Medieval StoryTelling and Modern Appropriation

I'm working on some odd thoughts that are crashing in my head as disparate projects are cross-pollinating each other.

One of the things that I'm trying to articulate is that it strikes me that much criticism of Hollywood these days regarding taking books and adapting as movies is somewhat misguided on the part of us medievalists. I have in mind specifically attempts to film Beowulf for example, or even the Tolkien movies....

If I can try and boil down the thought: In medieval literature we are accustomed to noting that stories live. They have their own life. Chaucer tells a version of an older story that many other tale tellers have told, such as the Fall of Troy in Troilus and Criseide, Shakespeare takes a story from Saxo Grammaticus and turns it into Hamlet and so on. Peter Jackson made LoTR into a movie, it isn't the same as Tolkien's LoTR. Seamus Heaney translated Beowulf and as any Anglo-Saxonist will tell you it is Heaneywulf, not Beowulf.

So what I'm saying is this: it seems to me that the medieval method of story telling: taking a preexisting tale and reshaping it in a new context/genre/medium is still with us and we can trace it from the medieval period through Shakespeare and Marlowe, through Chapman's Homer, Pope's Iliad, Dryden's Aeneid, Joyce's Ulysses right up to the present with Jackson's LoTR. By reshaping the story, these adapters and retellers have made a new work of art, related to what was previously there, but sufficiently different as to stand on its own as an independent work. So when these Beowulf movies come along, and we groan at the fact that it isn't our Beowulf, perhaps we should groan less, and listen to the new story and judge it on those terms.

Still working on this, or wondering if it is worth working on.....

You wanna know some irony? I've been thinking about this in the back of my mind......a dozen years or so ago Robertson wrote a book on "The New World Order" a diatribe that many Christians bought against the Clinton administration: a liberal cabal out to get Christians and destroy America. It seems to me though that his is slight of hand: what's happened is that since 2000 we've had a right-wing, Robertson supported cabal who has destroyed America, taken away our civil rights, and made American ideals a mockery on the world stage. His book was not only an anti-left treatise, but a blue print for Bushites and neo-cons on how to gain and keep power. Something to think about....

Blogs and Tenure

Cathy Davidson at HASTAC,not a blog I know, has raised the issue of blogs and tenure. Mark Goodacre has responded at: New Testament Gateway blog, followed by April DeConick at Forbidden Gospels Blog.

I'm not sure what I think yet, but this is worth thinking about beyond the Religious Studies corridor....