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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3176 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 20, 2024

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I'm not the only one who loathes old English poetry, right? Chaucer is great, Shakespeare is great... and then it's about two and a half centuries until you reach something enjoyable again. Awkwardly mythology references, cloying saccharine language, each stanza flowing out like a nursery rhyme and resolving itself in that lame self-satisfied way, with an aftertaste like stale bread. It is a wonder that they who read the King James Bible produced it.

Chaucer is Middle English. Old English is Beowulf. Gawain and the Green Knight isn't bad, neither is Piers Plowman.

I said old, not Old.

Out of curiosity, what do you find interesting after having slogged through those two and a half centuries?

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