Wormtalk and Slugspeak

2012-01-20T14:41:00.000-05:00

Tolkien Aloud

As the previous post suggests, we do a lot of reading aloud in our house even though both children like to read on the own. My daughter may be 11-going-on-17, but if you are wise, you won't mess with her bedtime reading, and my son likewise thinks it doesn't matter what else has gone on that night, where we've gone or how tired he is: if he doesn't get reading, something is wrong. I hope we can hold on to this family tradition as they continue to grow up.

A while back I published a piece in the journal Silver Leaves about reading The Lord of the Rings aloud to a four-year-old. That was my daughter, and we read the books again when she was six. Since then she's wanted to read other things (unlike me, who would force my father to start right in again on The Hobbit as soon as we got to the end of Return of the King), and we've done a lot of fantasy and science fiction. Over the past two years we've read Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising; Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books (just the original trilogy. I'm not reading Tehanu to my daughter, well, ever); the Anne McCaffrey Harper Hall dragonrider books; the Lloyd Alexander Chronicles of Prydain (she loved these more than anything else); some of the Heinlein "juveniles"; and the first two Hitchhiker's Guide books by Douglas Adams.

My son wasn't interested in The Lord of the Rings books when he was four, though he did like The Hobbit and we read it a couple of times, but last year, after he turned seven, we started on Fellowship and are now to the very end of The Two Towers.

So I've read Tolkien's work aloud two and a half times, plus probably four times for The Hobbit, and have a pretty good comparison group of other writers. Tolkien is by far, massively by far, the easiest of the major fantasy and SF authors to read aloud and the one whose work gains the most from oral presentation (Lloyd Alexander would probably be a fairly distant second).

Now that's the kind of evaluative statement that needs something to back it up. But one of the problems with trying to defend such an evaluation is that we have no agreed-upon metric, and so people end up quoting particular passages, pointing, and saying "See! See how great that is!" But often passages that are great out loud are also great when read silently, so the argument is hard to make in detail.

I think, though, that I've come across one minor technique in Tolkien that really makes a difference, and I think this aspect of his work arises from his having read so much of The Lord of the Rings to the Inklings: you never, when reading Tolkien, are in any doubt about who is talking in dialogue. There is always some kind of information, either in the set-up, the dialogue itself or the description, so that you never have the experience of reading a block of text and then realizing "Wait! That's Eomer talking, not Gandalf."

In contrast we might look at Frank Herbert's Dune. I just finished reading this out loud to my daughter, and almost every night there would be some large passage of dialogue that I'd start reading, thinking it was one character, and then, after it was finished, you'd get a bit of description or a "said X" that showed that it was an entirely different character speaking.

I'm particularly sensitive to this because I do "voices" for most of the characters in a text, and so when you start a passage thinking that it's in Gurney Hallek's accent, and it turns out to be Duke Leto or Stilgar, you have to go back and re-read the whole thing in the correct accent. Many of these passages in Dune are too long to scan to the end and find out who is speaking without losing focus on the part being read and drifting.

But this disorientation never happens in Tolkien, even in minor works like Farmer Giles. It's always easy to read his texts aloud, not only because you know who is talking, but because the writing--even the description of landscape--has a rhythm to it, and rise and fall that keeps you from having to stay at one pitch and speed all the time. There are rushing passages, but then also slower, more graceful ones.

Perhaps this orality (both in terms of oral roots and ease of oral presentation) is another aspect of Tolkien's work that makes it appealing to such a wide range of readers and draws people back to re-read the books over the courses of their lives.

2012-01-17T23:52:00.000-05:00

Actual Dialogue at the Drout House This Evening

Dad: Time for bedtime reading.

Daughter: Now we can start Life, the Universe, and Everything. It's going to be awesome.

Dad: Yes, well, about that, sweetie: the print in Life, the Universe, and Everything is really small.

Daughter: So?

Dad: I can't find my reading glasses. We'll have to read the Iliad until they turn up.

Daughter: This is so not fair...

Dad: Sing in me, O Muse, the wrath of Achilles...

2012-01-08T23:37:00.000-05:00

Tolkien and the Nobel Prize

Many of my friends are talking about the revelation that C.S. Lewis nominated Tolkien for the Nobel Prize for Literature and that JRRT was rejected in part because a jury member argued that The Lord of the Rings "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality."

Many people are getting a good laugh at the "storytelling" critique, and deservedly so. Tom Shippey has long documented the ability of Tolkien's work to cause supposedly intelligent critics to make fools of themselves. There's a long list of names and examples in Author of the Century, and you can tell that Tom enjoys finding obvious contradictions between what the critics say is good writing in other contexts and how they judge Tolkien.

But although we can just laugh at close-minded, self-contradictory critics, it's also useful to try figure out where people are coming from. Although I have never agreed with the idea that Tolkien's prose is bad, I think it is important not to deny that it is different from what mainstream literary taste and scholarship thought was good in the 1950s. Here my critical approach goes in a different direction than Tom's. He is saying "here's what you said is good literature according to your theory, and Tolkien fulfills every one of those qualities on the checklist, so you should admit that it's good literature." This is rhetorically very effective, and I'm grateful that Tom has done it, but I have less faith in mainstream theories of literary greatness. In the end, I think the contradictions do not show so much that Tolkien is great literature, but that the abstract theories of "what makes good literature" are pretty much useless.

The style of Tolkien's prose isn't bad. It's merely discontinuous (mostly) with the stylistic conventions that were in place at the middle of the twentieth century. Modernist were trying to make their prose seem new and different--the meta-instruction for all Modernist prose could be conceived of as: "never write a sentence that has previously existed. Try not even to use pre-existing phrases. If you must use a pre-existing collocation, only do so ironically." Tolkien was attempting to make his prose connected to long traditions in English. High-culture Modernists just don't understand Tolkien because he violates that fundamental convention. The irony is that Tolkien is discontinuous from Modernism in the same way that Modernism was attempting to become discontinuous from the pre-existing tradition.

Modernism wants a reader to feel that there is no tradition, no pre-existing set of conventions and cliches (though there is, as you can easily see by reading a bunch of second-tier mid-century Modernist works). Tolkien was quite deliberately linking with the traditions of English literature (particularly medieval literature), resurrecting popular poetic forms (i.e., no blank verse, almost no pentameter in his poems), and making his text appear as if it is part of a long-standing tradition. The aesthetics are completely different, and it's hard to see the Nobel committee being willing--or able--to get beyond their comfort zone in the Modernist style.

The great contribution of the "Theory Wars" was to cast doubt on the pronouncements of the literary establishment and even on the wisdom of taking that establishment very seriously. The drawback is that political interpretations end up colonizing all analysis of texts because politics is a lowest common denominator for criticism: you don't have to analyze in much detail if all you are talking about is politics and ideology. Political analysis is easy compared to aesthetic analysis when aesthetics are divorced from "this is what my friends and I like," an ideology that is, unfortunately, quite well enough established in literary studies to maintain its hegemony over the ever-shrinking field.

2012-01-06T14:14:00.000-05:00

A Return to Blogging (?)

I started this blog in June of 2002, nine and half years ago, and for the first few years it was great fun. The "blogsphere" itself was a lot of fun then, much like USENET back in the late 1980s: although a lot of people were participating, there was an intimacy to discussions and the trolls, spammers and hustlers hadn't yet taken over. Surprising people would reply to posts and the debates we got into could be quite interesting. I derived a lot of intellectual energy from Wormtalk.

But as time went on blogging became less fun. The advent of group blogs and monetized blogs and then group monetized blogs made individual blogs less personal. The movement from blogging to FB and Twitter reduced the number of interactions that happened on the blog itself, and the further development of coterie blogs with their hierarchies and cross-linked promotions further reduced the element of spontaneity that had been so much fun. Sometime in 2008 or 2009 I found myself dreading posting to Wormtalk and that, coupled with the effort that Anglo-Saxon Aloud required, saw me significantly reduce my posting of new material. Then came the economic crisis, when pretty much all my energies department chair energy was spent trying to shuffle around resources so that no one's jobs (we were successful, but at great cost of time and effort). I thought I would get back to blogging when I was on sabbatical, but during that time I ended up teaching anyway (we gave up the funding for a replacement for me in order to keep a colleague in a different time period) and sabbatical turned out to be more work than regular teaching. Simultaneously Scott Nokes stopped regularly updating his Unlocked-Wordhoard, which had become a significant source on inspiration, and I got some push-back from people about blogging while a department chair. Then in August 2010 the "Terrible Events" happened to members of my extended family (P.S.: At that time I de-friended pretty much every academic I know on Facebook. It was nothing personal. I just didn't want family things spreading all over the place, and didn't trust myself not to slip in managing different FB privacy levels for different groups of people). So in 2011 I posted a total of 3 times. Wormtalk was effectively defunct.

But although I find that I dislike, a lot, many things about the internet circa 2012, I miss sharing ideas in the more immediate form of blogging (as opposed to journal articles that take two years to appear and four to see a response). So I am going to give Wormtalk another whirl and see if I can get back some of the immediacy, energy and pleasure that was so apparent in the "Golden Age of Blogging" from 2003-2007. I plan to talk about Anglo-Saxon, Tolkien, our Lexomics research, the job market, graduate school, teaching and learning. We'll see what happens.

2011-04-27T22:00:00.000-04:00

NEH Supports Lexomics

We got the grant!

I guess third time was the charm. The National Endowment for the Humanities has fully funded our Lexomics project for the next two years (project total $178,000). We will be expanding lexomic analysis from just Old English (though we will be continuing this research) to medieval Latin, Middle English, and texts from the Harlem Renaissance, and we will be collaborating with Shawn Christian (Harlem Renaissance), Sarah Downey (Latin), Yvette Kisor (Old English, Beowulf) and Scott Kleinman (Old and Middle English, approaches to computational lemmatization). It's going to be an exciting two years.

Very soon we will have available on the lexomics website (lexomics.wheatoncollege.edu) a tool called "Divi-text," which allows people to upload any electronic text and cut it into chunks (in preparation for lexomic analysis). In the next year or so we will also complete the "dendro-grammer," which will enable researchers to produce their own dendrograms without having to learn how to use the statistical analysis software, R.

In July our team's first article in a major journal will appear:

Michael D.C. Drout, Michael J. Kahn, Mark D. LeBlanc and Christina Nelson, "Of Dendrogrammatology: Lexomic Methods for Analyzing the Relationships Among Old English Poems," JEGP 110 (2011): 301-36.

Some time after that another article from the research group will appear in Modern Philology:

Sarah Downey, Michael D.C. Drout, Michael J. Kahn and Mark D. LeBlanc, "'Books Tell Us': Lexomic and Traditional Evidence for the Sources of Guthlac A."

Currently work is ongoing on the Cynewulfian corpus (though some of that is in the JEGP article), Beowulf, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the Old English translation of Orosius, King Horn, and Mule Bone by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes.

I will post links to software and papers.

2011-02-21T23:39:00.000-05:00

Lexomics: An Explanation

I've been meaning to write this post for, I don't know, months, but life and being department Chair (those are two distinct states, like living and being a zombie) has gotten in the way. But now I've just learned that I'm going to be part of a working group at the Santa Fe Institute in March, so I need to get my ideas in order, and this blog is as good a place as any to do that.

The word "lexomics" describes an evolving set of methods for finding patterns in textual corpora. The term is taken from Bioinformatics, where it is used to describe the search for "words" and patterns in genomes (my colleague Betsey Dyer is apparently the first person to coin the word, an obvious adaptation of "genomics").

Our lexomic methods (which are described in much more detail in forthcoming papers in JEGP and Modern Philology, as well as in my new book, Tradition and Influence) use computer-assisted statistical methods to troll through the Dictionary of Old English corpus. Essentially, we cut texts into segments, count the words in each segment and compute their relative frequencies, and then compare these relative frequencies from segment to segment using a statistical method called hierarchical, agglomerative clustering. This method produces a branching diagram, called a dendrogram, that shows how similar (and thus how different) each segment is from each other.

Other scholars, such as John Burrows, have used similar methods to examine texts and even to attempt to determine the authorship of disputed or anonymous texts -- with varying degree of success. These approaches are usually much more complex and sophisticated than ours: scholars sometimes remove the 50 or 100 most frequently used words, or they force all words to standard spellings and morphologies, or they lemmatize their texts. We simply dumped all the words into the hopper and started counting them (this was just a preliminary experiment, after all).

But to our surprise, our methods seemed to "work" very effectively without any sophistication. For example, we were able to match one poem with the correct section of another poem to which it was related, and we could separate out the two well-known sections of a third poem with absolute accuracy (I'm only being oblique here because I think it would be impolite to scoop the massive JEGP article which will be out soon). It may be that by lumping together orthographic, morphological and other variants, we were able to detect patterns that were relatively subtle.

We also seem to be able to detect when a segment of a text has a different source than the main body of the text, which is particulary exciting for Anglo-Saxon studies because we have so many texts that are composites (so we have good controls) and others whose composite nature is controversial.

Thus far we get "good" results--in the sense that they are consistent with what we know from traditional methods--for Old English poetry and prose, Latin prose, Middle English poetry, and, intriguingly, some Modern English prose. We are hoping to refine the techniques by testing fully lemmatized texts (this is difficult, because lemmatizing is incredibly time consuming) and trying other, more sophisticated statistical methods. As you'll see in the two articles (and the book), we've been able to shed some light on the Cynewulfian corpus and on the structure of Guthlac A and its relationship to other texts. Soon we hope to be able to tell you some interesting things about Alfred's Orosius, King Horn, Bede's History, and the play Mule Bone.

The connection to my book is this: lexomics methods can detect and to some degree measure influence. In my new book, I argue that tradition is a special case of influence, and so detecting influence is in a way detecting certain kinds of traditions. This gives us an empirical way of looking at a topic that has tended to be approached in a very fuzzy way.

But--and this is perhaps the most important point in this capsule summary--lexomics does not work at all if you don't have a deep familiarity with the texts ("wearing the English Professor hat" I call it) and the critical problems associated with them. A dendrogram itself can tell you very little, but a dendrogram coupled to an understanding of the sources and structure of a poem has the ability to shed light upon--and even re-date--a complex text.

I'm hoping in my visit to the Santa Fe Institute to learn how others are approaching culture as a complex evolutionary system, and perhaps improve lexomics (and certainly offer it to them) as a tool for trying to untangle and trace a few strands of the massive cultural tapestry.

2011-01-31T14:52:00.000-05:00

A Nice Little Trick Enabled by Lexomics (and Excel)

It's nice when people overhear conversations and then help you.

I was at the climbing gym (Rock Spot Climbing in Boston -- the best climbing gym anywhere) and, in between bouldering runs, was talking with my wife about how my research was coming. Somehow we got to talking about whether Excel could speed up some of my searching. A guy at the gym overheard and said he had been the Excel guru for a Psych research project and offered to help. What follows comes from that brief collaboration. By combining material on the Lexomics website with Excel, you can do some interesting searching in uncommon words in the corpus of Anglo-Saxon.

Let's say you are researching a particular Old English poem, say, Juliana. You want to look at the more uncommon words in this poem and see if they are shared with the rest of Cynewulf's poetry or with other texts in Anglo-Saxon.

Go to the Lexomics website, choose "tools," and the "word frequencies." Click "entire corpus" and then "get stats." Click on the HERE to download this as an Excel file. You now have a file with a list of every word in the Anglo-Saxon corpus ranked in order of frequency.

Copy the column of words and the column of word frequencies and paste them into a new spreadsheet as column A and column B.

Now go back to the lexomics website, go to "tools," "word frequencies," and choose the poem of interest. "Get stats" for that poem and download them by clicking on HERE. You now have an Excel file with a list of every word in the poem ranked in order. Copy the column with the words and paste it into column C in your spreadsheet.

Now you are ready to find those words that appear in your poem and only a few times in the rest of the corpus.

Go to cell D1 and enter the following formula:

=SUM( if ( $A$1:$A$x = C1, if ($B$1:$B$x < n, 1))) ; where x = the total number of words in column A and n = the low frequency threshold (i.e., you want all words that appear fewer than 5 times)

*important* do not just press ENTER. Instead, press CTR-SHIFT-ENTER.

Then copy the formula into the entire D column by clicking the box in the lower right corner and dragging down to the last word in D.

It will take a few moments for processing.

When processing is complete, you will have a 0 in every cell in D in which the word does not fulfill the criteria (appearing in your poem and between 5 and 2 times in the corpus), and a 1 when the word does fulfill the criteria.

You can search for these 1's manually or use "Conditional Formatting" to bold or color the rows with a 1 in column D.

Now you can search these words in the Dictionary of Old English concordance and see where else they appear. Look for patterns. Enjoy.

2010-12-17T10:43:00.000-05:00

Beowulf Aloud and Anglo-Saxon Aloud Greatest Hits

My stockpile of the Beowulf Aloud and Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits cds had nearly run out, but I have now gotten some more. It's very close to Christmas now, but I send them first class, so they should still get there in time if there's someone on your list who really wants a 3-CD set of all of Beowulf in Old English (plus an introductory lecture) or a 2-CD set of some of the greatest poems in Anglo-Saxon (including the Wanderer, Deor, Caedmon's Hymn, The Wife's Lament and the Dream of the Rood) in both Old and Modern English, with commentaries.

To hear some Anglo-Saxon Aloud, you can go to Anglo-Saxon Aloud and listen to just about any poem in the entire corpus (without the translations and commentary, though).

Beowulf Aloud is $20.00 plus $5.00 shipping in the US ($8.00 for overseas)
Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits is $25.00 plus $5.00 shipping in the US ($8.00 overseas).

2010-12-13T15:25:00.000-05:00

Best Seller (!) on Audible: Understanding Poetry

Imagine my surpise when I got an email that one of my Modern Scholar courses on CD is currently a "best seller" on Audible.com. Not only that, it's a course on poetry!

You can read the story here. They have nice things to say about the course and provide handy links to a number of my courses on Audible.com as well as a link to a free excerpt.

This was the course that was a finalist for an Audie award (which I lost to Paula Poundstone), and I'm very pleased that people are enjoying it. However, I don't think it is my best course. That's probably either A Way with Words: Rhetoric, Writing and the Arts of Persuasion or A Way with Words III: Grammar for Adults. And I'm also rather partial to the newest course, The Anglo-Saxon World.

I've also done courses on The History of the English Language, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Chaucer and Approaches to Literature.

(I think I get something like 25 cents each time someone downloads an Audible course, so I have a tiny financial interest in promoting these. But I do think readers of this blog might enjoy some of the courses).

2010-11-16T12:27:00.000-05:00

Foreword to The Last Man Anthology: Tales of Catastrophe, Disaster and Woe (a memoire of my being a department chair -- just kidding)

I wrote a Foreword to this anthology of science fiction stories and poems. I ended up surprising myself and saying that in the end they are tales of hope (the title is "A Paradox: Tales of Hope"). You can read the essay and a sample of works from the anthology at Sword and Saga Press.

Comment from my daughter on the title: "Daddy, who on earth is going to buy a book that says 'Tales of Woe' on the cover?"

That's a good question, but it's a good collection of pieces, some classic and some brand new, so I guess the answer is "I would."

(please ignore the grotesque grammatical infelicity that I of course didn't notice in the entire editing process but saw immediately when I opened the book).

2010-10-31T22:16:00.001-04:00

Frivolous But Fun Piece in the Washington Post

On Wednesday the Washington Post emailed me and asked for a short OpEd piece on the labor politics of Middle-earth (really). This is what I came up with on short notice: Dept. of What If: Would hobbits go on strike?

I started out with all kinds of in-depth analysis, but settled for cheap laughs.

There was a lot of back-and-forth with the editor (at one point I was trying to make a joke about the Shirriffs, and the editor put in something like "...the bourgeois is concerned with finding stray beasts, not oppressing the proletariat" and I wrote back "well, it would be the police apparatus of the State, not the bourgeois who were doing any oppressing..." and then realized I was actually being more nerdy about Marxism than I was about Middle-earth).

But I think it ended up in a form where I can justify all the claims, even though at times it is a stretch.

For example, I wanted to hedge a little more on possible lack of upward mobility among the elves but also keep the joke about being stuck in a dead-end job for 1,000 years because nobody dies or retires. We obviously don't know that for sure, though there might be hints in Laws and Customs Among the Eldar.

For the dwarves, I was thinking of the way they drive hard bargains for excavating elf caverns, and then how they change their minds about the price of re-fashioning necklaces (or promising to pay Bilbo gold, silver and jewels in the letter but only offering gold and silver to Bard). Don't really know that there weren't wildcat strikes in Moria, though that's probably not a huge stretch. The gold standard joke was a cheap laugh, but really, can you image dwarves using fiat money for any reason?

Otherwise I think I'm on solid ground. Perhaps no one but Sauron goes into the Sammath Naur, but if he were running a smithy in contemporary America, he'd still need to put up handrails, lay down non-slip coatings on the floors, and post an MSDS for the boiling lava.

[update: thanks to those who pointed out the faulty link. Fixed]

2010-10-26T19:21:00.000-04:00

So What's Up with the Not Writing and Everything

I began this blog in June 2002, so it's been more than eight years (which is a millennium in internet time, I think). The past two months has been the most protracted dry spell for posting that I've had.

A few things are going on.

The biggest happened at the end of August. But (and I hate it when people do this on the internet, but oh well*), I am not ready to discuss it publicly. The family members involved have already had their privacy violated about as much as is possible, and they don't need me piling on. Suffice it to say that the situation involves people I love and the legal system in both its necessity and all its iron cruelty, and that it's more awful than anything I imagined could happen. Some day I will write about it, but not now.

It's strange how something traumatic changes you. I couldn't honestly say that (beyond the first few weeks) inordinate amounts of my time have been taken up, but there's been a subtle and very damaging shift in my ability to concentrate. Moments of solitude hurt, because that's when you think too much (mowing the lawn has tended to be the worst time) and so I've found myself filling those moments with as much buzzing as possible: answering email, flitting from one blog post to another, following comment threads. This takes up time but does not produce writing, and so when I've been able to concentrate, I've tended to spend that limited focus on my new book (now called Tradition and Influence) which was almost done.

Additionally, I am in what I had thought was my final year as department Chair, and there have been a variety of crises in the department. I never kept this blog a secret from my colleagues, but a few times previously something I had written here was brought up to me or complained about. I didn't care too much at that particular point, but given the nastiness that has overtaken my department recently, it has seemed like a good idea to self-censor. One of the things I dislike most about being Chair has been the requirement to think about how what I say or write isn't interpreted as only my personal opinions, but that's the way the world is, and there's not much that can be done about it.

Finally, "It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise." I've become increasingly disillusioned with the world of blogging and with internet communication in general. Scott Nokes suggests that the good discussions have migrated to Facebook or other places, and he's probably right, and it's even more likely that I'm just old and cranky, but it feels to me as if the conversations that sprung up around blogging have devolved either to partisan sniping or to coterie-focused back-scratching. Since neither of those interest me, I've been withdrawing. (Again, this most likely says more about me than about what anyone else is doing).

So I've done a couple of things. The first, which I did this summer when the events referenced above happened, was to plonk all of my Wheaton, departmental and academic acquaintances from my Facebook friends. Sorry about that. Given what was going on, it just wasn't appropriate to have Wheaton people or fellow academics on there, and I think for the forseeable future it will stay that way. Nothing personal in the plonking, believe me, but it was something I needed to do.

Second, I have avoided posting things to the blog about policy, administration or chairing. But since these things have been taking up a substantial part of my days, that has reduced the material for writing.

Finally, I have been focusing more on producing pieces for publication rather than on bloggy ephemera (though I guess in some ways the internet is more "forever" than JEGP or English Studies). I actually don't like writing with that much focus, as I've always preferred jumping from one project to another when I get stuck on the first, but I feel like I have to husband my limited reserves of concentration.

So really this post is an apology to those readers who have stuck with me so long and are no doubt irritated by the lack of content. I hope to do better, but don't know when I will.

* This does read like one of the cliches of internet drama. I'm sorry for that, but not sorry enough to make it too easy for someone to ferret out what I'm referring to. My most immediate family is thankfully not involved.

2010-09-16T16:26:00.000-04:00

Abstract Submitted for ISAS 2011

(as soon as I dig out from a new batch of wretchedly annoying and boring department chair stuff, I will do a post explaining more about lexomics, but here's a preview of what I hope to present at the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists conference at Madison this summer)

Untangling the Cynewulfian Corpus with Lexomic and Traditional Methods

At ISAS 2009 our multi-disciplinary team (English, Statistics, Computer Science) demonstrated software that researchers can use to generate statistical profiles of Anglo-Saxon texts. In this paper we present some of the results arrived at by using these tools, showing how, when combined with traditional approaches, lexomic methods can shed light on some long-standing problems in Anglo-Saxon studies. Specifically, we use hierarchical agglomerative clustering to examine relationships of the vocabulary of the signed poems of Cynewulf (Christ II, Juliana, Elene and The Fates of the Apostles) with other poems that have been over the years thought by some scholars to be by Cynewulf or in some way related to his work (Guthlac B, The Phoenix, Andreas, Christ I and Christ III).

Our software tools, whose development was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, allow us to cut poems into sections which we can then compare to each other in terms of vocabulary distribution. In early work on Genesis, Daniel, Azarias and Christ III, we determined that the dendrograms, or tree-diagrams created by hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis could be used to identify sections of poems that are particularly similar to each other, such as lines 279-361 of Daniel with Azarias. We also discovered that sections of poems cluster together by source: the chunks of Genesis B cluster together and separate from those with biblical sources; the section of Daniel influenced by liturgical texts and the portions of Christ III directly influenced by sermons of Caesarius of Arles were likewise separated.

