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.