(no subject)

[rymenhild]

I am sure I just read the passage of Beowulf that inspired Tolkien to write The Hobbit. A crafty thief steals something from a dragon... but the passage is so corrupt that we don't know quite what he stole. The passage includes the phrase "bigfolc beorna." "Bigfolc" literally means "neighboring people", but "big people" works too; "beorn" means warrior ("beorna" is genitive plural) and supplies the name for the bear-man the assembled dwarves meet in the woods on the way to steal from (and kill) the great dragon Smaug. (Never mind that "bigfolc" is a conjectural reading supplied by nineteenth-century scholars, as the damaged text only reads "b..folc." Tolkien would have seen the conjectural reading.)

Yes, I'm a geek. You noticed?