Breath Pauses and "swa" Clauses

After I record passages for my podcasts of Old English poems at Anglo-Saxon Aloud, I go back and use Garage Band to do some quick editing. No processing, pitch-changing, etc., but I do eliminate nasty saliva noises, hard breaths, the sound of turning pages, etc. When I was editing Exodus (which, by the way, should be completely posted by Monday and on iTunes by the following day), I noticed that I almost always had to edit out a heavy breath intake right before a "swa" clause. I wonder if that is a linguistic marker of some kind and if it might be related to pointing (or lack of pointing) in the manuscript.

Now I am reading the poetry as prose, attempting to inflect it for the story rather than emphasizing alliteration or even the caesura (which Tolkien called a "breath-pause" in "On Translating Beowulf," which is still the easiest-to-understand treatment of basic metrics for Beowulf, and which I use for my students). I'm guessing that if I chanted or sung the Anglo-Saxon (which I did for Finnsburg in Beowulf Aloud, so you can hear my singing/chanting there if you are in need of amusement), it might be different. Still, it is an observation of possible linguistic interest that there aren't a lot of places to breathe running right up to a "swa" clause. I wonder if we should consider punctuating those clauses as starting new sentences.

In which I mock the use of "imbricated" in literary and cultural studies

[update: link fixed. Also, the more I think about this, the worse I think "imbricated" is. Don't all discourses overlap to one degree or another? So it's not a case of using "imbricated" to mean "partially overlapping" (which would save words). I can't think of any discourses that would be "tesselated," so I don't think there's a useful distinction being made. I guess the point is that the "imbricated" discourses are held to be those that overlap more than other discourses do, but I'm not sure about how one goes about deciding when two discourses are "imbricated" and when they are not.]

I was at a wedding this weekend and was listening to my father (a physician) and my brother (an emergency room nurse) talk about injuries to the spleen and pancreas. It was very interesting, and, having grown up in a medical household, I followed most of the jargon. But at one point they started talking about "itp." After that went back and forth for a while, I had to say "acronymn, please?" and they told me that ITP stood for "idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura" (explained here). I could follow the "idiopathic" (unknown cause) and "purpura" (purple spots), but "thrombocytopenic" was, at least in conversation, lost on me. But once they explained, I followed the discussion.

That got me thinking about jargon in different specialities. There may be problems with medical jargon, but most of the time it works: once you know what the words mean (and if you have Latin and some Greek), they are pretty straightforward. Look up the term, and it is yours. This is not the case all of the time in English, and I think it illustrates a failing.

Which is why I will continue to mock the use of "imbricated" in literary studies. As I said in this post:

"imbricated discourses" aren't things--they're metaphorical descriptions of things. And that if "imbricated" is a better description than overlapping, you should explain why either metaphor has more explanatory power.

I knew the word "imbricated" from icthyology: there are a fair number of fish with the species name "imbricatus" which describes their scales. But as a quick search will demonstrate, there are also starfish, mushrooms and plants that are "imbricatus." In each case, the word is being used precisely: the scales or plates overlap just like shingles on a roof (as opposed to sitting next to each other like, say, tiles on a floor (which would be tesselatus).

In literary studies the word is obviously used metaphorically, which is fine: metaphors carry ideas from one place to another (according to Stephen J. Gould, the luggage carts at Athens airport say "metaphoros" on them); they are, to use Daniel Dennett's term, "intuition pumps" (which is itself a metaphor). I have no problem with using metaphors to explain complex ideas.

But the problem with "imbricated" is that it is a bad metaphor. When you use "imbricated," you're saying, I think, that discourses overlap partially but not completely. Ok, I guess, though when we say other things "overlap" we almost always mean that they don't overlap completely. But the discourses do not overlap the same amounts for every single one (single what, anyway? Discourse?) the way shingles do on a roof. I'm also not sure if discourses do overlap that way, anyway: they seem more intertwined rather than imbricated. And when you listen to people use "imbricated," it's pretty clear that they are not being precise at all, but using the word instead of "intertwined" or "connected."

I am being pedantic (and since I'm a teacher and professor, I think that's a good thing, kinda my job), but if the metaphor is imprecise and confusing (because most normal people don't know what "imbricated" means even in a literal sense), then we shouldn't use it. In fact, I think people who do use "imbricated" are using the word to indicate that they are members of an in-group, or to show that they are smarter than the average bear. At least for me, this doesn't work, which is why people who use "imbricated," especially in casual conversation, deserve a good mocking.

