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BDP's music became significantly more politically astute after Scott La Rock's death. KRS-One published four more albums under the title Boogie Down Productions, and each was increasingly innovative and expanded from the thuggish imagery of "Criminal Minded," exploring themes like black-on-black crime and black radicalism, using a riff on the words of Malcolm X, "by any means necessary", which became the title of the second BDP album, and remains one of the most political hip-hop albums to date. It was in this album that KRS defined himself as the "teacha" or "teacher", symbolizing his emphasis on educating his audience members and fans about relevant social issues surrounding the African-American experience.
During his time in association with Boogie Down Productions, KRS-One joined other rappers to create the Stop the Violence Movement, which addressed many of the issues brought up in BDP's music and is the most conscious effort displayed by KRS-One and BDP of political activism and engagement. The movement created the single "Self-Destruction" in 1989 through the collaboration of BDP (KRS-One, D-Nice & Ms. Melodie), Stetsasonic (Delite, Daddy-O, Wise, and Frukwan), Kool Moe Dee, MC Lyte, Doug E. Fresh, Just-Ice, Heavy D, Biz Markie, and Public Enemy (Chuck D & Flavor Flav), with the aim of spreading awareness about violence in African-American and hip-hop communities. All proceeds from this effort went to the National Urban League. |
Binary-coded decimal
In computing and electronic systems, binary-coded decimal (BCD) is a class of binary encodings of decimal numbers where each digit is represented by a fixed number of bits, usually four or eight. Sometimes, special bit patterns are used for a sign or other indications (e.g. error or overflow).
In byte-oriented systems (i.e. most modern computers), the term "unpacked" BCD usually implies a full byte for each digit (often including a sign), whereas "packed" BCD typically encodes two digits within a single byte by taking advantage of the fact that four bits are enough to represent the range 0 to 9. The precise four-bit encoding, however, may vary for technical reasons (e.g. Excess-3).
The ten states representing a BCD digit are sometimes called "tetrades" (the nibble typically needed to hold them is also known as a tetrade) while the unused, don't care-states are named "pseudo-tetrad(e)s", "pseudo-decimals", or "pseudo-decimal digits".
BCD's main virtue, in comparison to binary positional systems, is its more accurate representation and rounding of decimal quantities, as well as its ease of conversion into conventional human-readable representations. Its principal drawbacks are a slight increase in the complexity of the circuits needed to implement basic arithmetic as well as slightly less dense storage.
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BCD was used in many early decimal computers, and is implemented in the instruction set of machines such as the IBM System/360 series and its descendants, Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX, the Burroughs B1700, and the Motorola 68000-series processors.
BCD "per se" is not as widely used as in the past, and is unavailable or limited in newer instruction sets (e.g., ARM; x86 in long mode). However, decimal fixed-point and decimal floating-point formats are still important and continue to be used in financial, commercial, and industrial computing, where the subtle conversion and fractional rounding errors that are inherent in binary floating point formats cannot be tolerated.
Background.
BCD takes advantage of the fact that any one decimal numeral can be represented by a four-bit pattern. An obvious way of encoding digits is "Natural BCD" (NBCD), where each decimal digit is represented by its corresponding four-bit binary value, as shown in the following table. This is also called "8421" encoding.
This scheme can also be referred to as "Simple Binary-Coded Decimal" ("SBCD") or "BCD 8421", and is the most common encoding. Others include the so-called "4221" and "7421" encoding – named after the weighting used for the bits – and "Excess-3". For example, the BCD digit 6, in 8421 notation, is in 4221 (two encodings are possible), in 7421, while in Excess-3 it is (formula_1).
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The following table represents decimal digits from 0 to 9 in various BCD encoding systems. In the headers, the "codice_1" indicates the weight of each bit. In the fifth column ("BCD 84−2−1"), two of the weights are negative. Both ASCII and EBCDIC character codes for the digits, which are examples of zoned BCD, are also shown.
As most computers deal with data in 8-bit bytes, it is possible to use one of the following methods to encode a BCD number:
As an example, encoding the decimal number codice_2 using unpacked BCD results in the following binary pattern of two bytes:
Decimal: 9 1
Binary : 0000 1001 0000 0001
In packed BCD, the same number would fit into a single byte:
Decimal: 9 1
Binary : 1001 0001
Hence the numerical range for one unpacked BCD byte is zero through nine inclusive, whereas the range for one packed BCD byte is zero through ninety-nine inclusive.
To represent numbers larger than the range of a single byte any number of contiguous bytes may be used. For example, to represent the decimal number codice_3 in packed BCD, using big-endian format, a program would encode as follows:
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Decimal: 0 1 2 3 4 5
Binary : 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101
Here, the most significant nibble of the most significant byte has been encoded as zero, so the number is stored as codice_4 (but formatting routines might replace or remove leading zeros). Packed BCD is more efficient in storage usage than unpacked BCD; encoding the same number (with the leading zero) in unpacked format would consume twice the storage.
Shifting and masking operations are used to pack or unpack a packed BCD digit. Other bitwise operations are used to convert a numeral to its equivalent bit pattern or reverse the process.
Packed BCD.
Some computers whose words are multiples of an octet (8-bit byte), for example contemporary IBM mainframe systems, support packed BCD (or packed decimal) numeric representations, in which each nibble represents either a decimal digit or a sign. Packed BCD has been in use since at least the 1960s and is implemented in all IBM mainframe hardware since then. Most implementations are big endian, i.e. with the more significant digit in the upper half of each byte, and with the leftmost byte (residing at the lowest memory address) containing the most significant digits of the packed decimal value. The lower nibble of the rightmost byte is usually used as the sign flag, although some unsigned representations lack a sign flag.
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As an example, a 4-byte value consists of 8 nibbles, wherein the upper 7 nibbles store the digits of a 7-digit decimal value, and the lowest nibble indicates the sign of the decimal integer value. Standard sign values are 1100 (hex C) for positive (+) and 1101 (D) for negative (−). This convention comes from the zone field for EBCDIC characters and the signed overpunch representation.
Other allowed signs are 1010 (A) and 1110 (E) for positive and 1011 (B) for negative. IBM System/360 processors will use the 1010 (A) and 1011 (B) signs if the A bit is set in the PSW, for the ASCII-8 standard that never passed. Most implementations also provide unsigned BCD values with a sign nibble of 1111 (F). ILE RPG uses 1111 (F) for positive and 1101 (D) for negative. These match the EBCDIC zone for digits without a sign overpunch. In packed BCD, the number 127 is represented by 0001 0010 0111 1100 (127C) and −127 is represented by 0001 0010 0111 1101 (127D). Burroughs systems used 1101 (D) for negative, and any other value is considered a positive sign value (the processors will normalize a positive sign to 1100 (C)).
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No matter how many bytes wide a word is, there is always an even number of nibbles because each byte has two of them. Therefore, a word of "n" bytes can contain up to (2"n")−1 decimal digits, which is always an odd number of digits. A decimal number with "d" digits requires ("d"+1) bytes of storage space.
For example, a 4-byte (32-bit) word can hold seven decimal digits plus a sign and can represent values ranging from ±9,999,999. Thus the number −1,234,567 is 7 digits wide and is encoded as:
0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1101
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 −
Like character strings, the first byte of the packed decimal that with the most significant two digits is usually stored in the lowest address in memory, independent of the endianness of the machine.
In contrast, a 4-byte binary two's complement integer can represent values from −2,147,483,648 to +2,147,483,647.
While packed BCD does not make optimal use of storage (using about 20% more memory than binary notation to store the same numbers), conversion to ASCII, EBCDIC, or the various encodings of Unicode is made trivial, as no arithmetic operations are required. The extra storage requirements are usually offset by the need for the accuracy and compatibility with calculator or hand calculation that fixed-point decimal arithmetic provides. Denser packings of BCD exist which avoid the storage penalty and also need no arithmetic operations for common conversions.
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Packed BCD is supported in the COBOL programming language as the "COMPUTATIONAL-3" (an IBM extension adopted by many other compiler vendors) or "PACKED-DECIMAL" (part of the 1985 COBOL standard) data type. It is supported in PL/I as "FIXED DECIMAL". Beside the IBM System/360 and later compatible mainframes, packed BCD is implemented in the native instruction set of the original VAX processors from Digital Equipment Corporation and some models of the SDS Sigma series mainframes, and is the native format for the Burroughs Medium Systems line of mainframes (descended from the 1950s Electrodata 200 series).
Ten's complement representations for negative numbers offer an alternative approach to encoding the sign of packed (and other) BCD numbers. In this case, positive numbers always have a most significant digit between 0 and 4 (inclusive), while negative numbers are represented by the 10's complement of the corresponding positive number.
As a result, this system allows for 32-bit packed BCD numbers to range from −50,000,000 to +49,999,999, and −1 is represented as 99999999. (As with two's complement binary numbers, the range is not symmetric about zero.)
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Fixed-point packed decimal.
Fixed-point decimal numbers are supported by some programming languages (such as COBOL and PL/I). These languages allow the programmer to specify an implicit decimal point in front of one of the digits.
For example, a packed decimal value encoded with the bytes 12 34 56 7C represents the fixed-point value +1,234.567 when the implied decimal point is located between the fourth and fifth digits:
12 34 56 7C
"12 34.56 7+"
The decimal point is not actually stored in memory, as the packed BCD storage format does not provide for it. Its location is simply known to the compiler, and the generated code acts accordingly for the various arithmetic operations.
Higher-density encodings.
If a decimal digit requires four bits, then three decimal digits require 12 bits. However, since 210 (1,024) is greater than 103 (1,000), if three decimal digits are encoded together, only 10 bits are needed. Two such encodings are "Chen–Ho encoding" and "densely packed decimal" (DPD). The latter has the advantage that subsets of the encoding encode two digits in the optimal seven bits and one digit in four bits, as in regular BCD.
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Zoned decimal.
Some implementations, for example IBM mainframe systems, support zoned decimal numeric representations. Each decimal digit is stored in one 8-bit byte, with the lower four bits encoding the digit in BCD form. The upper four bits, called the "zone" bits, are usually set to a fixed value so that the byte holds a character value corresponding to the digit, or to values representing plus or minus. EBCDIC systems use a zone value of (), yielding -, the codes for "0" through "9", a zone value of () for positive, yielding -, the codes for "{" through "I" and a zone value of () for negative, yielding -, the codes for the characters "}" through "R". Similarly, ASCII systems use a zone value of 0011 (hex 3), giving character codes 30 to 39 (hex).
For signed zoned decimal values, the rightmost (least significant) zone nibble holds the sign digit, which is the same set of values that are used for signed packed decimal numbers (see above). Thus a zoned decimal value encoded as the hex bytes F1 F2 D3 represents the signed decimal value −123:
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F1 F2 D3
1 2 −3
EBCDIC zoned decimal conversion table.
(*) "Note: These characters vary depending on the local character code page setting."
Fixed-point zoned decimal.
Some languages (such as COBOL and PL/I) directly support fixed-point zoned decimal values, assigning an implicit decimal point at some location between the decimal digits of a number.
For example, given a six-byte signed zoned decimal value with an implied decimal point to the right of the fourth digit, the hex bytes F1 F2 F7 F9 F5 C0 represent the value +1,279.50:
F1 F2 F7 F9 F5 C0
1 2 7 9. 5 +0
Operations with BCD.
Addition.
It is possible to perform addition by first adding in binary, and then converting to BCD afterwards. Conversion of the simple sum of two digits can be done by adding 6 (that is, 16 − 10) when the five-bit result of adding a pair of digits has a value greater than 9. The reason for adding 6 is that there are 16 possible 4-bit BCD values (since 24 = 16), but only 10 values are valid (0000 through 1001). For example:
1001 + 1000 = 10001
9 + 8 = 17
10001 is the binary, not decimal, representation of the desired result, but the most significant 1 (the "carry") cannot fit in a 4-bit binary number. In BCD as in decimal, there cannot exist a value greater than 9 (1001) per digit. To correct this, 6 (0110) is added to the total, and then the result is treated as two nibbles:
10001 + 0110 = 00010111 => 0001 0111
17 + 6 = 23 1 7
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The two nibbles of the result, 0001 and 0111, correspond to the digits "1" and "7". This yields "17" in BCD, which is the correct result.
This technique can be extended to adding multiple digits by adding in groups from right to left, propagating the second digit as a carry, always comparing the 5-bit result of each digit-pair sum to 9. Some CPUs provide a half-carry flag to facilitate BCD arithmetic adjustments following binary addition and subtraction operations. The Intel 8080, the Zilog Z80 and the CPUs of the x86 family provide the opcode DAA (Decimal Adjust Accumulator).
Subtraction.
Subtraction is done by adding the ten's complement of the subtrahend to the minuend. To represent the sign of a number in BCD, the number 0000 is used to represent a positive number, and 1001 is used to represent a negative number. The remaining 14 combinations are invalid signs. To illustrate signed BCD subtraction, consider the following problem: 357 − 432.
In signed BCD, 357 is 0000 0011 0101 0111. The ten's complement of 432 can be obtained by taking the nine's complement of 432, and then adding one. So, 999 − 432 = 567, and 567 + 1 = 568. By preceding 568 in BCD by the negative sign code, the number −432 can be represented. So, −432 in signed BCD is 1001 0101 0110 1000.
