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Andrew's avatar

Very creative juxtaposition... something to "marvel" at!

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Connor Lewis's avatar

To answer the second of your closing questions, I think it's rather impossible to untether the content of Beowulf from its copier, insofar that the copier themself was immersed in (or at least familiar with) the Scandinavian tradition to which you refer. Nonetheless, I absolutely love your post, especially your contextualization of Beowulf (the hero) in, like Thor, a both mythological and post-modern light. Your marriage of musical history and ecology is also well-placed and is certainly a lens I had failed to consider at such length before. Interestingly, I think such an approach invites the modern reader to appreciate Beowulf (the poem) for its original purposes: to inspire, to entertain, and to move its audience (all aspects I associate with "true" music). By contrast, I believe modern literary analysis often orients us, the readers, toward more technical, more semantic interpretations. I think this technical conflict is perhaps, in part, the source of such "disjunct," as you put it — by hyper-fixating on and resolving one aspect of the poem's framework, we necessarily distance ourselves from and obscure another.

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