The difference between medical jargon (which can be just as "in-group" and alienating as "imbricated") is that the medical jargon is at least perfectly clear when you look it up in a regular old dictionary or know your Latin and Greek. Medical jargon also uses metaphor ("iliac," for instance), but the purpose is to illustrate and the effect is precision. The same can't be said for literary jargon, and I think that is unfortunate: again, we should be the strongest supporters of precision and detail in language use.

In Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet (a completely under-rated work by him, by the way; much better than Henderson the Rain King), there's a little passage about how it's an error to call a person "dilapidated," which means "having had stones removed from it." We fight a losing battle against fossilized metaphor and imprecise language, but it is a long defeat worth fighting, because when we preserve the specific meaning of "dilapidated" as "having stones missing" or "imbricated" as "overlapping like shingles on a roof," rather than allow these words to decay into just dead metaphors for "old" or "entwined," we keep the language richer and more powerful, more able to communicate specific, concrete ideas in only a few words.

Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Genesis

I have now posted the final lines of the Old English Genesis over at Anglo-Saxon Aloud. That means that very soon (hopefully when you read this) the entire poem, all 2936 lines of it, should be available on iTunes.

I was thinking about posting an interpretive lecture on Genesis, but that's going to have to wait a little while until some other things get cleared out of the way (though my bizarre Kalamazoo paper on Vainglory is now done). I do think I learned a lot about the poem from recording and editing and summarizing it: I've never worked on Genesis before, so I don't know if the things I've noticed are critical commonplaces (probably), but it was certainly illuminating to work on the poem in this particular way: you get a good feel for the rhythm and pace of the poetry (even though I tried to read it inflected as a narrative rather than emphasizing alliteration and lineation). Most Anglo-Saxonists focus on Genesis B, the section of the poem that includes the Fall of the Angels and was possibly an inspiration for Milton's treatment of Satan in Paradise Lost (Milton knew Francis Junius). But Genesis A has a lot of interesting stuff in it, and the way that the poet deals with some of the problems of the biblical narrative (in particular Lamech and circumcision) is probably worth some discussion, which I'll try to get to.

Exodus starts on Monday. It is worth noting that J.R.R. Tolkien thought Exodus to be closer to Beowulf in language, style and date of composition than any other poem. You can see what you think; I'll be posting Exodus from Monday April 2 until Monday April 9 (if all goes well), and Beowulf Aloud should finally be ready for sale by that time.

The 'Partridge' is a Phoenix

Finally, my article, The Partridge is a Phoenix: Revising the Exeter Book Physiologus [link fixed now] has appeared in Neophilologus (my apologies if the above link only takes you to the abstract; if you have an institutional subscription, you get the whole paper; if you want to read the paper, click on the "text" link over in the right margin).

It's sad to think how long ago I first formulated the argument that went into this paper: at least as early as February or March 1993. So fourteen years from idea to publication. Don't let anyone ever say again that I work too fast. The paper actually grew out of research for my M.A. thesis from the University of Missouri-Columbia, directed by John Miles Foley with Martin Camargo on the committee (see, I had great teachers even at the M.A. level). Then it sat fallow for almost a decade, coming up a few times in ANSAX discussions and occasionally being talked about with my students. In the summer of 2004, when my son was very, very little and being very difficult, I would sit up nights in the living room while my wife fed him. I had the laptop, and I started working on the paper.

I'm particularly fond of this little beast because there's something classically Anglo-Saxonist about it: it's an argument about a poem that doesn't exist except for a couple fragmentary lines and some additional bits that may or may not be related. Even if we could identify the bird of the poem, we have no poem to discuss. So of course nearly all the of the published discussion (and there's not much) is on this issue. I love Anglo-Saxonists!

A summary of the paper is in the abstract, but in case you don't want to click:

There's a break in the text between folios 97v and 98r in the Exeter Book, and at least one leaf is missing. On 97v we have the first line and a half of a poem about a bird. This immediately follows the Panther and the Whale and is assumed to be an additional part of the Physiologus. The text on 98r could be the end of the bird poem, or it could be an unrelated moralizing passage.

