1 00:00:00,490 --> 00:00:04,110 Hey, hello, welcome everybody. My name's David Cox. 2 00:00:04,110 --> 00:00:10,800 It's a huge pleasure to be back to my old college this evening to introduce Maria Giovanna Headley. 3 00:00:10,800 --> 00:00:14,910 She's a hugely exciting races to show me what you discovered. 4 00:00:14,910 --> 00:00:19,570 Best thing, I think Typekit Anglo-Saxon names and since John Douglas Grendel. 5 00:00:19,570 --> 00:00:25,770 And if you haven't yet got a copy of the midwife, there are some available to the bookstore. 6 00:00:25,770 --> 00:00:30,120 Monte will. We'll give you some call at bargain price £10. 7 00:00:30,120 --> 00:00:34,800 So buy some food. The family and friends, Christmas is coming up. 8 00:00:34,800 --> 00:00:41,250 True story This movie is going to be reading from the midwife, obviously, 9 00:00:41,250 --> 00:00:45,510 and it's also exciting for the first time from her forthcoming translation of Beowulf, 10 00:00:45,510 --> 00:00:51,210 so it'll be the first people to hear bits of that translation in public. 11 00:00:51,210 --> 00:01:00,050 Then Caroline Langston Hughes, the man who was brought here at St. John's, will interview her and there'll be a Q&A and then the book signing. 12 00:01:00,050 --> 00:01:10,830 Marie is a startlingly original and intelligent writer. The writing is by turns, dramatic and reflective, funny and tragic, brutal and tender. 13 00:01:10,830 --> 00:01:14,140 I've just been reading her young adult novel is actually going on scary. 14 00:01:14,140 --> 00:01:19,740 They're fantastic, but of course it's the mayor, which is the reason we're here today. 15 00:01:19,740 --> 00:01:24,870 It's a novel that demonstrates the stunning command of multiple voices and perspectives, 16 00:01:24,870 --> 00:01:33,040 refusing easy binaries and stereotypes as it explores some of the most complex and troubling questions of our time. 17 00:01:33,040 --> 00:01:40,180 I think this novel could only have been written by someone deeply versed in Baz and the Scotland debates around it. 18 00:01:40,180 --> 00:01:40,870 But equally, 19 00:01:40,870 --> 00:01:50,920 it shows how this ancient poem can speak to the contemporary world of toxic masculinity and competitive motherhood of cultural appropriation, 20 00:01:50,920 --> 00:01:55,870 PTSD as gated communities and fear of the other. 21 00:01:55,870 --> 00:02:04,060 And as the monstrous hunger beneath veneer of civilisation. The midwife calls us to listen to this and all, 22 00:02:04,060 --> 00:02:14,290 and well to others voices and I think assist in the city that if we take the long view, history may be able to change the future. 23 00:02:14,290 --> 00:02:22,270 And as someone or something that we see as a monster may in fact be a miracle meant to change the world. 24 00:02:22,270 --> 00:02:34,070 So please join me in giving a warm welcome to Mariette at. 25 00:02:34,070 --> 00:02:38,300 That made me blush, that was such a beautiful introduction. 26 00:02:38,300 --> 00:02:45,290 I'm so happy to be here in a room full of people who are interested in the same things that I'm interested in, which basically is everything. 27 00:02:45,290 --> 00:02:53,030 But this is the depths of the veil of interest is in this book. I'm going to read you a little chunk of three different views. 28 00:02:53,030 --> 00:02:57,170 I think one is the grand mother character who's a war veteran. 29 00:02:57,170 --> 00:03:04,070 This is set in contemporary America. The other is the point of view of the mountain and the natural world where she lives. 30 00:03:04,070 --> 00:03:13,910 And then the last one is the Rutgers wife character who is who is named Willa in this book. 31 00:03:13,910 --> 00:03:23,860 And I'm going to find it. I. I go back to the cave and hold the best friend's skull for a moment. 32 00:03:23,860 --> 00:03:28,150 I stroke his forehead. I give him a walnut and he choose it slowly. 33 00:03:28,150 --> 00:03:32,230 I can feel the cold of the cave floor through my jeans and his sleeping bag. 34 00:03:32,230 --> 00:03:39,190 There's sweat on the wall wicking upward. There's a sound out there clucking someone on the other side of the mountain has chickens. 35 00:03:39,190 --> 00:03:43,030 We got one last year, but I had to be correct because they have dogs too. 36 00:03:43,030 --> 00:03:47,830 There's a family inherited hall that has a parrot, and sometimes I hear it telling itself stories. 37 00:03:47,830 --> 00:03:53,530 When Scranton, I saw it fly over its wings, bright red and green, talking to itself. 38 00:03:53,530 --> 00:03:59,530 Once upon a time, it screeched. My son was terrified, but dazzled, so it turned out was I. 39 00:03:59,530 --> 00:04:03,370 I'd never seen a bird like that out here before and I was worried it to tell the world about us. 40 00:04:03,370 --> 00:04:08,140 But it just flew over, looked at us with the black and glittering eye and in the very soft voice, 41 00:04:08,140 --> 00:04:13,570 said once upon a time again before it took off into the morning. 42 00:04:13,570 --> 00:04:19,150 Hello. I said to the bird, and then close my mouth. Apparently, parrots grieve for the dead as much as humans do, 43 00:04:19,150 --> 00:04:27,220 and they're often a sad speaking creature capable of flying up into the trees to cry for you and all your neighbours for 20 years or more. 44 00:04:27,220 --> 00:04:32,960 I wish. I can smell haired house dinner, cooking. 45 00:04:32,960 --> 00:04:40,400 I wish Green didn't hear or smell as well as he does. He talks his head and looks out into the dark laughter carrying out for Parrot 46 00:04:40,400 --> 00:04:44,990 the sound of Music louder than it was at singing recorded Ella Fitzgerald. 47 00:04:44,990 --> 00:04:49,610 I know this song. It hurts my ears, he says. 48 00:04:49,610 --> 00:04:54,920 Grande doesn't know the words yet for how music makes you feel. It makes me want to sing, he says. 49 00:04:54,920 --> 00:05:00,170 He looks at me, his eyes darting around, looking first at one side of my face than the other. 50 00:05:00,170 --> 00:05:06,140 You can sing quietly, I say in a whisper. He whispers, I'm singing. 51 00:05:06,140 --> 00:05:11,300 He's shaking with excitement. I tried to distract him with this story. You can never go down the mountain. 52 00:05:11,300 --> 00:05:15,980 This story begins. A lot of my stories begin this way. 53 00:05:15,980 --> 00:05:22,160 Why not? He asks. Every time I tell it down the mountain, there's a town where everyone's a hungry monster. 54 00:05:22,160 --> 00:05:27,080 The monsters tear people limb from limb like tree limbs, he asks. 55 00:05:27,080 --> 00:05:33,110 Like, I might tear bark. He nods to Chu. He says they tear the skin from your arm. 56 00:05:33,110 --> 00:05:38,030 I say and eat it, which I want to go down the mountain, he says. 57 00:05:38,030 --> 00:05:43,930 Want and need aren't the same thing, I say. What if you're sick? I'm not. 58 00:05:43,930 --> 00:05:49,450 You've been sick before, he says reproachfully, his fingertips on the scar, on my face that was hurt. 59 00:05:49,450 --> 00:05:54,130 I say sick is something different. I don't think they're monsters. 60 00:05:54,130 --> 00:05:59,650 I watched them. When you're hunting ground face first, he hesitates a moment, then there's a little boy. 61 00:05:59,650 --> 00:06:03,760 He plays outside a little boy. I ask him. 62 00:06:03,760 --> 00:06:09,140 I know the one he means. There's a cold feeling in my stomach. You can't go down there, gran. 63 00:06:09,140 --> 00:06:15,130 You know that? Tell me you hear me. He looks at me defiantly and howls in harmony. 64 00:06:15,130 --> 00:06:18,880 I tell him, holding his shoulders hard. He keeps howling. Glaring at me. 65 00:06:18,880 --> 00:06:23,830 HIGH-PITCHED louder and louder. Do you want the monsters to kill your mama? 66 00:06:23,830 --> 00:06:29,110 I don't want to say it, but I said he hesitates. And then the howling turns to whimpering. 67 00:06:29,110 --> 00:06:34,750 I stay still checking, hoping there are no sounds that say anyone's heard him. 68 00:06:34,750 --> 00:06:39,580 No sirens. No new lights flicking on where they face the slopes. 69 00:06:39,580 --> 00:06:44,620 I point out into the sky, a shooting star streaking across the dark green, sniffling. 70 00:06:44,620 --> 00:06:54,990 But he looks. I reach out my arms to my son, and he huddles in the making himself smaller, his hard skull, his eyelashes on my face. 71 00:06:54,990 --> 00:07:01,740 Over there, when you saw a star fall, you weren't sure if it was a star at all or something sent from your country to blow up their country. 72 00:07:01,740 --> 00:07:07,260 There were, I was told, monitors showing all the people in every place with names put to the dots. 73 00:07:07,260 --> 00:07:12,690 There were, I was told, when I was one of the dots systems for making sure you killed only the monsters, 74 00:07:12,690 --> 00:07:18,780 not the good people who are the monsters who deserves killing. 75 00:07:18,780 --> 00:07:23,460 I wait for Grant to sleep. He's not a sleeper, and neither am I. 76 00:07:23,460 --> 00:07:27,820 But you can sleep in a time like this. 77 00:07:27,820 --> 00:07:33,850 We're listening to a little boy at a piano, the key is halting under his fingertips beneath the mountain in the cave. 78 00:07:33,850 --> 00:07:37,900 That song carries on someone's listening there to the people of Harriet Hall, 79 00:07:37,900 --> 00:07:43,810 eat dinner, drink wine and more wine and more wine until the entire place is sleepy. 80 00:07:43,810 --> 00:07:50,500 Snowfalls, heavy and soft insulating the roads and the rooftops, and a boy emerges from a crack in the mountainside, moving quickly. 81 00:07:50,500 --> 00:07:54,190 He runs down snow, kicking up around him. Clouds of cold. 82 00:07:54,190 --> 00:07:59,890 He glances back at the place he's come from, dodges out of sight of the cave entrance and down the slope. 83 00:07:59,890 --> 00:08:05,230 The lights blink over him, and then he's at the back of the house full of windows, tapping on the glass. 84 00:08:05,230 --> 00:08:09,880 Another boy appears inside the house, smaller than the first eye, as sleepy than like. 85 00:08:09,880 --> 00:08:15,340 They look at each other. One inside the other. Outside, they put their hands on the doors and stare. 86 00:08:15,340 --> 00:08:19,750 The glass fogs up, and at last, the boy on the inside slides his door open. 87 00:08:19,750 --> 00:08:25,870 He puts a finger to his lips. The other boy nods and comes into the house, using the door closed behind him. 88 00:08:25,870 --> 00:08:30,580 They're known to each other, not strangers. Silence here. 89 00:08:30,580 --> 00:08:37,000 The brightness of the snow, the shine of it under the moon. Nothing moves, but tree branches weighted with ice. 90 00:08:37,000 --> 00:08:43,060 The boys are out again, the smaller one dressed for the cold. Both of them run up the hillside out of sight of the house. 91 00:08:43,060 --> 00:08:49,420 The moon silhouettes two shadows as they play in the drifts. The boy from inside teaching the boy from outside how to make a snowball. 92 00:08:49,420 --> 00:08:55,960 The boy from outside. Teaching the boy from inside. How to throw the snowball hard and fast enough to hit the treetops. 93 00:08:55,960 --> 00:09:00,700 Your laughter carries up and away, and the birds consider the sound. We dampen the noise to. 94 00:09:00,700 --> 00:09:05,440 The laughter is only murmurs whispers to boys at play. 95 00:09:05,440 --> 00:09:12,880 They fall on their backs and roll the angel arms and legs flailing, and the snow melts around impressions of wings. 96 00:09:12,880 --> 00:09:17,560 After a while, the boys make their way down again and back through the sliding doors and into the house. 