Leásungspell: A Fool’s Tale
- Submitting institution
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Teesside University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 4036274
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- The British Museum, London, UK
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first performance
- -
- Year of first performance
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Leásungspell: A Fool's Tale is the result of extensive multi-disciplinary research, culminating in a published text, recorded sound-scape with accompanying music/sound effects, and live performance that has extensively toured the UK, premiering at The British Museum.
This work is informed by a broader interest in the role of regional history, legend and folklore in the exploration of regional (and peripheral) cultural identity. The poem is informed by the conventions of epic verse to weave into the narrative a series of digressions, stories within stories, drawing upon accounts of historical events and intertextual echoes of early English literature: Beowulf, The Seafarer, Deor, The Wanderer, Y Gododden, The History of the English People (Bede), the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle etc.
Departing from the representation of the Anglo Saxon world within contemporary language and literature, Leásungspell in methods similar to Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, Steve Ely’s Englaland and Oswald’s Book of Hours, attempts to articulate a Pre-Enlightenment consciousness and recreate an animistic perspective employing a synthesis of Old English and Northern dialect forms, utilising modern English syntax, and makes significant use of Anglo Saxon literary conventions: kennings, riddles, and alliterative and consonantive patterns.
Leásungspell represents a creative reimagining of a living, essentially oral language. Through sophisticated layering of historical, linguistic and formal experimentation, the text reclaims and dignifies Anglo Saxon based dialect forms as a literary language.
The alienating strategies of the text are, however, counterbalanced by the work’s performative qualities. Beagrie collaborated with five musicians in active research, creating a full audio version and an abridged version for live audiences, exploring how the orality, accompanying sounds, snatches of song, over-layered music and physicality, allow audiences to bridge the gap of defamiliarised language to experience a dramatized rendering of the poem, one more in keeping with the narrative techniques used by traditional scops.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
