Epic, among the earliest and most universal of genres, is found in a developed form among the most ancient written records of cultures from China to Greece, and has been recorded as oral narrative on every inhabited continent. From these roots in Western culture a varied yet unbroken tradition of heroic narrative has grown. Epic’s form has changed with human society, reflecting our literary, social and psychological development. This study aims to explore the effects in epic literature in English of one such development, namely the internalisation of writing, at two stages of this process as they are manifest in Beowulf and Malory’s Morte Darthur. Every culture has particular noetic processes, that is, methods of structuring and storing knowledge. Writing has profoundly influenced noetic development, so that primary oral cultures (without writing), chirographic culture (with writing) and typographic cultures (with printing) are profoundly different. Parry and Lord’s oral formulaic theory, and Havelock and Ong’s noetic theory describe the characteristics of primary oral thought and poetic discourse. Beowulf’s noetic paradigm is vocality; it is written, yet still largely rooted in the oral tradition and meant to be heard. The Morte shows loosening ties between poetic creation and extra-linguistic tradition in a mix of oral and literate traits. This study traces in Beowulf and the Morte seven characteristics of orality, namely stereotypical/formulaic expression, ceremonial appropriation of history, standardisation of themes, epithetic identification, heavy/ceremonial characters, agonistic style and copiousness. In all seven characteristics, the early signs of literate noetics just discernable in Beowulf are more developed in the Morte, as would be expected. Between Beowulf and the Morte, the form and the function of poetic discourse change. In primary oral epic, words make things real and function as communal memory. Epic discourse forms individuals as communal, ethical, technological beings, and enables human society to give expression to things unknown. Primary epic is in some ways one of the fullest expressions of language’s nature and possibilities. Writing, which relieves the burden of memorisation, frees energy for the development of certain of these functions. The development, made possible by writing, of abstract conceptualisation and then analytical logic is seen in Beowulf’s deathbed musings on heroic worth, which broaden into Malory’s extended critique of chivalry. The opposition of concepts becomes more important than the opposition of persons, and so from agonistic rhetoric grows scientific logic. This development spelled the end of primary epic, and other genres based on logic and analytical syntax developed to fulfil its didactic and prescriptive roles, from charters to essays. The evolutionary role of oral epic, which enabled communal desires to be expressed, passed to romance, but this genre too died with the advent of Enlightenment rationality and modern depth psychology. Fantasy, perhaps, succeeds romance in this function. The study ends with concluding remarks about the future of epic; with the shift from typographic literacy to secondary orality, epic is showing a rebirth in film and literature, notably in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. / Dissertation (Magister Artium (English))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / English / unrestricted

During the age in which Beowulf was written, Christianity was the prevailing cultural force. Since early medieval religion was rooted in biblical typology, the principles of which were widely disseminated by the liturgy of the Church, we may assume that the resulting Weltanschauung also influenced Old English literature. While it is increasingly being recognized that the poetry of the Anglo-Saxons is the product of the typological imagination, Beowulf is usually regarded as somewhat of an exception. Until now, no typological study of the poem as a whole has appeared. In order to interpret its major symbols and illuminate its perennial cruces, Beowulf needs to be studied in its literary context. An understanding of the poem is therefore promoted by a consideration of its relationship to the literature of the typology-based tradition: other Old English poetry (which is mostly biblical or hagiographic in theme), the liturgical texts (in which the Scriptures, especially the Psalms, are the prominent sources), as well as the exegetical and homiletical writings of the Church Fathers and their medieval successors. The soundness of taking such material into account in the study of Beowulf is demonstrated by the fact that this method yields not only explanations of many individual elements but also a unified interpretation of the poem in its entirety. The meaning of Heorot, the goldhall, can thus be determined by comparing it to structures that are discussed in similar terms in the literature known to the Anglo-Saxons --for example, the temple or the newly created earth when it is described as a building. As a result it can be shown that, contrary to what some have argued, neither the perfect beginning of the hall nor the misery subsequently caused by the monster Grendel is evidence of the sinful pride of Hrothgar, its builder. Heorot's typological --and, hence, also baptismal --connotations lead us to the conclusion that Hrothgar's seemingly reprehensible inertia in the face of Grendel's attacks is entirely appropriate in one who, like the mournful ones in the Old English Advent, can only await deliverance. Adiscussion of the spring motifs in the poem helps to identify Beowulf as the heroic redeemer which the situation calls for. Numerous other details, when examined in a typological perspective, help to confirm this identity. Furthermore, Beowulf can be defended against those who cast aspersions on his desire to defeat the dragon and win its gold for his people. The role of the thief provides important clues to the meaning of Beowulf's own spoiling of the dragon's hoard. It can be shown that Christ's rifling of the devil's hoard constitutes the paradigm. Like Beowulf's cleansing of Heorot, the plundering is a redemptive activity. Moreover, since the poet presents it as a doomsday motif, it forms an extension of the Flood and baptism typology to which he repeatedly alludes in the earlier presentation of Beowulf's fights with the Grendel kin. Time and again the Beowulf poet's choice of words and details reveals that he practised his craft within a tradition in which his creativeness was bound and disciplined by the objectiveness of a particular structure of images. We perceive in all the rich variety of his work the unifying effect of the typological imagination. It is in the typological mode of Beowulf that the key to its meaning and artistry is to be found. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The Fuzzy–ARTMAP (FAM) algorithm has been proven to be one of the premier neural network architectures for classification problems. FAM can learn on line and is usually faster than other neural network approaches. Nevertheless the learning time of FAM can slow down considerably when the size of the training set increases into the hundreds of thousands. In this dissertation we apply data partitioning and network partitioning to the FAM algorithm in a sequential and parallel setting to achieve better convergence time and to efficiently train with large databases (hundreds of thousands of patterns). We implement our parallelization on a Beowulf clusters of workstations. This choice of platform requires that the process of parallelization be coarse grained. Extensive testing of all the approaches is done on three large datasets (half a million data points). One of them is the Forest Covertype database from Blackard and the other two are artificially generated Gaussian data with different percentages of overlap between classes. Speedups in the data partitioning approach reached the order of the hundreds without having to invest in parallel computation. Speedups on the network partitioning approach are close to linear on a cluster of workstations. Both methods allowed us to reduce the computation time of training the neural network in large databases from days to minutes. We prove formally that the workload balance of our network partitioning approaches will never be worse than an acceptable bound, and also demonstrate the correctness of these parallelization variants of FAM.

