Weaving New Tales; A Tapestry for a Modern Hero

The Eisenhower Memorial in Washington D.C. Photos from Designboom.com

Adding to the Greco-Roman temples and Egyptian obelisk in Washington D.C. dedicated to former presidents is a memorial with a distinctly medieval twist. The Frank Gehry-designed Eisenhower Memorial makes use of an enormous tapestry made of steel wires. The 450-foot-long stainless steel tapestry depicts the coast of Normandy, which was the site of the American invasion of Europe in World War II. Dwight D. Eisenhower, then a general and Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, led the Allied campaign, including the invasion of Europe that is the focus of the memorial.

I have long been interested in the mythology of the American Republic and the public pieces of art we use to continue to tell its story, particularly when they reach into the remote past for inspiration. The first post I wrote for this blog was on the Lincoln Memorial, embroiled in political protests earlier in the summer. With the Eisenhower Memorial, I am particularly interested in the ancient technology the memorial pays homage to. It is nothing unusual for marble columns, pediments, domes to feature in American memorials, but a reference to a tapestry, I've never seen.

Weavers and weaving play a significant role in the stories of various mythologies. Penelope used her weaving of Odysseus's death shroud as a device to hold off her unwelcome suitors. Arachne boasted that she could weave better than Athena and was turned into a spider for it. The Scandinavian Valkyrie are grisly weavers, using the entrails of men. German folk tales are full of references to spinners. Not only can tapestries tell stories, but the very creation of textiles has become synonymous with tale telling. The English word text is borrowed from the Old French word, texo, for "I weave" and we see it in the word textile. When we tell stories, we "spin yarns;" we weave words and spells. However ubiquitous tapestries are in history though, using one to memorialize an American hero of the 20th Century is unique.

An Architect Known for Unusual Structures

Frank Gehry's buildings are recognizable for their unusual structures. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, an art museum in Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, CA, were both designed by Gehry. Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia.

Frank Gehry, 91, is an architect known for some famous buildings and his style is typified by the unusual motif of undulating walls and structures. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, an art museum in Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, CA are considered famous examples of Gehry's work. Gehry's challenge was to bring this ancient technology into a modern design, to make it long lasting in an in an existing public space surrounded by office buildings. The tapestry had to be semi transparent, so as not to block the windows of an entire office building. In an interview with WBUR’s Here and Now, Gehry said: “The tapestry did that. Most tapestries are solid. They’re woven with materials and they’re solid. You can’t see through them. Here we needed to devise a way to make a tapestry that was semi-transparent, that did not block the light, that was like a veil.” The Washington Post’s architecture critic Philip Kennicott described the effect of the tapestry catching the light at night to be “magical.” The memorial also includes bronze statues and engraved walls. The overall effect feels theatrical, with scenes of statues and the Pointe du Hoc tapestry as a backdrop.

Gehry's Pointe du Hoc Line Drawing

Frank Gehry's line drawing on the tapestry, of the headland of Pointe du Hoc on the coast of Normandy, perhaps from the perspective of the shorebound soldiers of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, which would scale the cliff with ladders and grappling hooks.

The scene from Normandy depicted on the tapestry is actually the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, a headland between Utah and Omaha beaches, which army rangers scaled using the medieval technology of ladders and grappling hooks. Of course, the most famous tapestry celebrating a military victory that I know of is the Bayeux Tapestry, a 240-foot long tapestry depicting the invasion of England by Normans in 1066, which ended the reign of Anglo-Saxon kings and meant that our language would have quite a bit more French in it. I found a comparison to the Bayeux Tapestry mentioned in Fred A. Bernstein's coverage of the memorial in Architect Magazine, but Bernstein said that he was not aware of Gehry speaking on the topic. Again, I don't know of a more famous tapestry celebrating a military invasion so it seems unlikely to me that this wasn't at least a partially intentional allusion. Eisenhower's family had strong feelings about the memorial and forced Gehry to make a number of changes to his design, specifically to bring the focus to his achievements. Reading about their objections makes me think that they would not have appreciated a reference to the Bayeux Tapestry. Perhaps Gehry remained mum for that reason. I have reached out to Gehry's company, Gehry Partners, for comment but haven't heard from him. I will update the post if I learn more.

