St. Paddy's Bonus Post! "Digging" by Heaney and "Two Towers" excerpt by Tolkien

It's convenient when I don't have to figure out what music goes with something.

I did two things on the main blog today: Complained about non-Irish excerpts on Saint Patrick's day, and memed on Samwise Gamgee. Let's address both of those by looking at two of my favorite works by Beowulf translators.

Me: Explaining how all writing connects to Beowulf.
Image: https://fersacambridge.wordpress.com/2021/05/10/an-ode-to-the-pinboard/

First up, Seamus Heaney's poem "Digging"

Between my finger and my thumb  

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. 

[...] 

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. 

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it. 

Blogger, why do you hate consistent line spacing? 

I just wanted to get some actual Irish in here today. Heaney wouldn't be born for another 30 years or so after the publication of T5FSOB, so I suppose we can't fault Elliot for not picking him. Today, he's probably best known for his Beowulf translation (probably the most popular one in American highschools. Not the most scholar-accurate, but very readable.), but he's a successful poet in his own right. 

It is, in my opinion, a good poem in a fairly traditional way. It rhymes cleanly, has imagery, the line breaks work, etc., etc.

But I like it because it speaks to me personally. Both of my grandfathers worked with their hands. Neither one seemed to actually have a very well defined job or title. On my mom's side, Pappy worked in an auto-shop, and my mom said he was basically a laborer, not a technician or whatever. In retirement, he was quite a woodworker, he made displays for all the holidays by hand. At least one of them won an award in the local newspaper. On my dad's, Poppop did something with the boiler at a cookie factory. Supposedly he only really worked the days they turned it on and off, and just kind of tinkered and fixed little things the rest of the year. I have a wooden giraffe that he made at some point.

My dad worked in programming, but I think he identifies more blue-collar than white. He always says he didn't "go to real college." For what it's worth dad, the community college you went to was rated better than the state school I went to.

And now I'm here, typing away at this blog, in between a couple of other writing projects.

But, at the end of the day, whether its carving or welding or programming or writing, we all wanted to dig in and make something. And, while text to speech is working on it and we might be able to hook our brains up to computers someday, we all have to do it with our fingers and thumbs.

Second, my favorite bit of Lord of The Rings, and one of the few popular Sam scenes I didn't post earlier today. Tolkien was a huge fan of Beowulf, and had quite a few articles and lectures on it, as well as doing his own translation. Beowulf (and Norse mythology in general) were major influences on Lord of The Rings. 

There's some good in the world Mr. Frodo...

You've probably seen this scene about a million times. Either way, probably worth watching it again. The scene that goes with it in the book is set a bit earlier in the book. I admit I'm not up enough on LOTR (Tolkien, like Beowulf, is meant to be read aloud, and I don't have the patience to do that with a 500K word long book) to be able to talk exactly about how that matters.

The crux of both is a beautifully written version of "it's always darkest before the dawn." I think Sam/Tolkien's is a bit more active, which I like. Yeah, the sun will come up tomorrow. But you won't see it if you don't keep going. The book version adds a bit in the middle that I like:

Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were

things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for,

because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was

a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way

of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the

mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them

Not many people in real life would want to go fight the Demon-Nazi-Terminator-Aliens. Or if they did, they'd change their mind the first time the guy next to them got blasted with a inside-out ray. But at the end of the day, the people who are in that place and that time are the ones that have to deal with it. If you're one of those people, sucks to be you, but I hope you'll do your best. If not, then I'm sure the smaller burden you have to carry is important all the same.

There's another bit in Fellowship that pairs nicely with this:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

There's good in the world, and that's what this whole reading project is about. Other people are a big part of that good (not to put down cats or waterfalls or cool looking rocks), and you can be part of it too.