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O objetivo deste trabalho consiste em entender-se como ocorreu a escolha, por volta do ano 1000, dos textos em inglês antigo reunidos no manuscrito conhecido como Nowell Codex ou manuscrito de Beowulf. O manuscrito aqui enfocado é a parte chamada de Nowell Codex, que somado ao Southwick Codex, integra o Cotton Vitellius A.xv, hoje em poder da British Library, em Londres. O Nowell Codex é composto pelos seguintes textos: Vida de São Cristovão, em prosa; Maravilhas do Oriente, em prosa; Carta de Alexandre para Aristóteles, em prosa; Beowulf, em poesia e Judite, em poesia. Ao buscar-se entender a unidade temática do manuscrito, é fundamental tocar em questões codicológicas juntamente com as textuais, isto é, questões materiais acerca da produção do codex. Esta abordagem foi muito pouco explorada pelos estudiosos que já se dedicaram aos textos do Nowell Codex, especialmente àqueles que se dedicam ao poema Beowulf. Defende-se aqui que os textos foram escolhido devido a uma semelhança em um arco maior de ideias que abarca todos os conteúdos do manuscrito: o Oriente. Não somente um Oriente geográfico, mas um Oriente como origem ancestral para os anglo-saxões. A palavra Níðwundor (terrível maravilha) resume todos os paradoxos e semelhanças deste Oriente construído pelos anglo-saxões e escolhido como tema para unir estes textos no manuscrito / The aim of this study is identify how happened the choice, around the year 1000, of Old English texts gathered in the manuscript known as Nowell Codex or Beowulf manuscript. The manuscript focused on here is the part called Nowell Codex, which added to Southwick Codex, includes the Cotton Vitellius A.xv, now held by the British Library in London. The Nowell Codex consists of the following texts: Life of Saint Christopher, in prose; Wonders of the East, in prose; Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, in prose; Beowulf, and Judith, in poetry. By be sought for understanding the thematic unity of the manuscript, it is essential to touch codicológicas issues along with the context, that is, material issues regarding the production of the codex. This approach has been very little explored by scholars who have devoted themselves to the Nowell Codex texts, especially those engaged in the poem Beowulf. It is argued here that the texts were chosen because of a similarity in a larger arc of ideas which all the contents of the manuscript: the East. This East is not only a geographical East, but it is an East as ancestral origin to the Anglo-Saxons. The word Níðwundor (terrible wonder) summarizes all the paradoxes and similarities of the East as is thought by the Anglo-Saxons and chosen as a theme to unite these texts in the manuscript

