Beowulf - Grendel's Ambush

[jcoschino89]

such beauty and power in the language. its truly breathtaking!

[geordieinjapan]

sounds rather swedish in accent but in vocabulary....yeah. not

[YanSui01]

@Shoxjie Why do you hate the history of the language you speak and write so much? Just because you don't appreciate the excitement others have for something that reaches back through time and space doesn't mean you need to be so foul to people who do. Where would mathematics be without the historic contributions of generations, from the Babylonians to the Romans to the Caliphate to Sir Newton to today? For some people, the journey is just as important as the end result.

[Heiryuu]

@Shoxjie just so you know i may have a lower IQ than you do but a man or woman that does not respect their heritage isn't worth the air that they breath, and isn't worth the time that i'm spending to rebuke them.

[austpom333]

@Smorgasbord341 Yes may be

[austpom333]

I rely don't get why people think they need to pronounce the old Anglo - Saxon in such a weird way, this language is easy to understand if it is spoken in a more normal modern English way

[darris321]

@inxs96 ... what? xD

as a spanish speaker, it is news to me that we don't make new words

that's amazing

[BeakyRed]

do the people in the audience know old english?

[redredshoes]

@BeakyRed The English translation is being projected on a screen so they can read along.

[BeakyRed]

@redredshoes Oh thx. Old english sounds cool

[manthasagittarius]

I like this guy. Fun what he's doing with the lyre. It sounds like an African kora.

[xenogis]

this guy is so fuckin high

[inxs96]

Too funny!!

'you read a book nerd'. :))

Hey, how about learning some grammar so You can read And write. :DD

[shadowninja1230]

It sounds like he's having an orgasm of the tongue.

[Sagahwaetichatte]

@compasscar1 Sorry to hear that you are not getting into it. There is a lot of beauty lost as Old English is slowly dying out. We are talking about a language of words such as sceadugenga - shadow stalker, or the concept of the wordhord or breosthord, the treasure of words and thoughts we keep hidden in our breasts as something precious to be shared. A language that has a pronoun for 'us two' (unc) which expresses a union of two without losing their individuality. Gorgeous.

[smellincoffee]

@Sagahwaetichatte Did you hear of shadow stalker through Bernard Cornwell's novels?

[compasscarl]

@Sagahwaetichatte There's a lot more beauty in the English we speak now. Embrace it.

[SpoookiePoookie]

@compasscarl Whereas that's probably true (and it's goof to acknowledge the 'probably' factor without being too insistent), it doesn't mean we denounce OE altogether. Sure, forcing people to study it can cause resentment. But if you're a lover of language, words, and not just stories, it's important to know where and how the language began, the cultural atmosphere back then, and how, for all its flaws, OE could be very creative at times. The language had a certain flavour that deserves credit.

[compasscarl]

@SpoookiePoookie It had a certain flavour, and then it evolved. Would you prefer to go back to being an ape because eating the nits from each other's hair had a certain flavour?

[SpoookiePoookie]

@compasscarl But studying an older language doesn't mean one has to de-evolve and abandon the freshness and flexibility of contemporary life and language! Nor does it mean we go allhail old english either. It's just abandoning the agenda of anger and distaste against OE I'm rooting for.

[SpoookiePoookie]

Also, rather inefficient analogy I'm afraid. Studying something old is not at all equivalent to suddenly incorporating to an older, PHYSICAL habit in your current lifestyle. Studying comes with a totally different set of tools and motivation altogether, and it occurrs at a more detached and analytical leve. But I'm not here to point fingers. Peace.

[TheRoyalFuzzybug]

@Sagahwaetichatte "Old English is slowly dying out" 

[philfingersjameson]

I think this is brilliant, although I have to say - that thing where you push a number on your keypad repetitively is so funny here! 8 and 9 are pretty good, but 3 is a real winner...

[ausweisbite]

wow,i must say i'm suprised. old english i much more diffrent than polish from old polish

[ginnoveffect]

This guy is such a badass.

Bards FTW

[Adschi2010]

that music is enchanting

[pokoid]

I have read Beowulf a number of times, but it is meant to be listened to! I never imagined it could be as good at this. What a storyteller............. will have to find out where to here him. Old English taught at school would be a waste of time...... we speak English already, but it has evolved, and that is what is so wonderful about our language.

[romuloVG]

WUNDERLIC!

