Beowulf

Well, and it seems like it's just a continuation of previous forms.

Like, the idea that you would gather in a group and tell stories, like, that's what Beowulf was, that's what Homer was.

Yeah.

It sits in this tradition quite comfortably.

Some scholars would mark it formally, usually with a kind of bracketed ellipsis, and then argue for decades about what probably used to be in there.

Beowulf's got a famous one.

A few missing words in the middle of a sentence about an unnamed queen.

And then editors have been proposing rival guesses for what filled that gap since the 19th century.

It's not a plot device.

It's just loss.

The Beowulf Gap specifically has had editors arguing over it for the better part of a century.

Kemp Malone proposed filling it with the name...

But it may be, in another sense, more historical, in so far as, in losing the impress of the actual events, it has taken on the impress of the mind and character of the people to which it was thus gradually accommodated.

Achilles, or Siegfried, or Beowulf, or Robin Hood, may be quite inadmissible to the pages of the scientific historian as actors in any definite historic events.

But the historian who is scientific in the true sense will be the last to dispense with these incomparable types of what Homeric Greece, or Hohenstaufen Germany, or pagan Angeln, or the yeomanry and woodlanders of Plantagenet England most wanted to be; and in their best moments, the moments when they most fully and richly lived, in effect were.

For this process, by which a historic matter becomes soaked and saturated, as it were, in the national character, is something quite different from that in which the ideal hero is consciously designed by the poet of a later age, and made to figure, perhaps, in some quasi-antique picture.

None has done so much to restore its terrible beauty, its heroism, its earth-shaking humour, and its heights of tragic passion and pathos to a place in our memories and a home in our hearts.

I say to restore, for it will not be, in truth, a new gift, but in some sort the recovery of a vanished and forgotten possession.

The mythic stories which we call Norse were in great part a common heritage of the Germanic peoples, and the tale of the Volsungs, which Morris told the other day, had been sung twelve or thirteen hundred years before in the Old English epic of Beowulf.

But between the day when these tales were last chanted at English feasts, perhaps on the eve of the conquest, and that on which they were first deciphered again by English antiquaries, life will be six centuries, during most of which they were utterly unknown.

And then played the game, gave up a grand slam, came home, watched more.

I remember we were reading Beowulf at the beginning of junior year, and we were supposed to have a quiz on chapters whatever.

And I was like, well, there's no way we're going to have a quiz first period.

This is a superseding event.

I was like, you've got to be bleeping me.

I was like, I'm not ready for this at all.

I don't regret watching 9-11 coverage instead of reading Beowulf.

Get out of my face.

In English his story, as a skillful smith, is traceable to a very early period.

In the Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf we find that hero desiring, in the event of his falling into conflict with Grendel, that his corslets may be sent to Higgelic, being as he says the work of Wayland.

And King Alfred, in his translation of Boethius de Consolatione, renders the words Fidelis ossa fabricii, etc., by fate, Volundas.

Where are now the bones of the famous and wise goldsmith Wayland? Evidently taking the proper name of Fabricius for an appellative to Faber.

To me, sometimes it's a bit of a misnomer because some of those movies have some, like if you're like, I heard an interview with Wes Craven one time talking about Freddie goes down into the basement or, um, You go down into the basement to face Freddy.

Because in Beowulf, he had to go down into the depths to face the monster or whatever.

So there's all these little literary things that these guys took with them and put into it.

So even though it's not right in your face, even though it's not the deepest story with the biggest cast, these things still do exist in these movies, for better or worse.

In English, his story as a skillful smith is traceable to a very early period.

In the Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf, we find that hero desiring, in the event of his falling into conflict with Grendel, that his corslets may be sent to Hygelac, being, as he says, the work of Wayland.

And King Alfred, in his translation of Boethius De Consolatione, renders the words, "Fideles ossa Fabrici etc." by fate, Volundus.

Where are now the bones of the famous and wise goldsmith Wayland? Evidently taking the proper name of Fabricius for an appellative to Faber.

She has a nice retort when people complain about her references.

Something like, you must have really loved Beowulf then, right? If you don't get my books.

Exactly, yeah.

There's a, I think...