Don’t Know Much About BEOWULF? Nobody Does! Feat. Princess Weekes | It's Lit
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- čas přidán 5. 08. 2021
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Let’s face it. Between English classes, Lit classes, World Culture classes, and History classes, there’s no escaping The Epic Poem. THE ODYSSEY, THE ILIAD, THE AENEID, THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH, BEOWULF. At some point, we’re going to have to confront the lyrical beauty of big strong men in big strong armor fighting big strong monsters, saving their kingdoms, and loving on their ladies. Or loving their male best friend -but that’s another poem.
Today we’re going to take a look at one particular Epic Poem and follow its long, winding journey from way, way, way long ago allllll the way to the present day, and we’ll interrogate its relevance to our lives in the here and now. Come now, Geats and Danes, to the violent, bloody, mythic, mysterious world of BEOWULF.
Hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Princess Weekes, It’s Lit! is a show about our favorite books, genres and why we love to read. It’s Lit has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.
Hosted by: Princess Weekes
Written by: David McCracken
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Dude was partying so hard, he got naked, fought a guy, and enjoyed it so much he fought the guy's mom too. That's the kind of stuff poems ought to be written about.
Not mentioning the fact that said mom had sent off her offspring every night to feast of menflesh with a blessing.
Anglo poetry nowadays is about how fragile you are or in love.
Well, we have the best translation right there.
@@DonnaBarrHerself I'm honored
“In true Beowulf style we can’t even agree on the amount of translations”
My mythology professor is laughing to the bank on that one
"Loving on their male best friend"
*Gilgamesh has entered the chat*
*Achilles has entered the chat*
"But that's a different poem"
*Sad reacts*
Unhhhhhhh 😌😏rawr
Bisexuality is pretty much the default in any culture not affected by Abrahamic religions
@@brutusmagnuson315 And I take great comfort in that. It's more that I find it very funny.
Don't forget about Cú Chulainn.
@@generalcyn1209 How could I? The guy was literally named for being as loyal as a hound to another man.
Damn, I wish Princess had mentioned that Headley’s own translation of Beowulf translates “hwæt” as “bro”
I had a classmate who translated it basically that way also xD
Came here to say this!
bruh
say hwæt?!
😂😂😂😂😂😂
I find it funny that people question whether Beowulf was an oral tradition before because of its "complexity", like... Wasn't the Iliad also an oral tradition before it was written down? And that's way longer and more complex than Beowulf. Or even stuff we know for sure is rooted in oral tradition like The Epic of Mwindo, or pretty much any of the First Nations mythological stories I learned as a kid. My point being that complex and detailed stories have always been in oral tradition, so it seems kind of silly to argue that Beowulf couldn't have been a story spread by word of mouth to begin with before it was written down.
In fact half of Beowulf is literally because of the go-to mnemonic which exists to make things easier to remember: The Rule of Three.
There is a party, monster arrives. Beowulf fights monster.
There is a party, monster arrives. Beowulf fights monster.
There is a party, monster arrives. Beowulf fights monster.
End
And the text itself if of poetic form. I can't get to the Seamus-translation copy I've had since high-school/college, but I recall that one of the opening lines explicitly declares the nearby sea or ocean as the "Whale Road". Alliteration and regular rhyming are peppered throughout the work even when written...the storytellers could easily sing a verse or two from memory and play around with the rest.
The Iliad's history amounts to:
- There's a bunch of stories being passed around orally about events occurring around 1250 BCE give or take (based on the archaeology of the site of Troy).
- Around 800 BCE or so, or 4 centuries later, somebody codifies it into an epic poem that gets passed down orally by professional performers, and by all accounts was remembered fairly consistently.
- Around 600 BCE, there was an effort by the ruler of Athens to write down a definitive version.
