Category Archives: Beowulf

Beowulf, Science fiction

The Underground Library society

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Beowulf

English professor and writer Charles French founded The Underground Library Society, inspired by Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. In Bradbury’s dystopian novel, books have been banned and the subject population submits to a crushing conformity. A handful of rebels “become” books by memorizing them in the hope that one day, books and free thought will again thrive.

Members of The Underground Library Society will have the opportunity to publish a guest post on French’s blog and reveal what book they’d “become” and why. In my post, I make a case for memorizing and preserving Beowulf. Why that particular work? Check it out!

Beowulf, Reading

Quote of the day

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“Finish reading an especially difficult book, and its cover functions more like a trophy awarded for intellectual labor. Carry a book around in public, and its cover can betray you to other people who will make assumptions about you. It feels risky to be so exposed, but at times such assumptions are welcome, as when a book cover, flashed across a crowded subway car, operates like a secret handshake.”

Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth

Beowulf, Fantasy Fiction

Beowulf: The enduring appeal of an Anglo-Saxon ‘superhero story’

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Viking

Here’s a great article from the BBC on the enduring influence of the epic poem that defined Western literature and thought:

Some 1,300 years on from when most historians believe it was written, Beowulf continues to be shared, adapted and revised, whether on screen, in print or in song.

JRR Tolkien, who was a noted expert on the poem, is widely thought to have taken inspiration from Beowulf for his Lord of the Rings trilogy.

According to Prof Andrew Burn, from University College London (UCL), the roots of popular medieval-themed video games and TV shows can also be found in this epic saga.

“Look at Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, Game of Thrones, any of those big TV franchises, and you realise what the perennial source of interest there is in the same themes: bravery, mortality, power struggles, social hierarchy,” he says.

Beowulf was one of my favorites as a student in high school and college. I now own translations by Kevin Crossley-Holland, Burton Raffel, JRR Tolkien, and Seamus Heaney. Of the four, my favorite is Heaney’s. Its sparkling, dynamic prose best matches the spirit and power of the story and its characters. Here’s a taste from page 51. It’s the scene where Beowulf, who has chosen to fight Grendel bare-handed, first tackles the monster in the mead-hall of King Hrothgar:

And now the timbers trembled and sang,
a hall-session that harrowed every Dane
inside the stockade: stumbling in fury,
the two contenders crashed through the building.
The hall clattered and hammered, but somehow
survived the onslaught and kept standing.

The legacy and importance of Beowulf was not only established by its being a robust and entertaining tale, but because it defined Western civilization itself. The worldview here is one of accommodation and repurposing of pagan traditions. Instead of scouring the old ways it encountered, Christianity adapted pagan values and made them its own. For example, Beowulf is presented as a warrior-savior, a kind of Nordic Jesus. And as James C. Russell argued in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, Christianity in northern Europe was significantly altered to become a “world-embracing” rather than a “world-denying” religion. As Kevin Crossley-Holland concludes in the BBC article, one of Beowulf’s themes is that “On the whole, life’s to be relished, lived to the full, laughed with and at.”

JRR Tolkien certainly concurred with that view, as every page of The Lord of the Ring confirms.

Beowulf, Comics, Shakespeare

Jack Kirby is Still King!

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thor

I loved this tribute from playwright John Ostrander:

What makes Jack Kirby the King? For me, it’s this.

Imagination – The word “prodigious” comes to mind. So many concepts, so many characters, bear his mark. So many styles of stories. From the spires of Asgard to the weird distortions of the Negative Zone to the brutal cityscapes of Apokolips, to Ego the Living Planet, no one could top his visuals.

Storytelling – His figures leaped off the page. The panels couldn’t contain the events on them. Even standing still, they vibrated with potential power. There was energy to burn on his pages. You felt them as much as you read them. You couldn’t read the story fast enough and when one issue was done you wanted the next one right now.

Artistry – Okay, his anatomy was not always perfect. And every woman’s face looked the same. He was still one of the best ARTISTS that ever drew a comic because comics are about storytelling and no one beat Kirby as a storyteller.

