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Beowulf's three bloodiest battles

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Beowulf’s three bloodiest battles - Iseult Gillespie

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Explore the classic poem, “Beowulf,” which follows a heroic prince as he fights to free a kingdom from the monster Grendel.--An epic written in Old English,…

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Scene: Scandinavia, late summer, a cloudless night. The Dark Ages. Seemingly from nowhere, a quasihuman monster, descended from Cain, hears the sounds of warriors reveling in their Great Hall and decides to silence them. Creeping out of the unstructured darkness of his usual stomping grounds, this monster sneaks into the Great Hall and slaughters the warriors in their sleep. The monster develops a taste for blood, so these murders become habitual. For years.

When the monster is at last maimed and slain by a hero, his semihuman mother creeps out of the fetid pond they live in to take revenge for her only child's death. She rips men apart in the night, seething like death itself. The same hero follows this grim hag into her pond (he's a strong swimmer) and cuts her down with a talismanic sword. Some time later, a third monster surges forth, this time a poisonous dragon. The hero kills the dragon, too, but not before the dragon lethally poisons him.

All that is left is horrified lamentation at the certainty that worse things are coming. Despite the hero's efforts and sacrifices, no one is safe. The women ululate, and the rituals of burial for the hero bring no comfort.

This is the story of Beowulf. And, to the best of my knowledge, it is the earliest horror narrative in English literature.

There are few-surprisingly few, in fact-good working definitions of horror, or even criteria that apply across long time spans. One definition leans on Freud's notion of the uncanny: things that are eerily unfamiliar; twisted versions of recognizably human, domestic things. Another is Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject: literally, things that are cast down, or cast out, yet somehow surge back into social space as an unwanted surplus, often a residue of our own bodily decay and vulnerability. A third definition understands horror less by its subject and more by its method of action, as a mode that simultaneously overloads the reader's or viewer's capacity for rational understanding and floods her with fear; the horrific, then, acts both cognitively and affectively.

I would add to the list an important fourth criterion. There are other literary modes, like tragedy, that leverage fear, or convey some degree of abjection or uncanniness. But, unlike tragedy, horror leaves readers or viewers with a hangover-a sense that, even though the story is over, we still have something to be afraid of. Tragedies end relatively tidily (usually, everyone dies but there's a sense that the violence is now over; there's a lot of blood on the floor at the end of Hamlet, for instance, but one doesn't have the sense that Fortinbras is going to turn out to be the next Nero). Horror ends chaotically: everyone dies, but the threat of future violence or blood or terror remains.

By all these criteria and definitions, Beowulf qualifies as horror. Grendel and his mother are perfectly uncanny: they're almost human, but not human. They're the spawn of Cain, one of the most notoriously unruly and unnatural characters of the Old Testament. They're also abject: they live cast down in a watery, rank pit, below the surface of the earth; they are the death and darkness that the revelers of the court of Heorot must suppress or be destroyed by. Readers of the poem are made to experience that abjection by proxy, in the cognitive confusion they feel as to the precise ontological status of Grendel and his dam: What exactly are they? What do they mean? Readers are also made to feel terror: Grendel is horrifying, his mother is horrifying, the dragon is horrifying, and the idea of living on without Beowulf to save us all is horrifying.

And, of course, there is the hangover: everyone knows more chaos is coming. This holds true even for the characters within the story. At the end, a grieving old woman says she dreads the hard days to come.

But there is still one other, often overlooked element of horror: humor.

Horror leaves readers or viewers with a hangover-a sense that we still have something to be afraid of.

It's a tough element to contend with critically, because humor's not as universally present in the genre as the other four criteria I've mentioned. In fact, some of the great American horror films almost totally lack it. It's usually the grosser, often shittier horror movies-the movies that give the genre an undeservedly bad name-that have the most humor: slasher movies, teen-scream movies, zombie movies, or spoof horror flicks, like The Cabin in the Woods or The Evil Dead franchise. "Serious" horror movies and stories are usually, well, more serious.

And, for my part, I have always read Beowulf as serious horror. Since I first read it in college, in the original Old English, and then painfully (and poorly) translated it into Modern English. Since I read Seamus Heaney's oft-maligned but simply magisterial facing-page translation. Since I decided to slog through most of the 20th-century versions of the poem, almost all by men, many in prose, some in verse, most awful. The one thing all these translations have strongly in common is that they read and interpret the poem seriously.

Maria Dahvana Headley's new translation does not. And the first time I read her Beowulf, I was so furious I had to put the book down-several times-before I could get to the end. And I had come to the book wanting so badly to like it. Because a balls-out feminist translation of Beowulf is long, long overdue, and that's what Headley aims at.

But then she starts her translation with "Bro!" as a rendering of the Old English "Hwæt." "Hwæt" is, admittedly, a very difficult word to render. It literally means "what," but it has the force of an invocation, like "lo!" or "behold!" or "so!"-but definitely not "bro!" My sense of the seriousness of Beowulf roiled within me as I slunk angrily through the first pages of Headley's book. Too many "bros," so I put the book down for a few days.

When I came back to it, I saw there were approximately one million exclamation points in Headley's translation. This irked me beyond telling; exclamation points were only invented after the printing press. They are, therefore, completely anachronistic in this context. Setting aside the blazing anachronism, exclamation points are also loud orthographic forms. They are stupid. They are jokey. They are, of course, hyperbolic. They are not serious. They are not Beowulfy. At all. Beowulf is a poem that operates litotically, snaking from understatement to understatement. It's not a thrilled, overwrought, ecstatic, or fun poem. Inner sense of seriousness roiling, roiling.

And then I saw that Headley uses slang and profanity. Words like "daddy" and "fuck." She calls Grendel "fucked by fate." In one passage, the narrator says to the reader, "Bro, lemme say how fucked they were." I mean, come on. "Bro, Fate can fuck you up." Why not "Wyrd can work you," I wondered. I had to put the book down for a few weeks. Beowulf is a goddamn epic. Slang has no place in epic discourse, and neither does profanity.

But when I came back to the poem, something had shifted. And I can tell you exactly what it was. I had seen Jordan Peele's crackling horror film Get Out, which, although extremely serious, highly politically charged, and totally brilliant, is also very, very funny, self-spoofing, and engaged with prior horror narratives ( The Stepford Wives and Rosemary's Baby, to name a couple of the obvious ones.) Now, reading Headley's Beowulf, I started to find myself chuckling at the "bros," shaking my head at them not in wrath but in some kind of fate-fucked lockstep with Headley. When Headley talks about Wealhtheow, the semi-enslaved wife of the leader of the Danes and probably the single most important female character in the poem, she says, "Hashtag: blessed." I laughed out loud.

And then it dawned on me: Headley sees in Beowulf what Peele sees in American horror cinema-that humor can be an asset in dealing with the horror of life, and in transforming what are otherwise slasher narratives into political critiques. Peele aims his humor at the horror of American racism. Headley aims hers at the horror of Anglo patriarchy.

For example: Queen Wealhtheow's name is often translated as "treasure bearer," but it can also mean "death thrall," or, better still, "corpse slave." Why? Because queens were often given over as a bribe to end a war. So, yeah, "treasure bearer" works; so does "death thrall." Or, maybe just a little bit, because, by becoming servants to their new lords, these women became the living dead: corpse slaves. Zombie queens. Hashtag: blessed, indeed.

I read Headley's book again, tip to tail. The heroes seemed frivolous, shallow, narcissistic. I keened at this; I had to take deep breaths every time Beowulf behaved like, well, like a bro. "Anyone who fucks with the Geats? Bro, they have to fuck with me," he says. It's hard to stomach when your heroes start to look like dickheads: "Beowulf," Headley writes, "gave zero shits." I felt like my brain had Norovirus. But I kept reading, in part because I realized something about Headley's project. Namely, that her translation forces us to contend with what we expect and maybe even crave from a translation of a historical work of literature. It forces us to think about what we need to be true about the past, and our access to it.

I'm a medievalist. I like translations that bring the past to us in a way that still seems somehow to honor the past as the past. This is why I love Heaney's Beowulf so much: because of the poetic and lexical license Heaney takes, the poem feels old and present at the same time.

I crave a little piety from a translation-a respectfulness toward a distant history that we can't ever really recover or participate in. (And maybe we wouldn't want to.) But if I dig deep, I think that hunger for piety is a resistance to the absolute certainty of death, the certainty of abjection. It is a resistance to the painfully real horror of living in historical time. I want to feel, when I read a translation, that the people in the translation still live, if only a little. Seriousness, accuracy, precision, transparency, literalness, preservation ... these are the elements of a translation that makes the past less dead for me. Respect. Piety.

But Headley's Beowulf is not especially respectful. It's certainly not pious. Instead, it enacts a spitfire, pistol-whipping commentary on translation, while also doing the work of translation itself. The book insists that it can, indeed, bring the past into the present. Because Headley's translation really does feel old, like Heaney's; it feels authentic to the original poem in many, many ways. It generally maintains the alliterative verse form of the original poem. It deploys a word-hoard that is mostly anciently English. But it does not domesticate or familiarize the past; it doesn't make the past pretty or cute or fancy. Instead, it coughs it up and roughs it up, makes it gross-like the hairball in the 2016 horror movie Raw-and keeps it squarely in that horrifying domain of the uncanny. At one point, Headley writes about how Grendel's "arteries unscrolled" when Beowulf hewed off his arm. Unscrolled! Because a scroll is both an ancient literary technology and a contemporary way of engaging with online information.

A balls-out feminist translation of "Beowulf" is long, long overdue.

All the slang, the profanity, the references to tech culture and social media-all of these things feel loud and wrong in the poem on first reading. But then you realize that Headley's translation is a verbal form of brutalism, and, like brutalist architecture, she wants to make us see and experience the nuts and bolts, the I-beams and structural elements of her creative intervention into the already overbuilt past of Beowulf. You can hear Headley everywhere in her translation; she doesn't disappear into the text like Tolkien, Gordon, Morgan, Donaldson, Heaney, or Mitchell in their translations. (Heaney, admittedly, disappears less than the others.) She remains there, everywhere, the zombie corpse-bride of the poem and its long history of maleness; she's another Wealhtheow, but a louder, scarier, and funnier one. In being a loud and often grotesque new Wealhtheow, Headley reminds us, at every turn, that this particular past of England-which is part of the American past, too-is one of radical, entrenched, unflinching, self-aggrandizing male privilege.

If you like horror-or feminism, for that matter-and have never read Carol Clover's book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), I recommend it as your beach reading this summer. Slasher films are traditionally seen by critics as wildly misogynistic. But Clover argues that there is a feminist element in slashers that should not be overlooked. That element is the so-called "final girl"-the one girl who survives the often bloody, often rapey, often stabby murder orgy of the usually male psychopath in the film. This final girl eventually gets phallicized-usually by taking up a knife or axe or some other penetrating agent-and murders the murderer.

The third time I read Headley's translation, I realized that she is the final girl. Splattered by the blood of a hundred other Beowulf s, she takes up her pen and goes berserk. (Note: "berserk" comes to English from an Old Norse term for a frenzied warrior, so I mean this literally.) Fate really can fuck you up, but it turns out you can fuck it up right back. Headley fucks up her own fate-as translator of the original English epic poem-with humor, grossness, cheesy phrasing, slang, profanity, anachronism, and a donkey dose of deadpan glee.

I reread Headley's final three lines, which describe the death and burial of Beowulf and which I had absolutely hated the first time.

Here he is now! Here our best boy lies!

He rode hard! He stayed thirsty! He was the man!

He was the man.

The original poem reads:

cwædon þæt he wære wyruldcyninga

manna mildust ond monðwærust,

leodum liðost ond lofgeornost.

These Old English lines literally, piously, precisely translate to, "They said that he was, of all worldly kings, the mildest to his men and the most courteous, the most loved of his people, and the most eager for fame." So, Headley is straight-up writing a new ending here.

If translations are supposed to render the past available to us in pellucid, precise ways, the ending here fails unequivocally. And in that failure, it's magnificent. The at-first-reading annoying repetition of "here" does real work. Headley is suggesting that Beowulf is-as part of the deep literary past of our cultural present-still here, right here, like the horror monster that will not die.

But Beowulf really is also dead. Right here, right now, he's both; he's the Schrödinger's cat of English literary history. Headley's also-annoying exclamations do their work, too: we're wired by the last few lines, amped and juiced, only to land, hard, on the enigmatic and bathetic statement that "he was the man." This I read, both darkly and victoriously, as Headley saying, "he was the man"-but, implicitly, " I am the final girl."

Featured image: Photograph by Andreia / Flickr ( CC BY-NC 2.0)

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Scene: Scandinavia, late summer, a cloudless night. The Dark Ages. Seemingly from nowhere, a quasihuman monster, descended from Cain, hears the sounds of warriors reveling in their Great Hall and decides to silence them. Creeping out of the unstructured darkness of his usual stomping grounds, this monster sneaks into the Great Hall and slaughters the warriors in their sleep.

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VIKING WARRIORS WERE ULTRA VIOLENT AND WITHOUT MERCY: SOME WERE WOMEN

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VIKING WARRIORS WERE ULTRA VIOLENT AND WITHOUT MERCY: SOME WERE WOMEN

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Bitter is the wind tonight, White the tresses of the sea;

I have no fear the Viking hordes Will sail the seas on such a night.

The Old Norse word and valkyrja combines valr, "corpse," kjósa, "to choose." The standard definition comes from Snorri Sturluson. Writing in Iceland between 1220 and 1241, this Christian-educated lawyer, politician, and poet described valkyries as pagan battle-goddesses with shield and sword (or spear) who ferried dead heroes to Valhalla, the otherworldly feast hall of the god Odin, and there served them celebratory cups of mead. Trusting Snorri (who was well known, in his lifetime, for being un- trustworthy), modern scholars classify valkyries as "mythological." They are "firmly supernatural" or, at most, "semi-human."

How do we know that?

Except she didn't.

Surely archaeology backs up the image of the Viking housewife with her keys, doesn't it?

It does not.

These women are called trolls or giants, valkyries, or shield-maids-but not shield-as in many modern translations. The Old Norse word "shield" to maidens, "girl," "daughter," or "virgin." Another term for a warrior woman, "shield-woman," makes it clear that sexual skjaldmær joins experience has nothing to do with warrior status. The comparable word for male warriors is literally "boy" or "lad" (which originally meant one who skjaldkona, is "led by a leader"). is occasionally applied to women, too. The issue is not sex, but status. These warriors are not house-holders. They have no economic responsibilities. They have no obligations except to their war leader. They are professional drengr, fighters. Drengr

The Victorian stereotype blinds us.

Reading itself is a form of interpretation. Words like in Old Norse, in Old English, and menn in Latin have been casually manna translated for hundreds of years as "men"-but they also homines mean "people," no genders implied. When these are warriors, translators have assumed they were all masculine. Yet Old Norse can be gender-specific when it matters. When a warrior using the masculine name Hervard killed a man in a king's hall, in one saga, the menn king's warriors egged one another on to go after him. Then the king spoke up, calling out information they'd apparently missed: "I think he is a the king said. "I think, moreover, that with the weapon she has, each of you would find it dearly bought to take her life." As the king's shift in pronouns reveals, means "female person"; is our word "queen." Its opposite, "male person," is also used in the sagas-when gender matters. kvennmann," kvennmann kvenn karlmann,

I think it was not.

Mercilessness is not a masculine trait.

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From The Real Valkyrie by Nancy Marie Brown. Copyright © 2021 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Publishing Group.

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Viking Warriors Were Ultra Violent and Without Mercy: Some Were Women

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Bitter is the wind tonight, White the tresses of the sea; I have no fear the Viking hordes Will sail the seas on such a night. The Old Norse word and valkyrja combines valr, "corpse," kjósa, "to choose." The standard definition comes from Snorri Sturluson.

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Grendel at 50: How John Gardner’s Finest Novel Undermines His Ideas About Moral Fiction

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Grendel at 50: How John Gardner’s Finest Novel Undermines His Ideas About Moral Fiction

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Not long ago, an acquaintance on Twitter asked for recommendations of lesser-read classics, which he defined as "anything published fifty years ago or more." Unable to resist any occasion for a book recommendation, I began ticking through titles in my head and came, eventually, to John Gardner's Grendel, a perennial favorite of mine. Scurrying to Google to look up the year of publication, I found that the novel was published in 1971-50 years ago.

I'd been the one to think of the novel in connection with the prompt, but I was still surprised to find that Grendel had reached the threshold to qualify as someone's definition of an "old" book-almost as much as the book itself surprised me when I first read it years ago. A few of my professors had recommended the novel to me when I was an undergraduate, but I resisted, thinking the book too musty, too stodgy, too... well, classic, precisely the category the book now apparently qualifies for.

A reworking of the Beowulf myth from the monster's perspective? Snore. Even the cover seemed to conspire in making me think the book was dull: that drab illustration in shades of brown and tan evoking the yellowed pages of a historical archive, and a fluffy monster looking a little like a Muppet, his head thrown back to unleash a howl at the sky. It was only years later when a trusted friend insisted over and over again that I read Grendel, practically thrusting the novel into my hands, that I gave in and discovered in its pages a work that felt newer, fresher, and far more dangerous than what I'd expected. That feeling has sustained itself through multiple readings over the years. No matter how many times I come back to it, Grendel still retains its ability to surprise.

The simple plot of the novel closely tracks that of Beowulf, its source material. Hrothgar, an ancient warlord-king, builds a mighty palace and mead-hall called Heorot to stand as a tribute to his greatness. But his peace is troubled by the embittered monster Grendel, who comes nightly to pick off Hrothgar's thanes and drag them back to his lair to eat their bones. The warrior Beowulf shows up and, after engaging in some mead-fueled boasting, engages in battle with Grendel, ultimately killing him by ripping his arm off at the socket. Beowulf later fights Grendel's mother and a dragon, too-though neither battle appears in Grendel, both monsters are featured.

Gardner's trick in Grendel is not merely to turn these events inside out and give them a straight retelling from the monster's perspective, but to give the story a fresh philosophical gloss, bringing a decidedly postmodern outlook to this pre-modern story.

Gardner's trick in Grendel is not merely to turn these events inside out and give them a straight retelling from the monster's perspective, but to give the story a fresh philosophical gloss, bringing a decidedly postmodern outlook to this pre-modern story. In Gardner's hands, Grendel is not merely a monster but a sort of existentialist antihero, meaning-obsessed, struggling to grasp the significance of his existence, his consciousness, and the brute reality, the inescapable thing-ness, of the world he perceives around him.

From afar, Grendel spies on humans-"thinking creatures," he calls them, "pattern makers, the most dangerous things I'd ever met." Grendel witnesses them making early stumbles toward culture, but the thing these humans like to cultivate most is war: they meet in fields, shout boasts, then fall on each other and fight until the ground runs with blood, their battles foolish and futile.

Things change when a blind traveling bard who Grendel calls "the Shaper" comes to Hrothgar's hall to sing a tale of the king's exploits in battle, turning the brute reality of the humans' fighting into art. The effect of the Shaper's song is transformative; the hills, Grendel says, are hushed, "as if brought low by language... Men wept like children; children sat stunned." Even Grendel, who knows the truth, is moved: "I too crept away, my mind aswim in ringing phrases, magnificent, golden, and all of them, incredibly, lies." Grendel's ambivalence turns to murderous anger when the Shaper's song casts him as a villain, an antagonist to Hrothgar's kingdom of courage and virtue.

So begins the monster's war on this pre-modern human society. Grendel's campaign against Hrothgar and his thanes is a contradictory one: he fights at once against the falsely constructed meaning of the Shaper's art, and out of a paradoxical belief in that very same constructed meaning-in resentment that he has been cast as an outsider to it, an enemy to the human community. Grendel remains a nihilist, believing firmly that reality is a brute physical fact with no underlying significance, humans dangerous beasts whose battles signify nothing more than a childish fight for dominance. Any art that would suggest otherwise is a lie.

Yet Grendel is also, simultaneously, deeply credulous, sentimental, even a sort of hopeless romantic when it comes to the Shaper's artistic propaganda. He can't help but be moved by it, even as he yearns to unmask it. Had the Shaper's song put Grendel in league with the humans, he might blithely accept their false values, their constructed virtues. But since the Shaper's song casts Grendel as an outsider to the human community, he makes war on them, and on the meaning their art creates.

Yet Grendel is also, simultaneously, deeply credulous, sentimental, even a sort of hopeless romantic when it comes to the Shaper's artistic propaganda.

That this artistic approach to the material actually works-that casting a monster of myth as a nihilist antihero agonizing over the meaning of existence and art comes off as anything more than a pretentious academic game-is a minor miracle of style. In Gardner's hands, all this philosophizing comes off as completely naturalistic, making perfect sense in the context of Grendel's psychology and his world. Of course, one thinks, reading it, of course the dragon should be an all-seeing creature engaging in Cartesian philosophical discourse, of course Grendel himself should be a deconstructionist engaging in Lacanian wordplay ("I am lack: alack!") and tearing apart the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition at its root.

Even more surprising, though, is who wrote the novel, relative to its contents and the conceptual tricks it deploys. John Gardner, in addition to being the author of Grendel, was a critic who, in his controversial work of criticism On Moral Fiction (1978), took the position of a traditionalist arguing against the meaning and language games of his postmodern contemporaries. He disapproved of metafiction and was stolidly anti-nihilist, arguing that the purpose of fiction was to inspire its audience toward morality. Yet his most enduring work of fiction... is a sly little metafiction full of postmodern language play. What gives?

A central image Gardner uses in On Moral Fiction provides a possible explanation. In the opening of the book, Gardner offers a "governing metaphor" for his project through a story from Norse myth about Thor "beating back the enemies of order." By the end of the fable, Thor has been bested, the agents of chaos triumphant; Gardner's goal in the critical work, he says, is to take up Thor's hammer, and fight for the kind of narrative art that "beats back the monsters" again. Gardner's use of heroes and monsters of myth as metaphors in this context is striking, suggesting that he might have intended Grendel as a critique of postmodernism by casting the monster as a miserable nihilist playing games with language and meaning, until he's overcome by the moral power of the Shaper's art, and ultimately killed by Beowulf, the order-restoring artist-hero. ( Grendel, it should be pointed out, predated On Moral Fiction by seven years.)

If this was Gardner's intent, however, then it's clear that the material got away from him and became something that he didn't quite intend. Grendel is simply too good a character, his perspective too charismatic and persuasive, to serve as a critique of postmodernism; if anything, Gardner ended up creating a vibrant space for the very perspectives and artistic approaches he claimed to be against.

Next to Grendel, On Moral Fiction is worse than unpersuasive-it's deadly dull, closed-down and dreary where Grendel is open, alive, vibrating with antic energy. Grendel is funny, entertaining, troubling, and above all unruly; the novel refuses to behave. As a result, the viewpoints Grendel espouses end up being far more convincing than Gardner perhaps intended them to be. Gardner, in On Moral Fiction, may believe a classic work like Beowulf to be an example of true moral art-of the epic poem, he says approvingly that its "moral causality is inexorable." But the falseness Grendel detects in the epic poem is real, and impossible to ignore. We have seen, through Grendel's eyes, the baseness of the warring human tribes; we have heard, through his ears, the emptiness of the virtues the Shaper creates in his propagandistic reworkings of the ugly, violent history.

Gardner disapproved of metafiction and was stolidly anti-nihilist, arguing that the purpose of fiction was to inspire its audience toward morality. Yet his most enduring work of fiction... is a sly little metafiction full of postmodern language play. What gives?

And Beowulf, the supposed hero of the tale? In Gardner's hands, he is hardly an order-bringing moralist, but a nihilist alongside Grendel-albeit a cheerful one. In the midst of their climactic battle, Beowulf gets Grendel in an iron grip and whispers in his ear: " Grendel, Grendel! You make the world by whispers, second by second. Are you blind to that? Whether you make it a grave or a garden of roses is not the point." Pushing Grendel against a wall, the warrior demands, " Feel the wall: is it not hard?... Observe the hardness write it down in careful runes. Now sing of walls! Sing!"

This is not quite the nihilism of Grendel and the dragon, but it's not the essentialist moralism of Gardner's critical work either. Instead it's something that lands somewhere between, far more daring and terrifying than either extreme: art, rather than reflecting the world, actually makes it. Stories create their own realities. They create graves, gardens-even walls. We make the world by language, by stories. And the worlds we make are both within our control and beyond it, just as stories themselves leap beyond our abilities as writers, readers, and critics to tame or contain them.

This is what I like to believe Gardner discovered in writing Grendel, and the reason the book feels so at odds with its creator's stated opinions, his dearly held beliefs: that in making stories, we bump up against something beyond ourselves, something outside our control, something that, if we're lucky, leaps beyond what limits us and lives outside our precious little categories. Maybe "morality" was the name Gardner tried to give to this indefinable thing, but in doing so he made it smaller, I think. Grendel lives beyond the opinions of its creator, and that is because it is in contact with something alive, something that resists naming, and taming.

Gardner's later critical work-which turned away from pure criticism to a consideration of writing craft-lends some credence to the idea that something in the writing of Grendel surprised Gardner, upending his tidy theories about the way life and art should work. In The Art of Fiction (1983), Gardner is more ambivalent about the traditionalist view of great literature; he acknowledges that many of the old stories, including Beowulf, are "authoritarian" in their purpose, and ripe for deconstruction.

In making stories, we bump up against something beyond ourselves, something outside our control, something that, if we're lucky, leaps beyond what limits us and lives outside our precious little categories.

Gone is the search for immutable truths in art, replaced by a striking humility, a growing sense that what truly lives on the page and in the hearts and minds of a reading public is beyond the control of the artist or critic: "What we enjoy we enjoy; dispute is useless. And one of the things human beings enjoy most is discovery." A passage in which Gardner disinterestedly considers a writer "retelling the story of Beowulf from the perspective of the monster Grendel" as though he had not himself written just such a book is odd indeed-to get a confession of Gardner's own sense of discovery in Grendel, one must turn to his other book on the craft of writing, On Becoming a Novelist (1983). There, Gardner speaks of moments in which writers encounter something in their stories he can only call "strangeness." He admits that he cannot fully put the experience to words: "The mystery is that even when one has experienced these moments, one finds, as mystics so often do, that after one has come out of them, one cannot say, or even clearly remember, what happened." But he says very clearly that he experienced just such a moment when he was writing-out of all the works of fiction he'd published to that point, all the texts he could have named- Grendel.

It's perhaps especially fitting that the scene he reports as the one whose writing brings him into contact with strangeness is the novel's final chapter, the scene of Grendel's death, in which the monster was, according to Gardner's own analysis, "hanging on for dear life to his convictions, in terror of being swallowed by the universe and convinced that his opinions and his identity are one and the same." I take this as a kind of confession on Gardner's part-a confession that Grendel's struggle was his own, and that the experience of having his own opinions swept away by the power and strangeness of art felt like a kind of death.

" Is it joy I feel?" Grendel wonders as he flees into the woods, less an arm, to die. Perhaps it's also the novelist speaking there, not quite understanding what he'd created, not knowing (how could he?) that it would be his most enduring work. And then, both wishing and not wishing the experience on his fellow writers, authors present and future, penning the monster's last words: "Poor Grendel's had an accident. So may you all."

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Grendel at 50: How John Gardner's Finest Novel Undermines His Ideas About Moral Fiction

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Not long ago, an acquaintance on Twitter asked for recommendations of lesser-read classics, which he defined as "anything published fifty years ago or more." Unable to resist any occasion for a book recommendation, I began ticking through titles in my head and came, eventually, to John Gardner's Grendel , a perennial favorite of mine.

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Secret History of the Easter Bunny: What They Don't Teach You in School

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Secret History of the Easter Bunny: What They Don't Teach You in School

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How did an egg-laying bunny come to be associated with the resurrection of Jesus?

If you're one of the millions of people who will be taking their children to an Easter egg hunt, eating giant chocolate bunnies, or painting eggs in bright pastels, you might be surprised to learn about the origins of these innocent traditions.

Humans have been celebrating Easter for thousands of years, but the truth is that the history of this holiday is replete with swords, fire, and strange women coming out of rocks and casting spells on forest animals.
So how did the holiday come to be represented by a cute bunny?
To understand the story of the Easter bunny, we must also understand the history of Easter itself.

Some of these details may surprise you. For example, did you know that the Easter bunny is a hermaphrodite with German roots? Or that many Easter traditions are actually repackaged pagan rituals?

The Easter Bunny is German

Our story begins with Eostre, a Germanic goddess worshipped by pagans in pre-Christian Europe. Eostre was known as "the Goddess of the Dawn," and ancient believers would hold a big festival around the time of the Spring Equinox each year in her honor.

According to scholars, these festivals were marked by feasts, giant bonfires, and sword dances in celebration of renewed life and light.

This welcoming of spring would slowly be transformed into a Christian holiday over time (more on that below, but there's a clue in the name here: "Easter" is widely understood to be derived directly from "Eostre").
So wait, where did the eggs come from? A modern spin by Big Chocolate™ to boost sales?
Scholars believe that Easter eggs can be traced all the way back to the goddess herself.

A popular legend tells the story of Eostre entertaining a group of children. As part of the demonstration, she transformed her pet bird into a pet rabbit. The catch? To the astonishment of the audience, this rabbit could still lay eggs like a bird.

And thus, rabbits and eggs become inexorably tied to the Easter tradition.

The story evolved over hundreds of years, eventually morphing into the legend of the 'Osterhase' - an egg-laying hare who produced eggs and hid them around homes and gardens for children to find on Easter morning.

Hopping Across the Pond

How did this legend make its leap across the Atlantic? Immigration, of course.

According to historians, 18th-century German immigrants bound for Pennsylvania brought the 'Osterhase' tradition with them. It soon spread across the country, even as it continued to evolve.

The Easter hare became an Easter bunny, and the real eggs were eventually replaced with molded chocolate eggs, first popularized by Cadbury in the late 19th century.
Quick sidenote: if you thought chocolate eggs couldn't be a controversial subject - well, think again.

The Madonna of the Rabbit, an oil painting by Titian (1596).

Historically Hermaphroditic

Here's where things get a bit strange. Rabbits have a long history as symbols of fertility, but one reason for this often flies under the radar: ancient scholars believed that hares were hermaphrodites.

Because of their rapid reproductive cycles, tiny reproductive anatomy, and extreme fertility, the experts of the day theorized that hares had both sets of reproductive organs and could impregnate themselves. Some even believed that hares could reproduce asexually.

That (incorrect) belief led to an association with the Virgin Mary - that's why in Middle Age art, the Virgin Mary is often depicted with rabbits or hares.

Come to think of it, there are some interesting parallels between how Mary and the Goddess Eostre were depicted in artistic works.
So that's how we got an Easter bunny. But how did this pagan holiday become a Christian one?
Easter, a Pagan Celebration

In 596 A.D., Pope Gregory sent a mission across the channel to convert pagan Anglo-Saxons in the British Isles to Christianity.

But knowing that the pagans were unlikely to simply drop their beliefs and embrace Jesus overnight, he instead gave a blueprint for conversion through coercion.

Pope Gregory instructed his missionaries to embrace, rather than reject, local pagan customs in order to make Christianity more palatable for the potential converts.

Over time, Christian symbols and messages were worked into these long-standing traditions. It was akin to a long-con, an inside job. Christianity became ubiquitous, and knowingly or not, the pagans slowly became Christians.

Thus, what began as a celebration of a Germanic goddess with an egg-laying rabbit transformed into the holiday we know as Easter today.

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Secret History of the Easter Bunny: What They Don't Teach You in School

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If you're one of the millions of people who will be taking their children to an Easter egg hunt, eating giant chocolate bunnies, or painting eggs in bright pastels, you might be surprised to learn about the origins of these innocent traditions.

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Maine Might Be Legalizing Viking-Style Funeral Pyres

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Maine Might Be Legalizing Viking-Style Funeral Pyres

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Maine Might Be Legalizing Viking-Style Funeral Pyres

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The state of Maine is considering a measure that would allow residents to forgo a traditional casket burial and instead opt for an "open air cremation" - also known as a funeral pyre. If you've seen "Game of Thrones", you're familiar with the concept: Lay the honored dead out on a stone slab and light them ablaze.

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beautiful

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POETRY / Self-Portrait as Grendel / Hannah Cohen / Writer of the Month I Drunk Monkeys | Literature + Film

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When all the men died I asked for more. More men until I'm happy again. I myself am half-hell and half-morning.

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The Curse of the Buried Treasure: Two metal-detector enthusiasts discovered a Viking hoard. It was worth a fortune—but it became a nightmare.

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The Curse of the Buried Treasure: Two metal-detector enthusiasts discovered a Viking hoard. It was worth a fortune—but it became a nightmare.

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Letter from the U.K.

Two metal-detector enthusiasts discovered a Viking hoard. It was worth a fortune-but it became a nightmare.

Leominster, in the West Midlands area of England, is an ancient market town where the past and the present are jumbled together like coins in a change purse. Shops housed in half-timbered sixteenth-century Tudor buildings face the main square, offering cream teas and antiques. The town's most lurid attraction is a well-preserved ducking stool, a mode of punishment in which an offender was strapped to a seat and dunked into a pond or a river while neighbors jeered; the device, last employed in 1809, is now on incongruous display inside the Priory Church, which dates to the thirteenth century. Christianity has even older roots in Leominster: a monastery was established around 660 by a recent convert, the Saxon leader Merewalh, who is thought to have been a son of Penda, the King of Mercia. For much of the early Middle Ages, Mercia was the most powerful of the four main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the others being Wessex, East Anglia, and Northumberland. In the tenth century, these realms were unified to become the Kingdom of England. Although the region surrounding Leominster (pronounced "Lemster") is no longer officially known as Mercia, this legacy is preserved in the name of the local constabulary: the West Mercia Police.

On June 2, 2015, two metal-detector hobbyists aware of the area's heritage, George Powell and Layton Davies, drove ninety minutes north of their homes, in South Wales, to the hamlet of Eye, about four miles outside Leominster. The farmland there is picturesque: narrow, hedgerow-lined lanes wend among pastures dotted with spreading trees and undulating crop fields. Anyone fascinated by the layered accretions of British history-or eager to learn what might be buried within those layers-would find it an attractive spot. English place-names, most of which date back to Anglo-Saxon times, are often repositories of meaning: the name Eye, for example, derives from Old English, and translates as "dry ground in a marsh." Just outside the hamlet was a rise in the landscape, identified on maps by the tantalizing appellation of King's Hall Hill.

Powell, a warehouse worker in his early thirties, and Davies, a school custodian a dozen years older, were experienced "detectorists." There are approximately twenty thousand such enthusiasts in England and Wales, and usually they find only mundane detritus: a corroded button that popped off a jacket in the eighteen-hundreds, a bolt that fell off a tractor a dozen years ago. But some detectorists make discoveries that are immensely valuable, both to collectors of antiquities and to historians, for whom a single buried coin can help illuminate the past. Scanning the environs of King's Hall Hill, the men suddenly picked up a signal on their devices. They dug into the red-brown soil, and three feet down they started to uncover a thrilling cache of objects: a gold arm bangle in the shape of a snake consuming its own tail; a pendant made from a crystal sphere banded by delicately wrought gold; a gold ring patterned with octagonal facets; a silver ingot measuring close to three inches in length; and, stuck together in a solid clod of earth, what appeared to be hundreds of fragile silver coins.

The find had all the hallmarks of a hoard-the term used by archeologists to characterize a collection of valuable objects that was deliberately buried or hidden, usually with the idea that it would later be retrieved. The Vikings, whose name means "raiders," began making plundering incursions into Anglo-Saxon Britain from Scandinavia in the second half of the eighth century. Although the Vikings did not use coins as a form of currency, they had a bullion economy-the trading of metals, based on weight and purity-and appreciated coins as portable forms of wealth. They coveted silver, which was not mined in their own lands; gold was even more prized. To obtain these precious metals, the Vikings stole or requisitioned the contents of Anglo-Saxon monastery vaults, which often included finely worked silver or gold, and chopped them into pieces, for purposes of trade- archeologists call such fragments hacksilver or hackgold-or melted them into ingots, for ease of weighing. A Viking hoard typically contains these forms of metal, and also coins minted by the Anglo-Saxon kings whose lands they had invaded.

Powell and Davies snapped a few photographs while their discovery was still embedded in the soil, then took more pictures after removing some of the dirt and laying the treasures out on a white plastic shopping bag. They also took photographs of the field where they'd made the find, so that they could locate the spot on a return visit.

Such technology would have been extremely useful to the Viking warrior from Denmark who, more than a thousand years earlier, had buried the valuables, probably to protect them from theft. That anonymous invader, who would have been gathering spoils as a member of the Great Army, which progressed through the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the 860s and 870s, would have had to make do with rudimentary reminders of where he'd hidden the stash: twenty paces to the left of that footpath, halfway between those two trees. Historians of England contend that the difficulty of accounting for where, exactly, something important has been buried is one reason that Viking hoards and Roman caches of silver denarii are still there for the finding-or, for that matter, for the stealing.

Gareth Williams, the curator of early-medieval coinage and Viking collections at the British Museum, became entranced by the Norse world as a small child, while paging through a library book. His grandmother, encouraging his passion, made him a helmet and a shield out of cardboard. He went on to study medieval history at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, where he completed his Ph.D., and then joined the British Museum. Williams, who has a well-developed salt-and-pepper beard and a lively manner, still needs little persuading to dress up like a Viking; he makes educational videos for schoolchildren in which he wears a belted jerkin and a helmet made from leather boiled in beeswax.

In the summer of 2015, he was approached by a contact in the coin trade. As Williams told me recently, the contact informed him that several pieces of what appeared to be a Viking hoard were being offered to dealers. Some of the coins were Two Emperors, a type so rare that numismatists knew of only two extant examples: one was discovered in 1840, the other in 1950. A Two Emperor coin had never appeared on the open market, and a single one was valued at a hundred thousand dollars. A hoard with a substantial number of rare coins could be worth more than ten million dollars. The fact that individual coins were being offered to dealers suggested that the hoard was in danger of being broken up and vanishing onto the black market. According to Williams, the contact told him that he hadn't personally seen the coins but "understood immediately from the description that this must be undeclared treasure."

The word "treasure" conjures everything from a religious relic to a pirate chest spilling over with booty. But in British law the term has a specific meaning: the Treasure Act of 1996 defines a treasure as any object that is more than three hundred years old and at least ten per cent gold or silver. Because finds of single coins are quite common, they are exempted from this rule, no matter their metallic content or rarity, but a find of two or more coins in the same place-and certainly of a hoard-qualifies as treasure, and the finder is legally obliged to report the discovery to local authorities.

The Treasure Act was passed, in large part, because metal detecting had become such a popular activity. During the Second World War, the technology was used to help sappers find buried mines, but by the nineteen-seventies detectors had become consumer products that were relatively inexpensive and easy to use. Hobbyists began spending their Sundays scanning beaches, parks, and archeological sites. Scholars warned that treasure hunters were vandalizing history, seizing finds as trophies and subverting the possibility of archeological interpretation by destroying the context of their discoveries. Detectorists resented the stigmatizing of their hobby: many of them are amateur history buffs who eagerly take their finds to local museums. As with so many aspects of English life, the conflict was inflected with class antagonism; working-class hobbyists often felt that they were being maligned by a professional élite.

In 1983, two detectorists in Surrey found a number of coins at the site of a Romano-British temple in the village of Wanborough. They informed local curators, but before the site could be properly excavated illicit treasure hunters, known as nighthawks, descended. As many as forty of them scanned the site by moonlight, plundering antiquities and selling them for profit; some dealers bought objects straight out of the ground. The looting of Wanborough helped usher in the Treasure Act. It replaced ancient common law holding that, when the owner of a buried treasure could not be identified, it became the property of the Crown. Under the terms of the current law, treasure still belongs legally to the Crown, but in practice it often ends up in a museum. (In the U.S., comparable laws vary from state to state, but most of them stipulate that someone who finds an object of value or a stash of money is entitled to keep it if the owner cannot be located.)

The Treasure Act provides an incentive for detectorists to declare their discoveries by establishing the right to a reward for the finder, who typically receives half the market value; the other half goes to the landowner. Some forty Finds Liaison Officers across the U.K. urge detectorists to report not just discoveries of gold and silver but also those of more humble metals, which can help explain the daily lives of earlier Britons: fallen brooch pins that might indicate the route of a Roman pathway; copper pennies dropped in a medieval marketplace.

Last year, detectorists in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland were responsible for thirteen hundred treasure finds, far exceeding the number made by professional archeologists. The expansion of the pastime has been encouraged by a popular sitcom, "Detectorists"-created by and starring Mackenzie Crook, of the original version of " The Office"-about the quest of two amateurs to make a great discovery. ("It's basically the Holy Grail of treasure hunting." "Well, no, the Holy Grail is the Holy Grail of treasure hunting.") The show's representation of the detectorists is wistful; their search is not just for treasure but for companionship and masculine identity. The hobby is so predominantly male that the code of conduct of one large Facebook group reminds members that it is not a dating site, and advises, "Please do not contact the ladies you may fancy and send inappropriate proposals."

Detecting tends to be either a solitary pursuit or undertaken in trusted pairs, with a pact to share spoils. Practitioners establish personal territories, known as permissions, by developing relationships with farmers, whose freshly plowed fields can dislodge new finds. In 2001, a detectorist in Kent found a decorative gold cup dating to the Bronze Age, more than thirty-five hundred years ago; having been crushed by a modern plow, it had the shape of a deli coffee cup retrieved from a trash can. More recently, metal-detecting rallies, in which a farmer is paid to open up his land to possibly hundreds of detectorists, have become common, further dismaying archeologists. As participants fan out over a field in the military-style camouflage jackets and pants that many of them favor, they can look like a Great Army themselves, bearing spindly devices in place of weapons.

Sometimes a find transforms a hard-up hobbyist into a wealthy man. In 2009, Terry Herbert, who was unemployed and lived in public housing, and who had picked up a metal detector for a few pounds at a yard sale, scanned fields belonging to Fred Johnson, a farmer friend in the West Midlands, and discovered England's largest-ever stash of Anglo-Saxon precious metalwork. Now known as the Staffordshire hoard, it includes gold and silver ornaments, among them decorative sword fittings. Buried in the seventh century, the collection was acquired by two institutions: the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, in Stoke-on-Trent, and the Birmingham Museum. The hoard is valued at more than five million dollars.

Powell and Davies had a potential fortune on their hands, but they also had a problem. It is standard practice for detectorists to come to an agreement, preferably in writing, with a landowner whose fields they wish to scan, in order to avoid charges of trespassing or ownership disputes over finds. Terry Herbert and Fred Johnson fell out after the discovery of the Staffordshire hoard, with Herbert accusing Johnson of wanting to keep the reward money to himself. (The proceeds were split.)

