Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf two decades got quite a bit of attention in mainstream magazines and newspapers. Plus, 2007 saw a film adaptation of Beowulf directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary. There is public interest in this poem as a classic of English literature even when Tolkien is not involved.
Reading a chunk of Beowulf in the original was, along with learning Maxwell's equations and reading Gibbon one of the best things I ever did for myself. It's ... fairly obvious it's one person. The latter half with the dragon could have been an add-on.
Heaney's translation is pretty fun to read, I don't know what you're talking about with this "bloody awful" stuff. It's a poets translation for sure, and he admittedly takes license, but "bloody awful" feels like a stretch.
Heaney's translation felt like he took Tolkien's "The Monsters and the Critics" to heart with his understanding, and clear love of the source.
I don't care if he loves the source; it was an awful translation and it gives me the heebie jeebies like nails on a chalkboard. Just picking it up gives me the creeps; vandalism.
Rebsamen is closer to something like what was actually written.
Your Rebsamen comment is true - everything else you say makes you sound like those people who go around telling others they can't possibly appreciate or enjoy sushi if they've never been to Japan.
You may want to try dislodging the stick from your wart ridden anus.
Man, you're really butthurt; are you a relative of Haney's? One of the terrible diseases of our time, along with things like never reading the anglo saxon classics (I learned OE and read Beowulf in the original because both my parents did so in high school, as, apparently did everyone in the US at one point in time) is not calling out terrible things as terrible, and ascribing importance to people the media has declared as "great." Haney's translation is bloody awful, and will be remembered as such for as long as anyone remembers what his name is.
>Plus, 2007 saw a film adaptation of Beowulf directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary.
That film would likely not have happened if not for the success of the Lord of the Rings films, and most people likely never heard of Beowulf until then, unless they dimly remembered having to read it in class once.
And no translation of anything, much less any book without a big media tie in, gets anything close to "quite a bit of attention" in the mainstream press. Coverage in literature sections of the newspapers or dedicated literary sites are far from mainstream.
And this is an article in Ars Technica, which to HN may seem mainstream, but which is far from it for the masses. A quick Google of "Tolkein Beowulf single author" brings up little in the way of mainstream coverage, with the Ars article being on top.
Don't get me wrong, I love Beowulf and Seamus Heaney's translation is one of the few books I'll reread regularly, but elfakyn is correct. If Tolkein's name weren't involved, no one would be covering this at all, and really, almost no one is now.
Well it does become difficult to separate considering Tolkein lectured about Beowulf, translated it in the 1920s (not published until this decade!), and his decades of work on ancient languages, philology and linguistics.
Nothing to do with LotR films, more to do with an intellectual giant well known in the field (who also wrote LotR). The books were far better anyway.
Neither is it Tolken's fault Beowulf is considered the most significant work from Old English. Often discussed in the broadsheets I once read, not ever likely to reach those who read the Sun or the Mirror. Still doesn't stop it being a highly significant work (without Tolken or Jackson).
The Beeb trot it out regularly - not buried in dusty literate sections that no one normal would encounter, which seems to be what you're driving at.
Mind it probably even reached down to tabloid readers from time to time. There was a fun Australian cartoon version, narrated by Peter Ustinov retelling from Grendel's point of view. Managed to become a bit of a cult classic in its day. There's been a couple of TV mini series. Probably a game and festival too for all I know!
> That film would likely not have happened if not for the success of the Lord of the Rings films
That particular film may not have been made, but it’s not hard to imagine an adaptation being made by someone even in the absence of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, which riffs on the Beowulf story, got a film adaptation (as The Thirteen Warrior) in 1999. The Beowulf story isn’t The Dream of the Rood or other esoteric Old English literature; it has adventure elements that will attract ordinary audiences from time to time.
> Coverage in literature sections of the newspapers or dedicated literary sites are far from mainstream.
Literature sections of mainstream newspapers are mainstream reporting, even if many readers are going to skip over those columns. And are you seriously arguing that mags like e.g. The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books are not mainstream? Those may be bought by a certain demographic of bookish people, but those mags are sold at ordinary newsagents. They are not specialist journals.
>And are you seriously arguing that mags like e.g. The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books are not mainstream?
Maybe. Most people read neither nowadays. Unless my understanding of the definition of "mainstream" is flawed, that makes them essentially niche publications.
But that wasn't actually my argument. My argument is that most people don't care about literature beyond anything not tied into a popular media franchise, non-literary books or books by famous authors, and Beowulf is none of those things.
Whether "most people ... care about [it as] literature", I'm not sure, but most people in many school districts and universities were at least forced to read Beowulf as part of a standard curriculum, possibly more than once over the years. Isn't the question merely whether they would've cared enough to upvote or comment on the HN posting without seeing "Tolkien" in the headline? Beowulf is part of what one might call literary canon. What constitutes a literary canon is always going to be subject to debate, as it is ultimately subjective at some level. How one is to define "popular" media franchise, "literary" books, or "famous" authors can only pose an even greater challenge in forming any consensus.
