Sigurd & Gudrun read-along: concluded
May. 11th, 2019 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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silwritersguildThe Sigurd & Gudrun read-along on the SWG Discord has now officially ended.
We covered a number of aspects in our chats; some of them were quite wide-ranging. We found much of interest in the bones of the stories themselves and the soup Tolkien makes out of them.
We discussed Tolkien’s general approach to stories as well as his opinions about Scandinavian legends and his sources for the particular poems included in the Legend of Sigurd & Gudrun. It became clear to us, as we read, how Tolkien “fixes” his source material, streamlining, tidying loose ends, plugging gaps. We compared some of his impulses to the way fan writers try to fix canon.
We spotted quite a number of sources and parallels for material in the Legendarium, some present in the tradition and others emerging in Tolkien’s adaptations; Turin’s role at the Dagor Dagorath and Sigurd’s at Ragnarok is an example of the latter, and the twice-forged swords Gram and Narsil an example of the former. (There were more of these, but it’s beyond me to compile a list.)
There are all sorts of interesting subjects and motifs to be found here: witchy ladies of several kinds, werewolves, literal ones and less literal ones, spectacular and gruesome revenge drama, good horse Grani, planned or half-witting incest, doomed hoards and ominous artifacts, unusual shapechangers, seeresses… (We had fun.)
We also explored the sound of Tolkien’s verse, not the metre so much, as the sound patterns and effects, and bunn demonstrated how good it can sound when read aloud.
Anyone who wishes to have a look, the introductory posts to each of the five sections are pinned in the dedicated channel over at the SWG Discord and would help you to navigate to earlier sections of the chat.
Bunn’s audio recordings (highly recommended) are also pinned in the channel; they can also be found on her Tumblr (where bunn's handle is "cycas").
We covered a number of aspects in our chats; some of them were quite wide-ranging. We found much of interest in the bones of the stories themselves and the soup Tolkien makes out of them.
We discussed Tolkien’s general approach to stories as well as his opinions about Scandinavian legends and his sources for the particular poems included in the Legend of Sigurd & Gudrun. It became clear to us, as we read, how Tolkien “fixes” his source material, streamlining, tidying loose ends, plugging gaps. We compared some of his impulses to the way fan writers try to fix canon.
We spotted quite a number of sources and parallels for material in the Legendarium, some present in the tradition and others emerging in Tolkien’s adaptations; Turin’s role at the Dagor Dagorath and Sigurd’s at Ragnarok is an example of the latter, and the twice-forged swords Gram and Narsil an example of the former. (There were more of these, but it’s beyond me to compile a list.)
There are all sorts of interesting subjects and motifs to be found here: witchy ladies of several kinds, werewolves, literal ones and less literal ones, spectacular and gruesome revenge drama, good horse Grani, planned or half-witting incest, doomed hoards and ominous artifacts, unusual shapechangers, seeresses… (We had fun.)
We also explored the sound of Tolkien’s verse, not the metre so much, as the sound patterns and effects, and bunn demonstrated how good it can sound when read aloud.
Anyone who wishes to have a look, the introductory posts to each of the five sections are pinned in the dedicated channel over at the SWG Discord and would help you to navigate to earlier sections of the chat.
Bunn’s audio recordings (highly recommended) are also pinned in the channel; they can also be found on her Tumblr (where bunn's handle is "cycas").
