Sorry I didn’t answer earlier, I was away for a while. I agree most great works do have something universal that cut across culture, but I’m still convinced they also have something peculiar to their period that doesn’t come across if you don’t have a minimum knowledge of the genre or of the culture they stem from. Would someone with no understanding whatsoever of tragedy or epic be able to fully appreciate Maldon or Othello, I’m not sure (I would answer more precisely about what you say about India but I'm being a bit lazy tonight, sorry!). I think it is the sign of great works that they are universal enough to appeal to almost any audience anywhere at first contact, AND that the more you learn about them the richer they reveal themselves to be, and the more powerful. Speaking about that passage from Maldon you quote, sure enough something comes across even in translation, but how much more richer the text is when : one has a notion of what a comitatus is, or what the vikings are doing there, of what’s the status of a lordless exile in Anglo-Saxon heroic culture...etc. Even better if one can access the text in the original and appreciate the sound patterns. Not to mention that « howl » as a translation for gnornian (to lament, to mourn) is not completely appropriate and seems to give into the cliché of the fierce and somewhat savage Germanic warrior instead of conveying mourning. Actually the whole « let him howl for ever » for « He may lament forever » (a mæg gnornian) is a bit strange.
I think Baudelaire explained that idea much better than me when he said that a work of art had a part of eternity (the universal thing that crosses across cultures) and modernity (the thing that’s particular to its own contemporary culture) and that some works have one aspect more than the other, so that the most « modern » tend to be forgotten after a while even if they were a huge success whereas the most « eternal » may be rediscovered long after they were produced, even if they were a complete failure at the time.
The best gift one can have is intelligent opponents. You have actually managed to understand something which I would gladly rewrite now, since I wrote it while collapsing with sleep and felt I was almost incoherent. I think we have argued ourselves nearly into agreement, at least there is nothing I want to pick you up on.
You are right about gnornian, and my translation missed an important point; one, indeed, which ties up with my interpretation of the whole emotional impact of that great passage. If you look at my response to jamesenge, upthread, you will see that I argued that it reflects the personal quality of social authority in that culture. It has to do with something that came out a few weeks back in this same blog, when I was debating early European Christianity with eliskimo. She said:
...the everyday people pretty much could and did believe what they wanted because the Church was engaged in a trickle-down theory of conversion (opposite what it practiced in the early days). Monks went to the warrior-kings like Clovis, not Joe farmer in the field, or Bob carpenter in the workshop. Between 950 and 1050 all those places you list may have become *officially* Christian, but there is a difference between that and truly Christianizing the population.
I would say of those places, the Hiberno-Norse ("Irish Vikings") probably experienced the most complete conversion, since it was coming from the ground-up (from the influence of thier already Christian neighbors*) rather than the top down. Iceland, Denmark and Norway are definately a different story. The concept of "Christ on land; Thor at sea" is well documented (see, for instance, Helgi the Lean in the Landnamabok) and demonstrates both the considerable ambivalance about Christianity in areas where the elite made professions of faith, but nobody bothered to check with the laity, and that nobody was bothering to check with the rank and file in either a positive (teaching) or negative (punishing) sense.
I replied:
... the "top-down" and "bottom-up" perspectives you describe in northern Europe were hardly mutually exclusive. You have to remember the dimension of the societies in question. You are not talking about a large state such as the Byzantine empire, not even about a confederacy of vast provincial landholders such as underlay the Frankish states. In England in the seventh century, in Scandinavia in the tenth, a king was the local boss, and he and his comitatus pretty much exhausted every man of importance in the kingdom - and most kingdoms were barely as large as a modern county, and not as populous. Once the royal family has been converted, the comitatus will become converted out of personal loyalty and individual influence; after all, they had been as much responsible for choosing the king as the king for choosing them, and their loyalty and affection was mutual. (Remember the speeches after the Ealdorman's fall in The battle of Maldon, written almost certainly by an eyewitness: the personal emotion, the direct and uncomplicated love for one's lord, can be felt.) And once these men had converted, pretty much all of society had; everyone was bound to them as they were bound to the king, by economic and personal links that strongly encouraged them to agree.
And the fact that the Landnamabok takes the trouble of mentioning Helgi the Lean's peculiar double religion hardly proves that it was common. One of the rules of textual interpretation is that common things are not mentioned, and uncommon things are. Why is that the practice of this one settler, out of dozens, is mentioned? Probably because it was unique, and remembered as such.
