Sunday, February 19, 2012
english language: Beowulf compare to The Dream of the Rood
english language: Beowulf compare to The Dream of the Rood: Anglo-Saxon “Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teac...
Friday, February 17, 2012
Beowulf compare to The Dream of the Rood
Anglo-Saxon
“Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.”
(William Jennings Bryan
The Anglo-Saxon period is the oldest known period of time that had a complex culture with stable government, art, and a fairly large amount of literature. Many people believe that the culture then was extremely unsophisticated, but it was actually extremely advanced for the time.
Anglo-Saxon is the name collectively applied to the descendants of the Germanic people who settled in Britain between the late 4th and early 7th cents. Their backgrounds varied. Some came as mercenaries, others as invaders. They included, besides Angles and Saxons, Jutes and other groups. The eventual use of the name ‘English’ and ‘England’ for people and territory probably owes something to Bede , whose History of the English People dealt with the whole.
The literary materials that have survived are of a high moral tone, including the epic poem Beowulf, various heroic lays or narrative poems, saints’ lives, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , the laws of some of the Saxon kings, charms, and gnomic verses or “wisdom literature.”
Consequently what the Anglo-Saxon “language of the street” was like is not known. However, there are numerous instances of maxims that stress the importance of using language in a disciplined and responsible way as,
“A wise man must be patient, not over-passionate nor over-hasty in speech” (Wanderer)
Art in the Anglo-Saxon period was influenced from many places. The three greatest influences were the Celtic arts of the Britons, the Christian church in Rome, and the Norse arts following the Viking invasions. Their manuscript painting, sculpted crosses and ivories, and enamel designs demonstrate a liking for intricate and interwoven designs. In the manuscripts of southern England, one can see how the way of writing changed. Before the 9th century, the writing was fairly plain.
Beowulf
Beowulf is an epic poem composed somewhere between the middle of the 7th and the end of the 10th century A. D. Before the Norman Conquest. Composed in Anglo-Saxon/Old English, yet set in Scandinavia, it recounts the deeds of a Scandinavian prince (Beowulf) and reflects the world of 6th-century Geats, Danes and Swedes, who were rigidly feudal, highly civilized, violent, and also newly Christian.
Beowulf's actual composition is dated at around the 8th century, because of its high degree of Christian content, paralleling the time of England's conversion from paganism to Christianity. Consisting of 3,182 lines in verse, its author is unknown and believed to have been a medieval poet or scop, who wrote down the poem's events. The poem was probably carried from generation to generation through a spoken retelling, as Old English verse was traditionally heard rather than read, its audience being mostly illiterate. The text of Beowulf exists in just one manuscript copy, which rests in the British Library in London. This 10th-century manuscript was probably copied by a late medieval monk and stored in monasteries, until their destruction and dissolution by King Henry VIII. The revised A Handbook to Literature defines an epic poem as:
"A long [heroic] narrative poem in elevated style presenting characters of high position in a series of adventures which form an organic whole through their relation to a central figure of heroic proportions and through their development of episodes important in the history of a nation or race."
"Beowulf is the most important poem in Old English and it is the first major poem in a European vernacular language,...remarkable for its sustained grandeur of tone and for the brilliance of its style."
(Margaret Drabble)
The story of Beowulf opens by recounting the career of Scyld Scefing, a king sent by God to the Danes. After Scyld's death the Danes prosper under his descendants. One of those descendants, H rothgar, builds the Danes a great hall called Heorot. Heorot is soon invaded by Grendel, a half-human monster who is hated by God. The Danes are helpless against these attacks until the hero Beowulf arrives to aid them. He battles Grendel in hand to hand combat in Heorot and kills the monster by tearing off its arm. Grendel's mother then comes to avenge her son. Beowulf and Hrothgar follow her to her lair in a disgusting lake, where Beowulf fights Grendel's mother in her hall at the bottom of the lake. Beowulf almost loses, but with the aid of God is eventually victorious. He is lavishly rewarded and returns to his own land where he tells his adventures to his uncle, King Hygelac. The poem then jumps fifty years into the future when Beowulf is in old age and king of the Geats. He then fights his last battle agains a dragon that is guardian of a cursed treasure. He tries to fight the dragon alone, but can only defeat it with the aid of a younger relative, Wiglaf. The dragon is killed, but mortally wounds Beowulf in the battle, and the old king passes away while gazing on the cursed treasure. The death of Beowulf marks the decline of the Geats, who are now surrounded by enemies made in previous campaigns. Consequently, the poem ends in mourning for both Beowulf and his nation.
