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Jun. 3rd, 2008 04:19 pmI 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.
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.