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Now that both numbers are represented in signed BCD, they can be added together:
0000 0011 0101 0111
0 3 5 7
+ 1001 0101 0110 1000
9 5 6 8
= 1001 1000 1011 1111
9 8 11 15
Since BCD is a form of decimal representation, several of the digit sums above are invalid. In the event that an invalid entry (any BCD digit greater than 1001) exists, 6 is added to generate a carry bit and cause the sum to become a valid entry. So, adding 6 to the invalid entries results in the following:
1001 1000 1011 1111
9 8 11 15
+ 0000 0000 0110 0110
0 0 6 6
= 1001 1001 0010 0101
9 9 2 5
Thus the result of the subtraction is 1001 1001 0010 0101 (−925). To confirm the result, note that the first digit is 9, which means negative. This seems to be correct since 357 − 432 should result in a negative number. The remaining nibbles are BCD, so 1001 0010 0101 is 925. The ten's complement of 925 is 1000 − 925 = 75, so the calculated answer is −75.
If there are a different number of nibbles being added together (such as 1053 − 2), the number with the fewer digits must first be prefixed with zeros before taking the ten's complement or subtracting. So, with 1053 − 2, 2 would have to first be represented as 0002 in BCD, and the ten's complement of 0002 would have to be calculated.
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BCD in computers.
IBM.
IBM used the terms "Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code" (BCDIC, sometimes just called BCD), for 6-bit "alphanumeric" codes that represented numbers, upper-case letters and special characters. Some variation of BCDIC "alphamerics" is used in most early IBM computers, including the IBM 1620 (introduced in 1959), IBM 1400 series, and non-decimal architecture members of the IBM 700/7000 series.
The IBM 1400 series are character-addressable machines, each location being six bits labeled "B, A, 8, 4, 2" and "1," plus an odd parity check bit ("C") and a word mark bit ("M"). For encoding digits "1" through "9", "B" and "A" are zero and the digit value represented by standard 4-bit BCD in bits "8" through "1". For most other characters bits "B" and "A" are derived simply from the "12", "11", and "0" "zone punches" in the punched card character code, and bits "8" through "1" from the "1" through "9" punches. A "12 zone" punch set both "B" and "A", an "11 zone" set "B", and a "0 zone" (a 0 punch combined with any others) set "A". Thus the letter A, which is "(12,1)" in the punched card format, is encoded "(B,A,1)". The currency symbol $, "(11,8,3)" in the punched card, was encoded in memory as "(B,8,2,1)". This allows the circuitry to convert between the punched card format and the internal storage format to be very simple with only a few special cases. One important special case is digit "0", represented by a lone "0" punch in the card, and "(8,2)" in core memory.
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The memory of the IBM 1620 is organized into 6-bit addressable digits, the usual "8, 4, 2, 1" plus "F", used as a flag bit and "C", an odd parity check bit. BCD "alphamerics" are encoded using digit pairs, with the "zone" in the even-addressed digit and the "digit" in the odd-addressed digit, the "zone" being related to the "12", "11", and "0" "zone punches" as in the 1400 series. Input/output translation hardware converted between the internal digit pairs and the external standard 6-bit BCD codes.
In the decimal architecture IBM 7070, IBM 7072, and IBM 7074 "alphamerics" are encoded using digit pairs (using two-out-of-five code in the digits, not BCD) of the 10-digit word, with the "zone" in the left digit and the "digit" in the right digit. Input/output translation hardware converted between the internal digit pairs and the external standard 6-bit BCD codes.
With the introduction of System/360, IBM expanded 6-bit BCD "alphamerics" to 8-bit EBCDIC, allowing the addition of many more characters (e.g., lowercase letters). A variable length packed BCD "numeric" data type is also implemented, providing machine instructions that perform arithmetic directly on packed decimal data.
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On the IBM 1130 and 1800, packed BCD is supported in software by IBM's Commercial Subroutine Package.
Today, BCD data is still heavily used in IBM databases such as IBM Db2 and processors such as z/Architecture and POWER6 and later Power ISA processors. In these products, the BCD is usually zoned BCD (as in EBCDIC or ASCII), packed BCD (two decimal digits per byte), or "pure" BCD encoding (one decimal digit stored as BCD in the low four bits of each byte). All of these are used within hardware registers and processing units, and in software.
Other computers.
The Digital Equipment Corporation VAX series includes instructions that can perform arithmetic directly on packed BCD data and convert between packed BCD data and other integer representations. The VAX's packed BCD format is compatible with that on IBM System/360 and IBM's later compatible processors. The MicroVAX and later VAX implementations dropped this ability from the CPU but retained code compatibility with earlier machines by implementing the missing instructions in an operating system-supplied software library. This is invoked automatically via exception handling when the defunct instructions are encountered, so that programs using them can execute without modification on the newer machines.
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Many processors have hardware support for BCD-encoded integer arithmetic. For example, the 6502, the Motorola 68000 series, and the x86 series. The Intel x86 architecture supports a unique 18-digit (ten-byte) BCD format that can be loaded into and stored from the floating point registers, from where computations can be performed.
In more recent computers such capabilities are almost always implemented in software rather than the CPU's instruction set, but BCD numeric data are still extremely common in commercial and financial applications.
There are tricks for implementing packed BCD and zoned decimal add–or–subtract operations using short but difficult to understand sequences of word-parallel logic and binary arithmetic operations. For example, the following code (written in C) computes an unsigned 8-digit packed BCD addition using 32-bit binary operations:
uint32_t BCDadd(uint32_t a, uint32_t b)
uint32_t t1, t2; // unsigned 32-bit intermediate values
t1 = a + 0x06666666;
t2 = t1 ^ b; // sum without carry propagation
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t1 = t1 + b; // provisional sum
t2 = t1 ^ t2; // all the binary carry bits
t2 = ~t2 & 0x11111110; // just the BCD carry bits
t2 = (t2 » 2) | (t2 » 3); // correction
return t1 - t2; // corrected BCD sum
BCD in electronics.
BCD is common in electronic systems where a numeric value is to be displayed, especially in systems consisting solely of digital logic, and not containing a microprocessor. By employing BCD, the manipulation of numerical data for display can be greatly simplified by treating each digit as a separate single sub-circuit.
This matches much more closely the physical reality of display hardware—a designer might choose to use a series of separate identical seven-segment displays to build a metering circuit, for example. If the numeric quantity were stored and manipulated as pure binary, interfacing with such a display would require complex circuitry. Therefore, in cases where the calculations are relatively simple, working throughout with BCD can lead to an overall simpler system than converting to and from binary. Most pocket calculators do all their calculations in BCD.
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The same argument applies when hardware of this type uses an embedded microcontroller or other small processor. Often, representing numbers internally in BCD format results in smaller code, since a conversion from or to binary representation can be expensive on such limited processors. For these applications, some small processors feature dedicated arithmetic modes, which assist when writing routines that manipulate BCD quantities.
Representational variations.
Various BCD implementations exist that employ other representations for numbers. Programmable calculators manufactured by Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard, and others typically employ a floating-point BCD format, typically with two or three digits for the (decimal) exponent. The extra bits of the sign digit may be used to indicate special numeric values, such as infinity, underflow/overflow, and error (a blinking display).
Signed variations.
Signed decimal values may be represented in several ways. The COBOL programming language, for example, supports five zoned decimal formats, with each one encoding the numeric sign in a different way:
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Telephony binary-coded decimal (TBCD).
3GPP developed TBCD, an expansion to BCD where the remaining (unused) bit combinations are used to add specific telephony symbols, similar to those in telephone keypad design.
The mentioned 3GPP document defines TBCD-STRING with swapped nibbles in each byte. Bits, octets and digits indexed from 1, bits from the right, digits and octets from the left.
bits 8765 of octet "n" encoding digit 2"n"
bits 4321 of octet "n" encoding digit 2("n" – 1) + 1
Meaning number codice_5, would become codice_6 in TBCD.
This format is used in modern mobile telephony to send dialed numbers, as well as operator ID (the MCC/MNC tuple), IMEI, IMSI (SUPI), et.c.
Alternative encodings.
If errors in representation and computation are more important than the speed of conversion to and from display, a scaled binary representation may be used, which stores a decimal number as a binary-encoded integer and a binary-encoded signed decimal exponent. For example, 0.2 can be represented as 2.
This representation allows rapid multiplication and division, but may require shifting by a power of 10 during addition and subtraction to align the decimal points. It is appropriate for applications with a fixed number of decimal places that do not then require this adjustment—particularly financial applications where 2 or 4 digits after the decimal point are usually enough. Indeed, this is almost a form of fixed point arithmetic since the position of the radix point is implied.
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The Hertz and Chen–Ho encodings provide Boolean transformations for converting groups of three BCD-encoded digits to and from 10-bit values that can be efficiently encoded in hardware with only 2 or 3 gate delays. Densely packed decimal (DPD) is a similar scheme that is used for most of the significand, except the lead digit, for one of the two alternative decimal encodings specified in the IEEE 754-2008 floating-point standard.
Application.
The BIOS in many personal computers stores the date and time in BCD because the MC6818 real-time clock chip used in the original IBM PC AT motherboard provided the time encoded in BCD. This form is easily converted into ASCII for display.
The Atari 8-bit computers use a BCD format for floating point numbers. The MOS Technology 6502 processor has a BCD mode for the addition and subtraction instructions. The Psion Organiser 1 handheld computer's manufacturer-supplied software also uses BCD to implement floating point; later Psion models use binary exclusively.
Early models of the PlayStation 3 store the date and time in BCD. This led to a worldwide outage of the console on 1 March 2010. The last two digits of the year stored as BCD were misinterpreted as 16 causing an error in the unit's date, rendering most functions inoperable. This has been referred to as the Year 2010 problem.
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Legal history.
In the 1972 case "Gottschalk v. Benson", the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court's decision that had allowed a patent for converting BCD-encoded numbers to binary on a computer.
The decision noted that a patent "would wholly pre-empt the mathematical formula and in practical effect would be a patent on the algorithm itself". This was a landmark judgement that determined the patentability of software and algorithms. |
Bumin Qaghan
Bumin Qaghan (, also known as Illig Qaghan (Chinese: 伊利可汗, Pinyin: Yīlì Kèhán, Wade–Giles: i-li k'o-han) or Yamï Qaghan (, died 552 AD) was the founder of the Turkic Khaganate. He was the eldest son of Ashina Tuwu (吐務 / 吐务). He was the chieftain of the Turks under the sovereignty of Rouran Khaganate. He is also mentioned as Tumen (, , commander of ten thousand) of the Rouran Khaganate.
Early life and reign.
According to "History of Northern Dynasties" and "Zizhi Tongjian", in 545 Tumen's tribe started to rise and frequently invaded the western frontier of Wei. The chancellor of Western Wei, Yuwen Tai, sent An Nuopanto (安諾盤陀, Nanai-Banda, a Sogdian from Bukhara,) as an emissary to the Göktürk chieftain Tumen, in an attempt to establish a commercial relationship. In 546, Tumen paid tribute to the Western Wei state. In that same year, Tumen put down a revolt of the Tiele tribes against the Rouran Khaganate, their overlords. Following this, Tumen felt entitled to request of the Rouran a princess as his wife. The Rouran khagan, Anagui, sent a message refusing this request and adding: "You are my blacksmith slave. How dare you utter these words?" Bumin got angry, killed Anagui's emissary, and severed relations with the Rouran Khaganate. Anagui's "blacksmith" (鍛奴 / 锻奴, Pinyin: duàn nú, Wade–Giles: tuan-nu) insult was recorded in Chinese chronicles. Some sources state that members of the Turks (referred as "Tujue" in Chinese sources) did serve as blacksmiths for the Rouran elite, and that "blacksmith slavery" may refer to a kind of vassalage that prevailed in Rouran society. Nevertheless, after this incident Bumin emerged as the leader of the revolt against Rouran.
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In 551, Bumin requested a Western Wei princess in marriage. Yuwen Tai permitted it and sent of Western Wei to Bumin. In the same year when Emperor Wen of Western Wei died, Bumin sent mission and gave two hundred horses.
The beginning of formal diplomatic relations with China propped up Bumin's authority among the Turks. He eventually united the local Turkic tribes and threw off the yoke of the Rouran domination. In 552 Bumin's army defeated Anagui's forces at the north of Huaihuang and then Anagui committed suicide. With their defeat Bumin proclaimed himself "Illig Qaghan" and made his wife qaghatun. "Illig" means Ilkhan (i.e. ruler of people) in Old Turkic. According to the Bilge Qaghan's memorial complex and the Kul Tigin's memorial complex, Bumin and Istemi ruled people by Turkic laws and they developed them.
Death and family.
Bumin died within several months after proclaiming himself Illig Qaghan. He was married to Princess Changle of Western Wei.
Issue:
Legacy.
He was succeeded by his younger brother Istemi in the western part and by his son Issik Qaghan in the eastern part. In less than one century, his khaganate expanded to comprise most of Central Asia.
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Bilge Qaghan
Bilge Qaghan (; ; 683 – 25 November 734) was the fourth Qaghan of the Second Turkic Khaganate. His accomplishments were described in the Orkhon inscriptions.
Names.
As was the custom, his personal name and the name after assuming the title Qaghan were different. His personal name was recorded in Chinese characters as (). His name after assuming the title was "Bilgä Qaγan". ).
Early years.
He was born in 683, in the early years of the khaganate. He campaigned alongside his father from early childhood. He was created as Tardush shad and given command over the western wing of the empire in 697 by Qapaghan. He managed to annihilate Wei Yuanzhong's army in 701 with his brother. He also reconquered Basmyl tribes in 703. He also subdued Yenisei Kyrgyz forces in 709, after their disobedience had to reconquer and kill their Qaghan in 710. He killed Türgesh khagan Suoge at Battle of Bolchu.
