Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
963
result(s) for
"Beowulf."
Sort by:
Beowulf
A retelling in prose of the Anglo-Saxon epic about the heroic efforts of Beowulf, son of Edgetheow, to save the people of Heorot hall from the terrible monster, Grendel.
Book
Beowulf in parallel texts
\"This dual-language edition of Beowulf is for the general reader's enjoyment of the poem and to serve as a study guide for students of English language and literature. To meet this dual purpose, the book provides the two texts running in parallel.\" -- Page [4] of cover.
Book
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Beowulf
In this essay, I suggest Rowling’s Goblet of Fire literarily echoes the Old English epic poem Beowulf, while simultaneously updating the medieval epic to reflect the novel’s place within the modernized, Christian-influenced fantasy tradition. While cursory popular links have been made between the Old English epic with Rowling’s novel, this essay presents a sustained dialogue between Beowulf and Goblet of Fire. Both heroes engage in one-to-one combat (Beowulf with Grendel and Harry with Voldemort), venture into an unknown watery abyss (Beowulf diving into Grendel’s mother’s underwater cave and Harry rescuing Ron and Gabrielle from the merpeople in Hogwarts’s Lake), and fight a dragon (Beowulf’s final fight and Harry’s fight with the Hungarian Horntail). I argue Goblet of Fire, if read in parallel with Beowulf, presents us with mirrors and inversions of the Beowulfian duel sequence, highlighting thematic and characterological analogues between Harry and Beowulf. The fourth Potter novel, whether consciously or otherwise, reflects symbolic elements from the Old English epic poem, and such Beowulfian reflections allows us to further appreciate Rowling’s unique themes, of which sometimes align with and sometimes depart from the novel’s Old English predecessor. While Goblet of Fire’s instances of thematic and visual echoes from Beowulf could be read as alluding to the epic, where I discuss Old English words or passages, such connections are at the most analogues. However, Goblet of Fire reflects yet transforms elements from Beowulf within its narrative, allowing us to further appreciate Rowling’s piece as a work of mythopoetic literature.
Journal Article
Beowulf
\"Beowulf tells the story of a Scandinavian hero who defeats three evil creatures--a huge, cannibalistic ogre named Grendel, Grendel's monstrous mother, and a dragon--and then dies, mortally wounded during his last encounter. If the definition of a superhero is \"someone who uses his special powers to fight evil,\" then Beowulf is our first English superhero story, and arguably our best. It is also a deeply pious poem, so bold in its reverence for a virtuous pagan past that it teeters on the edge of heresy. From beginning to end, we feel we are in the hands of a master storyteller. Stephen Mitchell's marvelously clear and vivid rendering re-creates the robust masculine music of the original. It both hews closely to the meaning of the Old English and captures its wild energy and vitality, not just as a deep \"work of literature\" but also as a rousing entertainment that can still stir our feelings and rivet our attention today, after more than a thousand years. This new translation--spare, sinuous, vigorous in its narration, and translucent in its poetry--makes a masterpiece accessible to everyone.\" -- Publisher's description
Book
The Transmission of \Beowulf\
The Transmission of \"Beowulf\"
like
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
, is a foundational work of Western literature that
originated in mysterious circumstances. In
The Transmission of Beowulf , Leonard Neidorf addresses
philological questions that are fundamental to the study of the
poem. Is
Beowulf the product of unitary or composite
authorship? How substantially did scribes alter the text during
its transmission, and how much time elapsed between composition
and preservation?
Neidorf answers these questions by distinguishing linguistic
and metrical regularities, which originate with the
Beowulf poet, from patterns of textual corruption,
which descend from copyists involved in the poem's
transmission. He argues, on the basis of archaic features that
pervade
Beowulf and set it apart from other Old English poems,
that the text preserved in the sole extant manuscript (ca.
1000) is essentially the work of one poet who composed it circa
700. Of course, during the poem's written transmission, several
hundred scribal errors crept into its text. These errors are
interpreted in the central chapters of the book as valuable
evidence for language history, cultural change, and scribal
practice. Neidorf's analysis reveals that the scribes earnestly
attempted to standardize and modernize the text's orthography,
but their unfamiliarity with obsolete words and ancient heroes
resulted in frequent errors. The
Beowulf manuscript thus emerges from his study as an
indispensible witness to processes of linguistic and cultural
change that took place in England between the eighth and
eleventh centuries. An appendix addresses
J. R. R. Tolkien's Beowulf: A Translation and
Commentary , which was published in 2014. Neidorf assesses
Tolkien's general views on the transmission of Beowulf and
evaluates his position on various textual issues.
eBook
In Defence of Böðvarr bjarki
For almost two centuries, Böðvarr bjarki has been a household name in Beowulf studies. The exploits of this monster-slaying champion of the Danish king match those of the epic hero at many points, and this has made Bjarki the subject of critical fascination. Many scholars have viewed the correspondences between Beowulf and Bjarki as evidence that certain aspects of Beowulf’s career may have been modelled on existing Scandinavian legend — a view with clear implications for our understanding of the originality of Beowulf. The value of the Bjarki story has also been challenged, largely on the basis that Scandinavian evidence is inconsistent in its presentation of this tradition. This article defends the usefulness of the Bjarki analogue by returning to the Scandinavian source material. It demonstrates that the various versions of the Bjarki story across Old Norse and Latin sources are structurally consistent and point to the existence of a coherent underlying tradition. This reopens the possibility that Beowulf and Bjarki may independently derive from the same legendary archetype.
Journal Article
Kid Beowulf. 3, The rise of El Cid
Beowulf and Grendel are in war-torn Spain, where honor is hard-fought, allegiances are dubious, and the bulls run wild. Amidst it all comes a young knight named Rodrigo, who fights for the name he's lost, the land he loves, and the virtue they've both forgotten.
BOOK
Old Norse Influence on the Language of Beowulf: A Reassessment
This article undertakes the first systematic examination of Frank’s (1979, 1981, 1987, 1990, 2007b, 2008) claim that Old Norse influence is discernible in the language of Beowulf. It tests this hypothesis first by scrutinizing each of the alleged Nordicisms in Beowulf, then by discussing various theoretical considerations bearing on its plausibility. We demonstrate that the syntactic, morphological, lexical, and semantic peculiarities that Frank would explain as manifestations of Old Norse influence are more economically and holistically explained as consequences of archaic composition. We then demonstrate that advances in the study of Anglo-Scandinavian language contact provide strong reasons to doubt that Old Norse could have influenced Beowulf in the manner that Frank has proposed. We conclude that Beowulf is entirely devoid of Old Norse influence and that it was probably composed ca. 700, long before the onset of the Viking Age.
Journal Article