Beowulf and Boyology

Abstract

Anna Smol’s 2012 talk explores the history of the conflation of ideas about medieval stories and childhood—the way in which texts from the “infancy” or “adolescence” of the English language came to be considered, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, uniquely suitable for actual children and adolescents. More specifically, these texts were considered appropriate especially for boys and contributed to the development of a field and literature called “boyology.” These texts seemed to uphold values of masculine, martial heroism. In earlier days, those values were combined with nationalist, racist discourses; more recent versions tone those discourses down but maintain the associations of Beowulf with heroic masculinity and primitivism.