Recognizing the differences between sections of poems and the strong influence of sources enabled us to refine our techniques and avoid the pitfalls of previous attempts to identify digital “signatures” (effectively critiqued by Janet Bately). Combining our more subtle lexomic methods with close reading and philological analysis allows us to determine that the signed Cynewulfian poems have significant similarities in vocabulary distribution (except in sections that are strongly influenced by direct paraphrase of a Latin source, such as much of Juliana). This similarity does not extend to the unsigned poems, with the major exception of most of Guthlac B, which is indeed very similar in vocabulary distribution to the signed poems. The combined lexomic and traditional evidence supports the long-held suspicion that this poem is also by Cynewulf (the poem is acaudate, so the lack of a runic signature is not dispositive). We also note that Christ I and Christ III exhibit different vocabulary distributions from each other and from Christ II, providing additional reasons to reject the one-poem hypothesis put forth so forcefully by Albert S. Cook but questioned by more recent scholars. We then discuss the similarity and difference of sections of the other putatively Cynewulfian poems and the implications of these relationships for the poems’ relative chronology. We conclude by noting that although computer-based and advanced statistical methods can never provide definitive arguments, they can usefully augment traditional analysis.

Tools and software available at http://lexomics.wheatoncollege.edu .

2010-09-15T00:35:00.000-04:00

On Exactitude in Terminology

“A word for which everyone has a different definition, usually unstated, ceases to serve the function of communication and its use results in futile arguments about nothing. There is also a sort of Gresham’s Law for words; redefine them as we will, their worst or most extreme meaning is almost certain to remain current and to tend to drive out the meaning we might prefer.”

-- George Gaylord Simpson
The Major Features of Evolution (1953).

"Imbricated discourses" is a sign of in-group jargon rather than clear thinking: no one can agree exactly on what it means or how "imbricated" is distinct from "partially overlapping" (to recap earlier arguments, "imbricated" means "overlapping just like the tiles on a roof," i.e., the same amount of overlap on each tile. No one, to my knowledge, has explained how discourses could be like this or how we would measure--or even observe--to be sure they were. Thus "imbricated" is a bad metaphor, one that confuses thought rather than clarifying it, and it fails even as a way to avoiding repetition-- for example, saying "overlapping" again and again--because it is opaque to most readers and incorrect in its details.

2010-09-07T11:45:00.000-04:00

Sabbatical Report: Fall 2009-Spring 2010

(this is a copy of the report I just sent to the Provost. The point of posting it here to see for myself if I lived up to my plan. And doing so made me realize that I left out the solid five weeks of work to put in a new grant to the NEH. Oops. Will have to send the Provost a note about that).

My first research leave without a newborn baby in the house was reasonably productive. Although my work did not end up following the exact path I had charted before the sabbatical (in part because I directed two honors theses and taught an experimental class during the leave), I am pleased at what I finished and what is near completion.

The biggest deviation from the plan, and the unexpected element that used the most time, was the need to prepare a revised and expanded edition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics. I did not know that the existing print run would sell out, but when it did, the opportunity to add new material and to make substantial corrections was not one I could pass up. This took much more time than I had anticipated, as I ended up having to proof the text against the manuscript again (for reasons I do not understand, my ability to decipher J.R.R. Tolkien’s handwriting has improved substantially even though I have not been working with it consistently since the first edition). I was able to include much additional material in this edition, including the first ever identification of all the “voices” in Tolkien’s “Babel of voices” allegory. The new edition is in press and will be published by Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies in late 2010 or early 2011.

[in press] J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics. Revised and Expanded Edition. Ed. Michael D. C. Drout. (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2011).

The other unanticipated event was the surprising early success of the lexomic methods that our interdisciplinary group (Mark LeBlanc, Mike Kahn and I) developed under the aegis of our NEH start-up grant. We had originally intended to publish a short demonstration paper. This metamorphosed into a complete methodological explanation the ended up being 60 pages long. To my shock and delight, it was accepted by the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, the oldest, most conservative and most prestigious journal of philology in America. To our knowledge, this is the first time they have agreed to publish material about computer-assisted approaches to texts. This success drove us to write another paper, with co-author Sarah Downey, using lexomic methods to re-date the Old English poem Guthlac A by nearly two centuries and explain details of the text that had been noted as anomalies but never before understood. This paper was accepted, without revisions, by Modern Philology.

[in press] Drout, Michael D.C., Michael J. Kahn, Mark D. LeBlanc and Christina Nelson. “Of Dendrogrammatology: Lexomic Methods for Analyzing the Relationships Among Old English Poems,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology (2010).

[in press] Downey, Sarah, Michael J. Kahn and Mark D. LeBlanc, “’Books Tell Us’: Lexomic and Traditional Evidence for the Sources of Guthlac A. Modern Philology (2010).

Other articles and essays accepted or published include:

[in press] “Albert S. Cook’s Invention of Cynewulf and the History of English Studies in America.” English Studies.

This piece almost made it into PMLA, but, as I feared, pointing out sloppy scholarship and tendentious mis-interpretation by the recent president of the MLA was not the ticket to acceptance. On the other hand, English Studies has a larger and more international audience than PMLA.

[in press] "The Rohirrim, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Problem of Appendix F: Ambiguity and Reference in Tolkien’s Books and Jackson’s Films” in Janice M. Bogstad and Philip E. Kaveny, eds. Picturing Tolkien: Essays on the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings Trilogy. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011).

[in press] Bloch, Bill Goldbloom and Michael D.C. Drout. “Fair and Unfair Division in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.” In Jessica Sklar and Elizabeth Sklar, eds. Mathematics and Popular Culture. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011).

This is the first jointly written publication to come out of Bill Goldbloom Bloch’s and my multi-year collaboration. The paper come directly from out “The Edge of Reason” pair of connected courses. Writing it was so easy that we have more work together planned.

[in press] “‘I am Large, I contain Multitudes’: The Medieval Author in Memetic Terms.” In Slavica Rankovic, et al., eds. Tradition and the Individual Talent: Modes of Authorship in the Middle Ages. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2011).

[in press] “The Council of Elrond, All those Poems, and the Famous F-ing Elves: Strategies for Teaching the Hard Parts of Tolkien.” In Leslie Donovan, ed. Approaches to Teaching J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works. (New York: Modern Language Association, 2011).

[in press] Rebecca Epstein, Michael D.C. Drout and David Bratman. “Bibliography (in English) for 2008,” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 379-98.

[in press] “Foreword: The End of the World in Science Fiction,” In Hunter Liguore, ed. The Last Man Anthology. (Bristol, CT: Sword and Saga Press, 2010).

[in press] “Cumulative Index: Tolkien Studies, Volume I-V,” Tolkien Studies 8 (2011); with Jason Rea, Tara L. McGoldrick, Lauren Provost, Maryellen Groot and Julia Rende.

I also co-edited volume VII of Tolkien Studies. I sometimes can’t believe that we are closing in on the journal’s first decade.

Anderson, Douglas A. Michael D.C. Drout, Verlyn Flieger. Tolkien Studies 7 (2010). West Virginia University Press.

I also completed another revision of my Old English grammar book, re-titled Drout’s Quick and Easy Old English, which I am using this fall in English 208 and for which I will once again be seeking a publisher after what can only be described as being shafted by Broadview Press.

In terms of non-traditional media, I recorded and distributed podcasts of all of Archbishop Wulfstan’s Homilies (in the original Old English). I also recorded a new audio course, this time for a new company, Crescite, which has a slightly different format (though I have not left Recorded Books, they have been proceeding more slowly with new courses). My three episodes in the History Channel’s Clash of the Gods aired during the sabbatical year but were recorded while teaching in 2008-09.

Anglo-Saxon Aloud: The Homilies of Wulfstan http://anglosaxonaloud.com

[in press] Tolkien and the West. Washington, D.C.: Crescite Group, 2011.

So much for the work completed, by my count a new edition, a new volume of a journal, a set of podcasts, a course on CD, a revised grammar book, and nine articles (a few more were published during this time, but they were mostly completed before the sabbatical started).

I also have some work in progress, the most significant item of which is my technical monograph, Tradition and Influence, the follow-up to How Tradition Works. This new book is mostly done, but I still need to complete my chapter on genre (I am probably 15 pages from the end), draft the final short chapter, “The Anxiety of Influence in Memetic Terms,” and polish the entire manuscript. Hopeful completion date: February 1, 2011. More realistic date: September 1, 2011.

I also have a complete draft of my new Tolkien book, The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s World, but this draft needs a great deal of work, as it is really just the argument itself and not the references, footnotes, etc.

Similarly, my book on grammar aimed at a popular audience, Grammar for Fun and Profit, exists partly in draft, partly as audio recordings, but it needs a substantial amount of re-writing.

Philology Reborn, co-authored with Scott Kleinman of Cal State Northridge, has two chapters written and a complete chapter-by-chapter synopsis. It is currently under consideration by Oxford UP.

One more semester without Dept. Chair responsibilities, right now, seems like it would be helpful and could allow me to finish Tradition and Influence and come pretty close to finishing The Tower and the Ruin. But that is not in the cards right now (someone has to be Chair, after all) and it’s not good to be greedy. Indeed, I appreciate very much the privilege of being able to work on my research as intensively as I did this year and have no one to blame but myself for not finishing things more quickly. As Leonard Bernstein supposedly said, to achieve great things one needs a plan and not quite enough time, and I think having to be ready to teach this fall did cause a number of the items above to be finished faster than they might have been. Teaching Tolkien and Anglo-Saxon this fall and Beowulf in the spring will help with all these projects, as I am presenting many of the ideas and arguments in the classroom, and nothing highlights a weak argument like the questions of Wheaton students. Overall, I am pleased with the work I completed during my sabbatical year, though I wish I had been more efficient, particularly at the beginning, and of course the horrible events of late August substantially reduced my productivity for the end of the summer. But I’ll pace myself and be more disciplined on my next research leave which, because of banked time, is the spring semester of 2012.

2010-06-28T15:28:00.000-04:00

Call for Papers: Computational Approaches to Medieval Literature
Kalamazoo 2011

The development and dissemination of electronic editions has opened up new possibilities for the computational and statistical analysis of medieval texts and corpora. Comprehensive collections like the Dictionary of Old English Corpus (for Anglo-Saxon texts) and digital editions of individual works not only serve to disseminate widely and inexpensively various medieval texts, but also provide machine-readable data that can be analyzed using mathematical methods that previously could not easily be applied to medieval texts. Scholars have in recent years used hierarchical agglomerative clustering methods, principle component analysis and other advanced statistical techniques to investigate authorship, influence and the structure of medieval texts. Other methods, such as those pioneered by John Burrows, have been applied more to texts from later periods, but these approaches may also have value for the study of medieval literature in various languages.

In this session we seek to gather together papers on computational approaches to medieval texts so that workers in this new and rapidly developing field can share results and methods. We hope thus to disseminate ideas and methods across research groups and inform the wider scholarly community of the ways in which computational and statistical methods can augment existing work. We also welcome papers that critique computer-aided and statistical methodologies or that modify standard approaches with more traditional methods. Our goal is to see where matters currently stand and encourage other scholars to adopt, modify, engage with and critique the methods themselves and the methodological approach as a whole.

Specific topics may include the types of pre-analysis processing done to texts, the problems of using editions that combine readings from multiple manuscripts, the value of and problems with lemmatization of words, and the possibilities for using computational and statistical methods across as well as within languages.

Send abstracts to mdrout@wheatoncollege.edu

2010-05-20T12:09:00.001-04:00

Lexomics: Gaining Acceptance

[UPDATE: and our Old English Newsletter item which gives explanations and links to the Lexomics website, where you can play with it or download all the tools, is now up on the we here at the Old English Newsletter]

Our huge methodological paper on lexomic analysis was accepted by JEGP a while back. Now, just before leaving for the Kalamazoo conference, I learned that our paper that uses lexomic methods to analyze Guthlac A was accepted by Modern Philology. So at some point in the future you'll be able to read:

Drout, Michael D. C., Michael J. Kahn and Mark D. LeBlanc. “Of Dendrogrammatology: Lexomic Methods for Analyzing the Relationships Among Old English Poems,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology.

Downey, Sarah, Michael D.C. Drout, Michael J. Kahn and Mark D. LeBlanc. “’Books Tell Us’: Lexomic and Traditional Evidence for the Sources of Guthlac A. Modern Philology.

I am in the very home stretches of the final proofing and indexing of the new edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's Beowulf and the Critics but I notice that the publisher has put 2011 as the copyright date, so I guess it will be out after Christmas. It will be printed primarily in paperback, but I'm trying to convince the publisher that there would be interest in a collector's edition if they can make it leather bound or otherwise really nice looking -- the last time I checked the out-of-print edition was selling for over $150.00 on Amazon (and what's really sad is that I have no extra copies to take advantage of this price).

Also, the new technical book is going well and, with a lot of luck will be done and off to a reviewer by the middle of June. Right now the title is: Tradition and Influence: Memetics, Literature and Tenth-Century Anglo-Saxon Culture. It includes chapters on the problems of genre, influence (and uses lexomics), aesthetics, authorship and the "anxiety of influence." Right now I'm struggling to draw "adaptive landscapes" and could really use a pointer to a cheap or free tool that can draw wire-frame terrain (by hand, not by inputting a bunch of data).

The Tolkien book, The Tower and the Ruin, is moving along in parallel, and I'll be switching to a primary focus on that one soon. As part of the process of writing it, I'm going to be recording a new Tolkien audio course, significantly different from my Rings, Swords and Monsters (also sold as Of Sorcerers and Men) that I did for recorded books. The new course will be called something like Tolkien and the West and I expect to do the recording in the beginning of July. Then I'll teach Tolkien this fall, testing out the chapters of the new book in class, so that that book will probably go out for review in December (though it could go earlier).

And Tolkien Studies volume 7 is mostly at the printer and needs only final proofing of some sections. We had some snags this year and are a little late, but hopefully we will still be out in July as we usually are.

Too much stuff! And I'm heading off to NY for the Audie awards next week (though I don't expect that I'll win, it's great to be a finalist in such a big group). But it's better to be busy than be bored.

2010-05-10T14:20:00.001-04:00

The argument of the new book, Tradition and Influence

A meme is a replicated bit of human culture. Memes evolve through Darwinian processes of differential survival and replication mediated through the human perceptual and cognitive systems. Memes combine into meme-plexes, which are then subject to selection as groups. One meme-plex has influenced another when a significant portion of the second meme-plex contains sub-units that have come from the first. A tradition is a special case of influence in which some elements of the structure of the meme-plex have caused it to be preserved substantially in the same form across multiple generations (i.e., the subsequent meme-plex contains all or nearly all the sub-units of the antecedent meme-plex and no others). The structure of traditional meme-plexes includes three components, recognitio, actio and justificatio, with the justificatio component either in the process of becoming or having become the Universal Tradition Meme: ‘because we have always done so.’ Each of the three aspects of a tradition is subject to different selection pressures. The presence of the Universal Tradition Meme produces selection pressure for traditions to link up with each other. The stability caused by traditions enables certain cultural phenomena, including traditional referentiality and communicative economy. Text-based traditions operate somewhat differently from traditions that are not textual, but the underlying processes are the same. The details of these processes and their interaction with the ever-changing physical and cultural world is the subject of the rest of this book.

Good question by John Cowan below: How is this different from my How Tradition Works. What I've presented above is the core argument of the theory, and it has evolved somewhat substantially since How Tradition Works, since I have refined and extend it in a variety of areas and tweaked the argument throughout. The most significant changes are my recognition that I could not just keep waving my hands at the problems of the perceptual, congitive and mnemonic systems, that instead had to go and try to learn a bunch of material about cognitive psychology, and that the variation and mediation imposed by these systems is responsible for both change and stability in memetic population.
Also, the big thing about this book is that we can see influence in action, even though that action behind the scenes in a way. We've developed "lexomic" techniques to detect influence, and we can even explain, statistically and mathematically, how we can do this. So the ideas (somewhat changed) of the old How Tradition Works are in Tradition and Influence, but the new book is a much-more-developed approach.

2010-04-26T12:32:00.000-04:00

"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics": The Brilliant Essay that Broke Beowulf Studies

I have an essay up at the Scholars Forum of Lotplaza: Link Here.

I discuss some of the negative effects of Tolkien's great essay. Usually they have very good comments at Lotrplaza. To see them you click on the "scholars forum" link at the top of the page and then select the discussion thread.

2010-04-14T22:59:00.003-04:00

Catching Up

I seem to have this tendency to write a provocative post just before I leave for a place where I don't have internet access. In this case, it was the post about my dream school and a spring trip to hike in Shenandoah National Park. With the dog and his short little legs, we went up and down mountains, splashed in waterfalls, and I caught my first few brook trout on a fly (of course it took me many, many years and my daughter caught one on her first try). Now I'm off to give a lecture at Washington College in Maryland, and I arrive back just in time for my son's sixth birthday party and a bunch of relatives arriving for that and because my brother is running the Boston Marathon.

So I'll just use this post to tie up some loose ends and clarify a few things.

First, one reason I haven't posted much is that I was in proofreading hell. But the new edition of Beowulf and the Critics is now proofed and back to the publisher, so that's moving along. It may be a while, though, before it actually gets printed, as we still have to index (though I can in some ways just mod the old index), but it's much closer now, and there's a 2010 date on the copyright page.

This is a completely corrected, revised and expanded edition. The expansions include the text of a previously unknown note by Tolkien that was part of the drafting of Beowulf and the Critics (found by Christopher Tolkien and included with his permission in this volume), an identification of all the voices in the "Babel of Voices" allegory, and a discussion and illustration of the structural evolution of "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." The corrections are thoroughgoing: I proofed the entire thing against the microfilm (my reading of Tolkien's handwriting has inexplicably gotten better) and received help from many scholars as well.

Now, on to Professor Drout's Academy of Wisdom and Learning. I received many interesting comments and emails, which I will try to address at some point. But at this time I just want to say this: I agree that it's not always the case that people with Ph.D.'s are better teachers than people without them. That wasn't the point of the post or the plan. The point was to suggest a model of an academy that would create an educational atmosphere that would be highly beneficial to certain students (and certain teachers). I think a place where the teachers were all new Ph.D.'s, all starting on the academic career path, all wanting to learn how to teach, and all part of a research organization would produce such an environment. I specifically designed the plan not to be a permanent career for anyone. The point is for people to flow through the system, share ideas, get energized, provide their own energy, and inspire some students, and then go off and do great things elsewhere. That's also why I chose the salary base of $ 42,000 per year. It's competitive for adjunct pay, but not something that a professor would stay at for more than two years (and it also illustrates, by the way, how bad the pay is for adjunct teachers, when 42K is considered a pretty good one- or two-year position by people who have on average 11 years of higher education).

There are surely weaknesses in the plan, and a school would probably be better served in some ways (not all) by long-term, experienced teachers who stuck to the institution. But I think that the flow of new talent through the system, the chance to do research in an interdisciplinary environment and involve high-school students in that research, and the chance to create an environment in which teaching and research were shared and valued and which in turn would show the students that their intellectual contributions were valued, well, I think it would have been a cool place to go as a student, as a teacher and, now, as the head of school (if some philanthropist wants to give it a shot).

Now to finish that lecture I'm giving tomorrow...

2010-03-27T13:48:00.002-04:00

My Dream: Professor Drout's Academy of Wisdom and Learning

I have an idea about how simultaneously to improve high school education for some kids and help out with the job crisis in academia. Here it is.

Just down the street from my house is an empty school building that was for a long time St. Mary's School in Dedham and then housed the British School of Boston and then the Rashi School (or vice versa) before these moved to new buildings. If a benevolent philanthropist or someone with the political and legal skills to create a charter school were to help me, here's what I would do:

I would open a school staffed entirely with new Ph.D.'s, probably mostly from local New England universities, who wanted to get teaching experience. It would pay $42,000 per year with full benefits on two-year contracts. The idea would be that faculty would teach at the Academy as a way-station on their academic careers, kind of a teaching and research post-doc. They would receive intensive on-the-job training about how to teach (because there is no tougher audience than high-school kids), though even if they weren't great teachers at the start, they would have energy and excitement about their work and would become good teachers.

Everyone would be expected to do research as well. We would have weekly colloquia and presentations, part of the benefits would include Interlibrary Loan and access to academic databases, etc, and time would be set aside each week and within each day to do and present research. The headmaster (me, to start) would advise and support the staff in interdisciplinary research efforts, bring in speakers, etc.

The "catch" would be that the students would have to be included in this research in various ways--you'd have to design your projects so that students could help, and this working on cutting-edge research projects would be a way to focus student learning. If a student was helping, for example, on a 19th-century history project, then the teacher would be teaching the students the background they needed to understand the project and contribute to it.

There would be no entrance examination for the school, and we would take students who were struggling and students who already were academically excellent (so much so that their parents wanted them to be taught by 100% Ph.D.'s.) The only requirements would be an entrance interview with the headmaster for both student and parents. Ideally the benevolent philanthropist or clever political and legal person who helped me set this up would have made it so that there was no tuition, but there would be some contribution expected from every family--volunteering, raising money for field trips, etc. (rather than writing checks, which some families can't afford).

The faculty in the school would be happy and fulfilled because they would still be doing their research and in fact might be producing more as part of an interdisciplinary, close-knit scholarly community. Taking a two-year position at the Academy (note, I would be happy to name it after anybody who wants to endow it) would be a way to improve one's career prospects, research productivity and financial bottom line. Instead of rushing from one adjunct job to the next, teachers would be in one place, earning a fair wage under good working conditions and where they were respected.

Students would have the benefits of an all-Ph.D. faculty who would every single day model for them the value of intellectual effort. The faculty would make up for in energy what they might lack in experience, and students could count on being as entertained as they were challenged (because we know how new Ph.D.s are about their research projects). Students who had been bored or isolated in the traditional school environment would have an opportunity to devote themselves to intellectual pursuits and to go as far and as fast as they wanted. Students who had struggled would suddenly have a peer group that cared deeply about academics.

I know there are a million problems with this dream, most of all that I lack the political and legal skills to bring it off, and I don't have any money to start the school. But I also think that within this crazy idea there might be the core of a way to address two very significant problems: the failures of the educational system (particular for kids who want to be intellectual) and the job crisis in academia. I think that a lot of faculty who tried it, and didn't see taking a job like this as a year or two lost to research but instead an opportunity to learn some new skills while earning a living wage, would discover how much they loved teaching. I think the students would learn more in a few years at the Academy than nearly anywhere else, and I think I could create the kind of intellectual community that we would need.

So, if any benevolent philanthropists or charter school experts are reading, please get in touch.

2010-03-18T15:23:00.002-04:00

The Prototype of the Manuscript DNA Extractor Now Sits on My Desk

On Tuesday I went to Northwestern University of meet with the team of engineers* who have worked for the past twenty weeks to bring into being my idea of a device to non-destructively extract DNA from medieval manuscripts. Working at the Segal Design Institute under the direction of Professors Stacy Benjamin and Barbara Shwom and advised by Kiki Zissimopoulos, and with some occasional input from me, Caroline Dougherty, Rahul Jain, Regan Radcliffe and Mimi Zou designed a simple machine that can insert a tiny needle into the edge of a manuscript leaf without leaving any marks that can be seen by the naked eye.

It was really a great, great experience to work with these students over many weeks and then to head out to Northwestern (where my wife did her Ph.D.) and see their presentation. The design is simple but sophisticated, and the final report includes testing data, complete drawings and a beautifully written explanation of how they arrived at the design, why it is a good one, and where it might go in the future. I was blown away not only by the quality of the engineering, but by how incredibly professional these students are. If I were recruiting for a company right now, I would hire them all, in a heartbeat. The prototype is elegant, and it's one of those well-made little machines that you can't keep your hands off. Considering that my first drawing was literally done on an envelope, and that I didn't even scan if for them but took a digital photo and emailed it, their ability to see the good idea at the heart of the mess I gave them and refine it over multiple iterations shows that they really learned their craft, and that Northwestern taught them well.

What Northwestern has done with their engineering program is remarkable. From a freshman design course that is completely integrated with their writing requirements (which may be why these students are good writers and communicators as well as good engineers), to the Ford design building, in which a complete shop floor, with bandsaws, lathes, etc., etc., is not only the center of the place, but visually the center of everything... It makes me want to go back to school to be an engineer (and if you have a kid thinking about going to college for engineering, you owe it to that kid--and to yourself--to check out this program; it integrates 'hands on' work with all the math, computer-assisted design, etc., you expect from engineering, and the students all seemed to be having a blast).

As for the extractor, plus the rest of the Sheep DNA project, we are getting pretty close. Now that we have a prototype, we need to figure out how to refine it and to manufacture it inexpensively (I'll be working with another team of engineers next year, I hope). And, from the biochemical side, we are about half an order of magnitude away from where we want to be: We thus far seem to need about 10 mg of material, and we really would like that to be 5 (though the extractor could extract 10 mg without too much trouble; just iterate the sampling).

Now I think my next job is going to be convincing librarians that a set of 40-micron diameter holes in the edge (even the binding edge) of a MSS is acceptable. I think what I will do is to sample my own manuscript leaf, hand it to librarians, and ask them if they can figure out, even using a magnifying glass, where the samples were taken. If they can't maybe they'll be willing to let me sample one folio from each quire in a MSS or two.

This plan assumes that we can get the biochemistry working (and if anyone has a contact with a "Clean Lab" that handles ancient DNA, let me know, please). If we can, we will be pretty close to being off to the races, especially since the team of computer scientists I'm working with are well on their way to having the manuscript database and visualization tool going.