O objetivo deste trabalho consiste em entender-se como ocorreu a escolha, por volta do ano 1000, dos textos em inglês antigo reunidos no manuscrito conhecido como Nowell Codex ou manuscrito de Beowulf. O manuscrito aqui enfocado é a parte chamada de Nowell Codex, que somado ao Southwick Codex, integra o Cotton Vitellius A.xv, hoje em poder da British Library, em Londres. O Nowell Codex é composto pelos seguintes textos: Vida de São Cristovão, em prosa; Maravilhas do Oriente, em prosa; Carta de Alexandre para Aristóteles, em prosa; Beowulf, em poesia e Judite, em poesia. Ao buscar-se entender a unidade temática do manuscrito, é fundamental tocar em questões codicológicas juntamente com as textuais, isto é, questões materiais acerca da produção do codex. Esta abordagem foi muito pouco explorada pelos estudiosos que já se dedicaram aos textos do Nowell Codex, especialmente àqueles que se dedicam ao poema Beowulf. Defende-se aqui que os textos foram escolhido devido a uma semelhança em um arco maior de ideias que abarca todos os conteúdos do manuscrito: o Oriente. Não somente um Oriente geográfico, mas um Oriente como origem ancestral para os anglo-saxões. A palavra Níðwundor (terrível maravilha) resume todos os paradoxos e semelhanças deste Oriente construído pelos anglo-saxões e escolhido como tema para unir estes textos no manuscrito / The aim of this study is identify how happened the choice, around the year 1000, of Old English texts gathered in the manuscript known as Nowell Codex or Beowulf manuscript. The manuscript focused on here is the part called Nowell Codex, which added to Southwick Codex, includes the Cotton Vitellius A.xv, now held by the British Library in London. The Nowell Codex consists of the following texts: Life of Saint Christopher, in prose; Wonders of the East, in prose; Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, in prose; Beowulf, and Judith, in poetry. By be sought for understanding the thematic unity of the manuscript, it is essential to touch codicológicas issues along with the context, that is, material issues regarding the production of the codex. This approach has been very little explored by scholars who have devoted themselves to the Nowell Codex texts, especially those engaged in the poem Beowulf. It is argued here that the texts were chosen because of a similarity in a larger arc of ideas which all the contents of the manuscript: the East. This East is not only a geographical East, but it is an East as ancestral origin to the Anglo-Saxons. The word Níðwundor (terrible wonder) summarizes all the paradoxes and similarities of the East as is thought by the Anglo-Saxons and chosen as a theme to unite these texts in the manuscript

The aim of this study has been to investigate in feminist terms whether or not the character Grendel’s mother symbolizes early matrilineal tribes in the form of the Norse goddess Gefion, also claimed to be the Earth goddess. The claim has been brought forward in an article by Frank Battaglia on the grounds that the chthonic deity is mentioned on several occasions in Beowulf. However, Grendel’s mother’s possible connection to the goddess has not been treated extensively in a feminist context, despite the apparent link between feminism and matrilineal tribes in a patriarchal hierarchy. The modern translations of her character as a monster stand in stark contrast to the original manuscript where she is depicted as an aglӕcwif, “female warrior”. The subject has given rise to a number of feminist researches on the theme of the so called “woman-as-monster” stereotype. These argue that Grendel’s mother has fallen victim to enforced marginalization due to etymological faults as well as sexist stereotypes in Anglo-Saxon literary culture. On the background of Moi’s definition of a woman and Kristeva’s concept of the abject, results demonstrate that Grendel’s mother may very well symbolize the female Other in a new social order, embodied or represented as the Earth goddess.

"Communities in Translation: History and Identity in Medieval England" argues that moments of identity formation in translated texts of the Middle Ages are best understood if translation is viewed as a process. Expanding on Brian Stock's idea that texts organize and define real historical communities, I argue that medieval translations--broadly considered as textual artifacts which relate received narratives--create communities within their narratives based on religious, ethnic, and proto-nationalist identities. In my first chapter, I assert that the Old English Orosius--a translation of a fifth-century Latin history--creates an audience that is forced to assume a hybrid Roman-English identity that juxtaposes a past Rome with a present Anglo-Saxon England. In chapter two, I argue that the inclusion of English saints among traditional Latin ones in Ælfric of Eynsham's Lives of the Saints stakes a claim not only for the holiness of English Christians but for the holiness of the land itself, thus including England in a trans-temporal community of Christians that depended on English practice and belief for its continued success. In my third chapter, I turn to Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, and read it alongside its historical source by Nicholas Trevet in order to demonstrate Chaucer's investment in a multicultural English Christianity. These arguments inform my reading of Beowulf, a poem which, while not itself a translation, thematizes the issues of community raised by my first three chapters through its engagement with the problematic relationship between communities and narrative. When Beowulf's characters and narrator present an inherited narrative meant to bolster community, they more often reveal the connections to outside forces and longer histories that render its textual communities exceedingly fragile. Where previous studies of translation focus on the links of vernacular writings to their source texts and their Latin past, I suggest that these narratives envision alternative presents and futures for the communities that they create.