Well worth it.
Is the phrase "Nu Labour" a jibe? If so, how?
One comment I've often made to libertarianish friends (and one with which they have usually agreed) is that the LP here would have a better time being taken seriously if they weren't constantly running a subset of candidates that were obviously and demonstrably insane. Interesting to see that isn't a purely American phenomenon.
Oh, dear. The writer seems to be unusually open to being suckered, though. Anyone can get taken, but she stayed entwined with the guy for a long time after you'd think that she'd have cut her losses and stopped interacting with him.
unusually open to being suckered
That's pretty much a prerequisite for believing in libertarianism, isn't it?
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Even better than the Nietzsche Family Circus: peanutweeter.
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I don't that Shroeder and Snoopy add anything to the brilliance of the line "she has breath that smells like someone put out a tire fire with wet cats".
6: Apropos of another thread:
http://peanutweeter.com/post/4755839669/ive-had-the-same
Also I'm embarrassed by how long I puzzled over the idiom "spoke over the water".
In case you're missing the reference.
re: 1
A minor jibe, the Blairites really did refer to the party as New Labour. Not everyone approved.
In case you're missing the reference.
Ooh, ooh, thread merge opportunity! Speaking of the German federal presidency and naive literal translations into English, the German term for such a translation is named after a former federal president, Heinrich Lübke.
The classic Lübke anecdote (which, to be fair, Wikipedia says is apocryphal) has the then head of state beginning an address to an audience in Africa with the words, "Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, liebe Neger..." ("Esteemed ladies and gentlemen, dear negroes...").
...all of which is to say, a German federal president really is a suitable substitute for a British royal.
I love this at the end:
"I still hold fast to my Libertarian beliefs though."
Of course, why wouldn't you? The barminess and dishonesty of its purveyors couldn't possibly indicate any problems with the product. Perish the thought.
I have zero sympathy for "Anna Raccoon." It would take someone incredibly committed to being a mark not to have cut ties with the LPUK immediately following the insane experiences she describes with "Dr. Rohen Kapur" just for starters. Yet the saga is only beginning at that point, and appears to involve a significant stretch of time in which "Anna Raccoon" was publicly stumping for people she privately knew perfectly well to be a group of lunatics and confidence men.
1: In context, she's accusing the LPUK of manifesting "totalitarian" behavior that's presumably worthy of the totalitarian evil of "Nu-Labour" (perhaps meant to insult "New Labour" by putting the term parallel to banal music industry buzzwords like "Nu-Metal"). It's presumably meant to reassure that the experience hasn't dented her confidence in libertarian crankery in general. She's just disillusioned with this particular group of cranks.
Yeah, I read that article when the Rodent first linked to it and even after the first few paragraphs it was clear Anna was being taken for a ride but too clueless to see it herself and I got annoyed with her after that because she was so willfully stupid.
Fairly typical of a certain breed of UK libertarian, who are either wilful dupes, argumentative (though sometimes entertaining) wankers or wannabe-Americans outraged that they cannot legally buy M-16s.
Speaking of prime ministerial gaffes, the worst our heads of government seem to perpetrate are out of a slightly too high confidence in their mastery of English, as with socialist pm Joop Den Uyl confidently telling an English audience that the Dutch "are a nation of undertakers" when he meant entrepreneurs.
re: 15
Some of the more arseholey of the right wing UK blogs referred to ZaNu Labour for a while, too.
as with socialist pm Joop Den Uyl confidently telling an English audience that the Dutch "are a nation of undertakers"
Has a certain synergy with the 'nation of florists', thing, too.
I have zero sympathy for "Anna Raccoon."
She advocates a political philosophy that boils down to "I got mine, fuck you". Well, they got theirs, and fucked you. Who could have seen that coming?
You know what's fantastic about that article? Everything. It confirms my contempt for libertarians, and it was a libertarian who got screwed. No downside.
You know what i'd like to see? A series of undercover investigative reporting bits on the tea party, libertarians, Rand Paul. I have no doubt the results would be horrific, but i find myself morbidly curious about the details of the horror. Related: didnt somebody do this in the 70s? Hunter S Thompson, probably? It's admittedly a really shmucky thing to do, and yet still a public service. There's got to be some enterprising, suicidal young reporter w the requisite narcissism to do the tv circuit after. I mean, safer than Libya, right? And you're famous and on tv forever after that.
You know what's fantastic about that article? Everything. It confirms my contempt for libertarians, and it was a libertarian who got screwed. No downside.
