#wulf and eadwacer project

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

Protagonist Mood Board II.

Reposts from pinterest.

[baeddel]

Hey darling, are there any particular translators of old English poetry that you'd recommend? The Wulf and Eadwacer posts have got me intrigued to read more :3

hey! :3

yeah, so I think for AS poetry, like a lot of poetry in translation, you really need to read multiple translations to really get the idea. Old English is a really hard language to translate and AS poetry has a bunch of very extensive formal conventions which were easier to deal with in Old English because word order and so on was a lot looser. For this reason the overwhelming majority of translations are prose translations that don’t even try and get into all that, but the problem with them is that you’re going miss most of whats going on in the poem. At the same time, some of the poems, when translated poetically, are kind of unreadable. Some of the best poems in prose translations are totally garbled in all poetical translations. So sometimes you really want to use the poetical translations as a sort of map for the prose translation, which you reference to find out what the kennings are and so on.

Anyway, all that said, for the most part I’ve been reading Sid Bradley’s prose translations in his compendium, Anglo Saxon Poetry. This is a really useful book because it translates the entire corpus (except for about three mysterious omissions), and he writes a little preface for every poem that provides you context. It’s extremely well written, but it has a few problems, namely that the translations are sometimes outright misleading, as we discussed. Unfortunately this book isn’t available for free anywhere that I could find. I had to get it for $3 on Amazon and its stuck in the kindle reader otherwise I’d upload it myself >.<

For poetical translations I’ve been reading Aaron Hoestetter’s translations at the Old English Poetry Project. This site contains most of the corpus and is free. Hoestetter is kind of a madman, who writes long rambunctious manifestos about Foucault and Helene Cixous and the need to break with academic dogma, and has a somewhat unrealistic vision of AS poetry as a refuge of queer resistance, but his translations are nonetheless good and dependable and the only place you can legally read them for free.

If you’re going to read Beowulf, the most famous of the AS epic poems, my favourite is Roy Liuzza’s translation. It’s a masterpiece, a poetical translation that preserves all of the formal poetics while being very readable in English, and has very useful footnotes to explain ambiguities and context where necessary. Liuzza has also published a translation of most of the corpus, as Old English Poetry: An Anthology, but there’s no ebook version :(

Finally if you want to cringe, there’s a ‘feminist’ translation of Beowulf that translates it mostly into twitter memes by Maria Dahvana Headley, which was somehow positively reviewed everywhere. AS studies is basically divided between parochial high tory grognards and liberal progressive gays who love Hamilton. That’s culture!

[roradraws]

MY HONOURS PROJECT BLOG

Here it is, as promised! I’ll be making daily updates about my project here! Check it out if you wanna! ;)

https://wulf-and-eadwacer-project.tumblr.com/

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

I'm Back, And I Nailed It

It's been too long friends, too long!

I know I jumped ship for a while there but in order to not drown I had to let this go for a while.

The good news is...

I FINISHED MY PROJECT!

I achieved a first class honours degree and I've been accepted into a PhD program. I'll be starting my PhD in 2023 (giving myself a year off, finally).

I dearly want to start posting about this and other projects again very soon. I think I may end up making a twitter and making that my main platform as well.

For now I just wanted to give y'all an update and thank you for your support!

tl;dr: I'm back, baby!

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

Experimenting with different poses and some flat, greyscale colouring.

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

Entry 19:Creative Career Advice From Industry Professionals

11th May 2021:

Today I attended the Creative Careers Conference, held by my uni. While this is not directly related to my project, I thought it would be a good chance to get industry insight and, sigh, n e t w o r k.

Anyway, I met a lot of cool people, including some people that have worked for Dark Horse, Marvel, Ubisoft (apparently an awful place to work), Disney, and Monkey Stack to name a few. They gave some excellent. Here are some key takeaways if anyone is interested:

When trying to break into the industry, you should:

Never be an asshole (this was repeated a lot!)

Be resilient and don’t let rejections get to you (many said they had experienced hundreds of rejections before breaking in)

Be okay with working your way up (mail-room and runner jobs are great starting points)

Be persistent

Take an interest in the work of other professionals’ work, i.e. don’t just try to peddle your work to them! Don’t be that guy who meets an industry professional then sucks up 20 minutes of their time talking about your work and asking if they can get your work into the industry. Actually appreciate their work -- it will leave a much better impression. People and the industry is small. People remember first impressions.

Other note: I’m drafting ideas for my script and taking lots of inspiration from Evanescence's Synesthesia “Lithium”.

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

Full body concepts for Wulf and Eadwacer’s “Protagonist”. Experimenting with grayscale look.

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

Entry 21: More Research

16th May 2021:

I’m working on my last assignment for Research Methods. It ties in with my overall honours thesis, so it’s not all wasted work.

I’m going over Murdocks’ The Heroine’s Journey again. It seems like a good idea to emphasise the protagonist’s mother if I want to use The Heroine’s Journey as a narrative device.

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

Two Day Break

Hey everyone! Thank you all for enjoying and interacting with my Honours Project Journal. I'm two days away from finishing all my coursework for the semester, so I will be taking a short break while focusing on that.

I'll be back to posting daily project updates later this week after my final assignment is done.

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

Finalising colour palettes for the Protagonist. Trying to keep with autumn colours, mostly desaturated with a pop of saturation on her dress.

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

She’s done! Here’s the completed character sheet for the Protagonist of Wulf and Eadwacer. She’s still unnamed at the moment, but me an my supervisor (the medieval specialist) are working on naming her.

It’s hard naming someone who hasn’t had a name for a thousand years, y’know?

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

Wip character sheet for Wulf and Eadwacer’s “Protagonist”.

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

Eadwacer Mood Board.

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

For Eadwacer's design, I'm taking influence from ancient Roman aesthetics (crossed with a dash of fantasy, of course). This will make sense within the religious/cultural context of how I'm presenting this story.

At this point in history, the 10th CE, there is mass conversion to Christianity. This didn't' happen overnight, and even people who become influenced didn't necessarily become fully converted. Instead, many practiced religions that were a mix of their past and new Christian converted aspects.

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

Been studying hot anime boi bods to get a better idea of how to make Eadwacer 100000% hotter. I think I’ve done a pretty good job so far.

My phallic sword gives me strength.

[wulf-and-eadwacer-project]

Working on full body concepts for Wulf.