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.

Book Review: Sarum by Edward Rutherford

Edward Rutherford began his novel writing career with this epic 900 page tome that spans ten thousand years in the history of the famous Salisbury plain, most notably the home of Stonehenge, and more recently (that is, circa 1258 A.D.) the towering Anglican cathedral of Saint Mary (commonly known as Salisbury Cathedral), which hosts the world's oldest working clock, one of only four existing copies of the Magna Carta, and the U.K.'s tallest spire (at 404 feet).

Born in Salisbury himself (the modern equivalent of the old word Sarum), Rutherford has an obvious love and affinity for the region which shows in this massive work. I had read this once before, back in 1987 when it first appeared, and recalled its highs and lows only vaguely when I took it up again last month.

Following in the footsteps of James Michener, Rutherford's plan is epic in scope: to tell the history of a single region from its earliest days to the present. He does this in two ways, using two methods which would provide the template for his future work. First, he creates a half dozen fictional families who he then follows throughout the ages as they interact and react to the major events and people of the past. Each of these family lines have specific traits and genetic characteristics, as well as social standing, both of which seem equally difficult to overcome, so that, for example, the long-toed and stubby fingered rivermen of 10,000 B.C. tend to be relegated to subservient positions and even slavery throughout their many generations, yet always prove exceptional craftsmen and waterfolk along the way.

The second, and less successful, method Rutherford employs is a continual jumping through time from one significant event to the next. This is understandable from a practical point of view, as obviously two covers could never contain a continuous narrative spanning such a length of time. Yet it proves jarring at every turn, rendering the novel more an anthology of short stories than one cohesive narrative. This is more an issue in the earlier stages of the book, as the temporal shifts grow consecutively shorter with each leap, so that where many hundreds of years are simply discarded between the construction of Stonehenge and the subsequent coming of the Romans, by the time of the Black Death and the War of the Roses it is very nearly a continuous timeline. Indeed, the last chapters, covering the years from the Reformation through World War II and beyond - a span of some 300 years - takes up as many pages as do all those that lead up to the conquest of the Normans in the 11th century.

This proves difficult to overcome at several points, in that many of the events themselves are not interesting enough to draw the story on, and as the characters are new at every section, their stories are often short and shallow. The seemingly endless conquests, for example, grow quickly tedious, and pale by comparison to the fascinating drama surrounding the construction of Stonehenge. Not until the building of Salisbury Cathedral does the intensity pick up again. From then on it's engrossing reading, with the drama building as events become more and more familiar and relevant. This is a problem I often encounter, both in historical fiction and non-fiction accounts of ancient events. For one thing, there is simply less known about such far flung times. But it's also true that the more distant events are in time from us, the harder they are to empathize with. Consequently, the relative weighting of Rutherford's chronology is not so different from that which is found in virtually every collegiate "Intro to Western Civilization" textbook.

All in all, Sarum is a truly astounding work, both in the scope and breadth of its subject, as well as in the way it makes actual history a fascinating tale. After all, human history is the greatest story ever told.

Rating: 4 out of 5