Geat out of here

The theme here lately is Beowulf, although you can skip that part and scroll down to the links and comments section if this isn't your cup of mead. Beowulf is the first major work of English literature, with the English being of the Old School Anglo-Saxon variety. Whatever you may have heard about the real Anglo-Saxons, they weren't WASPish.

The work presents all kinds of problems. Although it's written in Old English, none of the action takes place in England and none of the characters are English. The first part of the story takes place in what is now Denmark. The title character is a Geat,with Geatland presumably being somewhere in southern Sweden.

The earliest manuscript seems to date from around the 10th century, but the scholarly debates about how old the story itself is gets downright nasty. I tend to think the story goes back a few centuries for political reasons.

Starting in the late 700s, England was the target of Viking raids, which continued in a big way for a couple of centuries. The Vikings were a real pain in the backsides of the Anglo-Saxons, but in the poem the Danes and Geats (proto-Vikings, if you will) are portrayed sympathetically. I don't think too many Anglo-Saxons would write a pro-Danish epic when their monasteries and villages were being raided by their descendants. This seems to me to argue for an earlier date.

Interestingly, some of the characters in the story, such as the kings Hrothgar and Hygelac, seem to have been real people whose names were mentioned in other sources and may have dated from around the early 500s. Some scholars believe the social setting was similar to that which prevailed around the North Sea in the 500s, somewhere around the time when the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded or migrated to England.

Too bad there is no historical record of cool man-eating and mead hall raiding monsters. More to come.

NOTE: I apologize to email subscribers, but you may have accidentally gotten a not ready for prime time version of this post yesterday.

JOB KILLER? Not so much.

GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER? Hardly.

INTERESTING TIMES. WV politics have been a little bit weirder than usual lately. Yesterday's state supreme court decision just ramped that up a notch or two.

TALKING SENSE. This NY Times editorial works for me. I'm not sure it will work for the new majority in the US House.

DOGS AND LANGUAGE here.

SO I COME BY IT HONESTLY. Ancient Celts liked their brewskis.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Hamlet, revenge!

Several years ago, my judo teacher died. He was a great guy who volunteered his talents for years after hectic days as a public school administrator.

Although his mobility was impaired toward the end by old injuries, his chokes were sublime. When he sunk one on you, it didn't hurt at all. It felt like you were taking a nice long nap.

I attended his funeral with several of his other students. The thought occurred to us at the time that if this was a Chinese movie, we'd be plotting revenge right now. For the uninitiated, a standard plot in many martial arts movies is avenging the death of a teacher.

Revenge has been the theme of a great deal of literature, not to mention history, but the Elizabethans were really bonkers about it. Revenge plays became a major genre of the the theater during the Golden Age of English theater in the late 1500s and early 1600s (i.e. before the Puritans ruined everything).

The genre of revenge plays was influenced by the Roman writer and philosopher Seneca. In a typical revenge play, someone--often a legitimate ruler or powerful person--is murdered and replaced by another powerful figure. Sometimes the ghost of the slain person will appear to a protagonist and urge them to take vengeance. Then follows a period of intrigue and subterfuge leading up to the final crisis. The protagonists and his accomplices may die before its over.

Sound familiar? Shakespeare hit all these notes in Hamlet but whacked the whole genre in the process. Harold Bloom calls it "Shakespeare's revenge upon revenge tragedy..."

PEACOCKS. Krugman's latest column focuses on the difference between posturing and real solutions to the nation's economic problems.

HEALTH CARE moves from center stage, for now.

TRAMPS LIKE US, baby, we were born to run barefoot. (The story doesn't say where, however.)

COAL. Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo has an interesting post on the EPA's new approach to mining permits.

LANGUAGES. A new view of how languages evolve challenges earlier models. Simplicity seems to help determine which ones spread the farthest.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Bastions of wealth

The Murder of Agamemnon, painting by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Bastions of wealth
are no defence for the man
who treads the grand altar of Justice
down and out of sight.--Spoken by the chorus in Aeschylus' Agamemnon.

Goat Rope’s ongoing series on Greek tragedy continues. You’ll also find links and comments about current events below. Right now we’re on Aeschylus Orestes trilogy. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

According to Paul Roche,

“The Oresteia is the story of an aristocratic house in the process of destroying itself under a hereditary curse, which is both a destiny and a free expression of love and hate. The blood feud can end only by total self-destruction, or by giving way to a divinely established justice which is itself evolving—evolving from primitive concepts of retribution into a higher order of compassion, enlightenment, and peace."

Agamemnon, leader of the Greek expedition to Troy, gives the title to the first part of the trilogy. He was a prominent character in Homer’s Iliad (where he always seemed like a jerk to me) and his ghost appears in the Odyssey.

In the Odyssey, an epic of homecoming, Agamemnon’s return contrasts with that of Odysseus. Like all the Greeks who committed outrages and excesses in their sack of Troy, they are destined to suffer. But while Odysseus lives and is reconciled with the virtuous Penelope after many sorrows and a long and dangerous journey, Agamemnon is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra in revenge for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia for fair winds to Troy ten years earlier at the command of the goddess Artemis.

In Homer, Penelope is the archetypal good wife while Clytemnestra is the archetypal bad wife (although I always thought Agamemnon had it coming).

While Greek tragic writers almost always used mythic themes, they were free to adapt them to current circumstances. Aeschylus went way beyond Homer in his version of the story, even carving out a special place for his hometown of Athens in its resolution.

More tomorrow.

SPEAKING OF BASTIONS OF WEALTH BEING NO DEFENSE, here's a NY Times editorial about the recent US Supreme Court decision regarding hijinks on the WV Supreme Court.

A PLUG FOR PAINE. This item suggests that Thomas Paine is a founder worth another look today.

PLAIN ENGLISH. The language is projected to add its millionth word today. I recommend "glarnox." No definition yet, though some of our best people are working on it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED