The Transmission of "Beowulf" PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Transmission of "Beowulf" PDF full book. Access full book title The Transmission of "Beowulf" by Leonard Neidorf. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Leonard Neidorf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501708279
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Leonard Neidorf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501708279
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Leonard Neidorf
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781501705113
Category : Beowulf
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Leonard Neidorf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501766910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author:
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486111105
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 70
Get Book Here
Book Description
Finest heroic poem in Old English celebrates the exploits of Beowulf, a young nobleman of southern Sweden. Combines myth, Christian and pagan elements, and history into a powerful narrative. Genealogies.
Author: Thomas Meyer
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 9780615612652
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Get Book Here
Book Description
A stunning experimental translation of the Old English poem "Beowulf," over 30 decades old and woefully neglected, by the contemporary poet Thomas Meyer, who studied with Robert Kelly at Bard, and emerged from the niche of poets who had been impacted by the brief moment of cross-pollination between U.K. and U.S. experimental poetry in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a movement inspired by Ezra Pound, fueled by interactions among figures like Ed Dorn, J.H. Prynne, and Basil Bunting, and quickly overshadowed by the burgeoning Language Writing movement. Meyer's translation -- completed in 1972 but never before published -- is sure to stretch readers' ideas about what is possible in terms of translating Anglo-Saxon poetry, as well as provide new insights on the poem itself. According to John Ashberry, Meyer's translation of this thousand-year-old poem is a "wonder," and Michael Davidson hails it as a "major accomplishment" and a "vivid" recreation of this ancient poem's "modernity."
Author: Leonard Neidorf
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843843870
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Get Book Here
Book Description
Examinations of the date of Beowulf have tremendous significance for Anglo-Saxon culture in general.
Author: Andy Orchard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9781843840299
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 424
Get Book Here
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.
Author:
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300228880
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Get Book Here
Book Description
A widely celebrated translator's vivid, accessible, and elegantly concise rendering of an ancient English masterpiece 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.
Author: Tim Flight
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789144345
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263
Get Book Here
Book Description
An eye-opening, engrossing look at the central role of monsters in the Anglo-Saxon worldview—now in paperback. This book addresses a simple question: why were the Anglo-Saxons obsessed with monsters, many of which did not exist? Drawing on literature and art, theology, and a wealth of firsthand evidence, Basilisks and Beowulf reveals a people huddled at the edge of the known map, using the fantastic and the grotesque as a way of understanding the world around them and their place within it. For the Anglo-Saxons, monsters helped to distinguish the sacred and the profane; they carried God’s message to mankind, exposing His divine hand in creation itself. At the same time, monsters were agents of disorder, seeking to kill people, conquer their lands, and even challenge what it meant to be human. Learning about where monsters lived and how they behaved allowed the Anglo-Saxons to situate themselves in the world, as well as to apprehend something of the divine plan. It is for these reasons that monsters were at the very center of their worldview. From map monsters to demons, dragons to Leviathan, we neglect these beasts at our peril.
Author: Adrien Bonjour
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Beowulf
Languages : en
Pages : 104
Get Book Here
Book Description
