Harp Saves the Night

Chris Vinsonhaler begins the night explaining the need for Beowulf to be told through a story versus being read. She tells how this enhances the epic. Vinsonhaler starts off her presentation with obvious humor of telling her past experience with Beowulf and her hatred for it, much like many of the audience members. This allowed for Vinsonhaler to immediately connect with the room full of the Spring 2009 Introduction to the English Major students. The small auditorium of the Becker Communications building smelt of damp cloth from the rain that persisted outside as we all gathered to watch Vinsonhaler, in her black robe, perform Beowulf.

The two hour performance was divided into three sections. The first was Vinsonhaler acclimating the audience to the vocabulary of Beowulf, the second was the first part of Beowulf, and the third was through about half of the second part of the epic. To set up the background of the story, Vinsonhaler had the audience read ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ to “taste Gaelic upon [our] tongues.” She then translated the Old English into a language that we could understand. This allowed the audience to get a grasp of what was to come.

After a ten minute intermission before Vinsonhaler began to perform the epic of Beowulf she sang a song accompanied by her harp that seemed to be of her own composition. Vinsonhaler’s harp player a major role in her performance of Beowulf, she used it to sing, she used it during prose, and she used it to create dramatic effect during the battle scenes. In fact the performance was postponed from the Sunday, March 29th to Sunday, April 5th because Vinsonhaler had misplaced her harp tuner.

By the end of the end of the two hours the epic started to make a little more sense to everyone viewing. Even though she was unable to present the ending of Beowulf, due to time restrictions, Vinsonhaler still allowed for the audience to experience most of the poem and get a feel for the language employed throughout it. The dark sky was cool and moist as it quickly swallowed the bodies that occupied the seats of the auditorium…and we all could still hear the harp’s echo into the night.

-Annemarie Chambliss