The Dream of the Rood
The Dream of the Rood is the earliest dream-vision poem in the English language and one of the central documents of Old English Literature. Although no definite date can be assigned to the poem, many scholars agree that the most probable date of composition was during the 8th century. The influence of the poem in Pre-Conquest England is attested to by the fact that a passage from it appears carved on the Ruthwell Cross, a stone monument probably dating from the early 9thcentury, but the poem may also have influenced many later works in both Old and Middle English. Today, the poem exists in its most complete form in the Vercelli Book, a manuscript of Old English prose and poetry unanimously assigned to the second half of the tenth century.
The monologues and subsequent dialogue of two speakers, the Dreamer and the Rood (the cross of the Crucifixion) establish the framework of the elegiac poem. The poet of The Dream of the Rood was able to use fresh words and phrases to describe the attributes of Christ, God and the Cross, because the descriptions were not so conventional as to be weakened in meaning. The Dream of the Rood stands apart from other elegiac monologues in Old English not simply because one of the central speakers in the poem is an inanimate object, but because endowing the Rood with personality and the power of speech was "to use a device of unexampled effectiveness in making vivid an event about which [for Christians] the entire history of the world revolved" (Schlauch 228).
The Dream of the Rood has three parts: the Dreamer’s account of his vision of the Cross, the Rood’s monologue describing the Crucifixion, and the Dreamer’s resolution to seek the salvation of the Cross. The poem opens with the vision of the Dreamer who sees the Rood raised up and adorned with jewels and gold. After the Dreamer notices a stain of blood on the Cross’ side, the Rood begins to recount its experience as an instrument in the Crucifixion of Christ. The Cross recalls how it was initially cut down in the forest and chosen as the "tree" on which Christ was to be crucified. In a portrayal of the Passion, the Rood parallels Christ, as both are pierced with nails, mocked, tortured, killed and buried. In the same likeness to Christ, the Rood is resurrected soon thereafter and eventually adorned with gold and silver. Announcing its ultimate triumph through its suffering and obedience to God’s will, the Cross declares that it is honoured above all other trees, and commands the Dreamer to tell others what he has seen and heard as an instrument in explaining the salvation message. In the end, the Dreamer is renewed with hope and vows to seek again the glorious Rood.
Beowulf Compared to the Dream of the Rood
If you look closely at the literature created during the Old English period, you will be able to notice a few common parallels. The writings that evolved from this time period usually involved many heroic and warrior like bases with some kind of underlying religious theme. The works were mostly narrated by an unknown source and eloquently worded. The main characters were courageous and strong, loyal and trustworthy, and always accomplished their goals in the end, whether it is by victory or death. In the poems Beowulf and The Dream of the Rood, you can see how these attributes were portrayed by Beowulf, the Cross, and in some cases Jesus, all in a similar way. In these poems, Beowulf and the Cross are portrayed as loyal and heroic, and Jesus and Beowulf as a warrior and a savior.
Loyalty is a necessary quality to get through life. True loyalty is synonymous with being, and remaining faithful to a way of life, special cause, government, religion and so on. To act loyal means to be honest, truthful, and respectful. It means you stand by what you believe in and always stay true to those beliefs. A loyal person will remain true to whoever or whatever they follow or pr actice. Having true loyalty will help you stick to and achieve your goal, no matter how high they can be. Loyalty brings out the goodness that we are born with.
In The Dream of the Rood, the Cross displays an abundance of loyalty to Christ throughout the entire crucifixion. The Cross states
This powerful scene shows Jesus stripping himself and climbing onto the cross. It says he does this with much courage. Courage is a trait that no warrior can be without it. The Cross refers to Jesus as a warrior in the text to signify that he was not about to give up his fight. Jesus did not fight like Beowulf, he fought using personal strength. It takes much strength to die for your beliefs and that’s exactly what Jesus and Beowulf do.
In The Dream of the Rood Jesus can be viewed as and is even referred to as a warrior. Jesus battled his foes for his faith, with the Cross for support. The Cross states,
In Beowulf you can clearly see what the people of the Old English period thought to be a hero. To them, men who were fantastic warriors were considered to be heroes. Throughout the poem Beowulf is depicted many times as being “The strongest of all men to have ever seem the light of life on earth”(778-779). In the poem Beowulf describes his strong heroism by retelling one of his battles at sea to the people at the mead-hall after a verbal conflict with a warrior named Unferth.
Loyalty is a necessary quality to get through life. True loyalty is synonymous with being, and remaining faithful to a way of life, special cause, government, religion and so on. To act loyal means to be honest, truthful, and respectful. It means you stand by what you believe in and always stay true to those beliefs. A loyal person will remain true to whoever or whatever they follow or pr actice. Having true loyalty will help you stick to and achieve your goal, no matter how high they can be. Loyalty brings out the goodness that we are born with.