97 00:09:17,560 --> 00:09:23,840 The piano plays again, haltingly forehands and set off to. 98 00:09:23,840 --> 00:09:28,070 Listening halfway to the late night news well, as sitting in front of the TV in her robe and slippers, 99 00:09:28,070 --> 00:09:32,750 thinking about the scratches she's just found on the kitchen door. Long and thin in the glass. 100 00:09:32,750 --> 00:09:37,760 The marks of something that scratched it. She tried to do it with her own fingernails and couldn't. 101 00:09:37,760 --> 00:09:41,810 The marks were on the inside. The housekeeper must have brought her dog. 102 00:09:41,810 --> 00:09:46,430 There'll be discussion. She looks up at the Holly on the mantel. 103 00:09:46,430 --> 00:09:50,210 Holly Holly sold all equal suffering that drifts up from somewhere. 104 00:09:50,210 --> 00:09:55,580 Some college intro to Lit Canterbury, something Scrooge is on the screen suddenly. 105 00:09:55,580 --> 00:10:02,630 She's always hated tiny Tim. She changes the channel. Now it's a Christmas special with folk singers in Austin, where it's not snowing. 106 00:10:02,630 --> 00:10:07,010 It seems disrespectful to Welsh to sing winter songs in a place where the sun is shining. 107 00:10:07,010 --> 00:10:12,320 It was probably taped in daylight. The singer has an earnest face. She's playing the piano. 108 00:10:12,320 --> 00:10:21,120 She even alive this Christmas special looks nineteen seventy five chopsticks from the music room, then a tumult of notes hammering on the key. 109 00:10:21,120 --> 00:10:28,800 Stop it dilly! She says her voice sharper than it used. Then it should be because in our past, being sent to bed is supposed to be sleeping. 110 00:10:28,800 --> 00:10:32,820 She wants to be sleeping, too. The piano stops at the sound of complaint. 111 00:10:32,820 --> 00:10:39,410 She hears Delhi scuffling around and she sighs she'll go in in a moment and coax him back to where he belongs. 112 00:10:39,410 --> 00:10:43,610 There's a small yelp she assumes to be Delhi slamming down the piano lid on his own finger is not the 113 00:10:43,610 --> 00:10:49,460 first time Rogers sitting at the table reading a medical journal with the eyes him from where she sits. 114 00:10:49,460 --> 00:10:53,150 He's rolled up his sleeves and his collars undone. It's Christmas Eve. 115 00:10:53,150 --> 00:11:00,350 The packages are already wrapped and she takes her temperature every morning. There was a bad moment two years ago, but she managed to keep it secret. 116 00:11:00,350 --> 00:11:06,200 Well, it wonders if she was like a rabbit who eats its young. What if her womb is a cave full of teeth? 117 00:11:06,200 --> 00:11:13,100 She turns off the television and walks towards Roger. Her son is standing suddenly in the door of the living room, staring at her. 118 00:11:13,100 --> 00:11:17,360 You're supposed to be in bed, she tells him. I'm not sleepy, he says. 119 00:11:17,360 --> 00:11:22,220 His pyjamas look damp. His hair looks damp to a nightmare. His lips are bluish. 120 00:11:22,220 --> 00:11:27,920 Why not? She asks, wary of it, wanting to hold him. But he's getting too big for that, and she doesn't really want to anyway. 121 00:11:27,920 --> 00:11:32,780 She wants to want to, but she really feels like doing his drinking in the kitchen with Roger. 122 00:11:32,780 --> 00:11:39,830 There he is, just out of reach, his foot in his slipper, tapping on the tile and what my friend says still is still standing there. 123 00:11:39,830 --> 00:11:45,860 She's forgotten him. I want grin, but that really says looking down at him carrying grain. 124 00:11:45,860 --> 00:11:52,550 Why would anyone want to look at him? My friend Dylan repeats, he came to play, but he had to go home to his mommy. 125 00:11:52,550 --> 00:11:56,810 Roger comes into the room. He tends to look at Dell. Who's he? 126 00:11:56,810 --> 00:12:00,830 I showed him my room, Dell says and shrugs. Well, it looks at Roger. 127 00:12:00,830 --> 00:12:07,280 Roger lifts his eyebrows. Is this person imaginary? Roger says, and Willa shakes her head knowing the answer. 128 00:12:07,280 --> 00:12:16,190 No child thinks his best friends are imaginary. Who Dell says Fred's real and whose grand will asks kneeling to meet those eyes. 129 00:12:16,190 --> 00:12:22,400 You don't know anyone named Graham. That's not even anyone's name. You know it, Benji, Dylan writes with irritation. 130 00:12:22,400 --> 00:12:26,570 I'll show you. He runs down the hall and reluctant Willa follows him. 131 00:12:26,570 --> 00:12:29,880 Roger Goose's her from behind, but she's in control. She doesn't laugh. 132 00:12:29,880 --> 00:12:36,170 The pills she took in the kitchen is working. Jill's got into the music room, and when she arrives there, he's sitting at the open piano. 133 00:12:36,170 --> 00:12:41,650 Roger, behind her imaginary Roger whispers and almost laughs. 134 00:12:41,650 --> 00:12:47,230 What delay she says, Roger has no idea what it takes to do this job every day. 135 00:12:47,230 --> 00:12:51,580 He's in the city nipping and tucking a gardener, tidying the edges of labial hedges. 136 00:12:51,580 --> 00:12:59,710 Well, well, it is fairly busy making Dylan into a miniature man. She glances into the gold framed mirror of the piano and sees a flower surface. 137 00:12:59,710 --> 00:13:03,160 She steps forward to brush it away, but it's a scratch like the ones on the kitchen door. 138 00:13:03,160 --> 00:13:07,000 And then she looks down at the piano keys and gasps. What happened here? 139 00:13:07,000 --> 00:13:11,740 Roger says. I should get grand piano, Dell says in size. 140 00:13:11,740 --> 00:13:15,520 He didn't know how to play it, and then he saw himself in the mirror. 141 00:13:15,520 --> 00:13:19,810 Well, it puts her hand on the keys and runs her fingers over the scratches deep and wide. 142 00:13:19,810 --> 00:13:21,100 They make a sound as she touches. 143 00:13:21,100 --> 00:13:29,900 That may sound wrong for the moment sudden chords and she flinches, who's grabbed, and she asks again what she hopes is a casual tone. 144 00:13:29,900 --> 00:13:35,030 My friend says Delon closes the piano lid again, abruptly nearly catching her fingers in it. 145 00:13:35,030 --> 00:13:38,840 My friend who comes to play with me, Can you come again? Can you call his mommy? 146 00:13:38,840 --> 00:13:43,320 Can I have hot chocolate? What friend she presses? My friend says, Delegate. 147 00:13:43,320 --> 00:13:48,410 Again, he's gone from the room now, leaving Roger and Willis standing in front of the piano, looking at each other. 148 00:13:48,410 --> 00:13:52,550 I don't know, Willis says. Maybe he got a knife. How could our son possibly get a knife? 149 00:13:52,550 --> 00:13:58,700 Roger's looking at her with more blame than she could ever deserve from the kitchen, she says cautiously. 150 00:13:58,700 --> 00:14:05,030 Roger gives her the look he gives her when she's failed in any small way. The pill overtakes her, now filling her with glue. 151 00:14:05,030 --> 00:14:12,710 He is ruining its proper effect, which should be cloudless calls. [INAUDIBLE] have to lock them up from now on our Son Access to Knives novella. 152 00:14:12,710 --> 00:14:16,940 That is a no, it wasn't. She looks up and into the mirror again. 153 00:14:16,940 --> 00:14:21,590 There's no one reflecting there. No one but herself and Roger. Something tumbles in the kitchen. 154 00:14:21,590 --> 00:14:26,240 They both run in, but it's only duller. The scaling, scaling the cupboard, hunting marshmallows. 155 00:14:26,240 --> 00:14:29,780 She sways my friend. My friend came to play in the morning. 156 00:14:29,780 --> 00:14:36,440 She'll call her mother. Time for bed, Wallace says. No exceptions. Let me see your teeth deliberative. 157 00:14:36,440 --> 00:14:42,890 Brush them again. Yes, the mothers, all of them, Rogers, to one of the housekeepers bringing a dog, maybe it's a pit bull. 158 00:14:42,890 --> 00:14:49,340 The pill is working. She's falling but upright. The window, the dark outside of the light inside there should be curtains. 159 00:14:49,340 --> 00:14:55,410 For a moment, she sees something flashing out on the house. Roger has his hand and will side pushing up her white gown. 160 00:14:55,410 --> 00:15:02,030 Dylan's back in his bedroom, having drinks, a hot chocolate she doesn't remember making, but there's the dirty pot on the stove. 161 00:15:02,030 --> 00:15:06,800 Sometimes she takes her son into bed, and she feels like she's tucking a wild animal beneath the covers. 162 00:15:06,800 --> 00:15:13,880 It's always been that way. Well, the chef, the kitchen door locks it, twisting the little metal clasp that brings the bar across. 163 00:15:13,880 --> 00:15:18,950 There are locks on all the interior doors. Here she turns and looks at her husband. 164 00:15:18,950 --> 00:15:23,600 Well, they don't know what all that was, Roger, she says. Her voice coveted by the pill using his name. 165 00:15:23,600 --> 00:15:27,200 So she knows she knows it just still in inventing something. 166 00:15:27,200 --> 00:15:32,270 Roger says he has a big imagination. The knife. So we'll get locks for a cabinet and shut the door inside it. 167 00:15:32,270 --> 00:15:37,250 That can't happen. Well, it looks at the clock and changes change the subject. 168 00:15:37,250 --> 00:15:42,140 Merry Christmas, she says. She puts, pushes her hips up over the lip of the countertop. 169 00:15:42,140 --> 00:15:48,230 She's tall enough to hop without being awkward. She crosses in and crosses her legs long and pink like frogs. 170 00:15:48,230 --> 00:15:54,650 She thinks under the nightgown, which isn't for sleeping in. Everything is cream coloured, lace trimmed in red for the holidays. 171 00:15:54,650 --> 00:16:02,240 The lingerie saleswoman advised her on what men want. It was nice to be naked in that room watched by the sales lady appreciated. 172 00:16:02,240 --> 00:16:09,800 That suits you, the lady said, clapping her hands. That's perfect. Rogers Mouse is on her hip bone, and she's arching and pushing herself up. 173 00:16:09,800 --> 00:16:13,370 The couches are clean. She sterilised them with a spray bottle. 174 00:16:13,370 --> 00:16:17,690 She looks out the windows as Roger pulls her nightgown off her shoulders and she thinks there. 175 00:16:17,690 --> 00:16:22,340 Look at that if you're looking, but she doesn't see them, whoever they might be. 176 00:16:22,340 --> 00:16:27,350 All she sees are her breasts and their lacy half cups falling out of the dress hard and pale. 177 00:16:27,350 --> 00:16:33,530 And as Roger enters the tiny bows at the sides of her hips, the triangle of red gold hair between her legs. 178 00:16:33,530 --> 00:16:37,820 The windows are like a mirror light reflecting her own face, said Rogers. 179 00:16:37,820 --> 00:16:41,270 The two of them in their white kitchen, glowing like their lighthouse, 180 00:16:41,270 --> 00:16:51,560 culling whatever ship any ship lighthouses don't speak only to the ships of their own country will have sex and then know it's Christmas. 181 00:16:51,560 --> 00:17:09,580 Everything is bright. If anyone's watching from out there, let them watch. 182 00:17:09,580 --> 00:17:16,210 Thank you so much for that, Maria. And welcome to St. John's again. 183 00:17:16,210 --> 00:17:26,860 I'm particularly happy to be hosting you here because John's has not always been the most friendly place towards enthusiasts for fables. 184 00:17:26,860 --> 00:17:35,530 One of our former most distinguished former alumni was Kingsley Amis, who, according to his friend Billy Lockhart. 185 00:17:35,530 --> 00:17:48,340 Hebraic Kingsley is said to describe Beowulf as greeted me to recite this quotation from a cross per blind, infantile, featureless peak of gangrene. 