This
material should also help you decide which passage to choose, and may
provide other forms of inspiration as well. I
will be looking for conceptual clarity and depth (How well have
you thought through the problem? Does your research adequately support
your solution?), as well as good design and craftsmanship. Whatever
medium you choose, you must use it well (no pastels). This
assignment is required for completion of this class, as are the accompanying
concept statement and bibliography. Have fun with it, but take it seriously
enough to do a good job.
A page on translation
from Dr. Victoria Poulakis of Northern Virginia Community College offers
some insight into various versions of some of the texts we're considering.
Since you will be, in a manner of speaking, "translating"
the poem you choose by illuminating it, her examples might prove very
helpful. Some are linked directly below. Her resources page contains
further information, so it's well worth visiting even if you're not
dealing with one of the works she discusses.
Beowulf
Beowulf
in Hypertext, edited by Dr. Anne Savage. This is the
source of the text I supplied (I corrected a couple of spellings),
and should be cited as I have indicated on the packet cover. The site
also includes a glossary and history. If you visit no other online
sources, this should be helpful enough. The section we're using is
linked under "Text" and then "Modern Text" and
located at the beginning of section XI.
William Morris's
translation of the segment, "Grendel
cometh into Hart: Of the strife betwixt him and Beowulf."
Even though the style is an example of Morris's quasi-Medieval rendering
of language, it's fairly easy to understand.
Beowulf
in Cyberspace (Beowulf on Steorarume): terrifically cool
online edition of the poem.
Bulfinch’s
Mythology: The Age of Fable. This page from Bartleby.com
provides a version of the story retold by Thomas Bulfinch.
Syd
Allan’s Beowulf pages contains multiple translations
of various sections, plus a wealth of information, maps, images, and
more.
Beowulf:
An Anglo-Saxon Heroic Poem (segment translated by Alan
Sullivan & Timothy Murphy, with links to other texts).
A translation
of Beowulf by Dr. David Breeden, with a note
on his translation and an image of the manuscript.
Translation:
What Difference Does it Make? This page is from the site
mentioned above. It compares various translations of Beowulf and
discusses the translation process.
The University
of Nevada's list of Resources
for Studying Beowulf with some useful information on
the poem's literary importance, and on its cultural context.
A film by Sturla
Gunnarson, Beowulf
and Grendel (with Gerard Butler as Beowulf) is available
on DVD. It's filmed on location in Iceland, with spectactular scenery.
Another film that deals with the story (obliquely), is the 1999 film,
The
Thirteenth Warrior, with Antonio Banderas (based on Michael
Crichton's novel, Eaters of the Dead). In addition, Robert
Zemeckis's version (in motion-capture animation), with screenplay
written by Roger Avery and Neil Gaiman is decidedly unfaithful
to the text, but also available on DVD.
For design ideas,
take a look at these pages on the Sutton Hoo ship burial.
This excavation, which began in the '30s, provided an enormous amount
of information about life in Anglo Saxon England. The British Museum
site allows for magnified views of the artifacts in their collection,
and there are some nifty motifs that might make lovely borders and
other embellisments. The University of Chicago page gives background
and links to other images of artifacts (some of the same ones, but
different shots)--and the main page is also useful and includes a
section on Beowulf.
Artifacts
from the Sutton Hoo Burial: a page from
the British Museum that focuses on the helmet, but includes thumbnails
of other artifacts; enlarge the images for good clear photos of the
designs.
Sutton
Hoo (University of Chicago): embedded links take you
to the images, but it wouldn't hurt to read the essay for background.
See also the home page on Anglo-Saxon
England for links to further articles on the period and
its literature. The Beowulf section has a picture of an early
manuscript of the text--which might give you some hints on type. This
is all from James Grout's rather wonderful Encyclopedia
Romana, packed with information on all things to do with the Roman
Empire.
The recent (September
2009) find in Staffordshire, England, is recounted in this Guardian
Online story, Anglo-Saxon
gold hoard is the biggest - and could get bigger--with video and
good photos. Some of the "loot" featured could well provide
inspiration for an appropriate border or initial.
