Os heróis gregos e anglo-saxões ou as transformações de um paradigma

Abstract

This dissertation presents a reading of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf based on readings of the Homeric poems. The objective is to initiate a discussion about the nature of the Anglo-Saxon heroic paradigm relying on parameters normally used to discuss the nature of the Greek heroic paradigm. Because the first English literature is in general less known to the Brazilian public, this crossed approach tries to enlighten the main aspects of this literature by making use of analogous characteristics found in the better known Greek literature.Although establishing a conclusive poetic diachrony between the Greek and the Anglo-Saxon is impossible due to insufficient verbal parallels between Beowulf and the Homeric poems, the comparative method was found efficient for evincing that the protagonists of the three poems can be qualified following neuter and common parameters that do not describe a diachronic-poetic transformation, but rather an historic-social one. This method is, evidently, synchronic and the discovery that the Beowulf, due to its form, is better analysed by means of a synchronic method is perhaps this research's greatest achievement. This poem and the Homeric poems are products of oral literature, but, while the latter try to organically articulate many myths of a long-lived tradition dedicated to hero cult, the former tries to gloss the most important myths of the Germanic tradition by the time it was composed, a tradition already overwhelmed by Christianity. This study is essentially one in literary theory, but a great part of its arguments relies on a methodology that is as literary as it is linguistic: close reading, the procedure of textual analysis preferred by contemporary Hellenists, especially those from the Anglophone academic milieu. By adopting such a methodology, this dissertation calls attention to these Hellenists' thoughts and discloses the Anglo-Saxon literature in didactic fashion. It also takes this opportunity to exercise techniques of literary and philological hermeneutics that are state of the art in Classics and widely useful for literary studies in general.