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wilderthan) wrote2010-07-21 11:02 pm
wilderthan) wrote2010-07-21 11:02 pm
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Reviews - The Nibelungenlied, two Arthurian texts, two Norse sagas, Ursula Le Guin
The Nibelungenlied (Anonymous/various, trans. A.T. Hatto)
I've read the story of Siegfried and Brunhild elsewhere, in the Norse versions/origin, the Eddas and the Saga of the Volsungs, but it was good to read this expanded edition. It's well translated by Hatto, who also translated my copy of von Strassburg's Tristan, and whose work I can recommend, at least insofar as it's readable and accessible, but keeps an "archaic" sort of flavour -- I can't say if it really keeps the voice of the narrator, of course. What I mean is, it doesn't modernise it so that it's just exactly like writing a novel. The translator included footnotes that sometimes explain why he translated something a certain way, which are both interesting and helpful in understanding the double entendres that unfortunately get lost. The back of the book (in my, rather old, edition, in any case) contains a lot of helpful information for understanding the context of the poem and various inconsistencies within it.
The Nibelungenlied is, in any case, more like von Strassburg's Tristan or the various Arthurian romances than it is like the Norse sagas or the Eddas. The knights have similar ideals of chivalry and generosity to the Arthurian tradition; there's little of the legal stuff that surrounds the sagas (e.g. scenes from the All-Thing); there's no sudden reciting of supposedly spontaneous verses... Which, honestly, makes it more readable for a modern reader than the sagas: it's easier to keep track of the main players, and it 'feels' a lot more like a modern novel. Worth a try, if you can't keep track of it in the sagas.
The problem with it, for a modern reader, is that like many other old stories, what we've got has been cobbled together from various sources. So characters get suddenly reintroduced, as if they're new, and the characterisation of characters who've been in it since the beginning suddenly changes, or the attitude of the poet toward them... Particularly in the case of Kriemhild, where at first it speaks about her intended vengeance as something worthy of her and of Siegfried, but later condemns her for the bloodshed she causes. I'm used to such inconsistencies, and the footnotes discuss it a little, so it didn't bother me, but it's something to bear in mind.
The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Anonymous, trans. G.A. Hight)
The edition I have is pretty unhelpful. I didn't even realise it had endnotes, though I don't know how that happened, and the few footnotes it has are limited, only giving alternate/modern place names. It does have an introduction, which is a little helpful. I'm not sure about the translation: it's clear enough, and easy enough to read, but the idioms don't quite translate and sometimes I wasn't entirely sure what was meant, e.g. "Thorgeir said he did not care what Gaut did with his eyebrows." (chap. XXVII, p. 75)
The story itself is interesting. Like a lot of the other sagas, it wanders around for a good bit before Grettir himself is even born, and there's a lot of detail about who is descended from who. There's a fair number of legal disputes and random verses being recited, and the familiar old blood feud stories. There's also a few supernatural encounters, where Grettir lays ghosts, which might remind one of Beowulf...
One thing that really interested me was that Spes plays the same trick as Isolde in von Strassburg's Tristan, when she wants to avoid falsely swearing that only her husband has ever touched her. Maybe that's where that bit originates from. I'd like to look into that, somehow.
I think I might've enjoyed it more in a better translation. I'll look out for one.
Njal's Saga (Anonymous, trans. Robert Cook)
I really enjoyed this one. There's some likeable characters -- even from my soft-hearted modern point of view -- who I really got to care about, which isn't always the case with sagas. I was kind of sad when they went out of the saga. The translation is good, clear and easy to read, and there's helpful footnotes, a good introduction, and other helpful supplementary material. As with all sagas, there's an awful lot of names, but it's still pretty easy to follow.
I found some of it amusing in a somewhat macabre way -- especially at the beginning, with Hallgerd's bloodthirsty nature. In the end, the "eye for an eye" mentality of the characters becomes amusing because of the excess of it, to me. Gunnar and Njal are refreshing in their refusal to feud with each other.