Powell, who has a dark beard, an upturned nose, and extensive tattoos on his neck and knuckles, had obtained the permission of one resident in the Eye area, Yvonne Conod, to search a field of crops next to her farmhouse. In addition, he had a go-ahead from Conod's son, Mark, who lived on a farm nearby and also maintained his mother's field. But Mark, a tenant farmer, could not legally authorize a search of fields that he merely rented. Moreover, Powell and Davies had ventured beyond the Conods' fields, and the hoard had been found on an adjoining property-that of Lord Cawley, the preëminent local landowner, who has a large dairy farm.

The Cawley family once occupied Berrington Hall, an elegant eighteenth-century mansion just east of Eye. In the nineteen-fifties, when the present Lord Cawley's grandfather died, crippling estate taxes forced his widow, Lady Vivienne Cawley, to surrender the house to the Treasury, which subsequently donated it to the National Trust. A condition of the arrangement was that Lady Cawley, who was eighty years old when her husband died, could reside at the house for the rest of her life. No doubt to the stifled frustration of the National Trust, she lived for twenty more years, taking lunch every day in the opulent dining room, obliging restorers to stop their work while she did so. Berrington Hall, now open to the public, sits atop a hill with views of parkland laid out by the landscape designer Capability Brown, and picturesquely grazed by sheep. Beyond the manicured grounds lies Lord Cawley's current property, including King's Hall Hill and the adjoining King's Hall Covert, a small copse that rings with the gunfire of local gentry during pheasant-shooting season.

After trespassing onto Lord Cawley's land, Powell and Davies could have knocked on his door, baseball caps in hand, and made an excuse for having strayed-claiming, say, that they'd got turned around in the landscape-in the hope that, in light of their thrilling discovery, Lord Cawley would overlook a minor violation of protocol. Instead, they returned to South Wales, where Davies posted an image of three coins from the find on the online forum of a metal-detecting club. Gareth Williams, of the British Museum, told me, "The finders were stupidly indiscreet."

It didn't take long for word of the discovery to reach Peter Reavill, the Finds Liaison Officer for Herefordshire, the county that includes Eye. Reavill tries to cultivate good relationships with detectorists, often addressing meetings of local societies. Ian Richardson, the treasure registrar at the British Museum, told me, of one such gathering, in a pub, "He got this reception almost like a rock star-all these people rushed up to show him their latest finds." Reavill didn't learn much about what Davies had found-only that it was from the Saxon era. "I record thousands of objects a year, and of those maybe only twenty or thirty will be Saxon," Reavill told me. In more than fifteen years on the job, he'd dealt with only one hoard of Saxon coins.

The typical museumgoer is most drawn to the helmets, swords, or jewels of the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons; for many people, the most compelling object in the British Museum's early Middle Ages collection is the Sutton Hoo helmet, an ornate, full-face iron-and-bronze headpiece dating from the beginning of the seventh century. It is decorated with a nose, eyebrows, and a mustache, so that almost a millennium and a half later the glowering visage of its wearer-probably Raedwald, the King of East Anglia-outstares any viewer. But, for archeologists and historians, coins, whose detailed inscriptions allow for precise dating, and which are signed by their manufacturer, often provide more crucial insight about the shifting dynamics of power in proto-England.

The Two Emperor coins found in Eye featured a representation of two contemporary Anglo-Saxon kings-Ceolwulf II, of Mercia, and Alfred, of Wessex-sitting side by side. On the obverse of each coin was a stylized profile of either Alfred or Ceolwulf. King Alfred, known as Alfred the Great, took control of Mercia in the late ninth century-a victory recently dramatized in the Netflix series "The Last Kingdom." He thereafter commissioned the writing of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, annals that remain the principal source of information about early medieval England between the departure of the Romans, around 400, and the arrival of the Normans, in 1066. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ceolwulf II is briefly dismissed as anum unwisum cyninges þegne -a foolish king's servant-who collaborated with the Viking invaders. The discovery that Alfred and Ceolwulf minted coins in the same style offered surprising evidence of an alliance between them-one that Alfred had sought to whitewash in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. As Williams, the British Museum curator, explained to me, "It's like Stalin airbrushing Trotsky out."

Reavill obtained the e-mail addresses of Powell and Davies from a detectorist society, and wrote to them on July 6th, a month or so after their adventure. If they'd made an interesting find, he reminded them, they had a legal obligation to report it. Though the Treasure Act requires detectorists to contact the authorities within two weeks, it allows for a delay should the finder not recognize the value of an artifact (or claim not to). Administrators are sympathetic with detectorists who are reluctant to surrender exciting discoveries, sometimes for reasons more emotional than monetary. Ian Richardson, the treasure registrar, told me, "Obviously, people make a personal attachment to an object." The elasticity of the law's deadline is intended to encourage compliance. Historically, even in cases where a finder mistakenly strayed onto territory where he lacked permission to search, the Treasure Valuation Committee, which decides the apportionment of a reward, has been forgiving, with the finder dividing the prize equally with the landowner. Davies, in particular, might have been expected to respond to Reavill's prompt: over the years, he had brought more than a hundred detecting discoveries to his local Finds Liaison Officer, Mark Lodwick, an archeologist at the Museum of Wales, in Cardiff, who regarded him as a responsible detectorist. But Reavill didn't hear back from Davies and received only an affronted e-mail from Powell-who claimed that he didn't know what Reavill was talking about, and warned, "I won't tolerate any slander."

In fact, the coins were already being quietly sold off. Two days after making the find, Powell and Davies met with an acquaintance named Paul Wells, a retired builder from Cardiff who traded coins. Wells had asked a friend with whom he sometimes did business, Jason Sallam, to join them, and the four men met at the café of an antiques market in a repurposed Victorian municipal building in Cardiff. Powell and Davies took about a dozen coins from their pockets and explained that they had found perhaps two or three hundred more-though it was hard to tell how many, because they remained clumped together in the exhumed earth. Wells was astonished by the coins. "It was as if they had been put in the ground on the day they were minted," he later said. "They had never been used to buy a loaf or a pint of beer." When Powell brought out the gold jewelry, which he'd wrapped in tissue paper, "my eyes nearly fell out of my head," Wells said. Powell became so excitably loud that Wells told him, "Shut the fuck up, and go out and have a fag!"

Sallam, who owns Antiques at the Green, a shop in the harborside Welsh town of Tenby, told the detectorists that they had to report their find to the authorities, but he agreed to take the items to be seen by a more knowledgeable numismatic colleague, Lloyd Bennett. A few days later, Sallam went to Bennett's home, in Monmouth, for a consultation. Bennett, pointing out the pair of kings depicted on the coins, identified them as dating from the late ninth century, and said that they were in very good condition. He then told Sallam that he didn't want to see any more of the hoard, and that the detectorists needed to declare it as treasure as soon as possible. "Everything here needs to be in a museum," Bennett warned. Sallam returned the coins to Wells and repeated Bennett's injunction, adding, "Get in touch with these boys. It needs to be declared. Tell them, 'Don't fuck around.' "

But Powell and Davies didn't contact the authorities, and nine days after the discovery Powell travelled to a gas station on the M4 motorway, which connects South Wales with London, and met with Simon Wicks, a coin trader and a detectorist from Sussex. Wicks has a blighted reputation, having been convicted in 2014 of nighthawking. "He is, without question, not a dealer," Chris Martin, the chairman of the British Numismatic Trade Association, told me. "He's a vest-pocket person who happens to buy things from people, but doesn't really know what he's buying, and doesn't really care what he's buying. He could be buying coins today, motorbikes tomorrow, and old military-cap badges the next day."

On June 18th, Wicks went to London and took seven of the coins to Dix Noonan Webb, a blue-chip auction house in the Mayfair area. James Brown, a coin cataloguer there, later said, "One coin like that would be an incredibly lucky find. To have seven offered at one time is really unusual." It was obvious to him that he was examining objects from a hoard: such items are exposed to the same soil composition, and all seven coins featured rusty-brown staining. Hoard coins often bear a half-moon imprint indicating where one coin has overlain another. Those in the middle of a cache can be in almost pristine condition, having been protected from soil exposure by surrounding coins. Brown told Wicks that he could not give a valuation on the spot, and he retained the objects in a safe on the Dix Noonan Webb premises. Later, Brown estimated that the consignment of seven coins was worth nearly four hundred thousand dollars.

Powell and Davies did make one gesture toward legitimacy after receiving Peter Reavill's e-mail. Two days later, on July 8th, they went to the Museum of Wales to meet with Mark Lodwick, the Finds Liaison Officer with whom Davies had often dealt. Usually, Davies was chatty, but Lodwick noted that on this occasion he seemed anxious. Powell did most of the talking, and at one point produced a plastic takeout container. Inside, wrapped in paper towels, were the three items of gold jewelry: the bangle and the faceted ring, both later confirmed to be from the ninth century, and the crystal orb, which is from the fifth or sixth century. Powell seemed ignorant of the objects' provenances. Lodwick printed a map of the area where Powell said that the items had been found, and the detectorists marked several spots on it, claiming that the jewelry had been buried under a tree. When Lodwick later checked the area on Google Earth, there were no trees to be seen.

At the end of the meeting, Powell and Davies showed Lodwick two silver Saxon coins, of a style known to collectors as cross and lozenge. The pair was worth perhaps forty thousand dollars. Although the surface tint of the coins suggested to Lodwick that they had been buried together, the detectorists insisted that they had found one coin each, in separate fields, thereby obviating any need to declare them as treasure.

The next day, Powell returned to the Leominster area and visited the home of Mark Conod, the tenant farmer, excitedly recounting to him and his wife, Amanda, that on a recent scan of their property he had found some jewelry, which was now at a museum. He showed them photographs and said, "There might be money in this." They all went outside, and, from a distance, Powell pointed to indicate that he'd discovered the items at the top of the field belonging to Conod's mother, Yvonne.

That July, Reavill alerted the West Mercia Police to the possibility of a heritage crime, and, because of the potential multimillion-dollar value of the alleged find, an investigation was launched. Around this time, Simon Wicks, the coin dealer, returned to Dix Noonan Webb with nine equally remarkable coins, which the auction house also took into its custodianship. All the coins were soon turned over to the police.

The next month, the British Numismatic Trade Association issued an unusual warning to its members, stating that coins believed to be from an undeclared hoard were sneaking onto the market, and that buying any of them would violate the Treasure Act. On August 18, 2015, a little more than two months after their trip to Leominster, Powell and Davies were arrested. Powell warned the police, "I ain't gonna make it easy."

It's impossible to measure how much of a role the black market plays in archeological finds made by detectorists, but it isn't hard to turn up dealers who promise discretion. Nor is there any shortage of collectors who, in their eagerness to create a set of coins, may be willing to overlook a sketchy provenance or two. Coins are simple to move around, including overseas, and the fact that the Treasure Act permits the retention of single-coin finds means that a cunning detectorist, over a period of time, might sell a number of valuable coins one by one, without drawing undue attention. But such an approach is not foolproof. In 2017, a detectorist from Norfolk, David Cockle, was sentenced to a sixteen-month prison term for theft, after selling off a hoard of ten extremely rare Anglo-Saxon gold coins, having previously declared them as individual finds from various sites around the U.K. Cockle happened to be a police officer, a circumstance that likely added to the vigor with which his case was pursued. Prosecutions of rogue detectorists are uncommon, as criminal-investigation departments contending with cases of rape, murder, and armed robbery are disinclined to dedicate their limited resources to the disappearance of objects whose original owner might have been dead for more than a millennium.

Powell told the police that he was a longtime hobbyist, having started metal detecting with his father. He insisted that the gold he had handed in to Mark Lodwick at the Museum of Wales came from lands occupied by the Conods, from whom he had permission to detect, although he acknowledged that he had not sought permission from the Cawleys-"Lord and Lady of the Manor," as he characterized them. Powell denied all knowledge of a hoard of coins. "They are telling people I found three hundred coins," he said. "Why would I hand in the gold and keep the coins?"

The homes of Powell and Davies were searched. Both had display cases containing finds, but there were no valuable objects inside. "They didn't have the silver coins, and things like that, that you'd expect from detectorists who went out on a regular basis," Reavill told me. There was certainly no sign of a large cache of Anglo-Saxon silver.

Davies gave the police an account in line with Powell's: the pair had recently found just the three pieces of Saxon gold and a couple of stray coins-all of which they had declared to Lodwick. When asked about the café meeting with Paul Wells and Jason Sallam, Davies claimed that he and Powell had been lying when they'd said that the coins were from a large hoard: Powell had actually owned the coins presented at the café for years, and the hoard story had been concocted merely to help him "get rid" of them.

A few weeks later, Gareth Thomas, an officer with the West Mercia Police, visited Wells at home and discussed the encounter at the café. Wells insisted that he, Sallam, and Davies had agreed that the coins needed to be declared, but that Powell had other ideas. "George Powell was in it for the money-that was obvious," Wells said. He also revealed that, some days after the café meeting, Davies had asked him to retain five of the coins for safekeeping. Wells then showed the officer a leather case for a magnifying glass. On one side, the stitching had been unpicked then glued back together: it was a secret compartment. Wells opened it up, and all five silver coins slipped out. The police officer called his supervisor to ask what he should do. Arrest him, the supervisor replied. "I knew it would come to this," Wells said, as he was taken to the station.

Late that summer, Tim Hoverd, the archeology-projects manager for the Herefordshire Council, was dispatched to Eye to survey the territory. If, as Powell and Davies claimed, the items had been scattered at different locations, that might mean the presence of a significant new site: a Saxon cemetery, religious settlement, or royal palace. But seasonal changes made clues hard to come by. "By the time we got there, most of the area was covered with maize, which grows damn fast," Hoverd told me recently. "It was way over my head. And how do you find holes people have dug two or three months before when you can't actually see the ground?" Hoverd and his colleagues paced the fields, dug multiple test pits, and conducted an aerial survey by drone. "It quickly became apparent that there were no formal structures-no royal burials-that this material could have come from," he told me.

Powell and Davies hadn't yet been charged with crimes, but the case against them grew considerably stronger in 2016, when a forensic examination of their mobile phones revealed deleted photographs of glimmering objects being extracted from the ground. In addition to the jewelry, there were hundreds of coins. In Davies's original interview with police, he had asserted that he hadn't taken his phone with him to Herefordshire. After being confronted with the photographs, he declined to comment.

When Hoverd examined the deleted images, he immediately keyed into two snapshots of the landscape. "They were designed to fit together," Hoverd said. "I went back to the field with copies of the photographs and stood where they must have stood to take them." The hoard's location had been found-and it was decisively within the borders of Lord Cawley's property. Nevertheless, apart from the two dozen coins recovered during the police inquiry, any larger hoard had disappeared.

In October, 2019, Powell and Davies stood trial in Worcester, a city about an hour east of Leominster. They had been charged with theft and with conspiracy to conceal and convert criminal property. Wicks, the shady coin dealer, was charged with concealing and converting criminal property, and Wells, the retired builder, was charged with concealment. All four denied the charges. "This case, in two words, is about buried treasure," Kevin Hegarty, the prosecutor, said in his opening remarks.

The trial, which lasted for two months, offered the jury and others present in the courtroom an extended seminar in numismatics and in Viking history. Gareth Williams, the coin specialist at the British Museum, declared on the stand that the hoard had almost certainly been deposited sometime between the summer of 878 and the autumn of 879, when the Great Army fled northward from Wessex after Alfred the Great's victory over Guthrum, the king of the Vikings, at the Battle of Edington, in what is now Wiltshire. This battle, Williams explained, laid the groundwork for the establishment of England as a unified country by Alfred's grandson King Athelstan, in 927. Williams explained to me that while the Vikings were on the move "they would seize somewhere, normally either a royal estate or monastery, and stay there for the next few months, eating the food that someone's gone to all the trouble of gathering together." Although the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle doesn't mention Leominster, its monastery likely offered sustenance for a band of Viking fighters during that winter, before they moved on to settle in East Anglia. The coins told the story.

The detectorists, however, offered a different tale: there had never been a hoard of coins. Davies testified that their only finds in Eye had been the gold jewelry and a few coins, and that the dozen coins they had taken to the café came from Powell's own collection. Powell did not testify, but he appeared surprisingly confident as he arrived in court each day, chatting with security guards as he passed through the metal detectors. Hegarty, the prosecutor, told me that Powell was clearly the ringleader of the four men, and "saw himself as a bit of a character."

When Davies was asked to explain the images recovered from his phone, he offered a new twist to his story: the image showing a large cache of coins in the ground was actually a staged photo. "George had the coins in his rucksack, and he said he wanted to get some provenance on them," Davies told the court. "He put some coins in the ground, to make it look as if they were found there." Davies claimed that he hadn't been happy with the idea but had gone along with it. When Hegarty asked him what Powell's motivation for staging such a find might be, Davies said only that Powell wanted to "show off." (Hegarty told me, dryly, "He was never able to explain why you would come all the way from Cardiff to a piece of land in Herefordshire to dig a hole, and put things in it, and cover them up, and dig it up again.")

Simon Wicks and Paul Wells also denied any wrongdoing. Wells, who was charged with the lesser offense of concealing the five coins in his possession, explained that he hadn't sought to hide the coins inside the magnifying-glass case-he'd just wanted to protect them. Some of his testimony must have displeased Davies and Powell. Wells insisted that he had urged both men to declare the coins. After the café meeting, Wells said, he had spoken with Davies, who, indicating that there might be a problem with the landowner, told him, "I'm either going to be very rich or spend a long time in jail."

A turning point in the trial occurred after Gareth Williams, the British Museum numismatist, explained that Anglo-Saxon coins were struck by hand, with a hammer on a die, and fashioned by a named moneyer-Torhtmund, say, or Hygered. As a result, such coins all have minute variations that an expert eye can identify. A photograph recovered from Powell's phone showed a Two Emperor coin lying in what a fingerprint expert confirmed was Powell's palm, taken the day after Powell and Davies had made the find. Hegarty told me, "Williams was able to look at the Two Emperor in the photograph and say, 'No, that is not one of the coins that has been recovered.' So that proved beyond any doubt that there were more coins." The recovered coins were too fragile to bring to the courtroom-most were less than a millimetre thick. So Hegarty showed the jury slides of the coins. "They were really beautiful," he recalls. The Anglo-Saxon kings looked almost Cubist: Alfred the Great with a large nose and deep-set eyes, Ceolwulf II long-chinned and grimacing. Hegarty told me, "When you realize that this is something that was handmade twelve hundred years ago, you gasp."

The jury deliberated for two days. On November 22, 2019, the four men were found guilty on all counts. The judge, Nicholas Cartwright, was severe in his sentencing. Powell received ten years in prison, Davies eight and a half, Wicks five. Wells avoided prison time but was given a suspended sentence of twelve months. (Hegarty said, "The jury was quite satisfied that he had tried to conceal the coins, because, literally, he had concealed them.") Cartwright scathingly declared that the two detectorists had been recklessly motivated by greed. If they had only obtained the required permissions and reported the find to the authorities, they would have been richly rewarded. He told Powell and Davies, "You could have expected to have either a half share-or, at worst, a third share-of over three million pounds to share between you. You could not have done worse than half a million pounds each. But you wanted more."

Not only had Powell and Davies stolen the hoard-the value of which, intact, might have been anywhere between four million and fifteen million dollars-from Lord Cawley, the judge went on; they had cheated the public of its heritage, and deprived residents of Herefordshire of the illumination the find might have offered about the Kingdom of Mercia in the ninth century. Another constituency damaged by the plundering was the metal-detecting community, where news of the conviction was welcomed on online message boards. "I hope the law starts to come down heavily on these lowlifes," one contributor posted. The hobby's reputation had been severely tainted, and landowners would reconsider granting permissions. "They've spoiled it for the large percentage of genuine detectorists," another contributor posted. "They'll think we're all a bunch of crooks." At the close of the trial, James Tucker, the barrister for George Powell, said, of his client, "It is clear, from his point of view, he wishes he had never found the treasure. It became a temptation-and, for him, a curse."

The spot where the Viking buried the hoard, according to Tim Hoverd's expert analysis, is in the corner of a field just north of King's Hall Covert, the copse where pheasants are hunted. A spring flows nearby, leaving the soil often sodden. Aerial photographs and topographical analysis indicate that this was once a crossroads: one track connected two local hamlets, Moreton and Orleton; another, which fell out of use two hundred years ago, descended from King's Hall Hill to the hamlet of Ashton. It's impossible to know for certain whether Anglo-Saxons and Vikings trod these paths, but it's reasonable to conclude that they were established thoroughfares for centuries, and that their intersection provided a landmark for anyone with something to hide.

In an almost unbelievable coincidence, a similar Viking hoard was found in October, 2015, just four months after Davies and Powell made their discovery in Leominster. A detectorist named James Mather was scanning a field in Watlington, in Oxfordshire, when he came across what turned out to be hundreds of coins, and also ingots and jewelry. Mather followed protocol to the letter, informing the local Finds Liaison Officer as soon as he determined that there was something unusual in the ground, so that scholars could excavate the site. John Naylor, the National Finds Adviser for Early Medieval and Later Coinage at the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, told me that when he examined the Oxfordshire coins, a few days after their extraction, he was amazed to see several Two Emperor coins featuring the visages of King Alfred and Ceolwulf II. "It really reinforces the case that Ceolwulf was accepted by Wessex as the Mercian king," he told me. Press accounts described the Watlington hoard as having rewritten British history. The Ashmolean, which acquired the hoard for $1.75 million, now has it on prominent display, with signs citing James Mather's contribution to its recovery.

Three years ago, more than a thousand people in the Watlington area attended local events in which Ashmolean curators talked about the hoard. "That is the side that the public has really missed out on in Leominster," Naylor said. "The interest and excitement have been taken away." Despite the fact that the Leominster hoard was discovered first, the Watlington hoard has stolen its thunder, reducing it to a footnote in the ongoing reëvaluation of Anglo-Saxon political history. For the time being, the Leominster jewelry and several of the coins have been put on display at the British Museum, in a gallery featuring recent archeological finds; visitors have been able to see up close the chunky gold ring, the slender armband, and a handful of coins that look as thin and delicate as if they had been punched from sheet metal. The county museum in Hereford still hopes to acquire the Leominster hoard, but any display of it will inevitably be colored by the botched circumstances of its only partial recovery. Its main allure may be as a cautionary tale-of a heist gone awry.

The investigation into the missing coins continues. Last year, the Durham Constabulary reported that, in raids of several properties in the North of England, a silver ingot and a large number of Anglo-Saxon coins had been recovered, including some minted by Alfred the Great and Ceolwulf II. The objects were collectively valued at nearly seven hundred thousand dollars. No other details of the raids were offered, and the Durham Constabulary recently declined to comment on whether its find is connected to the Leominster cache. But several people with knowledge of the case told me that the coins are, indeed, believed to be part of the hoard-though likely just a fraction of it.

In late July, Powell, Davies, and Wicks successfully appealed the length of their sentences. Powell's prison term was reduced from ten years to six and a half, Davies's from eight and a half years to five, and Wicks's from five years to three and a half. (Ordinarily, British prisoners become eligible for parole after serving half their sentence.) But the detectorists will soon face more legal troubles. Early next year, Powell and Davies are scheduled to appear at a "proceeds of crime" hearing, where they will be held liable for the value of the objects they are deemed to have stolen. At the end of the Worcester trial, Judge Cartwright said, "There are hidden assets, by way of unrecovered treasure, worth a very large sum-probably millions of pounds." Should Powell and Davies be unable to restore the hoard to Lord Cawley or to repay him its equivalent value, they face the prospect of even longer prison terms.

Any observer trying to reconstruct what Powell and Davies did can make only informed guesses-piecing together the narrative like an archeologist deducing the past from scant clues. (Lawyers for Powell and Davies, citing the ongoing litigation, declined to comment for this article.) Gareth Williams told me that he thought the detectorists were "determined to be clever, and get one over on the system, and be greedy." Tim Hoverd, the archeologist from the Herefordshire Council, theorized that the defendants may have already had a habit of selling finds on the black market, "but the amount that they found this time was far too large for them to cope with, and they panicked." Kevin Hegarty, the prosecutor, suggested that, once Powell and Davies realized that they had failed to get Lord Cawley's permission to scan on his land, they found it impossible to reverse course. Hegarty told me, "I think they had gone too far, and had dispersed quite a large number of coins, and had the money, and couldn't get it back. It's a bit like comedy, in a way, where a character tells a lie, and then has to tell another lie in consequence of that, and then he has to act out all the lies."

The Vikings left no written explanation of why they buried hoards, but historians believe that these deposits were generally intended to be stored for brief periods. "The thinking is, probably, 'We are going to be here for several months, and I don't trust all the people I am with, so I am going to stick it in the ground for safety, and pick it up before we leave,' " Williams said. "And then either something happens to that individual, and he can't come back, or he comes back later, and he can't find it. Imagine using a tree as your spot for location, and then a big storm comes and blows the tree down, or some other Vikings come along and chop it up for firewood. It's easy to imagine circumstances in which they couldn't find what they buried." This, too, is an unintentionally comic scenario: the Viking not as a ruthless marauder but as a hapless, unwis character wandering a foreign landscape, realizing with dawning dismay that his fortune has slipped through his hands.

Hoverd, who climbed King's Hall Hill in the footsteps of whoever buried the treasure eleven hundred and forty-odd years ago, told me that he was attracted to an alternative explanation, which didn't depend on the hoard's owner having died unexpectedly, or having been unable to locate or return to the spot. He cited an Icelandic saga that describes the law-giving of Odin, the powerful Norse god who rules over Valhalla, the majestic hall that welcomes Viking warriors when they die. One of Odin's laws states that whatever you put in the ground will return to you after death. Were these warriors actually burying things with no intention of returning for them-because, they thought, they would get them back in the afterlife?

It's a tempting theory but a problematic one, as John Naylor, of the Ashmolean, explained to me. The text that mentions Odin's law-giving, the Ynglinga Saga, wasn't written until the thirteenth century, by Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic poet and chieftain. Snorri, as he is known, might well have been committing to paper an oral tradition dating back centuries. But it's also possible that Odin's laws are an elegant fiction devised by High Medieval Scandinavians as a way to fill the holes in their understanding of their ancestors. The desire to arrange perplexing material evidence into a shapely story-a desire that motivates detectives, archeologists, historians, lawyers, and journalists-surely motivated ancient Norsemen, too.

The most plausible, if unsatisfying, resolution to the saga of Powell and Davies is that the hundreds of other coins in the hoard have been dispersed on the black market, never to be regathered. But it is possible to conceive of another narrative-one in which those hundreds of missing coins have not been lost after all but have, in effect, been reburied. In this version of the story, the coins remain concealed in a safe hiding place, in anticipation of Powell and Davies's eventual release from prison. They have been stowed away, awaiting the finders' return to the Valhalla of ordinary life.

If the Viking treasure has been rehidden, it will be a very long time until it can be recovered yet again. Tim Hoverd, the archeologist, told me, "You can't do anything with it at the moment. Everyone will know where it came from." Given the coins' dramatic discovery and disappearance, their reëmergence would immediately attract the attention of watchful authorities. In monetary terms, at least, the Leominster hoard has gone from being worth millions to being worth nothing. To Kevin Hegarty, the prosecutor, there was one obvious conclusion: "If you are sitting on these coins, you may as well put them back into the ground." ♦

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Letter from the U.K. Two metal-detector enthusiasts discovered a Viking hoard. It was worth a fortune-but it became a nightmare. Leominster, in the West Midlands area of England, is an ancient market town where the past and the present are jumbled together like coins in a change purse.

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GREENSBORO - Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison spoke Tuesday at War Memorial Auditorium as part of Guilford College's Bryan Series of lectures.

In her speech to a capacity crowd, the bestselling author of books such as "Beloved" and "Song of Solomon" drew comparisons between the epic poem "Beowulf" and the modern war on terrorism .

Morrison said that in the poem the monster Grendel terrorizes a kingdom, striking at night and devouring the people and livestock. A hero and his warriors were sent to fight the monster, but she said one detail is missing.

"What never seemed to bother anybody was - who was this guy, this Grendel, who came every night?" Morrison said. "And why had he put them on the menu?"

Morrison said the mythic monster has no particular grudge against the people - he simply embodies pure, unadulterated evil. The monster is killed, but that just unleashes a new and even more horrible monster on the people.

In the end, that monster, Grendel's mother, is beheaded with her own sword. But the act of killing her causes the hero's sword to melt.

"One interpretation could be that violence against violence is so horrible that the sword of vengeance itself is melted and falls," Morrison said.

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GREENSBORO - Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison spoke Tuesday at War Memorial Auditorium as part of Guilford College's Bryan Series of lectures. In her speech to a capacity crowd, the bestselling author of books such as "Beloved" and "Song of Solomon" drew comparisons between the epic poem "Beowulf" and the modern war on terrorism .

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Toni Morrison, monster-baneby Stefan Beck

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Toni Morrison, monster-baneby Stefan Beck

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[Posted 1:30 PM by Stefan Beck]

We are by now accustomed to the spectacle of actors and musicians inveighing on matters of great geopolitical significance. For some of us, it's easy to forgive them. Often they're trying to buttress a crumbling career with some free P.R.; sometimes one suspects that, given all the people hanging on to their every word, they just don't know when to keep quiet.

Novelists, poets, and other literary figures are a very different matter. One may be tempted to assume they have some degree of credibility--so when they natter, their natterings have greater influence. Consider the lecture given recently by Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning Toni Morrison:

The Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist asked listeners Tuesday in Davis to consider how different approaches to the revenge epic "Beowulf" relate to global conflicts today. . . .
Morrison told the medieval tale of Beowulf, a hero who slays the monster Grendel for ravaging a town and later kills Grendel's mother when she tries to avenge him. The epic does not explain why Grendel behaves as he does; he is simply portrayed as evil incarnate. . . .

In "a world convulsing under the pressures of globalization," Morrison said, we must ask the same questions: "Who or what is the monster? Is it them or is it us? Where do we belong?"

The answers could be as stark and medieval as "Beowulf," she said. "Ours need not be - must not be."

Must we ask these questions? For many of us, the answers are intuitive. Between the transformative juggernaut of democracy and the poisonous force of terrorism, it's not hard to see what the "monster" is. It is a luxury of writers and intellectuals to ponder long what passions and grievances may motivate the wicked, as John Gardner did in Grendel. To expect those entrusted with the safety of our country to idle in that same creative luxury--as Toni Morrison and other "intellectuals" seem to--is to prepare oneself for cultural self-destruction. The dangers of the real world call not for poetry but a real Beowulf.

Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York. He has contributed on fiction and other subjects to The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and elsewhere.

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Posted 1:30 PM by Stefan Beck] We are by now accustomed to the spectacle of actors and musicians inveighing on matters of great geopolitical significance. For some of us, it's easy to forgive them.

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Evil Twins? The Role of the Monsters in Beowulf Alexander M. Bruce

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Evil Twins? The Role of the Monsters in Beowulf Alexander M. Bruce

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Evil Twins? The Role of the Monsters in Beowulf

Alexander M. Bruce

As a fan of the original Star Trek, I can remember having fun counting up how many times the show tapped into the "evil twin" motif. There was the episode where Kirk's psyche was split into two people, so that a nice but wishy-washy Kirk and a mean but decisive Kirk roamed the Enterprise; or the episode when Kirk and three others ended up in a parallel "evil" universe where evil Spock had an evil goatee; or the episode where Kirk and an evil woman scientist (whom he had jilted) switched bodies (straight out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon) . . . the list could continue. Nor has Star Trek been the only show to turn to the "evil twin" plot; it has become so familiar, such an overused and tired cliché in the modern storytelling medium of TV, that when a show resorts to an "evil twin" episode, we know its writers are pretty desperate.

When we consider the structure of Beowulf, especially the balanced contrast between Beowulf and the monsters he faces, we might be tempted to see the poem as an early "evil twin" story. And I think there is some truth in that reading, as I will outline in this essay: example after example points to an intentional highlighting of a Beowulf-monster association, a sort of apposition such as Fred Robinson has argued for in his Beowulf and the Appositive Style but more extended and pervasive. But what I also want to stress is how the poet went beyond what we may consider a cliché plot motif to a greater issue; even as I outline the extent of the "evil twin" connections between Beowulf and the three monstrous foes, I wish to explore why the poet made the connections. I believe that the poet was stressing the evil twin aspect to make a statement about human beings: how we have a monstrous side, how at times it is truly difficult to tell monster from human, and at times so much easier because the humans are so much more monstrous.

From the outset, it is obvious that the poet meant to create an immediate comparison between Beowulf and his foes, for they are described in parallel terms. Such is obvious in the case of Beowulf and Grendel. There's the matter of numbers: Grendel can "genam thritig thegna" ("he can seize thirty men at once"; 122-23). According to Hrothgar, Beowulf has "thritiges manna mægencræft on his mundgripe" ("the strength of thirty in his hand"; 379-80), a point illustrated later when Beowulf swims off with thirty suits of armor from Hygelac's battle against the Franks, though of course Fred Robinson has disputed that feat in his "Elements of the Marvellous in the Characterization of Beowulf: A Reconsideration of the Textual Evidence" (84-85). Beowulf and Grendel are both known for their murderous progenitors: Beowulf's father, Ecgtheow, was on the run for killing Heatholaf of the Wulfings (and not paying wergild). Grendel descends from Cain, who is likewise on the run for his crime of killing another; that Cain killed his brother makes his crime more grievous, but the basic act is the same.

Hrothgar relinquishes control of Heorot to each: unwillingly to Grendel, who has driven away the warriors so that now he "Heorot eardode, sincfage sel sweartum nihtum" ("held Heorot, the richly adorned hall, by dark night"; 166-67), and later willingly to Beowulf: "Hafa nu ond geheald husa selest, gemyne mærtho, mægenellen cyth, waca with wrathum!" ("Have now and hold this best of houses, think on glory, show your mighty valor, watch for the foe!"; 658-60) In preparation for their battle, Beowulf notes that since Grendel "for his wonhydum wæpna ne recceth" (434)—that is, does not use weapon, armor, or shield—nor will he, thereby directly casting himself as Grendel's equal or twin. Beowulf and Grendel also come from essentially single-parent families and have mothers who are never clearly named. Beowulf is known for his father Ecgtheow, and while he obviously has a mother, she is not deemed worthy of a name and has no place in the plot. Hrothgar does acknowledge and even praise her, but not for who she is but rather for whom she gave birth to:

Hwæt, thæt secgan mæg,
efne swa hwylc mægtha swa thone magan cende
æfter gumcynnum, gyf heo gyt lyfath,
thæt hyre Ealdmetod este wære
bearngebyrdo. (942-46)

Indeed, it may be said
that whatever woman brought this young man
into the world, if she yet lives,
that the All-Mighty was kind to her
in child-bearing.

This Geatish woman could be simply referred to as "Beowulf's mother." Similarly, Grendel obviously had a biological father, but he is never named nor plays any part in the story. Yes, his distant father is Cain, but Grendel's real father is unknown, and his mother is known not by her name but by her association with her son.

As with Beowulf and Grendel, there are also situational associations between Beowulf and Grendel's mother. Grendel's mother had held her lair for "hund missera" (1498)—a hundred seasons, or fifty years, if we allow two seasons (summer and winter) to make a year—and of course Beowulf rules "fiftig wintra" (2209). As Beowulf took Grendel's arm as a trophy, Grendel's mother took Æschere's body as a trophy. She beheads Æschere, which Beowulf repays by beheading both her and Grendel. And when they fight, there is a sense that she and Beowulf are more evenly matched than Grendel and Beowulf, for Beowulf is in real jeopardy during his battle with her.

Even Beowulf and the dragon have some "evil twin" connections. Both have the number fifty associated with them; again, Beowulf ruled fifty years, and the dragon is "fiftiges fotgemearces" ("fifty paces long"; 3042). More significantly, both are lords who respond when their respective halls are violated. The dragon, after all, has been robbed and is understandably angry:

Tha se wyrm onwoc, wroht wæs geniwad;
stonc tha æfter stane, stearcheort onfand
feondes fotlast; he to forth gestop
dyrnan cræfte dracan heafde neah. (2287-90)

When the worm awoke, the strife was renewed;
moving among the rocks, the stout-hearted found
the track of the foe—he who in secret cunning had stepped
too near the dragon's head.

For his part, Beowulf has had his mead-hall burned and wants revenge:

Hæfde ligdraca leoda fæsten,
ealond utan, eorthweard thone
gledum forgrunden; him thæs guthkyning,
Wedera thioden wræce leornode. (2333-36)

The fire-dragon had destroyed with flames
the stronghold of the people, the seaboard from outside,
the land-guard; for this the war-king,
the Weder-Geats' prince, devised revenge.

To protect him from the dragon's fire, Beowulf uses an iron shield, the metal reminding us of the dragon's scales which likewise shield it from sword-blows. The two opponents are also most evenly matched in battle; of course Beowulf is over-matched as he cannot kill the dragon alone, but their "twin" nature comes out as they prove to be each other's bane. The dragon, J. R. R. Tolkien reminds us, fits Beowulf perfectly: "it is necessary that his final foe should not be some Swedish prince, or treacherous friend, but a dragon: a thing made by imagination for just such a purpose. Nowhere does a dragon come in so precisely where he should" (128).

So we can readily note the descriptions, details, and situations—some obvious, some more subtle—that allow us to consider Beowulf and his three monstrous foes as "evil twins." Yet there is another way the poet highlights the connection between man and monster: there are numerous examples of linguistic "twinning," moments where the language itself blurs the line between man and monster. For example, both men and monsters have "folman": hands or paws, depending upon the translator's interpretation. "Rinc" (usually translated as "warrior") is used in reference to human beings almost exclusively, but it is also applied to Grendel at line 720. We translate "wer" as "man," but we can also note that Grendel is described as being "on weres wæstmum" (1352), that is, having the form of a "wer," or man. Klaeber tells us to translate "aglæca" as "wretch, monster, or fiend" as in "Licsar gebad atol æglæca" ("the horrid monster [Grendel] endured bodily pain"; 815-16), except when it refers to a person, in which case it ought to be translated as "warrior or hero," as in "Hæfde aglæca elne gegongen" ("the hero [Sigemund] had succeeded with strength"; 893). And actually, at line 2592 the word means both "monster" and "hero" at the same time, as the plural form "aglæcean" refers to both the dragon and Beowulf: "Næs tha long to thon, thæt tha aglæcean hy eft gemetton" ("It was not long before the aglæcean again clashed").

The scene with the dragon brings up one of the most complex examples of the impact of such ambiguous language. The specific moment comes as Beowulf and the dragon size each other up before their melee begins:

Stithmod gestod with steapne rond
winia bealdor, tha se wyrm gebeah
snude tosomne; he on searwum bad. (2566-68)

The stout-hearted one [Beowulf] stood with his high shield,
the lord of retainers, when the worm coiled itself
quickly together; he/it waited in cunning.

The flexibility of the language allows us to have the masculine personal pronoun "he" refer to the "winia bealdor," the person Beowulf; or the masculine personal pronoun "he" may refer to the closest masculine noun, in this case "se wyrm," the dragon. Or maybe "he" refers to both Beowulf and the dragon, for both "awaited in cunning."

I think the poet was intentionally exploiting the grammatical flexibility and ambiguity of his language to underscore subtly the point that at times we cannot distinguish between man and monster. Such blurring has been the case throughout the poem, for in each of the three battles, it becomes clear that it takes a monster to kill a monster. Only Beowulf with his monstrous strength can kill Grendel, and I have the sense that Beowulf's men strike ineffectively at Grendel not just because of his enchanted skin but also in part because Beowulf and the monster are wrestling so tightly that it is difficult to tell one from the other. The poem reads that they strike "thær hie meahton swa" ("where they might do so"; 797) suggesting that they had few chances at a clear shot. In his fight with Grendel's mother, Beowulf must arm himself with a giant's sword, the "ealdsweord eotenisc" (1558), choosing the weapon of a monster to kill a monster. Moreover, Beowulf's men confuse the blood of Grendel and his mother with the blood of Beowulf, assuming that the vast quantity of blood that gushed to the surface of the mere was the hero's. And finally, Beowulf and the dragon, linguistically equated, cancel each other out, neither surviving the battle; again, as Tolkien noted, Beowulf and the dragon truly fit each other, as Beowulf's death by anything less than a monster would be anti-climactic. Beowulf's dying wish is to see the treasure, to claim it in a way as his own just as the dragon had done before, and the gold indeed is transferred from the mound of the dragon to that of Beowulf.

So what is the point of equating man and monster, of making them "evil twins"? I think that ultimately the poet draws such strong associations to highlight not how threatening and dangerous the monsters are, but rather how threatening and dangerous human beings are, or at least can be. For all their monstrous nature—the strength, appetite, and terror of the Grendelkin and the flames and poison of the dragon—the monsters are in the end ineffective. They are defeated. The greater, more threatening force in the poem is people. Grendel can terrorize Heorot and Hrothgar but he does not destroy the hall nor kill Hrothgar and his kin: Heorot awaits destruction in "lathan liges," the "hateful flames" that will come in the feud between Hrothgar and his son-in-law Ingeld of the Heatho-Bards (81-85). And Hrothulf, Hrothgar's trusted but treacherous kinsman, will seize the throne from his cousin, Hrothgar's son. Grendel's mother, as monstrous as she is, is only acting out the approved social code of revenge, a code reaffirmed in the lay of Hildeburh, told the very night Grendel's mother attacks. And while Grendel's mother is hunted down for seeking revenge for the death of her son, Hildeburh is stripped of all right to such revenge for the death of her son, brother, and husband. The dragon, for all his destructive abilities and justifiable anger at being robbed, does not destroy the Geats; rather the Franks, Frisians, and Swedes will obliterate the Geats, as the messenger prophesizes at the end of the poem and apparently has come to pass, for we still have Franks, Frisians, and Swedes, but no Geats.

