Notice anything different?

We've revamped the blog to include a new, dramatic banner. I'm grateful to Jonathan for his technical expertize.

There are other questions that we've thought to address:

-- Beowulf is an arch-type, so for every archtype there would be a grain of truth, what is that reality?

-- Folktales vs. Myth -- Beowulf is which? A folktale is about the people, more personal (ie. Johnny Appleseed). A myth is a cultural identity (ie. fall of man).

-- Who is the hero? Mankind becoming godlike, yet with still the seed of human failing.

Stay tuned for some of our thoughts addressing these questions!

Virgil

Excited!

Virgil and Aine were kind enough to invite to post to the Beowulf Club Blog as we all went to college together. Many wonderful hours we spent studying British authors all of eras.

I look forward to our discussions here. I have missed academia. Though I've taught as an adjunct instructor, it's not the same as being a student led by a willing, enthusiastic professor. I miss it, and this will be a engaging substitute.

Tori

Our first meeting

Yesterday was the earliest chance that we had to meet and discuss how we wanted the Beowulf Club to happen. Aine, Tori, and I met at the library to fearlessly discuss life since college and what we wanted the Beowulf Club to encompass.

My friend Aine had been reading her copy of Seamus Heaney's Beowulf the most recently and she spoke with a lot of conviction about the importance of reading a translation of poetry written by a poet in his own right. She definately sold me on it and although we will continue to use the publicly accessed translation by Gummere, Francis Barton, 1855-1919, for the purposes of publishing on this blog. So for the our next meeting we will start with the Prologue by Heaney.

Tori was excited by the research into Anglo-Saxon linguistics and this invited discussion of the strengths that we each brought to the reading. I'm more interested in the use of this early literature as a source of modern science fiction and fantasy literature. It is our intention to approach this in an organic and hopefully unique fashion. There is a lot of wonderful work out there on the web about Beowulf, and our intention is to just have fun and see if we can bring our own take of this great literature.

We also talked about Beowulf through the lense of

• Anglo-Saxon history versus mythology


• Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, and Man vs. Self


• tension between Christian and Pagan beliefs


• was there a real Beowulf?


• Beowulf as a Superheroic figure

There is obviously a rich well to draw from and I hope to encourage developing conversation on some of these topics in the meetings ahead.

Virgil

Which text to use?

The next question (although we still don't have more than the two people starting) is which of the text do we use? Although I am a big fan of paper/books, for the purposes of this blog, I wanted to find an e-copy that was public and free. So far I've found:

A translation from Francis Gummere that were free on the net:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/beowulf/b48g/
or from Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/
searching "beowulf"

I'm still not sure which is better. We shall see.

This is also a place to upload an amazing viking related piece of art that I found from http://home.exetel.com.au/, I hope that they don't mind:

Thank you for reading,

Virgil

A BEGINNING

My friend, Aine, and I were talking about the "good-old days" of University when we were English Majors at The University of Akron. She had asked me if I missed the rarified air of the ivory tower (my words) and I said that I did, but that I didn't miss the student loan that I was still paying off. In other words that I was considering returning one day on a career related purpose, but not just because I missed the academics and discussions.

So the question is, how to keep our minds growing without paying for the privelege? So we both came to the conclusion that we needed a book club. Oh but what a club, because we intend not only to study a classic work, but then to branch out onto related and supporting literatures. Aine was interested in "Le Morte Darthur," but as we had been talking about some of the movie versions of Beowulf that had surfaced of late, I suggested that we start with this even older piece of literature.

So this blog is the forum where I intend to publish any interesting discussions or articles that we develop as we meet on a monthly basis. If anyone wants to add to our discussions, they are welcome to do so.

Virgil