Acocella, Joan. "Slaying Monsters: Tolkien's Beowulf." The New Yorker 2 June 2014.*
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/02/slaying-monsters
2023
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Beowulf. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Beowulf. Mostrar todas las entradas
viernes, 20 de octubre de 2023
martes, 19 de abril de 2022
"Net of Words": El autoengendramiento de 'Beowulf'
Comentamos algunos elementos de autoengendramienento en el poema épico anglosajón Beowulf. El motivo del autoengendramiento literario emerge espontáneamente allí a partir de la naturaleza misma de la narración—o quizá más bien vemos la emergencia natural de la narración artística a partir de las prácticas sociales que dieron lugar a ella, prácticas cuya traza queda registrada como parte de la obra misma. La arqueología de su génesis es así parte esencial de la obra memorable.
Texto completo:
"Net of Words": El autoengendramiento de Beowulf
https://doi.org/10.17613/rx5m-qj17
- Author(s):
- José Angel GARCÍA LANDA (see profile)
- Date:
- 2021
- Group(s):
- Anthropology, English Literature, Historiography, Narrative theory and Narratology
- Subject(s):
- Anglo-Saxon literature, anglo-saxon poetry, Epic poetry, Criticism, Narratology
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Beowulf, oral tradition, epic literature, Reflexivity
- Permanent URL:
- https://doi.org/10.17613/rx5m-qj17
- English abstract: Net of Words: Self-begetting Beowulf
- This paper comments some elements of self-begetting in the Old English epic Beowulf. The motif of literary self-begetting emerges spontaneously out of the very nature of narration—or perhaps one should say that the poem registers the natural emergence of artistic narrative out of the social practices which gave rise to it, and whose trace is preserved as a part of the work itself. The archaeology of its own genesis is thus part and parcel of the memorable work of art.
También aquí:
_____. "Net of Words: El autoengendramiento de Beowulf." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 14 June 2021.*
https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2021/06/net-of-words-el-autoengendramiento-de.html
2021
_____. "Net of Words: El autoengendramiento de Beowulf." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 25 June 2021.*
https://www.ibercampus.es/el-autoengendramiento-de-beowulf-41275.htm
2021 DISCONTINUED 2024 – online at the Internet Archive:
2024
Online at Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 5 Jan. 2023.*
https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/autoengendramiento.pdf
2024
_____. "Net of Words: El autoengendramiento de Beowulf." Academia 23 Sept. 2021.*
https://www.academia.edu/53242753/
2021
_____. "Net of Words: El autoengendramiento de Beowulf." ResearchGate 30 Sept. 2021.*
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354935198
2021
_____. "Net of Words: El autoengendramiento de Beowulf." Humanities Commons 22 Oct. 2021.*
http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/rx5m-qj17
https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:41989/
2021
_____. "Net of Words: El autoengendramiento de Beowulf." SSRN 31 Jan. 2022.*
http://ssrn.com/abstract=3914368
2021
_____. "'Net of Words': El autoengendramiento de Beowulf." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 19 April 2022.*
https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2022/04/net-of-words-el-autoengendramiento-de.html
2022
_____. "'Net of Words': El autoengendramiento de Beowulf." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 5 Jan. 2023.*
https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/autoengendramiento.html
https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/autoengendramiento2.pdf
2023
—oOo—
lunes, 14 de junio de 2021
Net of Words: El autoengendramiento de 'Beowulf'
La noción de narración autoengendrada (self-begotten narrative) surge en relación a la novela o a las ficciones en estos trabajos de Steven Kellman:
Kellman, Steven G. "The Fiction of Self-Begetting." Modern Language Notes 91 (1976).*
_____. The Self-Begetting Novel. London: Macmillan, 1980.*
Evidentemente también sería en principio aplicable a géneros no ficticios y no novelísticos—la autobiografía, por ejemplo, muy especialmente.
Aquí señalo algunos elementos de autoengendramienento en una épica antigua, Beowulf. No se presenta la obra a sí misma como autoengendrada de manera un tanto paradójica o narcisista o sorpresiva, como sucede en las narraciones literarias artísticas, decimonónicas o modernistas, que son el principal objeto de estudio de Kellman. Más bien encontramos aquí (era de esperar quizá) la emergencia natural del tema a partir de la naturaleza misma de la narración, o quizá al revés y a la vez—la emergencia natural de la narración a partir de las prácticas sociales que dieron lugar a ella.
