I know where is an hind...

Here is an interesting, short radio-essay on the deer  - a subject which I'm perhaps egotistically interested in because of my surname, Hart. In the programme Ruth Padel  mentions Sir Thomas Wyatt's sonnet 'Whoso List to Hunt', which we looked at in the Outlines course last semester (there is a good newspaper article about the poem here). Because of two homophones in particular (deer/dear; hart/heart), deer are often a significant symbol in English poetry  - but there are lots of other reasons, too. Have a listen - the programme begins one minute in.

And on a different, but connected note - do Turkish surnames usually have meanings? I'm guessing that they do. Anyone got a surname with an interesting meaning? Anyone called 'Hart' in Turkish? And does Turkey have a significant deer population?

Hwæt!

I know it is a bit late in the day for those of you sitting the exam, but this new website dedicated to Beowulf is one of the best I've seen. If you enjoyed the poem and want to know more, I strongly recommend it.

I found the link to it here, where there are also links to lots of other websites with good material on the poem.

Outlines of English Literature - Final Examination



I think this applies to Literature students too...

(I sent this out by email but one or two people may not have received it, so I'm posting it on here as well.)

Here is some information about the final examination that I hope will be useful.

The exam will cover the whole spectrum of the course, from Old English literature to the Romantics.

İn the exam you will be given a number of short texts. These may be extracts or complete poems. Most will come from texts we have studied together in class. A few may come from texts we have not studied in any detail, but with which you may be familiar.

In the first part of the exam you will be asked to indicate the period in which you think each text was written and the name of the author. If you get the name of the author wrong but give an author from the correct period, you will get half the marks.

In the second part of the exam you will be asked to write short commentaries on some of the texts, explaining your reasons for believing they belong to that period, and discussing in what ways they are typical of the literature of that time. You might do this by pointing out particular features of form, theme or style, and/or making comparisons with other work of the same period.

You will not be allowed to take any books or notes into the exam with you. This includes the course anthology, the Norton anthology, and any dictionaries.

If you have any questions, please email me.

Good luck!

AN INVITATION

This afternoon some of us met to discuss the performance of George Peele's The Arraignment of Paris which we will be putting on in April, and to read through the text. Thanks to everyone who came along.

If you didn't come to the meeting but would like to perform in the play, or to help with scenery, costume design, music or any other aspect of the production, it is not too late! Simply let me know, or come along to our next meeting, which will be held on Thursday 6th January at 2pm.  Don't be shy...

The sonnet form

Here is a website that gives a good introduction to the sonnet, if you want to revise this topic for tomorrow's Outlines course quiz. If you click through the pages, you come to a short practice test. You might also find this diagram useful in understanding the differences between the Shakespearean and the Petrarchan sonnet forms.

Run-on sentences

Run-on sentences were perhaps the single most common grammatical problem I came across when marking your midterms. I'm not going to fully explain what they are and how to avoid them here. If I identifed run-ons as a problem in your writing, though, I recommend that you look at this website. It gives a simple explanation of how you can join together separate, independent clauses. (You can also try the exercises; the answers are given on the same page).  In particular, note method 3. You cannot simply join two independent clauses with a comma; instead, you need a comma and a connecting word (e.g. and, but, or, for - when for means because). So, instead of writing

Mrs. Joe is cruel to Pip, she often beats him. 

you should write

Mrs Joe is cruel to Pip, and she often beats him.

or

Mrs. Joe is cruel to Pip; she often beats him.

or

Mrs. Joe is cruel to Pip. She often beats him.

I hope this helps a little.

Daphne and Apollo

Here is the sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini of Daphne metamorphosing into the laurel tree just as Apollo, the god of poetry, is about to catch her. (You can click on the picture to make it bigger.) The story is told in the Metamorphoses, by the Roman poet, Ovid. You can read Ovid's story (in an English translation) here. The Metamorphoses is one of the most important of the many Roman texts that fascinated writers and artists in the Renaissance.

Anti-Fraternal Literature

 You should be prepared to give a very brief definition of anti-fraternal literature in your midterm exam. Someone emailed me to say they are not sure about it.  I hope this will help...

Anti-fraternal literature was written from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. It was written against the friars, monks and other "religious" men and women who were supposed to be living lives of purity and holiness, but in reality were often living lives of  luxury at the expense of the poor. Often anti-fraternal literature would make fun of these hypocrites. Sometimes it would attack them directly.

The Pardoner



Interestingly, friars (like Grendel, hundreds of years before!) were often described as 'sons of Cain'. Chaucer, Gower, Langland and John Wyclif (who we discussed briefly in class) were all significant writers of anti-fraternal literature.  Remember, though - Chaucer could also present very positive images of religious men. For a contrast with the images of the Pardoner, the Summoner, and the Friar, look at the image of the 'holy-minded', honourable Parson in the 'General Prologue'.

You can find a review of a book on this subject here (appropriately for us, in a journal called 'COMITATUS'!) This review is short (one and a half pages) but quite difficult, especially at the start. Don't worry if you only understand a little. If you are really interested in this subject, you can have a look at this article on JSTOR, which you can access through the university library. Again, this is difficult, so don't worry if you have problems with it. You don't need to read it for the exam!

Beowulf, Heroic Culture and Christianity

I had an email from a student asking about the relationship between Germanic heroic culture and Christianity in Beowulf. I've copied my reply to him below - I hope this will be useful for some of you.  

