ABSTRACT
There is a particularly strong analogy of both form and content between Beowulf and those novels by William Faulkner most deeply engaged with the Old Testament: Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. Michael Lapidge compares Beowulf's technique of relating incomplete versions of an event through multiple perspectives to Faulkner's method of narration in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. Beowulf was written by a Christian in Anglo-Saxon England, but takes place in a pagan society in fifth- to sixth-century Scandinavia. Both Faulkner and the Beowulf poet place fictional, semi-mythical central characters among real places, people, and events with which they expect their readers to be familiar. Within a contemporary American cultural context, no research is required to establish the reality of Harvard University, William Tecumseh Sherman, or the 1940 census. Go Down, Moses is primarily about brothers, but reading it alongside Beowulf calls attention to a prominent secondary thread of uncle-nephew relationships especially the maternal side.
