Stufsocker

Ingeld is a minor character in Beowulf, who also crops up in a couple Old Norse sources. This line from Alcuin is both supporting evidence that there was a rich tradition of heroic literature in early England (of which Beowulf is the only survival in long form rather than brief poems), and an indicator of why we don’t have much of it anymore (the people who would otherwise be writing it down were discouraged from doing so by assholes like Alcuin).

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who studies Old English. Beowulf is the absolute peak of the corpus you have to work with, pretty much the only long-form story that isn’t a saint’s life and/or just a translation of something written elsewhere. Statistically, you’re probably in this field because you encountered Beowulf in high school or college & it hit you so hard it rewrote your brain. There is no indication that it was particularly well-known during the medieval period; it survives in one kinda-low-quality manuscript and had been completely forgotten until the early modern period. A few shorter poems in the Exeter Book (“Deor”, “Widsith”) contain allusions that indicate the existence of a whole complex of legends & literature linked to, but distinct from, other northern European traditions. We don’t have any of those except Beowulf, we almost lost that one, and here’s this jackass Alcuin criticizing the monks who had knowledge of these stories for wasting their time on them.

Da Vinci’s Last Supper

Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam

Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson

TUMBLR: OMG HE PERSECUTED ABUSE SURVIVORS11one!!! BAD MAN BAD MAN I R SPECIAL SNOWFLAK DO NOT ERASE MY RIGHTS CHECK UR PRIVELEGE EVIL MAN!!!!!!!!!! *flail*

lol thanks for proving his point, tumblr 

Feminism and Masculinity, with Robert Jensen