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Beowulf 贝奥武夫 Barnes & Noble Classics ISBN=9781593083830

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版次：1
页数：127
字数：
印刷时间：2007年02月01日
开本：16开
纸张：胶版纸
包装：精装
是否套装：否
国际标准书号ISBN：9781593083830

作者:Anonymous 　等著出版社: 出版时间:2007年02月

内容简介

Beowulf, by Anonymous, is part of the Barnes Noble Classics series, which offers qualityeditions at affordable prices to the student and the generalreader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages ofcarefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable featuresof Barnes Noble Classics:New introductions commissioned from today's top writers andscholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporaryhistorical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes andendnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems,books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired bythe work Comments by other famous authors Study questions tochallenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographiesfor further reading Indices Glossaries, when appropriateAlleditions are beautifully designed and are printed to superiorspecifications; some include illustrations of historical interest.Barnes Noble Classics pulls together a constellationof influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich eachreader's understanding of these enduring works.

<div>
<div><i>Beowulf</i>, by <b>Anonymous</b>, is part of the <i>Barnes
& Noble Classics</i><i> </i>series, which offers quality
editions at affordable prices to the student and the general
reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of
carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features
of <i>Barnes & Noble Classics</i>:
<div>New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and
scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary
historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and
endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems,
books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by
the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to
challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies
for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll
editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior
specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest.
<i>Barnes & Noble Classics</i> pulls together a constellation
of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each
reader's understanding of these enduring works.</div>
</div>
 <br />
Widely regarded as the first true masterpiece of English
literature, <i>Beowulf</i> describes the thrilling adventures of a
great Scandinavian warrior of the sixth century. Its lyric
intensity and imaginative vitality are unparalleled, and the poem
has greatly influenced many important modern novelists and poets,
most notably J. R. R. Tolkien, author of <i>The Lord of the
Rings</i>.<br />
Part history and part mythology, <i>Beowulf</i> opens in the court
of the Danish king where a horrible demon named Grendel devours men
in their sleep every night. The hero Beowulf arrives and kills the
monster, but joy turns to horror when Grendel’s mother attacks the
hall to avenge the death of her son. Ultimately triumphant, Beowulf
becomes king himself and rules peacefully for fifty years until,
one dark day, a foe more powerful than any he has yet faced is
aroused—an ancient dragon guarding a horde of treasure. once again,
Beowulf must summon all his strength and courage to face the beast,
but this time victory exacts a terrible price.<br />
New translation by John McNamara. Features an original map and
genealogy chart.<br />
<b>John McNamara</b> is Professor of English at the University of
Houston, where he teaches the early languages and literatures of
England, Scotland, and Ireland, with a special focus on their oral
traditions. He is the co-editor of <i>Medieval Folklore: An
Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and
Customs</i>.</div>

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Even more perplexing is the question of values and beliefs inthe poem. The world of Beowulf is the world of heroic epic,with its legendary fights among larger-than-life figures, bothhuman and monstrous, its scenes of feasting in great beer hallspresided over by kings, its accounts of bloody feuds trapping menand women alike in cycles of violence, its praise of giving richesto loyal followers rather than amassing wealth for oneself, itsmoments of magic in stories of powers gained or lost—and over all,a sense of some larger force that shapes their destinies, bothindividual and collective. Readers have often looked upon thislong-gone heroic world for a glimpse of a pagan past in NorthernEurope before Christianity was brought by foreign missionaries, yetthe poem is filled with references to the new religion and thepower of its God. This tension between the ancient past and whatwas, in the time of the poet, a new worldview disturbed manyromantic and nationalistic critics in the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. They sought in Beowulf the origins ofGermanic, including Scandinavian, culture—or at least clues fromwhich that culture could be reconstructed. Yet many were for themost part frustrated, for they saw the epic of Northern antiquity“marred” by the intrusions of foreign beliefs and values, such asthe Christianity imposed by missionaries from the MediterraneanSouth, and equally “marred” by the fantastic fights with monstersin the center of the poem, while the historical materials that mostinterested them were placed on the outer edges. In this view, thepoem simply was not the poem that it should have been.
However, the great work of Friedrich Klaeber, and especially theinfluence of Tolkien, cited above, would change all that. In recenttimes, scholars have not only stressed the Christian element asintegral to the poem as a whole, but they have spent enormousenergy in ferreting out its sources and functions. All of whichbrings us back, not just to the question of the poet, but moreimportantly to the question of the audience. After all, the poetwas composing the work for a community that already shared certaincore values, though those values appear at times to emerge from amoment of cultural transition between the memory of the old and thepower of the new. So, once again, we are faced with complexity, andattempts to reduce Beowulf to some single, or at leastpredominant, worldview cannot explain the creative tensions in thiscomplexity.

