Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Respect for Artistry Increased by Study The story of Beowulf is well known: the young hero sails from Geatland to Denmark with his retinue to deal with Grendel, a greedy descendant of Cain who for twelve years has been killing and eating anyone who spends the night in the magnificent mead hall of Hrothgar, King of the Danes. Nothing will end this “feud” between monster and men. Enter young Beowulf of the prodigious appetite and strength, eager for hand-to-hand combat ‘cause he’s heard that Grendel wields no weapons. Their grapple shakes the hall and leaves Beowulf gripping a grisly trophy. Then he must face Grendel’s dread dam in her submarine lair. The epic doesn’t stop there, but fast forwards fifty years to when the hero is the old Geatish king and must test wyrd once more to deal with a fire-breathing dragon who, after someone steals a cup from his treasure horde, starts flying around torching the country. In addition to those conflicts between men and monsters, throughout the poem there is plenty of background violence between peoples and kinsmen, highlighting the fleeting nature of life and the power of fate. In that context, we must try to be loyal and brave, for death is better than a life of shame, and sometimes wyrd will help the person who courageously tries, though it can get you even then. The poem builds a grim, grand power that ends with a forecast of sad days for the Geats. If that’s all there were to the 8th-century poem, it would be an exciting legend and an interesting artifact, but something more turns it into an epic worthy of rereading. For one thing, the Beowulf poet works in a large amount of historical and legendary background to create a rich, dark cultural texture: gift giving, lineage listing, speech making, lay singing, and funeral performing, as well as feats, feuds, wars, murders, marriages, betrayals, triumphs, good and bad heroes and kings. Superimposed over the pagan Scandinavian tale is a recently-converted Christian vision referring to God and hell and the like, which endows the poem with a kind of double ethos. I’ve read different translations of the poem. Francis Gummere writes alliterative verse, so if that’s what you like, his version (1910) would be appealing, while if you have a poetry-phobia Talbot Donaldson’s prose version (1966) would be fine. J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1926 version published in 2014 falls in between those two, for, rather than replicating the alliteration and rhythm of the original Old English, he aims at accuracy and readability and writes what reads like prose silently, but which often sounds like poetry when read aloud. Here are three parts to compare: Unhallowed wight, grim and greedy, he grasped betimes, wrathful, reckless, from resting-places, thirty of the thanes, and thence he rushed fain of his fell spoil, faring homeward, laden with slaughter, his lair to seek. (Gummere) The creature of evil, grim and fierce, was quickly ready, savage and cruel, and seized from their rest thirty thanes. From there he turned to go back to his home, proud of his plunder, sought his dwelling with that store of slaughter. (Donaldson) That accursed thing, ravenous and grim, swift was ready; thirty knights he seized upon their couch. Thence back he got him gloating over his prey, faring homeward with his glut of murder to seek his lairs. (Tolkien) I can’t say that Tolkien’s translation is better or worse than the others. Anyway, the best part for me of his version is the detailed Notes and Commentary written decades ago by Tolkien for his classes and edited by his son Christopher. Tolkien paraphrases passages from the poem that I carelessly skimmed, like the exchanges between Beowulf and Hrothgar, and reveals their implied meanings so as to enrich the poem. He also explains the references to older legends and histories, compares the poem to things like Gawain and the Green Knight, speculates on how the monk transcribed the pagan poem not long after his people had converted to Christianity, and so on. Tolkien says about the Beowulf poet, “he was not as has been supposed a mere dragger-in of old tales,” but a master manipulator of a “great nexus of interwoven ‘historical legend’, concerning English origins, and the great royal and noble houses.” He also memorably says, “History has a way of resembling myth: partly because both are ultimately the same stuff. If no man had ever fallen in love at first sight, and found old feuds to lie between him and his love, the god Frey would