Beowulf Analysis

          This movie actually reminded me of another movie that I'm sure some of us are familiar with, How to Train Your Dragon. The elements in this movie are actually quite similar to those of How To Train Your Dragon. Both of the main characters were given extremely masculine voices, in How To Train Your Dragon the clan leader had Gerard Butler's voice and I don't know if there can be a more masculine voice than his. This goes along with something I mentioned in a presentation of mine during the Decameron Unit. I spoke of how Vikings now are depicted as hyper masculine due to the fact that in their culture males had the choice to overindulge in their masculinity or risk losing it completely. I even threw in the little tidbit of information about homosexuality in Viking society and how it was not exactly frowned upon, but rather a ritual of domination of one being over another. All this to say that I feel that even though this movie was not particularly entertaining, the way the Norse society was depicted was fairly accurate, I even recently read an article that said that the Norse peoples were accustomed to and preferred staying situated near the coast of the land they were on as well as taking in accounts of the topography of the landscape. In this movie the settlement was on the coast of whatever body of water it was, and it was situated in an elevated landscape if I remember correctly, it was on a cliff but it was also in the midst of some mountains, again, if I remember correctly.
           Another sort of ideal that especially caught my attention was when Beowulf first encountered Grendel in the movie. Beowulf was completely naked when he battled Grendel while there were all these other soldiers who were fully armed who were getting slaughtered by Grendel. Beowulf in a sort of way was so confident and in a way put everything on the line battling this evil demonic creature without the least bit of protection. This directly correlates to two other films one contemporary and the other in the movie wit Heath Ledger. Heath Ledger or Sir Ulrich/William at the end in the final round of the jousting tournament, when it was do or die, William as well put everything on the line (including his life because I imagine that if you get hit  with one of those lances in the chest without any sort of armor on the result would be fatal) but the fact that William was confident enough in his abilities and made himself so vulnerable, is what set him aside from all the other knights and turned out to lead to his victory in the tournament. I can also relate this to a very modern movie the newest Batman movie, I think it's called The Dark Knight Rises, but the point is when Christian Bale/Bruce Wayne/Batman is down in the prison/pit an the only way to get out is by scaling the wall which many have tried...with the safeguard of attaching a rope to themselves in case they fall they won't be hurt. Bruce attempts it with the rope many times until he hears a story of the only person who has ever escaped the pit was a little boy who did it without the safeguard of attaching a rope to himself. So Bruce, in turn, decides to (once again) put his life on the line and has to fully confide in himself and make himself completely vulnerable to achieve success and ultimately escape the realm of the pit.
           This was just a small facet that came together and clicked in my head. I don't know if anybody else noticed or found this interesting, but I feel like it's true and applicable and it almost sounds virtuous, "you have to make yourself completely vulnerable to achieve what you've never achieved before" or something cheesy like that. Actually I think its equivalent is the saying "you have to do what you've never done before to go where you've never been before"or something along those lines.

Beowulf Analysis

The Knight's Tale Analysis

           The movie we finished watching on Friday was actually pretty good, I thought at least. I thought it was kind of interesting or peculiar the style of music the directors chose to go with the movie. Like what was the song there at the beginning, I think it was " We will rock you" or whatever the name of that song is. I just wanted to point out (even though I'm sure most of noticed) how the songs seemed out of place and didn't quite seem to fit the movie. There were a few examples in the movie, I can't really remember what the song was but at the end in the final tournament as William was riding in on his horse there was another song that didn't quite fit because it was just so our time and out of place I felt like the whole soundtrack and string of unfitting songs kind of ruined the seriousness and in some ways like the respect you could have for the movie kind of if you know what I mean ( I watch a ton of movies so I've kind of  learned to pick apart and be really critical of a ton of movies). But then I guess in defense of the director of the movie as we were walking out after we had finished the movie on Friday I heard Dr. Comber talking to someone saying that how the music could've just been forcing upon the audience the notion that jousting created that sort of atmosphere for people back then where it was all competitive and whatnot just like it does for us nowadays, for instance I'm pretty sure we would play "We Will Rock You" at like middle school basketball games all the time and it just got everybody into that competitive atmosphere. So I guess that would really be one of the few if not the only case the director could have for throwing in those soundtracks into his otherwise exceptional movie. I'm still not sure if I had had the chance that I would've tried to bring across that point at the expense of affecting the quality of the movie.
           I also wanted to point out some examples that for whatever reason caught my attention and I just now thought of. I'm sure the director's of all movies that are made after a historical piece like The Knight's Tale do extensive research into the real story itself to see if they can convey these messages that were lost in the historical sense, and for this reason I want to point out a line that stuck out at me, I think it was somebody in a position of power that told a subordinate to hurry up and get whatever it was done "before the second coming perhaps", it took me a little bit to think about what it meant and then I was like oh yeah religion was big in this time period so it meant the second coming as in the second coming of Christ that is prophesied about in the Bible. I just thought this really showed the difference in culture and where, I guess to say, where we put our values or interests almost, for example in the movie The Sandlot, Squints says when he's yelling at Smalls to throw the ball in " Hurry up! My clothes are going out of style." Which I guess is kind of a bad example but to put it bluntly I feel like lets say as each of the time periods progressed if we had a time line that started with the Middle Ages that went up and every like 100 years or whatever amount of time you want to say, there was the common way for somebody to tell someone else to hurry up, on the timeline now for 2013 the quote would simply be something along the lines of "Hurry the f*** up!" Like I know it might seem really random but I felt like this was the best thing for me to talk about because I actually thought about it while we were watching the movie, I just kind of went off on my train of thought and this is what I concluded.
Following suit of Emma's blog overall movie rating: 4.3/5

