The tales of magic and wonder such as those collected by the brothers Grimm in the late 18th and early 19th centuries are classified as 'fairy tales,' although very few of them actually contain a creature called a fairy. Instead, as J.R.R Tolkien has pointed out, these tales are of the land of 'Faerie'; 'the perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country. ...Faerie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible.' These stories of magic, enchantment, heroic quests and courtly romance form a cultural heritage thousands of years old, dating back to the oldest written epics and further still to tales spoken around the hearth-fire. It is these tales and epics that we will be studying; stories about the Celtic 'otherworld', Anglo-Saxon monsters (both human and other) in Beowulf, mysterious animals and lovers in the Lays of Marie de France, and encounters with the dead in Dante's Inferno. Along the way we will also encounter Norse gods and goddesses, Arthurian knights and wizards, and various philosophers, heroes, and villains.

We will discover that these tales of wonder differ from novels of social realism in their freedom to portray the world in bright primary colors; a dream-world half remembered from childhood when all the world was glistening and strange; a fiction unembarrassed to tackle the truths of Good and Evil, Honor and Betrayal, and Love and Hate. We will encounter individuals whose function within these worlds of 'faerie' is to confront the difference between illusion and reality (itself often composed of mystery, the monstrous and the fantastic) and emerge with their 'true selves' intact.

In this class we will go beyond a simple reading of the texts to an analytical study of the individual's reaction to experiences with the 'otherworld,' and progress towards an understanding of why these stories resonate through the ages and maintain an importance even today in our pragmatic world of science and rationalism. This will be achieved through an immersion in the texts, frequent writing in and out of class, extra-curricular research, and lively and informed class discussions.

Required Texts:

Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translation)
Gawain and the Green Knight
Dante's Inferno

E-reserve texts will include

Briciu's Feast
Selections from the Mabinogian
Selections from the poetic Edda
Selections from the Lais of Marie de France
Land of Cockayne
Sir Orfeo
Either: Chretiene de Troyes, Knight of the Cart or Percival, or
Robert de Boron, Merlin, Joseph of Arimathea or Percival
Selection from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Pardoner's Tale)