La narración retrata una sociedad heroica, y las prácticas sociales y discursivas asociadas a ella —el homenaje al héroe y al guerrero, la jactancia pública (y el compromiso de acción que conlleva). Entre estas prácticas está el canto heroico memorando las hazañas, y de ese canto surge Beowulf, y de ese canto también canta.
Sigo la traducción de Burton Raffel. He aquí un pasaje donde los compañeros de Beowulf celebran su heroismo tras la derrota de Grendel: han seguido la pista del monstruo hasta la laguna donde se pierde, tras su derrota a manos de Beowulf:
Where he'd dragged his corpselike way, doomed,
And already weary of his vanishing life,
The water was bloody, steaming and boiling
In horrible pounding waves, heat
Sucked from his magic veins; but the swirling
Surf had covered his death, hidden
Deep in murky darkness his miserable
End, as hell opened to receive him.
(Versos 845-852)
Y aquí vemos cómo el poeta épico habla de sus predecesores, los guerreros que cantan espontáneamente al héroe, cantos que son, podríamos decir, un primer esbozo de lo que la tradición oral convertirá en Beowulf:
Then old and young rejoiced, turned back,
From that happy pilgrimage, mounted their hard-hooved
Horses, high-spirited stallions, and rode them
Slowly toward Herot again, retelling
Beowulf's bravery as they jogged along.
And over and over they swore that nowhere
On earth or under the spreading sky
Or between the seas, neither south nor north,
Was there a warrior worthier to rule over men,
(But no one meant Beowulf's praise to belittle
Hrothgar, their kind and gracious king!)
And sometimes, when the path ran straight and clear,
They would let their horses race, red
And brown and pale yellow backs streaming
Down the road. And sometimes a proud old soldier
Who had heard songs of the ancient heroes
And could sing them all through, story after story,
Would weave a net of words for Beowulf's victory,
Tying the knot of his verses
Smoothly, swiftly, into place with a poet's
Quick skill, singing his new song aloud
While he shaped it, and the old songs as well—
Siegmund's
Adventures, familiar battles fought
By that glorious son of Vels. And struggles,
Too, against evil and treachery that no one
Had ever heard of, that no one knew (...)
(versos 853-878)
Y así se ve cómo a partir de la experiencia, interpretada a la luz de las viejas historias, que cantan hechos comparables, va surgiendo el canto que hará inmortal a Beowulf. Es especialmente memorable la expresión "Net of Words", red de palabras, como algo que se teje gradualmente, un texto, y a la vez algo que adquiere forma y estructura, y atrapa. Y algo que debe repararse o remendarse o rehacerse continuamente...
No olvidemos que empieza el poema con la celebración de las hazañas de los grandes reyes y llamando la atención sobre el recuerdo de las mismas—y más en concreto el gran reinado de Scyld, que viene a ser una analogía y predecesor de Beowulf, una vida heroica bien vivida y un memorable funeral que la imprime en la memoria. En ese sentido la autogeneración de Beowulf empieza con sus primeras líneas, y termina asimismo con el fin del poema, con el memorable funeral de Beowulf, la erección del monumento que (a modo del poema) perdurará y lo recordará a generaciones futuras. Alabanza, praise, es la última palabra del poema en la traducción de Burton Raffel.
Y es un final adecuado: Pues Beowulf el poema celebra la grandeza de los héroes, pero también celebra la celebración de la misma por los poetas, y en ese sentido es metaliteratura, self-begetting narrative—una justificación del papel de la poesía y la literatura en la perduración de la memoria, en la conservación de los valores que sustentan a la sociedad y la hacen posible.
También da el poema al héroe la inmortalidad que es posible "en esta tierra media." En el ejercicio y el análisis de su autogeneración, Beowulf el poema reclama la continuidad y retroalimentación entre los valores heroicos y la poesía que los sustenta y hace perdurar.
And then twelve of the bravest Geats
Rode their horses around the tower,
Telling their sorrow, telling stories
Of their dead king and his greatness, his glory,
Praising him for heroic deeds, for a life
As noble as his name. So should all men
Raise up words for their lords, warm
With love, when their shield and protector leaves
His body behind, sends his soul
On high. And so Beowulf's followers
Rode, mourning their belovèd leader,
Crying that no better king had ever
Lived, no prince so mild, no man
So open to his people, so deserving of praise.