[middungeard]

Some folks here write that OEis a dead language. Ic do not believe this. As in music, so in language: One must hear the whole symphony (that is the English language) from start to end to truly ken the worth. OE is like the first movement of the English "symphony." So learn it all and then ye can draw from the whole of the language to better speak forth your thoughts.Wherefore (Therefore)I can choose to say "Fro' whence comest thu?" rather than "Where you from 'essay'? But hey, Ic keep it real.

[SiriusPunk]

@middungeard wherefore means why x

[middungeard]

@SiriusPunk Yes it does mean why, but it is also interchangeable with "therefore," though it is a little archaic, but good on you for checking.

[SiriusPunk]

@middungeard ah I see, thank you for clearing that up.

You learn something new everyday! :) x

[3sixteendays]

So weird i was just watchin dis on the telly and this was in my recomended

[bloodbuddy7]

This guy is a legend!

[richfroggy7]

lol at 0:50

seelio drababadaluh

[missbabyice]

That guy rocks!

[JuiceBoxette]

Good storytellers are so hard to come by these days. I love this! :'D

[skipwadoo]

WHAT???????????????

[ossian1977]

Epic video. We have a scop here!!!!!

[CaitlintheMiller]

three idiots missed the like button

[ExitosGnosis]

@HeadsFullOfEyeballs oh good i'm not the only one dumb enough to look for casual beowulf lessons on youtube :-P

phonology rules! semantics be damned!

[HeadsFullOfEyeballs]

@ExitosGnosis Hey! I am a very German empirical linguist and I shan't have anyone badmouthing semantics in this house!

Phonology is nice too, though <:)

[Jejkan95]

I am trying to learn this beautiful language!

[snozwanger234]

SOOOOO 12 centurys ago.

[Xfodder4uX]

@inxs96 You read a book nerd!!

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAaaaaa!!!!!.­­........Loser! :D

[PuNiShEr126]

wtf is This

[balrog13571]

Gotta say this is probably the best version of Beowulf made so far. It's in Old English, it is delivered by a great performer, and it's told as a story to listen to rather than see. You're able to use your imagination listening to Bagby and form an image of what's happening. Well at the very least it's much better than the 1999 Beowulf.

[LexiClearwater]

why. just why?!

[oof333]

I had to absorb OE in one year, in the process of studying Beowulf and a few smaller poems. Honestly, the vocabulary is stunted-nothing about daily life, only about glory and battle. It' be like trying to piece together human society by watching SpikeTV and reading Maxim.

One thing it is good for though- swearing. Or at least, muttering. once you get the monothong vowels and the alliteration, you can work up some truly malicious muttering.

[RavenofDenmark]

I wounder if there is some english people who regret what have been done to the english language,

that it is not a mix of french and latin, with a sad remaning of english.

[andymckm]

This is so amazing!!! Bring back Old English - this is how our language should be and this is the best example of it that you will find anywhere. *** the French invaders!!! Wes hal thaem Angelcynn!!!!

[tamwehdistant5]

I have never studied old English, I just love the way it sounds. It makes you realy think of the barbaric England as described in Beowulf: where men were men and monsters common.

[hatezyousamon]

I think we should keep modern because no language has any benefits only a negative seperating many peoples from eachother. All people should learn english... modern english.

[YuriPRIME]

only 5% of people in the world knows English :P Much more knows Chinese dialects, and we should hurry to learn them, as those are languages of future.

[PeteTStarr]

"Only 5% of people in the world knows English", and apparently you're not one of them...

Besides you just made that up. It took me about 5 seconds to find the wikipedia page that said "500 million1.8 billion" people speak English. Also Chinese is only really spoken by the Chinese, so English is far more widespread. Also it's far too complex and difficult to use, and the internet is mostly in English, so there are many, many ways in which you are wrong.

[YuriPRIME]

I don't know what made you think wikipedia is a good information source, but congrats mate ^^

According to many pseudo-scientific 'sites' like wiki a person who knows how to read couple words in english and know how to form some basic sentences of what they heard in movies or songs - are considered English Speakers... Well if that's the case even parrots tought to repeate word "ass" are english speakers.

