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Hello, everyone. I'm Dr. Laura Varnam from University College Oxford, and the proper start of this lecture has,
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of course, to be [Old English].
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[Old English].
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[Old English].
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[Old English].
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[Old English].
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That was the opening of Beowulf, as I'm sure you all know, and the opening of Tolkien's posthumously published a translation on the slide.
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Tolkien, of course, always reciting Beowulf in his lectures, always if not as audibly as perhaps I've done just now.
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Now, I would just really like to put some old English into the room to really hear the alliterative metre more like masonry than music,
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as Tolkien described it.
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Just a whole round the grandeur, the weight, the seriousness about the subject matter and the style, which were two elements of the really massive,
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very deeply hokey way to lives is a thrill to be getting is talk today as possible 50th anniversary celebrations at Torquay in Oxford as
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Reynolds Oxford and I spent a great deal of my time teaching Bible and old English literature to I to address some of your comments.
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It's a particularly fitting to propose Tolkien's legacy as a valuable, solid translator and created responded to the public as the topic of my talk.
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Like many of my colleagues and students, my sort of medievalist origin story, as it were going back to Tolkien, my dad, who is in the audience,
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is a huge Tolkien fan, and I read The Lord of the Rings in my early teens and then talk about some characters with my dad.
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We'd look up all the monsters and police in Tolkien, blistering the scholar in training that I was.
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And so when I first encountered Beowulf and medieval texts like So Great,
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The Green Knight as a student, I thought, Oh, yes, I know this world already.
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I've been here before via Middle-Earth.
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But as well as teaching, I'm also a practising poet.
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I'm currently writing a poetry collection inspired by the women of Beowulf,
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particularly Grendel's mother, and as well as reshaping the field of Beowulf criticism.
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Tolkien also, I think, gave us permission to respond creatively today and to offer imaginative retellings as modes of reading fables,
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as ways of thinking with and about the poem. And even in an awful time, I'll say a little bit about Tolkien, the middle modernity, Let's roll.
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And there are four interrelated texts that I'm going to draw on today that for me form the basis of Tolkien's legacy
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as an able scholar and of course the field changing 1936 British Academy lecture did on the 25th of November.
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You know, we're not sort of far away from from that specific anniversary date.
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The book was published just by all the monsters and critics, but it's so shortened version of the battle.
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Of course, it's going to be edited by Mike Stroud.
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This also told his essay on translating by being treated to a new edition in 1940, and it also drew on material from the Bible,
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the critics essays, and then his posthumously published by The Wall translation commentary,
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which also is important as a final folktale won the title so much so an ambulance I I'm supposed to do
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in my lecture is to explore the ways in which Tolkien's ideas shaped our understandings of the poem,
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its preoccupations and style by way of modern translators and creative writers
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who consults at night equals its contributions to the museum as a talking.
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Michael It and so I'm going to talk a bit about the Scottish poet, actually.
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Morgan The Irish poet Seamus Heaney, the American writer and translator Maria Hadley.
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And just listing the places that those different writers come from reminds us
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of one of the really extraordinary things about how it speaks across oceans,
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across nations, even if not always comfortably.
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A wonderful fact to the yellow dog or former days of Scandinavia.
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Legendary chaos is able and really marvellously to look forward to our present moments and the present
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concerns from conflict and war to toxic masculinity and female power from fantastical creatures like tigers.
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Very attractive dress to lecture today about soaking wet, put on national rituals.
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Our dragons do all to human, says Reading mothers speech is a commonly made bible, and in his essay on five.
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Let's hope he also has recourse today as an example.
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He always wants to admit as possible in the various motifs we might find in various story quotes that remain still a point too often forgotten.
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Not just the facts produced now by these old things in the stories as they are talking.
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Talk to us about the kind of stew and bones that we find in what turns the culture of story.
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And these things have an impact beyond merely a source study.
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He says they, quote, Open a door on other times.
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And if we possibly know only for a moment, we stand outside our own time.
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Outside time itself. Maybe this is not a place that sometimes seems to sound sort of outside it.
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Time, is it? So this is a great place to open that door, its fairy story and set into talkies World of Babel.
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Now, it's no understatement to say that Tolkien's lecture, the Waltzer and the critics was all changing,
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and it continues to have the most profound impact on us to this day.
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Michael That's why he writes in his edition of Bible from Chris is that all the English scholars don't agree on very much.
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But one thing they do agree on is that most of the critics is the single most important critical essay ever written about Bible.
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He calls it a watershed, an origin, a turning point.
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And I still give it to my students as the first piece of criticism to read when they encountered the poems.
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When Tolkien gave his lecture, he was approaching the poet not just as a scholar, but as a literary critic, and I suggest as a creative writer.
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He famously observed that of all Beowulf, we all know that he addressed one rich in many departments.
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It was especially cool anymore, he said.
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It is poor in criticism. Criticism? It is directed to the understanding of a poem.
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I suppose it has been said of Beowulf itself that its weakness weakness lies in placing
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the other important things at the centre and the important things only outer edges.
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This is one of the opinions that I wish specially to consider. I think it profoundly are true of the poet.
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The striking issue of the literature about it by all has been used as a career
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factor probably far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art.
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After all, he Beowulf is a work of art,
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not a text that only belonged as a chapter to all the historians who are excavating it on
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linguistic fossils and hidden legends in the classical tradition that came before him.
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Tolkien lamented that Oasis poetry was usually forgotten, occasionally admitted by a side or sometimes dismissed on the doorstep.
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And while unexpected, guests on the doorstep, whether bearing party invitations or not, can cause all kinds of trouble.
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Tolkien wanted to welcome radio retreat back into the audience, back into the house of Beowulf.
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The problem is, he said, so interesting as poetry in places so powerful that this quite overshadows or content
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as much as might be interested inside the legendary identity of its digital hedgehog.
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And that power comes from a sound of the having from hearing it at all.
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And if I need to call it a way to draw archetypes for a very valuable individual,
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I'd really recommend looking up Benjamin Bachmann's performance on YouTube.
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If he does the first third of the poem. He's a medieval music specialist.
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He performs it with the harp completely off the top of his head. It's absolutely destroyed.
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And the video up at the moment have subtitles, so you can really enjoy that in all its glory.
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So is the sound of the poem, but also the story at the centre Babel device.
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Now Tolkien statements about what we find at the centre I'm on the margins of the poem casts a
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very long shadow and in some ways it's even suggested that the focus has all to all the other way,
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and it can sometimes be challenging to interest students imaginary figures or strange names like rugelach or various tribes,
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like the Visions and the piece of art and get you started on the whole Swedish Jesus conception.
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I'm still unsure of myself, but I think the critique of Tolkien's refocusing of our attention sometimes what this means is points.
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Tolkien is trying to replace one area of focus with the other.
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He's trying to redress the balance of sorting criticism at that point as he recognised himself.
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It is more than its plot. It's the cycle that's also crucial.
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I'll come back to that some of his remarks on translation.
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He said, for example, quote, The comparison of skeleton plots is simply not a critical process at all.
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And what you have is a problem where we try and summarise the story of a particular group of people before I met the children or young adults.
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One of the most iconic economies of all the on and after translation is versions for the children in children's literature versions.
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And so yes, I always asked about these three monster fights,
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but it is also about who is made up of all the regulatory material with which those stories are interlaced.
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And that texture is very much the sort of idea of as a text.
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So to get a flavour of Tolkien's appreciation of the monsters, both as flesh and blood creatures and potential symbolic cause of meaning,
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this is how he describes Grendel, the Dragons, in his selection.
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He says Grendel inhabits the physical world and eats the flesh and loves of men.
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He enters the houses by the doors and doors are always dangerous places in Tolkien, unimaginable danger.
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The dragon wields a physical fire, covetous gold, not souls.
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He is slain with iron in his balance. And Tolkien is especially receptive to the imaginative power of dragons as well he should be.
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He says. Dragon is no idle fancy, whatever may be his origins.
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In fact, the invention of the dragon, the legend is a potent creation of man's imagination, which is significant.
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But as far as it goes,
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and I think without this recognition of the monster's innate glamour and glamour is a word that comes back to the medieval word, real magic.
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You know, I think we wouldn't have this incredible tour de force of of a description from Seamus Heaney in the introduction to his 1999 translation.
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I think it's absolutely fantastic. He says Grendel comes alive in the reader's imagination as a kind of dark breath in the dark,
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a fear of collision with some hard bones and immensely strong Android fright or mixture of Caliban Hoplite,
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while his mother too has a definite brute battering about her creature, slouch and lunge on land, sea, all swept in the water.