In later years of Qapaghan, he had to fight four battles in a year starting from 714, resubduing tribes and nearly was killed in an ambush from Uyghur forces in 716.
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Reign.
In 716, Qapaghan Qaghan, the second Qaghan, was killed in his campaign against the Toquz Oghuz alliance and his severed head was sent to Chang'an. Although his son Inel Khagan succeeded him, Bilgä's brother Kul Tigin and Tonyukuk carried out a coup d'état against Inel Qaghan. They killed him and made him "Bilgä" "Qaghan". His name literally means "wise king".
He appointed his brother Kul Tigin to be Left Wise Prince, which made second most powerful person in realm. He re-subdued Huige in 716. He also appointed his father-in-law Tonyukuk to be Master Strategist.
New reforms and stabilization of the regime, caused tribes that fled Tujue to come back. Tang chancellor Wang Jun, believing that the Göktürks who surrendered would try to flee back to the Göktürk state, suggested that they be forcibly moved into the heart of the empire to prevent them from doing so. Before Wang's suggestion could be acted upon, however, there was an uprising by the Göktürks who surrendered, under the leadership of Xiedie Sitai (𨁂跌思泰) and Axilan (阿悉爛). Xue and Wang tried to intercept them and dealt them defeats, but they were able to flee back to the Göktürk state anyway. This defeat led to Xue Ne's retirement.
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Religious policy.
At some point in his life, he thought about converting to Buddhism and settling in cities. However, Tonyukuk discouraged him from this, citing the Turks' few numbers and vulnerability to Chinese attacks. While the Turks' power rested on their mobility, conversion to Buddhism would bring pacifism among the population. Therefore, sticking to Tengrism was necessary for survival.
Later reign.
In 720, Wang believed that the Pugu (僕固) and Xiedie tribes of the region were planning to defect to Eastern Tujue and attack with Eastern Tujue troops. He thus held a feast and invited the chieftains, and, at the feast, massacred them. He then attacked the Pugu and Xiedie tribes in the area, nearly wiping them out. He then proposed a plan to attack Qaghan along with the Baximi, Xi, and Khitan. Emperor Xuanzong also recruited Qapaghan Khagan's sons Bilgä Tigin and Mo Tigin, Yenisei Kyrgyz Qaghan Kutluk Bilgä Qaghan and Huoba Guiren to fight against Tujue. Tonyukuk cunningly launched first attack on Baximi in 721 autumn, completely crushing them. Meanwhile, Bilgä raided Gansu, taking much of the livestock. Later that year Khitans, next year Xi were also crushed.
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In 726, his father-in-law and chancellor Tonyukuk died.
In 727, he sent Buyruk Chor () as an emissary to Xuanzong with 30 horses as a gift. He also warned him of Me Agtsom's proposal of an anti-Tang alliance. This alarm proved to be true when Tibetan general We Tadra Khonglo invaded Tang China in 727, sacked Guazhou (瓜州, in modern Gansu), Changle (常樂, in south of modern Guazhou County), Changmenjun (長門軍, in north of modern Yumen) and Anxi (安西, modern Lintan).
On 27 February 731, Kul Tigin died, for which Qaghan mourned and ordered a great funeral ceremony.
In 733, he defeated rebellious Khitan tribes.
Death.
Just after sending an emissary to Xuanzong to gain heqin alliance, he was poisoned by Buyruk Chor. He did not die immediately and he had time to punish the family of Buyruk Chor with death. He died on 25 November 734, his burial ceremony took place on 22 June 735.
Family.
He was married to El Etmish Bilge Khatun, Tonyukuk's daughter. He had several children:
Legacy.
After his death from poisoning, several steles were erected in the capital area by the Orkhon River. These Orkhon inscriptions are the first known texts in the Old Turkic language.
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Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the , was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts. The school became famous for its approach to design, which attempted to unify individual artistic vision with the principles of mass production and emphasis on function.
The Bauhaus was founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar. It was grounded in the idea of creating a "Gesamtkunstwerk" ("comprehensive artwork") in which all the arts would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style later became one of the most influential currents in modern design, modernist architecture, and architectural education. The Bauhaus movement had a profound influence on subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. Staff at the Bauhaus included prominent artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Gunta Stölzl, and László Moholy-Nagy at various points.
The school existed in three German cities—Weimar, from 1919 to 1925; Dessau, from 1925 to 1932; and Berlin, from 1932 to 1933—under three different architect-directors: Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928; Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930; and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 until 1933, when the school was closed by its own leadership under pressure from the Nazi regime, having been painted as a centre of communist intellectualism. Internationally, former key figures of Bauhaus were successful in the United States and became known as the "avant-garde" for the International Style. The White city of Tel Aviv to which numerous Jewish Bauhaus architects emigrated, has the highest concentration of the Bauhaus' international architecture in the world.
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The changes of venue and leadership resulted in a constant shifting of focus, technique, instructors, and politics. For example, the pottery shop was discontinued when the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, even though it had been an important revenue source; when Mies van der Rohe took over the school in 1930, he transformed it into a private school and would not allow any supporters of Hannes Meyer to attend it.
Terms and Concepts.
Several specific features are identified in the Bauhaus forms and shapes: simple geometric shapes like rectangles and spheres, without elaborate decorations. Buildings, furniture, and fonts often feature rounded corners, sometimes rounded walls, or curved chrome pipes. Some buildings are characterized by rectangular features, for example protruding balconies with flat, chunky railings facing the street, and long banks of windows. Some outlines can be defined as a tool for creating an ideal form, which is the basis of the architectural concept.
Bauhaus and German modernism.
After Germany's defeat in World War I and the establishment of the Weimar Republic, a renewed liberal spirit allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation in all the arts, which had been suppressed by the old regime. Many Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism. Such influences can be overstated: Gropius did not share these radical views, and said that Bauhaus was entirely apolitical. Just as important was the influence of the 19th-century English designer William Morris (1834–1896), who had argued that art should meet the needs of society and that there should be no distinction between form and function. Thus, the Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design.
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However, the most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism, a cultural movement whose origins lay as early as the 1880s, and which had already made its presence felt in Germany before the World War, despite the prevailing conservatism. The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus—the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit—were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded. The German national designers' organization Deutscher Werkbund was formed in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius to harness the new potentials of mass production, with a mind towards preserving Germany's economic competitiveness with England. In its first seven years, the Werkbund came to be regarded as the authoritative body on questions of design in Germany, and was copied in other countries. Many fundamental questions of craftsmanship versus mass production, the relationship of usefulness and beauty, the practical purpose of formal beauty in a commonplace object, and whether or not a single proper form could exist, were argued out among its 1,870 members (by 1914).
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German architectural modernism was known as Neues Bauen. Beginning in June 1907, Peter Behrens' pioneering industrial design work for the German electrical company AEG successfully integrated art and mass production on a large scale. He designed consumer products, standardized parts, created clean-lined designs for the company's graphics, developed a consistent corporate identity, built the modernist landmark AEG Turbine Factory, and made full use of newly developed materials such as poured concrete and exposed steel. Behrens was a founding member of the Werkbund, and both Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer worked for him in this period.
The Bauhaus was founded at a time when the German zeitgeist had turned from emotional Expressionism to the matter-of-fact New Objectivity. An entire group of working architects, including Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut and Hans Poelzig, turned away from fanciful experimentation and towards rational, functional, sometimes standardized building. Beyond the Bauhaus, many other significant German-speaking architects in the 1920s responded to the same aesthetic issues and material possibilities as the school. They also responded to the promise "to promote the object of assuring to every German a healthful habitation" written into the new Weimar Constitution (Article 155). Ernst May, Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner, among others, built large housing blocks in Frankfurt and Berlin. The acceptance of modernist design into everyday life was the subject of publicity campaigns, well-attended public exhibitions like the Weissenhof Estate, films, and sometimes fierce public debate.
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Bauhaus and Vkhutemas.
The Vkhutemas, the Russian state art and technical school founded in 1920 in Moscow, has been compared to Bauhaus. Founded a year after the Bauhaus school, Vkhutemas has close parallels to the German Bauhaus in its intent, organization and scope. The two schools were the first to train artist-designers in a modern manner. Both schools were state-sponsored initiatives to merge traditional craft with modern technology, with a basic course in aesthetic principles, courses in color theory, industrial design, and architecture. Vkhutemas was a larger school than the Bauhaus, but it was less publicised outside the Soviet Union and consequently, is less familiar in the West.
With the internationalism of modern architecture and design, there were many exchanges between the Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus. The second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer attempted to organise an exchange between the two schools, while Hinnerk Scheper of the Bauhaus collaborated with various Vkhutein members on the use of colour in architecture. In addition, El Lissitzky's book "Russia: an Architecture for World Revolution" published in German in 1930 featured several illustrations of Vkhutemas/Vkhutein projects there.
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History of the Bauhaus.
Weimar.
The school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar on 1 April 1919, as a merger of the Grand Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art and the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts for a newly affiliated architecture department. Its roots lay in the arts and crafts school founded by the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in 1906, and directed by Belgian Art Nouveau architect Henry van de Velde. When van de Velde was forced to resign in 1915 because he was Belgian, he suggested Gropius, Hermann Obrist, and August Endell as possible successors. In 1919, after delays caused by World War I and a lengthy debate over who should head the institution and the socio-economic meanings of a reconciliation of the fine arts and the applied arts (an issue which remained a defining one throughout the school's existence), Gropius was made the director of a new institution integrating the two called the Bauhaus. |
In 1919, after delays caused by World War I and a lengthy debate over who should head the institution and the socio-economic meanings of a reconciliation of the fine arts and the applied arts (an issue which remained a defining one throughout the school's existence), Gropius was made the director of a new institution integrating the two called the Bauhaus. The early intention was for the Bauhaus to be a combined architecture school, crafts school, and academy of the arts. Swiss painter Johannes Itten, German-American painter Lyonel Feininger, and German sculptor Gerhard Marcks, along with Gropius, comprised the faculty of the Bauhaus in 1919. By the following year their ranks had grown to include German painter, sculptor, and designer Oskar Schlemmer who headed the theatre workshop, and Swiss painter Paul Klee, joined in 1922 by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. The first major joint project completed by the Bauhaus was the Sommerfeld House, which was built between 1920 and 1921. A tumultuous year at the Bauhaus, 1922 also saw the move of Dutch painter Theo van Doesburg to Weimar to promote "De Stijl" ("The Style"), and a visit to the Bauhaus by Russian Constructivist artist and architect El Lissitzky.
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From 1919 to 1922 the school was shaped by the pedagogical and aesthetic ideas of Johannes Itten, who taught the "Vorkurs" or "preliminary course" that was the introduction to the ideas of the Bauhaus. Itten was heavily influenced in his teaching by the ideas of Franz Cižek and Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel. He was also influenced in respect to aesthetics by the work of the Der Blaue Reiter group in Munich, as well as the work of Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. The influence of German Expressionism favoured by Itten was analogous in some ways to the fine arts side of the ongoing debate. This influence culminated with the addition of Der Blaue Reiter founding member Wassily Kandinsky to the faculty and ended when Itten resigned in late 1923. Itten was replaced by the Hungarian designer László Moholy-Nagy, who rewrote the "Vorkurs" with a leaning towards the New Objectivity favoured by Gropius, which was analogous in some ways to the applied arts side of the debate. Although this shift was an important one, it did not represent a radical break from the past so much as a small step in a broader, more gradual socio-economic movement that had been going on at least since 1907, when van de Velde had argued for a craft basis for design while Hermann Muthesius had begun implementing industrial prototypes.
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Gropius was not necessarily against Expressionism, and in the same 1919 pamphlet proclaiming this "new guild of craftsmen, without the class snobbery", described "painting and sculpture rising to heaven out of the hands of a million craftsmen, the crystal symbol of the new faith of the future." By 1923, however, Gropius was no longer evoking images of soaring Romanesque cathedrals and the craft-driven aesthetic of the "Völkisch movement", instead declaring "we want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast cars." Gropius argued that a new period of history had begun with the end of the war. He wanted to create a new architectural style to reflect this new era. His style in architecture and consumer goods was to be functional, cheap and consistent with mass production. To these ends, Gropius wanted to reunite art and craft to arrive at high-end functional products with artistic merit. The Bauhaus issued a magazine called "Bauhaus" and a series of books called "Bauhausbücher". Since the Weimar Republic lacked the number of raw materials available to the United States and Great Britain, it had to rely on the proficiency of a skilled labour force and an ability to export innovative and high-quality goods. Therefore, designers were needed and so was a new type of art education. The school's philosophy stated that the artist should be trained to work with the industry.
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Weimar was in the German state of Thuringia, and the Bauhaus school received state support from the Social Democrat-controlled Thuringian state government. The school in Weimar experienced political pressure from conservative circles in Thuringian politics, increasingly so after 1923 as political tension rose. One condition placed on the Bauhaus in this new political environment was the exhibition of work undertaken at the school. This condition was met in 1923 with the Bauhaus' exhibition of the experimental Haus am Horn. The Ministry of Education placed the staff on six-month contracts and cut the school's funding in half. The Bauhaus issued a press release on 26 December 1924, setting the closure of the school for the end of March 1925. At this point it had already been looking for alternative sources of funding. After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, a school of industrial design with teachers and staff less antagonistic to the conservative political regime remained in Weimar. This school was eventually known as the Technical University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, and in 1996 changed its name to Bauhaus-University Weimar.