Most people I know are familiar with The 13th Warrior, and know that it is a (reimagined) retelling of Beowulf by Michael Crichton. From wikipedia:
> In an afterword in the novel Crichton gives a few comments on its origin. A good friend of Crichton's was giving a lecture on the "Bores of Literature". Included in his lecture was an argument on Beowulf and why it was simply uninteresting. Crichton stated his views that the story was not a bore and was, in fact, a very interesting work. The argument escalated until Crichton stated that he would prove to him that the story could be interesting if presented in the correct way.
To be fair, chances are you and your friends are not representative of the mainstream. Just being on Hacker News makes that unlikely.
Michael Crichton is a famous enough author that people are more likely than not to see a movie based on his work because it's a "Michael Crichton movie" and neither know nor care about the source material. To most people, the Beowulf movie is just a fantasy movie where Angelina Jolie plays a sexy demon, not the adaptation of Beowulf they've been waiting for years to see, the way people were waiting to see (or dreading to see) the Lord of the Rings.
Beowulf just isn't that significant or relevant in popular culture - it just isn't. I don't even know why this is controversial.
How interesting. In that case am I right in guessing that your coverage of the Medieval part of the canon was limited to Chaucer and didn't include anything else? I'm just curious how much things have changed.
Chaucer was covered in a sense, but in History rather than English. The class did not read him, except for one student who chose that as the focus of a class project.
I did have a high school English class covering (among other, non-medieval works) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the story of Tristan and Iseult. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was read in translation, but Tristan and Iseult was a fairly modern reimagining (set in the original period), with an author's introduction discussing how she chose to omit the magic that was present in the original because she thought it detracted from the agency of the characters.
That sounds really good, I don't think I ever read Tristan and Iseult.
I'd have slotted Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in with Beowulf in the "medieval" part of the literary canon but I could be off-base there. I remember reading Beowulf in high school but not the other. That might be a function of which one I found more interesting at the time, I'm not sure.
I agree that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is "medieval". I meant to say that the English class covering it was not focused on a historical period, covering literature that was much more modern in the same year.
Beowulf is from around the 8th century; I guess that's technically "medieval" but I think of it as belonging to some nameless period that's older than "medieval". There's a huge difference between Old English of the 8th century and Middle English of the 14th.
I think the "medieval" terminology is a little dated anyhow. I guess Harold Bloom's categorizations and listings and so on are a lot more authoritative now (they sure pop on a google search) and it doesn't look like he uses the term. I have no real opinion on how much any of that matters.
Memory is unreliable but I recall my high school class using a pretty good textbook that included Beowulf with both old English and modern translations, but also the chapter of The Hobbit where Bard shoots the dragon, which stylistically invited some interesting comparisons. It was a pretty good lesson for a high school kid who was also a fan of Tolkien, back before that was something you could be without reading any books.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Are you trying to criticize the general public for not caring about Beowulf in "the right way" or are you trying to criticize the media for not caring about Beowulf in "the right way"? Or do you think this story should not have been reported at all?
> Are you trying to criticize the general public for not caring about Beowulf in "the right way" or are you trying to criticize the media for not caring about Beowulf in "the right way"? Or do you think this story should not have been reported at all?
I'm criticizing the premise that Beowulf is as well known as Tolkien's works in popular culture, or even that well known at all outside of niche literary circles, as counter to the claim that Tolkien's attachment to the story has no relevance to the degree of its coverage, which, itself, is limited to begin with.
Beowulf is required reading for many many students, when I worked in book stores students came in every new semester from all levels of schooling to buy either the Heaney or Raffel translations - so I think it's probably interesting to more people than you think.
I think this claim is true in its explicit sense. The Tolkien connection makes an interesting story even more interesting, which probably increases media attention by some non-zero value.
But it would be an interesting story for many of us without the Tolkien connection. Beowulf is an important artifact in the history of the language many of us are deeply attached to. And better than a potsherd, this artifact literally speaks to us from the distant past (literal if you consider writing of this sort to be a form of speech, as I do.) If the claim is implying that most of the coverage is due to the Tolkien angle, and it would have little to no coverage without it, I believe that to be incorrect. But I don't know if that is what was meant, and the explicit interpretation of the claim is probably correct.
And IIRC was largely responsible for getting people to read Beowulf in particular as literature. I mean to appreciate the work of art, as opposed to dissecting it as evidence about language etc.
It was my impression (not based on a lot) that Beowulf was sort of forced into the status of "great literature" by the fact that it is the only major work of Anglic literature at all, and English elites wanted something from their own native tradition (which, again, didn't really exist) to compete with the classical epics.