The featured image is a scan from my copy of The Mighty Thor # 159, from December, 1968. It’s a perfect example of the barely contained power that animates all of Jack Kirby’s illustrations. You can feel the tension in this scene: Thor, despite his earth-shattering might, approaches his father Odin with the most profound respect — and more than a little bit of fear. As well he should: Odin could rage and roar like no other monarch in comicdom.

I have no doubt Marvel Comics in its Silver Age strongly influenced me. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby definitely expanded my vocabulary, often forcing me to set my latest comic down to riffle through the dictionary to discover the meaning of what I’d just read. And the high quality of the stories and characterization I encountered in those comics, as well as the heroic subject matter, whetted my appetite in grade and high school for Beowulf, Shakespeare, science, and history.

Side note on the scanned picture of Thor: At the tender age of 31, barely a year after getting married, I sold my comic book collection. My wife and I needed money for a down payment on a house, and the stern lesson of 1 Corinthians recited at our wedding still reverberated in my ear: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

So it was time to let go of Spiderman, Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. But I held on to three of my favorite issues of Thor. I’ve found the best way to move forward is to hold on to a few pieces of a beloved past.

Beowulf, Celtic culture, Southern Culture

The shock of the old

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irish-statue

In the introduction to his translation of Beowulf, Irish poet Seamus Heaney recalls his surprise when he learned the odd-looking Anglo-Saxon word þole (pronounced “thole”) wasn’t really alien:

I gradually realized that it was not strange at all, for it was the word that older and less educated people would have used in the country where I grew up. “They’ll just have to learn to thole,” my aunt would say about some family who had suffered an unforeseen bereavement. And now suddenly here was “thole” in the official textual world, mediated through the apparatus of a scholarly editon, a little bleeper to remind me that my aunt’s language was not just a self-enclosed family possession but an historical heritage, one that involved the journey þolian had made north into Scotland and then across into Ulster with the planters and then across from the planters to the locals who had originally spoken Irish and then farther across again when the Scots Irish emigrated to the American South in the eighteenth century. When I read in John Crowe Ransom the line “Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole,” my heart lifted again, the world widened, something was furthered.

Learning and reading definitely widen and further one’s contact with the world. Literature, by making the strange familiar and the familiar strange, challenges us to see the world with new eyes. Recognizing an active past in our present world gives us a new dimension of life desperately needed in a live-for-the-moment consumerist society. And seeing one’s culture blossom in distant parts of the globe makes those faraway places seem a bit closer.

For more on the defining influence the Celts exerted on the South, check out Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways In The Old South.

Music, Nobel Prize, Reading

And the Nobel Prize in Literature goes to …

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Nobel Prize Map

First, this from My Poetic Side:

History has been made today, as Bob Dylan has become the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is also the first American to win the award since 1993, when novelist Toni Morrison walked away with it. The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, said that Dylan won the award because he was “a great poet in the English speaking tradition”. It may seem like the rules have been somewhat bent for Dylan to win the award, but his lyrics are considered poems, and no one can deny that they are excellent works of literature. The award will be presented on December 10th, which is the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the prize founder. …

We recently conducted some research to determine where the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature originate. If you look at the map, you will be able to get a good understanding of the countries that have had the greatest success.

No, the rules were not “bent” to give Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature; the rules were tossed along with the basic purpose of the Nobel Prizes. Now I like Bob Dylan’s work, but c’mon, he’s a folk singer. Even an aging Carl Sandburg knew better than to accept Dylan’s claim to be a poet.

Yippee! I’m a poet, and I know it
Hope I don’t blow it

This is just the latest slam against legitimate literature. I’m still steamed over North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory’s careless appointment of a state employee who’d self-published two thin books of poems as the state’s Poet Laureate. After an outraged literary community gave him an earful, McCrory changed his mind by replacing his initial candidate with Shelby Stevenson, a poet deserving of the title.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the Nobel Committee will do an about-face and give the Literature prize to Don DeLillo, Ron Rash, or Cormac McCarthy.

Too many forces are arrayed against the simple act of reading. Click on “Read Story” on many news sites (here, for example) and you get a blaring video that snaps your attention away from the written report.

So the Nobel Prize in Literature, once a sturdy champion of writers and their readers, has turned into yet another pusher of pop culture. Yuck.

Beowulf, History

The British Library

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Isaac NewtonSir Isaac Newton memorial at the British Library.

