Un alieno aletico: Beowulf

In literary theory, studies on possible worlds, originally introduced in philosophical logic, have greatly helped to define the more specific concept of “fictional world”. Fictionality is a distinctive property of literary texts and, in recent years, it has interested both literary theorists and philosophers. Nevertheless, fictional worlds do not share all the features of possible worlds. If we intend the fictional world as a creation of an author’s mind, there are different types of world one can create; the four categories of modal logic are useful in order to analyse how a fictional world is built. The alethic modality, in particular, is fundamental to an understanding of what Lubomír Doležel calls “alethic alien”. If this term is applied to the fictional world of Beowulf, we can ask ourselves if Beowulf is superior to the alethic standard of the other characters of the poem. Despite various opinions on the subject, the figure of the hero Beowulf can be considered as the alethic alien of the poem, a feature which he shares with the monsters of his world: he is the sole positive “alethic alien” and he proves it in several scenes.