A lot of the saga is based on the points of the law, as well as the killing, which is interesting. Someone compared it to a John Grisham book for the Norse, which... well, I can see their point.
Merlin and the Grail (Robert de Boron)
If you want something to read for fun, personally, this isn't my cup of tea. If overt Christianity in text bothers you, this text will bother you times a thousand. If you hate the links between Christ and the Grail myth, you will want to hurl it out of the window.
It's quite a dry text, particularly at the beginning, though interesting for the heavy involvement of Merlin in the middle section. If I actually did the dissertation I'd been thinking of, I'd have needed to talk about this text, because once order is established by Arthur, Merlin disappears from the text. After he's gone, the text starts to follow Perceval the Welshman, which doesn't please me as much as I could wish. He's not as childlike as he is in Chrétien de Troyes' version, but neither is he particularly likeable. None of the characters really are: there's little insight into how they feel, everything is just stated. Other characters such as Gawain and Lancelot are, in this tale, completely peripheral.
In its apparent influence on later texts, and on its origins in Chrétien de Troyes' and Geoffrey of Monmouth's works, and if you're interested in the grail story's early shape, it's fascinating.
The translation seems pretty good, and the footnotes are helpful in noting double meanings or departures from the main manuscript.
The Death of King Arthur (trans. James Cable)
This book is a translation of a part of the Vulgate Cycle, unfortunately a bit from the end. I really want to read that from the beginning, but this translation picks up after the end of the Grail quest. It's easy enough to follow, for me, but then, I know the story inside out. It's a much less fantastical narrative than some -- there's only one major bit of magic I can think of, and that's the hand of the Lady of the Lake catching Excalibur when Arthur has it thrown into the water at the end of his life. I disagree with the introduction's assertion that the other romances are silly and that this is more valuable for the lack of magic, but this is more realistic than other texts.
It helps that I know and love the characters already, but I liked their portrayals here and the various deaths made me sad. It's an easy enough translation to read, it seems pretty clear, and overall I thought it was pretty enjoyable.
Four Ways to Forgiveness (Ursula Le Guin)
The first story, Betrayals, is pretty nice, in a quiet way. It's set on one of her Hainish worlds, Yeowe, but it's not really alien or sci-fi in any way other than that -- it could easily be a story about our world. Werel is a slave-owning planet, and Yeowe its colony, and for some time when the story is set, Yeowe has had freedom, but they're still all fighting among themselves. That isn't the focus of the story, though it's wound into the background: in the foreground is an old woman, Yoss, and a disgraced politician, Abberkam, who have both chosen to do a kind of religious retreat. They come together slowly and talk, a little. Not much really happens, if you're looking for big space opera SF, but the characters feel real and close and are interesting.
The second story, Forgiveness Day, seemed more lively and fun from the word go. Solly, the main character, is an envoy to Werel from the Ekumen, and her observations of the world are more lively than those of Yoss (obviously, for good reasons). The other main character, Teyeo, is more stiff and stern, and you start off biased against him because of Solly, but I got to like him too. It's just odd to go from one to the other, disliking the first when in the POV of the other -- it's third person limited, not first person, but the effect is the same -- and then vice versa. It gets easier, later on. I wish there was just a bit more of Teyeo's POV, but I liked this one, the slow coming together.
The third story, A Man of the People, began on Hain -- now I think about it, how many stories have there been actually set on Hain? which are they? I should look back through the various anthologies and see -- but ended in Yeowe. All of the stories are about freedom, but this one is about women's freedom. The character and the customs he grows up with, and the world he goes to, are all interesting in themselves, but even better when they all tie in to questions like what is freedom? and what is truth? I love the way I can read Le Guin's thoughts on our own history in this. As good an argument against 'SF is just silly escapism' as I've ever seen...
The fourth story, A Woman's Liberation, tied into the third one, and was pleasing because it was a woman's own voice -- the one thing that I don't like so much is that in the third story, the women's liberation is from the point of view of someone who is male, and that one of the women he mentions, important as she is to him, isn't given a name... This fixed that. I liked her voice, the slow and difficult unfolding of her story, and loved the ending, the opening up to what had been taken from her, a full freedom.
