Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion

Finished Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology. Not sure how I feel about it. Was not expecting the author's life story to so interwoven in it.

Finally got my hands on Man and His Symbols. Currently reading it.

Finished Man and His Symbols. I am kinda meh, about it. Since studying JC so much, it felt like a step back.

Michele wrote: "Finished Man and His Symbols. I am kinda meh, about it. Since studying JC so much, it felt like a step back."

I really liked Jung's Dreams Michele. I read it years ago, but at the time, I liked it much better than Man and His Symbols.

Went on the used book market and got
Beowulf and Its Analogues. Discovered it via a video on YouTube that I watched. Just started reading it.

Michele wrote: "Went on the used book market and got
Beowulf and Its Analogues. Discovered it via a video on YouTube that I watched. Just started reading it."

I hope you enjoy it: it is an old favorite of mine. Unfortunately, being designed as an easy reference book for students of Beowulf, it cuts up continuous stories under different headings (mainly names), which makes it hard to figure out what is actually going on in any of the versions.

The Icelandic "Hrolf Kraki's Saga" (or The Saga of Hrolf Kraki) suffers a lot from this anatomizing. Fortunately, there are a bunch of English translations on Kindle, one of them very inexpensive.

And it is included in Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas. The translator points out that this story is closer to the popular image of Norse Saga than most of the Sagas of the Icelanders ordinarily encountered in translation (Njal's Saga, Egil's Saga, Laxdaela Saga, etc.).

See also
The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki
Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes: Hervor and Heidrek and Hrólf Kraki and His Champions
and, the least expensive, The Saga of Hrolf Kraki and his Champions

They must be distinguished from Poul Anderson's novelization of the story, based mainly on the saga, but incorporating details from other versions, Hrolf Kraki's Saga This has gone through a number of editions since it appeared in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in the early 1970s. Not all of the covers have been attractive.

It is currently on Kindle, and the price is marked down a bit: https://www.amazon.com/Hrolf-Krakis-S...

I once took a UCLA extension course which covered the material, and I mentioned the novel to the instructor, along with giving him a loan copy to look at. It wound up becoming one of the regular course readings, as easier to digest than the then-available translation. (Although he would have preferred a different choice for the final passage.)

Thanks for stopping by Ian! Great Comment. I may have to get that one on kindle. I got Beowulf and Its Analogues from a vendor on Abe Books. Cost less than the Amazon paperback. I don't even know if it is being published anymore. I am guessing not.

Back in 2013, I had to replace my copy of Beowulf and Its Analogues from a dealer. So far as I could figure out then, it was indeed out of print. And prices for used copies have now gone up.

Which is unfortunate: it makes a great supplement to the extracts of analogues which are included in Klaeber's Beowulf -- a book which I haven't reviewed on Amazon because one of the revising editors was a fellow graduate student when I was reading Beowulf in Old English in a UCLA graduate seminar. It is a thorough revision of one of the standard editions, which hadn't been really revised since the 1930s.

I would feel obliged to mention it, and Amazon officially frowns on reviewing books by '"friends," and I decided not to tangle with them, or rather their software. I have gotten away with mentioning that an author was one of my professors, or that I knew him socially, but I'm not sure what their AI is eliminating these days.

However, I did review the edition on which it is based, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburgh. at https://www.amazon.com/Beowulf-Fight-...

There are so many different translations, its enough to make the head spin. Beowulf was the one I read first, in school. Then, a few years ago, I read this one Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell. Now I am on to Beowulf and Its Analogues.

Yes, way too many translations to list, only some of which are really justified. Of those you mentioned, Garmonsway's adhered closely to one of the standard scholarly editions, Klaeber's third, with.supplements, which I reviewed.

Seamus Heaney used the revised Wrenn-Bolton edition, also highly regarded, and more recent than Klaeber, although not as thorough.

Tolkien was probably working with the second edition of Klaeber, the official Oxford University textbook from which he taught, but didn't always agree with Klaeber. (It, with his commentary, therefore has some added value for scholars interested in how Tolkien dealt with difficult passages.)

Finished Beowulf and Its Analogues. It is as described by Ian.

I am going to make a start on this book:

The Origins of the World's Mythologies by E.J. Michael Witzel.

Got it from an Abebooks vendor. This author will be trying to link various myths back to an African source some 100,000 years ago.

Finished The Origins of the World's Mythologies by E.J. Michael Witzel. It is a good, scholarly, look at the development of mythology. It is a bit out dated in the DNA stuff. For example, the author says no Neanderthal dna, but we now know that everyone Out of Africa has 1-4% Neanderthal or Devonian DNA. I wish the author would go back and update some sections as there has been a lot of new stuff since 2012.

For a devastating review of Witzel by a qualified scholar, see https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&a...

For Christmas, I got this book

The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History by Mircea Eliade

I will be reading this in 2025.

Going to make a start on The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History

Finished The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History. Dense book, you need to know something of myth in order to understand this book.