Anonymous asked:

how old is written language in scandinavia? a stuck up English teacher was acting like beowulf was the absolute first written literature from that entire region and that sounds super wrong to me I was hoping you’d know

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First of all, the date for the origin of Beowulf (as an Old English poem) is a hot mess. Scholars are still arguing about where it falls on a massive scale of time, c. 700-1000 AD. That said, the oldest date that it could possibly be from, according to such estimation, is 700. However, it is worth mentioning here that the earliest manuscript that we have for (a full) Beowulf, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, has been dated from between 975 and 1025.

Now, to answer your initial question, writing existed in Scandinavia in the form of runes (Elder Fuþark) around the year 100 (and perhaps even earlier, if we account for the time that it took for the art-form to spread a bit).¹ But, I am certain that your English teacher would not consider this form of writing to be ‘literature’. And neither would I, honestly. Literature implies a full-length written work, whereas runic inscriptions typically kept to short passages.

If we discount runes and only consider full-length material written in manuscripts with the latin alphabet, then Beowulf likely steals the gold for having been written earlier, since most of Scandinavian literature (of this sort) was composed between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (c.1200-1400). But to limit stories to a specific form is nonsense, if you ask me, especially when it is known that they have circulated orally before finally seeing the ‘light’ of vellum. 

If this English teacher wants to claim Beowulf as an older story than anything in Scandinavia, then he would be as mad as a troll who thinks they can withstand daylight. What they seem to be boasting is that the Anglo-Saxons happened to be converted before the Scandinavians, and therefore wrote their stories down before the Scandinavians felt the need to do so as well. Which is true, but not really impressive. Stories can exist without writing.

But I should wrap this up, since I feel the passion surging through my fingertips, which would turn this answer into a lengthy article regarding a brief history of storytelling and story-form.

I would just like to add, in conclusion, that there are runestones containing excerpts of similar stories (Völsunga saga) that date to around the same time as the manuscript containing Beowulf. There is a series of runestones known as the Sigurd Stones, broadly dated to c. 950-1000 AD, which would make them roughly contemporary with Beowulf, according to the Cotton Vitellius manuscript. These were written in runes (Younger Fuþark) and contain portions of Sigurd’s story. While it could not be considered a full-length work like Beowulf, Scandinavians were still writing bits of their own stories down around the same time (and likely earlier, as well).

But it is also worth mentioning that the events in Völsunga saga took place in the fourth and fifth centuries,² which is earlier than the events of Beowulf, which took place in the sixth century.³ The story itself, in essence, is likely older than Beowulf.

Long story short: They are right to say that Beowulf was written (in full) earlier than Scandinavian literature of the same sort, but stories predate literature (and some Scandinavian oral stories predate Beowulf).

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ENDNOTES

1. Michael P. Barnes, Runes: A Handbook (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2012), 2-3. [The part I that have cited is viewable in the preview].
2. Jesse L. Byock, “Introduction,” in The Saga of the Volsungs, translated by Jesse L. Byock (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 2.
3. Michael Alexander, “Introduction,” in Beowulf: Verse Translation, translated by Michael Alexander (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 1.