never have seen Gerthr [daughter of the giant Gymir].” Indeed, the legends and histories woven into the background of Middle-Earth reveal one of the ways in which Tolkien’s loving study of Beowulf influenced his creation of The Hobbit and LOTR. Tolkien also explains “cruces” in the poem, tricky translation points that have challenged scholars. Some of the fine points of grammar and etymology go beyond what I need to know, but often they soar with humor and historical and literary interest, as in the accounts of Old English words like “wyrd,” “ellen,” and especially “ealuscerwen” and “wrecca.” “Ealuscerwen” (ghastly fear) is difficult to translate because it appears only once in all extant Old English writing, in Beowulf. It is made by joining the words “ealu” (ale) and “scerwen” (deprive) and occurs when some warriors are terrified by Grendel, so that, perhaps, the men were as afraid of facing the monster as they were of having their ale (joy in life) taken from them! By contrast, “wrecca” (exile) appears multiple times in Beowulf and other Old English texts, and it leads by a negative line to modern English’s “wretch” (it’s difficult to live as an exile or outlaw like Grendel) and by a positive one to German “Rocke,” or knight/hero (a lone wolf exile can perform heroic feats far from home like Beowulf). After the Notes and Commentary comes “Sellic Spell” (wonder tale), Tolkien’s retelling of the epic playing up the fairy tale elements and playing down the historical ones. Beowulf is Beewulf (having been found as an infant living with honey-loving bears), Unferth Unfriend, and Grendel Grinder. Beewulf is accompanied on his Heorot adventure by a man with super strength gloves and by a man with a super spear. It’s entertaining and amusing. After “Sellic Spell” come two engaging modern English rhyming poems that Tolkien wrote long ago and recited to little boy Christopher: “Beowulf and Grendel” and “Beowulf and the Monsters.” Of this 2014 book by Tolkien and son, then, the epic occupies about 95 pages, the peripheral materials about 270. Finally, although I find Homer’s epics more entertaining, moving, humorous, substantial, and illuminating than Beowulf, the later epic is austerely and grandly appealing. As Tolkien says, “the degree of respect you have for the artistry (or at least for the thoughtful care) with which Beowulf was composed. . . is, I think, increased by study.” Yes! View all my reviews
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The Round House by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The sentence was to endure” Louise Erdrich's The Round House (2012) is narrated by Joe (nicknamed Oops because he was his parents’ accident) Coutts, who many years later as a married lawyer (?) is recalling the summer of 1988 when he had just turned thirteen. Joe and his family were members of the Ojibwe (Anishinabe) tribe living then on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. Joe’s father Bazil was a judge, his mother Geraldine a tribal enrollment specialist. The novel opens with Joe and father finding Geraldine covered in blood and vomit and smelling like gasoline. She has been raped and nearly immolated. But because she won’t reveal who did it or why, Joe takes it upon himself to find the perpetrator so as to bring him to justice of one kind or another. Joe has suspects, for instance a white man from a slimy family involved in one of his father’s court cases or the new white Catholic priest who’s a scarred veteran proficient at shooting gophers. Meanwhile, his mother becomes spider-like in her emaciation and isolates herself from her family. Despite, or perhaps because of, the appalling nature of the brutal rape and its tragic effects on Joe’s mother and his family, the novel is often very funny, Erdrich writing comical and quirky scenes, details, and asides through Joe’s narratorial voice, giving him and the reader plenty of chuckling or smiling release valves to ease sympathy and outrage. There are eccentric characters, like Joe’s grandfather Mooshum and Linda Lark. There are things like the account of the Star Trek Next Generation characters liked (Worf, Data, Deanna Troi) and disliked (Riker, Wesley) by Joe and his friends; the time when a self-important medicine man in training unwittingly dumped a lot of hot pepper herbs on the heated stones in a sweat lodge; the description of his friends’ idiosyncratic bicycles; his thirteen-year-old crush on his ex-stripper aunt’s breasts. Lines like, “There are Indian grandmas who get too much church and Indian grandmas where the