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Description of the seasonal cycle. Finally, it is winter again, and Gawain leaves to find the Green Knight’s chapel. His shield with the pentangle or “endlesse knot,” symbolizing five sets of five virtues. The northern journey through wonders and adventures. The northern lord’s castle. Hopitality is granted by the lord, who also offers a wager—another bet.
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A quick sketch of the development of the Arthurian mythos. The Middle English alliterative Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a romance full of wonders. The Green Knight challenges the Court of Arthur. Gawain accepts the challenge, and cuts off the Knight’s head. The Green Knight picks up his head and departs, telling Gawain that a year hence he must allow the Knight to strike his own blow.
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The Norman Conquest of 1066. The transformation of Old English into Middle English, partly through the influence of Anglo-Norman French. From heroic poetry to the romance, the tale of wonders. The new theme of Courtly Love, a new kind of idealized romantic love.
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Beowulf returns to the Geats, eventually becomes king for 50 years of peace. The dragon is awakened when someone steals from his hoard. Beowulf and Wiglaf defeat the dragon, but Beowulf is mortally wounded. He asks to see the treasure, then dies. The Geats may not long survive his death.
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Grendel’s mother breaks into Heorot, grabs Hrothgar’s best friend and her son’s hand. Beowulf pursues her to the uncanny mere, dives in, slays her with the help of a sword from the days of the giants, whose blade is melted by her blood. Return and a second celebration. Beowulf the triumphing warrior—but also Beowulf the peacemaker.
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Hrothgar’s line from the mysterious Scyld opens the poem. The building of Heorot, and the bard’s song. Grendel preys on Heorot 12 years. The arrival of Beowulf. Beowulf insulted by Unferth. The battle with Grendel.
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Everything about Beowulf is a mystery: its date and place of origin; its atypical hero, a monster slayer rather than heroic feuding warrior; its problematic relationship to Christianity. J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous essay about these problems.
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Northumbria, along the northeastern coast, site of a cultural efflorescence in the 7th and 8th centuries. From here, the Lindisfarne Gospels and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 731 CE, which preserves the first English poem, “Caedmon’s Hymn.” Also, an Anglo-Saxon elegiac lyric, “The Wanderer.”
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The 18th century discovery that 1/3 of languages today, including English, derive from the lost language of the Indo-Europeans. The waves of settlement of the British Isles: the Celts, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons, bearing with them what became Old English, the first form of the English language.
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Faust and Mephistopheles win a war for the Emperor in Act 4. In Act 5, Faust, now 100, reclaims land from the sea, and is responsible for the death of an aged couple in the process. He dies, angels save his soul in a wildly comic scene, and he is redeemed in the eternity of the Eternal Feminine. He is not yet done striving.
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Helen has been rescued from the underworld and taken to a medieval castle by Faust, courting her, uniting with her as a union of opposites, Classical with Medieval/German/Romantic. Their child Euphorion plunges to his death by trying to climb too high.
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It is easy to read Act 3 ironically. Faust strives for the archetypal feminine, but their union is an illusion and produces a child who, because ungrounded in the real world, leaps to his death. But there may be a less reductive way of looking at it, not instead of but in addition to the ironic reading.
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As Faust disappears to find Helen again, the Homunculus achieves his quest to be embodied at the climax of the Classical Walpurgis Night, the end of Act 2. Alchemical and scientific imagery of the union of fire and water unite with the imagery of evolution as Homunculus "impregnates” the waters of the sea nymph Galatea.
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Goethe invented the idea of a Classical Walpurgis Night? Why? Four quests: Faust for Helen (again), Mephistopheles for sex, the Homulculus for a body, and a fourth quest, symbolized by the enigmatic Cabiri. Symbolism of 3 and 4; of fire and water; of life as evolutionary metamorphosis.
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The Homunculus, artificial disembodied intelligence created by Wagner, tells the group that Faust is dreaming of Helen’s engendering through the rape of Leda, and that Faust must be revived at the Classical Walpurgis Night, where he will search for a body. The site in Thessaly is the Pharsalian fields, where Julius Caesar defeated Pompey and Cato, victory of future imperialism over freedom, the ironic cycle of history.
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Faust descends to the uncanny realm of the Mothers while the Court watches. He attempts to seize Helen of Troy, but an explosion knocks him unconscious. As Act 2 opens, he has been removed to his old study, still in a coma. Wagner has become an alchemist. Serious alchemy as a ritual meditation whose goal was the spiritualization of matter.
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To celebrate the solving of the Emperor’s financial crisis, a carnival-masque, dramatizing society’s ultimate value: wealth. Faust as Plutus, god of wealth, on a chariot. The mysterious Boy Charioteer who leads the chariot. Hijinks involving illusions of wealth. The Emperor commands Faust to summon up Helen of Troy. Mephistopheles tells Faust he must descend to the Nothing that is the ground of being, the realm of the Mothers.
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The Holy Roman Empire is broke, but Faust and Mephistopheles “solve” the Emperor’s problem by inventing wealth that only exists on paper—in short, by inventing modern finance, based not on material wealth like gold but symbolic wealth like money. It is fake alchemy, a con job. It is also the world of modern finance.
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Goethe does judge Faust morally, but not in the Aristotelian framework of the tragic hero, which is how he’d like to see himself. He is instead an antihero, redeemed, but not by the sacrifice of Christ: instead, perhaps unfortunately, through that of an innocent female figure, saving an unworthy man. The metaphor of the waterfall, the rainbow created by the sun within its spray: spirit immanent in this material world.
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For stark power, the end of Part 1 is almost unequalled in modern literature. Gretchen, mad, will not leave the dungeon, and Faust leaves her. Why is there a Part 2? In it, Faust moves in new directions: into the larger sociopolitical realm, and into transpersonal psychological depths. The difficulty of making a moral judgment of Faust.
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