Sunday, March 15, 2015

What are some examples of alliteration, hyperbole, litotes, kennings, and epithets in the Old English poem Beowulf?Please include line numbers.

Examples of alliteration, epithets, hyperbole, kennings,
and litotes occur throughout the Old English epic poem Beowulf, and
often many of these traits appear together.  Notice, for instance, how many of these
traits appear in the following passage, which describes God’s punishment of Cain for
murdering his brother Abel:


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. . . For the killing of
Abel


The Eternal Lord had exacted a
price:


Cain got no good from committing that murder . . . .
(107-09; Seamus Heaney
translation)



Alliteration,
which generally involves the repetition of initial consonant sounds, appears, for
instance in the final quoted line, especially in the words “Cain”
and “committing” and in the phrase “got no
good.” Alliteration is by far the most common strylistic trait of
Old English verse.


An epithet,
in which a person is identified and defined by some quality or trait, appears in the
phrase “Eternal Lord,” which is more precisely descriptive than “God” would have
been.


Litotes is defined at
dictionary.com as follows:


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understatement, especially that in which an
affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary, as in “not bad at
all.”



Litotes often involves
irony, and thus the statement that “Cain got no good from committing that murder” is a
perfect example of this stylistic trait. It would be hard to think of a better example
of ironic understatement.


A fine example of a
kenning, or a complex metaphor, usually linking two nouns,
occurs when the poet reports Beowulf’s plan “to sail the swan’s road” in order to help
the beleaguered Danes (200). Rather than saying “sail the ocean,” the poet uses the term
“swan’s road,” implying that Beowulf’s journal will be easy, graceful, and
untroubled.


Hyperbole, or
exaggeration for emphasis, is less obviously evident in Beowulf
than the other traits already discussed, although perhaps there is a bit of hyperbole
when the poet reports that Grendel was able to grab and kill “thirty men” during his
initial raid on Heorot and carry their corpses back to his lair (122-25). If the detail
is taken literally, then Grendel is both enormously strong and enormously large (a kind
of early medieval King Kong). The fact that he is later able to fit himself inside the
hall suggests that the poet may be engaging here in a bit of hyperbole, although some
other explanation may also account for this phrasing.

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