The Real Tragedy of Beowulf
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- Опубликовано: 28 янв 2024
- Beowulf is a good poem.
Here are some of my musings as I reread Beowulf for the 20th-something time.
If you're interested in Beowulf, check out my "Close reading Beowulf" series I did a few years ago where I go through Seamus Heaney's translation of the poem slowly:
Episode 1 (ll. 1-989): • BEOWULF (Lines 1-989)
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#beowulf #oldenglish #oldenglishpoetry #anglosaxon #medieval #medievalpoetry
Our fourth grade teacher had us read Beowulf. It changed my life.
Hello Sean,
I recently found your excellent videos. I am so grateful I did and want to thank you for introducing to me new authors and books! I did not discover my love of literature until 60 years old. I’m 64 and have not slowed my reading in the last four years! Making up for lost time. Impossible of course but doing my best. I am rereading Proust’s, In Search of Lost Time when I learned from you about Karl Ove Knausgard’s , My Stranger, Jon Fosse Septology and The Copenhagen Trilogy!!! I have dipped in to all and look forward to the continuance of each! Thank-you for all you share, including your readings! I have learned much. 😊Regards and Happy Reading!📚
I read it many years ago in post graduate class. Your passion for this epic shines through and makes me want to go back to it once more.
Thank you! It's a poem that really rewards rereading, I think.
Excellent video! My reading of the poem has always been strongly influenced by Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” so I largely agree with the characterization of the poem you put forward here. That said, I recently had the incredible opportunity to chat with Tom Shippey about his new translation of Beowulf, and he departs from Tolkien’s conception in some interesting ways, including his interpretation of that final word in the poem. It’s very much worth checking out Shippey’s thoughts (articulated in some brief essays included in the translation) if you haven’t already. All the best!
Thank you, Philip! My reading is also closely linked to Tolkien's essay -- I usually teach that essay alongside Beowulf and I meant to mention it here. I've been meaning to pick up Shippey's translation! He's a scholar I really respect, especially regarding his work with Tolkien and Old Norse, and I think I actually saw a clip of him talking about lof-geornost and how he reads it as a positive affirmation of Beowulf's service to his followers. Thanks for the lead -- I'm looking forward to watching your interview with him! I'm teaching a class on the "medieval north" right now, and so I've been reading his recent short monograph "Beowulf and the North before the Vikings." Really excellent stuff.
I first read Beowulf in 6th grade. It was probably an “adaptation for young readers” type thing in an English textbook with multiple selections. It had illustrations of Grendel and his mother. They gave me nightmares. Over 30 years since then and I have kept coming back to the story over and over again. Each time I return new depths are revealed. Truly a marvelous piece of literature.
doesn't get enough credit for how well it does horror -- the passage where Grendel comes "looping down off the moors" before eating a man right down to his "hand and foot" is brilliantly wrought and downright terrifying. Agreed wholeheartedly that this is a poem that rewards rereading!
Fascinating reading. It connects nicely with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad, too. All these ancient epic poems are elegiac, tragic. The overwhelming presence of death, of mortality, of the end of people and civilizations, is everywhere in them. But, parallel to this, there is an intense love of life. In the end, though, Troy is razed (and most of the Achean heroes die too), Gilgamesh and Uruk have disappeared, and Beowulf and his people are no more. What remains are works of art.
Excellent video. Thanks so much for making it.
Thank you, Vin!
Thanks for making this video. The ubi sunt theme is one of the most compelling for me in all of literature. We just finished reading the Inferno of Dante in my classes and it makes me consider whether we are in a similar period to that of the Beowulf poet - the only difference being that the culture of Medieval Christianity that subsumed the warrior culture of the Early Middle Ages is now itself being lost to the darkness of the past.