186 00:17:48,340 --> 00:17:53,470 Eloquent. That is Kingsley for. 187 00:17:53,470 --> 00:18:00,760 And he did then go on to write a poem about Beowulf, which is perhaps not quite so hard to listen to. 188 00:18:00,760 --> 00:18:11,170 But he does describe the poem as both tedious journey to his ancestors, an instance in old English harking back. 189 00:18:11,170 --> 00:18:15,850 So that's it's not fact, Kingsley, but there's a lot of exorcism that St John's needs. 190 00:18:15,850 --> 00:18:21,640 I think given this kind of cloud of antique thought we have in the past. 191 00:18:21,640 --> 00:18:28,540 So Amos and Larkin had to study Beowulf in their first year and probably their second year as well. 192 00:18:28,540 --> 00:18:35,110 If the syllabus was as I think it was back in the 40s when they were hit. 193 00:18:35,110 --> 00:18:39,220 But when did you first come across very well from what first drew you to the poem? 194 00:18:39,220 --> 00:18:47,260 Well, I think from parsing it backwards, I think that I first encountered Grendel smothering it in an image in illustration without beowulf. 195 00:18:47,260 --> 00:18:52,570 No context. She didn't have the rest of the poem around her. She was just coming out of the lake with a sword. 196 00:18:52,570 --> 00:18:57,100 And I thought, There's a female monster. I want to know about that monster. Where where did she come from? 197 00:18:57,100 --> 00:19:03,700 What is her story? And I was little and then encountered kind of in the Aether Beowulf, 198 00:19:03,700 --> 00:19:09,970 which always is floating around waiting to grab people who are interested in story by the hare. 199 00:19:09,970 --> 00:19:16,390 But I encountered Gardner's Grendel really as a reader before I encountered the actual text of Beowulf. 200 00:19:16,390 --> 00:19:20,020 OK. What did you make of Gardner's Grendel? Well, I loved it. 201 00:19:20,020 --> 00:19:23,320 I was a teenager when I found it first and I thought, Yes, yes, yes. 202 00:19:23,320 --> 00:19:28,330 And then I got to go to those mother again. And she's covered in fur and she has no voice. 203 00:19:28,330 --> 00:19:33,520 She's she's even made more more monstrous by by Gardner than she. 204 00:19:33,520 --> 00:19:37,900 Well, she's made more monsters for everyone than she has in the original. But she in gardens, Gandalf. 205 00:19:37,900 --> 00:19:41,830 She's really she's really awful. She's got that nothing film, isn't she? 206 00:19:41,830 --> 00:19:45,830 Yeah, she's one of the 10. Just doesn't give anything. She's a creature. 207 00:19:45,830 --> 00:19:50,290 Mm hmm. She's she's a bitey creature. She's a loyal mother, but she's. 208 00:19:50,290 --> 00:19:54,830 But she's got nothing intellectually to say to Grendel, who is brilliant, you know, etc. 209 00:19:54,830 --> 00:19:59,110 Yeah, we've heard that story before from the difficult mother. Yes. 210 00:19:59,110 --> 00:20:06,520 Who made him a monster? Yes. I think that's familiar. So when you actually when did you first encounter the text itself? 211 00:20:06,520 --> 00:20:14,830 I think in high school, in the states, it's taught in high school. I remember reading little bits of it and feeling no particular way about it. 212 00:20:14,830 --> 00:20:23,150 I thought. I think at the time I was, I was a reader, as many of us are of of all of the beat poets and they're all male. 213 00:20:23,150 --> 00:20:29,260 And I was accustomed, of course, to inviting stories of men and stories of transgressive men. 214 00:20:29,260 --> 00:20:33,160 And so reading beowulf was another story of a transgressive man, and I thought, OK, 215 00:20:33,160 --> 00:20:38,890 that's that's just normal reading, but also assigned reading, and I was ultimately looking for something else. 216 00:20:38,890 --> 00:20:45,820 But then as I got older, I started thinking about the ways in which Beowulf has has told us the story of our culture, 217 00:20:45,820 --> 00:20:49,720 the way the ways that we learn from it over the years, that it's existed because it's been around. 218 00:20:49,720 --> 00:20:54,370 So people have continuously read it, and it's an unusual text in that regard. 219 00:20:54,370 --> 00:20:59,200 Yeah. So did you then study it at some point in college? Did you have no lectures? 220 00:20:59,200 --> 00:21:07,600 I did not. I never studied it. It was. I have had a great strange fortune of having never had a formal education in 221 00:21:07,600 --> 00:21:11,260 Beowulf and then suddenly writing an adaptation of beowulf and translating. 222 00:21:11,260 --> 00:21:16,060 Now it's all of an interest in the cultural phenomenon that is Beowulf. 223 00:21:16,060 --> 00:21:23,020 OK, so that must be enormously liberating in the sense not to have to work your way through this edition of 224 00:21:23,020 --> 00:21:30,190 Beowulf and the having to note this mendacious versus thatthey mandate and just to encounter it as itself. 225 00:21:30,190 --> 00:21:36,670 I think it has been both liberating and also I have a longing for an alternate version of 226 00:21:36,670 --> 00:21:42,580 myself that that could have done those things because it's so much of is it it's wonderful. 227 00:21:42,580 --> 00:21:46,300 This the granular beowulf Fiona is really pleasing to look at. 228 00:21:46,300 --> 00:21:50,950 It's interesting for me working on all of this, and this is how I ended up with this text that I have now, 229 00:21:50,950 --> 00:21:57,610 and also with the translation going through and thinking about the ways that people have worked with this text 230 00:21:57,610 --> 00:22:04,120 over the years has been really fascinating to me and and fun for me as I've been playing with it myself. 231 00:22:04,120 --> 00:22:07,960 But I think, yeah, I was never I was never strapped to it. 232 00:22:07,960 --> 00:22:16,510 And force to it was all this is all the self-interested creatures and interested, interested in how we monstera as each other as humans. 233 00:22:16,510 --> 00:22:22,150 Right, so free choice. And well, I don't want to give away too many spoilers about what happens in the book. 234 00:22:22,150 --> 00:22:27,340 So obviously most of the people in the room know how Beowulf ends. 235 00:22:27,340 --> 00:22:31,450 But that may not entirely help, I guess. 236 00:22:31,450 --> 00:22:38,080 But I just wanted to to foreground. And I suppose this sort of stems from what you were just saying about Grindle mother 237 00:22:38,080 --> 00:22:43,600 as being the the primary figure that captured your imagination in that first image. 238 00:22:43,600 --> 00:22:46,420 The boxes were really interested in motherhood, 239 00:22:46,420 --> 00:22:55,540 and the poem is intermittently interested in looks kind of indirectly and and sort of tragically it wealthier. 240 00:22:55,540 --> 00:23:02,140 You are Willa. And what she wants for her children and what she's probably going to get for her children that 241 00:23:02,140 --> 00:23:08,200 the audience know that she doesn't know what sells a book that's just wanted for her son. 242 00:23:08,200 --> 00:23:17,470 But then she lays on the funeral pyre. And of course, Randall's mother herself said, Did you think that looking at the story as it came to be, 243 00:23:17,470 --> 00:23:22,240 did you think that motherhood was going to be absolutely primary and also 244 00:23:22,240 --> 00:23:26,530 refracted across different characters because there's not a single mother here? 245 00:23:26,530 --> 00:23:32,980 There are lots of them. It's a book full of mothers. It's I mean, I am myself a mother, I'm a stepmother. 246 00:23:32,980 --> 00:23:39,640 So I raised two children from their early childhood, and now they're in their late 20s. 247 00:23:39,640 --> 00:23:46,750 So I had some intimate experience with the difficulties of being a mother and the fears that one has as a parent of small children, 248 00:23:46,750 --> 00:23:53,990 fearing that something will happen to them at any moment that that someone will snatch them or that they'll be run over by a car, 249 00:23:53,990 --> 00:24:00,910 let go of your hand that that anything could happen to them. And that, for me, was an easy step to the fears of a friendless mother. 250 00:24:00,910 --> 00:24:09,610 In this book, which are that her son is going to be, is going to be murdered by any kind, any number of people in the book. 251 00:24:09,610 --> 00:24:15,370 And I think that's a pretty easy leap from the notion of what happened in the original poem with two Grendel 252 00:24:15,370 --> 00:24:21,490 who is hypersensitive and hears and does not like the sounds that he is hearing coming from the hall. 253 00:24:21,490 --> 00:24:28,420 He hates the noise and hates the noise so much that it drives him berserk. But but all of the notions of motherhood for me, 254 00:24:28,420 --> 00:24:37,450 the Frost Guy's wife's negotiation with her husband when he adopts beowulf, suddenly he says, Well, you killed my monster. 255 00:24:37,450 --> 00:24:46,280 No, now you're my son. And she comes out into the hall and says, Maybe you forgot about our sons. 256 00:24:46,280 --> 00:24:50,890 Surely you would never forget about our sons. I know you wouldn't do that, husband. 257 00:24:50,890 --> 00:24:59,080 But just in case you did remember, we have these sons and. And then she goes to negotiate with Beowulf on behalf of to get him to not kill her sons, 258 00:24:59,080 --> 00:25:10,060 which I think is really poignant in the context of a story in which we are about to see creditor's mother come in to get revenge for her murdered son. 259 00:25:10,060 --> 00:25:18,340 There are. So there are so many murdered sons in Beowulf, and to me, that's an easy leap from murdered sons to what about their mothers? 260 00:25:18,340 --> 00:25:25,750 And I think that in much of the adaptation of Beowulf, that has not been as much a consideration. 261 00:25:25,750 --> 00:25:31,480 The idea of a murdered son is more important to people than the grief and the the difficulties that a mother has gone 262 00:25:31,480 --> 00:25:39,580 through in order to raise that person who now is gone and is has been it's like religiously gone is horrifically gone. 263 00:25:39,580 --> 00:25:42,910 So I think about, yeah, I think about all those things. 264 00:25:42,910 --> 00:25:48,460 As much as I was writing this, I was thinking about all of the ways that you might lose your work and when it when your 265 00:25:48,460 --> 00:25:54,370 child is the only proof of credit that you have done anything as a mother in this poem, 266 00:25:54,370 --> 00:26:03,070 that's a lot. That's a loss. It's an enormous loss. And what about the other, the kind of chorus of mothers who moves to hair? 267 00:26:03,070 --> 00:26:10,420 Kind of, to me, very strikingly different from the the normative voices in the poem itself, 268 00:26:10,420 --> 00:26:15,940 where you have the poet saying that that was a good king or do they think they're silly but yet to saying that? 269 00:26:15,940 --> 00:26:19,390 But these all masculine voices say this is how things should be. 270 00:26:19,390 --> 00:26:26,140 This is this is what's appropriate, and you have the women really policing the community of heroine. 271 00:26:26,140 --> 00:26:28,990 I was looking when I when I put those women in, 272 00:26:28,990 --> 00:26:34,540 there's a choral point of view that's the sort of women of suburbia that the mothers and the mothers in law. 273 00:26:34,540 --> 00:26:39,220 And there's a group of them and they are policing everyone's actions within hair at all. 274 00:26:39,220 --> 00:26:44,290 And I had them in my mind. They are really the they're the soldiers of suburbia there. 275 00:26:44,290 --> 00:26:48,940 I wrote them as almost as as beowulf soldiers coming in. 276 00:26:48,940 --> 00:26:56,530 But they're also the soldiers that are already there, that the hall, the whole men and they are making sure the structure stays as it is. 277 00:26:56,530 --> 00:27:01,750 Because if it doesn't, of course, what's going to happen, it's going to be Flensburg. It's going to be blood wedding. 