Archive for the 'beowulf' Category

Apr 08 2019

All About Endpapers, or What You’ve Been Missing If You’ve Only Seen the Paperback of The Odyssey and The Iliad

A lot of my readers are not aware that the hardcover editions of The Odyssey and The Iliad have art in them that does not appear in the paperback editions.

At the beginning and end of a hardcover book is something called the Endpapers (or simply “ends”). These are usually separate sheets of paper that are used to bind the inside pages to the cover.

Ends fig a

Here are the endpapers I created for The Odyssey (click to see larger!)

Ends fig b

These are all actual vase paintings from classical Greece. Some of them are explicitly scenes from The Odyssey, others I just found thematically appropriate to allude to the story of Odysseus. In some cases I changed what kind of vessel they are painted on — in real life some are tiny and some are huge, and I wanted them to be more uniform in size.

For The Iliad, I chose a different approach. Here I use shields to tell the story of the lead-up to The Iliad. Again, you will only get these if you get the hardcover; but now at least you can see what you’re missing. In the book they’re printed in blue.

Ends fig c Ends fig d

The designs on Greek shields tend to be much less narrative than the vase paintings, so in this case I didn’t use real historical ones. (Quite a few of the shield designs inside the book are real, though not necessarily from the Bronze Age — but these I made up to tell the story, stylizing them in a way I think is reasonably consistent with Greek shield painting.)

They summarize the story of the beginnings of the Trojan War, as follows: (1) the founding of Troy, (2) Thetis and Peleus, (3) the Apple of Discord, (4) the abduction of Helen, (5) invoking the oath of the Achaean Kings, (6) Odysseus and Achilles being tricked into revealing themselves (as, respectively, sane and not a girl), (7) the fleet launching, (8) the sacrifice of Iphegenia at Aulis, (9) the archer Philoctetes bitten by a serpent, (10) the beginning of the war, (11) Chryses’ appeal to Agamemnon, and (12) the plague-arrows sent by Apollo.

Those, by the way, are all cool stories you should look up if you don’t know them 😉

Not all of my books have bonus artwork on the endpapers of the hardcover. If you’re wondering why that is, continue to Part 2, In Which the Author Geeks Out About Bookbinding.

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Feb 06 2012

Hwaet?

Published by under beowulf

I’d like to tell you a story. It’s about two huge fans of a certain Old English Epic poem you may have heard of. Beowulf.

Back in 1998, after self-publishing my first graphic novel Bearskin, I had decided to adapt Beowulf. It was one of my favorite works of literature, and a great action story which I hoped would resonate with both literature and superhero fans. The original text of Beowulf is in the public domain, but it’s not really readable in Old English (though it’s kind of fun to try), so I started researching different translations to use as the basis for my book (note that this was before Seamus Heaney’s translation came out, and in any case I strongly preferred to use one that was in the public domain). I soon came across a resource that proved absolutely invaluable in this search.

It seems a fellow named Syd Allan loved Beowulf so much that he had put together a website, beowulftranslations.net, comparing every available translation of the poem. You could choose from several key sections of the story, and read them in over 20 different translations, ranging from the 1800s to the 1980s (in subsequent years I think he more than quadrupled the number, adding many new translations as they came out and finding more obscure ones as well). He also summarized the available Beowulf films, comics, and novelizations. Using this site I was able to quickly settle on the Gummere translation for my book, and when I later went back to choose an easier translation for the Candlewick edition, I again found it by way of Syd’s site. I should also mention that when my book came out, Syd happily added info and samples to his page on Beowulf comics, and said nice things about it. Syd and I haven’t really correponded that much, and we’ve only met once (we arranged to have lunch at one point just so we could each put a face to the name behind the emails, and of course geek out a bit about Beowulf) — but it’s always been nice to know that his site was out there, a functional monument to the greatness of this poem and a resource for folks like me.

But apparently there aren’t a huge number of people looking to compare ~100 translations of an ancient viking poem, and Syd eventually got tired of putting energy into the site and let it lapse. However, he kindly made the whole thing available in a zip file via Google docs, here. Also, the Internet Archive, aka Wayback Machine, has it archived here.

So, I post this as a tribute to Syd’s hard work, and as a place where those links can live for my own reference and that of anyone searching for Beowulf translations. Enjoy.

(PS, the title of this post, “Hwaet” is the opening word of Beowulf. In Old English it means “Listen”, so it should more properly be followed by an exclamation point, comma, period, almost anything but a question mark. But since it scans like modern English “what”, I tried to make a little joke there about my reaction to finding that the site had gone down.)

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Jan 12 2011

Beowulf: 1000 Years of Baggage

Published by under beowulf,reviews,sketchbook

On Monday I went to see this fabulous show – Banana Bag & Bodice’s “Beowulf: 1000 Years of Baggage”. You can see the show on Vimeo, if you are so inclined, but I recommend seeing it live for the full effect. It’s funny and arty and clever, and the music is awesome.

I saw it at Joe’s pub. The place was packed, and quite dark, so I only got a few scribbly drawings, but here they are for your enjoyment.

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Nov 09 2010

Teachers’ Guides

Published by under beowulf,odyssey

Candlewick has written teachers’ guides for Beowulf and The Odyssey, and these are now available on their site. Direct links are as follows:

The Odyssey

Beowulf

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Aug 20 2009

“Letter to Beowulf”

Published by under beowulf,internet goodies

This poem (by Paul Willis on VerseDaily, found by Alison while looking for unusual poems to read at the wedding) is awesome.

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