The collaboration with Northwestern got started because Prof. Greg Olsen, of the Steel Research Group, asked me for specifications for the sword that would be required to slay a dragon. The Dragonslayer sword (which when finished will be the hardest in the history of the world, and will also contain meteorite iron) is coming along, as is a Beowulfian Seax, which the group made this year. And in return for some minor consulting about the Seax, Prof. Olsen connected me with Prof. Benjamin and the Segal Design Institute. I'm really grateful to him, and to all the people that have contributed to this insane project, which may well just end up working. Keep your fingers crossed, though, because there are still a lot of challenges ahead of us.

* Doing transdisciplinary research is worth it solely for being able to write "...a team of engineers" in relation to one of my projects.

2010-03-15T15:29:00.001-04:00

Tolkien Bibliography Online

For the past nine years or so, my students and I have been creating a bibliographic database of scholarship on J.R.R. Tolkien. For a long time this database was on Filemaker and thus not accessible outside of the Wheaton campus. Now, thanks to Patrick Rashleigh and others, the database is available on the web, and I encourage you to use it at http://tolkienbibliography.org.

There are over 600 entries right now, with at least 100 more scheduled to go up between now and the end of the summer. Most entries include full citation information, a summary of the article, and keywords for ease in searching (the 'location' information is usually just to our own very large collection of photocopied articles). You can therefore, at least hypothetically, search for all articles about the Anglo-Saxons, or the problem of evil, or eucatastrophe.

The bibliography is copious but not exhaustive. It has been compiled by students, though checked by me, but sometimes what happens is that a very enthusiastic student takes on a big pile of articles to read and summarize, then things come up, and the articles never do get into the database. So there are many lacunae, particularly in some of the more recent work. I would highly recommend cross-referencing your searches with the yearly bibliographies in Tolkien Studies, which are not precisely part of this project (though there has been some overlap).

Other gaps in the bibliography come from my own work mostly not being there. For internal purposes only (i.e., not for the web), students graded each article A-F. I did not think it was a good idea to put them in the position of having to rate my work, so it did not end up in the assignments.

Some day this may be the complete bibliography that Tolkien studies needs, and until then I hope it is a useful resource both for scholars and for students writing papers.

This project began when the late Marilyn Todesco asked me to find some summer work for her work-study student. "Search for 'Tolkien' in MLA Bibliography and then print out, ILL, copy everything you find," I said to Beth Affanato, having no idea how much that was. Nearly ten years and 600 articles later, we see yet another way that Marilyn contributed to the life of Wheaton College. She is still sorely missed.

Finally, I would like to thank the many students (and two doctoral students from Europe) who have contributed to the bibliography. They include:

Beth Affanato
Hilary Wynne
Kate Malone Hesser
Laura Kalafarski
John Walsh
Christopher Scotti
Shawn McKee
Melissa Higgins
Melissa Smith-MacDonald
Stefanie Olsen
Kathryn Paar
Jason Rea
Lauren Provost
Tara McGoldrick
Julia Rende
Rebecca Epstein
Marcel Bülles
Gergely Nagy
Namiko Hitotsubashi

2010-02-27T16:33:00.002-05:00

Some of my summer faculty/student research this year
(if we get the funding)

Lexomic Analysis of ‘Winchester Vocabulary’ Texts

We propose to use Lexomic methods of analysis to try to determine relationships among prose texts from the Anglo-Saxon period. Lexomic methods, developed by Wheaton Professors Mark LeBlanc, Mike Kahn and Mike Drout, employ computer-based statistical techniques to find the structures within and the relationships between texts. The Lexomic Project at Wheaton has already published significant research on the interrelationships of Anglo-Saxon poems and the significance of divisions within poems. This summer’s project will focus on the next frontier: the large corpus of Old English prose texts, in particular those associated with the tenth-century Benedictine Reform.

The culture of tenth-century England was shaped in large part by the political, cultural and religious movement called the Benedictine Reform. A small group of monks led by Dunstan (eventually Archbishop of Canterbury) and Æthelwold (eventually Bishop of Winchester), assisted by a series of sympathetic kings, took over religious life in England. In the 1970s scholars Helmut Gneuss and Walter Hostetter identified the “Winchester Vocabulary,” a set of words that the Benedictine Reformers used in specific semantic contexts. Hostetter showed that the Winchester Vocabulary spread from Æthelwold’s Winchester to other major reform centers and eventually ended up influencing late Anglo-Saxon throughout England. In the late 1990s, Mechthild Gretsch demonstrated that the roots of the vocabulary came from Glastonbury in the 940s, when Æthelwold and Dunstan, in internal exile, spent years studying the work of the early Anglo-Saxon writer Aldhelm, in particular his de Virginitate. Gneuss, Hostetter, Gretsch and other members of the “Munich school” of Anglo-Saxonists identified multiple Winchester Vocabulary texts, but their methods are extremely time-consuming, somewhat subjective, and require many educated or even inspired guesses. Lexomic methods are not subject to these same constraints. The computer does not get tired or bored, and our screening methods can process many texts to look for subtle clues which we then follow up using traditional philological methods.

But there is a significant hurdle we must pass before we can use Lexomics to examine the full range of the Winchester vocabulary. Unlike the poetry, nearly all of the major prose texts exist in multiple copies. When the manuscripts were edited to produce the versions that are now used in electronic corpora like the Dictionary of Old English corpus, editors produced “best texts” by collating manuscript witnesses. Thus the electronic edition of an Anglo-Saxon prose text can often represent no single manuscript. Our lexomic methods are considerably hampered when they do not have the raw material of spelling and grammatical variation to work with. Thus the edited prose texts are difficult to use, as editors have squeezed our variability in order to make single, consistent texts.

Phoebe’s work this summer will be to mitigate this problem by converting the “best-text” electronic editions to multiple versions that are consistent with the manuscripts. To do this she will begin with the electronic file of a given text and the scholarly edition from which it is drawn. Then, using the apparatus criticus of the edition, she will modify the file to make it like one of the major manuscript witnesses using a set of mark-up conventions developed by Prof. Scott Kleinman of Cal State Northridge. Phoebe is familiar with mark-up conventions from Prof. LeBlanc’s “Computing for Poets” course, and she understands the medieval cultural context of the Winchester vocabulary texts from Prof. Drout’s “Medieval Literature” course. Once the files are marked up to be consistent with their original manuscript witnesses, Phoebe will work with Prof. Drout, Prof. LeBlanc and Prof. Kahn as part of the Lexomics Project. She will attend our weekly or twice-per-week meetings, suggest and run experiments, and help write up the final results in one or more jointly authored papers.

Student’s Statement ###

2010-02-25T15:18:00.002-05:00

The Balance Problem

(I was going to call this "The Balance Fallacy," but that's too strong a term, though I think there is a flaw in the logic).

In my previous post I quoted The Chancellor of the Pennsylvania state system who wrote: "if rising scholars need to give up any semblance of a normal life to obtain a doctorate or tenure, then that program's values are out of alignment. I, for one, do not want institutions full of people who sold their souls for a degree or for tenure. I want balanced, well-rounded scholars."

I criticized these sentiments, pointing out that if you have one tenure line to award, it seems to me that it would go to the scholar with five excellent articles and two innovative classes rather than the more "balanced" scholar with three excellent articles and one excellent class. Tom Elrod at Wordisms disagrees, stating:

Maybe, but if we develop an academic culture where the maximum "success" is pursued at all times, we end up with universities filled with people with little or no "life" outside of their job. That's not good. It ultimately gives us less creative scholars and less dynamic universities. Humanities scholars have to be in touch with "the human experience" beyond their subject. A hyper success-driven academy also encourages only a certain type of person to enter academia: usually single, white, and male. It's just not good for demographic or intellectual diversity.

.

I understand what people are trying to get at, but I don't see how you can use that to award scarce resources to people. Let me give a hypothetical.

Let's say the me and one of my colleagues are up for the same endowed chair. The committee can't give it to both of us. Let's say that the deadline for that chair is Friday, and I'm not done with one more essay that I could include in the application packet. My colleague is in the same situation, and, as of now (Thursday afternoon) our applications are basically equal. She decides to stay at the office, work all night, finish the essay and include it in her application materials. I, however, being 'balanced,' decide to pick my kids up from school and drop off the skateboard-based parade float representing Alaska (instead of asking my wife to do it), cook dinner instead of ordering pizza, walk the dog all the way down to the river instead of just around the back yard, take the kids rock climbing after dinner and then watch the Olympics for a while. She turns in the extra essay. I don't.

How can the committee (which, by the way, doesn't know what I chose to do Thursday afternoon and evening) fairly award the endowed chair to me instead of to her? (Remember we've defined the application packets as being equal before this point). I may be happier, I may be more balanced, but I just can't think of a way to see it as fair that I would get the chair and she would not.

This is what seems to me to be missing from most of these arguments about 'balance.' How do you measure it as a contributing factor in a fair way? How are you going to award scarce resources if not by productivity? I never get anything but the most nebulous answers, which makes me suspicious, suspicious that underlying the idea of balance is a desire to have scarce resources awarded based on factors like demography, seniority, collegiality or politics. I'm not so keen on that.

And I wonder, sometimes, if the 'balanced' argument isn't a disguised way of denigrating the efforts of those who, because they don't have advantages of pedigree or attractiveness or easy sociability, are a threat to those who do and want to keep the advantages that come with those gifts. If you don't have some quasi-objective (and it will only ever be quasi) way of measuring the contribution to the institution, won't all resources just be awarded to members of a in-group, a coterie? Is that the hidden agenda behind the 'balance' argument: give things to people who are more like 'us' rather than to driven people who aren't content with their current estate? Again, forgive me for being too Foucaultian (though I've been reading Nietzche--more of a nutbar than I'd remembered--lately, not Foucault), but I do wonder about the deeper motives. There's at least a whiff of people, under the guise of 'balance,' wanting to keep the wrong kind of people (the grinds, the immigrants, the people from non-wealthy background) from doing extra work so as to move up. For their own good, of course.

Now, if you'll excuse me, even though I haven't finished my essay I have to pick up my kids, drop off Mt. Denali, walk the dog, cook dinner and go rock climbing. I may bump the Olympics from the queue, however, so that I can do some work later.

2010-02-24T10:46:00.002-05:00

Cutting Through a Little BS About How Tough Tenure Is

If you want to be really depressed about academia, read these reactions to the Huntsville murders in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Let me try to boil things down to the simplest possible terms:

(1) There are not as many paying tenured positions in colleges and universities as there are people who want those positions.

(2) Because of this mismatch in numbers, there must be some way of allocating those positions.

(3) You can either fully allocate at the time of hiring or later in the process.

(System A) If everyone or nearly everyone you hire 'automatically' gets tenure, then you've decided to make a very significant allocation decision based on on-paper materials and a brief interview. The hiring process will therefore become extremely high stakes (even more so than it is now), and therefore getting hired will be exceedingly difficult.

(System B) If, on the other hand, you allocate positions based more on post-hiring performance, then getting hired will be somewhat less difficult but getting tenure will be much harder.

*

Because of the mismatch noted above, in either system the requirements for getting hired or getting tenure will continue to ratchet up until the number of people 'qualified' matches the number of positions. This means that simply having earned a Ph.D. will not be the sole 'qualification' for a position (note my use of scare quotes) and additional "qualifications" will evolve (these will of course include luck, political connections, etc).

This situation cannot be fixed as long as there exists the mismatch of the number of people who want to be professors with the number of paid positions to be a professor.

There is no solution that can solve this problem, just as there is no solution to solve the 'problem' of the number of people who want to be famous authors, movie actors, rock stars or professional athletes being far greater than the number of job openings for authors, actors, rock stars and athletes.

Making it easier to get tenure once hired does not solve the problem, it only pushes the decision back from the tenure process (where the candidate is known and has a six-year track record) to the hiring process (where the candidate is less known and has only a grad school record).

The desire to make it easier to get tenure once someone is hired may seem kind to the particular person (whom you know as an individual), but it is unfair to the many, many other people who would like that job, who may be more qualified, but who haven't had a chance, possibly because they were passed over in the hiring, possibly because they entered the job market a few years later, etc. So by reducing the requirements for tenure--whatever they are--you are doing an injustice to all of these people.

Reducing the number of Ph.D.s awarded, a proposal mooted frequently (usually by people who already have Ph.D.s; people applying to grad school who want to get Ph.D.s. are usually less keen on the idea) does not solve the problem, it only pushes the decision process back from the hiring process to the graduate school entrance process, where the candidate has even less of a track record.

If the number of Ph.D. slots were radically reduced, a person who did not go to an elite institution and compiled a stellar record while there would not be able to pursue a Ph.D. and become a professor.

That in turn means that very significant decisions with long-term ramifications will be based in large part of the performance of students when they are juniors in high school. The choices you make when you are sixteen or seventeen years old--or maybe when you are eighteen or nineteen--would shape your permanent employment possibilities in ways even greater than they do today.

As long as the demand for a thing--professor jobs--is greater than the supply of that thing, the 'cost' of it will increase. The Chancellor of the Pennsylvania state system writes: "if rising scholars need to give up any semblance of a normal life to obtain a doctorate or tenure, then that program's values are out of alignment. I, for one, do not want institutions full of people who sold their souls for a degree or for tenure. I want balanced, well-rounded scholars."

Nice sentiments, but I would ask Chancellor Cavanaugh how he is going to allocate scarce resources: to the person who has a "semblance of a normal life" or the person who works the hardest for it? If I am willing to put in only 40 hours per week of work to get a tenured position, should I really take that position away from someone who is willing to put in 50 hours per week?

What should the allocation be based on, then? Where I went to undergraduate? Where I went to graduate school? People pay lip service to the 'quality' of research being better than quantity, but aren't two excellent articles better and two innovative classes better than one excellent article and one innovative class?

And let me tie this back to the murdering freak, Dr. Amy Bishop, who had very serious issues (such as killing her brother, beating people up in IHOP over a booster seat, and possibly mailing bombs to people). I am probably not the first to have dealt with the entitlement mentality of people who went to extremely elite institutions for undergraduate, continued for grad school and then are shocked and offended that they ended up not back at those elite institutions, but at "lesser" places and then found themselves, even at the "lesser" place not as good as someone with a humbler pedigree. These people, because they are not criminally insane, don't shoot anyone and, thankfully, settle for sneering, griping and politics. But the root sense of entitlement festers there.

Forgive me for being too Foucaltian, then, when I say that calls to restrict the number of Ph.D.s produced, for example, or to lessen tenure requirements so as to make the hiring decision carry more weight, come in part from a desire to remove competition from people from humbler backgrounds who want a professorial job very much indeed and are willing to put in the hours to get one. The system is extremely flawed, but putting more weight on the earlier part of the process seems like it will have the effect of making certain elites have an even greater advantage than they do now.

I don't think that the current system is good by any means, only that it is marginally better than the proposed alternatives. At least people have freedom and a chance as opposed to being locked out of a career because, hypothetically, you turned down admission to the Ivy school so as to live closer to a girlfriend in college (or, more seriously, as happened to one close friend, your mother died from cancer your junior year in high school and so your previous straight-A grades suffered significantly, causing you to get into Rutgers instead of Princeton).

The current system is wasteful and cruel because people put in years of effort to give themselves a chance at a job but then don't have a good place to turn if the chance doesn't work out. But this is not the slightest bit different from the entertainment, publishing and sports industries. Yet we don't hear calls to keep kids from practicing their music or their acting or their writing or their baseball skills, even though the chance of their making a living in these fields, and the financial payoff for years of work, might be even lower than in academia.

And here, I think, is the psychological root of the problem. People in entertainment, art, sports, politics and publishing tend not to have achieved nearly all of their early success mostly by being dutiful even though the successful ones work extremely hard. Academics, on the other hand, since grade school have been rewarded for being dutiful. When dutiful is not enough--when talent in multiple areas, and, most significantly LUCK--becomes a very large variable in the equation, the academic personality revolts and thinks things are unfair and need to be change.

Things are indeed unfair. I'm not the starting second basement for the Boston Red Sox, people have not filled Giants Stadium to hear Mike Drout sing and play guitar for the Tattered Remnants, and none of my books are best-sellers yet. There weren't enough of these jobs to go around, just as there are not enough professor jobs to go around. Yet no one is calling for professional baseball or the recording industry or the publishing world to discourage people from playing Little League or taking guitar lessons or writing novels. We should think about why the same situation in academia is seen as a failing, and we should be exceedingly careful that attempts to fix the system don't end up imposing one that is even more unfair and destructive. Freedom needs to include the freedom to take risks that don't pay off: when you want something very valuable, that a lot of other people want, there is unlikely to be a clear path to getting it.

2010-02-18T14:04:00.002-05:00

Unexpected Good News: An Audie Finalist

Just heard from Recorded Books that:

"We’re thrilled to announce that our Modern Scholar course "A Way with Words IV: Understanding Poetry" by Professor Michael D।C. Drout of Wheaton College has been named as a finalist in the "Original Works" category for a 2010 Audie® Award. The Audies, sponsored by the Audio Publishers Association (APA), is the premier awards program in the United States recognizing distinction in audiobooks and spoken word entertainment. Professor Drout has been one of our most popular lecturers with 9 courses in our archives, including three others in the "A Way with Words" series. The Audies will be awarded at the Audie Gala on May 25 in New York City."

I really wasn't expecting this, so it was a great boost on an otherwise difficult day (arguing for people's jobs in front of the Provost--keep your fingers crossed, but I think she understood the situation). I'm really happy with how this course came out, so I'm glad other people enjoyed it also.

2010-02-15T23:50:00.002-05:00

Give the People What They Want

Feeling particularly cynical about academia, I was thinking about how sometimes a particular essay ends up making a reputation for someone, and then, many years after the reputation has been made, the elite positions attained, you go back and reads the essay, and you realize that it wasn't all that great, that there were major flaws, and you wonder, why did this essay do so much for this person's reputation?

The answer, I think, is that the essay gave the people what they wanted. And for doing that, the author was rewarded.

Sometimes this is done is a relatively small-scale way: the critical establishment doesn't like a claim and so the board of a major journal decides to reinforce the orthodoxy. For example, Patrick Conner makes some very significant claims about the Exeter Book. These are never published in Anglo-Saxon England, but Richard Gameson's "refutation" of those claims is published at exceedingly great length. Likewise, and much more egregiously, Tom Shippey writes a critique of some of Walter Goffart's theories about Beowulf being influenced by a specific Latin text. Almost immediately Goffart's critique of Shippeys' piece appears in Anglo-Saxon England even though other articles, already accepted but not published, had been languishing for (literally) years.

But sometimes the "establishment" is just about everyone in a field. An inconvenient set of facts has come to light, or a new theory has challenged some significant orthodoxies, or a revisiting of historiography has shown that a foundational claim is problematic. When it is not just a minor conspiracy of editors, but the sense of the field as a whole, an essay can become immensely influential and its author celebrated for doing the job that the field wanted done, even though the essay, in hindsight, wasn't particularly good.

Larry Benson's "The Literary Character of Anglo-Saxon Formulaic Poetry," PMLA 81 (1966): 334-41 is the perfect example of such an essay. Enormously influential at the time, this essay is embarrassingly bad when you actually read it as opposed to mindlessly citing it to show that Anglo-Saxon texts derived from literary sources have the same 'formulaic density' as those that might be oral compositions. Setting aside the fact that formulaic density is a terrible measure of orality (a point that had been made by Albert Lord in the 1960s), Benson's essay still fails to do anything more than assemble some clumsy statistics that clump together all different kinds of formulas and quasi formulas without reasonable differentiation. Even worse, Benson is essentially searching for Homeric formulas in Anglo-Saxon texts, even though the Anglo-Saxon system works much differently. The essay may be useful as a counterpoint to the somewhat over-the-top cheerleading for orality done by Francis Magoun, but as an argument on its own, it should have been convincing to no one.

Yet it was convincing, not because of its intrinsic merit, but because it gave a lot of literary scholars in the 1960s exactly what they wanted: a reason to ignore all that new, confusing oral tradition stuff. Benson was rewarded for this with publication in PMLA (which really doesn't publish much medieval scholarship any more, though it did back then) and widespread citation.

There are other examples, but this is just the most egregious that I know. Efforts to locate Beowulf firmly in time of the manuscript (I'm not really talking about Kevin Kiernan's work here, even though he does this, because Kevin isn't giving anyone what they wanted) might be an example. I think that in another ten years people will see that Spivak's "Three Women's Texts" and Said's Orientalism are also examples of giving people what they wanted (a reason to rush as fast as possible to postcolonialist political readings) but aren't particularly well done in themselves.

The elephant in the room, though, would be J.R.R. Tolkien's "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". This text, so dear to my heart and which I've worked on for so many years, could be the ultimate example of giving the people what they wanted. The field didn't know it, I think, but it dearly wanted Beowulf as a literary work rather than something historical. Tolkien gave them this, and so in that sense I would have to damn him like I do Benson, Spivak or Said. But there's something different about "The Monsters and the Critics," also, because Tolkien wasn't only giving the people what they wanted. Yes, they got their literary Beowulf, but Tolkien also wanted them to see how the literary rose out of the historical. Tolkien thought that the Beowulf-poet knew his history, that references, as Tolkien saw them, to the Heruli or to Scedelandum in, or to the Heathobards or to Hengest were basically historically accurate. That wasn't what the field, at the time, wanted from "The Monsters and the Critics," and so it didn't take that path (and to be fair, Tolkien was not exactly clear about the specifics of his views; see Finn and Hengest, where the nearly the whole story has to be pieced together from footnotes). It took what it wanted and rewarded Tolkien for providing that.

The lesson seems to be that if you want to be influential and eventually powerful, give the people what they want.

(And if you care about the intellectual quality of your field, you might want to strongly question--even stubbornly resist--getting what you think you want).

2010-02-04T15:19:00.002-05:00

Crazy Sheep DNA from Medieval Manuscripts Project: Update

For quite a number of years now I have been involved with a long-term interdisciplinary project to extract DNA from medieval parchment and use the information so retrieved to help figure out relationships between manuscripts.

The project started back in 2005 or so, and for a while was more speculation and planning than anything else. Then I got some summer funding and trained a student in paleography while she simultaneously learned how to do Polymerase Chain Reaction work in Biology (she was a Bio major who has since gone on to medical school). A second student followed up and extracted more DNA from medieval parchment (I bought a leaf and a fragment at Kalamazoo for this purpose).

But we always had fears about contamination: although we did get what looked to be ovine DNA, we had some issues with our controls, making it seem like we might have had a contaminated room or contaminated reagents. Which is why I didn't rush into print or publicity like some other groups (who shall remain nameless, and really could have been more polite about priority and public discussion, but let that pass): we had the data a long time ago, but we just couldn't be sure.

Today, however, we confirmed as closely as we could that the apparent contamination was from human, not ovine, DNA, and so the previous results (success in extraction) will most likely stand up. We are running tests again, and today got confirmation that we got sheep DNA from modern parchment (thanks, Pergamana!). The two next steps are to go back to the medieval parchment and to see how small a sample we can use. Our results on modern parchment were done on 25mg of material: about 3x5 mm, which is too large to use on a lot of manuscripts (though might be useful for binding fragments, etc.). Librarians just aren't going to let you snip off even a corner that small (and rightly so). However, if we can reduce the necessary sample size to 2.5 mg, that's another story.

At the same time, we need a good way of getting samples that isn't destructive. That has been the project of a bunch of amazing engineering students at Northwestern University, with whom I've been working to design a Sheep DNA Extractor (a more accurate description is that I throw out crazy ideas and give them sketches on cocktail napkins, and they make cool prototypes that seem to work).

Hopefully these two strands of effort will come together in the next two weeks, when we finally get some data on the minimum sample size and the Northwestern students then choose which of their cool designs work.

The next step will be designing the database into which this information will go and a user interface both for inputting the information and for retrieving and manipulating it. That's where the Computer Science majors at Wheaton come in: for their senior seminar project, I am their "client" and they are going to work with me to design and program all the software.

The overall plan is that at the end of this year, we can present an integrated project, from procedures for sample-taking that is not visibly destructive, to the biological work to extract the DNA, to the database for storing it, to the software which looks for patterns and then allows readers to access the information.

This is one of the harder things that I have done, because I'm coordinating a number of disparate efforts, each of which has a different timetable, different problems and and different priorities: it reminds me of trying to cook a big meal, rushing from pot to pan to over to chopping block, juggling things frantically. But that's also what makes it fun.

And who knows, once I write this all up and present the still-secret extraction method and the interface and the plan for going forward, maybe some funding body or wealthy philanthropist will give the project some support.

In any event, and even before finishing (and of course any part or parts could still crash and burn), this has definitely been worth it, because it has given me an excuse to hang out in the Science Center and worth with biologists, computer scientists and engineers. All because I gave Scott McLemee a crazy answer to a question in 2005.

(by the way, as far as I know the first person to have the idea of tracing manuscripts through sheep DNA was Greg Rose, who told me about his idea in September 2001).

2010-01-25T13:47:00.003-05:00

Sabbatical Update

My apologies, dear readers: this post is more for my benefit than yours. As a way of making sure I am being productive, I figured I would keep track of what I've been doing on my sabbatical, which I am counting as having started on July 1. Since then:

Things Completed

1. New edition (revised, expanded) of Beowulf and the Critics: completed and to publisher.

2. Article written and accepted: "The Rohirrim, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Problem of Appendix F: Ambiguity and Reference in Tolkien’s Books and Jackson’s Films” to be published in Janice M. Bogstad and Philip E. Kaveny, eds. Tolkien in Fiction and Film. McFarland, 2011.

3. Essay revised, accepted, in press: “Survival of the Most Pleasing: A Meme-Based Approach to Aesthetic Selection,” tbp in John M. Hill, ed. On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems. (Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2010) 111-34.

