Announcing the Beowulf & Grendel Book Club
Starting the week after next, the League will be hosting the Beowulf & Grendel Book Club*. Everyone and anyone is invited (nay, encouraged!) to participate.
For those not familiar with either work, Beowulf
The book club will take place over a six-week period. The first three week’s we’ll tackle the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf; we will then take three weeks to go through John Gardner’s Grendel. If you have limited time, fear not. My version of Beowulf is about 200 pages, but half of those are the untranslated Anglo-Saxon; that means a very doable 35 pages or so a week. Grendel is about twice that length, but not being an epic poem it should read faster.
Our first “meeting” will begin on Friday, February 1 and will continue throughout the weekend until the discussion dies down. We’ll meet each subsequent week after that.
First assignment: Read Beowulf, lines 1 – 1007 (Pages 3- 67 in the Norton paperback edition of Heaney’s translation)
If anyone wishes to recommend supplemental books, essays, media, etc, please feel free to leave them in the comments section.
* The actual goings on might still end up being at Mindless Diversions. But we’ll have intro posts with links on the front page, so you will still be able to access it here.
áwierge, ic i náe bídean.Report
Schlaf nicht allein.Report
Um…
Damn me (Tod), you (Mike) will not be able to wait?Report
I was trying for “Damn, I can hardly wait”, but in Anglo-Saxon I don’t know my genitives from my fishhole.Report
Yeah, I would not go on my own internet searched word by word translation over yours.Report
Old English wouldn’t use “damn” in that context. You’d want sóþ, which begins a statement of truth.
Sóþ! Ic ne áwune anbidan.
Sooth! I cannot continue to bide [my time]Report
This probably goes without saying, but I am really hoping you’ll be doing this with us.
In fact, if I recall correctly you were commenting the other day that you were looking for things to post about this year. I’m having a hard time thinking of anyone I’d rather do some of the section posts than you, BP.Report
Is that a contraction of “God’s Truth”?Report
No. OE predates Christianity.
… gomela Scilding / elderly Scylding
felafricgende feorran rehte· / well-informed of ancient times
hwílum hildedéor hearpan wynne / often the brave warrior who loved the harp
gomelwudu grétte· hwílum gyd áwræc / old wood he played and often sang songs
sóð ond sárlíc· hwílum syllíc spell / truth and lamentation and often strange stories
rehte æfter rihte rúmheort cyning· / told correctly, that kind-hearted king.
-my own translationReport
Old English predates Christianity?Report
(The answer to this question is obviously no, it doesn’t predate Christianity. It doesn’t even predate Christianity in Britain.)Report
What a crock.Report
There was no Christianity in Britain. It had long since been rooted out by the time of Beowulf, which is hardly a British story at all but rather a story from the still-unconverted proto-Sweden.
Y’know, I’ve spent many long years studying linguistics and philology and the rise of the Romance languages. Far as I can tell, I’m the only person around here who can correctly conjugate a sentence in Old English, which may I add, isn’t really from England at all, but an import from what’s now Denmark and North Germany.
Trust me, nobody who wrote Beowulf had even heard of Christianity.Report
The Old English period starts after the first Christian missionaries appear, but I’m pretty sure it’s widespread only after Old English is clearly a language itself separately from the Germanic origins.
So I think one could go either way. It’s not as if the appearance of Christianity was an influence on the evolution of the language (or so the 1/3 semester of Old English taken 15 years ago led me to believe).
That said, Beowulf’s author is pretty explicitly living in a Christian land and is, almost surely, one himself. On the other hand, he was working from source material that was absolutely handed down from pre-Christian Scandanavia, so the relationship is a pretty central part of lots of Beowulf studies.Report
No it doesn’t. The chief corollary to what happened to Britain was what happened on the East Coast of North America: the invaders pillaged and took over the entire east coast of Britain. We know exactly when Christianity re-arrived in Britain, in 597.
To say Beowulf comes after Christianity is rather like saying the Iliad and Odyssey didn’t exist before some Greek wrote them down. Beowulf was recited for hundreds of years before the Nowell Codex.Report
I hear you Blaise, but I don’t accept your approach (I directly granted your points, other than getting picky that some missionaries appeared before what is generally accepted as the Old English period proper, but that’s even getting picky since it’s not as if the language sprung forth from nothing and certainly Christianity only became widespread a few hundred years later).