278 00:27:01,750 --> 00:27:07,250 Everybody dies. So I think that the notion of keeping the structure the same is. 279 00:27:07,250 --> 00:27:13,580 Something that has always been a thing for us as humans, if you if you flip the patriarchy, a lot of people die. 280 00:27:13,580 --> 00:27:20,330 So these women, the women in this chorus, don't want the patriarchy flip, they don't want to power, they want to run it from behind the scenes. 281 00:27:20,330 --> 00:27:23,570 They don't want to be in charge. They want their husbands in charge. 282 00:27:23,570 --> 00:27:29,900 But if that occasional suggestion that their work when the husband just is a little bit too troublesome, 283 00:27:29,900 --> 00:27:34,330 he might just something might happen to him or something. Yes. 284 00:27:34,330 --> 00:27:40,490 Yes. In the book, it's called It's same sort of regular incantation of Oopsy Daisy. 285 00:27:40,490 --> 00:27:44,550 And then there's a dead husband at the bottom of the stairs and oops, there was an accident. 286 00:27:44,550 --> 00:27:55,810 Error. But yes, the women have a lot of power. And you know, I think women always actually do have a lot of power, but often have. 287 00:27:55,810 --> 00:28:04,080 I've been forced to turn their own strength back on themselves, and that's that's a common theme in the history of the world. 288 00:28:04,080 --> 00:28:08,550 And so that has kind of swallowed up parts of one of my questions, 289 00:28:08,550 --> 00:28:15,960 which is about the various Greek chorus of voices that make the the the novel so fascinating. 290 00:28:15,960 --> 00:28:25,170 We've seen the mothers of heroine with the gated community that but there's also a counter set of voices in the mayor himself. 291 00:28:25,170 --> 00:28:29,190 And I didn't know quite where to place those voices. 292 00:28:29,190 --> 00:28:39,090 And for a while, I thought it was the voices of those sea monsters that they will fight his way down amongst them to get to the hall itself. 293 00:28:39,090 --> 00:28:45,960 For the kind of creature that one of the hats just casually shoots because he can sunning itself on the rocks. 294 00:28:45,960 --> 00:28:48,090 Mm-Hmm. Well, this thing is a total shame for that. 295 00:28:48,090 --> 00:28:57,300 Monster is having a great day, I think, but maybe those voices are a bit more complicated than just the voices of the wildlife. 296 00:28:57,300 --> 00:29:01,260 Could you say a bit more about? I think it's all of the above I intended it to be. 297 00:29:01,260 --> 00:29:07,440 I intended it to be an echoing collective point of view so that in part so that Dana, 298 00:29:07,440 --> 00:29:12,720 who is grandiose mother and green, who are alone living in this cave on the mountain, are not wholly alone. 299 00:29:12,720 --> 00:29:16,290 She also has a sort of imaginary friend that travels with her. 300 00:29:16,290 --> 00:29:22,440 That's a saint. But I was interested in in the case of those voices, 301 00:29:22,440 --> 00:29:27,480 I was interested in the history of the landscape and in the way, and it's in the original poem as well. 302 00:29:27,480 --> 00:29:31,020 The idea that the Mirror is this very old, very weird, 303 00:29:31,020 --> 00:29:37,140 very creepy place that is described with language that is different from anything else in the poem. 304 00:29:37,140 --> 00:29:45,000 It's fascinating that landscape description feels very much like that place is a character that that places a ghostly presence in the in the poem. 305 00:29:45,000 --> 00:29:48,120 So I was interested in writing a ghostly presence with The Voice. 306 00:29:48,120 --> 00:29:52,410 In this case, the mountain has the mountain is talking the creatures within it, or talking the owl, 307 00:29:52,410 --> 00:29:58,410 talking with one voice and there sometimes intervening as I think the natural world does. 308 00:29:58,410 --> 00:30:06,690 I mean that the long history of our relationship with the landscape is, you know, every once in a while, there's a landslide. 309 00:30:06,690 --> 00:30:09,810 And this is part of part of the nature of this story, 310 00:30:09,810 --> 00:30:18,690 as well as is that the water has feelings there and is inhabited with not just living creatures, but with the memory of the place. 311 00:30:18,690 --> 00:30:23,130 Yeah, memory is really important. There isn't the sense that these are not. 312 00:30:23,130 --> 00:30:28,320 These are much more ancient voices than even the voices of the humans in the story, 313 00:30:28,320 --> 00:30:32,230 and that the human timeline is very short compared to the one that the land has is on. 314 00:30:32,230 --> 00:30:35,880 Yes. This is just a moment in that timeline. Yes. 315 00:30:35,880 --> 00:30:37,970 For all the horror and the tragedy. 316 00:30:37,970 --> 00:30:48,270 Yeah, this too shall pass in the way that now that brings me on to the question of setting, because when I picked up the book and I thought, 317 00:30:48,270 --> 00:30:58,350 Okay, oh, it's a suburban gated community somewhere in America within striking distance of the the city. 318 00:30:58,350 --> 00:31:02,460 This is not kind of what I thought this would be like. 319 00:31:02,460 --> 00:31:12,960 Well, I was put there and then there's the mountain, there's a lake with hot springs and there's ancestral lands also there. 320 00:31:12,960 --> 00:31:20,070 So it's the edge lands, which have been swallowed up by the ambition of Roger Rogers father. 321 00:31:20,070 --> 00:31:31,320 It's it's the the the show, the taking, what is kind of on the edge of their property and appropriate way. 322 00:31:31,320 --> 00:31:36,600 And I wondered how you came up with that particular setting rather than just going right out somewhere in the wild, 323 00:31:36,600 --> 00:31:40,680 in the woods and saying, here's a strange place. Here's some people in the cabin. 324 00:31:40,680 --> 00:31:45,990 Hmm. I was interested in the idea because of it, because of the poem I was interested in. 325 00:31:45,990 --> 00:31:54,960 The idea of the glorious structure that is is also meant to house so many people. 326 00:31:54,960 --> 00:32:07,830 That is. And the idea that the glory of it is also kind of how do I say like general like it feels like when people come to Herod Hall, there is. 327 00:32:07,830 --> 00:32:11,430 There's a sense of it's the most beautiful, but it's built in like two lives. 328 00:32:11,430 --> 00:32:18,540 Like, you know you, Roscoe gets the idea to do it. And then then five months later, the hall is up and it's the most amazing building. 329 00:32:18,540 --> 00:32:25,140 And he constantly has to say how amazing it is, which is how I feel often gated communities or those like those, you know, 330 00:32:25,140 --> 00:32:30,360 cookie-cutter castles are this idea that this is it's felt like a real estate brochure, even in the original home. 331 00:32:30,360 --> 00:32:36,690 It feels that way to me. So I was interested in writing a place that that felt like it came directly from the catalogue copy. 332 00:32:36,690 --> 00:32:43,830 And here it is now you have a castle now, and the idea of American society is so much that the idea that you can now have your castle, 333 00:32:43,830 --> 00:32:49,560 you can be isolated from the horrifying masses that are probably going to come steal your [INAUDIBLE] like they want. 334 00:32:49,560 --> 00:32:54,930 There are monsters outside, they want to get to you. So part of the idea of American architecture. 335 00:32:54,930 --> 00:33:01,710 Is to build it up, make a wall, make a law, make a wall, and it was pass of the American border in this present moment. 336 00:33:01,710 --> 00:33:07,470 So yeah, so I wanted it to be a place where people certain kind of people could get in, but not everybody could get it. 337 00:33:07,470 --> 00:33:11,630 And it was it's closed off to people who are from outside the community. 338 00:33:11,630 --> 00:33:17,370 So if it had been a wild wilderness community, a log cabin, for example, or anything of that kind? 339 00:33:17,370 --> 00:33:23,490 I feel like that's a more that's a more transgressive idea than the idea of the utopian 340 00:33:23,490 --> 00:33:29,140 planned community that has locks and you wouldn't have the same sense of power. 341 00:33:29,140 --> 00:33:36,170 Yeah, I'm hearing I get a status just out in the woods. But yeah, everybody defers to Roger and his family. 342 00:33:36,170 --> 00:33:41,940 Yeah. Have remained that once you made it the king and queen and they have, and it's the dream. 343 00:33:41,940 --> 00:33:48,630 The dream is to come and have a house like this, to have a beautiful house that is white plaster and that has all windows. 344 00:33:48,630 --> 00:33:56,970 You have the luxury of like the view of the mountain, which has already been inhabited and they've built on top of the city that was there. 345 00:33:56,970 --> 00:34:01,620 I think we've got a very strong sense of the the uncanny knows of that landscape 346 00:34:01,620 --> 00:34:05,520 that you want to be able to see it outside and admire this picture book view. 347 00:34:05,520 --> 00:34:11,070 But the sense that was based on when you were reading of what could be out there looking back in at you. 348 00:34:11,070 --> 00:34:17,730 And the the digital presence that the the wild ones has come in the house and left those cruel marks, 349 00:34:17,730 --> 00:34:23,850 I think sort of the the most uncanny that's at the heart of the novel for me. 350 00:34:23,850 --> 00:34:29,610 And what about the mountain and the the lake itself and the railway to wait? 351 00:34:29,610 --> 00:34:37,320 What field is the railway come from? That was really intriguing. You know, one morning I woke up and I was in the middle of working on this novel. 352 00:34:37,320 --> 00:34:39,190 I had been working on it for years. 353 00:34:39,190 --> 00:34:45,750 I have been thinking about it for years and suddenly I I knew that I wanted it to be a commuter community within reach of a large city. 354 00:34:45,750 --> 00:34:50,280 And so it probably New York City. And that means train. 355 00:34:50,280 --> 00:34:57,060 And then I knew what the train was in it, and I had that feeling, but I didn't know what the train was in to affiliate. 356 00:34:57,060 --> 00:35:01,410 The train and the dragon with each other seemed to me suddenly out of nowhere, 357 00:35:01,410 --> 00:35:09,030 an obvious idea which then required a lot of back reverse engineering so that I could make that a place where where the dragon could be, 358 00:35:09,030 --> 00:35:17,940 the train could be a commuter train as well as watch has a dragon hand on it in person to the dragon moves around the kind of marker time. 359 00:35:17,940 --> 00:35:27,090 But the when I was because I think the dragon is sometimes the most difficult part of retellings of Fable and half the drama of the monster, 360 00:35:27,090 --> 00:35:30,630 the monster mother, the fight. And then there has to be the dragon somehow. 361 00:35:30,630 --> 00:35:34,320 Where did that come from? Where the [INAUDIBLE] did that dragon come under fire? 362 00:35:34,320 --> 00:35:44,760 When I saw the train, I kind of worked and I said, Yes, there it is underground with this, this hoard of of the old forgotten station. 363 00:35:44,760 --> 00:35:52,260 With these grand chandeliers and its mosaics and the splendour, the forgotten splendour, the last survivors hold right? 364 00:35:52,260 --> 00:36:00,630 And then the acquisition of a new hoard in the sort of museum when the the line is being reopened. 365 00:36:00,630 --> 00:36:09,720 I thought that was that a really astonishing and unexpected move in some way because otherwise dragons can be disappointed. 366 00:36:09,720 --> 00:36:13,110 They can be because they're they need to be so wonderful. 