"Them Dragons sure do know how to hold a grudge....
Posted on 08/31/2013 8:24:39 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Although the story of Beowulf centres around the heroic exploits of the Scandinavians, it found fame in the epic poem written in Old English by an Anglo-Saxon bard.
The poem, which is 3,000 lines long, is testimony to the historic links between the Norse and the Anglo-Saxons, some of whom emigrated from southern Scandinavia.
It tells the tale of Beowulf, a Geat warrior from modern-day Scandinavia, who travels to Denmark to help King Hrothgar defend his magnificent hall of Heorot.
Beowulf kills the monster Grendel, saving the Danes from his murderous attacks, then defeats the fiend's mother and is later acclaimed king of the Geats.
The poem concludes decades later with a face-off between the ageing king and a fearsome dragon, ending with the death of both.
It could have been written as early as the seventh century, but survives only in one manuscript from the early 11th century, which is now in the British Library but has been badly burnt...
The extent to which the events of the poem are based on historical fact is controversial, but it seems to have been inspired by the wealthy Danish court at Lejre...
Archaeologists have found a total of seven halls dating from various points between 500 and 1000, implying that the structures were periodically torn down and rebuilt.
The earliest of all the halls, located 500m from all the others, is the one most likely to have provided the historical inspiration for Heorot.
On the site there are the remains of hundreds of animals apparently killed and eaten at massive feasts, as recounted in the poem.
The animals include cattle, sheep, suckling pigs, goats, chicken, geese, ducks, deer and fish -- implying that the Scandinavian elite enjoyed a diverse and luxurious diet.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Just like my mother taught it to me.
Hah, you’re right....LOLs
It was not only the Norse; the Celts and Germanic tribes such as the Saxons practiced ritualistic human sacrifice in pre-Christian Europe as well. The Celts practiced human sacrifice more than the Germanic and Norse pagans who mostly resorted to it during times of crop failure, famine or war.
And the Romans, while they were “appalled” by the “barbarians” were not much better. The Romans also practiced human sacrifice a century or so before the Roman conquest of Western Europe but then they had gladiatorial games and feeding people to lions were regular sport and that continued up till and even after for a time after their conversion to Christianity. The early Greeks also practiced it as well those in China, Eastern Europe, India and Tibet and of course in the pre-columbian Americas and the Pacific islands.
And it should be noted that the Norse, the Vikings were not all that different from other Western European tribes of their era, they were just damned good at it, better than all the others for a couple of hundred years and converted to Christianity a bit later than the rest.
OK...time to watch, THE VIKINGS, again.
I once knew a professor who had a dog named Grendel. The dog was some kind of terrier, I think, and at most the size of a toy chihuahua. Not quite as terrifying as the Grendel of the poem.
That was the way my college English teacher taught me in the early 1950s.
Unfortunately, Mr. Heaney passed on recently.
Somewhere, college or high school, someone played a vinyl that sounded like that. I used to be able to recite about those same 13 lines or so, in what I thought was passable Anglo-Saxon. I can also do a fair Prologue to Canterbury Tales, going by memory and by ear:
Whan that Aprill with his showres suita
The droucht of March has pierc-ed to the roota
Than longen folkes to goon on pligrimages
So pricketh hem nature, in their courages.
I didn’t mean to imply that the Norse were uniquely appalling in their customs.
My point was simply that the Norse were not anything we would recognize as “Men of the West.” Their culture was one of the components than went into forming ours, and one of the less-important components.
The Saracens of Baghdad in the 10th century were by any logical criteria more civilized than the Norse or Rus of the time, who were almost uniformly illiterate.
"Them Dragons sure do know how to hold a grudge....
:’D
Very cool. Sounds like something out of Tolkein!
He’s listed in the phonebook as B.O. Wolf.
Thanks VR. The big mistake was building the library out of Cotton.
Wow, great experience! I think someone posted a topic about his passing as well.
Cursive, foiled again.
Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
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