In The Dream of the Rood, the Cross displays an abundance of loyalty to Christ throughout the entire crucifixion. The Cross states
This powerful scene shows Jesus stripping himself and climbing onto the cross. It says he does this with much courage. Courage is a trait that no warrior can be without it. The Cross refers to Jesus as a warrior in the text to signify that he was not about to give up his fight. Jesus did not fight like Beowulf, he fought using personal strength. It takes much strength to die for your beliefs and that’s exactly what Jesus and Beowulf do.
In The Dream of the Rood Jesus can be viewed as and is even referred to as a warrior. Jesus battled his foes for his faith, with the Cross for support. The Cross states,
In Beowulf you can clearly see what the people of the Old English period thought to be a hero. To them, men who were fantastic warriors were considered to be heroes. Throughout the poem Beowulf is depicted many times as being “The strongest of all men to have ever seem the light of life on earth”(778-779). In the poem Beowulf describes his strong heroism by retelling one of his battles at sea to the people at the mead-hall after a verbal conflict with a warrior named Unferth.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Doll's House As a Modern Tragedy
An event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a serious accident, crime, or natural catastrophe is known as tragedy.
A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.
Aristotle
Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy.
Jean Racine
The word "tragedy" appears to have been used to describe different phenomena at different times.Tragedy is derived out from Greek word tragÅidia, mean "he-goat-song". Scholars suspect this may be traced to a time when a goat was either the prize in a competition of choral dancing or was that around which a chorus danced prior to the animal's ritual sacrifice.
In another view on the etymology, Athenaeus of Naucratis says that the original form of the word was trygodia from trygos (grape harvest) and ode (song), because those events were first introduced during grape harvest
Writing in 335 BC (long after the Golden Age of 5th-century Athenian tragedy) , Aristotle provides the earliest-surviving explanation for the origin of the dramatic art-form in his Poetics, in which he argues that tragedy developed from the improvisations of the leader of choral dithyrambs (hymns sung and danced in praise of Dionysos, the god of wine and fertility). So it is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization.
MODERN TRAGEDY
A modern tragedy is a play in which the tragic protagonists are ordinary middle-class or lower-class individuals.
The term ‘Tragedy’ is used in a common parlance, and yet it cannot be reduced to a formula, for it has so many shades that it actually defies a logical analysis. An American critic has admirable summed up Tragedy in a few words: “Courage and inevitable defeat.” Now-a-days we can never think of a Tragedy without an unhappy ending. But the Greeks did. Philoctetes by Sophocles, for example, has no unhappy ending. There is a similarity between the ancient Greek Tragedy and a modern Tragedy. The hero and certain other characters are caught in a difficult situation.
The character and plot in most of Tragedies are linked up. In Greek Tragedies fate played a very important part, but after the Renaissance character became more and more prominent. In some of Shakespearian Tragedies, despite the importance of character, the motivation of action comes from the supernatural forces or even external circumstances. In modern Tragedies, the hero is often the victim of social forces.
Tragedy, F. L. Lucas maintains, had three different meanings in the three periods of literary history. In ancient times, a Tragedy meant a serious drama; in medieval times, a Tragedy meant a story with an unhappy ending; and a modern Tragedy is a drama with an unhappy ending.
A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, though written in the late 1800s, is a modern tragedy as it presents a woman's journey towards self-liberation in a patriarchal society.
From the opening scene of the play, Nora Helmer's clearly the subordinate in her marriage with Torvald. Many of his pet names towards her are references to animals which denote that her role in the marriage is a less than human one. Nora's positioned herself into a doll-like role, as she accommodate Torvald's needs; there is little to no reciprocity. The tragic heroine, Nora is an everyday woman. She is special in that she is very attractive and has lots of admirers, but she is still, for her time period, quite a typical woman in a typical house, in a typical financial situation, with a typical husband, and raising typical children. Her tragic downfall began taking place when she decided to commit fraud to rescue her husband, a decision that anyone in a similar situation can make. The plot of the tragedy spirals from there and Nora becomes subjected to blackmail, must confide in her husband and learns that he is not the genuinely caring, selfless person she believed him to be, all of which are events that can happen to anyone.
For the maternal calling of the conventional nineteenth-century woman is thwarted in Hedda by tendencies that were at the time viewed as masculine. The influence of her motherless, father-dominated upbringing is everywhere evident: in her taste for horses and pistols; in her eager anticipation of a contest between Tesman and Loevborg for the available university professor¬ship; even in General Gabler’s portrait, which is described in the opening stage directions, before we meet any of the actual characters, as occupying a prominent place in the Tesman’s’ drawing room. Explaining the play’s title, Ibsen wrote:
‘I intended to indicate thereby that as a personality she is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife’.
