#epic poetry

[nelc]

I am planning on writing an epic poem about this gorgeous pie.

David Lynch

[greeknerdsstuff]

dropped by Eris, the goddess of strife, at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis in the Greek myth of the Judgment of Paris. It sparked a vanity-fueled dispute among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite that eventually led to the Trojan War.

The Apple of Discord (Ancient Greek: μῆλον τῆς Ἔριδος)

ΤΗΙ ΚΑΛΛΙΣΤΗΙ (Ancient Greek: τῇ καλλίστῃ, romanized: tē(i) kallistē(i), lit. 'for/to the most beautiful',

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

[midsummernightsmemes]

ᴬʰ, ᵗʰᵉ ᴼᵈʸˢˢᵉʸ ... ᴵᵗ ʷᵃˢ ᶠᵘⁿ ᵗᵒ ʷᵃᵗᶜʰ ᵗʰᵉ ˢᵘⁱᵗᵒʳˢ, ᵃˢ ᵒⁿᵉ ᵒᶠ ᵐʸ ᶠᵃᵛᵒʳⁱᵗᵉ ʸᵒᵘᵀᵘᵇᵉʳˢ ˢᵃʸˢ, ᵍᵉᵗ ᵘⁿˢᵘᵇˢᶜʳⁱᵇᵉᵈ ᶠʳᵒᵐ ˡⁱᶠᵉ. ᴮᵘᵗ ʷʰᵉⁿ ᵉˣᵃᶜᵗˡʸ ᵈⁱᵈ ᴼᵈʸˢˢᵉᵘˢ ' ᵈⁱˢᵍᵘⁱˢᵉ ʷᵉᵃʳ ᵒᶠᶠ?

[reverie-quotes]

Is it the gods who put this fire in our minds, or is it that each man's relentless longing becomes a god to him?

— Virgil, The Aeneid (tr. Mandelbaum)

[ezekiel13]

Guys please stop shipping Odysseus my man just made it back to Ithaca

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Weinersmith and Boulet’s “Bea Wolf”

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

Bea Wolf is Zach Weinersmith and Boulet's ferociously amazingly great illustrated kids' graphic novel adaptation of the Old English epic poem, which inspired Tolkien, who helped bring it to popularity after it had languished in obscurity for centuries:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250776297/beawolf

Boy is this a wildly improbable artifact. Weinersmith and Boulet set themselves the task of bringing Germanic heroic saga from more than a thousand years ago to modern children, while preserving the meter and the linguistic and literary tropes of the original. And they did it!

There are some changes, of course. Grendel – the boss monster that both Beowulf and Bea Wulf must defeat – is no longer obsessed with decapitating his foes and stealing their heads. In Bea Wulf, Grendel is a monstrously grown up and boring adult who watches cable news and flosses twice per day, and when he defeats the kids whose destruction he is bent upon, he does so by turning them into boring adults, too.

And Bea Wulf – and the kings that do battle with Grendel – are not interested in the gold and jewels that the kings of Beowulf hoard. In Bea Wulf, the treasure is toys, chocolate, soda, candy, food without fiber, television shows without redeeming educational content, water balloons, nerf swords and spears, and other stuff beloved of kids and hated by parents.

That substitution is key to transposing the thousand-year-old adult epic Beowulf for enjoyment by small children in the 21st century. After all, what makes Beowulf so epic is the sense that it is set in a time in which a primal valor still reigned, but it is narrated for an audience that has been tamed and domesticated. Beowulf makes you long for a never-was time of fierce and unwavering bravery. Bea Wulf beautifully conjures the years of early childhood when you and the kids in your group had your own little sealed-off world, which grownups could barely perceive and never understand.

Growing up, after all, is a process of repeating things that are brave the first time you do them, over and over again, until they become banal. That's what "coming of age" really boils down to: the slow and relentless transformation of the mythic, the epic, and the unknowable and unknown into the tame, the explained, the mastered. When you're just mastering balance and coordination, the playground climber is a challenge out of legend. A couple years later, it's just something you climb.

The correspondences between the leeching away of magic lamented in Beowulf and experienced by all of us as we grow out of childhood are obvious in hindsight and surprising and beautiful and bittersweet when you encounter them in Bea Wolf.

This effect owes a large debt to Boulet's stupendous artwork. Boulet brings a vibe rarely seen in American kids' illustration, owing quite a lot to France's bande dessinée tradition. Of course, this is a Firstsecond book, and they established themselves as an exciting and fresh kids' publisher in the USA nearly 20 years ago by bringing some of Europe's finest comics to an American audience for the first time. You can get a sense of Boulet's darker-than-average, unabashedly anarchic illustrations here:

https://www.comixtrip.fr/bibliotheque/bea-wolf-weinersmith-boulet-albin-michel/

The utter brilliance of Bea Wulf is as much due to the things it preserves from the original epic as it is to the updates and changes. Weinersmith has kept the Old English tradition of alliteration, right from the earliest passages, with celebrations of heroes like "Tanya, treat-taker, terror of Halloween, her costume-cache vast, sieging kin and neighbor, draining full candy-bins, fearing not the fate of her teeth. Ten thousand treats she took. That was a fine Tuesday."

Weinersmith also preserves the kennings – the elaborate figurative compound phrases that replace nouns – that turn ordinary names and places into epithets at you have to riddle out, like calling a river "the sliding sea."

These literary devices, rarely seen today, are extremely powerful, and they conjure up the force and mystique that has kept Beowulf in our current literary discourse for more than a millennium. They also make this a super fun book to read aloud.

When Jim Henson was first conceiving of Sesame Street, he made a point of designing it to have jokes and riffs that would appeal to adults, even if some of the nuance would be lost on kids. He did this because he wanted to make art that adults and kids could enjoy together, both because that would give adults a chance to help kids actively explore the ideas on-screen, but also because it would bring some magic into those adults' lives.

This is a very winning combination (not for nothing, it's also the original design brief for Disneyland). Weinersmith and Boulet have produced a first-rate work of adult and kid literature, both a perfect entree to Beowulf for anyone contemplating a dive into old English epic poetry, and a kids' book full of booger jokes and transgressive scenes of perfect mischief.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/24/awesome-alliteration/#hellion-hallelujah

[funsizedshark]

💖✨️🎶 i know you wanted me to stay

but i can't ignore the crazy visions of me dying under the walls of troy 💖✨️🎶

💖🎶✨️please let me go die under the walls of troy i wanna go die under the walls of troy so bad 🎶✨️💖

[pierrotsoup]

Virgil having the faggiest face of anyone on this good green earth

[thesarosperiod]

epic poem smackdown! tell me which epic is your favorite (and why! if you feel so inclined). apologies in advance to everyone whose favorite i left off but unfortunately tumblr is stifling my power with this ten option limit

[mythoughttherapy]

“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”

—John Milton, Paradise Lost

[rael-f-wae]

A foolish man is all night awake, pondering over everything, and when morning comes, all is lament as before.

The Elder Eddas

[greeknerdsstuff]

#I'm back on my bullshit :3

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

“I sung of Chaos and eternal Night...” - John Milton

[pierrotsloop]

midwinter is heinous but also. Wishing everyone a very happy tolkien/berserk/medieval epic poetry/WW1 movies/dungeon synth/ethereal wave/freak folk/darkwave/illuminated manuscript/dostoyevsky/bulgakov/gregorian chant/long wandering walks through the fog/doing your makeup weird/hot tea season

[reverie-quotes]

As long as I still have some breath of life, I'll try—and try again.

— Ovid, The Metamorphoses