You know what i'd like to see? A series of undercover investigative reporting bits on the tea party, libertarians, Rand Paul. I have no doubt the results would be horrific, but i find myself morbidly curious about the details of the horror. Related: didnt somebody do this in the 70s? Hunter S Thompson, probably? It's admittedly a really shmucky thing to do, and yet still a public service. There's got to be some enterprising, suicidal young reporter w the requisite narcissism to do the tv circuit after. I mean, safer than Libya, right? And you're famous and on tv forever after that.
Also, OT: I am reading Beowulf. I found it on the cheapo table at the bookstore. Is it known for terrible storytelling and often non-sensical sentences, or is this a particularly bad translation? It's by John McNamara.
It's still pretty funny, though.
A series of undercover investigative reporting bits on the tea party, libertarians, Rand Paul.
Didn't WaPo briefly have someone assigned to this beat, which person was subsequently canned for, like, having an opinion or some bullshit?
They went undercover in the tea party? Really?
Thanks, google. Dave Weigel is whom I was thinking of.
To be clear: this is the piece of shit phone's fault, not Stanleys. Also possibly mine for dropping it down many flights of stairs.
Don't know about McNamara, but there's an ungodly number of Beowulf translations extant - my university library seems to have dozens at a glance - presumably because it's the only Old English work with any broad recognition. I've been informed that some of them actually just went through several existing translations and picked and chose the bits they liked best.
Much better. Except where the thing that actually happened is depressing and gross. But no, I was talking about more of a fairly unethical, completely undercover long term endeavor with the express purpose of revealing how the tea party, etc. works.
Also, beowulftranslations.net is a thing. So. The world is a weird place.
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I'm off to swim play basketball. This is going to be injurious; I just know it.
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There is IMO not much point bothering with Beowulf translations other than Seamus Heaney's, unless you are an academic these days.
17. Canonically, it was always ZaNuLieBore.
"ZaNu Labour"/"ZaNuLieBore"
Because of ZANU-PF?
Yeah, I just read some of the excerpts of Heaney's and compared to the one I have. Much, much better.
Still, Grendel is hilarious in any translation. "Look at them, in their mead hall, having all that fun. No one invites Grendel. Grendel isn't good enough. Well, I'll show them." Cue bone-crunching slaughter, which somehow they all sleep through.
Then next morning, they all wake up amidst like, piles of intestines and horns of ale.
"Dude."
"Dude."
"Grendel, dude."
"I know, dude."
Pause.
"So, same thing tonight?"
"You know it."
This is to say: had I lived a thousand years ago, I probably would have been burned as a witch before my thirteenth birthday. ("Excuse me, Mr. Traveling Bard? I have a question.")
34 Gets it right. You can also just listen to Heaney read it himself. (Or.)
35: yes, because of Zanu-PF and the supposed similarities between the opressive and corrput Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe and New Labour.
Well, you have to admit, Blair's "Land for Cronies" property redistribution program was pretty aggressive.
38, 39: this is a popular reference? If so, it's kind of sweet that the general population over there can be counted on to get it. What's that like, living in a place like that?
I suspect this is the blogger / avid newspaper-reader population, not the general population.
presumably because it's the only Old English work with any broad recognition.
Roughly equal recognition with The Battle of Maldon, I'd have thought. But Beowulf is well worth reading in the Heaney version, as Daniel says.
Nu Labour (NuLab, ZaNuLab, etc.) has pretty geneal recognition among anybody who's likely to see it written down.
Nu Labour (NuLab, ZaNuLab, etc.) has pretty geneal recognition among anybody who's likely to see it written down.
Well put.
Roughly equal recognition with The Battle of Maldon, I'd have thought.
I've never heard of that.
I'd have thought that most people who had heard of Beowulf would recognise the lines:
Our hearts must grow resolute, our courage more valiant,
our spirits must be greater, though our strength grows less.
NuLabour, I still stick my middle finger up .
Nope, just sounds like interchangeable courage-verse to me. Maybe Maldon is one of the primary-education standards in the UK but not the US? (I did read Beowulf in high school.)
I've read about the real battle of Maldon in multiple history books for fun, but never knew it was a work of literature. Not a piece of the US canon. Much less famous than "Gawain and the Green Knight", "Song of Roland", "Tristan and Isolde"...
Meanwhile Beowulf is up there with The Canterbury Tales. Probably one of the first five things people would come up with if you asked for non-Shakespeake literature more than 300 years old.
48: Don't forget The Bible!
...oh right, non-fiction.
