#beowulf
Scyld Scyldinga: Intercultural innovation at the interface of West and North Germanic
Scyld Scyldinga: Intercultural innovation at the interface of West and North Germanic Carl Edlund Anderson While many agree that Scyld in Beowulf was back-formed from Scyldingas, the context in which thisoccurred is rarely discussed. It seems frequentlyassumed that Scyld was created in Denmark andexported to England along with the name Scyldingas. However, the way that names and terms…
Andreas: an Edition Edited by Richard North and Michael Bintley This is the first edition of Andreas for 55 years, also the first to present the Anglo-Saxon, or rather Old English, text with a parallel Modern English poetic translation. The book aims not only to provide both students and scholars with an up-to-date text and introduction and notes, but also to reconfirm the canonical merit of…
Beowulf, Harry Potter, and Teaching the Uses of Literature
Beowulf,Harry Potter, and Teaching the Uses of LiteratureMargaret Cotter-Lynch
Southeastern Oklahoma State University
I teach Beowulfin a sophomore-level general education humanities course at a small, public, regional university in rural Oklahoma. The catalogue description of the course is simply: “Unity of philosophy and the arts in the ancient and medieval world. Emphasis on relevance to…
Reconceiving Beowulf: Poetry as Social Praxis
Reconceiving Beowulf: Poetry as Social PraxisJohn D. Niles
College English 61 (1998): 143-66
We’ve gained a lot of followers since we started this log, so thanks to all of you! You may have noticed that we haven’t been posting lately. We definitely don’t plan on abandoning this log, but we’ve had some recent life events (new job, no time, etc.) and so haven’t been able to post as much as we’d like.
In the mean time, feel free to submit your own firearms to be posted on the site.
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“Oh shit!” moment brought to you by the Dorks Of Sparda.
I forgot Dante’s Balrog had some shoulder thingies. Ooops.
I need a anime of this!!!
Beowulf Press Conference in LA (11.2007)
photo:@shejustshiness
These are subpar, but they are for meme purposes so who cares.
byrhtnoth be like ‘ic cnāwe ān stōwe’ and then take u to maldon
We get enough people at book fairs, sellers included, asking us what Speculative Fiction is that we thought an explanation was merited.
Note: I have no intention of arguing the case that science fiction and fantasy are as much skilled works of art as regular literature; that argument has been covered enough times and it bores me. Time determines what is art not genre.
As the term suggests speculative fiction is fiction that involves some element of speculation. Of course, one can argue that all fiction is speculative insofar as it speculates what could happen if various elements of a story were combined. Yet we feel that this term is descriptive enough to encompass the type of literature we want to categorise. First, a word about genre
Book genre is of limited use and is often more harmful than good. If you went into a bookshop and asked for literature, you’d be taken to the fiction section. If you said that you were looking for any Darwinian literature you’d be sent to the science section. At some point it was determined that literature suggested artistic merit. Yet we also use it to cover a particular grouping of written works. The point is that classifying the written word is a little futile as common usage will usually dictate what that classification envelops, and common usage is of course open to interpretation. Genre does however allow boundaries to be set for marketing purposes; if a reader enjoyed a number of books in a certain genre then there’s a reasonable chance they’d enjoy other books in the same genre. From a critical perspective, understanding genre helps align a work of literature with one’s expectations; certain tropes and mechanisms are, to some extent, more acceptable in one genre than another.
Now, this element of speculation. The speculation in speculative fiction isn’t concerned solely with speculation over how various story elements might interact, but speculation over the fabric of those elements. A work of speculative fiction takes one or more elements of an otherwise perfectly possible story and speculates as to what would happen if that element existed outside of current understanding or experience. Essentially, it’s writing about things that aren’t currently possible. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a father-son story of survival, nearly everything is contemporaneously possible, except one thing the setting of the story is plausible future.
