The contrast between the familiar social space and the world beyond has been widely recognised as an organising principle in medieval literature, in which the natural and the supernatural alike are set off against human society as alien and hostile. However, the study of this antithesis has typically been restricted to the spatial aspect whereas the literature often exhibits seasonal patterns as well. This dissertation modifies the existing paradigm to accommodate the temporal dimension, demonstrating that winter stands out as a season in which the autonomy of the human domain is drawn into question in both Anglo-Saxon and early Scandinavian literature. In Old English poetry, winter is invoked as a landscape category connoting personal affliction and hostility, but it is rarely used to evoke a cyclical chronology. Old Icelandic literature likewise employs winter as a spatial category, here closely associated with the dangerous supernatural. However, Old Icelandic prose furthermore give winter a place in the annual progression of the seasons, which structures all but the most legendary of the sagas. Accordingly, the winter halfyear stands out as the near-exclusive domain of revenant hauntings and prophecy. These findings stand in stark contrast to the state of affairs in Middle English poetry, which associates diverse kinds of adventure and supernatural interaction with florid landscapes of spring and summer, and Maytime forests in particular. Even so, the seasonal imagery in <em>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</em> makes clear that Middle English poets could use the contrastive functions of winter to no less effect than authors in neighbouring corpora. In partial explanation of authorial choices in this regard, it is proposed that winter settings are employed especially where a strong empathic response is desired of the audience.

The contrast between the familiar social space and the world beyond has been widely recognised as an organising principle in medieval literature, in which the natural and the supernatural alike are set off against human society as alien and hostile. However, the study of this antithesis has typically been restricted to the spatial aspect whereas the literature often exhibits seasonal patterns as well. This dissertation modifies the existing paradigm to accommodate the temporal dimension, demonstrating that winter stands out as a season in which the autonomy of the human domain is drawn into question in both Anglo-Saxon and early Scandinavian literature. In Old English poetry, winter is invoked as a landscape category connoting personal affliction and hostility, but it is rarely used to evoke a cyclical chronology. Old Icelandic literature likewise employs winter as a spatial category, here closely associated with the dangerous supernatural. However, Old Icelandic prose furthermore give winter a place in the annual progression of the seasons, which structures all but the most legendary of the sagas. Accordingly, the winter halfyear stands out as the near-exclusive domain of revenant hauntings and prophecy. These findings stand in stark contrast to the state of affairs in Middle English poetry, which associates diverse kinds of adventure and supernatural interaction with florid landscapes of spring and summer, and Maytime forests in particular. Even so, the seasonal imagery in <em>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</em> makes clear that Middle English poets could use the contrastive functions of winter to no less effect than authors in neighbouring corpora. In partial explanation of authorial choices in this regard, it is proposed that winter settings are employed especially where a strong empathic response is desired of the audience.

This work describes the installation of a Beowulf cluster at the University of KwaZulu-Natal / Thesis (Ph.D.-Eng)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

xi, 266 p. / This dissertation employs recent developments in the cognitive sciences to explicate competing social and religious undercurrents in Beowulf. An enduring scholarly debate has attributed the poem's origins to, variously, Christian or polytheistic worldviews. Rather than approaching the subject with inherited terms which originated in Judeo-Christian assumptions of religious identity, we may distinguish two incongruous ways of conceiving of agency, both human and divine, underlying the conventional designations of pagan and Christian. One of these, the poly-agent schema, requires a complex understanding of the motivations and limitations of all sentient individuals as causal agents with their own internal mental complexities. The other, the omni-agent schema, centralizes original agency in the figure of an omnipotent and omnipresent God and simplifies explanations of social interactions. In this concept, any individual's potential for intentional agency is limited to subordination or resistance to the will of God. The omni-agent schema relies on social categorization to understand behavior of others, whereas the poly-agent schema tracks individual minds, their intentions, and potential actions. Whereas medieval Christian narratives, such as Bede's Life of St. Cuthbert and Augustine's Confessions, depend on the omni-agent schema, Beowulf relies more heavily on the poly-agent schema, which it shares with Classical and Norse myths, epics, and sagas. While this does not prove that the poem originated before the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, it suggests that the poem was able to preserve an older social schema which would have been discouraged in post-conversion cultures were it not for a number of passages in the poem which affirmed conventional Christian theology. These theological asides describe an omni-agent schema in abstract terms, though they accord poorly with the representations of character thought and action within the poem. This minimal affirmation of a newer model of social interaction may have enabled the poem's preservation on parchment in an age characterized by the condemnation, and often violent suppression, of non-Christian beliefs. These affirmations do not, however, tell the whole story. / Committee in charge: James W. Earl, Chairperson; Louise Westling, Member; Lisa Freinkel, Member; Mark Johnson, Outside Member

This thesis explores three versions of Beowulf: Gareth Hinds’s graphic novel Beowulf (2007), Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation Beowulf (2020), and Rowdy Herrington’s film Road House (1989). While Hinds and Headley fail to convey Beowulf as a cultural elegy by subtracting or misrepresenting significant scenes and characters, Road House superimposes the story of Beowulf onto 1980s America. Parallels between the plots of Beowulf and Road House and Road House’s interaction with the political underpinnings of the 80s (such as Reaganomics and the AIDS epidemic) make the film one of the best at capturing the elements of cultural elegy in the original poem.