church doesn’t take and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young.” Even when he and his friends are scouring the woods around the Round House (an abandoned symbolically female site for traditional rituals) for clues that his mother’s attacker might have left behind, an intensely serious activity, Joe makes us smile via a legion of hungry ticks and his friend’s comical story about being accidentally flea bombed inside his house when he was four. There is a harrowing scene where Joe notices his mother’s vertebrae sticking out through her nightgown, her shoulder blades like knives, her complexion pasty, her eyes darkly circled, her hair lank and greasy, and her vitality dim, and then announces to her that he’ll find and burn her attacker, only to have her briefly assume her former mother persona’s authority to tell him that he will not cause her more fear, will not search for her attacker, and will not ask her questions, and then he tries to teach their wolf-dog Pearl how to fetch, only to have her intimidatingly refuse, closing her teeth on his wrist as if to snap his bones, leading Joe to say with humorous understatement, “So you don’t play fetch, I see that now.” Erdrich has an eye and an ear for how adolescent boys talk, act, feel, think: the teasing, boasting, joking, supporting, and rough housing; the randy bawdy hungry reckless behavior. It all feels real and adds layers of comedy and pathos to the story. Joe and his buddies (Cappy, Angus, and Zach) speculate on whether it’s better to have a penis looking like Darth Vader or the evil hooded Emperor, get side-tracked when looking for evidence by the lucky find of a couple of cold sixpacks, make Indian jokes, tease each other, sneak cigarettes, are embarrassed by lewd remarks from grandmothers, and enjoy each other’s company. When Joe gets his friends to help him try to find and nail his mother’s attacker, the book almost gets a Stand by Me vibe (though less sentimental). Throughout, Erdrich writes plenty of reservation life details about politics, policing, law, health care, enrollment, adoption, food, families, groceries, parties, powwows, sweat lodges, Catholicism, history, pronunciation of d instead of th, and more, as well as plenty of references to things like “the gut-kick of our history” experienced by all Native Americans by which, for instance, the USA (from the founding fathers and early Supreme Court on) eagerly took their land by any means devisable, or by which their people were lynched, or by which the federal government enacted outrageous laws interfering with their own legal systems and so on. Indeed, much of the book centers on the question of tribal autonomy (or lack thereof) when it comes to legal matters and criminal cases. “They’d built that place [The Round House] to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth.” In addition to Star Trek: The Next Generation, Erdrich also writes in plenty of vintage popular culture references to the likes of Lord of the Rings, Dune, Star Wars, Alien, and TV action games. She does much vivid and witty writing, like “Sour turnips and tomatoes, beets and corn, scorched garlic, unknown meat, and an onion gone bad, the concoction gave off a penetrating reek,” or like he “labored with incremental ferocity. . . ant-like.” The novel becomes bleak towards the end, shedding humor in favor of tragedy and loss and sudden aging, and I have to think more about what I think of the abrupt conclusion: is it perversely unfulfilling or bracingly honest? It is like the cold breath of a windigo winter wind: “We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.” I am glad to have read the novel and do recommend it as a necessary book for anyone interested in historical and contemporary Native American life, but. . . I prefer Erdrich’s Love Medicine or Birchbark House books. The audiobook reader Gary Farmer is just right. View all my reviews
