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Gandolorin
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on: June 30, 2014 12:32
pv said:Lucky you, Mr Flintstone! JRRT's Beowulf appears to be totally unavailable in my part of the world.

Well, I had to order it in my favorite real-life (not on-line) bookstore, they had the Harper-Collins (GB) hardcover, the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (US) hardcover, the one I have, and a collector's edition (quickly forgot from whom) hardcover for around 110 Euros (!) as choices. The book took between one and two weeks to arrive. So are you saying you are not even able to order it from "overseas", whatever that may be in your case??
Now THAT would be a definite bummer!
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pv
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on: June 30, 2014 11:09
I haven't made a serious effort, to be honest. Two of my favourite bookstores have recently closed down, and I've been crying over that, when I should really be looking for alternatives!
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pv
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on: June 30, 2014 11:18
Maybe this is the wrong place to rant about large bookstores overstocked with crass bestsellers with uninterested staff who can't be bothered about little known authors like Tolkien!
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tarcolan
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on: July 01, 2014 11:13
No, no pv. Feel free to rant.
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Gandolorin
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on: July 01, 2014 01:11
pv said:Maybe this is the wrong place to rant about large bookstores overstocked with crass bestsellers with uninterested staff who can't be bothered about little known authors like Tolkien!


Where do these bookstores get their staff? Are you sure they (the staff) are not aliens (in the sense of from outer space)??? Where do you live? (In this specific case, I can only feel sorry for you)
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pv
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on: July 02, 2014 08:55
good to know that there are people here who understand! ;D
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cirdaneth
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on: July 03, 2014 12:19
Looks like we need a bookstore ranting thread, so I've started one.
Gandolorin
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on: July 06, 2014 02:16
Finished JRRT's Beowulf yesterday. The biggest part is the commentary, derived from lectures JRRT held on Beowulf, and highly interesting for me because some names in LotR pop up here. And I need to compare it to my other two Beowulfs, a German translation and that of Seamus Heany. May be wrong, but their versions were shorter, unless memory fails (not entirely unlikely). And "Sellic Spell" is quite amusing (JRRT's "reconstruction" of a fairy tale source without the historical "attachments" that occurred later).
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pv
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on: July 10, 2014 09:07
That's great! What were your initial impressions of Tolkien's translation? Although some of us haven't got our copies yet, I guess everyone here has read some version of Beowulf - we might have read some of the commentary too, as many of the essays have been published before.



[Edited on 07/10/2014 by pv]
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Gandolorin
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on: July 10, 2014 10:20
@ pv: worth buying, no question for me. JRRT avoided trying for an alliteration version in modern English, instead writing in prose so as to convey as closely as possible his understanding of the poem.
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tarcolan
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on: August 01, 2014 04:36
A BBC series entitled 'Anglo-Saxon Portaits' on Radio 3 had one on the Beowulf bard by Seamus Heaney, recorded shortly before his death. It's still available on the wonderful but slightly clunky BBC iPlayer. If you can get it.
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pv
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on: August 09, 2014 09:47
I'd love to see it! I'll look for it on youtube -
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