It Is About Time  -  Beowulf and the Pre-Copernican Sky

This small essay concerns the relationship between Beowulf and the Greek mythic warrior, Perseus. That is the way it started out; along the way it changed a bit, but it is still about Beowulf and Perseus. And time. This is not the essay about Beowulf that changes everything; rather it is a small essay that seeks to throw a bit of light on a part of the poem that has not received, in my estimation, the attention it deserved. I refer to the action of the poem as a poem, a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

This essay explores the hypothesis that the basic Beowulf is a poem structured around  astronomy, the people’s astronomy of the early Middle Ages. The astronomy is presented in the scenes of the poem depicted on the horizon at dawn. No fault suggested toward those who skipped over the astronomical approach before the computer. Before these machines the only way anyone could appreciate the rising and setting of the stars in an ancient sky was to look at the astronomical charts, pages and pages of dates, angles and times for the rising, culmination and setting of the various stars. It took a dedicated expert to look at those charts and visualize the rise of Sirius into the predawn sky in Egypt and the excitement that this sighting caused. The only current context we have for Virgo, Leo, Scorpio, is the Astrological one, a most unfortunate connection that results in a bit of suspicion if one reads those names in an essay that purports to be rational. We have lost their context within the night sky, the reason they were created and were an indispensable part of life for everyone, for a far longer time than their replacements, the tower clock, paper calendar or the time signal on a computer screen have been in existence.

But with a proper astronomical program that same computer screen allows us to see the sky as the ancient Egyptians would have, to thrill at the sight of Sirius on the eastern horizon, the harbinger of the New Year and the Nile flood, to see the sun rise in the safety of the Pharaoh’s own chariot, Taurus at one time, who would keep it safe on its perilous journey across the sky. In ancient times people were actively engaged with their sky; they had to be; that sky gave them something they could gain nowhere else. It set their time.

But we have lost the most spectacular wonder on this earth, the night sky. We have lost it in two senses; fear of the dark and the perceived necessity of working around the clock have caused us to pollute the night sky with errant light. At night we try to light our streets, our offices, our yards, as if it were daylight, but our lights reflect most of their power upward. Our cities glow at night for hundreds of miles. Our streets and yards glare so fiercely that we cannot see the light from a star many millions of times brighter than any light we can produce. But the star is also many millions of times farther away, and in the modern astronomy business, distance counts a lot. We must go to special places, deserts, mountain tops, places where few people live, to find the sky as our ancestors saw it.

But even if we found the most remote desert site, the darkest mountain top, we could not see the sky as they saw it; we are not they. We are creatures of the twentieth, twenty first centuries with long range telescopes, GPS, pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We are confident that the earth spins around the sun, which is located half way along an arm of the Milky Way galaxy, one of innumerable galaxies located somewhere in a vastly expanding universe. We calculate time to the nanosecond; most of us carry PDAs that notify us of every impending date of any significance. We are inundated with paper calendars that constantly remind us of not only the date, but of our most minute shortcomings, from contributing to the deaths of polar bears by using the wrong brand of gasoline to failing to swallow the vitamin fad-of-the–day to keep us forever young.

No, the Beowulf poet did not live in our world; he lived in his flat world that floated in the middle of an ocean that stretched to the horizon and there connected to the celestial ocean surrounding all the constellations on the zodiac. His earth was modeled, perhaps, on the Christian Topography of Indiopleustes Cosmas, a religious geographer of the sixth century. Cosmas’ depictions of the earth show that at the still points in the sky, the points of rotation in the North and South, were mountains that held up the sky, and the path of the sun and moon, the ecliptic, circled the bases of those mountains. Most European mythologies agreed that on top of the northern mountain grew a tree, Yggdrasil if you were Germanic, The Tree of Truth if you were Egyptian, whose roots were in the Underworld, whose trunk grew through the mundane world where it formed the North Pole, and whose top, with its leaves and branches, spread in Hrothgar’s land. (Heaney 96-97) On the southern mountain grew another tree, but it is less important in European mythology because the southern point of rotation sky is never above the horizon for the Northern Europeans. Not even puppis and lupus two southern constellations used in this poem, are completely revealed at the latitude of Dublin or Copenhagen.

In this essay I use terms such as “House of the Sun,” the name a northern citizen would have given to the constellation the sun rises from on the spring equinox, and the names of the constellations in the zodiac, Pisces, Taurus, Gemini, etc. This is not astrology; it is astronomy before Copernicus. Astronomy is descriptive; it describes what the astronomer believes he sees in the sky, particularly at night. Astrology seeks to be predictive of the life of an individual; the astrologer believes that each element in the sky, the sun, each moving star, each constellation, has an influence on the earth, particularly on people. Though their goals were different, Astronomy and astrology shared the same language because they were describing the same elements, the stars and constellations and their positions on the celestial hemisphere, until the beginning of the sixteenth century when Copernicus stopped the sun in its orbit and flung the planets into their outer voids. Astronomy accepted the change; astrology did not. Written long before Copernicus this poem delineates the astronomy the ordinary people saw in their dawn sky and used to tell time.

