1/15/20 Robert Grande Period 2

Hey what's up guys it's Rob and today we'll be going over what happened on January 15th, 2020 in Ms. Fusaro's God's, Monsters, and the Apocalypse class. 

Today is a very sad day because Fusaro is not here, she's out at a conference :( but that's okay because she left us a little note and told us that there's a lesson on beowulf for us!

Alright so here's the aim: "How does the construction of Grendel as a monster indicate and embody the fears of the Nordic people during the Early Medieval Period?" 

Nice and simple aim, we'll be talking about how Grendel the monster directly shows how scared the Nordic people are. Sounds good to me. Here's the Do Now: 

"The Old Gods and the New: Explain how the narrator describes the tactics the Danes used to try and drive Grendel away from their lands. What can we ascertain about civilization, judgement and righteousness?" 

Alright so since there was no full class discussion about the do now, I'll give my own input on it. As I will be doing for all the discussion questions in this lesson. So it really all starts when they try to make him Grendel go away and try to escape from him by sleeping in different beds and trying to physically hide and flee from him. Obviously this didn't stop Grendel. Then Hrothgar and company attempted to hold secret meetings and discuss about what the best of the best and the bravest warriors could do about Grendel, and maybe they would even try to ask God for help, since Grendel would never know the love of God and therefore would never be able to capture the throne. I can be certain that these Danes do care a lot about their God and they are very religious, but they seem to lack the will to actually fight and bring a real war to Grendel; I'm going to compare this to Norse Mythology and say that Thor would have just knocked out Grendel with one punch and then have it be the end of it, but these Danes seem to keep trying too hard and not actually bringing a real war. 

Next slide is starting the talk about the dark ages. Scandinavia was the last of the Germanic Europe to convert and were the most resistant. These people and Northern Europe eventually all converted to Christianity. Finnic, Samic, Baltic, and some Slavic people also converted as a result. This was all a part of Germanic Christianization. 

Then there's a whole paragraph that's straight from Wikipedia (Thank you, Wikipedia in the bottom right lol). Talks about the Anglo-Saxons who were people who inhabited Great Britain and all that stuff.

OO wait now there's a video. Let's watch! 

So the video sounds like he's speaking a bunch of gibberish. This slide is labelled "the evolution of language" so I guess it makes sense that it has to start somewhere. I can hear some english words here and there. "He, was, Beo, Should," and like little cue words like that. 

Okay yeah so the video was just straight up Old English and I guess it's pretty cool to see where language kind of started from. 

Okay so next slide is about metonymy "It is a figure of speech that replaces the name of a thing with the name of something else with which it is closely associated. We can come across examples of metonymy both from literature and in everyday life."

Also on this slide is information about "kennings". "The typical kenning is a compound in which each element identifies an attribute through the figures of metaphor, synecdoche, and metonymy. It works by indirection." There's a lot of kennings that can be created and there's a lot of kennings that exist because people use these kennings to describe everyday things and the power or purpose that the object has. For example, on the slide, it says that Old English poems would sometimes call a sword a "battle-light", because the sword is used for battles, and the sword's metal gleams and shines a light.

So now we're gonna go back to the text and find some kennings to describe Grendel the monster. 

Okay so moving on now we're gonna talk about what a caesura is. Basically it's literary term for a pause in a story or poem. But in modern times, we denote these caesuras with punctuation. 

Here a little excerpt from Grendel where I can show you an example of a caesura:

"Nor His passing as He walks through our world, the

Lord

of Heaven and Earth"

There's a physical break in the text which is an example of a Caesura because it's just straight up a break in the text. It allows for the emphasized "Lord". 

I'm running low on time now so I'll just skip to the final group discussion. 

"Beowulf's poet describes Grendel as evil incarnate. What are your thoughts?"

So there's a lot of answers for this question. I immediately thought that the answer would be yes because Grendel causes havoc and absolutely destroys a lot of civilization by bringing evil amongst the people and scaring them to no end. But is he really the definition of evil in a monster form? You really do have a strong argument for Yes because Grendel is a descendant of Cain, who God did not forgive for murdering Abel. But you can also argue that he is not a true argument because Grendel can theoretically be saved from his evil WAYS if he is treated as such. So I think there's a lot of arguments for this question but I think my answer is that Grendel is not the living embodiment of evil, his ways are just very evil-like ways. 

Reflection!

So this blog was certainly out of the ordinary because we didn't really have a class, but it was fun, nonetheless. It was almost like I had to put myself into the shoes of the teacher and the students...  I had no problem with it, I love thinking like a teacher so this blog worked out for me. I definitely learned a lot from the lesson despite not having the input of other students, but in the end I know I'll be able to latch on to the thoughts of my other peers once we continue with the Beowulf unit. Not gonna lie, I think Beowulf is going to be a really interesting unit; I feel like there's going to be a lot of discovery about how our ancestors thought of their religion and how they delivered their stories before us, and also how these methods of delivery lead to all of the figurative language, themes, and other literary elements we all know today. So yeah, I think it's going to be fun learning about the legend of Beowulf. 

Thank you for reading bros!

- Rob Grande