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Dessau.
The Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925 and new facilities there were inaugurated in late 1926. Gropius's design for the Dessau facilities was a return to the futuristic Gropius of 1914 that had more in common with the International style lines of the Fagus Factory than the stripped down Neo-classical of the Werkbund pavilion or the "Völkisch" Sommerfeld House. During the Dessau years, there was a remarkable change in direction for the school. According to Elaine Hoffman, Gropius had approached the Dutch architect Mart Stam to run the newly founded architecture program, and when Stam declined the position, Gropius turned to Stam's friend and colleague in the ABC group, Hannes Meyer.
Meyer became director when Gropius resigned in February 1928, and brought the Bauhaus its two most significant building commissions, both of which still exist: five apartment buildings in the city of Dessau, and the Bundesschule des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes (ADGB Trade Union School) in Bernau bei Berlin. Meyer favoured measurements and calculations in his presentations to clients, along with the use of off-the-shelf architectural components to reduce costs. This approach proved attractive to potential clients. The school turned its first profit under his leadership in 1929.
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But Meyer also generated a great deal of conflict. As a radical functionalist, he had no patience with the aesthetic program and forced the resignations of Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and other long-time instructors. Even though Meyer shifted the orientation of the school further to the left than it had been under Gropius, he didn't want the school to become a tool of left-wing party politics. He prevented the formation of a student communist cell, and in the increasingly dangerous political atmosphere, this became a threat to the existence of the Dessau school. Dessau mayor Fritz Hesse fired him in the summer of 1930. The Dessau city council attempted to convince Gropius to return as head of the school, but Gropius instead suggested Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies was appointed in 1930 and immediately interviewed each student, dismissing those that he deemed uncommitted. He halted the school's manufacture of goods so that the school could focus on teaching, and appointed no new faculty other than his close confidant Lilly Reich. By 1931, the Nazi Party was becoming more influential in German politics. When it gained control of the Dessau city council, it moved to close the school.
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Berlin.
In late 1932, Mies rented a derelict factory in Berlin (Birkbusch Street 49) to use as the new Bauhaus with his own money. The students and faculty rehabilitated the building, painting the interior white. The school operated for ten months without further interference from the Nazi Party. In 1933, the Gestapo closed down the Berlin school. Mies protested the decision, eventually speaking to the head of the Gestapo, who agreed to allow the school to re-open. However, shortly after receiving a letter permitting the opening of the Bauhaus, Mies and the other faculty agreed to voluntarily shut down the school.
Although neither the Nazi Party nor Adolf Hitler had a cohesive architectural policy before they came to power in 1933, Nazi writers like Wilhelm Frick and Alfred Rosenberg had already labelled the Bauhaus "un-German" and criticized its modernist styles, deliberately generating public controversy over issues like flat roofs. Increasingly through the early 1930s, they characterized the Bauhaus as a front for communists and social liberals. Indeed, when Meyer was fired in 1930, a number of communist students loyal to him moved to the Soviet Union.
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Even before the Nazis came to power, political pressure on Bauhaus had increased. The Nazi movement, from nearly the start, denounced the Bauhaus for its "degenerate art", and the Nazi regime was determined to crack down on what it saw as the foreign, probably Jewish, influences of "cosmopolitan modernism". Despite Gropius's protestations that as a war veteran and a patriot his work had no subversive political intent, the Berlin Bauhaus was pressured to close in April 1933. Emigrants did succeed, however, in spreading the concepts of the Bauhaus to other countries, including the "New Bauhaus" of Chicago: Mies decided to emigrate to the United States for the directorship of the School of Architecture at the Armour Institute (now Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago and to seek building commissions. The simple engineering-oriented functionalism of stripped-down modernism, however, did lead to some Bauhaus influences living on in Nazi Germany. When Hitler's chief engineer, Fritz Todt, began opening the new autobahns (highways) in 1935, many of the bridges and service stations were "bold examples of modernism", and among those submitting designs was Mies van der Rohe.
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Architectural output.
The paradox of the early Bauhaus was that, although its manifesto proclaimed that the aim of all creative activity was building, the school did not offer classes in architecture until 1927. During the years under Gropius (1919–1927), he and his partner Adolf Meyer observed no real distinction between the output of his architectural office and the school. The built output of Bauhaus architecture in these years is the output of Gropius: the Sommerfeld house in Berlin, the Otte house in Berlin, the Auerbach house in Jena, and the competition design for the Chicago Tribune Tower, which brought the school much attention. The definitive 1926 Bauhaus building in Dessau is also attributed to Gropius. Apart from contributions to the 1923 Haus am Horn, student architectural work amounted to un-built projects, interior finishes, and craft work like cabinets, chairs and pottery.
In the next two years under Meyer, the architectural focus shifted away from aesthetics and towards functionality. There were major commissions: one from the city of Dessau for five tightly designed "Laubenganghäuser" (apartment buildings with balcony access), which are still in use today, and another for the Bundesschule des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes (ADGB Trade Union School) in Bernau bei Berlin. Meyer's approach was to research users' needs and scientifically develop the design solution. He intended to place emphasis on Gropius' objective analysis of the properties determining an object's use value, known as "Wesensforschung". Gropius believed that it was possible to design exemplary products of universal validity that should be standardized.
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Mies van der Rohe repudiated Meyer's politics, his supporters, and his architectural approach. As opposed to Gropius's "study of essentials", and Meyer's research into user requirements, Mies advocated a "spatial implementation of intellectual decisions", which effectively meant an adoption of his own aesthetics. Neither Mies van der Rohe nor his Bauhaus students saw any projects built during the 1930s.
The Bauhaus movement was not focused on developing worker housing. Only two projects, the apartment building project in Dessau and the Törten row housing fall into the worker housing category. It was the Bauhaus contemporaries Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig and particularly Ernst May, as the city architects of Berlin, Dresden and Frankfurt respectively, who are rightfully credited with the thousands of socially progressive housing units built in Weimar Germany. The housing Taut built in south-west Berlin during the 1920s, close to the U-Bahn stop Onkel Toms Hütte, is still occupied.
Impact.
The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in Western Europe, Canada, the United States and Israel in the decades following its demise, as many of the artists involved fled, or were exiled by the Nazi regime. In 1996, four of the major sites associated with Bauhaus in Germany were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List (with two more added in 2017).
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In 1928, the Hungarian painter Alexander Bortnyik founded a school of design in Budapest called Műhely, which means "the studio". Located on the seventh floor of a house on Nagymezo Street, it was meant to be the Hungarian equivalent to the Bauhaus. The literature sometimes refers to it—in an oversimplified manner—as "the Budapest Bauhaus". Bortnyik was a great admirer of László Moholy-Nagy and had met Walter Gropius in Weimar between 1923 and 1925. Moholy-Nagy himself taught at the Műhely. Victor Vasarely, a pioneer of op art, studied at this school before establishing in Paris in 1930.
Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Moholy-Nagy re-assembled in Britain during the mid-1930s and lived and worked in the Isokon housing development in Lawn Road in London before the war caught up with them. Gropius and Breuer went on to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked together before their professional split. Their collaboration produced, among other projects, the Aluminum City Terrace in New Kensington, Pennsylvania and the Alan I W Frank House in Pittsburgh. The Harvard School was enormously influential in America in the late 1920s and early 1930s, producing such students as Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, Lawrence Halprin and Paul Rudolph, among many others.
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In the late 1930s, Mies van der Rohe re-settled in Chicago, enjoyed the sponsorship of the influential Philip Johnson, and became one of the world's pre-eminent architects. Moholy-Nagy also went to Chicago and founded the New Bauhaus school under the sponsorship of industrialist and philanthropist Walter Paepcke. This school became the Institute of Design, part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Printmaker and painter Werner Drewes was also largely responsible for bringing the Bauhaus aesthetic to America and taught at both Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. Herbert Bayer, sponsored by Paepcke, moved to Aspen, Colorado in support of Paepcke's Aspen projects at the Aspen Institute. In 1953, Max Bill, together with Inge Aicher-Scholl and Otl Aicher, founded the Ulm School of Design (German: Hochschule für Gestaltung – HfG Ulm) in Ulm, Germany, a design school in the tradition of the Bauhaus. The school is notable for its inclusion of semiotics as a field of study. The school closed in 1968, but the "Ulm Model" concept continues to influence international design education. Another series of projects at the school were the Bauhaus typefaces, mostly realized in the decades afterward.
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The influence of the Bauhaus on design education was significant. One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and technology, and this approach was incorporated into the curriculum of the Bauhaus. The structure of the Bauhaus "Vorkurs" (preliminary course) reflected a pragmatic approach to integrating theory and application. In their first year, students learnt the basic elements and principles of design and colour theory, and experimented with a range of materials and processes. This approach to design education became a common feature of architectural and design school in many countries. For example, the Shillito Design School in Sydney stands as a unique link between Australia and the Bauhaus. The colour and design syllabus of the Shillito Design School was firmly underpinned by the theories and ideologies of the Bauhaus. Its first year foundational course mimicked the "Vorkurs" and focused on the elements and principles of design plus colour theory and application. The founder of the school, Phyllis Shillito, which opened in 1962 and closed in 1980, firmly believed that "A student who has mastered the basic principles of design, can design anything from a dress to a kitchen stove". In Britain, largely under the influence of painter and teacher William Johnstone, Basic Design, a Bauhaus-influenced art foundation course, was introduced at Camberwell School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design, whence it spread to all art schools in the country, becoming universal by the early 1960s.
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One of the most important contributions of the Bauhaus is in the field of modern furniture design. The characteristic Cantilever chair and Wassily Chair designed by Marcel Breuer are two examples. (Breuer eventually lost a legal battle in Germany with Dutch architect/designer Mart Stam over patent rights to the cantilever chair design. Although Stam had worked on the design of the Bauhaus's 1923 exhibit in Weimar, and guest-lectured at the Bauhaus later in the 1920s, he was not formally associated with the school, and he and Breuer had worked independently on the cantilever concept, leading to the patent dispute.) The most profitable product of the Bauhaus was its wallpaper.
The physical plant at Dessau survived World War II and was operated as a design school with some architectural facilities by the German Democratic Republic. This included live stage productions in the Bauhaus theater under the name of "Bauhausbühne" ("Bauhaus Stage"). After German reunification, a reorganized school continued in the same building, with no essential continuity with the Bauhaus under Gropius in the early 1920s. In 1979 Bauhaus-Dessau College started to organize postgraduate programs with participants from all over the world. This effort has been supported by the Bauhaus-Dessau Foundation which was founded in 1974 as a public institution.
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Later evaluation of the Bauhaus design credo was critical of its flawed recognition of the human element, an acknowledgment of "the dated, unattractive aspects of the Bauhaus as a projection of utopia marked by mechanistic views of human nature…Home hygiene without home atmosphere."
Subsequent examples which have continued the philosophy of the Bauhaus include Black Mountain College, Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm and Domaine de Boisbuchet.
The White City.
The White City (Hebrew: העיר הלבנה), refers to a collection of over 4,000 buildings built in the Bauhaus or International Style in Tel Aviv from the 1930s by German Jewish architects who emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine after the rise of the Nazis. Tel Aviv has the largest number of buildings in the Bauhaus/International Style of any city in the world. Preservation, documentation, and exhibitions have brought attention to Tel Aviv's collection of 1930s architecture. In 2003, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) proclaimed Tel Aviv's "White City" a World Cultural Heritage site, as "an outstanding example of new town planning and architecture in the early 20th century." The citation recognized the unique adaptation of modern international architectural trends to the cultural, climatic, and local traditions of the city. Bauhaus Center Tel Aviv organizes regular architectural tours of the city, and the Bauhaus Foundation offers Bauhaus exhibits.
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Centenary.
As the centenary of the founding of Bauhaus, several events, festivals, and exhibitions were held around the world in 2019. The international opening festival at the Berlin Academy of the Arts from 16 to 24 January concentrated on "the presentation and production of pieces by contemporary artists, in which the aesthetic issues and experimental configurations of the Bauhaus artists continue to be inspiringly contagious". "Original Bauhaus, The Centenary Exhibition" at the Berlinische Galerie (6 September 2019 to 27 January 2020) presented 1,000 original artefacts from the Bauhaus-Archive's collection and recounted the history behind the objects. The Bauhaus Museum Dessau also opened in September 2019, operated by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and funded by the State of Saxony-Anhalt and the German Federal government. It is set to be the permanent home of the second-largest Bauhaus collection at 49,000 objects, while paying homage to its strong influence in the city when the Bauhaus arrived in 1925.
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In 2024, the German far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfG) sought to attack celebrations of the Bauhaus because of their view that the Bauhaus did not follow tradition. The Bauhaus was also crushed by the Nazis before World War II, and according to political scientist Jan-Werner Mueller, AfG's condemnation seeks to use it in a culture war of far right-wing provocation.
The New European Bauhaus.
In September 2020, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen introduced the New European Bauhaus (NEB) initiative during her State of the Union address. The NEB is a creative and interdisciplinary movement that connects the European Green Deal to everyday life. It is a platform for experimentation aiming to unite citizens, experts, businesses and institutions in imagining and designing a sustainable, aesthetic and inclusive future.
