Beowulf is the tale of a man who kills monsters – dragons, and shadowy swamp-dwellers. Interlaced with its heroic exploits are tales of human struggle and suffering in the face of darkness and evil – and more simply in the face of inevitable old age and death. But Beowulf is as mysterious as it is celebrated. The poet is unknown and the narrative itself is rich with supernatural mystery, but there are questions too about why a poem featuring a Scandinavian hero was copied down in Anglo-Saxon England, why an apparently Christian scribe recorded an apparently pagan oral poem, and why he chose to do so in a manuscript with very diverse other texts. It is not even known how the manuscript survived – it was missing for 500 years. In this course, we will consider some of these mysteries and study the text itself, looking at selected passages in Old English, but also considering the whole poem in various modern English translations and adaptations. We will also discuss a number of Beowulf films and their presentation of the poem’s monsters. 21.09 Beowulf: getting to know the story 28.09 The Language of Beowulf 05.10 The Beowulf manuscript: the contents of Cotton Vitellius A.XV 12.10 Beowulf’s monsters 19.10 Beowulf’s history 26.10 Beowulf and Tolkien 02.11 Beowulf and Heaney 09.11 Beowulf’s gods 16.11 The Monster’s view: John Gardner’s Grendel 23.11 Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife 30.11 The modern American Beowulf: Maria Dhavana Headley’s Mere Wife 07.12 The Feminist Beowulf? Maria Dhavana Headley’s translation 14.12 What if the hero was a thinking man? (Beowulf and Grendel, 2005) … 21.12 … and what if he wasn’t? (Beowulf, 2007) |