Jonathan’s answer to “does anyone else read and reread this?” > Likes and Comments
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You learned Old English! Wow that's amazing!
I was 12 when I started learning the language, mostly thanks to an idiot history teacher, who wiped out nearly a millennia of English history in one class with the sentence:
"The Anglo Saxons were a bunch of uncivilised savages who couldn't control themselves until the Normans came."
That night, on TV there was a programme about Sutton Hoo and I saw the great gold buckle and though 'how could uncivilised savages create that?' I asked the teacher and got 500 lines as punishment for questioning the teacher's authority.
My aunt gave me a translation of Beowulf as a way of confirming that my history teacher was merely the cloaca through which all misinformation passed and the son of my music teacher put me in touch with a group called 'þa Engliscan Gesiþas'.
þa Engliscan Gesiþas used to offer a correspondence course (don't know if they still do) which was run by Duncan McRae Gibson, an Old-English, Celtic and Norse lecturer at the University of Dundee. The course when I did it in the '80s was £10 all in. That is about £50 in today's money and was well worth it.
By the time I finished the course, I was 14 and able to understand most OE texts.
It is better to read the original, as there is a great deal of inaccuracy in most translations. Most importantly, in one particular area, all translations are consistently incorrect, and it wrecks the story:
Beowulf doesn't swim for half a day to the bottom of the mere, he swims across it. The text states that he dives into the mere and that it is half a day before his feet touch the bottom of the mere again. In other words, he swims out from the shore and the lake bottom goes down and half a day later, he gets to the other side as the bottom of the lake rises to meet the shore again. This is confirmed by the fact that Grendel's mother is on lookout on a promontory and sees him coming, besides which, no one, not even a super hero can hold their breath for half a day. Not even the Saxons would believe that, even if they did believe in monsters.
Wow that's a really neat story. Thanks for sharing that. Do you enjoy Heaney's rendering though for its own sake, as a masterpiece of modern English? Personally, he is my favorite poet of all. Have you read any of his original poetry?
As literature, his Beowulf is incredible. As a translation of the original, it leaves a great deal to be desired. He takes quite a few liberties with the text.
Heaney is a fantastic poet and I really enjoy reading his original work, but It would be impossible for me to classify anyone as my 'favourite' poet. He is certainly up there in my list of 'immortals', together and on a level with others such as Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin.
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Stephen
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Jan 11, 2016 06:59PM
You learned Old English! Wow that's amazing!
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I was 12 when I started learning the language, mostly thanks to an idiot history teacher, who wiped out nearly a millennia of English history in one class with the sentence:"The Anglo Saxons were a bunch of uncivilised savages who couldn't control themselves until the Normans came."
That night, on TV there was a programme about Sutton Hoo and I saw the great gold buckle and though 'how could uncivilised savages create that?' I asked the teacher and got 500 lines as punishment for questioning the teacher's authority.
My aunt gave me a translation of Beowulf as a way of confirming that my history teacher was merely the cloaca through which all misinformation passed and the son of my music teacher put me in touch with a group called 'þa Engliscan Gesiþas'.
þa Engliscan Gesiþas used to offer a correspondence course (don't know if they still do) which was run by Duncan McRae Gibson, an Old-English, Celtic and Norse lecturer at the University of Dundee. The course when I did it in the '80s was £10 all in. That is about £50 in today's money and was well worth it.
By the time I finished the course, I was 14 and able to understand most OE texts.
It is better to read the original, as there is a great deal of inaccuracy in most translations. Most importantly, in one particular area, all translations are consistently incorrect, and it wrecks the story:
Beowulf doesn't swim for half a day to the bottom of the mere, he swims across it. The text states that he dives into the mere and that it is half a day before his feet touch the bottom of the mere again. In other words, he swims out from the shore and the lake bottom goes down and half a day later, he gets to the other side as the bottom of the lake rises to meet the shore again. This is confirmed by the fact that Grendel's mother is on lookout on a promontory and sees him coming, besides which, no one, not even a super hero can hold their breath for half a day. Not even the Saxons would believe that, even if they did believe in monsters.
Wow that's a really neat story. Thanks for sharing that. Do you enjoy Heaney's rendering though for its own sake, as a masterpiece of modern English? Personally, he is my favorite poet of all. Have you read any of his original poetry?
As literature, his Beowulf is incredible. As a translation of the original, it leaves a great deal to be desired. He takes quite a few liberties with the text.Heaney is a fantastic poet and I really enjoy reading his original work, but It would be impossible for me to classify anyone as my 'favourite' poet. He is certainly up there in my list of 'immortals', together and on a level with others such as Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin.
