Anglo-Saxon English: Lyric Poetry, The Venerable Bede and Grendel
The History of the English Language, Part One: Anglo-Saxon
English as we know it--or, frankly, as we decidedly don't know it--begins with a language we now call Anglo-Saxon. It's an amalgamation of dialects spoken by germanic tribes--the Angles and the Saxons, principally--and written with the Roman alphabet we use, plus a few Celtic characters thrown in for sounds the Romans didn't have (like 'th'--thus making it technically impossible for Romans to lisp). Old English (another name for Anglo-Saxon) flourished between 500 CE and about 1300 CE, when it morphed into Middle English. Just for the fun of it, here are a few lines in Anglo-Saxon:
Anglo-Saxon Poetry and the work of the Venerable Bede
There are more resources on the Internet for Anglo-Saxon Poetry than anyone has a right to guess about. Pages are devoted to the poems in translation, the longer, epic poems such as Beowulf (which we'll read excerpts of in class), and Deor, and even a site here and there that offers to read the work aloud to you. Life is good. In class, we'll mostly be concerned with a few famous examples, however, such as Caedmon's Hymn, The Ruin, The Wanderer, The Wife's Lament and a selection of Anglo-Saxon riddles (and some of you might be familiar with these already: they're featured in J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit.) In addition, we'll read a famous excerpt from the very first history of England, The Church History of the English People by the Venerable Bede.
John Gardner's Grendel
Grendel is a novel, written in the late 1960's, in which the author, John Gardner, reimagines the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf from the viewpoint of the monster. This approach, in which the story is retold from a viewpoint (or in a narrative approach) that questions its integrity is called metafiction. Heard from a different point of view, we have to reexamine the story for what it says and what it implied-what is heroism? evil? what is a monster? how does one become a monster? what makes a 'good' monster--and how can anyone tell? As Grendel grows, he also watches Hrothgar, King of the Geats, and meditates on effective leadership and the role of media and propaganda in creatng a society. This train of thought leads us to our first phlisophical speculation of the course, namely existentialism, an attitude toward life made popular by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