Pat Conner divides the Exeter book into Booklets II and Booklet III exactly between 97v and 98r, so if he's right (I think he probably is), the fragment on 98r is unlikely to be part of the bird poem begun on 97v. So we would really have 1.5 lines of bird poem and then an unrelated fragment (which does, unlike any other piece in the Exeter Book, end with a large "Finit").

Others suggest that the passage on 98r is consistent with a poem about a partridge and could in fact serve as the summation of a 3-animal Physiologus.

I show that there really is no case for the bird being the partridge, and it is far, far more likely to have been the phoenix. This is the case whether or not the fragment on 98r is part of the bird poem, though if it is, then the charadrius is at least a more reasonable possibility than the partridge.

It turns out that most of the argument for the bird being the partridge rests on a series of dubious assumptions made in the 19th century. But you'll have the read the paper to find out the whole story.

Professor Drout: Should I Come to Wheaton?

It is getting to be college decision time, and I've had a bunch of emails from prospective Wheaton students that basically ask the question given above.

Let me start with a quote from my high school swimming coach, Mr. Wishart, that has always stayed with me. I told him that I had decided to go to Carnegie Mellon. "That's a name school," he said. "And that's good. But college is completely what you make of it. Even the worst college in the US can teach you everything you need to learn if you decide to try."

At the time I was a little deflated, but he was right (and also right that the IM should have been my best event, no matter how much I hated the butterfly leg). College is what you make of it. If you don't get into your top choice, you can make that not matter by how hard you apply yourself. Even the lowest-ranked college has resources that will allow you to educate yourself if you decide to do more than the minimum.

But, let's say that you're one of the lucky few who has been accepted to Wheaton. Should you come here?

The short answer is "yes." I believe in this college. I have seen it change students' lives. I have put my students into the best Ph.D. programs in the world (Cambridge, Toronto) and seen them go to top law and business schools and succeed. I've had students win international scholarship, publish papers in peer-reviewed journals, and get into their top choices for med school. I've seen really troubled students turn their lives around and become happy academic superstars. I'm sure these things happen at other places, too (I know they do, because many happened for me at Carnegie Mellon), but here I see it all the time.

I believe in Wheaton's "Connections" curriculum. Yes, I was one of the people who wrote it, but in the end the entire faculty came on board and designed an innovative curriculum in which classes are linked across disciplines. This is not half-assed interdisciplinarity, with English professors trying to teach biology. The brilliance of the curriculum is that the students, become interdisciplinary by taking real classes in different disciplines that that faculty have linked together. So, for example, the students in Figure Drawing are taking Anatomy for a Connection. The Students in "Race, Empire and the Victorians" are taking "Darwin and Biology" for the Darwin Connection. The students in Studio Art are taking Art, Color and Chemistry.

I believe in Wheaton's committment to teaching. I've never seen a bad teacher get tenure. I see the faculty as a whole constantly talking about teaching, working on improving our teaching and figuring out how we can adapt ourselves to the learning styles of our students as these change over time. 80% of the discussion in the Faculty Dining Room is about teaching: "Did you see John in class today? He looked out of it. Do you know if he is ok? His first two assignments were excellent, but then he tailed off. Who is his advisor? I'll give him a call." Is a typical lunchtime conversation. For the exhorbitant fee of over $40,000 per year, you are getting close attention for your child from multiple Ph.D.s who know your kid's name and tendencies, who can spot your kid on the other side of campus and say 'hi.' Who remember a good English 101 paper four years later and mention it on graduation day.

I believe in Wheaton's students. Every time I push them, every time I treat them like graduate students, every time I give them work harder than they think they can do, they have risen to the challenge. Wheaton students are less arrogant than their peers at the Ivies, and thus they actually learn more, because they listen. Wheaton students are basically kind and generous. In nine years there I've had exactly one discipline problem in one single class. Wheaton students are generally honest: they may screw up, they may not do the work, but they (generally) don't lie about it.

I believe in the Wheaton faculty. The faculty is genuinely devoted to the students and to the college. We have very different ideas about the best possible practices and the right way to go about our goals, and we fight about these, but nearly every single professor loves and believes in Wheaton. When I was a Ph.D. student at Loyola Chicago, nearly all the junior faculty thought that they deserved to be at a "better" institution. They didn't respect the University, they didn't respect the grad students, and they didn't respect each other. This is not the case at Wheaton. We don't all agree (if you have 10 Ph.D.s in a room, you'll have 11 opinions), but we seek the same goals of better student education. We think we belong here. We're devoted to the place.