Wish you could explore the world’s largest library whenever you wanted? Imagine being able to leaf through ancient books, view online exhibitions, and feast your eyes on some of Britain’s most treasured objects. Can you think of a better way to inspire your next story?

You can do just that, and you don’t have to leave home. This resource pretty much tumbled into my lap in the form of an email request from the British Library:

Hello Mike,

My name is Bryn Roberts and I’m contacting you on behalf of the British Library. I noticed recently that you have a mention of Bald’s Leechbook on the following page: https://mctuggle.com/2015/03/31/the-1000-year-old-solution/

This text is now featured as one of our online exhibits, available for all to browse on our website: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/illmanus/harlmanucoll/m/011hrl000000055u00001000.html

The manuscript is unique and sadly can no longer be handled very often due to its partly damaged state, which means it crumbles upon contact. Viewing the document electronically is now the most viable approach for those interested in it, and we have made it available to all via our website.

We would be very grateful if you could include a link to it in your article so your readers can access the original version and discover the text for themselves.

Do you think this might be possible?

Many thanks for your time.

Kind Regards,

Bryn Roberts

How could anyone refuse such an elegant and polite request? I updated my original post on the rediscovery of medical cures from the time of Beowulf. Since that post is nearly a year old (that’s ancient history on the Internet) I thought I’d also link the address in today’s post. Enjoy!

Beowulf, Joseph Campbell, Movies

Why ‘The Force Awakens’ Is the ‘Star Wars’ Movie We Needed

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Joseph CampbellReprint of Campbell’s classic with Luke Skywalker on the cover.

Some folks have criticized The Force Awakens for drawing too heavily on Star Wars: A New Hope. Writing in The Rolling Stone, David Ehrlich argues that these critics are missing the point. In The Force Awakens, Abrams is “making new” a tale that inspires and excites with each retelling:

The original 1977 movie was innovative in many respects, but it was derivative by design. In creating a galaxy far, far away, Lucas effectively draped his imagination over a constellation of yarns so familiar that they seem to have spun from the marrow of our bones. Its alchemy is nothing if not well documented: A New Hope combined the plot of Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress with the widescreen scale of Lawrence of Arabia and the Saturday morning spectacle of serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. With his 20th-century influences well in hand, Lucas then poured them like molten metal into the iron mold of the hero’s journey as laid out by Joseph Campbell, who traced the origins of modern narrative arcs back to the beginning of civilization. “I wanted a contemporary version of the myth and the fairy tale,” Lucas said in a Los Angeles Times interview published days before Star Wars first hit theaters in 1977.

Whether we’re talking about Beowulf, the Iliad, or Indiana Jones, such stories resonate because, as Ehrlich puts it, “they seem to have spun from the marrow of our bones.” Campbell stripped the heroic myth down to its barest essentials:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

The heroic myth, then, is about leaving behind what was once comforting and familiar, confronting new challenges, and finding one’s place in a world that has changed in many ways, some good, some bad. But the hero now knows he can survive and thrive in that world. Sounds like growing up, doesn’t it?

Beowulf

The 1,000-year-old solution

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Anglo Saxon helmet

My father is in a nursing home, and a couple of weeks ago, we had a bad scare when he was exposed to methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as MRSA. It’s a “superbug” that sneers at modern antibiotics. Fortunately, Dad responded well to the treatment and is doing well — but he’s being watched in case it flares up again.

MRSA is the scourge of nursing homes. So this BBC News story caught my eye:

Scientists recreated a 9th Century Anglo-Saxon remedy using onion, garlic and part of a cow’s stomach.

They were “astonished” to find it almost completely wiped out methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as MRSA.

Their findings will be presented at a national microbiology conference. …

The remedy was found in Bald’s Leechbook – an old English manuscript containing instructions on various treatments held in the British Library.

The leechbook is one of the earliest examples of what might loosely be called a medical textbook

It seems Anglo-Saxon physicians may actually have practised something pretty close to the modern scientific method, with its emphasis on observation and experimentation.

Bald’s Leechbook could hold some important lessons for our modern day battle with anti-microbial resistance.

How about that? A home remedy from the time of Beowulf works better than any of our over-priced, hyper-marketed pharmaceuticals.