28
With this note, Oldham claims this Beowulf narrative as her own. Not
only does she refer to it as “my narrative,” but she also justifies her
decision to re-shape the narrative of the poem in order to emphasize
what she considers to be the true central storyline of her Text of Beowulf.
Like Gardner’s Grendel, The Raven Waits tells its story from the
point of view of a character marginalized in the Old English poem. In
this case, the novel’s perspective comes from King Hrothgar’s teenaged
son Hretheric, a figure with whom the probable target audience of the
book (adolescent boys) might be presumed to identify. Though this
choice implies that Hrethric will be the hero of the story, the young
prince is in fact no more than a close observer of actions performed by
others. The real agency in the novel comes from the exiled Anglian scop
who befriends Hrethric and becomes his constant companion. The scop’s
name Angenga means “lone-goer,”'* and he meets Hrethric on the day of
Beowulf s arrival at Heorot, shortly after the story begins. He calls
himself a “scop, bard poet, versifier, word-weaver, spell-spinner, mythmaker, string-strummer—there are plenty of names” (Oldham 24) and
arrives in the land of the Scyldings armed with stories, including tales of
King Arthur, and Beowulf s watery race with Brecca and battle with the
sea monsters. Called simply “the scop” by Raven's other characters,
Angenga quickly grasps the significance of Beowulf s arrival. He also
predicts the coming of Grendel’s mother, averts conflict between
Hrothulf and Beowulf, and convinces Hrothgar to banish his Thule
Unferth, all through the subtle execution of his storytelling technique.
This posits the writer/storyteller in a particularly powerful position
within this story.
The scop not only uses his role as storyteller to interpret the
novel’s action for the other characters, he is also a meta-narrator who
mediates between the world of the novel and a modem British Young
Adult audience. Though this might seem to align him with the Beowulf
poet who tells a pagan story from a Christian perspective, we must keep
in mind that the Beowulf poet does not play a direct role in the tale being
told. Moreover, the Beowulf poet “controls his two perspectives simply
by distinguishing between the natural wisdom possible to pagans and the
revealed [Christian] knowledge he shares with” the Anglo-Saxon
audience (Osbom TGF:SHSB 978). Unlike the Beowulf poet, Oldham’s
scop judges that the pagan Scyldings are too primitive to accurately
interpret their tragic situation. They need the scop’s intervention and
advice, which comes from a Christian as well as a British perspective.
Judging other civilizations from one’s own cultural perspective is not
unexpected, but is problematic for an author trying to accurately depict
the values of the Anglo-Saxon society.