I believe in the Wheaton administration. You have never seen a "flatter" or more efficient administration at a college. I don't always agree with the decisions they make, and I'll fight back when I have a chance and I think something is wrong, but the administration has, in my experience, prudently and effectively continued to improve the college. The administration respects the college, the students and the faculty. And any place where an Assistant (ok, now Associate, but I was Assistant then) Professor and another colleague can wander into the Provost's office and have an impromptu meeting in which a new research partnership program is developed, and that program is implemented in only a few weeks.... that's an administration that can improve the place.

Professor Drout, what you describe sounds like heaven on earth. There have to be drawbacks. What are they?

Good question. We don't have enough money to do everything that we would like to do. Our endowment is small, which is why our fees are big. We don't have enough room in the buildings. We don't have enough faculty to teach everything that we'd like to teach (there are work-arounds, including classes at Brown). Like nearly all faculties, we're too much of an intellectual mono-culture, and like all faculties, we have a tendency to be arrogant about things we are not expert about. Norton is isolated and somewhat boring. There is no Starbucks around. You need a car or a bus to get to Boston or Providence. Nightlife revolves around the dorms. Having faculty members know you by name can be a drawback when you want to sleep through class and then, terribly hung over, you see you professor in the mail room. People who go to Brown or Harvard or Amherst have more doors opened for them whether they deserve them or not. If you are interested in super-specialized research, we probably don't have someone who does it (i.e., if you plan on becoming the world expert in horseshoe crab taxonomy, Harvard is probably a better bet, though we do have a leading termite parasitologist).

I wouldn't go to Wheaton if I wanted to be an engineer or a concert violinist or a nuclear physicist. I wouldn't spend that much of my parents' money if I just wanted to doze through a big lecture a few days a week and then come out at the far end with an easy degree and some cool sweatshirts. I wouldn't go to Wheaton if I already knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.

But I intend to send my own kids to Wheaton (if they want to go, of course), because I think--for kids who take advantage of it--the institution really works to develop individual potential in a way I've not seen elsewhere throughout my travels in higher education.

[P.S.: If you're coming to Wheaton to study Tolkien with me: 1). I'm flattered, and I'll do my best. 2). The official Tolkien course is only offered every other year, but in between there is Anglo-Saxon, Beowulf, Medieval Lit. in translation, etc. 3). I will be away doing research Fall 2009 and Spring 2010. 4). It would be wrong for me to promise that I'll always be here. I have no plan for leaving and I intend to to work at Wheaton until I die or they wheel me out the door for being too senile (though who knows how I'll feel after becoming Dept. Chair in July), but it's dangerous to predict too far into the future when one's life is intertwined with others' and their needs, jobs, etc.]

R. W. Chambers and the Laws of Edgar

Recently I've been re-reading R. W. Chambers' Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn. This is a great, great book, but one that I read straight through only once, way back in graduate school, and have since used as a quarry for information. This time I've just been thoroughly enjoying reading it, but I came across a very interesting tidbit that I didn't remember from before and which, to my knowledge, isn't addressed very much in contemporary Anglo-Saxon studies. I'd be interested in comments if you happen to know or just have a guess (I may post this query to ANSAX, also, when I get a chance):

Everything seems to show that about 700 an atmosphere existed in England which might easily have led to a scholarly Englishman, acquainted with the old lays, to have set to work to compose an epic. Even so venerable a person as Bede, during his last illness, uttered his last teaching not, as we should expect on a priori grounds, in Latin hexameters, but in English metre. The evidence for this is conclusive [cite to Letter of Cuthbert to Cuthwine]. But, at a later date, Alcuin would surely have condemned the minstrelsy of Aldhelm [cite: "quid Hinieldus cum Christo"]. Even King Alfred seems to have felt that it needed some apology. It would have rendered Aldhelm liable to severe censure under the Laws of King Edgar; [cite discussed below]; and Dunstan's biographer indignantly denies the charge brought against his hero of having learnt the heathen songs of his forefathers. [cite to Vita Dunstani by B in Stubbs, ed]

Here is the cite from the Laws of Edgar, converting thorns and eths to th: "thaet aenig preost ne beo ealuscop, ne on aenige wisan gliwige, mid him sylfum oththe mid othrum mannum" --Thorpe, Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, 1840, p. 400 (Laws of Edgar, cap. 58).

