Where the Middle Ages Begin
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.
Scholarship on Amis and Amiloun has generally been divided into two critical schools. The majority of critics have read the work as an exemplar of perfect friendship, overlooking (or ignoring) any trace of homoeroticism, citing the possibility itself as anachronistic, or explaining away its presence by offering historical or theoretical justification for intimacy among medieval men.
The status and image of a king was, at least partially, derived from the sacral king of sagas, such as that of Niall Noígiallach. In these sagas it is conveyed that under a righteous and unblemished king of royal ancestry there is peace and prosperity…I will give an overview of the elements of these ceremonies, the sources in which they are mentioned, and the developments during the high and late medieval period.
Valla wrote about Epicureanism before the Renaissance rediscovery of classical Epicurean texts. Poggio Bracciolini had not yet circulated his newly-discovered manuscript of first century Epicurean philosopher Lucretius’ De rerum natura, and Valla wrote without access to Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, which discussed Epicurus’ teachings in greater detail.
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.
This is a brief summary of a paper on Welsh poetry, patronage and politics. It was given at the Celtic Studies Association of North America Annual Conference at the University of Toronto April 18 – 21, 2013.
It is useful to begin by comparing the way the sages are initially described to the Emperor in the Latin, Middle English, and Middle Scots texts. Although the Middle Scots text is not connected to the English ones, they serve as a useful backdrop to illustrate the singular nature of the Scottish version of the story.
Thus, although I would not suggest that “The Dream of the Rood” was composed orally in performance, it is, I would contend, oral-derived, and it is that presumption upon which this analysis is founded. The poem, in other words, straddles both worlds, having ties to both textuality and orality.
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.
How did the Vikings want to be perceived–by other members of their own culture, and by posterity?
They are most famous for being violent invaders of foreign shores but a new book by a University of Nottingham Viking expert shows they were also poetry lovers with a wicked sense of humour!
The image of the Virgo Lactans orMaria Lactans (the image of the Virgin Mary suckling the Child Jesus), which occurs as early as the third century in the catacomb of Priscilla inRome, later spread ing across Europe, is found in a number of Irish sources.
Bernard of Morlaix was a monk of the order of Cluny who flourished around 1140. Excerpts from one of his poems appear in some anthologies of medieval Latin verse1 and he is briefly noticed in some works on the twelfth-century renaissance, but he has received little critical attention and only one of his poems has been translated from the Latin.
The information on trade contacts between Novgorod and Scandinavian countries preserved in the works of Old Norse
Chaucer uses both common and courtly love in the Canterbury Tales. His pilgrims represent nearly every level of the social scale and range anywhere from a knight to a miller to a parson to a pardoner. Thererfore, their status will determine what kind of tale they will tell.
The later runic alphabets do, of course, follow the basic pattern of the earlier Germanic Fupark though considerably modified by the late eighth century, decreasing in the number of runes in Scandinavia whilst increasing in number in the runic alphabets of England.
Toward the end of the twelfth century, moral conflict was rampant in the Catholic Church regarding the conduct (and misconduct) of all levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, though especially at the two extremes on the scale of power. Music and literature from the period have immortalized the mischievous and impious escapades of certain members of the lower orders of clergy, termed satirically the ordo vagorum.
We should be aware that the semantic scope of each word may vary drastically and that the reader is influenced by many variables in attaching the meaning to a given word. The question becomes trickier if we take the allegorical viewpoint, because polysemy is concerned with the entire text, not with just a word. Thus, we should not consider the surface meaning of the words, but look more carefully for the covert meanings.
Since we have melodies for both songs, the question of what “feminine” voices we are hearing is a musi- cal as well as a poetic issue.
The death of any ruler in the twelfth century, even if it were expected, caused a considerable amount of shock and disquiet amongst those who were left behind.
The wood-of-the-cross legend is actually a group of narratives that trace the pre- history of the wood used to make Christ’s cross back to Old Testament figures, or in some cases back to paradise itself.
In Fleas, Flies, and Friars, Nicholas Orme, an expert on childhood in the Middle Ages, has gathered a wide variety of children’s verse that circulated in England beginning in the 1400s, providing a way for modern readers of all ages to experience the medieval world through the eyes of its children.
This dissertation builds upon the work of feminist medievalists and other literary and cultural scholars to argue that sight, and objects that are seen, articulate love relationships between characters in medieval romances, and that seeing is frequently a locus of resistance to gender norms the texts both establish and refuse to accept.
The structure of this study follows the development of Tolkien’s social criticism and heroic aesthetic. The study begins by looking at some biographical elements of Tolkien’s life and how those elements shaped the creation of Tolkien’s anti-hero, the Hobbit.
When Bilbo, and the readers of The Hobbit, are confronted with the dragon, they are in for a surprise, as Smaug’s behaviour is somewhat unusual for a dragon.
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