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She nevertheless retains a certain no strangeness.
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And if the dragon he writes, there's something glorious in the way he manifests himself a 4th of July,
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a Folger's fire working its path across the night sky.
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He is at once a stratum of the earth and a streamer in the air no painted dragon,
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but a figure of real American power dream like power, one that could easily survive.
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The prejudice rises, but we mention also the word dragon.
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And he describes he talks about Tolkien prophecies and critics Messiah essay in his introduction as epoch making.
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He argues that talking about assumes that the poet has felt his way through the inherited
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material and felt as he's stressed that he serves his way through this inhabited material.
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The fabulous elements in the traditional accounts of a heroic past by a combination of creative intuition,
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a conscious structuring, a derived unity of effects and a balance order.
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So he assumed, in other words,
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that the Battle of Poets was an imaginative project rather than information derived from 19th century folklore and philology.
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And he needs identification. A feeling I think is really crucial, and it's something that both Tolkien I'm about in the share.
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Both of them have thoughts that right through this material and that attitude to it is shaped by the emotions that it stimulates.
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We see this then also supported what, for example,
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Tolkien describes the Christian Beowulf poet's attitude to the paper, the cast of his heroic characters.
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Tolkien cites the quote, The shadow of the paper path despair only as a mood, as an intense emotion of regret is still there in the poem.
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The work of defeated Follett in this world is deeply felt.
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Tolkien identifies the by as emotional engagement with his material.
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Tolkien's own desires and dissatisfactions also come into play,
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both explicitly implicitly in his discussion of and response to the drama in Bibles and the essay on three stories.
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He admits that as a child, and I absolutely am with India, I desire dragons with a profound desire.
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But Tolkien admitted they might say, Look what he did not wish to happen in the neighbourhood intruding.
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From my relatively safe world, I think I'd be fine with that.
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But he admits that the world contained even the imagination of athletes not involved.
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But it was richer and more beautiful at whatever cost of peril, but regrettably encompassed with it.
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I'm talking from the Bible in one state and one reluctant to criticise.
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He did say in the notes of the critics, saying that the problem is not to be blamed for being a problem, but rather for not being broken enough.
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He says there are in the power of very touches of the right kind in which the dragon is real, one with a peaceful life of thought of his own.
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But the Tolkien conception noble approach is to call it us,
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rather the Draper personification of malice, the greed and destruction, the evil side of own life.
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Oh, that's all he does. Well, for the Bible. This is what it should be.
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But his frustration had already produced a creative results whereby Tolkien imagined exactly the right kind of targeting of all people again.
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It's also the critics like Tolkien have set off his manuscript of The Hobbit.
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And of course, that story contains no other than small talking.
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Weirdly, Dawkins, who is more than a match for Batman or indeed the name of a Bible,
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and lots of critics have pointed out the ways in which the Battle of the Dragon on the story sort of slip into smiles,
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unconscious in the practical inside information.
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But Bilbo has entered the mountain as smoke is described as having, quote,
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an uneasy dream in which a warrior altogether insignificant in size but provided with a bitter sword and great courage, fitted most unpleasantly.
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So somehow is having this dream like a kind of ghost story or a premonition of Bilbo about to about to enter the mountain of Tolkien's small ways.
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The other big problem that arises from Beowulf in the published version of the monsters and critics,
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such Tolkien called Tolkien comments rather obliquely the quote more than an old poem in recent years,
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since by overstate so often the dominion of the students origins, use of poetry has been inspired by Beowulf, but no less.
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I know why it goes to. So he's recognising that strategy's already inspiring new creative writings.
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And in the original he doesn't say more about that in the published version of what actually in the original
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manuscript that Michael Brown's has edited the two versions of so brilliantly and is very critical of Tolkien,
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including the two poems that he alluded to here, what is by himself and is the you want a gold out of the London poem.
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And that's a that's a line from Babel describing the gold of man of law that is wild around like outer,
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which means something like incantation or spells.
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The other poem that Tolkien alludes to is by his friend The thought of Magic with C.S. Lewis supposed Dragon.
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I want to talk about those thoughts in detail.
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But if you're if you are interested in the appendix in Holy [INAUDIBLE],
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these are the recently published translation available has a fantastic description of how that poem
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people right in the 1920s and then works on and revised the role of that poem in developing his ideas.
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And it's a really fascinating question. But I do want to quote the way in which Tolkien plans to introduce the poems in my own writings essays.
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He said, I will quote you, though this may seem an unpalatable digression in the amount of support by all poets to modern poets on the docket,
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the two together for all their defects, especially in the first,
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I suppose so seems to me more important for that criticism for which they say when all that very much has been written for that purpose,
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I think something she said.
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But it shows how Tolkien really believes that creative results can and should be important for approaching the thinking about it,
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for reading, for the power in 1979 Tolkien's art.
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But I also James Schultz notes that he told his prose non-fiction his monster is the critic solely prefers history and philology on approach.
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So I'll say that in contrast to what she calls the alive and joyful imagination of the artist, he.
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With him. Tolkien identified this alive and joyful imagination of the artist.
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It's exactly what we see applied in Tolkien spiral Criticism.
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Let me give you an example of one of my favourite moments in Tolkien commentary on Beowulf.
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Translation is this discussion of the introduction of the dragon and the back story of the trash.
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Not talking perceptively Comments in the notes.
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I think the Bible operation talking Tolkien's Thomas Tolkien's translation available I think is amazing.
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It's a fantastic piece of work, really very useful for me and a real kind of treasure in wrapping up with all the commentaries,
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all talking about the fact that it's just fascinating.
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And one of the things that he picks out in the introduction of the Dragon episode is the
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way in which the introduction of both the thief who steals from the dragon and the dragon,
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he's treated by the Bible in a very moving way.
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And it's remarkable how he says, for the sin of the show, both the the wretched fugitive and the dragon,
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and explains that the effect of the poet's kind of serpentine introduction of the fact is equal right but wrong.
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That is, quote, characteristic of old English as we know it as a whole.
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That the scene in the past few months into an elegy in retrospect on the Forgotten Lords who
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place that gold into the Lord and then died one by one until it was in fact most of us.
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Right. So almost as soon as we hear about the dragon in the fact of the whole world,
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we get the events of Last Survivor, how the treasure came to be in the mines in which it's found.
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Well, Tolkien, we use that this quote occupies the emotional space between the pondering up the hold and the curiously vivid
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and perceptive lines of the dragon snuffling in absolute rage and injured greed when he saw this upset.
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And for me, this feeling that he's created for all the treasure and a sense of its art history,
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what he says is what raises the whole thing right above a mere treasure story and just another dragon tale, he concludes.
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The whole thing is sombre, tragic, sinister and curiously real.
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I hope he opens up a real empathy in this reading,
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and it offers a cool counterpoint to some of his rather more dismissive comments about the evil monsters and critics, as they once had gotten,
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wasn't frightfully good of me, and it shows how imagination and compassion or fellow feeling can lead to productive on attentive,
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close readings of the original power because of reading spirit as close to it.
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Rather than taking this away and more from places in a 20th and 21st century have also responded to
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the heroic feelings about the Beowulf poet's treatment of the monsters within that translation.
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So that's why the Battle for the Dragon. A particular case in point.
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Here is the American translator on Hadley, whose new translation was published in 2020 after the 2018 novel adaptation of the Story.
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Meanwhile, as the title character demonstrates, Headley is interested in babel's real life or woman of water scandal.
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But the former me, a wife, only a half sister, Headley's feminist perspective on the power of one major gap and sulking,
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small city critics aside, is Grendel's mother herself.
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Tolkien says that he will quite confine himself mainly to the monsters Scrabble.
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And if you read the essay without knowing, you might have no idea that it even exists.
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Unfortunately, Tolkien's empathy for the dragon does not extend to Grant his mother.
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He doesn't even see her as structurally significant.
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He argues that the poem is about an opposition of ends and beginnings.
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Contrast the description of two moments in a great life,
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rising and setting the elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and death.
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And he says that he thinks the dragon is a fitting end for Beowulf, the hero, just as Grendel is the perfect beginning.
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Now I was talking about her mother is the perfect middle and surprising for an essay that
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is so interested in sentence that Tolkien neglects the female monster of the whole story.
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He only mentions in the essays Appendix on Religious titles.