So for Beowulf to stick around for hundreds of years orally after the events in question is entirely plausible, although it might have been more informal and probably exaggerated stories about how awesome this local king was back in the day before it turned into an organized work of poetry. It's also notable that epic poetry is arguably easier to remember word-for-word than prose stories, because the poem demands certain patters of words that help a less-than-perfect poet recover what they've missed.
also, who's to say the oral version wasn't simpler before whoever wrote it made it more complex? duh 🙄
Yeah, the idea that oral traditions can't preserve complex themes and ideas is some colonialist nonsense.
Don't forget the Nibelungenlied. This one has been found 37 times in german manuscripts, three containing more or less the whole story, some containing only passages or an additional text that is supposed to be a comment on the story's origin (which is fictional). These versions aren't identical, yet there must have been a single person who compiled all the stories that existed at that time, and turned them into the one epic we know.
So, oral tradition and written literature may have a third sibling, an in-between that makes all these epic poems that tell stories about a heroic past, in order to give us a cultural (often also national) identity.
_"I am Ripper... Tearer... Slasher... Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength... and Lust... and Power! I AM BEOWULF!"_
- Beowulf
Underrated and underappreciated movie
He rips?… and …tears? RIPS…AND…..TEARS!!!! RIP AND TEAR! RIP AND TEAR GRENDEL’S GUTS! [Mick Gordon music plays]
Man knows how to hype himself up.
I love how he screams his name when he beats a monsters ass
@@jimmythe-gent
Honestly, if someone manages to beat a monster like that, they have every right to scream their own name.
THE PRINCESS CONTINUES HER BENEVOLENT REIGN OF MAKING ALL LITERATURE ACCESSIBLE AND FUN, HWÆT!
How do you pronounce hwaet
Ok ty
I'd pay good money to hear Lil Jon do the audio book of Beowulf
Give a prize to this woman 😍
Her enthusiasm for the world of books is so very refreshing. I'd love to see her apply her Victorian Lit sensibilities onto the wacky world of Jasper Fforde's Eyre Affair...
Fun fact: Hrothgar is the ancestral version of the name Roger, and I can't stop laughing every time i think about it 😂
I'm going to make a translation where he's only ever referred to as Roger now.
Princess, add one more to the count!
Also, Beowulf = Bee Wolf = Bear. Yep. A story about two dudes named Roger and Bear...
So High Hrothgar is really High Roger?
@@Pheonixco considering the geography, there was likely rye being grown.
Where there was rye before science, there was ergot. THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING.
BEOWULF IS A BAD TRIP
Mr. Hrothgar's Neighborhood is heckin' terrifying
When I was in high school, an historical interpreter came and recited his interpretation of the epic poem, "Beowabbit." He told us that the work was incomplete because parts of the text had been obscured by food stains and inky cat prints. There were lots of inside-English Lit in-jokes.
Oh man, I want to hear that version so bad lol
I totally read "Beowabbit" in Elmer Fudd's voice 😅
“What? We be Quarterstaffs? We be not! We be men of tribe Boxjutes who with great Welaf wiped wide Wonderwen tribe, unmanly and not nice!” Attributed to Aethelstan of Devonshire and translated by Bruce Blackistone. I had an official copy in the long ago and Bruce was pointed out to me at a party once.
I think a legendary hero would feel honored to know that their story was told to countless masses by a Princess. Also, I reccomend people checking out the 13th Warrior. It's a great re-telling of this saga
I'll have to check that out. It certainly can't help but be better than that CGI Beowulf movie.
@@jeremyt2212 Personally, I think it is
@@jeremyt2212 "13th Warrior" is based on the Michael Crichton book "Eaters of the Dead." It is great history geek fun! I highly recommend it. Go back to the book if you like footnotes. One of my favorite little snippets from the movie is a moment where an archer pulling back his bow to shoot, quietly says to the 13th warrior, "Don't stand in front of me," and our guy has to tear his attention from the bad guys to get out of the way of the shot. A tiny warrior training moment!
The 13th Warrior is AMAZING.