I have often considered how the Beowulf-poet tended to say "both/and" instead of "either/or," for example how the poem speaks positively about both pagan qualities (courage and loyalty to one's lord) and Judeo-Christian theology (the need to trust God, not heathen idols). I think that with the "twinning" of Beowulf and the monsters, we have another example of "both/and." The poet did not place Beowulf and the human beings clearly on one side and Grendel and the dragon on another; we cannot read the poem and say that people are either heroes or monsters, for as the poem reminds us, we human beings can be heroic and we can be monstrous at the same time. The real monsters—the ones completely beyond our power and control—are the people. We can get our heads or hands around the simple monsters; we can appreciate the direct nature of Grendel's evil or of the dragon's greed and anger. But the desire of men to kill each other, openly and treacherously, and a social system that encourages such destruction is more frightening, a point I believe the Beowulf-poet wanted to make. He gave us monsters with whom we can identify: which is to say that we are they.
Notes
¹All citations are from Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, edited, with introduction, bibliography, notes, glossary, and appendices by Fr. Klaeber, 3rd ed. (Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1950). Line numbers will be noted in the text. The translations are my own. Return

²A version of this essay was read at the 2005 meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association at the "SEMA at SAMLA" session. Return
Works Cited
Klaeber, Fr. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 3rd ed. Lexington: D. C. Heath and Co., 1950.

Robinson, Fred C. Beowulf and the Appositive Style. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1985.

-----. "Elements of the Marvellous in the Characterization of Beowulf: A Reconsideration of the Textual Evidence." Beowulf: Basic Readings. Ed. Peter S. Baker. Basic Readings in Anglo-Saxon England. New York: Garland, 1995. 79-96.

Tolkien, J. R. R. " Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245-95. Rpt. In Beowulf: A Verse Translation. Ed. Daniel Donoghue. New York: Norton, 2002. 103-30.
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Evil Twins? The Role of the Monsters in Beowulf

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Evil Twins? The Role of the Monsters in Beowulf Alexander M. Bruce As a fan of the original Star Trek, I can remember having fun counting up how many times the show tapped into the "evil twin" motif.

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Hamilton refs here :)

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Maria Dahvana Headley's revisionist translation infuses the Old English poem with feminism and social-media slang.

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Afew weeks ago, during a visit to the doctor, I laughed out loud when the online check-in portal suggested Old English as my language preference, and not only because I happened to have with me Maria Dahvana Headley's " Beowulf " (MCD), a new translation of the long poem that is one of the oldest surviving works of literature in the language. Without serious study, no speaker of contemporary English could converse in or even read Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon), a language as distinct from its modern equivalent as many foreign tongues. Of Germanic origin, it contains numerous elements that don't appear in the modern English alphabet: the diphthong "æ" (ash), as well as two letters that represent the "th" sound, "þ" (thorn) and "ð" (eth). Its unintelligibility is evident from the first line of "Beowulf": "Hwæt wē Gār-Dena  in geārdagum."

Even without understanding the meaning (roughly, "We of the Spear-Danes in the days of yore"), we can notice a few things about Old English poetry. Each line is broken up into two half lines, separated by a caesura; the focus is on metre and alliteration, not rhyme. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," called the structure of Old English literature "more like masonry than music." (In addition to writing " The Hobbit" and the " Lord of the Rings" trilogy, both distinctly inflected by Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythology, Tolkien was a prominent scholar of Old English.) The effect, when read aloud, is something like boots marching on gravel, with Yoda-style inversions. James Joyce famously parodied it in " Ulysses ": "Before born babe bliss had."

Headley, a novelist known primarily for her works of fantasy for young adults, is the most recent of the dozens of modern English translators who have taken on the poem, which runs three thousand one hundred and eighty-two lines long. They range from scholars like Tolkien (who spent decades revising his translation before deciding not to publish it; it appeared posthumously in a 2014 edition put together by his son Christopher) to the poets Seamus Heaney and Stephen Mitchell, both of whom have produced lyrical and critically admired versions. Very few of these translators are women, which is unsurprising. "Beowulf"-in which the eponymous hero, a man of gigantic, and perhaps supernatural, strength, defends King Hrothgar and the Danes against Grendel, a part man, part monster who is plaguing the kingdom-tends to be perceived as a masculine poem, its vocabulary and its ethics those of the battleground and the mead hall. (If I had wanted to discuss spears or honor codes with the doctor, Old English would have served just fine.) The men in "Beowulf" drink and boast and fight; the women, even the queens, exist mainly to pass around the mead cup and to mourn their fallen kinsmen.

There is one notable exception. As the warriors sleep off their drunken celebration of Grendel's defeat at Beowulf's hands, Grendel's mother shows up to avenge her son's death in a surprise attack. Headley writes that, as a child "on the hunt for any sort of woman warrior," she came upon this character in an illustrated encyclopedia of monsters and assumed, naturally, that Grendel's mother was the focus of the story. When Headley finally read the poem, she was dismayed that scholars had treated the character as a marginal figure, an extension of her child, or as only partially human.

In 2018, Headley published " The Mere Wife," an astonishing novel in which she reimagines the "Beowulf" story, setting it in modern times and placing the female characters at its center. Grendel's mother becomes an Iraq War veteran, her child likely the result of rape, while Wealhtheow, Hrothgar's queen, is represented by Willa, a wealthy suburban housewife who posts photographs of her home-cooked meals and suppresses her fantasies of violence. The novel is both a brilliant investigation of the man-monster dichotomy-the line between them is not as clear as we might think-and a caustic sendup of contemporary family life. In their own way, the novel suggests, all women are warriors, even if their armor takes the form of a sequinned cocktail dress.

Dedicated to "Anonymous and all the stories she told," "The Mere Wife" includes some tantalizing snippets of "Beowulf" as translated by Headley. Now we have the full version, and it is electrifying. The lack of scholarly apparatus is deceptive: Headley has studied the poem deeply and is conversant with some of the text's most obscure details. Though she comes to "Beowulf" from a feminist perspective, her primary purpose is not polemical or political but, as she writes, to render the story "continuously and cleanly, while also creating a text that felt as bloody and juicy as I think it ought to feel."

Headley's version is more of a rewriting than a true translation, reënvisaging the poem for the modern reader rather than transmitting it line for line. It is brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand-Grendel is "fucked by fate," Wealhtheow, "hashtag: blessed." Not everyone will admire all the linguistic and stylistic choices she has made; that crunching noise in the background is the sound of her predecessors rolling in their burial ships. Hrothgar's thanes are his "fight-family," Wealhtheow admires Beowulf's "brass balls," treasure is "bling." But the over-all effect is as if Headley, like the warrior queen she admired as a child, were storming the dusty halls of the library, upending the crowded shelf of "Beowulf" translations to make room for something completely new.

"Hwæt," the first word of "Beowulf," has no direct equivalent in modern English. Tolkien described it as "a note 'striking up' at the beginning of a poem," calling the listener or reader to attention. In his translation, he rendered it as "Lo!," following John Mitchell Kemble, whose influential 1837 translation was one of the earliest in modern English. Stephen Mitchell avoided picking any single word, apparently in response to new linguistic research arguing that "hwæt" was not an interjection but, rather, imparted an exclamatory tone to the entire sentence. Heaney went for "So," explaining that he wanted his version of the poem to sound as if one of his Irish relatives were telling the story: "So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by / and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. / We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns." Other translators have opted for "Attend," "Listen," "Behold," "Yes!" and-unfortunately-"What ho!"

Headley's version opens:

Bro! Tell me we still know how to talk about kings! In the old days,
everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound. Only
stories now, but I'll sound the Spear-Danes' song, hoarded for hungry times.

Bro? In Headley's vision, the "Beowulf" narrator is "an old-timer at the end of the bar, periodically pounding his glass and demanding another." Indeed, the poetic tradition from which the poem arises is an oral one, in which poetry may have been sung by bards-called "scops"-who entertained the kings and their entourages after feasts. Headley's intervention is not only humorous and attention-grabbing but also historically justified. The poem, she points out, was probably composed by a man for a largely male audience. But she also hears a satirical quality in the boasts and pledges that constitute much of the characters' speech. The men of "Beowulf"-not least the protagonist-are preoccupied with definitions of masculinity: what makes a man, or how a man can make himself.

The narrator is at once looking back and looking forward; the poem may have been composed as early as the eighth century A.D., but it describes, with fantastic touches, a world that existed a couple of hundred years earlier. He interrupts himself to comment on the action, to foreshadow events to come, or to add a Christian gloss. "I mean, personally?" he says after Beowulf's defeat of Grendel, as Hrothgar rains gifts down like "pennies from Heaven" on the hero. "I've never seen anything / like it, so many treasures. . . . No fighting? No fury? Nope, bro, this was / a certain type of night." (Cue "Oh What a Night" on the jukebox.) "Anyone knows how fair it was: / bro, more than fair" is his assessment of Beowulf's reward. (For comparison, Heaney: "A fair witness can see how well each one behaved.")

But we get ahead of ourselves. The story opens with Hrothgar, King of the Spear-Danes (in modern-day Denmark), building a magnificent hall, Heorot, to celebrate his successes in war and to reinforce his dominance. (There are echoes here of the Tower of Babel.) Grendel, whom Headley calls a "woe-walker"-the poem doesn't describe him physically, except to suggest his prodigious size and strength-is enraged to hear the men drinking and singing. Why? The original text doesn't give a reason. "Grendel hurt, and so he hunted," Headley suggests. He so terrorizes the Spear-Danes that they abandon Heorot after dark, leaving the great hall deserted.

After twelve years of this, "News went global." Across the sea, in Geatland (modern-day Sweden), Beowulf gathers "fourteen fists for hire" and sails for Hrothgar's kingdom. The watchman who greets them at the cliffs might be a bouncer at a bar more exclusive than the one where the narrator hangs out: "There's a dress code! You're denied." "Kindly give us / directions and we'll get gone," Beowulf assures him.

Headley is obviously enjoying herself, and never more than when she's speaking in the voice of her hero, "hard-core in his helmet," who might have apprenticed with Omar from " The Wire." His speech is ridiculous, glorious, and irresistible. Here, having come to relieve Heorot from its "early curfew," he introduces himself to Hrothgar:

Every elder knew I was the man for you, and blessed
my quest, King Hrothgar, because where I'm from?
I'm the strongest and the boldest, and the bravest and the best.
Yes: I mean-I may have bathed in the blood of beasts,
netted five foul ogres at once, smashed my way into a troll den
and come out swinging, gone skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
and made sashimi of some sea monsters.
Anyone who fucks with the Geats? Bro, they have to fuck with me. . . .
Now, I want to test my mettle on Grendel, best him,
a match from man into meat. Just us two,
hand to hand. Sweet.

Headley's cadences and her revisionist spirit owe a debt to Lin-Manuel Miranda. When Unferth, one of Hrothgar's men, challenges Beowulf's stories of a swimming contest with another warrior named Breca, their back-and-forth might be taken from the Cabinet battles in "Hamilton." "I heard no one could convince you two of clarity, / that you dove overboard, surfing on stupidity," Unferth sneers. "Let me drop some truth / into your tangent," Beowulf shoots back. "Let me say it straight: / You don't rate and neither did Breca / when it came to battle. The gulf? You're cattle, / and I'm a wolf." Later, the narrator tells us that Unferth "unexpectedly stanned" Beowulf by lending him a sword for the fight with Grendel's mother.

But Headley's "Beowulf" also has moments of more traditional poetry, as when Hrothgar's court scop sings the song of Hildeburh, a woman who loses both her son and her brother on the battlefield and watches them burn on a single pyre: "Fire comes from the same / family as famine. It can feast, unfulfilled, forever." Or when the narrator foreshadows the destruction of Heorot:

The hall loomed, golden towers antler-tipped;
it was asking for burning, but that hadn't happened yet.
You know how it is: every castle wants invading, and every family
has enemies born within it. Old grudges recrudesce.

"Beowulf" scholars may stop us here. Wait a minute! they say. That's not in the original: not the antler-tipped towers, not the generalization about burning castles, not the familiar mode of address ("You know how it is"). They're right, bro. But "Beowulf" translators have always taken liberties with the poem-in part because the source text is faulty. It was originally written down on vellum about a thousand years ago by two scribes, who are believed to have been working from an even older copy. In 1731, a fire broke out in the building where it was stored; someone had the presence of mind to throw the manuscript out a window, but every page had been badly burned. Thus pieces of the "Beowulf" story have been lost, both in the fire and, as Headley puts it in her introduction, "in the gestation of the written version itself, which was at the mercy of memory and (presumably) mead."

In addition to such confusions, there's a surprising lack of agreement among scholars about the literal meaning of many lines. When Beowulf dives into the sea in search of Grendel's mother, who lives in a kind of underwater castle, does the poet say that he swims for most of the day before reaching the bottom or that he gets there while it is still daylight? What should be done with the combat scene between the two of them, in which Grendel's mother seems to sit unceremoniously on Beowulf-a verb that "will simply not do," as one translator complains? Heaney renders it as "pounced upon him." Headley, concerned with neither fidelity nor heroic style, says that she "turned on him, gripping / and flipping him." (Heaney's Beowulf, suiting up for battle, is "indifferent to death"; Headley's "gave zero shits.")

More important, it's unclear from the description of Grendel's mother whether she's meant to be understood as a monster or as a human woman. As Headley notes, the Old English word "fingrum" is often translated as "claws," but Grendel's mother uses a knife during her fight with Beowulf, and "wielding a knife while also possessing long nails is-as anyone who's ever had a manicure knows-a near impossibility." The character is called "aglaec-wif," which others have translated as "wretch," "ogress," "hell-bride," and even "ugly troll lady." But Headley asserts that it is a female equivalent of the noun "aglaeca," which means awe-inspiring. Many versions also call Grendel's mother a "sea-wolf," but the Old English equivalent for this is "brimwylf"-and the manuscript itself reads "brimwyl," which, Headley points out, could easily be a scribal error for "brimwif," "sea-woman." (Not one of six translations by men which I consulted noted this possibility.) By contrast, Headley's translation allows for the monstrous element but also emphasizes the character's recognizably human emotions:

Grendel's mother,
warrior-woman, outlaw, meditated on misery. . . .
carried on a wave of wrath, crazed with sorrow,
looking for someone to slay, someone to pay in pain
for her heart's loss.

Those scribes who recorded "Beowulf" did make mistakes. The manuscript shows that they sometimes crossed out and emended each other's work. A tantalizing example of these emendations has to do with Grendel's genealogy. In one of the many ways in which the text retroactively applies a Christian slant to pagan mythology, Grendel is said to be a descendant of Cain, who begat "ogres and elves and evil phantoms" (Heaney), cursed to wander the earth as penalty for their ancestor's fratricide. But Headley believes that Grendel is neither a wanderer nor a fugitive; he lives in a hall with his mother. What if the standard interpretation is wrong? In the original text, the first scribe wrote that Grendel was descended from "Ham's kin," which the second scribe emended to "Cain's kin." (In Old English, the spellings of "Ham" and "Cain" are similar.) The curse of Ham-punishment for seeing his father, Noah, naked-was that the descendants of one of his sons would be slaves, which has been interpreted as a Biblical justification for slavery.

Toni Morrison, in an essay called "Grendel and His Mother," published last year in the posthumous collection " The Source of Self-Regard," examines the way both figures are presented as "beyond comprehension . . . mindless without intelligible speech." Neither has or requires a motive; evil "is preternatural and exists without explanation." Morrison lingers on the moment in which Beowulf vanquishes Grendel's mother. After Unferth's sword fails Beowulf, he tries unsuccessfully to attack her with his bare hands. Suddenly, a ray of light-the narrator implies that this is God's doing-shines upon a nearby sword, part of Grendel's mother's armory. Beowulf grabs it and beheads her, then beheads her son's corpse. The sword melts away, leaving him holding only the hilt. Morrison is unconvinced by the usual interpretation: that the steel was melted by the monsters' foul blood. "The image of Beowulf standing there with a mother's head in one hand and a useless hilt in the other encourages more layered interpretations," she writes. "One being that perhaps violence against violence-regardless of good and evil, right and wrong-is itself so foul the sword of vengeance collapses in exhaustion or shame."

Morrison's and Headley's revisionist readings highlight some of the challenges "Beowulf" presents to the modern reader. But both also demonstrate the richness with which the oldest texts still speak to us. They may be "only stories now." Nevertheless, they are stories in which readers-perhaps especially those who come from outside the mainstream of those texts' traditions and approach them without preconceptions-can continue to find meaning. With a "Beowulf" defiantly of and for this historical moment, Headley reclaims the poem for her audience as well as for herself. ♦

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I fell in love with Neil Price's comprehensive new history of the Vikings, Children of Ash and Elm, when I got to the paragraph that's just a list of bread: "There were rectangular loaves baked in a form; round loaves threaded on a thin wire; oval buns; thin, soft, and foldable flatbreads made on a circular griddle pan-rather like a sort of Nordic tortilla to be stuffed with food; thin, circular wheels of dry, crisp flatbread with a central hole so they could be hung up for storage ... " And that's not even the end of it! Who knew how creative the Vikings could get with carbohydrates?

The bread menu is but one detail in a book that offers delight after delight. If you, like me, have loved fictional Viking stories like that History Channel show about Ragnar Lothbrok (very good) and Linnea Hartsuyker's Golden Wolf Saga (very, very good) and have always wanted to read a fuller history informed by current scholarship but wondered where to start, this book is it. Price, an English archaeologist working at Uppsala University in Sweden, has produced a single (albeit lengthy!) volume that offers a sense of chronology and hits the major high points, while also introducing nonspecialists to the major questions that those who know a lot about Vikings still consider unresolved. Vikings, Price writes at one point, are interesting to him because of their "curiosity, creativity, the complexity and sophistication of their mental landscapes, and yes, their openness to new experiences and ideas." This is a set of qualities also to be found in this book, which manages to be lyrical, unnerving, specific, and passionately uncertain, all at once.

Throughout this book are glorious collections of Viking facts that are technically known yet still resist our best attempts at interpretation. Cataloging the small and large variations found in graves to make a point about the way Vikings attended to the "sense of the individual" while burying people, Price lists:

The women buried wearing the skins of lynx, or laid out beneath heavy bear pelts; the swords stuck vertically in a grave; a shield over the face or by the waist; a coin, just one, that was already a century old and worn thin; a line of burials, in which every corpse clasps a smooth, white pebble in their hand; a horse led down into a grave, actually standing on the corpse, before being slaughtered; at the food of the same burial, inside the grave, a standing stone over which the body of a dog has been squashed down, ripping it apart ...

It's not just a list of finds, but of mysteries-mysteries of the kind that could prompt someone to devote their life to studying Vikings. "One could fill a book with things like this," Price writes, voicing a fascinated curiosity that seems to drive him almost to despair.

Price diverges periodically from his tone of easy erudition to make conversational, enthusiastic asides. These can be pretty funny. There's no evidence, Price writes, that the "berkserkers," Viking warriors who went into trancelike hyperviolent states in battle, used drugs, "despite the fact that Wikipedia's entry for berserkers recommends the reader also look up 'Dutch Courage' and, indeed, 'Going Postal.' " Recounting the stories of Viking religious ceremonies recorded by the medieval chronicler Adam of Bremen in the 11 th century, Price writes, "Adam also mentions that all this was accompanied by festivities so obscene 'it is best to pass over them in silence' (damn)." "Damn," indeed!

Price has a talent for evoking the Vikings' physical surroundings as they might have been-a gift for recreation that's probably natural for an archaeologist accustomed to eking significance from the smallest bit of disturbed dirt. While dining in firelit halls, Viking warlords (textual sources tell us) wore their helmets inside; "the flickering orange flames of the hearth would have animated the covering of relief pictures on their tiny press-metal plaques," Price writes. On the sites of many such long-gone halls, "wafer thin" rectangular golden foils, stamped with images, have been found-foils that archaeologists believe may have been "calling cards" for visitors and that would have been fixed onto the posts holding up the hall. If the "calling card" theory holds, Price writes, those sites that yield a great variety of foils may have been the halls of renowned lords, accustomed to "welcome guests from far and wide." "In the fire's glow, the foils, too, would have glittered, the towering roof posts appearing through the smoke as pillars of shining golden lights," Price invites us to imagine.

Just because the Vikings were tolerant of many types of difference doesn't mean they were kind to thepowerless.

Yet, although the wealthiest and most powerful Vikings trail drama and beauty down through the archaeological record, the author never forgets the grim side of all that gloriousness. Price's pages totting up the many human hours that must have gone into the production of seafaring Vikings' sails and clothing-pages that show how improbable it was that any Viking should ever have sailed anywhere, let alone gotten as far as they did-end where they should: where the labor was done. Enslaved women labored on sails in windowless weaving huts, and "the conditions within the sheds would have been horrendous," Price writes. Imagine bending over cloth all day in the dim, thinking of lost home and family, Price's prose asks us; imagine your body suffering, along with your mind: "All day, tiny floating particles of wool would gradually accumulate around the work, drawn into the lungs with every breath. By evening, the air inside the huts was probably opaque and filled with the sound of coughing."

"Behind every Viking raid, usually visualized today as an arrow or place-name on a map, was the appalling trauma visited upon all people at the moment of enslavement, the disbelieving experience of passing from people to property in seconds," Price writes. A text by Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a traveler from Baghdad who encountered Scandinavians on the Volga River in 922, describes the rape of enslaved women as integral to the "everyday routine" of the Vikings. "Even at the point of sale," Price writes, "a woman was sometimes raped one last time in the presence of her purchaser." Ahman ibn Fadlan's text, he adds, "should be compulsory reading for anyone tempted to glorify 'heroic' Viking warriors."

It's a testament to Price's efforts to thread discussion of slavery, violence, and oppression throughout the book that I don't even really need the summing-up paragraphs he places at the beginning and the end, directly addressing whether we should "appreciate" or "like" the Vikings-whether, in short, we should allow ourselves to admire them. But this question, Price says in opening the book, needs to be considered, because "over the centuries, a great many people have eagerly pressed the Vikings into (im)moral service, and others continue to do so ... any meaningful twenty-first-century engagement with the Vikings must acknowledge the often deeply problematic ways in which their memory is activated in the present." The very concept of a "pure Nordic" bloodline, he points out, would have "baffled" the historical Vikings, engaged as they were in relentless and curious expansion. But as Price's own details make clear, just because the Vikings were tolerant of many types of difference doesn't mean they were kind to the powerless.

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Price was one of the lead authors on the research team that confirmed by genomic analysis in 2017 that a warrior buried with utmost honors-sitting up, surrounded by weapons and horses-first unearthed in Birka, Sweden, in 1878, was female. "In a sense it does not really matter whether the person in the Birka grave was a female-bodied warrior woman or not," Price writes. "This person may equally have been transgender, in our terms, or non-binary, or gender fluid. There are other possibilities, too, but the point is that they must all be recognized as possible Viking-Age identities while-crucially-not assuming that this must be the case." (The italics are Price's.) To convey such a deep sense of scholarly indeterminacy, all while dazzling the reader with cinematic detail-this is, truly, a feat.

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7:15 discussing Vikings finding out there is land "to the west"

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7:15 discussing Vikings finding out there is land "to the west"

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S.3 E.6 (3rd)

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In 790 AD, the Vikings of Norheim have a hectic schedule that includes pillaging, plundering, enslaving others and solving problems with violence. Watch trailers & learn more.

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Most readers of Beowulf understand it as a white, male hero story-tellingly, it's named for the hero, not the monster-who slays a monster and the monster's mother. Grendel, the ghastly uninvited guest, kills King Hrothgar's men at a feast in Heorot. Beowulf, a warrior, lands in Hrothgar's kingdom and kills Grendel but then must contend with Grendel's mother who comes to enact revenge for her son's murder. Years later, Beowulf deals with a dragon who is devastating his kingdom and dies while he and his thane, Wiglaf, are slaying the dragon. Crucially, Grendel is never clearly described, but is named a "grim demon," "god-cursed brute," a "prowler through the dark," a part of "Cain's clan."

Indeed, Beowulf is a story about monsters, race, and political violence. Yet critics have always read it through the white gaze and a preserve of white English heritage. The foundational article on Beowulf and monsters is J.R.R. Tolkien's "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Yes, before and while writing The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was an Oxford medieval professor who interpreted Beowulf for a white English audience. He uses Grendel and the dragon to discuss an aesthetic, non-politicized, close reading of monsters, asking critics to read it as a poem, a work of linguistic art:

Yet it is in fact written in a language that after many centuries has still essential kinship with our own, it was made in this land, and moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must ever call with a profound appeal-until the dragon comes.

Beowulf-which is written in Old English-was produced over a millennium ago and is set in Denmark. Learning Old English is on par with learning a foreign language. Thus Tolkien's view on which bodies, fluent in this "native" English tongue, can read Beowulf, also offers a window into the politics of who gets to and how to read and write about the medieval past.

Tolkien's investment in whiteness does not just apply to his ideal readers of medieval literature. It also extends to the ideal medieval literature scholars. At the 2018 Belle da Costa Greene conference, Kathy Lavezzo highlighted Tolkien's role in shutting the Jamaican-born, Black British academic Stuart Hall out of medieval studies. Hall's autobiography, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands, describes a white South African gatekeeper. Tolkien was the University of Oxford Merton professor of English Language and Literature when Hall was a Rhodes scholar in the 1950s. Hall explains how he almost became a medieval literature scholar: "I loved some of the poetry- Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wanderer, The Seafarer-and at one point I planned to do graduate work on Langland's Piers Plowman." However, according to Lavezzo, it was Tolkien who intervened in these plans: "But when I tried to apply contemporary literary criticism to these texts, my ascetic South African language professor told me in a pained tone that this was not the point of the exercise."

To this day, there have only been a few black scholars of Anglo-Saxon studies to publish on Beowulf.

This clashes with Tolkien's friendlier image that has permeated popular culture, thanks to The Lord of the Rings. Through Tolkien's white critical gaze, Beowulf as an epic for white English people has formed the backbone of the poem's scholarship. To this day, there have only been a few black scholars of Anglo-Saxon studies to publish on Beowulf. Mary Rambaran-Olm has reported on the many instances of black and non-white scholars being shut out of medieval studies. She recently explained at the Race Before Race: Race and Periodization symposium what Tolkien did to Hall in light of her own decision to step down as second vice president of the field's main academic society, citing incidents of white supremacy and gatekeeping. As a result of these incidents, studying Beowulf has long been a privilege reserved for white scholars.

Ironically, Tolkien's advocacy for a Northern, "native," and white ideal readership contrasts with his own personal and familial histories. He spent his first years in South Africa. Though Tolkien's biographers have claimed that his birth in Africa scarcely influenced him, scholarly critics have pointed out the structural racism in his creative work, particularly in The Lord of the Rings. Additionally, he wrote an entire philological series, " Sigelwara Land" and " Sigelwara Land (continued)," on the Old English word for "Ethiopia." In this series, he explicates the connections between Sigelwara Land and monsters by flattening the categories of black Ethiopians, devils, and dragons. He writes:

The learned placed dragons and marvelous gems in Ethiopia, and credited the people with strange habits, and strange foods, not to mention contiguity with the Anthropophagi. As it has come down to us the word is used in translation (the accuracy of which cannot be determined) of Ethiopia, as a vaguely conceived geographical term, or else in passages descriptive of devils, the details of which may owe something to vulgar tradition, but are not necessarily in any case old. They are of a mediaeval kind, and paralleled elsewhere. Ethiopia was hot and its people black. That Hell was similar in both respect would occur to many.

Tolkien's work of empirical philology is a form of racialized confirmation bias that strips Ethiopia of any kind of connection to the marvels of the East, gems, or even his own fixation on dragons. He highlights Sigelwara as a term related to black skin and its connections to devils and hell, framing Ethiopians within the same category as "monsters." He has no qualms about consistently connecting the Ethiopians to the "sons of Ham," and thus the biblical descendants of Cain, linking medieval Ethiopia with the justification for chattel black slavery. In fact, no part of the etymology ( nor any part of medieval discussions of Ethiopia) discusses slavery. Tolkien would have read Beowulf's Grendel, who is linked to Cain, as a black man:

Grendel was that grim creature called, the ill-famed haunter of the marches of the land, who kept the moors, the fastness of the fens, and, unhappy one, inhabited long while the troll-kind's home; for the Maker had proscribed him with the race of Cain.

Tolkien's articles on Ethiopia and on Beowulf, all published in the 1930s, reveal that Tolkien likely interpreted Grendel as a black man connected to a biblical justification for transatlantic chattel slavery. Thus, Grendel was raced within the logics of Tolkien's white racist gazer. However, his philological method is still seen as a non-politicized and non-personal form of "empirical" scholarship. His interest in solidifying white Englishness and English identity-as a chain of links from the premodern medieval past to contemporary racial identities-is a project that extended into multiple scholarly areas.

Over the last several years, Tolkien's most circulated political stance has been his resistance to fascism as displayed in letters he wrote to a German publisher. He may have abhorred fascism and antisemitism, but he upheld the English empire's white supremacy. He held racialized beliefs against Africans and other members of the English black diaspora.

***

Black scholars have been systematically shut out of Old English literature. If there is no critical mass of black intellectuals, writers, and poets who can talk back to the early English literary corpus and the large-looming white supremacist gatekeepers, then Toni Morrison's Beowulf essay might well be the first piece to do so. Because she writes about Beowulf, race, and how to read beyond the white gaze, her essay speaks back not only to Beowulf but to the English literary scholarship that has left Anglo-Saxon Studies a space of continued white supremacist scholarship.

In Toni Morrison's 2019 collection, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, we get the first revision of who should read Beowulf and how race matters. In her essay, "Grendel and His Mother," she explains:

Delving into literature is neither escape nor surefire route to comfort. It has been a constant, sometimes violent, always provocative engagement with the contemporary world, the issues of the society we live in... As I tell it you may be reminded of the events and rhetoric and actions of many current militarized struggles and violent upheavals.

As a black feminist reader, Morrison examines Beowulf as political, current, for any reader. Indeed, she opens by explaining that literary criticism is always performed through the lens of its moment, urging her readers to "discover in the lines of association I am making with a medieval sensibility and a modern one a fertile ground on which we can appraise our contemporary world." Morrison's Beowulf interpretation highlights what other critics, following Tolkien's lead, have deemed marginal. She decenters the white male hero, focusing instead on the racialized, politicized, and gendered figures of Grendel and his mother, who in Tolkien's read would have been black. In his article " Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," his white male gaze concentrates on what these two "monsters" can do for Beowulf's development as the white male hero of Germanic epic. Morrison, on the other hand, is interested in Grendel and his mother as raced and marginal figures with interiority, psyche, context, and emotion.

Morrison centers the marginal characters in Beowulf, who have not been given space and life in the poem itself.

In Morrison's interviews with Bill Moyers, Charlie Rose, and The Paris Review, she explains her literary method when she unpacks nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature-especially Faulkner, Twain, Hemingway, and Poe-and how white writers and critics hide blackness and race. Similarly, in Morrison's discussion about Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl, she exposes the power dynamics of whiteness in Cather's novel. The novel describes the complicated relationship between a white and a black woman in which Cather's white gaze forces not just unspeakable violence onto the black woman but also erases her name, context, and point of view. Similarly, Tolkien is not interested in Grendel or his mother's racialized contexts, emotions, and reasons. He writes with the white gaze-Grendel and his mother are racialized props that help explain Beowulf's conflicts, contexts, emotions, and reasons. Morrison's sentiments about nineteenth-century American literature apply to white supremacist Anglo-Saxon Studies: "The insanity of racism... you are there hunting this [race] thing that is nowhere to be found and yet makes all the difference."

Morrison analyzes Beowulf through Grendel's racialized gaze. She points out Grendel's lack of back story:

But what seemed never to trouble or worry them was who was Grendel and why had he placed them on his menu? ...The question does not surface for a simple reason: evil has no father. It is preternatural and exists without explanation. Grendel's actions are dictated by his nature; the nature of an alien mind-an inhuman drift... But Grendel escapes these reasons: no one had attacked or offended him; no one had tried to invade his home or displace him from his territory; no one had stolen from him or visited any wrath upon him. Obviously he was neither defending himself nor seeking vengeance. In fact, no one knew who he was.

Morrison asks readers to dwell on Grendel beyond good versus evil binaries. She centers the marginal characters in Beowulf, who have not been given space and life in the poem itself. She forces us to rethink Grendel's mother and Beowulf's vengeance, writing:

Beowulf swims through demon-laden waters, is captured, and, entering the mother's lair, weaponless, is forced to use his bare hands... With her own weapon he cuts off her head, and then the head of Grendel's corpse. A curious thing happens then: the Victim's blood melts the sword... The conventional reading is that the fiends' blood is so foul it melts steel, but the image of Beowulf standing there with a mother's head in one hand and a useless hilt in the other encourages more layered interpretations. One being that perhaps violence against violence-regardless of good and evil, right and wrong-is itself so foul the sword of vengeance collapses in exhaustion or shame.

Morrison's discussion of Grendel, Grendel's mother, and Beowulf is about violence and how it undoes all potential motivations, including vengeance. The final tableau of Beowulf holding both the blood-covered sword of vengeance and Grendel's mother's head is about the corrosiveness of violence. For Morrison, the corrosive violence that eats through the sword of vengeance is that of whiteness.

Morrison goes further to unpack Beowulf through the work of contemporary writers. She explains:

One challenge to the necessary but narrow expectations of this heroic narrative comes from a contemporary writer, the late John Gardner, in his novel, titled Grendel... The novel poses the question that the epic does not: Who is Grendel? The author asks us to enter his mind and test the assumption that evil is flagrantly unintelligible, wanton, and undecipherable.

Specifically, she discusses Gardner's rethinking of Grendel's interiority. She writes that Gardner tries to "penetrate the interior life-emotional, cognizant-of incarnate evil." For Morrison, the poem's most salient interpretation comes from reading it politically, cogently, and rigorously. She writes:

In this country... we are being asked to both recoil from violence and to embrace it; to waver between winning at all costs and caring for our neighbor; between the fear of the strange and the comfort of the familiar; between the blood feud of the Scandinavians and the monster's yearning for nurture and community.

In Morrison's analysis, Grendel has developed from being a murderous guest to Hrothgar's Hall who kills for no reason, to becoming the central focus. This passage asks us to think about why Grendel would do what he did. Morrison understands him as dispossessed; his "dilemma is also ours." She situates Grendel as kith and kin to her imagined critical reading audience-black women.

Morrison concludes with a meditation on complicity, inaction, and the politics of contemporary late fascism and democracy:

...language-informed, shaped, reasoned-will become the hand that stays crisis and gives creative, constructive conflict air to breathe, startling our lives and rippling our intellect. I know that democracy is worth fighting for. I know that fascism is not. To win the former intelligent struggle is needed. To win the latter nothing is required. You only have to cooperate, be silent, agree, and obey until the blood of Grendel's mother annihilates her own weapon and the victor's as well.

In other words, we can reread that scene as a statement about fascist violence and its self-destroying and gendered toxicity. Morrison has made reading Beowulf raced, gendered, political; she has envisioned its interpretation through the centrality of a black feminist reading audience where politics matter and "democracy is worth fighting for."

As Tolkien's intellectual grandchild (my advisor was his student), I do not think it is accidental that Morrison's critical voice reframes Beowulf for the racialized, political now. Tolkien's deliberate shut out of Stuart Hall means that we can only speculate about Hall as a critic of Beowulf, and we know that Anglo-Saxon scholarship continues to shut out black and minority scholars. With Morrison, finally, I believe we can put Tolkien's "Monsters and Critics" to bed and read Beowulf anew.

Editors' note: This essay has been updated to reflect the fact that while Tolkien may be considered South African by measure of his birthplace, he moved to England as a toddler.

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The Question of Race in Beowulf - JSTOR Daily

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Most readers of Beowulf understand it as a white, male hero story-tellingly, it's named for the hero, not the monster-who slays a monster and the monster's mother. Grendel, the ghastly uninvited guest, kills King Hrothgar's men at a feast in Heorot.

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14:46 Vikings discover there are poc and a "country to the west"

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14:46 Vikings discover there are poc and a "country to the west"

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S.3 E.6 (2nd)

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In 790 AD, the Vikings of Norheim have a hectic schedule that includes pillaging, plundering, enslaving others and solving problems with violence. Watch trailers & learn more.

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Norsemen (Vikingane) Season 1 Official Netflix HD Trailer

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Norsemen (Vikingane) Season 1 Official Netflix HD Trailer

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1st

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Norsemen (Vikingane) Season 1 Official Netflix HD Trailer

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Assassin's Creed Valhalla - Official Trailer

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Assassin's Creed Valhalla - Official Trailer

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Assassin's Creed Valhalla - Official Trailer

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In The Last Kingdom, Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon) and Alfred, King of Wessex (David Dawson), have more than a complicated relationship. Over the years, it becomes heated between the two at times and they struggle to understand each other. However, one defining moment solidifies the relationship as critical to the survival of Wessex. Read on to find out more. There are spoilers ahead for season 3 of Last Kingdom.

Uhtred speaks with Alfred the Great

In season 3, episode 9, Alfred is extremely sick and almost on his deathbed. Somehow, he stays alive to see his son Edward (Timothy Innes) marry. During the wedding feast, Uhtred, who is considered an outlaw at this time, goes to speak with Alfred one final time.

While waiting for Alfred to arrive from the wedding feast, Uhtred admires pages on the table. "It is a chronicle. The pages. It is a chronicle of Wessex," Alfred says as he appears in the shadows. "It will include my life as King from the moment of my brother's death until now. Songs of a kind. None of which will mention Uhtred of Bebbanburg."

"Men will remember what I have done," Uhtred tells the King.

"But your men will die, as we all must," Alfred replies. "These pages will remain. The act of committing ink to parchment gives a deed permanence."

"If it is not burnt," Uhtred hotly replies.

'They will know nothing of the Lord Uhtred'

"If it is preserved, yes," Alfred says. "And in 100 years from now, learned people will read or recite what is written and Alfred will appear. They will know nothing of the Lord Uhtred, nor of your loyalty, advice, bravery, courage, and insolence."

Alfred asks Uhtred why he is there and what he wants to say to him while he is still around to hear it. Alfred is looking more and more sickly and he's inches from the grave.

"If I were to say one thing it's that I could never have killed you when I held the knife to your throat," Uhtred tells him. "I could never have taken your life. I would have beaten you gladly, but I would never be the man who killed Alfred, King of Saxons."

Alfred pardons Uhtred

Uhtred also says he understands why he isn't included in the pages of history. "It will not be written that Alfred did stand on Uhtred's shoulders. Many times, but I know it to be true," Alfred tells him.

They eventually toast to Edward and his new bride. Alfred then admits he was wrong for what happened between them and he's afraid of Wessex being lost. Alfred again asks Uhtred to watch over Edward, at least until he is crowned King. He gives Uhtred a pardon regardless and takes his hand. "I've made my peace. I've made my request. I do not require an answer," Alfred says.

Once Alfred dies, Uhtred makes the tough decision to stay and help Edward. It's what Alfred wanted and Edward will be better off with Uhtred there to help guide him and protect him in arguably the most dangerous time for Wessex.

The relationship between Alfred and Uhtred was tumultuous at best, but they were bonded from the start. This one moment defines the nature of their friendship.

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'The Last Kingdom': The 1 Moment That Defines the Relationship Between Uhtred and Alfred

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In The Last Kingdom, Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon) and Alfred, King of Wessex (David Dawson), have more than a complicated relationship. Over the years, it becomes heated between the two at times and they struggle to understand each other. However, one defining moment solidifies the relationship as critical to the survival of Wessex.

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Uhtred of Bebbanburg & King Alfred | The Forgiven | The Last Kingdom

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Lost Viking ‘highway’ revealed by melting ice

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Lost Viking ‘highway’ revealed by melting ice

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Lost Viking ‘highway’ revealed by melting ice

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1,000-year-old horseshoes, sleds, and tools are emerging from a shrinking ice patch in Norway, telling the story of the rise and fall of a mountain pass and the people who traveled along it.

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Say
Listen
So
What
Attend
Hark
Tell
Behold
Ah
Lo
Yes
Sing
Now

History is written by the winners and by the literate

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Can you solve the Ragnarok riddle? - Dan Finkel

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Can you solve the Ragnarok riddle? - Dan Finkel

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Ragnarok. The fabled end of the world, when Norse gods and monsters fight for supremacy. As Thor, you must stop a giant serpent from digesting Valhalla by channeling Odin's lightning along the length of its body. But can you find a path that will completely destroy it?

The video briefly references the case when all the nodes in a graph have an even number of edges. Will the starting and ending point of an Eulerian circuit on such a graph always be the same node? How do you know? Try drawing examples of other graphs with this property, and see whether the starting and ending points of an Eulerian path are indeed always the same.

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Can you solve the Ragnarok riddle? - Dan Finkel

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Ragnarok: The fabled end of the world, when giants, monsters, and Norse gods battle for the future. The gods were winning until the great serpent Jörmungandr emerged. It swallowed Valhalla and contorted itself across the land. Odin has just enough power to strike with one final bolt of lightning, and you have the fabled hammer, Mjölnir.

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Day one in class: sections 1-5, pages 7-12 (do parts I and II on the question packet)

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Day one in class: sections 1-5, pages 7-12 (do parts I and II on the question packet)

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Day two/three: sections 8-13, pages 16-22 (do parts III, IV, V on the question packet)

Day three/four: sections 14-17, pages 23-end (do the rest of the question packet)

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In 2017, a team of Swedish archaeologists announced an exciting discovery: They had, for the first time, identified the remains of a Viking woman warrior. A DNA analysis of a Viking Age skeleton previously thought to be male had turned out to be female. The skeleton in question was originally discovered in 1878 in a grave known as Bj. 581 at the Swedish Viking Age trading town of Birka. Lacking the scientific knowledge available today to determine the biological sex of human remains, the 19th-century archaeologists looked at the objects buried with the skeleton - weapons like swords and spears, shields, and even the remains of several horses - and declared the human remains to have belonged to a male warrior. The modern DNA result proved this theory wrong.

The tale of the Viking woman warrior from Birka continues to capture our imaginations. She has even been called a "real-life Viking version" of Game of Thrones' iconic female knight, Brienne of Tarth. But what hasn't attracted as much attention is the ongoing controversy among scholars about the validity of these recent conclusions. According to the critics, the claim that the woman in Bj. 581 had been a warrior is based on some wobbly assumptions. That we so desperately want to believe in the Viking woman warrior, despite evidence to the contrary, says a lot about the ongoing women's movement, and betrays our rigid ideals of how we want female strength to be displayed.

During the Viking Age (c. 800-1050), men and women from what is today Norway, Sweden, and Denmark set sail to new lands and spread out across a vast area reaching from the North Atlantic to the Caspian Sea and the Mediterranean. In popular culture, Vikings are mainly known for their fighting abilities, but being a warrior was only a part-time occupation in a life otherwise based on farming and fishing, in which both men and women were needed for the family to survive. At the same time, Viking Age Scandinavia was a violent society, fueled by vendettas and power struggles. People needed to know how to fight and how to defend themselves.

