Recently back for Portugal were we had a great time visiting some of the most historical sites of its history including the founding city in the north Guimares (a name derived from a Germanic based word meaning the "the rich ones" because that is where all the wealthy land owners lived - which is what made it very attractive to the Spanish. We stayed in a beautiful 12th century monastery that was converted by the government (called a Passada). It was there in the 12th century that the warlord Don Alfsono Henriques defeated his own mother in the Batalha de S.Mamede and started the foundation of Portugal. In Coimbra (the Oxford of Portugal) we say the great Library of Joao V as well as the fascist like statues the dictator Salazar has erected at the University of Coimbra. We also toured one of the largest Roman sites - Conimbriga (a Roman summer resort with one of the largest bath houses in the area). Going further back we went to the Celtic site of Britarieos which was excavated in the 19th century and has some of the most extensive pre-Roman Celtic remains including many foundations of Celtic round houses. The site also contains Roman and Medieval remains (perched a high on a hill it became a place for hermits in the 10th century (I go down to the moors, collect me berries, chastises myself - sorry lapsed in Monty Python...). Also returned to Lisbon (where we had been before) and took a trip back to Belem - to have their speciality Pastleis de Belem and a dinner in the Barrio Alto of Bacchaleu (Salt Fish). In Lisbon, we stayed in a hotel right above the famous coffee house - The Braseliera - where the famous 20th century poet Pessoa used to sit and write (and where after a drinking bout he apparently died). There is nothing like a bica in the morning.
So I have fallen in love with the country and the language which I am learning - there is so much great Portuguese literature and very little in translation and the other interesting thing I find is the amount of literature on the Knights Templar who found refuge in Portugal towards their end - and when we return I want to go to Tomar - one of their major strongholds. So in the coming months I hope to dig into this wealth of literature and of course, eventually, read Lord of the Rings in Portuguese.
On another front I am getting increasingly interested in this concept of "The Great Chain of Reading" which Nagly put forth in the recent book on Tolkien and the Middle Ages. I am interested in studying authors who did what Tolkien did in terms of developing an "original" piece of connected literature out of a series of layered stories, annuals, chronologies,etc - I am currently re-reading Roger Loomis's volume on Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages and seeing the many layers of stories that make up what eventually became the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table has "fixed" in Malory and Tennyson - another interesting one that I picked up while reading the excellent book Lord of the Rings and the Western Narrative Tradition is the Hellenistic poem The Argonautika by Appollinious of Rhodes who was himself a librarian and had access to many sources of books on the gods and heroes that make up the story of Jason and Medea (and what of Homer and the layers we can find in that - could the Cretan lies of Odysseus in the later books of the Odyssey be an earlier layer of the story? All very much worth investigating.
Of course, life is busy and my partner and I have of late been doing marathon Lord of the Rings Online games (I'm a level 17 elf - he a level 20 hobbit) - eats up time but its fun - anyone interested in joining a fellowship quest into the great barrow of Ongenthow (thought that was Beowulf's father??).
Will be at the UK Tolkien conference next week - and will report on next week.
Showing posts with label Homer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Homer. Show all posts
Sunday, 22 June 2008
Sunday, 3 February 2008
Launch a Website - Read Tolkien Books
This week in the midst of launching a new website for the theatre I work at the Hackney Empire I got through two excellent books from the latest batch of books on Tolkien - The Frodo Franchise by Kristen Thompson and The Silmarillion Thirty Years On edited by Allan Turner. I enjoyed both very much and found some really good insights in each.
On a different front - Walking Tree Presses The Silmarillon Thirty Years On is an excellent series of essays celebrating the thirty anniversary of the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977. The two essays that really had an impact on me (they are all very good) is Professor Michael Drout's very personal essay on what it was like to first read The Silmarillion when his parents were in the midst of a divorce and the idea of sadness and nostalgia (coming from the greek words nostos - "return home"/algos "pain."
My other fav article was Jason Fisher's Tolkien, Lonnrot, and Jerome - a really fascinating article about the role of Christopher Tolkien in forging together the vast source work of material Tolkien left at his death in 1973 into the published Silmarillion and comparing to the same process Lonnrot used in fashioning The Kalevala and Jerome used in The Vulgate Bible. This is a topic I first became interested in when I read Nagy's article in Jane Chance's Tolkien the Medievalist "The Great Chain of Reading" which relates that the various versions of some of the key cycles Tolkien developed (Beren, Turin, etc) were paralleling the various source works of the key myths and legends in different versions (lays, prose works, chronicles). What Christopher did is take these and develop a single narrative that became the "accepted story" of that specific cycle of legend - that is until he published in the 1990's The History of Middle Earth and we learned that actually there are many versions of the stories. Fisher who has an excellent blog called Lingwe - Musings of a Fish, also shows places in the story where Christopher actually had to write some of his own material (as in the chapter in the Silmarillion "The Ruin of Doriath") to give the story a unified narrative struture) Fisher as also done some great work on paralleling this to the creation of the Finnish epic The Kalevala - and he has made me take that CN Eliot Finnish Grammer I purchased for Ebay a year ago (the very 1915 edition Tolkien used to study Finnish) and start to "plod through some of the original" as JRR said.