[YuriPRIME]

Wait... Yeah... but that's what you get if you check statiscics only without getting any context. Officially there are 680 milions of people who CLAIM Enlgish is their foreign language, but if you try to speak with most you won't get anything reasonable beside chaotic mumbling. There was even a good joke:

A some thugs try to robb a guy and he says

-Stop! I know Karate, kung-fu, Jiu-jitsu

Robbers got scared and fleed in a moment...

-... and many other asian-words.

[YuriPRIME]

This way I can prove I know Patric Swayzee XD

Mate, the fact someone knows English worldwide doesn't mean anything. You can be sure that +300/-400 milions people know english and can operate it for sure. And this one on five know english crap XD please...

[PeteTStarr]

It took you three comments to reply to my first point. I'm not sure why you said 'pseudo-scientific', I don't think you know what that actually means. Claiming wikipedia is faulty... what are your sources? And saying that people don't speak English well enough is kind of separate from the point. Chinese is not the language of the future; there are a lot of chinese people, yes, but anyone learning a language will learn english because it is most useful to them in their life.

[christmascnn]

Chinese is complicated because its origin is "pictures" while English is a phonetic language.(However, English alphabets are picture words, since you cannot tell why they are pronounced that way; phonetic symbols were invented when English had been used for centuries.) It's true that Chinese is usually utilized by Chinese (It's their mother language), and you can see people all around the world speaking English. I think Chinese and English are languages of future, as they will keep on existing.

[TheJudasCradle]

If the Welsh still speak Welsh, the Cornish speak Cornish and the Scottish and Irish have Gaelic, why can't we start using Old English again? It would be nice to see classes set up to teach it as I think it would be a positive thing culturally.

[MaBu888]

Yis it wuld be a positive change. Eald Englisc wold be greet tunga!

[jezebellexinhell]

That would be interesting, but supporting the use of Old English rather than Modern English doesn't seem to have any benefits in my opinion. We should learn both.

[geneimperfect]

I doubt that, even in the entire corpus of OE literature we do still have records of, there would be enough vocabulary for us to reconstruct the entire language to the extent that we could train people to produce it. True, it's possible to read OE texts if you've studied the language enough, but language comprehension and language production are two different things. I don't believe it would be possible to teach OE the way Welsh, Cornish and Gaelic are taught.

[romuloVG]

@TheJudasCradle I AGREE

[TheScribhneoir]

@TheJudasCradle THat would be cool, but the problem with that is, the last native speaker of Cornish died in 1777. The last native Manx speaker died in 1974. Scottish Gaelic is declining rapidly. So in a sense, these languages are dying slowly. But I get what you mean, and I agree, it would be a cool/great thing.

[windmoveswater]

@TheJudasCradle I'm diving into learning it right now mate. lol. I'm gonna meditate with it. It sounds how the english spirit feels.

[tsimos4eva]

@TheJudasCradle Exactly! Just like ancient greek and latin. linguistics are more than syntax and grammar, it's about history, the origins of today's cultures, the understanding of the dynamics that resulted in the words we use in our everyday conversations! If not anything else, it's interesting!

[missbabyice]

@TheJudasCradle - Cornish isn't really spoken, except in language classes

[Xan81]

@TheJudasCradle I'm sure that those languages have evolved since the time of Beowulf; just as English has evolved since "Old English", "Middle English" all other stages. Wikipedia, "Old Welsh". Both Old English and Old Welsh developed into the "Middle" versions at c.1100 CE

[hirsutesimia]

@TheJudasCradle

Because Welsh and Gaelic are modern languages... Old English is not. It would be better to reason, Latin and Ancient Greek are still taught, why not Old English, Old German, Old Norse?

[TubaGlider2]

@TheJudasCradle Cornish is a dead language, just like Celtic British.

[fuelfreak108]

@TheJudasCradle UGA offers an Old English class. It's mostly taught from a linguistics standpoint as the actual pronunciation is a lot of guesswork., but still pretty cool.

[Minotaurosu123]

@TheJudasCradle Yeah, as some have already said, Old English just evolved into Middle, then Early Modern and then Modern English. It isn't dead, just changed. Welsh, Cornish and Gaelic were threatened languages, however, that could have become extinct had they not been taught in schools.

That said, I wouldn't mind learning Old English. :P

[Cherubicon]

@Minotaurosu123 If it hadn't been for the Norman conquest, English probably wouldn't have changed nearly as much.

