Thursday Feb 28, 2008

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I dearly, dearly love Beowulf. It's easy to forget just how much in the long intervals that usually elapse between my readings of it. I love it most of all for its digressions (which, if added together, would doubtless prove more substantial than its supposed primary matter). The boasts in the mead hall, the tales of foreshadowing and effective prophecy, the tangled skein of the houses of Denmark, Sweden, and Geatland -- all are so superfluous and so wonderful. If all that survived of the poem (and it very nearly perished entire) were fragments of Beowulf swimming against Breca and battling the sea dragons or Hengest's bloodyminded wait through the long winter in Finn's halls, these themselves would be miniature masterpieces.

Enough rhapsodizing though. I have gotten some other things read as well, mostly cherry picking the Anglo-Saxon period. Here's the list so far:

"Judith"
"Deor"
"The Battle of Maldon"
"The Finnesburg Fragment"
Selections from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
"The Wanderer"
"The Seafarer"
"The Wife's Lament"
"Wulf and Eadwacer"
"The Dream of the Rood"
Excerpts from the prose of Bede, Alfred, and Aelfric

I am reminded of the plangent pull of individual lines of the elegies (and also of how many of Bernard Hill's best bits in LOTR were things Tolkien lifted from his sources):

Where has the horse gone? Where the man? Where the giver of gold?
Where is the feasting-place? And where the pleasures of the hall?
I mourn the gleaming cup, the warrior in his corselet,
the glory of the prince. How that time has passed away,
darkened under the shadow of night as if it had never been.
[. . .]
Nothing is ever easy in the kingdom of earth,
the world beneath the heavens is in the hands of fate.
Here possessions are fleeting, here friends are fleeting,
here man is fleeting, here kinsman is fleeting,
the whole world becomes a wilderness.



Mind must be the firmer, heart the more fierce,
courage the greater, as our strength diminishes.
Here lies our leader, hewn down,
an heroic man in the dust.
He who now longs to escape will lament for ever.
I am old. I will not go from here,
but I mean to lie by the side of my lord,
lie in the dust with the man I loved so dearly. *



The sad beauty of fatalism is overwhelming -- I am enamored even of its simplest expressions, like the way a man is not fortunate or lucky, but undoomed.

I'm sad to leave it all behind, but the Anglo-Norman period calls. Next up will be some brief excerpts from Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Gerald of Wales, and Layamon. Then I'll get to settle down a bit with a longer work when I get to Marie de France:




*: Translations from "The Wanderer" and "The Battle of Maldon" are by Kevin Crossley-Holland and are taken from his excellent collection published by Oxford University Press.
morgan:
I ended up having to put up with reading on the computer, because at work I am not allowed to be obviously reading. If I'm looking at a computer screen, they don't care, but if I'm looking at a real book, I could get fired.

I should check out some Verne after I read through Wells, though I don't know if that's available for free in some kind of computer format. Unfortunately I already read through everything I wanted to read that's free on dailylit.com (mostly I re-read lots and lots of P.G. Wodehouse).

I LOVED Blood Meridian. Basically every McCarthy is my favorite in it's own way, though. He's such a poet.
morgan:
I like that description of McCarthy.

I'd recommend "Right Ho, Jeeves" as a good first Wodehouse read. All of them are absolutely hilarious.

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