Posted on 03/21/2014 4:28:36 PM PDT by Perdogg
Almost 90 years after JRR Tolkien translated the 11th-century poem Beowulf, The Lord of the Rings author's version of the epic story is to be published for the first time in an edition which his son Christopher Tolkien says sees his father "enter[ing] into the imagined past" of the heroes.
Telling of how the Geatish prince Beowulf comes to the aid of Danish king Hroðgar, slaying the monster Grendel and his mother before - spoiler alert - being mortally wounded by a dragon years later, Beowulf is is the longest epic poem in Old English, and is dated to the early 11th century. It survives in a single manuscript, housed at the British Library, and has inspired countless retellings of the myth - recently and famously by the late Seamus Heaney, whose translation won him the Whitbread book of year award in 1999.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
They just did a Beowulf movie a couple of years ago.
It’s not that hard. A week or two on the basic grammar and syntax, a few simple prose texts, and you are good to go. You can always look up the vocabulary you don’t know. Certainly it’s nowhere near the difficulty of Latin and Greek.
I happened to see part of that on TV last night. It looked like the whole thing was CGI using the images of real actors. Felt like a video game. Very strange.
Seamus Heaney did an excellent translation. My wife and I read it out loud to each other one year on a cross-country trip.
Ping!
I always liked Chrichtons “Eaters of the Dead”
Read _Grendel_. First person narrative by the monster.
One question I’d have is, would this still be under copyright?
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