Bayeux Tapestry

The Bayeux Tapestry, woven in England in 1070, depicts the events leading up to another invasion, that of the Normans to England.

I am no expert on the Bayeux Tapestry, the historical events it recounts, or of the history of the landings at Normandy, but after seeing images of the U.S. Army Rangers' ladders and reading of their use of grappling hooks at Pointe du Hoc, which sits in the center of Gehry's tapestry, I had to check the Bayeux Tapestry for examples of medieval siege technology. I found a few examples, including a fellow on a rope and a number of soldiers beneath a tower with what appear to be torches. My research of the scenes tells me that the images depict a battle between Dukes William and Conan, that preceded William's invasion of England. I don't know what the fellow with the rope is scaling, perhaps a siege tower? However, the main story seems to be Conan's retreat and eventual surrender to William from atop the Castle Dinan.

Sieging Castle Dinan: Details from Bayeux Tapestry

The Latin text above these sections of the Bayeux Tapestry refer to a battle that preceded the invasion of England, of the retreat of Duke Conan to the Castle Dinan and of his surrender to William.

D-Day Invasion

The 2nd Ranger Battalion Scaling the Sheer Cliffs of Pointe du Hoc.

I will be honest and say that one of the lesser known episodes depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry seems a tenuous connection to the invasion of Normandy. My theory is beginning to feel threadbare and about to unravel! Perhaps the Pointe du Hoc provided Gehry with a better image than a line drawn landscape of the better known beach landings.

But what do you think? Is Gehry's tapestry an appropriate element in a memorial for a modern U.S. president? Is it appropriate for this particular president? Am I following the right thread in my thinking that the Bayeux Tapestry was in Gehry's mind when he designed his tapestry? Let me know in the comments below!

General Eisenhower Memorial Statue, Bayeux, France

Whether or not Gehry was thinking of Bayeux in designing his Eisenhower Memorial, the people of Bayeux, France certainly remember Dwight D. Eisenhower, as there is a memorial to the president there with a statue and more traditionally French arch.

"This Little Book;" Marjory Wardrop and the Tales of the Georgians

Statues dedicated to Marjory Wardrop and her brother Oliver in Tbilisi, Georgia in 2015, for the siblings' dedication to the nation and its culture and a photograph of the scholar herself. Tbilisi also boasts a square named for Oliver Wardrop and a room in parliament's national library that bears both of their names.

The very best version of the Cinderella story is that of the female Victorian scholar who starts her studies in secrecy, hiding her work from even from her parents, and ends it with her previously hidden work, her talents and herself celebrated by an entire nation. This is the story of the English scholar Marjory Wardrop, who introduced the English-speaking world to the ancient literature and folktales of Georgia. The conflict Wardrop faced in trying to break out of the domestic sphere assigned to her is palpable in this letter to her brother Oliver:

“I have got to stay at home just doing nothing when I might be living, learning and working. If I had been a man, I should have run away long ago and seen the world. You cannot think how rebellious against my situation I often feel. But there is no help for it: a woman must not have strong feelings, and I must pretend I am delighted with my happy existence. Nobody seems to understand that the soul, or I suppose I must say the heart as I am only a woman, strives and longs for something more than a well-built house and good things to eat, with a certain amount of paternal and maternal affection and a few respectable acquaintances. I don’t think you can feel much more lonely than in the far-away East than I often do at home.” (7)

Wardrop's words en totem echo those of certain revelations from Charlotte Bronte’s heroine Jane Eyre, in a novel Bronte felt she had to publish under a pen name almost fifty years before. Those about the prohibition of women having strong emotions unfortunately reflect complaints I read from women striving for equality in the workplace today. I felt an admiration and kinship with Wardrop before learning more about her personal experience, but learning about her aptitude in learning Old and Modern Georgian before having ever set foot in the country, she has truly become a hero to me. I write this article having just read Nikoloz Aleksidze’s handsome coffee-table book, Georgia; A Cultural Journey through the Wardrop Collection, published this summer by the Bodleian Library, and having long wanted to review Wardrop’s collection of Georgian Folk Tales. I will do both here.