[I'd translate this as "that no priest be an ale-poet, nor in any way perform minstrelsy with himself or with other men." ]

Here's my question: what has Chambers gotten wrong here that causes him basically to be ignored when it comes to discussing religious contexts for 10th-century poems? Because this argument, which to be fair, isn't made in any detail, is as far as I know completely ignored in a vast quantity of criticism about 10th-century (i.e., manuscript-era dates) for poems. At the bottom of the note on the Vita Dunstani, Chambers asks "were these songs heroic or magic?" (i.e., the ones Dunstan wasn't singing). But how has this chapter of the Edgar code been interpreted? Are we assuming that an "ale-poet" was not performing/composing texts like Beowulf? What about Widsith, in the Exeter Book and having thus some kind of monastic context?

Does anyone know why (outside the usual Beowulf dating squabbles) Chambers has been ignored here?

Best Comment Ever

One of the things I regret about this blog is that I'm not very good at responding to comments. I read every one avidly, but because they can't be replied to directly, I often don't send the emails that I compose. I should probably just post below, but very long blog coment trails remind me too much of Usenet, circa 1989, and I know what a time-killer that used to be. So, first, my apologies for not being a better interlocutor, but please know that I really do value the comments and read all of them immediately.

And now I have to quote the best comment I have every received, It came on this post about my new project, Anglo-Saxon Aloud , which is now up past line 1000 in Genesis. It's by Mearcstapa, who said...

I can't wait to be bumpin' down the street in my sweet ride, crankin' the 'wulf on my i-Pod!

I have not laughed so hard in a long time. Thank you, Mearcstapa!! (and to everyone for your comments).

Crazy Sheep DNA Project Lives!

Way back in the summer of 2005 I wrote about wanting to extract DNA from medieval manuscripts in order possibly to discover relationships among MS that might otherwise be completely opaque. I was pretty surprised at the response. People seemed really interested, and I got a lot of useful suggestions.

But saying that you want to extract DNA from a medieval manuscript is one thing; doing it is quite another. I personally do not know how to do polymerase chain reaction work, the biologists weren't about to give me free run of the lab, and when I spoke casually to the Art Historians about snipping off some bits of their new Book of Hours... Well, you can imagine the reaction (I'm surprised I don't get patted down for hidden scissors when I go over to the art history department).

Now, however, in my best tradition of juggling six projects at once, the Crazy Sheep DNA Project is moving ahead. I was just awarded an Arnold Summer Fellowship (courtesy of one of our particularly far-sighted benefactors at Wheaton) to work on a pilot program to see what we can do.

Supposedly the Parker Library at Cambridge was going to do this (but there's been no word since the announcement), and a Greek group was able to extract some caprid (goat) DNA from ancient parchments. But everyone is running up against the same problems, I think: how do you test without destroying the manuscripts?

Well, we think we've come up with some ways, and, with my brilliant student Amanda Shorette, we'll be working on them this summer and continuing through the fall. Our goals are:

To demonstrate non-destructive testing.

Assuming this non-destructive testing works, to prototype a simple extraction method that others can replicate. This will probably require the design of inexpensive jigs that can be mass-produced.

To design a database into which all parchment/vellum DNA information from any group could be placed (to facilitate collaboration--there's no way that any one group could do all the testing, but if every group can pool data, interesting relationships can arise).

To design an interface for that database and a visual representation of the data (for related work, see this post.

To identify the most promising manuscripts for testing (i.e., which manuscripts would potentially give us the most valuable information).

Our plan is to make Amanda (who is a Biology major) as fully interdisciplinary as possible in manuscript studies and DNA sequencing (and this gives me an excuse to become a fully interdisciplinary as possible in the same fields). To this end, I'll be teaching her paleography, how to use the Ker catalogue and Gneuss handlist, etc., and we'll be doing an extensive literature search for ovine/bovine DNA sequencing.

And best of all, I get a really good excuse to hang out in the Science Center not just all summer, but all next year. Because when fall comes around, we'll be collaborating with Prof. Barbara Brennessel, with whom I co-wrote my ASE article on Anglo-Saxon medicine (summary: it didn't work very well).

