Friday, February 25, 2011
beowulf is not boring
Why do people think Beowulf is boring? It's not. I swear. But I was reading this article about how Ayn Rand sucks (she sucks) in which the author wondered what would accompany Atlas Shrugged and the The Fountainhead on his list of straight-up bad books. He considered Beowulf but then dismissed it as definitely boring but not necessarily bad. I guess I'm glad that he didn't consign Beowulf to the same literary dumpster as Ayn Rand, but what's so boring about it? Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but I literally never hear people complaining about how the Odyssey or the Illiad or even the Aeneid (each of which Beowulf is the equal of) is boring. Is it the dark, cold atmosphere of Northern Europe? Is it the difficult to pronounce names? I feel like it can't be the brutality. That ought to be a source of excitement. There are three fights with outrageous monsters. One of them happens underwater. Heroism is supposed to be exciting. Maybe people are reading bad translations (it's 2011. Seamus Heaney or gtfo). A crappy translation can ruin an epic poem, and a prose translation will probably not retain much, if any, of the verbal beauty of the original poem. I can see that making it boring. It's not a novel and it won't read like one. It's also possible that I'm out of touch thinking people care about medieval literature.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I feel like it was probably taught poorly, with little reverence. And thankfully that guy did not put it on a list of bad books as it is not a book, but rather a written record of an oral epic poem; therefore, you cannot judge it by the same standards as you would judge a novel. Also, it is great. But maybe I'm biased. I could go on, but I won't.
ReplyDelete