(Versos 3169-3182)
—oOo—
martes, 4 de mayo de 2021
Grendel, el hombre del saco
Un detalle a menudo obviado en Beowulf es que el semihumano Grendel no es una mera swamp thing, sino que lleva un zurrón para almacenar el botín, como cualquier depredador civilizado que se precie:
But of Grendel: you need to
Know more to know everything; I ought to
Go on. It was early in the evening, Heaven's
Jewel had slid to its rest, and the jealous
Monster, planning murder, came seeking us
Out, stalking us as we guarded Hrothgar's
Hall. Hondshew, sleeping in his armor,
Was the first Geat he reached: Grendel
Seized him, tore him apart, swallowed him
Down, feet and all, as fate
Had decreed—a glorious young soldier, killed
In his prime. Yet Grendel had only begun
His bloody work, meant to leave us
With his belly and his pouch both full, and Herot
Half-empty. Then he tested his strength against mine,
Hand to hand. His pouch hung
At his side, a huge bag sewn
From a dragon's skin, worked with a devil's
Skill; it was closed by a marvelus clasp.
The monster intended to take me, put me
Inside, save me for another meal.
He was bold and strong, but once I stood
On my feet his strength was useless, and it failed him.
Memoria Histórica en Beowulf
Cito de la traducción de Burton Raffel:
I heard
The oldest soldiers of all calling
For ale from Hrothgar's daughter's hands,
And Freaw was the way they greeted her when she gave them
The golden cups. And Hrothgar will give her
To Ingeld, gracious Froda's son;
She and that ripening soldier will be married,
The Danes' great lord and protector has declared,
Hoping that his quarrel with the Hathobards can be settled
By a woman. He's wrong: how many wars
Have been put to rest in a prince's bed?
Few. A bride can bring a little
Peace, make spears silent for a time,
But not long. Ingeld and all his men
Will be drinking in the hall, when the wedding is done
And Freaw is his wife; the Danes will be wearing
Gleaming armor and ring-marked old swords;
And the prince and his people will remember those treasures,
Will remember that their fathers once wore them, fell
With those helmets on their heads, those swords in their hands.
And seeing their ancestral armor and weapons
Ingeld and his followers will be angry. And one
Of his soldiers, sitting with ale in his cup
And bitterness heavy in his heart, will remember
War and death, and while he sits and drinks
His sharp old tongue will begin to tempt
Some younger warrior, pushing and probing
For a new war: "That sword, that precious old blade
Over there, I think you know it, friend.
Your father carried it, fought with it the last time
He could swing a sword; the Danes killed him
—And many more of our men—and stripped
The dead bodies: the brave, bold Danes!
One of the princess's people, here,
Now, might be the murderer's son,
Boasting about his treasures, his ancient
Armor—which ought to be yours, by right."
Bitter words will work in a hot-tempered brain,
Pushing up thoughts of the past,
And then, when he can, calling his father's
Name, the youngster will kill some innocent
Dane, a servant—and bloody sword
In hand will run from the hall, knowing
His way through the woods. But war eill begin
As he runs, to the sound of broken oaths,
And its heat will dry up Ingelds's heart,
Leave him indifferent to his Danish bride.
Hrothgar may think the Hathobards love him,
Loving Freaw, but the friendship can't last,
The vows are worthless.
Denuncias falsas en Beowulf
Que haberlas, haylas, en Beowulf. El victimismo abusivo ya se había inventado en las Eras Oscuras. La princesa Thrith va un paso más allá de denunciar acosos falsos, o de denunciar los piropos como "agresión sexual". El poeta lo denuncia, y no acepta ni siquiera el "Black Lives Matter" como excusa para el victimismo agresivo. Así reza la traducción de Burton Raffel. Habla de Higlac, el rey de los gautas:
He was a famous king, with a fitting
High hall and a wife, Higd, young
But wise and knowing beyond her years.
