The next lit reading assignment TeenSthrnAccent has for English IV is Beowulf. TSA’s teacher sent me an email that he could “read” his assignments by listening to them from a book on tape because he has an eye injury at the moment that is making it difficult to read. More detail in this thread for the curious.
He needs to have it “read” by Monday and he leaves tomorrow on a bus to go to a state tournament, so there is a long four hour ride to fill in. Tonight we discussed purchasing Beowulf on cassette for him to listen to on the team bus during the drive, but the tape player is lost or loaned out, so I didn’t follow through and go to the library to check out the book on tape.
Later I noticed he has his MP3 player laid out to take with him. It made me wonder if you can get anything on MP3 or if it’s just current music. I Googled a bit and found some nice study guides and summaries, but it looks to me like even though I put in MP3 as part of the search, that they are on cd or tape.
Can I buy or download Beowulf in MP3 format? Are all MP3 players the same? The software on our computer to make a cd into a MP3 says MPIO Manager 2.
I leave for work at 7 a.m. and the bus leaves the school at 3 p.m. So there’s no time for me to run to the store and buy it and run it through the software. I was hoping to download it and “surprise” him with it in the morning. Yeah, I know Beowulf on MP3 is not necessarily going to seem like a nice surprise to an athlete distracted by the excitement of going to state. But it’s a long ride, he might get bored enough to go ahead and listen to it. Besides, he is wonderfully cool in his odd mix of athleticism and geekiness and he just might be secretly pleased, but not able to admit it. (Yeah, that’s the ticket.)
There’s lots of well studied and creative folk here, and I thought maybe someone would know a site where I could get literature, Beowulf specifically, for an MP3 player quick without having to go buy it and run it through the software. I don’t mind buying the MP3, that’s not the issue, it’s the timing. I didn’t think of it until late and he leaves tomorrow.
Well, Beowulf is available in plain text at Project Gutenberg and there exist text to mp3 converters (google for them). However having run it through a couple I can’t honestly recommend it except for a laugh. It’ll end up about 22Mb, take an hour or so to create and sound awful.
If you do end up buying a copy on CD might I recommend this one . Heaney’s translation, while probably not exact enough for a scholar is at least fabulously evocative and interesting, nobody to whom I’ve leant it has not liked it.
My very favorite tends to be audible.com – they do support most mp3 players IIRC, but you may want to check on their website. They have Beowulf and lots of other stuff.
I haven’t done it, but I can imagine it. Machine pronunciation? I had a piece of software called, I believe, Davidson KidWorks. This thing was supposed to be great because it had a child-friendly word-processor (more of just a bunch of lines with no actual word-processing), a built in Paint program, and a digited voice that would read anything you wrote. This thing screwed up fairly common words, mostly because it had pure machine pronunciation and didn’t make the different pronounciations due to spelling that you need for English. (I betcha this program would’ve worked great for German.)
So, yeah, unless there has been great advances in this sort of thing, I don’t suggest a text to MP3 converter. Look on Audible, though it’ll cost you some money.
Not a lot of good MP3 options, but if you want to listen to Beowulf for free on a PC, laptop or handheld, try Microsoft Reader. It’s a free download, there are thousands of free books with a (robotic) sound track, and one of them is Beowulf.
Not exactly what you asked for, but this might do in a pinch.
Thank you for the link. You were right, they did have it. I bought it this morning and I have an order number. But I am apparently not hip or intelligent to figure out what to do now that I bought it. I can’t tell where to click to download it off the sight.
Thank you everyone!