The Latest Review

Well, I'm back from summer vacation, which went on much longer than anticipated, and provided a much needed respite. How I got along so many years without a summer break I can't imagine. Now it's time to get back down to work.

But first... this just in. The Historical Novel Society has just posted their review of The Saga of Beowulf, and so I pass it along here to you. I may have missed a few reviews while I was gone, but this is one I had been looking forward to with some anticipation, as I expended a fair amount of effort working out the historical aspects of the story. While Beowulf must be considered a fantasy through and through, still it is set in a real time and place, and does include several historical personages and datable events. I made no effort to gloss over the fantasy, but likewise I didn't shy away from reality either.

The Historical Novel Society
Book Review by Steve Donoghue

In The Saga of Beowulf, R. Scot Johns tackles a story as old as English literature itself: the saga of the Geatish strongman Beowulf and his many adventures—especially his battle with Grendel, the monster terrorizing Heorot, the great hall of the Danish King Hrothgar. Many others have dramatically shaped this material, from the Beowulf poet himself to John Gardner in his 1971 novel Grendel to director Robert Zemeckis in his 2007 special effects extravaganza, and even in such varied and powerful company, Johns acquits himself well.

His big, engrossing novel is Beowulf’s story from beginning to end, thickly populated with engaging characters, from warrior-women to evil kings (foremost of which is Hygelac, King of the Geats and Beowulf’s uncle, who’s here presented as a great snarling, monk-skewering bad guy) to Beowulf and his valiant men, seeking glory and a bit of international diplomacy by standing guard to face the monster haunting Heorot.

Johns is in great earnest while telling his epic story, and he’s done an impressive amount of research into 6th-century Scandinavia, but even above these things, the saving grace of his book is its sly sense of humor, which hums along in the background of virtually every scene, such as when he identifies some bad guys: “For these were Stone-Trolls of the highland hills that ate great bowls of rocks for breakfast—when they couldn’t get a decent fill of human flesh (which was not often enough these days to their way of thinking).” In this Johns remembers what many previous dramatizers have forgotten: if the saga of Beowulf hadn’t been just plain entertaining, it wouldn’t have survived all these centuries.

That dramatic legacy is in good hands with Johns. The Saga of Beowulf is highly recommended.

Sales continue to trickle in at a slow, but steady pace, which is nice and quite surprising, considering I've done no promotion on the novel now for over four months. Reviews such as this have helped a lot in that respect, since it will likely bring in at least a few new readers and help to spread the word. Book promotion, as it turns out, is a slow and steady build over a lengthy course of time. Like melting snow that starts as just a single droplet sparkling in the dawning sun, yet one day will help to carve a path through rocky canyons to become one with the ocean, so every word from each new reader to another functions as a tributary of that mighty river. And so I thank you all.

Gone Fishin'

I'll be gone for the next few weeks on a much-needed (and, I believe, well deserved) vacation. The past year has been a long and demanding one, and the creative juices are in dire need of recharging. I have three months off from work for summer, so before I dive head-first and get too deep into my next project I thought now would be a good time to take a break and just relax.

Not all R&R, however, as I'll be doing "research" for a travel guide I plan to write...

The Saga of Hrolf Kraki

The Saga of Hrólf Kraki is a 13th century Icelandic tale which bears remarkable similarities to Beowulf at many points. Like its forbear, Hrólf's saga is tale of tragedy and strife set in the Danish royal hall, and is, in fact, the source for the location of Heorot at Lejre, a pivotal bit of information not given in Beowulf.

It was due to the mention of Hleidargard that excavations were begun at Lejre on the isle of Zealand in the 1940's, with the remains of an enormous Viking-era great hall discovered there in 1986. The largest hall found thus far in all of Scandinavia, it measured 142 feet in length by 38 feet wide, covering an area of roughly 5400 square feet - a mansion even by today's affluent standards.

More importantly, the saga provides corroboration and/or clarification of many details in Beowulf that might at best remain sketchy otherwise. For example, it is here we find the name of Yrsa, Onela's wife, and hear the story of her incestuous relationship with Halga, her own brother (on which I drew heavily for my own novel). In addition, the characters of Hrothgar, Halga, and Healfdene appear as members of the Skjöldung clan (the Danish Scyldings of Beowulf), along with the Heathobard king Froda (whose story we get much of here) and the young Eadgils as the king of Swedes. Their names appear here in their Icelandic form, so that one might not at first make the connection that Hrólf himself is the Hrothulf of Beowulf. Here their stories are as different as they are like those of Beowulf, bearing witness to the changes that take place in oral tradition over time, and much debate has since ensued as to their common thread, and how and where and when the stories came to be.

