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Class notes Tain to Tolkien
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Class notes Tain to Tolkien
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Week 1 26/04/2021Prepare readings / questions: you will be asked about it.
Manuscript —> a book, material object that is handwritten, as a handwritten physical object it
contains a copy of a text. It can be a single text and the text can exist in di erent copies. The text
is an idea, the manuscript is something physical.
Adaptations
- Process
- Product
Bromwich
- Literatures which have developed on the European periphery may thus show similar
charac….
- Re ects worry over ancestry.
- Are the similarities you observe due to in uence or common heritage, is one an adaptation of
the other?
- Mabinogion is the rst modern translation of those tales.
- Liminal zone between the imaginary and reality
Hutcheon
- Di cult problem: own biases / presumptions
- Trend to dismiss adaptations as second-rate
- Very much about status
- Translations: medieval translations of earlier texts or medieval texts that are translated from
more contemporary texts
- Originality and newness are valued now, things that are derogatory are disregarded
- In medieval Europe authority was valued as much as originality is now
- Medieval texts adaptations refer to their own validity, often by naming sources
- Even in the manuscripts, the texts that are preserved are a copy of a copy of a copy, these
are not the texts that the medieval people were exposed to
- The relative distance between the text and the modern adaptations
- Issue of translating texts to lm
Authority & Pseudo Authority
- Pseudo-Augustine
- Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
- Author of Confessions, On the City of God, etc
- Pseudo-Isidore
- Isidore of Seville (560-636)
- Author of The Etymologies, On the Nature of Things, etc.
- Pseudo-Bede
- Bede the Venerable (670-735)
- Author of The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, The Reckoning of Time, etc.
- Vernacular —> text — text written in the spoken language (e.g. Irish, Welsh, French) as
opposed to Latin.
- Transmission —> of texts — broadly distinguished into oral and written transmission. We
now also have electronic / digital transmission
- Oral transmission —> stories remembered and told by a storyteller.
- Written transmission —> stories preserved in books, handwritten before the age of
printing.
King arthur
- A whole course can be given about di erent versions and characters that exist
- Recent movies about king Arthur
- e.g. King Artur, Legend of the Sword (2017); The Kid Who Would be King (2019).
- Recent productions of the opera King Arthur by Henry Purcell (1659-1695), with libretto by
John Dryden (1631-1700)
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, - e.g. La Fenice & Vox Luminis on 31 August 2015; Motus Theatre Company, in Rimini
16th and 17th September 2014.
- Fascination of fantastic literature
The fantastic —> the fantastic is the hesitation felt by a being who only knows natural rules faced
by an event supernatural.
Transparent Naturalism —> consisted of a heightened imaginative power, combined with close
observation and sympathy with nature, by which the marvelous appeared as an extension of
natural phenomena, bringing with it a constant awareness of the supernatural possibilities of the
actual visible world.
Importance of authority and tradition are predominantly pseudo-augustian.
Historia Regum Brittanniae
- Latin
- History of the kings of Britain
- Claims to be historian, but that is questionable
- Geo rey claims his source was an ancient book in the British language
Narration and retelling are the focus of this course
Assignments
- Paper
- Follow your own interests
- Use one of the medieval texts in the list as the focus of your paper
- Feel free to talk about your favourite adaptations
- Arthur is the most adaptable
What is it that is being adapted? What is the “original”?
Based on your reading of the two texts assigned for this class, how might we use contemporary
analytical approaches to medieval adaptations (i.e. medieval texts that are themselves adaptations
of earlier texts)?
- Looking at the middle ages, we shouldn’t be surprised that games, anime etc. adapt from
literature, you can analyse those things seriously even though they may be seen as less
valuable.
- Fidelity is an important concept.
- The idea of relative distance between texts, compare texts, which ones are further away from
the original, is style and such similar?
- Barely any of Shakespeare's plays were set in the Elizabethan age, they are in adaptations
often set there. people like Austen do not get put in other settings as those are period
pieces.
Auctoritas —> you are not supposed to. Come up with something original in the middle ages. If
you had an original thought, you’d pick a person that is closest to that mindset and you’d pretend
like they said something, that’s how you get the pseudo-narratives.
Week 2 03/05/2021
Where does Arthur come from?
- Arthur is the most famous one, the most used in terms of characters who originate from
celtic literature.
How Culwhch won Olwen
- Oldest arthurian welsh narrative
- Di erent from any later representation of later arthurian stories.
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ff ff
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