Beowulf Rap

I was going through an old filing cabinet and found something that gave me flashbacks to my English-teaching days—a rap I wrote in 1988 so my 8th graders would understand Beowulf better. Granted some with more literary talent than I possess have done translations, but I figured mine might work for 8th graders. Plus the movie version of Beowulf wouldn't come out until 2007, and even the animated version wasn't available back then:

Anyhow, here's my rap version. If you're an English teacher desperate to get your students more involved, feel free to use it: 

The Beowulf Rap

By Becky Mushko © 1988

Old King Hrothgar built Heorot Hall,

And him and his homeboys had a ball

’Til Grendel came upon the scene.

Man! This dude was big and mean—

Big red eyes, twelve feet tall—

Listen to what I’m tellin’ y’all!

Grendel chowed down on twenty guys—

Only a snack for a dude his size!

Every night he came again

And chomped and crunched up more and more men.

Poor old Hrothgr was reallin illin’

’Cause Grendel really got into killin’.

This went on for twelve years long

Until Mr. Beowulf came along.

Now Beowulf was one cool cat,

And he wondered where old Grendel was at.

A dude named Unferth put him down,

But Beowulf would prove he ain’t no clown.

Hrothgar said, Get it on, Man,

But you got to kill him with your own bare hand!”

They feasted and drank and went to sleep drunk,

And along came Grendel, the ugly punk.

He chomped one dude and slurped his blood

And said to himself, “Mmm-mmm, that’s good!”

But as he reached for another to harm,

Beowulf grabbed him by his arm

And slung him back and forth like a rocket

’Til he ripped his arm right outta its socket.

Grendel ran back to his bloody lake

’Cause he’d had about all that he could take.

Beowulf nailed his arm to the wall,

And they partied and boogied in Heorot Hall.

Hrothgar gave him gold and stuff

’Cause that’s what you get when you’re good and tough.

I hope you understand the poem of Beowulf

’Cause I think I’ve done rapped enough.

I can't guarantee that it'll work, though.

~

According to Pope

Today is Alexander Pope's 324th birthday. Part of his poem, "An Essay on Man," was featured on the Writer's Almanac today. Here's the excerpt, with some of my photos interspersed.

ALL are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;

That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth, as in th' ethereal frame,
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent:
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part;

As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns
As the rapt Seraphim, that sings and burns:
To him no high, no low, no great, no small—
He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all....

All nature is but art, unknown to thee:
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see:
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good.

~

Winning and Losing

Last Saturday, my Lake Writer/Valley Writer buddy Betsy Ashton and I journeyed to Wytheville for the annual Wytheville Chautauqua Literary Festival, where I placed second in the short story category; she placed third in the essay category.


There we were joined by fellow Lake Writer Bruce Rae who placed second in the essay category. It never hurts to win a bit of money.

On Monday, the winners in the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest were announced, and I—who’d won the Vile Pun division in 2008—didn’t even place. Indeed, there were no winners from Virginia at all.

Here’s the grand prize winner, written by David McKenzie of Federal Way, WA:

Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.

The winning entry had a nautical theme, as did this losing one I submitted:

I’d momentarily considered rekindling my romance with Hobart but that ship had not only sailed long ago, it had gone down soon after leaving the harbor and now lay belly up in the breakers, looking like a soon-to-be-beached whale whose rotting remains would drive away tourists, so I decided not to return his calls and just get another restraining order like the last time.

I thought that my pun-packed entry with numerous literary allusions to the poetry of Thomas Gray was bad enough to place, but (Alas!) it was not:

Asked by his wife why he had not completed his poem, Thomas Gray replied, “It’s a long story, but on my way to pay the tax collector what we owed on the spring and surrounding property, I took a shortcut over Mount Odin, but as I began the descent of Odin, I passed a cemetery whereupon I stopped to read the epitaph on Mrs. Clerke and then commenced sneezing, for I suffered an allergy within a country churchyard, so my lack of progress of poesy is owed to adversity.”

I figured this entry of mine wouldn’t be bad enough for a “Vile Pun,” and I was right:

Amelia decided to accept the job teaching creative writing to prisoners after she had carefully considered the cons and prose.

But I had hopes (Dashed!) for this:

Always jealous of her brother and his business accomplishments, Jessica found it difficult to be sweet to him when her Fabulous Fudge business fizzled while his Gourmet Goober business succeeded, and she could hardly suppress her peanuts envy.

Ah, well. Win some, lose some.

~