As in A Doll’s House, the clash between Hedda’s unfeminine inclinations and the step she takes down the feminine path of marriage and, inevitably, pregnancy results in hysteria. Her gestures are as telling as her words: drawing the curtains, seeking fresh air, walking nervously around the room, raising her arms, clenching her fists, drumming her fingers, physically abusing Thea Elvsted. And as in the case of Nora, her hysteria finds release in music, in the ‘wild dance tune’ she plays on the piano. Yet unlike Nora, Hedda is still too much the victim of traditional inking to move from hysteria to feminism.
Ibsen’s awareness of the difficulties of motherhood on the one hand and of the overwhelming power of the myth of maternity as the proper calling for women on the other hand is expressed by several memorable instances in the major prose plays in which women who have either lost their children or never had any remain trapped in maternal thinking toward metaphorical offspring. Although the tragic secret at the heart of The Master Builder is the Solnesses’ loss of their infant twins as the indirect result of a fire that had destroyed their home years before, Aline Solness reveals that she in fact grieves not for the babies but for her nine dolls lost in the blaze, which she had carried under her heart ‘like little unborn children’.
This consideration sheds new light on Ibsen’s claim late in life that it is the women who are to solve the social problem. As mothers they are to do it. And only as such can they do it. Whereas this statement is often inter¬preted to mean that Ibsen viewed motherhood as the proper calling for women, he may in fact be suggesting that it is the only vocation truly open to them. The many female figures in his plays demonstrate the enormous and often detrimental influence of the notion that maternity is woman’s duty: women who have motherhood imposed on them against their will, mothers unsuited to motherhood, childless women for whom the maternal model is so strong that they take on foster or metaphorical children.
Ibsen’s implication that the best mother is the one who assumes this calling not because of biological determinism, as was so often the case in his day, but out of free choice, finds its most wholehearted endorsement in The Lady from the Sea. In a kind of counterpoint to A Doll’s House, where Nora must create her own freedom by leaving behind the domestic environ¬ment which has confined her, Dr Wangel grants his wife Ellida the freedom to choose between joining the mysterious seafaring stranger to whom she has been so powerfully attracted and remaining with Wangel and his chil¬dren. Where Nora exchanges motherhood for autonomy, Ellida is able to truly embrace (step) motherhood only because Wangel has rendered her autonomous.
The Lady from the Sea may stand as the last word on the question of Ibsen and feminism. For insofar as it reverses the pattern of A Doll’s House, it does not present women with the choice between motherhood and soli¬tary New Womanhood but rather powerfully advocates women’s right to choose their destiny and combine roles as they desire. Supporting the belief that a woman’s mind and body are hers to control as she wishes, Ibsen’s oeuvre allies him with feminist thinkers not only of his era but of our own day as well.
A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.
Aristotle
Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy.
Jean Racine
The word "tragedy" appears to have been used to describe different phenomena at different times.Tragedy is derived out from Greek word tragÅidia, mean "he-goat-song". Scholars suspect this may be traced to a time when a goat was either the prize in a competition of choral dancing or was that around which a chorus danced prior to the animal's ritual sacrifice.
In another view on the etymology, Athenaeus of Naucratis says that the original form of the word was trygodia from trygos (grape harvest) and ode (song), because those events were first introduced during grape harvest
Writing in 335 BC (long after the Golden Age of 5th-century Athenian tragedy) , Aristotle provides the earliest-surviving explanation for the origin of the dramatic art-form in his Poetics, in which he argues that tragedy developed from the improvisations of the leader of choral dithyrambs (hymns sung and danced in praise of Dionysos, the god of wine and fertility). So it is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization.
MODERN TRAGEDY
A modern tragedy is a play in which the tragic protagonists are ordinary middle-class or lower-class individuals.
The term ‘Tragedy’ is used in a common parlance, and yet it cannot be reduced to a formula, for it has so many shades that it actually defies a logical analysis. An American critic has admirable summed up Tragedy in a few words: “Courage and inevitable defeat.” Now-a-days we can never think of a Tragedy without an unhappy ending. But the Greeks did. Philoctetes by Sophocles, for example, has no unhappy ending. There is a similarity between the ancient Greek Tragedy and a modern Tragedy. The hero and certain other characters are caught in a difficult situation.
The character and plot in most of Tragedies are linked up. In Greek Tragedies fate played a very important part, but after the Renaissance character became more and more prominent. In some of Shakespearian Tragedies, despite the importance of character, the motivation of action comes from the supernatural forces or even external circumstances. In modern Tragedies, the hero is often the victim of social forces.
