Blogs Who've Cried Beowulf

There've been a couple of posts on Beowulf in recent memory that I meant to blog about when they came out and never got around to. Consider them officially around-to-gotten.

First, and more recent, is Michael Drout's post on Benjamin Bagby's performance of Beowulf. I don't have much to add, except that I'm excited and can't wait to get a copy for myself. I was also interested to see in the comments section that Bagby sang about the Volsung story with Sequentia. I have a CD of theirs of Norse music (as best as can be reconstructed, of course), and I know they've also set both Old English and even Gothic to music. (I wonder if Mikaela knows ... speak Gothic around her and she melts like buttah!)

The second post is Scott Nokes' post Beowulf Hobbyists of the World, Unite!, where he links to a LanguageHat post [2nd item] about Syd Allen's Beowulf site. Syd indeed has an excellent site, with detailed info pages on anything you can think of: various editions and translations, comic books, historical background, maps, a pronunciation guide, alliteration, even a word search. You want to know what the meadhall Heorot might have looked like? Syd's got this picture:
You want to compare the handwritings of the two scribes who copied the only existing manuscript of Beowulf? He's got this page. He's even got a whole page dedicated to the question of whether Beowulf, in his fight with Grendel's mother, pulled her hair (feaxe) or her shoulder (eaxle).

I consider Syd Allan's site, together with Ben Slade's Beowulf on Steorarume ("Beowulf in Cyberspace"), the two headquarters of Beowulf-studies on the web. The latter link also has many cool features, not least of which is a cool url: www.heorot.dk (since, after all, Heorot was in Denmark). Ben has also pimped his site with cool art from fan and Photoshop, a dual-language text which periodically sports audio files (which, oddly, while his, seem to live on Syd Allan's site), helpful lists of characters and monsters, and links to other Old English works like Deor, Waldere, and the Finnsburg fragment (which has a more detailed account of the Frisian kinslaying whose tale the poet ironically tells in Heorot before Hrothgar and his son (and Beowulf).

Finally, I'm in the process of rearranging my own sidebar. You'll see some additional links and resources (including the two I just mentioned). In the future, I'll probably try to categorize my blog links (I wonder if I need to create separate blogrolling accounts for that, or if I should just put them up manually. Any ideas?), and thereby add more to each category, especially medievalist blogs (after the spirit of this post).