“Moor and Mead Hall” is a musical version of the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. It is focused on the setting of the first two thirds of the poem: the portion of Denmark in which Hrothgar has built his great mead hall, Heorot. Close to the hall is a moor, on which live two troll-like monsters, Grendel and his nameless mother. The piece imagines the building of the hall and the events that follow it.
Instrumentation
Three instruments are featured: a low drone made with the “strings” function on a digital piano, a lever harp, and a whistle. All of them are played by me. The drone represents the moor. It is a constant throughout the piece; even when the other instruments take over, the drone remains. The whistle is Grendel, and the harp is the hall. I’m playing the harp in the range of an Anglo-Saxon lyre, sticking to seven notes only (many Anglo-Saxon lyres had six strings, but some had seven, and I am weak). The lyre is an instrument that features in the poem itself, though it is called a “harp” there. It therefore simultaneously embodies the hall, the harper, and the whole concept of storytelling.
Musical Storytelling
The piece begins with Grendel on the moor. This section is gentle and harmonious; Grendel is where he needs to be. The building of the hall is introduced by the entry of the harp. The harp and the whistle sometimes harmonise, but they are on their own paths, and as the piece progresses, they clash more often. The harp gradually takes over, pushing the whistle into the background. At the same time, the whistle becomes harsher and more dissonant as Grendel begins to rebel against the new presence on the moor. He attacks the hall towards the end, and the whistle and the harp come together in battle. There are some squeaks and dissonant high notes in this section; I wasn’t trying to make it pretty. The birdlike sounds of the whistle from the opening of the piece have decayed into rage and vengeance, the presence of the Danes changing not just the feel of the landscape but the behaviour of its inhabitants.
In the poem, Grendel is portrayed as resenting the hall and, in particular, the sound of the harp. My piece ends with his resentment intact and his vengeance begun, as thirty men lie dead, and the peace of the hall is shattered. The last notes of the harp, the whistle, and the drone all clash, as the landscape has slid into disharmony with itself.
The Video
The piece was originally published as an audio track only. The video was created for the exhibition piece Deformance as un/linking. The text in the video, with the exception of the words “Moor and Mead Hall” and “by Kari Maaren,” constitutes the opening of Beowulf. The text is in Old English and has been deliberately left untranslated, since the music is acting as my translation of the work.
Transforming Literary Places
The piece (sans video) was first created for the exhibition Transforming Literary Places (Tartu Ülikooli kunstimuuseum), which collected artistic responses to settings in various works of literature.
Deformance as un/linking
This exhibition, which will debut at the 2024 Electronic Literature Organisation Conference, consists of four digital works by members of the Decameron Collective, a group of nine academics and artists who have met on a weekly basis since the spring of 2020 to explore their reactions to the global pandemic.
Deformance as un/linking‘s premise, as explained on its website, is:
This exhibition underlines “the theoretical commonality that holds their practices of “deformance”, that is, the “deforming and performing anew” of past literary and artistic texts (Prescott; Samuels and McGann, 25). Together, these works explore deformance as a radical (un)linking from the pre-existing source text in shifts of media, form, and intention.
The works featured in the exhibition are:
Siobhan O’Flynn’s “An Experiment in Yellow: ‘THE YELLOW WALLLPAPER. THE YELLOW WALLPWAPER. The lyelorwwalplater’”: a digital deformance of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Jolene Armstrong’s “Spelarne”: an augmented-reality deformance of Hjalmar Soderberg’s protomodernist short story “Spelarne”
Monique Tschofen’s “In There Behind the Door”: a digital deformance of Gertrude Stein’s poetic volume Tender Buttons
Kari Maaren’s “Moor and Mead Hall”: a musical deformance of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf
“Moor and Mead Hall” and Deformance
“Moor and Mead Hall” “deforms” the opening of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf by presenting it as music. Shifting Beowulf from words to music reveals the underlying tension the poet frames as a battle between the justified Danes and the monsters abandoned by God, identifying it as an issue of territory, not morality. By removing the voice of the poet and leaving sound alone, “Moor and Mead Hall” focuses on the story beneath the Christian filter that itself may initially have deformed the oral pre-Christian version of the epic.
The video accentuates the deformation of the text by presenting the Old English verse on its own, thus forcing the listener to accept the music in place of a translation. Translation itself acts, of necessity, as deformance, since no translation is exact; the translator, in bridging the gap between languages, imposes meaning on the text. In the case of Beowulf, any translation is of a work that has already been modified from its lost oral form and that is limited by the interpretation of the Beowulf poet. “Moor and Mead Hall” presents a visual version of that text but, in an echo of what the music is doing, pulls it to pieces.
Grendel's Mere 