-Society’s Portrait
-Epic vs. Drama - a time based distinction
-Fight to impose your own standards
-Natural Behaviour and Behavioural Needs
-Media coverage Exposure/Affection
-Passive - Aggressive National education
-Daily Post -Traumatic Stress Disorders

EpicTales

Carlo Zanni's EpicTales offers us a prism through which we can view our own society and its' militaristic tendencies. Using a php based online engine, EpicTales translates and substitutes English words with Old English words drawn from the Beowulf manuscript. When a user types in a url (www.cnn.com <http://www.cnn.com> for instance) the page is displayed in a disconcerting combination of modern English and the Anglo-Saxon of an ancient warrior culture.

The work recognizes the ephemerality and ghostliness of the webpage and employs it to expose the old mankilling currents that run beneath the gloss of contemporary language. This is most striking when Zanni's engine is used to scan news sites and reportage of current events. The cosmetic sheen of political spin doctors and compliant journalists is stripped back, baring the raw violence of war that is so carefully packaged for consumers.

At the same this process makes us aware of the gap between the terrible banality of war today and the way in which we glamourise the act with hindsight. Beowulf raises the act of a warrior to 'epic' status, granting authority and dignity to a culture that lives by the sword - a high culture propaganda vehicle for a ruthless ideology.

Zanni's choice of poetic vocabulary has other consequences. The Beowulf poet often confers a dream quality on his narrative, rendering it a hallucinatory internal experience for his audience. Making strange the world around us, we gain a new perspective on our language and culture.

Recently the Irish poet Seamus Heaney prefaced his translation of Beowulf by pointing out that there is an undeluded quality about the Beowulf poet's sense of the world that gives his lines immense emotional credibility and allows him to make general observations about life that are far too grounded in experience and reticence to be called 'moralizing'

This honesty that Heaney describes brings us back to EpicTales and its' logo based on a drawing by Leonardo entitled 'fight for the standards'. It may be likely that Leonardo was suggesting soldiers should rally to their flags and regimental standards. It is tempting though to misread the title as a call to defend other standards in society - a realistic awareness of the implications of military power, a clear appraisal of the glamourisation of past wars and recognition of the value of plain speaking.

Francis McKee

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Borges quote from 'On Blindness'

I remember that at home there were two books I could retrieve. I
had placed them on the highest shelf, thinking I would never use them.
They were Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Both
had glossaries. And so we gathered one morning in the National Library.

I thought: I have lost the visible world, but now I am going to
recover another, the world of my distant ancestors, those tribes of men
who rowed across the stormy northern seas, from Germany, Denmark, and
the Low Countries, who conquered England, and after whom we name England
- since Angle-Land, land of the Angles, had previously been called the
land of the Britons, who were Celts.

It was a Saturday morning. We gathered In Groussac's office, and
we began to read. It was a situation that pleased and mortified us, and
at the same time filled us with a certain pride. It was the fact that
the Saxons, like the Scandinavians, used two runic letters to signify
the two sounds of th, as in thing and the. This conferred an air of
mystery to the page.

We were encountering a language which seemd different from
English but similar to German. What always happens, when one studies a
language, happened. Each one of the words stood out as though it had
been carved, as though it were a talisman. For that reason the poems of
a foreign language have a prestige they do not enjoy in their own
language, for one hears, one sees, each one of the words individually.
We think of the beauty, of the power, or simply of the strangeness.