It also got me thinking of another poet we all read and accept what is fixed in the literal poem as the "authorized story" - and that is Homer and The Iliad and The Odyssey. In college I did some work on the various lies that the willy Odysseus uses when he returns to Ithaca (to the goatherder Eumeaus, his son Telemachos and finally wife Penelope) - in each he says he from Crete and analysis of the language and structure indicated that this might be an older part of the oral tradition of the Odyssey (also similar with the Proteus episode) - it would be interesting to look at how those forgers of the Homeric tradition in Athens put together these epics into what we now accept as the Iliad and the Odyssey - and can we do similiar with Gilgamesh and Beowulf?
Both two great reads and worth a read - now its on to three more Tolkien books and I am slogging my way through the new translation of War and Peace which is excellent.
The Frodo Franchise is an in-depth analysis of the development he current Rings franchise from the movie and DVD's to website, games, and fan clubs that have sprung up. I especially love how that moment when Peter Jackson pitched the movie idea to New Line's Bob Shaye (after beiing forced by Mirimax to attempt to compress the movie into two parts - including cutting out completely Lorien and Galadriel) and after watching the preview reel Shaye said why two movies when Tolkien wrote three books - there is something almost mythic about this moment. Also the line of one of the Weinstein's (loveling depicted as trolls in one of the credits) saying - "do you have to have four hobbits?" just showed what PJ was up against. From a marketing point of view the online promotion and alliance with the fans now seems just commonplace (just look at the current marketing campaign for Cloverfield) and it will be interesting to sse how The Hobbit movie(s) will be promoted. Also, this book brought me to two web sites that has passed me by in the course of the movies - Lord of the Peeps and Figwit the Elf in Rivendell who thanks to the fans has become an online elf star (and made into a peep as well). Well worth a read a Thompson's blog is one I look at on a regular basis - especially as news on The Hobbit movies are starting to take off (as well as Ian Mckellen's excellent website where one can find any news and rumors of his Gandalf doings - the king of actors as his recent Lear in the UK showed)
On a different front - Walking Tree Presses The Silmarillon Thirty Years On is an excellent series of essays celebrating the thirty anniversary of the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977. The two essays that really had an impact on me (they are all very good) is Professor Michael Drout's very personal essay on what it was like to first read The Silmarillion when his parents were in the midst of a divorce and the idea of sadness and nostalgia (coming from the greek words nostos - "return home"/algos "pain."
My other fav article was Jason Fisher's Tolkien, Lonnrot, and Jerome - a really fascinating article about the role of Christopher Tolkien in forging together the vast source work of material Tolkien left at his death in 1973 into the published Silmarillion and comparing to the same process Lonnrot used in fashioning The Kalevala and Jerome used in The Vulgate Bible. This is a topic I first became interested in when I read Nagy's article in Jane Chance's Tolkien the Medievalist "The Great Chain of Reading" which relates that the various versions of some of the key cycles Tolkien developed (Beren, Turin, etc) were paralleling the various source works of the key myths and legends in different versions (lays, prose works, chronicles). What Christopher did is take these and develop a single narrative that became the "accepted story" of that specific cycle of legend - that is until he published in the 1990's The History of Middle Earth and we learned that actually there are many versions of the stories. Fisher who has an excellent blog called Lingwe - Musings of a Fish, also shows places in the story where Christopher actually had to write some of his own material (as in the chapter in the Silmarillion "The Ruin of Doriath") to give the story a unified narrative struture) Fisher as also done some great work on paralleling this to the creation of the Finnish epic The Kalevala - and he has made me take that CN Eliot Finnish Grammer I purchased for Ebay a year ago (the very 1915 edition Tolkien used to study Finnish) and start to "plod through some of the original" as JRR said.
It also got me thinking of another poet we all read and accept what is fixed in the literal poem as the "authorized story" - and that is Homer and The Iliad and The Odyssey. In college I did some work on the various lies that the willy Odysseus uses when he returns to Ithaca (to the goatherder Eumeaus, his son Telemachos and finally wife Penelope) - in each he says he from Crete and analysis of the language and structure indicated that this might be an older part of the oral tradition of the Odyssey (also similar with the Proteus episode) - it would be interesting to look at how those forgers of the Homeric tradition in Athens put together these epics into what we now accept as the Iliad and the Odyssey - and can we do similiar with Gilgamesh and Beowulf?
Both two great reads and worth a read - now its on to three more Tolkien books and I am slogging my way through the new translation of War and Peace which is excellent.
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