Redundant Ethnogenesis in Beowulf

Redundant Ethnogenesis in Beowulf

Davis, Craig R.

The Heroic Age Issue 5 Summer/Autumn 2001

Abstract

One of the Beowulf poet’s purposes is to inspire a sense of common identity in an ethnically complex audience by reimagining relations between various hero-peoples of a traditional past with whom members of that audience might have identified. However, the poem’s ethnogenesis failed to achieve broad cultural authority. It proved superfluous to the task of national consciousness-building which was already being accomplished on a biblical model of moral ethnicity adumbrated in the poem itself.

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