4. Essay revised, accepted: “‘I am Large, I contain Multitudes’: The Medieval Author in Memetic Terms.” In Slavica Rankovic, et al., eds. Tradition and the Individual Talent: Modes of Authorship in the Middle Ages. Accepted for collection (I think), but collection still in negotiations with publisher.

5. Article written, accepted, to be published, but minor revisions needed: Drout, Michael D.C., Michael J. Kahn, Mark D. LeBlanc, “Dendo-Grammar: Lexomic Methods for Analyzing the Relationships Among Old English Poems.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology

6. Article written, revised, passed by outside readers, awaiting editorial board decision: “Albert S. Cook’s Invention of Cynewulf and the History of English Studies in America.” PMLA.

7. Grant proposal written, submitted, awaiting decision: Untangling the Web of the Old English Corpus:Developing Lexomic Methods for Textual Analysis, NEH.

8. Invited Lectures given: “Fantastic Language: Tolkien and Philology” Bowdoin College, October 1, 2010.
“Memes and Memetics.” Bowdoin College, October 2, 2009.

9. Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Completed, the Homilies of Wulfstan.

10. Conference Presentation: “Lexomics for Anglo-Saxon Literature,” with Mark LeBlanc, Michael Kahn and Christina Nelson (Wheaton ’11). International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, July 26-August 31, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Things in Progress:

1. Article being revised: Downey, Sarah, Michael D.C. Drout, Michael J. Kahn, Mark D. LeBlanc: "'Books Tell Us': Lexomic and Traditional Evidence for the Sources of Guthlac A." [submit on 2/12/10]

2. Essay in progress, but accepted: Bloch, Bill Goldbloom, Michael D. C. Drout, “Information and Disinformation in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.” In Jessica Sklar and Elizabeth Sklar, ed. Mathematics and Popular Culture. MacFarland, 2011.

3. Article in progress. Research ongoing. Drout, Michael D.C., Michael J. Kahn and Mark LeBlanc. "'The Devil Talks Like a Preacher Man': Where Anglo-Saxon Poets got their Satanic Speeches."

4. Research in progress: "Untangling the Cynewulfian Corpus: Lexomic Analysis of the Similarity if Vocabulary.

5. Essay accepted; need completing and revision: "“The Council of Elrond, All those Poems, and the Famous F-ing Elves: Strategies for Teaching the Hard Parts of Tolkien,” in Leslie Donovan, ed. Approaches to Teaching J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works. Modern Language Association.

6. Invited Lecture: “Whole Worlds out of Single Words: Tolkien and Language.” Washington College, Chestertown, MD. April 15, 2010.

7. Book in Progress: From Tradition to Culture. Drafted: Introduction, Ch 1 (theory of tradition), Ch 2 Genre ('Is Vainglory a Wisdom Poem?'), Ch 3 The Author; Ch. 4. Aesthetics. In progress: Ch. 5 Lexomic Methodology and Memes. To do: Ch 6. Crossovers and Influences. Ch 6. The Anxiety of Influence in Memetic Terms.

8. Book in Progress: Grammar for Fun and Profit. Whole Book rough-drafted. Only Ch 1. polished.

9. Book in Progress: JRRT. Completed: Intro.; Silmarillion chapter, scholarship chapter. To do: Chapter on Hobbit, one chapter for each LotR volume. Ch. on on-line gaming ("I'm a level 63 hunter, Don't you mess with me, hunter); Ch. Ret-Conning and the Evolution of Lore. Conclusion.

10. Book in Progress: Philology Reborn. With Scott Kleinman. At proposal stage, but with 2 chapters drafted.

11. Minor revisions of King Alfred's Grammar.

12. Cumulative Index to Tolkien Studies volumes 1-6.

13. Bibliography for Tolkien Studies volume 7.

14. Editing Tolkien Studies volume 7.

Possibilities: Requests for contributions to 3 Tolkien books; possible new Tolkien course on CD;

If I can finish these things before July 1 (which would be a minor miracle), it will have been a good use of what is probably the only year-long sabbatical I'll have.

2010-01-19T14:00:00.005-05:00

Devils Talking

I'm compiling a list of places in Anglo-Saxon literature where devils, demons or the Devil himself speak. Off the top of my head I have:

Genesis B -- the Devil in that whole Fall of the Angels and then Fall of Man thingy.

Juliana -- the devil that Juliana captures and forces to confess.

Christ and Satan -- the Devil.

Guthlac -- the devils who torment St. Guthlac by showing him monks being bad (oh, and dragging him to the hellmouth and threatening to throw him in).

Andreas -- when the devil shows up to convince the men to attack Andrew and later encourages them when they are torturing the Saint.

Elene -- devil shows up to stir up the people to go against Judas. (I had forgotten this. Thanks Jason Fisher)

Are there any I've missed in the poetry? Can you think of any in the Prose?

Yes. Gospel of Nicodemus (thanks Vellum)

Also, possibly, sermons for first Sunday in Lent because the text is Matt 4:1-11 (thanks Derek).

LS 14 (MargaretCCCC 303) 16.7: se deofol hire to cwæð: Sathana urne cyning, hine gewræc drihten of paradises myrhþe (cf. Pass.Marg.[Par] 10.7 tunc demon dixit). (thanks Hilary)

Other possibilities:
Mark 5:12
Acts 19:15
thanks (Eutychus)

And I will check out Peter Dendle's book (Thanks Dr. Virago).

Looking through Saints' Lives and using the concordance to find references to Satan and Devil will certainly be a way to go as well, but I am mainly looking for long speeches by the devil or demons rather than things about them.

Updates: Vellum points out some devil talking in prose: Gospel of Nicodemus. Jason Fisher reminds me that the devil makes an appearance in Elene as well. Derek suggest sermons for the first Sunday in Lent. Dr. Virago points to Peter Dendle's Satan book (you know he also wrote a book on zombies. How cool is that?). Eutychus points out places in Scripture that would work and Hilary notes the Life of St Margaret.

2010-01-15T14:11:00.002-05:00

On Productivity

My apologies for the blog's being quiet lately. For one thing I've been busy with interesting work that has taken a lot of my time. For another, I've (not yet terribly successfully) been trying to spend less time on the internet, and finally, I'm feeling a little bit discouraged about the whole blogospheric thing right now. I haven't yet decided to nuke the blog and the whole web 2.0 thing yet but am at least considering it.

But, that said, I did get a couple of interesting questions from readers over break, and I thought a modified version of my answers might be useful to one or two people. The questions were about how to be productive after graduate school and about how to maintain research productivitywhile not neglecting your family. I don't think I live up to my own answers here, but as I have managed to maintain a slow trickle of articles and books while raising two young children, I have a few "well, it worked for me -- at least sort of" suggestions.

The single most important thing that I discovered about productivity is so stupid that is probably shouldn't be written, but it was an eye-opener for me when I figured it out:

(1) Your academic work is a job.

One of the reasons many of us go into academia is that we love the structure (or lack of structure) of the system: you have to be there for classes, but after that you're on your own in many ways to do what you want to do and when. It's one of the best things about academia that you don't have to punch a clock, that you can do a lot of work from home if you want and that you can define your own goals.

That's all great. Now put in 40+ hours per week. Every week. And make up hours lost to vacations, etc.

We all think we work long hours in academia and go out of our way to tell people that it is not a cakewalk. And that, to some extent, is true. Hours in the classroom take up far more energy per hour than hours in many other jobs. Just as a Broadway actress can use a whole day's worth of energy in a three hour show, you can blow a lot of your energy budget for a day with a couple of big classes that need to be kept awake and enthusiastic. But if you actually check up on yourself and keep track of how much time that you are working (as opposed to half-working while alternating between grading papers and Facebook), you'll find that you can probably do more to get to that 40-hour level of productivity.

But there's a more positive side to "treat your job like a job" as well, although this is extremely hard to do in academia: When the job is over, it's over. Get to your 40 hours however you need to, and then do something else. (I am absolutely terrible at taking this advice, but when I do, I'm happier and over all more productive).

(2) Un-divide your attention

(I am terrible at this, also) A stack of papers that should take two hours to grade will take six hours to grade if you've got Facebook open while you do it. Walk away from the computer and plow through the papers. Also, don't cherry pick: the amount of time you waste paging through the papers looking for a good one to grade adds up to an enormous amount of wasted time. You're going to have to grade the bad paper anyway, so just discipline yourself into grading from the top of the stack down to the bottom. I recommend physically unplugging your ethernet cable when you're writing. Yes, it's a pain when you could easily google a citation but is worth it when you are just slightly prevented from flipping over to Firefox for a second to check on junk. Keep your focus.

This applies in spades to your family and is perhaps the one area where I've been having a little more success. Your family won't begrudge you your work time if, when you're not working, you're giving them your undivided attention. I am still working on this, but I have tried to make it a rule that from the minute I pick the kids up from the bus to the minute they go to bed, I don't do academic work. That doesn't mean that they are getting undivided attention all the time, because there's cooking, dog walking, cleaning, errands, etc., but at least I'm not zombified at the stupid computer. Undivided attention is much more effective than trying to do multiple things at once, badly.

(3) Push forward in multiple directions

This next principle of productivity seems like a contradiction to the previous one, but really what I mean there is not to try, say, to write an essay and surf FB at the same time. When it comes to running projects, I am a very big believer in having more than one thing going on at a time. Some of the projects will be long-running, others quick. I started co-authoring a paper on Guthlac on Dec 28 and we are going to be ready to send it to a journal by Feb 1 (it isn't just a note but is about 30 pages now). On the other hand, the paper that may or may not get published by PMLA has gone 14 years and uncounted iterations between original research and now (and it still has to get approved by the editorial board). Having a lot of different things in different stages is good as long as you can also finish them off when the time comes. This usually involves a transition between regular, steady work and a crazy push to get to the end.

(4) Read, and read way outside your field

This has been the area where I've been relatively successful lately: instead of staring blankly at a word processing window, walk away from the computer and read something. Read it in hard copy, in a book if at all possible. Too often after we finish our dissertation research, we stop reading. I remember the exact moment when I figured out how to make How Tradition Works fit together: I was sitting on the floor of O'Hare Airport at 6:20 a.m. on the way back from Kalamazoo, and I was reading Mechthild Gretsch's The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform and a light went on. I really think, if it's at all possible, that you should take the semester before a research leave or a sabbatical and do no writing at all: just read. It not only catches you up on what's going on in the field, but it inspires and encourages you in a way that writing doesn't.

Also, read not only in your field and not only what other members of your field are reading. This has been my biggest boost to productivity: reading mathematics, seemingly unrelated philosophy (i.e., not 'literary philosophers'), books about beekeeping, the Shakers, people living on islands, biology, engineering, medicine -- break out of your bubble. It's useful not only because you can see how other people solve problems, but because you will be less of a lemming than the other people in your field (and, if Facebook is any guide, English professors are pretty lemminglike when it comes to political opinions, idiotic Farmville or the meme of the day). There's an enormous amount of really interesting stuff out there, and it's incredibly valuable to see how smart people think. Reading in other disciplines also helps you to avoid being colonized by "single answer" memes: you'll be a lot better at being skeptical about whatever today's tedious orthodoxy is if you come across people addressing related problems in different ways. For example, it's hard to take "the social construction of the body" as seriously as you did after you read some books about developments in surgery and see how much effort, technique and creativity has gone into solving problems that were, not long ago, impossible to address: the "physical construction of the body" seems awfully more important. Reading widely has the very salutary effect of reducing some of the English professor's tendency towards hubris.

(5) Use your deadlines

My final piece of advice is to use deadlines to manipulate yourself. The problem with our academic research is that although we operate with inflexible deadlines all the time (the class has to be taught, which means you have to be there and ready to teach it) the deadlines for our research are often far away and flexible. An inflexible deadline will always beat a flexible deadline, and so your research time gets swallowed up by class prep, meetings, etc. But you can overcome some of this if you use deadline flexibility to your advantage. For example, let's say I have to write three syllabi and also I want to get a paper finished. The syllabi have to be done before the semester starts. The paper? Well, it would be nice... But what I do is refuse to allow myself to work on the syllabi until the paper is finished. This takes all the stress of the syllabus deadline and transfers it to the paper deadline. I know that I'll get the syllabi done, because I have to, so if I make myself get the paper done first, I'll end up with it all done. (I don't think, by the way, that this is an entirely healthy way to live because it can be extremely stressful, but it gets the job done).

So those are my five principles for productivity. And now I am going to put some of them into play by unplugging the stupid internet and trying to crank out a page or two before I have to pick up the kids.

2010-01-07T15:31:00.002-05:00

The Return of Anglo-Saxon Aloud

After a fairly long hiatus, Anglo-Saxon Aloud returns. I have decided to do at least some Ælfric and am beginning with The Lives of the Saints, using the Rev. Walter W. Skeat's 1881 EETS edition. Today I put up the Preface.

I am not promising that I'll do all the Lives of the Saints like I did all of Wulfstan's homilies, but this is at least a start, and I'll keep going until I (or you) get bored and then will shift, possibly, to the OE translation of Boethius.

Also, due to really surprisingly strong holiday demand, I only have a few more copies of Beowulf Aloud and Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits, so if you were holding off on getting one, now's a good time, as I don't know when I'll be able to get them re-printed when I run out of the copies I have now.

Thanks for your patience with Anglo-Saxon Aloud. I hope it is useful to you.

2009-12-07T19:49:00.003-05:00

Reasons for Radio Silence: Some Equations

Swine Flu Virus Circulating

+

Government Ineptitude with Vaccine Distribution

=

Family Very Sick for Very Long

+

New Puppy

+

Revising Two Major Articles

=

No Blogging

2009-11-04T16:41:00.002-05:00

Well, I'm back

The fish were pretty cooperative and the weather was better. The boy was Joe Pro Fisher-Man this time, catching the first fish, the biggest fish (21" snook), the most fish and the most different kinds of fish (flounder, mangrove snapper, snook, jack, sea trout, sand perch, grunt, ladyfish and catfish. I got my first sea trout, a fish which looks a lot like a rainbow trout except that it has one long tooth in the middle of its upper lip. Weird.

But the mammals were more exciting than the fish. We got within inches of a pair of manatees, who stayed near the boat for a while, and we had wild dolphins following us and showing off. One circled the boat, hoping for fish, and when we caught one did the whole Flipper routine. Not a good idea to feed them, though, as it makes them too unwary of fishing line and boats.

Hope to have more bloggy goodness soon, but got a "revise and expand" letter from v. prestigious journal and want to get that taken care of asap.

2009-10-23T22:08:00.003-04:00

Gone Fishin'

For the next week I will be pestering redfish and snook, collecting shells and looking at spoonbills and ibis.

I will have no internet access while I am doing these things. Bye.

2009-10-19T09:09:00.002-04:00

The Homilies of Wulfstan on Angl0-Saxon Aloud

For the first time in 1000 years, the Homilies of Wulfstan are recorded and available on the internet. Take a listen and enjoy all the ranty goodness of Wulfstan.

I've recorded and posted all of the Old English homilies in Dorothy Bethurum's edition. All told there are about 60 podcasts, each of about 3 to 5 minutes, adding up to a whopping four hours of Wulfstan's sermons.

I started recording these homilies at the end of June, so I've been living with Wulfstan just about every weekday since then. It takes probably about 45 minutes total for each podcast. First I read over the homily and make a few marginal notes (for example, if a cluster of small words extends across a line break, I make sure I'll keep the intonation right. If there's a really long question coming up, I'll put a question mark at the beginning of the sentence, etc.). Then I record the homily in 100-line chunks. Although this only takes about 4 minutes or so to listen to, it takes longer to record, since I make mistakes. Then there's editing, which takes a while, and the actual posting, which is relatively quick.

I've learned a lot from recording these homilies. First, prose is harder than poetry. Much harder. In recording the poems, I found I didn't have to work very hard to get the intonation right: the natural rhythm of the lines took care of that (and having sentences end at the half-line was also helpful). In prose, intonation is very tricky and requires you mentally to read ahead and parse the sentence a bit before your speech gets there. We do this all the time when we read aloud, but it's very challenging in Old English, where my speech of comprehension is just not quite as quick as it is for Modern English.

Second, Wulfstan was a big man. At least I'm pretty sure he had to be. There are just too many sentences in which it would be very easy to run out of breath, especially if preaching without amplification. If Wulfstan delivered these sermons, he had to be a powerful speaker to get out some of the huge sentences in which the payoff is only at the end.

Third, Wulfstan used a lot of aural effects. He is very different from Ælfric in that his word pairs, rhythm, alliteration, paranomasia, etc., all seem (this is unscientific, of course) to be focused on what things sound like rather than what they look like on paper. Again, totally based on gut instinct, I think Wulfstan wrote these homilies with a very good sense of how they were going to sound to an audience.

I've learned a lot by doing this, and my oral comprehension of Anglo-Saxon prose has improved immensely as a result. I still don't think I could go back to Anglo-Saxon England and carry on a real conversation, but I think I might be able to serve as a translator from OE to ModE if the problem ever came up. I really can now translate out loud on the fly in real time and without pausing, which is something I can't do for any modern language.

I am going to take a break from Anglo-Saxon Aloud until Nov. 1. I haven't decided what to do next. Ælfric is pretty daunting, and, although I will do the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at some point, I don't think I have the time right now to convert all the Roman numerals into Old English words (and, as I learned, this is something I can't quite do on the fly).

Any suggestions? What would you like to hear next on Anglo-Saxon Aloud? What would be most useful for your teaching or your learning?

P.S.: I'm not planning on creating a professionally produced CD-set of Wulfstan the way I did for Beowulf Aloud or Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits. I don't think there's enough demand, and it costs a lot of money to make the first fifty copies (not as much after that). But please contact me directly if for some reason you want to buy a 4-CD-set of Wulfstan and we'll figure something out.

2009-10-11T21:14:00.002-04:00

History Channel, Clash of the Gods: Thor -- time change

Just got an email from someone at the History Channel, Monday's Clash of the Gods episode, about Thor, will be show at 11:00 p.m. Eastern rather than 10:00 p.m. There's some special that is pushing it back.

(You know you are old when you think "There is no way I am staying up til midnight to watch something on television" and you are in the show that you don't want to stay up for).

2009-10-07T14:22:00.003-04:00

History Channel, Clash of the Gods: The Lord of the Rings: analysis

I was wondering how the producers would get The Lord of the Rings to fit their thesis that mythological stories might have historical roots that can be explained by archeology and history. After all, Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings in the 20th century, so the "digging" is literary-historical rather than archeological.

When you work on one of these shows, you don't have a script. I did get a tip off from the producers a few days before about the questions they'd be asking and the general direction they were hoping to go, but that material wasn't fit into a larger structure. So when I answered questions about Tolkien's Roman Catholicism, for instance, I didn't know that they were going to fit those answers into the larger framework (I don't really object to the way it was done, but I didn't plan my answers with that framework in mind).

Thus I was pleased that the Indonesian "hobbit" fossils didn't make an appearance and instead the show basically tried to look at influences on Tolkien's work. At times I didn't agree with emphasis, and I would have put things somewhat differently in places. Also, just as with Beowulf, it was unfortunate that a few inaccuracies snuck in to both the narration and to some of the expert commentary (I mis-spoke by saying that Fr. Francis 'adopted' Tolkien; he was appointed guardian by Tolkien's mother. It's not a huge difference, but it is a difference). For example, one expert says that when the hobbits return to the Shire it is devastated and that there are steel machines everywhere. Huh? As far as I can tell from reading the text, there is one machinery-filled mill in the Shire whose sole purpose seems to be pollute the river. Bad enough, of course, but not "steel machines everywhere." This error is similar to the statement in the Beowulf episode that Grendel's mother kills all the thanes in the hall: story-telling drama is replacing fact, and that's not good, or necessary, especially because the actual text is pretty exciting anyway.

But it's also incredibly hard not to mis-speak in these kinds of situations, without notes and without a chance to correct over-statements, etc. Part of the training for Beowulf scholars is to be repeatedly smacked (rhetorically, of course) whenever you exaggerate or change the text for the purpose of making it sound more exciting or to fit it to your thesis. I've seen this in conference papers by graduate students, for instance, where a reasonably intelligent and well-trained person just got carried away with an interpretation of the dragon fight and added some swinging, parrying, and so forth that's not in the text. But that's hard training and it takes a while, and there isn't the same kind of cultural apparatus for Tolkien studies (yet).

However, I'll also put on my grumpy hat and note that for some reason, opining about Tolkien seems to generate critical errors. The distinguished prof. Catherine Stimpson, for example, wrote a book about Tolkien in which she criticized his style by saying that Tolkien would not write "they came to an island" but instead "to the eyot they came." Unfortunately for Stimpson, the line "to the eyot they came" never appears in The Lord of the Rings, and Stimpson never thought to check. Somehow JRRT is an error-magnet.

But be that as it may, the Clash of the Gods episode was not bad, particularly considering how the producers did not have a 300 million dollar budget and were, I think, trying to stay a little bit away from the Jacksonian interpretation of Tolkien. I didn't like all the visuals, but I'm not the target audience, and I think that target audience learned something, particularly in relation to the other episodes in the series.

Net week we'll see what they do with Thor.

2009-10-05T14:45:00.002-04:00

Clash of the Gods: The Lord of the Rings

I have no idea how this episode is going to turn out. I looked over some of the prompting questions from my interviews, and I don't see an obvious way to keep up with the theme of the series: that there might be archeological or historical evidence behind various mythological stories. I'm guessing that the "hobbit" fossils found in Indonesia might make an appearance, but I don't have a clear idea of what else they are going to do. The questions that I answered were pretty straightforwardly about Tolkien and his work (at least if I remember correctly), so I don't have any insider knowledge here. It will be interesting to see how they apply the thesis of the series to a twentieth-century text.

Nothing to do but watch (10:00 p.m. Eastern) and see, I guess.

(I do hope my answer to "can you give us the plot of The Silmarillion in two minutes or less?" makes it into the episode, esp. because I don't remember how I phrased it).

2009-09-29T15:48:00.002-04:00

Clash of the Gods: Beowulf Evaluation

An excerpt from the Beowulf episode of Clash of the Gods is now up on YouTube, and I've embedded it below [UPDATE: it was pulled down for copyright violation. That was quick!]. Overall I'm reasonably happy with how it all came out. I didn't say anything obviously idiotic, which is a relief.

I was most pleased by the way the producers worked in archeological work and material culture into the discussion, even going so far as to bring in the battle between the Geats and the Swedes (though they cut my attempted explanation of who Eadgils was -- maybe too many names in too short a time) and showing the reconstruction of one of the halls at Lejre. Since I think it's really important for us to change our view of Beowulf as being entirely set in fantasy land, as opposed to the "named lands of the North," I'm very happy to think that a wide audience heard part of the case for this view.

But the handling of the story elements wasn't quite as good. There were a few modifications of the story for the sake of drama that I think went too far: In the poem Grendel's mother drags off one thane instead of slaying many; the sword Hrunting comes not for Beowulf's men but from Hrothgar's retainer, etc. I don't think there was any intention to distort the story, but instead a game of "telephone," where one person read a translation, wrote a synopsis, listened to an 'expert,' etc., and the events of the poem end up being changed, perhaps even unconsciously, so that they more easily fit a particular storyline. Beowulf isn't a perfect fit for contemporary storytelling (which is one reason I and many others love it so).

But overall it was nicely done, though a little bloody for my kids to watch (though I do like the fact that I'm doing background narration in a scene where there is decapitation). Also happy that the 'dragons come from people seeing dinosaur skeletons' theory was given some play. In the end, I'm not sure I buy the premise that Beowulf himself was likely to have been historical: he is the part of Beowulf who for me lives in fantasy land as much as the Grendels and the dragon. It's everything around him that lives in the partially remembered world of the North. Still, very fun. I'm now very interested to see how the Lord of the Rings episode turns out, and to see if they used my answer to the question "can you summarize The Silmarillion in two minutes?" (I am not making that up).

2009-09-28T13:49:00.002-04:00

Tonight on The History Channel: Clash of the Gods -- Beowulf

Tonight we will finally find out how my talking-head performance went. It's time for Clash of the Gods: Beowulf. It airs at 10:00 p.m. Eastern Time on the History Channel.

I haven't seen the episode, but I'm hopeful that my attempt to explain the battle on the ice at Lake Vanern and the relevance of Eadgils (among other things) got picked up.

I didn't do as much for this episode as I did for The Lord of the Rings (next week) and Thor. but I answered a fair number of questions.

So it's not quite as exciting as the Staffordshire Hoard, but tomorrow (actually Tuesday, when the kids get to watch the recording) will be a fun day at the Drout homestead.

//Below I'm pasting in a repeat of a post for the benefit of people who are googling for Clash of the Gods.//

Welcome, History Channel Clash of the Gods Viewers

Thanks for dropping by. It was a real pleasure to work with The History Channel on the series. I contributed to the episodes on Beowulf (Sept. 28), The Lord of the Rings (Oct 5), and Beowulf (Oct. 12). All the shows air at 10 p.m. on Mondays on The History Channel. I myself haven't seen them yet, so I don't know how they'll come out, but the producers asked good questions and listened to my answers, so I'm pretty hopeful that the episodes will be good.

I'm Professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where I teach Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon), Middle English (what Chaucer spoke), fantasy, science fiction and courses on J.R.R. Tolkien. This year I am on research leave and trying to finish four different books (on tradition, Tolkien, grammar and philology; in retrospect, I probably should have worked on one at a time), but I am giving some talks away from campus, including at Bowdoin College in Maine (Oct. 1 & 2) and Washington College in Maryland (April). I'll also be participating in one or more Scholarly Sojourns (more info to follow).