There were two things that I enjoyed most in Aleksidze’s text. The first was learning more about Marjory Wardrop. I must register the complaint that this was not a more Marjory-centered book, but given the text’s focus on the Bodleian’s Wardrop Collection, built by Marjory and her brother Oliver, I am grateful for what I got. Aleksidze recounts the effects of a letter Wardrop wrote to Georgia’s literary luminary of the day, Ilia Chavchavadze, to ask Chavchavadze if he would give her permission to publish her translation of his poem, “The Hermit.” Chavchavadze was so impressed with Wardrop and her grasp of his language that he printed her letter in a newspaper he edited and the letter set off a debate about the state of women’s rights in Georgia. It received a flurry of lively responses in the newspaper, including: “The letter is written in fine Georgian, such fine Georgian that I wish a young Georgian woman had been able to write in it” (22). Ekaterina Gabashvili, a founder of the Georgian feminist movement, wrote: “Today, every young woman, if not entirely devoid of energy, can act freely, can receive higher education, and an educated person will never succumb to anyone these days. A modern woman will never bow in front of a man: please take me as your slave” (22). The irony to these responses is that the woman sparking debate in the state of rights of Georgian women felt compelled to ask her brother Oliver not to reveal to their parents, who disapproved of her interest in learning Georgian, that she was, in fact, compiling a Georgian-English dictionary that would exceed a thousand words!

Public Poets

Image of ashughs, public poets and musicians from Aleksidze’s Georgia, with traditional drums, daf, a large somewhat tambourine-like instrument with jingling internal rings, the plucked tar, and the bowed kamanche.

The second thing I most enjoyed learning about in Aleksidze’s Georgia was just how much the culture values storytelling. From the photograph of the four ashughs, the public poets and musicians who performed in public squares and challenged each other to the equivalents of rap battles, to the number of kings who produced their own poetry, a love of stories is apparent. The ashughs composed and performed in Georgian, Armenian, Azeri, Turkish and Farsi, and Aleksidze writes that Tbilisi’s greatest poet, Sayat-Nova, “exhibited poetic virtuosity in all of these languages” (15). And the works of the poet kings were not just the extravagant hobbies of powerful men with captive audiences, but texts that were popular and handed down. King Teimuraz I produced adapted the Biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, a tale popular throughout the region. Aleksidze writes that his greatest poetic achievement was a poetic adaptation of the martyring of his mother, Queen Ketevan, which he witnessed. Georgia’s location north of Iran and Turkey placed it in the historical reach of competing empires, but also in the midst of different language groups and cultural histories. The English Wardrop also brought her own love of stories to Georgia, first seeing the land through the classical lens of Greek mythology, marveling that she was in the lands of Jason, Medea and the golden fleece, of Prometheus’s chaining. One can hear her poetic heart gush as she brags of meeting Georgians named Jason, Medea, Telemachus, Juno and Venus: “In Imereti we are in the land of romance” (10). These are the sentiments of a romantic finally discovering herself unbound .

Marjory Wardrop's Georgian Folk Tales

For those who love folk literature, but who have not yet read Marjory Wardrop’s Georgian Folk Tales: do. You will not be disappointed. I read these tales in bed and found myself repeatedly laughing out loud and feeling compelled to interrupt my wife’s reading to share details with her that made her laugh out loud as well. There are obvious similarities with Grimms’ tales and other folk tales I've read, but the Georgian tales go to unexpected places, particularly when characters do the wrong thing and are somehow rewarded for it. Some of the tales have motifs so familiar to readers of Grimm that I wonder whether the Grimms scrubbed tales of moral ambivalence to be more socially correct. If so, it is our distinct loss, which you will discover upon reading Wardrop's translations. I delight in their many unexpected moments: I like the mother siding with the troll over her son. I like the women who claim their sister gave birth to a puppy. I like the youngest brother who feels a sense of responsibility to a frog, when his older brothers won high born maidens. These are just fun!

The tale of “The Fox and the King’s Son” is illustrative. It begins, “There was once a king who had a son. Every one treated him badly, and chased him away. Even passers-by looked upon him with disfavour” (106). I expected this prince, who decides to leave to live in the woods, to be a sympathetic character, but he isn’t. The fox who befriends him does so because the prince hunts every day and throws out the majority of his kill, which the fox finds wasteful. In order to economically deal with the prince’s wastefulness, the fox eventually brings in an entire staff of animals who work for the prince even though the prince is uncomfortable and frightened by this menagerie. The animals provide the prince with everything one in his station in life could want, and he just fouls it all up. One of the funniest moments of the tale is when the animals pretend to be a band of roving performers in order to kidnap a princess bride for him. You will have to read it to find out where it goes from there.

