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Beowulf and Material Goods 12452 Views
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Description:
The characters in Beowulf knew the importance of bling. Watch the video to learn more about the place of material goods in the wonderful world of Beowulf.
Transcript
- 00:01
We speak student!
- 00:04
Beowulf a la Shmoop
- 00:06
Material Goods
- 00:09
If you haven't noticed yet, there's a lot of things -
- 00:12
material wealth and stuff - in Beowulf.
Full Transcript
- 00:14
Beowulf recovers items from Grendel's mother's lair.
- 00:17
Hrothgar rewards him handsomely multiple times.
- 00:21
And now we have a big trove of treasure
- 00:23
guarded by - what else? - a dragon.
- 00:25
So, question - talk to us
- 00:27
about the importance of material goods in Beowulf.
- 00:30
What are they? How do they function?
- 00:32
And how do they get discovered?
- 00:35
Are their mines that they're digging in?
- 00:37
And, you know, how does all that work?
- 00:39
Material stuff has been cropping up, you know,
- 00:41
throughout this whole story.
- 00:43
We see goblets all over the mead hall.
- 00:46
You know, this is the equivalent of, you know,
- 00:50
having -- what do you call it when you have the gold...?
- 00:51
- Grill. - The grill! There we go.
- 00:53
Yeah, Ryan Lochte.
- 00:53
The equivalent of having a grill is having goblets
- 00:55
all over your mead hall.
- 00:56
The men have these, you know,
- 00:58
tons of armor all blinged out.
- 01:00
The women are wearing tons of jewelry.
- 01:01
When Beowulf kills Grendel,
- 01:03
Hrothgar, you know, in addition to these gnomes
- 01:06
that we talked about, gives him
- 01:08
so many things. He gives him horses.
- 01:10
He gives him a kingly saddle.
- 01:12
He gives him a sword and a shield
- 01:15
and all this stuff.
- 01:17
So, clearly, it's important.
- 01:18
And again, it reflects the cultural values of the time.
- 01:22
We look at this and we're like,
- 01:23
"Oh, they were greedy. Theme of greed in Beowulf."
- 01:26
But, like, it's not.
- 01:28
That's just how things worked back then.
- 01:30
Having these material goods
- 01:32
were a sign of your success and your wealth.
- 01:34
Now, if you walked into someone's house
- 01:36
and they had goblets everywhere,
- 01:38
you might -- Or like in this case, you know,
- 01:40
dollar bills, like, making it rain.
- 01:42
You might think, "Oh, you know. They're greedy."
- 01:45
But that's not what we're supposed to think.
- 01:47
We're supposed to think, "Oh, they're successful."
- 01:49
It's a good thing. It's respected.
- 01:50
Why do you think that's the case?
- 01:52
You know, when I think about this era,
- 01:54
I think about resources.
- 01:56
Just living, having food reliably,
- 01:59
and water reliably available,
- 02:01
and protection from the elements and disease
- 02:03
and God knows what else,
- 02:04
it was like an achievement.
- 02:05
Like blowing out your birthday candles
- 02:07
was something that came
- 02:09
because life was so hard. And that was only
- 02:10
a couple of hundred years ago that tradition started.
- 02:12
That you still had breath strong enough
- 02:14
to blow out your candles so you celebrated another year
- 02:16
of life.
- 02:17
In this era, my goodness,
- 02:19
it must have been very hard.
- 02:20
So I get the materiality mattering.
- 02:23
And it wasn't dollar bills,
- 02:23
it was like goblets for water.
- 02:25
Right. And the materiality matters
- 02:28
and you have to remember that, again,
- 02:29
we're not talking about everyday people,
- 02:31
we're talking about kings here, right?
- 02:32
So things like a goblet or a sword
- 02:36
or, you know, jewels,
- 02:38
were a way for a king to, say,
- 02:40
make an alliance. Instead of just kind of like
- 02:42
shaking someone's hand and saying like,
- 02:44
"Yes. We're good. Gentleman's agreement."
- 02:46
Like, we don't do that today either.
- 02:48
We sign contracts.
- 02:49
And, you know, the way that they did it to have alliances
- 02:53
was to give gifts among each other.
- 02:54
Give material things instead of just saying, like,
- 02:57
"Yeah, we're good."
- 02:57
And it was important to kind of have that,
- 02:59
as you brought up earlier,
- 03:00
that symbol of a connection.
- 03:02
But, in Beowulf, there's a tension.
- 03:04
Because, you know, again, reflecting cultural values,
- 03:07
material things being good and respected.
- 03:09
But, when the story was written down,
- 03:11
the Christian values had really come into play.
- 03:14
And, as we know from the Bible,
- 03:17
you're not supposed to value worldly things.
- 03:19
You're supposed to, you know, value the other-worldly,
- 03:22
not the worldly.
- 03:23
And so we do see this tension.
- 03:25
Some of the gnomes that Hrothgar says to Beowulf
- 03:30
are about, you know, "value eternal life."
- 03:32
Kind of, "you can't take it with you" idea.
- 03:35
So we do see the tension,
- 03:36
and if you're, you know, if you're confused
- 03:38
while you're reading Beowulf, you're supposed to be.
- 03:40
Because there is a tension between pagan and Christian values.
- 03:44
Valuing what's worldly and what's material
- 03:48
versus completely pushing all that aside
- 03:51
to value the other-worldly.
- 03:55
What are some of the material goods talked about in Beowulf?
- 03:59
What's the purpose of the display of wealth and all the glitzy gifts?
- 04:04
Why is there a tension between materiality and immateriality in Beowulf?
- 04:09
How is this tension shown in reading the story?
- 04:15
Yes, we're good.
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