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Who knew that morels were the state mushroom of Minnesota?
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50: me
I've never been fortunate enough to eat them, though.
first five things people would come up with
Paradise Lost, Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, and uhhh, maybe Doctor Faustus*?
*I originally had Ivanhoe, but that's not quite 300 years old yet. Once that was out, I had a hard time coming up with a fifth that would be widely known outside of English departments.
Oh, dear. The writer seems to be unusually open to being suckered, though. Anyone can get taken, but she stayed entwined with the guy for a long time after you'd think that she'd have cut her losses and stopped interacting with him.
It's the bad-picker archetype, innit? Not clear whether they seek 'em out or the other way around, probably equal parts of both.
The good news is that the Libertarian Party is basically entirely negligible in every way.
Meanwhile, @35, yes, Tories are weirdly obsessed with Zimbabwe. Not in the sense of having had any policy there, just in the sense of fantasising about teh nigras taking their land right there in Twickenham.
Once that was out, I had a hard time coming up with a fifth that would be widely known outside of English departments.
Dante's Inferno (or Human Comedy) is the only obvious one I can think of. Unless you get into the ancient Greeks.
Robinson Crusoe, but that's a mere 291 years old.
51: They are fantastic. I've been fantasizing about sautéed morels stuffed with salt cod, and it galls me to know that morels are out there, nearly within reach, while I'm shackled to my fucking desk.
Morels are great, and they're excellent and easily available in dried form as well.
Shakespeare anyone?
Once that was out, I had a hard time coming up with a fifth that would be widely known outside of English departments.
The Bible;Grimm
Childe Ballads? like "Pretty Polly" "Too Long at the Fair" "PSRaT (1670)" ...not completely sure how old they are, but nobody is
depends on who you asking, mustn't be anglonormative or elitist
Tao Te Ching, Confucius, Genji, Basho, uhhh...The Koran?
"PSRaT (1670)" s/b "Scarborough Fair" like I meant to do when I looked up the date.
Mother Goose/Hubbard; Perrault
Shakespeare anyone?
Non-Shakespeare literature was specified.
For non-Shakespeare literature more than 300 years old: oddly, The Canterbury Tales probably don't count. I didn't know them until I took English at university level, anyway, nor did I know anyone who did, including my (university-educated and quite well-read) parents. The Bible really has got to count, along with the Koran, the Tao Te Ching and Confucius' Analects; even if most of us are only familiar with the latter three via deeply-corrupt translations or parodies, it's pretty inescapable to be aware of them.
Cervantes (most people would probably recognize Don Quixote, though they're more familiar with it as a movie adaptation than a book);
Dante (there's a reasonable shot at someone with a high school education knowing The Divine Comedy and Dante's name, though there's a good chance they would only know the Inferno);
Aesop (still used as children's literature; a copy of Aesop's Fables was part of how I learned to read; sure he's a mostly apocryphal and probably mythical "author" but the tradition ascribed to the name is well over 300 years old);
The Bhaghavad-Gita (this is one where a contemporary Westerner is likeliest to be familiar with it because it was Gandhi's favourite scripture; so it depends how much you knew or cared about Gandhi growing up);
Sun Tzu's The Art of War (because it's flourished as a fashionable, status-primping text among lawyers and corporate types and not just in academic study, indeed history departments give it annoyingly short shrift and utterly wrong accounts of it routinely turn up in modern military history);
Machiavelli's The Prince (for the same reasons as Sun Tzu; unfortunately people who know about it are a fractional people of those who've actually read it, much less The Discourses which are far better guide to his thought and a useful correction to his sociopathic reputation).
mustn't be anglonormative or elitist
We're talking about the canon (as it is lodged in the minds of USians who've even heard of Beowulf in the first place), so yes, it's going to be anglonormative and 'elitist' as you use the term.
"Machiavelli's The Prince (for the same reasons as Sun Tzu; unfortunately people who know about it are a fractional people "
Uhhh, fractional portion. I could've just said "fraction." I guess.
I'm having a hard time putting Beowulf in the same category as The Prince or Don Quixote. We're looking for Old English, I thought.
Though I see Ned switched to just older than 300 years.
Oh. Well, for Old English I'd expect the popular canon would be very limited. Most of the Western canon from prior to Shakespeare would be classical literature, not Old English literature.
I notice I missed Homer and Vergil in the above, huge oversight for Homer in particular.
I was going to throw Homer in there, hadn't thought of Virgil .. but then got all confused about which era of lit'rature we're supposed to be talking about.