She was Hareth's daughter, a noble queen
With none of the niggardly ways of women
Like Thrith. Higd gave the Geats gifts
With open hands. But Thrith was too proud,
An imperious princess with a vicious tongue
And so fierce and wild that her father's followers
Averted their eyes as she passed, knowing
That if anyone but their king watched where she walked
Her hands would shape a noose to fit
Their necks. She would lie, her father's lieutenants
Would write out her warrants, and he who had stared
Would end his life on the edge of an ancient
Sword. And how great a sin for a woman,
Whether fair or black, to create fear
And destruction, for a woman, who should walk in the ways
Of peace, to kill with pretended insults.
—oOo—
viernes, 18 de septiembre de 2020
Old English Literature
(Chapter 1 of The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote).
OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE
I
This is a chronicle of how men and women, for more than a thousand years, have expressed themselves in a literature of extraordinary fertility and a language of matchless resource.
The origins of that language reach back to the remote fifth century when conquering tribes of Jutes, Saxons and Angles first brought to the country the various dialects of a Germanic tongue now called Old English. Many of the words the invaders used survive in our vocabulary today. We have no difficulty recognizing mann, wif and cild. We are familiar with the hus in which they libben or live, the mete they etan and the waeter they drincan. The bok you are reading describes a history almost as old.
Though pronunciation has changed and modern English has freed itself of nouns that must be declined and adjectives that reflect their gender, Old English had several qualities which uniquely fitted it to survive and grow. Its users were willing to borrow words from the Latin culture of the Christian church and to absorb the Scandinavian vocabulary of later Viking raiders. Old English thus drew on European traditions, while her poets further enriches their 'wordhoard' with an imaginative range of synonyms. These last tell us a great deal about Anglo-Saxon life. In a world oss war, gold and honor, the king was the heroes' treasure keeper and 'victory lord'. His warriors were his 'shield bearers' fighting in the 'iron-clad ring.' Over the heaving 'whale's road', riding the 'water's bak', sailed the broad-bosomed longships with crews of 'Spear Danes' eager for fame.
Such fame was a principal preoccupation of the poet or scop, seated at his chieftain's hearth and regaling the company with records of their history. Widsith, in a poem that dates perhaps from the early seventh century, offers a detailed inventory of the men who rose and fell in the great period of warrior migration a hundred years before. While presenting this panorama of the past however, Widsith also portrays himself in the timeless and masculine role of the Old English bard. His name implies that he is the widely travelled one, the man whose albeit imaginary journeys have disciplined him to received wisdom. Suffering, loneliness and the experience of good and evil have made Widsith a man apart and the singer of songs who can reveal to his audience the glory and pathos of their uncertain world. This is the world created again by the stoic author of Deor (?seventh century), and both men look to the lord of the 'mead hall' for generous gifts in return for immortalizing his fame.
The communal and oral nature of such poetry accounts for a number of its characteristic features. All of these made it easier for the bard to improvise his work and his listeners to understand it. For example, each line, divided into halves of two stressed and a varying number of unstressed syllables, is symmetrical and alliterative. Such patterns appeal directly to the ear. Vivid poetic diction and the frequent use of parallel expressions for a single idea set the verse apart from normal speech and mark it out as a special mode of discourse, a means of imagining the world. Lastly, many set-piece passages describing such events as fights or frasts are composed from verbal formulas that were clearly part of a traditional and unwritten inheritance on which all poets could draw.
Such are some of the formal characteristics of this verse, but if Old English poetry is marked by artifice it is also characterized by deep emotion. The following lines from The Battle of Maldon (993) in which a band of warriors face certain defeat suggests these qualities well:
Courage shall grow keener, clearer the will
The heart fiercer, as our force faileth
Here lies our lord levelled in the dust,
the an all marred; he shall mourn to the end
who thins to wend off from this war-play now.
Though I am white with winters I will not away,
for I think to lodge me alongside my dear one,
lay me down by my lord's right hand.
This passage conveys the ideal of warrior loyalty, the love of fame and honour embodied in the Germanic and originally pagan forms of the warrior life. It also suggests the reverence for conventional wisdom and the recognition of an uncertain and even malign universe which characterize the longst and most famous Old English poem, the epic Beowulf.