The relationship between Germanic heroic culture and Christianity in the poem is a difficult subject. I don't expect you to have an answer to this problem in your midterms! You should know that the problem exists, however.

Much of the poem seems to be clearly Germanic, heroic, "pagan". For example, the values celebrated in the poem are those of the warrior, and of kinship, and of a life after death achieved through fame on earth for heroic deeds, rather than in a Christian heaven.  Yet the poem also contains allusions to the story of Cain and Abel and a great flood caused by God - both stories from the Bible. On the other hand, if it is a Christian poem, why is there no clear reference to Christ anywhere?

There are basically two theories. One is that the poem is fundamentally an old Germanic, heroic, "pagan" poem that a Christian scribe (probably a monk) tried to make "Christian"  as he wrote it down. People who support this theory usually argue that he didn't do a very good job! For them, Beowulf would be a better, more unified poem if the Christian elements had not been added.  This theory was first argued by German critics in the nineteenth century.

The other theory is that the poem is more deeply, truly Christian. According to this theory, the poem may have its origins in Germanic heroic culture, but it is full of Christian ideas and references. Christian elements are fundamental to its structure and meaning, and the Germanic, pagan setting is more 'decorative'. This theory was put forward by in the middle of the twentieth century.

Now, the most popular view of Beowulf tries to find a compromise between these two theories. The poem itself is seen as an attempt to bring together  and assimilate Christian and pagan views.

There is an interesting article on this question here. This is a DIFFICULT article, but you might find the first four paragraphs helpful. PLEASE DON'T WORRY if you don't understand it all, though. After the first four paragraphs the author gives his own answer to the question - this is even more complicated. I'd suggest you ignore that part!

As I said, I don't expect you to have an answer to this problem!  You should simply be aware of it and able to give a couple of examples of why it is difficult to answer.

Gat-toothed was she...



The Wife of Bath

While talking today about the description of the Wife of Bath in the 'General Prologue' to The Canterbury Tales, we briefly discussed the gap between her two front teeth:

Gat-toothed was she, soothly for to saye.     ( l.470)

In Chaucer's time this was seen as a sign of an amorous character. I also mentioned that gap-toothed models, like Lara Stone and Georgia Jagger, are now becoming very fashionable - and that models are even paying dentists and surgeons to separate their teeth. Most of you looked at me as though I had gone mad. Well, here is the story.



Georgia Jagger - distant relative
of the Wife of Bath?

 Secondly, and more seriously, I’d recommend this website for working on your Chaucer assignments. Here you can find the descriptions of the individual pilgrims. Look on the left of the webpage, and click on your pilgrim. You then have the original Middle English, and a modern translation.

Finally, here's a link to an interesting website about the Wife of Bath hosted by the University of North Carolina. In particular, it looks at the 'good Wif' in relation to medieval ideas about virginity. As Jane Zatta observes there, 'by challenging the value of virginity, the Wife of Bath calls into question both secular and religious ideals of women.'

Secondary reading

I'm sure you are all familiar with this, but just in case, here is a link to the university library website. You can access a wide range of reading material here. In particular, I want to draw your attention to EBRARY. You can search here for articles and book chapters related to your study, read them online, and even print them. There are lots of interesting things here on Dickens and the nineteenth-century novel, John Milton, Modernist poetry, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales...and pretty much anything else you are likely to study.

Especially if you are in the third or fourth year, you should be accessing this kind of secondary material - reading not only the texts themselves but also what critics and scholars have written about them. I know you have a lot of reading to do already. Reading critical studies and articles, though, will give you new insights, and make reading the primary texts - the poems, plays and novels - much more rewarding.

The image, by the way, is from the Ellesmere manuscript. This manuscript is famous for containing an illuminated (or illustrated) version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Here you can see the knight, the first of Chaucer's pilgrims to tell his tale.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and more Chaucer

I talked briefly about the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c.1375-1400) in today's Outlines class. You will not have to answer questions about it in the exams or tests, but perhaps some extra information might interest some of you.

There is a useful short introduction to the poem here, on the Luminarium webiste. On the same site, you can also find two modern translations of the poem. I mentioned last week that J.R.R. Tolkien (author of The Lord of the Rings) wrote one of the most important studies of Beowulf. He also wrote on, and was influenced by, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Luminarium also has some excellent pages on Geoffrey Chaucer, which you might well find helpful. These include a link to the text of the poem in the original Middle English with parallel translation into modern English. I'll talk more about Middle English at our next class.

The Canterbury Tales

This week in Outlines of English Literature we will (hopefully!) begin to look at Geoffrey Chaucer's The  Canterbury Tales. You can find a very good modern verse translation of all the tales here. There is another one here, and you can find others all over the web. I'll say a little bit more about these in class. 

More Breaking News: Anglo-Saxon Hospital Discovered!

This find dates to the same period as the Beowulf manuscript. It will change how we see Anglo-Saxon culture - and it's a reminder of how civilized the Anglo-Saxons were. It wasn't all mead-halls, flyting and fighting!

Seamus Heaney's Beowulf - The Prologue

Here's a link to Seamus Heaney (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1995) reading his translation of the prologue of Beowulf. This might help you with reading the prologue for the class.

You might also find this website useful. It gives the original Old English text (don't worry about this!) with a modern verse translation that keeps the caesuras (the breaks between the first and second parts of each line). It also has very helpful notes - click on the links and they will appear in a new window. You can also listen to a reading of selections of the original Old English, if you like!