Interesting Links for 16-04-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Listen up! Bea Wolf is a brilliant retelling of a classic Old English saga—for kids

(tags:English history writing children books review )

2. Broccoli consumption protects gut lining, reduces disease, in mice

(tags:vegetables health mice )

3. Edinburgh's most dangerous road junctions named as council plans major safety upgrades

(tags:safety Edinburgh transport roads )

Comments

[hilarita]

1. Beowulf is not a saga. Dammit. Someone is wrong on the internet.

[andrewducker]

The British Library disagrees with you. https://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/englit/beowulf/index1.html#:~:text=This%20is%20the%20only%20known,itself%20is%20probably%20even%20older.

[hilarita]

Ewww. The British Library are using "saga" informally in a really really unhelpful way. I do hold two degrees in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic*, and as far as I can recall, the vast majority of the scholarly literature on the subject does not consider Beowulf in the incarnation in Cotton Vitellius A.XV to be a saga.
The crucial differences are: it's a poem, not a prose work with occasional verses included.** While the poem treats on Scandinavian subjects, it's not itself a Scandinavian work; it was produced in England, probably on the borders of Mercia and Wessex in around the year 700, and then copied down in this version a little before the Norman Conquest. The Sagas (of their various kinds), were primarily produced in Iceland in the 13-14th centuries, as part of a very different set of cultural pressures, and they were correspondingly very different in form and style.
I haven't kept up with the field in detail for a while, but unless there's been some fairly major reappraising of the definition of saga, this is a rather misleading description.

*This is what my degree is in; nowadays we'd probably not use Anglo-Saxon as a descriptor. I studied Beowulf in great detail for finals; I studied the translation of Alexander's Saga for my M.Phil, and the Family Sagas in undergraduate courses.

** This does mean that it's more legitimate to claim that The Lord of the Rings is a saga - a primarily prose work with bits of poetry included.

[andrewducker]

Thank you, that was fascinating!

[bens_dad]

So Beowulf is not a saga (partly) because it is too old !

I knew it had a Scandinavian background and had assumed that that meant it was following the tradition of the sagas.

Talking of versions for kids; I first came across Beowulf in the school reading book "Brave and Bold" - one of the later (maybe the last) in the "Janet and John" books. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brave-Bold-Janet-Mabel-ODonnell/dp/0720205328#

[anef]

How interesting! I did not know that (I am sure it has been explained to me before but I was probably Not Listening at the time).