Out of this violence grew a warrior ideal that came to permeate Viking Age Scandinavian society. According to Norse mythology, a warrior killed in battle earned a place in Valhalla. As far as we know, this warrior ideal was associated with masculinity, and Valhalla was a place reserved for men. However, Norse mythology also contains women who were associated with battle, namely the Valkyries.

When we think of the Valkyries, we tend to conjure images of buxom women with braids and horned helmets. But the Vikings would not have recognized this interpretation; the Valkyries were mythological creatures, not actual women who walked the Earth. And they were not associated with femininity, but with carnage. As archaeologist Neil Price points out, the Valkyries of the Viking Age were thought to be more like battle demons than female superheroes. They were vicious creatures, serving a vicious god.

In addition to the Valkyries, the Icelandic sagas mention shield maidens, women who wielded weapons and fought in battle. But similarly to the Valkyries, there is no evidence they ever really existed.

In other words, there is very little in the history books to support the claim that the skeleton in Bj. 581 was a Viking woman warrior. In fact, we can't say for certain that this individual was a woman, a warrior, or even a Viking.

While the DNA evidence suggests this skeleton belonged to a female, we don't know enough about how gender and biological sex related to one another during the Viking Age to conclusively say how this person identified. On the one hand, there seems to have been a clear delineation between men and women: On the family farm, chores were gender-coded as either male or female; from the sagas, we learn that cross-dressing was grounds for divorce. On the other hand, it wasn't uncommon for female skeletons to be buried with male-coded objects, such as weapons. We still don't know what this meant to the Vikings, but it does mean that Bj. 581 is not unique.

That the individual buried in Bj. 581 was a warrior is also hard to confirm, because as professor of Viking studies Judith Jesch observed, the skeleton shows no marks or wear that might be associated with battle woulds.

Finally, the grave objects in Bj. 581 are not Scandinavian, which raises the question of whether this person was a Viking at all. Instead, the weapons, the clothes, and the animals found in this grave seem to have originated nearer the Caspian Sea, which is located in Central Asia.

So why does the myth of the Viking woman warrior endure? The answer has to do, in part, with our shifting ideas about what female rage, strength, and empowerment look like. Claiming the Viking woman warrior existed allows her to be co-opted as a sort of mascot for the ongoing women's movement. She serves as a canvas onto which we project fantasies of vengeance and power without upsetting the status quo. "Maybe it's empowering to some extent," Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, the lead author of the paper concluding the skeleton was a woman warrior, told The New York Times. "There is always hope that there were female warriors."

Until more solid evidence comes to light, the Viking woman warrior remains a fantasy. And unfortunately, apart from sensational discoveries like that of the individual who was laid to rest in Bj. 581, Viking Age women are rarely spoken of at all. It is not until they behave like Viking Age men, wielding swords and running into battle, that they are considered worthy of our attention. We dismiss all the other ways in which Viking women were strong and empowered, and at the same time undermine all the ways in which modern women can be strong and empowered without ever picking up a weapon.

Viking women were strong, even if they weren't warriors. Eking out a living on a farm in or near the Arctic 1,000 years ago took a certain type of robust character. In the harsh climate, growing crops and reaping a harvest was backbreaking work with little reward. There was no modern medicine with which to ease the pains of illness, injury, old age, and of course, childbirth.

But perhaps most importantly, the Viking women's craft and artistry were pivotal to their people's regional proliferation. The women wove the sails that brought the iconic Viking ships to new shores, where these adventurous Scandinavians could raid, trade, and settle. Indeed, without the work of women, the Viking Age would never have happened.
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In 2017, a team of Swedish archaeologists announced an exciting discovery: They had, for the first time, identified the remains of a Viking woman warrior. A DNA analysis of a Viking Age skeleton previously thought to be male had turned out to be female.

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School shooting survivors speak out in a new book. Their pain is terrible — and vital — to hear.

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School shooting survivors speak out in a new book. Their pain is terrible — and vital — to hear.

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Many books have analyzed school shootings. " If I Don't Make It, I Love You " simply records them, in the words of those who lived through them in a personal way: the parents and friends of those killed, those who ran from bullets they struggle to forget. There are more than 60 voices here, beginning with that of Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter, Jaime, was killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February 2018. "I think about her final seconds every day of my life," he writes. "But I've learned so much about myself since her death. I'm strong and resilient. And I learned the same is true for those affected by gun violence."

In this shattering collection, we learn how true that is, and yet how difficult it can be to summon that strength. Here, survivors confess a variety of responses to mass shootings: Some speak of laughter when they ought to have panicked, numbness when they ought to have wept, lingering fear in the absence of anything to be afraid of. They feel shame, anger and grief in strange proportions, and above all, they feel helpless. "The weight of this felt unbearable," Josh Stepakoff writes of his life since being shot at age 6 at his California day camp 20 years ago. "If you learn one thing from me, learn that your life belongs to you and no one else."

This book, an anthology of woe, offers a modicum of succor and hope to anyone interested in learning how gun violence is affecting our nation. That the book is uneven and sometimes unpolished reflects the roughness of the experiences it captures.

Editors Amye Archer and Loren Kleinman sew themselves into the fabric of the anthology, with a page or two of introduction to each essay and sometimes personal anecdotes. About the Sandy Hook shooting, Archer writes of her own children being the same age as many of the victims: "I remember thinking [my daughter] should not associate first grade with murder."

The book begins with the most recent shootings, slowly moving back in time to the 1966 University of Texas at Austin tower sniper. This structure is remarkably well-considered. It demonstrates the long-term impact of trauma, transitioning slowly from survivors who are just a few months out to those who have had decades to work through their experiences. It also shows, nakedly, how school shootings have increased in frequency and deadliness from the 1990s to today, and how a particular kind of school shooting has become de rigueur.

Poets respond to gun violence

Before about 1997, shootings were relatively few and far between, and they could be explained as flukes: people with undiagnosed schizophrenia, people with grievances, bigots with nothing to lose. But after the shooting at Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky, in December 1997, a pattern began to form. Kids with excess hate and access to guns showed up at school and fired indiscriminately. After Columbine, the pattern was set, and experts designed a response protocol. But the book shows how this protocol fails to account for the emotional reactions of survivors and loved ones - what happens to kids who are told to walk out of school with their hands on their heads, and elementary school students who learn how to hide under their desks, in closets or behind barricaded doors.

Again and again, survivors tell individual versions of the same story: A boy came in, he killed some of us, we don't know why and now I will always be afraid. Some of them angrily place blame on institutions or individuals (the Virginia Tech survivors have a lot to say about their school's response), while others explain their paths to forgiveness and healing. Jane Nicholson, the wife of a professor killed at the University of Iowa in 1991, writes: "A bullet makes a straight-line trajectory, grief makes a circle."

Some write poems or draw graphic stories; some rely on photographs or tweets to tell the tale; still others speak in interviews with Archer and Kleinman or write letters to their murdered loved ones. The variation in these stories lies on the surface. Fear, violence, loss, and the bright line between life before the shooting and life after the shooting - these qualities all run bone-deep, and the survivors express them again and again. "My moments of silence in my backyard became torture," writes Mona Samaha, the mother of a student killed at Virginia Tech, speaking for many others. "I felt fear instead of peace."

17 years after Columbine, the mother of one of the killers finally tells her story

Frankly, the sheer repetition of this book is depressing. The events described here are horrible; over and over, they are even more so. Some survivors write about joining Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety, while others pursue healing and help in more individual ways. Columbine survivors have founded private groups to support school shooting survivors, and they reach out after every new incident. It's awful that this is necessary, that there are enough school shooting survivors that groups specifically intended to help them through trauma had to be created. But survivors from pre-2000 shootings say they had no notion of where to turn or what to do. "Every time I went to a counselor, I was told they had no idea how to help me," says Christina Hadley Ellegood, who survived the Paducah shooting but whose sister did not. "There was no one else like me in America." Survivors of the Sandy Hook shooting and others credit the Columbine group with helping them get through.

The purpose of "If I Don't Make It, I Love You" is clear: to compile and tell these stories. That's an important, even necessary endeavor. In these pages, hope comes in tiny measures, and suffering overwhelms. It would be a gross understatement to say that opening a chest of horrors like this one is difficult. Open it anyway.

Katharine Coldiron is a critic and essayist based in Los Angeles.

IF I DON'T MAKE IT, I LOVE YOU

Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings

Edited by Amye Archer and Loren Kleinman

Skyhorse. 492 pp. $27.99

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Review | School shooting survivors speak out in a new book. Their pain is terrible - and vital - to hear.

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Many books have analyzed school shootings. " If I Don't Make It, I Love You " simply records them, in the words of those who lived through them in a personal way: the parents and friends of those killed, those who ran from bullets they struggle to forget.

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Nations were the most foolish of modern inventions; no man is worth more than another, wherever he is from (Miller, Song of Achilles  298).

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Nations were the most foolish of modern inventions; no man is worth more than another, wherever he is from (Miller, Song of Achilles  298).

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Vikings season 402, episode 4: "In the Uncertain Hour Before the Morning"                   Amazing episode of Vikings. Discusses the meaning of life and the various versions of heavens 

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Vikings season 402, episode 4: "In the Uncertain Hour Before the Morning"                   Amazing episode of Vikings. Discusses the meaning of life and the various versions of heavens 

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Uhtred | In the Spotlight | The Last Kingdom

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Shield Wall Situation Involving the Church and Especially Some Monks

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Shield Wall Situation Involving the Church and Especially Some Monks

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A cruise ship issued a mayday during rough seas off the coast of Norway

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Anglo Saxon Feasting

Suzanne Duncan

Copyright 2000

When the great feasts are described in Beowulf, a modern reader may find him or herself confused. For one thing, the menu seems small and there appears to be little of the pomp and circumstance that one often associates with feasting in the Medieva l period. The first feast mentioned in Beowulf takes place in a large feasting hall where the warrior guests drink from a communal ale cup and a poet extols the bravery of Beowulf. It is important to note that a short while ago, the feasting hall was the site of another type of feast-that of the Grendel's. Because the same space is used, the reader begins to wonder about the differences between the two events and the usage of the hall as a primary space in the kingdom's day to day functions. A feast, by its very nature, is a time of peacefulness and alliances, where guests can feel safe and satiated among allies, so the Grendel's intrusion and perversion of the feasting hall mirrors the way that the Grendel epitomises transgression. In order to understa nd how great the Grendel's violation was, an examination of the social function of feasting is in order.

Feasts were a display of prestige held both to impress political allies and assert power over the lower class and provided a means of establishing alliances with other households. While very few feasts would have been held for the same reasons in B eowulf, they were common at coronations, holidays and any other time that marked alliance and goodwill. Feasts were not just for the aristocracy, often large spreads were put out for the labouring peasants at harvest time by their rulers. The feast was an act of hospitality, and as such played an important part in the social values of Early Medieval English culture. It was of utmost importance that those present at a feast were not to be harmed in any way, and in the late sixth century Æthelberht of Kent sets out a list of laws that includes a fine of 50 shillings for the injury of any of his guests at court. Laws around safety at feasts were important, since the guests would be unguarded and mead and ale played the most important culinary role.

For an aristocratic feast, the hall would be decked in finery including tapestries and sometimes mosaics. It was the call, the site of hospitality that would hold all of the treasures of the household, illustrating both the wealth of the ruler and the trust he had put in his guests. These great halls boasted room for a few hundred guests and the dozens of servants required to staff the affair. Since glazed windows and uncovered openings were rare, torches fuelled by animal fats and wax provided a s moky and gloomy light. Large fires would be roaring but to protect guests from drafts in the winter, fur robes would be provided. As in Beowulf, guests would be entertained by musicians and poets, often equipped with harps, who entertained throughout th e entire meal, which could often last upwards of 16 hours.

There were two types of royal feasting, those that were spontaneous celebrations, as in the first feast of Beowulf and those that took several days to prepare, possibly like the victory celebration in the same poem. For a spontaneous feast, the kin g had to make do with what was on hand, which was a fair amount. Large quantities of cider, ale and mead (made of fermented honey and water) were served throughout the night, but to drink to excess was frowned down upon many religious moralists like Alcui n and Bede. While general festivities were appreciated, drunkenness could cause violence or other trespasses that were not appreciated in the king's home. In Beowulf, there is much discussion about the drinking of ale to loosen one's tongue, but to become intoxicated would leave the warriors unable to fight.

Second to the importance of drink was the meat which came from domesticated animals, supplemented occasionally by fish, eels and wild fowl. Multiple roasts of beef, mutton, venison, game fowl, rabbit, seafood and especially pork were heaped togeth er and served on platters. If the household had the chance to prepare in advance delicacies like whales tongue and small birds would be served. Cooked vegetables would be present at a spontaneous feast, but more elaborate mashes vegetable and meat stews c ould only made with a few days notice. Parsnips, cabbages, lettuces, onions, and radish greens stood as primary vegetables along with pulses like dried beans, barley and peas. These would be flavoured with mint, sage, thyme, honey, acorns, fruit vinegar a nd copious amounts of expensive salt. Bread, the only starch at the feast, came in numerous varieties of rye and wheat. Feasts of this period were distinct the Middle and High because there were few established trade routes. The Crusades opened spice rout es, exposing English people to different forms of cooking and social customs and functioned as a culinary exhibition of new flavours and exotic meats. Low Medieval feasts, however, focused on local cuisine and resources.

Preparing a feast provided many difficulties to the cooks and the community. The ovens in Anglo-Saxon manors were communal, and the bakers made the community's bread for a surtax of wheat. Feasting meant that the peasantry would be without bread or large roasted shanks of meat. Additionally, many of their personal supplies would be used for the meal, something for which the peasants were compensated, but had no right to refuse. Because of preservation problems, dishes would be prepared either on the day before or on the day of the feast. The lack of forks made ground foods a necessity, so a mortar and pestle were used to grind many of the dishes which could then be scooped with the fingers. Frying was rare because the fire was hard to control so foods were roasted on spits or stewed in large earthenware pots covered in burning embers. Pastries may have been used to turn stews into pies, but the dough would have been leavened and thus very different from modern pies.

Back in the hall, guests were seated according to their social standing at a single table. If there was time, a large table covering made of pieces of flat bread caught drips and spills and the bread was either consumed by the guests or given to th e poor. Plates were made of a dough resembling a cracker. Food was brought out in communal dishes, and goblets, spoons and knives were shared among guests. Since forks had not yet arrived, everyone ate with their hands. The smell in the room was quite str ong, with chamber-pots kept under the table, emptied periodically be servants. It was common that a guest who had eaten his/her fill would vomit into the chamber pot or floor before embarking on the next course-it was unheard of to stop eating. Another so urce of odour came from the meat itself which was often poorly preserved, and is perhaps the impetus for the heavy use of spices in the later periods, which disguised the scent and taste of rotting meat.

Regardless of the amount of preparation that had went into the feast, guests, by custom, were not permitted to leave the table until all the food was eaten and this was an enormous task. But to leave food would have been near sacrilege in a time of scarcity, frequent invasion and famine. Not only had the peasants, the providers, of the community been inconvenienced, but the household was using up its precious stores. Food was not just a thing to be consumed but a symbol of hospitality and prosperi ty. Wealth in the Anglo Saxon world was based on agriculture and food trade, so a feast would be a display of the affluence and capability of a household. Even under attack from the Grendel, King Hrothgar was able to provide a bountiful feast for his newl y arrived guests, and for a single warrior to turn away from the food would have been an insult to the kingdom and it's worth. Feasting is not just a large dinner but a metaphor for a kingdom's goodness and ability, providing a space where guests can eat and be merry without fear of death or harm so when the Grendel smashes into the dining hall and violates the guests of the king, societal values are being shattered. The feasts with Beowulf and his warriors re-inscribe the correct usage of feasting and re store the kingdom of Hrothgar to its rightful place.

For Further Reading

Bayard, Tania Ed and trans. A Medieval Home Companion: Housekeeping in the Fourteenth Century. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

Crossley-Holland, Kevin, trans. Beowulf. New York: Oxford, 1999.

Counihan, Carole and Penny Van Esterik eds.. Food and Culture: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Hamilton, David. "The Diet and Digestion of Allegory in Andreas." Anglo-Saxon England. Peter Clemoes ed. Volume 1. London: Cambridge U.P., 1972. pp 147-158.

Jacob, H.E. Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History. New York: Doubleday, 1945.

Mead, William Edward. The English Medieval Feast. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931.

Oliver, Lisi. "Cyninges fedesl: The King's Feeding in Æthelberht, chapter 12." Anglo-Saxon England. Michael Lapidge ed. Volume 27. London: Cambridge U.P., 1998. pp 31-40.

Page, R.I. Life in Anglo-Saxon England. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1970.

Scott, A.F. The Saxon Age: Commentaries of an Era. Surrey: Croom Helm, 1972.

Simoons, Fredrick J. Eat Not This Flesh: Food Avoidances in the Old World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961.

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Anglo Saxon Feasting Suzanne Duncan Copyright 2000 When the great feasts are described in Beowulf, a modern reader may find him or herself confused. For one thing, the menu seems small and there appears to be little of the pomp and circumstance that one often associates with feasting in the Medieva l period.

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Feasts: The Mead-Hall of Anglo-Saxon Tradition

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Feasts: The Mead-Hall of Anglo-Saxon Tradition

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By In the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Lisa J. Yarde
Beowulf, King Hrothgar's warriors enjoyed feasts and drowned their sorrows and fears in the finest mead served at Heorot, the king's mead-hall. The mead-hall originated in Europe as a gathering place for the community, where the rulers lived and administered daily functions, and their warriors served as faithful retainers. With the fifth century invasions of Angles from the Jutland peninsula and the Saxons from Germany, tribes brought the traditions of the mead-hall to England.In the early Anglo-Saxon period before Christianity gained influence, a ruler summoned his household for a ritual gathering, where the men drank, made boasts or binding oaths in the service of their lord and received gifts of land from him. As in subsequent centuries, alcohol flowed freely at these gatherings. Guests consumed mead, fermented from a mix of honey and water flavored with herbs, and beer, cider and malted ale all day or over a period of three days. A general understanding assumed that alcohol could cause guests to become boastful, but even drunken oaths were upheld and the safety of those in attendance at feasts safeguarded by the lord.

The Anglo-Saxons constructed long mead-halls of timber with thatched roofs to accommodate hundreds of guests. Typically, there were no windows and one or two access doors at most. Wall hangings and a central hearth kept guests warm, but the hall would have likely been very smoky as a result. Meat such as pork, beef or venison could be roasted over the fire pit on a spit, fish like herring or eel on a griddle, or a stew or pottage could be boiled in a cauldron. Bread made from rye or wheat baked in a clay oven, fruits such as crab apples and plums, and vegetables like peas, beans, parsnips and cabbage might have accompanied the meal. Guests sat according to their social on benches arranged along rows of tables that went around the hall. Bards were always on hand to entertain the guests with tales of heroism, accompanied by musicians who played the flute and harp. Remnants of the Anglo-Saxon halls have been found and attempts at reconstructing them have been made at West Stow in Suffolk and Yeavering in Northumberland.

There were everyday gatherings but feasts to celebrate battle victories, special events, seasonal festivals and religious observances must have offered food and drink in copious quantities.Feasts were the means for rulers to forge strong ties between people in a communal setting. They demonstrated the lord's wealth, support and protection of his community, meant to bind them together in his service.

Lisa J. Yarde writes fiction inspired by real-life events. She is the author of historical novels set in medieval England and Normandy, The Burning Candle,based on the life of Isabel de Vermandois, and On Falcon's Wings, chronicling the star-crossed romance between Norman and Saxon lovers. Lisa has also written Sultana and Sultana's Legacy, novels set during a turbulent period of thirteenth century Spain,where rivalries and ambitions threaten the fragile bonds between members of a powerful family.

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Feasts: The Mead-Hall of Anglo-Saxon Tradition

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By In the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Lisa J. Yarde Beowulf, King Hrothgar's warriors enjoyed feasts and drowned their sorrows and fears in the finest mead served at Heorot, the king's mead-hall. The mead-hall originated in Europe as a gathering place for the community, where the rulers lived and administered daily functions, and their warriors served as faithful retainers.

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A good party is something which was enjoyed as much by the people of the ninth to the eleventh centuries as is it today and the role of Feast-Giver was one to be enjoyed as well as admired. The feast hall was, in itself, a sight to behold. Great halls decorated with fine wall hangings; kept warm with fires, lamps and people; the colour and splendour of the clothes kept for such occasions all added to the atmosphere.

It seems, from written evidence of the period, that feast day food was looked forward to with anticipation and pleasure. You could look to having better food at a feast as well as copious quantities. Choicer cuts of meat, roasts - hot from the kitchen, rich sauces, cheeses, fish, sweet meats, fresh - well dressed salads, quality breads and plenty to drink. Beef and pork were well liked as the animals could be fattened for the purpose, poultry too was a tender meat, in some cases game and fowl such as plover, goose, swan and even peacock were on the menu.

Considerable skill was displayed by the cooks who would have made breads enriched with added milk and/or eggs. The pastry crusts were not only as part of the dish, pies and flans would be moulded and decorated with flower heads in season. There would have been simpler editions for those guests of lower rank. Fish too was often made into what the modern diner would know as pates and terrines each carefully shaped and embellished to show the status of the feast-giver as well as the guest. The ornate dishes transported through time would gain applause from the modern hand and could rival some of the cordon-bleu' chiefs of the twentieth century.

Drinks were sometimes brewed specially for a feast as the drinks were regarded as almost as important as the food. Ale, some probably fermented fruit based, beer made from such plants as Bog-Myrtle, meads and wines are recorded. Butter-milk, skimmed milk and whey were also drunk but probably not in such great quantity at a feast.

Three day feasts seem to have been the usual for great celebrations and day-long feasts were common. The feast began with the guests gathering and waiting for the sound of the horn. Handwashing came next and then they would enter passing the `door-wardens' who stopped gate-crashers.

There were rules of etiquette even then - from the seating order to the use of napkins, table-cloths, how to eat and what to do if food fell from the table - is was not considered polite to pick it up and eat it, but one should pick it up, bless it, and lay it aside. (Perhaps this was part of what a rich feast giver used as left-overs to be disposed of in a charitable way?) During the early part of the Anglo-Saxon period a woman's place was not at the table other than as a cup-bearer, the task of cup-bearing even included the lord's wife and daughter, with the most honoured guests being served by them. By the eleventh century they were accepted at the table if they were of sufficient rank. Some guests were entitled to bring companions with them, minstrels and fotsetla (those who sat at the feet) but it was usual for a payment of honey to be made for the privilege.

People went to feasts to enjoy themselves and, especially as they lasted so long, could also expect entertainment. Scops (story tellers) would be welcome to tell of heroic deeds in the form of epic poems. Musicians - harp and lyre players during the meal with bagpipes, trumpets, flutes and drums reserved for after the eating was done. Then, at the feast of a wealthy man, the jesters, actors, dancers, singers could be expected . In an old poem about Athelstan's coronation feast it is recorded that `stomachs are filled with delicacies, minds with song.' The minstrel was often paid to sing the praises of his master at the feast (as bad as the holiday slides!) `one makes the harp resound, another contends with praises'. Gifted minstrels could expect good pay, either in the employ of one man or as travelling minstrels. There are records of gifts of jewelled bracelets, grants of land, houses and, for the more immediate moment, a horn of liquor at the end of their song. When that was done, guests would start the `home-made' entertainment of riddling. Many of these were full of innuendo probably getting worse as the horn toasting cup went round and round those gathered! An account of the murder of King Æthelberht, in 792, tells that the royal party after dinner spent the whole day with music and dancing in great glee. Non-one was expected to leave the hall before the lord retired and many were probably glad of the right to sleep in the hall after the feast.

In addition to feasts given in celebration of such things as weddings, births, betrothals and so on, there were also those which the Church insisted upon. The early Christian Church realised the importance of pagan festivals in peoples' lives and soon found Christian replacements. Festivals were holidays and feasts and the Church even said there should be no fasting on such days. Even the poor had their feasts, those observed for church reasons and those to do with the agricultural tasks being completed. There is evidence of a winter feast, Easter feast, a feast to celebrate the binding of the sheaves, one at which the drink was to flow for ploughing, a reward for mowing, making ricks, loading wood and carting corn. Even if you were of the poorest class there would be the charity portions - maybe leftovers or even better if there was a good lord. Guilds were established by Anglo-Saxon times and they too had their feasts. The patterns of fasting and feasting were part of everyday life. A one day feast was preceded by a day of fasting. Longer periods of fasting came before periods of feasting and only the infirm and children were excused.

There were three forms of fasting, one which excluded the eating of certain foods, one which only allowed the eating of one limited meal a day and, the one most difficult for the modern mind and stomach, that which demanded the food should have unpalatable additions! (We will not dwell on the latter!)

The reason for fasting was mostly connected with church observations. There was also the practical reason that, at a time of year when food was short, to fast would be a help, in the mind at least. The idea was that those most likely to over-eat could, by fasting, free up supplies for the poor - but how often this happened can only be speculation. The church found all sorts of evidence as to why meat was not always eaten - Adam's sin of gluttony, angels not needing food, Cain's cruelty and, of course, the forty day fast of Christ in the wilderness.

In the time of Æthelred, about 1009, the nation was to fast for the three days before Michaelmas. Slaves were to be freed of work so they would be able to observe the fast and in fact the three day fast became as important as the three day feast.

The importance is evident since it was part of the mass-priest's duties to tell the people of the days - if he failed to do so he could be fined. This is one of the reasons for the introduction of the calendars for fast and feast days being developed. Friday fasting by not eating meat, was common to all and indeed it was said that to violate the rule was the most visible way to reject the faith.

Food for fast days varied for the rich although the poor may not have noticed the difference so much especially if they lived in an area away from the sea and so had limited access to fish. In areas where fish was available it was often caught in times of plenty and smoked or salted for use later, the poor ate this mixed with linseed or rape oil as fast-day food These areas also had the addition of shell fish at their disposal and even those not living by the sea could find fresh water fish, eels and fresh water mussels. Some foods would appear strange to the modern reader; porpoise, dolphin and otter were not regarded as meat and so could be eaten on fast days except for those needing the strictest observation, like Lent. Many monasteries had fish-pools attached to give plentiful supplies for fast days. A total Vegan diet was not usual although there are recipes for meals needing no meat, eggs or diary products. Some fast days only required that the number of meals a day were cut to one and then it could have three or four courses. The amount of food and the time when it was to be consumed was considered and special rules applied to those needing to keep up their strength because of the manual work they undertook. This even applied to some monks and to those who had not taken their final vows. Rules of the time say that, in some cases, two should share the bowl for one but that the dish should have meat puddings and sausages. For others, and if no such things are available, then they should have sufficient soft cheese, fish and whatever vegetable dishes are available instead. Most of the written evidence for fast day foods does come from regulations laid down for the clergy and when reading it it is clear that many of the poorer laymen would have found the monastic meals a feast in themselves.

For all those of you wanting to stray from a self-imposed diet read on ... It was a sin to fast on a feast day `he who fasts on that day through self-will is to be excommunicated'. In this case the day referred to is Shrove Tuesday but if you want a good excuse - who's counting!?

Click here to return to the village.

Click here to return to the manor of Drengham.

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Regia Anglorum - Feasting and Fasting in Anglo-Saxon England

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A good party is something which was enjoyed as much by the people of the ninth to the eleventh centuries as is it today and the role of Feast-Giver was one to be enjoyed as well as admired. The feast hall was, in itself, a sight to behold.

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How Fantasy Reflects Our World | It's Lit!

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Fantasy novels are more than just hundreds of pages worth of swords and magic!

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What Dragons Say About Us | Monstrum | PBS Digital Studios

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What Dragons Say About Us | Monstrum | PBS Digital Studios

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Great American Read • Watch Episodes • PBS

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Great American Read • Watch Episodes • PBS

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In the first episode of Monstrum, Dr. Emily Zarka reveals the mythological origins of iconic dragons from Game of Thrones and The Hobbit, and explains why dragons have been a part of human culture...

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12 Surprisingly Soft Things Vikings Really Did

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12 Surprisingly Soft Things Vikings Really Did

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1. They liked fancy things

Werner Forman / Getty Images

Forget the image of the Viking as a sheepskin-clad brute: they were actually the bling kings of their day. Fancy and intricately-made jewelry, tools, weapons were in high demand and still turn up all over Europe.

2. They gave us many cute words

Neil / Flickr (CC BY-ND http://2.0) / Via Flickr: nb360

Sure the Vikings gave us words like anger, berserk and knife, but did you know they also donated nicey-nice words like cake, husband and freckle to English?

Oh and let's not forget Yule - because they were also very into Christmas.

6. They enjoyed spa treatments

Shutterstock

Some of the oldest remaining Viking structures in Iceland are their thermal spring hot tubs, like the one pictured above which was built around 1209 by the brilliantly-named Viking Snorri Sturluson.

That's how much they cared about having a nice soak and a bit of a chill-out.

7. They were (pretty) hip on equal rights

Ran Yaniv Hartstein / Flickr (CC BY http://2.0) / Via Flickr: ranh

Since we're talking about people who lived over a thousand years ago, let's stress the Norsemen were advanced on women's rights for their time.

Girl Power it wasn't, but Viking women could inherit property, request divorces and claim their marriage dowries back if the coupling didn't work out, while women elsewhere in Europe didn't have those rights.

Women could also hold high offices - one of the most elaborate Viking burials ever found was for a woman, the so-called Oseberg Queen, and what appeared to be her daughter.

9. They went skiing in their spare time

Public Domain / Via en.wikipedia.org

In their native Scandinavia, Vikings used skis as a handy way to get from A to B in the snow - but they also skied for fun. They even had their own god of skiing called Ullr. Here he is, participating in the 902 AD Winter Olympics.

10. They wore highlights

Raphaël Labbé / Flickr (CC BY-SA http://2.0) / Via Flickr: ulikleafar

So fashionable and desirable was blonde hair that brown-haired Viking men would use a soap heavy with lye to dye their hair and beards to suit the fashion.

The soap also helped to prevent head lice - so they were pretty health conscious too.

12. They really loved the outdoors.

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12 Surprisingly Soft Things Vikings Really Did

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Vikings were pretty urbane characters when you look past the facial shrubbery and horned helmets. Here's proof as discovered by How To Train Your Dragon 2, in cinemas July 10.

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Craziest Facts About Viking Berserkers, History's Hardcore Norse Warrior-Shamans

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Craziest Facts About Viking Berserkers, History's Hardcore Norse Warrior-Shamans

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see bottom for Grendel?!?!!?

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The Vikings were known throughout Europe as fierce warriors, and no discussion of Viking warrior culture is complete without an examination of the history of berserkers, a particularly wild, crazy, violent sect of Norsemen. Berserkers entered a state of animalistic frenzy before battle. This bizarre cult of crazies was eventually outlawed, even in the warrior culture of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, but not before making their mark on history.

If you're interested in Norse berserker history, look no further than this list. Here you will find crazy berserker facts, and learn about the Viking berserker drugs imbibed before these beastly warriors enter the fray of war. Hold onto your battle ax, because things are about to get kinda berserk.

Berserkers were a special group of elite Viking warriors who went into battle without traditional armor. Instead, they wore animal pelts, typically from bears or wolves. The word "berserker" derives from the Old Norse "serkr," meaning "coat" or "shirt," and "ber," the Norse word for "bear."

Also, they were butt-ass naked under the pelt. At least according to legend.

Like all traditional members of shamanic secret societies, berserkers acquired their power through ritualistic practice. These practices included spending periods in extreme isolation, fasting, exposure to extreme heat and cold, and engaging in group weapon dances prior to battle. In the wilderness, berserkers lived like their totem animal, adopting its mannerisms and habits, sustaining themselves by hunting and raiding settlements.

So, yeah, they just ran off into the woods and lived like f*cking bears and wolves because they were goddamn Viking berserkers.

Berserkers are historically described as taking part in rituals that, before battle, would induce a trancelike collective state called berserkgang:

This fury, which was called berserkergang, occurred not only in the heat of battle, but also during laborious work. Men who were thus seized performed things which otherwise seemed impossible for human power. This condition is said to have begun with shivering, chattering of the teeth, and chill in the body, and then the face swelled and changed its colour. With this was connected a great hot-headedness, which at last gave over into a great rage, under which they howled as wild animals, bit the edge of their shields, and cut down everything they met without discriminating between friend or foe.

While in this frenzied state, berserkers lost all human capacity for reason or self-cognizance, and were known to scream and howl constantly, and rip enemies to shreds with their bare hands.

Though there's no definitive proof as to whether or not berserkers got blitzed before charging into battle, it's hypothesized the used both magic mushrooms and obscene quantities of alcohol.

Writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Howard Fabing explains berserkers may have taken Amanita muscaria. a psychedelic mushroom containing bufotenine. In trials, bufotenine has been shown to cause hallucinations and psychophysiological effects consistent with those described in Norse sagas.

It's also possible they drank butt tons of alcohol. Both shrooms and booze consumption fit contemporary knowledge of Viking rituals, though other reasons for the berserker rage-trance have been suggested, including self-induced hysteria, epilepsy, mental illness, and even genetics.

"What do you want to be when you grow up, little Morten?"

"Well, my daddy flies into an uncontrollable rage and rips off all his clothes and runs into battle wearing nothing but a bear pelt, so I think I'll probably get into that racket, too."

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14 Brutal Facts About The Viking Berserkers, History's Most Psychotically Deranged Deathforce

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The Vikings were known throughout Europe as fierce warriors, and no discussion of Viking warrior culture is complete without an examination of the history of berserkers, a particularly wild, crazy, violent sect of Norsemen. Berserkers entered a state of animalistic ...

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Cat lovers, farmers, and ski enthusiasts? Lesser-known facts about the Vikings

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Cat lovers, farmers, and ski enthusiasts? Lesser-known facts about the Vikings

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1. Our days of the week are named after their gods

Well, most of them are. Aside from Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, the rest of the days of the week are named after Norse gods, Tiu (Twia) is the English/Germanic god of war and the heavens. He's identified with the Norse god Tyr, a Norse equivalent to the Greek god, Ares.

The other three days, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are named after Woden, father supreme of the Norse gods; Thor, Norse god of thunder, and Freya is the goddess of love, fertility, beauty, and marriage. So the next time you are having some serious TGIF vibes, you can give thanks to the Vikings.

2. They did not call themselves Vikings

Unless you are a fan of the Minnesota Vikings, you would not really call the Vikings, well, Vikings. The name was a verb in Old Norse that meant "a pirate raid" and Scandinavians referred to people who went raiding as "going viking." Over time, since the Scandinavians gained quite an affinity for "going viking," and the word changed into the noun as we know it.

So once we get time travel down pat, and go back in time, calling the Norse "Vikings" will only make you look like a ding-bat. And the Vikings weren't the most easy going bunch of folks. Instead, impress them and blend into the crowd and call them what they called themselves: Norse, Norseman, or Danes.

3. No horned helmets

Were the Vikings grizzly looking characters who wore bear pelts on their shoulders, handled large shields, swords, and most importantly, donned horned helmets? Because let's face it, a Viking isn't a Viking without his horned helmet! We hate to be the one to bust your bubble, but the horned helmets weren't as common as Hollywood would have us think.

Vikings didn't wear horned helmets. In fact, there are no records of Vikings ever wearing horned helmets (sorry to disappoint). The trend might have started when 19th-century painters portrayed our sea-faring friends with the horned cap based on derogatory descriptions from northern Europeans such as the ancient Greeks and Roman chroniclers.

4. Vikings did not drink from skulls

Vikings may have been raiders, invaders, and traders, but they weren't skull cap drinkers. In fact, the earliest recording of any civilization drinking out of human remains was written by Greek historian, Herodotus, in his book Histories where he named Scythians, a group of Eurasian nomads, as the real cranium sippers.

There hasn't been archaeological evidence proving his claim, but there's nothing written in the books that the Vikings participated in this formidable and cringe-worthy tradition. They did like to drink out of bones though: they drank out of the horns of cattle, which may be where the rumor originated from.

5. Mead was made from fermented honey

Since we're debunking myths here, we can confidently say Vikings didn't drink the blood of their enemies. Instead, the Norseman's thirst was quenched by the golden nectar of the gods: Mead. Also called metheglin, this delicious brew is made from fermented honey, water, and sometimes yeast. Other ingredients included spices and herbs such as cloves, ginger, rosemary, hyssop, and thyme and can be light, rich, sweet, dry, or bubbly.

Our Viking pals would drink an abundance of mead, not just out of the usual pleasure of getting smashed. It also held medicinal properties too. Unlike our Greek friends in the Mediterranean, our Viking pals didn't have the vines to create wine. They had honey, and honey is an antibiotic that not only tasted great, but helped in blood-purifying, digestion, and stimulated immunization.

6. Good hygiene

You'd think that rowing massive ships, sailing across the seas, and farming, would rack up a nice and potent stench under the arms of our humble Viking friends, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, compared to other Europeans of their time, Vikings were generally a clean bunch.

Artifacts excavated from Viking sites revealed tweezers, razors, combs and ear cleaners made from animal bones and antlers. According to History.com, Vikings even bathed once a week and enjoyed dips in local hot springs. Plus, how could a Norse rack up much of a musk in colder climates like Iceland or Scandinavia?

7. Better to be blonde

Okay, out of all the things you heard about Vikings, this one is most likely the most accurate depiction of Viking culture. Still, it's not quite what you think. The most common natural hair colors a Viking man or woman were brunette, red, or black. Blondes were actually pretty rare.

Those born with blonde hair were considered attractive and more desirable. Both men and women used a soap with high quantities of lye to strip pigments from their hair to appear more blonde. It has even been documented that lightening their hair helped manage head lice, a nice bonus of this cosmetic trend.

8. Notched teeth

In some cultures, ornamenting your teeth could represent one's status, or a fashion statement. But with Viking teeth, anthropologists can't seem to riddle out the notched teeth belonging to the Norse. Filed evenly, and notched with noticeable lines on the tooth's face, 24 male skulls were excavated with delicate line work.

National Geographic reports the practice could have been adopted after encountering West Africans who filed their teeth during their voyages to Spain and the Mediterranean. However, they filed their teeth into points, not evenly. The only other place in the world that has a similar horizontal filing was in the Great Lakes of America. It's assumed the trend could represent an achievement or ornamentation.

9. They could navigate with zero visibilty

Vikings kicked some serious butt both in an out of the water. Not only were their ships impeccably crafted and some of the most reliable ships in the world at the time, but they were also serious ocean navigators. They could navigate through thick fog, even with low or zero visibility.

When they didn't have the sun or the stars to guide them (though it was highly unlikely they didn't use a compass) it's believed that Vikings used an instrument called a sun-shadow to help them navigate. With their brilliant navigation skills, the Norse were able to find their way along the rivers of Russia, Germany, and were able to trade with Arab and Eastern countries.

10. Women were warriors

There is evidence of women taking on the role of the warrior. Though rare, Byzantine-era historian Johannes Skylitzes recorded on History.com that women fought alongside a group of Vikings in a battle against the Bulgarians in 971 AD. A 12 th-century Danish historian described female Vikings as "communities of warrior women as shieldmaidens who dressed like men and devoted themselves to learning swordplay and other warlike skills."

Most of the information we know about the Viking warriors comes from the literature or various and nearby communities. There are several accounts of female warriors rolling around on the Viking raids, who are known as Valkyries. In myth, Valkyries are fierce warriors who raise the souls of fallen warriors to Valhalla.

11. Vikings founded Dublin

Dublin was established by the Vikings themselves, though the way they went about it was pretty brutal. The Vikings created settlements in Iceland, Greenland, Normandy and Newfoundland, Canada, and raided nearby neighbors like Great Britain along the way. Because they were making their way through the area a lot, they started setting up posts.

They invaded Ireland in the early 9th century where they established a kingdom called Dyflin, which later became modern day Dublin. It was a major trading post and traded anything from precious metals, fabrics, weaponry, and horses. Dyflin was also a stronghold in Ireland, and the Vikings ruled Dublin for 300 years and meld with the Celtic people.

12. Active in the slave trade

It's hard work maintaining farmland or a household on your own. For Vikings, it was an impossible feat or would have been without the labor of slaves or "thralls" as they called them. Like the slaves of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, human trafficking was one of the Vikings' major economic trades.

Many Vikings got rich by abducting people from various settlements around Northern Europe. The usual choices were women and young boys and many of the raiding Norseman would pillage any village they came across including Anglo-Saxons, Celtic, and Slavic establishments.

13. Abandoned sick children

Not their proudest moment on this list, but according to History.com, Vikings valued physical strength above all else. They relied on their good health for survival, whether that meant tending their land or racing into battle. That affinity for the physically strong was handed down from generation to generation, And not just by societal pressures either.

Their lifestyle very much depended on being self-sufficient, and the Viking lifestyle, whether at home or abroad, was often physically demanding. For this reason, if a child was born with defects or sickly, particularly if the child's condition meant a lifetime of dependence on others, the Vikings would abandon them.

14. Trading and raiding

Trading was essential for the Vikings. They blazed the trail for many of the critical trade routes, and had more mobility that most other groups of the day thanks to their superb ship building skills. They are widely believed to be the first Europeans to reach North America. But their motivation for sailing into the unknown was trade.

They would traverse as far as Africa for precious goods. Excavated burial sites revealed dirhams - thin silver coins of the Arab world - dating between 750 to 950 AD. Other excavations revealed Persian jewelry and Chinese silks, which suggested an intricate network of barter trade. They traded furs, amber, ivory, and slaves.

15. Justice systems were (almost) like ours

The Norse had an oral culture that helped establish both law and government without so much as having a written text. All free men gathered in their communities to make laws and decided cases in meetings called a Thing. Each community had its own Thing. Like our legal systems, there was a plaintiff and defendant, and a jury.

They were most likely made up of a local, powerful family, or sometimes multiple families. Malefactors who are tried and found guilty are either fined, declared semi-outlaw, or fully outlawed. To be an outlaw was complete banishment; his property would be confiscated and he would receive no help from the community.

16. Women had rights

Viking Age Scandinavian women enjoyed a tremendous degree of freedom when compared to the Viking women settlers of Iceland and Greenland. Unlike the Viking settlers who depended on gender roles (dividing keeping the land vs keeping family), Scandinavian women were able to own property, request a divorce and reclaim their dowries if their marriages started to take a turn for the worse.

And if their husbands died, women were expected to permanently take over their husband's roles as the providers of their households. As such, they were able to obtain economic opportunities that was rarely offered to contemporary women in other parts of Europe. Some women were even traders, warriors, and farmers.

