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"Epic poetry, English (Old)"
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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
The Art and Thought of the \Beowulf\ Poet
In The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet ,
Leonard Neidorf explores the relationship between Beowulf
and the legendary tradition that existed prior to its composition.
The Beowulf poet inherited an amoral heroic tradition,
which focused principally on heroes compelled by circumstances to
commit horrendous deeds: fathers kill sons, brothers kill brothers,
and wives kill husbands. Medieval Germanic poets relished the
depiction of a hero's unyielding response to a cruel fate, but the
Beowulf poet refused to construct an epic around this
traditional plot. Focusing instead on a courteous and pious
protagonist's fight against monsters, the poet creates a work that
is deeply untraditional in both its plot and its values. In
Beowulf , the kin-slayers and oath-breakers of antecedent
tradition are confined to the background, while the poet fills the
foreground with unconventional characters, who abstain from
transgression, display courtly etiquette, and express monotheistic
convictions.
Comparing Beowulf with its medieval German and
Scandinavian analogues, The Art and Thought of the Beowulf
Poet argues that the poem's uniqueness reflects one poet's
coherent plan for the moral renovation of an amoral heroic
tradition. In Beowulf , Neidorf discerns the presence of a
singular mind at work in the combination and modification of
heroic, folkloric, hagiographical, and historical materials. Rather
than perceive Beowulf as an impersonally generated object,
Neidorf argues that it should be read as the considered result of
one poet's ambition to produce a morally edifying, theologically
palatable, and historically plausible epic out of material that
could not independently constitute such a poem.
eBook
\Beowulf\ and Other Old English Poems
The best-known literary achievement of Anglo-Saxon England,Beowulfis a poem concerned with monsters and heroes, treasure and transience, feuds and fidelity. Composed sometime between 500 and 1000 C.E. and surviving in a single manuscript, it is at once immediately accessible and forever mysterious. And in Craig Williamson's splendid new version, this often translated work may well have found its most compelling modern English interpreter. Williamson'sBeowulfappears alongside his translations of many of the major works written by Anglo-Saxon poets, including the elegies \"The Wanderer\" and \"The Seafarer,\" the heroic \"Battle of Maldon,\" the visionary \"Dream of the Rood,\" the mysterious and heart-breaking \"Wulf and Eadwacer,\" and a generous sampling of the Exeter Book riddles. Accompanied by a foreword by noted medievalist Tom Shippey on Anglo-Saxon history, culture, and archaeology, and Williamson's introductions to the individual poems as well as his essay on translating Old English, the texts transport us back to the medieval scriptorium or ancient mead hall to share an exile's lament or herdsman's recounting of the story of the world's creation. From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom, to the thrilling account of Beowulf's battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, the world becomes a place of rare wonder in Williamson's lines. Were his idiom not so modern, we might almost think the Anglo-Saxon poets had taken up the lyre again and begun to sing after a silence of a thousand years.
eBook
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
The Nordic Beowulf
Cross-disciplinary study arguing that the material, geographical, historical, social, and ideological framework of Beowulf cannot be the independent literary product of an Old English Christian poet, but was in all essentials created orally in Scandinavia.
eBook
Beowulf : a translation and commentary
Presents the prose translation of the Old English epic that Tolkien created as a young man, along with selections from lectures on the poem he gave later in life and a story and poetry he wrote in the style of folklore on the poem's themes.
Book
Beowulf and the Grendel-Kin
n Beowulf and the Grendel-kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England, Helen Damico presents the first concentrated discussion of the initiatory two-thirds of Beowulf’s 3,182 lines in the context of the sociopolitically turbulent years that composed the first half of the eleventh century in Anglo-Danish England. Beowulf and the Grendel-Kin lays out the story of Beowulf, not as a monster narrative nor a folklorish nor solely a legendary tale, but rather as a poem of its time, a historical allegory coping with and reconfiguring sociopolitical events of the first half of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon England.
eBook