CT insight from Daniel (Prioress)

Today we ended discussion with Dr . Comber asking us to further elaborate on the contradictions The Prioress's Tale offers readers in today's world and in the Middle Ages. Emma further explained to me quickly after class (sorry if I steal what you were going to write about Emma) that by contradictions with the Christian faith that become prevalent in this excerpt, its how this idea that Jews were horrible persecutors of Christians (monsters really, like Dr. Comber's PP pointed out) that murdered innocent Christians, that likewise, like we have seen throughout history today, Christians have just as equally been monstrous in their acts against Jews (Holocaust). In fact, I personally am going to say that if we replace the roles of the characters from the Jews and their ideas being put into the slots of the Christians in The Prioress's Tale I'll bet there was this actual scenario that happened probably quite a few times somewhere in Western Europe, specifically in the first half of the 20th century. Now I understand that there is no way that Chaucer was referring to it, but for analyzing this story right now I think it's fairly interesting how interchangeable the roles of Christians and Jews could be and were, specifically during the Holocaust.

One other thing we pointed out in class that I'm not sure we fully discussed, is the fact that in the Prioress's prologue she is depicted as this prim and proper lady who cries if she sees a mouse in a mouse trap, but her story is so not ladylike or more of a story that would better fit someone that is not her. I can't really put it together to make sense in my head right now, but I just feel like maybe Chaucer is trying to say something by making this woman seem so delicate, but then give her a story to tell like this. I feel like it may be able to go along with the fact that he describes her more womanlike than a nun and the fact that this was her story to tell may just emphasize Chaucer's desire to lead her portrayal away from that of a proper nun. Along with taking a few cuts at the prioress herself and well, obviously the Jews, he also takes a few cuts in at monks to, specifically the abbot I believe, its very subtle but I'm pretty sure I remember him saying something about monks and their duties or how they act and then he corrects himself and specifically says how they should act. This just further reiterates the message of disapproval that Chaucer has for most of the characters and the roles they played in his society.

Norse Influence (ish)

For this week we all got assigned an aspect of information that we would need to use for context of CT. We were to try and incorporate or show our knowledge of our specialty areas throughout these presentations. As for me, my specialty area is Norse (Viking) influence on the Middle Ages. Awesome right, I picked an area that we can easily see and relate to throughout the semester. I touched on this briefly in my presentation today (Thurs), that the fact that we don't have many religious artifacts, manuscripts, etc. is due to the Vikings. When they started invading the northern British Isles sometime around 800 AD (date is debatable) like I mentioned in my presentation, they took for themselves things of value (religious and otherwise) and destroyed manuscripts.

For now, I will make light connections between Norse culture and the culture of the people in the Age that we have been studying. To start off, I would like to talk about the way Vikings were raised. Unlike many world cultures we have learned about through our basic history courses, Vikings were raises to be physically strong and self-reliant. They had no use for educating themselves through math, literature, or philosophy. Running, jumping and wrestling were substituted for the education they may have received in another culture. As soon as a child could carry a weapon, his training for battle began. In the war aspect,the Vikings are very similar to the culture of warriors we studied during our Beowulf unit. The greatest honor a Viking could have was to die in battle, and therefore enter Valhalla ( Norsemen heaven). Another incentive for battle (outside the honor of dying in it) was that a great voyage that brought fame or fortune to a group of Norsemen might earn all who took part the rank of a noble.