@@tessat338 That's a great character moment. I like the scene following the battle at the hall . One of the Northmen whimpers (about the Wendol) " They are demons" and their leader Bulvyf answers , " Their blood looks real enough. "
Was I the only loser who loved the Odyssey, Iliad, Macbeth, and Beowulf when I was in school? Hell, I remember enjoying the Odyssey even before I started school because of a Wishbone episode.
I remember that Wishbone episode, too! fwiw I loved all the classics, too. I don't know that it made us losers; I remember my grade 1 book presentation (show-and-tell style) being about Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass... I know that the teacher loved it, and probably the other kids in the class didn't care one way or the other lol. Not that at age 6-7 I could understand every concept evoked, but lots of well-written lit is fairly accessible to all sorts of age groups. Thanks for reminding me of Wishbone, too!
I relate so hard to all of the above! 😆
Wishbone is responsible for getting a generation hooked on the classics
Beowulf is, at its heart, a horror story. It endures because it is scary. Beowulf girds himself for a nocturnal battle with an ogre, mutilates it, and the next morning goes to track its bloody trail back to its lair. There, he finds the monster dead... only to encounter its even bigger, scarier, angrier mom. That's the definition of horror. HP Lovecraft (who knew a thing or two about scary stories) raved over Beowulf.
To add credence to your point, I think it's possible to read the first three Alien films as a loose sci-fi horror adaptation of Beowulf.
Uuuuh. Really????
I suppose it's horror the way Se7en is horror, or Keeping Up with the Kardashians, I suppose.
@@Bizarro69 It is a horror story at its core. Grendel doesn't have a set image hence nobody truly knows what Grendel looks like yet is a monster that has the worst qualities of a human that is exiled. Furthermore, Grendel's mother is even scarier given her rage following Grendel's death.
The problem with modern audiences is that they became numb to horror and given their short attention span and constant dependence on technology (e.g. phone distraction). They never truly understand what 'horror' really is at its core such as the horror of being exiled or the fear of the unknown nor care for it tbh, unlike the Anglo-Saxons did at the time (remember they didn't have technology but rather depended on story telling) along with their over exposure to Hollywood 'horror' films concerning paranormal ghosts, serial killers, etc rendering audiences today to be numb hence the 'horror' of Beowulf goes over peoples' heads. Nonetheless Beowulf as Perry Lake mentioned, is a horror story at its core
@@v2btrthnu24 kinda silly to say that modern audiences cant appreciate horror, given the fact that we are in what is widely considered to be the golden age of the horror genre... like, horror is an extremely well utilized tool in modern storytelling and if you think that all horror today has to offer is B-movie crap, well, that says far more about your exposure to the genre than it does about the genre itself. im not even saying this to be antagonistic, btw; it's just that, if this is really what you think, i feel bad, because you're probably missing out on some of the great and horrifying stories that are made by modern storytellers!
@@TheRandomzcookie You're missing the entire point of my post if that is your response. Sure you can claim I'm 'missing out' and that you 'feel bad' (which btw don't feel bad since I don't want pity from anyone for anything in life) but again you're missing the entire premise of my post which is unfortunate. It's not a diss to 'horror' or its fans today and fwiw, everyone says their own time is the 'golden age' of whatever so that biased argument never flies. I have seen many horror films since I personally love horror as a fellow millennial myself fwiw
The concept of horror's core is the base of my argument which still stands since you basically proved my point from the initial post and this 'core' is what Perry was referring to. Have to look at it as an impartial party rather than a biased one since horror today has grown and added a lot of layers but the core while remaining the same, is often buried by the 'fluff' and the latter is what many turn to with their flawed arguments such as yours here. It's just to show that Beowulf is a 'horror at its core' which the previous poster also seemed to overlook and fail to grasp at its most fundamental state per his kardashian comment. I never believed nor said that horror is awful today or anything but rather you like most people seem to do today took it out of context and twisted it to make your flawed rebuttal attempt
You’re right about how many interpretations of Beowulf there are... I have a college obsessed with the poem. He leads guided tours here in Sweden to places that MAY be the ones the text refers to.