Sport and physical activity were an essential part of the original Bauhaus approach. Hannes Meyer, the second director of Bauhaus Dessau, ensured that one day a week was solely devoted to sport and gymnastics. 1 In 1930, Meyer employed two physical education teachers. The Bauhaus school even applied for public funds to enhance its playing field. The inclusion of sport and physical activity in the Bauhaus curriculum had various purposes. First, as Meyer put it, sport combatted a “one-sided emphasis on brainwork.” In addition, Bauhaus instructors believed that students could better express themselves if they actively experienced the space, rhythms and movements of the body. The Bauhaus approach also considered physical activity an important contributor to wellbeing and community spirit. Sport and physical activity were essential to the interdisciplinary Bauhaus movement that developed revolutionary ideas and continues to shape our environments today.
Bauhaus staff and students.
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Beowulf
Beowulf (; ) is an Old English epic poem in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and most often translated works of Old English literature. The date of composition is a matter of contention among scholars; the only certain dating is for the manuscript, which was produced between 975 and 1025 AD. Scholars call the anonymous author the ""Beowulf" poet".
The story is set in pagan Scandinavia in the 5th and 6th centuries. Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall Heorot has been under attack by the monster Grendel for twelve years. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother takes revenge and is in turn defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland and becomes king of the Geats. Fifty years later, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is mortally wounded in the battle. After his death, his attendants cremate his body and erect a barrow on a headland in his memory.
Scholars have debated whether "Beowulf" was transmitted orally, affecting its interpretation: if it was composed early, in pagan times, then the paganism is central and the Christian elements were added later, whereas if it was composed later, in writing, by a Christian, then the pagan elements could be decorative archaising; some scholars also hold an intermediate position.
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"Beowulf" is written mostly in the Late West Saxon dialect of Old English, but many other dialectal forms are present, suggesting that the poem may have had a long and complex transmission throughout the dialect areas of England.
There has long been research into similarities with other traditions and accounts, including the Icelandic "Grettis saga", the Norse story of Hrolf Kraki and his bear-shapeshifting servant Bodvar Bjarki, the international folktale the Bear's Son Tale, and the Irish folktale of the Hand and the Child. Persistent attempts have been made to link "Beowulf" to tales from Homer's "Odyssey" or Virgil's "Aeneid". More definite are biblical parallels, with clear allusions to the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel.
The poem survives in a single copy in the manuscript known as the Nowell Codex. It has no title in the original manuscript, but has become known by the name of the story's protagonist. In 1731, the manuscript was damaged by a fire that swept through Ashburnham House in London, which was housing Sir Robert Cotton's collection of medieval manuscripts. It survived, but the margins were charred, and some readings were lost. The Nowell Codex is housed in the British Library.
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The poem was first transcribed in 1786; some verses were first translated into modern English in 1805, and nine complete translations were made in the 19th century, including those by John Mitchell Kemble and William Morris.
After 1900, hundreds of translations, whether into prose, rhyming verse, or alliterative verse were made, some relatively faithful, some archaising, some attempting to domesticate the work. Among the best-known modern translations are those of Edwin Morgan, Burton Raffel, Michael J. Alexander, Roy Liuzza, and Seamus Heaney. The difficulty of translating "Beowulf" has been explored by scholars including J. R. R. Tolkien (in his essay "On Translating "Beowulf"), who worked on a verse and of his own.
Historical background.
The events in the poem take place over the 5th and 6th centuries, and feature predominantly non-English characters. Some suggest that "Beowulf" was first composed in the 7th century at Rendlesham in East Anglia, as the Sutton Hoo ship-burial shows close connections with Scandinavia, and the East Anglian royal dynasty, the Wuffingas, may have been descendants of the Geatish Wulfings. Others have associated this poem with the court of King Alfred the Great or with the court of King Cnut the Great.
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The poem blends fictional, legendary, mythic and historical elements. Although Beowulf himself is not mentioned in any other Old English manuscript, many of the other figures named in "Beowulf" appear in Scandinavian sources. This concerns not only individuals (e.g., Healfdene, Hroðgar, Halga, Hroðulf, Eadgils and Ohthere), but also clans (e.g., Scyldings, Scylfings and Wulfings) and certain events (e.g., the battle between Eadgils and Onela). The raid by King Hygelac into Frisia is mentioned by Gregory of Tours in his "History of the Franks" and can be dated to around 521.
The majority view appears to be that figures such as King Hrothgar and the Scyldings in "Beowulf" are based on historical people from 6th-century Scandinavia. Like the "Finnesburg Fragment" and several shorter surviving poems, "Beowulf" has consequently been used as a source of information about Scandinavian figures such as Eadgils and Hygelac, and about continental Germanic figures such as Offa, king of the continental Angles. However, one scholar, Roy Liuzza, feels that the poem is "frustratingly ambivalent", neither myth nor folktale, but is set "against a complex background of legendary history ... on a roughly recognizable map of Scandinavia", and comments that the Geats of the poem may correspond with the Gautar (of modern Götaland).
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Nineteenth-century archaeological evidence may confirm elements of the "Beowulf" story. Eadgils was buried at Uppsala (Gamla Uppsala, Sweden) according to Snorri Sturluson. When the western mound (to the left in the photo) was excavated in 1874, the finds showed that a powerful man was buried in a large barrow, , on a bear skin with two dogs and rich grave offerings. The eastern mound was excavated in 1854, and contained the remains of a woman, or a woman and a young man. The middle barrow has not been excavated.
In Denmark, recent (1986–88, 2004–05) archaeological excavations at Lejre, where Scandinavian tradition located the seat of the Scyldings, Heorot, have revealed that a hall was built in the mid-6th century, matching the period described in "Beowulf", some centuries before the poem was composed. Three halls, each about long, were found during the excavation.
Summary.
The protagonist Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, king of the Danes, whose great hall, Heorot, is plagued by the monster Grendel. Beowulf kills Grendel with his bare hands, then kills Grendel's mother with a giant's sword that he found in her lair.
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Later in his life, Beowulf becomes king of the Geats, and finds his realm terrorised by a dragon, some of whose treasure had been stolen from his hoard in a burial mound. He attacks the dragon with the help of his "thegns" or servants, but they do not succeed. Beowulf decides to follow the dragon to its lair at Earnanæs, but only his young Swedish relative Wiglaf, whose name means "remnant of valour", dares to join him. Beowulf finally slays the dragon, but is mortally wounded in the struggle. He is cremated and a burial mound by the sea is erected in his honour.
"Beowulf" is considered an epic poem in that the main character is a hero who travels great distances to prove his strength at impossible odds against supernatural demons and beasts. The poem begins "in medias res" or simply, "in the middle of things", a characteristic of the epics of antiquity. Although the poem begins with Beowulf's arrival, Grendel's attacks have been ongoing. An elaborate history of characters and their lineages is spoken of, as well as their interactions with each other, debts owed and repaid, and deeds of valour. The warriors form a brotherhood linked by loyalty to their lord. The poem begins and ends with funerals: at the beginning of the poem for Scyld Scefing and at the end for Beowulf.
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The poem is tightly structured. E. Carrigan shows the symmetry of its design in a model of its major components, with for instance the account of the killing of Grendel matching that of the killing of the dragon, the glory of the Danes matching the accounts of the Danish and Geatish courts. Other analyses are possible as well; Gale Owen-Crocker, for instance, sees the poem as structured by the four funerals it describes. For J. R. R. Tolkien, the primary division in the poem was between young and old Beowulf.
First battle: Grendel.
"Beowulf" begins with the story of Hrothgar, who constructed the great hall, Heorot, for himself and his warriors. In it, he, his wife Wealhtheow, and his warriors spend their time singing and celebrating. Grendel, a troll-like monster said to be descended from the biblical Cain, is pained by the sounds of joy. Grendel attacks the hall and devours many of Hrothgar's warriors while they sleep. Hrothgar and his people, helpless against Grendel, abandon Heorot.
Beowulf, a young warrior from Geatland, hears of Hrothgar's troubles and with his king's permission leaves his homeland to assist Hrothgar.
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Beowulf and his men spend the night in Heorot. Beowulf refuses to use any weapon because he holds himself to be Grendel's equal. When Grendel enters the hall and kills one of Beowulf's men, Beowulf, who has been feigning sleep, leaps up to clench Grendel's hand. Grendel and Beowulf battle each other violently. Beowulf's retainers draw their swords and rush to his aid, but their blades cannot pierce Grendel's skin. Finally, Beowulf tears Grendel's arm from his body at the shoulder. Fatally hurt, Grendel flees to his home in the marshes, where he dies. Beowulf displays "the whole of Grendel's shoulder and arm, his awesome grasp" for all to see at Heorot. This display would fuel Grendel's mother's anger in revenge.
Second battle: Grendel's mother.
The next night, after celebrating Grendel's defeat, Hrothgar and his men sleep in Heorot. Grendel's mother, angry that her son has been killed, sets out to get revenge. "Beowulf was elsewhere. Earlier, after the award of treasure, The Geat had been given another lodging"; his assistance would be absent in this attack. Grendel's mother violently kills Æschere, who is Hrothgar's most loyal advisor, and escapes, later putting his head outside her lair.
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Hrothgar, Beowulf, and their men track Grendel's mother to her lair under a lake. Unferth, a warrior who had earlier challenged him, presents Beowulf with his sword Hrunting. After stipulating a number of conditions to Hrothgar in case of his death (including the taking in of his kinsmen and the inheritance by Unferth of Beowulf's estate), Beowulf jumps into the lake and, while harassed by water monsters, gets to the bottom, where he finds a cavern. Grendel's mother pulls him in, and she and Beowulf engage in fierce combat.
At first, Grendel's mother prevails, and Hrunting proves incapable of hurting her; she throws Beowulf to the ground and, sitting astride him, tries to kill him with a short sword, but Beowulf is saved by his armour. Beowulf spots another sword, hanging on the wall and apparently made for giants, and cuts her head off with it. Travelling further into Grendel's mother's lair, Beowulf discovers Grendel's corpse and severs his head with the sword. Its blade melts because of the monster's "hot blood", leaving only the hilt. Beowulf swims back up to the edge of the lake where his men wait. Carrying the hilt of the sword and Grendel's head, he presents them to Hrothgar upon his return to Heorot. Hrothgar gives Beowulf many gifts, including the sword Nægling, his family's heirloom. The events prompt a long reflection by the king, sometimes referred to as "Hrothgar's sermon", in which he urges Beowulf to be wary of pride and to reward his thegns.
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Final battle: The dragon.
Beowulf returns home and eventually becomes king of his own people. One day, fifty years after Beowulf's battle with Grendel's mother, a slave steals a golden cup from the lair of a dragon at Earnanæs. When the dragon sees that the cup has been stolen, it leaves its cave in a rage, burning everything in sight. Beowulf and his warriors come to fight the dragon, but Beowulf tells his men that he will fight the dragon alone and that they should wait on the barrow. Beowulf descends to do battle with the dragon, but finds himself outmatched. His men, upon seeing this and fearing for their lives, retreat into the woods. However, one of his men, Wiglaf, in great distress at Beowulf's plight, comes to his aid. The two slay the dragon, but Beowulf is mortally wounded. After Beowulf dies, Wiglaf remains by his side, grief-stricken. When the rest of the men finally return, Wiglaf bitterly admonishes them, blaming their cowardice for Beowulf's death. Beowulf is ritually burned on a great pyre in Geatland while his people wail and mourn him, fearing that without him, the Geats are defenceless against attacks from surrounding tribes. Afterwards, a barrow, visible from the sea, is built in his memory.
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Digressions.
The poem contains many apparent digressions from the main story. These were found troublesome by early "Beowulf" scholars such as Frederick Klaeber, who wrote that they "interrupt the story", W. W. Lawrence, who stated that they "clog the action and distract attention from it", and W. P. Ker who found some "irrelevant ... possibly ... interpolations". More recent scholars from Adrien Bonjour onwards note that the digressions can all be explained as introductions or comparisons with elements of the main story; for instance, Beowulf's swimming home across the sea from Frisia carrying thirty sets of armour emphasises his heroic strength. The digressions can be divided into four groups, namely the Scyld narrative at the start; many descriptions of the Geats, including the Swedish–Geatish wars, the "Lay of the Last Survivor" in the style of another Old English poem, "The Wanderer", and Beowulf's dealings with the Geats such as his verbal contest with Unferth and his swimming duel with Breca, and the tale of Sigemund and the dragon; history and legend, including the fight at Finnsburg and the tale of Freawaru and Ingeld; and biblical tales such as the creation myth and Cain as ancestor of all monsters. The digressions provide a powerful impression of historical depth, imitated by Tolkien in "The Lord of the Rings", a work that embodies many other elements from the poem.
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Authorship and date.
The dating of "Beowulf" has attracted considerable scholarly attention; opinion differs as to whether it was first written in the 8th century, whether it was nearly contemporary with its 11th-century manuscript, and whether a proto-version (possibly a version of the "Bear's Son Tale") was orally transmitted before being transcribed in its present form. Albert Lord felt strongly that the manuscript represents the transcription of a performance, though likely taken at more than one sitting. J. R. R. Tolkien believed that the poem retains too genuine a memory of Anglo-Saxon paganism to have been composed more than a few generations after the completion of the Christianisation of England around AD 700, and Tolkien's conviction that the poem dates to the 8th century has been defended by scholars including Tom Shippey, Leonard Neidorf, Rafael J. Pascual, and Robert D. Fulk. An analysis of several Old English poems by a team including Neidorf suggests that "Beowulf" is the work of a single author, though other scholars disagree.
