The Sword and the Hoard: Reframing Armaments and Treasures in Beowulf Novelistic Retellings

This dissertation examines the reception of the Old English poem Beowulf in a corpus of 20th- and 21st-century novelistic retellings, focusing on the reframing of armaments and treasures. By analysing the intertextual dynamics between the poem and its modern adaptations, this thesis investigates how these material elements function on the poetological, semiotic, and narrative levels. The study acknowledges the fictional nature of Beowulf and the poem's engagement with broader old Germanic cultural values and narrative conventions, examining the way these characterising features are reworked into subsequent interpretations. The research conducted diverges from other studies on Beowulf retellings in both its thematic focus — material objects central to the Anglo-Saxon poem — and methodological approach, combining the analysis of modern novel adaptations with a philological examination of the poem’s cultural and literary milieu. It identifies the elements of the original poem that are preserved and those that have been altered in the process of adaptation to align with contemporary sensibilities and expectations, enabling a nuanced appreciation of the interplay between diverse reception strategies enforcing either a primitivist discourse — an imitation of Beowulf’s original framework — or a subversive discourse — an attempt at destabilising the poem’s perceived ideological underpinning. This approach addresses a gap in existing scholarship, which often overlooks the importance of the source material’s historical and cultural background when examining its contemporary receptions.