One man who's an entire college?
@@Richard_Nickerson and that man is owned by this bjorn
He means colleague, guys. And what a cool story, Bjorn!
You’re absolutely right, both of you. He’s a sight to behold.
@@Sunshine-zm1fx
We obviously know, otherwise we wouldn't be able to make jokes about the mistake...
We don’t have many Bards today, but at one time they were a valued source of information and entertainment at on time. They were trained to repeat the stories carefully. Many people knew the stories and would have been unhappy with a bad rendering. It’s unfair to compare oral traditions to the game of telephone. Of course there may have been changes but the story was probably basically the same. Bring more mead.
I'm glad someone else appreciates Seamus Heaney's translation of "Hwæt!" as "Ok, like, so..."
Confirmed: Beowulf is my favorite anime.
beowulf emerged from the peat bogs and we're still not sure whether or not it was even actually a thing.
ETA: using stills from the angelina jolie mocap beowulf movie is a POWER MOVE and i love it
I often wonder if word of mouth can change a story like Beowulf from it's original text. Beowulf is still badass in story form!
Absolutely! I’m personally fascinated by the very power of the oral tellings of such epics. Those adaptations that convey the visceral nature of Nordic life, the brutality and the vitality of the culture and landscape, are closest to my heart
If Beowulf was an oral story first, then there would have been no “original text” as such, or at least by the time it came to be written down it very likely would have different from the first telling of the story. It’s fascinating how oral traditions change by time & area, & how we’re so used to things being written down that we assume text versions must be more accurate/the original.
Okay, but seriously, HWÆT is the deal with Princess getting second billing on this series.
Princess is such a charismatic and engaging host, if she ever did classes I would love to join!
Shes got so much personality i hope she does more vids on here.
she has her own channel, check out Melina Pendulum
My dad lent me his olde English copy when I finished secondary school (time conversion just before sophmore in American). I loved it but jeez did I have to pay attention.
Beowulf's fight with the final dragon is some of my favourite descriptions in literature.
*Edit* yes can I haz a Lil Jon audio book version. That would be epic.... comedy drum roll.
love that jimmy squibbles is constantly getting recognition in this channel
With Beowulf, the Dragon Part always seemed added in as it doesn't fit the narrative structure well when compared to the other 2 monsters that was slayed.
were* not was
I want to ask more about the breakdown you see but am also aware that youtube is not great for longform essay responses....
Technically, there are four monsters in Beowulf. But yes, the bit with the dragon is really a separate story, just about the same hero. When I read that final battle I could feel the heat of the dragon's breath. The scene comes alive even today, although it was written over a thousand years ago!
Who here remembers that weird Beowulf movie? I saw it as part of a senior field trip.
The 2007 computer animated movie? It was interesting and, of course, Angelina Jolie was at the height of her popularity in Hollywood movies at this time. This movie used the motion capture techniques that were used for Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the characters. There were changes from the text, but it was still pretty enjoyable to me.
Yess! It wasn't the most amazing movie, but I watched it recently just to see if it holds up and it's still visually stunning (and undeniably entertaining).
It wasn't based on the poem, I think it was based on a comic adaptation and a loose one at that.
Aside from the song A Hero Comes Home, I hated it.
Which weird Beowulf movie? The CGI version with Angelina Jolie or the odd semi-futuristic-but-not-really one with Rutger Hauer?
Seriously though, I would listen to a series called "Lil' Jon Presents" wherein Lil Jon reads classic literature. I would also settle for T-Pain.
We can get him to read the Robin Hood ballads!
Thug Notes. I love that guy. I hope he’s alright.
