Books I Love, Part 2

In this addition to my private bibliography, I give you the books that have made me a medievalist. I look forward to exploring these works,authors, and themes in greater detail over the next several years.

The Eddas- When I first started looking at medieval literature, I was immediately attracted to this simple, powerful poetry and vigorous prose. It has a quality of strangeness and mystery that drew me, and the gods and heroes of the poems are complex and intriguing. As much as I love the poems themselves, I also love the suggestions of other stories beneath them, the glimpses at the depths of history and myth, and the tantalizing quality of its lost allusions.

 

The Sagas- Reading the Eddas eventually brought me to the Old Norse sagas, of which I have still only read a handful. There is so much in them to study and discover and translate, and it is a shame that they are so little known. They have some of the strangeness of the Eddas, and they also share their simplicity and terseness. Dialogue plays an important role and provides some of the best lines of the sagas: In one saga, a man who has just been run through with a spear looks down at the weapon and before he dies tells the killer that his blade is indeed quite sharp. They are full of powerful and flawed characters, and they have flashes of humor and moments of great tragedy. My favorites so far are Laxdaela saga, Gisla saga Surssonar, and Egils saga.

Beowulf- An Old English tutor helped me to see the complexity and pathos of this poem in a new way, and it changed my perspective on medieval literature as a whole. Like many of the Icelandic sagas, Beowulf is a Christian work written about pagans, and the poet reveals the contradictions and ambiguities in Beowulf’s existence in a way that is subtle and disquieting. He compounds the human tragedy of Beowulf’s death with a spiritual tragedy that is more difficult to accept.

C.S. Lewis- I grew up with Narnia, and I liked the books just fine as a child. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to appreciate them in different ways. I like the way Lewis uses myth and legend in his stories, and the way he thinks about the relationship of paganism to Christianity. It was also through Lewis that I first read about the Norse myths. My favorite books of his are Surprised by Joy, Perelandra, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and The Magician’s Nephew.

J.R.R. Tolkien- No other book has had as profound and extensive an influence on my life as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I first read it in high school, and I thought it was a very good book. Then I read it again the next year and found it was even better. I’ve read the trilogy several times now, and each time it gives me something new. His thought is as challenging as Le Guin’s, and his world even more fully realized. His work is more complete and ordered than Lewis’, stronger because it is more autonomous. It offers the allusive glimpses into a wider world of myth that the Eddas have, and it owes much to the style and language of the Old Norse sagas. I also admire Tolkien’s scholarly work and the principles by which he lived. His essay “The Monsters and the Critics” is the turning point in Beowulf scholarship, from which all modern scholars now proceed, and The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien reveals something of his personality and beliefs. My favorite works of his besides The Lord of the Rings are The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, Tales from the Perilous Realm, The Children of Hurin, the translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the essay “On Fairy Stories.”