[Minotaurosu123]

@Cherubicon Frankish/Early French culture was already very dominant in English courts at the time; by 1066 everybody was copying whatever the French aristocrats were doing. As such, some have argued that English may have began to be influenced by French anyway as the English nobles began speaking French in order to seem fashionable.

Compare it to how much American English the British English have picked up over the past century. That is very much a similar similar case.

[Homoclassicus]

@Cherubicon Actually, most linguists now believe that the Norman conquest interrupted the use of OE as a literary and administrative language so what we consider Middle English is as much a Norman-influenced dialect as it is just Old English as it was spoken by the masses in a developed way. Old English written in Beowulf and other texts was an erudite language, not the language of people in the 11th century, so it's probable that English is just a case of an extremely "unstable" language.

[MissSelair]

@TheJudasCradle Cornish is a dead language. But I agree with you about teaching Old English. I love it and want to learn it so bad!!! :)

[ErieMaxwell]

@TheJudasCradle Absolutely agreed

[compasscarl]

@TheJudasCradle Why stop there? Why not go back as far as Old Norse? Hell, why not just communicate through grunts, and go back to living in caves? It'd be so much easier to find a spouse as well, as all you'd need is bigger club than your rivals'.

If you want to learn it, there's nothing stopping you, but speaking as somebody who is being forced to learn Old English as part of their degree, it's not a good idea to bring this tedious language back from extinction.

[karelsson]

@TheJudasCradle I think it would definitely give true insight into Modern English.....

[ilghazi]

@TheJudasCradle Well, the old english equivalent of irish and welsh would just be the more archaic versions of each- basically, old irish and old welsh aren't spoken for the same reason old english is no longer- language changes and morphs over time into what it is today. in a thousand years, the english you and i are speaking will be the equivalent of what we hear in this video to what is spoken then.

[frankantoniomartin]

Chapter XI Ðá cóm of móre under misthleoþum Grendel gongan· godes yrre bær· mynte se mánscaða manna cynnes sumne besyrwan in sele þám héan· wód under wolcnum tó þæs þe hé wínreced goldsele gumena gearwost wisse faéttum fáhne· ne wæs þæt forma síð þæt hé Hróþgáres  hám gesóhte· naéfre hé on aldordagum aér ne siþðan heardran haéle healðegnas fand.

[PARABELLVM]

un idioma protocavernícola

[MaBu888]

PRAE TET TREMONTI

[TheSchwarzeRitter]

Please tell me which lines are these from the poem so that I can read while listening?

[frankantoniomartin]

Chapter XI

THEN from the moorland, by misty crags,

with God's wrath laden, Grendel came.

The monster was minded of mankind now

sundry to seize in the stately house.

Under welkin he walked, till the wine-palace there,

gold-hall of men, he gladly discerned,

flashing with fretwork. Not first time, this,

that he the home of Hrothgar sought, --

[thecritiquevirtuoso]

i don't know why we don't employ the edh and the thorn for germanic words in the english lexicon any longer... we whould definitely have a resurgence of those characters!

[TheSchwarzeRitter]

I agree! And I want to go even further, I want every loanwords not belonging to the Germanic Languages be removed from English!

[thecritiquevirtuoso]

OMG I KNOW! You're the first person to share this sentiment with me. I also want the old english declensions to be in the English language again.

[TheSchwarzeRitter]

Yeah, I envy your language because Icelandic still have some significant declensions!

[thecritiquevirtuoso]

Ja, aber deine Sprache hat Deklination auch! Ich liebe die deutsche Sprache!

[TheSchwarzeRitter]

Yeah, among all the Germanic Languages, German is the most inflicted!

That's the good thing about it!

[AngloSaxonLoyalist]

You should google search "Anglish". Look for the page called the Anglish moot my friend.

[moonlightdeath16]

wtf

[aschindler22]

wtf

[Annoyingthing321]

No offense to all of the other comments but that has to be one of the funniest videos I've ever seen. I do understand what he's trying to get at and I'm sure he does it well.....but OMG that was funny

[nevermore1000]

Good to see I'm not alone.

[PeteTStarr]

I know, I respect him for doing this, but all the seemingly honest replies who love this confuse me. And I am actually studying Old English, so I kind of do understand where it's going, but I still laughed. Rather funny.

[jamasunda]

wow... at first I thought he was speaking Icelandic XD This is awesome! :D

Much discussion here about "þ" and "ð"... and the only thing I can say to that, is that I use those letters every day xÞ

[PacRowSF]

I speak Icelandic and in icelandic þ (þorn) and ð (eð) make what is in english "th".

