Touch the Past, Think the Future

Time travel, but in our brains

My last newsletter touched on several areas of personal interest like mythology and music in a broad sense. This week, something shiny caught my attention, an aspect of Beowulf that is hard to miss: the abundance of treasure and gilded creations. The dragon at the end of the poem sits on a hoard of gold, Beowulf is buried with treasure, and even the ship Beowulf arrives on is full to the brim with glittering weapons and chainmail. Heorot, the mead hall, is a fortress made of treasure and acts as a centerpiece in the poem, a place where warriors meet, a place where disaster strikes, and at the same time, it is a beautiful architectural masterpiece. All of the precious treasures that Medieval warriors would have coveted can represent many philosophical points on humanity's value system, but at the simplest level, treasure is tangible. Textbooks like the Norton Anthology (10th ed.) include color plates that depict what certain gilded elements found in Beowulf might have looked like based on archeological discoveries. Take for instance this image of a decorative scepter featuring a ring shape, a common shape mentioned throughout the poem - rings and ring givers:

Sceptre from the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo

“A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbor,
ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.” (32-33)

The Norton Anthology suggests that Shield Sheafson’s funeral ship would have been decorated with something like this scepter. So why the fascination with treasure and archeological findings? At the risk of spending too much time geeking out about treasure (as Tolkein would advise to move beyond the nitty-gritty aspects of the poem to see the bigger picture), artifacts are ecologically significant, and thus, are necessary for a more comprehensive understanding. 

Timothy Morton’s introduction from The Ecological Thought explains what ecological thinking is; it is a combination of lived human experience over time - the historical tangible and intangible. Morton describes “the ecological thought” as shadowy, dark, ever-present, and suggests that everyone has a role to play:

“Like archaeologists of the future, we must piece together what will have been thought.” (Morton 2622)

How can one construct anything that has yet to exist? Morton suggests that we must look into the past and become “archeologists” - an interesting statement. If traditional archaeologists dig up the past in search for tangible remnants, treasure, or artifacts, then “ecological archaeologists” must dig up past thoughts and experience, combined with the tangible relics of the past, to approach the ecological state of the future. When we look at Beowulf, the poem itself is an artifact, a treasure.

First page of Beowulf in Cotton Vitellius A. xv.

Treasures, whether they be decorative ship ornaments, swords, manuscripts, or shared sentiments over centuries, are part of an ecological framework and thus should all be considered as equal components of “the ecological thought“ and what makes that up. To think about the future, one must consider the past, and what we know of the past is often derived from tangible objects buried in layers of soil. Maybe ecology is best understood as a layered subject, including the tangible and intangible, and what artifacts from the past can teach us ranges from the culture, beliefs, or thoughts of the people from said artifact’s time. That is to say, a tangible object like a gilded mead hall is not simply a building from the past, but a treasure trove of memory - a narrative in and of itself. 

I will leave you with a final thought to ponder and help wrap up this entry. An excellent read, Andrew Johnston’s Anachronic Entanglement: Archaeological Traces and the Event in Beowulf explores how time and artifact work together in Beowulf. I think Johnston’s analysis of Beowulf’s necklace (given to him by Wealhteow and bestowed upon Hygelac) sums everything posited in this post nicely:

“In this case, too, we witness a past being kept alive, though we cannot always be sure what kind of past it is--the poem does not spell it out--that remains in the present. At the end of the day, the notion of the specter that haunts the present is never far away, even as it seems to be outshone by the brightness of precious metals, the brilliance of sparkling jewels and the seductive sheen of glittering gold surfaces.”