The social class system is another similarity that Norsemen share with people of the Middle Ages. The Norsemen had kings ( king definition for them was more similar to the way a Lord of a castle would act) that would govern a small group of people and an area of land about the size of a county. The majority of Norsemen were free farmers that payed taxes and pledged their loyalties to their local leader or noble. There were really only two classes to put it simply, if you were a farmer or "peasant" if you will, you grew up surrounded with the idea of battle and war, so if your king ever called upon you to fight you would. In this way I guess you could say peasants were knights as well. And through war and battle one could move up into the ranks of the nobles. Another connection I found between the way of life of the Norsemen and those of which we studied during the Beowulf unit is blood feuds between tribes and marriages for diplomatic reasons. They used marriage to settle disputes between two conflicting tribes.

Religion was an area that Norsemen differed in from that of Middle Age society in that they were polytheistic and believed in their own gods. Gods that we hear of in their myths and legends like Thor the god of thunder. Norse mythology is very similar to that of Greek mythology, which like Dr. comber expressed when Trevor said something about Norse mythology, brings about the question of how all these ancient mythologies were so similar between peoples spread about across the globe who apparently had no form of contact with these other civilizations.

I chose for my specialization to be Norse influence on this time period because in the opening weeks of this class I heard that the Vikings come up and I simply thought that in all the years of history that I've taken I always hear about the Vikings, but never actually learn about them so hear would be my chance to take what I learn about a subject I'm interested in and incorporate it with the topics of discussion in class. 

Citations

International World History Project. World History Center. Web. 9 September 2008.

Cohen's Monster Theory and The Rule of St. Benedict

I found this week particularly interesting, the texts we read, "The Rule of St. Benedict" and "Cohen's Monster Theory", were by far (in my opinion) the most interesting texts we've read so far. At first, "The Rule of St. Benedict" seemed very monotonic, straightforward and simplistic, everything I knew about monks from my  little bit of exposure simply seemed to be outlined in this text. I remember that for most of the time I spent reading "The Rule of St. Benedict" I was thinking, "Why is Dr. Comber having us read this? I don't even think there is anything worth discussing here." But sure enough when we came together and with some guidance from Dr. Comber, I found that the topics of discussion were actually quite interesting. I'm not sure if I've heard it elsewhere or just recently when we discussed how the monks were to live in their community, but it really was astonishing how much you could learn about a culture or community by examining the rules made for it's members. I would just like to point out how easily anyone could see the difference in "culture" from Burris to Muncie Central, simply given by the rules that teachers and staff have placed over their students. At Burris I think it's obvious that our rules are much more laid back than say any other normal public school, but why is that? I felt that when I went to Central it was hard to be bitter against teachers who had stupid, remedial rules because I quickly learned that they were necessary. The majority of students at Central could not be trusted to be responsible with the amount of freedom that Burris students have (I won't go into specifics because I don't want to waste your time with examples about rules at a school that most don't care for) .

I thought "Cohen's Monster Theory" was very tedious and hard to read, 23 pages with lots of references that I didn't understand and background knowledge that I didn't have. I had really high hopes for "Cohen's Monster Theory" because of what my sister said about it and she had begged me to take your Contemporary Lit class so that I could get exposed to the ideas in this theory. The most that I took away from reading Cohen's work is in Thesis V, the idea of how we as people turn anything that is different or outside the social norm or that threatens our personal beliefs into a monstrous figure could not be more true. From large scale transformations like the Jews during the reign of Hitler, or even small scale transformations like the freshmen that just reek of BO after gym class and then even they are "exiled" or more like shunned for being different (or smelling different) from the rest of us.

I thought it was really different to learn about how much was revealed about a culture/society through the rules and ideas that are placed over it's people.

Works Consulted

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)." Monster Theory; reading culture. (1996) :                      3-26.  Print.

St. Benedict of Nursia. "The Rule of St. Benedict". Dr. Comber. Medieval Links. n. pag. Web. 4         September 2013.

Who Likes Poetry?

This week was more interesting for me, I'll admit I was a little lost for the last couple weeks (as you may have noticed reading the content of my blogs), but now I've gotten back into the swing of Burris academics. To start, I would like to point out the difficulty I personally had in interpreting the poems Dr. Comber put into her power point on Tuesday. I know some of them were easy to figure out due to the simple descriptions provided for us in the poem, but I felt that having the mindset and different outlook on the world than say, someone living during the Anglo-Saxon time period, put very different ideas of objects in my head than what the poem was originally intending to portray.

