Beowulf's Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition

Beowulf's Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition PDF Author: Helen Damico
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Beowulf's Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition

Beowulf's Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition PDF Author: Helen Damico
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description


Interpretations of Beowulf

Interpretations of Beowulf PDF Author: Robert D. Fulk
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253206398
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Interpretations of Beowulf brings together over six decades of literary scholarship. Illustrating a variety of interpretative schools, the essays not only deal with most of the major issues of Beowulf criticism, including structure, style, genre, and theme, but also offer the sort of explanations of particular passages that are invaluable to a careful reading of a poem. This up-to-date collection of significant critical approaches fills a long-standing need for a companion volume for the study of the poem. Larger patterns in the history of Beowulf criticism are also traceable in the chronological order of the collection. The contributors are Theodore M. Andersson, Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, Jane Chance, Laurence N. de Looze, Margaret E. Goldsmith, Stanley B. Greenfield, Joseph Harris, Edward B. Irving, Jr., John Leyerle, Francis P. Magoun, Jr., M. B. McNamee, S. J., Bertha S. Phillpotts, John C. Pope, Richard N. Ringler, Geoffrey R. Russom, T. A. Shippey, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

The Origins of Beowulf

The Origins of Beowulf PDF Author: Richard North
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191525731
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
This book suggests that the Old English epic Beowulf was composed in the winter of 826-7 as a requiem for King Beornwulf of Mercia on behalf of Wiglaf, the ealdorman who succeeded him. The place of composition is given as the minster of Breedon on the Hill in Leicestershire (now Derbyshire) and the poet is named as the abbot, Eanmund. As well as pinpointing the poem's place and date of composition, Richard North raises some old questions relating to the poet's influences from Vergil and from living Danes. Norse analogues are discussed in order to identify how the poet changed his heroic sources while four episodes from Beowulf are shown to be reworked from passages in Vergil's Aeneid. One chapter assesses how the poem's Latin sources might correspond with what is known of Breedon's now-lost library while another seeks to explain Danish mythology in Beowulf by arguing that Breedon hosted a meeting with Danish Vikings in 809. This fascinating and challenging new study combines careful detective work with meticulous literary analysis to form a case that no future investigation will be able to ignore.

Beowulf and the Grendel-kin

Beowulf and the Grendel-kin PDF Author: Helen Damico
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781938228711
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In 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. Damico offers incisive arguments that major historical events and personages pertaining to the reign of Cnut and those of his sons recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, and major continental and Scandinavian historical texts, hold striking parallels with events and personages found in at least eight vexing narrative units, as recorded by Scribe A in BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, that make up the poem's quasi sixth-century narrative concerning the fall of the legendary Scyldings. Given the poet's compositional skill--widely relational and eclectic at its core--and his affinity with the practicing skalds, these strings of parallelisms could scarcely have been coincidental. Rather, Damico argues that examined within the context of other eleventh-century texts that either bemoaned or darkly satirized or obversely celebrated the rise of the Anglo-Danish realm, the Beowulfian units may bring forth a deeper understanding of the complexity of the poet's compositional process. Damico illustrates the poet's use of the tools of his trade--compression, substitution, skillful encoding of character--to reinterpret and transform grave sociopolitical "facts" of history, to produce what may be characterized as a type of historical allegory, whereby two parallel narratives, one literal and another veiled are simultaneously operative. 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.

