RE: Universitatlity

I guess the poking was all in the wrong places until now. But now "all
'woked up", I'll admit that reading that big slog of posts was worth it.
Daniel

And Matt's remarks about Beowulf are not clear to me. It seems to me that
we have the written text that we have as an incidental fact, a historical
accident. In fact, I believe that we have only a single manuscript of that
particular poem (if I'm not associating this fact with the wrong epic) and
it is a simple stroke of luck that we know of Beowulf at all. If what we
had were the original performed versions, I am not sure that it would be any
less sensible to us than what we have at present. And the fact that texts
change seems to me to have less to do with an ever-shifting "human nature"
than with the eternal perfectionism of said nature, and the existence in
manuscript and clay tablets of several "drafts" of single poems, sometimes
spanning several centuries, seems to demonstrate this beyond my capacity for
skepticism.

-Robbie
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Received on Tue Dec 9 18:24:29 2003