BEOWULF (ENGLISH) (original) (raw)

A Critical Companion to Beowulf and Old English Literature

Lulu Press, 2017

This book is the end result of my extensive researches carried out on and into the lone survivor of a genre of Old English long epics, Beowulf—a painstakingly laborious, yet pleasurable task through the journey of which I discovered, unearthed, gleaned, and absorbed a great wealth of previously-unknown-to-me information about Old English Literature in general and Beowulf in particular.

The Beowulf manuscript reconsidered: Reading Beowulf in late Anglo-Saxon England

Literator, 2003

This article defines a hypothetical late Anglo-Saxon audience: a multi-layered Christian community with competing ideologies, dialects and mythologies. It discusses how that audience might have received the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. The immediate textual context of the poem constitutes an intertextual microcosm for Beowulf. The five texts in the codex provide interesting clues to the common concerns, conflicts and interests of its audience. The organizing principle for the grouping of this disparate mixture of Christian and secular texts with Beowulf was not a sense of canonicity or the collating of monuments with an aesthetic autonomy from cultural conditions or social production. They were part of the so-called “popular culture” and provide one key to the “meanings” that interested the late Anglo-Saxon audience, who would delight in the poet=s alliteration, rhythms, word-play, irony and understatement, descriptions, aphorisms and evocation of loss and transience. The poem provided...

Beowulf By All Community Translation and

2021

I contributed lines 436-450. Edited by: Abbott, Jean Abbott, Elaine Treharne, and Mateusz Fafinski "Beowulf By All is the first ever community translation of the poem known as Beowulf, and is published here for the first time in workbook form as Beowulf By All: Community Translation and Workbook in order to provide space and an added incentive for readers to assemble their own working translations alongside this one." https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/50261

A Comparative Study of Three Modern Translations of the Old English Lines (675-702) of Beowulf

Journal of Arts and Humanities, 2018

In this article, I compare the modern translations of lines (675-702) of Beowulf in Seamus Heaney’s 2000 translation, Roy Luizza’s 1999 translation, and Edwin Morgan’s 1952 translation . I begin with Morgan’s text since it is the earliest translation and ends with Heaney’s translation, as it is the most recent one. My evaluations for the three texts take into consideration the syntax, the poetic dictions and the approach used by Haney, Luizza and Morgan. I choose these lines in particular because these lines describe the confrontation with Grendel, and because an evaluation of the translations of the entire epic would be an overwhelming task. The article begins with a brief introduction to Old English structure and typological descriptions so we understand the challenge the aforementioned translators of Beowulf have met as they worked on the original manuscript and be able to acutely evaluate the final product of their translations of the aforementioned lines. Keywords : Old English...

Locating 'Beowulf' in Literary History

Exemplaria, 1993

What work did the poem 'Beowulf' do in its own time? This paper attempts to reconstruct a social context within which the making of a poem of this character makes sense. The story is traced over a period of some few hundred years, with 'Beowulf' approached as a response to changes that affected a complex society during a period of major transformation. A point of special interest is the poet's depiction of the Danes, seen as an indication that the poem in its present form post-dates the first Viking Age. This essay was reworked as chapter 1 (pp. 13-58) of my book 'Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts' (2007). Here it appeared along with a 'footnote' on 'Recent Work on Mythmaking and Ethnogenesis' and a query relating to the 'Geatas' of Beowulf.

Beowulf and the margins of literacy

Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 1974

A 3 a historian I take up the theme of Beowulf and its world with hesitation. The study of the poem must lie mainly with the literary scholars, because they alone have the time and expertise to master the complex problems it raises and the vast international literature devoted to it. It is noticeable, however, that in spite of generations of energy and ingenuity in pursuit of the real Beowulf, he and it are not in sight: not, that is, the subject of a scholarly consensus. There is no agreement as to the date of the poem ; there is even less agreement as to its author's intentions, let alone his identity or the places in which he might be found. In the last few years two scholars have written two different books on Beowulf, each of obvious distinction : Dr. Sisam and Dr. Goldsmith.2 So different, so absolutely contradictory, are their conclusions, it is difficult to believe they are writing about the same poem. Something must be seriously amiss when generations of scholarship can give us no basic facts that are undisputed outside the particular tradition or connection which discovered, I had almost said invented, them. It seems to me that historians are after all the one relevant group of scholars who have had little to say about Beowulf. Of all the Beowulf scholars only one of the great names was equally famous as historian, Hector Munro Chadwick. A good many of his points seem to me not to have been taken by his fellowstudents of literature simply because they were not altogether understood. Chadwick wrote out of a very informed and 1 I have taken some passages from another article " Beowulf and the Limits of Literature ", which appeared in New Blackfriars, lii (1971), by kind permission of the editor. Earlier versions of the paper were read to the Sixth Conference of Medieval Studies at the University of Western Michigan and the Medieval Seminar at Columbia University. I am particularly indebted to Professor Manning and his pupils for a stimulating discussion that greatly improved the paper.

Of Bawns and Bros: Beowulf Translations and a Modernist Medievalism

Essays in Medieval Studies

On the surface, the Old English Beowulf seems neither modern nor modernist, given that Beowulf is one of the oldest works in the English language. Yet, the connection is far less paradoxical than it seems, not only because of the fascination that high modernists, such as Ezra Pound, had for the medieval era engaging with it frequently through their own translations, but also because medievalism is itself modernist. 1 Medievalism is born out of the desire to remake or recreate the medieval, both in how it truly was, as well as how we like to imagine it. 2 However, due to the impossibility of true recovery, medievalism is not centered solely in the past, but is instead created by the collision and combination of the medieval and the modern, the exact sort of amalgamation that stands at the heart of the modernist genre. As such, engaging with a medieval texts and its translations through a kind of modernist medievalism helps us to understand how the text also lies on this collision point, existing across multiple modernities as its own kind of amalgamation. To expand on that, I will be examining the translations of Seamus Heaney and Maria Dahvana Headley to consider and define modernist medievalism. 3 While both works exemplify the translation of a medieval work into a modernist piece, they do so in rather different ways. Heaney translates Beowulf through a focused form of spatial modernity, in which his use of regionalisms and dialect allows him to ground the work in his native land of Northern Ireland. Whereas, Headley works within a more strictly temporal modernity with her use of diffuse contemporary dialect that calls upon not only poetic turns of phrase but slang terms as well. Finally, I will use these works to construct a kind of Beowulfian palimpsest, in order to examine how Beowulf is not just Beowulf, the original text, standing alone a singular static object anchored in the past. Beowulf, as an object of study, is also a Of Bawns and Bros: Beowulf Translations and a