Ep. 22: Heroes of Old

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Education, Society & Culture

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2020

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of the biggest lies we're told is that celebrating our ancestral past is stupid, dishonest, or worse. None of that is true. "Beowulf," the Anglo-Saxon masterpiece about England's Germanic forefathers, is a sophisticated tale full of weirdness, complexity, and melancholy—plus, it's an awesome romp with lots of crazy monsters and sick fights. In this episode of "Young Heretics," Spencer Klavan uncovers the poem's greatness.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hark! Gather you round and listen to the tales of the heroic past.
0:08.2	That is the opening of Bealth.
0:10.6	The great heroic poem of Old English Literature
0:13.7	is going to be great openings in all of literature.
0:16.5	The very first word is the word, the Old Anglo-Saxon word,
0:20.3	HWAT, which means something like,
0:22.4	LOW or HARK. Listen up.
0:24.3	And that is what we are talking about today.
0:27.7	We are talking about Bealth.
0:29.7	And it is one of the great openings in all literature.
0:32.4	It is one of the great poems in the West.
0:35.8	And we have not really delved into the tradition
0:38.8	from which it emerges yet.
0:40.2	We have done a lot on the classical tradition,
0:42.0	a lot on the biblical tradition.
0:43.4	But this is the tradition of English poetry.
0:47.4	And it is in fact one of the foundational texts of English poetry.
0:51.3	It is written in Old English, which we will get to in a bit.
0:54.4	But let's just start off the bat by reading that fantastic opening
0:59.2	from the translation of J.R.R. Tolkien of Lord of the Rings
1:02.6	Fam.
1:03.6	And we will talk also about Tolkien's translation in a moment,
	...

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