Thanks, Drake. I completely agree, and I should have mentioned "ubi sunt" as it's in integral theme of Beowulf -- the lament of unnamed man who buried the treasure that becomes the dragon's hoard is beautiful and seems right out of 's desperate plea, "hwær cwom mearg" Hwær cwom mago?," etc. That's a fascinating observation. It's funny because I was planning to teach this semester, but decided not to last minute primarily because I thought it would take too much time to get the students familiar with medieval Christianity (and 13th century Italian politics, to be fair) for them to actually read the text. So, yeah, I do think it's disappearing. Good on you for teaching it though! I imagine it's immensely difficult, but once students get into it, I bet they love it.
I stopped my car when I saw a big raccoon and a bunch of smaller raccoons crossing. The big raccoon made sure the littles got across safely and stood staring me down in my car. Then she nodded at me and crossed herself. I could have been anthropomorphizing her… but I swear she nodded at me.
Now that's a tempting reread! Do you have a favorite translation?
Roy Liuzza's translation is my current favorite. It's published in a nice edition by Broadview.
Wonderful video, as usual. I haven’t read Beowulf for years, but without warning you have made me want to!
It's a poem that I think many people encounter in high school or college and never revisit - I always try to encourage readers to come back to it though! Thanks for the kind words.
I've had a copy of the Burton translation of Beowulf for ages now, but I don't think I've ever read it all the way through. Beowulf is kind of an oddity to me; it's a very important work, anthropologically, but from a literary standpoint it doesn't really have a whole lot of depth. It really is kinda just a story about a guy who fights monsters, (which is cool though, lol). To be perfectly honest, I actually thought the Zemeckis film version gave the story a little more depth than the original poem seems to have. Also, I do quite like John Gardner's Grendel; hella deep and philosophical. 😵💫
I obviously very strongly disagree, though I'll grant you that most translations do flatten the poem quite a bit. Even Heaney grossly simplifies various characters (Beowulf and Grendel's Mother mostly) through various erroneous and just strange translations. I think Beowulf is marvelously deep, and it only gets deeper with each reread. Agreed re: Gardner's Grendel though! I like it a lot, and should probably revisit it soon, though it doesn't come close to Beowulf itself 😉
Ever-increasing reliance on electronic storage at the expense of paper means, I'm afraid, that eventually we will lose a vast amouint, maybe even virtually all, literature. For the most part people seem to assume electronic media will endure "forever". In truth, those media are far more fragile than convventional printed books.
Have you read Bo Gräslund's *The Nordic Beowulf*? He makes an argument that Beowulf wasn't actually originally in Old English, but rather an Old English translation of an unattested Old Norse saga. I haven't read it myself, but it does sound very interesting.
I have read pars of it, yes, and I have no doubt that stories like Beowulf circulated orally in early Old Norse pre-725 -- we have echoes of the narratives and potential analogues of Beowulf's character in Hrolfs saga kraka and Grettis saga after all. I'm not sure that I buy the idea that this version of Beowulf is any kind of translation from Old Norse though. "Translated" from an oral source, sure, but I don't think there's anything to suggest that there was an Old Norse Beowulfs saga or anything like that. The timing just doesn't work, nor do I think it's necessary for understanding why there are parallels of it in ON. I may need to revisit Gräslund's specific argument though, as I'm no doubt conflating parts of it with Magnús Fjalldal's presentation/argument in his The Long Arm of Coincidence. Really interesting idea though!!
thought provoking when compared against with todays empires.
This might be a stupid question to ask, but as a person not really familiar with Anglo-Saxon history (and Beowulf), I was wondering whether Grendel by John Gardner retells events from Beowulf authentically or if the author only used the names as a frame for his book. You will know if you have read Grendel.
Not a stupid question! Gardner's retells the story from Grendel's perspective and gives us the voices of Grendel, Grendel's Mother, and the dragon, from whom we don't hear in the original poem. It's a great novel in its own right, though I think you would want to read first to see why he decided to give these "monsters" a voice and perspective. It's less of a retelling of the narrative and more of a refocusing of the narrative.
@travelthroughstories Ah, this makes sense, thank you for explaining! I really liked the book, and because of it, I may be reading Beowulf some day...