Gloming Dark: Beowulf shortfic

[ineptshieldmaid]

Or: In which I abandon my standards at the behest of goblinpaladin.

Title: Gloming Dark (Yeah, uh. Didn't know what to title it so I followed the grand old Medievalist principle of naming the text by the first noun phrase therein.)
Fandom: Beowulf (Various eds & trans used- Klaeber's ed; Liuzza's trans; Heaney's trans.)
Characters: Beowulf, Unferth and Wiglaf

Comments

[goblinpaladin]

Uh...wow.

Although, Wiglaf himself only appears during Beowulf's reign as king, so don't feel too bad for certain teacher-types.

[goblinpaladin]

It felt very Beowulfian, if Unferth is meaner than I'd like.

[ineptshieldmaid]

I can't make nice upstanding Anglo-Saxon heroes go in for teh buttsex. They just won't do it. I could perhaps have written a more sympathetic Unferth, but by that time, it would've been impossible to get him interested in manlysex.

Er. Not that it came out as anything worth the title of 'sex', in the end. But that's the only way I could get any of them to think about it- as a matter of power and shame.

[goblinpaladin]

Hey, it works better this way- far more medieval than the usual happy, fluffy, hand-holding buttsex that slashers write when writing medieval slash.

I think there'd be ways to do it in longer pieces.

[miss_morland]

I love how dark it is, without ever being explicit - it's very well handled, I think.:-)

[ineptshieldmaid]

I can't make Anglo-Saxons have explicit sex. They just refuse. They also refuse to have consensual homosexual sex. *shrug* But anyway, all the euphemisms are entirely in character with the original language. One of the most common phrases for 'to have sex' is 'to have enjoyment of his husbandship'. It makes me snortle.

Thanks for commenting!

[miss_morland]

Yes, it seems very much in character - I'm not an expert on these things, but I think applying modern-day descriptions and/or conceptions of the sex would make the piece seem anachronistic.

You're welcome, and thanks for writing it.:-)

[ineptshieldmaid]

*grins* High Medieval lit, on the other hand, I have NO PROBLEM with slashing out of its existence. There's so much sex going everywhere in high medieval lit, what does it matter if we redirect some of it?

Besides, you can't tell me Chretien didn't ship Yvain/Gawain.

[luthien13]

Wow, impressive stuff!

[ineptshieldmaid]

Thank you!