بیوولف نوردیک (رسانه و فرهنگ قرون وسطی)

The one existing manuscript of Beowulf very narrowly escaped the devastating fire that ravaged the Cotton Library at Ashburnham House in Westminster, London, on 23 October 1731, apparently by being thrown out of a window at the last minute. As the wall behind the bookcase in which the manuscript was kept had started to burn, most of its leaves are badly scorched along their outer edges. The manuscript has been very fragile ever since, and has been restored on several occasions since the middle of the nineteenth century, one of them very recent (Harrison 2009). After the fire it was transferred to the British Museum, but it has now belonged for many years to the British Library.Today, Beowulf may seem to be one of a kind, but in the world in which it was once created, it might perhaps have been no more unique than a star in the heavens. The metre of the poem corresponds to an archaic, common Germanic fornyrðislag. Roughly the same metre is found in the Heliand and the Hildebrandslied and in early eddic poetry, and can be made out in some Scandinavian runic inscriptions from the Migration Period. The basic story of the poem is well known. It consists of three main parts, the first of which is linked to the second, which is in turn linked to the third "In such a wide-ranging, long-standing, and international field of scholarship as Beowulf, one might imagine that everything would long since have been thoroughly investigated. And yet as far as the absolutely crucial question of the poem's origins is concerned, that is not the case. This cross-disciplinary study by Bo Gräslund argues that the material, geographical, historical, social, and ideological framework of Beowulf cannot be the independent literary product of an Old English Christian poet, but was in all essentials created orally in Scandinavia, which was a fertile seedbed for epic poetry. Through meticulous argument interwoven with an impressive assemblage of data, archaeological and otherwise, Gräslund offers possible answers to the questions of the provenance of the Geats, the location of Heorot, and many more, such as the significance of Sutton Hoo and the signification of the Grendel kin and dragon in the sixth century when the events of the poem, coinciding with cataclysmic events in northern Europe, took place."--Page [4] of cover "In such a wide-ranging, long-standing, and international field of scholarship as Beowulf, one might imagine that everything would long since have been thoroughly investigated. And yet as far as the absolutely crucial question of the poem's origins is concerned, that is not the case. This cross-disciplinary study by Bo Gräslund argues that the material, geographical, historical, social, and ideological framework of Beowulf cannot be the independent literary product of an Old English Christian poet, but was in all essentials created orally in Scandinavia, which was a fertile seedbed for epic poetry. Through meticulous argument interwoven with an impressive assemblage of data, archaeological and otherwise, Gräslund offers possible answers to the questions of the provenance of the Geats, the location of Heorot, and many more, such as the significance of Sutton Hoo and the signification of the Grendel kin and dragon in the sixth century when the events of the poem, coinciding with cataclysmic events in northern Europe, took place."--Back cover Cross-disciplinary study arguing that the material, geographical, historical, social, and ideological framework of Beowulf cannot be the independent literary product of an Old English Christian poet, but was in all essentials created orally in Scandinavia.