While you're here, look around the archives, or check out some things that may be of interest:

If you want to hear Anglo-Saxon, the language of Beowulf (and J.R.R. Tolkien's academic specialization), you can go to Angl0-Saxon Aloud, where I've posted a podcast of every poem in Anglo-Saxon (there are a lot). Some of the favorites are The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Dream of the Rood, and excerpts from Beowulf.(just ignore the dialogue box; you don't need to give any info). Currently I'm recording and posting the homilies of Wulfstan, who would definitely have had a Sunday morning television show if he were alive today.

If you like Anglo-Saxon Aloud, you can buy the Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits, which is a two-CD set. This includes the most popular poems both in Old English and Modern English as well as introductory discussions of each poem.

Or, if you like both Anglo-Saxon and Beowulf, I also sell Beowulf Aloud, a 3-CD set that includes the entire poem of Beowulf plus an introductory lecture.

If you'd like to learn to read Anglo-Saxon, you can use my on-line grammar book, King Alfred's Grammar. The book is designed to walk you through Old English and does not assume that you already know a lot about grammar.

My edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's Beowulf and the Critics is temporarily out of print, but a new edition is at the publisher, so I'm hopeful that will be available soon. My book How Tradition Works is more technical, but, I think, interesting to those who like Anglo-Saxon literature and theories of cultural evolution.

My latest course on CD, The Anglo-Saxon World, should be out from Recorded Books' Modern Scholar series any day now. Until that comes out, I have a number of other courses available in the series, including those on Chaucer, Fantasy Literature, Science Fiction, The History of the English Language, Writing and Rhetoric, Approaches to Literature, Grammar (this is actually a really fun course) and Understanding Poetry.

Again, thanks for stopping by, and I appreciate any comments, suggestions or criticism. I'm also trying to convince The History Channel that they should do a whole series (or at least a longer show) on Beowulf and/or Anglo-Saxon. If you think that is a good idea, please let them know.

2009-09-24T16:22:00.006-04:00

The Staffordshire Hoard

The largest Anglo-Saxon gold hoard ever discovered was unearthed this July in Staffordshire by an amateur treasure hunter. The website is here and a gallery of images on Flikr is here.

The hoard seems to be a "trophy hoard," a collection of items, possibly taken in warfare, that were then buried for safekeeping. They are not part of a funeral or offering, at least as far as we can tell. Many of the items are decorative parts of sword hilts and other military gear.

One of the most intriguing finds is a strip of gold inscribed with Latin: [.] I R G E : D N E : D I S E P E N T U // [.] F I N I M I C I T U I [:] E/T
[.] U G E N T Q U I O D E R U N // T T E A F A C I E T [U] A

Elizabeth Okasha takes the inscription as being:

[.]irge domine disepentu[r] inimici tui et [f]ugent qui oderunt te a facie t[u]a

which is a quotation from Numbers 10:35, though probably taken directly from Psalm 67:2, where it is also used. Translated, it means “Rise up, Lord, and may your enemies be dispersed and those who hate you be driven from your face.”

It has not yet been determined what the inscribed strip is, though it may have been part of a shield or helmet. Michelle Brown (annoying name-dropping: she's my friend!) dates the script to the eighth or ninth century. There is already some speculation that the hoard could be part the immense treasure supposedly paid to King Penda of Mercia by King Oswiu of Northumbria, but there really isn't any specific evidence at this stage.

Anglo-Saxonist websites and facebook pages are all abuzz right now. It is an incredibly exciting find, mostly because it is so beautiful, but also because of the potential to shed new light on Anglo-Saxon culture. And it's really wonderful to think that such a find could be made in 2009: what else is buried at the edges of old fields or in areas that for a long time were marginal but are now plowed or developed?

2009-09-18T10:12:00.005-04:00

New Course: The Anglo-Saxon World (and an update on Clash of the Gods schedule)

My ninth course for Recorded Books, The Anglo-Saxon World, is now available. I'm really happy with the way it came out: as always, the Recorded Books people did an amazing job with the design and production.

It can be tricky teaching in your direct specialty. My student evaluations in Anglo-Saxon used to be consistently a little lower than in my English 101 or Chaucer courses, and this was incredibly frustrating. Anglo-Saxon is, after all, my baby. But looking back over those early evaluations, I saw that I sometimes lost The Big Picture because I was so invested in certain technical questions. I now make a special effort to make sure that even as I dive into fun, technical arguments, I keep them connected to the major points of the course. I think this worked in The Anglo-Saxon World, where I have a full lecture devoted to Anglo-Saxon from the Conquest to the Renaissance and another that goes from Thomas Jefferson to Angelina Jolie. I also used more archeology in this course that I have done in the past, in part because recent work by John Hines, John Blair and Christina Lee showed me how to integrate archeological findings with other kinds of material.

The course also has a website, The Anglo-Saxon World, which right now just includes the full translations of some of the poems I discuss--some of these were too long to fit in the course book. Recorded Books also has a blog now.

If you want more Anglo-Saxon (and who doesn't, really?) you can go to Angl0-Saxon Aloud, where I've posted recordings of the entire Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records and am finishing up the homilies of Wulfstan, and, as always, I have for sale Beowulf Aloud and Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits.

And this is a reasonable segue to Clash of the Gods on The History Channel. I just spoke to one of the producers--they were doing final voice-over work on the Lord of the Rings episode and needed pronunciation advice--and the schedule for the series has been revised, so that the Thor episode will now be last (I hope that means an even cooler cgi Midgard Serpent) and Beowulf will be the first of my episode to air, on September 28. That's different from what the website says (some maybe you should watch on Sept 21, too, just in case), but here's the schedule they gave me over the phone:

Sept. 28: Beowulf
Oct. 5: The Lord of the Rings
"Last": Thor (I think that would be Oct 19, because Minotaur would have to be Oct 12, but I may have lost track).

[One quick story about a reason I'm so happy about the way the course came out. A number of years ago I very publicly said that we should put a fifteen-year moratorium on Anglo-Saxon books with the Sutton Hoo helmet on the cover. So of course when Recorded Books sent me the proofs of The Anglo-Saxon World, our old pal the helmet, the most overused image in medieval studies, was on the cover (very nicely done, but still...). Part of my publishing agreement is that I don't have final say over covers, marketing, etc., so if that's what they wanted to do, I was just going to have to live it with it. But all praise to Recorded Books in that they made a new cover, using an image of Bede's Life of Cuthbert from the Digby MS. So I avoid eating crow and the cover is beautful. Win!]

2009-09-16T16:35:00.003-04:00

FMyLife, Academic Version

Months ago:
Snippy review criticizes my edition of Beowulf and the Critics for not discussing Haber's A Comparative Study of Beowulf and the Æneid and Bertha Phillpotts' article on "Wyrd and Providence." I get all worried. I go and re-read the book and the articles wondering why I would be so stupid to leave out something so obvious. Turns out there was a reason: the stuff was completely irrelevant.

Today:
Anonymous referee writes: "Drout should look at Title of Book." Remarkably boring, Title of Book is almost entirely irrelevant to my paper. I spent today reading it. All 400 pages. All of today. Hey, I've got a new footnote.

Clearly I am incapable of learning from my mistakes. FMAcademicL.

2009-09-11T11:03:00.002-04:00

Beowulf and the Moops

Right now on ANSAX-L, the Anglo-Saxonists' listserv, there is an argument raging about the historicity of Beowulf (Yes, some things never change).

One part of the argument goes like this:

Witega 1: We have a poem in a manuscript from the 10th century. Read that poem. As it is. Don't try to reconstruct an earlier version.

Witega 2: But there are things in the manuscript that make no sense. You've got to emend them, and when you do, you reconstruct an earlier version of the poem.

Witega 1: What you think is a mistake may not be, but if it is, it may just be the equivalent of the typo and does not give you license to go creating ancestral versions of Beowulf.

Witega 2: But the scribes of Beowulf consistently get names of people and places bollixed up. The scribes don't have any idea who the Merovingians are, or the Heruli, or Eomer, or Heardred, but the poet did. So "read the poem we have" is impossible.

Witega 1: No it's not.

Witega 2: Yes it is.

And then things quickly devolve into the Argument Sketch

or, sometimes, the Fish-slapping Dance.

Perhaps Seinfeld has something to say that might be useful. The end of the famous "Bubble Boy" episode turns on a Trivial Pursuit card. The question reads "Who invaded Spain in the 8th Century?" The Bubble Boy answers "The Moors," but on the card is printed "The Moops," and so George holds that "The Moors" is wrong. Hilarity ensues.

I think reading Beowulf 'as we have it' is like insisting upon "The Moops." George may be technically correct within the rules of the game (that what is printed on the card has final within-game authority), but he is obviously incorrect in any reasonable, meaningful sense. Likewise, I think, no one really believes that the error of "dryhten wereda" for "dryhten Wedera" or "hea rede" for "Heardred" or the complete botch the scribe made of "Merovingian" reflects what the poet wrote or what the audience of Beowulf ever heard or read or even what a scribe had in front of him. And in fact, the scholars who say "read the poem we have" don't actually keep those obvious errors in their readings, because if you keep the manuscript readings as they are, you can't actually read the poem.

So the argument is really about how much to emend, and that's a reasonable and important argument to have. Should we be reconstructing possibly lost names of tribes when the philology is inconclusive, as in "egsode eorl" at the very beginning of the poem? The safe emendation is to "eorlas," though accepting that emendation implies that the scribe made a huge and obvious grammatical blunder in the sixth line of the poem; the other alternative, that the poet made a reference to the tribe of the Heruli (exemplar something like "eorle") requires us to import a lot of meaning into a place where it's not obvious from context. Where we draw the line between an error that is "obvious" and an over-clever re-writing of the poem is a very difficult question, and we need to keep debating it.

But using "read the poem as we have it" is really more rhetoric than anything else, and if you say "read the poem as we have it," you would probably, for consistency's sake, have to agree that the Moops invaded Spain in the 8th century.

[When everyone really knows that it was Bayonne, NJ, not Spain, that was invade by the Moops, and it happened in 1926]

2009-08-25T13:38:00.002-04:00

Clash of the Gods:
What it's like being a talking head

For additional info on Clash of the Gods, click here.
For Clash of the Gods schedule click here.

Clash of the Gods has been running on The History Channel for a few weeks (Monday nights at 1o p.m. for the premier of each episode). I haven't seen the ones I am in yet, and they're not giving us DVD copies until the specific episodes run, but, having watched some episodes on Greek mythology, I'm feeling pretty hopeful about the ones on Thor (Sept. 14), The Lord of the Rings (Sept. 21), and Beowulf (Oct. 5). The visuals are very good and, although there's a bit of repetition where the series uses the same clips again and again (Zeus sitting down on his throne, for example), the overall quality seems very good. I don't get the impression that the words of the other professors have been twisted into anything they didn't say.

Over at I Just Read About That, Paul concludes that all the guest experts were told to wear black, "or it's an amazing saratorial coincidence." He's right. We were told to wear black jackets and either black or white shirts and then they provided red ties. One expert, who was coming in right after me, didn't get the memo (or chose to ignore it), but they had a jacket for him and were muscling him into it as I was leaving.

The History Channel producers and crew were exceedingly smart and efficient the whole way through (even when they had to call me in last minute). They had a basic script that set up what they wanted to talk about, and I was given the questions that would be asked in advance so I could be prepared. It wasn't possible to have notes because you are looking directly at the producer, who stands to the side of the camera. I had learned, when doing the National Geographic "Behind the Movie" piece for the Return of the King DVD that if your eyes move away from the producer, you look shifty, so I can't imagine how you read notes unless there's a sophisticated teleprompter, which there wasn't.

What I could glean of the script from the questions made it seem pretty decent (which has been borne out so far). The writers/producers had done good work tracking down reasonable information. However, it was a little surprising how much the agenda (as opposed to the actual content) seemed to be set by Wikipedia. For example, I got asked a question about the Canterbury Charm, which I hadn't studied very much. I was impressed at how wide-ranging the inquiry was until I happened upon the Wikipedia page for Thor and found the Canterbury Charm referenced. I'm not a Wiki-hater, but the influence of Wikipedia on the script does give yet another reason why professors in relevant fields should perhaps look at the relevant Wiki entries and correct them if need be (though I, sadly, haven't gotten around to doing this yet).

The producers also were surprisingly good at not trying to put words into my mouth. Producers are generally very strong willed (they have to be in order to get anything done when dealing with a lot of creative people), and they don't like you to say "no." But in one particular case, I was just not going to say that J.R.R. Tolkien used the word "orc" to refer to the Roman god of the dead, Orcus. It's just not right. "Orc" clearly and obviously comes from an Anglo-Saxon word (see Tolkien's introductory note to The Hobbit and his comments elsewhere), and while he never laid out his case for why he thought that "orc" did not come from "Orcus," my inner Philologist-Sense (like Spidey-sense, but different) agrees totally with him that the derivation from Orcus isn't right. (Note also that the orc/Orcus connection comes from Wikipedia). In the end, I said all that, and everything was fine.

Overall the people who worked for KPI, the shop that produced the series, were incredibly professional, energetic and fun. Everything I've ever done for TV is always rushed, and this was no exception, but it was a good kind of rush, when time wasn't being wasted and a whole bunch of people were all bustling around doing things at once. I'm looking forward to "my" episodes (of course I'm just one of many experts) and pretty hopeful that I'll like the final result. Particularly if there really is a CGI Midgarth Serpent fighting Thor while I narrate the battle. That would finally be something my kids care about seeing.

2009-08-18T23:40:00.003-04:00

Professing Literature: Tendentious with Extra Tendentious Sauce

I've had to go back and re-read Gerald Graff's Professing Literature so that I can dot the i's and cross the t's for an article, and ... wow.

I'm going to break my own rule about not using rhetorical questions just to give an example of how tendentious the "history" in this book really is:

Of the "Classical College" in the early 19th century: "Classroom concerns hardly ever went beyond the endless memorization and recitation of grammatical and etymological particularities."

Endless? Is that a technical term? Is that an honest, fair, accurate historical evaluation?

Of Johns Hopkins in the 19th century: "Its early work in modern languages was so wholly monopolized by philologists that it was late in developing courses in literature proper."

Have we defined "literature proper"? Have we made an argument for "literature proper" as being separate from philology? No, we have not. Can we read "literature proper" in any language other than contemporary languages without philology? (You might think you can, but you'd be wrong). So is all literature before 1800 outside of "literature proper," or should we just assume that the philologists have already gotten everything right and we can just read their editions transparently? How comforting.

Francis A. March's description of his class "makes no mention of the meaning of Milton's works." Instead, the student went through Paradise Lost line by line, "calling for the meaning of words, their etymology when interesting, the relations of words, parsing when it would help, the connection of clauses, the mythology, the biography and other illustrative matter."

Now I'm not the president of the MLA, but it sounds to me that they were figuring out a lot about the meaning of Milton's work by *shudder* studying it in detail.

As opposed to? Well, I assume bloviating about the "meaning" of Milton without having to trouble to tether that meaning to any actual, "relations of words."

It goes on and on like this, and at a certain point I can't decide if Graff just doesn't know what he is talking about (for example, when he talks about philology or etymology), if he hasn't bothered to read the books he is criticizing (when he talks about Albert S. Cook, for instance), or if he does know and is just being tendentious to the point of intellectual dishonesty.

If you want to know why your colleagues think the odd things they do about our discipline and its history, part of the answer might be that they have read Professing Literature uncritically and without actually knowing very much about 19th and early 20th century literary studies.

Depressing. But on the other hand, in a single 24-hour period I topped out on a particular bouldering climb that had been impossible just a few days ago, got bitten by a snake and taught my son how to slide into a base (hint: if you do this at the beach, make sure you don't do a backdoor slide into a chunk of weathered basalt). Real life, when you're doing it right, can be more exciting even than academia.

2009-08-02T21:50:00.006-04:00

Welcome, History Channel Clash of the Gods Viewers

Thanks for dropping by. It was a real pleasure to work with The History Channel on the series. I contributed to the episodes on Thor (Sept. 14), The Lord of the Rings (Sept. 21), and Beowulf (Oct. 5). All the shows air at 10 p.m. on Mondays on The History Channel. I myself haven't seen them yet, so I don't know how they'll come out, but the producers asked good questions and listened to my answers, so I'm pretty hopeful that the episodes will be good.

I'm Professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where I teach Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon), Middle English (what Chaucer spoke), fantasy, science fiction and courses on J.R.R. Tolkien. This year I am on research leave and trying to finish four different books (on tradition, Tolkien, grammar and philology; in retrospect, I probably should have worked on one at a time), but I am giving some talks away from campus, including at Bowdoin College in Maine (Oct.) and Washington College in Maryland (April). I'll also be participating in one or more Scholarly Sojourns (more info to follow).

While you're here, look around the archives, or check out some things that may be of interest:

If you want to hear Anglo-Saxon, the language of Beowulf (and J.R.R. Tolkien's academic specialization), you can go to Angl0-Saxon Aloud, where I've posted a podcast of every poem in Anglo-Saxon (there are a lot). Some of the favorites are The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Dream of the Rood, and excerpts from Beowulf.(just ignore the dialogue box; you don't need to give any info). Currently I'm recording and posting the homilies of Wulfstan, who would definitely have had a Sunday morning television show if he were alive today.

If you like Anglo-Saxon Aloud, you can buy the Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits, which is a two-CD set. This includes the most popular poems both in Old English and Modern English as well as introductory discussions of each poem.

Or, if you like both Anglo-Saxon and Beowulf, I also sell Beowulf Aloud, a 3-CD set that includes the entire poem of Beowulf plus an introductory lecture.

If you'd like to learn to read Anglo-Saxon, you can use my on-line grammar book, King Alfred's Grammar. The book is designed to walk you through Old English and does not assume that you already know a lot about grammar.

My edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's Beowulf and the Critics is temporarily out of print, but a new edition is at the publisher, so I'm hopeful that will be available soon. My book How Tradition Works is more technical, but, I think, interesting to those who like Anglo-Saxon literature and theories of cultural evolution.

My latest course on CD, The Anglo-Saxon World, should be out from Recorded Books' Modern Scholar series any day now. Until that comes out, I have a number of other courses available in the series, including those on Chaucer, Fantasy Literature, Science Fiction, The History of the English Language, Writing and Rhetoric, Approaches to Literature, Grammar (this is actually a really fun course) and Understanding Poetry.

Again, thanks for stopping by, and I appreciate any comments, suggestions or criticism. I'm also trying to convince The History Channel that they should do a whole series (or at least a longer show) on Beowulf and/or Anglo-Saxon. If you think that is a good idea, please let them know.

2009-07-22T23:01:00.001-04:00

J.R.R.T. CFP

Wanted to pass this along:

"We are issuing a call for papers for a proposed volume of scholarly essays on J.R.R.Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Papers should address any aspect of the work, but the editors are especially interested in works which make connections among disciplines, demonstrating the richness of the trilogy as well as its continuing widespread appeal.
Papers should be between 20 - 30 pages, note key words, and include a 250 word abstract.

The deadline for papers is 15 September 2009; decisions will be announced by 1 November 2009. "

Papers should be submitted to
Prof. Kathleen Dubs
Angol Intézet
Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem
2087 Piliscsaba
Egyetem utca 1.
Hungary
kedubs@axelero.hu

Dr. Janka Kaščáková
Katedra Anglického Jayzka A Literatury
Katolícka Univerzita v Ružomberku
Hrabovská cesta 1
023 01 Ružomberok
Slovakia
janka.kascakova@fphil.ku.sk

2009-07-07T00:35:00.002-04:00

That Max Planck sure was one smart feller

Bad News

A new scientific truth does not establish itself by its enemies being convinced and expressing their change of opinion

Good News

but rather by its enemies gradually dying out and the younger generation being taught the truth from the beginning.

A real spate of the good news lately. It's incredibly gratifying to read articles and dissertations where work that I did that was thought to be "out there" by certain establishment folk (whom I dearly love), is now being cited as a matter of course by a new generation of Ph.D.'s and Assistant Professors. Weird feeling, and I keep wanting to yell out "you need to get an authority better than Drout for that point..." But overall a very hopeful sign.

I do basically believe that if the idea is good, it will eventually get picked up, but it's still nice to know that "eventually" isn't as long as it could be.

2009-06-29T11:23:00.002-04:00

The Return of Anglo-Saxon Aloud: The Prose

Turns out that I miss recording and re-recording and re-re-recording bits of Old English every morning. So I am back to posting daily podcasts of Old English at Anglo-Saxon Aloud.

I had originally planned on starting with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and I'm sure I will eventually do that text, but I ended up deciding to go with the Homilies of Wulfstan. I am going to work through these in order, using Dorothy Bethurum's edition.

The first post, Wulstan homily Ib "De Anticristo" (I'm skipping the Latin homilies, as no one wants to hear me read Latin), is up here

2009-06-19T17:25:00.003-04:00

Google Books: Actually Useful

I've been finishing up my revised edition of Tolkien's Beowulf and the Critics and have cleaning up the section where I identify of all the "voices" in Tolkien's "Babel of Voices," where he presents the history of Beowulf criticism.

In doing all the necessary but tedious i-dotting and t-crossing, I've found Google Books to be remarkably helpful for nineteenth-century Beowulf scholarship. They have full text of a lot of important but hard-to-find books (hard to find because Interlibrary Loan isn't often willing to send books published in 1840), and the interface and mark-up is much better than I remember it being.

I'm still not a fan of Google Scholar, which seems incredibly random in its selection of material, but Google Books seems to be not only a copyright grab but also a useful resource.

2009-06-12T11:47:00.003-04:00

Another Boynton Forgery!
Editorial Hypercorrection in the "Cavort" Recension of But Not the Hippopotamus

Earlier this year I announced the blockbuster news that Hippos Go Berserk by Sandra Boynton was likely a forgery by a later author who was attempting to imitate Boynton the Great. I can now show that the forger of Hippos Go Berserk, or Pseudo-Boynton, was at work elsewhere as well.

I recently purchased a copy of But Not the Hippopotamus at the Blue Bunny bookstore in Dedham, Mass. In this copy I found the following opening lines:

A Hog and Frog
cavort in a bog.
But not the Hippopotamus.

Something did not seem right, so I consulted my personal copy of But Not the Hippopotamus. Sure enough, the opening lines are:

A Hog and a Frog
do a dance in a bog.
But not the Hippopotamus.

This variation, "cavort" for "do a dance" is an editorial hyper-correction, probably based on an attempt to force Boynton the Great's artistically flawless meter into a straightjacket of perfect regularity.

Note that in the original version, "do a dance" is a straightforward anapest. I scan the lines as:

a HOG and a FROG (iamb plus anapest)
do a DANCE in a BOG (two anapests)

Pseudo-Boynton forces both lines to be iambs followed by anapests, but examination of the rest of the poem shows that Boynton only once uses the 2 / 3 pattern in the line:

a HARE and a BEAR (iamb anapest)
have BEEN to a FAIR (iamb anapest)

In the other two stanzas we see:

are TRYing on HATS

and

toGETHer have JUICE

These two parallels, "are TRYing" and "toGETHer" are amphibrachs, also three-syllable feet. So there is no need to assume that the iamb in the fourth stanza needs to be followed slavishly by forcing a two-syllable foot ("cavort") into the first stanza.

From this analysis of the forgery, we can conclude that Pseudo-Boynton is a highly trained scholar, but one for whom Boynton's brilliant verse is not a native idiom. We can also note that as well as lacking Boynton the Great's attention to detail (in that Pseudo-Boynton forgets to deal with the six distressed hippos who have never left in his/her version of Hippos Go Berserk), Pseudo-Boynton has a predilection for hippos. Scholars should thus re-examine the Boynton corpus to determine which other texts may have been interfered with by Pseudo-Boynton, looking for editorial hypercorrection, subtle contradictions, and hippos.

And the "Cavort" Recension of But Not the Hippopotamus must be athetized from the corpus.

2009-06-08T22:19:00.003-04:00

"Clash of the Gods" on the History Channel

UPDATE: More stuff here.

Back in December and January I did some work for the series that is going to be on the History Channel. Today they sent me the tentative air dates (and a nice basket of English muffins!):

Clash of the Gods
Airing on The History Channel at 10:00pm

Zeus 8/3
Hercules 8/10
Odyssey(1) 8/17
Odyssey(2) 8/24
Hades 8/31
Medusa 9/7
Thor 9/14
Lord of the Rings 9/21
Minotaur 9/28
Beowulf 10/5

I am in the Thor, The Lord of the Rings and Beowulf episodes.

I'm hoping that they did what they said they would do in the Thor episode, and that my narration of "Thor and Hymir Go Fishing" includes a cgi Thor fighting a cgi Midgard Serpent.

2009-06-05T10:35:00.002-04:00

Time-wasting and Productivity

I'm somewhat hopeful that the dead silence here and at Anglo-Saxon Aloud is coming to an end. I'm slowly but steadily extricating myself from the gigantic backlog of work and deadlines caused by:

1) the economic crisis causing me to have to spend inordinate amounts of time with spreadsheets, budgets, etc. as well having to reshuffle and reschedule the department's course offerings three times;

2) the unexpected good news that I need to do a new edition of Beowulf and the Critics;

3) my ill-considered decision to assistant-coach two different youth baseball teams (although this is incredibly fun, and I will do it again next year, it has been a huge un-budgeted time-committment);

Before those three things happened I was already scheduled to the hilt, but I would have made all the deadlines, etc. Once number 1 hit, I pretty much had to run as fast as I could to stay in place.

So having finally worked out from under most of my administrative responsibilities (annual reviews, etc.), in the past couple weeks I was able to turn my attention to real work, and it's amazing what you can get accomplished when you have a break from 40-75 emails per day, paperwork and meetings (Oh, how I hate meetings).

