Beowulf Blog, 5 Years Old Today

Frederic Soulacroix, "The Tea Party"

Frederic Soulacroix, “The Tea Party”

Today is the five-year anniversary of this blog. I can’t quite believe that, in that time, I’ve written close to 1700 posts and probably over a million words. I have never had so much fun writing.

I have particularly enjoyed my interactions with readers. Each month during the school year, around 10,000 different individuals visit the blog (traffic slows down during the summer), and some I have gotten to know: a church educator, a high school English teacher, a Slovene professor, a Ugandan business woman, a Tolsoy enthusiast. And then, of course, there are all those I already know and with whom, in this way, I maintain a kind of contact.

All along, I have felt honored that you would allow me to expand my teaching beyond my classroom and enter into your lives.

In my first post, I cited one of my favorite passages about what stories mean to us. It appears in the novel Ceremony by the Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko:

I will tell you something about stories,
[he said]
They aren’t just for entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.
You don’t have anything
if you don’t have the stories.

In that first post, I wrote:

Like Leslie Marmon Silko, I believe that stories are essential to our existence. Maybe not as essential as food and shelter, but they come close. This website and blog are dedicated to exploring the power of stories and the critical role that they play in our lives. 

I am particularly interested in the potential of literary classics to impact our lives. A second goal of this website is to convince readers to give the classics a chance. Or a second chance if the first encounter was a bad one.  I want people to think of the classics as stories, not as dusty artifacts in a museum.  Works like Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Doctor Faustus are a lot more accessible if you think of them as gripping stories rather than as “great literature.”

And then I mentioned the work that lends its name to this website:

Take Beowulf, for instance, since I have named my website after this marvelous epic. When Anglo-Saxons in 8th century Mercia or Northumbria gathered to listen to this tale of warriors and monsters, they weren’t doing so in order to think of themselves as highly cultured. Nor were they academically analyzing the poem as they listened. They went because it was a good story—a story as exciting as our most exciting action adventure films, as blood curdling as our scariest horror films. Now, why they were entertained by such fare—and why we ourselves are entertained by having the wits scared out of us—are fascinating questions that I will be taking up time and again in blog posts. But the point is, they regarded England’s first great literary work as no more (and no less) than a really good story.

I emphasize the story-telling dimensions of literature because I never want to lose sight of literature’s entertainment dimension. After all, everyone loves a story. While I can be terribly earnest at times, I always try to hold on to my sense of play. Literature is all about play—about playing with ideas, with characters, with images and words and sounds. As Freud points out, it is through play that we learn how to engage with the world.

I have in mind his famous essay “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” where he argues that literature grows out of children’s play—and that children’s play is more than play:

The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. In spite of all the emotion with which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates the child’s “play” from “fantasying.”

Reading literature, then, is an adult version of playing with dolls and toy soldiers:

As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now fantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called daydreams.

With every novel or poem or play you read, you are practicing vital life skills. My aim is to help you make conscious connections. As you do, you enhance your life.

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