeln; and wiederholte Verse. Richard Kistenmacher gathers repetitions of words and word groups in the first part of his study (of Beowulf and other poems) and repetitions of half-lines in the second, comparing Beowulf to Elene in that regard. The identifications of formulas and repetition were almost an industry in the late nineteenth century.
Where Homeric scholarship from the late eighteenth century divides along Analyst and Unitarian lines, with the former seeking the seams of multiple authorship and the latter arguing for one author, for artistic unity, opinions of Beowulf develop similarly. Müllenhoff and his followers seek the seams of multiple authorship, and the recognition of the poem’s (formulaic) repetition is deployed, as we have seen, to support Liedertheorie, but also to advance other theories of authorship. Gregor Sarrazin, most famously, argues on the basis of parallels between Beowulf and the signed poems of Cynewulf that Cynewulf brought Beowulf into its current form through a process of translation and adaptation, thus agreeing with Müllenhoff while demonstrating a further relevance to repetition across poems.4 The earlier work of Grimm and Sievers, however, suggests instead a traditional storehouse of words and phrases and, by extension, the possible artistic unity of the poem. Johannes Kail is the most vocal opponent of Sarrazin: Kail argues (later supported by Ellen Clune Buttenweiser [1898]) that the repetition is so ubiquitous as to render arguments for authorship on the basis of shared diction and half-lines ridiculous. Instead, again, the Parallelstellen are simply evidence of a storehouse of words and formulas that were in traditional and common use (“Es ist wol das natürlichste, die parallelstellen als einen gemeinsamen poetischen formelschatz zu betrachten, aus welchem alle ags. dichter unabhängig von einander je nach bedarf ihren ausdruck entnahmen”; It is no doubt most natural to consider the parallel passages as a common poetic vocabulary from which all Anglo-Saxon poets, independently of one another, took their phrases as needed; 1899, 32); as Bernhard ten Brink would put it, they we...