367 00:36:13,110 --> 00:36:22,230 And in in the difficulty in beowulf, in translation, I think the difficulty is often that the dragon feels unaffiliated with the rest of the story. 368 00:36:22,230 --> 00:36:25,020 The dragon feels like suddenly out of nowhere a dragon is pissed off. 369 00:36:25,020 --> 00:36:30,120 His [INAUDIBLE] has been stolen and he wants to come for somebody, anybody it doesn't matter who. 370 00:36:30,120 --> 00:36:40,200 Whereas if you entwined the ethics of Beowulf throughout the story with a certain kind of faded disaster that is coming for him because of theft, 371 00:36:40,200 --> 00:36:44,310 because of because of stealing life, because of the cup, because of the cup. 372 00:36:44,310 --> 00:36:49,560 Yeah. And you have to you have to entwine it as eventually this is what's going to happen to you too. 373 00:36:49,560 --> 00:36:54,540 It's coming. So I think that the dragon and the dragon can easily make sense in that context. 374 00:36:54,540 --> 00:37:03,780 But if the translation is Grendel, smother as a ferocious monster who's who's unhinged and is deserving of death, 375 00:37:03,780 --> 00:37:08,030 I think it changes the dynamic of Beowulf and the Dragon ultimately changes its action. 376 00:37:08,030 --> 00:37:14,460 It seems justified that he would go and kill her when in fact, it's a pretty mercenary act that he goes to kill her. 377 00:37:14,460 --> 00:37:25,080 Yeah, yeah, I think that's certainly right. And in the it's most of it is also the act of somebody who, unlike the beowulf in the poem, 378 00:37:25,080 --> 00:37:37,980 who is the kind of epitome of heroism that the beowulf of the book is as deeply damaged as monstrous a person as they know it's Grendel smother. 379 00:37:37,980 --> 00:37:45,000 And it struck me that there's a kind of dialogue about war trauma going on in the book and the fate of veterans. 380 00:37:45,000 --> 00:37:53,880 Not only these two crucial characters, but other veterans who appear on the kind of edges of the story that seem to me to be. 381 00:37:53,880 --> 00:37:58,870 I think though, do you think it's? Particularly North American theme. Yeah. 382 00:37:58,870 --> 00:38:04,980 In some ways, because I'm really talking about the way that American masculine status has acquired the that what you need to do, 383 00:38:04,980 --> 00:38:08,580 although it's also throughout the history of of literature, 384 00:38:08,580 --> 00:38:12,780 the notion that you need to do violence in order to be a man, 385 00:38:12,780 --> 00:38:18,610 in order to be seen that way and then to have Dana, who's a woman and she's a female soldier for her. 386 00:38:18,610 --> 00:38:23,850 It like to be a woman. You don't need to do violence. Like that's not part of the qualifier. 387 00:38:23,850 --> 00:38:27,120 To be a good woman, to be a strong woman, to be any sort of woman. 388 00:38:27,120 --> 00:38:32,070 You don't actually have to kill someone and you don't have to fight a monster that's not part of the lineage of storytelling. 389 00:38:32,070 --> 00:38:40,260 So for me, writing about about about war in this book was partially that I wanted to write about the 390 00:38:40,260 --> 00:38:48,120 poisonous qualifications that we put ourselves through in regard to gender and proof of heroics. 391 00:38:48,120 --> 00:38:55,560 Proof as proof of my deeds were worthy. My deeds were actually worth doing rather than potentially wrongful deeds, 392 00:38:55,560 --> 00:38:59,400 which are some of the deeds that were done by Ben Wolfe Beowulf character in this book, 393 00:38:59,400 --> 00:39:03,720 he did some wrong things, but he recategorized himself as a hero throughout the book. 394 00:39:03,720 --> 00:39:08,820 Yes. And I think there are institutions in place like having been in the army, 395 00:39:08,820 --> 00:39:14,130 having been in the police, having that kind of role, which allows him to do that. 396 00:39:14,130 --> 00:39:18,690 But then I also went and fought and killed in a war. 397 00:39:18,690 --> 00:39:27,990 Is circus different? I think that she is as much a victim of the society as she is a participant in it. 398 00:39:27,990 --> 00:39:34,840 She's she's a soldier, but she's also and I don't think being a soldier is inherently doing war crimes, obviously. 399 00:39:34,840 --> 00:39:42,630 But and nor do I think that commits war crimes. I think that does. I think that Dana is someone who's serving. 400 00:39:42,630 --> 00:39:43,850 She thinks it will be OK. 401 00:39:43,850 --> 00:39:52,980 It's not OK, what happens to her as a joke, but she's not prepared for it and ends up with it, which is an extreme story that she did not intend. 402 00:39:52,980 --> 00:39:58,050 And in fact, carrying a story inside of her body that she didn't intend. So I don't know. 403 00:39:58,050 --> 00:40:03,000 I think they're different characters, but I think they could. They are. They both do good and bad things. 404 00:40:03,000 --> 00:40:08,940 He does mostly bad things. Are not pro-bailout. Like, my soul just doesn't live there. 405 00:40:08,940 --> 00:40:12,960 But, but I think Dana does. She does best in the course of this story. 406 00:40:12,960 --> 00:40:19,380 She keeps her son very isolated and what ultimately happens as a result of the isolation as much as it is the world? 407 00:40:19,380 --> 00:40:26,260 Yeah, I think that that's true, isn't it, that they're both coming from in some ways, kind of similar backgrounds, aren't they? 408 00:40:26,260 --> 00:40:35,190 She joins up because her mother's died. She's 17. You to do with herself and the the community has been kind of destroyed and he's an orphan. 409 00:40:35,190 --> 00:40:37,920 He's a swimming champion, of course. 410 00:40:37,920 --> 00:40:47,670 And there've been some slightly odd episodes in his life already, I guess, but he looks like he was always meant to join up and go and kill people. 411 00:40:47,670 --> 00:40:51,150 That was his destiny, where she kind of falls into it. Yeah. Well, 412 00:40:51,150 --> 00:40:59,190 one of the things that's interesting to me in the original in the poem is the idea of familial bonds between warriors 413 00:40:59,190 --> 00:41:04,560 and the idea that if that even more than your family that you might even potentially forget about your family, 414 00:41:04,560 --> 00:41:09,300 you might forget you have sons because you've just met a warrior that you quite like and you want to be brothers with him. 415 00:41:09,300 --> 00:41:10,290 You want him to be your child, 416 00:41:10,290 --> 00:41:17,520 you want him to be your heir and your bond now as as fellow fighters or as not even fighting in the same battle together. 417 00:41:17,520 --> 00:41:23,460 But it's knowing that you have fought is stronger than the bond that you have with your wife, with your so. 418 00:41:23,460 --> 00:41:29,820 So the brotherhood of the hall, I think, is that really it's an interesting thing to think about, 419 00:41:29,820 --> 00:41:35,910 and it was interesting for me to think about it as I was the brotherhood of not just brotherhood, but sisterhood of suburbia. 420 00:41:35,910 --> 00:41:43,410 And the idea that the emotional bond is stronger than a romantic bond, that it's that it is a blood bond, 421 00:41:43,410 --> 00:41:50,910 the bond of defending your home territory, you're very isolated home territory from from wickedness, you know, whatever. 422 00:41:50,910 --> 00:41:57,060 And then the need to name it wicked. The need to look out from your high window and say wickedness, it's below. 423 00:41:57,060 --> 00:42:01,790 We're all united here, which is, I think, the source of many bad deeds throughout the history of humans. 424 00:42:01,790 --> 00:42:08,070 So the idea that you can only have a sisterhood or only have a brotherhood if you have an opponent? 425 00:42:08,070 --> 00:42:16,200 Yes, if that's what you identify yourself against and we've already talked a bit about John thought the scramble 426 00:42:16,200 --> 00:42:24,810 and the I think you told me the fact that it has when makes you look at the poem again and think, 427 00:42:24,810 --> 00:42:30,540 yes, you can take that story and read vision it in in an interesting way. 428 00:42:30,540 --> 00:42:33,090 Even if the cold had to stay in the cold, 429 00:42:33,090 --> 00:42:40,410 is it then that but are there other versions of Beowulf that you've particularly enjoyed and a few years ago? 430 00:42:40,410 --> 00:42:48,180 And I think maybe when David was still here. I had a beowulf film day and I showed all the versions of beowulf I could get my hands on, 431 00:42:48,180 --> 00:42:54,820 including the amazing animated Grendel, Grendel, Grendel, which has a great. 432 00:42:54,820 --> 00:43:00,480 It a kind of pink dinosaur like monster with yellow spots voiced by PETA is still. 433 00:43:00,480 --> 00:43:10,350 And he looks really cuddly, but he still marches into how amazing and eats his way through the assembled words, saying, Oh, not, not so nice. 434 00:43:10,350 --> 00:43:19,590 After all, a bunch of other beowulf movies have any particularly caught your eye or to be found interesting. 435 00:43:19,590 --> 00:43:23,190 And some kids one, of course, is a kind of case in point. 436 00:43:23,190 --> 00:43:34,170 Well, about earlier as this as this book was beginning to gestate in me, I the Zemeckis movie came out and it was I didn't yet know that basically, 437 00:43:34,170 --> 00:43:42,090 I got so aggravated by the Zemeckis movie and by also Revolutionary Road, which is American suburban novel about misery in the suburbs. 438 00:43:42,090 --> 00:43:49,200 The two things aggravated me in different directions, but ultimately resulted in this book, and it was. 439 00:43:49,200 --> 00:43:55,200 It was because I wanted this reckless movie to be awesome. I wanted the awesomeness that was not in it. 440 00:43:55,200 --> 00:44:01,950 And then there was Randall's mother again painted gold and naked and a seductress with 441 00:44:01,950 --> 00:44:08,970 those Intego high heels that just grew out of her feet like a strange golden Barbie. 442 00:44:08,970 --> 00:44:14,220 And but I think that that even more and maybe this is just human. 443 00:44:14,220 --> 00:44:19,260 But the things that have have really I've been inspired by the things that I hated, 444 00:44:19,260 --> 00:44:23,550 as I have been by the things that I've loved in this regard and the things that I did. 445 00:44:23,550 --> 00:44:27,540 I want it to be glorious that we're not as glorious as I want them to be, 446 00:44:27,540 --> 00:44:31,920 cause me to do a lot of thinking about the nature of the feminine monstrosity. 447 00:44:31,920 --> 00:44:39,420 The Angelina Jolie version in that movie, the grandiose mother played by Angelina Jolie is is a femme fatale and she's a seductress, 448 00:44:39,420 --> 00:44:45,570 and she and all kinds of sex happens with Randall's mother in that book with seemingly everyone, she's just banging it out. 449 00:44:45,570 --> 00:44:51,100 And I was just like. How did this happen? 450 00:44:51,100 --> 00:44:54,730 But also thinking about that sort of spectrum of monstrosity that has been available 451 00:44:54,730 --> 00:44:59,620 for female characters that really led me to a lot of thought on that topic, which has led to my career, 452 00:44:59,620 --> 00:45:10,000 which I think has was it was good that I watched that movie that I didn't like in terms of in terms of thinking about the voices that I 453 00:45:10,000 --> 00:45:19,240 ultimately and in my work have been wanting to really amplify and to to reveal voices that characters that didn't have voices in these stories, 454 00:45:19,240 --> 00:45:25,750 you know, Grendel as mother has. No, she doesn't say anything. And and that's that's of course, 455 00:45:25,750 --> 00:45:31,600 very strange to me that she doesn't say anything that she it doesn't make me think that she doesn't have anything to say. 456 00:45:31,600 --> 00:45:40,390 But I think in the in the original version of many of these stories, I just thought, well, in my early career, anyway, 457 00:45:40,390 --> 00:45:47,170 I it didn't occur to me that I could just make these women talk that I could shine the light on them and just have it be all about them. 458 00:45:47,170 --> 00:45:52,540 Like to take on beowulf seemed very daunting to me when I first had the fight. 