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Beowulf a la Shmoop

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Digressions

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After the defeat of Grendel,

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Hrothgar throws this big party to celebrate Beowulf's success.

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And during the feast, a poet tells the story

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of Hildeburh, a woman caught

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in between the war of Danes and Frisians.

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And I hope I'm pronouncing that

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in my fine Old English style here.

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So, the poem takes quite a while to tell.

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And what's the idea behind giving all of this information

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about all these people in the middle of Beowulf?

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Like, what does that do for us

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other than make us yawn every now and then?

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Yeah, it will make us yawn.

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Epic poems are long.

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This is part of the reason they're long,

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is that there's these digressons.

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But they're not necessarily digressions

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in the way that we might think of it.

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There's a point.

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First of all, again, we're shown the cultural value

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of celebrating and feasting and gift-giving.

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After Beowulf does his heroic deed,

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they have a huge party.

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And that tells us something about society.

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It's like violence and revenge are valued

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enough to celebrate.

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He gives -- Hrothgar gives Beowulf tons of gifts

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and they eat lots of food

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and there's goblets everywhere.

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But, on top of just kind of showing us a little bit more about society,

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these stories that might seem like digressions,

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almost always comment on the main storyline itself.

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So the story we hear,

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the story that's told by a poet at the party

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is basically about this woman

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who is caught between, as you said,

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the Danes and the Frisians.

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She has loyalties to both sides.

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And then some of her relatives are killed during --

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when there's a war.

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And she's kind of torn between the two sides.

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And what happens is that Hrothgar's wife,

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whose name I definitely can not pronounce,

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comes out and really relates herself to this story

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because she sees Hrothgar

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giving Beowulf all these gifts

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and all this, you know, amazing stuff.

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And meanwhile, Hrothgar has sons. He has two sons and

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he stands there and he says,

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"Beowulf, you're like a son to me."

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So Hrothgar's wife is like,

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"Well, you know, you have sons.

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Beowulf is an outsider."

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And so she kind of is a little bit worried

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and sees Beowulf as coming in from the outside

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and maybe causing trouble

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and she wants to protect her sons' rights to the throne.

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So, these little stories that come in between

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sometimes are the most morally complex parts

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of an epic poem.

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They're the parts that we kind of tend to forget

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'cause we're reading along and we're like,

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"Aw, shoot, I gotta get a hundred on the quiz.

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I don't need to know what happens in this offshoot

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of the story. I just need to know if Beowulf dies."

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But if we really pay attention, we can get a lot more

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out of these kind of side stories

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that seem like they might not fit in,

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but in reality, they're commenting on the cultural values

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and on the plot of the story itself.

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Why is the story of Hildeburh

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told in the middle of Beowulf?

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What can the party tell us about Hrothgar's society?

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How does Hrothgar's wife relate to Hildeburh?

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What role do digressions play in an epic poem?

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Yeah, it will make us yawn.

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