17. They discovered America (probably)

Columbus discovered diddly-squat compared to the Vikings. You can thank Leif Erikson for stumbling across the North American continent. The son of Erik the Red and legendary explorer, Leif was said to have been the first European to discover North America while accidentally trying to make his way toward Greenland.

He instead landed in the shores he called Vineland or today's Newfoundland. It was rumored to have an abundance of grapes and a lush landscape, but Leif wasn't interested in the scenery. He took one look at the new land and decided to turn back and set sail for home. Leif returned to Greenland, dragging his men back to his settlement.

18. Viking soup

Being a Viking equates to a life of bloodshed. When warriors return home to camp, women were accustomed to seeing some gruesome gashes and scrapes. To prove whether a wound was fatal, women would create a strong-smelling soup made from onions, leeks, and herbs. They would force feed the wounded warriors, making sure they swallowed every bite.

Once finished, the women would lean over and smell the open wound. A wive's tale and remedy: If the women could smell the aromatic soup in the wound, it meant that the wound was fatal. If she didn't smell anything, the women would proceed to aid the warrior to recovery.

19. They went berserk

Vikings were known to be savage on the battlefield. So savage that warriors hellbent on bloodshed were known as berserkers. The name suggests that the berserkers wore bearskins and were a special class of warriors who was blessed by the god Odin, the supreme god of the heavens and god of war.

The chosen warriors would work themselves into a state of frenzy and "supernatural power" so intense that they bit on the edge of their shield and could ignore the pain of their wounds. Some hypothesize it could be one or two things: The first is natural adrenaline, the second, shrooms. That's right. It's been rumored that before battle Vikings would consume "magic mushrooms" to help them blitz for battle.

20. They were short and lean

If you think Vikings were nothing but rippling muscles covered in leather, furs and resembled Conan the Barbarian you'd be bitterly disappointed. The Vikings didn't look like body-builders. In fact, the majority of Norsemen were lean and would reach anywhere between 5′ 7″ - 5′ 9″ in height and dedicated their time in one field: the wheat fields.

In fact, most Norse were farmers, held a scythe, and maintained a balanced diet of protein, grains, and greens. Sure, some pillaged, but as you recall, in the Viking age, "Viking" was a form of action and not a title. For those who didn't partake in Viking, they spent their humble lives as farmers. That'll do pig, that'll do.

21. Buried not burned

There is nothing nobler than setting a corpse on fire in open waters, watching as red flames turn a beloved and honorable warrior or dear neighbor into charcoal, then become food for the fish. As honorable as it sounds, the Vikings actually buried their dead in boats rather than burn them.

Only the most honorable and noble of Viking persons were buried with ships. Vikings loved their boats, which were a fortress on the sea, so to be buried in one was a great honor. Like ancient Egyptians, Vikings saw the ship to help serve the dead to reach their final destinations. It wasn't just men who reserved the honor, but women too, and sometimes sacrificed slaves.

22. Marriage was bargained

No matter how you look at it, marriage is a ritual. Even if that ritual includes a bride-price and a dowry, a marriage is a binding contract that confirms the unity of two individuals into one household. It was no exceptions for Vikings. Women were expected to marry between the ages of 12 to 15, and their marriages were arranged even sooner than that.

In the marriage agreement between the two families, the groom's family paid a bride price to the bride's family once the happy couple was married. The bride's father paid a dowry, and there was even an agreement between the two families should the couple divorce. Norsewomen had certain privileges, and one of them was the power to divorce.

23. They blended with other cultures

Vikings had invaded multiple countries within the three-hundred years they were in power, so it's only rational that Viking men would mingle with a diverse crowd of women and establish settlements. According to National Geographic, five hundred years before Columbus sailed to America, a Native American woman may have voyaged to Europe with Vikings, according to a new DNA study.

Analyzing the DNA passed from mother to child, scientists found more than 80 living Icelanders with a genetic sequence that is found in Native Americans. Scientists are still trying to identify if the exact cause for the blending. What is known, however, it is confirmed that Norsemen did inter-marry with Celtic women when journeying to Ireland.

24. Not all of them pillaged together

Think of Vikings as a biker gang. they really were a gang that rolled around together and took what they wanted. The Viking people did not belong to anyone colony or one country and did not recognize fellow Vikings. It was during the Viking age that many countries contained a "patchwork" of chieftain-led tribes.

When they weren't wreaking havoc on foreign shores, they were getting into squabbles with their neighbors. An aggressive bunch, the Vikings expanded solely to find newer and finer resources. during the times that they weren't pillaging and invading (Viking downtime, if you will), they were settling in new grounds and making their mark wherever they could latch.

25. Spent most of their time farming

Vikings weren't always war and bloodshed, most Norse populations had a simple farming life. As stated before, Vikings were too busy moving around, establishing settlements and fighting to survive. Norsemen grew oats, barley, and wheat, and ground the grain to make flour, porridge, and ale (because you're not a Viking without ale, come on).

They grew vegetables such as onions, beans, and cabbage, and raised livestock such as pigs, sheep, goats, cattle, geese, and chickens. It was a much more domestic lifestyle that many Norsemen chose over a life of plundering. Not quite as exciting as the sea faring, village plundering counterparts, which is why their TV deal has been harder to push through.

26. Used fungus and human waste to start fires

In the boy and girl scouts, they are taught multiple ways to start a fire. One of them is the useful invention of a Firestarter, one scrape of the stone and voila, fire! In the 10 th century, however, there wasn't the modern convenience such as a Firestarter or even a flashlight. Instead, Vikings used a fungus called touchwood, a plate-shaped mushroom that grows along tree bark, and boiled it for several days in urine.

That's right - using a combination of tree fungus and human waste, the Norse would take the urine-boiled fungus and pound it until its texture resembled felt. The sodium nitrate in the urine would allow the material to smolder so Vikings could take the fire with them anywhere (porta-potty has a whole new meaning).

27. Skied for fun

Skiing has been a favorite Viking past time for the last 6,000 years. However, there are some speculations that the Russians may have invented the sport ever earlier. According to BBC, fragments of ski-like objects were discovered in 1960. Turns out, they dated back to 6000 BC in Northern Russia.

However, the Vikings mostly used skis for recreational purposes and competitive sport. It was also an efficient way to get around. It became so popular that they worshiped a god of skiing called Ullr. He was also a great archer, hunter, and skater. Just a really outdoorsy kind of God.

28. Responsible for spreading house mice

The Vikings were one of the many civilizations responsible for spreading house mice worldwide. National Geographic reported DNA research that showed a genetic pattern found only in mice originating from Norway. That kinda pointed the finger at the Vikings, because as you may recall, Norway was the Vikings' home base.

Research also shows that cats were taken on board with their human companions, both on boats (which is probably how the Norwegian variety spread to other geographic areas) and on the homestead to help curtail the mouse population. No word on whether or not the kitties wore horned helmets, but one can hope.

29. Warriors believed Valkyries would take them into Valhalla when they died

We seldom hear about women in mythology. Unless it's Greek then there's a fat chance you won't find much about women in mythology, especially any that hold any power in the mortal realm. But there is one female presence that strikes fear even in the hearts of men: Valkyries. Powerful beings adorned with swan feathers, shields, and chainmail, they are Odin's prized warriors.

It was the Valkyries who chose the fate of fallen warriors. Only the fierce and brave were allowed to enter Valhalla and meet the powerful sky god Odin, while the benign are sent to Freya's field, Folkvang, the adobe of the goddess of love, fertility, and sometimes war.

30. They used stones to navigate on a cloudy day

Once a myth, now a plausible explanation. The Viking sun stones have been stumping experts since they discovered it was first mentioned in The Saga of King Olaf. Smithsonian reports it wasn't until 1967 that Danish archaeologist Thorhild Ramskou came up with the idea that chunks of crystals found naturally in Scandinavia could have been used to help Vikings navigate on grey and cloudy days out at sea.

In 2011, experts put the hypothesis to the test and used a common crystal called Iceland spar, a type of calcite, that could have been used by Norse sailors. When holding the transparent crystal to the sky and rotated, "the crystal polarized and depolarized light in a certain pattern which could reveal the position of the sun."

31. They were cat lovers

They are the perfect lap warmers in a harsh Greenland winter. Dogs are great and all, but for the Vikings, cats were a big deal. So much of a big deal that their fertility goddess, Freya, had a chariot pulled by two blue-grey colored cats. Not only did they get rid vermin, but they were kept as companions.

Which made sense, because who else is going to understand a Viking better than a cat? BBC recorded how Thor, the god of thunder, tried to prove his strength by lifting a mythical, giant cat, but could only lift a single paw. Even the mighty Vikings were no match for Fluffy.

32. They painted their shields to hide the grain

So we know about their swords, but what about their shields? You'd think Viking warriors would paint their shields as a form of loyalty, painting the very things that protected their bodies as a symbol to those they are protecting. Well, you would be wrong. You see, it didn't really matter what color they painted their shields as long as it hides the wood grain.

If their enemy could see the weakest place to strike, you better believe they would strike there first. What also made the shield so special was its shield boss or s köldbucklawas. It was a metal center created not only to ward off enemy blows but to also bash against their attacker.

33. Their houses only had one room

The Viking home was rectangular in shape and only had one room (sorry kids, no one gets their own bedroom). This one open space would revolve around a central hearth where most of the cooking and spinning is done. Women mostly stayed indoors and often take on the responsibility of keeping up the house and tending to the cattle.

Not only did they spin for their children and the elderly, but they were also responsible for the dairy. The rectangular houses have been found in Sweden, Newfoundland, York, and Dublin. Their homes were usually constructed out of wood, stone, and turf.

34. Their meals were decent

We know about the Viking's onion soup, but what else did the Norsemen consume other than stew? Not much else. But, they do mirror some diet choices we make on the daily. For instance, while working in the fields, most of the Norse would enjoy some cottage cheese with a crust of bread.

If they're lucky, have a bit of dried fruit such as a plum or crabapple. Breakfast is usually leftover dinner, which was prepared in a cauldron made up of boiled lamb bones, grains, beans, peas, carrots, and turnips. If they had a feast, various meats, cheeses, fish and dried fruits drizzled in honey would be presented. By no means was the average Norsemen starving.

35. Vikings wore makeup

If you're a fan of the History Channel show, "Vikings" then you often saw some of the characters, men, and women donning on some interesting face paint. What is up with that? Well, it's true for one. Vikings did indeed wear some liner, which was made out of dark-colored powered made of crushed antimony, burnt almonds, lead, oxidized copper, ash, and soft semi-precious stones.

Sure they looked fierce, but it wasn't all for looks. The liner was used to protect their vision from the sun's glare. Imagine running into battle or working in the field with having to constantly squint away the sun? This is a perfect example of how good eye-makeup can literally save lives.

36. Their ships were built like tanks

If you know anything about maritime vessels than you would know that none was more progressive in history than the Viking longship. Able to hold 25 to 60 men the largest ships were said to hold up to 100. The raiding crew sat in the top deck while sailing at 10 to 11 knots.

They had iron-clad bows and sterns with mastheads intricately carved as fierce dragons. The draconic face would strike fear into their enemies and intimidate civilians they planned to raid on the shorelines. Their propped shields on either side of the ship were also used as an intimidation tactic.

37. They used legendary swords ahead of their time

The Vikings were ruthless in battle. A hardy bunch, they're capable of withstanding just about anything at the hands of their enemies. With the right tools, or in this case weapons, who could blame them? No other weapon was more terrifying than their swords. Though many carried weapons, none was more legendary than the Ufberht.

It's said to be made out of a metal so pure that its existence baffles archaeologists today. Used between 800 to 1,000 A.D. the swords would have been forged under 3,000-degree heat, an impossible temperature to reach until the Industrial Revolution 800 years after. Only the most elite and skillful Vikings carried a Ufberht.

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Cat lovers, farmers, and ski enthusiasts? Lesser-known facts about the Vikings

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When you think about Vikings, we tend to gravitate toward the image of hulking, grizzly, and vicious barbarians who ruthlessly plundered, invaded, and enslaved nations across Europe. This is a partial truth. Sure, they burned down churches and pillaged villages; but they were also explorers, navigators, and settlers who founded cities and traded goods across the globe.

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Over a thousand years before Bilbo Baggins crept into Smaug's lair to lift a cup from the dragon's hoard, a nameless slave came slinking into the dragon's cave in "Beowulf" to steal a cup that led to the worm's fiery retaliation. Long before Frodo Baggins battled the forces of evil in Gollum, Shelob and Sauron, Beowulf did battle with the monster Grendel, his mother and the dragon. Before there was Tolkien's Middle-earth, there was the Old English middangeard (literally, "middle-yard, middle-world"), a place where history and fantasy met, where heroes did battle with both their real enemies and the...

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Book Review: 'Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary' by J.R.R. Tolkien

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Over a thousand years before Bilbo Baggins crept into Smaug's lair to lift a cup from the dragon's hoard, a nameless slave came slinking into the dragon's cave in "Beowulf" to steal a cup that led to the worm's fiery retaliation.

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Albania: The dark shadow of tradition and blood feuds

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Albania: The dark shadow of tradition and blood feuds

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An ancient code of retaliation is forcing generations of Albanians into their own private prisons.

Seventy-year-old Kol Shllaku sits in his prison cell in Kruje. He has already served nine years and must serve another 13 for participating in a blood feud [Carlo Gianferro/Al Jazeera]

It can be trigged by something as trivial as a dispute between neighbours or a disagreement among family; an incident that, anywhere else, might be forgotten with the passage of time or left to the authorities to resolve.

But in northern and central Albania, where an ancient code of conduct known as the kanun still regulates life for a large portion of the population, it can descend into a blood feud spanning generations and forcing entire families into confinement.

Comprised of 12 books and 1,262 articles, the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini, who is thought to have been a 15th-century Albanian nobleman about whom little else is known, was passed down orally for centuries and only put into print in the early 20th century.

First the Ottomans and then Albania's communist dictator Enver Hoxha sought to outlaw it. But it continued to run parallel to state rule, governing everything from the economic organisation of households to notions of honour.

However, it is for its authorisation of retaliation killings that it has become most notorious, particularly since enjoying a revival in the years following the fall of communism. Where once it sought to regulate such blood feuds - imposing limitations on who could be killed (no women or children under the age of 16) - these aspects of the code have gradually been eroded, with the notion of vengeance overriding all others.

'It's like being dead'

Basmir Gjeloshaj lost his father and two uncles to a feud in which two members of an opposing family were also killed.

He was just six years old when his father's life was claimed in 2001 and has seldom left his home since. The gjakmarrja , or blood feud, weighs heavily on Basmir and his family. He was only able to study until the fifth grade, and that was only through the assistance of a teacher who would come to his house to teach him.

His younger sister, Drenica, was a little luckier. She was able to leave the house to attend school. But then, one day when she was in the fifth grade, a car sped up behind her and offered her money to get in. Fearing it was part of an attempt to kill her, she too retreated inside.

Like many Albanians in their position, the Gjeloshaj family hoped that they might be able to outrun the feud - by fleeing the country and starting anew somewhere far away. And when, in 2012, Sweden accepted their claim for asylum, it looked as though they would finally succeed.

But their new lives were short-lived. In December 2013, the Swedish government expelled them on the basis that their expatriation papers, supplied by Albania's Committee of National Reconciliation, a body set up to counter the kanun, were counterfeit.

"When I was in Sweden, I used to go to school, talk with the other students and make friends," explains Drenica. "I did not go out that much, but felt freer."

Basmir was also able to study in Sweden and had aspirations of becoming a mechanic, getting married and starting a family.

Now back in Albania, the 19-year-old spends most of his day laying on a bed that is too small for his more than six-foot frame. It is, his mother, File, says, "like being dead once again".

'The wound is still bleeding'

Fifty-year-old Mhili Zefi lives in isolation in his decaying home in the Shkoder suburbs. His house faces a disused railway and is so cold that his breath forms small clouds in the air.

Pictures of his daughter's wedding and images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary serve as the sole form of decoration for its bare walls. Mhili inherited a feud from his father 20 years ago. That is close to being resolved thanks to rulings imposed by a council of elders and the intervention of a peacemaker, Nik Zefi. Sixty years ago, when Nik was just 15, a blood feud forced him inside for 10 years.

It is that experience that has inspired him to help others in a similar position. But even once Mhili's inherited 20-year feud comes to an end, he may not be able to leave his home.

In 2009, what he describes as a "quarrel" with another family led him to accrue a further "blood debt". He doesn't explain the details but says: "The wound is still bleeding for the other family. My children know they have to keep an eye when walking around in the streets. I've got three brothers behind bars and must help their families, though I don't know by what means."

For now, that burden falls upon Mhili's wife, who works two shifts a day in order to keep all four families afloat. Her husband lives in hiding - allowed out only for an hour every now and again as a result of an agreement with the injured party that grants him temporary freedom. And even if he did have the freedom to move about, nobody would hire a man with a gjakmarrja sentence hanging over him.

'I'd kill myself right now'

Gjion Mhilli is also paying for a crime he did not commit. He will forever remember the date of September 19, 1992, as the day his brother shot and killed a neighbour in a dispute over land.

On the few occasions that Gjion has ventured outside since, he has been threatened or chased, often having to hide in the store rooms of sympathetic shopkeepers.

His wife, Valentina, married him at a time when most other Albanian women would have refused. "My family disagreed and put pressure on me to give up," she explains. "But I love him and do not regret [marrying him]. Of course, our children are confined at some relatives of ours, but we keep going."

Of their three children, only 15-year-old David is able to read and write. Twelve-year-old Yussef has never been to school, and although illiterate, he can speak English perfectly. At just seven, Gjonna understands little of why her family lives as it does.

Gjion's fingers are stained yellow from chain smoking and the television, his only company during the day, is permanently on. "Should I be sure my children would be spared, I'd kill myself right now," he says, shaking his head.

As such blood feuds engulf different generations of the same family, they create, according to Milva Ekonomi, Albania's deputy minister for health, "a deeper generational gap ... as children have access to social networks and suffer more, while their parents are completely cut off from society and from virtual reality".

Even though children are theoretically off-limits for retaliation killings, family homes often become prisons for children whose destinies have seemingly been written by the actions of others. "Women and children are not to be shot," explains Luigj Mila, the chairman of the Law and Peace Committee. "But parents are afraid and lock them away."

'I don't know how I would react'

Often, the urge for revenge is nursed in the shadow of an individual's conscience. Thirty-two-year-old Gega Murj, whose older brother was killed by his uncle and cousin, explains: "Should I meet them in the street, I don't know how I would react." His father, Marko, does not want any further bloodshed but fears he will not always be able to control Gega.

Seventy-year-old Maria Chosaj says that her family is not looking for revenge for the murder of her son. Despite this, she has never accepted an offer of peace from the family of her son's killer, and in her refusal to do so, she is bequeathing a heavy burden to her grandchildren.

The eyes of the eldest, Kujtim, are etched with pain over the loss of his father.

But reconciliation is possible and, when it happens, often takes place at Shkoder's Catholic cathedral, where a kiss between opposing sides seals a peace lasting generations. "Should the government let laws be applied and respected, people would not take the law into their own hands, explains Angelo Massafra, the bishop of Shkoder. "The kanun rules call for reconciliation," he adds, criticising its misrepresentation.

In fact, the kanun offers three ways to avenge murder: by paying money to the family of the deceased, by securing the forgiveness of the church or by killing the murderer.

But as Albania transitioned from communism, a frail state and widespread judicial corruption saw more people turn to the kanun and its most extreme interpretations.

The government has responded by increasing the prison sentence for murder to 15 years to life, but well-off murderers who can afford to pay the judge often see their sentences reduced. According to unofficial reports, a little over $6,000 will secure a year's reduction. "Increasing penalties is not enough. We also need 'clean hands' here in Albania in order to reform our corrupted justice system and to make the judge do his job," explains Milva Ekonomi.

'I spared the child'

Eighty-three-year-old Nikoll Marku has a sunken face and bright blue eyes. He wears a grey busby hat and clothes that are too large for his skinny frame.

Nikoll has spent the past 15 years in prison and must serve 10 more after he avenged the murder of his son, killed by a neighbour over a tree branch that was protruding onto their property. "It was 1997 and anarchy reigned in Albania," explains Nikoll. "The government didn't act and the neighbour did not approach me for reconciliation.

According to the kanun, I should have killed his 16-year-old son, so having him experience pain the way I did. But I spared the child, who saw his father dying before his eyes."

Father Marian Loci is a Catholic priest who works with several of the prisoners. He explains that those who do not avenge the killing of their loved ones often lose respect in their community and suffer exclusion. "In some areas, the tradition of 'coffee under the knee' still exists, [whereby] on feast or wedding days coffee is not served at the table but at the level of the feet for those who did not avenge their killed relative."

The priest shares another story about a friend of his, whose father had been killed. One day when this friend was playing football in the street, he got into a fight with another player over whether or not a goal should have been allowed.

The other player mocked him for being willing to fight over such a thing but not brave enough to avenge his father's murder. In order to avoid becoming a murderer himself, he jumped aboard the first raft heading to Italy.

Meanwhile, those, like the Gjeloshaj family, who stay behind, brick up their windows and build tall walls around their homes, retreating further into their personal prisons as they hope that the cycle of bloodletting will come to an end.

This article first appeared in the January issue of the Al Jazeera Magazine.

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Albania: The dark shadow of tradition and blood feuds

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An ancient code of retaliation is forcing generations of Albanians into their own private prisons. It can be trigged by something as trivial as a dispute between neighbours or a disagreement among family; an incident that, anywhere else, might be forgotten with the passage of time or left to the authorities to resolve.

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Beowulf Is Back!What’s behind the running pop-culture engagement with the epic poem?

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Beowulf Is Back!What’s behind the running pop-culture engagement with the epic poem?

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Image Comics

B eowulf, of precarious provenance-the single surviving, crumbling manuscript bears the scorch marks of an 18th-century library fire-has traveled across a thousand years to lodge in our imagination like some kind of radioactive space nugget. A story from a pre-Christian era written down by an anonymous Christian, in alliterative Old English verse, it has an otherness, a real frosty interstellar otherness, but also a mysterious resonance. It's holding something for us, this poem, the value of which is inseparable from its long and lonely transmission. And so we keep going back to it, we wonderingly retell it, testing it on our tongues like the syllables of a dream. The past 20 years alone have given rise to two feature films, a TV series, and no fewer than four graphic novels based on the poem, including one released this January.

What's it about, this running pop-cultural engagement with the old poem? To begin with, there's the action: kinetic, enthralling fight scenes that go on for pages, pitting a superheroic human against a shape-shifting, ever-regenerating principle of destruction. Beowulf, mighty warrior of the Geats, hearing that some neighboring Danes are being terrorized by a misshapen antiman called Grendel, crews a ship with up-for-it countrymen and sails to the rescue. In the great hall Heorot-built for feasts, now stalked by Grendel-a bare-handed Beowulf fights the monster, rips his arm off, and nails it over the door of the hall. Then he fights Grendel's mother, a water monster, diving into her demonic pond (where Grendel crawled to die) and running her through with a sword, which promptly melts. And then, back in Geatland 50 years later, Beowulf faces a dragon. Billows of Game of Thrones -esque dragon breath, heroic paroxysms. Beowulf kills the dragon, and the dragon kills Beowulf. The end.

But it's not the end. Because beyond, or behind, Beowulf 's triptych of hero-on-monster showdowns lies its starker-than-stark Dark Ages existentialism. The poem begins, very deliberately, with an image that is also a kind of parable: a person emerging nameless from the sea and then-after a lifetime of making a name for himself-being delivered back to the sea again. Scyld Scefing arrives on the shores of Denmark as an oceanic foundling, a baby drifting in a boat, and in time becomes a legend: ruler of the Danes and great-grandfather of Hrothgar, the king whose people Beowulf will later arrive to save. When Scyld dies, he is laid out in a vessel stacked with weapons and treasure, and set adrift once more. Away he floats. That's it, the poet is saying: That's life. Out of nowhere, and into nowhere. Better make it count.

It was Seamus Heaney who made a Beowulf nerd out of me. Heaney's 1999 translation/interpretation-some call it "Heaneywulf"-was a literary landmark and a best seller. I read it aloud to the mound of my pregnant wife's belly, hoping to inculcate Beowulfian ruggedness in my son in utero. These days I have a geekish preference for Michael Alexander's more musical 1973 version ( Away she went over a wavy ocean, / boat like a bird, breaking seas, / wind-whetted, white-throated), but it was from Heaney that I first slurped the overlapping atmospheres of the old poem: Heorot, the fear-swept hall; the phosphorescent mere where Grendel's mother lives; the dragon dozing on his bed of treasure, heaped glitterings and huge coils.

Heaneywulf is also, crucially, an aural experience: You hit Play on the audiobook, and suddenly you are a drowsing thane at the long table, wine and gravy in your beard, holding your goblet with heavy fingers as the skald, the bard, Heaney himself, lulls and astounds you with his verses. In the Old English, the first word of Beowulf is the exhortation Hwaet, for which translators have offered "Hear me!," "Attend!," and (in the infamous case of the otherwise forgotten literatus William Ellery Leonard) "What ho!" Heaney's version-conversationally, recursively, strum-of-the-harp-ishly-begins "So ..." A sort of hypnotic trigger. Into the epic trance you go. Your mind's eye blinks and opens, and here come the images and the moods: the granitic dignity of the cliff-top sentinel who challenges Beowulf and his gang of Geats when they first land on the shores of Denmark; the dismay of those Geats as they stare at the surface of the pond into whose vicious depths their chief has just dived, and see blood rising in the water.

Cinematic stuff. But big-screen adaptations of the poem have so far fallen short. In 1999, the year of Heaneywulf, we also received a cheerfully B-movie, jerkins-and-lasers film starring a peroxided and somewhat out-of-breath Christophe Lambert. Robert Zemeckis's CGI-crazed 2007 adaptation, with Angelina Jolie writhing and glistening in the role of Grendel's mother, was more coherent but horrible to look at. On the small screen, the 2016 miniseries Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands, while not unenjoyable in a medievally glowering sort of way, took some diabolical liberties with the story.

Much more successful and interesting have been the graphic novels. Beowulf is a natural comic book, full of fractured perspectives, sudden zoom-ins, and spooky poolings of consciousness around heavy-metal details. January saw the publication of a gorgeous, splattery, hallucinated Beowulf by the Spanish writer-artist team of Santiago García and David Rubín. In the final combat, a half-roasted Beowulf, flung aloft by a whip of the dragon's tail, plummets through four circular frames like a smoking Icarus spied through a telescope. Stephen L. Stern and Christopher Steininger's 2007 version was also pretty good: Steininger's Grendel was dripping-faced and wraithlike, with a curl of malevolence fuming off his scalp like a poisonous dreadlock.

But it's Gareth Hinds's 2000 Beowulf that is the near-masterpiece, a scholarly, synesthetic freak-out: skutchlp goes Grendel's arm as Beowulf breaks it with his elbow, and the monster's agony-his "God-cursed scream and strain of catastrophe"-is rendered by Hinds as streamers of ancient script unwinding into the night sky. In my favorite panel, a blood-red Beowulf is breaching the surface of the evil pond, with Grendel's severed head hanging by its hair from his teeth and the handle of his melted sword hoisted above him like a crucifix. With this one wild image Hinds is resolving, in a sense, the tension between the pagan origins of the Beowulf story and the later, Christian messaging of the anonymous Beowulf poet: Beowulf himself may never have heard of Christianity, but when he vanquishes monsters, he does so under the sign of Christ.

What Beowulf fights against is the undoing of everything. I used to think that Grendel was your archetypal party-hater, a buzzkill like Jason Voorhees (of the Friday the 13th franchise) or Michael Myers ( Halloween), his deep-brain slasher centers activated by laughter, music, the trebley ripples of hedonism. Harp-playing in the great hall makes him homicidal, to be alliterative about it. But it's not just any old harp-playing that gets Grendel going; it's the Christian vision of cosmic order laid out by the skald. It harrowed him to hear ... how the Almighty had made the earth / a gleaming plain girdled with waters. Creation itself, and the fact that it makes sense, is unbearable to Grendel.

So Grendel hates God. But the promise of Christianity, we begin to see, made barely a dent in this poem, which now emerges whole-eerily intact-into the post-Christian wreck of the current historical moment. There is no transcendence in Beowulf, and no redemption. Tear off the man-beast's arm, says the poet; plumb the lake of psychic terror and come up victorious; kill the dragon-but the dragon will get you anyway. Cyclical, tribal violence obsesses the Beowulf poet: In the same breath that he hails the splendors of Heorot, he assures us that the great hall will one day be burned to the ground. Beowulf saves the Geats from the dragon, but the rider who distributes the news feels obliged to add that, as a people, they will shortly be under the heel of the murderous, unsupernatural Swedes. And in the churning smoke of Beowulf's funeral pyre, a tableau from any age, every age: A Geat woman ... sang out in grief; / with hair bound up, she unburdened herself / of her worst fears, a wild litany / of nightmare and lament; her nation invaded, / enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, / slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Turned On.

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B eowulf, of precarious provenance-the single surviving, crumbling manuscript bears the scorch marks of an 18th-century library fire-has traveled across a thousand years to lodge in our imagination like some kind of radioactive space nugget.

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Victoria Symons puzzles out the meaning of monsters in Beowulf, comparing the hero with Grendel, Grendel's mother and the dragon.

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This story appears in the March 2017 issue ofNational Geographic magazine.

A cold drizzle falls as we shiver in the streets, waiting for the Viking lord and his band of raiders to appear. It's a raw January night in the old Shetland town of Lerwick, but there's euphoria in the air.

Beside me, a man with two young children laughs as he spots a red smoky haze rising behind the town hall. "Looks like they torched the whole building," he shouts, to grins all around. Fire, after all, is why we are here. It's Up Helly Aa, the great incendiary celebration of the Viking past in Shetland. Like everyone else, I've come to see a Viking ship burn.

As the lord's squad and dozens of others pour into the street, fire seethes from hundreds of torches. A roar of delight goes up from the crowd as it catches sight of the sleek longship the raiders tow. The Vikings first landed on these rocky shores north of the Scottish mainland some 1,200 years ago, crushing the local resistance and taking the land. For nearly seven centuries Norwegian lords ruled Shetland, until they finally pawned the islands to a Scottish king. Today the old Norse dialect-Norn-is all but forgotten in Shetland, but the islanders remain intensely proud of their Viking past. Each year they prepare obsessively for Up Helly Aa, assembling, plank by plank, a replica of a Viking ship.

Now, as the crowd belts out old songs of sea kings and dragon ships, the torchbearers tow the vessel into a walled field. As the lord gives the signal, a hail of torches sets the ship ablaze. Fire races up the mast, and embers fly into the night sky. On the sidewalk, children stomp their feet and dance, nearly delirious with excitement.

Later that evening, as revelers kick up their heels at parties, I marvel at the power the Vikings still hold over our imaginations. Dead and gone for centuries, these medieval seafarers and warriors live on in the invented worlds of filmmakers, novelists, and comic book artists. Today most of us can reel off details of these imagined Vikings-how they fought and feasted, where they lived, how they died. But how much do we really know about the Vikings? Who were they, how did they see the world, and what were their lives truly like?

Now, with advanced technology-from satellite imagery to DNA studies and isotope analysis-archaeologists and other scientists are coming up with many surprising new answers. In Estonia, scientists are poring over two buried ships filled with slain warriors, shedding new light on the violent origins of the Vikings. In Sweden, researchers are studying the remains of a female Viking commander, illuminating the role of women in warfare. And in Russia, archaeologists and historians are tracing the routes of Viking slave traders, revealing the importance of slavery to the Viking economy. For archaeologists the doors are starting to swing open on a world that was far more complex and compelling than once thought. "These are heady times in Viking research," says Jimmy Moncrieff, a historian at the Shetland Amenity Trust in Lerwick.

Taken together, the new studies reveal a fresh picture of the ambitions and cultural impact of these daring seafarers. From the shores of their Scandinavian homeland, between the Baltic and North Seas, Viking fortune seekers took to the world stage in the mid-eighth century, exploring much of Europe over the next 300 years and traveling farther than earlier researchers ever suspected. With sleek sailing ships and expert knowledge of rivers and seas, they journeyed to what are now 37 or more countries, from Afghanistan to Canada, according to archaeologist Neil Price of Uppsala University in Sweden. En route they chanced upon more than 50 cultures and traded avidly for luxuries. They donned Eurasian caftans, dressed in silk from China, and pocketed heaps of Islamic silver coins. They built thriving cities at York and Kiev, colonized large swaths of Great Britain, Iceland, and France, and established outposts in Greenland and North America. No other European seafarers of the day ventured so fearlessly and so far from their homeland. "It's only the people from Scandinavia who do this," says Price. "Just the Vikings."

But exploration and trade weren't the only roads to wealth. Viking raiders prowled the coasts of Britain and Europe, striking with sudden, shocking brutality. In northern France they sailed up and down the Seine and other rivers, attacking at leisure and filling their ships with plunder. Spreading terror far and wide, they extorted nearly 14 percent of the entire economy of western Europe's Carolingian Empire in exchange for empty promises of peace. Across the channel in England, sporadic raids expanded into total warfare, as a Viking army invaded and conquered three Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, leaving bodies to rot in the fields.

The Viking age, says Price, "is not for the squeamish." But how, ask researchers today, did all this mayhem begin? How and why did medieval farmers in Scandinavia become the scourge of the European continent?

In the nearly three centuries before the raids on foreign shores began around A.D. 750, Scandinavia was wracked by turmoil, Price says. More than three dozen petty kingdoms arose during this period, throwing up chains of hill forts and vying for power and territory. In the midst of these troubled times, catastrophe struck. A vast cloud of dust, likely blasted into the atmosphere by a combination of cataclysms-comets or meteorites smashing into Earth, as well as the eruption of at least one large volcano-darkened the sun beginning in A.D. 536, lowering summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for the next 14 years. The extended cold and darkness brought death and ruin to Scandinavia, lying as it did along the northern edge of medieval agriculture. In Sweden's Uppland region, for example, nearly 75 percent of villages were abandoned, as residents succumbed to starvation and fighting.

So dire was this disaster that it seems to have given birth to one of the darkest of all world myths-the Nordic legend of Ragnarök, the end of creation and the final battle, in which all gods, all supernatural beings, and all humans and other living creatures die. Ragnarök was said to begin with Fimbulwinter, a deadly time when the sun turns black and the weather turns bitter and treacherous-events that eerily parallel the dust veil that began in 536, Price says.

When summer at last returned to the north and populations rebounded, Scandinavian society assumed a new, more truculent form. Leaders surrounded themselves with heavily armed war bands and began seizing and defending abandoned territory. In this real-life Game of Thrones, a militarized society arose in which men and women alike celebrated the virtues of warfare-fearlessness, aggression, cunning, strength under fire. On the Swedish island of Gotland, where archaeologists have found many intact graves from this period, "almost every second man seems to be buried with weapons," notes John Ljungkvist, an archaeologist at Uppsala University.

As this weaponized society was gradually taking shape, a new technology began revolutionizing Scandinavian seafaring in the seventh century-the sail. Skilled carpenters began constructing sleek, wind-powered vessels capable of carrying bands of armed fighters farther and faster than ever before. Aboard these ships, northern lords and their restless followers could voyage across the Baltic and North Seas, exploring new lands, sacking towns and villages, and enslaving inhabitants. And men with few marriage prospects at home could take female captives as wives by persuasion or force.

All of this-centuries of kingly ambition, a seeming abundance of wifeless young warriors, and a new type of ship -created a perfect storm. The stage was set for the Vikings to pour out of the north, setting much of Europe on fire with their brand of violence.

Around 750 a band of early Viking warriors dragged two ships onto a sandy headland on the island of Saaremaa, just off the coast of Estonia. Far from their homes in the forests near Uppsala, Sweden, the men were the bloodied survivors of a costly raid. Inside their ships lay the tangled corpses of more than 40 Viking men, including one who may have been a king. All were in their youth or prime of life-tall, muscular, strapping men-and many had seen savage fighting. Some had been stabbed or hacked to death, others decapitated. One man died after a sword took off the top of his head.

On the sandy headland the survivors began the gruesome task of reassembling severed body parts and arranging most of the dead men in the hull of the largest ship. Then they covered the bodies with cloth and raised a low, makeshift burial mound by placing their wood and iron war shields over their slain comrades.

In 2008 a work crew laying an electrical cable discovered human bones and bits of a corroded sword, and local authorities called in archaeologists. Today, sitting in his office at Uppsala University, Price marvels at the discovery. "This is the first time that archaeologists have ever been able to excavate what is clearly a Viking raid," he says. More remarkable: The warriors laid to rest at Salme, Estonia, died nearly 50 years before Scandinavian raiders descended on the English monastery of Lindisfarne in 793, long thought to have been the first Viking attack.

Today the ship burials at Salme are creating a stir among Viking specialists. "What I find amazing is all the swords," Price says. Most researchers had long assumed that early Viking raiding parties consisted of a few elite warriors armed with swords and other costly war gear, as well as a few dozen poor farm boys furnished with cheap spears or longbows. But that's clearly not the case at Salme. The burials there contained more swords than men, confirming that at least some early expeditions consisted of many warriors of high status.

On a January morning in a quiet industrial park south of Edinburgh, Scotland, researchers lead the way through locked doors to a small conservation lab. For more than a year, scientists here have been unpacking the riches that one Viking leader amassed from raiding and ransacking in foreign lands. Buried some 1,100 years ago in southwest Scotland, the Galloway hoard is a collection of strange and beautiful things, from a solid-gold ingot to pieces of silk samite cloth from the Byzantine or Islamic world to an enameled Christian cross. Olwyn Owen, an independent archaeologist who specializes in the Viking age, says she's never seen anything quite like it. "It's an incredible find," she says, "just incredible."

Today a conservator has laid out some of the rarities from the hoard. On the table there's a slender gold pin shaped like a bird. It resembles an aestel, a small pointer that bishops and other members of the clergy once used to read sacred texts. Nearby is a gold filigree pendant, possibly designed to hold a small relic of a saint. And, at the end of the table, Owen gazes at nine silver brooches, some bearing swirling tendrils and mythical creatures, others strange humanlike faces. All but one, says Owen, were designed for Anglo-Saxon wearers. "In other words," she concludes, "some Anglo-Saxon monastery or settlement had a very bad day."

The Viking leader who carried off these treasures had a weakness for beautiful things. Rather than melting down all the plunder into bullion, this Viking lord set aside several pieces for his personal collection of exotic, foreign art. The Vikings, says archaeologist Steve Ashby with the University of York, had a taste for finer things from foreign cultures, and some elites took pleasure in owning and using these status symbols. "The top men, they were dandies," says Ashby. "It's a society in which conspicuous consumption is important."

More Johnny Depp than Vin Diesel, Viking leaders painted their eyes, pulled on flashy colored clothing, and donned heavy jewelry-neck rings, dress pins, armbands, and finger rings. But this dress for excess had a serious purpose: Each object told a story of foreign adventure, of recklessness and courage rewarded. Fitted out in the spoils of war, a Viking was a living recruitment poster for the raiding life, beckoning young men to take an oath of loyalty in return for a share of booty. "Viking leaders couldn't be bashful about what they achieved, if they wanted to maintain a power base," Ashby says.

At the start of the Viking age, these raiders targeted mainly coastal or island monasteries-armed, it seems, with advance intelligence. Scandinavian traders were already plying the coasts of Britain and Europe, and they quickly discovered that the markets typically were held next to monasteries. Strolling past stalls and sizing up the goods, some would have spotted the silver chalices and gold altar furniture adorning monastic chapels. "I don't think it requires mental leaping to think there's someone who finally says, 'Guys, why don't we just nick the stuff?' " says Price.

Early raiding parties planned their attacks for the summer months, and they often set out with just a few ships and perhaps a hundred fighters. Bristling with iron weaponry, the raiders struck rapidly and went about the carnage swiftly, setting sail before locals could mount a defense. In France, in the ninth century alone, Viking raiders stormed more than 120 settlements, massacring monks and local inhabitants, stripping churches of their treasures, and enslaving the survivors. "If you lived in northwest France in the late ninth century," Price says, "you must have thought your world was ending."

As rivers of precious metals flowed back to Scandinavia, young men flocked to the great halls of Viking leaders, eager to swear their loyalty. What began as small raiding forays of two or three ships gradually evolved into fleets of 30 vessels, then many more. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a contemporary annal, hundreds of Viking ships arrived along the east coast of England in 865, carrying a ravenous host that the Chronicle writers called micel here, the great army. Pushing inland along England's rivers and roads, these invaders began smashing Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and seizing large swaths of land to colonize.

Just outside the modern city of Lincoln, archaeologist Julian D. Richards from the University of York is studying one of the winter camps of the great army. The encampment, known as Torksey today, was large enough to accommodate 3,000 to 4,000 people, but discoveries there indicate that the great army was more than a fighting force. Metalsmiths melted down plunder, and merchants conducted trade. Children raced through the muddy fields, and women went about their work-which may have included leading men in battle in some parts of the Viking world.

One famous early Irish text records how a woman known as Inghen Ruaidh-or Red Girl, after the color of her hair-led a fleet of Viking ships to Ireland in the 10th century. Bioarchaeologist Anna Kjellström of Stockholm University recently reanalyzed the skeletal remains of a Viking fighter found in the old trading center of Birka, in Sweden. Mourners had furnished the grave with an arsenal of deadly weapons, and for decades archaeologists assumed that the elite fighter was male. But while studying the warrior's pelvic bones and mandible, Kjellström discovered that the man was in fact a woman.

This nameless Viking woman seems to have commanded the respect of many Viking warriors. "On her lap she had gaming pieces," says archaeologist Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson of Uppsala University. "This suggests that she was the one planning the tactics and that she was a leader."

The fleets that carried death and destruction to western Europe also transported slaves and commodities to markets scattered from Turkey to western Russia, and possibly Iran. Medieval Arab and Byzantine officials described convoys of armed Viking slavers and merchants known as the Rus who regularly voyaged along river routes to the Black and Caspian Seas. "I have never seen more perfect physiques than theirs," observed Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, a 10th-century Arab soldier and diplomat from Baghdad. "Every one of them carries an ax, a sword, and a dagger."

To shed light on this southern trade, archaeologists are now excavating sites along the routes to the Byzantine and Muslim worlds. On a late June morning some 230 miles southwest of Moscow, Veronika Murasheva, an archaeologist at the State Historical Museum in Moscow, walks the bank of the Dnieper River where a small medieval city once stood. Founded by Viking explorers more than 1,100 years ago, Gnezdovo lay along two major trade routes-the Dnieper, which flows into the Black Sea, and a skein of streams that sweeps into the Volga River, whose waters empty into the Caspian Sea. Gnezdovo clearly profited from this geography, flourishing and eventually sprawling over an area the size of 30 city blocks.

