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.

This chapter tracks the fate of a particular category of literature that was popular then and is not now: wisdom literature. Works such as Barlaam and Josaphat, Kalilah and Dimnah, the Book of Secundus and the Seven Sages of Rome were widely read in the pre-modern world in both Arabic and a variety of western European languages. Then gradually, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, they vanished. Modern scholars have generally assumed that readers’ tastes changed. These works are all categorised as ‘wisdom literature’, and modern readers seek entertainment, not wisdom, in their leisure reading. But this account is incomplete, in part because each of these works has a distinct ethical footprint. Barlaam and Josaphat talks about religion and society. Kalilah and Dimnah focuses on the wiles of ministers or those who serve men in power. The Book of Secundus is an analytical wordlist of key terms used to describe the natural world, religion and society. And the Seven Sages of Rome is a tangled knot of sexual mores, investigating the games played by men and women, the tension between older and younger men, and the difficulty of establishing trust between men and women and between the young and the old. This chapter asks what ‘wisdom’ looks like in pre-modern literature, and why modern audiences have stopped reading these works.

The afterword begins by summarizing how the book formulates the ‘heat’ of Beowulf, cataloging its operation on the level of diction, variation, and narrative, characterizing it in ecopoetical, sensological, and phenomenological terms. After reflecting on the medievalness of Blaser’s and Spicer’s modern poetics, the Afterword then points to larger implications of the book and areas for further study. First, the Afterword notes the book’s attention to the convergence of sensology, phenomenology, and ecopoetics, suggesting possible comparisons between twentieth-century poetry by John Ashbery and Bernadette Mayer with early medieval texts and monastic orthopraxis. This is followed by pointing to potential future considerations of historical discourses and experiences of sensory impairment in relationship to the possibility of non-representational, sensological ecopoetics, noting especially the importance of early medieval medical and legal texts. Finally, the Afterword explores how Blaser’s and Spicer’s revision of Ezra Pound’s medievalism invites a new consideration of the non-representational functions of ornament in early medieval poetics. This last possibility is briefly explored in a reading of Exeter Book Riddle 31.

Today, the Ṭawq al-ḥamāma is not only the most famous work of the Andalusian scholar Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456 / 1064), it has become a nearly ubiquitous text: in the Arabic-speaking world it is found on school curricula and is widely read; on a global scale it has been translated into numerous languages; and it has not only sparked much scholarship, but has also inspired modern literary adaptations. It is considered a quintessential guide to the theme of love in Arabic literature. Yet this modern popularity is in stark contrast to its perilous transmission. How can it be that a text so fundamental today could have been transmitted to us on the feeble thread of a single manuscript, now held in Leiden? Its singularity, however, does not mean a lack of interest in the book between its inception and its rediscovery in the nineteenth century. The manuscript bears many traces of former possessors and readers, traces that have hitherto not been analysed. This chapter charts the path of this manuscript in the East, explains how it ended up in Leiden, and shows how it was first edited and popularised in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

This chapter revisits the debates about Old English poetic diction that formed the bedrock of the mid-century interest in Beowulf’s aesthetics, rewound through Blaser’s and Spicer’s responses to Arthur G. Brodeur’s instruction. For Brodeur and his followers, the aesthetics of Old English poetic diction were legible to the extent that they participated in the organic unity of the poem and exhibited the individuality of poet. Brodeur was interested in the ‘inner workings’ of compound poetic diction in order to measure its originality. Blaser’s and Spicer’s attention to Brodeur’s interests, as evidenced in their coordinated experiments translating the compound words of the poem, indirectly point towards a fundamental instability within compound words stemming from the ease of their capacity for rephrasing, or what the chapter calls ‘translatability’. The chapter theorizes translatability by way of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of basic concepts of translation theory, including the phenomenological valences of its vocabulary and Roman Jakobson’s concept of ‘interlingual translation’. Attending to the translatability of compound diction as the locus of a corporeal experience, the chapter then performs a close reading of Beowulf at Hrothgar’s verbal map to the so-called ‘Grendel-mere’. By ‘opening up’ the kineticism that inheres in the emphatic rephrasability of compound poetic diction, the chapter describes a deforming lexical ‘movement’ that constitutes the rhetorical ductus (path) through passage. The resulting earmsceapen (ill-shaped) style resonates with the cardiocentric hydraulic model of cognitive-affective vernacular psychology in Old English verse and indexes an ecopoetical process by which the poem deforms the human sensorium.