459 00:45:52,540 --> 00:45:57,490 I thought, I don't know enough about Beowulf to take this on. People have written about this for hundreds of years. 460 00:45:57,490 --> 00:46:03,760 It's really it's it's it's the big thing to take on and then it's watching. 461 00:46:03,760 --> 00:46:11,000 Watching things like high heel, integrated feet on those mother started me thinking, Well, why not? 462 00:46:11,000 --> 00:46:13,630 Why? Why not take this on? Why not go in? 463 00:46:13,630 --> 00:46:22,000 Because it seems that maybe there has been lots of women have been neglected from the like larger power plays in in the study of beowulf, 464 00:46:22,000 --> 00:46:25,150 like they've not gotten the shot shining on their work. 465 00:46:25,150 --> 00:46:30,850 And there are so many women who have worked on Beowulf over the years that whose work has not been seen in popular culture. 466 00:46:30,850 --> 00:46:36,700 So that aggravates me and I want I want more of that work to show I want. 467 00:46:36,700 --> 00:46:43,180 I want a more diverse spotlight on scholarship and in this field. 468 00:46:43,180 --> 00:46:46,930 Fantastic. So talking around Beowulf as well as recasting it, 469 00:46:46,930 --> 00:46:54,800 we can see different kinds of people now beginning to engage with it and to to ask the the questions which it provokes. 470 00:46:54,800 --> 00:47:01,150 I think in this particular period differently from 12 years ago or 30 years. 471 00:47:01,150 --> 00:47:09,490 Mm hmm. Well, I lost you. I think quite enough questions now about what you think of the poem, what you think of the book The Great. 472 00:47:09,490 --> 00:47:16,750 If you would read as some of the translation work in progress since the first time you ever get to hear that. 473 00:47:16,750 --> 00:47:27,110 So in progress. I it's like completely. Yeah, it's a newborn baby right now, but. 474 00:47:27,110 --> 00:47:29,450 I will read you a little tiny piece of the beginning. 475 00:47:29,450 --> 00:47:38,330 I will go to Grendel coming in to the hall right before the battle, which I hear is being read by some people in this room. 476 00:47:38,330 --> 00:47:48,260 So that's the section you're on. So I'm going to read some of it. OK, bro, tell me we still know how to talk about caves in the old days. 477 00:47:48,260 --> 00:47:57,200 Everyone knew what men were brave gold and glory about only stories now, but also in the spirit in song hoarded for hungry times. 478 00:47:57,200 --> 00:48:05,450 Our first father was a foundling child, she said. He spent his youth fists up browbeating every Barstool Brother and bonfire of his enemies. 479 00:48:05,450 --> 00:48:11,840 The man began in the waves, a baby in a basket, but he bootstrapped his way into a kingdom trading loneliness for luxury. 480 00:48:11,840 --> 00:48:17,360 Everyone from end to end of the railroad now to him, whether they thought is necessary or no. 481 00:48:17,360 --> 00:48:23,990 They brought a tribute and bowed down. There's a king and there's a crowd that was a good case, God said. 482 00:48:23,990 --> 00:48:27,630 Show the Sun a wolf cub, further proof of manhood in God. 483 00:48:27,630 --> 00:48:33,260 He knew how the spirit dance had suffered. The misery that mangled through leaderless, long years of loss. 484 00:48:33,260 --> 00:48:40,430 Follow fathered a fierce fame. Bears name kissed legions of lips by the time he was half grown, but his own father was still breathing. 485 00:48:40,430 --> 00:48:44,540 And we all know a boy can't take his daddy's throne until his daddy's dead. 486 00:48:44,540 --> 00:48:50,480 Privilege is the way men cry and power the world over. Smart son gives gifts to his father's friends. 487 00:48:50,480 --> 00:48:52,430 When he takes those trips, [INAUDIBLE] need them to follow. 488 00:48:52,430 --> 00:48:58,760 The leader shows was ion until the end, and when he died, his warriors attended to his last orders. 489 00:48:58,760 --> 00:49:04,100 They swaddled their king of rings and brought him into the bosom of an ice ship, anchored and eager to embark. 490 00:49:04,100 --> 00:49:09,980 They packed him tight and treasure. Bright swords wore weeds. His shroud showed son stitched. 491 00:49:09,980 --> 00:49:17,270 I've never heard of any ship so heavy nor cups so rich. She came into the world and favoured his men, weighted him as well as those strangers. 492 00:49:17,270 --> 00:49:20,060 Had he'd first walked him to the waves left. 493 00:49:20,060 --> 00:49:27,140 Even ghosts need to be fitted to fight the war battle flew a golden flag over their main man in the Salt Sea saluted him, 494 00:49:27,140 --> 00:49:31,910 and so did the storms and shield soldiers got drunk instead of crying. 495 00:49:31,910 --> 00:49:41,360 They mourned the way men do. No man. No, it's not me, not you who hauled his hoard to shore, but the poor are plentiful and somebody got lucky. 496 00:49:41,360 --> 00:49:53,560 Onward to the grand old, it's. Which I have found in here somewhere. 497 00:49:53,560 --> 00:50:06,900 OK, here we go. OK, so this is like Beowulf has arrived and everybody is partying and everybody's drunk and going to bed, 498 00:50:06,900 --> 00:50:12,180 then Bale will play with his head on a pillow and beside him rested his men warriors of sea and sleep. 499 00:50:12,180 --> 00:50:16,650 They were ready for life and didn't expect to see their parents again or their wives. 500 00:50:16,650 --> 00:50:21,540 They knew the story of the slaughter and of how many years the Danes had been driven from their home hearth. 501 00:50:21,540 --> 00:50:25,860 But the Almighty had other plans a tapestry of terror threaded with triumphs. 502 00:50:25,860 --> 00:50:33,930 The wet weather gives the winners the drive with their one leader, crushed their challengers and cruised on through creation in calm and pleasure. 503 00:50:33,930 --> 00:50:41,970 You know how it goes. God is the final decider, and then only the question asker students seeking solace in the dead of night. 504 00:50:41,970 --> 00:50:46,830 He emerged a walker without need of light racing along the edge of the hollow shadows. 505 00:50:46,830 --> 00:50:51,510 Nearly all the guards were asleep, sat in chains to chests they'd given themselves over to God, 506 00:50:51,510 --> 00:50:57,360 and knew that if the Almighty chose it, they'd be goners. But if not, no enemy could drive them to his hall. 507 00:50:57,360 --> 00:51:04,440 One of them waited as the hour got later ready for blood. He alone lay awake eyes opened on the alert. 508 00:51:04,440 --> 00:51:09,390 Hidden by fog, Grendel roamed the moors. God cursed grudge worsening. 509 00:51:09,390 --> 00:51:12,810 He knew who he hunted the men in the tall hall. Wine drugs need fit. 510 00:51:12,810 --> 00:51:17,280 Then he pining for his prey to extinguish them under storm clouds. 511 00:51:17,280 --> 00:51:24,900 He walked in his usual anguish, feeling their hearts and heat the gilded hall atop the hill, gleaming still through years of bloodshed. 512 00:51:24,900 --> 00:51:29,430 This was not the first time he'd hunted here, but never before or after had such hard luck. 513 00:51:29,430 --> 00:51:33,360 [INAUDIBLE], no one where they had ever lain and wait for him. 514 00:51:33,360 --> 00:51:38,190 The warrior walked toward the hall, his head and heart hurting, and arrived at the Iron Cross door. 515 00:51:38,190 --> 00:51:42,300 Its hinges hold a welcome for him and his rage ratcheted up. 516 00:51:42,300 --> 00:51:46,140 He flooded the door wide and leapt into the hall of decorated floors and into the hold. 517 00:51:46,140 --> 00:51:53,910 His fury crossing. His gaze flamed as he counted that man by man nested together, roosting like roasting chickens. 518 00:51:53,910 --> 00:51:56,520 He'd be the sort of fox that stalks tonight. 519 00:51:56,520 --> 00:52:04,470 Before sunrise, he prised souls from flesh and eaters filled the crew remaining noble, but only feathers loose on the floor. 520 00:52:04,470 --> 00:52:10,500 His destiny, though, was no longer rich in others blood footprints to the door and outdoors the mirror. 521 00:52:10,500 --> 00:52:13,290 Now tonight was the night Randall's goose would be cooked. 522 00:52:13,290 --> 00:52:23,190 His funeral banquet bruised and blue from his bench kinsmen watched over the long hunter-paul, waiting for his hot, punted hunter to pout. 523 00:52:23,190 --> 00:52:28,080 At last, his enemies struck, leaping to snatch a sleeper and suck him bone dry staining, the Plex read. 524 00:52:28,080 --> 00:52:33,960 Grunting, gobbling, draining Harry's throat. Head fingers, feet dead. 525 00:52:33,960 --> 00:52:39,540 Grendel dropped his first course and approached the bed, where Beowulf slapped hands outstretched to slaughter a second. 526 00:52:39,540 --> 00:52:44,820 But he gripped and found himself conscripted, his hand grabbed by a commanding gait. 527 00:52:44,820 --> 00:52:49,500 The grasp raised Grendel score, rendering him a revenant in a hall he'd always revelled in. 528 00:52:49,500 --> 00:52:56,790 His bones cracked, but he could not rest himself free of this class war, wedded to a world greater look slightly like no human had ever come. 529 00:52:56,790 --> 00:53:01,770 Keeping him close, though, he tried to flee to divest himself of halls and return to his home. 530 00:53:01,770 --> 00:53:08,010 Dive into the dark and abide with any awful thing there. Stay in a stuffy house the rest of his days. 531 00:53:08,010 --> 00:53:13,020 He was an unwilling draftee and had never been bested like this before, nor held hostage. 532 00:53:13,020 --> 00:53:19,170 Now he collects men chained, chanting the boasts he'd made his bed red climbed out of the covers to get a better grip. 533 00:53:19,170 --> 00:53:21,420 Knuckles buckled in joints and joined. 534 00:53:21,420 --> 00:53:28,560 The attacker became the attacked, wracked with pain, attempting to escape to run and raced from hall to fence those hidden highways. 535 00:53:28,560 --> 00:53:32,070 His own grasp unlatched and flesh locks loosened. 536 00:53:32,070 --> 00:53:39,630 The hurt holder was full of horror heroes has held while shook benches splintered and danced, dreamt of doom or quivered questioning. 537 00:53:39,630 --> 00:53:43,620 The warriors wrestled their bodies, lurching through the halls, smashing and crashing. 538 00:53:43,620 --> 00:53:50,280 But the hall still hold its design fit for fighting wooden walls crusted iron bands at forest fettered together. 539 00:53:50,280 --> 00:53:51,480 Though from what I've heard, 540 00:53:51,480 --> 00:53:58,920 the meat benches stood on end of shattered cold MoneyGram's no match for battle and the two fighters fought on in the rubble. 541 00:53:58,920 --> 00:54:00,180 I mean, damn man. 542 00:54:00,180 --> 00:54:06,960 Until this night, no shielding elder would have believed the whole vulnerable to anything but flame its ivory and iron, its careful cantilevered. 543 00:54:06,960 --> 00:54:13,230 But now at risk timber by Typekit, a wailing clamour rose again, rocking the room in the north stands. 544 00:54:13,230 --> 00:54:17,100 Listen to the sound of doom knocking the whole hall heard the hull. 545 00:54:17,100 --> 00:54:21,660 The whole hill hut heard the hall resonate with the shriek of that almighty abrogate. 