Many universities and research laboratories have developed low cost clusters, built from Commodity-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components and running mostly free software. Research has shown that these types of systems are well-equipped to handle many problems requiring parallel processing. The primary components of clusters are hardware, networking, and system software. An important system software consideration for clusters is the choice of the message passing library. MPI (Message Passing Interface) has arguably become the most widely used message passing library on clusters and other parallel architectures, due in part to its existence as a standard. As a standard, MPI is open for anyone to implement, as long as the rules of the standard are followed. For this reason, a number of proprietary and freely available implementations have been developed. Of the freely available implementations, two have become increasingly popular: LAM (Local Area Multicomputer) and MPICH (MPI Chameleon). This thesis compares the performance of LAM and MPICH in an effort to provide performance data and analysis of the current releases of each to the cluster computing community. Specifically, the accomplishments of this thesis are: comparative testing of the High Performance Linpack benchmark (HPL); comparative testing of su3_rmd, an MPI application used in physics research; and a series of bandwidth comparisons involving eight MPI point-to-point communication constructs. All research was performed on a partition of the Wyeast SMP Cluster in the High Performance Computing Laboratory at Portland State University. We generate a vast amount of data, and show that LAM and MPICH perform similarly on many experiments, with LAM outperforming MPICH in the bandwidth tests and on a large problem size for su3_rmd. These findings, along with the findings of other research comparing the two libraries, suggest that LAM performs better than MPICH in the cluster environment. This conclusion may seem surprising, as MPICH has received more attention than LAM from MPI researchers. However, the two architectures are very different. LAM was originally designed for the cluster and networked workstation environments, while MPICH was designed to be portable across many different types of parallel architectures.

This thesis surveys the children's literary accounts of Anglo-Saxon history and literature that have been written since the mid-nineteenth century. Authors of different ages emphasize different aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture as societal need for and interpretation of the past change. In studying these changes, I show not only why children's authors would choose to depict the Saxons in their writing, but why medievalists would want to study the resulting literature. My second chapter looks at children's historical fiction and nonfiction, charting the trends which appear in the literature written between 1850 and the present day. I survey the changes made in authors' representations of Anglo-Saxon England as children's publication trends have changed. I show how these changes are closely related to the changes made in popular conceptions of the past. My third chapter discusses the way in which children's retellings of Beowulf have placed the poem into a less culturally-dependent, more universal setting as they have separated the tale from its linguistic and cultural heritage. Children's authors have gradually removed the poem's poetic and linguistic devices and other cultural elements from their retellings, instead favoring a more courtly medieval setting, or even a generic universal one. Children's literature is an important indicator of the societal values contemporary with its publication. Authors and publishers often write the literature to reflect their own ideologies and agendas more openly in children's literature than in other literature. As I show in this thesis, the attitudes toward Anglo-Saxon England which pervade children's literature of any age make it a particularly useful tool to those scholars interested in the study of popular reception of the Middle Ages.

The purpose of this essay is to show that what defines a hero is far more complicated than the prolific author and mythological expert Joseph Campbell would have one believe – in his view, heroic qualities stem from a certain type of chosen individual and reoccurring narrative motifs without taking social structures and masculinity into account. By analyzing the characters Beowulf and Odysseus through a filter, consisting of Campbells model of the “hero’s journey” along with perspectives provided by studies in the masculinity field done by Raewyn Connell and Jørgen Lorentzen together with Claes Ekenstam, this essay concludes, in short, the following: applying Campbells model of the hero does reveal several similarities between the two characters, though it ultimately fails to prove any deeper connection. The aspects brought into focus by utilizing different concepts of masculinity however, proved to be more enlightening, with the most notable conclusion that the various tests forced upon both Beowulf and Odysseus mirror Raewyn Connells concept of “the hegemonic masculinity”, which in essence means that the most elevated masculine qualities existing in the context of the book are also the same ones being targeted by the antagonistic forces present in the story.

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Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / Due to their unique expertise, military officers have always held a special position within Western society. Yet, while individuals who have demonstrated knowledge of warfare and prowess in battle have long been held in high regard by society and the members of their profession, it is those who have also demonstrated the ideals of citizenship and chivalry who serve as the icons for thoughtful military officers. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the evolution of the citizen-officer ideal- through a close study of historical and literary case studies. By establishing a common theme or values among completely separate exemplars of this ideal, a continuum joining Odysseus, Cincinnatus, Beowulf, and Gawain to Washington, Chamberlain, and Marshall might eventually be carried forward to the present and the modern military officer. Specific focus is given to the roles that classical notions of citizenship and the Code of Chivalry have played in shaping the ethos of the American officer. / Lieutenant, United States Navy