Although composed in a Christian court in seventh- or eight-century Mercia or Northumbria, Beowulf is deeply sympathetic to the heroic tradition, to the culture of the all and that view of human activity characteristic of the pagan world of southern Scandinavia two hundred years earlier. The poem thus reflects a life of fights and feasting, of ceremony, brilliant gold and sudden darkness. Here are pride in birth and physical strength, a world of sacred obligations, feud and vengeance. Beyond this, the forces of wyrd or fate seem to control man's destiny with mysterious omnipotence, while evil itself (personified in the poem by the monstrous Grendel, his dam and the dragon) is both primordial and powerful, something to be outwitted and destroyed by cunning and physical strength. However, while Beowulf contains many scenes of vivid action, it is principally conceived as a meditation on the heroic life, a philosophic vision of warrior man in his splendour and defeat.
The opening lines, for example, portray the funeral of a great king who as a young man crossed the waters to bring glory to an ailing country, just as Beowulf himself will later do. We watch the building of Hrothgar's mighty hall at Heorot, but even as this symbol of heroic society is celebrated, so we know it is waiting for the fire that will one day destroy it. Man's highest achievements are thus set against a background of inexorable change, and man himself is subject to time, weakness and age. Hrothgar has now passed his prime, and creatures of darkness prey on his fading glory.
Grendel and his dam are embodiments of primordial evil, the outcast forces of destruction who hate the order of Heorot with satanic jealousy. Hrothgar can no longer hold them at bay, and Beowulf in his shining 'war-gear' — the young hero from across the sea — is the only figure who can counter their power. When Grendel and his mother have been slain, a period of celebration ensues. There is rejoicing in victory and Beowulf's strength. Treasure is lavished on the hero and he returns home with his fame immeasurably increased. Hrothgar's words in the mids of proud success cannot however be forgotten:
Put away arrogance,
noble fighter! The noon of your strenght
shall last for a while now, but in a little time
sickness of the sword will strip it from you:
either enfolding flame or a flood's billow
or a knife-stab or the stoop of a spear
or the ugliness of age; or your eyes' brightness
lessens and grows dim. Death shall soon
have beaten you then. O brave warrior!
This speech is the pivot of the poem. It combines a love of heroism and conventional wisdom with a view of man poised between the brightness of youthful achievement and the shadow of death. If the first half of the work is a record of glory, we now move to a more somber view.
The last section of Beowulf describes the ageing hero's defeat in his struggle against the dragon. The whole encounter is suffused with pessimism and the meanness of the man who has stolen the dragon's gold. With his spirit 'gloomy, deah-eager, wandering', Beowulf himself seems to realize there is somehting fatal in this last encounter, a corrosion of confidence that eats away at the heart of the heroic ideal. In the heat of battle, all his companions save one desert him. As the dying hero offers his kingship to his last loyal retainer, so the glory do a nation withers away. Death and exile wait for all, and heroism passes into poetic legend.
2
The anonymous author of Beowulf drew on traditional resources to present an all-involving view of man and the supernatural, war and peace, life and death. This helps give his work its status as a heroic elegy. Great churchmen such as Alcuin of York (735-804) however had long asked what verse fundamentally sympathetic to a pagan culture could have to do with Christian salvation. This was a serious challenge to the older tradition, and a passage from The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in Latin by the Venerable Bede (probably 673-735) suggests how it was resolved.
Bede relates that when the harp was passed to the devout but unlearned Caedmon (late seventh century) he would rise from the company rather han expose his ignorance and distaste for pagan convention. One evening when this had happened and Caedmon had retreated to the cowshed, a figure appeared to him in a dream and commanded him to sing. 'What should I sing about?' the bewildered Caedmon asked. 'Sing about the creation of all things,' the figure replied. Bede says that Caedmon promply improvided the following verses:
Now we must praise the Keeper of Heaven's Kingdom,
The Maker's might, and his conception
The deed of the Father of Glory; as He of all wonders
— The Eternal Lord — established the beginning.
He first created for the children of men
Heaven as a roof, the Holy Shaper;
Then Middle Earth did Mankind's Keeper,
The Eternal Lord, afterward ordain,
The earth of men, thee Almighty Lord.
In thse nine lines Caedmon had drawn heavily on the traditional 'wordhoard', but epìthets previously reserved for pagan warriors have now been applied to the Christian God. When Caedmon was taken before St. Hild, Abbess of Whitby, she and her learned advisers were so impressed that Caedmon was made a lay brother and offered instruction in order that he might versify the whole Christian story and so teach the people.