Today Gnezdovo is mantled in forest and grassland, but over the past century and a half, Russian archaeologists have uncovered hill forts, hoards, caches, workshops, a harbor, and nearly 1,200 burial mounds that have produced rich artifacts. Gnezdovo, they discovered, was home to a wealthy Viking elite who collected tribute from the local Slavic population and who likely managed aspects of the southern commerce. Each year, after the spring thaw, Viking traders set off from Gnezdovo in ships laden with luxury goods-furs, honey, beeswax, chunks of amber, walrus ivory-and cargoes of human slaves. Many, says Murasheva, were bound for the Black Sea and Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire and a city of more than 800,000 people at the time. In the heat and dust Viking traders wandered the markets, striking deals for their cargo and buying prized commodities: amphorae filled with wine and olive oil, fine glassware, colorful glazed plates, swatches of silk and other rare textiles.

Other Viking traders ventured farther east from Gnezdovo, following streams that wended across western Russia into the Volga. In bazaars along the river and around the Caspian Sea, Muslim buyers paid handsomely for foreign slaves, since the Quran forbade believers from owning freeborn Muslims. The eastern buyers settled their bills with heaps of silver coins known as dirhams, a key source of wealth in the Viking world.

By searching archaeological reports and databases, Marek Jankowiak, a medieval historian at Oxford University, has found records of more than a thousand hoards of dirhams that Viking traders and others buried across Europe. Based on an initial analysis, Jankowiak estimates that Viking slavers could have sold tens of thousands of eastern European, mostly Slavic, captives into bondage in the 10th century alone, earning millions of silver dirhams-an immense fortune at the time. In the Viking world, where lords regularly rewarded their fighting men with gifts of silver, the road south was the road to power.

In the firelit halls of the Norse lords, storytellers also described early voyages to the west. Gazing around at those assembled, they told the tale of a trader, Bjarni Herjólfsson, who lost his way in thick fog while sailing from Iceland to Greenland. When the mist finally lifted, Herjólfsson and his men spied a new land that bore little resemblance to Greenland. It was blanketed in forest, but Herjólfsson had little interest in exploring it, so he angled his ship out to sea. The lost Viking had reached the New World by accident-the first European, it seems, to lay eyes on its shores. It was the beginning of Viking voyages to North America.

Today few feats of Viking seafarers are so cloaked in mystery and controversy as their exploration of the New World. According to the Norse sagas, Viking mariners sailed westward from Greenland in four major expeditions, searching for timber and other resources. Scouting along the northeast coast of Canada as early as 985, they wintered in small base camps, cut timber, picked wild grapes in a place they called Vinland, gave birth, and traded and fought with the indigenous people.

In 1960 a famous Norwegian explorer, Helge Ingstad, went looking for these Viking camps. Along Newfoundland's northern tip, at a place known as L'Anse aux Meadows, a local landowner led him to several hills whose contours resembled longhouses. Nearby lay a peat bog that contained bog iron, a source of iron ore prized by Vikings. Excavations revealed three large Viking halls, some huts, a furnace for processing bog iron, and butternuts from a type of tree that grows hundreds of miles farther south. Taken together, the discoveries and saga clues strongly suggested that Viking explorers not only had landed in Newfoundland but also had ventured farther south into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

More recently a Canadian archaeologist turned up traces of Viking traders in the Canadian Arctic. Patricia Sutherland, an adjunct professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, was searching through old collections at the Canadian Museum of History near Ottawa when she discovered pieces of Viking yarn. Spun by skilled weavers, the yarn came from sites inhabited by the Dorset, a Paleo-Eskimo people who lived in the Arctic until the 15th century. "I thought it just can't be," Sutherland says, so she expanded her museum search and discovered a trove of Viking artifacts, from whetstones for sharpening metal knives to tally sticks for tracking trade transactions.

The most intriguing find was a small stone vessel that looked like a crucible for melting metal. Sutherland and a small team recently took a closer look using a scanning electron microscope. Along the inner surface they detected traces of bronze, as well as tiny glass spheres that form when minerals are melted at high temperatures-tantalizing evidence of Viking-style metalworking. Sutherland thinks that Viking seafarers from Greenland voyaged to the Canadian Arctic to trade with indigenous hunters, exchanging metal knives and hones for thick arctic-fox furs and walrus ivory-luxury goods for European markets.

Tracking down other Viking expeditions mentioned in the sagas, however, remains a big challenge. To locate potential sites, archaeologists must comb thousands of miles of remote coastline. So three years ago archaeologist Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham decided to try a new approach.

Parcak, a National Geographic fellow, specializes in using imagery from orbiting satellites to detect potential archaeological sites. In a test run in Iceland, she and her colleagues detected what appeared to be turf walls. When archaeologist Douglas Bolender of the University of Massachusetts Boston went to investigate the area, he discovered buried remnants of turf buildings and a turf wall only six inches tall-exactly where Parcak suggested. "This is astounding," he marvels, "the tiny remains of a buried turf wall identified from 770 kilometers in space."

Buoyed by this success, Parcak and her team began poring over satellite imagery of Atlantic Canada. In southwestern Newfoundland they spotted clusters of what looked like turf walls on a promontory known as Point Rosee. Overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Point Rosee lies along a sea route to lands of butternut trees and wild grapes. And like L'Anse aux Meadows, it adjoins a large peat bog where Viking seafarers could have collected iron ore.

During a small excavation in 2015, Parcak and her colleagues found what looked like a turf wall, as well as a large hollow where someone seemed to have collected bog ore for roasting-the first step in producing iron. But a larger excavation last summer cast serious doubt on those interpretations, suggesting that the turf wall and accumulation of bog ore were the results of natural processes. Today Parcak is waiting for additional test results to clarify the picture.

Parcak thinks, however, that she and her team are developing a scientifically rigorous way to seek Viking sites in North America. Her colleague Karen Milek, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen, agrees. "Looking for the Norse here is like looking for a needle in a haystack," Milek says. Satellite imagery is one of the best ways to go, she adds, "and Sarah is defining that best approach."

On a blustery winter day, I catch a cab to Shetland's Sumburgh Airport. It's the morning after Up Helly Aa, and few Shetlanders are awake after the long night of revelry. The swords and helmets are put away, and the children are sleeping, dreaming of sea kings. The wooden longship, the pride of the lord, is now ashes in the field.

But the idea of the Vikings, the romance of these intrepid northerners who built great ships and sailed ice-choked seas to a new world and winding rivers to the bazaars of the East, never grows old, never grows tired. It lives on here and across their northern realm, a message from a long-dead world, an enduring spirit of an age.

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This story appears in the March 2017 issue ofNational Geographic magazine. A cold drizzle falls as we shiver in the streets, waiting for the Viking lord and his band of raiders to appear. It's a raw January night in the old Shetland town of Lerwick, but there's euphoria in the air.

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The Mere Wife Gives Grendel’s Mother Her Due

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The Mere Wife Gives Grendel’s Mother Her Due

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The Mere Wife is Maria Dahvana Headley's second adult novel, following the two YA fantasies, Magonia and Aerie , and it arrives on a wave of critical acclaim. " Beowulf in suburbia" is the intriguing log line, but it does little to capture what the book is really about-it is so much more than a simple retelling of an Old English epic. It is the story of the fierceness of a mother's love, delivered with a full-throated feminist roar, a highly literary sensibility, and characters who straddle the line between reality and fantasy.

The notion of a feminist retelling of is novel, but , an important mistranslation of an adjective used to describe Beowulf according to Headley and his antagonists (aglæca/æglæca), along with years of oversights by male translators, might be at the root of the common understanding that Grendel and his mother are monsters, rather than merely "formidable" foes fighting an equally formidable "hero." The idea of telling the story from Grendel's mother's point of view is very rare, per the author; it's certainly intriguing to reexamine with her this word, æglæca, to rethink it in terms of Grendel's mother, and to place her in a modern context.

Enter Dana Mills, war veteran and mother, battling severe PTSD that has led her to give birth in a cave above a shining gated community called Herot Hall. Many of the names from Beowulf are preserved, and the overall structure and general character types are echoes of the original text, but you don't need to be a scholar to enjoy it, though I imagine those more than glancingly familiar with the epic poem will uncover more layers of meaning than the surface-level reader. Dana is Grendel's mother, and she was the fiercest of warriors, surviving an attempted beheading and a pregnancy of unknown origin, a fugitive of the military untrusting of everything and everyone.

Dana's greatest enemy is civilization, and no one more perfectly personifies that concept than Willa, a woman of suburbia, and the de facto master of Herot Hall. Ben Woolf, policeman, acts as Willa's sword and shield against the monsters of the forest around her home. When Gren, Dana's son, comes down from the mountain and dares to make friends with Willa's son Dylan, the world tilts for both women, as each must confront the "otherness" that disrupts their separate peaces. It's a sensitive, often harrowing telling of post-war trauma and its deeply felt effects on both those afflicted and everyone around them, to perhaps catastrophic effect. At the same time, it is an evisceration of the rigid and unwelcoming practices of white middle- and upper-class Americans who can and do unthinking damage to those around them.

The story of these two very different, very fierce women fighting to maintain their lives is wrapped in Headley's elegant prose. is an epic poem, and while the novel is not told in verse, it rings with musicality. It is, perhaps, a rhythm that takes getting used to, but there is magic in it, and only once you've modulated to its frequencies does it truly begin to sing. Take, for example, this excerpt:

"Listen," someone whispers into my ear. I move, looking around, trying to find a way out of here. "Listen to me. Listen. In some countries, you kill a monster when it's born. Other places, you let it go, out into the forest or the sea, and it lives there forever, calling for others of its kind. Listen to me, it cries. Maybe it's just alone." "What monster?" I ask. "Who's the monster?" She's with me, my truck-stop saint, chest open, candle inside it lit for Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and anyone else. She's smoking two cigarettes, flicking sparks, her stringy hair, her sweaty T-shirt, her skin so smooth it glows, like she's a thing on fire herself, like she can jump water and hit the other side.

Maria Dahvana Headley is herself a formidable woman, and a formidable writer. Her prose takes no prisoners, and her musings on myth and magic and feminism hit like a welcome punch to the face (consider also, her fantastical take on another woman of legend: Queen of Kings: A Novel of Cleopatra, the Vampire). Read The Mere Wife, and look forward to her forthcoming translation of , which will further shift our understanding of what makes a monster, a hero, a woman.

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The Mere Wife Gives Grendel's Mother Her Due

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The Mere Wife is Maria Dahvana Headley's second adult novel, following the two YA fantasies, Magonia and Aerie, and it arrives on a wave of critical acclaim.

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Demonising the demon: the power of translation

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Demonising the demon: the power of translation

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an awesome or formidable opponent, ferocious fighter. formidable, awe-inspiring. (poetic) combatant, warrior. (poetic) one who inspires awe; wretch, monster.aglæca - translation - Old English-English Dictionary - Glosbe

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aglæca - translation - Old English-English Dictionary - Glosbe

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aglæca translation in Old English-English dictionary

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(Old English, noun, feminine); wretch. monster, hell-bride, hag

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Grendel's mother ( Old English: Grendles mōðor ) is one of three antagonists in the anonymous Old English poem (c. 700-1000 AD). The other antagonists are Grendel and the dragon, all aligned in opposition to the hero Beowulf. She is introduced in lines 1258b to 1259a as: "Grendles modor/ides, aglæcwif".

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Say it. The beginning and end at once. I'm facedown in a truck bed, getting ready to be dead. I think about praying, but I've never been any good at asking for help. I try to sing. There aren't any songs for this. All I have is a line I read in a library book. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

There's a sack over my head, but I'm seeing the faces of dead soldiers. I'm watching the war in slow motion, and then too fast, a string of men, a line of blood and baffled eyes -

We got lost. All of us got sent to the wrong country, and everyone but me is dead. Now I think all countries are the wrong country, and I'm out here, two minutes from gone.

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My guys are ghosts, and my girls too. My best friend Renee got killed a week ago, slipped on a step, made a noise, and bullets, fast as wasps. I had her in my arms when she died. Three days ago, I was riding in a truck with Lynn Graven from Gulfport, who told me the Mississippi River had wandered according to its own hungers, changed its path in order to drink up land it wanted to claim, and then told me that there was a river like that in this desert too, and we should swim in it and see if it drank us. He dove out of the truck we were in at eighty miles per hour, thinking he'd land in water. Raul Honrez grew up in Idaho, his parents fruit pickers. He got halfway through med school before the planes flew into the towers and he joined up. I watched his body blow apart, right before someone grabbed me and threw me into this truck.

Two months ago I was on leave, far away from all this.

" Listen! " Someone shouted from the sidewalk, and she held on to my ankle. She had a sign that read YES. I GOT LOST. ANYTHING HELPS. She'd come from the same war I'd come from. Tin dish, rattling for change.

"Listen, lemme tell you what's gonna come for you," she said. "Gimme five bucks."

"You can have everything," I told her, and dropped the contents of my wallet into her dish.

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"Then I'll tell you everything I know," she said.

"No, thanks," I said, and walked.

"You're gonna live forever!" she shouted after me. "You're the one who gets away! You're gonna lose some shit, though, so you better watch out."

"I don't have anything to lose," I said to her, cocky for no reason.

"My guys are ghosts, and my girls too. My best friend Renee got killed a week ago, slipped on a step, made a noise, and bullets, fast as wasps. I had her in my arms when she died."

You go into war knowing you're signing up to be a goner. Living is luck, not anything special. You're not magic. You're just lucky.

I figured I knew the shape of things. I'd been fighting awhile. I signed up right after people stopped volunteering, in the middle of a war that went on forever. They made me think it was about heroes. That's how they sell it to you when you're seventeen. Go out and save the starving, the war-torn, the children, and the women. Instead, you march in and roll down roads, close your eyes and shoot. Hungry people on rations, scared people, fucked-up people, shooting by clothes and color of skin, or by the way bodies send out heat. Bright blots on a map, hearts beating.

I figured I'd been lucky so far. I figured that if I died, I died.

I got on a plane and came back to the desert.

Now I'm rattling down the road, and there's nowhere I want to go, no good option. If I'm being taken, I'm going into a prison, or I'm going up on a screen. My brain's shaking up old things, distractions, picking over the moments leading me here, grabbing things I should have paid attention to when people said them.

" Listen! " an old woman said to me ten years ago, on a Greyhound Bus. "Let me tell you a story!"

I didn't know that I could move away, so I listened. Windows full of places. Night and the highway, lights green and red, people in every car going somewhere, and beside me this woman, telling me her version of the story of the world, all the things that ever happened from the beginning of time to the end of it. Thirty hours.

"This is the thing about history," she said. "People lie about the parts they missed. They tell you they know what happened, the world exploded and they watched it, when really all they did was hear a sound so loud it shook the ground. You never understand the whole story until you're at the end of it. If you're the last one standing, you're the one who sings for everyone else's funeral. But at least you get to be the one who tells it. You tell it for the rest of us."

I looked at her, sitting next to me, her shaky hands and church hat. She looked old enough to have been born in the single digits.

I thought I knew everything.

I thought I knew what the Earth had in it. I thought I knew what was coming for me. Now I know all this was waiting, this desert, this sack, this stumble as they drag me out of the truck.

I hear the whetting of a blade.

I don't know who they are, whoever has me, but I'm their them , and they're mine. We are each other's nightmares. I'm on my knees in the sand. They give me words, and I say them for the video.

"My name is Dana Mills," I say. "America, this is your doing."

I feel the wind of the blade swinging back, and I'm in a thousand cities at once, all shall be well, and in a thousand countries, and I'm on a ship coming across an ocean, and I'm an old woman dying on a mountain, the last of my family, the last of my line, and all shall be well, and there's blackness, and in the blackness, there's a bright star, and it gets bigger, and bigger - and all manner of thing shall be well,

"Listen," someone whispers into my ear. "Listen to me."

"Listen," the voice whispers. "In some countries, you kill a monster when it's born. Other places, you kill it only when it kills someone else. Other places, you let it go, out into the forest or the sea, and it lives there forever, calling for others of its kind. Listen to me, it cries. Maybe it's just alone."

I wake up, gasping, underneath sand. Grit between my fingertips. There's space around my face, but nowhere else. I feel my heart beating, though, and that tells me something.

The sand is heavy and hot. Sunlight through my eyelids. I move sand with my fingers, then with my whole body, until my hand comes into the air. I push myself out, and stand up, swaying. There's an unfamiliar weight, and I look down at my stomach.

"You never understand the whole story until you're at the end of it. If you're the last one standing, you're the one who sings for everyone else's funeral. But at least you get to be the one who tells it."

I'm a tent in the middle of the desert, and someone's inside it, someone who doesn't speak and doesn't march, who just sleeps. I almost laugh. I almost cry. I don't know who the father is.

I'm the mother.

This is how I come back from the dead. Six months pregnant. This is what I have. This is what I own.

I look out across the sand, and there's movement at the edge of it, ripples of heat, silhouettes of people moving. I start walking.

Hours in, something blows up ten feet from me. A shard of shrapnel in my eye, blood running down my cheek, nothing else. I tie my shirt around my face and keep going.

I walk until I get to Americans. I look so bad no one knows which side I'm on. They freak out when they get close. They read my tags.

Shitfuck, it's Dana Mills. Get someone.

I wake up later, under lights, shaved all over, my head, my pubic hair, my legs, my armpits, like someone on her way to be cooked. There are bars on the windows. There's a patch over my eye, and I feel drugged.

"Tough luck," says the girl in the bed beside mine. She doesn't have legs. "Guess it's too late now," she says. "For all of us stupid fuckers."

"Guess it is."

"I made it out of where I came from and I'm never going back," she says. "I got no one out there in the whole wide world."

"Me neither," I say. "My mother's dead. I'm alone." We both look at my stomach.

"You're not," she says. "You got that one. Whoever that one's gonna be."

She has freckled skin and a pointed nose, crooked lips covered in black lipstick like she's planning to go to a club and throw herself into a mosh pit. Maybe she's seventeen, the same age I was when I joined up. Her fingernails are longer than regulation and polished with glitter. I don't ask her what she did. She doesn't ask me.

"So, are you crazy?" she asks, without fanfare. " I am. I see things. Mostly I see my legs. Why am I alive, anyway? Is that what you're thinking? That's what I'm thinking."

I'm in the middle of replying when I see something light up in the center of her chest. A flicker. A flame?

"What's in there?" I ask, but she's gone.

Five men are in her place, making themselves at home, feet on the bed frame, one or two looming over me, looking at my charts. Letting me know I'm the only one in the room who can't run. Being barefoot, once you've been to war, is terrifying.

"What happened to you, soldier? Who took you?"

"I don't know," I say. I'm still looking for the girl, but there's no girl.

A guy kneels in front of me, looking at me with all sincerity, like I can't tell him from a good person.

"We saw you on television," the man says. "You were lucky. You were still pretty enough for video. The rest of your team got blown up."

I think about luck.

"We watched you die. It was convincing." "I'm alive," I say. My skin's prickling all over.

"Execution by edit." He gestures at my stomach. "Whose child is this?"

"Mine." I don't expect to say that, but it's what I say.

"Rape? Or consensual?"

One answer means I'm a victim, and the other means I'm a collaborator, and I don't know, so I don't answer. I hear one of them say something about DNA tests. My brain is skipping like a record. They hypnotize me, insist I tell them everything. There's nothing to tell, except that I'm back from wherever I've been, that I'm alive, and that I'm pregnant.

I stay in the hospital that isn't a hospital for six weeks, and then I feel my baby under my ribs, kicking hard.

There are other soldiers working in the prison. I find a guy who was stationed where I was. He gets me out in the middle of the night, a key in my food, a map under my plate, and I run. When I can't find a train, I hide myself in trailers carrying horses. Go under a tarp in the back of a pickup. Wake up in a parking lot one night with someone staring at me, punch him in the side of the head, and take off into the dark.

I see the girl from the hospital again in a truck-stop bathroom. She walks out of a stall without the use of legs and says, "Hey," and I say hey back to her like I'm not worried about my sanity. Her fingers are nothing but skeleton. She's smoking a cigarette.

In the center of her chest there's an open wound, and through it I can see her ribs, her lungs, a candle lit, balanced on her solar plexus and surrounded by gilding.

"God get to you yet? God ask for any favors?" she asks.

"I don't know," I say. "Something happened to me. I don't know what. I don't know what's happening to me now, either."

"Something happened to me too," she says. "I started spitting fire, and then I turned to ice and melted and everyone around me said I was a martyr. I got painted by every painter. You've seen me on walls and on drugstore candles. Go get one if you want."

She indicates the votive in her chest. "Might help you."

The girl takes a long drag, and her cheeks suck in so far I can see what her skull looks like.

"Still hurts," she says. "You don't want to go this way, even if you get famous. Your face shows up on burnt toast and you never stop feeling like you can't get a good breath. Still, it's better than the alternative."

"What's the alternative?" I ask. "Oh," she says. "You know. Eternal flame."

She walks out of the bathroom, legless, leaving footprints made of fire, but then they're gone and I'm standing there, one hand wrapped in paper.

My baby kicks inside me, cars pull in and out of the lot, trucks make that grieving moan of too heavy and brakes half broken. I see a bunch of them pull off the highway and uphill because nothing works on a big thing, nothing but gravity.

I keep going. Why am I going home at all? It occurs to me that they'll know where I came from, and be waiting for me. But they aren't. Nobody's there.

I guess that's because where I came from is gone. I'm having contractions, close enough together that I'm scared, and all that's left in the place where I used to live is a bright white light, a fence around new buildings, and a mountain.

Every life starts with the same beginning and ends with the same end. The rest is the story, even if you don't understand it, even if you aren't sure which parts are true and which parts are your brain trying to make sense out of smoke. I grew up in a house looking up at this mountain. I left this place forever, but forever is over. Now I'm coming home again.

I climb, stumbling up the slope, through the trees and toward the cave.

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From The Mere Wife. Used with the permission of MCD Books. Copyright © 2018 by Maria Dahvana Headley.

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Say it. The beginning and end at once. I'm facedown in a truck bed, getting ready to be dead. I think about praying, but I've never been any good at asking for help. I try to sing. There aren't any songs for this. All I have is a line I read in a library book.

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Fiction

Credit... Lilli Carre

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THE MERE WIFE
By Maria Dahvana Headley
308 pp. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.

The Anglo-Saxon epic "Beowulf" has a historic place in English literature. But how much contemporary cultural resonance does it have? Plenty, Maria Dahvana Headley suggests in her new novel, "The Mere Wife" - if you mess around with it enough.

Quick recap of "Beowulf": A monster named Grendel is slaughtering the denizens of Heorot, a Danish feudal stronghold, on a nightly basis. From across the Kattegat, a warrior called Beowulf arrives with his comrades-in-arms, offering to save them. In battle, he defeats Grendel, wrenching off the monster's shoulder and arm as proof of his victory. Problem solved? Not quite. Grendel's vengeful mother soon ravages Heorot. But Beowulf tracks her down beneath the burning/freezing waters of a "mere," where he kills her and beheads the corpse of her son. Later in his life, in his own land, Beowulf confronts a troublemaking dragon. Both die.

The action is gory and the monsters colorful, especially the dragon. The do-gooding hero is also keen for riches and fame, and he's not subtle about it. Headley (whose previous books include "Magonia" and "Queen of Kings") isn't the first writer to approach this tale from the monster's point of view; John Gardner's 1971 novel, "Grendel," did the same. But "The Mere Wife" brings the story into the 21st century in a curious way.

Here, the mother of Grendel's counterpart, Gren, is a traumatized American veteran, Dana Mills, who inexplicably escapes from a hostage situation after her beheading is broadcast to the world. She's six months pregnant from an encounter she doesn't remember. Once she returns to the United States and gives birth, she and her son take refuge in the caverns of a mountain with an abandoned railway station at its heart and a sulfurous lake at its foot (once the site of a hot-springs resort). During her absence, an upscale gated community, Herot Hall, has sprung up on her old stamping grounds.

Gren isn't like other children. "His eyes are gold," Dana tells us. "He's all bones and angles. He has long lashes, like black feathers. He's almost as tall as I am and he's only 7. To me, he looks like my son. To everyone else? I don't know. A wonder? A danger? A boy? A boy with brown skin?" Gren is a changeable figure, depending on who's observing him. He has claws that can do a fair amount of damage. And he's as curious about Herot Hall as his mother is wary of it.

Those interests are reciprocal. Willa Herot, wife to a plastic surgeon, Roger, grew up thinking the mountain was haunted. However, their 7-year-old son, Dylan, is at ease with his surroundings, and especially pleased to have a pal who wanders down from the mountain to play with him. But when he describes Gren to his parents, they're convinced he's an imaginary friend. At the same time, Willa believes a "wild animal" is prowling their home, but Ben Woolf, a policeman who's also a veteran like Dana, has his doubts. Then things take a bloody turn.

Headley's jabs at suburban smugness are fun ("To us, and people like us" is a favorite Herot Hall toast), and Dana's hallucinatory flashbacks to the desert war are both harrowing and disorienting ("I don't know what real is, I don't know what alive is"). Headley's prose can be stark, lacerating, insightful ("If events don't make sense, a story grows to cover up the confusion"), but it also has its over-the-top lapses. "The trees are saw blades stuck in the snow," Willa thinks at a crisis point. "The snake in her vein wriggles and turns to an earthworm, a pale pink shudder making its way in and out of her body." The metaphorical flights grow especially wild and woolly in the book's last lap.

But the role reversals Headley devises - and the way she adapts an ancient tale into a 21st-century struggle between haves and have-nots, brown-skinned and white, damaged and intact - are largely effective. Genuine wisdom sometimes emerges. "The world isn't large enough for monsters and heroes at once," Ben reflects toward the end. "There's too much danger of confusion between the two categories." That seems especially true in Headley's imaginative realm, where identifying monsters and monstrous acts has less to do with fact than perception.

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'Beowulf' Gets a 21st-Century Update (Published 2018)

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Fiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. THE MERE WIFE By Maria Dahvana Headley308 pp. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27. The Anglo-Saxon epic "Beowulf" has a historic place in English literature. But how much contemporary cultural resonance does it have?

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Beowulf In The Suburbs? 'The Mere Wife' Is An Epic Retelling

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Beowulf In The Suburbs? 'The Mere Wife' Is An Epic Retelling

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with Podcast

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There's a vitally important word in the epic tale of Beowulf and, according to Maria Dahvana Headley, it's been translated incorrectly for a very long time. The word is aglæca/æglæca - no one's entirely sure how to pronounce it - and, as Headley explains, that same word is used to describe Beowulf and his three antagonists: Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon.

"In the early English translations it was translated for Beowulf as 'hero' and for Grendel as 'monster,' and for Grendel's mother as 'wretch of a woman' or 'hag,' " Headley says. "But it's the same word."

That didn't sit well - particularly the characterization of Grendel's mother. "She's a woman with a sword," Headley explains. "She's a woman who fights. ... She's a noble woman. But none of that ends up in the translation because that's not as good a story for our culture."

Headley suspects the word really means "formidable" or "awe-inspiring" - and that's the picture she hopes to paint in The Mere Wife, a modern retelling of the Old English epic, set in the American suburbs.

Interview Highlights
On the way errors get compounded over centuries of translation
The translations in the 20th century of Beowulf are really wrong upon wrong. ... The way that the translations have run - they've been mostly male translators looking back and thinking, OK, well, I read that guy's translation and he's really a major scholar, he's really smart.

The translations in the 20th century of 'Beowulf' are really wrong upon wrong.

In the case of [J. R. R.] Tolkien, for example, who studied Beowulf for 40 years - he was working on a translation for a very long time and obviously he's brilliant - but he really received the idea that Grendel's mother was a monster and it was tempting to him. And I think that a lot of people went back and looked at his work and thought, well, he would know.
On focusing her story around the character of Grendel's mother
Grendel's mother is way more hardcore than Grendel is. She is amazing with a sword. She's really strong and Beowulf has to get very armored up in order to fight her - and he kind of only wins by luck. ...

No one had really written a book about Grendel's mother. We have John Gardner's Grendel which is from the [point of view] of Grendel ... but in that book Grendel's mother is kind of a furry beast who doesn't even have any language. Grendel is brilliant and his mother is ... a monster. So I was interested in taking this in a different direction and portraying Grendel's mother as a human.
On her suburban adaptation, in which Grendel's mother is a veteran named Dana Mills
She has pretty bad PTSD. She doesn't know exactly what happened to her in the war. She's been kidnapped and held and has returned back into society. ... She is pregnant and she doesn't know how she got pregnant. ... She runs back to where she came from ... and around the mountain is a new development called Herot Hall which is a gated community which has taken over the place where Dana grew up. So she ends up living in a cave on the mountain which is overlooking this fancy, shiny gated community. ... She gives birth to her son and has - for many good reasons - a lot of fear about their place in the world and whether or not they will be able to be integrated with society at all. ... So they are in isolation but looking down at the sort of glittering capitalist grandeur of America.
On police officer Ben Woolf, the Beowulf character
The world is so full of profound injustice to young people of color ... in this book Dana Mills and her son Gren are both people of color. ... I started writing this book in 2015 looking at every headline, thinking, how are we still here?

Ben Woolf, the Beowulf character, is based very much in the original Beowulf. He's a soldier, he's a veteran, he's become a police officer - he wants glory. And I think the story of Beowulf is a story about a man who wants glory. He comes as a mercenary to kill monsters. ... He wants to be respected as a strong, good man. ... I thought, OK, what equivalents do we have in contemporary American society?
On adapting the role of the wife of Hrothgar, King of the Danes, to Willa - a wealthy woman living in the subdivision
She's a suburban housewife who's sort of holding the glamour of suburbia together. ... I was interested in writing about the ways in which female roles are sort of doubled down upon. ... We now have the lovely housewife role which [thanks to social media] is hashtagged and ... filtered to make it look even more perfect and perfect to excess. ...

Dana Mills has none of that. She's living just on ... trapped animals, she doesn't have electricity. She's living in a very survivalist kind of fashion on this mountain without any of the accouterments of modern American society. I'm interested in looking at the juxtaposition between extreme class imbalances that are right next to each other in this country.

Many of these canonical texts have been kind of misinterpreted as just exclusively masculine when really many of them are about love ...
On working on her own translation of
This text has long been perceived as a masculine text. It's been perceived as: Oh that's about men and war. But I think this text is as much about domesticity ... it's a text about home as much as anything. ... A story about: How do we live amongst other people? How do we live as neighbors? ...

People often interpret our work [the work of women] as: Oh, they're just writing about the small domesticity, the little stories of the home. And I think so many of the big stories are the big stories of the home. I think that many of these canonical texts have been kind of misinterpreted as just exclusively masculine when really many of them are about love, and about how to sustain it, and how to sustain life with a family. I am interested in that perspective and scholarship. I'm interested in women coming in and saying: Here's what I see that maybe you didn't see.
Hiba Ahmad and Barrie Hardymon produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.

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Beowulf In The Suburbs? 'The Mere Wife' Is An Epic Retelling

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There's a vitally important word in the epic tale of Beowulf and, according to Maria Dahvana Headley, it's been translated incorrectly for a very long time. The word is aglæca/æglæca - no one's entirely sure how to pronounce it - and, as Headley explains, that same word is used to describe Beowulf and his three antagonists: Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon.

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Is school violence the fault of outcasts or their tormentors? 

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Is school violence the fault of outcasts or their tormentors? 

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Is school violence the fault of outcasts or their tormentors?

(April 21, 1999 6:39 p.m. EDT Nando Times http://www.nandotimes.com )

A 13-year-old is tortured, teased and ridiculed by classmates. Boys spit at him and push him, knowing that he will not fight back. Cheerleaders gift-wrap used tampons and give them to this "nerd" as mock presents.

This social outcast's only comfort is going with his grandfather to the shooting range for target practice on weekly expeditions.

Wait a minute, you might be saying at this point: This sounds like our next potential school killer, ready to take revenge on his classmates toward the end of a hellish school year. But this year is 1978 and this "nerd" thought of no other plan of action except to commit suicide, fall into deep depression or just go "plain crazy."

He survived, but his even more unpopular friend succumbed to the torture. Unlike the "Trench Coat Mafia," whose members' names will be shouted around the electronic village, no one remembers the name of a boy at that small-town high school in Tennessee in 1978 who was bullied and teased so regularly that he finally doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. It never made the national news.

Fast forward to 1999. Gone are the days of the long-suffering nerd who turned his feelings of rage inward and committed suicide. Today's kids have obviously learned that as long as they are the only ones in pain, little is done to improve the situation. Taking others with you, on the other hand, gets attention and even inspires emulation. As one survivor of the Springfield, Ore., school shooting said: The only time that society pays attention to 16-year-olds is when they pick up a gun.

The rest of the time, teachers and school administrators mostly want kids to not make waves. In my work as a forensic psychologist, I have talked with many adult patients who tell me that teachers and parents often just told them to ignore the bullies and not to fight back. I have seen how this solution works firsthand.

A few years ago, I was a consulting psychologist at a high school where one of my first patients was a depressed girl. This 14-year-old was a self-described nerd and "social outcast" who informed me she was depressed because a gang of girls at the school were bullying and threatening her on a regular basis. When I informed the school authorities of these findings, their reaction was, unfortunately, typical: Rather than go after this gang of girls, their solution was to send the depressed girl to an "alternative" school to finish out her high school years.

The girl gang, meanwhile, got off scot-free, ready to find another victim. They, along with the school administration, didn't have to change a thing. Only the victim suffered - and, quite obviously, nobody cared about her so long as she represented the path of least resistance. This of course, has been the fate of nerds since time immemorial.

But something has changed.

Nowadays, for whatever reason, these same nerds and social outcasts no longer feel they must suffer through their adolescent years in depression and humiliation and anonymity. They no longer have to feel that they are "nobodies" who desperately want to be "somebodies."

Finally, they can let others know the extent of their feelings by taking an arsenal of guns to school and "blowing their classmates away" in a Stallone-like scene of mayhem and firepower. When a depressed teen commits suicide, it barely makes the local news. But their classmates, the whole town - with the help of the media - the nation will never forget the names of these school killers: Luke Woodham, Kip Kinkel, Michael Carneal, and, now, the "Trench Coat Mafia."

I remember the trial of Woodham, who opened fire at his high school in Pearl, Miss. At his trial, Woodham told jurors he "didn't have much of a home life after his parents separated and was something of an 'outcast' at school." He said the first acceptance he had found was with a classmate, Christina. When they broke up a year before the shootings, he was devastated. He finally became involved with Satanism to gain some control over his feelings of loss. "One second I was some kind of heartbroken idiot and the next second I had power over many things."

From powerlessness to power, from despised outcast to national celebrityhood in a culture where celebrityhood is everything. It's easy to see what these school killers get out of their outrages.

But without suggesting that their actions are justified - because they're absolutely not - it isn't hard to understand their actions.

Tragedy, yes.

Senseless tragedy, no.

As the 13-year-old nerd I mentioned at the beginning - now a successful professional with bad memories of junior high - notes: "What's amazing isn't how many of these shootings there are, but how few."

These high-profile national tragedies mask a much lower profile tragedy of equal or greater proportions: Thousands, maybe millions, of ruined lives and miserable teen years.

As our schools try "zero tolerance" programs to keep out weapons, maybe they should consider zero tolerance for bullying, teasing and ostracism.

Not only would such a program probably do more to prevent school killings than the zero-tolerance program that failed to stop Kip Kinkel and the "Trench Coat Mafia," but also it would also improve the lives of the vast majority of nerds and outcasts who will never be killers.

Surely they deserve some attention too.

Published April 21, 1999 Nando Times http://www.nandotimes.com

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Violent Kids Information Site - Is school violence the fault of outcasts or their tormentors?

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Is school violence the fault of outcasts or their tormentors? (April 21, 1999 6:39 p.m. EDT Nando Times http://www.nandotimes.com ) A 13-year-old is tortured, teased and ridiculed by classmates. Boys spit at him and push him, knowing that he will not fight back. Cheerleaders gift-wrap used tampons and give them to this "nerd" as mock presents.

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The Exeter Book and The Seafarer and The Wanderer

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The Exeter Book and The Seafarer and The Wanderer

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Insignificance?

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From the crises in the Middle East to mass shootings in U.S. schools to the reckless striving for wealth and world domination, there is one overarching theme that almost never gets media coverage-the sense of insignificance that drives destructive acts. As a depth psychologist with many years of experience, I can say emphatically that the sense of being crushed, humiliated and existentially unimportant are the main factors behind so much that we call psychopathology.

Why would it not follow that the same factors are at play in social and cultural upheavals? The emerging science of "terror management theory" shows convincingly that when people feel unimportant they equate those feelings with dying-and they will do everything they can, including becoming extreme and destructive themselves to avoid that feeling.

The sense of insignificance and death anxiety have been shown to play a key role in everything from terrorism to mass shootings to extremist religious and political ideologies to obsessions with materialism and wealth. Just about all that is violent and corrupt in our world seems connected to it.

So before we rush to judgment about the basis of violence in our world, we would do well to heed the terror management theorists and consider missing pieces of the puzzle. Economic, ideological and biological explanations take us only so far in unpacking the bewildering phenomenon of slaughtering people in cold blood, or playing recklessly with their health, safety or livelihoods. Granted, some violence is defensive and perhaps necessary to protect the lives of sovereign individuals and states. But too often violence is provocative, and when it becomes so betrays a common thread of psychological destitution-the sense of insignificance, the sense of not counting, of helplessness, and of emotional devaluation. We have stories daily about both lone gunmen and soldiers who seek vengeance and "prestige" to cover over their cultural and emotional wounds. Correspondingly, such stories parallel the kind of psychopathy of some in the corporate sector who speculate, pollute and militarize at will.

How do we prevent such terrorizing cycles from continuing to arise? How do we transform people who feel so utterly estranged and stripped of value that they are willing to do virtually anything to redress perceived injustices? That transformation is not likely to occur through political or military coercion (as is now being contemplated in Iraq), nor through the ingestion of pills nor anger management programs (as was the case with several mass shooters), nor through the usual hand-wringing about stricter gun laws and increased diplomacy, which are imperative, but don't go far enough.

What is needed is no less than a "moral equivalent of war," to echo the philosopher William James, but at a fraction of the cost. The rampant sense of insignificance needs to be addressed at its root, and not with simplistic bromides. This means that alongside providing affordable short-term public mental health services, we also need to provide affordable long-term, in-depth mental health services. Such services would emphasize the transformative power of deeply supportive, subtly attuned relationships over short-term palliatives and would likely be life-changing (as well as life-saving) in their impact.

We could (and should) also provide cadres of group facilitators to optimize encounters between people in power. These encounters could include heads of state, members of diplomatic corps and legislators. Such facilitators could be schooled in well-established approaches to mediation, such as nonviolent communications, and would likely be pivotal in the settlement of intractable disputes. While the most hardened extremists may be unreachable, there are many others who might surprise us and engage the opportunity.

There is no theoretical reason why such practices would not work with the appropriate adaptations; we see these practices work every day in our clinics and consulting rooms, and often with the most challenging personalities.

The range of violent upheaval in the world is alarming. The quick fix, militarist solutions to this problem are faltering. In many cases, they are making situations worse (as we have seen with recent military operations). The time for a change in societal consciousness is at hand. By focusing our resources on the root of the problem, the many people who feel they don't count, we not only bolster individual and collective lives, we provide a model that others will find difficult to ignore.

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Why Are Humans Violent? The Psychological Reason We Hurt Each Other

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Terror management theorists explain how when we feel small and humiliated, we'll do anything to feel big. From the crises in the Middle East to mass shootings in U.S. schools to the reckless striving for wealth and world domination, there is one overarching theme that almost never gets media coverage-the sense of insignificance that drives destructive acts.

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The Root of All Cruelty?Perpetrators of violence, we’re told, dehumanize their victims. The truth is worse.

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The Root of All Cruelty?Perpetrators of violence, we’re told, dehumanize their victims. The truth is worse.

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Poor Grendel

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A recent episode of the dystopian television series "Black Mirror" begins with a soldier hunting down and killing hideous humanoids called roaches. It's a standard science-fiction scenario, man against monster, but there's a twist: it turns out that the soldier and his cohort have brain implants that make them see the faces and bodies of their targets as monstrous, to hear their pleas for mercy as noxious squeaks. When our hero's implant fails, he discovers that he isn't a brave defender of the human race-he's a murderer of innocent people, part of a campaign to exterminate members of a despised group akin to the Jews of Europe in the nineteen-forties.

The philosopher David Livingstone Smith, commenting on this episode on social media, wondered whether its writer had read his book " Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others " (St. Martin's). It's a thoughtful and exhaustive exploration of human cruelty, and the episode perfectly captures its core idea: that acts such as genocide happen when one fails to appreciate the humanity of others.

One focus of Smith's book is the attitudes of slave owners; the seventeenth-century missionary Morgan Godwyn observed that they believed the Negroes, "though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men " but, rather, "Creatures destitute of Souls, to be ranked among Brute Beasts, and treated accordingly." Then there's the Holocaust. Like many Jews my age, I was raised with stories of gas chambers, gruesome medical experiments, and mass graves-an evil that was explained as arising from the Nazis' failure to see their victims as human. In the words of the psychologist Herbert C. Kelman, "The inhibitions against murdering fellow human beings are generally so strong that the victims must be deprived of their human status if systematic killing is to proceed in a smooth and orderly fashion." The Nazis used bureaucratic euphemisms such as "transfer" and "selection" to sanitize different forms of murder.

As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss noted, "humankind ceases at the border of the tribe, of the linguistic group, even sometimes of the village." Today, the phenomenon seems inescapable. Google your favorite despised human group-Jews, blacks, Arabs, gays, and so on-along with words like "vermin," "roaches," or "animals," and it will all come spilling out. Some of this rhetoric is seen as inappropriate for mainstream discourse. But wait long enough and you'll hear the word "animals" used even by respectable people, referring to terrorists, or to Israelis or Palestinians, or to undocumented immigrants, or to deporters of undocumented immigrants. Such rhetoric shows up in the speech of white supremacists-but also when the rest of us talk about white supremacists.

It's not just a matter of words. At Auschwitz, the Nazis tattooed numbers on their prisoners' arms. Throughout history, people have believed that it was acceptable to own humans, and there were explicit debates in which scholars and politicians mulled over whether certain groups (such as blacks and Native Americans) were "natural slaves." Even in the past century, there were human zoos, where Africans were put in enclosures for Europeans to gawk at.

