The prophetic Beowulf: heroic-hagiographic hybridity in Andreas, Juliana, and Beowulf【翻译】

ABSTRACT
Beowulf’s contest with Grendel has universally been read as an assertion of heroic
agency. Yet as I demonstrate, this purportedly neutral convention derives from the
misreading of a riddle design that invites and then disrupts expectation in the accidental
denouement of Grendel's self-destruction. As an alternative to heroic misprision, I locate
Beowulf's salient analogues in the poetic hagiographies, Andreas and Juliana. Within
these poems I demonstrate a distinctive Christian critique, which defines heroic order
through its assertion of loyalty to insiders and enmity to outsiders, and aligns with René
Girard’s anthropology in marking enmity both as a source of social cohesion and
instability. I also demonstrate a distinctive “crossover poetics” that switches godly and
demonic attributes between the opposed communities. As this crossover design gives rise
to tropes of heroic-hagiographic hybridity, it exposes a biblical prophetic distinction
between the physical realm of objects, actions, and words, and the metaphysical realm of
emotional, ethical, and relational principles--a distinction by which the poem locates the
origin of enmity in the idolatrous gestalt of egoistic materialism and the origin of loyalty
in the covenant ethos of transcendent affiliation. This crossover design, moreover,
functions in rapprochement with heroic culture, to affirm the godliness of loyalty and
reject demonic enmity, while also interrogating the idolatrous potentiality of Christian
discourse. As an alternative to the instabilities marked within heroic social order, the
hagiographies offer a new social order based in a two-fold conception: a Christological
model that entails compassion for enemies and self-sacrificing obedience to the covenant
ethos, and a prophetic model that resists violent contagion through egoistic effacement,
entailed in acts of divine praise and benevolent prayer. Lacking these redemptive
disciplines, Beowulf's pagan fictive world nevertheless incorporates the same
hagiographic critique, but through dystopian patterns of demonic inversion. Thus,
Beowulf synthesizes the cardinal hagiographic elements—the same narrative arcs, lexical
2
patterns, and crossover poetics—in a drama that schools its audience in prophetic
discernment: to see the essential, defining reality beneath the surface of human events
and to recognize patterns of divine retribution as paradoxical enactments of demonic selfdestruction.
Abstract Approved: ____________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________
Title and Department
____________________________________
Date
THE PROPHETIC BEOWULF: HEROIC-HAGIOGRAPHIC HYBRIDITY
IN BEOWULF, ANDREAS, AND JULIANA
by
Nettie Christine Vinsonhaler
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2013
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Jonathan Wilcox
Copyright by
NETTIE CHRISTINE VINSONHALER
2013
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
PH.D. THESIS
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Nettie Christine Vinsonhaler
has been approved by the Examining Committee
for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in English at the May 2013 graduation.
Thesis Committee:
Jonathan Wilcox, Thesis Supervisor
Lori Branch
Kathy Lavezzo
Claire Sponsler
Garrett Stewart
ii
For the Beowulf poet.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I offer my heartfelt gratitude to all the people who made this project possible. In
this undertaking, first thanks goes to my dissertation director, Jonathan Wilcox, who
encouraged me against all odds to push beyond Beowulf. His example of joy and
generosity, erudition and keen intelligence, has given me a model of scholarship I will
always seek to emulate. I also offer heartfelt thanks to the exemplary members of my
committee: Lori Branch, Kathy Lavezzo, Claire Sponsler, and Garrett Stewart. Thank
you for brilliant insights and encouragement, and for the vital contributions each of you
made to this project. I thank other mentors too—David Hamilton, Miriam Gilbert,
Ralph Keen, Sarah Gordon, and Takis Poulakos, as well as scholars in the field of
Anglo-Saxon studies: Robert Bjork, Mary Baine Campbell, Ed Haymes, David
Johnson, and Andy Orchard, all of whom moved this project forward. Of these,
however, I feel particular gratitude to Stanley Hauer, without whose generosity, love,
and guidance I would never have found this path.
This endeavor, undertaken in my midlife years, challenged me in ways I could not
have anticipated; without my friends, this final page would not have been turned. I give
thanks to far-flung companions—Jeremy Eisler, who always understood the big why;
the Community of the Holy Spirit, for keeping me in your prayers; Neil and Carol Penn
and Rita Yerkes, who kept encouragement coming. My gratitude also goes to new
friends— fellow medievalists, especially Erin Mann, Joseph Rodriguez, Tom Blake, and
Travis Johnson, and all my comrades in the English graduate program; the Bardonians,
especially Sarah Fay McCarthy, whose companionship sustained me many a winter
night; my student assistants, Jonathan Graf, Ashley Johnson, Mackenzie Leonard,
iv
Joseph Henderson, and Rochelle Liu; and my Iowa River Call friends, especially Julia
Wasson, Joe Hennager, and Miriam Kashia. I also feel immense gratitude to my Trinity
Episcopal family, especially to those who gave my labors a listening ear—Alice Fulton,
Barbara Eckstein, Barbara Schlachter, Ben Webb, Beth Rapson, Beth Stence, Cathy
Quehl-Engel, Jan Palmer, Jerry Partridge, Jim Throgmorton, Karen Nichols, Mel
Schlachter, Pamela Bulmahn—not to mention the most incorrigible Wild Women of the
Wilderness! Of all these, however, eternal gratitude goes to me “Irish family”—Lori
Erickson and Bob Sessions, their sons, Owen and Carl, and Jacquelyn Philips, my 95-
year-old Irish mother. Your abiding love has sustained me!
Finally, my adored family, beginning with my siblings: the most illustrious Dr.