I'm really grateful to Trish Arnold, who has done so much for Wheaton, for her visionary approach to unusual, long-shot interdisciplinary research.

New Small Feature on Anglo-Saxon Aloud

I've just gone back and added very brief descriptions of the action for each passage that I've posted on Anglo-Saxon Aloud. So if you're listening to the podcasts as a way to improve your Anglo-Saxon, you'll have some idea of what is happening in each particular passage. Eventually, then, there will be a summary of each poem as well as a recording of the poem in Old English.

When You've Never Taught it Before

The Prentice Chair that I currently hold is given in part to encourage innovation in teaching, and back when I applied for the Professorship I came up with a set of proposals to enhance my teaching and incorporate new material in my work. And although, due to departmental needs, I wasn't able to take any of my course releases until last semester, I have actually managed to do quite a bit of work developing new courses (one of History of the English language hasn't actually managed to make it onto the books yet, but it is done) and revising my old ones.

I'm teaching one of those old ones now, English 207: Medieval Literature: Beowulf and Others (I inherited the ending of the title and, although I thought I killed it off a few years ago, it snuck back into the course name somehow). I have a rule--which I try to persuade others in my department to follow--that I shouldn't teach anything in translation that I can't read in the original language. We do, after all, have departments of Russian, German, French, Spanish, Classics, etc., and it seems to me that the professors in those departments are better qualified to teach Don Quixote or Faust or Madame Bovary, even in English translation, than I am. I've bent this rule a little bit for Dante--I don't read Dante's Italian very well, but having medieval Latin as a background, I can figure out enough to at least answer student questions about individual words, especially since we're using the Robert Pinsky edition with the facing-page translation--but I've generally stuck to it (which is why it will be some years before I teach The Tale of Genji in this class the way I want to). But this year I finally felt that my Old Norse was good enough to teach some Icelandic materials in translation. I put in a few of the Eddic poems (Voluspa, Havamal and Vafthrudnismal) a bit of Gylfaginning (Thor and Utgartha-Loki), plus Hrafnkel's and Egil's Sagas.

Monday and yesterday we did Hrafnkel's Saga (and I highly recommend this as a starter if you've never read any sagas). When I walked into class I got a kind of shaky, nervous feeling that I haven't had in a classroom for a long time (too long, perhaps): I had no idea what was going to happen. And I realized that a big part of the confidence one has in teaching comes from having been a student first and remembering how your teacher taught the material. That's certainly the way it is for me with Chaucer, when I still hear Peggy Knapp's voice in my head when I'm discussing the Wife of Bath or the Clerk's Tale, and I had the good fortune of having several excellent teachers (Peggy Knapp, John Miles Foley, Allen Frantzen) for Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon in general.

But there's a great freedom in having no real deep idea (obviously I'd read some criticism, etc.) of where the discussion of a work of literature should go (not that I always follow these prescriptions, and of course classes go in their own directions). It was scary, but it was incredibly liberating. We had a great discussion of violence and social position in Hrafnkel's Saga, and students agreed that the "moral" was not so much "Sam should have killed Hrafnkel when he had the chance instead of torturing him by hanging him by his achilles tendons," but was instead "See what happense when you try to look like a powerful person when you're not" (i.e., because Sam's letting Hrafnkel live in humiliation, although it was intended to build Sam up, was a step too far for someone of Sam's weak inherent power). We also concluded that the Saga does not so much celebrate violence as it is fascinated by violence: that's an important distinction that I probably would have brought to the class if I'd had a detailed existing agenda.

I don't want to oversell the experience. We have had some better discussions in this class, particularly about Beowulf (which, obviously, I've taught many times), and there was some hesitation in our talking about Hrafnkel's Saga (in part because the students were nervous about pronouncing the names). In fact, I won't even say that it was one of our very best discussions. But it was great in an entirely different way because I hadn't already built in a mental map of how the class was going to go. That tells me that shaking things up, although scary, is good. I'm really looking forward to Egil's Saga (or, as I've tried to sell it, the saga of the world's first poet/serial-killer) and to the other texts I've never taught before. I can't always answer students questions as quickly or easily as I can with other texts, but there are, as you can see, other compensations.