If we stick with the original question (i.e. Beowulf vs. The Battle of Maldon in name recognition), I'd go with Ned's initial list in 48.1.
65: For the Song of Roland (Old French, not Old English) and Gawain and the Green Knight, anyway. Although I have trouble working out on the fly whether "most people" would know either without a university education. I found both of them (via interest in Tolkien and fantasy literature) when I was a geeky kid, but geeky kids are not a good metric for popular knowledge.
Another biggie from broader tradition would be "The Epic of Gilgamesh." But again, I find it hard to assess how well that one would really be known in a popular sense.
Oh yes! Epic of Gilgamesh, definitely.
As for the level of education likely needed before people might have heard of these things, yeah.
Leaving aside Old English (or Old French), it's true that in my high school, anyway, Homer and Shakespeare were required reading, so absent a university education, and if I'm any indication, the former are least likely to get a spark of recognition from the average person.
Are there people out there (in western societies) who have never heard of Dante?
Jesus, these hypothetical people sure are philistines, but even so they're probably familiar with Aesop.
Just musing now, but we've all noticed that we're presented with political polls up the wazoo, including those that attempt to assess the public's understanding of basic knowledge questions, like how many houses of Congress there are, who the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court -- or the Vice President -- is, and so on.
Are there similar studies of things like whether people have heard of Dante, Homer, Shakespeare, Plato, Machiavelli?
I would be fairly fascinated to see the results of such things.
Gawain and the Green Knight is Middle English, as are the Canterbury Tales (which a lot of Americans apparently read in high school, although I didn't). If we're talking about Old English specifically, Beowulf is probably it for Americans, although it sounds like Brits are generally familiar with Maldon too. Non-Shakespeare literature more then 300 years old is another matter, of course.
Are there similar studies of things like whether people have heard of Dante, Homer, Shakespeare, Plato, Machiavelli?
There are, and they tend to result in a round of "kids these days don't even know the canon!!1!" whenever they're released. I don't know of any specific ones offhand, though.
kids these days don't even know the canon!!1!
With an increasing number of smartphones featuring built-in cameras, it's not surprising that the youth of today would be unfamiliar with more conventional camera brands.
67: Your HS required Homer? Oy vey. My obviously shitty and second-rate HS never did that. I was just thinking the miscellaneous entry-level books about Greek Mythology would mostly do the trick.
68: Glad we're all on the same page.
As it were. Get it? I said "page"... like, of a book. Wasn't that clever?
70: D'oh. But I'd been hoping you'd show up to tell us how confused this discussion was.
a round of "kids these days don't even know the canon!!1!"
Bah. That's not the point. I'd just like to know what people have heard of, and what they haven't. Editorializing about the results is stupid and unnecessary. It's also not just the kids that are of interest.
My kids all read Beowulf in HS and that is where I first saw Heaney's superior translation (and which we subsequently purchased). In at least two of the cases it was paired with Gardner's Grendel which I thought worked quite well. I believe one of them was assigned some of The Canterbury Tales.
Actually in the informal survey described here (1997) both were in the top ten assigned to 12th-graders (I'd enjoy seeing a more recent and comprehensive survey).
Macbeth
Hamlet
Beowulf
Canterbury Tales
Fallen Angels [I bet this one has fallen off]
To Kill a Mockingbird
Pride and Prejudice
A Separate Peace
Lord of the Flies
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
(Note: some other "classics" made earlier grades--Moby Dick, Huck Finn, etc.)
73: Your HS required Homer? Oy vey.
Uh, I was on the honors track? The college-bound kids. I had forgotten. My high school made a pretty clear distinction between the kids who were college track and the ones who weren't; we were in different classes (courses).
I don't know what the standard English courses for the non-college-track kids were. But the college-track kids, anyway, read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. This was a public high school, the only one in a town of about 18,000 population wise.
Now I feel weird.
Dante's Inferno
D'oh! Yes, that would be the obvious fifth.
This looks like a more comprehensive survey, but from 1989 and I can only access a summary which does not break down by grade (I'd also like to see the comparison with a similar survey from 25 years previously that is mentioned). Neither of the ye oldes make the top 10 for grades 9-12. I do wonder if Heaney's translation is increasing the popularity of assigning Beowulf (I look forward to the 2014 survey).
Public Schools: Romeo and Juliet; Macbeth; Huckleberry Finn; Julius Caeser; To Kill a Mockingbird; The Scarlet Letter; Of Mice and Men; Hamlet; The Great Gatsby; Lord of the Flies.
