More on Anglo-Saxon Aloud, Singing, etc.

I wanted to thank everyone who has made suggestions and given me kind words about the project. I think I will be ready to record the Paris Psalter in at least a very simplified form of singing when the time comes this spring. I've got a lot to listen to now, and two excellent students who are interested in the project, and now a Music professor who wants to help, as well as folks like Derek on line, so it's just a matter of finding time and learning how to do it right.

So now I'm going to be working through the Minor Poems volume of the ASPR. Yesterday it was Finnsburh, today it's Waldere, and tomorrow through Friday it will be Maldon, a poem which seems to me more artful and more poignant each time I read it.

Unfortunately, I won't be talking about Anglo-Saxon Aloud at Kalamazoo, because that abstract just got rejected. I was a little surprised, but the session it was for got cancelled, and I guess it just wasn't a fit with anything else. I guess it's some kind of karma re-balance for the crap papers I gave at Kalamazoo when I was in graduate school.

I am not going to end up doing an entire set of recording of the Bibliothek der angelsachisen Prosa, but I think I will perhaps do a few of those works that lend themselves to oral delivery, like the Sermo Lupic. Brendan makes some good suggestions, though right now I can't imagine myself reading the entire Ecclesiastical History. Maybe the Chronicle day by day, though (I'd have to calculate how long that would take to record and edit, though), and I was going to ask for suggestions for shorter homilies to give readers a taste "rhythmical prose" by Ælfric or Wulfstan's prose besides the Sermo Lupi.

As for plans for the project: As long as Wheaton will keep the server up, I plan on keeping the project going. If I were to sell it as a CD-set (like Beowulf Aloud, it would end up being about 20 disks long, and I don't know if anyone is going to pay me for what it would cost to make that (i.e., the covers, etc.). Maybe I can load the entire thing onto a cheap iPod Shuffle off of eBay and sell it that way if people don't want to have to keep downloading.