Forrest,+Jesse

Well the powerpoint made this easier to set up. I guess I'll get the hang of the rest of it as the semester goes on.

I was only able to attend the 11:00 talk because I had a 3:30 class.

I really enjoyed the ending. We were introduced to Beowulf as a young, really powerful warrior, and by the end of the story the only thing that appears to have changed was his age. Having fought and won against the dragon, which surprisingly to me deflated like a balloon after being cut open in the graphic novel, he just sat down to die. He took it very well, saying that it was his time to join his ancestors in the afterlife. I thought the bird was a nice touch, symbolzing what I thought was his flight into heaven.

I find some of these phrases to be a bit odd, but all of them seem to have a bit of truth to it. The last one on the list that says 'Nothing forbids one woman being loved by two men or one man by two women' is right in that nothing prevents men or women from loving two people. But if that man or woman is married to another, then it is deemed morally wrong to have a second lover. Another states that 'Boys do not love until they arrive at the age of maturity'. Nowadays you see people dating as early as middle school.

From lines 1846-1869 on pages 192-193, the passage that begins with "Now, do you refuse..." is a turning point in the story, because it is here initially that you believe that Gawain might actually stand a chance at living from the blow from the Green Knight. The woman who we later learn is the wife of the Green Knight claimed to have fallen for Gawain, and she had made plenty of advances on him. But his knightly honor would not allow him to court her, but he got through to her in a way that at least didn't insult her enough to curse him. Of course we later learn that had he been able to reject the belt he would have been fine.

I thought the article was difficult to read. Whenever it went to talk about passages or words from the story, it would use the original language as opposed to the translated text, which meant that every time it mentioned passages from the text I would have to go look it up in the book. While it was nice that it included the line numbers for each passage, it was still a chore to look each of them up when the writer of the article could have just included a translated version in its place. I do find it interesting that he seemed to explode in anger against the Green Knight's wife once he realized he had failed one tiny part of his 'test'. It does seem to be uncalled for, especially when he did so well up until that point. But I suppose that it might be that he realizes that he will have the mark from the belt on him like a scar for the rest of his life, and so he will always have proof that he failed at the last possible moment, and so rather than just automatically blame himself, which he eventually does, he throws the blame onto the wife.

I don't understand why the people who so-called 'translated' the Canterbury Tales stories did it the way they did. All it does for me is make it twice as difficult and twice as time consuming to read. For nearly every line I have to look at the notation translation on the side and fit it back into the rest of the line, and with lines where every word requires that kind of translation, it makes no sense to me to not have just translated the entire line properly. I do not understand the reasoning for this kind of a translation especially when it is vastly different from the rest of the book; I would have much preferred it if they went the route of Sir Gawain's story and just had the original text side-by-side with the translated version.

My favorite pilgrim would have to be the Miller. In response to the Knight's tale, which was about courtly love, he came up with the most bizzare and saddening story in which almost no one seemed to have a happy ending. Almost all the stories we have read so far have had happy endings, and all of them did not contain as much dispair as the Miller's tale. One character was burned, another had the unfortunate luck of being farted on, and the husband of the cheating wife was deemed mad by the society they lived in. A startch contrast to every story we've read so far.

One difference in the bibles seems to be that different words are emphasized. The most notable example that I remember is in the King James version where certain words were italicized to show the emphasis. For example, one passage states that the light //was// good, as opposed to just the light was good.

I was reading the Culture reading for 4/11, and I'm curious as to what they mean by 'bear-baiting'. Did they literally aggrivate bears in the name of sport or is it supposed to mean something else?

Whenever I read about a story with the devil and selling your soul, I can't help but think about the song 'Devil Went Down To Georgia' for some reason.

Also, the introduction to the story it talks about how before Marlowe and Shakespeare, scenes just jumped from one place and time to another, and that the two writers were the first to really write the transition between scenes. I think that any story nowadays pretty much has to do this otherwise people would think the story doesn't make sense. So I think it's neat to see where this kind of thing started.

For the final essay I was thinking about using either Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as those two stories were the ones I enjoyed the most. In terms of subject, maybe something about what the role of the warrior/knight was to the king at the times the books take place in.

It was a surprise to see Professor Morgan here. I have him for a Speech class this semester (and is actually the class I have after this one at 12:30). I found the whole Elizabethan Chain with Earth thing to be very interesting, I never considered that Satan had an 'equivalent' to the Holy Trinity. I remembered he talked about catasrophes in relation to speeches and that the moment where Romeo drinks the poison just as Juliet wakes up was mentioned as the example.

There was one poem that Walter Raleigh wrote to his son, who apparently died while he was on one of his voyages at sea. It kind of makes the poem seem a lot sadder, since it seems to have been trying to tell the son that they'd meet again, even if they are far apart.

One of the books I shall be using is The Audience of Beowulf by Dorothy Whitelock.

Whitelock, Dorothy. //The Audience of Beowulf//. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951.