The supernaturality in modern versions of Beowulf: a lexical study

Abstract

This paper aims to verify how supernatural characters and environments are described in modern versions of Beowulf and describe the root of the monsters' characterization. Four modern versions of the poem were used as corpus: A.D. Wackerbarth (1849), James M. Garnett (1882), Francis B. Gummere (1910) andJohn McNamara (2005). This research departs from the Lexical Field Theory, in which words can be gathered according to their common semantic meaning or to the absence of it (ABBADE, 2011;LIPKA, 1980). As a result, the lexical occurrences that describe the supernatural were divided into five fields: Religion, War, Name and Kinship, Creatures, and Hatred. There is a greater number of religious words, corroborating the idea that there is a contrast between paganism and Christianity in modern versions, just as there is in the original version of the poem "Beowulf" (GREENFIELD, 1966). Furthermore, the five proposed lexical fields correspond to the sacredness scale made by Júnior (2011), contributing to the idea that people in the Middle Ages saw the world with a supernatural perspective (JUNIOR, 2011).