The first tale in the collection, “Master and Pupil,” sets the morally ambiguous tone I find so exciting. It is about a poor peasant who apprentices his son to the devil and manages to come out well from it. After swindling the devil, the father and son set out to swindle more people, with his son turning into animals that his father sells at a high price with both fleeing afterwards to repeat the con. Each time the pair dupes someone, my expectations of punishment rose higher. When the father sells his son back to the devil I thought they were done for, but he manages a way out of it that recalls the tale of the Welsh Taliesin. One might feel that the peasant and his son would become annoying or villainous, but the tone of the tale entirely allows them to be sympathetic and in the right, from the moment the peasant’s wife insults and berates him for being so poor and stupid.

Wardrop’s collection of folk tales has become my favorite. They glitter in ways that make their closest literary relatives seem dull in comparison and though there are thirty, I never found myself yearning for one to be finished because it lost my interest. I can’t say the same of any other collection of folk tales. It is the utmost irony that she translated them "as a relaxation from these more arduous studies (of translating Georgia's premier epic poem)," and characteristic that she introduced them with the hope that: "this little book may perhaps claim some attention from the public" (1).

My main takeaway from Aleksidze’s Georgia and Wardrop’s Georgian Folk Tales is that Marjory Wardrop, as revered as she still is in Georgia, lacks the critical attention in the west that she so richly deserves. Wardrop’s translations of the tales and her great work, a translation of Georgia’s shining poetic jewel, Shota Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther’s Skin still remain the gold standards for English translations of these works. Georgia in 2015 dedicated statues of Marjory and her brother Oliver, who was England’s ambassador to Georgia, near the Georgian parliament. Oliver’s likeness is animated, but Marjory clutches her book, the literary heritage of Georgia, to her bosom. Her chin is raised in defiance of anyone who would question that this brilliant woman should be a scholar. I long for an annotated version of her tales and for dedicated biographies that a scholar of her importance, and person who would be regarded as a truly inspirational feminist hero, currently lacks. Wardrop deserves our attention.

But what do you think? Are you a fan of Georgian Folk Tales? Do you feel a kinship with Marjory Wardrop, her passion and her struggle? Would you (like me) like to know more about this woman and her editorial and research process? Let me know in the comments below!

Two Trolls and a Dragon Walk into a Tale; Bridging the Grettir-Fafnir Divide in Beowulf

Two devis relax over a game with pieces that look suspiciously like human bones at Musthaid Park in Tblisi, Georgia. Devs are troll-like creatures in Georgian folk tales. Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

Books I’ve read about Beowulf analogues are invariably broken into two parts: the stories that resemble events from the first half of the poem and stories that resemble the second half. It’s the Grettir-Fafnir divide. The stories about protagonists fighting trolls or other giant humanoid horrors resemble the Grendel section and stories about dragon slayers resemble the dragon section. And this has always seemed reasonable because I hadn’t ever seen a story that incorporated both. That is, until I read “Asphurtzela.” The Georgian folktale, translated by English scholar Marjory Wardrop in 1894, opens with a hero killing two trolls (and a troll’s mother) and finishes up with conflicts with two dragons. I have not seen scholarly analyses of the tale by Beowulf scholars and feel that "Asphurtzela" must be entered into the record and addressed. Not only does Asphurtzela battle trolls and dragons, but many of the details of his encounters in these conflicts also exist in Beowulf. This article lays out the concordances between the poem and the folk tale with the understanding that these moments of agreement, as striking as they are, may still be the result of coincidence. That said, “Asphurtzela” deserves a place in Beowulf scholarship to rival those of Grettis saga and European folk tales like "Strong Hans." I also analyze the nature of the similarities between the folk tale and poem and offer suggestions for how the similarities could be based on a missing tradition of tales or traditions. This is the third of a series of articles investigating the possible relationship between “Asphurtzela,” Beowulf and the Beowulf-analogues Grettis saga and “Strong Hans.” There are links to those pieces at the bottom of this article.