In a little more than two weeks I was able to:

Turn my paper from the Bergen conference into a real essay for a forthcoming book. The essay is “‘I am Large, I contain Multitudes’: The Medieval Author in Memetic Terms.”

Do revisions and complete proofing of the course book for the latest course from Recorded Books, The Anglo-Saxon World, which should be out very soon.

Finish identifying all of the "voices" in Tolkien's "Babel of Voices" in "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics."

Write the first large article to come out of our lexomics research: "Lexomic Methods for Analyzing Relationships Among Old English Poems." (it still needs some revisions, but I think we will ship it off to a journal at the end of next week).

Although a couple of those things were "finish," that was a lot of work to get done in a little more than two weeks when I also wrote three annual evaluations. But it as basically easy, because my time wasn't being fragmented by useless meetings and incessant email. Think of how productive we could be if we could find ways to skip all that crap.

Thus you should not expect to see me writing reports or going to meetings. I am now on a crap-skipping crusade.

2009-05-22T09:12:00.003-04:00

Drout Bingo

More amusement from my students. This time it wasn't given to me, just left behind in the classroom. Hint to students: if you want to keep something secret from your prof, don't leave a pile of copies in the classroom.

I can't tell if this was ever actually done (though I imagine that it was), but students constructed their own boards by choosing from a list of words:
Tolkien, Beowulf, Medieval, Anglo-Saxon, Philology, Poetry, Scribe, Drunk, Battle, Monster, Myth, Revenge, Killing, Grendel, Lord of the Rings, Thane, Warrior, Unicorn, Rainbow, Syphilis, Knight, Nun, Mead, Thor, Egil, Sheep, Killer Bjarni, Jane Austen, New Jersey, Axe, Epic, Death, Virgin Mary, Armor, Sword.

2009-05-13T14:02:00.002-04:00

Things Professor Drout Said: Spring 2009 edition

(Apparently this is becoming a tradition. The following appeared anonymously in my mailbox).

Sheep DNA from manuscripts = CSI: Beowulf.

A librarian's goal in life is to not let people touch the materials.

'Cataloguey' -- I don't know if that is a word, but I'm going to use it.

(on theories of authorship): So theory will help you decide who's responsible for the awesomeness of Star Wars... and the crapitude of Jar Jar Binks.

I haven't mentioned J.R.R. Tolkien yet in this whole class, and that's just not acceptable.

So there was this bus full of drunken Anglo-Saxonists...

Scyld overturns the mead benches. Yes, he's fearsome because he re-arranged furniture.

I do have a life ... sometimes ... Maybe I was playing Lord of the Rings online and forgot to check my email...

Is New Jersey its own ethnic group?

(on Beowulf's lack of children)
I think the perfect phrase would be "epic fail."

Grendel couldn't pay wergild. My theory? No pockets.

(on Beowulf's sword)
It's a sword! It's pointy! Like a penis! And when it fails ... I don't really know what that means or when the other sword melts...

(on Icelandic sagas)
People don't worry too much about the existential meaning of life when at any moment someone might show up at their door with an axe.

His name means "Killer Barney" and all I can think of is the purple dinosaur.

"I love you, you love me. I slaughtered some members of my family..."

Imagine how well class would go if my name was "Killer Drout."

Where's the last severed head you had in a Jane Austen novel?

(On Egil Skallagrimsson)
He's a huge, snarling, murdering freak, and everyone wants him as their ancestor.

If I live in tenth-century Iceland, I don't want to go into Egil Skallagrimsson's bed closet for any reason whatsoever.

So I mixed up my 80's hair bands ... oh God, how horrible!

(on Gawain and his shield)
"So as I'm hacking someone's arm off and making him bleed to death, I can gaze at the Virgin Mary and it makes me feel better."

Everyone has a favorite Mayan god and Tlaloc is mine.

The first circle is the good part of Hell, with nice condos.

(on the problems with the rain in the upper circles and the rain of fire in the seventh circle)
It's a vision of Hell. I don't have to explain the meteorology!

Let's play "Name that heresy!"

Then the vikings realized "Hey! We can just go over to England and take their stuff."

Newton would boil mercury for a while, go insane, be dragged back to London and then invent physics.

Word of advice: Never build torture devices for evil tyrants. Ever.

Think of the barrators as being in a fondue pot of pitch.

Look! I made it to one minute before the end of class ... J.R.R. Tolkien!

2009-05-05T21:42:00.002-04:00

Lexomics at Kalamazoo

Do you like to count things? If so, the website our research group (me; Mark LeBlanc, prof. of computer science; Mike Kahn, prof. of statistics; and our students) is unveiling at Kalamazoo might be useful to you.

The on-line tools we have put up at http://lexomics.wheatoncollege.edu help researchers examine Anglo-Saxon texts in terms of patterns of words. For example, if you would like to list all the words in The Gifts of Men in order of frequency, you can. If you'd like to see what were Wulfstan's favorite words, you can. If you want to know how many words there are in the entire Anglo-Saxon corpus, and which are most common, you can find out.

Not only can you count words in any text, but you can create "virtual manuscripts" that combine separate texts into one file for counting purposes. So if you'd like to determine the most common--or the rarest-- words in the Beowulf manuscript (not just the poem Beowulf), you now can. Want to see which words appear once and only once (or twice and only twice) in Cotton Tiberius A.iii.? Easy!

And each of the words you might countis linked to a concordance search in the Dictionary of Old English. So if you discover that meahtum appears only twice in the Beowulf manuscript, you can then click on it and, provided you have electronic access to the DOE, you can see its other appearances in Old English (yes, the texts aren't lemmatized; if you want to know why, come to our paper at Kalamazoo).

Now why would I want to count words, you ask?

First, because looking at word frequencies helps you to identify interesting words in a text. If a word appears only in the OE translation of the Rule of Chrodegang and a text by Ælfric, that's potentially useful. Our tools can thus help literary scholars zero in on words that are worth a second look and can open the way for additional literary analysis.

Also, because the counts can be downloaded as Excel spreadsheets, there are many advanced statistical techniques that can be applied to them. But saying more would give away our paper at Kalamazoo, which I don't want to do.

Instead, I want to invite you to come to a roundtable, "Computing with Style," Thursday at 10:00 in Bernhard 213, our formal paper, "Lexomics for Literature" Thurs at 1:30 in the Bernhard Brown and Gold Room, and the poster session for Digital Humanities Thurs at 6:30 in Fetzer 1035. We'll have the software there for you to try and all three of us will be there to answer questions. We're looking for people who want to use the software and for additional collaborators.

All the software is open-source and available for free at the lexomics website, and it can easily be adapted to work on any electronic corpus of texts in any language.

This work is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Initiative, Grant #HD-50300-08.

2009-04-20T09:35:00.005-04:00

J. G. Ballard

[UPDATE: Geez! Step away from the computer for a weekend so you can coach some little league teams, and, whammo! People descend from everywhere to mark a stylistic infelicity caused by splicing up one start with another. Ouch! Below is the revised. If you want to see the original error, tough.]

On a Tuesday in 1982 I was in the Monmouth County Library in Shrewsbury, NJ. I know it was a Tuesday because, as a treat, my dad took my brother and I there every Tuesday. In the metal rack of paperback science fiction books, I noticed a beat-up copy of Chronopolis. On the way home I started to read it and was completely hooked, powering through the entire book that night and reading it several times again before returning it the following week. I had never read anything like it, and the best stories from the volume, "The Voices of Time," "Deep End," "The Cage of Sand," and especially, "The Terminal Beach" have been part of my interior world ever since.

My students find it hard to conceive of "life before Amazon," not to mention "life before the internet" and "life before Barnes and Noble superstores," so they don't understand how it's possible to love a writer but be limited to the one or two volumes in the local library and the bits and pieces that you found in random bookstores. But that was the way I encountered Ballard, a new novel here, a short story there, a paperback tucked away in the science fiction section of a college bookstore. I never engaged with Ballard's work systematically, the way I did with "The Big H" writers that were so important when I was in high school: Hemingway, Heinlein and Herbert. Ballard was different, but that made his books more powerful to me: found treasures.

In college The Day of Creation came out, and for a while it was easier to find other novels. I devoured The Drowned World and obsessively re-read The Crystal World and collections of short stories, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future, Vermillion Sands. The story that got me into the Iowa Writer's Workshop, I am almost certain, was my attempt to write a reverse version of The Drowned World, and I often argued for the literary value of Science Fiction by using illustrations from Ballard's work (unfortunately none of the other students in Carnegie Mellon creative writing classes had read Ballard).

But it was only in 1990-91, when I was doing my M.A. at Stanford, that I really investigated Ballard and his intellectual world: I found, but did not really enjoy, the books for which he gained so much fame: Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, The Concrete Island, High Rise. Much more important to me was surrealism, which I discovered through Ballard. I spent hours and hours at Stanford's art library, pouring over major and minor works, and I tried to write surrealist SF myself. Simultaneously I went though a bad period of horrible insomnia (it didn't help that I lived in East Palo Alto, which that year was one of the crime capitals of California, so there were frequent shots fired in the distance and sirens, cracked-out people knocking on the door at 3 a.m., etc.) and for a while thought I was entering into a Ballard story or a Paul Delvaux painting. Somehow this all made Ballard even more powerful and personal.

Ballard was most widely acclaimed for his non-surrealist, non-SF novel, Empire of the Sun, and he was notorious for the experimental, weird books like Crash. But those books, interesting and accomplished as they are, don't do much for me. I am instead fascinated by the visual surrealism of the shorts stories and the books from the 60's and 70's. London half-submerged under warm salt water, a bird encased in crystal, a giant beach of red Mars sand, jeweled insects, sculptured clouds, flocks of sand-rays flying through the desert, the concrete blocks of Eniwetok. Ballard managed to write visually beautiful things, images that, once read, never leave you.

J. G. Ballard died of cancer on April 19th.

2009-04-14T19:25:00.008-04:00

The Council of Elrond
Adapted by Michael D.C. Drout and August G. Stoll, III

2009-04-14T14:36:00.003-04:00

Bizarre Email of the Week

More Council of Elrond later tonight, maybe, but I just had to let you see this:

Dear Dr. Drout,

We have learned of your published research on whales. We would like to invite your participation in our publishing program. In particular, I have in mind a new research or review article for an edited collection (invitation only) being assembled under my direction tentatively entitled "######## [no need to embarrass the editor ###" The contributions for this edited book are intended to range from 4,000-35,000 words. If you are interested in participating, please consult the Notes for Contributors at the bottom of this letter.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what I ever wrote that had any bearing on whales at all (I've never even written anything significant about Wales).

UPDATE: Google is your friend.

Apparently there is a V. Drout out there who did a 2003 dissertation on Sperm Whales and that must be the source of the confusion. I am so jealous! Although Anglo-Saxon is cooler than anything else in the humanities, Sperm Whales are way cooler than that.

And there goes my plan of seeing if I could actually write something about whales and get published in a by-invitation-only collection. Dang.

UPDATE AGAIN: It gets better: the V. Drout who writes about whales got his/her Ph.D. from the University of Bangor in Wales.

2009-04-12T22:14:00.004-04:00

The Council of Elrond: An Adapted Play

(My apologies for the lack of content. I have been absolutely buried with:

Administration
The editing and then proofing of Tolkien Studies volume 6
The production of the cumulative index for Tolkien Studies volumes 1-5
Expansions, correction and revision for the new edition of Beowulf and the Critics
Prepping our Lexomics presentation for Kalamazoo
Writing a book chapter, "The Medieval Author in Memetic Terms" for an April 17 deadline
Prepping to give a lecture at Amherst
My son's 5th birthday
My daughter having two weeks off from school and a violin recital
Easter
My son's birthday party (which involves knights, princesses and ponies))

So in lieu of new content, I offer you something I wrote 31 years ago (how's that for recycling?)

Back in 1978, in Mrs. Hamer's 5th grade class in Ocean Township School, my best friend Chipper Stoll and I decided to adapt part of The Lord of the Rings for a play. Mrs. Hamer, being a brilliant teacher, let us sit in the book corner in the back of the room and do this for several days.

So with the whole Lord of the Rings to draw from, what did Chipper and I choose? Well, "The Council of Elrond" Why not? We had many choices: battles, stirring speeches, deep emotional struggles, beauty and terror. Of course we chose a faculty meeting with Elves.

"The Council of Elrond" is perhaps the most infamous chapter in the book: in 2005 I did a radio show in which one caller, who ran a bookstore, said "I just tell everyone to skip that chapter, and then they enjoy The Lord of the Rings (I'm afraid I took umbrage). And I have heard the same idea from many people, which I why I'm writing a chapter for a Tolkien book (assuming the chapter and the book are accepted) called "The Council of Elrond, all those poems, and the famous F-ing Elves: Teaching the Hard Parts of Tolkien."

Recently I found Chipper's and my script of The Council of Elrond, and, after reading it over, I have to be snotty and say that we did a better job (on this particular chapter) than Philippa Boyens. Our version is not all fighty-fighty, and we managed to use a lot of Tolkien's own words. I'm also extremely amused that my pedantic, academic self manifested itself even in fifth grade: Sez Elrond: "The Rings of Power were forged by the Elves of Eregion in S.A. 1590. The One Ring was forged in S.A. 1600, by Sauron."

So, for your amusement, over the next few days I will post The Council of Elrond, adapted by Michael D.C. Drout and August G. Stoll, III.

More to come...

2009-03-24T20:10:00.002-04:00

Tolkien Classes

Recently I got an email from the Chair of a high-school English department who wanted to know about classes in Tolkien or fantasy literature that might be taught at other high schools. I realized I have no idea.

Furthermore, I have no idea how many college courses are now devoted to Tolkien. Back in 2003, when I was making the case to WVU Press that they should publish Tolkien Studies, I did a rough survey, searching for "Tolkien" and "syllabus" on the same page and then weeding out by hand. This is no longer possible: there are 37,000 results, and many duplications.

So, instead of brute-force googling (though I'm sure those with better google-fu than I could narrow it down), let's try the power of distributed intelligence and social networking.

If you know of classes devoted to Tolkien or having a substantial Tolkien component, at the high-school or college level, post about them in the comments here or email me. I will assemble all the data and make a new post. You don't need to write much, just something like:

Wheaton College, Norton Mass: English 259: J.R.R. Tolkien, English 401: Sr. Seminar: Tolkien and Le Guin.

Of course if there's a link to a syllabus, that's even better, but not necessary. And if you don't have specific data, but can remember something like "I had a course on JRRT at University of X in 2002," that's fine, too.

My gut feeling is that the number of courses has perhaps even doubled since 2003. Just recently I was partnered with someone from another New England elite liberal arts college, and he just mentioned, in passing, that one of their new faculty members "does this course on Tolkien, of all things, and it's really very good." (I just smiled). Anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of medievalists are now teaching a Tolkien course as well (and, yes, I'll be they are "really very good"). So I think these courses are now all over the place and are more "respectable" than they were even six years ago. I'd like to see if this hunch is correct.

(I'll save a description of my war with the raccoons for the next post)

2009-03-14T10:22:00.003-04:00

Yet another surreal moment (thanks, JRRT)

This morning my son and daughter were playing "Mama warg, baby warg." Yes, they were pretending that they were bloodthirsty super-wolves, ravening through Middle-earth (though mostly it seems they were making "dens" by draping blankets over the furniture).

So I asked them, "What are your names? Bone-gnasher and Blood-fang?"

Son: "I'm Cookie."

Daughter: "My name is Patches."

The Lord of the Rings Online should definitely add these two as wandering Elite level 50s: Cookie and Patches, Wargs.

2009-03-13T08:56:00.002-04:00

History Channel update

Back in December I did some video interviews for an independent production company on Old Norse, Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings. The series they were filming has now officially been picked up and renamed for The History Channel and is entitled (at least for now), "Clash of the Gods." I'm guessing, based on their schedule, that it will be out this summer. As soon as I know dates, etc., I will post.

2009-03-11T23:11:00.004-04:00

Triple Nerd Score!

In which I connect Beowulf, the Rev. Walter Skeat and ornithology

In Beowulf: The Critical Heritage, Tom Shippey and Andreas Haarder quote the Rev. Walter W. Skeat on one of my favorite Beowulf controversies: does the hero's name mean "bear" or "woodpecker"? (As I said before, the Angelina Jolie "naked philology" scene might have been even more amusing if, after she asked him if he was the "wolf of the bees, the bear," he had answered "no, the woodpecker").

Skeat comes down on the side of "woodpecker" (first proposed by Jacob Grimm in 1836 (though Skeat didn't know it when he wrote this piece in 1877). He writes:

I wish to draw attention to the fact that the Old Dutch biewolf, according to Kilian, was a woodpecker. I read that the great black woodpecker is common in Norway and Sweden, and that its food consists of the larvae of wasps, bees, and other insects. Also, that the green woodpecker, found in most countries of Europe, has been known to take bees from a hive. The question remains, why should the woodpecker be selected as the type of a hero? The answer is simple -- viz., because of its indomitable nature; it is a bird that fights to the death. Wilson says of an ivory-billed woodpecker whom he put into a cage, that he did not survive his captivity more than three days, during which he manifested and unconquerable spirit, and refused all sustenance. This bird severely wounded Wilson while he was sketching him, and died with unabated spirit. 'This unconquerable courage, most probably gave the head and bill of the bird so much value in the eyes of the Indians.'

Shippey notes: "I have been unable to trace Skeat's reference, 'English Cyclop. Nat. Hist.' IV, 345. 'Wilson' is probably John Marius Wilson, a zoologist who produced two other 'Cyclopedias' between 1847 and 1867."

But because I'm a bird nerd, I can trace Skeat's reference, or, rather I found his source (his specific reference remains a mystery): the great ornithologist Alexander Wilson (1766-1813), who wrote the great nine-volume American Ornithology and whose meeting with Audubon in 1810 inspired Audubon to start his great work. Reading anything about birds and "Wilson" in the same paragraph immediately made me think of that Wilson, but the European references at the beginning of the Skeat quote at first threw me off. However, a quick check of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's page on encounters with the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker finds the section Skeat is referring to:

Like many naturalists and painters of the day, Wilson shot his subjects, not with a camera but with a gun, in order to paint them from life (or rather, death). Wilson wrote of shooting and slightly wounding an Ivory-billed Woodpecker a few miles from Wilmington, North Carolina. He decided to keep the bird as a pet so he could study and illustrate it at his leisure. Upon capture, the woodpecker "uttered a loudly reiterated and most piteous note, exactly resembling the violent crying of a young child, which terrified my horse so as to nearly cost me my life."

Wilson took the bird to an inn in Wilmington, where he left the bird loose in his room while he took care of his horse. When he returned to the room, less than an hour later, the bird had nearly destroyed one wall of the room and part of the ceiling in its effort to escape.

Leaving the room again to search for grubs for the bird, Wilson decided to tether the bird to the leg of a mahogany table. Upon his return he "heard him again hard at work, [and] on entering, had the mortification to perceive that he had almost entirely ruined the mahogany table to which he was fastened, and on which he had wreaked his whole vengeance."

The ivory-bill died a few days later, much to Alexander Wilson's dismay. It "displayed such a noble and unconquerable spirit, that I was frequently tempted to restore him to his native woods," he wrote. "He lived with me for three days, but refused all sustenance, and I witnessed his death with regret."

I have two other connections with Wilson (which is probably why I got the idea that he was the source). First, my colleague John Kricher has been the president of the Wilson Society, the great American ornithological group. Second, I own a print of Audubon's painting of a Wilson's Warbler (and if you'd like to buy an Amsterdam Audubon print of the Wilson's Warbler, let me know).

It's a small world, the connections are everywhere (and still the best tool for finding them is your brain armed with a wide variety of experiences).

P.S.: It's been a very birdy week. Yesterday, my son and I spotted a mature bald eagle not 100 feet away from us at the Norton Reservoir, right near Wheaton. Today there were both hooded and common mergansers in Mother Brook in Dedham (the first artificial waterway in America and a really short walk from my house).

2009-03-11T00:08:00.003-04:00

Well at least I won't have to kill any more widows

I've been in the process of revising J.R.R. Tolkien's Beowulf and the Critics for a revised, expanded and corrected second edition, and I have been driving myself up a tree not to do anything that would change the pagination of the edition. Thus I've been, in journalists' jargon, "killing widows," re-wording lines or paragraphs to keep them from running over into a next line. It's frustrating work (but amazing discipline for improving your writing).

But today I learned from the press that this work has been for naught (except that it has tightened up the writing considerably). The only way to make the minor corrections I want to make throughout will mess up the pagination. No way around it, due to the way the book was produced the first time around. That means (and you have no idea how hard it is to type these words) I will have to do a new index ...............

You see, I've done five indices this year. True, my brilliant students Jason Rea, Lauren Provost, Tara McGoldrick and now Maryellen Groot (learn these names: They are future professors, famous lawyers and captains of industry) have been doing the code-insertion. But in the end I'm responsible for the cumulative index for five volumes of Tolkien Studies. And now I have to re-index a book I wrote and indexed nearly ten years ago. It is enough to make you want to kill some more widows (or wander around a level-35 enemy camp completely nuking everything that moves in range of your level-56 crossbow. Not feeling like such a tough goblin now, are we Nishruk?).

So that's the bad news. The good news is now that there won't just be a new preface, corrections throughout and two (and, if I'm lucky, three) new sections added to the introduction. I can do a much more thoroughgoing revision to the text, and I can integrate the new material (tables showing the evolution of the original Oxford lectures into the published lecture; the identification of the various voice in the 'Babel of Voices' section, and, perhaps, a previously unpublished note that relates to the text), and I can revise some of the conclusions (W.P. Ker is even more important than I had realized) . So the "Expanded and Corrected" second edition will now be even more true than it was in the original plan and I will be able, with a clean conscience, to encourage you to buy either the paperback release or the planned "collector's edition" (we still haven't figured out the logistics of my signing all of them. I suggested flying me to Arizona in the middle of winter. They haven't said "no" that that yet).

And one final note: if you are one of the rare few who are selling copies of my book on Amazon for >150.00, you suck (well, a little), because I have no extra copies of my own to sell and thus can't capitalize on the fortunes of an out-of-print book. And the good news for you, though not for me, is that the ones you have will soon not only be a hard-to-get first edition, but a first edition that really is different than the second edition. You're welcome. Please send checks, fruit baskets or huge bars of gold to my Wheaton address.

2009-03-05T23:40:00.002-05:00

Laying Down Markers

This semester I am the Chair of yet another committee (yes, before we go further, department Chairs are not supposed to have to chair major committees, but, this committee didn't look so major when I agreed to chair it. Now we are meeting every single week and doing stuff. But somehow the Committee on Committees -- of course we have a Committee on Committees, doesn't everyone? -- hasn't noticed and pulled me off). We are having to make some potential hiring/searching decisions, and I've gotten into some debate with my colleagues. And I realized that one thing that we medievalists need to do, is to lay down some markers.

I'll explain. The quasi-searches we are doing are for interdisciplinary-type, short-term positions, meant to temporarily augment college teaching offerings. So we're looking at stuff we don't usually teach. One very good candidate is a medievalist. That is, he/she specializes in the medieval period of the non-traditional area we are looking for. One of my colleagues said, "given this [in the news a lot] subject area, I think we should have someone contemporary."

I decided not to let this go, as I'm sure everyone wanted me to. Instead, I laid down a marker: we are not going to make this decision without a debate about this idea on the merits of the argument and its philosophical structure. It will be a long, difficult, drawn-out debate, because I know my arguments very well and am happy to make them (and if they're not careful, I'll use rhetoric, I will...). But I am not going to do the typical thing, the medievalist thing (I'm sad to say), and make one gesture and then roll over. Instead, I'm going to be willing, as one of my colleagues put it in another circumstance "to die on this hill."

And I'm going to do that every single time someone asserts that the study of the present is more valuable than the study of the past, or that medieval culture is less important than contemporary culture. There won't be a motion on the floor of the faculty meeting or a discussion in a department meeting or a conversation in the Faculty Dining Room in which someone gets away with making the assertion that medieval studies isn't at the very minimum as valuable (we all know it's actually more valuable, but I'll throw them a bone) as any other discipline or sub-discipline at the colleage. Every single time people try to discount, denigrate or ignore the field, I am going to make them engage in a long debate from first principles.

I am certain that after a while this is going to get old to the people who have to have debate after debate after debate about the first principles of a liberal arts education and the value of the past and its relevance. And I am going to be relentless about this. And eventually, for many people, it will just be easier to take the study of the Middle Ages seriously so as not to have to lose 2/3 of a meeting on a long, tedious but impassioned rant from / debate with Drout.

[N.B.: I am not suggesting using these tactics if you are actually on the wrong side of your debate. But since the value of the Middle Ages is so easy to defend, and I am on the right side, eventually, the truth will prevail.]

The bigger point is that the way medievalists can "fight" for the value of what we do is challenge every single time the absolutely brain-dead idea that what's done in psychology or sociology or urban studies or political science is more important than medieval studies . It's not even as important as medieval studies, but we'll keep that amongst ourselves. If people make that assertion, you make them defend it with actual arguments as opposed to sighing, sneering, or going into full condescension mode. I'll bet they can't if they're actually challenged.

I'll keep you posted.

2009-03-03T20:41:00.005-05:00

Crazy Sheep DNA Project on Video

Wheaton put together a little video on our sheep-DNA project. It's most valuable for seeing how smart and articulate my students are. (Wish I could take credit, but they came that way).

2009-03-01T10:48:00.003-05:00

The Secret Language of Department Chairs

This week I was an outside evaluator for an English department that is undertaking a program review. It turns out, this was a lot of work (and even more for them than it was for me). I learned an awful lot, and I plan to steal lots of good ideas.

