Mead-Halls and Men-At-Arms: Problems of Dating and the Image of the Heroic Age
By Kit Kapphahn
Creative Spaces: A Postgraduate Journal for the Creative Industries, Vol.1 (2010)
Abstract: Problems of dating consistently haunt modern scholars who have no way of knowing whether a text written down in the fourteenth century might have been composed in the sixth, the tenth, or even later. Despite this, the enduring image of the ‘heroic age’ of early Britain has persisted, with poetry—Y Gododdin, the praise of Urien Rheged, and the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf—providing a historical canvas. Scholars pick apart the texts for clues like (and sometimes as) archaeologists, patching together what they can find into a framework built from other, equally unreliable sources.
Writers of high middle ages held an equally romantic vision of the bygone age of the noble barbarian, and far less attachment to the authorship of their own work. The images of mead-halls and blood-feuds, while attested to some extent, are far from complete, though their remnants are found throughout modern popular culture. Were the scribes who saved the poems really preserving the works of the ancients, or merely the medieval version of historical fiction? Linguistically, a strong case can be made for a later date; historical attestations point to an earlier one. Care must be taken when attempting to present a firm conclusion.
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