Missing Fathers

In keeping with Friedrich Panzer's Bear’s Son tales, Beowulf and Asphurtzela are separated from a father. In Beowulf’s case, he knows of his father Ecgtheow and speaks of him proudly, but it is not clear what became of him or if he was part of Beowulf’s life. Beowulf has a father-son relationship with his uncle Hygelac and was raised by his grandfather and uncles. Hrothgar provides what we learn about Ecgtheow, whom he rescued from a feud by paying wergild, which seems to have motivated Beowulf’s expedition to Heorot Hall: his desire to repay his father's debt. Asphurtzela is born after his brothers and sister go searching for their father and are captured by a devi, a creature that resembles and functions very much like trolls in the Scandinavian tradition. His mother had mysteriously recommended that they go searching for their “patrimony,” but the story is silent on exactly what that means. As with Bear's Son tales, Asphurtzela is born through magical means, via an apple given to his mother by a stranger. When Asphurtzela is old enough to learn of his sibling's captivity, he goes on a quest to rescue them.

Dominating Through Words

Beowulf and Asphurtzela’s first physical battles are preceded by a battle of words and wills. Beowulf’s famous flyting scene with Unferth establishes Beowulf as the alpha male in Heorot, a man able to face down a verbal attack and a challenge to his ego. This verbal competition seems to prove him worthy to face Grendel. When Asphurtzela faces the hundred-headed devi, he first establishes himself as the devi's better in ways that his brothers previously failed. Granting hospitality to his guest, the devi asks Asphurtzela if he would prefer a bed or a stables; meat or the bone; the small or large container of wine. Whereas his brothers repeatedly choose the smaller or lesser choice, Asphurtzela always chooses the better. In choosing the lesser offers, Asphurtzela's brothers mark themselves as unworthy of respect and doomed to lose. Asphurtzela marks himself as a man of courage and self-respect. He not only chooses the better lot each time, but he berates the devi for offering him less than he deserves. When offered bones or flesh, Asphurtzela says: “Why should I eat bones? Am I a dog that I should do this?” (75). When offered a bed or stable, he says: “I am a man, what should I do in the stable? Give me a bed,” (75). Aspurtzela thus forces the devi to take the lesser accommodations and food and thereby places himself above the devi in the devi's own house.

Sneak Attack at Night

The Grendel episode can be compared to the Asphurtzela's contests with two separate devis. Like Grendel, the hundred-headed devi that Asphurtzela first faces lives with its mother. Asphurtzela first outwits the mother, who had facilitated the devi's kidnapping of his siblings. When the devi sees Asphurtzela, flames shoot from his eyes much as Grendel's do when he first sees the Geats sleeping: “From his eyes shone an unlovely light, most like a flame” (726-727). (Author’s translation, based on Benjamin Slade.) The elements of a sneak attack by night, and the hero outwitting the troll are present in "Asphurtzela." When Asphurtzela lies in bed, he is awoken by the sound of the devi sharpening a giant sword. Guessing his intentions, Asphurtzela puts a log in his bed and hides elsewhere. The devi chops the log in two and leaves and Asphurtzela then shakes off the bed and sleeps peacefully. The episode, along with the eating scene, is reminiscent of stories of the Norse god Thor's conflicts with trolls -- except that Thor is usually the one being outwitted. Asphurtzela and the devi wrestle when the devi, to his surprise, discovers Asphurtzela unscathed the next morning. The fight is short and the devi is outmatched: “The devi struggled and struggled, but could not move his brother-in-law. Then Asphurtzela attacked him, and buried him in the ground up to the neck” (76). Beowulf’s fight with Grendel is more developed than this, but it is similar in a crucial way. The moment Beowulf gasps him, Grendel is unable to gain power over him: “quickly (Beowulf) grasped his evil plan and clamped down on (Grendel’s) arm. At once the shepherd of atrocities discovered he had not met on earth, in the whole world a greater hand grip in another man on earth” (748-752). Beowulf and Asphurtzela then, immediately have their enemy in their power. Asphurtzela kills the devi and its mother with his arrows, which is unlike Grendel's escape, however, the second devi that Asphurtzela kills, by cutting it in half with an arrow, continues to move. Just as Grendel leaves a trail of blood to his lair, the second devi's head rolls to a hole in the ground, kicking off another episode in the story that resembles Beowulf's descent into Grendel's mere, and the analogous episode in Grettis saga.

