Beowulf

[porphyry]

Most of us had to read “Beowulf” in our teens, struggling through the 1,000-year-old ramblings of some anonymous author.

Well, leave it to 3-D special effects and computer imagery to make this epic poem palatable.
__________

The name “Beowulf” surely will inspire painful memories of high-school English class and pangs of dread.
(this one was accompanied by a photo of Angelina Jolie trying out for the remake of Goldfinger wearing only a pair of six inch spike heels: Grendel’s mother, evidently)

These are the lead paragraphs in the reviews of the Beowulf film in our two local newspapers. Note first the complete disappearance of the paragraph: every sentence is offset as a seperate paragraph; and this continues throughout both reviews. Second, note the substitution of placing the title of a work of literature in quotation marks for italicization. Finally, note the bizarre use of hyphens in both pieces. I suppose Beowulf is not the only thing that filled the authors with dread in their English classes.

Who is this aimed at? Who is this 'we' they mention? Who would hate Beowulf? Certainly not us. That was the only thing my Baptist-trained English teacher could not trample the joy out of. Mde. Malkhos actually learned Old English for the express purpose of reading Beowulf. We are not being well served by our papers. It does no good to complain. I’ve actually written in about the film reviews in the past, only to be told they have to cater to the mass audience. No risk of educating them instead, I suppose.

Comments

[lordtangent.livejournal.com]

I hear some version of this story from a lot of people, but is it even possibly true that students in American high schools have ever been expected to read Beowulf in the original Old English? Or at all?

I came of age in the 1990s, so maybe standards had dropped off by then, but the highlights of my high school English classes included a "condensed" version of Great Expectations, the poetry of Maya Angelou, and watching West Side Story so that we could better understand the complicated plot of Romeo and Juliet.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Oh no, we read it in a modern English trnsalation. Mde. Malkhos did not take up Old English util she was in graduate school.

My senior English syllabus was a bit better than what you desribe. We were assigned a reasonalbe array of improtnat works,but I somehow managed to get an A in the class without reading any of them. The really awful thing was the teacher. We often talked among oursleves about his being the msot broing person we had ever seen--like a chartreed accountant from Monty Python. And what the Baptist Bible College he attended had done to him! He spent the first week contextualizing the English language within world history. Although I did not understand it at the time, he spieled out 19th century difussionism, telling us that all civilziation had begun in Babylon and spread out symetrically from there, with cultural differences being directly proportinal to distance from the center and with minor local variations caused by isolating geographcial features such as mountain ranges. Once the crest of this civilizing wave reached cornwall it ahd to stop for a while but then eventually picked up over here again with the pioneers.

[stefanie-bean.livejournal.com]

Angelina Jolie as ... Grendel's mother? I thought she was going to be some eye candy at Hrothgar's hall.

I enjoyed the 2005 Sturla Gunnarson version with Gerard Butler, though.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Actually, I took "Old English Grammar" and "Readings in Old English" as an undergraduate; I believe I was a junior during both those courses. Both were 400-level courses and were supposed to be for seniors, but I knew the professor and got special dispensation. I had, a must admit, an affinity for languages.

Beowulf was indeed, however, an entire graduate seminar. I loved that course. It was extremely difficult and time-consuming but well worth it.

[gislebertus.livejournal.com]

We read Beowulf my senior year. As well as Milton, Spenser, Marlowe, Swift, Addison, Pope, Dante. . .

I guess I was lucky. I'm even happy to have been able to read Camus and Ionesco in high school.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I can recommend a very good modern novel related to this topic: John Gardiner's novel (well, perhaps it would more properly be called a novella because it's so short) Grendel. Outstanding piece of work; a quasi-Freudian approach that tells the story from Grendel's point of view.

[siamhussein.livejournal.com]

Ah, GRENDEL (à la Gardner). It is the only worthwhile thing he ever wrote. But my goodness! You should all run out and read it right away. For years I had one of the excellent illustrations found therein pasted to my front door.

[siamhussein.livejournal.com]

What a difference only a few years makes. I suspect everyone imagines their literary studies to be more worthwhile than those conducted afterwards but, man, I am so happy to have escaped the burdensome mush of Maya Angelou. Later, as a somewhat older-than-normal graduate student, I often remarked how thoroughly versed in horseshit my younger colleagues were.

For the record we read GRENDEL in Americna high school (in modern English) but also Chaucer in Middle English.

Oh, one more thing. Years later I was hired to proofread the new edition of the anthology we read in high school. One of my tasks was to be sure that there remained no cross-references to Emerson, who had been summarily dismissed from those pages. Okay, American culture is pretty shallow, but erasing the first real American philosopher from this book can only be explained by dimwit high school lit teachers who found the excerpted versions of his work impenetrable.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I had a similar unfortunate experience in graduate school; one of the newly hired professors commented, when I bemoaned the students' lack of knowledge about the first group of American philosophers; namely, Emerson and Thoreau and the whole Transcendentalist tradition, looked at me with disdain and said, "Why would everyone need to read them? I'm from the South; they have nothing to say to me."

"You're the reason academia is in the condition it is today," I told her, omitting You goddamn idiot.

Needless to say, she wasn't on my dissertation committee.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

You didn't like Jason and Medea?

[siamhussein.livejournal.com]

Ah the wonderful world of identity politics. Nothing pertains to anyone, really, unless the philosopher in question happened to live across the street. Thank you, Maya Angelou, etc.

Quelle horreur.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

You know how I feel about Medea, having played the role on stage.

I thought it amusing the way you insisted we put the Gardiner novel in with Freud's works among our books.