Epic musings
Oct. 3rd, 2010 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inulroNo, really. Epic in the technical, literary sense.
Anyhow, it's taken me ages to get around to watching all the programmes the BBC showed as part of their "Normans" season. I've liked what I've seen so far but, as this used to be my career, none of the programmes told me much, if anything, that I don't already know.
Today I finally saw Simon Armitage's hour on "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight". I thoroughly enjoyed it. What I did learn is that Armitage has made a translation of it, as a poet rather than as a scholar, thus keeping the alliteration and cadence. As soon as I have £5.99 to spare I'm buying a copy, because what he reads in the programmes is beautiful. Naturally I have read it in Middle English, but not since my undergrad days. If I recall correctly, reading Gawain next to Chaucer is what got me interested in dialect ad how I ended up studying variations of Old English and working on reconstructing lost Northern dialects. It certainly pulled me into the world of medieval studies in a way that Chaucer never would have.
By way of associations that are logical to me, this links to a project I've been planning since the new translations of The Mabinogion and The Tain came out in the mid-00s - an Epic reading-fest. Considering I've read a lot about the anthropology and mechanics of epic, I'm grievously deficient in my actual epic-reading[2].
I've read Beowulf in Old English[1] and got the Seamus Heaney translation but not got around to reading it. I read parts of The Mabinogion as an undergrad but the old Penguin translation was clear as mud, and did The Tain at U of T. I have done The Song of Roland and The Cid and am not dead keen to revisit either of these
Where I suck, epic-wise, is the classical world. I've read the Iliad but not The Odyssey, The Aeneid or Ovid's Metamorphosis (I'm sure Tony or Simon will be along shortly to tell me the last isn't epic; I have to admit I don't remember).
I welcome suggestions to add to this.
I think I've recovered enough brain cells for this to be do-able, but I would need to lock myself in a cottage in the middle of nowhere for several weeks to get through the lot.
I've got a similar planned thematic reading of Victorian women novelists along with The Madwoman in the Attic at some point.
[1] Don't take the piss. Why do you think I'm finding Swedish so obvious?
[2] Lo, I am the queen of the secondary source. This is only a good thing for the intellectually lazy.
Anyhow, it's taken me ages to get around to watching all the programmes the BBC showed as part of their "Normans" season. I've liked what I've seen so far but, as this used to be my career, none of the programmes told me much, if anything, that I don't already know.
Today I finally saw Simon Armitage's hour on "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight". I thoroughly enjoyed it. What I did learn is that Armitage has made a translation of it, as a poet rather than as a scholar, thus keeping the alliteration and cadence. As soon as I have £5.99 to spare I'm buying a copy, because what he reads in the programmes is beautiful. Naturally I have read it in Middle English, but not since my undergrad days. If I recall correctly, reading Gawain next to Chaucer is what got me interested in dialect ad how I ended up studying variations of Old English and working on reconstructing lost Northern dialects. It certainly pulled me into the world of medieval studies in a way that Chaucer never would have.
By way of associations that are logical to me, this links to a project I've been planning since the new translations of The Mabinogion and The Tain came out in the mid-00s - an Epic reading-fest. Considering I've read a lot about the anthropology and mechanics of epic, I'm grievously deficient in my actual epic-reading[2].
I've read Beowulf in Old English[1] and got the Seamus Heaney translation but not got around to reading it. I read parts of The Mabinogion as an undergrad but the old Penguin translation was clear as mud, and did The Tain at U of T. I have done The Song of Roland and The Cid and am not dead keen to revisit either of these
Where I suck, epic-wise, is the classical world. I've read the Iliad but not The Odyssey, The Aeneid or Ovid's Metamorphosis (I'm sure Tony or Simon will be along shortly to tell me the last isn't epic; I have to admit I don't remember).
I welcome suggestions to add to this.
I think I've recovered enough brain cells for this to be do-able, but I would need to lock myself in a cottage in the middle of nowhere for several weeks to get through the lot.
I've got a similar planned thematic reading of Victorian women novelists along with The Madwoman in the Attic at some point.
[1] Don't take the piss. Why do you think I'm finding Swedish so obvious?
[2] Lo, I am the queen of the secondary source. This is only a good thing for the intellectually lazy.
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 08:02 pm (UTC)I congratulate myself for getting through "The Pardoner's Tale" and actually understanding it! (Back when I was a teen)
To be fair though, I am Science Grad and not a literature/language person.
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Date: 2010-10-03 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 07:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 07:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 04:50 pm (UTC)Which is the new Mabinogion translation?
Le Morte d'Arthure too, I guess.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 07:57 pm (UTC)I also still have my middle English copy which is, as middle English goes, really easy because it's so late it's practically modern English, but I'd probably get so caught up in the mechanics of the transition from middle to modern English that my head would explode.
Plus, not that I spent too much time with the Morte as an undergrad, but in grad school some lecturer asked who succeeds Arthur just to prove a point (that there are parts of well known books that *nobody* has read), mine was the lone hand in the air...
no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 03:21 am (UTC)The Odyssey is wonderful, and the Aeneid is OK but kind of contrived. I like Dante's Divine Comedy as well, though it too is a little contrived.
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Date: 2010-10-04 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 07:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 07:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-06 08:01 am (UTC)There's always Paradise lost, too.