I’m taking Tolkien’s side here. The Beowulf that we’re reading is a specific work of art to be appreciated on it’s merits alone and not primarily as a version of an epic.
Yes, there was a Beowulf oral tradition that is, sadly, lost to us and so all you say here is true in a way. But this Beowulf was written down by a specific man in a specific time and place and this is his Work, not merely a jotting down of a folk tale and so I’m going to stick with my version of events. The author is clearly a Christian man living in a Christian England.Report
If you must talk about Beowulf’s “authors”, the drudges who worked on the Nowell Codex, there were two of them. And we know they were working with an old Norse saga, Böðvar Bjarki, another monster-slaying hero, parts of which are all over the records of those times. Pretty much all the sagas of the era featured monsters of one sort or another.
The Scyldings were the mythological kings of Denmark. All sorts of stuff comes out of that trove, including eventually Hamlet. The Swedes have their own mythological kings, the Ynglings. Compare to King Arthur, etc.Report
We know there were Christians in Britain as early as the second century, and there were Christian communities in England in the 3rd century. Old English comes about in the 5th century, after the effective end of Roman rule (the Romans brought Christianity). So, it’s a few centuries after Christianity came about, and slightly less time after Christianity had made its way to Britain. In no sense did Old English precede Christianity. This is not controversial.Report
englisc isn’t British, any more than it is American. It’s Danish and German. End of story.Report
Oh, the predecessors of Old English certainly predate Christianity, but by that measure, we might as well say that modern French predates Christianity, as does modern English, and Spanish, hell, even American Sign Language.Report
Play the merry pedant an it please thee, Chris. The Scyldings might be Martians, too.Report
The Merry Pedant! Glyph, I think we’ve got a name for the club.Report
This much we do know about the Christian influence on Beowulf, the text is all larded-up with Christian references. But all the while, the old stuff is still peeking out at the cognisant scholar:
wonsaélí wer weardode hwíle / the miserable thing spent a while
siþðan him scyppend forscrifen hæfde / since the Creator evicted him
in Caines cynne þone cwealm gewræc / with the kin of Cain, whose murder avenged
éce drihten þæs þe hé Ábel slóg· / the eternal Lord, he who slew Abel
ne gefeah hé þaére faéhðe ac hé hine feor forwræc / this feud annoyed him for [God] drove him far away
metod for þý máne mancynne fram· / the Lord, for this crime, from mankind.
… but here comes the real stuff, not the Christian hoo-hah about Cain and Abel.
þanon untýdras ealle onwócon / then awoke unspeakable descendents
eotenas ond ylfe ond orcnéäs / ettins and elves and orcs
swylce gígantas þá wið gode wunnon / and giants who fought with God
lange þráge· hé him ðæs léan forgeald. / for many years. God rewarded them for all that.
See, Beowulf is about those eotenas ond ylfe ond orcnéäs. The Cain and Abel stuff, that’s all glommed on to pass muster by the time of the Nowell Codex in the 800s or 900s. But Grendel arises from far older roots. We only see it through the light of some “antiquarian monks”, as Tolkien put it.
The real Heorot, like the real Troy, and for that matter, the real Beowulf and the real Grendel, have more solid roots that we suppose. This is not a mere story. It contains a myth, a very powerful one, with bones and skin and nails, and swords, too. Never laugh at live dragons, JRRTolkien said in the Hobbit.Report
Much of the debate over the origins of Beowulf concerns the Christian influence, depending on whether it comes from an oral tradition or whether it was originally composed for the written word (the only people who would likely have been able to write it at the time would have been monks).Report
Much of that debate is handled by pie-eyed people blissfully unencumbered by so much as a single minute of postgrad linguistics.Report
Well, I’m sure you’re the expert, and the medievalists don’t know what they’re talking about. Hell, they think Old English came about in the 5th century. Shows what they know!Report
I majored in Old English as an undergrad, but I am afraid I don’t remember a thing.Report
Hiyo!Report
Look, read Beowulf for yourself.
fyrene ond faéhðe fela misséra, / felony and feud for many seasons
singále sæce· sibbe ne wolde / endless conflict, he wanted no peace
wið manna hwone mægenes Deniga, / with any man of the Danish people
This was never an English story. It was an ancient Danish holdover, full of Danish and Swedish origins, no more English than the man in the moon. This is a poem I know rather well, as you may have worked out by now. A few shaved-pate monks copying down a bastardised version of an ancient Danish story is what we have on offer. You may make of it what you will.Report
Considering the low literacy levels, epic poems were made to be easily memorized, and Beowulf certain qualifies in its heavy use of alliteration in its lines.
