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