One moment really got me:

Former Department Chair: So students can fulfill that requirement with 208, 209 or 211. 210 is on the books but is really a place-holder for the course that have run as 298. We make sure to offer 253, 255 and 256 each year, and 254 rotates in based on sabbaticals and releases. At the 300-level, we have 302, 303 and 305 that run every year, and then we rotate 304 and 306 and sometimes 309, which used to be 310.

And I realized that I understood exactly what he was talking about.

2009-02-24T08:30:00.002-05:00

Things only amusing to academics

Yesterday we had to interview a grad student who is going to be part of our teaching fellows program. Rather than appointing a committee, I just grabbed the person who will be the mentor and the person who will be interim chair when I'm doing research next year.

Me: "So here you have the current Chair [me], next year's interim Chair, the person who will be the Chair the year after that [me], and the person who will be taking over Chair when I'm done. We're a veritable Bob's Discount Furniture of professors."

Well, I thought it was funny.

2009-02-11T00:00:00.001-05:00

The Complete Old English Poetic Corpus is Now Online at Anglo-Saxon Aloud

After nearly two years (just ten days short of two years), 528 posts and many hours of recording and even more hours editing, every Old English poem is now recorded and on-line at this site. The posting of "Instructions for Christians" a few minutes ago thus marks the completion of my original plan for Anglo-Saxon Aloud.

If some of the statistics are accurate, there have been nearly a quarter of a million downloads from Anglo-Saxon Aloud (I find this hard to believe, actually). The Dream of the Rood seems to have been downloaded the most, at 1,900 or so times thus far, with the Wanderer next, at 1,600.

If you have just discovered this site, I encourage you not just to click on the first recording below (which is not a very good poem, if it even is a poem), but instead to listen to some of the best Anglo-Saxon poems, including The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Dream of the Rood, selections from Beowulf, Cædmon's Hymn, and The Battle of Maldon. You can find over 100 different poems through the "category" links. If you would like to listen to the poems in both Old English and Modern English, with brief introductory discussion by me, you can buy the 2-CD set of Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits from the link. For complicated reasons, not all of Beowulf is on this site, but you can buy the entire poem in Old English as a 3-CD set at Beowulf Aloud.
I am extremely gratified by all of the feedback I have received on this project. I have learned an immense amount about Old English poetry by doing it and have also had a great deal of fun. And at the times when I wondered why I was spending yet another Thursday morning recording a week's worth of posts, or when I was editing out the ten millionth loud breath or too-long pause, knowing that people were listening to me in Russia and Taiwan and Japan and Chile and Australia and South Africa was a great motivator. I am particularly encouraged that so many people have emailed to say that they have used the site for their classes.

A word about my pronunciation. I was trained to speak Old English by John Miles Foley at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He in turn was trained by Robert Creed. Professor Foley also worked with Benjamin Bagby on his pronunciation, so a great deal of the recorded Old English in the world goes back to John and to Bob Creed. But although there are good reasons for thinking that the way we pronounce Old English is close to the original pronunciation, I do want to note that there are different "schools" and accents of Old English. I definitely slip into American pronunciation of vowels on occasion, and those taught by different teachers will pronounce Old English in subtly (and less subtly) different ways. Such is the nature of language: it always changes from speaker to speaker, from time to time. I do not know what Anglo-Saxon native speakers, presented with the poems on this site, would think. Perhaps they would think it barbarous, but I am hopeful that they would recognize at least a little of the beauty of their poetry.

In an early exercise in Bright's Old English Grammar, the text from which I learned Old English, the "Learning-Maiden" says: "ðeah þe we ne mægen hieran ussera ealdfædera stefna, þeahhwæðere magon we rædan heora word, þa þe ða boceras gewriten habbað." (Although we may not hear our ancestors' voices, we nevertheless may read their words, those that the writers have written). We can never bring back the voices of those long gone, but, through centuries of patient scholarship, effective training and new technology, we can recapture at least an idea, an echo of what those voices might have been. I hope I have accomplished that, to a very small degree, here.
I am done with the poetry, and will be taking a short break from recording, but I am not done with Anglo-Saxon Aloud. 30,000 lines of poetry took 2 years. 300,000 lines of prose would then, theoretically, take 20, and I am not making that kind of a commitment right now (and it would in any event be longer, because prose has more words per line). My next step will either be The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi, but I have not decided yet. I'll also be doing some housekeeping, fixing tags, adding explanations, etc., here (so let me know if you find errors) and I hope to work with Aaron Hostetter, who has created the incredibly valuable Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry project) to link together translations with the recordings. At some point I will offer for sale (in case you don't want to spend a year downloading) the entire corpus on a jump drive, iPod shuffle, or set of DVDs or CDs, but that is in the further future.

Again, thanks very, very much for your support over the past two years. Enjoy the poetry. Learn the language. Wes þu hal

2009-02-09T21:47:00.002-05:00

The World We Now Live In

Yesterday my son and daughter were playing at being wolves. My son was the baby wolf and my daughter was the mommy wolf, and they were crawling around the house, howling, attacking stuffed animals, etc.

Daughter: Ok, Baby. Now you go into your den and stay there and be safe until Mama catches the moose. Then you can come out and join Mama.

Son: How will I know when you've caught the moose, Mama?

Daughter: Mama will text you.

2009-02-04T23:13:00.002-05:00

A Remarkable Life

When I first came to Wheaton, I met Professor Emeritus Holcombe Austin, who was a retired Philosophy professor and also an expert on trees. He and his wife Ethelind were fixtures on the Wheaton campus, and I remember chatting with him at lunch when I was a brand-new assistant professor. He was a fascinating and very kind person.

Sadly, Holcombe passed away in 2003 at the age of 97, and a few days ago Ethelind also died, either at 100 or just shy of making her century.

Below I've pasted in Ethelind's obituary from the Denver Post. What a remarkable life!

ETHELIND ELBERT AUSTIN
1909-2009

Ethelind Elbert Austin, the grandniece of Colorado territorial governor Samuel Elbert--for whom Mount Elbert is named--and the great-grandniece-in-law of territorial governor John Evans--for whom Mount Evans is named--died at her home in Aurora on January 28.

A skilled and avid horsewoman, she rode in 1917 at the age of 8 to the top of Mount Evans, long before the road to the peak was built. It was a 16-hour single-day round trip, starting by moonlight at 3 a.m. for an ascent of some 7000 feet from the family ranch in upper Bear Creek Canyon. When the ride was over, she later recalled almost falling asleep face first into her soup.

She was a raconteur of early Colorado history and in her 90's sometimes told historical anecdotes ("The Story of Deadeye Dick" was a favorite) at events in Denver at the Byers-Evans House museum, which she visited as a little girl when the family of territorial governor John Evans was still living in the house.

She was born in Des Moines, Iowa, grew up on a family farm, and by age 16 had the ambition of becoming the nation's first female competitive racing jockey, but instead she enrolled as a student in Radcliffe College, in Cambridge, MA, where she graduated with honors in Romance languages in 1930 and where she met a graduate student in philosophy from Texas named Holcombe Austin. They were married in 1933. He taught philosophy at Harvard College, Scripps College in California, and for most of his career he was professor of philosophy at Wheaton College, in Norton, MA, where she was a librarian at the college.

After retirement in 1970, they spent each summer at the family ranch in upper Bear Creek Canyon, where she rode nearly daily through age 98 and was the acknowledged local expert on the canyon's trails.

She is survived by three children. John Austin, M.D., is a professor of radiology at Columbia University in New York City, David Austin is former principal cellist of the New Haven and Hartford, CT, symphony orchestras and a businessman in Hoonah, AK, and Sue Austin Ricketts, Ph.D., is a demographer for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and lives in Denver. She is survived also by 8 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.

2009-01-29T19:32:00.003-05:00

My Latest Course on CD is out
A Way with Words IV: Understanding Poetry

I recorded this course months ago, but it take a while for editing, post-production, writing the course book and then having a designer make it look good...

But it's out now. So if you want to hear me talk about poetry (and really, who doesn't?), you can get the course directly from Recorded books and listen to me make fun of the emo parts of "Ode to the West Wind." The other courses in the series are also available from Recorded Books and from audible.com.

(Joking aside, I'm pretty happy with the way the course came out. I recorded another one, The Anglo-Saxon World, in December and that should be out in the early spring).

2009-01-29T11:19:00.002-05:00

Anglo-Saxon Aloud wins an award.
Thank you!

Over at The Ruminate, Larry Swain created the PEAA Awards (Praemium Ephemeridis Aetheriae Auctoribus awards [Award for Authors of Ethereal Diaries]), and he recently announced that Anglo-Saxon Aloud won for Best Podcast on Medieval Subject.

This award is incredibly gratifying, because it comes from the people who know best (the medievalist blogging community), and I really appreciate the award and Larry's putting together the whole thing.

Of course it is a little ironic that I got the award just as I got too much of a cold to effectively finish up the poetry. The entire ASPR is recorded and posted, but there are a few other short poems (well, except Instructions for Christians, which is a beast). As soon as my voice no longer sounds like I have smallish bees up my nose, I'll finish that up and then try some prose.

So thanks to Larry, to those who voted for Anglo-Saxon Aloud, and most importantly, for those who listen to Anglo-Saxon Aloud. Knowing that there are listeners, all over the world it turns out, has been the biggest motivator for my keeping up with the project, and the project itself has taught me an enormous amount about Anglo-Saxon poetry.

(Larry, you can just email me for the mailing address for my statuette since Nokes already claimed the whole 1.4 million dollar check...)

2009-01-26T11:35:00.003-05:00

Hippos Go Berserk is a Forgery!

The following information is so explosive that I just couldn't wait for the Speculum article to come out.

I have evidence that Hippos Go Berserk, allegedly by Sandra Boynton, is likely a crude forgery that has duped generations of scholars. A close-minded critical establishment dominated by a line of Oxford and Cambridge Professors has refused to acknowledge that Hippos Go Berserk contains inconsistencies that the real Sandra Boynton would never have included in a work.

I draw your attention in particular to the point of the story where the Hippos have already gone berserk and are leaving the party. "Hippos" states:

Seven hippos heading west
Leave six hippos quite distressed.
Five hippos then set forth
With four hippos headed north.
Three hippos say 'good day.'
The last two hippos go their way.
One hippo, alone once more, misses the other forty-four.

See it? See the problem? The six hippos who were quite distressed NEVER LEFT. They are still there. So the final hippo is NOT alone, missing the other forty-four: He's with six hippos, and the seven of them are (perhaps) missing the other thirty-eight hippos.

If the version we have of Hippos Go Berserk were actually by Sandra Boynton, this inconsistency would never have occurred. Therefore Hippos Go Berserk is a later forgery, not actually by the great Boynton, and thus the entire edifice of scholarship built upon the assumption that Hippos Go Berserk is genuine needs to be demolished.

The "six hippos who never leave" inconsistency and others (for example: the fuzzy blue animal at the beginning of the book is at one point called "a guest" and at another, "a beast") suggest a writer who is trying to imitate Boynton from a different point in time. We will, to be cautious, call this writer Pseudo-Boynton, but it is likely that the forger is the only writer of the tenth century who had the ability even to attempt to forge Boynton's unique style. The true author of our version of Hippos Go Berserk is thus none other than . . . Byrhtferth of Ramsey!

2009-01-22T21:04:00.002-05:00

Sheep DNA and Manuscripts (Again)

I meant to blog about this last week, but I had to get a lot of other stuff finished before the semester started.

Recently a research group at Johns Hopkins announced some results at getting DNA out of manuscripts. Jonathan Jarrett blogged about it here.

This isn't my crazy Sheep DNA project, which got started back in 2005 after Scott McLemee sent around a meme on Inside Higer Ed and I responded.

I may have spread the idea to the internet in 2005, but it was not mine, originally. Greg Rose came up with it in a conversation with me in the fall of 2001 (though of course he may have thought of it earlier). And other people seem to have had the idea independently. Supposedly (though I can no longer find the link), a group at Cambridge tried to sequence the DNA out of some manuscripts in the Parker Library.

In 2007 I was able to get some funding for the project, which is why I was able to get started and give a report here. With Prof. Barbara Brennessel (my co-author in the Anglo-Saxon medicine paper) and our student, Amanda Shorette, we started laying the foundation for the project. I taught Amanda paleography so that she could understand the ways that humanistic researchers work, and she researched and then taught me about DNA extraction and PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) amplification of DNA.

Amanda did a lot of very good research to show what we could and could not do with ovine DNA. Then this fall another student, Jay Korzun, was able to extract DNA from a fragment of manuscript. We didn't go to press or publicize this yet because we have been consistently worried about cross-contamination and are trying to rule that out, but it seems we are basically at the same place as the Hopkins group.

Here's the problem, which, word has it, the Cambridge group also ran into: when you have about 1000 years worth of touching and rubbing along the edges of books, you end up with a lot of DNA cross-contamination, not just from human DNA that has rubbed off (which you can rule out by using different primers), but from the various leaves bound together in the manuscript (for example, if someone touches leaf 42r and then touches leaf 45v, particles of DNA from one can be transferred to the other). Again, rumor has it that the Cambridge group concluded that you would have to cut out a few square centimeters out of the middle of each leaf in order to avoid contamination as much as possible. Librarians were not enthusiastic.

All these problems don't make the project impossible (maybe), just very difficult. I have been working on a patent application for a process/device to get samples in a non-destructive manner (i.e., get microscopic samples; there is no non-destructive way to get DNA out of a manuscript -- swabbing doesn't get you enough, we learned), but even if that works (and working on it as a patent isn't meant to keep anyone from using it; it's meant to keep anyone else from patenting it and then stopping me from using it), we will still have a very, very messy data set.

But, as I've learned from the lexomics project, messy data can be dealt with if there is enough of it. So the key is to get data from a huge number of manuscript leaves and try to weed out the cross-contamination. To that end, we've concluded that we're going to need to take a bioinformatic approach, and figure out as much of the ACTG etc. coding of the DNA we extract. Then all of those codes, as fragmentary or complete as they are, go into a massive database, to which other researchers can contribute. Eventually we will be able to start building some phylogenetic trees.

So, to those who've asked: no, I'm not upset at the Hopkins group, who almost certainly came to the idea independently. The only way this will ever give us interesting results (i.e., Fred the Sheep gave his life for the Beowulf manuscript and look, part of Fred is in the Blickling homily manuscript also; or Fred's cousin Violet is in this Malmesbury charter...) is if a very large number of researchers and groups gather data over a long period of time, so there more people working, the better.

2009-01-22T15:01:00.003-05:00

Beowulf Aloud is Back!
(in stock, that is).

The studio had told me that it would only take two weeks, but it was more like a month (the holidays probably did get in the way a bit), but now I have copies of Beowulf Aloud in stock again ("the Tickle Me Elmo of 2008").

If you'd like to have your own personal copy of the 3-CD set of the greatest poem in Old English, filled with monster fights, dynastic politics and, most importantly, beautiful poetry, you can order it here.

Cost: $20.00 USD + packing and shipping ($5.00 for domestic US)

or use PayPal Button below (for domestic US shipping only; contact me m drout at wheaton ma dot edu for information about overseas shipping).

2009-01-14T00:06:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I think I live in a different world...

This is a paraphrase of a conversation at a meeting.

Background: Wheaton has arranged for a sophomore January experience. Sophomores come two days early and do some stuff. This happens to be on the day of the inauguration, so the planners decided that all the sophomores could be brought to the field house where they would watch the ceremony on a giant screen.

Drout: (as tactful and politically savvy as I always am): I'm just glad I never had to participate in such a creepy experience when I was in college.

X: (confused): Why would you call it creepy?

Drout: You are rounding up a large group of people and forcing them to watch political theater. On a giant screen. In a gymnasium.

[Long pause while people look uncomfortable.]

Drout: It never occurred to any of you who planned this that it was the slightest bit creepy, did it?

X: The way you describe it makes it sound creepy. It is a major event that most people will want to watch.

Drout: Couldn't they watch it without being herded together into a gymnasium? Maybe hang out with their friends, watch it on the various lounge TVs? Make comments?

X: But then there wouldn't be the bonding experience.

Drout: Bonding over a political spectacle is, in your view, a good thing?

[another uncomfortable pause]

X: Maybe you should be one of the faculty members afterwards who can give talks to contextualize the event. You could analyze the rhetoric.

Drout: I'm pretty sure I don't want the students to see me as part of the creepy event.

X: But you'd have a chance to express your point of view.

Drout: But you've got my entire point of view. I think it's creepy.

X: (Gives up in exasperation).

[Clarification: I am not suggesting that watching the inauguration is creepy. It's a major national event and it makes sense for people to watch it (although I was too busy working, I may watch the speech on YouTube later). I am creeped out by the leadership of the college putting together a program where students are pressured to go to watch a piece of political theater on a giant telescreen in a gymnasium. And I thought it amusing that a group of Ph.D.s didn't immediately spot the Orwellian imagery.

My only political comment, since I didn't vote for President Obama or his opponent or his predecessor, or his predecessor's predecessor, or his predecessor (this wasn't just a joke) is that it is more important to be skeptical, cynical and on your guard when your guy wins the election than when the other guy does (Likewise, you should read Dune Messiah and not just stop with Dune). My colleagues were very effective at being critical of the rhetoric, etc., of the previous administration. They should keep up the good work.

Everyone needs to practice good memetic hygiene! Keep your mind your own.]

2009-01-09T08:52:00.002-05:00

Alleluia! The Psalms are Done!
The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records are now complete on Anglo-Saxon Aloud

Psalm 149 and Psalm 150 went up today, which is perhaps appropriate. I certainly feel like praising, as I am very glad not to be doing Psalms any more. I started with the sung version of Psalm 51 on April 17 and have thus been recording Psalms for nearly nine months! I am rather in awe of those who memorized and sung the Psalter, particularly those who did not understand Latin but sung it anyway.

So the entire ASPR is now available. I'll be tying up loose ends over the next two weeks and then poetic side of Anglo-Saxon Aloud will be, for the time being, complete.

2009-01-05T10:38:00.003-05:00

Anglo-Saxon Aloud: The Home Stretch
(and poems that aren't in the ASPR)

Apologies for my absence from the internet world. Just before Christmas I recorded a new course for Recorded Books (The Anglo-Saxon World) and am now finishing writing the course book and, with the holidays and family life, I had to put other things on hold for a while. But now it's back-to-work time.

I've finished recording the final ten Psalms in the Paris Psalter and will be posting them, two per day, for the rest of this week, so by Friday recordings of the entire Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records will be on line except for the whole of Beowulf, which for economic reasons is only up in a few select pieced ("economic reasons"= I had to pay a lot for studio time to record it, so I sell the complete Beowulf at here at Beowulf Aloud).

Now it's time to tie up some loose ends. I'm going to go back and re-record the Psalms that I sung instead of recited (Psalms 50-68) and have both versions, spoken and sung, up on the site. That will be next week's project. And then I want to put up those remaining poems that are not in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records.

I want to make sure that I have a complete list (and texts), so I'm using the Dictionary of Old English corpus to look for anything in the Verse category that I haven't recorded. Here's what I came up with so far. Is there anything missing?

A44 Instructions for Christians
A45 Cnut’s Song
A46 Godric’s Prayer I and II
A47 The Grave
A48 Distich on Kenelm
A49 Distich on the Sons of Lothebrok
A50 Psalm 17:51
A51 Metrical Psalms 90:16 - 95:2

With a little luck, I will manage to get the re-done Psalms (50-68) and these miscellaneous poems all recorded, edited and posted before the 2-year anniversary of Anglo-Saxon Aloud on February 21 (I thought it would take about a year to do the whole project, and I'd like to not be wrong by a full factor of two).

Once the podcasts are all finished, I will be working to put the whole thing together on a CD-set, an iPod shuffle, or a memory stick for those who want to own a complete copy rather than doing two years of downloading. In the meanwhile, you can get the 2-CD set of Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits (which also has modern English translations and brief commentaries) at the link.

2008-12-14T18:31:00.003-05:00

Beowulf Aloud: Why so Popular?

[update: I've heard back from the studio, and "The Tickle Me Elmo" of 2008" (thanks, Tom), Beowulf Aloud, will be available again in two weeks, so you won't be able to get on in time for Christmas, but it will make a great New Year's present]

I guess this speaks to the enduring popularity of Beowulf, but there has been a run on copies of Beowulf Aloud lately. Of course I'm grateful, but I hadn't expected it, so I am now temporarily out of copies until I can get new ones made (probably a week or so).

But what is so surprising to me is that Beowulf Aloud is more popular than Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits, even though Beowulf Aloud has been out a lot longer and, it would seem, is less accessible. Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits has both Old and Modern English and is only 2 CDs, not 3. Any yed, I continue to sell twice as many Beowulf Alouds. Weird.

However, if you are looking for some Old English to charm your significant other this holiday season, then you should order Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits, because, although I am rushing the Beowulf Aloud masters to Boston tomorrow, I'm not sure if I'll have them ready by Christmas.

[I am also planning on working with CD-Baby to put Beowulf Aloud and Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits for sale on iTunes, but having to write and record a 14-lecture course, The Anglo-Saxon World, for Recorded Books (by Wednesday, when I have to go down to Manhattan and record) and having a pile of papers to grade so large that the papers at the bottom are starting to turn into diamond is slowing me down there.]

2008-12-12T22:08:00.002-05:00

Beowulf and the Critics

The other day I got a tip that copies of Beowulf and the Critics are selling at used book sites for well over $100.00. 'What's up with that?' I thought. I bought a few copies in September and sold them at A Long-Expected Party. Now I wish I had some extra ones in the basement to sell.

It turns out that even the super-expanded print run we did of Beowulf and the Critics has finally sold out. So the book is right now out of print. Hence the high prices (and those of you who bought B&C at ALEP -- whatta bahgain!).

But I've been in touch with the publisher, and we are going to reprint, so don't worry. The question we're working on right now is whether or not to do a paperback and whether or not to do a revised edition. I have discovered some errors that it would be good to correct, and there's a little new scholarship available (some by me, much more by Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull) that could be relevant.

So only pay those ridiculous prices if you need the book for research in the next few months. Though I guess that if we do a new edition, that will make those old ones a more collectible first editions (there are two printings; the first print run was only 300 copies, and there are two different covers, one with a little banner). Argh! Why didn't I keep more than my personal copy and one in the display case at work?

2008-12-11T23:36:00.002-05:00

Miracles of Medicine

To everyone, especially my students, whose emails I haven't returned. I'm really sorry, and I'll try to catch up, but my four-year-old son has been very sick (vomiting for 12 hours straight) and we had to take him to the Emergency Room last night for IV fluids. He's now doing much better, but it was (obviously) very tough for him and for the family.

Very sobering to think that 50 years ago, or at least 100 years ago, a bad bout of stomach flu could mean a dead child. It certainly makes one grateful for the years of science and engineering and medicine that goes into having an IV line with a peristaltic pump and sterile saline solution and the miracle drug of zofran and the ability to check blood electrolytes in less than an hour. And most of all, I'm grateful for the training and kindness of every single person we encountered in the ER. My little guy went from a limp, glassy-eyed rag doll to a somewhat contented child munching on popsicles and watching Bob the Builder in only a few hours. Thanks to you all, and to the long, long line of giants upon whose shoulders we all stand. May our own efforts be worthy of theirs and give as much to the people of the future as they have given to us.

2008-12-08T12:56:00.002-05:00

Good Rhetoric = Bad Argument?

In a post a while back I talked about pushing the metaphor until it breaks as a way of really testing whether a metaphor is a useful heuristic, whether it illuminates what you are discussing or obscures it. I argued that "imbricated discourses" is a bad metaphor and thus just a piece of jargon intended to show that you are a member of a certain clerisy (and I just wanted to put the boot in on "imbricated discourses" yet again since this blog is now the #3 google search for "imbricated," so hopefully people will see how stupid "imbricated" is and will stop using it outside of contexts in which the metaphor, overlapping shingles on a roof, is really descriptive. If I can help make the use of "imbricated discourses" the sign of sloppy thinking and a second-rate mind, I'll be a happy person).

On the last day of classes, I was discussing Smith of Wootton Major with the students in my J.R.R. Tolkien class and gave them the famous quote by Roger Lancelyn Green that seeking meaning in Smith is to "cut open the ball in search of its bounce."

When I was giving my talk in Norway, I mentioned another nice bit of rhetoric, by Maurice Bloch, who, in criticizing meme-based theories of culture, stated that “the culture of an individual, or of a group, is not a collection of bits, traits or memes, acquired from here and there, any more than a squirrel is a collection of hazelnuts.”

Now both of these pieces of rhetoric are quite effective in that they always get a laugh and do a lot to move the audience to the "side" of the speaker. But the more I analyze them, especially as metaphors, the more I think they are fundamentally wrong and that they are a kind of sophistry that is very counterproductive to understanding the world.

The rhetorical stance of both metaphors implies that the speaker is being sensible and arguing for some kind of holistic or integrated approach that the "dissectors" (to steal a term from Tolkien's "Beowulf:The Monsters and the Critics") are missing. The metaphor is supposed to show how dumb such an approach would be: What kind of an idiot would cut open the ball to try to find the bounce? Ha, ha! There's no bounce in there. Who would dissect a squirrel to find all the hazelnuts that make it up? Only a total bozo--like you, who is using this approach.

That's an effective stance in many cases, but I think it is sophistry. Because the point is that the metaphor is supposed to fail, and fail easily, and from the failure of the metaphor, we are supposed to see the failure of the larger argument to which it refers.

But in both of these cases, I don't think the metaphor actually fails, and thus the rhetorical device, when examined carefully, actually does the opposite of what the speakers intend.