I’m not really aware of much real debate over Beowulf being ever composed for written or oral tradition as most scholars will admit it was oral in tradition.
Given the history of English literature, most older literature was meant to be told out loud and thus written in a way conducive to public speaking until fairly recently in history.
I mean, a good chunk of Chaucer’s tales, if not all, were just retellings of existing tales according to class, and at least one was a bawdy tale like you would hear in an inn or pub at night.Report
Bob, it’s an ongoing debate, and the alliteration isn’t much of a clue.Report
Lo! We Gardena!
I would suggest looking at old English text to get a feel for poetic structure and to listen to a recording of at least the opening in old English. This is somewhat important to understanding how these stories were told in the oral tradition and how the meter helped people memorize it without the written.Report
An awesome idea I would not have considered, Bob2.
Here’s a youtube of the the opening of the poem being read dramatically (which, I am ashamed to admit, first put my in mind of what the Swedish Chef would sound like if he were a Klingon):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y13cES7MMd8
A less dramatic reading can be heard here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkaPNlOz0N4
And here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkK4_5DqLhkReport
Beowulf resources online at academic sites are plentiful. Beowulf is the only full text that isn’t a short poem that’s in Old English iirc. Every other long work in OE has been lost to time.
http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/Tutorials/old-english-metre-a-brief-guide
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/pometer.html
Old English text, though oddly this one doesn’t split up the lines:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/beowulf-oe.asp
And many of the translations are available free online.
The Heaney one via quick google:
http://hs.auburn.cnyric.org/teachers/michael_sullivan/ap/s0095617f?textonly=Report
Does the Norton have the Old English Text? The FSG edition (either the pictured cover is the FSG or the Norton shares the art) of Heaney’s translation does and it happens that line 1007 also ends on page 67, so I’m guessing it does?
I’m going to recommend reading Tolkien’s lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics – it’s a watershed in Beowulf criticism that opened the way for appreciation of Beowulf as a work of art instead of solely as a document of language and history. I’ve not read it since college but I came across it the other day and bookmarked it to re-read again when the Book Club started (which is now!)Report
Yeah, the Norton is the Heaney and the Heaney is the Norton.Report
Also, thanks for the Tolkien tip. I’m going to see if I can track that down before February 1.Report
Ah, I forgot to copy/paste the link, you can get here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21301124/J-R-R-Tolkien-Beowulf-The-Monsters-and-the-Critics
I think I may have purchased my copy of the Heaney translation when I was in the UK, which would explain why my copy has a different publisher but the same cover art. When you wrote ‘Norton’ I was thinking of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, why wouldn’t everyone own one of those, right??Report
I’ve never read Beowulf. Now seems like a good time to start.Report
My thought exactly. My copy is on it’s way.Report
You guys are in for a treat. Gardner’s novel has one of the best final lines in all of literature. Took me two tries to get to it, though.Report
1001 lines! This class is too hard.Report
Seriously. Can’t we just keep complaining that the free or fairly low-cost television entertainment that is being produced to do nothing but please us is falling distressingly short of doing so?Report
Yeah, I can’t believe “Ow, My Balls” isn’t a real TV show yet.Report
This class is too hard.
I see that you will use the bookclub as a chance to get karmic revenge, at some point interjecting every petty gripe that you commonly hear from yr pupils.
“When you you came to us, you were just a master; but now, you are the student.”Report
The Heaney translation is available on Kindle (can someone make this an afilliate link?)Report
Got Beowulf and Grendel from the library today! Count me inReport
Can I just look at the pictures?
(I’m looking at the edition with illustrations edited by John D. Niles.)Report
Great idea!
The only follow-up fiction to Beowulf I’ve ever read is Larry Niven’s book “The Legacy of Heorot” (this one http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004Q9TC8C/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=themorcoy-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004Q9TC8C ), which was a solid enough homage, I guess.
I’m looking forward to reading this with you folks!Report