Novela bowulf

Beowulf
Anonymous - circa 1000 A.D. http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~beowulf/

Hwæt! What can be known about a unique poem in a unique manuscript, dated around the year 1000 a.d.? What do we know about the circumstances of its composition? Is it literary, oral, or something in-between? What can we never know? Beowulf is both strange and familiar: it has some links with ancient classicalpoems like Homer's; 19thc ideas of it have been received and reworked in the course of the 20thc in academe, children's literature and adult popular culture; and yet it remains an ancient artifact of a culture whose world we can never share. The manuscript and its editions always present us with a linguistic obstacle: Old English has a different kind of grammar from Modern. Old English is like Latinor Russian, or many other languages whose grammar is expressed by inflection: that is, affixes on a root word can stand in for function words like pronouns, so that a noun like "stow" will indicate its grammatical place in a sentence or clause by a series of endings: "... nis Þaet heoru stow!" (That is not a pleasant place!); or "He het þa þa stowe Dominus videt" (He named that place Dominus videt;or "on manegum stowum" (in many places). In an Old English sentence, especially in the poetry, syntax (the order of words) much more fluid than in Modern. Spelling will seem inconsistent, even random, in our terms; the alphabet contains some unfamiliar letters derived from runes. Translation of a language removed in kind and in time is a process of exploration, not a neat matching of word andidiom to sense, or the grammar of one language to the grammar of another. We will use translation as our primary means of reading Beowulf. What kind of overlap can be found between our written, literary experience of the poem, and its earlier oral delivery, which may have been memorized, reconstituted anew each time, and was always designed for being heard? Memory functions in different and oftenenhanced modes in oral rather than written cultures, especially when supported by verbal patterns evolved through centuries in a poetic or sung medium. Written literature may produce an intense impact, but rarely through its delivery; in Beowulf and other Old English poems, impact was always made through oral performance. When such poetry is written down, it is neither strictly oral nor graphic.Within the poem, no distinction is made between myth and history, although it is now read as though it were 'history with fabulous elements' or 'myth with some correspondence to fact.' Beowulf cannot accurately be described as fiction or fact. It is a kind of narrative comprised of analogical episodes, people, creatures more or less human, praise, blame, lyrical moments, grim comedy and even grimmertragedy. The poem makes an icon of a former age, constructed as such very consciously by a maker of poems, literate, somewhat literate or not at all literate, from familiar elements in this particular way. Analogies are built which bridge the preChristian and Christian Germanic worlds, by making the characters in the poem noble, monotheistic preChristians, for an audience of Christian Germanicpeople; the poem is not anachronistic, and is, even in our terms, accurately placed according to 'history.' It is a story about 'those others who were ourselves'.

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PROLOGUE
Old English Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, 5 monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearðfeasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad, weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah, oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra 10 ofer hronrade hyran scolde, gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning! Ðæm eafera wæs æfter cenned, geong in geardum, þone god sende folce to frofre; fyrenðearfe ongeat 15 þe hie ær drugon aldorlease lange hwile. Him þæs liffrea, wuldres wealdend, woroldare forgeaf; Beowulf wæs breme (blæd...