Posted by John Nichols on May 26, 2013 at 15:11:19 user Mcneacail.
In Reply to: Re: Modern Books posted by Robert Hill on May 26, 2013 at 13:52:34:
I gave a talk at a poetry conference recently. + I was a ring in+
I raised the point about Beowulf and it was known by a few. Heaney is noted by Liceo Scientifico Statale "V. De Caprariis" as:
The writer Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, has studied this work and has also translated it. The extract, taken from Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (2000), offers an interesting criticism of this epic poem. First of all, he draws the readers’ attention on the recurrent presence of number “three”. Maybe the recurrence of number three in the poem, observed by S. Heaney, can be viewed as a Christian element (the Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit).
In fact, Heaney argues, there are three fights, three monsters of demonic shapes and three places where the epic hero usually “meets” them: the barricaded night-house, the infested underwater current and the reptile-haunted rocks of wilderness. All these places are called “archetypal sites of fear” (l. 4) by the writer. Actually also the opening and closing scenes of the poem evoke a sort of frightening presence in the readers’ mind. Then, in the second paragraph, Heaney underlines that there are also three different peoples involved in the story. In fact, first we meet the Danes, that are in a very positive period (“a people in the full summer of their power”, l. 9), then the Heathobards and the Swedes who, though not very important for the main action, have a symbolic function: they are a threatening external presence looming large in the social life of the Danes, unlike the internal menace represented by Grendel, the monster from within the country. Seaney focuses on the poem’s geography saying that it isn’t definite, as there isn’t a “clear map-sense of the world” (l. 15). Apart from this, each lord’s hall is at the same time a real palace and a symbol of protection. Also the heat and light in each hall are a symbol of affection and solidarity.
But the best bit is indeed the notes he provides on the first line. It is an interesting problem. He uses Lo! in a medieval sense, in modern sense I take it as Listen.
JMN