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Firstly, to note that both Grendel and his mother according all her devils.
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And then, drawing on Rendell's physicality as a monster, he cites in brackets.
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Grendel's mother is naturally described separately, treated in precisely the terms she is with Edo's.
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All that with such a woman, a noble woman, and he says, rising to the inhuman.
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Mia we will go and work some of those terms later on.
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Sometimes Tolkien's own translations really amplify this idea with the of the inhuman sometimes in the way that I think is not quite not in the text.
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Thus Tolkien defends his argument to all the proxy forces by asserting that we do not deny the worth of the hero by accepting Revel in the Dragon.
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I think when it comes to trying to smother it, maybe that we have to slightly recalibrate what we think about Beowulf invades her home.
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Just as Randall invaded Eros, I was pointed out in a memorable essay by old English.
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Trilling Well, I always wanted to fight Grendel.
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We all absolutely went up to the box to fight Grendel's mother, despite the fact that apparently her wolf is the less because she is a woman.
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And the marginalisation of Rendell's love is a major driver of the power empathy that we find in the way that we see translation.
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And in fact, in her introduction, she begins by declaring the, quote, Love of God with Beowulf began with Grendel's mother.
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The moment I encountered her in an illustrated compendium of Monsters, a slithery greenish entity someday naked in a swamp, knight in hand.
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And how do you have to have said enough?
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Does he have to write it without the surrounding cast of characters?
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Randall and Beowulf. He is a queen, just a woman with a weapon all by herself in the centre of the page.
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And perhaps she then describes the shock that she felt years later when she realised that, quote,
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Mother was not only not for the main event, but also to so many people an extension of Grendel rather than the character herself.
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She isn't even really quite an extension of Randall in invoking blessing and in the creative.
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It's all his creative texts and finds at the end of a published translation in the folktale.
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So much so in one of the versions. The mother of the monster.
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Exactly Grinder For the monster, Grendel warned his mother doesn't come to take vengeance for her son.
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But if you have a other version, she does. But in the seconds of the two lines about all that Tolkien writes,
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that I think was a really fascinating moment because he gives Grendel's mother a
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voice and she almost seems to the prophesy the fall of Denmark through a compromise.
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So I think Tolkien is starting to move toward rethinking his approach toward this mother.
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A little thing that Maria doesn't have any particular attention to in her introduction.
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Is the tone of the talk you identified in all of the in the question what does much of Michael's honour and that is for the word of.
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It's just one of the most debated tones for the destruction of not in the power to look at it just in by with an all black man.
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I frequently used to refer to a formidable opponent.
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So what is it like 1259 of the poem Grendel's mother is referred to as It is often brief.
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It refers to a noblewoman queen, while theatrical does and which makes woman so happy,
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she suggests we should talk like this formidable noblewoman role, as we see in quite a scholarly edition wretch, or also a woman.
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In his posthumously published translation, Toki translates over US bears destroyed in the form of a woman.
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I think he's using female form of ogre that because he uses Ogre to describe Grendel earlier in his translation.
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And I do think that fierce captures the power of of a proxy destroyer makes translation a little bit more pejorative.
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But I think he captures the force a great deal softer when you translate lines 58 to 90 grams work here with Mystic,
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He comes out as the monstrous woman of the sea.
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She will fish out of the deep. I'm assuming he's getting monstrous from mating.
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And so from Mighty Lear wife is the woman of the male waters throughout a guy who is.
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Is this a disaster? What is a feminine holocaust?
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Describes often translated as Wolf of the deep wolves are often used as symbols of outlaws in old English literature.
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According to the dictionary of Old English long term enemies, a cursed female creature of the deep because, well, it means evil.
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Cursed went wrong. Hadley refers to Grendel as an outlaw in her exceptional warrior woman.
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In her translation of Ten Line, here she translates one exclusive note Queen The Mighty Me A life I take,
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said Knightly, to refer both the thought on his walk walked the territory for 50 years.
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Because what I would like to do as king and one of the things that I've been exploring in my
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work on ground with some of the other women in the poem is thinking about her as a queen.
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She she rules her whole. She operates as kind of anti queen figure, just as the dragon is a kind of abdicate what she calls his holds his gold.
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And a lot of Grendel's mother is in many ways isolated to be the it she does share
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in a kind of emotional community with the other queens in battle because she,
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too, is a grieving mother as many of the other women are.
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And the other thing, I think that how do you what do you do with the pieces here is pushing back at the idea of her being coerced.
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We know that gradually stopped because he is descendants of K, the first murderer,
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but ultimately it's the murderous actions of men that drove Randall's mother into this tormented family tree.
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And it also renounces the girl's mother, doesn't leave and go on the night he rampages.
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So does I get the sense that she sort of keeps it herself?
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Minds are ambitious until she's required to take revenge for Gravel's death in lieu of him, the father to do so.
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The grumbles. All the space is invaded by rivals.
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We see this in her social media was described as a neath sailor, a hostile whole, and so it is imagined through the framework of a hole.
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Beowulf is a sailor, I guess for a whole guest.
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Of course, you don't really ask for invading territory and this ties in to the way in which marriage of all that has he represents the dragon.
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I'm worried about this whole piece praised for the and its efforts to encourage sympathy for the Dragon.
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I hope this translation creates a cross connection between the grandmother and the Dragon by imagining
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them both as female characters whose homes have been invaded when animals enters the as she translates.
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Yes, she felt his presence in her room and knew a man from the above was invading love.
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And that's what really in the struggle she is had happening. And that's a really interesting moment because in the original old English,
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the poet actually uses the male pronoun and says on to say, So he discards.
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And Hadley happily translates, Yes.
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She credits reinstating a female pronoun and couching that discovery as a kind of emotional recognition rather than just a ban on sexual slavery.
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That kind of knowledge and some critics have interpreted that use of male pronouns
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in this section as indications of the poet's discomfort with my mother's gender.
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Only about I try to rule the whole in his way of talking slightly sidesteps the issue of gender.
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My having my having that creature perceived that smiles of some of those questions when it comes to the stealing of the cup from the Dragon sword,
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I think deliberately gender switches the dragon in the old English.
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The passage where the thief steals the cup, it's half damaged,
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but it probably reads that he was busy at night while sleeping as a result of the thief captor or cutting on people.
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I learned that he is older than me, swollen with rage.
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Grendel was missing a broken arm Early in the poem, Tolkien translates this The dragon did not, after in silence,
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that albeit he had been cheated in his sleep by the thieves cutting, and that the legal that he was wroth.
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Indeed, this sense of trickery is even more poignant.
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It had this obsession because she could already the anger,
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but the fear and the shame but women might feel when attacked in their own homes, she translates.
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She rose, raging, grieving, though to cry out was to confess.
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She'd been stripped while sleeping. Later, when the properties described sleeping upon it thought that it's more than just an alehouse and a stone,
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a combination of house of ancient treasures.
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The treasure port is a bet highlighting the personal, even gender response to which the dragon and certainly Grendel's mother subjected the poet.
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And I really love this passage because it has little hints of Tolkien as he writes,
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The fault was more than a treasury, piles of preciousness nested beneath the coils of the sword servant.
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It was immense. And of course, Precious is called out for the sake of Tolkien.
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Why? She describes the thief who wrapped trembling fingers around the first small shining skin.
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He found sweat that also feels to me like a knot to build on the ring.
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And so King's influence as a theorist to play with translation was certainly in Hadley's mind when she worked on her version In her introduction.
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She goes from talking all of us by criticism, his remarks on how to translate for the poem.
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So she quotes Tolkien, asserting that if you wish to translate, not rewrite fables translated, not rewrite.
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So he says, your language must be literary and traditional, not because it is not a long one,
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it's how it was made or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient,
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but because the diction about was poetical, archaic, artificial, if you will, in the day when the poem was made.
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And how do you comments in response to this that Tolkien and I wouldn't have
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agreed when it comes to the sort of language required for translation of Beowulf,
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but sections of literary, traditional language very widely, depending on who's doing the scene.
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And so he had a lot of things to call you, but I do share.
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But we agree that they are the originals. That's what they must be reckoned with.
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We see Tolkien is like like Kings of the Cool,
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and it's so surprising in some ways you have this language of sort of knights in medieval chivalry, but isn't available to be called a pre.
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Tolkien sees a kind of incipient should our culture at play in the power?
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He thinks they will have the complication with the Knights of the Round table.
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But of course all modern English word is not as capacious as the old school.
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So I think Tolkien partly draws on that lexical tradition in knights and lights and questing and partly to give us that texture.
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I think he is right that Tolkien probably would not have agreed with her approach to translation,
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not least because a few sentences earlier in that same essay, Tolkien declared a warning against colloquialism and false modesty and Tolkien.
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I think that comes through partly because he slightly fears that part of the language of modernity.
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But of course the courage of the trivial might be, as he calls it, to a self-conscious, self-conscious and often silly laughter.
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He says the things we are dealing with here are serious.
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Moving on full of high salt tots sentences, the English word that we find in Chaucer were a sort of moral doctrine out of the sovereignty.
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Now, she argues that her modern style is at the service of poetic voice and communicative clarity.
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And she argues for the power of modern slang or new cultural context.
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She states that language is a living thing. What it all means. It means bones and dots and fossils here next to some newborns.
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I was interested in contemporary slang on India, as I am in New York.
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As she says, if you're looking for a language of nice romance, you can find plenty of other translations.
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Now, has this translation is that, if you will, probably no is famous for its translation of the opening of Front Row row.
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How will we still know how to speak of kings? In the old days, everyone knew what men were brave, bold, glory bound only stories.
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Now some display date and song hoarded for hungry time, I think.
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How do you just write? Tell me. Have so many got the feel of the original and the alliterative pattern with the phrase the poem The Glory Bound.
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She sounding inspired a song that's haunted for how many times.
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But she also sets out staked out new territory.
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They might be on these stories now.
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She said to silence all present moments, a moment where she fears that perhaps we don't know how to speak about things anymore.
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I totally try to write a bit on lies about what men are all now running around involved in the time they were.
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What was all they know? I mean, my heart, particularly at the moment, given the conflict war taking place in the world.
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While the opening role also enables having to do is that she talks about the way that to her how it feels like a
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sort of competitive conversation I've often heard between men the kinds of conversations that men have the balls,
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she says. Competition that hides aggression between behind brotherly bonds.
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She says depending on tone, Rove can run the family for fun.
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And she repeats the word other places in the pub where she suggested it reminds us of the ways in which men can afford or deny
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one another power safety by using coded language to raise women from power structures by speaking culturally only to other men.
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Hadley's role on the original poet squat is a call to attention, but whose attention?
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All we paradoxically, all included, is that we, all of us, do.
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We share these particular stories, all all the other stories for which we are not yet given proper attention.
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Until his comments on translation were also a catalyst for Scottish progress.
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And with Morgan. And his discussion of style in the introduction to his 1952 translation,
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which was one of the first translations by a practising poet published via poetry publication.
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If you want to go away, we talking about translating Bible.
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I also really recommend. And Morgan's opening is also thinking about translation.
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And Morgan tuned in to the poem's discussion of Holmes social relationships to for a different reason,
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to having Edwin Morgan describe his translation as his unwritten walk away.
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He translated it. We came back from the Second World War after he was finding it very difficult to access his poetic voice again.
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And his translation is wonderful for its humane and compassionate depiction of the camaraderie of thousands of soldiers.
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It's already moving in places as Morgan counters Tolkien's arguments about modernity for two reasons.
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Firstly, he says, while it is indeed true that the original section of the poem was a register reason for the poetry,
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even if not, how started is lost in translation.
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He says, quote, The background of the poem cannot be modernised.
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The social systems, the entertainments, the supernatural beings, the battles in the weapons,
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and in the inescapable, inescapable bedrock vocabulary of Caine.
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Lord rightly, goals get immediate codes of male talking and barriers that the 20th century reader will find
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enough that is remote from his own experience without any super radical linguistic quantum crank.
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So we can all do without the mommy pressing and all of that,
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all of that is that all of that dignity and all kinds of sense of what about the past is that without it needs to be added in the language of his use.
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I'm fundamentally for the moment, he argues that quote was that of the tradition of the original poetry may have been the
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translator's duty is as much to slit his own age as it is to represent the voice of past age.
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These are indeed equal tasks, he suggests.
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The communication must take place. The nerves must sometimes take over and flush out immediately.
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So that's what the translation is doing its job when you read it and it just feels as long as the original I would be, I would agree more.
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I think if a translation doesn't in some way light a kind of beaker within us and
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give us a sense of the feeling for the passive voice from the past has been ignited,
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that it isn't necessarily working as a poetic translation.
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I think that's something that the original poet knew and of the he recognised what it looks like.
393
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It's fascinating how his discussion of the structure of in impulses is increasing, especially if he picks up this one.
394
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But he says might be the only potential weakness in the power of this organisation.
395
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And this is what he calls the lonely capitulation, the record labels.
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So this is what I also call a regular mother, and he has up to the easiest table that whole section of being lonely.
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His he says, Wow. It was like to figure out exactly how that ally brilliant, how do they go about it?
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Said, Well, let me tell you. And he's talking only about the old schools and tells him about political situation, about the marriage alliance.
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It's going to take place between Friday morning and another time he's feeling about the work.
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So he gets a really interesting sort of political insight from Magnus.
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I'm told he suggests that in this week she calls it that it's coming down to older folk time.
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But seriously, I was working with a talking.
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It also likes this. I've seen comments about the value of Fables bringing the tale of Grendel back to the patrons,
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he says, as they will, Samson would like soul and tells his story.
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He sets his fleet firm again in the land of his own people and is no longer in danger of appearing at the end of each and every adventure.
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Exiled traveller and slave. What do you hope? He said?
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He told me back to the straight, back to his discussion of the bipartite structure of the poem in these two parts.
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But what he recognises here is the importance of bringing the story hope of opening a door to want
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to help inspire images through which Beowulf can set into each kingdom to step into our world.
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When the plot in Tolkien's traditional language or in the modern dress of recent
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translators is the fabulous allegory and the illustration of all this in critics,
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Tolkien described a man who had. Is it a field in which it's an accumulation of old stone halves of an old hole and some of that to be
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used in building a house in which you have actually lived and some of which should be built into a tower.
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But the nonsensical about how without looking for hidden carvings and inscriptions,
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all these other animals went around for all this time, building material from and scrambling around in the soil.
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Not only do they neglect to expose themselves, they miss the point of the tower itself.
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And Tolkien says from the top of that tower, the man had been able to look out a policy.
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That was the point of the tower. You can see the sea from it's almost half a mile sometimes.
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Tolkien spoke of focussed attention,
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neglected parts of the poem to which we are now responding urgently to the present day, such as the role of the sun.
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I do think that a lasting legacy of his work on the Current has been to open up really important vistas and viewpoints
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from which we can look out to the sea and think about what we learn from seeing the world from the storyteller.
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A fable and a deep rooted drone. Hadley concludes the introduction to her translation with a similar image.
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She views the poems,
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various stories as lighthouses and conjuring up an image of poring over maps of the world when she was a child with a Happy Dragons mornings.
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She writes, quote, All that imaginary map I added story lighthouses that I want to look over here at lighthouses.
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Here is a safe of how I feel about this evolved. Here is a spot to watch out for Out here.
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What happens out here with the stories of those dragons on those heroes and more on their stories that haven't yet been reckoned with.
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Stories hidden within the stories that we think we know.
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It takes you, readers, writers and souls to find them.
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I think the legacy of Torquay's work on my TO has been to encourage us to take steps onto
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that road that leads ever on into and through the original Bible and insurance stories.
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Tolkien might be naively a medievalist. He made me a creative person.
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He gave me permission to make the dragons my own.
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To become a shield titan and a world hoarder.
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I'll always be eternally grateful to him for the rich and perilous imaginative worlds that he opened up here in Oxford and in Middle-Earth by being.
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I.
00:00:00,360 --> 00:00:07,460
Hello, everyone. I'm Dr. Laura Varnam from University College Oxford, and the proper start of this lecture has,
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of course, to be [Old English].
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[Old English].
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[Old English].
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[Old English].
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[Old English].
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That was the opening of Beowulf, as I'm sure you all know, and the opening of Tolkien's posthumously published a translation on the slide.
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Tolkien, of course, always reciting Beowulf in his lectures, always if not as audibly as perhaps I've done just now.
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Now, I would just really like to put some old English into the room to really hear the alliterative metre more like masonry than music,
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as Tolkien described it.
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Just a whole round the grandeur, the weight, the seriousness about the subject matter and the style, which were two elements of the really massive,
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very deeply hokey way to lives is a thrill to be getting is talk today as possible 50th anniversary celebrations at Torquay in Oxford as
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Reynolds Oxford and I spent a great deal of my time teaching Bible and old English literature to I to address some of your comments.
