The poem was created in the oral-formulaic tradition (or oral poetic method), probably developing over a period of time with roots in folk tales and traditional stories until a single, very talented poet put it in something very near its current form.
3 When, early in Book I, the letter next emerges as a center of attention, the focus will be on how it should be read.Beowulf probably was composed in England sometime in the eighth century ad and written down circa1000 ad by a literate scop (bard) or perhaps a Christian scribe who was possibly educated in a monastery.
Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee.
#An invocation of a muse free#
Then, as Arrah-na-Pogue, with a kiss, person-to-person and lips-to-page, she passes along the secret written message that will free its recipient: "Take. 2) ALP is vocalizing and, with Shem's help, writing her last words. ( Finnegans Wake persistently plexes the two: "reder" (249.14) is reeder, writing with a reed. In another, it is a preparation for the first word, now finally written out but still yet to be read. In one way, this is what the reader has been waiting for all along, the last word. Book IV ends with the letter itself, in the voice of ALP, in its most extended and, presumably, final form. Starting with Book III, the main story line is the delivery of the letter by Shaun, the postman. That is, it would be the end of the letter as it is of the book, immediately followed by whatever is involved in the process of doubling back from first page to last.įor the book overall, that would make narrative sense. ("the … riverrun" might count as echoing the more formal "the Reverend," frequent throughout.) In turn, "the," as " thé," French for "tea," would accordingly be the tea stain that is the letter's last visible sign, showing up after its signature, postscript, and three or four X's. Because, as everyone agrees, the letter is to some extent Finnegans Wake itself, "riverrun" would therefore work as a proper beginning for the book. Read in the polyglot language of Finnegans Wake, voicing all three of its syllables, and, for the nonce (and not counting the title) taking it as the first word of the book, "riverrun" is also a variant of "Reverend," along with "Majesty"-church with state-one of the two ways of addressing the august male figure of the letter's salutation: "Dear. In this case, the ideal is probably, again, both: The end of Finnegans Wake is both a sundering and a (re)joining. But then there is also the English "rive," meaning "to split apart." It depends on how many of the three syllables of "riverrun" that you include, which syllable you emphasize, and which language you hear or choose to hear. The next word, "Jined," is a Wakeism for, primarily, "joined": the two doubled ends are joined, "the" to "river." Accordingly, embedded in its first word, "riverrun," is the French " river," meaning "to rivet," that is, to join together. The first word, "Doublends," is Dublin, one city, but with a pair of, a doubling of, "-ends." In Finnegans Wake, "doubling" is a contronym, along the order of "cleave" or "sanction," in this case a word that can go either forward, as in "doublin their mumper all the time" (3.8–9), or backward, as in doubling back from last page to first. That phrase "Doublends Jined," in fact, seems to say as much. Like much else in the book, the sequence from "A way" to "Environs" may want to have it both ways. Still, most of them are considerably longer than this one sentence, if it is one. Some of its sentences seem to have lost track of their beginnings by the time they reach their ends. (Neither, for that matter, does "riverrun … Environs.") Anomalies of this sort are not rare in Finnegans Wake. 1 Although when read as a single sentence the thirty-eight words from capital-A "A way" to "Environs"-period (628.15–3.3) generally observe conventional rules of punctuation and subordination, they do not add up to a grammatical sentence. Widely accepted, this interpretation has nonetheless raised some questions. Its first syntactical unit completes a " Suspended Sentence" (106.13–14) continuing from its last one, from "the" to "riverrun." Finnegans Wake is a book of "Doublends Jined" ( FW 20.16).
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