Welcome to Litsy!

1. My degrees are in Classics, so I have (or had, super rusty now) Latin and Greek. I'd love to learn Old English so I could read...

2. ... Beowulf in the original. I love the Seamus Haney translation.

@TheSpineView #two4tuesday

#Two4Tuesday
@TheSpineView (thanks for the tag! 😍)

1. Latin.
2. I'd love to be able to read THE AENEID in Latin.

Play? @TheLudicReader @BarkingMadRead @mcctrish

Happy Tuesday! Here are today's questions. I'll tag a few Littens to get us started. Hope your day is beautiful!

My answers:
📘 I would like to learn Greek.
📘 Tagged

Play? @dabbe @AnnCrystal @DebinHawaii @Eggs @Kshakal @TheBookHippie @peaKnit @BethM @AmyG @Susanita @julesG @InkedBookworm13 @PageShifter @Cupcake12 @Blueberry @Texreader @Born.A.Reader @BookmarkTavern

One day late.

I would love to eat ambrosia and drink nectar with the Greek gods. That way, I'd stay young, gorgeous, and live forever so I could actually read every book on my TBR! 🤩🤣🤩

Well, this was stirring stuff! It makes some of Uhtred of Bebbanburg's escapades look like a church fête!
There's no getting away from its being a matter of masculine heroics in the extreme; part of me wanted to find it all a bit ridiculous on that account. However, I was audio-drawing and more than once I realised my pen had been hovering motionless over the paper for some minutes. Audio is *definitely* the way to go with this.

Reread with IRL club and it was a raucous good time, lots of fodder for laughter and discussion.

Once again struck by the highly relatable themes. Humanity hasn‘t fundamentally changed.

Emily Wilson's translation gets a HUGE standing O from me, and Audra McDonald's audiobook narration is unbelievably moving and deeply emotional. It's a long listen (took me 4 weeks to get through), but it's worth the commitment. And the quote here from Wilson's introduction could not be more true. The loss throughout the story is staggering in scale, brutal and overwhelming- yet the grief described is so human and so cathartic. Bravo all around.

5am flight fuel

@dabbe #ThreeListThursday

My three favorites and ones that I still read are.
1. Beowulf
2. Canterbury Tales
3. Don Quixote

This could have been a really interesting spiritual successor (at the time) to Homer, but this read more like Roman Empire propaganda than an original work.

Virgil does have *some* original ideas and portrayals of the characters and events in the overall story, but it still feels like you're better off reading the Iliad and the Odyssey.