Supplementary Material: On Anglo Saxons, their Culture and Arts
Listening to Beowulf Of course we can never know for sure what a recitation of an epic like Beowulf really sounded like, but this fellow probably comes as close as anyone can to a realistic recreation. Imagine: staring into the firepit in the meadhall, the wind howling in the wild outside...now, click here. And for a bit of info about the singer, Benjamin Bagby, click here. The Barrow Wights
Sometime in the 6th or 7th centuries, in Suffolk, England, a king was buried along with much of the gold he'd won in life -- he very well might have been spoken to someone who'd shared a cup of mead with Hygelac, or maybe Beowulf himself. 1400 years or so later his barrow was discovered at Sutton Hoo. Buried Hoard
Think walking around with a metal detector, wearing those bulky earphones and some baggy shorts is goofy? Not if you live in Staffordshire, England. Check out the latest Anglo Saxon hoard uncovered in 2009.... here. Whoever was buried here might've been a contemporary of Caedmon, Bede, or Saint Hilde... Notice the interlace? Lindisfarne Gospel, detail.
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Tolkien on Beowulf As you might know, in his day job J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo Saxon at Oxford, and he cribbed mightily from Beowulf in writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (what sets off the Dragon in Beowulf, for example? It should sound pretty familiar to any aficionados of The Hobbit). Tolkien's influential essay on Beowulf is still one of the best overviews of the poem, and does a fine job of capturing and setting forth much of what's magic in it. Read Tolkien's "Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics" here. Texting Beowulf
A student brought this to my attention: an Atlantic article about a Stanford medieval scholar's project to translate Beowulf into a hundred tweets, and the actual thing here. What do you think? Is it in the spirit of oral-formulaic poetry? Cool or irritating? Contemporary Writers
doing AS: Nicola Griffin's Hild Want a great, um, 'winter' read? Between the Chaucer and Milton, I mean? Try Nicola Griffin's Hild, p'raps. Pretty extraordinary novel, on Saint Hilde, Caedmon, Northumbria, and 7th century AS England. And John Gardner's Grendel. A classic. Beowulf from the point of view of the monster, from the hand of a beautiful writer. Want to know more about that poor fellow Unferth? Gardner provides. |