The ð is used softly and þ is used for harder stress words. I do not know for old english.

[jamasunda]

Talar þú íslensku? :D

[zarqwan]

As a Danish speaking Englishman, I have been wondering if "þ" is like the English "TH" and the "ð" more like the D or T at the ends of Danish words like "Jeg har talet" or "Jeg Talede" where in both cases the D and the T make a sound half way between "TH" and "L"

[thecritiquevirtuoso]

Danish phonemic conventions ultimately descend from that of Old Norse with a large influence of low German... Hence the reason why Swedes have such a difficult time understanding spoken Danish.. ;)

[NeoFalcon69]

Neither the Danish numbers ;)

But that is a totally different story XD LMAO

[resurgam44]

@zarqwan

As far as we can surmise, there was no organized phonetic distinction between the 'eth' and 'thorn' characters; the seem to have been used interchangeably for the voiced and unvoiced 'th' phoneme.

[geneimperfect]

þ and ð are used indiscriminately in Old English texts for the "th" sounds (by that I mean both the "th" in think and the "th" in this). There aren't any set rules for when to use which. The same text may spell a word with an eth ð in one place and a thorn þ in another place.

[skromt]

Very inspiring, what a performance! I play the lyre myself and hope to perform the death of Balder and the demise of Loki in a simmilar fashion by this summer.

[thevolta23]

fag

[lukasz]

I pretty much love you. A+

[xIrelandsfinestx]

This would have been better with different lighting. And maybe if he were wearing some Anglo-Saxon armor too..

[piscadil]

This guy is a good performer. It's almost like traveling back to fifteenth century England. I just wish I knew what he was saying.

[Syngekhoomei]

lol.

[madbob73]

Try 6th century!

[sivrel]

Fifteenth Century was when Geofry Chauser's "The Canterbury Tales" was written. Though I could be wrong about the time, I know it was written in the late middle ages.

[syiunshi]

if fifteenth century was when chauser was around then that was middle english, not olde

[ccoraxfan]

Chaucer lived from 1342 - 1400, so 14þ century, not 15þ. But ðe beginning of ðe end of Old English came in 1066.

[thecritiquevirtuoso]

Why are you using ðe þorn and ðe eð?

lol

[ccoraxfan]

Why not? Ðey make so much sense!

[rellman]

I always thought the thorn (þ) and eth (ð) were a good innovation... I mean if you think about, there is nothing particularly "natural" about TH equally that sound. I think we should bring them back, but þat's just my opinion.

[ccoraxfan]

If we used þorn and eð, we wouldn't have to write Beethoven and see "Beeth oven"!

[DerPoltergeist13]

It's pronounced beet-hoven

its a seperate syllable and the thorn and eth are for one sound

[ccoraxfan]

DerPoltergeist, I know how Beethoven is pronounced, and I know how Þ and Ð were used in Old English. What I was talking about is how Beethoven LOOKS in English (like beeth-oven) since we use th to represent ðe sounds of Þ and Ð. My point is ðat if we used Þ and Ð instead of TH, we could eliminate some confusion. Also, in modern English ðere are 2 sounds, not 1, which correspond to ðe 2 letters. Þ as in þigh (thigh) and eþer (ether) and Ð as in ðy (thy) and eiðer (either).

[poopydoop22]

I agree with you. except we should use Ðð for the hard th and Þþ for the soft th

[thecritiquevirtuoso]

It's my opinion as well.

[Weorthmyndum]

More correctly: why are you using the þorn and the eð in the wrong place?

Not to be picky, but it's "þe", and "14ð".

[ccoraxfan]

Are you speaking of modern English or old, Weorthmyndum? In my speech at least, Thorn begins with a voiceless interdental fricative, and fourteenth ends with one. Eth ends with a voiced interdental fricative, and "the" begins with one. Thorn (þ) is equivalent to Greek Theta (θ), and Eth is a modified D which represents the voiced variation of Thorn, although in Old English they were used inconsistently.

[ShaShaZane88]

........ummm....you DO see the subtitles right?

[piscadil]

No! I'm blind! I can't see anything thus, Thanks very much!

[buttfuckmcgurk]

Youtube is for sighted people only.

[generallegolas]

Please, contact the main office for any Racism complain