Germanic literature would require Lil Jon’s higher energy. DMX would be better, but he’s passed (RIP)
it could be both
Occasionally I wish these episodes were half an hour, an hour long. I could do with that
+
Skanland? You mean Scania, or Skåne as we call it here.
Geats/Götar means 'the Goth'. Altho they are not the same goths as those who took Rome, it is not far off, as they had a rather interesting cultural connection.
I dont quite buy that the linguistic complexity of Beowulf would be so much of an issue that the it cant have been passed on orally. Even scientists have a tendency to underestimate people of the past. Remember that a skald would memorize it, word for word, in a systematic way. For example, the Prose Edda spends plenty of space showing how a norse poem is supposed to be constructed, and it is highly complex stuff. This in a culture where writing was rare, generally very short and exclusively for the upper class. The oral tradition was significant.
And this would not make Beowulf unique. While attributed and likely written down by Homer, we can be quite confident that the Iliad and Odyssey were also old traditional word of mouth poems, long before then. The epic of Gilgamesh was probably in a similar situation.
I really like Princess as presenter. She’s a great story teller!
I had to watch this video twice, because I kept getting distracted by Princess. She really is the whole package; beauty and brain, along with that melodic voice.
Five minutes in we done talked about Lil Jon lovin male best friends and quoted the Godfather. I'm guessing this person is dope as hell to chill with 😂
Plus I'm pretty sure she keeps calling Beowulf gay which is beyond hilarious
I'm not so sure that in oral traditions in preliterate societies there is as much change as we see in games of telephone.
When Alex Hailey visited the home village of his ancestor, Kunta Kinte. As an honored guest Mr. Hailey was given the history of the village. In that oral history Kunta Kinte was mentioned as a teenager who vanished one day while looking for a log from which he could make a drum for his brother.
Kunta Kinte would have been a rather unimportant young man in the village. He was young, unmarried, landless and childless. Yet he was still mentioned in that history, though it was not known, in the village what had happened to him. I imagine people would vanish rather often in that environment. Not only are there slave catchers about kidnapping people, there are also dangerous animals. Not to mention random accidents like stepping in a hole and breaking your ankle.
This oral history matched the oral family history that had been passed down to Hailey. This trip was made before Roots was published, so it is unlikely that the village historian had heard it before the arrival of Kunta Kinte's 7 times great grandson.
As far as he could tell, the stories he had grown up on matched the stories that Hailey had heard of Kunta Kinte's life before he was kidnapped.
That is pretty astonishing accuracy for something that is passed down by oral tradition.
To my understanding, the structure is what allows them to survive with fewer changes than you'd expect based on how unstructured stories change over time. How many people have a 4 minute speech memorized by heart, vs how many people have a 4 minute song they know all the lyrics to?
As far as I know even the Vedas were originally oral literature, and so was pretty much everything, the first use for writing wasn’t to preserve accuracy but rather to keep track of taxes. The whole notion that oral literature is a game of telephone is colonialist and it reinforces negative stereotypes of non-white communities.
Even Michael Crichton had problems with Beowulf. His story, Eaters Of The Dead, was born from his college experiences with, as he called them, the Classical Bores.
Taking the manuscript of ibn Fadlan as a starting point, he developed an imagined basis for Beowulf, which was eventually adapted to become one of my favourite movies, The 13th Warrior
"That's why you weren't invited Grendel!" 🤣👊 Right!? Last time we let Grendel in the club... 😪
When I was in my early 20's, my brother's mother-in-law owned a community theater. I played Grendel in a rock musical version of Beowulf. It was very strange.
Also, Skåne is Scania in English.
9:10
I'm not used to seeing that picture of Tolkein without a "World's Best Grandpa" mug shooped in.
If you know, you know.
6:15 Actually it's today to 1721. It was 11 years before George Washington was even born.
The whole opening sentence is the interjection, not just "Hwæt!" So more like, I think, "Hwæt we Gardena in geardagum, þeod-cyninga þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon" "What do we know of the deeds of those ancient nobles?!" I love Tolkien but he was wrong, Hwæt alone is not attested to as an interjection.
