1/14/20 Cindy Liang Period 8

Cindy Liang PD. 8
1/14/20

Aim: How did the Medieval Anglo-Saxons se figurative language to develop oral traditions? 

Do Now: What connections can be drawn between The Norse and Beowulf's history?

We discussed how the story of Beowulf and Norse mythology in general was affected by geography. Ruby also mentioned how both the history of the Norse and Beowulf were passed down orally, resulting in many potential mistakes.

We then started to discuss the grammar and stock epithets
Stock-Epithets are adjectives that point out special traits of particular persons or things (usually compound adjectives)

Hercules can be described as “lion-hearted” while Achilles can be described as “swift-footed”, the sea as “wine-dark”

Ms. Fusaro then asked us to write a positive comment about a person in the room using stock epithet. Adam won 20 points for his group by writing a sentence about Ms. Fusaro, describing her as the “dark-haired, all-knowing ruler.” Ryan made up a weird sentence about Bryan, saying he has “lustful eyes”


Next we discussed Kenning: a conventional poetic phrase used for or in addition to the usual name of a person or thing, especially in icelandic and Anglo-Saxon verse, as “a wave traveler” for “a boat”

Some examples listed on the board were:
Bookworm = someone who reads a lot
Brown noser = person who does anything to gain approval
Fender bender = slight car accident
First Lady - wife of the president
Four-eyes = someone who wears glasses
Head twister = owl

Some kennings that we came up with:
Bruh moment
Squad


Last but not least we started talking about appositives. It is a  syntactic relation between expressions, usually consecutive, that have the same function and the same relation to other elements in the sentence, the second expression identifying or supplementing the first.

After learning the grammar we watched a video on The Story of Cain and Abel

We answered a few questions:

1. Why would God choose Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s?
2. What lessons are intended for people to learn from this story?
3. Is there ever retribution for the sins of our parents. 

For the first question, Ryan suggested the idea that God chose Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s because Abel sacrificed livestock while Cain sacrificed agriculture. He was on the right page but Ms. Fusaro later explained that the main difference wasn’t because Cain gave in vegetables. Abel sacrificed his first livestock, not knowing if his sheep will produce more healthy babies in the future. However, Cain “sacrificed” vegetables that were pulled out from the ground and that were going to be thrown away at the end of the day. The period was ending when we tackled question two but some lessons to be learned were: 
There is no shortcut in pleasing god
Vengeance is not the answer.

Reflection:
When we  think of English and grammar in the olden days, we view it as something distant and unrelatable. However, kenning shows that something from the medieval days still apply to us now.