***
Scott Nokes mentions how busy he's been, and it must be that time in the semester, because I've been so busy that it's taken me this long to thank him for mentioning my new project, Anglo-Saxon Aloud. I'm working on recording the entire Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records and posting it, 100 or so lines at a time, in the form of podcasts to the Anglo-Saxon Aloud site. The podcasts are also available on iTunes. So far I think it's gone pretty well. Doing the editing is much more boring than reading and takes more time, but I think I may be able to keep up the 100-lines-per-day pace. So if you want to listen to the first 500 or so lines of Genesis, it's at Anglo-Saxon Aloud. And more Old English poems will follow. Relentlessly.

Anglo-Saxon Aloud

I'd like to introduce my latest project, Anglo-Saxon Aloud. I will be reading the entire Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records aloud and posting these readings as podcasts. If you go to that site, you can add this podcast to your iTunes, to various feeds, etc. (I thank Scott Hamlin for all his help with the technical matters).

I will be trying to read, record, edit and post between 50 and 100 lines every day (or at least every weekday), thus working through all 30,000 lines of Old English Poetry in something over a year. If I can work them up (and this depends on children, teaching, research, being department chair, etc.), I will try to give short, interpretive discussions about each poem as it is completed.

I hope that people will find these podcasts amusing and interesting. If you do, you may want to buy my Beowulf Aloud CD, which should be ready for sale (as should its site) within two weeks. Beowulf Aloud is a complete recording of all 3182 lines of the great Old English poem, and it comes with an introductory lecture on Beowulf, the exciting history of its manuscript, and its cultural background and significance. Beowulf Aloud was recorded in studio and edited by a professional recording editor (the genius, Matthew Cavnar, who directed all of my courses on CD for Recorded Books). I'll be selling it as a 3-CD set, with cover art and liner-design by my brilliant student, Jennifer A. Schuman.

The podcasts for Anglo-Saxon Aloud can be used to improve your own Old English, to help with your teaching or to put young children to sleep (I originally read the entire ASPR aloud as a way of getting my daughter to sleep each night). Feel free to use them for educational purposes, but please check with me before adopting it for any other uses and, obviously, please don't sell my work without working out a deal with me first.

I've started this project for a number of reasons: I want to show that Old English is entertaining and a pleasure to listen to even if one doesn't know the language. I want to investigate how many of these particular poems can be recited or performed. And I want to use these readings as an opportunity for additional research: I just had a paper come out in Modern Philology, on Beowulf, whose genesis was my inability to get a particular line (1864) to scan fluidly when I was reading the poem aloud to my daughter. I think in reading the entire Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records from beginning to end I will find more things to think, talk and write about, and that will be fun.

So welcome, to Anglo-Saxon Aloud.

Kalamazoo Teaser:
Vainglory and Sanctacaris, The Order of the World and Naraoia, The Gifts of Men and Anomalocaris

My Kalamazoo paper will answer the pressing question:

What do the poems Vainglory, The Order of the World, The Gifts of Men, The Fortunes of Men, Precepts and Maxims I have in common with the fossilized animals Sanctacaris, Naraoia, Anomalocaris, Wiwaxia and Nectocaris?

All that remains is the writing and more research.

On another note, I will be Chair of the English department starting in July. Please light candles and make offerings at the appropriate shrines to propitiate Cthulhu or Nyarlhotep or whatever deities or demons are responsible for this.

[UPDATE (because I realize that this was an obnoxious tease, and because some people came close in the comments)]. In Wonderful Life, Stephen J. Gould talks about the 'weird wonders' of the Burgess Shale and how, at that stage of evolution, it seems as if features that were later restricted to one particular lineage could be recruited in various other lineages. He gives the analogy of the grab-bag" of anatomical features from which the "great token-stringer" could pull out different pieces at random and put together and working animal. Later on, there are separate grab-bags labeled "arthropod body plan," "angiosperm body plan," "vertebrate body plan," etc. But at this early stage there's more variability.
I think with the "wisdom poems" and other Exeter Book poems (particularly in codicological booklet II) we see poets' abilities to recruit various features (catenulate passages, envelope patterns with homlies on each side, and other bits that I'll be identifying) across genres because those genres haven't fully hardened in place. I think we can find "Vainglory" and "The Order of the World" to be closer to each other than to other poems, just as "Gifts of Men" and "Fortunes of Men" are closer to each other than to other poems, and closer to "Vainglory" and "The Order of the World" than they are to "The Seafarer," and with "Widsith" having similarities in one way (catenulate structure) but not in others (content). Likewise the "wisdom" passage in Christ is very close to passages in Gifts and Fortunes, but the poem as a whole is not.
The analogy to the Burgess Shale (in Gould's interpretation; not all of which I agree with) is this: at an early stage of development, structural stereotypy is less rigid than it will later become. With such a fragmentary record for Old English short poems, I'm not sure I can do as much as I'd like (and, sadly, its not as if one can go dig up new poems the way one can excavate new fossils from a quarry or a museum drawer), but we'll see.

