https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hUjxvEw3uCY
Hello everyone. I am very excited to announce that Richard Rowland and I of Universal History Fame, we are going to participate together in doing a class on Beowulf, a Christian interpretation of Beowulf. It will be led by Richard, but I will be there participating, hopefully giving a little bit of my opinion. So Richard, tell us what you plan for us. I’m very excited about this. First of all, I’ve always, I mean, I’ve actually taught through Beowulf a couple of times, but this will be the first time I will have done it in kind of a larger setting. And actually I have a lot more material than I have since the last time that I taught through it. So we’re going to be starting on Thursday afternoons, starting September 7th, meeting weekly for about two hours a week. And there’ll be more details about this on the Symbolic World site with all the details of wedded, where and whatnot. But basically what we’re going to be doing is reading through the Beowulf poem. I will expose you a little bit to the poem and its original language, which is of course very beautiful and in a certain sense, the only way to really read the poem. However, this is not an intro to Old English class. So we’ll start out each lesson or each class by reading a little bit in Old English, and then we’ll just kind of go from there to talking about the readings. And basically what we’ve done is divided the Beowulf poem up into six different divisions. Basically, you’ll get everything that you would learn about Beowulf in the course of like a university level course, but it’s going to be crammed into six weeks. In addition to all of that, we’re going to be specifically focusing on it as a work of medieval Christianity. That is something that was written by a medieval Christian, most likely a monk, most likely in the eighth century of England. We’re going to talk about when and where the dating of Beowulf, as I’ve mentioned in the past, quite a contentious subject. There have literally been actual fistfights at conferences about it. So I’ll tell you all a little bit more about that, but we’re going to be looking at it specifically as a medieval Christian text and doing something that actually most modern day medievalist and medieval studies scholars won’t do, which is looking at it in the context of ancient Jewish and Christian literature, as well as contemporary Christian literature around it. So it’s going to be awesome. And it’s going to be the first time that we’ll have gone really, really deep in terms of the universal history project, as far as like not just sort of explaining at a high level here, here’s how it works, but actually looking really, really closely at a case study. I’m very excited about it. And my hope is that you will be too and you’ll all sign up and join us for this and it’ll be so successful that we’ll have no choice but to do like a year and a half of Dante. So that’s my nefarious plan. So join us. It’s going to be the first version of this is going to be live. And so people will be able to ask questions. You know, we’ll find a way to have moderators so that people can ask their questions in person. So we’re really excited to do this. I’m looking forward to this. I love Bay Wolf and I obviously I love our universal history series. So I will be learning and engaging and I will be there every week. So go to thesymbolicworld.com and sign up. See you all there.