Not altogether all in order, but these thoughts relate to the importance of gnornian as "mourn, howl with grief" - in the sense that anyone who does not defend his lord's body and avenge it will suffer for it personally, in his own deepest feeling and affections.
I agree most great works do have something universal that cut across culture, but I’m still convinced they also have something peculiar to their period that doesn’t come across if you don’t have a minimum knowledge of the genre or of the culture they stem from.
Would someone with no understanding whatsoever of tragedy or epic be able to fully appreciate Maldon or Othello, I’m not sure (I would answer more precisely about what you say about India but I'm being a bit lazy tonight, sorry!).
I think it is the sign of great works that they are universal enough to appeal to almost any audience anywhere at first contact, AND that the more you learn about them the richer they reveal themselves to be, and the more powerful.
Speaking about that passage from Maldon you quote, sure enough something comes across even in translation, but how much more richer the text is when : one has a notion of what a comitatus is, or what the vikings are doing there, of what’s the status of a lordless exile in Anglo-Saxon heroic culture...etc. Even better if one can access the text in the original and appreciate the sound patterns.
Not to mention that « howl » as a translation for gnornian (to lament, to mourn) is not completely appropriate and seems to give into the cliché of the fierce and somewhat savage Germanic warrior instead of conveying mourning. Actually the whole « let him howl for ever » for « He may lament forever » (a mæg gnornian) is a bit strange.
I think Baudelaire explained that idea much better than me when he said that a work of art had a part of eternity (the universal thing that crosses across cultures) and modernity (the thing that’s particular to its own contemporary culture) and that some works have one aspect more than the other, so that the most « modern » tend to be forgotten after a while even if they were a huge success whereas the most « eternal » may be rediscovered long after they were produced, even if they were a complete failure at the time.
Reply
You are right about gnornian, and my translation missed an important point; one, indeed, which ties up with my interpretation of the whole emotional impact of that great passage. If you look at my response to jamesenge, upthread, you will see that I argued that it reflects the personal quality of social authority in that culture. It has to do with something that came out a few weeks back in this same blog, when I was debating early European Christianity with eliskimo. She said:
...the everyday people pretty much could and did believe what they wanted because the Church was engaged in a trickle-down theory of conversion (opposite what it practiced in the early days). Monks went to the warrior-kings like Clovis, not Joe farmer in the field, or Bob carpenter in the workshop. Between 950 and 1050 all those places you list may have become *officially* Christian, but there is a difference between that and truly Christianizing the population.
I would say of those places, the Hiberno-Norse ("Irish Vikings") probably experienced the most complete conversion, since it was coming from the ground-up (from the influence of thier already Christian neighbors*) rather than the top down. Iceland, Denmark and Norway are definately a different story. The concept of "Christ on land; Thor at sea" is well documented (see, for instance, Helgi the Lean in the Landnamabok) and demonstrates both the considerable ambivalance about Christianity in areas where the elite made professions of faith, but nobody bothered to check with the laity, and that nobody was bothering to check with the rank and file in either a positive (teaching) or negative (punishing) sense.
I replied:
... the "top-down" and "bottom-up" perspectives you describe in northern Europe were hardly mutually exclusive. You have to remember the dimension of the societies in question. You are not talking about a large state such as the Byzantine empire, not even about a confederacy of vast provincial landholders such as underlay the Frankish states. In England in the seventh century, in Scandinavia in the tenth, a king was the local boss, and he and his comitatus pretty much exhausted every man of importance in the kingdom - and most kingdoms were barely as large as a modern county, and not as populous. Once the royal family has been converted, the comitatus will become converted out of personal loyalty and individual influence; after all, they had been as much responsible for choosing the king as the king for choosing them, and their loyalty and affection was mutual. (Remember the speeches after the Ealdorman's fall in The battle of Maldon, written almost certainly by an eyewitness: the personal emotion, the direct and uncomplicated love for one's lord, can be felt.) And once these men had converted, pretty much all of society had; everyone was bound to them as they were bound to the king, by economic and personal links that strongly encouraged them to agree.
And the fact that the Landnamabok takes the trouble of mentioning Helgi the Lean's peculiar double religion hardly proves that it was common. One of the rules of textual interpretation is that common things are not mentioned, and uncommon things are. Why is that the practice of this one settler, out of dozens, is mentioned? Probably because it was unique, and remembered as such.
Not altogether all in order, but these thoughts relate to the importance of gnornian as "mourn, howl with grief" - in the sense that anyone who does not defend his lord's body and avenge it will suffer for it personally, in his own deepest feeling and affections.
Reply
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