Betrayals

In Beowulf and “Asphurtzela” the hero is betrayed or abandoned repeatedly. Beowulf's lack of a father reframes Beowulf as an orphan and outcast when he narrates his upbringing in the second half of the poem. Hrothgar and the Danes later leave him for dead when the blood bubbles up from Grendel’s mere after he kills Grendel’s mother. Finally, Beowulf’s men abandon him in his final battle with the dragon. Asphurtzela is similarly a figure who generally cannot count on the help of others. This begins when his mother deceives him about his missing siblings and his jealous brothers tie him to a tree after he saves them. They intend to abandon him, binding him so tightly “blood poured from his fingers” (77). Asphurtzela is again left to his death when he goes into the hole in the ground. His new companions draw up the princesses he finds and then cover the hole with rocks. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a folklore version of Beowulf intended to show what a missing link between the poem and the extant Bear’s Son Tales could have looked like. In Tolkien’s “Selic Spell,” the Unferth figure accompanies the hero to Grendel’s lair and lowers him down on a rope, only to abandon him. In a previous piece on Beowulf and “Asphurtzela” I investigate the similarities between “Asphurtzela” and the Beowulf-analogue Grettis saga, in which a companion abandons the rope Grettir expects to climb after facing a troll.

Voracious Enemies

Beowulf and Asphurtzela both face ravenous foes of fractional natures. Grendel, of course, eats thirty men in his first accounted attack on Heorot and then devours the Geat Hondscio, which the poet dramatizes in gross detail: “He quickly grasped a sleeping warrior, rended without restraint, bit into the bone-locks, from the veins drank blood, swallowed great chunks, soon he had the unliving one all devoured, feet and hands” (740-745). Grendel is also a physical being with magical protections and his cannibalism makes him beast-like while his emotions mark him as human. Protected by magic from the blades ordinary men could use to defeat him, it requires a man of superhuman strength to defeat him without weapons. Grendel is therefore invulnerable and torn apart; terrifying and, in a moment, pitiable. Asphurtzela’s second adversary is the lame devi, who demands food from him and his comrades and finally threatens to devour each of them: “'If thou wilt not give me to eat, I shall eat thee and thy food too'” (80). The lame devi's split nature makes him, like Grendel, strong and weak and as I wrote in a previous piece, this puts them in the position of an antagonist of the Bear's Son tales, as the giant dwarf from the Bear’s Son Tale “Strong Hans” is both large and small. The devi’s lameness is never described and plays no role in the plot. His family of devis leaves him behind in the house (hidden in a chimney) but they could just as easily leave a fully able devi behind to spy. And despite its lameness, the devi is more than a match for Asphurtzela's superpowered companions. The lame devi's name alone marks him as lame. This seems a significant detail because there is no obvious reason for the devi to be lame (or the dwarf to be a giant) and when details in stories are never followed up it makes me wonder if something may have been lost in their transmission. This is the logic that Beowulf scholar R.W. Chambers followed in determining that Grendel's mere was meant to be a cave behind a waterfall, and that the setting was imperfectly adjusted to address the new English audience that had no experience with Scandinavian waterfalls.

Dragons

St. George the dragon slayer, 15th Century enamel icon, Art Museum of Georgia, Tbilisi.

In an prior piece, I established "Asphurtzela" as a tale with enough motifs to categorize it as one of Friedrich Panzer's Bear's Son tales, but the Bear’s Son tales were only meant to demonstrate how the Grendel section, including the fight with Grendel’s mother, could have been based on a folklore tradition. However, in addition to the Beowulf-like conflicts with trolls, “Asphurtzela” also includes a fight with a dragon. Like his conflicts with the trolls, the fight with the dragon is described in a sentence. I will therefore focus here on the point of greatest similarity between the dragon fights in the poem and folk tale, which is their settings. Both fights occur in or near a symbolic underworld, as Beowulf stands at the boundary of the dragon’s cave and Asphurtzela faces his dragon in a fairyland-like underworld.