For Bede, concerned above all to show the operation of the divine in English history, Caedmon's discovery of his vocation was an act of God. What his account more certainly shows is how an important cultural problem was exposed and then solved by a creative intuition, an imaginative leap we may well choose to call inspired. In Caedmon's 'Creation-Hymn', two apparently contradictory cultures were reconciled and Old English poetry was joined to the great tradition of European Christianity. An enormous artistic advance had been made, and scholars sometimes refer to this as the Caedmonian revolution. What is less often recognized is the role played in this process by St. Hild. A woman of commanding personality, and respected as such by Bede, the intelligence and foresight with which she used the important place offered her by her society require that she too be seen as a central figure in the making of English literature.
Though Bede goes on to describe how Caedmon versified a wide range of biblical events, modern scholars suggest that the remaining eighth-century Christian poems in Old English are the work of Caedmon's followers. One such poet is known by name. The verse of Cynewulf (late eight or ninth century) lies firmly within contemporary patterns of Christian devotion and scholarship, motifs to which the poet in such works as Elene brings both his culture's natural regard for able women and an often skiful use of the formulas of Germanic heroic verse. These last were also used by the anonymous author of Genesis who delighted in describing God and the angesl in terms of a warlod and his warriors, while heaven itself becomes an image of the earthly mead hall.
In Exodus, the flight of the Israelites and the crossing of the Red Sea are again imagined in terms of epic poetry, but to these effects the poet adds traditions of scriptural interpretation learned from the church fathers. Beneath the adventure there lies a serious spiritual purpose. Just as the Israelites are shown gaining the Promised Land, so Christians may enter the kingdom of God. Events in the Old Testament thus prefigure those in the New and teach all men of their salvation. This method of allegorical interpretation was to be of great importance to writers for many centuries to come, and they applied it not just to the Old and New Testaments. The whole world could be seen as an image of spiritual truth. In The Whale, for example, the great beast represents the Devil who lies in wait for unwary men, swallows them and drags them down to the depths of hell. Even wholly imaginary animlas could be made to serve religious instruction. In The Phoenix, the fabulous bird, leaving its earthly paradise to die and be reborn, becomes an image of Christ's passion and resurrection.
Such works suggest how the church and its poets believed the true function of art was not simply to release feeling but to teach others and enhance devotion. A poem might give pleasure but it should also do something spiritually useful. It should help its hearer to pray and to assist in the most important duty of life—the pursuit of salvation. It is against such a background that we should read the masterpiece of Old English devotional verse, The Dream of the Rood (c. 700).
Rood is Old English for a cross, and this most famous symbol of the Christian faith appears in the narrator's dream encrusted with gold and reaching out over the whole world. At once bleeding and glorious, the cross is an image of shame and redemption—a uniquely powerful fusion of Anglo-Saxon culture with New Testament love. Christ is portrayed as the young warrior standing to embrace death and victory, while the cross itself takes on the burden of his suffering. When it speaks to the narrator of Christ's eager sacrifice and its own humiliation, the poet's skilful handling of words and emotion—his rhetoric—makes us feel we are present at the Passion itself:
I was reared up, a rood.
I raised the great King
liege lord of the heavens,
dared not lean from the true.
They drove me through with dark nails:
on me are the deep wounds manifest,
wide-mouthed hate-dents.
I durst not harm any of them.
How they mocked at us both!
I was all moist with blood
sprung from the Man's side
after He sent forth His soul.
As the poet of The Dream of the Rood obliges us to relive the agony of the Crucifixion, so his art stirs our pity and gratitude. We become ever more conscious of human sin. At the close of the work, when the poet's vision has faded, he offers a final and moving image of himself as devout Christian alone on the worthless earth and longing to be reunited with the cross in heaven.
The heroism, sense of transitoriness and ardour for salvation that characterize The Dream of the Rood are also seen in some of the Elegies, that mighty handful of poems gathered in the Exeter Book, one of four manuscripts dating from about the year 1000 in which the greater part of Old English verse is preserved. The names by which these eighth-century poems have come to be known are The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Ruin, The Wife's Lament, The Huisbands's Message and Wulf and Eadwacer. Each concerns loss and isolation, and coldly through the greatest of them blows a salt-edged wind and a knowledge of the heaving wastes of the sea. These build to a sense of universal desolation.