Now moving on to the poetry we were each assigned in our groups, I would like to further discuss how I thought the interpretation of The Wife's Lament further went along with Beowulf, and how the idea of dualism played a part in Anglo-Saxon literature. Dualism is the idea that there is a good deity or force in the world that coexists with an opposing deity or force. We see this clearly and have mentioned it throughout our discussions of Beowulf. I have put quite a bit of thought into the poetry assigned to our group and have made connections with this idea of dualism that we see in Beowulf. The wife's husband in The Wife's Lament has the same representation as Beowulf does in Beowulf. They both take on the role of Jesus or God. The husband by manipulating the wife in the way that god would manipulate his followers and Beowulf manipulating or influencing the lives of all who heard of him. Each of these two stories also has the opposing deity or symbolic representation of the devil as well. In Beowulf, obviously Grendel takes the role, and in The Wife's Lament, the opposing figure may not have been so bluntly presented, but however I do feel like the place in which the wife was exiled symbolically represented hell, therefore giving us this dualistic theme of having good and evil play out against each other in The Wife's Lament as well.

Now there is always this other side of the argument that I have never actually wanted to say because it could seem quite ignorant and possibly rude, but do we all really think that the authors and writers of all the literature we read really meant to put all this symbolism and representation and whatnot into their writing. I mean what if Grendel and Beowulf were just thrown in together because have a big, bad monster and a knight in shining armor with super-strength just makes a good story. What really stemmed this idea in me was freshman year when we read Lord of the Flies and I remember Dr. Comber saying that when it rained right after Piggy or Simon had died that it symbolically represented a sort of baptismal renewal coming about in the story. What if it just rained because it was a darker setting that gave us a more intense feeling about the fact that piggy died. Now I know this might be kinda ignorant and maybe stupid considering the exposure we've all had with the idea of symbolism in writing, but I never really said it aloud and this is my blog so I guess it's allowed. I was just trying to throw that "what if" out there. ( And if it were true, think about all the time we've spent dwelling on symbolism in texts we've read).

Works Consulted

 Delahoyde, Michael. "Anglo-Saxon Culture". Anglo-Saxon Culture-Washington State University. 08/28/2013

Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. NY: Norton, 2001. Print

 

Beowulf

              This week we were introduced to a lot of medieval concepts that were most likely foreign to us. I thought it was a little hard to keep up with discussions seeing as how there was so much to take in but what I would really like to go into in more depth is the idea of the ring and what it's significance is in medieval literature. In a primitive mind set rings served as guardians that kept demons and evil spirits from entering the body. Rings also serve to symbolize keeping the soul in place with the body, this may also serve as a sort of symbolic immortal status (1).
               We also see the ring s everlasting impression when couples propose to each other with an eternal circle. This symbolizes that the commitment of the ring-giver to his/her people. Just as we saw in Beowulf when I believe the author/translator refers to Beowulf exclusively as a "ring-giver". This term comes with much more weight than the simple fact of protecting a group of people. In these times a leader is what defined a group of people just as when Beowulf or even his father lead their people, the Geats were known as a strong, proud, honorable group of people. We see throughout history how important the "ring-givers" are in a society. They are the difference between a strong and weak society.
               

 1. Frazer, James, 1922. The Golden Bough. Published by Penguin Books Limited with an introduction by George Stocking Jr., 1996 (Frazer's abridged version).

First Blog!

I really don't know much at all about the Middle Ages. Other than like stories about King Arthur and Merlin, I really can't remember anything. I do know that back in whatever time periods their was always a definite gender separation in which we mostly here about men and their stories and hardly ever women. This was even shown in the art displayed in the David Owsley Museum, of all the pieces in there, I don't think there was a sole picture of just a woman and the one that was, Portrait of a Lady with a Turban, had its reasons for having been painted. the lady in the picture displayed jewelry indicating that she was married and we are even able to tell that by the slight plumpness of her midsection that she is pregnant. In the description of the painting all of this is explained, indicating that if this women was not pregnant or at least married she most likely would not have been the sole subject of this picture. These are my thoughts at least...


Citations

Pulgo Domenico. Portrait of a Lady with a Turban. 1525. Oil on canvas. David Owsley Museum, Muncie, Indiana.