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “the Written Word is a Fairy” Nathaniel Chanticleer seems like an ordinary, comfortable, complacent denizen of Lud-in-the-Mist, the capital city of Dorimare, and he is the scion of an important family with a long history, the current Mayor of Lud-in-the Mist and High Seneschal of Dorimare, but in fact he often feels like a stranger in his hometown and prey to a certain recurring fear, ever since he was a youth and dressing up with his friends like the ghosts of past Chanticleer family members, he picked up an old sort of lute at random, plucked the “strings rotted by damp and antiquity,” and provoked “one note, so plangent, blood-freezing and alluring, that for a few seconds the company stood as if petrified.” Although his friends forgot about it instantly, the note has ever since stayed with Nathaniel, rendering him at times melancholy and almost fey. Next to Dorimare on the other side of the Debatable Hills and the Elfin Marches lies Fairyland but for a long time Dorimare and its capital Lud-in-the-Mist have been attempting to ignore, forget, and banish Fairyland or any mention of Fairies or magic and to focus on material gain, commercial matters, and the Law. To cross the Hills and enter Fairyland is “considered tantamount to death.” Things were not always so. It develops that about two hundred years ago the merchants of Dorimare rose up against Duke Aubrey “a hunchback with a face of angelic beauty” given to pranks “seasoned by a slightly sinister humor,” deposed him and drove him into apparent exile in Fairyland. The merchants initiated a new culture based on earning money and especially on following the Law, which has rendered aesthetic creation bland and all things Fairy (especially the fruit) illegal and taboo. One suspects the senators and other elite of Lud-in-the-Mist of suppressing an important part of life, mind, and soul. Indeed, the novel explores the relationship between reality and fantasy, and its plot gets going in earnest when Nathaniel’s young son Ranulph begins showing signs of having been fairy-touched, shouting at imaginary companions, evincing difficulty in focusing on the “real” world around him, and finally revealing that an absconded stableboy called Willy Wisp gave him Fairy fruit to eat. Enter the eccentric and ubiquitous Dr. Endymion Leer, who recommends the boy be sent to Widow Gibberty’s country farm, which is coincidentally located near the Debatable Hills. Soon there is trouble in Miss Primrose Crabapple’s Academy for young ladies, rumors of contraband Fairy fruit being smuggled into Lud-in-the-Mist, challenges to Nathaniel’s authority, letters undelivered, hollow sounding walls in the Guildhall (which used to be Duke Aubrey’s palace), the exhumation of a nearly four decades-old murder trial, strange manifestations of Duke Aubrey, provocative visits to the town cemetery (called Grammary), and much more. Hope Mirrlees’ writing in Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) is rich and savory. I read the first chapter three times to fully appreciate its beauty, poignancy, implications, and pleasures. Throughout, she writes much exquisite fantasy prose, like the following: “The condition described by Ranulph as the imprisoning of all one’s being into a space as narrow as a tooth, whence it irradiates waves of agony, became so overwhelming, that he was unconscious of the external world.” “But, depicted in these brilliant hues, they were like the ashes of the past, suddenly, under one’s very eyes, breaking into flame.” “It is almost as if the two [father and child] were walking in time to perfectly different tunes. Indeed, though they hold each other’s hand, they might be walking on different planets.” “Master Nathaniel was very sensitive to the silent things—stars, houses, trees; and often in his pipe-room, after the candles had been lit, he would sit staring at the bookshelves, the chairs, his father’s portrait—even at his red umbrella standing up in the corner, with as great a sense of awe as if he had been a star-gazer.” “All the world over we are very conscious of the trees in spring, and watch with delight how the network of twigs on the wych-elms is becoming spangled with tiny puce flowers, like little beetles caught in a spider’s web, and how little lemon-colored buds are studding the thorn.” “Reason I know, is only a drug, and as such, its effects are never permanent. But, like the juice of the poppy, it often gives a temporary relief.” “There is not a single homely thing that, looked at from a certain angle, does not become fairy.” “Once more he began to feel the balm of silent things, and seemed to catch a glimpse of that still, quiet landscape the future, after he himself had died.” “It would seem that the trees broke into leaf and the masts of all the ships in the bay into blossom; that day and night the cocks crowed without ceasing; that violets and anemones sprang up through the snow in the streets, and that mothers embraced their dead sons, and maids their sweethearts drowned at sea.” “And this is but another proof that the Written Word is a Fairy, as mocking and elusive as Willy Wisp, speaking lying words to us in a feigned voice. So let all readers of books take warning!” One problem with the Prologue Books Kindle version I read is that it’s marred by multiple distracting typos. These range from botching a wonderful line (“A house with old furniture has no need of GUESTS to be haunted”) to twice calling a shop run by a woman a “ship,” and to doing things like printing “the” instead of “they” and “and” instead of “an,” and so on. Egregious mutilation of fine fantasy prose! But in any form, if you are a lover of classic fantasy (where the action is in the prose rather than on the battlefield), you should read Lud-in-the-Mist. View all my reviews