I've noticed the same, unfortunately. Lot's more posts on anything that isn't coding or directly tech related that just say something like, "this shouldn't even be on HN"
At least the tend to get downvoted relatively fast
Yes, and that directly causes a device to fail SafetyNet Attestation which can cause some third-party apps to not work even with sideloading/different app store.
> You can "unbreak" glass. I had a project that started to get a stress fracture as it cooled. I quickly put it back in a cool part of the torch flame to anneal it. The cracks literally healed.
Curious, would that still maintain a weak point in the area?
The problem is that people often conflate dispassionate writing with neutral writing, which makes a biased dispassionate edit much more likely to get through.
Remember that these statistics are specifically from Amazon warehouses, and not from Amazon warehouse workers calling from home. We'd need statistics on calls from workplaces. A quick google scholar search finds suicide rates [1] in the workplace which are significantly lower than what you cite as general suicide rates. I couldn't find any data on 911 calls, so we can't really draw any statistical information from this data.
That's dangerous advice. Having access to some (or a combination of) "less-secure" accounts could allow an attacker to get enough personal information to escalate privileges through reset fields, social engineering in customer support, or just plain weird interactions between accounts.
Besides, most people have enough "important" logins (social media, email, amazon, bank(s), computer, cloud accounts) and some have lots that there's no good reason not to use a password manager. Even with 6 passwords to remember (plus a 7th for all the non-sensitive accounts), it's hard to make them unique enough, and if you end up with a system it's pretty easy to infer the rest of the passwords.
Imagine this scenario: you are an average person. You have 90 accounts each requiring a password [1]. 5 of them you deem sensitive enough to have their own password and 85 of them share a password. One of those 85 is compromised. Now you'll spend all day stressing out whether one of those 85 accounts, in hindsight, is actually something you care about at least to some extent. Desperately trying to remember whether there were any other accounts that you should've secured better. (Anecdotally, this has happened to me before a password manager: I had different logins for important stuff and the same for non-important stuff; it's also happened to most of my friends at some point.)
Or you can use a password manager. Once you do have a password manager, you can go ahead and have unique random logins for everything, there's no extra effort needed. 2FA is another important security measure.
In regards to rotation, I agree, and NIST doesn't even recommend forced rotation anymore[2].
Google changed the operators; now it's double quotes instead of plus (it was changed for google+ so that the plus searches g+ profiles and pages). You now have to search:
"noir" "film" -"pinot noir"
I wonder whether they'll revert back now that google+ is dead.
I know gmail is different than search, but if you do a quoted search for a string in gmail that has zero matches, it will return a few "close" matches.
This really confused me, because I was trying to find something specific, and it found a few emails, so I read them, and then was confused that they didn't actually take about the specific thing I was trying to remember. Then I realized that they I included one of the words from my string.
In this case, a close match was completely useless, and ended up wasting my time reading irrelevant results. A message saying "we didn't find that, but here's a few close matches" would have been more helpful and avoided wasting my time.
The reasons in this thread about non precise search results are half the reason I stopped using Google Search about a year ago. I get why they've done it, but I don't like it.
I try to wean myself off Google search every few months but I've never managed to stick. What do you like for an alternative? I'm probably due another attempt.
This happened to me just this week! I was trying to find a specific Onion article, so I searched various permutations, many of them including "the onion" which wasn't respected in the result output. I was absolutely furious that the one escape hatch I have to ameliorate bad searches was taken away from me.
Give it a try - I run CookieAutoDelete so it is 'theoretically' a clean search each time if that makes any difference.
I don't know whether this is necessarily the cause of your issue, but I discovered one reason why it doesn't always work. On mobile Safari, iOS ends up inserting smart quote characters rather than straight quotes when you type them. Google ends up ignoring the smart quote characters. To work around this, I have to hold down the " button to explicitly make the keyboard insert the straight quote character.
Are you saying that it was returning pages that didn't contain the phrase "the onion", or just weren't articles from The Onion? What was the exact search term?
Google appears to respect the quotes for me. Changing the example query above to `"film" "noir" -"film noir"` returns results that mention noir films but not the phrase "film noir". However, searching for `film noir -"film noir"` without quotes on the individual words does return a Netflix page titled "Film Noir".
It's more noticeable for niche topics, which google tends to struggle with in general.
I remember trying to google something about Sufism and its relationship to mysticism and the occult...and google brought up a bunch of results from right wing conspiracy websites claiming that Islam was related to the "New World Order".
I haven't seen all of this behavior documented in a single place, so here it is.
Some of it has security implications (such as being able to brute force usernames) that is worth knowing about.
A TL;DR of the security stuff:
* Brute-forcing valid principal names is possible, since you can't create a bucket policy with an invalid principal.
* User compromise will break cross-account access, since if AWS becomes aware of a compromise, they will want you to delete the user and recreate it.
* Explicit denies will stop working if the principal is deleted and recreated, since they operate internally on the Principal ID and not the ARN
* Canonical IDs offer no extra security compared to account ARNs, since it's trivial to convert them back and get an account number.