Tragedy, F. L. Lucas maintains, had three different meanings in the three periods of literary history. In ancient times, a Tragedy meant a serious drama; in medieval times, a Tragedy meant a story with an unhappy ending; and a modern Tragedy is a drama with an unhappy ending.
A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, though written in the late 1800s, is a modern tragedy as it presents a woman's journey towards self-liberation in a patriarchal society.
From the opening scene of the play, Nora Helmer's clearly the subordinate in her marriage with Torvald. Many of his pet names towards her are references to animals which denote that her role in the marriage is a less than human one. Nora's positioned herself into a doll-like role, as she accommodate Torvald's needs; there is little to no reciprocity. The tragic heroine, Nora is an everyday woman. She is special in that she is very attractive and has lots of admirers, but she is still, for her time period, quite a typical woman in a typical house, in a typical financial situation, with a typical husband, and raising typical children. Her tragic downfall began taking place when she decided to commit fraud to rescue her husband, a decision that anyone in a similar situation can make. The plot of the tragedy spirals from there and Nora becomes subjected to blackmail, must confide in her husband and learns that he is not the genuinely caring, selfless person she believed him to be, all of which are events that can happen to anyone.
For the maternal calling of the conventional nineteenth-century woman is thwarted in Hedda by tendencies that were at the time viewed as masculine. The influence of her motherless, father-dominated upbringing is everywhere evident: in her taste for horses and pistols; in her eager anticipation of a contest between Tesman and Loevborg for the available university professor¬ship; even in General Gabler’s portrait, which is described in the opening stage directions, before we meet any of the actual characters, as occupying a prominent place in the Tesman’s’ drawing room. Explaining the play’s title, Ibsen wrote:
‘I intended to indicate thereby that as a personality she is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife’.
As in A Doll’s House, the clash between Hedda’s unfeminine inclinations and the step she takes down the feminine path of marriage and, inevitably, pregnancy results in hysteria. Her gestures are as telling as her words: drawing the curtains, seeking fresh air, walking nervously around the room, raising her arms, clenching her fists, drumming her fingers, physically abusing Thea Elvsted. And as in the case of Nora, her hysteria finds release in music, in the ‘wild dance tune’ she plays on the piano. Yet unlike Nora, Hedda is still too much the victim of traditional inking to move from hysteria to feminism.
Ibsen’s awareness of the difficulties of motherhood on the one hand and of the overwhelming power of the myth of maternity as the proper calling for women on the other hand is expressed by several memorable instances in the major prose plays in which women who have either lost their children or never had any remain trapped in maternal thinking toward metaphorical offspring. Although the tragic secret at the heart of The Master Builder is the Solnesses’ loss of their infant twins as the indirect result of a fire that had destroyed their home years before, Aline Solness reveals that she in fact grieves not for the babies but for her nine dolls lost in the blaze, which she had carried under her heart ‘like little unborn children’.
This consideration sheds new light on Ibsen’s claim late in life that it is the women who are to solve the social problem. As mothers they are to do it. And only as such can they do it. Whereas this statement is often inter¬preted to mean that Ibsen viewed motherhood as the proper calling for women, he may in fact be suggesting that it is the only vocation truly open to them. The many female figures in his plays demonstrate the enormous and often detrimental influence of the notion that maternity is woman’s duty: women who have motherhood imposed on them against their will, mothers unsuited to motherhood, childless women for whom the maternal model is so strong that they take on foster or metaphorical children.
Ibsen’s implication that the best mother is the one who assumes this calling not because of biological determinism, as was so often the case in his day, but out of free choice, finds its most wholehearted endorsement in The Lady from the Sea. In a kind of counterpoint to A Doll’s House, where Nora must create her own freedom by leaving behind the domestic environ¬ment which has confined her, Dr Wangel grants his wife Ellida the freedom to choose between joining the mysterious seafaring stranger to whom she has been so powerfully attracted and remaining with Wangel and his chil¬dren. Where Nora exchanges motherhood for autonomy, Ellida is able to truly embrace (step) motherhood only because Wangel has rendered her autonomous.
The Lady from the Sea may stand as the last word on the question of Ibsen and feminism. For insofar as it reverses the pattern of A Doll’s House, it does not present women with the choice between motherhood and soli¬tary New Womanhood but rather powerfully advocates women’s right to choose their destiny and combine roles as they desire. Supporting the belief that a woman’s mind and body are hers to control as she wishes, Ibsen’s oeuvre allies him with feminist thinkers not only of his era but of our own day as well.
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