I think the latter two stories are my favourite, but all four of them make a world I was happy to lose myself in, for a day.
I've read the story of Siegfried and Brunhild elsewhere, in the Norse versions/origin, the Eddas and the Saga of the Volsungs, but it was good to read this expanded edition. It's well translated by Hatto, who also translated my copy of von Strassburg's Tristan, and whose work I can recommend, at least insofar as it's readable and accessible, but keeps an "archaic" sort of flavour -- I can't say if it really keeps the voice of the narrator, of course. What I mean is, it doesn't modernise it so that it's just exactly like writing a novel. The translator included footnotes that sometimes explain why he translated something a certain way, which are both interesting and helpful in understanding the double entendres that unfortunately get lost. The back of the book (in my, rather old, edition, in any case) contains a lot of helpful information for understanding the context of the poem and various inconsistencies within it.
The Nibelungenlied is, in any case, more like von Strassburg's Tristan or the various Arthurian romances than it is like the Norse sagas or the Eddas. The knights have similar ideals of chivalry and generosity to the Arthurian tradition; there's little of the legal stuff that surrounds the sagas (e.g. scenes from the All-Thing); there's no sudden reciting of supposedly spontaneous verses... Which, honestly, makes it more readable for a modern reader than the sagas: it's easier to keep track of the main players, and it 'feels' a lot more like a modern novel. Worth a try, if you can't keep track of it in the sagas.
The problem with it, for a modern reader, is that like many other old stories, what we've got has been cobbled together from various sources. So characters get suddenly reintroduced, as if they're new, and the characterisation of characters who've been in it since the beginning suddenly changes, or the attitude of the poet toward them... Particularly in the case of Kriemhild, where at first it speaks about her intended vengeance as something worthy of her and of Siegfried, but later condemns her for the bloodshed she causes. I'm used to such inconsistencies, and the footnotes discuss it a little, so it didn't bother me, but it's something to bear in mind.
The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Anonymous, trans. G.A. Hight)
The edition I have is pretty unhelpful. I didn't even realise it had endnotes, though I don't know how that happened, and the few footnotes it has are limited, only giving alternate/modern place names. It does have an introduction, which is a little helpful. I'm not sure about the translation: it's clear enough, and easy enough to read, but the idioms don't quite translate and sometimes I wasn't entirely sure what was meant, e.g. "Thorgeir said he did not care what Gaut did with his eyebrows." (chap. XXVII, p. 75)
The story itself is interesting. Like a lot of the other sagas, it wanders around for a good bit before Grettir himself is even born, and there's a lot of detail about who is descended from who. There's a fair number of legal disputes and random verses being recited, and the familiar old blood feud stories. There's also a few supernatural encounters, where Grettir lays ghosts, which might remind one of Beowulf...
One thing that really interested me was that Spes plays the same trick as Isolde in von Strassburg's Tristan, when she wants to avoid falsely swearing that only her husband has ever touched her. Maybe that's where that bit originates from. I'd like to look into that, somehow.
I think I might've enjoyed it more in a better translation. I'll look out for one.
Njal's Saga (Anonymous, trans. Robert Cook)
I really enjoyed this one. There's some likeable characters -- even from my soft-hearted modern point of view -- who I really got to care about, which isn't always the case with sagas. I was kind of sad when they went out of the saga. The translation is good, clear and easy to read, and there's helpful footnotes, a good introduction, and other helpful supplementary material. As with all sagas, there's an awful lot of names, but it's still pretty easy to follow.
I found some of it amusing in a somewhat macabre way -- especially at the beginning, with Hallgerd's bloodthirsty nature. In the end, the "eye for an eye" mentality of the characters becomes amusing because of the excess of it, to me. Gunnar and Njal are refreshing in their refusal to feud with each other.
A lot of the saga is based on the points of the law, as well as the killing, which is interesting. Someone compared it to a John Grisham book for the Norse, which... well, I can see their point.