Annnnnd the translation rumbles beginnnnnn! "Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war!"
This guy Beowulfs
I feel like people underestimate storytelling from oral traditions. It probably wasn't exact in how it was transcribed (because I'm pretty sure old English/Scandinavians/whoever wrote it didn't think dragons, Grendel's mother, sea serpents, whatever Grendel is, and beowulf's multiple obviously way beyond Olympic level athlete abilities were literally true and, thus prioritizing it as literal history probably wasn't deemed vital) but exact or borderline exact translations of oral stories happen and happens quite often. We actually know of many atrocities done to Native Americans specifically because of how reliable their oral traditions are. In fact, many historians would question these oral traditions and assume they were mostly grossly exaggerated but, upon actually unearthing the locations of massacres (such as the sand creek massacre), Native Americans were shown to be basically entirely accurate in numbers of massacred and the location despite over a century passing since the event. I'm less familiar with Australian aboriginal history (I'm sorry, I'm aware aboriginal is considered offensive but I do not know the correct term) but I've heard their traditions are possibly even more accurate by an order of magnitude or more.
Love me some Beowulf! My wife and I listened to Seamus Heaney's reading of his translation on radio every night for a week when we first moved in together, cuddled up on a sofa in the dark. But I think I love the Epic of Gilgamesh even more; it seems even more primal and elemental, perhaps for being so much older.
I was already a Beowulf fan before I watched this, but I did enjoy it and I think you tackled the topic pretty well. Nice work
love the story of beowulf. we read it as a class in my freshman year.
A day with new Princess content is a GOOD DAY
Wait?!?! 300 plus years is like comparing today to 1821! That was a long nap I took this afternoon. I would never have guessed CZcams would be a thing in the 22nd century.
Oh, that fanfic jab. Bravo!
This is one of my favorite poems.I have enjoyed the story in it many incarnations. It sparks the imagination..
I love the continued lore of hype house blood bath
Imagine drinking hard in a mead hall, 5 tankards in, and the bard gets up on the dias and screams "Hweat!" I imagine that one word would be the equivalent to an opening guitar riff at a rock concert. The sheer uproar from the crowd would be deafening!
I was the only person in my final year of English Lit in High School who liked this poem.
Most of my AP Lit class was Tolkien fans, so we just ate it up
Lucky. My class hated everything from Beowulf, Gawain, Romance Poetry, Paradise Lost and Shakespeare. It wasn’t until that T.S Eliot Idiot that they started actually liking it.
@@dylantennant6594 your classmates sucked
Love them all
This was fun! I studied Beowulf in Medieval Literature nearly 2 decades ago - it was a fun, if somewhat daunting, read and it's really cool to see someone make an accessible primer like this! Thank you!
I love Gilgamesh so much. I'm also all crazy about the history of that area of the world. The birthplace of culture and very interesting culture it was. Beowulf is next in the line and I like that one for the historical stuff that is just STUFFED into its pages.
What I remember the most about Beowulf is that, according to the text, Grendel might not be a monster. He could be a human. It's only his mother and the dragon that are explicitly monsters.
I wonder if we could get an adaptation like that someday.
There is a novel by Parke Godwin called "The Towet of Beowulf." It shows Grendel and his mother in a sympathetic lights. Grendel's mother has a name, Sigyn. She uses magic to raise Grendel in an illusion that they are humans in a fairy tale kingdom. She wants him to grow up without pain but the illusion backfires when Grendel grows up.
Yay another princess video
It frustrates me to know that Grendel's Mother most likely had a name, but was lost over the many retellings before it was written down. Like all they could think of was Grendel's Mother? You got a venomous fire breathing dragon, and a monster in the night named Grendel, and then just Grendel's Mother. It is pretty anticlimactic 😂😂
Your presentational style/performance is on point!