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The claim to an early 11th-century date depends in part on scholars who argue that, rather than the transcription of a tale from the oral tradition by an earlier literate monk, "Beowulf" reflects an original interpretation of an earlier version of the story by the manuscript's two scribes. On the other hand, some scholars argue that linguistic, palaeographical (handwriting), metrical (poetic structure), and onomastic (naming) considerations align to support a date of composition in the first half of the 8th century; in particular, the poem's apparent observation of etymological vowel-length distinctions in unstressed syllables (described by Kaluza's law) has been thought to demonstrate a date of composition prior to the earlier ninth century. However, scholars disagree about whether the metrical phenomena described by Kaluza's law prove an early date of composition or are evidence of a longer prehistory of the "Beowulf" metre; B. R. Hutcheson, for instance, does not believe Kaluza's law can be used to date the poem, while claiming that "the weight of all the evidence Fulk presents in his book tells strongly in favour of an eighth-century date."
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From an analysis of creative genealogy and ethnicity, Craig R. Davis suggests a composition date in the AD 890s, when King Alfred of England had secured the submission of Guthrum, leader of a division of the Great Heathen Army of the Danes, and of Aethelred, ealdorman of Mercia. In this thesis, the trend of appropriating Gothic royal ancestry, established in Francia during Charlemagne's reign, influenced the Anglian kingdoms of Britain to attribute to themselves a Geatish descent. The composition of "Beowulf" was the fruit of the later adaptation of this trend in Alfred's policy of asserting authority over the "Angelcynn", in which Scyldic descent was attributed to the West-Saxon royal pedigree. This date of composition largely agrees with Lapidge's positing of a West-Saxon exemplar .
The location of the poem's composition is intensely disputed. In 1914, F.W. Moorman, the first professor of English Language at University of Leeds, claimed that "Beowulf" was composed in Yorkshire, but E. Talbot Donaldson claims that it was probably composed during the first half of the eighth century, and that the writer was a native of what was then called West Mercia, located in the Western Midlands of England. However, the late tenth-century manuscript, "which alone preserves the poem", originated in the kingdom of the West Saxons — as it is more commonly known.
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Manuscript.
"Beowulf" survived to modern times in a single manuscript, written in ink on parchment, later damaged by fire. The manuscript measures 245 × 185 mm.
Provenance.
The poem is known only from a single manuscript, estimated to date from around 975–1025, in which it appears with other works. The manuscript therefore dates either to the reign of Æthelred the Unready, characterised by strife with the Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard, or to the beginning of the reign of Sweyn's son Cnut the Great from 1016. The "Beowulf" manuscript is known as the Nowell Codex, gaining its name from 16th-century scholar Laurence Nowell. The official designation is "British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.XV" because it was one of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton's holdings in the Cotton library in the middle of the 17th century. Many private antiquarians and book collectors, such as Sir Robert Cotton, used their own library classification systems. "Cotton Vitellius A.XV" translates as: the 15th book from the left on shelf A (the top shelf) of the bookcase with the bust of Roman Emperor Vitellius standing on top of it, in Cotton's collection. Kevin Kiernan argues that Nowell most likely acquired it through William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, in 1563, when Nowell entered Cecil's household as a tutor to his ward, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
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The earliest extant reference to the first foliation of the Nowell Codex was made sometime between 1628 and 1650 by Franciscus Junius (the younger). The ownership of the codex before Nowell remains a mystery.
The Reverend Thomas Smith (1638–1710) and Humfrey Wanley (1672–1726) both catalogued the Cotton library (in which the Nowell Codex was held). Smith's catalogue appeared in 1696, and Wanley's in 1705. The "Beowulf" manuscript itself is identified by name for the first time in an exchange of letters in 1700 between George Hickes, Wanley's assistant, and Wanley. In the letter to Wanley, Hickes responds to an apparent charge against Smith, made by Wanley, that Smith had failed to mention the "Beowulf" script when cataloguing Cotton MS. Vitellius A. XV. Hickes replies to Wanley "I can find nothing yet of Beowulph." Kiernan theorised that Smith failed to mention the "Beowulf" manuscript because of his reliance on previous catalogues or because either he had no idea how to describe it or because it was temporarily out of the codex.
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The manuscript passed to Crown ownership in 1702, on the death of its then owner, Sir John Cotton, who had inherited it from his grandfather, Robert Cotton. It suffered damage in a fire at Ashburnham House in 1731, in which around a quarter of the manuscripts bequeathed by Cotton were destroyed. Since then, parts of the manuscript have crumbled along with many of the letters. Rebinding efforts, though saving the manuscript from much degeneration, have nonetheless covered up other letters of the poem, causing further loss. Kiernan, in preparing his electronic edition of the manuscript, used fibre-optic backlighting and ultraviolet lighting to reveal letters in the manuscript lost from binding, erasure, or ink blotting.
Writing.
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Performance.
The scholar Roy Liuzza notes that the practice of oral poetry is by its nature invisible to history as evidence is in writing. Comparison with other bodies of verse such as Homer's, coupled with ethnographic observation of early 20th century performers, has provided a vision of how an Anglo-Saxon singer-poet or scop may have practised. The resulting model is that performance was based on traditional stories and a repertoire of word formulae that fitted the traditional metre. The scop moved through the scenes, such as putting on armour or crossing the sea, each one improvised at each telling with differing combinations of the stock phrases, while the basic story and style remained the same. Liuzza notes that "Beowulf" itself describes the technique of a court poet in assembling materials, in lines 867–874 in his translation, "full of grand stories, mindful of songs ... found other words truly bound together; ... to recite with skill the adventure of Beowulf, adeptly tell a tall tale, and ("wordum wrixlan") weave his words." The poem further mentions (lines 1065–1068) that "the harp was touched, tales often told, when Hrothgar's scop was set to recite among the mead tables his hall-entertainment".
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Debate over oral tradition.
The question of whether "Beowulf" was passed down through oral tradition prior to its present manuscript form has been the subject of much debate, and involves more than simply the issue of its composition. Rather, given the implications of the theory of oral-formulaic composition and oral tradition, the question concerns how the poem is to be understood, and what sorts of interpretations are legitimate. In his landmark 1960 work, "The Singer of Tales", Albert Lord, citing the work of Francis Peabody Magoun and others, considered it proven that "Beowulf" was composed orally. Later scholars have not all been convinced; they agree that "themes" like "arming the hero" or the "hero on the beach" do exist across Germanic works. Some scholars conclude that Anglo-Saxon poetry is a mix of oral-formulaic and literate patterns. Larry Benson proposed that Germanic literature contains "kernels of tradition" which "Beowulf" expands upon. Ann Watts argued against the imperfect application of one theory to two different traditions: traditional, Homeric, oral-formulaic poetry and Anglo-Saxon poetry. Thomas Gardner agreed with Watts, arguing that the "Beowulf" text is too varied to be completely constructed from set formulae and themes. John Miles Foley wrote that comparative work must observe the particularities of a given tradition; in his view, there was a fluid continuum from traditionality to textuality.
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Editions, translations, and adaptations.
Editions.
Many editions of the Old English text of "Beowulf" have been published; this section lists the most influential.
The Icelandic scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin made the first transcriptions of the "Beowulf"-manuscript in 1786, working as part of a Danish government historical research commission. He had a copy made by a professional copyist who knew no Old English (and was therefore in some ways more likely to make transcription errors, but in other ways more likely to copy exactly what he saw), and then made a copy himself. Since that time, the manuscript has crumbled further, making these transcripts prized witnesses to the text. While the recovery of at least 2000 letters can be attributed to them, their accuracy has been called into question, and the extent to which the manuscript was actually more readable in Thorkelin's time is uncertain. Thorkelin used these transcriptions as the basis for the first complete edition of "Beowulf", in Latin.
In 1922, Frederick Klaeber, a German philologist who worked at the University of Minnesota, published his edition of the poem, "Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg"; it became the "central source used by graduate students for the study of the poem and by scholars and teachers as the basis of their translations." The edition included an extensive glossary of Old English terms. His third edition was published in 1936, with the last version in his lifetime being a revised reprint in 1950. Klaeber's text was re-presented with new introductory material, notes, and glosses, in a fourth edition in 2008.
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Another widely used edition is Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie's, published in 1953 in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records series. The British Library, meanwhile, took a prominent role in supporting Kevin Kiernan's "Electronic Beowulf"; the first edition appeared in 1999, and the fourth in 2014.
Translations and adaptations.
The tightly interwoven structure of Old English poetry makes translating "Beowulf" a severe technical challenge. Despite this, a great number of translations and adaptations are available, in poetry and prose. Andy Orchard, in "A Critical Companion to Beowulf", lists 33 "representative" translations in his bibliography, while the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies published Marijane Osborn's annotated list of over 300 translations and adaptations in 2003. "Beowulf" has been translated many times in verse and in prose, and adapted for stage and screen. By 2020, the Beowulf's Afterlives Bibliographic Database listed some 688 translations and other versions of the poem. "Beowulf" has been translated into at least 38 other languages.
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In 1805, the historian Sharon Turner translated selected verses into modern English. This was followed in 1814 by John Josias Conybeare who published an edition "in English paraphrase and Latin verse translation." N. F. S. Grundtvig reviewed Thorkelin's edition in 1815 and created the first complete verse translation in Danish in 1820. In 1837, John Mitchell Kemble created an important literal translation in English. In 1895, William Morris and A. J. Wyatt published the ninth English translation.
In 1909, Francis Barton Gummere's full translation in "English imitative metre" was published, and was used as the text of Gareth Hinds's 2007 graphic novel based on "Beowulf". In 1975, John Porter published the first complete verse translation of the poem entirely accompanied by facing-page Old English. Seamus Heaney's 1999 translation of the poem ("", called "Heaneywulf" by the "Beowulf" translator Howell Chickering and many others) was both praised and criticised. The US publication was commissioned by W. W. Norton & Company, and was included in the "Norton Anthology of English Literature". Many retellings of "Beowulf" for children appeared in the 20th century.
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In 2000 (2nd edition 2013), Liuzza published his own version of "Beowulf" in a parallel text with the Old English, with his analysis of the poem's historical, oral, religious and linguistic contexts. R. D. Fulk, of Indiana University, published a facing-page edition and translation of the entire Nowell Codex manuscript in 2010. Hugh Magennis's 2011 "Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse" discusses the challenges and history of translating the poem, as well as the question of how to approach its poetry, and discusses several post-1950 verse translations, paying special attention to those of Edwin Morgan, Burton Raffel, Michael J. Alexander, and Seamus Heaney. Translating "Beowulf" is one of the subjects of the 2012 publication "Beowulf at Kalamazoo", containing a section with 10 essays on translation, and a section with 22 reviews of Heaney's translation, some of which compare Heaney's work with Liuzza's. Tolkien's long-awaited prose translation (edited by his son Christopher) was published in 2014 as "". The book includes Tolkien's own retelling of the story of Beowulf in his tale "Sellic Spell", but not his incomplete and unpublished verse translation. "The Mere Wife", by Maria Dahvana Headley, was published in 2018. It relocates the action to a wealthy community in 20th-century America and is told primarily from the point of view of Grendel's mother. In 2020, Headley published a translation in which the opening "Hwæt!" is rendered "Bro!"; this translation subsequently won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work.
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Sources and analogues.
Neither identified sources nor analogues for "Beowulf" can be definitively proven, but many conjectures have been made. These are important in helping historians understand the "Beowulf" manuscript, as possible source-texts or influences would suggest time-frames of composition, geographic boundaries within which it could be composed, or range (both spatial and temporal) of influence (i.e. when it was "popular" and where its "popularity" took it). The poem has been related to Scandinavian, Celtic, and international folkloric sources.
Scandinavian parallels and sources.
19th-century studies proposed that "Beowulf" was translated from a lost original Scandinavian work; surviving Scandinavian works have continued to be studied as possible sources. In 1886 Gregor Sarrazin suggested that an Old Norse original version of "Beowulf" must have existed, but in 1914 Carl Wilhelm von Sydow claimed that "Beowulf" is fundamentally Christian and was written at a time when any Norse tale would have most likely been pagan. Another proposal was a parallel with the "Grettis Saga", but in 1998, Magnús Fjalldal challenged that, stating that tangential similarities were being overemphasised as analogies. The story of Hrolf Kraki and his servant, the legendary bear-shapeshifter Bodvar Bjarki, has also been suggested as a possible parallel; he survives in "Hrólfs saga kraka" and Saxo's "Gesta Danorum", while Hrolf Kraki, one of the Scyldings, appears as "Hrothulf" in "Beowulf". New Scandinavian analogues to "Beowulf" continue to be proposed regularly, with Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar being the most recently adduced text.
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International folktale sources.
(1910) wrote a thesis that the first part of "Beowulf" (the Grendel Story) incorporated preexisting folktale material, and that the folktale in question was of the Bear's Son Tale ("Bärensohnmärchen") type, which has surviving examples all over the world. This tale type was later catalogued as international folktale type 301 in the ATU Index, now formally entitled "The Three Stolen Princesses" type in Hans Uther's catalogue, although the "Bear's Son" is still used in Beowulf criticism, if not so much in folkloristic circles. However, although this folkloristic approach was seen as a step in the right direction, "The Bear's Son" tale has later been regarded by many as not a close enough parallel to be a viable choice. Later, Peter A. Jorgensen, looking for a more concise frame of reference, coined a "two-troll tradition" that covers both "Beowulf" and "Grettis saga": "a Norse 'ecotype' in which a hero enters a cave and kills two giants, usually of different sexes"; this has emerged as a more attractive folk tale parallel, according to a 1998 assessment by Andersson.