Catholic Schools: Huckleberry Finn; The Scarlet Letter; Macbeth; To Kill a Mockingbirg; The Great Gatsby; Romeo and Juliet; Hamlet; Of Mice and Men; Julius Caesar; Lord of the Flies.
Independent Schools: Macbeth; Romeo and Juliet; Huckleberry Finn; The Scarlet Letter; Hamlet; The Great Gatsby; To Kill a Mockingbird; Julius Ceasar; The Odyssey; Lord of the Files
76: Uh, I was on the honors track? The college-bound kids.
So was I. Those fuckers.
OTOH I had a feminist Shakespeare scholar as my AP teacher, so I learned the Bard really well. But still.
The list in 75 is interesting as a 12th grade reading list.
My high school divided things into eras, in a way.
Freshman: Early American. Jonathan Edwards, Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter) -- I don't remember much of the syllabus.
Sophomore: Anglo-American classics. Thomas Hardy, Samuel Clemens (Huckleberry Finn), Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities), Hemingway (Old Man and the Sea), etc.
Junior: The Homer and Shakespeare year
Senior: Modern. All I remember distinctly is Waiting for Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Eliot's Wasteland. Things were a little fraught.
What's really remarkable in retrospect is that there was no non-English literature. Also nothing actually contemporary.
I should have read 78 before posting 80. Anyway, do I determine from 78 (without reading the link) that these categories of schools are all reading the same things? And the list is about what I read in high school as well.
I'm glad To Kill a Mockingbird is still on the menu. Though this is from 1989, which is freaking ancient history, Stormcrow.
I didn't have a particular good HS English program, but what I remember included:
Freshman - Romeo & Juliet (heavily abridged), Raisin in the Sun, To Kill A Mockingbird, Great Expectations
Sophomore - Inferno, Iliad, A Separate Peace, Gilgamesh
Junior - Invisible Man, ?
Senior - poetry, ?
DS, I'm not sure I can say I got much from reading Homer when I was 15 or 16. It was a slog, though I didn't hate it.
We were given an exercise, I recall, to 'translate' some passage or other into contemporary English. That was actually a pretty good exercise. You can't really fake your way through that. We also had to memorize some Shakespeare.
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar ...."
God knows I've probably gotten that wrong, but it's astonishing that I still remember it.
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar ...."
"the bad jazz that a cat blows wails long after his [death] but the groovy, the groovy, is oft stashed with his frame."
82: A map of when Minivet discovered [liquor / drugs / some other form of delinquence]? I only ask because I have vagaries on a similar pattern. Hell, maybe we [i]did[/i] study Homer.
80: pretty much what we did 94-97. So hs didn't change that much, right?
85: I never thought about this, but I might have been more attentive to my surroundings at the beginning of high school, because I had just moved from Montessori to public schools, and by junior year had realized that I would get A's with minimal effort in the humanities classes. (No deviancy until college, and even then just barely.)
At my Catholic (and Canuckistan) HS, we read one Shakespearean play per year (Julius Caesar; Macbeth; Hamlet; and The Tempest), and also a bunch of sonnets. No Beowulf; but we did read a bit of Chaucer (including the Wife of Bath's Tale). We read The Scarlet Letter and To Kill a Mockingbird, but very little other American literature that I can recall. No Jane Austen, no Dickens, and not enough English stuff, I now believe; and probably too much contemporary CanLit overall.
The best English teacher I had was a French Canadian nun: in retrospect, I have to wonder whether her somewhat 'outsider' status (her mother tongue was French, and she spoke English with a heavy accent) to the English language/English 'canon' didn't give her a more interesting perspective toward the works of the standard syllabus. We were regularly, not to say relentlessly, drilled in grammar, syntax, and spelling; and we probably read more poetry than did the kids at the public school.
We read so much in my high school English courses, honors track, public school - at least 30 books my senior year, which was AP Literature. (I seem to recall a schedule that was roughly a book a week, and we had a great deal of choice from approved readings). Existentialism (lots of Kafka, Camus, etc), West African lit (Achebe for sure), Magical Realism - that's largely what I remember as sub-fields for that. We also had a lot of poetry, somewhat randomly chosen - I mainly remember a dramatic reading a class mate gave of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Junior year was AP Language; we were given mostly non-fiction essays, a lot of the Transcendentalists, some short stories (I mostly just remember Tim O'Brien, there). Freshman and sophomore years are a blur of classics - Dickens, Shakespeare, etc.
And then I found $5 on the floor of the library, which made all that reading worthwhile.