Merlin and the Grail (Robert de Boron)
If you want something to read for fun, personally, this isn't my cup of tea. If overt Christianity in text bothers you, this text will bother you times a thousand. If you hate the links between Christ and the Grail myth, you will want to hurl it out of the window.
It's quite a dry text, particularly at the beginning, though interesting for the heavy involvement of Merlin in the middle section. If I actually did the dissertation I'd been thinking of, I'd have needed to talk about this text, because once order is established by Arthur, Merlin disappears from the text. After he's gone, the text starts to follow Perceval the Welshman, which doesn't please me as much as I could wish. He's not as childlike as he is in Chrétien de Troyes' version, but neither is he particularly likeable. None of the characters really are: there's little insight into how they feel, everything is just stated. Other characters such as Gawain and Lancelot are, in this tale, completely peripheral.
In its apparent influence on later texts, and on its origins in Chrétien de Troyes' and Geoffrey of Monmouth's works, and if you're interested in the grail story's early shape, it's fascinating.
The translation seems pretty good, and the footnotes are helpful in noting double meanings or departures from the main manuscript.
The Death of King Arthur (trans. James Cable)
This book is a translation of a part of the Vulgate Cycle, unfortunately a bit from the end. I really want to read that from the beginning, but this translation picks up after the end of the Grail quest. It's easy enough to follow, for me, but then, I know the story inside out. It's a much less fantastical narrative than some -- there's only one major bit of magic I can think of, and that's the hand of the Lady of the Lake catching Excalibur when Arthur has it thrown into the water at the end of his life. I disagree with the introduction's assertion that the other romances are silly and that this is more valuable for the lack of magic, but this is more realistic than other texts.
It helps that I know and love the characters already, but I liked their portrayals here and the various deaths made me sad. It's an easy enough translation to read, it seems pretty clear, and overall I thought it was pretty enjoyable.
Four Ways to Forgiveness (Ursula Le Guin)
The first story, Betrayals, is pretty nice, in a quiet way. It's set on one of her Hainish worlds, Yeowe, but it's not really alien or sci-fi in any way other than that -- it could easily be a story about our world. Werel is a slave-owning planet, and Yeowe its colony, and for some time when the story is set, Yeowe has had freedom, but they're still all fighting among themselves. That isn't the focus of the story, though it's wound into the background: in the foreground is an old woman, Yoss, and a disgraced politician, Abberkam, who have both chosen to do a kind of religious retreat. They come together slowly and talk, a little. Not much really happens, if you're looking for big space opera SF, but the characters feel real and close and are interesting.
The second story, Forgiveness Day, seemed more lively and fun from the word go. Solly, the main character, is an envoy to Werel from the Ekumen, and her observations of the world are more lively than those of Yoss (obviously, for good reasons). The other main character, Teyeo, is more stiff and stern, and you start off biased against him because of Solly, but I got to like him too. It's just odd to go from one to the other, disliking the first when in the POV of the other -- it's third person limited, not first person, but the effect is the same -- and then vice versa. It gets easier, later on. I wish there was just a bit more of Teyeo's POV, but I liked this one, the slow coming together.
The third story, A Man of the People, began on Hain -- now I think about it, how many stories have there been actually set on Hain? which are they? I should look back through the various anthologies and see -- but ended in Yeowe. All of the stories are about freedom, but this one is about women's freedom. The character and the customs he grows up with, and the world he goes to, are all interesting in themselves, but even better when they all tie in to questions like what is freedom? and what is truth? I love the way I can read Le Guin's thoughts on our own history in this. As good an argument against 'SF is just silly escapism' as I've ever seen...
The fourth story, A Woman's Liberation, tied into the third one, and was pleasing because it was a woman's own voice -- the one thing that I don't like so much is that in the third story, the women's liberation is from the point of view of someone who is male, and that one of the women he mentions, important as she is to him, isn't given a name... This fixed that. I liked her voice, the slow and difficult unfolding of her story, and loved the ending, the opening up to what had been taken from her, a full freedom.
I think the latter two stories are my favourite, but all four of them make a world I was happy to lose myself in, for a day.