Beowulf and the Grendel-Kin

Beowulf and the Grendel-Kin PDF Author: Helen Damico
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781938228735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Honour, Exchange and Violence in Beowulf

Honour, Exchange and Violence in Beowulf PDF Author: Peter Stuart Baker
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
ISBN: 1843843463
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Argues for a new reading of Beowulf in its contemporary context, where honour and violence are intimately linked. This book examines violence in its social setting, and especially as an essential element in the heroic system of exchange (sometimes called the Economy of Honour). It situates Beowulf in a northern European culture where violence was not stigmatized as evidence of a breakdown in social order but rather was seen as a reasonable way to get things done; where kings and their retainers saw themselves above all as warriors whose chief occupation was thepursuit of honour; and where most successful kings were those perceived as most predatory. Though kings and their subjects yearned for peace, the political and religious institutions of the time did little to restrain their violent impulses. Drawing on works from Britain, Scandinavia, and Ireland, which show how the practice of violence was governed by rules and customs which were observed, with variations, over a wide area, this book makes use of historicist and anthropological approaches to its subject. It takes a neutral attitude towards the phenomena it examines, but at the same time describes them fortnightly, avoiding euphemism and excuse-making on the one hand and condemnation on the other. In this it attempts to avoid the errors of critics who have sometimes been led astray by modern assumptions about the morality of violence. PETER S. BAKER is Professor of English at the Universityof Virginia.

The Metrical Grammar of Beowulf

The Metrical Grammar of Beowulf PDF Author: Calvin B. Kendall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521393256
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This book argues that the Old English epic Beowulf is shaped by the poetic language which the poet inherited.

A Critical Companion to Beowulf

A Critical Companion to Beowulf PDF Author: Andy Orchard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 0859917665
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
This is a complete guide to the text and context of the most famous Old English poem. In this book, the specific roles of selcted individual characters, both major and minor, are assessed.

Klaeber's Beowulf, Fourth Edition

Klaeber's Beowulf, Fourth Edition PDF Author: R.D. Fulk
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442692898
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1273

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Book Description
Frederick Klaeber's Beowulf has long been the standard edition for study by students and advanced scholars alike. Its wide-ranging coverage of scholarship, its comprehensive philological aids, and its exceptionally thorough notes and glossary have ensured its continued use in spite of the fact that the book has remained largely unaltered since 1936. The fourth edition has been prepared with the aim of updating the scholarship while preserving the aspects of Klaeber's work that have made it useful to students of literature, linguists, historians, folklorists, manuscript specialists, archaeologists, and theorists of culture. A revised Introduction and Commentary incorporates the vast store of scholarship on Beowulf that has appeared since 1950. It brings readers up to date on areas of scholarship that have been controversial since the last edition, including the construction of the unique manuscript and views on the poem's date and unity of composition. The lightly revised text incorporates the best textual criticism of the intervening years, and the expanded Commentary furnishes detailed bibliographic guidance to discussion of textual cruces, as well as to modern and contemporary critical concerns. Aids to pronunciation have been added to the text, and advances in the study of the poem's language are addressed throughout. Readers will find that the book remains recognizably Klaeber's work, but with altered and added features designed to render it as useful today as it has ever been.

Direct Speech in Beowulf and Other Old English Narrative Poems

Direct Speech in Beowulf and Other Old English Narrative Poems PDF Author: Élise Louviot
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844346
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
A new examination of the little-studied phenomena of Direct Speech in Old English poetry. Some of the most celebrated passages of Old English poetry are speeches: Beowulf and Unferth's verbal contest, Hrothgar's words of advice, Satan's laments, Juliana's words of defiance, etc. Yet Direct Speech, as a stylistic device, has remained largely under-examined and under-theorized in studies of the corpus. As a consequence, many analyses are unduly influenced by anachronistic conceptions of Direct Speech, leading to problematic interpretations, not least concerning irony and implicit characterisation. This book uses linguistic theories to reassess the role of Direct Speech in Old English narrative poetry. Beowulf is given a great deal of attention, because it is amajor poem and because it is the focus of much of the existing scholarship on this subject, but it is examined in a broader poetic context: the poem belongs to a wider tradition and thus needs to be understood in that context. The texts examined include several major Old English narrative poems, in particular the two Genesis, Christ and Satan, Andreas, Elene, Juliana and Guthlac A. Elise Louviot is a Lecturer at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France) and a specialist of Old English poetry. Her research interests include orality, tradition, formulas and the linguistic expression of subjectivity.