Although it only survives in one half-burned copy, Beowulf is today both the star poem that begins countless British literature surveys and one of the few medieval texts with sufficient name recognition to receive a major movie adaptation under the same title as its scholarly edition. Yet the traditional account of the poem’s – relatively recent – rise to prominence hinges on a single essay. For a long time, Beowulf’s success has been attributed to J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1936 Israel Gollancz Memorial British Academy lecture, subsequently published as ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, which is conventionally understood to have authorised the poem for literary study insofar as it frames Beowulf as worthy of aesthetic appreciation and analysis. Was Tolkien – together with the British Academy – really singularly responsible for delivering Beowulf to the literature classroom, the publishing industry and Hollywood? In this chapter, we ask what other stories we can tell about the poem, both in terms of its enduring appeal as a poem and its course through different institutional spaces and historical moments.

Of all the Arabic works bearing upon the history of the Crusades in the Levant, none has been so warmly received as the Kitāb al-Iʿtibār or Book of Contemplation, by the Syrian warrior-poet Usama ibn Munqidh (d. 1188). Indeed, in the non-Arabic-speaking West, in studies academic and popular, in textbooks, anthologies, syllabuses and websites, Usama’s Book of Contemplation has become the first, and very often the only voice of Islamic perspectives on the Crusades. And yet the work was not particularly well known in its time, and survives only in one ragged and incomplete unicum manuscript. How do we account for this disjuncture? How is it that this once obscure work has become, after the Qur’an and The Thousand and One Nights, one of the best-loved texts of pre-modern Arabic literature in the West? This chapter traces the history of Usama’s work, sketching first what we know about its circulation in the medieval Islamic world and then its reception in European and American academic circles. But there is more to the prominence of Usama’s work than just its history of publication and translation. Rather, the work itself possesses features that have lent themselves to reformulation by translators and editors, preserving its cogency and immediacy even as fashions in the field of Crusades studies have come and gone.

Unlike mid-century approaches to the aesthetics of diction and variation, the influence of mid-century accounts of the narrative aesthetics of Beowulf have had a long reach in accounts of the poem’s aesthetic unity, balance, stability, and stasis. Against the backdrop of mid-century structuralist narratology, Blaser’s and Spicer’s approach to what they called the ‘serial poem’ provides a point of departure for a reevaluation of the interruptive and incomplete aesthetics of the ‘episodes and digressions’ that obsessed Beowulf’s mid-century critics. Rather than relitigate the episodes and digressions directly, the chapter first turns to lyrical interruptions of the poem’s narrative and, paying attention to the poem’s lexicon of fire, traces a fragmentary narrative about the aesthetics of fire and flame, touching on the burning of Heorot, the poem’s cremations, and the dragon. The aesthetics of these instances of flame-eaten lyricism mark an attempt to render sensible the resistance of sensoriality to narrativity. The chapter then turns to the ‘Finnsburg episode’, which Brodeur asked Blaser and Spicer to read as a discrete modern poem just as they were formulating their early serial poetics. Examining the narrative, formal, stylistic, and ‘fitt-division’ boundaries at either end of the episode, the chapter traces a latent seriality conditioned by a layering of pure spacing and the intrusion of non-narrative compositions whose edges mark a besieging of the poem’s narrativity by sensoriality. The chapter concludes by articulating how the heat of Beowulf operates differently—perhaps less humanly—on the scale of narrative than on that of diction.

The Introduction addresses the strange fact that, in both European and Middle Eastern medieval studies, those texts that we now study and teach as the most canonical representations of their era were in fact not popular or even widely read in their day. On the other hand, those texts that were popular, as evidenced by the extant manuscript record, are taught and studied with far less frequency. The Introduction offers an overview of the situation from the perspectives of both the European and the Middle Eastern literary traditions.

This chapter asks what precisely Blaser meant in referring to the ‘heat’ of Beowulf, and what this comprehends about early medieval aesthetics. Contextualizing heat within Blaser’s poetics, heat emerges as a term of a phenomenologically translative poetics that phrases the aesthetic as ‘perception’, and frames poesis as a primarily perceptual, corporeal process. Calibrating this critical lexicon to early medieval concepts of aesthetics, the chapter constellates Blaser’s engagement with the Old English poem The dream of the rood with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, critical sensology, early medieval discourses of the senses, and Mary Carruthers’ analysis of rhetoric and multisensory complexion in medieval aesthetics. The chapter also introduces the concept of ‘ductus’, or the paths that lead a reader through the experience of the text, and nuances all these discourses with perspectives from medieval disability studies and a critique of the assumed dominance of the visual in early medieval aesthetics, especially in the sensology of the Fuller Brooch. Phrased as a question about perception, Blaser’s ‘heat’ gestures to the ecopoetical functions of aesthetics and the ways that sensory impairments—especially visual impairments in early medieval England—might shape how we understand aesthetics within western medieval hierarchies of the senses. The chapter concludes by turning this analysis on a reading of multisensoriality in Beowulf, arguing that the poem represents a world whose multisensoriality and synesthesia would require the kind of phenomenological translation performed by Blaser’s ‘heat’ to render it sensible for the vulnerable corporeality of the human sensorium.