Author: Stanley Marvin Wiersma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Beowulf
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description

Author: Jeffrey Burton Russell
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801494291
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
"If, as Chesterton claimed, the devil's greatest triumph was convincing the modern world that he does not exist, Jeffrey Burton Russell means to rob him of his victory. Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages is both a scholarly assessment of the development of diabology in the Middle Ages and an impassioned plea to the 20th century to recognize and acknowledge the existence of real, objective evil. The third in a series of works tracing the history of the devil from his Judeo-Christian roots, it represents a formidable undertaking: the devil's history is integrally related to the problem of evil, which is in turn at the heart of Western religious thought. Each of the volumes on Satan comprises, in essence, a judicious and able tour of Christian theology from the villain's point of view... Book jacket.

Author: Andy Orchard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9781843840299
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
This is a complete guide to the text and context of the most famous Old English poem. In this book, the specific roles of selcted individual characters, both major and minor, are assessed.

Author: Elizabeth Marshall
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846403
Category : Beowulf
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
A fresh and sympathetic investigation of the depiction of wolves in early medieval literature, recuperating their reputation.

Author: Leonard Neidorf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501766910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
In The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet, Leonard Neidorf explores the relationship between Beowulf and the legendary tradition that existed prior to its composition. The Beowulf poet inherited an amoral heroic tradition, which focused principally on heroes compelled by circumstances to commit horrendous deeds: fathers kill sons, brothers kill brothers, and wives kill husbands. Medieval Germanic poets relished the depiction of a hero's unyielding response to a cruel fate, but the Beowulf poet refused to construct an epic around this traditional plot. Focusing instead on a courteous and pious protagonist's fight against monsters, the poet creates a work that is deeply untraditional in both its plot and its values. In Beowulf, the kin-slayers and oath-breakers of antecedent tradition are confined to the background, while the poet fills the foreground with unconventional characters, who abstain from transgression, display courtly etiquette, and express monotheistic convictions. Comparing Beowulf with its medieval German and Scandinavian analogues, The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet argues that the poem's uniqueness reflects one poet's coherent plan for the moral renovation of an amoral heroic tradition. In Beowulf, Neidorf discerns the presence of a singular mind at work in the combination and modification of heroic, folkloric, hagiographical, and historical materials. Rather than perceive Beowulf as an impersonally generated object, Neidorf argues that it should be read as the considered result of one poet's ambition to produce a morally edifying, theologically palatable, and historically plausible epic out of material that could not independently constitute such a poem.

Author: Christine Rauer
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859915922
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
The analogues discussed are presented with facing translations and detailed bibliographies."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Sam Newton
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 9780859914727
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
A detailed and passionate argument suggesting that Beowulf originated in the pre-Viking kingdom of 8th-century East Anglia. Where did Beowulf, unique and thrilling example of an Old English epic poem come from? In whose hall did the poem's maker first tell the tale? The poem exists now in just one manuscript, but careful study of the literary and historical associations reveals striking details which lead Dr Newton to claim, as he pieces together the various clues, a specific origin for the poem. Dr Newton suggests that references in Beowulf to the heroes whose names are listed in Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies indicate that such Northern dynastic concerns are most likely to have been fostered in the kingdom of East Anglia. He supports his thesis with evidence drawn from East Anglianarchaeology, hagiography and folklore. His argument, detailed and passionate, offers the exciting possibility that he has discovered the lost origins of the poem in the pre-Viking kingdom of 8th-century East Anglia. SAMNEWTON was awarded his Ph.D. for work on Beowulf.

Author: R.D. Fulk
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442692898
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1273

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Book Description
Frederick Klaeber's Beowulf has long been the standard edition for study by students and advanced scholars alike. Its wide-ranging coverage of scholarship, its comprehensive philological aids, and its exceptionally thorough notes and glossary have ensured its continued use in spite of the fact that the book has remained largely unaltered since 1936. The fourth edition has been prepared with the aim of updating the scholarship while preserving the aspects of Klaeber's work that have made it useful to students of literature, linguists, historians, folklorists, manuscript specialists, archaeologists, and theorists of culture. A revised Introduction and Commentary incorporates the vast store of scholarship on Beowulf that has appeared since 1950. It brings readers up to date on areas of scholarship that have been controversial since the last edition, including the construction of the unique manuscript and views on the poem's date and unity of composition. The lightly revised text incorporates the best textual criticism of the intervening years, and the expanded Commentary furnishes detailed bibliographic guidance to discussion of textual cruces, as well as to modern and contemporary critical concerns. Aids to pronunciation have been added to the text, and advances in the study of the poem's language are addressed throughout. Readers will find that the book remains recognizably Klaeber's work, but with altered and added features designed to render it as useful today as it has ever been.

Author: Nicolas K. Kiessling
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Beowulf
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description

Author: Andy Orchard
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442659009
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Monsters and the monstrous, whether from the remote pagan past or the new world of Christian Latin learning, haunted the Anglo-Saxon imagination in a variety of ways. In this series of detailed studies, Andy Orchard demonstrates the changing range of Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards the monstrous by reconsidering the monsters of Beowulf against the background of early medieval and patristic teratology and with reference to specific Anglo-Saxon texts. The immediate manuscript context of the monsters in Beowulf is analysed, shedding light on the poet's treatment of the theme of the monstrous and its integration into his work, and a series of parallel discussions consider a range of medieval treatments of the same theme in a variety of analogous texts (all provided with translation), in Latin, Old English, Middle Irish, and Old Icelandic. The twin themes of pride and prodigies are suggested by tracing changing attitudes towards the concept of pride and establishing a close link between the proud pagan warriors depicted in Christian tradition and the monsters they fight, and with whom they become increasingly identified. An appendix contains new editions and translations (some for the first time in English) of the Liber Monstrorum, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and The Wonders of the East. Originally published in 1995 by Boydell & Brewer.