Let's take the ball and the bounce. Setting aside the danger of cutting open a golf ball and having the radioactive goo inside that makes it bounce so far leak out (I believed this as a child, at least for a while), you can in fact "find" the bounce if you cut open a ball. First, after cutting it open, you examine its internal structure and determine the physical construction of the ball--solid rubber, twine wrapped around a core, air under pressure, solid wood. Then you examine those materials in more detail, perhaps producing micrographs to determine physical structure, grain boundaries in rubbers or plastics, for instance. Then you do some chemistry to figure out how the molecules of the material are arranged, noting, for example, long chains of polymers and whether they are cross-linked or not and to what degree. At a certain point, when you understand the forces of tension and compression, stored energy, etc., you have "found" the bounce; you understand why the ball behaves the way it does.

If you have never cut open the ball, you might be talking about abstract qualities of "bounce-ness," but you really would not understand it. So the rhetorical attack, which relies on the metaphor failing, actually fails itself, because the metaphor succeeds.

Likewise with the squirrel and the hazelnuts, though in a different way. A squirrel that eats hazelnuts is in fact composed of hazelnuts, but to understand how, we need to break down the hazelnuts into their component parts (proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, etc.) and then understand the biochemical property by which the squirrel changes hazelnut into squirrel. Bloch has mis-identified the level of analysis of meme-based approaches, which are really working at the biochemical level but which he insists on seeing at the hazelnut level. (To be technical for just a moment, Bloch's "hazelnuts" are very large, co-adapted meme-plexes, but meme-based theory is much more interested in separating out much, much smaller memes, analogous to the complex chemicals in the hazelnuts. The structure of the hazelnuts also has something to tell us about the squirrel, as do their production, digestions, etc., etc.). So this metaphor also fails to fail in the way the device assumes it will for all right-thinking people.

When I discussed this with my students, I pointed out that they should get particularly suspicious when the metaphor seems to work too well in one way or the other. That is, a beautiful metaphor should be pushed until it breaks and then the pieces examined (or, if it does not break, then its robustness will be demonstrated). And the metaphor designed to fail should be treated as if it might actually work.

The worst intellectual failures happen when things people want to hear get put into a pleasing form. The rhetorical techniques illustrated by Green and Bloch encourage such failings. And "imbricated discourses" is still a useless bit of annoying jargon and people will think you're a doofus if you use the phrase.

2008-12-03T12:57:00.003-05:00

The 'Canterbury Charm'?

[See below for updates]

Help! I have to do a TV taping tomorrow in New York, and the producers just provided me with a gigantic list of questions they want to ask. One set of the questions is about "The Canterbury Charm," which supposedly mentions Thor.

The problem: I know nothing about "The Canterbury Charm." I did some research, and I can find almost nothing. So I plead with my readers to help me.

Here's what I have figured out:

Wikipedia thinks there is such a thing as the Canterbury Charm and other, possibly questionable sites say:

171. Canterbury Charm:

kuril sarþuara far þu nu funtin is tu þur uigi þik þ(u)rsa trutin kuril sarþuara uiþr aþrauari
Kuril wound-causer, go now, you are found. Thor hallow you, Lord of Troll, Kuril wound-causer. Againstblood-vessel pus.
Since Thor hallows with his hammer, the ‘Thor hallow you’ must be understood as ‘Thor strike you with hishammer!’, which makes sense in this curse against a sickness.

Supposedly the charm is found in the margin of a 1073 manuscript. Another site says it is in Cotton Caligula A.xv., which indeed dates in part to 1073.

But...

There is no mention in Ker's Catalogue of such a charm.

Searching on the strings of words in the DOE corpus produces nothing (trying sar Taura, sarTaura, funtin, trutin, etc.)

The charm is supposedly written in runes, but there is no mention of it that I can find in Ray Page's An Introduction to English Runes

These problems could be explained if the charm is considered Old Norse. C.f., the inscription on the Glavendrup stone, "þor uiki þasi runar" (Thor bless these runes). But there is no mention of it in Heather O'Donoghue's excellent intro to Old Norse/Icelandic, and it's not familiar to my go-to person on charms, magic and medicine in Anglo-Saxon England, either.

Guillame Schiltz presented a paper at ISAS in 2003 in Arizona on the charm (The Canterbury Charm: Evidence for Mutual Exchange During Conversion?), and later there was this publication:

Schiltz, G. (2004) Der Canterburyspruch oder "wie finden dänische Runen und englische Komputistik zusammen?" Ein Beitrag zur historischen Textlinguistik. In: Th. Honegger (ed.): 'Riddles, Knights and Cross-dressing Saints: Essays on Medieval English Language and Literature' (Collection Variations). Bern: Lang, p.115-138.

I don't have a copy of Stanley's The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism anywhere close, so I can't check if he mentions it.

So, dear readers, so much better informed than I am:

Does anyone know the full context of the charm?
Is the use of "Thor" an example of a Scandinavian deity being invoked in an A-S manuscript?
Why isn't the Canterbury charm in the OE corpus?

Thank you!!

Mike

[UPDATE: See John Cowan's comments below, which pretty much answer most of my questions. Far better internet search skills than I possess. And K.A. Laity via Scott Nokes sent this link, where Alaric Hall mentions it on page 4. So the charm is legit. and not just something that got dumped into Wikipedia.

I conclude that the charm isn't in Ker or Page or the DOE corpus because it is Old Norse (I guess it says something about my glacially improving ON that I just read the charm and it didn't really register what language it was in), and that it really does say something about Thor. That will have to do for the crazy TV shoot tomorrow. Thank you all!!]

2008-11-26T09:19:00.002-05:00

Pretty Amazing Conference
(and I got to eat whale).

Last week I went to the most intellectually high-end conference I have ever attended. The Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway, has got to have the most intellectual firepower in medieval studies that is assembled in any one institution, anywhere. The only place I've ever been that was similar is the Santa Fe Institute, but I was the only humanities scholar there at the time, so there's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, and this was all medievalists rather than physicists and theoretical biologists.

But enough with the qualification, this conference was awesome! "Tradition and the Individual Talent: Modes of Authorship in the Middle Ages," was the theme. It was by invitation, with only 25 papers, so everyone went to every paper and there was discussion that continued throughout the conference. I was the only person from an American institution (though there are several American scholars at Bergen now); the majority of the scholars were from Scandinavia, and my Old Norse got a workout reading the handouts. But there were plenty of papers on Latin as well as Old Norse (I was the only Anglo-Saxonist). Some of the papers (mine, Slavica and Milos Rankovic's, Atle Kittang's, Lauri Harvilahti's) were more theoretical than others, but all took the theme of the conference seriously.

It was particularly gratifying that a few people picked up some of my ideas from my paper ("'I am large, I contain multitudes,': The Medieval Author in Memetic Terms") and connected them to their own work. A real eye-opener for me was Aidan Conti's amazing paper on "Scribes as Authors? Detecting Acts of Composition in the Process of Transmission." This was one of those instances where you've had an inchoate idea and then find that someone else has done a paper on it. I started out feeling mildly resentful, because I had never gotten around to doing the cool research that Aidan had done, but as the paper went on, and it became clear how creative and rigorous he had been, my grumpiness turned into complete admiration. I don't want to spill the beans on Aidan's work before he publishes it, so I'm sorry to be so opaque here, but basically he demonstrated how "distributed authorship" and iterated, interpreted, selected and reproduced error could create textual improvements. I was practically bouncing up and down in my seat by the end of the paper.

It was also wonderful to learn about how Rune Stones were produced, to get to meet Gísli Sigurðsson (whose book The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method influenced me a lot), and to talk to Lauri Harvilahti again--he spoke to my graduate seminar in 1993 at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Really, my head is completely full right now.

What summed up part of the experience for me was one of the nights when a group of us were sitting at the bar and talking and Dr. Harvilahti said "last year, when I was talking to a shaman..." "Was this in Karelia?" I asked. "No, Siberia."

And, I got to eat whale carpaccio one night. It was delicious!

2008-11-13T17:45:00.003-05:00

Medieval Literature: Not Dead Yet (Feeling Much Better... thinks it might go for a walk...)

This year, because I am department Chair, I only officially teach three classes (because I am a doofus, I'm actually teaching four, one as an unpaid overload, and I'm directing an honors thesis, but I digress). And because I'm going to be on research leave all of next year, I had to get in some key classes in now, so I'm teaching Chaucer (in ME), Medieval Literature (in translation), and J.R.R. Tolkien all in one year. Normally I'd be teaching a First Year Seminar or a Senior Seminar or an English 101.

You'd think, with only three classes, I would not have that many students, especially since medievalists are so superfluous and medieval literature isn't popular.

So here are the enrollment totals for my official classes:

Fall 2008: J.R.R. Tolkien: 62
Chaucer: 35

Spring 2009: Medieval Literature: 37.

Keep in mind:
The average course at Wheaton enrolls 19 students. We are, after all, a small, liberal arts college. (Though that number is skewed due to small courses being mandated for first-year and senior seminars and English 101).

But also, because I knew how swamped I was going to be this year,

I deliberately scheduled these courses MWF to keep down enrollments (as you can imagine, T Th courses are more popular. Students don't like classes on Fridays).

I deliberately schedules these courses at the 10:30 and 11:30 time slots so that they would come up against a lot of other courses.

Yet the enrollments are the highest they've ever been. Even setting aside the Tolkien course, the pure medieval courses are averaging nearly twice the college average. And it's not due to my sparkling personality: there are a ton of students in these classes whom I've never taught before and wasn't able to recruit out of English 101 or First Year Seminar.

So whoever says that medieval studies isn't popular has no idea what he or she is talking about.

(I could be a real jerk and point out which other courses in which specific time periods medieval is out-drawing, but I don't need to, because it is out-drawing all of them.)

2008-10-30T19:18:00.003-04:00

Syzygy

If I haven't answered your email or responded to your message in the past week or so, I apologize. The convergence of

1. An NEH grant application being due;

2. My paper for the medieval authorship conference in Norway needing to be finished before I actually go to the conference;

3. My students turning in their first big paper in the Tolkien class;

4. My daughter having a week off from school;

5. Halloween: costumes, pumpkins, class parties;

6. Having my next door neighbor (who is a master stonemason) have an opening in his schedule to replace our fireplace;

7. Therefore taking the "opportunity" of torn out drywall, cement dust, jackhammers in the house, etc., to paint the living room, including the cathedral ceiling.

has left me completely weeded with regard to email.

Hopefully next week, or at least before I leave for Norway.

2008-10-30T11:09:00.003-04:00

The Only Political Post I'll Do

2008-10-17T23:04:00.003-04:00

Well I did know that the Old English words are "lob," "cob" and "spiþra"

I got publicly corrected twice in class today.

You, Prof. Drout, were corrected about Tolkien lore?

No, not hardly (though it could certainly happen).

About philological principles?

Nope, though there are plenty of people who could do this.

About literary theory?

Nope.

About spiders.

We were discussing Shelob, and I mentioned in a throw-away line that I thought her portrayal "as a tarantula" in the film didn't work for me; that Shelob, with her great horns, etc., didn't look like the Peter Jackson version.

"It wasn't a tarantula; it was a trapdoor spider" corrected one student.

"Well, ok," I said. "But I wished they'd used a bird-eating spider. They are much scarier looking." (I had just seen one in a jar up at the Harvard Museum of Natural History."

"A bird-eating spider is actually a kind of tarantula," said a different spider-loving student.

So I have not one, but two arachnophiles in my class.

Later the second student emailed me:

The Black Tunnel Web Spider was the spider that Peter Jackson modeled Shelob after. The spine that Shelob from the movie uses is inconsistent with spiders' actual morphology. Spiders have no spine on their abdomens and use hollowed out fangs to inject venom into their victims.

Shelob could not have been one of the goliath bird-eating spiders because they are tarantulas and tarantulas do not produce webs. Tarantulas rely simply on a single venomous bite to kill their prey before eating it.

Though I would add that GiantSpiders.com suggests that at least some tarantulas put a veil of silk across their burrow entrances, my student is right that this is very different from what Shelob does.

My students so totally rock.

2008-10-12T15:39:00.001-04:00

Why Memorizing is Good

An email I received the other day:

Dear Professor Drout,

I don’t know if you remember me but I took Anglo Saxon and Chaucer with you a couple of years ago. I’m teaching junior high English this year and I wanted to share a little story with you about how taking Anglo Saxon helped me with classroom management.

I was trying to define “epic” for the students a couple of days ago and no one would be quiet and pay attention. I was getting really frustrated. I tried to give them examples but everything went in one ear and out the other. Besides that none of them had even heard of The Odyssey or Beowulf! I finally I shouted “It’s like this!” and started reciting the first eleven lines of Beowulf in Anglo Saxon. In an instant the class was DEAD SILENT. They were all dying to know what that was and hung on my every word after that.

So thank you for making me memorize the first eleven lines of Beowulf!

2008-10-09T13:27:00.002-04:00

Too many Psalms!

Dear King Alfred,

Did you really have to translate so many Psalms?

Sincerely,

Mike Drout

(Anglo-Saxon Aloud is now up to Psalm 110. Not only are there still 40 to go, but 118 is an absolute monster. My goal is still to have everything done by Christmas, but right now that's looking like a stretch if I also include those poems not included in the ASPR like "Instructions for Christians" and "The Grave" and if I go back and re-record the first 18 Psalms in spoken rather than sung form...)

2008-10-01T21:23:00.006-04:00

My Trip to the Shire

This past weekend I got a chance to visit the Shire. It was re-created in Kentucky, and it was amazing.

The Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, is about 30 miles south of Lexington. This was a thriving village up until the Civil War but then fell into decay. In 1961 it was saved and has since be refurbished, with costumed actors playing the parts of Shakers. But for this one weekend, it became Middle-earth.

The rolling Kentucky countryside, the old buildings, the stone walls, the quiet (away from traffic) and darkness at night (away from street lights), combined with 144 Tolkien enthusiasts (most in costume), made the leap of imagination from contemporary America to Tolkien's Shire a very short one indeed. The people who organized A Long Expected Party brought Tolkien's vision of a joyful rural idyll to life.

I gave one of my talks in a gigantic barn, performed a bit of Beowulf in that same barn, and then got to give another talk in a 19th-century house. The audiences were amazing: incredibly informed about Tolkien (and about medieval literature), eager for more, and full of challenging and interesting questions. Even more importantly, every single person I met (and I feel like I met all 144) was interesting, kind and just a pleasure to talk to. I had originally thought that I would sneak back to my room, which was in an incredible little wash house built around 1850, and grade papers between talks, but I got caught up in all that was going on and ended up learning about armor from Michael Cook, listening to costumers discuss sewing techniques and riding a riverboat with hobbits, elves and rangers (Quote of the trip: "Spider in the boobs! Spider in the boobs!" -- the dangers of certain costumes).

Several of the organizers are involved in theatre, and it showed. The weekend never felt like a real convention event (it was not commercial, we weren't jammed into a hotel, there weren't long lines to get actors to autograph things), but by the second day it was becoming something else entirely. The only way I can describe it is to say that the organizers were in some ways putting on a play, but all the rest of us in the "audience" were becoming part of it. By the time we reached the climactic celebration of Bilbo's and Frodo's birthdays, we were pretty much integrated into a single show, the fundamental division between audience and performers completely blurred.

It was, of course, very fun for me to have so many people enjoy Beowulf in Old English (and let me tell you, an old barn, filled with 144 people and surrounded by pitch blackness--it was a new moon--is the perfect place to perform the part of Beowulf where Grendel enters Heorot and eats Hondscio), and it was gratifying to have so many people interested in medieval literature and its links to Tolkien. It was even better to have a chance to spend some time with the parents of one of my best students ever, and I loved listening to the ethereal singing of Kate Brown.
But the very best moment for me came towards the end. Bilbo's party was set up, with paper lanterns strung between trees. The Brobdingnagian Bards were performing on the stage. A large group of people, in full costume, were dancing reels and jigs. I walked pretty far away from the party, into the darkness, until I was far enough from the lights that I could look up and clearly see the stars, so incredibly bright, the milky way clouding the entire middle of the sky. I looked back, and there was the patch of gold light, surrounded by darkness, the people dancing and laughing, the music just barely reaching me. I looked back at all that, and I saw and felt what dream was for the Anglo-Saxons, the joy of people and companionship and music, the joy of the little circle of light. We feel dream, but we rarely can step back and watch it. Tolkien's works give us one way. Seeing what some people inspired by his works could create gave me another.

þær wæs gesiþa dream, duguð unlytel, holbyltla ond ylfa and manig monna and wifmanna.

2008-09-24T22:50:00.003-04:00

Off to the Shire

If I don't answer email for a few days, it's because hobbits don't have internet access (I don't know this for a fact; I am only guessing).

I'm off to speak at A Long-Expected Party in the Shaker Village outside of Lexington, KY. I'll be talking about Tolkien's "mythology for England" (even though he never wrote those exact words) and reading Beowulf in Old English at a huge bonfire, among other things. Should be fun.

I anticipate a massive email backlog when I return, so don't think I am ignoring you (unless you were rude, and then I am), but ping me if I don't respond by Thursday afternoon.

2008-09-22T23:52:00.003-04:00

Poor Results at Emulating Tolkien's Style
(but it does show that the "Mythology for X" has moved a bit more deeply into the culture)

Today the WSJ has an editorial that begins:

Once upon a time, in the land that FDR built, there was the rule of “regulation” and all was right on Wall and Main Streets. Wise 27-year-old bank examiners looked down upon the banks and saw that they were sound. America’s Hobbits lived happily in homes financed by 30-year-mortgages that never left their local banker’s balance sheet, and nary a crisis did we have.
Then, lo, came the evil Reagan marching from Mordor with his horde of Orcs, short for “market fundamentalists.” Reagan’s apprentice, Gramm of Texas and later of McCain, unleashed the scourge of “deregulation,” and thus were “greed,” short-selling, securitization, McMansions, liar loans and other horrors loosed upon the world of men.

Now, however, comes Obama of Illinois, Schumer of New York and others in the fellowship of the Beltway to slay the Orcs and restore the rule of the regulator. So once more will the Hobbits be able to sleep peacefully in the shire.

With apologies to Tolkien, or at least Peter Jackson, something like this tale is now being sold to the American people to explain the financial panic of the past year.

Well, they really do have a lot to apologize for in that lede, mostly for butchering Tolkien's style so badly that it's not even recognizable except for the words Hobbits, Mordor and Orcs. It interests me how people do this so frequently. They recognize something different in the style, and they glom onto that, but they haven't been paying enough attention.

So here, WSJ, is how it should have been done (I make no comment on the actual content of the editorial. Not related to my purpose here):

Then all listened while X in his clear voice spoke of America, the land built by FDR, and of the Regulations of Power, and for time, peace and prosperity were on Wall and Main Streets. Wise where the regulators in those days, and young bank-examiners performed their duties well and bravely, seeing that their banks were sound. In those times the Hobbits lived quietly in the Shire in 30-year-mortgaged homes, and they meddled not at all in the balance sheets of their bankers, who were not troubled by the world outside.

But that time ended, and evil things began to stir again in the land or Mordor. And the shadow that arose was "Reagan," and his Orcs, and his "Market fundamentalists," spread across the lands. At the same time, Gramm of Texas, in flattery and imitation of the greater Reagan, began his "deregulation," a smaller shadow under his master's great shadow. “Greed,” was multiplying in the mountains, and short-sellers were abroad, now armed with securitization. And there were murmured hints of still worse creatures: McMansions, liar loans and other horrors.

I could go on, but it gets tedious, and I don't really agree either with the satire or with what the WSJ is satirizing. But my point is that it is possible to create a "Tolkienian" feel without immediately reaching for the "Lo!"

Now, because I'm a hopeless geek, I decided to see how many times Tolkien uses "Lo!" and in what situations. They are:

FR: Galadriel shrinks back to regular elf woman after "All shall love me and despair."
TT: none
RK: passing of the Grey Company -- this one seems unnecessary. They just go through a rock wall and there's a stream.
RK: sun on Théoden's shield -- appropriate, as the battle is taking the epic turn.
RK: Nazgûl's shadow blocks sun -- balance to previous example
RK: Éowyn's fight with the Nazgûl -- if there's one place where you need a "Lo!", it's here.
RK: Théoden opens eyes when Merry thinks he's dead -- I don't think this one is necessary or that it works, though note part of epic scene
RK:Éomer defies black ships -- works here.
RK: Denethor is holding a palantír -- don't think it's necessary to express the surprise. But does preserve the epic tone.
RK: In the retelling of the Passing of the Grey Company -- maybe, but I don't think it fitswith retell by Legolas and Gimli, though you could argue that they are influenced by the awe of Aragorn.
RK: When Aragorn seizes the black fleet -- appropriate for epic action, though again, this is in the indirect voices of Legolas and Gimli.
RK: The Field of Cormallen, when the Minstrel sings the Song of Frodo. Utterly appropriate.
RK: When Aragorn finds the sapling of the white tree. 2 times. Don't know if it needed both, but this is meant to be a moment where we get the Strider/Aragorn contrast, the feeling that he will not be able to be an epic king and the sign of the tree that shows he has been transformed that way.

So, 1 example of "Lo!" in Fellowship, none in Two Towers, but 11 in RK. These are mostly in the "high epic" modes of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields and the events surrounding that, so the epic style is at work. If I (perish the thought) were Tolkien's editor, I would have suggested he drop the one with Theoden's eyes, the entering the cave in the Passing of the Grey Company, and probably the two in the re-telling by Legolas and Gimli. But the rest work really, really well (and the ones I object to probably work well for others).

But the larger point is that Tolkien would never (as you can see) use "Lo!" simply for the kind of background narration that happens in the Preface, The Shadow of the Past or The Council of Elrond. And that's the analogous style-situation that the WSJ writers are trying to conjure up.

Grade: C- . Needs closer study. Do the reading again and come see me in office hours.

2008-09-18T20:33:00.007-04:00

Anglo-Saxon Aloud Greatest Hits: Now Available

The studio called today, and the CDs are finished. I will be able to start shipping them on Tuesday or perhaps sooner. If you would like a copy, you can order them by using this PayPal button. Cost is $30.00 USD ($25.00 for the CD and $5.00 for domestic US shipping)

Anglo-Saxon Aloud Greatest Hits is a 2-CD set that includes ten poems in Old English, their Modern English translations, and commentaries on each of them as well as an introductory lecture. The poems included are: Cædmon's Hymn, The Battle of Brunanburh, The Wanderer, The Ruin, The Wife's Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer, Deor, The Fortunes of Men, Riddle 47 ('Book-Moth') and The Dream of the Rood.

I will have copies with me at A Long-Expected Party in Kentucky next weekend. For listeners who don't use PayPal or who are overseas, email me at mdrout@wheatoncollege.edu and we can make arrangements. You can also send me land mail at Prof. M. Drout, Wheaton College, 26 E. Main Street, Norton, MA 02766, USA. Thanks to all the listeners and readers who have given me so much encouragement. And if people like Anglo-Saxon Aloud Greatest Hits, I can maybe someday put together Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Unplugged.

2008-09-18T08:27:00.003-04:00

Medieval History Job at Wheaton

Come here to Wheaton and be my colleague.

Our History department is starting a search for a medieval historian. This is the search that go put on hold last year due to health issues in the department (which have, thankfully, all turned out ok). It's a tenure-track job, teaching load of 5 courses per year (four the first year), fully funded junior leave (1 semester at full pay or 1 year at 1/2 pay), fully funded post-tenure sabbatical (same), good yearly research/travel budget and a clear path to tenure (the tenure line is for this particular job; it's not one of those situations where three people are hired for two lines).

Although the job ad (given below) lists a variety of areas, I know that they are in strong support of medieval (but they've left their options open, depending on which classical and late antique applications they come across), and they are particularly interested in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Carolingian history.

Wheaton is a small, highly selective liberal arts college in Massachusetts, 30 minutes south of Boston and 25 minutes (or less) north of Providence, RI. We have about 1400 students and around 120 tenured/tenure-track faculty. Average class size is 15-19 students, though that can vary depending on the subject.

For Anglo-Saxonists, it may be encouraging to know that around 25-30 students regularly take Old English (though I've had as many as 40 in a semester) and 15 or so of those go on to do an advanced class in Beowulf, so there would be a reasonably sized body of students who could do work with primary texts in Old English. Our Latinist is Joel Relihan (translator of Boethius, among many other things), and our medieval Art Historian Evie Lane (of the Corpus Vitrearum project), so we have a good community of medievalists who work closely together on our "Connected" courses and regularly visit each other's classes.

Wheaton is also a very good place for collaboration across disciplines. The scientists and mathematicians are easy to work with and interested in pursuing complex, trans-disciplinary projects (including thus far those linking English, Biology, Math, Computer Science and, soon, Psychology). We're in the process of building a beautiful new Science Center, which should be done in 2011.

Wheaton departments are fiercely autonomous in matters of hiring (as they should be), so I won't be a part of the search formally. I will be constantly lobbying for a medievalist, though.

Medieval/Ancient World

The Department of History at Wheaton College (MA) seeks a tenure-track assistant professor with scholarly and teaching expertise in the fields of classical, late antique, and/or medieval history. The History Department is especially interested in social or cultural historians whose thematic expertise includes gender, popular religion, material culture, cross-cultural contact, or the history of science or the environment. Geographic field open; preference for Celtic world, northwestern Europe, or southeastern Europe. Ph.D must be in hand at time of appointment. Send letter of interest, CV, and three letters of reference by November 15, 2008 to Anni Baker, Chair, Department of History, Wheaton College, Norton, MA, 02766. Preliminary interviews will be conducted at the 2009 AHA annual meeting. AA/EOE. Wheaton College seeks educational excellence through diversity and strongly encourages applications from women and men from historically underrepresented groups. Wheaton offers a competitive benefits package, including benefits for domestic partners.