Date Published:

Abstract:

Beowulf features complex shifts in temporality, traditionally labeled “digressions,” and a generally disjointed narrative structure, making it hard to follow for modern audiences. This article proposes a reframing of this much debated trait of the text by reading two episodes characterized by temporal entanglement and intense emotion, approaching them through the lens of cognitive literary study. Seen as cognitive blends within a specific mode of poetic production and drawing on a now partially lost tapestry of narrative traditions, such moments will be understood on their own terms as aesthetically pleasing and emotionally charged episodes rather than as haphazard interruptions to the main storyline.

March 2026: Catalin Taranu is a medievalist specializing in Old and Middle English and the vernacular cultures of early medieval Northwestern Europe. His research focuses on heroic verse as myth-historical narrative and as a social technology for negotiating emotional norms. He is currently Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and the PI of Becoming Axolotl: Empathy, Simulation, and Embodiment in Medieval Narratives, a project based at New Europe College (Bucharest), collaborating with colleagues at the University of Bern and the The Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts within the MAPS framework. His publications include the monograph The Bard and the Rag-picker: Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia (Routledge, 2021) and the co-edited volume Vera Lex Historiae?: Constructions of Truth in Medieval Historical Narrative (Punctum Books, 2022).