The Gilgamesh
Epic
World
Civilizations: Mesopotamia (good background material and a
lot of the text--although not the same translation I want you to use)
The
Epic of Gilgamesh translated
by Maureen Gallery Kovacs
The Met Timeline
of Art History thematic essay on Gilgamesh
by Ian Spar from the Met's curatorial staff, and a list of essays
on Ancient
Near Eastern art.
Some images: a
section
of the tablet that refers to the Great Bull of Heaven; some cylinder
seals with images from the story: Gilgamesh
and Enkidu; Gilgamesh
killing a lion (and another);
Gilgamesh,
Enkidu, and the Bull of Heaven; and a drawing
of a relief depicting Gilgamesh.
Prof. Diane Thompson's
Gilgamesh
Study Guide --an excellent resource, with background
and commentary on the poem
Storytelling,
The Meaning of Life, and the Epic of Gilgamesh (Arthur
Brown, on Exploring Ancient World Cultures)--this essay provides some
helpful insight into the importance of this story in world history.
This page on The
History of Jewelry | Origins of Jewelery Design might
provide some motif inspiration; scroll down to the Mesopotamian section
(there are also sections on the Egyptians and the Greeks, among others).
Also: check out
the links on Mesopotamia
from my Humanities class pages (although some of the links may be
out of date).
One of the best
available translations of the Gilgames epic is the relatively new
rendition by Stephen Mitchell. He talks about his work on Stripped
Books, along with an illustrated version of the portion
we're considering (the Prologue).
An Old
Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the
Gutenberg Project. The introductory material offers some good background
on the story and its history.
My Myth,
Mythology, and Mythography course schedule and resource
links provide some additional places to look for information on the
story and its context. And don't forget to look at Week 2's slide
list on Art,
Design, and Civilization Before Civilization for Mesopotamian
art, and check out the related information on the side bar.
Homer and The
Odyssey
Homer:
Odyssey. ThinkQuest is a teaching/learning organization
aimed primarily at K-12; teachers and learners collaborate on various
educational projects, and the Odyssey pages are a good example of
a decent effort. The site provides introductory information and links,
and can be helpful for folks who slept through the lecture on Bronze
Age Greece.
Samuel
Butler's prose translation of The Odyssey is available
through the Internet Classics Archive. The link is to Book IX, and
the Lotus Eaters passage occurs near the beginning. This translation
may help you to understand the action, but reading it as prose completely
obliterates the rhythm of the poem.
In 1997, Robert
Fagles (who tranlsated the Odyssey section used in this assignment)
participated in a PBS
News Hour forum on the Odyssey and its meaning. The translator
responded to questions about the text, and students may find it interesting
to read through some of his responses (questions are linked at the
bottom of the page). Fagles died in 2008, and the obituary I posted
on my Owl's Farm blog, Passing
Strange and Wonderful, includes some links to useful
information. The Fagles entry is just below the obit for Arthur C.
Clarke.
MiraCosta College
(California) maintains a useful page on the
Odyssey, with links to translations, study guides, and
the like.
One particularly
popular form of entertainment enjoyed by scholars involves seeking
out the "truth" (whatever facts may exist) of Homer's stories.
The most famous of these efforts was Heinrich Schliemann's quest for
Troy. Odysseus
Unbound: The Search For Homer's Ithaca is one of the
latest entries in the game, this one trying to pinpoint the location
of Odysseus's home island. An Ithaca exists off the western coast
of Greece, but Robert Bittlestone offers geological and other evidence
to suggest that the "real" Ithaca is actually a peninsula
of the larger island to its west, Cephalonia. This may not be terribly
relevant to your quest, but it does indicate the power that this story
still holds well into the twenty-first century. The site also includes
some background information on the poem.
The Classics department
at Temple University in Philadelphia provides a good Study
Guide for Homer's Odyssey, aimed at college students.
In the segment on Book 9, the lotus eaters link leads to further information
from ancient sources (i.e. Herodotus and Apollodorus).
