Early English Aloud & Alive: The Language of Beowulf, Chaucer & Shakespeare

We all have our pet party tricks that we're delighted to bore family, friends or even perfect strangers with on a moment's notice. I can recite, for example, the first few of Beowulf's 3,182 lines from memory in the original Old English (although I can't actually type them out here, because Microsoft Word has taken Edward Fitzgerald's admonition that "the moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on" quite literally and simply eliminated letters and accents that aren't part of the king's, queen's or even Billy Bob's, English anymore). The Anglo-Saxon-cum-Middle-English-cum-Modern-English evolution transpired over a mere thousand years, from 800 A.D. to 1800, during which the language changed in form, meaning, and even pronunciation. In this decade-old (though not terribly dated) program, Dr. Joseph Gallagher recites excerpts from Old English (Beowulf), Middle English (Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales) and Early Modern English (Shakespeare's The Tempest), while visiting the site of the ancient Sutton Hoo burial grounds, the cathedral in Canterbury, and the location for the (now completed) recreation of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Along the way, Gallagher discusses changes in word order from Old English to Middle English, the great vowel shift from Middle to Early Modern English, and the relatively minor adaptations the language has undergone since the Elizabethan period. The final third of the program takes a closer look at Beowulf and includes dramatizations that are, admittedly, a bit cheesy, but Gallagher's commentary on the poem is anything but: by reminding us of the central question of Beowulf (who is the real intruder--newly arrived man or indigent beast?), Gallagher reaffirms the power of the earliest extant epic in the English language to still speak to us centuries later. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)