Homer Jackson Moore, the most illustrious Dr. Dorothy Helen Moore, and the most
illustrious Dr. Emanuel Henry Martin IV—each of whom never let me forget that I may
be the last, but definitely not the least. As for my daughters, Anna and Morgan, I can
only offer humble, amazed gratitude—for your stunningly good advice, your unfailing
faith in me, and for your unbounded support for this exhilarating and arduous
adventure. As for the angel (whoever you are!) who sent me one William Blair, thank
you for the most perfect surprise of my life. Dear William, your radiance, compassion,
and keen engagement have made all the difference these last two years. Truly, you are
the gardener extraordinaire!
v
ABSTRACT
Beowulf’s contest with Grendel has universally been read as an assertion of
heroic agency. Yet as I demonstrate, this purportedly neutral convention derives from
the misreading of a riddle design that invites and then disrupts expectation in the
accidental denouement of Grendel's self-destruction. As an alternative to heroic
misprision, I locate Beowulf's salient analogues in the poetic hagiographies, Andreas and
Juliana. Within these poems I demonstrate a distinctive Christian critique, which
defines heroic order through its assertion of loyalty to insiders and enmity to outsiders,
and aligns with René Girard’s anthropology in marking enmity both as a source of social
cohesion and instability. I also demonstrate a distinctive “crossover poetics” that
switches godly and demonic attributes between the opposed communities. As this
crossover design gives rise to tropes of heroic-hagiographic hybridity, it exposes a
biblical prophetic distinction between the physical realm of objects, actions, and words,
and the metaphysical realm of emotional, ethical, and relational principles--a distinction
by which the poem locates the origin of enmity in the idolatrous gestalt of egoistic
materialism and the origin of loyalty in the covenant ethos of transcendent affiliation.
This crossover design, moreover, functions in rapprochement with heroic culture, to
affirm the godliness of loyalty and reject demonic enmity, while also interrogating the
idolatrous potentiality of Christian discourse. As an alternative to the instabilities
marked within heroic social order, the hagiographies offer a new social order based in a
two-fold conception: a Christological model that entails compassion for enemies and
self-sacrificing obedience to the covenant ethos, and a prophetic model that resists
violent contagion through egoistic effacement, entailed in acts of divine praise and
benevolent prayer. Lacking these redemptive disciplines, Beowulf's pagan fictive world
nevertheless incorporates the same hagiographic critique, but through dystopian patterns
of demonic inversion. Thus, Beowulf synthesizes the cardinal hagiographic elements—
vi
the same narrative arcs, lexical patterns, and crossover poetics—in a drama that schools
its audience in prophetic discernment: to see the essential, defining reality beneath the
surface of human events and to recognize patterns of divine retribution as paradoxical
enactments of demonic self- destruction.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... viii
CHAPTER ONE: THE FIGHT WITH GRENDEL ............................................................1
A Ringside Tale .............................................................................................1
Heroic Aporia ................................................................................................4
The Heroic Coup .........................................................................................12
A Riddle Explained .....................................................................................26
The Hagiogrophic Analogue .......................................................................29
CHAPTER TWO: THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ANDREAS ..........................................32
A Cultural Hermeneutic ...............................................................................32
Enmity: Cohesion and Fragmentation .........................................................37
A Rhetoric of Rapprochement .....................................................................45
A Prophetic Ontology ..................................................................................49
Retribution and Crossover ...........................................................................57
CHAPTER THREE: ANDREAS AS HYBRID ................................................................62
Crossover Poetics: God and Satan ...............................................................62
Crossover Poetics: The Mermedonians .......................................................71
The Apostolic Plunderer ..............................................................................76
Patterns of Circularity ..................................................................................82
Allegories of Mimesis .................................................................................90
Crossover Poetics: The Flood ......................................................................97
CHAPTER FOUR: THE HYBRID JULIANA ................................................................120
Juliana and Andreas ..................................................................................120
Crossover and Contradiction .....................................................................127
Prologue and Indeterminacy ......................................................................135
Crossover and Ambiguity ..........................................................................147
Affricanus and Heliseus: Virtue and Stability ...........................................152
Juliana: Transgression and Instability .......................................................161
A Prophetic Critique ..................................................................................167
The Hel in Heliseus ...................................................................................173
Invective and Instability ............................................................................181
Love and Stability ......................................................................................186
CHAPTER FIVE: THE NON-VIOLENT JULIANA .....................................................196
Torture and Identity ...................................................................................196
Christian Eschatologies .............................................................................198
Godly Violence in the Latin Juliana .........................................................203
Manichean Eschatology and the Dominant Tradition ...............................209
Prophetic Eschatology ...............................................................................214
vii
Prophetic Eschatology in Heliseus’ Calamity .............................................218
Prophetic Eschatology in the Prison Scene .................................................226
The Deofol is in the Details .........................................................................235
The Devolution of the Deofol ......................................................................241
Coming to Grips ..........................................................................................254
Signs of Retribution .....................................................................................268
CHAPTER SIX: THE PROPHETIC BEOWULF ..........................................................275
The Hermeneutic Conundrum .....................................................................275
Juliana as Analogue ....................................................................................279
Andreas as Christological Analogue ...........................................................293
Andreas as Apostolic Analogue ..................................................................301
Critique and Rapprochement .......................................................................316
Retribution and the Insufficiency of Evil ....................................................320
Parody and Paradoxical Retribution ............................................................328
A Prophetic Hermeneutic ............................................................................331
CODA: HEROIC MISPRISION AND THE POETICS OF HYBRIDITY .....................337
Parallels Revisited .......................................................................................337
Heroic Disseminations .................................................................................347
Promising Touchstones ................................................................................356
WORKS CITED .............................................................................................................359

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