<div>Even more perplexing is the question of values and beliefs in
the poem. The world of <i>Beowulf</i> is the world of heroic epic,
with its legendary fights among larger-than-life figures, both
human and monstrous, its scenes of feasting in great beer halls
presided over by kings, its accounts of bloody feuds trapping men
and women alike in cycles of violence, its praise of giving riches
to loyal followers rather than amassing wealth for oneself, its
moments of magic in stories of powers gained or lost—and over all,
a sense of some larger force that shapes their destinies, both
individual and collective. Readers have often looked upon this
long-gone heroic world for a glimpse of a pagan past in Northern
Europe before Christianity was brought by foreign missionaries, yet
the poem is filled with references to the new religion and the
power of its God. This tension between the ancient past and what
was, in the time of the poet, a new worldview disturbed many
romantic and nationalistic critics in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. They sought in <i>Beowulf</i> the origins of
Germanic, including Scandinavian, culture—or at least clues from
which that culture could be reconstructed. Yet many were for the
most part frustrated, for they saw the epic of Northern antiquity
“marred” by the intrusions of foreign beliefs and values, such as
the Christianity imposed by missionaries from the Mediterranean
South, and equally “marred” by the fantastic fights with monsters
in the center of the poem, while the historical materials that most
interested them were placed on the outer edges. In this view, the
poem simply was not the poem that it should have been.<br />
However, the great work of Friedrich Klaeber, and especially the
influence of Tolkien, cited above, would change all that. In recent
times, scholars have not only stressed the Christian element as
integral to the poem as a whole, but they have spent enormous
energy in ferreting out its sources and functions. All of which
brings us back, not just to the question of the poet, but more
importantly to the question of the audience. After all, the poet
was composing the work for a community that already shared certain
core values, though those values appear at times to emerge from a
moment of cultural transition between the memory of the old and the
power of the new. So, once again, we are faced with complexity, and
attempts to reduce <i>Beowulf</i> to some single, or at least
predominant, worldview cannot explain the creative tensions in this
complexity.<br />
Yet there are further questions about audience. Did it consist, as
some scholars have proposed, of people so well versed in Christian
teachings, and even in learned theology, that it would have been a
monastic community? The answer is by no means clear. We do have the
famous letter from Alcuin to the monks of Lindisfarne (797)
enjoining them not to include secular heroic narratives in their
entertainments. But we also have the even more famous story of the
poet Caedmon in Bede’s <i>History of the English Church and
People</i> (731), which shows the members of the monastery at
Whitby singing narrative lays, while accompanying themselves on the
harp. Their lays must have been secular since it was only after the
miracle of Caedmon’s poetic inspiration that Christian biblical
narratives were set to traditional Anglo-Saxon poetic forms. Such a
community would not only house scholars, as well as monks with
considerably less education, but also the monastic familia was made
up of all the lay people—men, women, and children—who occupied and
generally worked the lands surrounding (and dependent on) the
monastery.<br />
Our modern view of medieval monasteries has been shaped by later
reforms, in which walled structures often shut reclusive monks in
cloistered protection from the temptations of the larger world. But
in Anglo-Saxon England, the monasteries were generally open to the
social world, and the Rule of St. Benedict lays great stress on the
need to extend hospitality to all who come to the community. We
also have depictions in monastic works, such as lives of the
saints, of storytelling events that included monks and laypeople
alike. Thus, even if one were to claim that <i>Beowulf</i> was
aimed at a monastic audience, it is clear that such an audience
would most probably include many who were not monks. And, of
course, one need not postulate a monastic audience at all in order
to account for the Christian element in the poem. For the dominant
ethos of the poem is a celebration of the values of heroic society,
and while the poet-narrator’s comments often reflect a Christian
point of view, the heroic values in the poem are in themselves
primarily secular. Or do we have, once again, a complex creative
tension between the
two?            </div>

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