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It's a particularly fitting to propose Tolkien's legacy as a valuable, solid translator and created responded to the public as the topic of my talk.
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Like many of my colleagues and students, my sort of medievalist origin story, as it were going back to Tolkien, my dad, who is in the audience,
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is a huge Tolkien fan, and I read The Lord of the Rings in my early teens and then talk about some characters with my dad.
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We'd look up all the monsters and police in Tolkien, blistering the scholar in training that I was.
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And so when I first encountered Beowulf and medieval texts like So Great,
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The Green Knight as a student, I thought, Oh, yes, I know this world already.
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I've been here before via Middle-Earth.
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But as well as teaching, I'm also a practising poet.
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I'm currently writing a poetry collection inspired by the women of Beowulf,
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particularly Grendel's mother, and as well as reshaping the field of Beowulf criticism.
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Tolkien also, I think, gave us permission to respond creatively today and to offer imaginative retellings as modes of reading fables,
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as ways of thinking with and about the poem. And even in an awful time, I'll say a little bit about Tolkien, the middle modernity, Let's roll.
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And there are four interrelated texts that I'm going to draw on today that for me form the basis of Tolkien's legacy
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as an able scholar and of course the field changing 1936 British Academy lecture did on the 25th of November.
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You know, we're not sort of far away from from that specific anniversary date.
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The book was published just by all the monsters and critics, but it's so shortened version of the battle.
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Of course, it's going to be edited by Mike Stroud.
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This also told his essay on translating by being treated to a new edition in 1940, and it also drew on material from the Bible,
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the critics essays, and then his posthumously published by The Wall translation commentary,
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which also is important as a final folktale won the title so much so an ambulance I I'm supposed to do
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in my lecture is to explore the ways in which Tolkien's ideas shaped our understandings of the poem,
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its preoccupations and style by way of modern translators and creative writers
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who consults at night equals its contributions to the museum as a talking.
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Michael It and so I'm going to talk a bit about the Scottish poet, actually.
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Morgan The Irish poet Seamus Heaney, the American writer and translator Maria Hadley.
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And just listing the places that those different writers come from reminds us
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of one of the really extraordinary things about how it speaks across oceans,
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across nations, even if not always comfortably.
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A wonderful fact to the yellow dog or former days of Scandinavia.
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Legendary chaos is able and really marvellously to look forward to our present moments and the present
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concerns from conflict and war to toxic masculinity and female power from fantastical creatures like tigers.
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Very attractive dress to lecture today about soaking wet, put on national rituals.
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Our dragons do all to human, says Reading mothers speech is a commonly made bible, and in his essay on five.
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Let's hope he also has recourse today as an example.
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He always wants to admit as possible in the various motifs we might find in various story quotes that remain still a point too often forgotten.
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Not just the facts produced now by these old things in the stories as they are talking.
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Talk to us about the kind of stew and bones that we find in what turns the culture of story.
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And these things have an impact beyond merely a source study.
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He says they, quote, Open a door on other times.
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And if we possibly know only for a moment, we stand outside our own time.
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Outside time itself. Maybe this is not a place that sometimes seems to sound sort of outside it.
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Time, is it? So this is a great place to open that door, its fairy story and set into talkies World of Babel.
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Now, it's no understatement to say that Tolkien's lecture, the Waltzer and the critics was all changing,
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and it continues to have the most profound impact on us to this day.
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Michael That's why he writes in his edition of Bible from Chris is that all the English scholars don't agree on very much.
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But one thing they do agree on is that most of the critics is the single most important critical essay ever written about Bible.
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He calls it a watershed, an origin, a turning point.
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And I still give it to my students as the first piece of criticism to read when they encountered the poems.
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When Tolkien gave his lecture, he was approaching the poet not just as a scholar, but as a literary critic, and I suggest as a creative writer.
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He famously observed that of all Beowulf, we all know that he addressed one rich in many departments.
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It was especially cool anymore, he said.
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It is poor in criticism. Criticism? It is directed to the understanding of a poem.
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I suppose it has been said of Beowulf itself that its weakness weakness lies in placing
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the other important things at the centre and the important things only outer edges.
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This is one of the opinions that I wish specially to consider. I think it profoundly are true of the poet.
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The striking issue of the literature about it by all has been used as a career
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factor probably far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art.
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After all, he Beowulf is a work of art,
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not a text that only belonged as a chapter to all the historians who are excavating it on
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linguistic fossils and hidden legends in the classical tradition that came before him.
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Tolkien lamented that Oasis poetry was usually forgotten, occasionally admitted by a side or sometimes dismissed on the doorstep.
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And while unexpected, guests on the doorstep, whether bearing party invitations or not, can cause all kinds of trouble.
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Tolkien wanted to welcome radio retreat back into the audience, back into the house of Beowulf.
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The problem is, he said, so interesting as poetry in places so powerful that this quite overshadows or content
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as much as might be interested inside the legendary identity of its digital hedgehog.
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And that power comes from a sound of the having from hearing it at all.
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And if I need to call it a way to draw archetypes for a very valuable individual,
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I'd really recommend looking up Benjamin Bachmann's performance on YouTube.
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If he does the first third of the poem. He's a medieval music specialist.
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He performs it with the harp completely off the top of his head. It's absolutely destroyed.
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And the video up at the moment have subtitles, so you can really enjoy that in all its glory.
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So is the sound of the poem, but also the story at the centre Babel device.
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Now Tolkien statements about what we find at the centre I'm on the margins of the poem casts a
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very long shadow and in some ways it's even suggested that the focus has all to all the other way,
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and it can sometimes be challenging to interest students imaginary figures or strange names like rugelach or various tribes,
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like the Visions and the piece of art and get you started on the whole Swedish Jesus conception.
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I'm still unsure of myself, but I think the critique of Tolkien's refocusing of our attention sometimes what this means is points.
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Tolkien is trying to replace one area of focus with the other.
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He's trying to redress the balance of sorting criticism at that point as he recognised himself.
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It is more than its plot. It's the cycle that's also crucial.
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I'll come back to that some of his remarks on translation.
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He said, for example, quote, The comparison of skeleton plots is simply not a critical process at all.
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And what you have is a problem where we try and summarise the story of a particular group of people before I met the children or young adults.
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One of the most iconic economies of all the on and after translation is versions for the children in children's literature versions.
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And so yes, I always asked about these three monster fights,
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but it is also about who is made up of all the regulatory material with which those stories are interlaced.
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And that texture is very much the sort of idea of as a text.
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So to get a flavour of Tolkien's appreciation of the monsters, both as flesh and blood creatures and potential symbolic cause of meaning,
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this is how he describes Grendel, the Dragons, in his selection.
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He says Grendel inhabits the physical world and eats the flesh and loves of men.
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He enters the houses by the doors and doors are always dangerous places in Tolkien, unimaginable danger.
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The dragon wields a physical fire, covetous gold, not souls.
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He is slain with iron in his balance. And Tolkien is especially receptive to the imaginative power of dragons as well he should be.
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He says. Dragon is no idle fancy, whatever may be his origins.
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In fact, the invention of the dragon, the legend is a potent creation of man's imagination, which is significant.
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But as far as it goes,
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and I think without this recognition of the monster's innate glamour and glamour is a word that comes back to the medieval word, real magic.
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You know, I think we wouldn't have this incredible tour de force of of a description from Seamus Heaney in the introduction to his 1999 translation.
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I think it's absolutely fantastic. He says Grendel comes alive in the reader's imagination as a kind of dark breath in the dark,
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a fear of collision with some hard bones and immensely strong Android fright or mixture of Caliban Hoplite,
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while his mother too has a definite brute battering about her creature, slouch and lunge on land, sea, all swept in the water.
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She nevertheless retains a certain no strangeness.
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And if the dragon he writes, there's something glorious in the way he manifests himself a 4th of July,
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a Folger's fire working its path across the night sky.
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He is at once a stratum of the earth and a streamer in the air no painted dragon,
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but a figure of real American power dream like power, one that could easily survive.
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The prejudice rises, but we mention also the word dragon.
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And he describes he talks about Tolkien prophecies and critics Messiah essay in his introduction as epoch making.
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He argues that talking about assumes that the poet has felt his way through the inherited
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material and felt as he's stressed that he serves his way through this inhabited material.
