Beowulf: A Universal History Course

By Richard Rohlin and Jonathan Pageau

Beowulf: A Universal History Course

By Richard Rohlin and Jonathan Pageau

Join Richard Rohlin and Jonathan Pageau for their first Universal History course where they take a deep dive into the epic poem Beowulf.

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Course Overview

Join the Symbolic World Circle Community for a 6-week in-depth tour of the Old English epic poem Beowulf. Listeners of the Universal History series on Jonathan's Youtube channel will be familiar with these discussions about hagiography, using the Middle Ages as a cultural backdrop for rediscovering a shared and coherent narrative by understanding historical events symbolically. This course is based on a class Richard has developed over the past several years.

This course will be a live discussion held on Thursdays at 2:00 pm Eastern time beginning September 7th and wrapping up on October 19th or you can watch recordings at your own pace. There will be a moderated Q&A portion of each class, so come ready to engage this seminal legend of Beowulf with master of symbolism Jonathan Pageau and philologist extraordinaire Richard Rohlin.

Course Details

Live Course Schedule

- Lesson 1: Sep 7, 2023

- Lesson 2: Sep 14, 2023

- Lesson 3: Sep 28, 2023

- Lesson 4: Oct 5, 2023

- Lesson 5: Oct 12, 2023

- Lesson 6: Oct 19, 2023

What you'll need

All materials will be provided, except for a copy of R.M. Liuzza's translation of Beowulf.

Course Outline

Lesson 1: Sailing out of the Mists of Myth

• Liuzza, lines 1-188

• Battaglia, Not Christianity versus Paganism, but Hall versus Bog: The Great Shift in Early

Scandinavian Religion and its Implications for Beowulf

• Leyerle, The Interlace Structure of Beowulf

Lesson 2: Wyrd Goes as She Will

• Liuzza, lines 189-709

• Shippey, Principles of Conversation in Beowulfian Speech

Lesson 3: Beowulf, Sigurd, and St. Michael

• Liuzza, lines 710-1472

• Excerpt from Grettissaga (Liuzza, Appendix B)

• Homily on Vainglory from the Exeter Book (Liuzza, Appendix D)

• Sims-Williams, Is it Smoke or Fog or Warriors Fighting?

Lesson 4: Beowulf Goes to Hell

• Liuzza, lines 1473-1887

• Excerpt from Blickling Homilies (Liuzza, Appendix B)

• Kaske, Beowulf and the Book of Enoch

Lesson 5: Until the Dragon Comes

• Liuzza, lines 1888-2601

• Shippey, Wicked Queens and Cousin Strategies in Beowulf

Lesson 6: The Dragon

• Liuzza, lines 2602-3182

• Excerpts from Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetic

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Presenters

Richard Rohlin

Richard Rohlin is a software developer, Germanic philologist, and Orthodox Christian living in Texas with his wife and children. He speaks and publishes on Germanic poetry, the Inklings, and the Sacramental Imagination. He regularly contributes to Jonathan Pageau’s The Symbolic World YouTube channel through the Universal History series, which has recently launched a 6-week course studying the epic poem Beowulf.  

Richard co-hosts The Amon Sul Podcast, and has published several works of fiction and non-fiction. He’s currently working on a collection of essays called Finding the Golden Key: Essays Toward a Recovery of the Sacramental Imagination. His superhero pulp novel Guardians: The Eye of Horus is currently under development as a graphic novel. Richard is also a life-long tabletop gamer and wrapped up a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to produce Amboria: Roleplaying in the World Under Starlight, which is now in production and preparing to ship.

Jonathan Pageau

Jonathan Pageau is a renowned liturgical artist, writer, and public speaker. Through his popular YouTube channel The Symbolic World, he has become a sought-out interpreter of the deep patterns in stories. With his 2022 publication of God's'Dog: Monster, a graphic novel invented with his brother Matthieu Pageau and artist Cord Nielson, Jonathan proved himself a powerful storyteller in his own right. The project’s successful crowdfunding encouraged him to continue his efforts to reclaim the storytelling landscape by starting a publishing company called Symbolic World Press (SWP).

SWP’s maiden publication is The Tale of Snow White and the Widow Queen, the first of an eight-book series of fairy tales in which Pageau explores a new way of telling fairy tales: one which is both aware of our cultural moment and simultaneously committed to honoring the deeply celebratory of the roots these stories have planted in our common imagination.  

Jonathan’s YouTube channel, The Symbolic World, now has nearly 200k subscribers, and the community that has developed around his listenership is an active, supportive, and talented collection of artists and thinkers from around the globe. He recently launched a new Symbolic World Website, where people can sign up to access exclusive content unavailable on the regular channel, and to engage in the Symbolic World Community for timely discussions around symbolism, literature, religion, art, and culture. The site has also begun hosting paid courses, where people can sign up for an interactive deep dive into specific works, such as Beowulf, C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, and the rebirth of Christian Metaphysics.

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