546 00:54:21,660 --> 00:54:29,850 The loaners lament handcuffed by hopelessness. The warrior holding him was stronger than any monster, more muscular than any man. 547 00:54:29,850 --> 00:54:34,590 The stalwarts of soldiers soldiers had no wish to imprison the invader, but only to slay him. 548 00:54:34,590 --> 00:54:36,180 Brando's life wasn't worth living in. 549 00:54:36,180 --> 00:54:42,240 Dallas had decided that his own men set up a guard as the two enemies spot swinging their little blades willy nilly, 550 00:54:42,240 --> 00:54:48,180 though really their captain needed. Though keeping this one for the Slayer saw that their struggle was for not. 551 00:54:48,180 --> 00:54:55,170 They could have stayed sleeping because their swords, sharp as they were, couldn't injure the fiend his spouse had ordered him and kneeling his skin. 552 00:54:55,170 --> 00:54:57,520 Still, his death would be agony, and it wouldn't be swift. 553 00:54:57,520 --> 00:55:05,410 No existence, nothing instant, but slow suffering is sending spirit sent to sink slowly down to [INAUDIBLE]. 554 00:55:05,410 --> 00:55:11,770 He knew it now. He had spent seasons haunting this hall, preying on poets, bringing pain to the privileged. 555 00:55:11,770 --> 00:55:15,310 His body was breached and its bones were breaking. He collapsed. 556 00:55:15,310 --> 00:55:19,000 Kinsman had him hand welded. Each of them living cancelled out. 557 00:55:19,000 --> 00:55:23,680 The other as Cain had Abel, brother and brother. Someone had to give and it was this one. 558 00:55:23,680 --> 00:55:29,140 The Unforgiven Grindle shoulder split muscles twisting and arteries on the scroll. 559 00:55:29,140 --> 00:55:35,050 His limb worried from wholeness into a wound. And at last, his arm was bested by a fatal fist. 560 00:55:35,050 --> 00:55:41,170 Bell was the winner. Grendel dismissed. He was gone to his grave, still living, running to the water, his wound weeping. 561 00:55:41,170 --> 00:55:44,680 His lair, his last long in his hourglass was emptying. 562 00:55:44,680 --> 00:55:47,380 Now his day is done and he knew it. 563 00:55:47,380 --> 00:56:08,430 Each heartbeat wrote its number in red, and the remains were delivered up to wretch with the reinforced their enemy dead. 564 00:56:08,430 --> 00:56:24,930 Fantastic. Thank you. Well, now it's time for the audience to put any questions they have and they want to change the channel. 565 00:56:24,930 --> 00:56:30,240 That's awesome. Thank you. Well, come back here so fast and robust. 566 00:56:30,240 --> 00:56:38,720 I have some neighbours also, I'm very curious to something as each person by the translation. 567 00:56:38,720 --> 00:56:46,230 And when you're talking about, I'm just stating the North American novel, how do you approach writing this across? 568 00:56:46,230 --> 00:56:50,660 Do you have to play rituals go through when you kind of first contact for book? 569 00:56:50,660 --> 00:56:55,350 Like what kind of love goes into these parts? 570 00:56:55,350 --> 00:57:01,620 I think always and my work, all of my work has been really each book is really different from the next one. 571 00:57:01,620 --> 00:57:05,250 But what always happens is that I get this little kernel of something. In this case, 572 00:57:05,250 --> 00:57:12,780 it was it was the idea that the the word for that is usually translated as hero for beowulf and 573 00:57:12,780 --> 00:57:18,060 clever and as monster or hag for grandiose mother and monster for Grendel is the same word. 574 00:57:18,060 --> 00:57:22,320 So I had that notion and I thought, what? No, I can't. 575 00:57:22,320 --> 00:57:27,720 And that caused me to do it sort of wild, free ranging, deep dive across everything. 576 00:57:27,720 --> 00:57:32,880 I could read about that topic and everything I could read about classification of Grendel smother. 577 00:57:32,880 --> 00:57:36,690 So yeah, so that's like, that's kind of typical. Like, 578 00:57:36,690 --> 00:57:46,950 I start with the with a question and then and then do as much research down any little paths that I can find and then just start making [INAUDIBLE] 579 00:57:46,950 --> 00:57:55,620 up in hopes that it will work and then trying to find research that can support the possibility that I have imagined something might be. 580 00:57:55,620 --> 00:58:05,100 So this is why I write fiction. By the way, though, this is why this is why I am not an academic, because the burden of proof is like, it's there. 581 00:58:05,100 --> 00:58:11,550 Like the idea that I would need to like find in writing many of the things that I want to find that aren't in writing. 582 00:58:11,550 --> 00:58:21,430 That's it means that I have to write fiction because I want to write the possibility that that has not been in the canonical text. 583 00:58:21,430 --> 00:58:28,450 You're welcome. From that. 584 00:58:28,450 --> 00:58:33,880 Hi, thanks for that. I talk to them about how they treated us. 585 00:58:33,880 --> 00:58:38,160 And I may be missing something. I loved it. All right. 586 00:58:38,160 --> 00:58:43,180 But then when you saw the of what you were doing? 587 00:58:43,180 --> 00:58:51,610 So that's what you definitely do in concession, like, hey, I'm going to make everyone happy or genre wise, I don't know. 588 00:58:51,610 --> 00:58:57,580 I've written in kind of every show my whole career and I it's a mash up of always a mash up of things. 589 00:58:57,580 --> 00:58:59,630 So like, there's definitely some horror in Moerewa. 590 00:58:59,630 --> 00:59:07,330 If there's some kind of a little bit of a thriller structure because you're you're hopefully it's a page turner, 591 00:59:07,330 --> 00:59:10,980 but it's also a lot of it is written in poetry. I don't know. 592 00:59:10,980 --> 00:59:15,460 I frustrated every publisher deeply that I have ever had. They're all like, Where do we solve your books? 593 00:59:15,460 --> 00:59:24,190 We don't know. And so I was like, Well, just wait. Eventually, I write enough books that you can just have a shelf, the headteacher. 594 00:59:24,190 --> 00:59:25,360 That's that's the goal. 595 00:59:25,360 --> 00:59:33,810 But at the moment, this in the states has been shelved in like literary fiction, which is, you know, a genre unto itself, in my opinion. 596 00:59:33,810 --> 00:59:43,480 And it's certainly not a naturalistic book. There's lots of lots of surreal and poetic supernatural stuff happening throughout it. 597 00:59:43,480 --> 00:59:49,540 But, but yeah, I'm also interested in in writing in all kinds of genre tropes. 598 00:59:49,540 --> 00:59:54,670 I'm interested in the ways that that we create hunger. 599 00:59:54,670 --> 00:59:57,250 And this is a book a lot about the creation of hunger. 600 00:59:57,250 --> 01:00:02,710 So I'm interested in the way that we create a hunger for a story and then create a story that continues to be told. 601 01:00:02,710 --> 01:00:08,410 And a lot of those things are genre tropes. They're there like, you know, Oh my god, there's a monster. 602 01:00:08,410 --> 01:00:14,470 And in beowulf, in the poem, you know, he keeps like the poet keeps going back and saying, last night on Beowulf, 603 01:00:14,470 --> 01:00:22,450 This happens and you get a little recap, a little quirk like emergency recap of of the reasons that people are pestered each other. 604 01:00:22,450 --> 01:00:32,560 So. So it's yeah, I you know, I see myself as as a genre writer in the long tradition of writers that started with, 605 01:00:32,560 --> 01:00:39,220 you know, the Odyssey because all of those things are monsters and heroes and gods and quit. 606 01:00:39,220 --> 01:00:44,260 And that's that's what I like to write in that in that realm. 607 01:00:44,260 --> 01:00:49,570 Still, yeah, yeah. I want it to be epic. I try, I try, I want it. 608 01:00:49,570 --> 01:00:54,270 I like to tell the biggest story. I can think of it and see if I can make it happen. 609 01:00:54,270 --> 01:00:58,840 In this case, it's the biggest story I can think of, with also a lot of it taking place in like a suburban kitchen. 610 01:00:58,840 --> 01:01:04,180 But it's still like. Right? So yeah, I'm interested in that sort of thing. 611 01:01:04,180 --> 01:01:10,480 But like a question and Hitchcock, you know, we would just come off the midterm elections in America. 612 01:01:10,480 --> 01:01:15,180 One of the things that everybody is talking about, the fact that 59 percent white women who. 613 01:01:15,180 --> 01:01:19,930 Spokesman for the Republican, Ted Cruz. And just a little rattled for sure. 614 01:01:19,930 --> 01:01:24,800 Think this is connexion to the characters in the middle shot? 615 01:01:24,800 --> 01:01:33,220 Expand little. Yeah, it's that thing that I that I ranch about, because it's because I'm a white woman. 616 01:01:33,220 --> 01:01:36,640 I'm like, What are you [INAUDIBLE] doing that you're voting for? 617 01:01:36,640 --> 01:01:48,550 And in the 2016 election, voting for Trump, who made it really clear that he has no respect for women and doesn't think that there are objects. 618 01:01:48,550 --> 01:01:49,990 Cruz is very similar. 619 01:01:49,990 --> 01:01:59,320 I I started thinking about it in the context of beowulf and in the context of this sort of storytelling in regard to women's safety 620 01:01:59,320 --> 01:02:07,540 in the world and the idea that if you are a person who sort of transforms yourself not into a woman who has equality with men, 621 01:02:07,540 --> 01:02:12,940 but into an object, into a beautiful object, into something that can be hoarded, 622 01:02:12,940 --> 01:02:21,010 that you actually have greater safety as a part of someone's hoard than you have as his wife or as his as a woman who is his colleague. 623 01:02:21,010 --> 01:02:28,930 In the case of many stories across America in the last year and across the world and in just across the whole history of the world, let's be honest. 624 01:02:28,930 --> 01:02:34,300 So thinking about why a woman in this case might vote for Ted Cruz, 625 01:02:34,300 --> 01:02:39,460 I was thinking about the ways that those women who would vote for someone like that would 626 01:02:39,460 --> 01:02:43,540 think my safety is assured if I side with the man that I've already been siding with. 627 01:02:43,540 --> 01:02:50,050 He will know that he is meant to defend me. He will. If I tell him that I am his possession, he will, of course, take care of me. 628 01:02:50,050 --> 01:02:58,330 I will. I will not be attacked. I'll be safe. And I think that that's a big part of the political mess in the US and in the world in general. 629 01:02:58,330 --> 01:03:06,910 But the the idea that that one must keep the power where it has been or risk, you know, 630 01:03:06,910 --> 01:03:12,220 revolution is scary and dangerous, and lots of loss of life happens in revolution as well. 631 01:03:12,220 --> 01:03:16,030 And I think this is why a lot of women who I think would otherwise, 632 01:03:16,030 --> 01:03:23,620 I would have imagined would have raised their fists and charged instead said, No, no, no, but he's a poor little man. 633 01:03:23,620 --> 01:03:28,150 Don't attack him. He's he's so he's so good. No, no. 634 01:03:28,150 --> 01:03:33,940 Don't come for him. And that's what has happened in the states. It's been it's been people saying, don't be mean to the men. 635 01:03:33,940 --> 01:03:39,760 And I'm like, Well, he's a president like he is. He's put himself up there saying, I am. 636 01:03:39,760 --> 01:03:47,440 I am the one in charge. It is only reasonable to say the work you are doing is wrong if you think it's wrong, but instead it's like no one. 637 01:03:47,440 --> 01:03:50,650 Don't attack him. He's so delicate. And you know, I mean, 638 01:03:50,650 --> 01:03:56,230 that's all just part of this screwy structure of of keeping the power in its place and the way that that 639 01:03:56,230 --> 01:04:00,760 has been taught to women to help keep the power in place because women have to women have to help it. 640 01:04:00,760 --> 01:04:05,020 If it's going to happen, it can't just be men saying it's a bit it doesn't work like that. 641 01:04:05,020 --> 01:04:11,530 It also works with women telling other women to submit and women saying, Well, you must submit or we all die. 642 01:04:11,530 --> 01:04:20,450 The whole system will be broken and we'll all die. And yeah, I don't believe that's true, but I believe that's a powerful, powerful mythology. 