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The epic's similarity to the Irish folktale "The Hand and the Child" was noted in 1899 by Albert S. Cook, and others even earlier. In 1914, the Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow made a strong argument for parallelism with "The Hand and the Child", because the folktale type demonstrated a "monstrous arm" motif that corresponded with Beowulf's wrenching off Grendel's arm. No such correspondence could be perceived in the Bear's Son Tale or in the "Grettis saga".
James Carney and Martin Puhvel agree with this "Hand and the Child" contextualisation. Puhvel supported the "Hand and the Child" theory through such motifs as (in Andersson's words) "the more powerful giant mother, the mysterious light in the cave, the melting of the sword in blood, the phenomenon of battle rage, swimming prowess, combat with water monsters, underwater adventures, and the bear-hug style of wrestling."
In the Mabinogion, Teyrnon discovers the otherworldly boy child Pryderi, the principal character of the cycle, after cutting off the arm of a monstrous beast which is stealing foals from his stables. The medievalist R. Mark Scowcroft notes that the tearing off of the monster's arm without a weapon is found only in "Beowulf" and fifteen of the Irish variants of the tale; he identifies twelve parallels between the tale and "Beowulf".
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Classical sources.
Attempts to find classical or Late Latin influence or analogue in "Beowulf" are almost exclusively linked with Homer's "Odyssey" or Virgil's "Aeneid". In 1926, Albert S. Cook suggested a Homeric connection due to equivalent formulas, metonymies, and analogous voyages. In 1930, James A. Work supported the Homeric influence, stating that the encounter between Beowulf and Unferth was parallel to the encounter between Odysseus and Euryalus in Books 7–8 of the "Odyssey," even to the point of both characters giving the hero the same gift of a sword upon being proven wrong in their initial assessment of the hero's prowess. This theory of Homer's influence on "Beowulf" remained very prevalent in the 1920s, but started to die out in the following decade when a handful of critics stated that the two works were merely "comparative literature", although Greek was known in late 7th century England: Bede states that Theodore of Tarsus, a Greek, was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 668, and he taught Greek. Several English scholars and churchmen are described by Bede as being fluent in Greek due to being taught by him; Bede claims to be fluent in Greek himself.
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Frederick Klaeber, among others, argued for a connection between "Beowulf" and Virgil near the start of the 20th century, claiming that the very act of writing a secular epic in a Germanic world represents Virgilian influence. Virgil was seen as the pinnacle of Latin literature, and Latin was the dominant literary language of England at the time, therefore making Virgilian influence highly likely. Similarly, in 1971, Alistair Campbell stated that the apologue technique used in "Beowulf" is so rare in epic poetry aside from Virgil that the poet who composed "Beowulf" could not have written the poem in such a manner without first coming across Virgil's writings.
Biblical influences.
It cannot be denied that Biblical parallels occur in the text, whether seen as a pagan work with "Christian colouring" added by scribes or as a "Christian historical novel, with selected bits of paganism deliberately laid on as 'local colour'", as Margaret E. Goldsmith did in "The Christian Theme of "Beowulf"". "Beowulf" channels the Book of Genesis, the Book of Exodus, and the Book of Daniel in its inclusion of references to the Genesis creation narrative, the story of Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, the Devil, Hell, and the Last Judgment.
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Dialect.
"Beowulf" predominantly uses the West Saxon dialect of Old English, like other Old English poems copied at the time. However, it also uses many other linguistic forms; this leads some scholars to believe that it has endured a long and complicated transmission through all the main dialect areas. It retains a complicated mix of Mercian, Northumbrian, Early West Saxon, Anglian, Kentish and Late West Saxon dialectical forms.
Form and metre.
Old English poets typically used alliterative verse, a form of verse in which the first half of the line (the a-verse) is linked to the second half (the b-verse) through similarity in initial sound. That the line consists of two halves is clearly indicated by the caesura: (l. 4). This verse form maps stressed and unstressed syllables onto abstract entities known as metrical positions. There is no fixed number of beats per line: the first one cited has three () whereas the second has two ().
The poet had a choice of formulae to assist in fulfilling the alliteration scheme. These were memorised phrases that conveyed a general and commonly-occurring meaning that fitted neatly into a half-line of the chanted poem. Examples are line 8's ("waxed under welkin", i.e. "he grew up under the heavens"), line 11's ("pay tribute"), line 13's ("young in the yards", i.e. "young in the courts"), and line 14's ("as a comfort to his people").
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Kennings are a significant technique in "Beowulf". They are evocative poetic descriptions of everyday things, often created to fill the alliterative requirements of the metre. For example, a poet might call the sea the "swan's riding"; a king might be called a "ring-giver". The poem contains many kennings, and the device is typical of much of classic poetry in Old English, which is heavily formulaic.
Interpretation and criticism.
The history of modern "Beowulf" criticism is often said to begin with Tolkien, author and Merton Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford, who in his 1936 lecture to the British Academy criticised his contemporaries' excessive interest in its historical implications. He noted in "" that as a result the poem's literary value had been largely overlooked, and argued that the poem "is in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite overshadows the historical content..." Tolkien argued that the poem is not an epic; that, while no conventional term exactly fits, the nearest would be elegy; and that its focus is the concluding dirge.
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Paganism and Christianity.
In historical terms, the poem's characters were Germanic pagans, yet the poem was recorded by Christian Anglo-Saxons who had mostly converted from their native Anglo-Saxon paganism around the 7th century. "Beowulf" thus depicts a Germanic warrior society, in which the relationship between the lord of the region and those who served under him was of paramount importance.
In terms of the relationship between characters in "Beowulf" and God, one might recall the substantial amount of paganism that is present throughout the work. Literary critics such as Fred C. Robinson argue that the "Beowulf" poet tries to send a message to readers during the Anglo-Saxon time period regarding the state of Christianity in their own time. Robinson argues that the intensified religious aspects of the Anglo-Saxon period inherently shape the way in which the poet alludes to paganism as presented in "Beowulf". The poet calls on Anglo-Saxon readers to recognize the imperfect aspects of their supposed Christian lifestyles. In other words, the poet is referencing their "Anglo-Saxon Heathenism". In terms of the characters of the epic itself, Robinson argues that readers are "impressed" by the courageous acts of Beowulf and the speeches of Hrothgar. But one is ultimately left to feel sorry for both men as they are fully detached from supposed "Christian truth". The relationship between the characters of "Beowulf", and the overall message of the poet, regarding their relationship with God is debated among readers and literary critics alike.
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Richard North argues that the "Beowulf" poet interpreted "Danish myths in Christian form" (as the poem would have served as a form of entertainment for a Christian audience), and states: "As yet we are no closer to finding out why the first audience of "Beowulf" liked to hear stories about people routinely classified as damned. This question is pressing, given... that Anglo-Saxons saw the Danes as 's' rather than as foreigners." Donaldson wrote that "the poet who put the materials into their present form was a Christian and ... poem reflects a Christian tradition".
Other scholars disagree as to whether "Beowulf" is a Christian work set in a Germanic pagan context. The question suggests that the conversion from the Germanic pagan beliefs to Christian ones was a prolonged and gradual process over several centuries, and the poem's message in respect to religious belief at the time it was written remains unclear. Robert F. Yeager describes the basis for these questions:
Ursula Schaefer's view is that the poem was created, and is interpretable, within both pagan and Christian horizons. Schaefer's concept of "vocality" offers neither a compromise nor a synthesis of views that see the poem as on the one hand Germanic, pagan, and oral and on the other Latin-derived, Christian, and literate, but, as stated by Monika Otter: "a 'tertium quid', a modality that participates in both oral and literate culture yet also has a logic and aesthetic of its own."
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Politics and warfare.
Stanley B. Greenfield has suggested that references to the human body throughout "Beowulf" emphasise the relative position of thanes to their lord. He argues that the term "shoulder-companion" could refer to both a physical arm as well as a thane (Aeschere) who was very valuable to his lord (Hrothgar). With Aeschere's death, Hrothgar turns to Beowulf as his new "arm". Greenfield argues the foot is used for the opposite effect, only appearing four times in the poem. It is used in conjunction with Unferð (a man described by Beowulf as weak, traitorous, and cowardly). Greenfield notes that Unferð is described as "at the king's feet" (line 499). Unferð is a member of the foot troops, who, throughout the story, do nothing and "generally serve as backdrops for more heroic action."
Daniel Podgorski has argued that the work is best understood as an examination of inter-generational vengeance-based conflict, or feuding. In this context, the poem operates as an indictment of feuding conflicts as a function of its conspicuous, circuitous, and lengthy depiction of the Swedish–Geatish wars—coming into contrast with the poem's depiction of the protagonist Beowulf as being disassociated from the ongoing feuds in every way. Francis Leneghan argues that the poem can be understood as a "dynastic drama" in which the hero's fights with the monsters unfold against a backdrop of the rise and fall of royal houses, while the monsters themselves serve as portents of disasters affecting dynasties.
Further reading.
The secondary literature on "Beowulf" is immense. The following is a selection. |
Barb Wire (character)
Barb Wire is a fictional character appearing in Comics Greatest World, an imprint of Dark Horse Comics. Created by Chris Warner and Team CGW, the character first appeared in "Comics' Greatest World: Steel Harbor" in 1993. The original "Barb Wire" series published nine issues between 1994 and 1995 and was followed by a four-issue miniseries in 1996. A reboot was published in 2015 and lasted eight issues. In 1996, the character was adapted into a film starring Pamela Anderson. Unlike the comics, the film takes place in a possible future rather than an alternate version of present-day Earth.
Creators.
1–4: Chris Warner, script and pencils/Tim Bradstreet, inks
Fictional character biography.
Barb Wire's stories take place on an alternate version of present-day Earth with superhumans and more advanced technology. In this Earth's history, an alien entity called the Vortex arrived in 1931 and began conducting secret experiments. In 1947, an atom bomb test detonated in a desert nearby the alien's experiments. The result was the creation of a trans-dimensional wormhole referred to as "the Vortex" or "the Maelstrom", which released energy that gave different people across Earth superpowers for years to come.
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Decades later, Barbara Kopetski grows up in Steel Harbor when it is still a thriving steel industry city. Barbara and her brother Charlie live with their grandmother and parents, their mother being a police officer while their father is a former marine who became a steelworker. Officer Kopetski later dies, after which her husband becomes so ill he is confined to a bed for years, developing Alzheimer's disease as well before passing away. Following the death of her father, Barbara leaves Steel Harbour for a time as the city's economy starts to spiral and crime begins rising. Soon, much of the city is controlled by warring gangs rather than local government. Years later, Barbara returns to Steel Harbor, now an experienced bounty hunter operating under the name Barb Wire. Reuniting with Charlie, she decides to stay in her hometown, becoming the owner of the Hammerhead bar. To help bring in money, she continues moonlighting as a bounty hunter, working with the police directly or bail bondsman Thomas Crashell.
As time goes on, Steel Harbor becomes more dangerous, described as "a city under siege from drugs, crime, pollution and gang warfare". In 1993, a second American Civil War begins when Golden City announces its secession from the Union. The announcement leads to protests and riots in several cities. The Steel Harbor Riots leave some neighborhoods in literal ruin, with hundreds of buildings destroyed or abandoned in the area known as "Metal City". Many are forced to leave the city or take to the streets, and the gangs (all of whom have superhuman members) start moving to take more control. To help contain the chaos and keep her home from descending further, Barb Wire now acts at times as a vigilante, intervening when the police can't or won't. Fighting alongside the Wolf Gang, she defies criminal Mace Blitzkrieg's attempts to bring all gangs under his leadership and control the city.
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Growing up with a police officer mother and marine father, as well as her life experiences traveling outside of the city, Barb Wire is an excellent hand-to-hand combatant, skilled in various firearms, and an expert driver and motorcycle rider. Her bar has been considered neutral meeting ground by the Steel Harbor gangs. Aiding her bounty hunter activities is her brother Charlie, acting as her mechanic and engineer, and others such as Avram Roman Jr., a cyborg sometimes known simply as "the Machine". Though she has loyal allies, including Charlie, Barb Wire is a harsh, guarded person who looks at the world with suspicion and cynicism, considering herself a loner at heart.
Film adaptation.
A film adaptation was released in 1996 starring Pamela Anderson as Barb Wire. The story's premise was that Barb Wire lives in the near future rather than an alternate version of the present day, a world where superhumans and Dark Horse superheroes do not exist. In this version of the story, Steel Harbor is the last neutral "free city" during the Second American Civil War, and Barbara Kopetski is a resistance fighter who leaves behind the war after her heart is broken and she loses faith in the cause. Like the comic, she returns home to become a bounty hunter and owner of the Hammerhead. |
Blazing Saddles
Blazing Saddles is a 1974 American satirical postmodernist Western black comedy film directed by Mel Brooks, who co-wrote the screenplay with Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor, Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger, based on a story treatment by Bergman. The film stars Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder. Brooks appears in two supporting roles: Governor William J. Le Petomane, and a Yiddish-speaking Native American chief; he also dubs lines for one of Lili Von Shtupp's backing troupe and a cranky moviegoer. The supporting cast includes Slim Pickens, Alex Karras and David Huddleston, as well as Brooks regulars Dom DeLuise, Madeline Kahn and Harvey Korman. Bandleader Count Basie has a cameo as himself, appearing with his orchestra.