I went to a super-nerdly private high school that prided itself on its English department, so I know that my experience isn't typical.
In our freshman year, we read the Odyssey, some key bits of the Bible, and several more modern pieces of literature.
Sophomore year we did "History of English": We read bits of Beowulf and The Dream of the Rood, as well as Shakespeare, Dryden, Chaucer, and then somehow we ended up at the end of the year with Heart of Darkness.
Junior and Senior years, we had thematic electives. I ended up doing one semester of Shakespeare, one Romantic literature. I'm blanking on the other two.
I got my existentialist literature exposure mostly in French class: Sartre, Beckett, and Camus are comparatively easy as far as language is concerned.
Gawain and the Green Knight is Middle English, as are the Canterbury Tales (which a lot of Americans apparently read in high school, although I didn't)
Gawain is Middle English, but because of the dialect and metre it arguably feels closer to Beowulf than to The Canterbury Tales.
I'm not sure The Battle Of Maldon is all that familiar to Brits. I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of it until I read it at university, whereas I'd read Gawain in translation long before. As for pre-Shakespeare (English) literature in general, I'm kind of surprised nobody's mentioned Spenser or Sidney or Malory.
Gawain is Middle English, but because of the dialect and metre it arguably feels closer to Beowulf than to The Canterbury Tales.
Fair enough. I never took any Middle English courses myself.
Simply put, Canterbury is in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter, whereas Gawain is in the older non-rhyming alliterative style with lines divided into two halves with two stresses each, just like Beowulf. Also while Gawain's English is much more modern than Beowulf's, the vocabulary is much less influence by French.
re: 91
I'm not sure The Battle Of Maldon is all that familiar to Brits. I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of it until I read it at university, whereas I'd read Gawain in translation long before.
Yeah, ditto. I did four years of undergrad English Language, so had to translate a lot of OE, and Old Norse, and read a crapload of ME, but almost none of it was familiar to me before I started. I was aware of, but don't think I'd read, Beowful, but I had read Gawain in a modernised version, and the Morte D'Arthur.
I don't we did any pre-Shakespearean English at high school. I can't remember what all of the set texts were for Higher (roughly equivalent to A-level) but they were largely 20th century, with some Shakespeare. There were more Scottish authors, I think, than you'd have found in England but I'm struggling to come up with concrete examples. Although I do remember:
http://www.booksfromscotland.com/Books/Consider-The-Lilies-9780753812938
which I thought was god-awful at the time.
We did the Canterbury Tales (unmodernised, but only the prologue and a few tales) at school. I don't think it was a set text for exams but I might be wrong. Other than that, I can only remember The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (translated). Unless you count Latin stuff. A-Level set texts for me were Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Translations (the Brian Friel play) and Paradise Lost.
Though this is from 1989, which is freaking ancient history, Stormcrow.
Indeed, as noted. I certainly encourage those with access to newer data to post it.
45 years, not a freaking clue. Shakespeare play every year, and I did a senior paper on a magic talisman or amulet or something in Oedipus Rex or something which I ripped right out of Graves at 3 AM.
That's it
8 semesters of Latin took me thru Vergil to Catullus I think.
84 is fantastic (and what's really weird is that it jogged my memory enough to be able to supply the rest of the Shakespeare).
it galls me to know that morels are out there, nearly within reach, while I'm shackled to my fucking desk.
Ha ha, Jesus McQueen admits - but regrets - his amorel nature.
I was aware of, but don't think I'd read, Beowful,
This is a great typo from ttaM. "What's Old English literature like?" "It's Beowful."
We also did the Canterbury Tales at school, but I'd never even heard of the Battle of Mauldon until recently, and only read Beowulf at university. Also, Barbour's "The Bruce" which is 14th century Scots.
A! Fredome is a noble thing!
Fredome mays man to haiff liking;
Fredome all solace to man giffis,
He levys at ese that frely levys!
A noble hart may haiff nane ese,
Na ellys nocht that may him plese,
Gyff fredome fail; for fre liking
Is yarnyt our all othir thing.
Na he that ay has levyt fre
May nocht knaw weill the propyrtè,
The angyr, na the wretchyt dome
That is couplyt to foule thyrldome.
Bot gyff he had assayit it,
Than all perquer he suld it wyt;
And suld think fredome mar to prise
Than all the gold in warld that is.
Barbour had obviously read his Herodotus: "if you knew what freedom was, you would advise us to fight for it, and not only with spears, but with hatchets."
Foule thyrldome is a wlatsome thing.