Britain’s pre-Conquest past and its culture continues to fascinate modern writers and artists. From Henry Sweet’s 'Anglo-Saxon Reader' to Seamus Heaney’s 'Beowulf', and from high modernism to the musclebound heroes of comic book and Hollywood, Anglo-Saxon England has been a powerful and often unexpected source of inspiration, antagonism, and reflection. The essays here engage with the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons and their literature have been received, confronted, and re-envisioned in the modern imagination. They fresh insights on established figures, such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and David Jones, and on contemporary writers such as Geoffrey Hill, Peter Reading, P. D. James, and Heaney. They explore the interaction between text, image and landscape in medieval and modern books, the recasting of mythic figures such as Wayland Smith, and the metamorphosis of 'Beowulf' into 'Grendel' - as a novel and as grand opera. The early medieval emerges not simply as a site of nostalgia or anxiety in modern revisions, but instead provides a vital arena for creativity, pleasure, and artistic experiment.
Author(s): David Clark, Nicholas Perkins (eds.)
Series: Medievalism, 1
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 302
City: Cambridge
List of Illustrations vii
Contributors ix
Foreword / Bernard O’Donoghue xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Abbreviations xiv
Introduction / Nicholas Perkins and David Clark 1
1. From Heorot to Hollywood: 'Beowulf' in its Third Millennium / Chris Jones 13
2. Priming the Poets: the Making of Henry Sweet’s 'Anglo-Saxon Reader' / Mark Atherton 31
3. Owed to Both Sides: W. H. Auden’s Double Debt to the Literature of the North / Heather O’Donoghue 51
4. Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Old English Chronicles / Maria Artamonova 71
5. ‘Wounded men and wounded trees’: David Jones and the Anglo-Saxon Culture Tangle / Anna Johnson 89
6. Basil Bunting, 'Briggflatts', Lindisfarne, and Anglo-Saxon Interlace / Clare A. Lees 111
7. BOOM: Seeing 'Beowulf' in Pictures and Print / Siân Echard 129
8. Window in the Wall: Looking for Grand Opera in John Gardner’s 'Grendel' / Allen J. Frantzen 147
9. Re-placing Masculinity: The DC Comics 'Beowulf' Series and its Context, 1975–6 / Catherine A.M. Clarke 165
10. P. D. James Reads 'Beowulf' / John Halbrooks 183
11. 'Ban Welondes': Wayland Smith in Popular Culture / Maria Sachiko Cecire 201
12. ‘Overlord of the M5’: The Superlative Structure of Sovereignty in Geoffrey Hill’s 'Mercian Hymns' / Hannah J. Crawforth 219
13. The Absent Anglo-Saxon Past in Ted Hughes’s 'Elmet' / Joshua Davies 237
14. Resurrecting Saxon Things : Peter Reading, ‘species decline’, and Old English Poetry / Rebecca Anne Barr 255
Index 279
