Ghost Song

by Joe Cocchiarelli

Overview

Our poet, Wulf, was a monk in the East Anglian monastery of St. Oswald until, as luck would have it, he became attached to the episcopal household of Wulfstan, Archbishop of London during the final years of King Ethelraedʼs reign. This book tells how he composed his epic, inspired by the fragments of a Geatish shaper, Egil, which survived among his motherʼs people after their arrival in East Anglia. Following our poetʼs murder, by no less than a monk of his own monastery, his poem continued to exist in the libraries of various noblemen until its acquisition by the British Library and its first transcriptions by Grimur Jonsson Thorkelin in 1787. The story opens just at the moment that fire threatens to extinguish the entire holdings of Sir Robert Cottonʼs Library in October 1731, which that time was preserved in the Condon palace of Lord Ashburnham. Of course, the poet is unaware of the happy fate that awaits his masterwork and frets endlessly over the workʼs future as he narrates the story of how the Geatish heroʼs exploits came to him and how, despite the violent disapproval of his monastic superiors, he came to produce the manuscript that later came to be known as Cotton Vitellius A XV, the Beowulf ms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781987087499
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble Press
Publication date:	06/13/2019
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Joe Cocchiarelli taught high school and college English for half his lifetime. He worked on this novel every summer for over 10 years, while teaching at Brooklyn Technical High School in New York. his interest in the topic arouse after he received his PhD in Medieval Studies from Fordham University, Bronx, NY in 1986. Among the courses he completed for the doctorate, Old English studies was a central focus. His PhD dissertation, a translation and commentary on the Old English Version of the Enlarged Rule of Chrodegang, gave him the basic knowledge for the tensions that arose between the monastic and canonical chapter houses that produced the intellectual revolution culminating in the literary masterpieces of Old English literature. The Beowulf epic is the jewel in the crown of that literary corpus.

Cocchiarelli is also the author of a noted filmography of crime film with a collection of essays tracing the evolution of the genre from the first early talkie detective films to the landmark film, The Name of the Rose, based on Eco's novel of the same name. SCREEN SLEUTHS will be republished online in Fall 2019.