felis_ultharus

I finished Beowulf last week. It really has stood the test of time, and I'm now able to read enough Anglo-Saxon to get the gist of things, so I can better appreciate the work of the anonymous master (or, more likely, series of masters) who first crafted the poem.

There are odd notes -- like when the poem slips in and out of the original local faiths and the Christian one, and you can see the stitches were the monk tried to graft his worldview onto the Pagan one. And I wondered at times if the author had some sympathy for Grendel, as Milton seems to have for Satan in Paradise Lost.

I used to wonder sometimes why the last part of the story -- the dragon's awakening -- rarely makes it into most modern retellings, but when I read it in Seamus Heaney's translation and the original, it seemed very familiar to me. Then I realized that J.R.R. Tolkien had stolen it and embellished it and fashioned it into the second half of The Hobbit. So it's made its way to the modern world too, though by a more secret route.

There are words in Beowulf I'd love to give a second life -- etonisc, for instance, which in modern English would come out to something like ettinish, and which means related to trolls, giants, or ogres. Or féondschipe -- fiendship -- which is the opposite of friendship, being the bond of hatred you have with your enemies.

("We come in fiendship," would be a great thing for an envoy of an approaching army to yell to a hard-of-hearing gatekeeper.)

I read the graphic novel version of Beowulf that the Royals gave me, bringing to three the versions of that poem I read last week. The art was good, and the adaptation was actually very faithful. This week, I've taken a break from Anansi Boys to re-read The Sandman. So it's really been a month for gods and monsters.

so I'm reading Beowulf, and trying to puzzle out the Anglo-Saxon before I cheat and read the the translation on the opposite page.

I think the Old English word "snotor" -- meaning "clever, wise, or prudent" -- most appeals to my inner 12-year-old. I keep thinking that Snotor was that mutant rejected by all leagues and societies of superheroes and supervillains because his powers were too disgusting, and is now reduced to robbing banks.

Meanwhile, I've developed a lot of sympathy for Grendel. I mean, here's this guy who's had a pretty hard life -- I mean, if living in a lake isn't low income housing I don't know what is. And he lives with his mother, so he's either a) a kid, b) a slacker who's bounced back home, or c) looking after an elderly mother in her declining years. Either way he gets my sympathy.

So the Yuppie-Danes move in, build a fancy new building that likely drives up the property values and rents, and then proceed to party late into the night, every night so that Grendel Jr. and Mrs. Grendel can't sleep.

Their options for recourse are few. There won't be a police force to call about this sort of thing for a good thousand years, so Grendel climbs up the hill to have a word with the Danes. What happens next -- well, we only have the Danes' side of the story.

(I'm suspicious of the bias of any version where the author feels the need to often describe the villain as evil, and repeatedly traces a lineage for them back to Cain.)

And Mrs. Grendel's situation is even more understandable. Who wouldn't snap after the loss of a child?

ETA: Also, I added the Facebook app iRead, because it's one of the few apps that looks interesting. It allows me to see the books my friends with the same app are reading/have read. Right now it's displaying 1984, Brave New World, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, and two different editions of Lord of the Flies. My friends are cheery bunch, aren't they?