On the subject of anachronism, since that seems to be the subject,
it's pretty clear that all of us, acculturated to the present givens,
would be even less comfortable than we are in our own world if we
suddenly found ourselves in the world of Beowulf or of its redactor,
regardless of gender or class. Almost certainly members of the
original audience felt differently, in ways it's difficult for us to
imagine, but the exercise of trying to is no less important, if we
want to understand our possibilities as a species, than the exercise
of trying to understand other present-day peoples.
A value of Beowulf is the insight we can glean, presuming it's not,
as David suggests, a fake, into the sense of the past of anglo saxons
at the moment when oral transmission became less certain (which is
when stories get written down, otherwise nobody bothers). We know
less surely what they thought of that imagined past. If it is a fake,
of course, the text is equally revealing about what the perpetrator
thought his audience's imagined past might be, as a successful fake
Vermeer tells us what its first viewers thought Vermeer was about, or
as Ossian tells us what Macpherson's audience thought about the
ancient celts..
Absent these concerns, we're left with a gripping narrative, or
perhaps a fantasy novel.
Mark
At 03:53 PM 11/23/2008, you wrote:
>Sometimes, Alison, I can feel that all of our literature is tainted,
>except for John Clare in his rare moments of sanity, and maybe Thomas
>Hardy, however, I think projecting terms like colonialism or
>imperialism back on the Elizabethans is slightly misleading, there
>certainly were ambitions that we would see in that light but I'd give
>them the allowance that they were innocent of the contemporary hues of
>those concepts: Spenser on Ireland is not nice, nor is the fact that
>Raleigh was a slave trader, but I don't think they would have the same
>awareness that our very slightly more grown up world has, I say that
>with hesitation.
>
>The fascination of Elizabethan-Jacobean poetry is the verve of its
>language, particularly the the theatre, Shakespeare the writer of
>Hamlet and Lear is a far greater writer than the author of the Sonnets
>or Venus and Adonis. One of the endless confusions in discussing
>gender in the stage plays is of course that women weren't allowed to
>act, and how much of what was going in the companies was what we might
>call gay culture, we just don't know.
>
>I know too many people who are Beowulf in their own trousers, btw, I
>hate it all. The wretched primitiveness that underlies even a
>supposedly sophisticated country like contemporary England, I find
>myself in the counsels of despair.
>
>best
>
>Dave
>
>2008/11/23 Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>:
> > Hey David - By that token, practically all of our literature is
> > impossible to touch. All of Elizabethan poetry is tainted by
> > colonialism and imperialism, etc etc. I find it rather more
> > problematic - and fascinating - from the point of view of its gender
> > stuff. If you mightn't have wanted to be a man in that society, you
> > most certainly didn't want to be a woman.
> >
> > For all that, I just like it. I even like that you can see the joins,
> > or that there are those weird ellipses where the poetry leaps from
> > here to there, or where another story begins and ends with the barest
> > of warnings.
> >
> > Translating it culturally! Hmm. There might be legends in their own
> > trousers hanging around in local pubs who think they're Beowulf, but
> > the thought makes me blench. There actually aren't modern equivalents
> > for the story of Grendel or his mother, or the dragon and, to be
> > serious about it, there's a starkness in the poem which I'm finding,
> > from my point of view, quite illuminating. There ain't nothing _nice_
> > about Beowulf, and leaving it in its time and place means we can make
> > of it what we will. I guess I'm primarily interested in seeing how it
> > might be cast effectively in plain contemporary English as (from my
> > point of view) a gripping narrative.
> >
> > I never saw the most recent movie, but Hal Duncan's review is
> > hilarious -
> http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2007/11/i-am-beowulf-youre-going-daaaaahn.html
> >
> > "...At this point, anyone who's read the Anglo-Saxon source text might
> > well be stroking their chin. Grendel's Mother was a super-sexy
> > babe-demoness? I don't remember that in the original! One might grow
> > more curious still when Beowulf proceeds to shag aforesaid super-sexy
> > babe-demoness rather than dispatching her. Um... isn't that, like, a
> > *radical* departure from the original? we might ask. No matter; all of
> > these considerations pale into insignificance against the key question
> > raised by this representation of Grendel's Mother: just how Mother
> > Dearest, given her barbie-doll smooth and entirely slitless pubic
> > mound, manages to get it on with both Beowulf and Hrothgar -- here
> > revealed as Grendel's father, ye see, to provide a nice pat theme of
> > parental responsibility as opposed to all that complex guff about the
> > conflict of Christian belief systems with autochthonous religion and
> > mythology; remember, it's about "the Age of Monsters", not the age
> > of... well... the Christianisation of Northern Europe. Fuck that shit!
> > It's about Monsters! Big 3D Monsters THROWING SHIT OUT AT THE
> > AUDIENCE!!! But, I'm getting off the point, so, yeah, how exactly did
> > she shag them? And from which orifice did she drop her sprogs? Sure,
> > sure, others might ask *why*, given that Beowulf is all about "the Age
> > of Monsters", we have Grendel's Mother as a stereotyped Evil Sexy
> > Vixen rather than the ass-kicking, man-munching Monster of the source
> > text, why she has to use her "womanly wiles" on the hero rather than,
> > well, going mano-a-mano with him in an underwater slug-fest cause she
> > ain't nobody's bitch, motherfucker. Me, I just want to know *how*.
> >
> > "It may seem that I'm overemphasising the importance of Grendel's
> > Mama's labia-lack. To be sure, I have to confess I'm not quite sure
> > what Zemeckis was trying to say by this, so it's entirely possible I'm
> > missing something important. I can only be sure that we're *meant* to
> > take this as highly significant from the close-up crotch-shot of
> > Grendel's Mum that, in Imax, cannot fail to impress with it's
> > in-yer-faceness (It's a giant gold barbie-crotch and IT'S COMING TO
> > GET YOU!!!)."
> >
> > xA
> >
> > On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 6:11 AM, David Bircumshaw
> > <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >> Anglo-Saxon literature was of interest to white supremacists like
> >> Pound or Tolkien, which doesn't mean that people who follow on in that
> >> are of the same ilk, the trouble is that of taking on a poisoned
> >> chalice.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> > --
> > Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
> > Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> > Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
> >
>
>
>
>--
>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
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