Fall 2006 Courses

English 304-01: Medieval Monsters, Magic, & Marvels (Krier)

M/W/F 10:50-11:50am, Old Main 001

Monsters, dragons, demons, magicians, shape-shifters, nature spirits, fairies, giants, cannibals, grotesques, bear-men, wolf-men, angels, and many other fantastic creatures inhabit the stories, poems, and visual arts of the long Middle Ages. We will look at the startling visual grotesques in the margins of medieval books, and then move entirely to stories and poems, surveying works from Britain and Scandinavia: Beowulf, The Volsung Saga, The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, Sir Orfeo, Sir Bevis of Hampton, Valentine and Orson, Sir Gowther (he is a giant), The Wedding of Sir Gawain & Dame Ragnelle (she is a loathly lady), the stanzaic Life of  Margaret,  the Welsh mythic tales of The Mabinogion, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Second Shepherds’ Play, excerpts from Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a few farewells to magic from the 17th and 18th centuries.

We’ll consider subjects like the nature of the uncanny, the grotesque, the fantastic, and wonder; the ways that monstrosity might work out anxieties about unknown others; the effects of enchantment, disenchantment, shape-shifting; why monsters fit so well into genres of heroes and of saints (St. Margaret always has adventures with a dragon, as does St. George); the ways that monster-vs.-hero stories handle the interior strains of change, transformation, growing to adult identity; differences between today’s monsters and medieval ones. We’ll frame the course with large segments of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, asking: What happens to Celtic forms of magic and metamorphosis, and to Arthurian heroes, when these encounter the 20th-century forms of writing for children and the novel?

Books will probably include: The Saga of the Volsungs (Penguin, ed. Jesse Byock); The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki (Penguin, ed. Jesse Byock); Beowulf (Norton critical edition, trans. Seamus Heaney); Malory, the Morte Darthur (Oxford World’s Classics, ed. Helen Cooper); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / Patience / Pearl (Norton, trans. Marie Borroff); The Mabinogi (California, trans. Patrick Ford); Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (Penguin, ed. Thomas Roche); T. H. White, The Once and Future King (Ace reprint edition). For brief works like the romances, for which no single collection will serve our purposes, we’ll use e-reserve.

Fall 2006 Course Listings