But Hrólf's Saga was written down in Iceland some three hundred years after Beowulf was committed to parchment around the year 1000. Scholars date the Icelandic variation from between 1230 to 1450, but their common roots go back much further. At present there are 44 existing manuscripts, with the earliest extant copy dating from the 17th century, although there are records of a copy housed at the monastery of Möðruvellir in Iceland as early as 1461.

Was the tale of Beowulf transmitted down the years from mouth to ear until three hundred years had passed and it was written down at last a thousand miles across the sea?

For a more detailed comparison see Origins for Beowulf and Hrólf Kraki at Wikipedia, or pick up a copy of the Penguin Classics edition, which has thorough notes.

DOWNLOAD "THE SAGA OF HROLF KRAKI" HERE FOR FREE!

Summer's Here At Last!

Having survived (barely) another year of work delivering hefty stacks books to schools across the state, I'm more than ready for a lengthy break. I honestly don't think that I could do this job year-round - and fortunately for me, I don't. So now I'm at the start of a three month break and preparing to get back to the work I truly love.

And just what will that be? You'll just have to wait and see.

This past few days I've been relaxing, resting up and recuperating while finishing off a few books I've been reading lately. Unfortunately neither of them merit a full review in my opinion, although of the two, Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, Book One: Prodigal Son was well written and intriguing. I just got bored before the end and can't imagine wading through two more books to find out how it all turns out. But I thoroughly enjoyed Koontz's writing style, and particularly his wit. However, it dragged on for way too long with nothing really happening in terms of plot or character development.

As for the other, Stephen Lawhead's Song of Albion, Book I: The Paradise War, I finally gave up three chapters from the end, as I no longer even cared what happened to the pathetic characters he populates this inane excuse for mythology with. Written in first person, I immediately disliked his whining protagonist from the start, and nothing he said or did throughout the remainder changed my mind. This book shows exactly why I despise contemporary fantasy fiction, which tends to ramble with little purpose to no end with characters who rarely change in any meaningful way.

Still, I keep hoping to find that rare gem among the shale and detrius. But there's a reason why the classics have achieved their revered status, and Lawhead's mess is proof of it.

More Beowulf Text Downloads

Today I added the text of Beowulf in the original Old English to the download page, for anyone truly interested in delving into it. I've had several queries lately from readers wanting to see more of the Old English text, and while I don't have space here to present and analyze the entire work, I can at least provide the text for those who want it.

Along with the manuscript transcription I've uploaded a useful resource for further study of the history of Beowulf scholarship and criticism, which is C. B. Tinker's 1902 Yale dissertation on the translations that had been done up to that time. As this covers most of those now in the public domain, and a great many of the more important works, this is a highly worthwhile reference on the subject.

Reading it will tell you almost all you want to know about how Beowulf came to be in its present form - from its obscure place on the shelves of Robert Cotton's library to the honored place it now holds in the British Museum. It will also get you well on your way to understanding the content of the poem, and the many difficulties it presents due to its damaged state. However, a study of the actual manuscript it crucial to a full appreciation of this masterpiece of epic poetry.

BEOWULF DOWNLOAD PAGE

Free Download: Beowulf Translations

Beowulf is the oldest work of literature in the English language. There are a handful of shorter poems which are actually earlier, for the most part consisting of religious homilies and translations of Biblical passages, as well as a scattering of financial records and the like, but Beowulf is the first significant work of epic literature written in what had by then become the English language (unrecognizable though it may be to modern English speakers).

It also has the distinction of being complete (or nearly so), whereas several clearly earlier works exist in fragments. For example, The Fight at Finnsburg, which itself is told in part within the Beowulf poem, and so must be older, is extant in only a single folio of some fifty lines, and that as a transcript dating from 1705: the original has since been lost.

The single existing Beowulf manuscript itself was nearly lost due to a fire which destroyed much of the Ashburnham House library in which it was residing during the year 1731. The manuscript was damaged both by fire and by water, as well as smoke and age; the edges of many pages have shrunk and crumbled from the heat, resulting in the loss of many individual letters. Since then the manuscript has been preserved and digitized, and much of the text restored through ultraviolet and fiber-optic photography, though many hundreds of letters are forever lost.

In 1995 professor Kevin Kiernan created The Electronic Beowulf Project, a comprehensive interactive cd-rom edition of the Beowulf manuscript, which I purchased for my book research at a cost of around $300. The cd-rom includes not only the manuscript plates along with infrared and x-ray photos of all the damaged portions, but all of the early transcripts of the poem as well, which provide much useful information on the text, as the earliest of these were written down before the manuscript had fully deteriorated, and one short section even before the fire.

