Of Men and Monsters

Books read this week: Beowulf 7/10, The Poem of the Cid 7/10, Soulless 7/10 (Gail Carriger), In the House of the Worm 7/10 (George R R Martin)

Beowulf is, of course, the Old English Epic, just about the only survivor of the (mostly) pre-Christian English oral tradition and a cracking good story in it's own right. It is interesting to compare it with the Iliad and the Gilgamesh Epic; Beowulf is shorter than either, and, with all the various digressions (fascinating as they are), spends much less time with the main characters and so we get a much fuzzier picture of the protagonist and his companions. Achilles, Odysseus and Agamemnon are developed, distinct characters with their own strengths and foibles, as are Gilgamesh and Enkidu; I didn't really get that sense with Beowulf. There just seemed to be a succession of blokes with axes hitting each other. This is unfortunate, as it robs the story of some of it's pathos: Enkidu's death in the Gilgamesh epic is genuinely moving in a way that Beowulf's just isn't. This is not just a product of length - some of the ballads are capable of building sympathy and pathos in just a dozen lines (see Twa Corbies or the Cruel Mother). The other thing missing from Beowulf is a clear overarching theme; this isn't to say that there are no themes, just that both the Iliad and Gilgamesh have a strong, single overarching idea: in the Iliad it is rage and jealousy (as Homer tells us right at the start: "Sing O Muse of the Rage of Achilles") and in Gilgamesh the inevitability of death. The closest thing to an overarching theme in Beowulf is "if you're a king and your warriors won't fight for you, you're in trouble".

The Poem of the Cid is one of the Spanish stories about Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, El Cid. It has the feel of one of the Robin Hood stories, if Robin Hood had reacted to his exile by travelling to Scotland and stealing Aberdeen. You can tell from the repeated epithets ("the Campeador", "the Cid of the flowing beard") that the poem was originally transmitted orally, and there is (much as in Robin Hood) an interesting undercurrent of social conflict; we're reminded several times that El Cid comes from relatively humble origins, and the villains of the piece are the two (very aristocractic) Infantes of Carrion, who marry and then abandon the daughters of the Cid, rather than the Moors. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that a more accurate translation of the title of the work ("El Poema de mio Cid") would be "The Poem of My Cid", Cid being a word of Arabic origin meaning "Lord". The most entertaining passage of the poem by far is the incident where a lion gets loose in the palace, the commotion wakes El Cid, who then proceeds to stare down the lion, which then creeps back to it's cage and closes the door. Comedy gold. Both the Poem of the Cid and Beowulf I read in Penguin Classics translation.

Soulless is a fairly light and frothy supernatural comedy/romance, set in Victorian London. It's nice to see the werewolves get some love (both figuratively and literally, in this case), and even nicer to see a heroine who responds to being leapt upon by a vampire by finding the nearest heavy object and smacking it in the nuts. I was again struck by the way in which American books on the supernatural tend to assume that it will be handled by the free market; the government is at best indifferent, and at worst actively malicious. British books, on the other hand, tend to assume that supernatural occurrences will be investigated by Her Majesty's Constabulary, and that if Queen Victoria finds out people are being murdered with magic she Will Not Be Amused. I think it's an interesting commentary on our assumptions about the role and limits of government on either side of the Atlantic.

Finally, In The House of the Worm is a fairly short post-apocalyptic piece by George RR Martin, he of A Song of Ice and Fire fame; it's entertaining enough, and probably best described as a morlock's-eye view of the end of the world.