This foray into Beowulf began with a copy of Heaney’s new translation of the poem. For the first time I enjoyed the travails of the Nordic hero, no struggling with a language that is identified as Old English, no concerns with possible historical figures and their sword politics. Instead I enjoyed the story of a hero who enjoyed measuring himself against the world he lived in, and was rewarded sumptuously by kings. I saw something else; Beowulf has a more than passing resemblance to Perseus, the Greek hero. This was a path I had not traveled before and I followed it with interest. Looking at Beowulf from the perspective of the Perseus myth allows us to see the structure of the first part of the poem as mythic rather then nationalistic, and leads to understanding a bit about the author of the poem and where he is from.

Following the possible link between Beowulf and the Perseus myth I read as much of the commentary as I could, looking for a way to integrate my work with the commentary that has gone before. I read books about Beowulf, both psychological, Thinking About Beowulf, James Earl; myth and archeology, Beowulf & Grendel, John Grigsby: books of criticism grouped around a specific approach, The Dating of Beowulf, Colin Chase, and books that tried to be inclusive and listed the important essays within each certain approach in chronological order, almost a time machine in itself, A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert Bjork and John D. Niles. Beowulf scholarship evolved as the scholars evolved, learned more in their fields and applied their new approach to Beowulf, making it seem as if he evolved also.

Some commentary became so specialized that the fact of the poem became almost irrelevant. Accepted Beowulf criticism has become deductive and the poem seems to be getting lost in the commentary.

In none of the comments did I find anyone who mentioned the link between Beowulf and the Greek myth Perseus; I found no one except Edwin Irving who divided the poem at line nineteen hundred or so with reason. Beowulf Handbook, (1997) 185. He found that the preponderance of religious references were in the first part of the poem, the last part having very few. This difference he attributed to the absence of Hrothgar because he was the source of many of the religious utterances in the first part. Had he been inclined to strip out the non-Beowulf material he might have seen more.

I found no one who even hinted that the poem contained a calendar for the common man; most critics seemed to read a poem meant for the elite, the nobility. Finding a relationship between the older commentary and the Perseus approach is difficult, except that the use of a computer to aid research into the celestial part of the poem is a bit of an evolution. So Beowulf criticism evolves. Loaded with a program that simulates the sky (The Sky Student Edition, Bisque.com), the computer becomes a time machine, letting us look at the sky as the poet saw it in northern Europe, the pre-Copernican sky in the first millennium CE, the constellations rising and falling, the seasons parading across the horizon in their timely manner. The poet came to the north to do a specific job and did it very well. Besides the general form of the night sky he had these twelve signs, the zodiac, twelve groups of stars that were shaped by our imaginations into animals, objects and people, regardless of their names locally, forming the monthly celestial calendar. The zodiacal constellation on the horizon where the sun rose denoted the month; no other element in their world gave them this information, and this information was critical to their lives, just as it is today.

Suppose our man in northern Europe awoke one spring night and went outside to relieve himself. He looked at the eastern horizon and saw the bowman, Sagittarius, sitting on the trees. It is the middle of the night; he still has plenty of time to sleep. If he were an educated man he would know there are three images that will visit the eastern horizon before he must arise and get to work: after Sagittarius, next Capricorn, then Aquarius before the dawn sign, Pisces. I use the Greco/Roman names for the constellations because we know the Greco/Roman names; we are in the process of learning the names by which he would have known them. The names would have changed with the society, but that alteration does not change their use as time designators. Our man also knows that if Pisces is on the horizon when the sun comes up it is spring, March. If the sun rises from Aries it is April; Taurus means it is May, with May Day celebrations, the May Fairs, etc. If the “Wolf is at the door” it is winter; the wolf is the constellation Lupus on the southern horizon in December, January and February.

Why must he know these signs? Because if he doesn’t he and his family will die, of starvation, of cold because he will not know when to do what has to be done. When must he prepare to plant? When can he take time to go to town, to visit? When is the fair? When must he get his barns ready to store the harvest? When will the rains come? His morning sky tells him.

How does he learn these sign? He learns them at his father’s feet as a natural part of the wisdom people pass on to their children. He learns from songs, stories, poems he hears at the fairs, at the local beer hall, anywhere groups of men gather to exchange information.

But nothing, not even the star patterns, lasts forever and these constellations do not remain on the horizon at dawn indefinitely. Because of Zodiacal Precession each constellation remains on the dawn horizon for only some 2100 years or so. Then it slips down into the celestial sea and the next sign drops down out of the sun’s glare to replace it. Periodically the populace must be made aware that the old constellation, the old House, is no longer when it ought to be, and the new House must be introduced. This is one service the Beowulf provides.

 

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