Gilgamesh and Beowulf: foundations of a comparison (original) (raw)
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The Epic of Gilgamesh: Thoughts on genre and meaning
Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria: Proceedings of the Conference Held at the Mandelbaum House, the University of Sydney, 21-23 July 2004, ed. J. Azize and N. Weeks, 2007
The Assyriologist's approach to the literature (and other written documentation) of ancient Mesopotamia is conventionally philological. Through a close reading of the text, involving the meticulous dissection of its vocabulary, grammar and syntax, he produces an understanding of it and extracts meaning from it. This empirical method of literary study, which has been called the "positivist approach" (e.g. by Black 1998), owes much to historicist methodology and little to the often subjective techniques of modern literarycritical method. Editions of Babylonian literary texts are necessarily founded upon the philological approach and should remain so, at least while the pioneering work of reconstruction remains at a comparatively early stage. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a case in point. I am fortunate enough to have recently completed a philologically based critical edition of this masterpiece of Babylonian poetry (George 2003), and know that, as more text comes to light and our knowledge of Akkadian language and grammar is refined, so the techniques of philological enquiry will continue to be the principal tool that Assyriologists will employ in the task of understanding how the poem reads and what it says. At the same time, Assyriologists are aware that the academic study of literature has steadily developed an array of other critical methods, many of which have not been much utilized in discussing the literatures of ancient Mesopotamia. A few have been vocal on * This paper is not at all the one I gave as keynote speech to the symposium on Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria on 21 July 2004. That paper, entitled "The present state of Gilgamesh studies", was a summation that looked more back than forward; it contributed little that had not already been said in George 1999 and 2003. The present contribution makes a different approach. It is offered here with great gratitude to Dr Joseph Azize and Dr Noel Weeks for their kindness in making possible my visit to Sydney and for their hospitality during the week of the symposium. It was written during a period as a visiting scholar in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where I was privileged to browse in the libraries of the Institute, Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary. It is a pleasure to acknowledge here the generous support of the Institute's Hetty Goldman Fund. 2 this specific point (e.g. Moran 1980, Michalowski 1996), while others have called for a greater engagement with, and understanding of, other academic disciplines generally (e.g.
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.
Review of 'Beowulf: A Student Edition', by George Jack
Speculum, 1997
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An introductory overview of the compositional history and themes of the various versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the elements of tension and correspondence among them.
Current General Trends in Beowulf Studies
Literature Compass, 2007
This overview of late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century literary criticism charts the kinds of ongoing approaches diverse readers bring to the Old English masterpiece-approaches likely to be mainstays into the near future. The post-structuralist Beowulf has many faces: there is the archaic Beowulf, containing a dramatized social world from an anthropologically remote time and place; the feminist Beowulf, where the center of contention is over the marginality or not of female figures; the psychological Beowulf, replete with one dynamic or another of the unconscious or of the projected, monstrous Other, which in turn yields a monster-studies Beowulf. We also have the oral-traditional Beowulf with its political and ethnogenetic implications, the moral Beowulf, the comical Beowulf, and finally the dragon-inhabited Beowulf. Dozens of studies have been organized to illuminate these categories, while the survey ends on suggestions that the poem may in fact be formed deeply according to some arithmetical or geometrical scheme. By far among Old English poems Beowulf attracts the largest number of philological, metrical, textual, and literary-critical studies in any given year. One can hardly survey objectively the wealth of intelligent, provocative commentary in any discrete number of years, let alone in years characterized by upheavals in scholarly commentary. The curious reader should consult the annual bibliography published in the Old English Newsletter (OEN), with the Beowulf section's recent reviewers including Roy M. Liuzza, Susan E. Deskis, and Craig R. Davis. Also one should consult the extensive bibliographies of Victorian, modern, and contemporary scholarship accompanying A Beowulf Handbook, edited by Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (1997), along with Andy Orchard's A Critical Companion to Beowulf (2003). My modest aim is this: a review of the literary-critical work I have found most influential in the past fifteen years or so, work likely to stimulate further study along the many lines reviewed below and thus become the key inspirers of Beowulf criticism into the near future. This review has two parts: an overview with brief mention of the work that seems most important, followed by more detailed accounts of numerous studies including many of those mentioned in the general overview. However, before proceeding further, I should note some recent publications in textual and metrical areas within my time constraints, as well as
The present article reconsiders Michael Lapidge’s influential argument concerning the archetype of Beowulf in the light of recent textual scholarship. It supports his conclusions concerning the antiquity of the first written text of Beowulf, while arguing that his views on the subsequent transmission history of the poem merit revision.