A wise man may grasp how ghastly it shall be
when all this world's wealth standeth waste,
even as now, in many places, over the earth
walls stand, wind-beaten,
hung with hoar-frost; ruined habitations.
Such pessimism remains profoundly moving, but as we come to know more intimately the rhetorical image of themselves that these poets fashioned, so we can also begin to see how the narrators of The Wanderer and The Seafarer were deeply responsive to the Christian view of existence as this was formulated towards the much feared end of the first millennium. Aware of the anger of God towards the sinful soul, these poets present exemplary Christian images of themselves as strangers and sojourners in a corrupt and corrupting world.The author of The Seafarer in particular suggests that the true image of the righteous man is of a traveller or pilgrim on his way thorugh the snares of mortal life to the eternal and heavenly Jerusalem. Such an image not only underlies some of the finest Old English poetry, but was to be developed by many of the greates writers of the Middle Ages.
3
It is recorded that Alfred the Great (reigned 871-901) was keenly interested in Old English verse, but Alfred's literary concerns are principally associated with the revival of written prose and hence that crucial cultural achievement: the preservation of a body of advanced thought on which others could draw to describe their world. Books—rare, valuable and open to only the tiny minority of the literate—were now to take on their vital role as the repositories of what is known.
In Alfred's Wessex, the writing of such books was an urgent matter. Repeated Viking raids, cutting ever deeper into the kingdoms of England, had resulted in the sacking of churches and the burning of libraries. The centres of knowledge were being destroyed. When Alfred had finally forced the Vikings into retreat, he realized that to build his kingdom afresh he would have to develop its language and revive the learning once preserved by churchmen such as Bede. Literacy was clearly essential to this, but since Latin (for centuries the international medium of scholarship) had fallen into decay over most of England, the native tongue would have to serve. Its use in government and the law, in church matters and education, would stretch the resources of Old English to their limit and be a powerful force for national unity.
When peace was at last assured, Alfred wrote to the bishops saying that it seemed best to him, provided it did so to them, that they now 'turn into the language we all understand certain books most necessary for all men to know'. To revive the tradition of knowledgte, Alfred would, with the help of scholars from England and abroad, translate the wisdom of the Latin and Christian classics into the language of his time. These translations include the Dialogues of St Gregory (trans. c. 880), one of the most influential fathers of the church. The fact that Alfred chose to translate this collection of saints' lives suggests he was determined to create for his people—such young men at least as could be spared from the army or the production of food—a literature of exemplary Christian conduct. Alfred's version of Gregory's Pastoral Care further shows how he wanted to place his own rule and that of his senior administrators on a firm intellectual basis, for Pastoral Care describes the moral and spiritual qualities required of those who have the government of others.
To provide his subjects with a sense of historical continuity, Alfred had an edited translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People prepared. This work tells, with a critical concern for accuracy unique in its time, the history of England subsequent to the arrival fo St. Augustine of Canterbury as a missionary in 597. This event had helped establish the Roman Church as the focus of the country's European culture, and Bede's illustration of the then common belief that history is a moral pattern shaped by the hand of God would be a fundamental notion influencing writers for centuries to come. Finally, two further translations by Alfred himself reveal his more personal concerns. His version of the first fifty of the Psalms expresses the emotional side of his piety, while his work on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (the book which, more than any other, handed down the classical inheritance of reason to the Middle Ages) shows Alfred's interest in developing a language for abstract and critical thought.
Alfred's revival of literacy was sustained by many others. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 871-1154), for example, is a laconic record of contemporary national events and thus an important source of information for Alfred's and subsequent reigns. It survived the Norman Conquest, and entries in the version from Peterborough (one of the seven centres at which the Chronicle was kept) continue into the harrowingly described reign of King Stephen (1135-54). While the narrative rarely rises to the level of literary interest, what is chiefly remarkable about the work is its very simplicity at a time when Latin authors in England and abroad were striving for elaborate rhetorical effect.
Conscious artifice and a concern with style and fluency were clearly of interest among later writers of Old English prose. This is particularly true of those associated with the Benedictine revival which took place during the reing of King Edgar (959-75). In this prolific period, during which many of the manuscripts in which Old English verse survives were written, the learning fostered by Alfred was placed on a firm foundation after the troubles that succeeded his reign.