Early psychological research on dehumanization looked at what made the Nazis different from the rest of us. But psychologists now talk about the ubiquity of dehumanization. Nick Haslam, at the University of Melbourne, and Steve Loughnan, at the University of Edinburgh, provide a list of examples, including some painfully mundane ones: "Outraged members of the public call sex offenders animals. Psychopaths treat victims merely as means to their vicious ends. The poor are mocked as libidinous dolts. Passersby look through homeless people as if they were transparent obstacles. Dementia sufferers are represented in the media as shuffling zombies."

The thesis that viewing others as objects or animals enables our very worst conduct would seem to explain a great deal. Yet there's reason to think that it's almost the opposite of the truth.

At some European soccer games, fans make monkey noises at African players and throw bananas at them. Describing Africans as monkeys is a common racist trope, and might seem like yet another example of dehumanization. But plainly these fans don't really think the players are monkeys; the whole point of their behavior is to disorient and humiliate. To believe that such taunts are effective is to assume that their targets would be ashamed to be thought of that way-which implies that, at some level, you think of them as people after all.

Consider what happened after Hitler annexed Austria, in 1938. Timothy Snyder offers a haunting description in " Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning ":

The next morning the "scrubbing parties" began. Members of the Austrian SA, working from lists, from personal knowledge, and from the knowledge of passersby, identified Jews and forced them to kneel and clean the streets with brushes. This was a ritual humiliation. Jews, often doctors and lawyers or other professionals, were suddenly on their knees performing menial labor in front of jeering crowds. Ernest P. remembered the spectacle of the "scrubbing parties" as "amusement for the Austrian population." A journalist described "the fluffy Viennese blondes, fighting one another to get closer to the elevating spectacle of the ashen-faced Jewish surgeon on hands and knees before a half-dozen young hooligans with Swastika armlets and dog-whips." Meanwhile, Jewish girls were sexually abused, and older Jewish men were forced to perform public physical exercise.

The Jews who were forced to scrub the streets-not to mention those subjected to far worse degradations-were not thought of as lacking human emotions. Indeed, if the Jews had been thought to be indifferent to their treatment, there would have been nothing to watch here; the crowd had gathered because it wanted to see them suffer. The logic of such brutality is the logic of metaphor: to assert a likeness between two different things holds power only in the light of that difference. The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not.

What about violence more generally? Some evolutionary psychologists and economists explain assault, rape, and murder as rational actions, benefitting the perpetrator or the perpetrator's genes. No doubt some violence-and a reputation for being willing and able to engage in violence-can serve a useful purpose, particularly in more brutal environments. On the other hand, much violent behavior can be seen as evidence of a loss of control. It's Criminology 101 that many crimes are committed under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and that people who assault, rape, and murder show less impulse control in other aspects of their lives as well. In the heat of passion, the moral enormity of the violent action loses its purchase.

But " Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships " (Cambridge), by the anthropologist Alan Fiske and the psychologist Tage Rai, argues that these standard accounts often have it backward. In many instances, violence is neither a cold-blooded solution to a problem nor a failure of inhibition; most of all, it doesn't entail a blindness to moral considerations. On the contrary, morality is often a motivating force: "People are impelled to violence when they feel that to regulate certain social relationships, imposing suffering or death is necessary, natural, legitimate, desirable, condoned, admired, and ethically gratifying." Obvious examples include suicide bombings, honor killings, and the torture of prisoners during war, but Fiske and Rai extend the list to gang fights and violence toward intimate partners. For Fiske and Rai, actions like these often reflect the desire to do the right thing, to exact just vengeance, or to teach someone a lesson. There's a profound continuity between such acts and the punishments that-in the name of requital, deterrence, or discipline-the criminal-justice system lawfully imposes. Moral violence, whether reflected in legal sanctions, the killing of enemy soldiers in war, or punishing someone for an ethical transgression, is motivated by the recognition that its victim is a moral agent, someone fully human.

In the fiercely argued and timely study " Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny" (Oxford), the philosopher Kate Manne makes a consonant argument about sexual violence. "The idea of rapists as monsters exonerates by caricature," she writes, urging us to recognize "the banality of misogyny," the disturbing possibility that "people may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhuman ways are fellow human beings, underneath a more or less thin veneer of false consciousness."

Manne is arguing against a weighty and well-established school of thought. Catharine A. MacKinnon has posed the question: "When will women be human?" Rae Langton has explored the idea of sexual solipsism, a doubt that women's minds exist. And countless theorists talk about "objectification," the tendency to deny women's autonomy and subjecthood, and to scant their experiences. Like Fiske and Rai, Manne sees a larger truth in the opposite tendency. In misogyny, she argues, "often, it's not a sense of women's humanity that is lacking. Her humanity is precisely the problem."

Men, she proposes, have come to expect certain things from women-attention, admiration, sympathy, solace, and, of course, sex and love. Misogyny is the mind-set that polices and enforces these goals; it's the "law enforcement branch" of the patriarchy. The most obvious example of this attitude is the punishing of "bad women," where being bad means failing to give men what they want. But misogyny also involves rewarding women who do conform, and sympathizing with men (Manne calls this "himpathy") who have done awful things to women.

As a case study of misogyny, Manne considers strangulation-almost always performed by men on female intimate partners-which she describes as "a demonstration of authority and domination," a form of torture that often leaves no marks. Other forms of expressive violence are very much intended to leave marks, notably "vitriolage," or acid attacks, directed against girls and women in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Catalysts for such attacks include refusal of marriage, sex, and romance. Then, there are so-called family annihilators, almost always men, who kill their families and, typically, themselves. Often, the motivation is shame, but sometimes hatred is a factor as well; and sometimes the mother of murdered children is left alive, perhaps notified by phone or a letter afterward- See what you've made me do. The victim is also the audience; her imagined response figures large in the perpetrator's imagination.

Manne delves into the case of Elliot Rodger, who, in 2014, went on a killing spree, targeting people at random, after he was denied entry to a sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He slew six people and injured fourteen more before killing himself. In a videotape, Rodger, who was twenty-two, explained that women "gave their affection and sex and love to other men but never to me." And then, talking to these women, he said, "I will punish you all for it . . . . I'll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you."

Manne makes clear that Rodger wasn't objectifying women; he was simply enraged that their capacity for love and romance didn't extend to him. Manne's analysis can be seen as an exploration of an observation made by Margaret Atwood-that men are afraid that women will laugh at them, and women are afraid that men will kill them. For Manne, such violent episodes are merely an extreme manifestation of everyday misogyny, and she extends her analysis to catcalling, attitudes toward abortion, and the predations of Donald Trump.

Nor are the mechanisms she identifies confined to misogyny. The aggressions licensed by moral entitlement, the veneer of bad faith: those things are evident in a wide range of phenomena, from slaveholders' religion-tinctured justifications to the Nazi bureaucrats' squeamishness about naming the activity they were organizing, neither of which would have been necessary if the oppressors were really convinced that their victims were beasts.

If the worst acts of cruelty aren't propelled by dehumanization, not all dehumanization is accompanied by cruelty. Manne points out that there's nothing wrong with a surgeon viewing her patients as mere bodies when they're on the operating table; in fact, it's important for doctors not to have certain natural reactions-anger, moral disgust, sexual desire-when examining patients. The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum has given the example of using your sleeping partner's stomach as a pillow when lying in bed, and goes on to explore the more fraught case of objectification during sexual intercourse, suggesting that there's nothing inherently wrong about this so long as it is consensual and restricted to the bedroom.

As a philosopher, Manne grounds her arguments in more technical literature, and at one point she emphasizes the connection between her position and the Oxford philosopher P. F. Strawson's theory of "reactive attitudes." Strawson argued that, when we're dealing with another person as a person, we can't help experiencing such attitudes as admiration and gratitude, resentment and blame. You generally don't feel this way toward rocks or rodents. Acknowledging the humanity of another, then, has its risks, and these are neatly summarized by Manne, who notes that seeing someone as a person makes it possible for that person to be a true friend or beloved spouse, but it also makes it possible for people to be "an intelligible rival, enemy, usurper, insubordinate, betrayer, etc." She goes on:

Moreover, in being capable of rationality, agency, autonomy, and judgment, they are also someone who could coerce, manipulate, humiliate, or shame you. In being capable of abstract relational thought and congruent moral emotions, they are capable of thinking ill of you and regarding you contemptuously. In being capable of forming complex desires and intentions, they are capable of harboring malice and plotting against you. In being capable of valuing, they may value what you abhor and abhor what you value. They may hence be a threat to all that you cherish.

If there's something missing from these approaches to violence, it's attention to first-person attitudes, how we think about ourselves as moral agents. I can resent someone, but I can also feel shame at how I treated him or her. Fiske and Rai sometimes write as if the paradigm of moralistic violence were the final scene of the movie in which our hero blows away the terrorist or the serial killer or the rapist-a deeply satisfying act that has everyone cheering. But what about doubt and ambivalence? Some fathers who severely beat their misbehaving children, or some soldiers who engage in "punitive rape," are confident in the moral rightness of their acts. But some aren't. Real moral progress may involve studying the forms of doubt and ambivalence that sometimes attend acts of brutality.

In a masterly and grim book, " One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps " (Little, Brown), Andrea Pitzer articulates some of the perplexities of her subject. A concentration camp exists, she says, whenever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process, and nearly all nations have had them. They can be the most savage places on earth, but this isn't an essential feature. During the Second World War, American camps for the Japanese weren't nearly as terrible as camps in Germany and the Soviet Union. There are even some camps that began with noble intentions, such as refugee camps set up to provide food and shelter-though they tend to worsen over time, evolving into what Pitzer describes as "permanent purgatory."

When concentration camps are established, they are usually said to exist to protect the larger population from some suspect group, or to be part of a civilizing message, or to be a way to restrain some group of civilians from supporting hostile forces. From this perspective, concentration camps are a means to an end, an example of instrumental violence. Typically, though, the camps do have a punitive aspect. Pitzer tells of how, after the First World War, Bavaria's Social Democratic premier, Kurt Eisner, was slow to demand that Germans be released from French and British camps; he wished instead to appeal to the Allies' sense of humanity. Eisner was Jewish, and Hitler fumed about this "betrayal" in a speech in 1922, saying that the Jews should learn "how it feels to live in concentration camps!"

Certainly, Pitzer's description of various concentration camps contains so many examples of cruelty and degradation that it's impossible to see them as a mere failure to acknowledge the humanity of their victims. As the scholar of warfare Johannes Lang has observed of the Nazi death camps, "What might look like the dehumanization of the other is instead a way to exert power over another human."

The limitations of the dehumanization thesis are hardly good news. There has always been something optimistic about the idea that our worst acts of inhumanity are based on confusion. It suggests that we could make the world better simply by having a clearer grasp of reality-by deactivating those brain implants, or their ideological equivalent. The truth may be harder to accept: that our best and our worst tendencies arise precisely from seeing others as human. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the November 27, 2017, issue, with the headline "Beastly."

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A recent episode of the dystopian television series "Black Mirror" begins with a soldier hunting down and killing hideous humanoids called roaches. It's a standard science-fiction scenario, man against monster, but there's a twist: it turns out that the soldier and his cohort have brain implants that make them see the faces and bodies of their targets as monstrous, to hear their pleas for mercy as noxious squeaks.

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Blob: An Irreverent and Insightful Modern Fable About Beauty, Ugliness, the Paths to Acceptance, and How Admiration Hijacks Our Sense of SelfA playful and profound tale about the struggle for belonging.

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Blob: An Irreverent and Insightful Modern Fable About Beauty, Ugliness, the Paths to Acceptance, and How Admiration Hijacks Our Sense of SelfA playful and profound tale about the struggle for belonging.

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"Worshipped today, scorned or even crucified tomorrow," Albert Einstein wrote in contemplating the fickleness of fame, "that is the fate of people whom - God knows why - the bored public has taken possession of." And indeed the public itself often knows not why it has taken possession of those whom it inflates before deflating with the same rapaciousness and rapidity - such is the arbitrary and fleeting nature of popular favor in its gruesome modern guise of celebrity. "Success is the pageantry of genius," Germaine de Staël wrote in her pioneering eighteenth-century treatise on happiness, but in the twenty-first century celebrity has become the simulacrum of success and visibility the simulacrum of genius.

An irreverent, insightful, and surprisingly touching parody of this vacant pageantry comes in Blob: The Ugliest Animal in the World (public library) by French writer-illustrator couple Joy Sorman and Olivier Tallec, translated by Sarah Klinger - the story of Blob the Fish, his unrelenting quest to win the world's premier ugliness pageant, and his struggle to cope with the loneliness of celebrity and the suddenness with which fame courts and abandons its victims.

There is something charmingly subversive about the very premise, as paradoxical as the idea of trying to fail at failure. There is also something profound in the questions it raises about our civilizational fascination with beauty and its counterpoint - what does it really mean to be ugly, and was Emerson correct in asserting that "the secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting"? When ugliness itself becomes a point of interest, a point of contest, it begins to take on the superficialities reserved for the cult of beauty - a cult which, as Harvard cognitive scientist Nancy Etcoff has noted, is "entwined with our deepest conflicts surrounding flesh and spirit."

With his unshapely flesh, Blob the Fish is decidedly unbeautiful. But he has spent his life trying to wrest from his ugliness a path to acceptance, even to adoration: Every year for many years, Blob has left his home in the deep coastal waters of Australia's Pacific Ocean, boarded a boat to a train to a plane clad in a spy-like coat and brimmed hat "to avoid frightening the other passengers" with his ugliness, and journeyed to compete in the esteemed contest for the world's ugliest animal.

Every year so far, Blob has lost.

Sorman writes:

The first time Blob entered the contest, he was upstaged by a frog from Lake Titicaca. The second time, he was beaten by a Kakapo parakeet - a bird so awkward and dumpy it couldn't even fly. The third time, a Sea Pig won gold. And Blob, both proud and sensitive, was outraged at the injustice of it all.

It enraged Blob not to be recognized for his true worth. When a member of the jury called him "more darling and adorable than ugly and repulsive," he felt even worse, and he almost blew his top at the judge's offer to adopt him as a pet. How horrifying! How shameful!

The illustrations by Tallec, who has given us such immeasurably sympathetic treasures as Big Wolf & Little Wolf and This Is a Poem That Heals Fish, lend the humorous story a lovely dimension of tenderness. Blob comes alive as a sensitive creature of contradictions - full of determination yet easily given to dejection, a living fable of ego and insecurity, easy to fault but also easy to love.

Wearied by his many near-misses, Blob resolves to win the pageant this year. When the announcer introduces "his formidably formless physique, and his sad and sheepish demeanor," Blob can feel he is about to have his moment. And so he does - he beats out the Bald Ukari Monkey, the Naked Mole Rat, and the Vietnamese Leaf-Nosed Bat, earning the crown of the "Ugliest Animal in the World."

Thunderous applause erupts. Rose petals and confetti rain down. A young boy approaches Blob with a crown of diamonds, which squeaks quietly against his scaly head.

Immediately, Blob is elevated to the status of global celebrity and plunged into an unimagined life. He becomes the spokesperson for ugly animals, walks red carpets between bodyguards, and indulges hoards of autograph-hunters. Fans rub his body for good luck. Famous designers dress him, famous rappers pose with him. He carries the torch at the opening ceremony of the Olympics. The Queen of England invites him to tea.

In a wonderful stroke of cultural conscience, Sorman slips into the lighthearted fictional story a point of serious real-world significance:

Blob delivers a lengthy speech on climate change at the UN, arguing that it threatens humans as much as the world's ugliest. He talks about the destruction of the seabed, where he makes his home.

But all of this attention begins to poison Blob's character - he becomes a diva, makes outrageous demands for caviar and private jets, throws legendary tantrums. All the while, he is lonely and gnawed by the awareness that his fame is fleeting - since animals are allowed to compete only once, next year's contest will confer the coveted title upon another, ejecting Blob from celebrity and returning him to his plain old self. "This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?" the young Tolstoy wrote in his diary - questions Blob no longer knows how to answer, having lost the essence of his self in his ephemeral public persona.

Under Tallec's subtle brush, we see a difficult realization dawn on Blob - privilege is bestowed largely by chance and little of actual substance separates the most fortunate from the least fortunate.

Blob sinks into a deep depression.

When the day of the next contest arrives, his reign comes to its expected end - the cameras descend upon another ugly creature as Blob, uncrowned and unregarded, heads home to the deep seabed, this time unshrouded by hat and overcoat on his voyage, hoping some remnant fan would recognize him.

Looking back on his improbable ascent to celebrity from the remove of 3,000 feet below the surface of the ocean, Blob - whose ugliness remains his own even without the world's prized distinction - can suddenly see that the trappings of fame are "far from beautiful."

Blob comes from Brooklyn-based independent powerhouse Enchanted Lion Books, publisher of such thoughtful and tender gems as Cry, Heart, But Never Break, The Lion and the Bird, , and The Paper-Flower Tree.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books. Photographs by Maria Popova.

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Blob: An Irreverent and Insightful Modern Fable About Beauty, Ugliness, the Paths to Acceptance, and How Admiration Hijacks Our Sense of Self

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"Worshipped today, scorned or even crucified tomorrow," Albert Einstein wrote in contemplating the fickleness of fame, "that is the fate of people whom - God knows why - the bored public has taken possession of."

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The Psychology of Evil

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TED and The Huffington Post are excited to bring you TEDWeekends, a curated weekend program that introduces a powerful "idea worth spreading" every Friday, anchored in an exceptional TEDTalk. This week's TEDTalk is accompanied by an original blog post from the featured speaker, along with new op-eds, thoughts and responses from the HuffPost community. Watch the talk above, read the blog post and tell us your thoughts below. Become part of the conversation!

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EVIL: How and why do good people turn evil?

VERSUS

GOOD: How can ordinary people be inspired to act heroically?

These two questions have been challenging me since I was a kid, and finally after many decades, I have discovered answers that I need to share with everyone who might care about these fundamental issues about Human Nature.

Growing up in poverty in the inner city of the South Bronx, New York City, means that I, like all such kids similarly situated everywhere in the world, was surrounded by evil. There were and are always hustlers, guys who make a living by getting good kids to do bad things for a little money, like steal, run drugs, sell their bodies, and worse. Why did some kids give in and start down that slippery slope of evil, while others resisted and stayed on the right side of that line separating good from evil?

As a religious little Catholic kid, I dutifully prayed to God to help me resist such daily temptation and deliver me from evil, it was hard to really count on God having the time to check out what was happening around 1005 E. 151 St. There were wars to attend to, Hitler to be contained, hurricane victims needing help, and Communists to be converted. So I reasoned I had to be more self-reliant and band with buddies I could trust to provide strength in our numbers against those perpetrators of evil. And it worked for some of us.

This concern continued for much of my life, until, as a research psychologist, I reasoned the best way to understand evil, was to go beyond theological analyses, philosophical discourses and dramatic renditions, to actually "create" evil in order to understand its dynamics from the inside out. My classmate from James Monroe High School in the Bronx, Stanley Milgram, had set a workable agenda for doing so through his pioneering investigation of Obedience to Authority back in 1963. His experimental research at Yale University quantified evil in a novel way: how many volts of electric shock would someone administer to an innocent victim when an authority figure ordered him or her to take such action that went against conscience. His findings shocked the world: The vast majority of participants, ordinary adult citizens, two of every three, went all the way down the 30 switches on the shock generator from an insignificant initial mere 15 volts, increasing incrementally by 15 more volts, until they got to 450 volts. Danger! Potentially lethal!

Although the research participants, acting as Teachers punishing their Learners for their errors -- to ostensibly help improve their memory -- believed their learner-victim was being shocked from the screams heard over the speakers, the learner was actually a confederate with responses automated.

What is the lesson to be learned here? Bad people will inflict pain on innocent victims when given permission to do so. No.

Most ordinary, even good, people are vulnerable to subtle, pervasive situational forces when they are in new circumstances where usual, habitual ways of behaving are not relevant.

I took that message a step or two further in my 1971 study, known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Could a situation be created in which normal, healthy, intelligent college students inflict pain on their peers in the absence of any authority commanding their obedience? My "subjects" were two dozen students from all over the country who had just finished summer school in local colleges, chosen from among 75 who had answered an ad for a psychology study of prison life to run for up to two weeks. By random assignment, half became prisoners who lived in our simulated jail 24/7, while the others were guards working each of three eight-hour shifts. The sad sack prisoner uniforms, with their new identity numbers prominently displayed on their smocks, contrasted with the military-style uniforms of the guards who also displayed their various symbols of power. The situation created was a functional simulation of American prisons in many ways; in short, it was an "Evil Barrel" into which we put a bunch of "Good Apples," at least on day one.

We are training ordinary people on how to become everyday heroes by learning how to stand up, speak out and take wise and effective action in the challenging situations they face daily at home, school, business, community and nation. - Dr. Philip Zimbardo

Would an evil place that was populated with only good people dominate and corrupt them, or would humanity win out and keep them decent and caring despite such a situation? Within 36 hours, one of the normal, healthy college students had a severe emotional breakdown and had to be released from his prisoner role. On each of the next five days and nights, other prisoners broke down in similarly disturbing ways. I was forced to terminate this experiment, to shut down my prison after only 6 days; it had spun out of control.

Bad news in this particular contest between good and evil: evil 1, humanity 0.

My situation was a setting where institutionalized evil dominated. Rules, roles, uniforms, policies, group dynamics, arbitrary power differentials -- all within a physical context that gave legitimacy to the treatment of other people in dehumanizing ways. This metaphor of powerful guards dominating powerless prisoners is not limited to either my mock prison or real prisons, but can be seen in many settings: traditional marriages, mental hospitals, schools, military and business settings.

So the findings of the Milgram obedience experiments (in its 19 variants), combined with those of the Stanford Prison Experiment, reveal the extent to which human behavior can be situationally influenced, even dominated, in ways that we are reluctant to acknowledge. We all want to believe in the dignity of individual character and free will. That dignity is best served by recognizing our vulnerabilities and learning how to develop our "situational awareness," as a kind of ghetto "Street Smarts," in every context we enter. We can resist such powerful forces only by becoming savvy to the operation of myriad of social-situational forces in our lives, on the "dark side" (as our former VP Dick Cheney reminded us, this was the way we would deal with terrorists).

This allusion leads us to year 2004 and the horrific images of American soldiers, military prison guards, men and women, seen in their own photos torturing and degrading their Iraqi captives in Abu Ghraib Prison. Doing so all while smiling, with high fives all around. Who were these bad apples, disgracing not only the military but America's war effort to bring democracy, freedom and dignity to a people long dominated by a cruel dictator?

For me, I was as shocked as anyone, but I was also hardly surprised, because the visual parallels with my prison study seemed direct. I contended in many media interviews that I believed our soldiers were good apples that someone had put into a very bad barrel in that prison dungeon. I became an expert defense witness for one of those guards, in part to better understand how he and all the other MPs on his night shift on Tier 1-A could have perpetrated such terrible deeds. In that capacity, I had access to all the existing investigative reports and the full collection of the condemning photos. I believe I was able to show, to demonstrate, with a variety of evidence, how Sgt. Chip Frederick, like the other MPs, fell under the spell of a situation that was created by some "Bad Barrel Makers." This was a system of power that mismanaged the prison, combined with a narrow-minded military leadership and a war-focused presidential cabinet. All the MPs received dishonorable discharges, some with long prison sentences, while their officers were never tried. They did not even receive letters of reprimand for their "command complicity" in abuses that went on under their watch for three solid months.

I summarized all that I had learned about this torture center, as well as the first full presentation of the Stanford Prison Experiment in my 2008 book, The Lucifer Effect. That same year, I was invited to present my ideas (worth spreading) at the TED Conference. It was difficult to contain all these ideas into the tight, 18-minute limit that is the TED signature, despite practicing on the main stage earlier. I am a 60-minute academic dude, but I would try my best to squeeze into that slot. But, just as I was racing toward the end, shifting focus and asking the audience how ordinary people can act heroically, the bell sounded with no time on the clock.

I swear that I felt the audience simultaneously hold a collective inhalation. Just then my deus ex machina ascended the stage to tell the audience that he had heard the rehearsal and that what was coming was too important to stop now, so he would violate policy and allow me a few more minutes. With that temporal reprieve from Chris Anderson, TED major domo, the audience exhaled and I raced on for five more minutes with the good news ending: that it was possible to inspire people, especially our youth, to learn how to transform compassion into heroic action. Standing ovation.

Having nearly fainted from hyperventilating for talking faster than I ever had, I was happy just to be standing. Immediately after, many TEDsters encouraged me to develop the hero project more fully, to scale it up, to develop a non-profit, to start a foundation, a business. I even got seed funds from Pam and Pierre Omidyar, eBay founders, to do so, and I did.

I went on from this exhilarating experience to create a San Francisco based non-profit, The Heroic Imagination Project, HIP.

We are training ordinary people on how to become everyday heroes by learning how to stand up, speak out and take wise and effective action in the challenging situations they face daily at home, school, business, community and nation. We have developed a full educational program, based entirely on proven social psychological research in six areas, as well as a corporate leadership program designed to encourage heroic leadership. We are also doing and supporting others' research on the nature of heroism. Finally, we are planning a mobile phone app with daily exercises for all those who want to start on the bright path of becoming Heroes-In-Training. If we succeed, then, we will reverse the score: evil 0, humanity 1.

I need your help to make this mission into a national and international movement that has the potential to change the world for the better, one hero at a time.

I welcome sponsors and funders who believe that by working together we can all do it -- heroically.

Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TEDWeekends will highlight some of today's most intriguing ideas and allow them to develop in real time through your voice! Tweet #TEDWeekends to share your perspective or email tedweekends@hufﬁngtonpost.com to learn about future weekend's ideas to contribute as a writer.

This story appears in Issue 40 of our weekly iPad magazine, Huffington, in the iTunes App store, available Friday, March 15.

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TED and The Huffington Post are excited to bring you TEDWeekends, a curated weekend program that introduces a powerful "idea worth spreading" every Friday, anchored in an exceptional TEDTalk. This week's TEDTalk is accompanied by an original blog post from the featured speaker, along with new op-eds, thoughts and responses from the HuffPost community.

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uncharted territory 239-255

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Remember Milgram's classic experiment on obedience to authority? Anyone who's taken Psych 101 will recall the infamous 1963 study, in which participants were asked to administer increasingly painful electrical shocks to an innocent person.

The experiment, conducted by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, revealed that an overwhelming majority of people would follow orders to administer the maximum shock, even if they felt uncomfortable about hurting another person (who was actually an actor pretending to be in pain).

Milgram's disturbing findings have often been used to explain how ordinary people can be convinced to follow ruthless leaders like Hitler.

But new research is raising questions about Milgram's conclusion. Are most people really capable of such evil? And is it really in our nature to blindly obey authority, even when it means hurting others?

Milgram's study gave rise to as many questions as it answered. Until now, however, researchers have been unable to replicate the experiment in its full scope, largely because ethical standards have since been tightened. But a team of Australian and Scottish psychologists found a way to circumvent these ethical challenges, using a new technique called immersive digital realism, which asked a director and a group of actors to re-enact the Milgram experiment.

Milgram's Disturbing Findings: Milgram told his study participants, a group of healthy men in New Haven, Connecticut, that they were involved in research about the effects of punishment on learning. The participants took on the role of "the teacher," tasked with administering electric shocks of increasing voltage to another man, "the learner," whenever he erred on a word recognition task. The learner sat behind a curtain, not visible to the teacher.

Of course, unbeknown to the teacher, the learner was an actor hired by the research team, and didn't actually receive any shocks.
Check out this video to see footage from the famous experiment:
The results were surprising. Even when the learner cried out in pain, hysterically yelling, "Let me out!", 65 percent of the participants continued to raise the voltage, ultimately delivering the maximum shock of 450 volts (by pushing a button menacingly labeled "xxx").

Milgram concluded that it is in our nature to blindly obey orders, even when that means perpetrating acts of evil. "It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act," he said.

The Dramatic Re-enactment: For the new study, 14 actors were assigned different characters in a restaging of Milgram's experiment. After the tests, the actors were asked how much they identified with their character, "the experimenter" or "the learner."

The results mirrored Milgram's findings -- the majority of the actors were willing to administer painful shocks, especially when they identified more with the experimenter. However, when the experimenter tried to force them to administer the shock, most actors refused. This suggests that obedience was a matter of choice, and of deliberate allegiance to the experimenter and his cause.

"The more [the actor] identifies with the experimenter and his scientific goals -- and this is something that varies across different versions of the experiment -- the more likely they are to obey," Alex Haslam, a psychologist at the University of Queensland and one of the study's lead authors, told The Huffington Post in an email. "On the other hand, the more they identify with the learner (the victim) -- and this also varies -- the more likely they are to disobey."
Check out this description of the new experiment, courtesy of Vocativ:
What it all means: So, was Milgram right? Are we just zombie-like creatures who follow authority without question, even when it means hurting others?

Not necessarily. While the two experiments did yield similar results, the researchers who conducted the replication had a very different explanation for why this was the case.

"People have always understood Milgram's studies as showing that people are naturally inclined to follow orders," Haslam said. "They aren't. Whether or not they do is a choice, and this is predicated upon a belief in the cause they are being asked to pursue."

Haslam explained that rather than blindly following orders, most people do so because they come to identify with a particular leader and cause, which helps them justify pushing the proverbial button. So when we obey orders, we comply knowingly and willingly.

"People harm others when they are convinced that doing so is necessary to advance a noble cause -- the cause of the 'volk' in Nazi Germany, the cause of science in Milgram," co-author Stephen David Reicher, a psychologist at St. Andrews University in Scotland, said in an email to The Huffington Post. "The real problem is not that people are unaware that they are doing evil. Rather they think they are doing good."
Clarification: Language has been amended to reflect that while no subsequent experiments have replicated the Milgram's original experiments in their full scope, at least one 2009 study represented a "partial" replication.

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What 1960s Psychology Got Wrong About The Human Capacity For Evil

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Remember Milgram's classic experiment on obedience to authority? Anyone who's taken Psych 101 will recall the infamous 1963 study, in which participants were asked to administer increasingly painful electrical shocks to an innocent person.

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MM discusses who might be at fault in school shootings

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It is sad to think that the first few people on earth needed no books, movies, games or music to inspire cold-blooded murder. The day that Cain bashed his brother Abel's brains in, the only motivation he needed was his own human disposition to violence. Whether you interpret the Bible as literature or as the final word of whatever God may be, Christianity has given us an image of death and sexuality that we have based our culture around. A half-naked dead man hangs in most homes and around our necks, and we have just taken that for granted all our lives. Is it a symbol of hope or hopelessness? The world's most famous murder-suicide was also the birth of the death icon - the blueprint for celebrity. Unfortunately, for all of their inspiring morality, nowhere in the Gospels is intelligence praised as a virtue.

A lot of people forget or never realize that I started my band as a criticism of these very issues of despair and hypocrisy. The name Marilyn Manson has never celebrated the sad fact that America puts killers on the cover of Time magazine, giving them as much notoriety as our favorite movie stars. From Jesse James to Charles Manson, the media, since their inception, have turned criminals into folk heroes. They just created two new ones when they plastered those dip-shits Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris' pictures on the front of every newspaper. Don't be surprised if every kid who gets pushed around has two new idols.

We applaud the creation of a bomb whose sole purpose is to destroy all of mankind, and we grow up watching our president's brains splattered all over Texas. Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised. Does anyone think the Civil War was the least bit civil? If television had existed, you could be sure they would have been there to cover it, or maybe even participate in it, like their violent car chase of Princess Di. Disgusting vultures looking for corpses, exploiting, fucking, filming and serving it up for our hungry appetites in a gluttonous display of endless human stupidity.

When it comes down to who's to blame for the high school murders in Littleton, Colorado, throw a rock and you'll hit someone who's guilty. We're the people who sit back and tolerate children owning guns, and we're the ones who tune in and watch the up-to-the-minute details of what they do with them. I think it's terrible when anyone dies, especially if it is someone you know and love. But what is more offensive is that when these tragedies happen, most people don't really care any more than they Would about the season finale of Friends or The Real World. I was dumbfounded as I watched the media snake right in, not missing a teardrop, interviewing the parents of dead children, televising the funerals. Then came the witch hunt.

Man's greatest fear is chaos. It was unthinkable that these kids did not have a simple black-and-white reason for their actions. And so a scapegoat was needed. I remember hearing the initial reports from Littleton, that Harris and Klebold were wearing makeup and were dressed like Marilyn Manson, whom they obviously must worship, since they were dressed in black. Of course, speculation snowballed into making me the poster boy for everything that is bad in the world. These two idiots weren't wearing makeup, and they weren't dressed like me or like goths. Since Middle America has not heard of the music they did listen to (KMFDM and Rammstein, among others), the media picked something they thought was similar.

Responsible journalists have reported with less publicity that Harris and Klebold were not Marilyn Manson fans - that they even disliked my music. Even if they were fans, that gives them no excuse, nor does it mean that music is to blame. Did we look for James Huberty's inspiration when he gunned down people at McDonald's? What did Timothy McVeigh like to watch? What about David Koresh, Jim Jones? Do you think entertainment inspired Kip Kinkel, or should we blame the fact that his father bought him the guns he used in the Springfield, Oregon, murders? What inspires Bill Clinton to blow people up in Kosovo? Was it something that Monica Lewinsky said to him? Isn't killing just killing, regardless if it's in Vietnam or Jonesboro, Arkansas? Why do we justify one, just because it seems to be for the right reasons? Should there ever be a right reason? If a kid is old enough to drive a car or buy a gun, isn't he old enough to be held personally responsible for what he does with his car or gun? Or if he's a teenager, should someone else be blamed because he isn't as enlightened as an eighteen-year-old?

America loves to find an icon to hang its guilt on. But, admittedly, I have assumed the role of Antichrist; I am the Nineties voice of individuality, and people tend to associate anyone who looks and behaves differently with illegal or immoral activity. Deep down, most adults hate people who go against the grain. It's comical that people are naive enough to have forgotten Elvis, Jim Morrison and Ozzy so quickly. All of them were subjected to the same age-old arguments, scrutiny and prejudice. I wrote a song called "Lunchbox," and some journalists have interpreted it as a song about guns. Ironically, the song is about being picked on and fighting back with my Kiss lunch box, which I used as a weapon on the playground. In 1979, metal lunch boxes were banned because they were considered dangerous weapons in the hands of delinquents. I also wrote a song called "Get Your Gunn." The title is spelled with two n's because the song was a reaction to the murder of Dr. David Gunn, who was killed in Florida by pro-life activists while I was living there. That was the ultimate hypocrisy I witnessed growing up: that these people killed someone in the name of being "prolife." The somewhat positive messages of these songs are usually the ones that sensationalists misinterpret as promoting the very things I am decrying.

Right now, everyone is thinking of how they can prevent things like Littleton. How do you prevent AIDS, world war, depression, car crashes? We live in a free country, but with that freedom there is a burden of personal responsibility. Rather than teaching a child what is moral and immoral, right and wrong, we first and foremost can establish what the laws that govern us are. You can always escape hell by not believing in it, but you cannot escape death and you cannot escape prison.

It is no wonder that kids are growing up more cynical; they have a lot of information in front of them. They can see that they are living in a world that's made of bullshit. In the past, there was always the idea that you could turn and run and start something better. But now America has become one big mall, and because of the Internet and all of the technology we have, there's nowhere to run. People are the same everywhere. Sometimes music, movies and books are the only things that let us feel like someone else feels like we do. I've always tried to let people know it's OK, or better, if you don't fit into the program. Use your imagination - if some geck from Ohio can become something, why can't anyone else with the willpower and creativity?

I chose not to jump into the media frenzy and defend myself, though I was begged to be on every single TV show in existence. I didn't want to contribute to these fameseeking journalists and opportunists looking to fill their churches or to get elected because of their self-righteous finger-pointing. They want to blame entertainment? Isn't religion the first real entertainment? People dress up in costumes, sing songs and dedicate themselves in eternal fandom. Everyone will agree that nothing was more entertaining than Clinton shooting off his prick and then his bombs in true political form. And the news - that's obvious. So is entertainment to blame? I'd like media commentators to ask themselves, because their coverage of the event was some of the most gruesome entertainment any of us have seen. I think that the National Rifle Association is far too powerful to take on, so most people choose Doom, The Basketball Diaries or yours truly. This kind of controversy does not help me sell records or tickets, and I wouldn't want it to. I'm a controversial artist, one who dares to have an opinion and bothers to create music and videos that challenge people's ideas in a world that is watered-down and hollow. In my work I examine the America we live in, and I've always tried to show people that the devil we blame our atrocities on is really just each one of us. So don't expect the end of the world to come one day out of the blue - it's been happening every day for a long time.

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It is sad to think that the first few people on earth needed no books, movies, games or music to inspire cold-blooded murder. The day that Cain bashed his brother Abel's brains in, the only motivation he needed was his own human disposition to violence.

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The best way to get rid of evil is to change our ideas about it. The two concepts about evil that do nothing to end it are, first, the concept of cosmic evil embodied by Satan, and second, the concept of human evil as a permanent human inheritance, part of our nature.

If you Google the phrase "Americans believe in heaven," you find that about 90 percent do, with 75 percent believing in hell and 70 percent in the devil. Those statistics remain fairly uniform from poll to poll; it's strange that there's a drop off between heaven and hell since the two go together in the mind. However, it seems possible that believing in the devil is a matter of having nothing better to put in his place. Evil so perplexes people that attributing it to a cosmic Prince of Darkness provides some explanation at least. It saves the trouble of taking responsibility for evil ourselves.

As a practical matter Satan is all but useless. The number of people who have met him is minuscule. After coming back from near-death experiences, only a small fraction of reports picture hell and its torments; the vast majority experience a benign light and feel a divine presence. Perhaps this is a sign, psychologically or spiritually, that Satan is withering away --over 85 percent of Americans say that they expect to go to heaven, and fear of hell isn't used so intensely by organized religion to frighten children anymore.

Despite the prominent place that old-fashioned sin and the devil occupy in fundamentalism of every stripe, Satan has been culturally evolving over the years. Theologians now describe him as an archetype, myth, psychological projection, or a symptom of guilt and shame. It is indisputable that Satan rises and falls according to changing conditions in society, which means that evil is changing, too. Original sin, which once brought evil into the world as an inevitable birthright, has largely been replaced by evil as a psychological force, which means it has the potential to be treated as a mental disorder and healed.

Inherent evil, whether satanic or human, becomes more real under the following conditions:

-- People feel they deserve punishment instead of healing.
-- A culture believes in the Satan myth.
-- Believers pay attention to that myth and give it value.
-- Guilt is projected outward on to demons instead of healed inside.
-- Wrong-doing accumulates without a means for finding forgiveness, atonement, or purification.
-- Children are put in fear of demons and told that they have power.

Evil, satanic or psychological, becomes less real under the following conditions:

-- People feel they deserve healing instead of punishment.
-- A culture is aware of how myths are made.
-- People are self-aware and take responsibility for their own emotions.
-- There is a belief in forgiveness, healing, and atonement.
-- Outlets for negative energies are found (through therapy, sports, open dialogue, healthy family dynamics, education, etc.)
-- Children are not conditioned to believe in demons ad other external enemies.
-- Society promotes the evolution of consciousness.

By these standards one can say that modern America is moving further away from Satan, as it has been for a century. What's harder to measure is whether the grip of evil has been easing psychologically. The most important step is to accept responsibility for one's own sense of wrongdoing and judgment against the self. Evil isn't an inevitable part of human nature once we realize that we have the power to shape human nature and make it evolve.

Perhaps that sounds too optimistic given the prevalence of fanaticism and religious fundamentalism in the world, and I'm not slighting war, crime, and other forms of destructive violence. But I take heart that dying people no longer tremble at the prospect of meeting Satan and that those who come back from near-death experiences haven't met him. In addition, the number of people dying in mass warfare has declined drastically, along with despotic regimes. Slim evidence, I know, but promising.
Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 80 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers. He serves as the founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing. His latest book is The 13th Disciple: A Spiritual Adventure.

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The best way to get rid of evil is to change our ideas about it. The two concepts about evil that do nothing to end it are, first, the concept of cosmic evil embodied by Satan, and second, the concept of human evil as a permanent human inheritance, part of our nature.

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Old English

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The Lords Prayer in Old English from the 11th century

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I am reading The Lords Prayer in Old English from the 11th century. In standardised West Saxon literary dialect of Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon). Location of filming is Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh.

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Remember Milgram's classic experiment on obedience to authority? Anyone who's taken Psych 101 will recall the infamous 1963 study, in which participants were asked to administer increasingly painful electrical shocks to an innocent person.

The experiment, conducted by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, revealed that an overwhelming majority of people would follow orders to administer the maximum shock, even if they felt uncomfortable about hurting another person (who was actually an actor pretending to be in pain).

Milgram's disturbing findings have often been used to explain how ordinary people can be convinced to follow ruthless leaders like Hitler.

But new research is raising questions about Milgram's conclusion. Are most people really capable of such evil? And is it really in our nature to blindly obey authority, even when it means hurting others?

Milgram's study gave rise to as many questions as it answered. Until now, however, researchers have been unable to replicate the experiment in its full scope, largely because ethical standards have since been tightened. But a team of Australian and Scottish psychologists found a way to circumvent these ethical challenges, using a new technique called immersive digital realism, which asked a director and a group of actors to re-enact the Milgram experiment.

Milgram's Disturbing Findings: Milgram told his study participants, a group of healthy men in New Haven, Connecticut, that they were involved in research about the effects of punishment on learning. The participants took on the role of "the teacher," tasked with administering electric shocks of increasing voltage to another man, "the learner," whenever he erred on a word recognition task. The learner sat behind a curtain, not visible to the teacher.

Of course, unbeknown to the teacher, the learner was an actor hired by the research team, and didn't actually receive any shocks.
Check out this video to see footage from the famous experiment:
The results were surprising. Even when the learner cried out in pain, hysterically yelling, "Let me out!", 65 percent of the participants continued to raise the voltage, ultimately delivering the maximum shock of 450 volts (by pushing a button menacingly labeled "xxx").

Milgram concluded that it is in our nature to blindly obey orders, even when that means perpetrating acts of evil. "It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act," he said.

The Dramatic Re-enactment: For the new study, 14 actors were assigned different characters in a restaging of Milgram's experiment. After the tests, the actors were asked how much they identified with their character, "the experimenter" or "the learner."

The results mirrored Milgram's findings -- the majority of the actors were willing to administer painful shocks, especially when they identified more with the experimenter. However, when the experimenter tried to force them to administer the shock, most actors refused. This suggests that obedience was a matter of choice, and of deliberate allegiance to the experimenter and his cause.

