ENGL 6301, Seminar in English Medievalism
Spring Semester 1998

Course Description
Required Texts
Grades and Requirements
Projected Schedule

Alliterative Poetry in Old and Middle English

This seminar (< L seminarium ‘seed-plot, nursery’) takes as its potting soil four well-known alliterative poems—Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Some ancillary readings will be required, others encouraged. Though a seminar is never fully defined beforehand—in the work of the course its definition will emerge—I anticipate moving toward a number of important objectives during the semester:

• A thorough familiarity with the works themselves and a solid understanding of alliterative structures in Old English and Middle English poetry;
• A general understanding of the literary-critical issues, voices, and conversations surrounding these works; and
• A specific exploration of issues involving literary influence, translation, sources, analogues.

This last objective is of particular concern as we turn to old “stories,” and it will ask us to contemplate the life of a story through time and to make explicit the interpretive issues raised by such a critical “angle.” These issues and questions will lead the seminar’s explorations in two directions: (1) into the poems’ pasts—What is a source? What is an analogue? What does “influence” mean?—and (2) into their futures—How are old stories kept alive? What is the nature of literary translation? What, exactly, have we read after reading a translation? How can we responsibly talk about the relationships between old and new stories? Und so weiter.

Required texts

For each poem, we will work with two texts, an edition and a translation. With Beowulf we will go beyond the two texts and read a medieval Icelandic analogue and discuss at least two modern descendents, The Hobbit and Grendel.

Beowulf

• Chickering, Howell D., ed. and trans. Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition. Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1977.
• Jones, Gwyn, trans. Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980.

The Dream of the Rood

• Edition: handout.
• Glenn, Jonathan A., trans. The Dream of the Rood (http://www2.uca.edu/english/glenn/texts/rood.htm).

Pearl

• Gordon, E. V., ed. Pearl. Oxford: Clarendon, 1953.
• Borroff, Marie, trans. Pearl: A New Verse Translation. New York: Norton, 1977.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

• Tolkien, J. R. R., and E. V. Gordon, eds. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 2nd ed. Rev. Norman Davis. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967.
• Borroff, Marie, trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation. New York: Norton, 1967.

Grades and Requirements

The final grade will have three parts, in the proportions indicated:

1. Reading and research journal, 35%. This journal will be a place to record, accumulate, and develop insights and information during the semester. It is to be kept regularly; I will read it seven times during the semester. We will talk about this journal—and reading journals in general—in class, but here let me stipulate that the journal must include not only a record of your work with the poems on the reading list, but also of your reading at least one secondary scholarly/critical work, related to the particular part of the reading list we are working on at the time, per week (a book may be used for two weeks if you wish). The purpose of this requirement is to get us in touch with the kinds of scholarly/critical “conversations” surrounding these works and to raise important questions involved in the heart of our course: what must these scholars/critics assume, know, discover (what have you) to engage in these conversations? In what ways is the scholarly/critical enterprise the same when it treats old and new works? In what ways is it different? What difference do the differences make?
2. Two formal essays, 30%. These essays, to be defined more exactly as the semester progresses, will allow you to come to terms in a public way with some of the issues developed in your journals. You will write one essay about your work in relation to the Old English poems, another about your work in relation to the Middle English poems.
3. Seminar participation, 35%. A seminar cannot work without full participation from the “seminarians” (that’s all of us). Part of that participation will involve each student’s responsibility for at least one of the criticism presentations during the semester, but even in regard to the more subjective aspects of this category, I will unabashedly and without apology pass judgment on your presence and participation in the life of the class. Each student should confer with me three or four times during the semester about her/his performance in this regard.

Projected Schedule

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Jonathan A. Glenn, University of Central Arkansas
Updated 1998-01-18