Lost in translation: The queens of Beowulf
When Bēowulf first arrives to the Danish shore with his troop of armed warriors, he is of course challenged by Hrōðgār’s sentinel to state his purpose. This delicate situation could end in violence or in welcome depending on Bēowulf’s reaction.
Heroic Worlds: The Knight’s Tale and Beowulf
Epic and Christianity are not incompatible, but they are uneasy bedfellows.
What Seamus Heaney Did to Beowulf : An Essay on Translation and Transmutation of English Identity
Heaney’s Beowulf provides us with a great deal which other translations do not: a poetic fluency rendered in Modern English, a skilled understanding of linguistic choices, and most importantly, a consciousness of the translative act which negotiates fluidly between modern perspectives and Anglo Saxon artistry.
Beowulf Is Not God Cyning
By understanding the etymology of the Old English cyning, and by recognizing the poet’s use of Scyld as the model for a good king, we can see that each of the three uses of the phrase ‘Þæt wæs god cyning’ has a different meaning…
Human Monstrosity in Terminator II: Judgement Day, Beowulf and The Passion of St Christopher
The idea of a humanoid monster that can be reluctantly empathized with can be traced back to various source texts. For example, Grendel in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf is a bloodthirsty savage, however upon a close reading of the poem he appears more human.
Symbel: The Heathen Drinking Ritual?
Examination of symbel in Anglo-Saxon society from archaeological and literary evidence and its role in modern Heathen/Pagan societies
Wonders and Wisdom: Anglo-Saxons and the East
What the Anglo-Saxons ‘knew’ about Moslems and Jews, and about Babylon and Egypt and India, depended upon Biblical exegesis, saints’ lives, and other texts derived from Latin sources. Numerous Old English texts, as well as Latin versions that circulated and were copied in Anglo-Saxon England, concern Asia; these are quite varied in genre and in content.
A Feminist Critique of Beowulf: Women as Peace-Weavers and Goaders in Beowulf’s Courts
This thesis will examine the fundamental roles of women in the societies described in Beowulf, paying specific attention to the function as peace-weavers and goaders.
Heorot and the Plundered Hoard: A Study of Beowulf
Time and again the Beowulf poet’s choice of words and details reveals that he practised his craft within a tradition in which his creativeness was bound and disciplined by the objectiveness of a particular structure of images. We perceive in all the rich variety of his work the unifying effect of the typological imagination. It is in the typological mode of Beowulf that the key to its meaning and artistry is to be found.
An Ecoritical Approach to Chaucer. Representations of the Natural World in the English Literature of the Middle Ages
The choice to write and present a study of nature in medieval English literature from an ecological perspective has been originated by a personal interest in the urgency of the deep environmental crisis we are faced with and by the drive to expand the eco- oriented study of representations of nature in literature to chronological and spatial areas well beyond those originally typical of ecological criticism.
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics
J. R. R. Tolkien’s classic work on the Old English poem
”Beowulf” and the Influence of Old English on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is set in the fictional but incredibly vast and detailed universe of Middle-Earth. Tolkien has put great effort in developing an impossibly gigantic realm peopled by many diverse races. Of the immeasurable number of characters and locations present in Tolkien’s work, many bear a name deeply rooted in Old English.
Beowulf and Boyology: The Processes of Medievalism
Between 1870 and 1914 more than twenty children’s versions of Beowulf were published, with twenty more done in rest of 20th century.
Monstrosity in Old English and Old Icelandic Literature
In medieval Europe belief in monsters allowed for corresponding acceptance of the possibility of humans transforming into monsters. In medieval Iceland and Anglo-Saxon England the mixture of Christian and pagan world views and beliefs create a situation where the boundaries are not merely fluid but can be transgressed, in either direction.
Hafa nu ond geheald husa selest: Jurisdiction and justice in “Beowulf”
This coincidence of literary image with legal significance, is as I shall attempt to show in this study, by no means unique in Beowulf.
Running Widdershins Round Middle Earth: Why Teaching Tolkien Matters
Returning to Tolkien’s allegory, it is clear that he suggests that his fellow medievalists have taken a work of great imaginative and artistic power, and instead of using it to “see the sea”, they have mined it for words and phrases, and pulled it apart, looking for bits and pieces from other ancient works, and even reworked it after their own notions of how it “ought” to be built.
Beowulf and Hygelac: Problems for Fiction in History
In Beowulf, the key historical figure with whom the hero interacts is Hygelac, and Arthur G. Brodeur has convincingly demonstrated that their relationship is central to the entire poem.
Beowulf: a heroic tale of fact or fiction?
The Old English epic Beowulf is under discussion in this essay and the idea of the truth embedded in the poem. As no concrete evidence exists on the provenance of the poem, its authorship, date or truth of content, all statements from published writers on the subject are mere conjectures
The Evolution Of English
A video lecture on the origin and vagaries of the English language up to the 15th century
Reading Beowulf in the Rubble of Grozny
From December of 1994 through January 1995, and again in August 1996, Russia launched bombing campaigns against Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, as part of its war against Chechen separatists.
The Treatment of Mythology in Children’s Fantasy
Fantasy stories trace their roots back to far older tales: the myths and legends of various cultures, which grew from oral storytelling in the days when myths were the only explanation for the mysterious workings of the real world.
Pride and Prudentius: Beowulf and the Seven Deadly Sins
This work also explores the conflict between the warrior culture of the pagans and the ideologies behind the Christian conversion.
Queer Pedagogy (A Roundtable)
A roundtable discussion on teaching Queer Theory with Susannah Mary Chewning (Union County College) Lisa Weston (California State University–Fresno); and Michelle M. Sauer, (University of North Dakota)
Constructions of Gender in Medieval Welsh Literature
The discussion of gender in medieval literary criticism is generally considered
to be a relatively new field, having achieved real momentum only in the latter half of the twentieth century. However, since it was the early fifteenth century when Christine de Pisan wrote a response to Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose, it cannot really be imagined that the medieval audience was too primitive to be fully aware of the subtext inside their stories.