The
Perseus Digital Library entry under "lotus"
produces a page full of sources from antiquity that mention the word.
Some of these are buildings, some ceramics, and some literary. But
this is a site you need to know how to use, because it's one of the
most authoritative and reliable places on the web to look for information
on ancient Greece and Rome.
Mythweb's
Illustrated Odyssey (.pdf) is cute, but for short attention spans,
this outline of the story can be helpful. The paragraph on the lotus
eaters appears on p. 18, right next to the drawing of the Cyclops.
This site will not count as a source (it's way too superficial
to be suitable for a college assignment), but it's kind of cute.
A short but helpful
essay on Odysseus's adventures by Dana
Siegel, when he was a grad student at MIT, maps Odysses onto Joseph
Campbell's somewhat oversimplified notion of the hero journey. Still,
it offers a glimpse into the narrative framework of the poem and the
character of its hero.
Papyrus
copy of a segment from the Odyssey, Book 9 (not the chosen
passage, but you can see what the earliest copy of the text looks
like). This page
from the Met includes a segment from Book 20 that doesn't
appear in modern versions.
Troy
(another of Prof. Diane Thompson's pages, with lots of good sources
for background on Homer, The Odyssey, related myth, etc.)
Week 2's slide
list on Art,
Design, and Civilization Before Civilization includes
visual sources for Bronze Age Mediterranean art and design, plus additional
information on the side bar. My old Humanities pages on the Bronze
Age Aegean might also provide some useful images and
sources (although some links may duplicate those above, and some may
be out of date). At the end of my introductory essay I list some books
available in the Kelley Library.
A warning: do
not be tempted to use Symbol or other Greek fonts to accomplish this
assignment. If you do not understand the difference between transliteration
and translation by this time, you're already in trouble. Don't compound
your error by trying to be cute. Unless you are fluent in Greek (and
I am), you're constrained by the limitations of English language and
letterforms.
Dante and Inferno
Alas, the new
video game, Dante's Inferno, has nothing whatsoever to do
with the poem or the period and if you use it as any kind of a model
for this project, you'll probably get it all wrong. Thanks to Allen
Teer, by the way, for his help updating this section.
Several major
universities have initiated web-based research tools for studying
Dante. One of these is a perennial favorite in this class, The
Digital Dante Project from Columbia University. It features
comparisons of the original Italian and two translations: Longfellow's
and Mandelbaum's There's even a comparison between Longfellow and
Mandelbaum, so you can see how different translators treat the text.
Click on Canto V in the left frame, and choose which comparison you
want to bring up in the right frame.
Others: The
Princeton Dante Project (all of his works; it has an
audio feature). The Dartmouth
Dante Project provides access to a long list of commentaries.
Some of the more recent, especially by Robert Hollander, might be
helpful. Choose "Inferno" under "cantica," type
5 into "canto," scroll down to Hollander on the "commentaries"
menu, and you can access information on each tercet.
Danteworlds
(particluarly
Circle
2) is a wonderful site from UT Austin. It requires a Flash player,
and includes solid information on such aspects as literary allusions
(which can help you decide how to illuminate your passage), as well
as a brief description of what's going on in each circle. As if that
weren't enough, there's an image gallery for each circle, containing
a variety of images from throughout history.
Renaissance
Dante in Print from
the University of Notre Dame includes Renaissance texts of Dante's
works, and links to further information--including a chronology of
Dante's life, and many other useful sources. Students working on the
text might find the section on Dante's
Hell particularly useful.
The Flash-based
Dante's
Inferno: A virtual tour of hell is interesting to look
at but not as helpful as some of those already listed. It includes
illustrations by Doré, and an interface that lets you choose
circles to visit, along with quotations. It's a bit confusing in places,
and the illustrations don't always match what they're linked to. Still,
it can give you an idea of what has been done, and open up possibilities
for doing it better (if you're a Web guy looking for a project).
Translation:
What Difference Does It Make? contains
valuable information on reading Dante in translation.
