Anthropological Horizons
Editor: Michael Lambek, University of Toronto
This series, begun in 1991, focuses on theoretically informed
ethnographic works addressing issues of mind and body, knowledge
and power, equality and inequality, the individual and the collective
Interdisciplinary in its perspective, the series makes a unique
contribution in several other academic disciplines: women's studies,
history, philosophy, psychology, political science, and sociology.
‘The Varieties of Sensory Experience
‘A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses
Elite by David Howes
Arctic Homeland
Kinship, Community, and Development in Northwest Greenland
‘Mark Nuttall,
Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte
Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession
Michael Lambek
4 Deathly Waters and Hungry Mountains
Agrarian Ritual and Class Formation in an Andean Town,
Pater Gose
5 Paradis
Class, Commuters, and Ethnicity in Rural Ontario
Stanley R. Barrett
6 The Cultural World in Beowulf
John M. Hill
John M. Hill
THE
CULTURAL
WORLD
IN BEOWULF
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo LondonContents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 5
Feud Settlements in Beowulf 25
“The Temporal World in Bewulf 38
The Jural World in Besoulh 65
‘The Economy of Honour in Beowil 85
The Psychological World in Besoalf 108
Conclusion 242
Notes 353
Work Cited 203
Index 219eae
Acknowledgments
‘Acknowledgments reveal the debts we know and thus our self
conscious, authorial identity. Appropriately enough for a book on
Beooulf and such topics as gift giving and constructed kinship, the
close and extended kindred of influential predecessors, colleagues,
and collaborators is large. The scholarship of some predecessors is
0 fundamental that without them this book could not have been
conceived. I think here mainly of the great editor, Frederick Klaeber,
the historians Frederic Seebohm and DH. Green, the germanicist
Vilhelm Gronbech, the literary historian H. Munro Chadwick, and
such anthropologists as Marcel Mauss, Bronislaw Malinowski, Mar-
shall Sahlins, and Marilyn Strathern. I also owe much to a host of
literary scholars, whose contributions appear in both the text and
notes
Robert D. Stevick and Robert O. Payne first guided me through
Beowulf and the daunting commentary surrounding it. My debt to
them is inestimable. Several generations of students, first at Smith
College, and then at the U.S. Naval Academy shared my enthusiasm
and sparked scholarly essays underlying sections of this book. But
‘my anthropological interests found a comprehensive voice only after
Ross Samson and Pam Graves invited me to a 1988 conference at
Glasgow University on New Perspectives in Viking Studies. The ex-
posure there to anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians sug-
gested startlingly different ways of addressing old problems. While
a scholar in residence at Denison University, received helpful advice
about British anthropology from Keith Maynard and Susan Didick.
Readers for the University of Toronto Press suggested additional an-
thropological readings appropriate for the kind of society Beowulf
dramatizes, To William McKellin, whose advice helped shape this