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The fabulous elements in the traditional accounts of a heroic past by a combination of creative intuition,
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a conscious structuring, a derived unity of effects and a balance order.
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So he assumed, in other words,
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that the Battle of Poets was an imaginative project rather than information derived from 19th century folklore and philology.
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And he needs identification. A feeling I think is really crucial, and it's something that both Tolkien I'm about in the share.
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Both of them have thoughts that right through this material and that attitude to it is shaped by the emotions that it stimulates.
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We see this then also supported what, for example,
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Tolkien describes the Christian Beowulf poet's attitude to the paper, the cast of his heroic characters.
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Tolkien cites the quote, The shadow of the paper path despair only as a mood, as an intense emotion of regret is still there in the poem.
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The work of defeated Follett in this world is deeply felt.
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Tolkien identifies the by as emotional engagement with his material.
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Tolkien's own desires and dissatisfactions also come into play,
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both explicitly implicitly in his discussion of and response to the drama in Bibles and the essay on three stories.
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He admits that as a child, and I absolutely am with India, I desire dragons with a profound desire.
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But Tolkien admitted they might say, Look what he did not wish to happen in the neighbourhood intruding.
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From my relatively safe world, I think I'd be fine with that.
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But he admits that the world contained even the imagination of athletes not involved.
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But it was richer and more beautiful at whatever cost of peril, but regrettably encompassed with it.
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I'm talking from the Bible in one state and one reluctant to criticise.
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He did say in the notes of the critics, saying that the problem is not to be blamed for being a problem, but rather for not being broken enough.
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He says there are in the power of very touches of the right kind in which the dragon is real, one with a peaceful life of thought of his own.
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But the Tolkien conception noble approach is to call it us,
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rather the Draper personification of malice, the greed and destruction, the evil side of own life.
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Oh, that's all he does. Well, for the Bible. This is what it should be.
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But his frustration had already produced a creative results whereby Tolkien imagined exactly the right kind of targeting of all people again.
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It's also the critics like Tolkien have set off his manuscript of The Hobbit.
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And of course, that story contains no other than small talking.
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Weirdly, Dawkins, who is more than a match for Batman or indeed the name of a Bible,
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and lots of critics have pointed out the ways in which the Battle of the Dragon on the story sort of slip into smiles,
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unconscious in the practical inside information.
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But Bilbo has entered the mountain as smoke is described as having, quote,
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an uneasy dream in which a warrior altogether insignificant in size but provided with a bitter sword and great courage, fitted most unpleasantly.
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So somehow is having this dream like a kind of ghost story or a premonition of Bilbo about to about to enter the mountain of Tolkien's small ways.
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The other big problem that arises from Beowulf in the published version of the monsters and critics,
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such Tolkien called Tolkien comments rather obliquely the quote more than an old poem in recent years,
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since by overstate so often the dominion of the students origins, use of poetry has been inspired by Beowulf, but no less.
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I know why it goes to. So he's recognising that strategy's already inspiring new creative writings.
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And in the original he doesn't say more about that in the published version of what actually in the original
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manuscript that Michael Brown's has edited the two versions of so brilliantly and is very critical of Tolkien,
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including the two poems that he alluded to here, what is by himself and is the you want a gold out of the London poem.
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And that's a that's a line from Babel describing the gold of man of law that is wild around like outer,
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which means something like incantation or spells.
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The other poem that Tolkien alludes to is by his friend The thought of Magic with C.S. Lewis supposed Dragon.
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I want to talk about those thoughts in detail.
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But if you're if you are interested in the appendix in Holy [INAUDIBLE],
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these are the recently published translation available has a fantastic description of how that poem
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people right in the 1920s and then works on and revised the role of that poem in developing his ideas.
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And it's a really fascinating question. But I do want to quote the way in which Tolkien plans to introduce the poems in my own writings essays.
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He said, I will quote you, though this may seem an unpalatable digression in the amount of support by all poets to modern poets on the docket,
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the two together for all their defects, especially in the first,
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I suppose so seems to me more important for that criticism for which they say when all that very much has been written for that purpose,
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I think something she said.
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But it shows how Tolkien really believes that creative results can and should be important for approaching the thinking about it,
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for reading, for the power in 1979 Tolkien's art.
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But I also James Schultz notes that he told his prose non-fiction his monster is the critic solely prefers history and philology on approach.
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So I'll say that in contrast to what she calls the alive and joyful imagination of the artist, he.
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With him. Tolkien identified this alive and joyful imagination of the artist.
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It's exactly what we see applied in Tolkien spiral Criticism.
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Let me give you an example of one of my favourite moments in Tolkien commentary on Beowulf.
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Translation is this discussion of the introduction of the dragon and the back story of the trash.
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Not talking perceptively Comments in the notes.
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I think the Bible operation talking Tolkien's Thomas Tolkien's translation available I think is amazing.
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It's a fantastic piece of work, really very useful for me and a real kind of treasure in wrapping up with all the commentaries,
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all talking about the fact that it's just fascinating.
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And one of the things that he picks out in the introduction of the Dragon episode is the
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way in which the introduction of both the thief who steals from the dragon and the dragon,
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he's treated by the Bible in a very moving way.
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And it's remarkable how he says, for the sin of the show, both the the wretched fugitive and the dragon,
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and explains that the effect of the poet's kind of serpentine introduction of the fact is equal right but wrong.
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That is, quote, characteristic of old English as we know it as a whole.
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That the scene in the past few months into an elegy in retrospect on the Forgotten Lords who
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place that gold into the Lord and then died one by one until it was in fact most of us.
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Right. So almost as soon as we hear about the dragon in the fact of the whole world,
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we get the events of Last Survivor, how the treasure came to be in the mines in which it's found.
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Well, Tolkien, we use that this quote occupies the emotional space between the pondering up the hold and the curiously vivid
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and perceptive lines of the dragon snuffling in absolute rage and injured greed when he saw this upset.
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And for me, this feeling that he's created for all the treasure and a sense of its art history,
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what he says is what raises the whole thing right above a mere treasure story and just another dragon tale, he concludes.
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The whole thing is sombre, tragic, sinister and curiously real.
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I hope he opens up a real empathy in this reading,
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and it offers a cool counterpoint to some of his rather more dismissive comments about the evil monsters and critics, as they once had gotten,
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wasn't frightfully good of me, and it shows how imagination and compassion or fellow feeling can lead to productive on attentive,
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close readings of the original power because of reading spirit as close to it.
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Rather than taking this away and more from places in a 20th and 21st century have also responded to
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the heroic feelings about the Beowulf poet's treatment of the monsters within that translation.
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So that's why the Battle for the Dragon. A particular case in point.
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Here is the American translator on Hadley, whose new translation was published in 2020 after the 2018 novel adaptation of the Story.
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Meanwhile, as the title character demonstrates, Headley is interested in babel's real life or woman of water scandal.
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But the former me, a wife, only a half sister, Headley's feminist perspective on the power of one major gap and sulking,
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small city critics aside, is Grendel's mother herself.
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Tolkien says that he will quite confine himself mainly to the monsters Scrabble.
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And if you read the essay without knowing, you might have no idea that it even exists.
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Unfortunately, Tolkien's empathy for the dragon does not extend to Grant his mother.
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He doesn't even see her as structurally significant.
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He argues that the poem is about an opposition of ends and beginnings.
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Contrast the description of two moments in a great life,
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rising and setting the elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and death.
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And he says that he thinks the dragon is a fitting end for Beowulf, the hero, just as Grendel is the perfect beginning.
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Now I was talking about her mother is the perfect middle and surprising for an essay that
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is so interested in sentence that Tolkien neglects the female monster of the whole story.
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He only mentions in the essays Appendix on Religious titles.
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Firstly, to note that both Grendel and his mother according all her devils.
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And then, drawing on Rendell's physicality as a monster, he cites in brackets.
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Grendel's mother is naturally described separately, treated in precisely the terms she is with Edo's.
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All that with such a woman, a noble woman, and he says, rising to the inhuman.
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Mia we will go and work some of those terms later on.
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Sometimes Tolkien's own translations really amplify this idea with the of the inhuman sometimes in the way that I think is not quite not in the text.
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Thus Tolkien defends his argument to all the proxy forces by asserting that we do not deny the worth of the hero by accepting Revel in the Dragon.
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I think when it comes to trying to smother it, maybe that we have to slightly recalibrate what we think about Beowulf invades her home.
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Just as Randall invaded Eros, I was pointed out in a memorable essay by old English.