Project
Gutenberg's copy of Canto V, with illustrations by Gustave
Doré. The translation is by Rev. Henry Francis Cary, 1892.
The
Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies Dante section includes
links to texts and translations, and other material.
The Electronic
Literature Foundation (ELF) has mounted a project called The
Divine Comedy, Research Edition, which offers some of
what Digital Dante does (translation comparisons between Longfellow
and Mandelbaum), and includes illustrations by Doré, Dali,
and Botticelli.
The Bodleian Library
(Oxford University) copy of a fourteenth-century illuminated
manuscript, in Italian, of Inferno.
The
World of Dante a hypermedia project with good information,
translations, and some visual resources.
Dante's
Universe (an illustration of Dante's view of the physical
universe)
The
Physical Environment and Structure of Dante's Inferno as Influenced
by Vergil's Aeneid (an
essay about Dante's debt to Virgil). If you want to check into the
Aeneid, see Professor Diane Thompson's marvellous page on
Virgil's
Aeneid from Troy to Rome.
Through
a Dark Wood: Essays on Dante's Divine Comedy (this is a Canadian
site with a spiritual emphasis and some brief essays and information)
Lecture
on Dante (by Ian Johnson, from the Malaspina Great Books site).
This is long but very informative, especially if you're new to reading
the Inferno.
Academic Earth
offers a free online course on the Divine
Comedy by Yale Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta. Lecture 4
covers Canto 5 of Inferno, and provides a very nice introduction
to what's going on. You might also want to watch the first lecture,
an introduction to Dante in context.
Although you can't
use it as a true source (and I'd better not see it on your bibliography),
the Wikipedia article on the Divine
Comedy is a good place to start if you don't know anything. The
resources listed at the bottom is where you should go looking for
substance, but the article provides a useful introduction.
Shakespeare and
The Tempest
Mr.
William Shakespeare and the Internet
Charles and Mary
Lamb's story version of The
Tempest, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham (1909).
Shakespeare
Illustrated (19th century paintings and drawings of events
in the plays)
The
Complete Works of William Shakespeare (MIT's electronic library
of Shakespeare's plays, including a glossary, FAQs, and links to other
sites) Note: this site is back online, and the plays are supposed
to be accessible; however, there was some kind of catastrophic disc
failure not long ago, so don't be surprised if something goes wrong.
Here's a rather
informative blog post from a few years back by The Bardiac: Ceres
and Fun with The Tempest.
A Tempest
study guide from Britain includes a segment on the masque.
Click on the link to "The masque in Act IV." Sources on
this aspect of the play don't get much better.
Prospero's
Dream: The Tempest and the Court Masque Inverted, by
Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen is a scholarly analysis of the role of masques
in Shakespear in general, and more specifically in The Tempest.
Walter
Crane's illustrations for The Tempest, via Project Gutenberg
Absolute
Shakespeare's page on The Tempest is more like
a cheat sheet and not indicative of serious research on your part,
but it, like the Wikipedia
article, can get you started. Not for bibliographical inclusion--go
to scholarly sources for real insight.
The Shakespeare
Resource Center's page on the Tempest is helpful for
background. It also has information on the production of the plays,
the Globe Theater, and other useful background.
This just in:
For film buffs, and especially fans of Julie Taymor, here's a post
from an LA Times review blog, Culture Monster: Shakespeare's
'The Tempest' is a favorite for radical cinematic revision.
Taymor (Titus,
The
Lion King on Broadway) re-genders Prospero (who becomes Prospera,
played by Helen Mirren), so the film promises to be interesting to
say the least. The review also talks about other films based on the
play, including my favorite, Peter Greenaway's Prospero's
Books. Go here
for some videos on YouTube; one of these is a ten-minute operatic
segment of the wedding--but if you're not amused by naked people,
stay away. Alas, Taymor's version doesn't open until December.
For resources on
the history and process of manuscript illumination, see the sidebar
for the week 6 image list, Manuscript
illumination, printing, and book design: the origins of the graphic
arts.
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