"The more [the actor] identifies with the experimenter and his scientific goals -- and this is something that varies across different versions of the experiment -- the more likely they are to obey," Alex Haslam, a psychologist at the University of Queensland and one of the study's lead authors, told The Huffington Post in an email. "On the other hand, the more they identify with the learner (the victim) -- and this also varies -- the more likely they are to disobey."
Check out this description of the new experiment, courtesy of Vocativ:
What it all means: So, was Milgram right? Are we just zombie-like creatures who follow authority without question, even when it means hurting others?

Not necessarily. While the two experiments did yield similar results, the researchers who conducted the replication had a very different explanation for why this was the case.

"People have always understood Milgram's studies as showing that people are naturally inclined to follow orders," Haslam said. "They aren't. Whether or not they do is a choice, and this is predicated upon a belief in the cause they are being asked to pursue."

Haslam explained that rather than blindly following orders, most people do so because they come to identify with a particular leader and cause, which helps them justify pushing the proverbial button. So when we obey orders, we comply knowingly and willingly.

"People harm others when they are convinced that doing so is necessary to advance a noble cause -- the cause of the 'volk' in Nazi Germany, the cause of science in Milgram," co-author Stephen David Reicher, a psychologist at St. Andrews University in Scotland, said in an email to The Huffington Post. "The real problem is not that people are unaware that they are doing evil. Rather they think they are doing good."
Clarification: Language has been amended to reflect that while no subsequent experiments have replicated the Milgram's original experiments in their full scope, at least one 2009 study represented a "partial" replication.

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What 1960s Psychology Got Wrong About The Human Capacity For Evil

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Remember Milgram's classic experiment on obedience to authority? Anyone who's taken Psych 101 will recall the infamous 1963 study, in which participants were asked to administer increasingly painful electrical shocks to an innocent person.

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For the first time, J.R.R. Tolkien's 1926 translation of the 11th century epic poem Beowulf will be published this May by HarperCollins, edited and with commentary by his son Christopher. The elder Tolkien, says his son, "seems never to have considered its publication." He left it along with several other unpublished manuscripts at the time of his death in 1973. The edition will also include a story called Sellic Spell and excerpts from a series of lectures on Beowulf Tolkien delivered at Oxford in the 1930s. Tolkien did publish one of those lectures, " The Monster and the Critic," in 1936. In this "epoch-making paper," writes Seamus Heaney in the introduction to his hugely popular 1999 dual language verse edition, Tolkien treated the Beowulf poet as "an imaginative writer," not a historical reconstruction. His "brilliant literary treatment changed the way the poem was valued and initiated a new era-and new terms-of appreciation." This very same thing could be said of Heaney's translation which, true to his stated goals, brought the poem out of academic conferences and classrooms and into living rooms and coffee shops everywhere. (You can hear Heaney read from that translation here.)

Nowhere in Heaney's introduction to his version does he mention Tolkien's translation of the poem, so we must presume he did not know of it. Long before Tolkien's lectures and translation, Beowulf had been perhaps the most revered poem in the English language, at least since the 18th century, when the sole manuscript was rescued from fire and and translated and disseminated widely. Despite that status, Beowulf was not actually written in English---not an English we would recognize---but in Old English, or Anglo-Saxon. As readers of Heaney's dual translation will know, that distant provincial ancestor of the modern global language, named for the mixture of Germanic peoples who inhabited England 1000 years ago, appears mostly alien to us now. (To add to the strangeness, its unfamiliar alphabet once consisted entirely of runes).

The poem, moreover, is not set in England, but where Shakespeare set his Hamlet, Denmark. Its titular hero, a prince from Geat (ancient Sweden), stalks a monster named Grendel on behalf of Danish king Hroðgar, killing the monster's mother along the way. Tolkien's almost universally beloved body of fiction was deeply influenced by Beowulf. Nevertheless, his translation may be less accessible than Heaney's, though no less beautiful, perhaps, for different reasons. In Heaney's verse, one hears Ted Hughes, some echoes of Milton, Heaney's own voice. If we are to credit the redditor who posted a now-defunct 2003 article from Canadian newspaper National Post that quotes from Tolkien's translation, the Hobbit author's verse hews to a more direct correspondence with the Anglo Saxon, a language made of giant rocks and timber and crashing waves, not elegant, elaborated clauses. The National Post article announces the discovery at Oxford of the Tolkien translation by English Professor Michael Drout (a story he's since debunked), and quotes from both Heaney and Tolkien. See the comparison below:
Heaney's translation:
Time went by, the boat was
on water,
in close under the cliffs.
Men climbed eagerly up the
gangplank,
sand churned in surf, warriors
loaded
a cargo of weapons, shining
war-gear
in the vessel's hold, then
heaved out,
away with a will in their
wood-wreathed ship.
Tolkien's translation of Beowulf and his men setting sail:
On went the hours:
on
ocean afloat
under cliff was their craft.
Now climb blithely
brave man aboard;
breakers pounding
ground the shingle.
Gleaming harness
they hove to the bosom of the
bark, armour
with cunning forged then cast
her forth
to voyage triumphant,
valiant-timbered
fleet foam twisted.

One wonders what the recently departed Irish poet would have said had he lived to read this Tolkien edition. Might it, as Heaney said of his lectures, change the way the poem is valued? Or might he see it resembling other difficult attempts to make modern English replicate the strongly inflected built-in rhythms of Anglo-Saxon-a language, Tolkien once said, from "the dark heathen ages beyond the memory of song."

You can pre-order a copy of Tolkien's translation of Beowulf here.
Related Content: Seamus Heaney Reads His Exquisite Translation of Beowulf and His Memorable 1995 Nobel Lecture Discover J.R.R. Tolkien's Personal Book Cover Designs for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy "The Tolkien Professor" Presents Three Free Courses on The Lord of the Rings Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Read an Excerpt of J.R.R. Tolkien's 1926 Translation of Beowulf Before It's Finally Published Next Month

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For the first time, J.R.R. Tolkien's 1926 translation of the 11th century epic poem Beowulf will be published this May by HarperCollins, edited and with commentary by his son Christopher. The elder Tolkien, says his son, "seems never to have considered its publication."

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Heroes, Sheroes, Villains, and anti-heroes

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Live Live: article for annotation

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Beautiful images of an island tradition before it's lost forever.

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Americans Are A Lonely Lot, And Young People Bear The Heaviest Burden

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Americans Are A Lonely Lot, And Young People Bear The Heaviest Burden

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Loneliness isn't just a fleeting feeling, leaving us sad for a few hours to a few days. Research in recent years suggests that for many people loneliness is more like a chronic ache, affecting their daily lives and sense of well-being.

Now a nationwide survey by the health insurer Cigna underscores that. It finds that loneliness is widespread in America, with nearly 50 percent of respondents reporting that they feel alone or left out always or sometimes.

Using one of the best-known tools for measuring loneliness - the UCLA Loneliness Scale - Cigna surveyed 20,000 adults online across the country ages 18 and above. The UCLA tool uses a series of statements and a formula to calculate a loneliness score based on responses. People scoring between 20 and 80 on the UCLA scale are considered lonely, with a higher score suggesting a greater level of loneliness and social isolation.

More than half of survey respondents - 54 percent - said they always or sometimes feel that no one knows them well. Fifty-six percent reported they sometimes or always felt like the people around them "are not necessarily with them." And 2 in 5 felt like "they lack companionship," that their "relationships aren't meaningful" and that they "are isolated from others."

The survey found that the average loneliness score in America is 44, which suggests that "most Americans are considered lonely," according to the report released Tuesday by the health insurer.

"Half of Americans view themselves as lonely," said David Cordani, president and CEO of Cigna Corp. "I can't help but be surprised [by that]." (Cigna is an NPR sponsor and a major provider of health insurance for NPR employees.)

But the results are consistent with other previous research, says Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University, who studies loneliness and its health effects. She wasn't involved in the Cigna survey. While it's difficult to compare the loneliness scores in different studies, she says, other nationally representative estimates have found between 20 and 43 percent of Americans report feeling lonely or socially isolated.

Loneliness has health consequences. "There's a blurred line between mental and physical health," says Cordani. "Often times, medical symptoms present themselves and they're correlated with mental, lifestyle, behavioral issues like loneliness."

Several studies in recent years, including ones by Holt-Lunstad, have documented the public health effect of loneliness. It has been linked with a higher risk of coronary heart disease and stroke. It has been shown to influence our genes and our immune systems, and even recovery from breast cancer.

And there's growing evidence that loneliness can kill. "We have robust evidence that it increases risk for premature mortality," says Holt-Lunstad. Studies have found that it is a predictor of premature death, not just for the elderly, but even more so for younger people.

The latest survey also found something surprising about loneliness in the younger generation. "Our survey found that actually the younger generation was lonelier than the older generations," says Dr. Douglas Nemecek, the chief medical officer for behavioral health at Cigna.

Members of Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, had an overall loneliness score of 48.3. Millennials, just a little bit older, scored 45.3. By comparison, baby boomers scored 42.4. The Greatest Generation, people ages 72 and above, had a score of 38.6 on the loneliness scale.

"Too often people think that this [problem] is specific to older adults," says Holt-Lunstad. "This report helps with the recognition that this can affect those at younger ages."

In fact, some research published in 2017 by psychologist Jean Twenge at San Diego State University suggests that more screen time and social media may have caused a rise in depression and suicide among American adolescents. The study also found that people who spend less time looking at screens and more time having face-to-face social interactions are less likely to be depressive or suicidal.

However, the Cigna survey didn't find a correlation between social media use and feelings of loneliness. This would on the surface contradict the new findings on screen time, but Holt-Lunstad says that previous research shows that how people use social media determine's its influence on one's sense of isolation.

"If you're passively using it, if you're just scrolling feeds, that's associated with more negative effects," she says. "But if you're using it to reach out and connect to people to facilitate other kinds of [in-person] interactions, it's associated with more positive effects."

That last finding is also corroborated by the Cigna survey across all age groups. Respondents who said they have more in-person social interactions on a daily basis reported being less lonely.

The survey also found that working too little or too much is also associated with the experience of loneliness, suggesting that our workplaces are an important source of our social relationships and also that work-life balance is important for avoiding loneliness.

Cigna wants to work with employers to "help address loneliness in the workplace," says Nemecek.

Social connection or the lack of it is now considered a social determinant of health. In a 2014 report, the Institute of Medicine (now the Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine) suggested that health providers should collect information about patients' "social connections and social isolation" along with information on education, employment, lifestyle (diet, exercise, smoking etc) and psychological health.

"But this hasn't happened," says Holt-Lunstad. "I would hope that with a large insurer like Cigna [releasing a report on loneliness], that it would start to be more on the radar of major health organizations but also actual health care providers."

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Americans Are A Lonely Lot, And Young People Bear The Heaviest Burden

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Loneliness isn't just a fleeting feeling, leaving us sad for a few hours to a few days. Research in recent years suggests that for many people loneliness is more like a chronic ache, affecting their daily lives and sense of well-being. Now a nationwide survey by the health insurer Cigna underscores that.

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Loneliness

The alliteration is beautiful

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Jacob Gebrewold performing his poetry slam. He did a great job MC'ing and also performing at the 2012 Spoken Word Festival! Filmed By: Eric Smith and Edward Cao Edited By: Eric Smith

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Shooters of color are called ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs.’ Why are white shooters called ‘mentally ill’?

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Shooters of color are called ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs.’ Why are white shooters called ‘mentally ill’?

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The Difference Between Existentialism, Nihilism, and Absurdism

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The Difference Between Existentialism, Nihilism, and Absurdism

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Many philosophers have believed for centuries that there's no intrinsic meaning in the universe. Here I'll summarize three of the major responses to this belief.

1. Existentialism is the belief that through a combination of awareness, free will, and personal responsibility, one can construct their own meaning within a world that intrinsically has none of its own.

2. Nihilism is the belief that not only is there no intrinsic meaning in the universe, but that it's pointless to try to construct our own as a substitute.

3. Absurdism is the belief that a search for meaning is inherently in conflict with the actual lack of meaning, but that one should both accept this and simultaneously rebel against it by embracing what life has to offer.

Those are the philosophical structures for those beliefs, but practically there are three ways people deal with the situation:

Embracing or creating a meaning framework, such as a religion or a spirituality framework

Acceptance of the lack of meaning, and living on with-and in spite of-this knowledge

Suicide due to life being ultimately meaningless and therefore either too boring or too painful

I view Camus' Absurdism as the most satisfactory response, as it remains practical without abandoning intellectual integrity. It teaches simultaneous acceptance and rebellion.

To commit suicide is to turn one's back on the beauty that life has to offer, and I believe it to be a legitimate option only in extreme cases.

Adopting a religion or some sort of nebulous "spirituality", as someone who as accepted the truth of intrinsic meaninglessness, amounts to either intellectual laziness, emotional weakness, or some combination thereof. It is to say that the truth is too difficult to consume and accept, and that you've chosen to accept something untrue because it is easier.

This is a weak position, but it often looks identical to Absurdism, which is not.

Absurdism has us either construct or adopt a belief structure that provides a practical reprieve from the impossibility of true meaning, while never actually rejecting that the system used is itself also meaningless.

So a person who has surrendered will say that they believe in something, and that it provides meaning in the universe, while someone who has not surrendered may say that they've adopted a scaffolding that may look similar, while knowing the whole time that it's artificial.

The barrier is delicate between embracing a belief structure because not doing so is too painful, and only doing so for practical purposes while still knowing it is false. Many start as one or the other and then migrate, or exist day to day as one and become the other when pressed.

Knowing where one stands among (or perhaps outside) these options is a crucial part of self understanding.

Notes

1. I'm quite aware that one can, and people have, written entire books on each of these definitions. The goal of this exercise is not to dive deeply into each, but instead to summarize as cleanly as possible how they respond to a lack of intrinsic meaning.

2. The choice to rebel is specifically Camus' response to the situation, but since he's associated with the term I include it in the definition here.

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The Difference Between Existentialism, Nihilism, and Absurdism

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Many philosophers have believed for centuries that there's no intrinsic meaning in the universe. Here I'll summarize three of the major responses to this belief. Existentialism is the belief that through a combination of awareness, free will, and personal responsibility, one can construct their own meaning within a world that intrinsically has none of its own.

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Romancing the StonesOn the winter solstice, modern-day Druids flock to Stonehenge.

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Romancing the StonesOn the winter solstice, modern-day Druids flock to Stonehenge.

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When we got off the bus, at around 6 A.M., it was pitch dark, and the fields of Salisbury Plain were sodden after a night of desultory rain. Most of the passengers-who included a retired physicist and his wife, and a pair of young lovers peering at their smartphones while audibly pining for hot chocolate-were dismayed to learn that the bus would go no farther. To our right, the new Stonehenge Visitor Center, an elegantly wispy structure with more than two hundred slender, tilted pillars and an undulating steel roof, was a blur in the murk. The standing stones were a mile and a half to the southeast. It was too blustery for umbrellas, so those of us with hoods pulled them over our heads, and we all started walking. The sun would not rise for more than two hours: it was the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year.

Four and a half thousand years ago, people also approached Stonehenge on foot, but they walked from the northeast, along a wide processional path leading up from the River Avon. Traces of this earthwork road, which is known as Stonehenge Avenue, are etched in the field north of the stones: a pair of long, straight creases about twenty feet apart in the pillowy turf. Until recently, the A344 was paved over them. Such indignities were decried in Parliament as a "national disgrace," and in June, 2013, the highway was decommissioned and the land was reseeded with grass where the road grazed the henge. The old, bunker-like visitor center-which had been built just across the road from the stones-was closed in December. These changes, along with the more distant placement of the new visitor center, are intended to return the landscape of Stonehenge to the "solemn and lonely" setting described in Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles," when Tess and Angel Clare stumble into the stones in the dark after her flight from the law.

Some of the people walking alongside me were merely curious travellers; an intrepid Japanese teen-ager had come by herself. But the pilgrims on our bus were predominantly British, and many of them felt that Stonehenge connected them to their collective past, to a time before England itself existed. "You used to say . . . that I was a heathen," Tess tells Angel as she lies down on one of the fallen stones. "So now I am at home."

Except for a few days a year, you can walk among and touch the stones of Stonehenge only by special arrangement with English Heritage, the quasi-government agency that manages the site. In 2000, the agency began opening the site to the public on the solstices and the equinoxes. On these days, during the hours around dawn, pilgrims descend to worship or wander among the megaliths. Otherwise, visitors are limited to a narrow path that ribbons through the grass and stops a few yards from the stones. Stonehenge has been slowly falling down for millennia; a stone toppled as recently as 1900. English Heritage aims to retard this process by minimizing erosion, including the damage caused by human feet. The monument's most iconic stones, called sarsens, are sandstone megaliths the color of elephant hide; the heaviest weigh forty tons. Of the outer ring of thirty or so upright sarsens, seventeen still stand, and five of the curved lintels that were placed on the uprights, forming an unbroken circle, remain in place. Five sarsen trilithons-separate three-stone structures-once stood at the center of the circle, in a horseshoe configuration. Three of them endure, along with the surviving upright from the tallest of the five, the Great Trilithon, which towers twenty-four feet above its fallen lintel.

English Heritage occasionally allows filmmakers inside the circle, and an episode of "Doctor Who" was shot there in 2010. But many of the groups that are granted special access are religious, or, as Tess would put it, heathen. Several idiosyncratic faiths claim a special bond with Stonehenge, one that English Heritage is willing to honor, up to a point. The most prominent groups call themselves Druids, after the priestly caste of Iron Age populations in Britain. The Sunday before the winter solstice, Christine Cleere, the lead priest of a Druid group called the Gorsedd of Cor Gawr, led about eighty participants in a twilight ritual inside the stone circle. After Cleere delivered a "call to peace," in Welsh, the worshippers blessed mistletoe, shared bread and mead, and prayed for the "return of the light."

William Stukeley, an eighteenth-century pioneer of British archeology, erroneously believed that Druids built Stonehenge, and scientists have since found it difficult to dispel the notion. (The word "Druid" was coined by the Romans some three thousand years after the stones were erected.) In any case, ancient Druids left no record of their beliefs or practices, so any continuity between them and contemporary groups is more imagined and desired than actual. Although modern Druidry can be roughly characterized as revering nature, it has no set rituals or beliefs, and can be customized to suit each practitioner's preferences. It is a young faith, at best a couple of centuries old, which hankers after an irretrievable, primal past whose most celebrated and mysterious remnant is the prehistoric stone circle on Salisbury Plain.

Marching toward the stones, we passed people emerging from parked cars, pulling tunics over their heads, wrapping cloaks around their shoulders, and taking up staffs or drums or masks before joining the procession. We soon caught up with what appeared to be a walking Christmas tree: black against the indigo sky, and studded with colored lights. A portable tower light placed farther down the path revealed the figure to be a man wearing a pointed headdress above a sort of full-body hoopskirt, the hoops tied with multicolored rags and twined with a strand of tiny battery-powered lights. He carried a concertina, and played Celtic-sounding music on it as he walked.

The rain was now lashing us; Salisbury Plain's chalkland plateau is notorious for its gales. Halfway to the stones, and just to the north of us, lay one of the most enigmatic monuments in the Stonehenge area: the Greater Cursus, a giant rectangle, formed by ancient ditches, nearly two miles long and four hundred and ninety feet wide. It resembles an athletic field or an airstrip, but its original purpose is a mystery. Although Stonehenge's wind-whipped setting and the unusual configuration of its sarsens have contributed to its reputation for strangeness and isolation, the stone circle is situated amid one of the densest concentrations of prehistoric structures in the world. The oldest known human alterations to this part of Salisbury Plain are three Mesolithic postholes, dating back more than ten thousand years. (The holes are currently covered by the old visitor center's parking lot, which will soon be removed.) The Greater Cursus predates Stonehenge by several hundred years, and the countryside surrounding the stone circle is dotted with round and rectangular burial mounds from the Stone Age and the early Bronze Age. This was a sacred landscape for millennia.

The Greater Cursus, first noted by Stukeley, was partly excavated and authoritatively dated in 2007, as one stage of an extensive archeological inquiry called the Stonehenge Riverside Project. The project exemplifies a trend in the discipline, known as landscape archeology, which considers ancient peoples in the context of their environment, and views archeological sites as parts of a network rather than as solitary phenomena. The archeologists have made major discoveries, identifying what they believe is the temporary settlement where the builders of Stonehenge lived, and pinpointing the date of the settlement to within a few decades. These revelations support a new theory about why the stone circle was built: it apparently served not as a temple, or as a site of regular religious ceremonies, but as a cemetery. We can only surmise what Stonehenge meant to its builders, but there are indications that, as one scholar has put it, "the meaning was in the making."

The fundamental element of the prehistoric monuments surrounding Stonehenge isn't stone but earth. When the late-Neolithic peoples of Britain set to work commemorating their dead and invoking their gods, they began by digging. What makes Stonehenge a henge is not the stones but the circular ditch surrounding them and the bank built from the excavated chalk. Stonehenge's ditch, not much deeper than a city curb, usually goes unnoticed, but there is a much larger henge and stone circle at Avebury, a short drive away, which gives a sense of how much this society invested in earthworks.

Avebury's original bank once loomed nearly fifty-five feet over a thirty-foot-deep ditch. Even today, with the grassed-over bank standing at around eighteen feet and the ditch plunging more than sixteen feet below ground level, it's an impressive sight. It encircles nearly twenty-nine acres; thousands of years later, an Anglo-Saxon settlement was founded inside the henge, and a village stands there to this day. Like all the Neolithic banks and ditches in the region, including the Greater Cursus, the Avebury henge was dug with simple tools, mainly picks made from deer antlers. (Archeologists have performed radiocarbon dating on the remnants of antlers found at the sites to determine the age of the monuments.) It took about a million hours of human labor to construct Avebury's henge. When it was new, it would have been visible for miles: a towering ring of chalk blazing white against the green turf.

There are at least fifty known henges in Britain, all round, some containing standing stones or stone circles, others with the remains of timber circles. At Woodhenge, a site two miles from Stonehenge, concentric rings of stout wooden poles were arranged to form a sort of artificial forest. Some henges, like Stonehenge, are aligned with the movements of the sun. Like henges, cursuses are unique to Britain, and there are more than a hundred of these vast enclosures; they contain nothing of evident importance, except for the occasional burial mound. Although archeologists cannot say for sure why these labor-intensive earthworks were built, others are far less circumspect. Days before the solstice, I met a snaggletoothed Druid named Kim, who announced portentously that he had a theory about the Greater Cursus: "It's long, like a runway, yeah? Well, that's where they'd land when they flew in on their dragons, and Stonehenge was the bus terminal!" He cackled madly, confirming my suspicion that Druids know just how nutty you think they are.

The people who made Stonehenge and the other monuments in the area were part of what archeologists call the Grooved Ware culture, which is named for its pottery: thick-sided, flat-bottomed vessels decorated with a pattern of linear scratches. "It's a whole-package idea," Sara Lunt, one of the archeologists who curated the new Stonehenge Visitor Center, told me when I went to see the exhibits. "Stone monuments, grooved pottery, a particular type of arrowhead, a tendency at a drop of a hat to have a feast-and, when they're done, to drop everything in a pit. It's what they do for fun."

Those pits are significant: excavations often uncover objects buried in an apparently ceremonial manner, including caches of special items placed at the bottom of the ditches of henges. In some of the pits, scientists have found animal bones and pottery arranged in seemingly deliberate fashion on top of the remnants of feasts. Some pits include "curated" objects-particularly old bones-that predate other material in the pit by many years, and that appear to have been hoarded for the occasion.

Joshua Pollard, an archeologist at the University of Southampton and one of the directors of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, told me that, compared with other sites from the period, Stonehenge looks "really odd." He said that archeologists had long puzzled over the underground deposits at Stonehenge: "lots of burials; no ceramics, really; odd animal burials; a fair number of wild animals." Fifty-six pits circle the rim of the henge and are among the oldest parts of the monument, predating the sarsens; thirty-four have been excavated, and most of them contained cremated human remains. There are few signs of domestic life in the immediate vicinity of the henge, and none of the feast pits that Lunt described.

Yet many people would have been required to haul the sarsens to the chalk plain, most likely by rolling them over logs on sledges, from the Marlborough Downs, some twenty miles to the north. Once transported, the sarsens were dressed to a remarkably fine degree, by pounding them with smaller stones, or mauls, in a nearby field, where archeologists have found sandstone debris. Mortise-and-tenon joints, like those made by carpenters, were fashioned to attach the upright stones to the lintels. Ramps and counterweights were probably used to tip the upright stones into place, and a platform and levers likely raised the lintels.

Figuring out who these builders were, and where they lived, has been complicated by the fact that Neolithic houses in Britain typically had shallow foundations, leaving behind few traces. "They are quite lightly constructed," Pollard explained. "Whereas people are putting colossal amounts of effort into creating these huge ceremonial structures that they don't actually live in. They could make very big, very elaborate houses, but they choose not to. They choose to invest everything into this domain that relates to the sacred."

As a milky-gray dawn bloomed through the rain, we came up an incline in the road, and the stones finally emerged, like whales rising to the surface of the sea. We weren't going to see the sun come up, but no matter: although Stonehenge is aligned so that its stones frame the sunrise at midsummer, at midwinter the stones frame the sunset. In the early twentieth century, Druid groups started a popular modern tradition of welcoming the summer solstice at the monument. But most archeologists believe that the midwinter sunset was the crucial astronomical event for Stonehenge's creators. It marks the point in the calendar, heralded by many solar religions, when the nights shorten and Earth begins returning to its most fecund state. If you ask Druids about the importance of midwinter, they'll tell you that the Christmas holiday was scheduled at the same time in order to co-opt pagan celebrations.

The idea that Stonehenge was designed to be an astronomical calendar, an observatory, or a calculator gained popularity in the mid-nineteen-sixties, prompted by the work of Gerald Hawkins, an astronomer at Boston University who published a book called "Stonehenge Decoded." Perhaps inevitably, this line of argument inspired wild notions about space aliens and supernatural forces, and such tainted associations may explain why scholarly research on the astronomical aspects of Britain's Stone Age monuments is not often published.

However, in 2008, the Stonehenge Riverside Project made a discovery that underlined the site's association with the two solstices. Scientists found long ridges in the chalk beneath the turf covering the final leg of the Stonehenge Avenue, close to the stone circle. The ridges point directly toward the stones. At first, the project's leader-Mike Parker Pearson, of University College London-thought that the ridges might be the work of human hands, but they turned out to have been produced by a cycle of freeze and thaw at the end of the Ice Age. Disappointment gave way to excitement when two geologists on the team pointed out that the ridges would have been visible during the early Mesolithic period, and that their correspondence to the solstice axis would have made the spot look like a place marked out as special by a divine hand. The ridges are like arrows shot directly at the midwinter sunset, and the henge is aligned along the same axis. In a recent book, "Stonehenge: A New Understanding," Parker Pearson writes, "We had stumbled upon the reason why Stonehenge is where it is."

If you follow those ridges away from the stone circle, and continue down the Stonehenge Avenue, you eventually reach the River Avon. At this juncture, the Stonehenge Riverside Project found the remains of another, smaller henge with standing stones. This spot, archeologists believe, was a ceremonial disembarkation point. Stone Age visitors, perhaps bearing the ashes of their most honored dead, would have stepped off their boats and walked up the avenue to the stones. But where did these people come from? The archeologists had their eye on a known prehistoric settlement upriver, Durrington Walls. At that location, about two miles from Stonehenge, the Stonehenge Riverside Project performed some of its most significant excavations.

The digging revealed that Durrington Walls, which was occupied for a brief time four and a half thousand years ago, was a much larger community than anyone had anticipated. It was surrounded by a henge, and inside were the remnants of two timber circles. At its peak, Parker Pearson said, Durrington Walls contained perhaps a thousand houses and sheltered four to five thousand people-a significant percentage of Britain's population at the time.

Among the items found at Durrington Walls were many pig bones. One such bone is on display at the Stonehenge Visitor Center; the tip of a flint arrowhead is lodged in it. Yet DNA analysis indicated that this pig, like all the others found at the site, was a domesticated animal. The pigs may have served as targets in exhibitions or contests. In his Stonehenge book, Parker Pearson memorably imagines such events as "archers demonstrating their skill by bringing down squealing ranks of porkers in front of a crowd." Chemical analyses of pig and cattle bones at Durrington Walls suggest that some animals had been driven to this riverside gathering place from as far west as Wales and as far north as Scotland. All the pigs had been slaughtered in autumn or winter.

This indicates that Durrington Walls operated seasonally, almost like a winter resort-it was not a place where many people put down lasting roots. Parker Pearson estimates that people lived in the village for no more than forty years and possibly for as briefly as a decade or two. "Their year is split in two, I suspect," he told me. Like many archeologists, he has a habit of speaking about ancient peoples in the present tense and in the second person. "You'd live in relatively isolated small groups and then come together once a year," sometime between the fall harvest and the spring planting.

Durrington Walls is full of the domestic touches that are missing at the austere and stately Stonehenge. Its Neolithic houses resemble dwellings from the same period that have been discovered all over England and Scotland: small square constructions, probably with thatched roofs, featuring compacted chalk-plaster floors with a hearth in the center. Parker Pearson writes of finding "two knee prints close by, on the south side of the fireplace," where a resident had spent hours cooking food.

Although most of the houses at Durrington Walls have the same modest configuration, a few dwellings were apparently set apart for élites. "Stone Age society has been characterized as fairly egalitarian," Parker Pearson told me, but, for a project as grand as Stonehenge, "you need a management structure, sad to say." Yet there's no evidence of forced labor. "What we've found at Durrington Walls is a community who have far too much to eat. They haven't extracted the full nutritional value from these carcasses. They left whole ribs lying there! You'd ordinarily just find bone fragments, because the bones would have been broken up to get every bit of marrow. So these are people who are living high on the hog, literally." The erection of Stonehenge appears to have taken place in an atmosphere of festivity, during the longest and coldest nights of the year, with the promise of spring heralded by the stones themselves.

The increasing precision of radiocarbon dating, Parker Pearson said, makes clear that Durrington Walls was largely abandoned after a period of intense use. Stonehenge itself saw alternating periods of construction and relative neglect: "We've discovered to our horror that, instead of monuments being built and then used for generations, they were built, saw a short period of activity, and then they were left alone. That's been a consistent pattern we've seen over two thousand years of the Neolithic in Britain: the short-used site."

Years ago, Parker Pearson invited a colleague from Madagascar to see Stonehenge. The colleague shrugged and said that, when people in his homeland built in stone, they did so to honor the dead; wood was for the living. Struck by the analogy, Parker Pearson has become convinced that Durrington Walls and Stonehenge, with their parallel circles in wood and stone, were dwelling places for, respectively, the living and the dead. When I asked other British archeologists about this theory, some expressed enthusiastic assent, but many were more guarded. Sara Lunt, the curator at the visitor center, said, "We were taught to approach ethnographic parallels with great caution."

Parker Pearson supports his claim that Stonehenge is "our largest cemetery from the entire third millennium B.C." by pointing to the many cremations deposited in the pits along the rim of the stone circle. So far, sixty-three different cremation burials have been unearthed at Stonehenge, and he estimates that there may be as many as a hundred and twenty more. Joshua Pollard, of the Riverside Project, tends to agree with this view, although he notes that cremated remains "are mostly found on the periphery of the monument. So it kind of makes you wonder whether or not what's represented in the center of the monument might actually have connections with even higher orders of deities." When it comes to Stonehenge, it's hard to imagine a consensus emerging. "No one explanation will completely satisfy anyone," Lunt told me.

At about 7 A.M., I stepped onto the henge and into a damp, milling mass of people dressed in everything from Druidic garb to sporty anoraks. Musicians toted gongs, drums, and even a didgeridoo, and media crews wrangled cameras and boom mikes. At the center of the stones, where the ground had been trampled into a porridge of mud and grass, the crowd gathered around a small Druid group standing in a ritual circle, led by a Stonehenge veteran named Rollo Maughfling. At his request, onlookers delivered "the universal mantra of om " on behalf of such causes as Aboriginal rights, the crisis in Syria, and "nuclear-fuel cores in the sea." A mustached man wearing a resplendent buffalo-fur collar intoned, "By the great lords of the air, by the great lords of fire, by the great lords of the sea, we're gathered here to celebrate the return of the sun!" Spectators held up their smartphones to record the ceremony. Their posture made the glowing screens look like ritual offerings.

On an ordinary solstice morning, Maughfling would have been joined by Arthur Pendragon, a biker turned Druid activist who has been protesting English Heritage policies at Stonehenge for two decades. That day, Pendragon and his followers, who call themselves the Loyal Arthurian Warband, held their own ritual just outside the henge; by removing themselves from the circle, they were expressing indignation over English Heritage's decision to display at the new visitor center cremated human remains that were excavated inside the henge, as well as human bones found in a nearby burial mound and in a flat grave. The Druids consider the exhibit degrading, and want only replicas to be displayed. By the time I arrived at the stone circle, Warband members were marching around the henge, chanting "Put them back!" and "Let those we lay to rest stay at rest!"

Modern Druid groups have a fraught history with Stonehenge. Some of the oldest of these organizations were Mason-like fraternal orders; Winston Churchill belonged to one. In the early twentieth century, however, a more militantly spiritual faction-devoted to sun-worshipping and socialism and calling itself the Church of the Universal Bond-began using the site regularly. This irritated archeologists, who saw these people as keeping alive William Stukeley's mistaken belief that ancient Druids had either built Stonehenge or had some notable connection with it.

When pressed, most contemporary Druids admit that their way of life is an invention no older than the eighteenth century; many prefer not to call Druidry a religion. Druidry makes up for its lack of history with a surplus of opportunities for self-exaltation. Almost every Druid I met had a grand title or a "circle" of his or her own to lead. Terry Dobney, a sixty-five-year-old Gandalf look-alike who was protesting outside the visitor center, told me that he is "the Keeper of the Stones and the democratically elected ArchDruid of Avebury," a claim that elicited fond chuckles whenever I mentioned it to other Druids. A penchant for flowing garments and a love of nature seem to be the only universals among Druids; there is no set pantheon, creed, or liturgy, although most groups stand in a circle and chant. A group oath recited by both Rollo Maughfling and Arthur Pendragon goes, "We swear by peace and love to stand / Heart to heart and hand in hand / Mark, oh spirit and hear us now, / Confirming this, our sacred vow."

For decades, archeologists tolerated Druid rituals at Stonehenge. In the nineteen-seventies, however, the summer solstice became the climax of a monthlong gathering with live music, called the Stonehenge Free Festival, and English Heritage grew concerned about the preservation of the site. By 1984, the concerts were attracting tens of thousands of revellers associated with a nomadic subculture called the New Age Travellers. They camped out in the field across the A344, participating in a Burning Man-style experiment in alternative communal living, complete with drugs, loud music, and nudity. Their disrespectful behavior upset some Druids. Helen Tarrant, a member of the Gorsedd of Cor Gawr, remembers vandalism: "People were climbing all over the stones and spray-painting them purple."

Before the summer solstice of 1985, constabularies established a four-mile exclusion zone around Stonehenge. Hundreds of revellers vowed to take the fields anyway, and the two sides clashed in what is now known as the Battle of the Beanfield. Hundreds of people were arrested, and several were injured. Afterward, the government announced that the exclusion zone would remain in place on future solstices.

Druids were dismayed, and in 1990 Arthur Pendragon launched a protest by setting up camp in what he describes as "a hole in the ground," on a ridge overlooking the stones. (He now lives in a flat in Salisbury.) Pendragon has been arrested more times than he can count, and in 1996 he argued against the exclusion zone before the European Commission of Human Rights, in Strasbourg; the commission ruled against him, stating, "The ban on observing the summer solstice in the vicinity of Stonehenge cannot be said to have had a disproportionate effect on Druids as opposed to other groups who wanted to observe the summer solstice due to different beliefs or purely secular reasons." In the spring of 2000, however, English Heritage softened its stance, and the public regained access on the solstices and the equinoxes. According to Pendragon's autobiography, "The Tales of Arthur," on the morning of the next summer solstice he stepped into the center of the stone circle and shouted to the crowd, "This is your henge. This is your temple. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

Three days before the most recent winter solstice, Druids and pagans gathered outside the new visitor center and staged a protest about the remains. They were hardly the kind of genteel hobbyists who had once welcomed Winston Churchill into their assemblies. I met home-care workers, a funeral-home employee, and a street vender. Some of Pendragon's followers had covered their street clothes with white tunics emblazoned with the red symbol of the Loyal Arthurian Warband: a dragon rampant with a crown, a sword, and an erect penis.

Kazz, a small, fierce, wiry woman with white-blond hair and an abundance of mystical-looking jewelry, is Pendragon's partner and shares his penchant for fiery rhetoric. She'd been pounding a ceremonial drum so passionately that both hand and drum were stained with blood. "During the 2008 dig, we were told that the remains would be put back," she said. "We were lied to. Not only have they not been put back but what English Heritage has done to display them is just tasteless." (In a statement, English Heritage said, "Authenticity is important to tell England's story. We use real objects and artifacts because we believe they are the best way for people to come close to history.")

As visitors approached the center's admission-ticket windows, Kazz stood with forty other protesters, stamping her foot and shaking her fist. "Don't pay, walk away!" she shouted. There was an occasional rallying whoop of "Warriors!"

Not all Druids favor such confrontational methods. The next day, in Avebury, I met Christine Cleere, the priest who had led the Sunday-morning ritual inside the Stonehenge circle. She is a soft-spoken, articulate woman in her sixties with chin-length gray hair; wearing a yellow cable-knit sweater and a blue scarf, she resembled a branch librarian. In addition to her priestly role in the Gorsedd of Cor Gawr- gorsedd is a Welsh-derived term for a gathering of bards-she is the Stonehenge representative for a group called Honouring the Ancient Dead, or HAD. According to Cleere, HAD 's members include "people from all sorts of walks of life" who believe that remains excavated by archeologists should be "treated with honor and respect."

Cleere isn't necessarily against the display of remains in museums, but insists that it be done in an appropriate way. " HAD has provided all sorts of booklets and guidance on this that some museums are following," she said. What bothers HAD most about this issue, according to Cleere, is being shut out of discussions. "The main issue over these displays is about consultation, because they were put in without any form of consultation whatsoever."

But why should archeologists consult Druids about handling prehistoric remains? Cleere, Kazz, and Pendragon compared their claims on the bones of their "ancestors" to the efforts of indigenous peoples from other countries to persuade museums and other government institutions to return their ancestors' human remains and cultural objects. (In the United States, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act has provided for the repatriation of such remains since 1990.) When I pointed out to Druids that they could not actually document their descent from the Grooved Ware people, the conversation often took an emotional turn. Several people asked me how I'd feel if my grandmother's bones were on display.

Mark Horton, an archeologist at the University of Bristol, dismissed the Druids' attempts to invoke the moral authority of Native Americans. He said of repatriation requests, "Archeologists don't like them, but at least there's a link between the members of the tribes and the remains in question, and additionally there's the history of white European settlers imposing themselves on Native Americans. Here, there isn't that history. There's no genetic or direct cultural connection between contemporary pagan groups and the people whose remains are displayed here. I have as much right to determine their fate as they do."

Sara Lunt, the curator, said that English Heritage is "proud of what we do" at the new visitor center, adding, "Visitor surveys show that people expect and like to see human remains. They need these people to take them by the hand." Seeing the bones may offend Druids, but it makes other Britons feel more connected to the ancient dead.

For all their disputes, the Druids and the archeologists that I met ordinarily get along pretty well. When an archeologist fits her knees into the depressions left by a Neolithic cook, or a modern-day Druid invokes ancient gods he can never understand in the way that their original worshippers did, both are struggling to connect with an elusive past. Some of the Druids hanging around Stonehenge have helped out on digs, and they closely follow the archeologists' reports, incorporating new findings and theories into their views of the monument. Joshua Pollard said of the Druids, "They are a force for good, in terms of having a real affinity with these sites, of wanting to protect them." Indeed, the return of Stonehenge's setting to a more pastoral state pleases scientists and spiritualists alike.

After a few hours of standing in the wind and the rain, I had begun to envy the Druids' cloaks. As I drifted through the crowd, I spotted a plump woman in a tiger-striped catsuit dancing to the beat of a drum circle, a tall man in white robes with a mask made of leaves, and a hobbity fellow in a brown woolly sweater telling an interviewer, "I'm a pagan and I've come here to exercise my religious rights." Someone had made a sign that began with the line "Hello, I am an Earthian," and surely nobody read past that point. A man in a green Inverness coat and a wide-brimmed felt hat was blowing mightily on a three-foot trumpet made from an ox horn. He told me he was the Summoner of the Hearth of the Turning Wheel and urged me to have a go at the instrument. I couldn't even get it to squeak. Behind a trilithon, people rubbed the padded heads of mallets over gongs, producing a groaning and swelling tone that seemed just right.

The eccentric aspects of a Stonehenge solstice draw the eye first, but people in ordinary street clothes turned out to be more affecting. Some placed small offerings-a tangerine, a painted rock-on the fallen upright of the Great Trilithon. Many people, like me, stepped up to one of the three remaining trilithons and rested their palms against its oddly dry-feeling surface, heads tilted all the way back. Tourists who visit Stonehenge without entering the circle often come away saying that the monument is smaller than they expected it to be, but anyone who's stood next to a forty-ton behemoth dotted with puffs of green lichen, and gazed up its mottled gray length, knows what big is.

The sky had turned white, and I resisted the urge to remain inside the circle, where the crush of bodies cut the wind. Moving on, I passed an older man with a battered face posing for a photograph by leaning jauntily on a fallen lintel, holding a cigar. He intended to take the piss, as the British say, but it was a hopeless cause. The dignity of those stones is impermeable; only the wind, the rain, and another thousand years will ever diminish it. I turned a corner and spotted a young man with cropped fair hair, in a brightly striped rain jacket. He was facing an upright trilithon, leaning into it with his whole body, his eyes closed, his arms curled in front of him, and his head resting on his hands. He molded himself to the stone, like a child clinging to his mother. Ten minutes later, when I circled back the same way, he was still there, unchanged. ♦

Laura Miller, the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia," is a books and culture columnist for Slate.
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When we got off the bus, at around 6 A.M., it was pitch dark, and the fields of Salisbury Plain were sodden after a night of desultory rain. Most of the passengers-who included a retired physicist and his wife, and a pair of young lovers peering at their smartphones while audibly pining for hot chocolate-were dismayed to learn that the bus would go no farther.

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Annotation guide and questions for Gardner's letter

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Annotation guide and questions for Gardner's letter

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