643 01:04:20,450 --> 01:04:31,750 Hmm. I've always been quite struck by the loud noise from Harriet and how destructive it is symbolic significance. 644 01:04:31,750 --> 01:04:42,850 So I was wondering why Ella Fitzgerald? Oh, well, in this case, it's because they're white people inherit who are like appropriating black culture. 645 01:04:42,850 --> 01:04:49,030 And in and in my mind, I was thinking, What would you do to try to be like, I'm so cool with people of colour. 646 01:04:49,030 --> 01:04:52,660 Will you play like someone that you've appropriated and made part of? 647 01:04:52,660 --> 01:04:55,900 You're like white noise, music, literal white noise. 648 01:04:55,900 --> 01:05:00,850 But except that it's a black singer whose career has been appropriated as an acceptable black singer. 649 01:05:00,850 --> 01:05:10,120 Yeah. This is the Christian. 650 01:05:10,120 --> 01:05:16,820 And again, I want to ask you that, but you of what at the beginning of the campaign, 651 01:05:16,820 --> 01:05:28,250 there's so many ways you can translate that I just wrote, I just wanted to know more about this whole process that arrives at Bro. 652 01:05:28,250 --> 01:05:39,230 Yeah. I think that the tone of the wolf I wasn't this didn't happen to me, actually, somewhat ironically, given where we are right now. 653 01:05:39,230 --> 01:05:46,040 This happened to me when I read Tolkien's translation of Beowulf. I was reading the language that he uses in that translation. 654 01:05:46,040 --> 01:05:59,300 And it's so had this certain kind of like formal masculinity that to me, is like just another another shade of bro. 655 01:05:59,300 --> 01:06:04,320 And so much of the stories like, Oh, let me tell you about love and ended. 656 01:06:04,320 --> 01:06:07,160 My man did this. I didn't even know that maybe I was kind of there. 657 01:06:07,160 --> 01:06:12,200 The way the P.O.V. works in the poem is that sometimes sometimes the narrator acts like he was in the room, 658 01:06:12,200 --> 01:06:17,720 and other times he's like, I heard it from my friends. I heard it from my brothers that this happened this crazy [INAUDIBLE]. 659 01:06:17,720 --> 01:06:22,400 And I just like the I like it. 660 01:06:22,400 --> 01:06:24,170 Do I like it. I don't like it in the world. 661 01:06:24,170 --> 01:06:35,120 But the notion of inflated actions coming from, you know, just sort of grow tall tales, which is a big part of what Beowulf does in himself. 662 01:06:35,120 --> 01:06:40,160 In the poems he himself is like, I did these really heroic, badass things, 663 01:06:40,160 --> 01:06:45,650 but you didn't see them because they were underwater where I killed nine sea monsters. But you weren't there because you're not hardcore enough. 664 01:06:45,650 --> 01:06:55,430 I was under the water. And, you know, it's also very familiar to me from that particular kind of culture that says, I did this amazing thing. 665 01:06:55,430 --> 01:07:00,430 I am the most heroic, the most hard core, the strongest, the best. 666 01:07:00,430 --> 01:07:06,110 And and yet there were no witnesses to this hardcore behaviour. So you have to tell the story in a certain way. 667 01:07:06,110 --> 01:07:12,230 You have to be like and bro, of course, is also a way of stopping traffic. 668 01:07:12,230 --> 01:07:19,970 It's a way of saying, no, don't. I'm talking right now, which is also like Seamus Heaney uses stealth for that purpose. 669 01:07:19,970 --> 01:07:27,260 It's a way to say I have the floor. And but bro is also a way to say I have the floor, but I am friendly to my audience. 670 01:07:27,260 --> 01:07:33,860 We are all brothers together. We're all the same kind of men. We all we all understand I can skip over some part of this story. 671 01:07:33,860 --> 01:07:36,800 We know what we know what it's like to be this man. 672 01:07:36,800 --> 01:07:44,840 And so you have that bond with the with the heroic narrative, which I think is, yeah, that's why I did it. 673 01:07:44,840 --> 01:07:49,100 And, you know, once I had that idea, then I had to translate that, which is what happened to me. 674 01:07:49,100 --> 01:07:53,270 I had an idea for the first word and then I was broken, which is a long tradition. 675 01:07:53,270 --> 01:07:57,200 This has happened to others and then it's like, you've got to play, you know, you're like, 676 01:07:57,200 --> 01:08:03,620 Oh, no, it's now it's going to be years of my life where I am like, clawing through rhyme. 677 01:08:03,620 --> 01:08:12,370 But yeah, that's where it came from. Thanks very much for sharing your work. 678 01:08:12,370 --> 01:08:16,570 It's a really exciting translation. It's great to see you putting your stamp on it. 679 01:08:16,570 --> 01:08:21,220 We'll see about The Adventures, Seamus Heaney, because my question is going to be, 680 01:08:21,220 --> 01:08:26,920 to what extent do you balance working in your own translation when you are living in his shadow, 681 01:08:26,920 --> 01:08:32,650 much in the same way that it like your grandma to live in the shadows told you about? 682 01:08:32,650 --> 01:08:39,100 The traditional Swedish translation does cast a long shadow over the whole translation. 683 01:08:39,100 --> 01:08:45,230 So how did you know? Well, it's it's going to be interesting because in the US it's coming out from the same publisher. 684 01:08:45,230 --> 01:08:49,330 It's it's also FSG and it's, you know, it's been 20 years. 685 01:08:49,330 --> 01:08:57,430 So I I think his translation is really interesting, particularly reading it in comparison with, you know, 686 01:08:57,430 --> 01:09:02,440 the nine others that I have surrounding me all the time because that's what I'm interested in. 687 01:09:02,440 --> 01:09:09,910 I mean, I'm not I'm not a scholar. I'm interested in the the ways that people have wanted to look at this narrative contextually 688 01:09:09,910 --> 01:09:13,150 in the ways that they have wanted to look at what actually happens in this story. 689 01:09:13,150 --> 01:09:23,980 And so his his shadow is long and Nobel prise winning poet like pretty intense and a little and a little scary to look at. 690 01:09:23,980 --> 01:09:28,180 So I just don't look at that. I look at his words and think, OK, you made that choice. 691 01:09:28,180 --> 01:09:31,330 That's an interesting choice here, someone else making a different choice. 692 01:09:31,330 --> 01:09:36,580 And the choices are a wide spectrum of choices in terms of what people have done as they worked in this material. 693 01:09:36,580 --> 01:09:40,000 And you know, of course, there's no shortage and shortage of translations. 694 01:09:40,000 --> 01:09:46,990 So I feel like there's always room for another view on something like this text. 695 01:09:46,990 --> 01:09:49,870 But yeah, it's interesting. 696 01:09:49,870 --> 01:09:58,840 FSG assigned him an English Saxon scholar because they were worried he would get it wrong, and he he did so much work to get it right. 697 01:09:58,840 --> 01:10:08,170 He and still got a lot of critique about the translation itself, I think, whereas right now, because I wrote Mirwais, they did not ask me scholars. 698 01:10:08,170 --> 01:10:13,810 I mean, just like a wild creature rushing through the forest with two torches, studying trees on fire. 699 01:10:13,810 --> 01:10:17,980 So but I think, you know, there's room for that translation as well. 700 01:10:17,980 --> 01:10:22,780 Like I am. I've been lucky enough to have a publisher who's like, OK, we're ready for that. 701 01:10:22,780 --> 01:10:30,190 Let's do that. Let's let's see what happens if you if you come through wildly as a novelist rather than as a poet or, you know, 702 01:10:30,190 --> 01:10:37,390 I mean, I've certainly been a poet over the years, but I but I don't consider myself to be formally a poet. 703 01:10:37,390 --> 01:10:43,480 So too, to play with language in this way. Is privilege so, so much fun? 704 01:10:43,480 --> 01:10:50,540 Yeah. How we doing? I mean, maybe I'll take one final question. 705 01:10:50,540 --> 01:11:02,000 I'll go get. Some questions and questions that you could go sulking about when you ask. 706 01:11:02,000 --> 01:11:12,020 Right. And you know, that's one of the I found really interesting and that comes from the same company for a voice that uses the privileged few times. 707 01:11:12,020 --> 01:11:18,080 Now this state load, you would ask yourself what kind of position? 708 01:11:18,080 --> 01:11:28,850 You're right, sir. In regards to like how what it's going to raise to actually think about story, so that kind of on pretty travel with that kind of. 709 01:11:28,850 --> 01:11:39,170 Yeah, I mean, that, of course, is the topic of many years of scholarship on all sides of that in terms of what I think, 710 01:11:39,170 --> 01:11:43,160 what I'm what I'm doing in my version. 711 01:11:43,160 --> 01:11:51,260 You know, I've always been interested in the feeling of like the poet slash the people who are copying the text, 712 01:11:51,260 --> 01:11:56,660 the monks going, and you know, I think I'm just going to stick a little thing in here that I remember from elsewhere. 713 01:11:56,660 --> 01:12:04,250 So I think there's always not exactly a critical eye, although sometimes there's like, wrong god. 714 01:12:04,250 --> 01:12:11,510 Just so you guys know, I here I am working on this story. I'm going to pause for a second and say, Ron God, and I'm putting that it. 715 01:12:11,510 --> 01:12:16,010 And I mean, it's part of the it's part of the text and it's an interesting part of the text. 716 01:12:16,010 --> 01:12:22,550 The idea of like which is why I think what I was saying about earlier, the idea of we're all in this together, we all have to say. 717 01:12:22,550 --> 01:12:29,510 In fact, knowledge is part of the way the story is being told here because it's sort of like we're all the same kind of God, we're all the same. 718 01:12:29,510 --> 01:12:33,530 And here's a little bit of random that I drew in. I read it in together. 719 01:12:33,530 --> 01:12:38,390 It's some scholarship from elsewhere, you know, and I'm telling a different weird bit of story. 720 01:12:38,390 --> 01:12:43,970 And that's that's part of what's so interesting about the bill of time is it's full of scraps 721 01:12:43,970 --> 01:12:49,770 and bits and bobs that you can also entwined working on it with the themes of the poem, 722 01:12:49,770 --> 01:12:56,900 but sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're just like things that are treated as fragments like they don't make sense, but they do. 723 01:12:56,900 --> 01:12:59,540 They're about they're about lost very frequently. 724 01:12:59,540 --> 01:13:05,750 They're about they're about war and grief and loss and what you give up in order to have loyalty to your people. 725 01:13:05,750 --> 01:13:14,930 And I think that's, you know, as far as point of view goes, it's a wild compendium of knowledge that's stuffed into this poem, 726 01:13:14,930 --> 01:13:20,600 and it's fun to think of somebody trying to like, go, OK, OK, let me break it down for you. 727 01:13:20,600 --> 01:13:24,980 I know you don't have this scholarship. I'm just going to grab it. I'm just going to toss it right here. 728 01:13:24,980 --> 01:13:33,020 Totally different, Peter, and and having someone be able to do that because they have put in a kind of all encompassing voice at the top that says, 729 01:13:33,020 --> 01:13:35,608 we all know what the story is, don't we?