The manuscript itself has been dated to the reign of Canute the Great, Viking king of England, Denmark, and Norway, who died in 1035. The poem was very likely composed (or at least written down at this time) to please these Viking overlords of England, who were then at the height of their power. Indeed, it begins with a call to remember the heroic deeds of the ancient Danes, and how they achieved great fame in former days.

The events detailed in the story of Beowulf are both historical and legendary, set in a time some five hundred years before its composition. Much like the tales of King Arthur or Robin Hood, where a grain of truth is obscured by superhuman feats and mythological beings, the young Norse warrior Beowulf undertakes an epic quest to defeat a marauding ogre that is ravaging the Danish realm. Although there is no historic evidence for Beowulf's existence, many of the supporting characters show up in early chronicles and sagas from France to Iceland, or are associated with burial sites in Sweden and the Rhine.

It would be futile to undertake a comprehensive analysis of Beowulf in such a short space as this, but as the founding work of English literature there could be few works more worthy of that status. As difficult as it may be to read, even in translation, it is well worth the effort to any lover of heroic adventure or epic fantasy. Many modern works in the fantasy genre owe their inspiration to Beowulf, from The Lord of the Rings to Star Trek's Klingons.

Because it's poetry, with Beowulf translations it's really a matter of personal preference as much as anything. Some are better than others, with some being stronger in one area than another, due to the choices each translator is forced to make. While one will adhere as strictly as possible to a literal translation at the expense of form, another will focus on alliteration or metre and take great liberties with content. Few achieve both, and that does not begin to address the academic debates each line and word has undergone throughout the past two hundred years. Short of learning Old English and reading the original as written, my advice is to read as many translations as you can, and there are by now no shortage of them to chose from.

I will continue to add editions to the page linked below as I find time (I will post notices of updates here). To start with there are three: those by Leslie Hall (1892), William Morris & A. J. Wyatt (1895), and Francis Gummere (1910). Of these, the easiest to read (and most popular) is Gummere's, while the other two tend to use a great deal of archaic language which is now rather outdated.

DOWNLOAD BEOWULF TRANSLATIONS HERE

New Feature: Classic Book Downloads

Today I'll be adding a new section to the Fantasy Castle Books website, which will also be tied in to a series of book reviews I'll be posting here. These will be reviews of classic works of literature, and each will feature links to download the book for free in several formats (both here and on the website), including e-Reader, Microsoft Reader, and reformatted standard text files.

I'm doing this for several reasons. One is that I read a lot of classics, but the free ebook files I tend to find on sites like Project Gutenberg or The Online Books Page are either poorly edited or in a generic text format that doesn't allow for such basic e-reader features as bookmarks or annotations, which I use a lot. And while Gutenberg is a fabulous repository of our literary history and culture, their text files often have quirky issues, such as hard return line breaks that don't allow for wrapping smoothly to my iPaq's window, or tabs that push the text too far to the right, and consequently I end up reformatting all their files as I read. Once I've done this I turn them into Reader files so that next time I can read them more comfortably. It occurred to me that I should maybe share these files so that other readers might benefit.

My other motivation for doing this is entirely self-serving, and has to do with my efforts in marketing my own work. One of reasons I've started doing book reviews on this blog is to increase the number of potential keywords readers might search for when they're looking for new books to read. And since my own name isn't well known yet, getting the names of other authors and their works inserted on my site will hopefully bring new readers who might like what they find. Even if they don't buy my book, the added traffic will increase my page rank and make it easier for other readers to find me.

But since I don't read a lot of contemporary fiction, preferring the works that have withstood the test of time, the number of reviews of new books I can offer here is minimal at best. I just don't find most modern authors have the skill in handling character and narrative as do the masters. I can re-read Homer endlessly, but it's all that I can do to get through a Cussler or a Clancy novel even once. After all, entire academic careers are spent on studying the Shakespeare canon, or even just the tragedies. But what modern author could fill even a single semester course? Perhaps Asimov or Orwell, but there again we're getting into classics territory.

I'll continue to do reviews of modern works I read as I see fit, but for the most part I plan to focus on the history of several genres, such as fantasy and science fiction (from the likes of Morris and MacDonald in fantasy, or Verne and Wells in sci-fi), as well as those that fall into the realm of folklore and mythology (such as the tales of Robin Hood and the Arthurian tradition, both of which I have researched extensively, and in the case of King Arthur, even done a public lecture on the subject). My intention is to provide something of a historical retrospective of these genres, with the texts and all the relevant background data provided for your perusal and enjoyment.