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My take on Beowulf is that, although it is linguistically interesting, poetically it is boring, there is a dullness in its repetitive rhythms, the dead-handed praisewords, and the tacked-on Christian moralising, that makes one glad not to have been part of the culture it purportedly came from (there has always been a suspicion lurking that it's a fraud anyhow, that might sound crazy; why would anyone do that, but there are things like the Voynich manuscript, the hoax that no-one can read, there's certainly something of a manufactured feel to its vocabulary) Deor, or Wulf and Eadwacer, are real poems that survive from the Anglo-Saxons, and they have real beauty, Beowulf by contrast is as about as stimulating as The Excursion, except for its apparent historical interest. It is death to 'translate' it, even the term is a misnomer: how do you translate from a language into itself? Best dave 2008/11/23 Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>: > << > keep meaning to get a version that has the original alongside the > transcription/interpretation. >>> > > Tina, > > You might want to consider: > > Beowulf: A Glossed Text > By Michael Alexander > Published by Penguin Classics, 1995 > ISBN 0140433775, 9780140433777 > 237 pages > > It's not quite a parallel text, but one *heavily glossed on the right hand > facing page. > > You can get an idea of what it's like from google books, which allows you to > read as far as about line 20. > > > http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KFlpxcQftwoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0 > > There are, I think, several versions of the original text on the Web as well > as various out-of-copyright translations. > > Best, > > Robin > -- David Bircumshaw Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/ The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk