Bastardized mockery given the status of high art.
>>an epic mead-hall rap battle
Just NO
wat
This sort of thing was cooler when Lord Buckley was doing it in the 1940s and 1950s
The Gettysburg Address (complete) by Lord Buckley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuQ-Xt-pDbk
You have to read it aloud with your horned helmet turned backwards to get the full dude-brah effect.
This is a crime; an almost Ebonics version for people who will never read it!
The Beowulf I know best is of .50 Caliber.
(And the Grendel I know best is 6.5mm).
;-)
Best modern “Beowulf”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpn1QtMoL7E
Never going to click on that!
I’m sure it rates right up there with that old black-sploitation movie “Blackula” as a work of literary art.
Cannot unsee such trash so better to never look.
“fighting each other in the margins, crossing out each other’s words and replacing them.
“Because there is no real Beowulf. Not anymore. ..”
This is the ‘tell’. Literary version of window-breaking theory.
As someone says above: We have Mike Fink.
If NPR is pushing this, you need to avoid it.
I”ll stick with Heaney and Tolkien.
I have the Seamus Heaney translation.
The version in this article sounds sort of like what the narrator of the “Myths and Legends” podcast does.
I decline the offer of purchase, perusal, ponderance, or any profundity that might ooze from this trash can dribble.
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Run through the Ebonics Translator:
"Yo! My stack o' dolla bills iz ahs as boundless as da watah, My blahnd is as big as yur butt; da mo I give you b_tch - da mo you ax fah!"
I like Seamus Heaney’s version. He presents his translation with the original, which he reads himself.
No, this is not the drunk at the bar recalling his football days.
This is an old soldier, sitting with other old soldiers, talking about a legendary general who became the leader of a nation with a growing crowd of kids sitting at their feet on the floor.
This is literary deconstruction—the equivalent of pulling down the statues of Western Civilization.
Micheal Crichton did this in med school - he re-wrote Beowulf and named Eaters of The Dead. That was made into the movie: The 13th Warrior. Crichton did a great job.