Riley Mack and the Other Known Troublemakers by Chris Grabenstein
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Light Fun: Spunky Kids Dealing With Unpleasant Adults Seventh grade, twelve-year-old Riley Mack is the leader of the “Gnat Pack,” three other long-standing members and a new recruit, precocious junior high schoolers with attitude and a desire to stand up for the little guy against bullies and venal adults. Each member of the Pack has his or her own strengths: Briana is good at costumes, disguises, accents, and acting; Mongo is giant; Ben is an ace computer hacker; Jamal is a lock picking whiz (who loves using new words learnt from the dictionary); and Riley? He’s good at a bit of everything, especially planning and improvising. Riley’s father is overseas serving his country in the army, an officer leading top secret dangerous missions who, when talking with Riley on the phone, gives him advice like Don’t run from danger and Protect your family and people in trouble and quotes famous martial minds like Sun Tzu. Riley’s mother is an earnest, good-natured woman working as a teller in the town bank. Arrayed against the Gnat Pack in the full-cast Audible Original Drama Riley Mack and the Other Known Troublemakers (2018) written by Chris Grabenstein are the corrupt town Sherriff Brown, his tobacco-juice-spitting, stolen-goods-selling, puppy-mill-running mother, and his bully son Gavin. And the smarmy “Call me Chip” bank manager, who has a gambling issue. And a couple bank robbers who happen to be afraid of dogs. Also playing roles in the drama are night vision goggles, duct tape, ear mics, computers, locks, dog treats, security cameras, multiple safes and locks, a limo, some opera, a shotgun, fifty-seven or so dogs, an FBI agent or two, and more. I almost stopped listening at the start due to the arm farts, omnipresent noisy peppy late 70s early 80s police sit com music, and pre-teen slang like “fabtastic” and “skeezer.” But it actually ended up catching me, so I had to finish all 4+ hours. It does have a nice animal rights thrust, solid voice-acting, and fast-moving and fun (if implausible) story. It is always good to see corrupt and nasty adults getting their comeuppance at the hands of spunky 12-year-olds, and I can see why kids would enjoy it. View all my reviews
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Diné Monsters, Holy Ones, Clan Powers, and Romance No! Please--not ANOTHER first-person present tense laconic super special young female narrator heroic adventure story! If writers these days would write in the past tense and or third person, I could handle almost everything else, but… The Hunger Games (2008), Divergent (2011), Dread Nation (2018), The Map of Salt and Stars (2018)… That was my first reaction to starting Trail of Lightning (2018) by Rebecca Roanhorse. Especially when she starts her story in the midst of a full-on action scene: “The monster has been here. I can smell him.” Two things enabled me to persevere: the monster-slaying heroine Maggie Hoskie is Diné (Navajo), and the writing is mostly tight and fast-paced and often gut-punching or chortle-inducing. The Diné angle enables Roanhorse to insert interesting historical, cultural, supernatural, and linguistic details, like the following: Maggie loading her shotgun with “shells full of corn pollen and obsidian shot, both sacred to the Diné”; her K’aahanaanii Living Arrow Clan and Honaghaahnii Walks Around Clan powers from her parents heightening her strength and senses and speed and temporarily turning her into a superhuman killer in moments of need; her calling white people bilagaanas; her showering with yucca soap and rationed water brought by truck; her living near Narbona Pass, named for a Diné chief who was killed by the US army in 1847 while trying to sign a peace treaty; her references to things like the Long Walk, when the Diné were force marched away from their homes in 1864; and her former mentor/lover Neizghani