When you pick up an Agatha Christie, a Jane Austen or a Graham Greene, regardless of how the story unfurls, and how perhaps unlikely the story, it’s always within the realm of possibility (poor writing and deus ex machina aside). Yet a Philip K. Dick, a Tolkien or a Stephen King will always seem impossible, given current understanding.
The word current is key, to allow inclusion of scientific speculation. A seminal work like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars has a lot of the science in place to explain how the colonisation of Mars might / could take place (I assume the science is correct; it doesn’t matter to me personally but I know a lot of readers are particular in this area). The speculation is on how plausible, but currently theoretical, scientific and technological advances might solve a problem.
There is a slight grey area where such scientific knowledge and its technical implementation exists and is currently possible and a good story has been written about it. Imagine a book about travelling to the moon written in 1969. Imagine it’s not an adventure, it explores personal relationships between the characters and their heroic journey. For someone unfamiliar with planned space travel such a book would seem like science fiction, yet it was of course entirely possible in 1969. I personally wouldn’t classify such a work as speculative fiction as it doesn’t fit the definition, but I’d certainly class it as science fiction if I were to market it as it would fit the bill for many readers. Similarly a book like Psycho, it’s a work of horror but there’s no supernatural element and it’s plausible and possible given current understanding.
For books like The Hobbit orCarriethecurrent part of the definition becomes less important; Middle-Earth neither has nor probably will exist, neither will telekinesis. Of course, as science progresses some things that are currently implausible will be come plausible, if not possible. Space travel being a great example; progress is constantly being made.
Speculative fiction is also an umbrella term so includes the majority of works in the fantasy, science fiction and horror genres, also smaller genres such as magic realism, weird fiction and more classical genres such as mythology, fairy tales and folklore. Many people break speculative fiction into two categories though: fantasy and science fiction, the former being implausible the latter being plausible (in simplistic terms). This is helpful for those interested in having some sort of technical foundation upon which to build their speculation, and those who aren’t.
When one thinks of science fiction, one thinks back to the 1930’s and the Gernsback era, perhaps earlier to Wells and Verne. One might even cite Frankenstein. When one thinks of fantasy one thinks of Tolkien, perhaps Victorian / Edwardian ghost stories, Dracula, perhaps Frankenstein. It seems comfortable to think of these things as modern endeavours. Anything earlier often falls under the general category of literature (in the non-speculative fiction sense). Take More’s Utopia,you’d find that under literature or classics, not under fantasy. Similarly Gulliver’s Travels. Again, this is just marketing; there’s no reason why Gulliver’s Travels should not be shelved next to Lord of the Rings other than to meet a reader’s expectation.
At Hyraxia Books we like to think of certain classic works not simply as works that have contributed to the literary canon, but also as works that have contributed to the speculative fiction canon. For us, Aesop’s Fables,Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, Otranto, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Iliad, The Prose Edda, Beowulf and the Epic of Gilgamesh are not simply classics, but also speculative fiction classics. We don’t like to think of the genre starting in the last two hundred years, we like to think of literature (in the non-speculative fiction sense) having branched off from the speculative rather than the other way round. We like to see how that story has played out over the millennia.
That is how we define speculative fiction for the basis of our stock. Of course, we stock other items too, many of which we are very fond of.
Beowulf: Spends 55 and a half lines boasting about how strong he is and how weak and cowardly Unferth is in comparison
Also Beowulf: “but not to boast”
Gryffindor
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- Henry V by William Shakespeare
- Beowulf
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
- Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- Histories by Herodatus
- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
Hufflepuff
- East of Eden by John Stenbeck
- Othelloby William Shakespeare
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
- Love In the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- White Fang by Jack London
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Ravenclaw
- Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Slytherin
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu
- All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare
- Draculaby Bram Stoker
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
(Attend!
We have heard of the thriving of the throne of Denmark,
how the folk-kings flourished in former days,
how those royal athelings earned that glory.)
Beowulf
verse trans. Michael Alexander 1973