Editing Scop (section)

== Literary fiction or reality==
{{see|Translating Beowulf}}

The scholar of literature [[Seth Lerer]] suggests that "What we have come to think of as the inherently 'oral' quality of Old English Poetry{{nbsp}}... [may] be a literary fiction of its own."<ref>{{Cite book |title=Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature |last=Lerer |first=Seth |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |year=1991 |location=Lincoln, Nebraska}}</ref> Scholars of Early English have different opinions on whether the Anglo-Saxon oral poet ever really existed. Much of the poetry that survives does have an oral quality to it, but some scholars argue that it is a trait carried over from an earlier Germanic period. If, as some critics believe, the idea of the Anglo-Saxon oral poet is based on the Old Norse [[Skald]], it can be seen as a link to the heroic past of the Germanic peoples. There is no proof that the "scop" existed, and it could be a literary device allowing poetry to give an impression of orality and performance. This poet figure recurs throughout the literature of the period, whether real or not. Examples are the poems [[Widsith]] and [[Deor]], in the [[Exeter Book]], which draw on the idea of the mead-hall poet of the heroic age and, along with the anonymous heroic poem [[Beowulf]] express some of the strongest poetic connections to oral culture in the literature of the period.{{cn|date=March 2021}}

The scholar and translator of Old English poetry [[Michael J. Alexander|Michael Alexander]], introducing his 1966 book of ''The Earliest English Poems'', treats the scop as a reality within an oral tradition. He writes that since all the material is traditional, the oral poet achieves mastery of [[alliterative verse]] when the use of descriptive half-line formulae has become "instinctive"; at that point he can compose "with and through the form rather than simply ''in'' it". At that point, in Alexander's view, the scop "becomes invisible, and metre becomes rhythm".<ref name="Alexander 1966">{{cite book | last=Alexander |first=Michael | title=The Earliest English Poems | url=https://archive.org/details/earliestenglishp00vari | url-access=registration | publisher=Penguin | year=1966 |pages=15, 19–20|isbn=9780140441727 }}</ref>

The nature of the scop in ''Beowulf'' is addressed by another scholar-translator, [[Hugh Magennis (scholar)|Hugh Magennis]], in his book ''Translating Beowulf''. He discusses the poem's lines 867–874, which describe, in his prose gloss, "a man{{nbsp}}... mindful of songs, who remembered a multitude of stories from the whole range of ancient traditions, found new words, properly bound together".<ref name="Magennis 2011">{{cite book |last=Magennis |first=Hugh |author-link=Hugh Magennis (scholar) |title=Translating Beowulf : modern versions in English verse |publisher=[[D.S. Brewer]] |publication-place=Cambridge Rochester, New York |year=2011 |isbn=978-1-84384-394-8 |oclc=883647402 |pages=30–21 "Oral and aural"}}</ref> He notes that this offers "an image of the poetic tradition in which ''Beowulf'' participates", an oral culture: but that "in fact this narrator and this audience are [in this instance] a fiction", because when the ''Beowulf'' text is read out, the narrator is absent. So, while the poem feels like a scop's "oral utterance .. using the traditional medium of heroic poetry", it is actually "a literate work, which offers a meditation on its [centuries old] heroic world rather than itself coming directly from such a world".<ref name="Magennis 2011"/>