“Asphurtzela’s” dragon episode introduces an entire kingdom underground that seems more like a fairyland, or in modern fantasy parlance, another dimension or plane of reality. Asphurtzela, trapped in the hole his companions shut him in, disregards instructions from the maiden he saved and puts his head under a stream and is “immediately carried to the lower regions” (80). This land is later contrasted with “the land of light” (82). There is no real physical detail to allow a reader to understand it as subterranean other than our knowledge that he has journeyed far underground. Asphurtzela is able to “wander about,” suggesting the land is large. He also finds an old woman’s cottage and travels to a well and meets a princess and the king of this land. The old woman and princess tell Asphurtzela that the dragon has stopped the water until it is given a human sacrifice. In this, the dragon resembles the Vedic serpent Vritra, a symbol of drought, and several other Indo-European myths dragons or serpents that cut off the water supply and must be defeated by a storm god to return the rains. As in Beowulf, “Asphurtzela’s” dragon is also a “fiery dragon” (80). Asphurtzela makes short work of the dragon with his arrows.

Beowulf’s dragon lives in a barrow from which issues a stream that is scalding hot: “the brook’s surge, hot with deadly fire, he could not near the hoard without burning” (2546-2548). As with Beowulf’s adventure in Grendel’s mere, the description of this stream is not very easy to follow. The text suggests that there is a natural spring flowing from a cave, but that it has been super heated by the passive heat of the dragon’s breath. Beowulf is burnt by the stream before he alerts the dragon to his presence. I have spent many readings of Seamus Heaney's translation of this passage unclear as to where the heat issues from and it may be that in looking at the original text I filled in blanks. Beowulf’s dragon is not a cause of drought, but as with the dragon from “Asphurtzela,” a source of water has been affected and it doesn't take much of a leap of imagination to conceive of the water being more of a central issue in an earlier iteration of the tale. Beowulf’s dragon, in the Scandinavian tradition, is a hoarder of gold. This likens him to Fafnir of the Volsung Saga, a tale referred to in Beowulf. All evidence in Beowulf and other Old English texts clearly link good kingship with gift-giving and bad kingship with greed. Beowulf's Heremod shows that a king who stops the flow of gold stands in the way this culture operates, interrupts its economy, and Heremod's men betray him. If Anglo-Saxon kings were the central hub of the society, literally making it work, Beowulf's dragon is an inversion of a good king. The dragon in Beowulf is clearly a gold-hoarder and is also repeatedly described with the words and formulae otherwise reserved for kings. The dragon is a hordweard (2293), hoard-guardian, as opposed to kennings for king, folcesweard (2513) and a folceshyrde (2981), defenders of people. Hrothgar is also called goldwine gumena (1171), gold-friend of men, and the Old English poem "The Wanderer" twice uses goldwine as a kenning to indicate a king. Where the Anglo-Saxon culture and economy depended on the free flow of gold from the king to his thanes, perhaps the tradition of dragons hoarding gold grew out of a drought story of a dragon hoarding water. Perhaps the scalding, dragon-polluted stream in Beowulf reflects that earlier tradition.

In my study of “Asphurtzela,” Beowulf, “Strong Hans” and Grettis saga, I have found the closest correspondences between “Asphurtzela” and “Strong Hans,” and “Asphurtzela” and Beowulf. “Asphurtzela” definitely possesses the elements of the Bear’s Son Tale “Strong Hans,” but with its dragon episode, more closely resembles Beowulf than “Strong Hans.” There is more work to be done to chase this investigation to its end. A closer investigation of “Asphurtzela” in its original language and of translator Marjory Wardrop’s notes to the story are two ways to further this study that I don’t at the moment have access to. Neither have I investigated all of Friedrich Panzer’s Bear Son tales in order to see how closely they align with “Strong Hans” and “Asphurtzela.” These resources would be more easily obtainable if there were not a global pandemic affecting libraries, but I will surely continue looking for ways to answer my questions and satisfy my curiosity.

But what do you think? Is it worth while to even study Beowulf analogues? Do you think all of these similarities are evidence of a relationship, or shared history? Do you think it's all coincidence? Let me know in the comments.

This piece is the third in a series on “Asphurtzela” and a possible relationship with Beowulf. If you liked this post, read “No Stone Unturned,” and “‘Asphurtzela’ and the Bear’s Son Tale Tradition.” The first piece compares Steinn from Grettis saga with the Clod-swallower from “Asphurtzela,” and the second gives more context the theory that the Grendel-section of Beowulf could have been based on a folk tale.