The film is full of deliberate anachronisms, from the Count Basie Orchestra playing "April in Paris" in the Wild West, to Pickens' character mentioning the "Wide World of Sports".
The film received generally positive reviews from critics and audiences, was nominated for three Academy Awards and is today regarded as a comedy classic. It is ranked number six on the American Film Institute's "100 Years...100 Laughs" list, and was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2006.
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Plot.
On the American frontier of 1874, a new railroad under construction will have to be rerouted through the town of Rock Ridge to avoid quicksand. Realizing this will make Rock Ridge worth millions, territorial attorney general Hedley Lamarr plans to force Rock Ridge's residents out of the town and sends a gang of thugs, led by his flunky Taggart, to shoot the sheriff and trash the town.
Not wanting to go with Reverend Johnson's suggestion to leave, the other prominent citizens (all of whom are named Johnson) lead the other townspeople in demanding that Governor William J. Le Petomane appoints a new sheriff to protect them. Lamarr persuades dim-witted Le Petomane to appoint Bart, a black railroad worker about to be executed for assaulting Taggart. A black sheriff, Lamarr reasons, will offend the townspeople, create chaos and leave Rock Ridge at his mercy.
After an initial hostile reception in which he takes himself "hostage" to escape, Bart relies on his quick wits and the assistance of Jim, an alcoholic gunslinger known as the "Waco Kid", to overcome the townspeople's hostility. Bart subdues Mongo, an immensely strong and dim-witted, yet philosophical henchman sent to kill him, then outwits German seductress-for-hire Lili Von Shtupp at her own game, with Lili falling in love with him.
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Upon release, Mongo vaguely informs Bart of Lamarr's connection to the railroad, so Bart and Jim visit the railroad worksite and discover from Bart's best friend Charlie that the railway is planned to go through Rock Ridge. Taggart and his men arrive to kill Bart, but Jim outshoots them and forces their retreat. Furious that his schemes have backfired, Lamarr recruits an army of thugs, including common criminals, motorcycle gangsters, Ku Klux Klansmen, and Nazi soldiers.
East of Rock Ridge, Bart introduces the White townspeople to the black, Chinese, and Irish railroad workers who have all agreed to help them in exchange for acceptance by the community, and explains his plan to defeat Lamarr's army. They labor all night to build a perfect copy of the town as a diversion. When Bart realizes it will not be enough to fool the villains, the townsfolk construct copies of themselves.
Bart, Jim, and Mongo buy time by constructing the "Gov. William J. Le Petomane Thruway", forcing the raiding party to send for change to pay the toll. Once through the tollbooth, the raiders attack the fake town and its population of dummies, which have been booby trapped with dynamite. After Jim detonates the explosives with his sharpshooting, launching bad guys and horses skyward, the Rock Ridgers attack the villains with Lili singing with the Nazi soldiers.
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The resulting brawl between townsfolk, railroad workers, and Lamarr's thugs literally breaks the fourth wall and bursts onto a neighboring movie set where director Buddy Bizarre is filming a Busby Berkeley-style top-hat-and-tails musical number. Then the brawl spreads into the studio commissary for a food fight and spills out of the Warner Bros. film lot onto the streets of Burbank.
Lamarr escapes the brawl and takes a taxi to hide at Mann's Chinese Theatre which is showing the premiere of "Blazing Saddles". As he settles into his seat, he sees onscreen Bart arriving on horseback outside the theatre. Bart blocks Lamarr's escape and shoots him in the groin. Bart and Jim then enter the theater to watch the end of the film.
Back in the film, Bart announces to the townspeople that he is moving on because his work is done (and because he is bored). Riding out of town, he finds Jim, still eating his popcorn, and invites him along to "nowhere special". The two friends briefly ride into the desert before dismounting and boarding a limousine which drives off into the sunset.
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Cast.
Cast notes:
Production.
Development.
The idea came from a story outline written by Andrew Bergman that he originally intended to develop and produce himself. "I wrote a first draft called "Tex-X"" (a play on Malcolm X's name), he said. "Alan Arkin was hired to direct and James Earl Jones was going to play the sheriff. That fell apart, as things often do." Brooks was taken with the story, which he described as "hip talk—1974 talk and expressions—happening in 1874 in the Old West", and purchased the film rights from Bergman. Though he had not worked with a writing team since "Your Show of Shows", he hired a group of writers (including Bergman) to expand the outline, and posted a large sign: "Please do not write a polite script."
Brooks described the writing process as chaotic: Bergman remembers the room being just as chaotic, telling "Creative Screenwriting",
Title.
The original title, "Tex X", was rejected to avoid it being mistaken for an X-rated film, as were "Black Bart" – a reference to Black Bart, a white highwayman of the 19th century – and "Purple Sage". Brooks said he finally conceived "Blazing Saddles" one morning while taking a shower.
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Casting.
Richard Pryor was Brooks' original choice to play Sheriff Bart, but the studio, claiming his history of drug arrests made him uninsurable, refused to approve financing with Pryor as the star. The role of Sheriff Bart went to Cleavon Little, and Pryor remained as a screenwriter instead. Brooks offered the other leading role, the Waco Kid, to John Wayne. He declined it, deeming the film "too blue" for his family-oriented image, but assured Brooks that "he would be the first one in line to see it." After that, Dan Dailey was Brooks' first choice for the role. Gig Young was cast, but he collapsed during his first scene from what was later determined to be alcohol withdrawal syndrome, and Gene Wilder was flown in to replace him.
Johnny Carson and Wilder both turned down the Hedley Lamarr role before Harvey Korman was cast. Madeline Kahn objected when Brooks asked to see her legs during her audition. "She said, 'So it's THAT kind of an audition? Brooks recalled. "I explained that I was a happily married man and that I needed someone who could straddle a chair with her legs like Marlene Dietrich in "Destry Rides Again." So she lifted her skirt and said, 'No touching.
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Filming.
Principal photography began on March 6, 1973, and wrapped in early May 1973. Brooks had numerous conflicts over content with Warner Bros. executives, including frequent use of the word "nigger", Lili Von Shtupp's seduction scene, the cacophony of flatulence around the campfire and Mongo punching out a horse. Brooks, whose contract gave him final cut, declined to make any substantive changes, with the exception of cutting Bart's final line during Lili's seduction: "I hate to disappoint you, ma'am, but you're sucking my arm." When asked later about the many "nigger" references, Brooks said he received consistent support from Pryor and Little. He added: "If they did a remake of "Blazing Saddles" today [2012], they would leave out the N-word. And then, you've got no movie." Brooks said the use of the slur was to show how despised, hated, and loathed the black sheriff was. Brooks said he received many letters of complaint after the film's release.
Music.
Brooks wrote the music and lyrics for three of "Blazing Saddles" songs, "The Ballad of Rock Ridge", "I'm Tired", and "The French Mistake". Brooks also wrote the lyrics to the title song, with music by composer John Morris. To sing the title song, Brooks advertised in the trade papers for a "Frankie Laine–type" singer; to his surprise, Laine himself offered his services. "Frankie sang his heart out ... and we didn't have the heart to tell him it was a spoof. He never heard the whip cracks; we put those in later. We got so lucky with his serious interpretation of the song." In an interview with Terry Gross, Laine said that he did not know at the time that "Blazing Saddles" was a comedy.
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The choreographer for "I'm Tired" and "The French Mistake" was Alan Johnson. "I'm Tired" is a homage to and parody of Marlene Dietrich's performance of Cole Porter's song "I'm the Laziest Gal in Town" in Alfred Hitchcock's 1950 film "Stage Fright", as well as "Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It)" from "The Blue Angel".
The orchestrations were by Morris and Jonathan Tunick.
Lawsuit.
During production, retired longtime film star Hedy Lamarr sued Warner Bros. for $100,000, charging that the film's running parody of her name infringed on her right to privacy. Brooks said that he was flattered and chose to not fight it in court; the studio settled out of court for a small sum and an apology for "almost using her name". Brooks said that Lamarr "never got the joke". This lawsuit would be referenced by an in-film joke where Brooks' character, the Governor, tells Lamarr that "This is 1874; you'll be able to sue HER."
Release.
The film was almost unreleased. "When we screened it for executives, there were few laughs," said Brooks. "The head of distribution said, 'Let's dump it and take a loss.' But [studio president John] Calley insisted they open it in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago as a test. It became the studio's top moneymaker that summer."
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The world premiere took place on February 7, 1974, at the Pickwick Drive-In Theater in Burbank; 250 invited guests—including Little and Wilder—watched the film on horseback.
Critical response.
While "Blazing Saddles" is now considered a classic, critical reaction was mixed upon initial release. Vincent Canby wrote:
Roger Ebert gave the film four stars out of four, calling it a "crazed grab bag of a movie that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over the head with a rubber chicken. Mostly, it succeeds. It's an audience picture; it doesn't have a lot of classy polish and its structure is a total mess. But of course! What does that matter while Alex Karras is knocking a horse cold with a right cross to the jaw?" Gene Siskel awarded three stars out of four and called it "bound to rank with the funniest of the year," adding, "Whenever the laughs begin to run dry, Brooks and his quartet of gag writers splash about in a pool of obscenities that score belly laughs if your ears aren't sensitive and if you're hip to western movie conventions being parodied."
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Critics often perceived "Blazing Saddles" as inherently "un-cinematic", defying some expectations for Hollywood filmmaking in the era, often displaying production style associated with Broadway theater and US television variety shows. This was in part due to its "simplistic framing" and the casting of Harvey Korman, known for "The Carol Burnett Show" (CBS, 1967–1978), which was similarly "low on characterization and story, instead opting for a high volume of one-liners and visual gags." Typical to this perception, "Variety" wrote: "If comedies are measured solely by the number of yocks they generate from audiences, then "Blazing Saddles" must be counted a success ... Few viewers will have time between laughs to complain that pic is essentially a raunchy, protracted version of a television comedy skit."
Charles Champlin of the "Los Angeles Times" called the film "irreverent, outrageous, improbable, often as blithely tasteless as a stag night at the Friar's Club and almost continuously funny." Gary Arnold of "The Washington Post" was negative, writing: "Mel Brooks squanders a snappy title on a stockpile of stale jokes. To say that this slapdash Western spoof lacks freshness and spontaneity and originality is putting it mildly. "Blazing Saddles" is at once a messy and antiquated gag machine." Jan Dawson of "The Monthly Film Bulletin" wrote: "Perhaps it is pedantic to complain that the whole is not up to the sum of its parts when, for the curate's egg that it is, "Blazing Saddles" contains so many good parts and memorable performances." John Simon wrote a negative review of "Blazing Saddles", saying: "All kinds of gags—chiefly anachronisms, irrelevancies, reverse ethnic jokes, and out and out vulgarities—are thrown together pell-mell, batted about insanely in all directions, and usually beaten into the ground."
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On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 88% based on 69 reviews, with an average rating of 8.10/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "Daring, provocative, and laugh-out-loud funny, "Blazing Saddles" is a gleefully vulgar spoof of Westerns that marks a high point in Mel Brooks' storied career." On Metacritic it has a score of 73 out of 100 based on 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Ishmael Reed's 1969 novel "Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down" has been cited as an important precursor or influence for "Blazing Saddles", a connection that Reed himself has made.
Box office.
The film earned theatrical rentals of $26.7 million in its initial release in the United States and Canada. In its 1976 reissue, it earned a further $10.5 million and another $8 million in 1979. Its total rentals in the United States and Canada totalled $47.8 million from a gross of $119.5 million, becoming only the tenth film up to that time to pass the $100 million mark.
Awards and accolades.
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While addressing his group of bad guys, Harvey Korman's character reminds them that although they are risking their lives, he is "risking an almost certain Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor!" Korman did not receive an Oscar bid, but the film did get three nominations at the 47th Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actress for Madeline Kahn.
In 2006, "Blazing Saddles" was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Upon the release of the 30th-anniversary special edition in 2004, "Today" said that the movie "skewer[ed] just about every aspect of racial prejudice while keeping the laughs coming" and that it was "at the top of a very short list" of comedies still funny after 30 years. In 2014, NPR wrote that, four decades after the movie was made, it was "still as biting a satire" on racism as ever, although its treatment of gays and women was "not self-aware at all".
The film is recognized by the American Film Institute in these lists:
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Adaptations.
TV series.
A television pilot titled "Black Bart" was produced for CBS based on Bergman's original story. It featured Louis Gossett Jr. as Bart and Steve Landesberg as his drunkard sidekick, a former Confederate officer named "Reb Jordan". Other cast members included Millie Slavin and Noble Willingham. Bergman is listed as the sole creator. CBS aired the pilot once on April 4, 1975. The pilot episode of "Black Bart" was later included as a bonus feature on the "Blazing Saddles" 30th Anniversary DVD and the Blu-ray disc.
Possible stage production.
In September 2017, Brooks indicated his desire to do a stage version of "Blazing Saddles" in the future.
In popular culture.
The Rock Ridge standard for CD and DVD media is named after the town in "Blazing Saddles".
The 1988 animated television film "The Good, the Bad, and Huckleberry Hound" is a Western parody. Starring anthropomorphic cartoon dog Huckleberry Hound, the film is set in the California Gold Rush era and has similar spoofs and gags to "Blazing Saddles", as well as depiction of Native American stereotypes. Here, much like Bart, Huck is unexpectedly appointed as a sheriff to defend townspeople.
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