There's a lot of characters gossiping at each other and it's not always clear why. If you've read Beowulf, you know after the defeat of Grendel's mom, it gets very odd to a modern person. Roughly speaking, this book covers roughly the first 40 percent of the original poem. Are we going to get Bea Wolf, The Sequel? She started doing that a little bit, which is just precious.Īrs Technica: Bea Wolf doesn't cover the events of the entire poem, most notably Grendel's mother. The book uses, for lack of a better term, epic language-talking in a high register. When I got the author copies, she grabbed one and ran up to her bunk bed and read it straight through, even the little educational part at the end. Zach Weinersmith: I mean, it's always hard to tell. Jennifer Ouellette: Your daughter is now nine. We don't know who wrote it, or what the original source material was, or what it was when it was originally told. It's fascinating how little we know about Beowulf. He's long dead, but the newest edition is just called Klaeber's Beowulf, and there are 150 dense pages talking about what scholars believe about this book right now.
He was this weird German dude who wrote the book where the analysis stuff is way thicker than the actual poem. You know how in every field there's that forgotten person who did the work one time and we all bow at their altar? That was Klaeber. I had multiple sources, but my main one was a book called Klaeber's Beowulf. A surprising amount of research went into that. I was not originally going to have an educational background, but my editor requested it. Zach Weinersmith: The whole trick, I think, with science communication, is to know the right level to talk to your audience and then stay at that level. There's a part where there's a river referred to as "a sliding sea," because a slide is a thing kids like.Īrs Technica: The book also includes a wonderfully educational, kid-friendly appendix, walking them through what the poem was about and some of the history and scholarship associated with the original poem.
Kennings have a formal definition that I skirt in places, but these are kennings that work both for kids and for Vikings. My favorite parts of the book are those where there's a new kenning. There's something about the human brain when you hear someone call the sky "the shoreless sea" it gives it a grandeur that's lacking in the bare word for it. And it helps you alliterate if you can come up with a brand-new term in this formal way.
Slay the spire forgotten altar plus#
They're giving you a riddle so that you take delight in figuring it out, plus it sounds cool. It's not like they're trying to be sneaky. Having things like kennings, where you say something like, "Battle adder" and you're meant to know that it's an arrow-adder in the sense of snake. There are actually whole books of riddles, and they seem to have enjoyed this as part of their poetry. Zach Weinersmith: There's this riddling quality to Old English poetry.
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