being an immortal, the Monsterslayer of legend, the lightning sword bearing son of two Holy People, Changing Woman and the Sun. With the help of hataalii (Holy Ones), who have stepped out of dreams, legends, and songs, Maggie’s people managed to quickly construct four giant magical, sacred walls (east white shell, south turquoise, west abalone, north obsidian), which have protected them from the chaos of the outside world: the Big Water flooding that killed two billion people worldwide, submerged the entire Midwest, made a new coastline from San Antonio to Sioux Falls, and ended the USA; ensuing energy wars and race wars; oil companies, Feds, prospectors, and multinational corporation armies all doing their greedy things. Unfortunately, it also means that the Diné of Dinétah are locked in behind their walls with a variety of monsters. The novel begins with Maggie tracking a new kind of monster (a tse naayee made of flesh, wood or stone, and a sacred artifact) who’s taken a twelve-year-old girl from her house and carried her up a mountain. The suspenseful sequence introduces us to Maggie’s world and to her abilities (knives and guns, temporary turbocharging clan super powers and senses, etc.), her personality (tough, solitary, anti-social, trauma-scarred, evil-tainted), her monster hunting career (paid in trade items and feared and ostracized for her best efforts), and her 1972 Chevy 4x4 cherry red truck (running on whisky--talk about hardboiled!). Wanting to find out about that monster leads her to consult with her surrogate grandfather Tah, a saintly medicine man monster expert, which in turns leads to Tah foisting his Big Medicine, healer/weather worker, sweet-talking, too-handsome and natty grandson Kai on an unwilling Maggie. The odd-couple partners (she’s taller than Kai and rougher and tougher and more laconic, and while she can become a “living arrow” superhuman killer, he’s a man of peace super healer) go on the road to track down the witch who’s making the appalling new monsters. But, yikes, another special mortal young lady with an uber-cool immortal love interest complicated by the introduction of a handsome and clan-power endowed “Big Magic” healer and weather worker with “preternatural charisma”!? Holy Diné YA Love Triangle?! The novel is very much in the vein of mutant-monster-hero triad stories like X-men, where we’re pretty sure the super-powered protagonist is a hero despite other people and maybe she herself suspecting her of being a monster. Roanhorse also writes the short sentences and short cliff-hanger chapters de rigueur for YA fiction today. And she also writes some corny overly hardboiled lines, like “Trauma, scars, that’s what I’m good at,” and “But I’m no hero. I’m more of a last resort, a scorched-earth policy. I’m the person you hire when the heroes have already come home in body bags.” Is there enough Diné matter to make up for the otherwise typical monster hunting/slaying matter (and the first-person present tense narration)? For that matter, according to Wikipedia, the novel has been criticized “for misrepresenting Navajo teachings and spirituality.” No expert, I have no idea how accurate the novel is in its cultural background. To my mind, it presents a mostly positive female Native American heroine in Maggie and does make Diné culture seem cool. But I don’t care for what Roanhorse does with the Holy People of the Diné, like the trickster god Coyote, the immortal hero Neizghani, or a cat goddess (?) called Mose: they are all extremely unappealing and pettily human in their supposedly immortally derived separation from humanity (what they call “the five fingers”). Though there is plenty of graphic violence with fists, knees, guns, knives, flamethrowers, and supernatural weapons like lightning blades, there is no sex. Audiobook reader Tanis Parenteau is capable, but I didn’t care for her Holy People voices or manners (that may be down to Roanhorse’s writing of those characters, though). People who like Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation or who are interested in a Native American hardboiled yet sensitive female protagonist driving around kicking monster ass would probably like the book. Will I go on and read the sequel? Hmm... View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
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by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
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An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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