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Trilling Well, I always wanted to fight Grendel.
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We all absolutely went up to the box to fight Grendel's mother, despite the fact that apparently her wolf is the less because she is a woman.
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And the marginalisation of Rendell's love is a major driver of the power empathy that we find in the way that we see translation.
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And in fact, in her introduction, she begins by declaring the, quote, Love of God with Beowulf began with Grendel's mother.
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The moment I encountered her in an illustrated compendium of Monsters, a slithery greenish entity someday naked in a swamp, knight in hand.
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And how do you have to have said enough?
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Does he have to write it without the surrounding cast of characters?
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Randall and Beowulf. He is a queen, just a woman with a weapon all by herself in the centre of the page.
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And perhaps she then describes the shock that she felt years later when she realised that, quote,
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Mother was not only not for the main event, but also to so many people an extension of Grendel rather than the character herself.
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She isn't even really quite an extension of Randall in invoking blessing and in the creative.
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It's all his creative texts and finds at the end of a published translation in the folktale.
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So much so in one of the versions. The mother of the monster.
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Exactly Grinder For the monster, Grendel warned his mother doesn't come to take vengeance for her son.
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But if you have a other version, she does. But in the seconds of the two lines about all that Tolkien writes,
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that I think was a really fascinating moment because he gives Grendel's mother a
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voice and she almost seems to the prophesy the fall of Denmark through a compromise.
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So I think Tolkien is starting to move toward rethinking his approach toward this mother.
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A little thing that Maria doesn't have any particular attention to in her introduction.
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Is the tone of the talk you identified in all of the in the question what does much of Michael's honour and that is for the word of.
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It's just one of the most debated tones for the destruction of not in the power to look at it just in by with an all black man.
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I frequently used to refer to a formidable opponent.
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So what is it like 1259 of the poem Grendel's mother is referred to as It is often brief.
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It refers to a noblewoman queen, while theatrical does and which makes woman so happy,
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she suggests we should talk like this formidable noblewoman role, as we see in quite a scholarly edition wretch, or also a woman.
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In his posthumously published translation, Toki translates over US bears destroyed in the form of a woman.
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I think he's using female form of ogre that because he uses Ogre to describe Grendel earlier in his translation.
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And I do think that fierce captures the power of of a proxy destroyer makes translation a little bit more pejorative.
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But I think he captures the force a great deal softer when you translate lines 58 to 90 grams work here with Mystic,
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He comes out as the monstrous woman of the sea.
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She will fish out of the deep. I'm assuming he's getting monstrous from mating.
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And so from Mighty Lear wife is the woman of the male waters throughout a guy who is.
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Is this a disaster? What is a feminine holocaust?
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Describes often translated as Wolf of the deep wolves are often used as symbols of outlaws in old English literature.
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According to the dictionary of Old English long term enemies, a cursed female creature of the deep because, well, it means evil.
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Cursed went wrong. Hadley refers to Grendel as an outlaw in her exceptional warrior woman.
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In her translation of Ten Line, here she translates one exclusive note Queen The Mighty Me A life I take,
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said Knightly, to refer both the thought on his walk walked the territory for 50 years.
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Because what I would like to do as king and one of the things that I've been exploring in my
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work on ground with some of the other women in the poem is thinking about her as a queen.
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She she rules her whole. She operates as kind of anti queen figure, just as the dragon is a kind of abdicate what she calls his holds his gold.
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And a lot of Grendel's mother is in many ways isolated to be the it she does share
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in a kind of emotional community with the other queens in battle because she,
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too, is a grieving mother as many of the other women are.
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And the other thing, I think that how do you what do you do with the pieces here is pushing back at the idea of her being coerced.
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We know that gradually stopped because he is descendants of K, the first murderer,
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but ultimately it's the murderous actions of men that drove Randall's mother into this tormented family tree.
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And it also renounces the girl's mother, doesn't leave and go on the night he rampages.
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So does I get the sense that she sort of keeps it herself?
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Minds are ambitious until she's required to take revenge for Gravel's death in lieu of him, the father to do so.
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The grumbles. All the space is invaded by rivals.
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We see this in her social media was described as a neath sailor, a hostile whole, and so it is imagined through the framework of a hole.
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Beowulf is a sailor, I guess for a whole guest.
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Of course, you don't really ask for invading territory and this ties in to the way in which marriage of all that has he represents the dragon.
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I'm worried about this whole piece praised for the and its efforts to encourage sympathy for the Dragon.
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I hope this translation creates a cross connection between the grandmother and the Dragon by imagining
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them both as female characters whose homes have been invaded when animals enters the as she translates.
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Yes, she felt his presence in her room and knew a man from the above was invading love.
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And that's what really in the struggle she is had happening. And that's a really interesting moment because in the original old English,
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the poet actually uses the male pronoun and says on to say, So he discards.
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And Hadley happily translates, Yes.
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She credits reinstating a female pronoun and couching that discovery as a kind of emotional recognition rather than just a ban on sexual slavery.
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That kind of knowledge and some critics have interpreted that use of male pronouns
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in this section as indications of the poet's discomfort with my mother's gender.
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Only about I try to rule the whole in his way of talking slightly sidesteps the issue of gender.
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My having my having that creature perceived that smiles of some of those questions when it comes to the stealing of the cup from the Dragon sword,
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I think deliberately gender switches the dragon in the old English.
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The passage where the thief steals the cup, it's half damaged,
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but it probably reads that he was busy at night while sleeping as a result of the thief captor or cutting on people.
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I learned that he is older than me, swollen with rage.
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Grendel was missing a broken arm Early in the poem, Tolkien translates this The dragon did not, after in silence,
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that albeit he had been cheated in his sleep by the thieves cutting, and that the legal that he was wroth.
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Indeed, this sense of trickery is even more poignant.
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It had this obsession because she could already the anger,
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but the fear and the shame but women might feel when attacked in their own homes, she translates.
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She rose, raging, grieving, though to cry out was to confess.
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She'd been stripped while sleeping. Later, when the properties described sleeping upon it thought that it's more than just an alehouse and a stone,
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a combination of house of ancient treasures.
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The treasure port is a bet highlighting the personal, even gender response to which the dragon and certainly Grendel's mother subjected the poet.
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And I really love this passage because it has little hints of Tolkien as he writes,
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The fault was more than a treasury, piles of preciousness nested beneath the coils of the sword servant.
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It was immense. And of course, Precious is called out for the sake of Tolkien.
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Why? She describes the thief who wrapped trembling fingers around the first small shining skin.
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He found sweat that also feels to me like a knot to build on the ring.
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And so King's influence as a theorist to play with translation was certainly in Hadley's mind when she worked on her version In her introduction.
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She goes from talking all of us by criticism, his remarks on how to translate for the poem.
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So she quotes Tolkien, asserting that if you wish to translate, not rewrite fables translated, not rewrite.
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So he says, your language must be literary and traditional, not because it is not a long one,
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it's how it was made or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient,
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but because the diction about was poetical, archaic, artificial, if you will, in the day when the poem was made.
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And how do you comments in response to this that Tolkien and I wouldn't have
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agreed when it comes to the sort of language required for translation of Beowulf,
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but sections of literary, traditional language very widely, depending on who's doing the scene.
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And so he had a lot of things to call you, but I do share.
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But we agree that they are the originals. That's what they must be reckoned with.
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We see Tolkien is like like Kings of the Cool,
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and it's so surprising in some ways you have this language of sort of knights in medieval chivalry, but isn't available to be called a pre.
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Tolkien sees a kind of incipient should our culture at play in the power?
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He thinks they will have the complication with the Knights of the Round table.
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But of course all modern English word is not as capacious as the old school.
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So I think Tolkien partly draws on that lexical tradition in knights and lights and questing and partly to give us that texture.
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I think he is right that Tolkien probably would not have agreed with her approach to translation,
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not least because a few sentences earlier in that same essay, Tolkien declared a warning against colloquialism and false modesty and Tolkien.
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I think that comes through partly because he slightly fears that part of the language of modernity.
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But of course the courage of the trivial might be, as he calls it, to a self-conscious, self-conscious and often silly laughter.
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He says the things we are dealing with here are serious.
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Moving on full of high salt tots sentences, the English word that we find in Chaucer were a sort of moral doctrine out of the sovereignty.
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Now, she argues that her modern style is at the service of poetic voice and communicative clarity.
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And she argues for the power of modern slang or new cultural context.
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She states that language is a living thing. What it all means. It means bones and dots and fossils here next to some newborns.