I really enjoyed the Beowolf quest in AC Valhalla. Like the ending and the way it builds towards the story we know
By the way, Grendel's mother: the original Karen!
They killed... her son...
@@Ollebolle112 Grendel killed hundreds of people and was a danger to everybody.
But her baby boy! 😫😫😫
@@miradfalco251 Are you seriously defending mythical monsters?
@@Ollebolle112 Yes, let's hear it for all the giant, savage, flesh-eating monsters, and their mothers.
Bro this video slaps! If you haven't already, I'd love to see an analysis of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Woooowwwww princeeessss!!!!! Love you!!! I assigned nebula because of you
We read Beowulf in one of my college literature classes, and learnt that the fight with Grendel's mother was a telling of the switch between the matriarchy of the old Pagan ways to the patriarchy of the more modern world. It made sense with the fight against the dragon since they used to be considered protectors of women.
I love poetry! Beowulf's timeline (assuming that it is set in the 7th to 10th centuries) would see the life expectancy of the clans of that time was relatively short if they drank that much alcohol. But that is just a guess on my part.
Suppose that most of the literary works of the time - such as the Iliad and Gilgamesh - were passed through oral tradition and lost in translation through the centuries since its origin, but looking at how many writings it has inspired is food for thought.
Wasn’t Beowulf a traditional story handed down through generations? By people who lived in cold places? Written down whenever? By scribes who thought they had the correct version?
That's all speculation. There's only one known written copy of the story, packed in a codex containing several other works. There's not even mention of the work in anything else, and it wasn't really known until transcriptions and translations made from this one copy started in 1786. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowell_Codex
@@marsilies 😯
Even Michael Crichton wrote Beowulf fanfiction. See _Eaters of the Dead_ (1976)
Seal of Not-Boring Approval! Well done!
Once again, I petition someone to write "Hype House Bloodbath". It just sounds too cool!
That was entertaining, a good summary of the story it's history and some jokes
Don't forget the poem of the Battle of Finsborg in Frisia. Where a bunch of danes were invited by Fin. They feasted a lot and than Fin attacked his own Meat Hall in his castle Finsborg. The danes defended themself and killed Fin, but his Gesith, his bodyguard, took it on them to avenge their dead leader and killed all the danes.
It was spoken about the poem in the poem of Beowulf, in a way that indicates, that all who listened to the story of Beowulf, would know about the battle of Finsborg.
Beowulf is my favorite!
Can you do a video on the Mahabharata, if y'all are doing epic poems now?! :D
Even the Bhagavad Gita would do. Might be too deep for most of the audience though.
@@edcrichton9457 I mean, explaining the cultural context and the depth of the story might be too much for such a short form of education, but I think it could serve as an incredible introduction.
Beowulf should live on as a video game franchise.
After excessive study, the only thing that can be confirmed is Beowulf was most likely written between 50 bc and 900 ad, which is a ride margin. The author was familiar with Homers epics and other Greek and pagan idols. The story is littered with religious contradictions which suggests the original script was edited by early christians. The author was a sailor or knew a great deal about sailing. Beowulf is portrayed/ plotted almost exactly like The Odyssey, which suggests Unknown spent enough time in Greece or library of Alexandria to be familiar with the languages of the original texts. It's generally considered the be the after effects of a great war between Danish Anglo-saxon England and Scandinavia in that time, resulting through Beowulf's actions in a peace treaty. The great monsters he faces are humanoid and exaggerated in appearance and brutality suggesting the idea of Goliath warriors which are not unheard of in ancient texts. Beowulf is considered to be a second hand history, though the changing handwriting near the end suggests is was either dictated to writers that came and went, or the author's penmanship/mental faculties deteriorated halfway through the text. Or the second half was ripped out and replaced entirely. This is as much as I know, but it's still not enough.
love anything Princess is in
I am 1:25 seconds into the video and I am laughing on the floor with that "WHAT!!!!!" OMG, that was hilarious!!!, ok I will keep on watching the video now, but I just wanted to take the time to express how good that joke was.
Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton, great book
Agree. Darn good historical fiction.
I was today years old when I realised that It's Lit also refers to literature. much smart, very wow
Yeah I love the Grendal Buster
This couldn't come in any better time. I have a test coming up and I can't swallow Beowulf.
Of course you can't, the guy's freaking huge! You'll need to take an axe to him first.
That’s what she said
Neither could the monsters
hope your feeling better Princess
Thanks for including all of the critical opinions, great starting points for further research. SO !
I tried reading Beowulf back in the long, long ago and couldn't get past the first page. But I really liked the movie.
try the Headley
Shout out to the art at 5:22, which is from Beowulf: The Legend, an out-of-print board game that very heavily referenced the actual text of the story.
My high school subjected me to reading Grendel, which I now see as Beowulf fanfic.
Mead is bloody lovely
Not quite what I thought the video would be about, but still fascinating. I was hoping to learn about the story as I've heard the name Beowulf, but never read it in school. I did read parts of the other epic poems mentioned tho.
Cool Dude Fights Monsters
I think I need to go find this 1999 translation. I studied this (the first time) in 1994...five years too soon I guess! I wanted to like it, I did...it has A FREAKIN' DRAGON!! But I honestly remember far more about the selection from Chaucer that we read in the fall of that year... and we also read the re-telling of the story from the monster's POV, titled "Grendel."
The ONLY other thing I recall about that first meeting with Beowulf is that for final spring project, three of the boys in class joined forces and made a life size model of Grendel.
Yes, I said life size. I still do NOT know how they got that massive thing into the classroom. Or how I didn't have a heart attack on being greeted by a face only Grendel's mother could love LOL
A good friend of mine who passed a while ago, always believed that Beowulf was a woman, as was her entire crew.
Academia likes to dismiss aural traditions as being qualitatively inferior to written ones. This is as true in music as in literature. I studied classical performance in university, but now play in a largely aural tradition. And the things that I can play 'by ear' are every bit as complex and nuanced, if not more so, as the notated works of the classical western tradition. That mindset of things not written down as being inferior or in some way incorrect or lacking authority was a very, very difficult one to break free of. But the written note does not tell you *how* to play it in the same way learning from a master would. Likewise, the words on the page don't tell you *how* to read them the way you would get from a recitation by a bard/scholar/performer.
Aural tradition is uncomfortable to academics, because it feels mutable. But for all I love a good original document, and find the comparison between translations interesting, I think they miss the point. Aural stories and music are about keeping them vibrant, immediate, and alive. A set in stone (or velum) version cannot help but be stagnant.
Belwulf was probably just fanfic of the author’s favorite oral traditions
Question is, ....is it part of the omegaverse ? My lawyer wants to know
Edit: just saw this is literally what this video says. Damn
that orchestal piece in the background slaps though
Man I’ve never seen the young JRR Tolkien before!! He’s a babe wow 😳
😂😂😂 I loved that thank you
I’m toasting to this video tonight! Santé!
Hwæt!! I love Beowulf! Pour the mead and get your fight on!
The complexity of both meter and rhyme are exactly why it would have worked in an oral tradition. Look at other orally transmitted lores, skaldic sagas from Norway and it's neighbors; or Rosc poetry from Ireland. It seems hard for us, because we have gotten used to the pen and page.
Fantastic video
This Is the video i didn't know i wanted untill It popped.
Anyway, how about The mío Cid? I know i read that at some point in the last but i can't remember a single thing about it
It was an assigned reading in my last lit class but the teacher was such a boring person I couldn't bring myself to read it, I watched a CZcams animation and answered the key questions but I do want to read the "epic poems" like the Illyad and the epic of Gilgamesh someday (however I do enjoy these summary style retellings so much )
Thanks.
Where was this video last semester when I had to read Beowulf and write an essay about it???