There’s no other source for this, so treat it with caution. But if it’s real…hooboy.
And Beowulf? It’s my bet that no one is likely to read Beowulf.
“Potential” doing a lot of work there
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24 responses to ““Potential” doing a lot of work there”
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They missed Thomas Paine.
no wait
he was kinda lefty
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Is 1984 on the list? It’s in the picture.
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Far-right extremism? Say what?
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I’ve read Beowulf. Though not in the original.
But surely this can’t be real. Can it? I mean, yeah, righties read, but so do lefties.
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@4: At this point, I think that most righties and most lefties in fact do not read.
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Yeah, I was always weird that way. And more so now.
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Even if it isn’t real, what does it say about the state we’re in that we’re not sure? The fact that it feels as if it could be real is astonishing.
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It appears to be real and based on a report issued in 2023. Douglas Murray wrote about it in the Spectator. The report was based on analysis from 2019 done by Prevent’s “Research Information and Communications Unit” (RICU). I have not yet found the list, but I have found several other writers speaking about the list (one is here.
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I’ve read Beowulf several times, parts even in the original when I was at university and took some Old English classes for funsies (yes, I’m a nerd).
If you are interested in classics like Ilias/Odyssey, I strongly recommend giving Beowulf a try.
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What A Maroon, Sonderval, I’ve also read “Beowulf” (in both the Kevin Crossley-Holland and Seamus Heaney translations). I thought it was excellent.
I see the list flagged books by C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien….but once again left out their fellow Inkling fantasy writer, Charles Williams.
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Joining the chorus — I, too, have read and enjoyed Beowulf. I also love the Epic of Gilgamesh (I once aspired to compose an opera version of Gilgamesh).
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An opera version of the “Epic of Gilgamesh” sounds like a brilliant idea.
I was taught Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton in my impeccably left-of-centre Irish University in the early 2000s, by nice, “Irish Times”-reading, lecturers with “Stop Factory Farming” badges. Guess they’d all be on Prevent’s list.
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I played Gilgamesh in a sixth grade production of the epic.
I also took a quarter of Old English, but it wasn’t enough to read Beowulf in the original. Mostly we read the Saxon Chronicles. (The professor was dating my historical linguistics professor, who was sitting in on the class. So in the Old English class I was considered the expert on historical linguistics, while in the historical linguistics class I was the expert on old English. I’m really just a dilettante in both. Universities are strange places.)
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Of those 12 books shown I have read 7. I might be an extremist? Why?
Complete rubbish, I mean what’s the criteria?
The extremists nowadays don’t read books, they surf the internet. Go check Truth Social. Flag that.
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Ok, sorry, I take it back about Beowulf. I do in fact like the Iliad and the Odyssey a lot, and have forgotten whatever I once knew about Beowulf, so My Bad.
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I notice nobody has a good word for The Aeneid. Too much 10th grade Latin?
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Just went to see if Emily Wilson had tackled Aeneid – looks like she hasn’t, but two other women have recently published translations.
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I studied the 6th book of the Aeneid at school many years (nearly 70 of them) ago , and I can still remember the opening lines:
Sic fatur lacrimans, classique inmittit habenas,
et tandem Euboicis Cumarum adlabitur oris.
(I cheated a bit with the second line, with the help of Google, but the first is all my own.)
I don’t remember how far we got, or whether we did anything much with the other books.
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I do like the music of Latin. Was deaf to it as a child, took decades to learn better. (I notice a certain clipped quality to that sentence that is probably accidental mimicry of Latin.)
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I doubt whether any “far-right” extremist would get through any of those books pictured, except, perhaps, for The Four Feathers, which I’d never heard of but sounds (after a perusal of Wikipedia) as eminently suited to the sentimentality of the extreme-right mind – and, I suppose, The Lord of the Rings (beloved of types like Peter Thiel), which I read (one volume a night in bed in my teenage years), and never went back to; I think The Hobbit a far better book, since it has a sense of humour, whereas LoR is stuffed with “noble” sentiments, particularly where the elves are concerned. I like Beowulf a lot, as I do the Icelandic Sagas, as well as other epics. Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Paradise Lost (which was suspected of being seditious by the regime of the time), The Canterbury Tales, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1984, Brave New World? Who the devil made this choice of books, and on what grounds? And why in the first place? Was there some vague plan to ban the lot?
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Burke is ‘right wing’ (though admittedly likely heavy going for groypers and such) – given the seemingly random and perverse stances of the ‘wings’ these days I’ve personally boiled the definition of each ‘wing’ down to one sentence – ‘right wing’ people believe some people are inherently better than others and ‘left wing’ people don’t. (Which makes the phrase ‘liberal elite’ contradictory; I’m still working on that.)
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As for the Iliad and the Odyssey, I read both as a child (in English). I liked the Odyssey a lot, and the Iliad less. My Greek was never up to coping with Homer, whose language was several centuries before the classical period. However, we did read some Herodotus and maybe a bit of Xenophon, as well as parts of the New Testament (mainly the Acts of the Apostles, I think). I had to give up Greek when I started chemistry, because the school considered it impossible to do both, and I was determined to study chemistry. Latin remained compulsory up to O levels (15 years old).
As for Beowulf, I never got beyond the first word: Hwæt!
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Tim Harris #20 : While I greatly respect J. R. R. Tolkien’s worldbuilding in “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Silmarillion”, “The Hobbit” is the Tolkien book I re-read the most. I never cease to enjoy that charming adventure.
I should probably be relieved that neither the “Prevent” crowd nor the Peter Thiel crowd have any interest in my other favourite fantasy books, such as the “Gormenghast” trilogy by Mervyn Peake, or “Lud-in-the-Mist” by Hope Mirrlees (a fascinating woman who was a friend of Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell, and whose work was admired by Christopher Isherwood).
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guest #21: I really do not think that Burke was “right-wing” by contemporary standards, if the contemporary far-right even attains to anything that could be called a standard. Thiel’s infantile gibberings are an example. And Hobbes? He was accused of blasphemy by religiously-minded contemporaries, and his books, including Leviathan, were banned in his time. In my examination of certain far-right websites, the favourite “go-to” writings are those of people like Carl Schmitt (whose arguments these acolytes do not understand, merely parrotting phrases like “state of exception” and “the friend-enemy distinction”), Ernst Jünger (“The Worker”, in particular), Julius Evola, and the despicable Alexandr Dugin (still, regrettably, alive) — fascists all.
Mostly Cloudy#23: I’m glad to find someone else who shares my opinion of The Hobbit!
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