Like A Sparrow, or, Sing With Me, If It's Just For Today--

[bellatrys]

Apropos of - not nothing, but the new Beowulf film which I haven't seen and don't know if I will out of sheer masochistic duty (it would be one thing, if y'all and I could go MST3K it together IRL) and someone in comments somewhere around wondering just how plausible it would be to have a bunch of Viking warriors sitting around drinking beer and

Comments

[nenya_kanadka]

The years have passed like swift draughts of the sweet mead in high halls beyond the West....

Am going to have to look up that song--I really like the lyrics! (But was not yet born in 1973, and have, alas, far too little a musical library.)

[lyorn]

I love that song, mostly because it's immense fun to sing. The harmonies are fancy enough to be interesting without being difficult, it needs some power but not only power, and it's easy to mean it. Although it's hell to do it on an acustic guitar...

[sartorias]

Depends where one was, I guess. That year I moved to Isla Vista, in the wake of bank burnings. The streets were full of drug burnouts, still wearing the beauty of youth (though that would change fast) as they held their hands out for "the people" to support them. Everyone pointed out the blind ones who'd dropped double doses of acid and lay on a grassy hill in the middle of town staring at the sun, tripping, to wake up with thoroughly burned out retinas. Supposedly their families had cast them off. The town was full of packs of skinny dogs, half-tamed, who'd been adopted for a semester, kerchief tied round their necks--and then abandoned when the kids had to move back home

[evilstorm]

I'm watching Beowulf today! I expect a few good laughs. To reread the poem just before I go into the movie or not, that is the question...

Also, yay, you use the Gummere translation too, that's always been my favourite (Nobel prize or not, Heaney has never done it for me).

[lyorn]

I'm watching Beowulf today!

Review? Because I found the trailers so horrible (like some badly-aged ten year old ego shooter game) that I doubt I want to shell out money to see that thing on the big screen...

caveat: I'm not a good reviewer, I just ramble

[evilstorm]

The verdict...is pretty much that I want Neil Gaiman to get off whatever drugs he's on and to go back to things like Stardust. Or maybe it's not his fault, but eh.

In a nutshell, it's not what you'd want Beowulf to be, it's completely lost the epic feel, notwithstanding grand action sequences. Er, major spoilers from here on in, obviously. For whatever reason, the writers tried to make Beowulf...mundane? human? something like that, except they did it wrong, and instead of magnificent old world angst he just ends up being sad and feeble and destroyed (in the second half, anyway). None of the characters are particularly sympathetic, Wealtheow is wispy and distant and just untouchable (except for one, one brief scene where she made me grin), Beowulf is a macho hero in the first half but without the bombastic crack, Hrothgar is a bloody drunk (wtf?!), Wiglaf is comic relief and incidentally the only character I could sorta like. There are a lot of nice little nods to the time period, like the two guys discussing the new Roman god whilst

Re: caveat: I'm not a good reviewer, I just ramble

[deiseach]

I saw one review which said the older Beowulf is having an affair with a teenager - is this true?

I mean, I can maybe see this if they want to make it 'reason old geezer goes off dragon-slaying is because he wants to recapture glory years of being monster slayer' but come on!

Sounds like the perfect film to watch for purposes of mockery whilst devouring a takeaway after stumbling in post-pub night out...

[therealsherbs]

I studied the poem in the original at Uni and the general consensus of opinion is that the Christian elements were added later.

Later than what?

[bellatrys]

There's only one MS of it in existence (and I doubt you actually got to study the Cotton MS! tho' if you did you were very lucky), which is a heck of a little to try to hang a framework of its development on to, and the very age of that one lonely original is highly debated.

There may well have been an existing story of Beowulf vs. Grendel hanging around, that someone in one of the AS kingdoms finally wrote down, with updated pop culture refs, somewhere between 700 CE and 1066. Or it could be an Original Story that some fan created to fit into their cultural heritage of Scyld and Finnsburgh and so on. We just don't have anything to go on. I mean, there's external *and* internal textual evidence for "The Song of Roland" being an updated version of a much older story - about an entirely different war against entirely different enemies, but Beo. just sits out there by itself, there's no historical chronicle we can factcheck it against of real Scandinavian kings being harrassed by critters aqueous and firebreathing, there's a strand of

Re: Later than what?

[therealsherbs]

Fair point, maybe I didn't phrase it particularly well. What I meant was, that the references to The Almighty were probably not in the original oral tradition story. Whether the nature of the passage was much the same, but without any Christian reference is up for debate. Its just that Beowulf, Like Gawain & the Green Knight and countless other early tales probably predate the widespread popularity and power of the church that would have seen them altered to fit.

Re: Later than what?

[deiseach]

Mmmm - but that makes it sound much more like conscious propaganda than what probably went on, which is that people hung on to their favourite stories/music/customs and added in or on the Christian elements

1973

[lyorn]

... I remember a very hot sommer, and a winter without snow. We had a puppy dog, I read my first "real" books, liked to dress up as an (American) Indian (with the image taken from popular movies) and wanted to learn to ride and shoot a bow when I grew up. And listened to children's songs from all over Europe on vinyl LPs. We had just moved, and my mother had got some new stuff, so I got a lot of her old things, among them a record player and a photo camera. I still got the photos from back then. Mostly it's sky on them, because I always pointed the camera too high. We had no rock music in the house. Shelves of classical, some children's songs, some Beatles, some Jazz, but only because my uncles were playing in a Big Band.

Re: 1973

[therealsherbs]

you could be describing my 1973 too, except the record player still belonged to my mother and we didn't have a dog. Music was either vinyl and consisted of folk music from around the world, children's songs from Sweden and Albania, some jazz and some ragtime; or played on the piano by my mum with us singing. Our house and garden was slowly emerging from 10 years of utter neglect and provided endless opportunities for playing make-believe games, assisted by our huge and varied dressing-up box.