The importance of Benedictine monasteries as institutions for preserving scholarship can hardly be overemphasized. The value placed on learning by St Benedict himself (the founder of Western monasticism) resulted in the making of digests or florilegia of the classical writers and theologians. These traditions of literacy were then passed on by an educational system based on the trivium or the skills of Latin grammar, rhetoric (the techniques of shaping language into persuasive and effective forms) and logic, the rational ordering of ideas. Such are the foundations of medieval and later scholarship. They were brought to bear on Old English by the ecclesiastical requirement to preach in the native tongue. For many centuries the sermon, educating people in what were held to be their spiritual, social and political duties, was an important force in preserving and developing the language. A quantity of alliterative prose sermons survives from the tenth century. Some of these, forcibly decrying the evils of the age, see further Viking raids as a divine punishment foretelling the end of the world.
It is the particular mark of Old English prose in this last great period however that it proved itself capable of dealing with almost any subject, be it history, romantic adventure such as we find in the translation Apollonius of Tyre (c. 1050), righteous indignation or the subtleties of theological argument. The lucid, powerful homilies of Aelfric (d. 1020) and Wulfstan (d. 1023) reveal a complete mastery of the medium and show how fifty years before the Norman Conquest southern England especially had, along with a remarkable body of poetic achievement, the most advanced prose literature of any region in Europe.
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jueves, 9 de julio de 2020
Beowulf retocado digitalmente
Una lectura intertextual de Beowulf (2007), una película animada con captura de movimiento dirigida por Robert Zemeckis y escrita por Neil Gaiman y Roger Avary, basada en el poema anglosajón Beowulf.
Beowulf retocado digitalmente
https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3558788
Ibercampus (Jan. 17, 2020)
9 Pages
Posted: 15 Apr 2020
Date Written: January 17, 2010English abstract:
A Digital Remastering of Beowulf
An intertextual reading of 'Beowulf' (2007), a motion-capture animated feature directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, based on the Anglo-Saxon poem 'Beowulf'.Suggested Citation:
Garcia Landa, Jose Angel, Beowulf retocado digitalmente (A Digital
Remastering of Beowulf) (January 17, 2010). Ibercampus (Jan. 17, 2020),
Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3558788
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Literature Researh Network Subject Matter eJournals |
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| Literature Research Network Subject Matter eJournals |
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| Arts Research Network Subject Matter eJournals |
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| Arts Research Network Subject Matter eJournals |
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| Women and Gender Studies Research Network Subject Matter eJournals |
Also online here:
_____. "Beowulf retocado digitalmente." Rev.
of Robert Zemeckis's film. In García Landa, Vanity
Fea 17 Jan. 2010.*
2010
_____. "Beowulf retocado digitalmente." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 17 Jan. 2020.*
2020
_____. "Beowulf retocado digitalmente." Academia 30 March 2020.*
2020
_____. "Beowulf retocado digitalmente." ResearchGate (Jan. 2020).*
2020
_____. "Beowulf retocado digitalmente / A
Digital Remastering of Beowulf." Social Science Research Network 15 April 2020.*
2020
English & Commonwealth Literature
eJournal 15 April 2020.*
2020
Women & Gender Studies eJournal 15
April 2020.*
2020
Film, Media & TV Studies eJournal 15
April 2020.*
2020
Arts Education eJournal 15 April 2020.*
2020
Media, Gender & Identity eJournal 15
April 2020.*
2020
_____. "Beowulf retocado digitalmente." Humanities Commons 11 July 2020.*
https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:31377/
http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/vve8-j125
2020
_____. "Beowulf retocado digitalmente." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 9 July 2020.*
https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2020/07/beowulf-retocado-digitalmente.html
2020
_____. "Beowulf retocado digitalmente." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 4 Jan. 2023.*
https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/beowulfretocado.pdf
2024
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jueves, 14 de mayo de 2020
Beowulf en la clase de inglés
Me citan en esta tesina o artículo sobre Beowulf y la enseñanza del inglés:
Alvez,
Barbara. "Epic Literature in the EFL Class: Beowulf." MA diss. U Nacional del Litoral, 2008. Online at Academia.*
2020
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