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I was interested in contemporary slang on India, as I am in New York.
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As she says, if you're looking for a language of nice romance, you can find plenty of other translations.
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Now, has this translation is that, if you will, probably no is famous for its translation of the opening of Front Row row.
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How will we still know how to speak of kings? In the old days, everyone knew what men were brave, bold, glory bound only stories.
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Now some display date and song hoarded for hungry time, I think.
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How do you just write? Tell me. Have so many got the feel of the original and the alliterative pattern with the phrase the poem The Glory Bound.
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She sounding inspired a song that's haunted for how many times.
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But she also sets out staked out new territory.
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They might be on these stories now.
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She said to silence all present moments, a moment where she fears that perhaps we don't know how to speak about things anymore.
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I totally try to write a bit on lies about what men are all now running around involved in the time they were.
355
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What was all they know? I mean, my heart, particularly at the moment, given the conflict war taking place in the world.
356
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While the opening role also enables having to do is that she talks about the way that to her how it feels like a
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sort of competitive conversation I've often heard between men the kinds of conversations that men have the balls,
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she says. Competition that hides aggression between behind brotherly bonds.
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She says depending on tone, Rove can run the family for fun.
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And she repeats the word other places in the pub where she suggested it reminds us of the ways in which men can afford or deny
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one another power safety by using coded language to raise women from power structures by speaking culturally only to other men.
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Hadley's role on the original poet squat is a call to attention, but whose attention?
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All we paradoxically, all included, is that we, all of us, do.
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We share these particular stories, all all the other stories for which we are not yet given proper attention.
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Until his comments on translation were also a catalyst for Scottish progress.
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And with Morgan. And his discussion of style in the introduction to his 1952 translation,
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which was one of the first translations by a practising poet published via poetry publication.
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If you want to go away, we talking about translating Bible.
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I also really recommend. And Morgan's opening is also thinking about translation.
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And Morgan tuned in to the poem's discussion of Holmes social relationships to for a different reason,
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to having Edwin Morgan describe his translation as his unwritten walk away.
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He translated it. We came back from the Second World War after he was finding it very difficult to access his poetic voice again.
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And his translation is wonderful for its humane and compassionate depiction of the camaraderie of thousands of soldiers.
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It's already moving in places as Morgan counters Tolkien's arguments about modernity for two reasons.
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Firstly, he says, while it is indeed true that the original section of the poem was a register reason for the poetry,
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even if not, how started is lost in translation.
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He says, quote, The background of the poem cannot be modernised.
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The social systems, the entertainments, the supernatural beings, the battles in the weapons,
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and in the inescapable, inescapable bedrock vocabulary of Caine.
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Lord rightly, goals get immediate codes of male talking and barriers that the 20th century reader will find
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enough that is remote from his own experience without any super radical linguistic quantum crank.
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So we can all do without the mommy pressing and all of that,
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all of that is that all of that dignity and all kinds of sense of what about the past is that without it needs to be added in the language of his use.
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I'm fundamentally for the moment, he argues that quote was that of the tradition of the original poetry may have been the
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translator's duty is as much to slit his own age as it is to represent the voice of past age.
386
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These are indeed equal tasks, he suggests.
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The communication must take place. The nerves must sometimes take over and flush out immediately.
388
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So that's what the translation is doing its job when you read it and it just feels as long as the original I would be, I would agree more.
389
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I think if a translation doesn't in some way light a kind of beaker within us and
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give us a sense of the feeling for the passive voice from the past has been ignited,
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that it isn't necessarily working as a poetic translation.
392
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I think that's something that the original poet knew and of the he recognised what it looks like.
393
00:44:53,120 --> 00:45:01,030
It's fascinating how his discussion of the structure of in impulses is increasing, especially if he picks up this one.
394
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But he says might be the only potential weakness in the power of this organisation.
395
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And this is what he calls the lonely capitulation, the record labels.
396
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So this is what I also call a regular mother, and he has up to the easiest table that whole section of being lonely.
397
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His he says, Wow. It was like to figure out exactly how that ally brilliant, how do they go about it?
398
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Said, Well, let me tell you. And he's talking only about the old schools and tells him about political situation, about the marriage alliance.
399
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It's going to take place between Friday morning and another time he's feeling about the work.
400
00:45:42,260 --> 00:45:45,930
So he gets a really interesting sort of political insight from Magnus.
401
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I'm told he suggests that in this week she calls it that it's coming down to older folk time.
402
00:45:54,710 --> 00:45:58,540
But seriously, I was working with a talking.
403
00:45:58,560 --> 00:46:04,820
It also likes this. I've seen comments about the value of Fables bringing the tale of Grendel back to the patrons,
404
00:46:05,390 --> 00:46:09,530
he says, as they will, Samson would like soul and tells his story.
405
00:46:09,860 --> 00:46:18,590
He sets his fleet firm again in the land of his own people and is no longer in danger of appearing at the end of each and every adventure.
406
00:46:19,310 --> 00:46:22,400
Exiled traveller and slave. What do you hope? He said?
407
00:46:22,400 --> 00:46:29,930
He told me back to the straight, back to his discussion of the bipartite structure of the poem in these two parts.
408
00:46:30,380 --> 00:46:37,240
But what he recognises here is the importance of bringing the story hope of opening a door to want
409
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to help inspire images through which Beowulf can set into each kingdom to step into our world.
410
00:46:44,360 --> 00:46:48,709
When the plot in Tolkien's traditional language or in the modern dress of recent
411
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translators is the fabulous allegory and the illustration of all this in critics,
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00:46:53,780 --> 00:47:02,889
Tolkien described a man who had. Is it a field in which it's an accumulation of old stone halves of an old hole and some of that to be
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used in building a house in which you have actually lived and some of which should be built into a tower.
414
00:47:09,280 --> 00:47:14,020
But the nonsensical about how without looking for hidden carvings and inscriptions,
415
00:47:14,350 --> 00:47:21,850
all these other animals went around for all this time, building material from and scrambling around in the soil.
416
00:47:22,090 --> 00:47:27,220
Not only do they neglect to expose themselves, they miss the point of the tower itself.
417
00:47:27,640 --> 00:47:34,270
And Tolkien says from the top of that tower, the man had been able to look out a policy.
418
00:47:34,480 --> 00:47:40,780
That was the point of the tower. You can see the sea from it's almost half a mile sometimes.
419
00:47:40,810 --> 00:47:42,730
Tolkien spoke of focussed attention,
420
00:47:43,180 --> 00:47:49,320
neglected parts of the poem to which we are now responding urgently to the present day, such as the role of the sun.
421
00:47:49,810 --> 00:47:56,950
I do think that a lasting legacy of his work on the Current has been to open up really important vistas and viewpoints
422
00:47:57,160 --> 00:48:04,000
from which we can look out to the sea and think about what we learn from seeing the world from the storyteller.
423
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A fable and a deep rooted drone. Hadley concludes the introduction to her translation with a similar image.
424
00:48:10,420 --> 00:48:11,499
She views the poems,
425
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various stories as lighthouses and conjuring up an image of poring over maps of the world when she was a child with a Happy Dragons mornings.
426
00:48:21,100 --> 00:48:28,810
She writes, quote, All that imaginary map I added story lighthouses that I want to look over here at lighthouses.
427
00:48:29,080 --> 00:48:34,510
Here is a safe of how I feel about this evolved. Here is a spot to watch out for Out here.
428
00:48:34,510 --> 00:48:41,380
What happens out here with the stories of those dragons on those heroes and more on their stories that haven't yet been reckoned with.
429
00:48:41,680 --> 00:48:44,830
Stories hidden within the stories that we think we know.
430
00:48:45,220 --> 00:48:49,210
It takes you, readers, writers and souls to find them.
431
00:48:50,140 --> 00:48:56,230
I think the legacy of Torquay's work on my TO has been to encourage us to take steps onto
432
00:48:56,230 --> 00:49:02,830
that road that leads ever on into and through the original Bible and insurance stories.
433
00:49:03,280 --> 00:49:07,600
Tolkien might be naively a medievalist. He made me a creative person.
434
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He gave me permission to make the dragons my own.
435
00:49:11,350 --> 00:49:13,810
To become a shield titan and a world hoarder.
436
00:49:14,080 --> 00:49:23,410
I'll always be eternally grateful to him for the rich and perilous imaginative worlds that he opened up here in Oxford and in Middle-Earth by being.
437
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I.