The Most Exciting Topic Ever!!!!
Indexing

Tolkien Studies volume 4 is just about ready to go to the printer. It is perhaps our best issue, and includes a reprint of Tolkien's "The Name Nodens," a text which is oftentimes very hard to get. There are also a number of fine articles (and an article by me, also). But now it's already time to start thinking about TS 5 and 6, and Verlyn Flieger, Doug Anderson and I have been doing just that. One thing we want to have in volume 6 is a comprehensive index of the first five volumes (it would be nice to have each individual volume indexed, but, given the production schedule, it simply isn't feasible at this time). I had also thought of publishing an index in each subsequent volume (i.e., index for volume 1 in volume 2), but that rapidly gets confusing. So instead the plan is to index 1-5 and publish that index in 6.

So, in order to do this, I am getting my Wheaton Research Partners students ready to start indexing, and, as I was drawing up the guidelines for them, I realized that this little hack that I've put together might be useful for others who have to do indexing and a) can't afford professional indexing and b) don't want to develop a note-card (electronic or physical system). So here is:

Drout's Quick and Dirty Indexing System (TM).

Step 1: Make a Word file that contains your entire book. You may have to use Word's "Master Document" system to do this. That system, like most things about Word, is truly annoying, but generally it works. Hint: Do not do this until all the editing on your book is done. Otherwise you will have a data fork from hell.

Step 2: Put hidden indexing characters into your book. In Word you can do this by using the Insert menu to insert an Index and then Mark an entry (i.e., highlight the entry, then click Insert, then click Index, etc.). But there is an easier way (at least for Macintosh): highlight the word or phrase you want to index and then hit Shift+Option+Command+X. You'll get a dialogue box with the entry and you can add further customization (say you've highlighted "tradition," you can then add "in animal communication" in a subhead. You can also do cross references, etc. )

2A: Advice: There is a global command to mark all entries. Use this sparingly, as you may end up with hundreds of entries for innocuous things. The global marking command is good for proper names (generally) and other real technical terms. Otherwise you want to go more slowly and read and mark at the same time, thinking about what you are really referencing.

Step 3: Wait for the pdf of your book to come back from the printer. When it arrives, you are in the home stretch.

Step 4: The most difficult part: Make the page numbers in your word document match those of your book. You will probably have to do some messing around with section breaks and re-starting page numbers. But this is the key point, and the one that will save you lots of work. I put in manual page breaks at every real page break (tedious, but takes only about an hour for a 300-page book). Then I shrink the font down to 6 points or smaller so that every page fits completely inside my manual break. Then it's test and fiddle. But once the page numbers of the word document match the pdf from your publisher, you are set.

Step 5: Have Word compile the index. It should be perfectly keyed to the page numbers of your book (though you'll want to do some sample collation).

Step 6: Proof the Index. Invariably you will have been inconsistent about things (Dennett, Daniel vs. Dennet, Daniel C., etc). You can easily fix these manually if you read the index carefully.

Step 7: Rejoice! You're done. Send it back to the publisher and commence waiting. The Index has taken less than a week, is comprehensive and was not that terrible to do. Your publisher thinks you are a genius. Your readers thank you.

(You did remember to put your dissertation director's name in the index, didn't you? Also Norman Mailer's--he apparently always checks the index for his name).

J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia Patches

[UPDATE: New version of the Corrigenda as of 2/15/2007]

As readers of this site know in excruciating detail, I was very frustrated in the way that the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia was rushed into print without adequate final editing (even after I had done a lot of the editing; the marked-up pages still sit in my attic). I don't think I mentioned that I never saw the index before it was published, and I was given 48 hours to proof all of the final front matter (hey, at least they incorporated most of those corrections). But, as others have noted, the volume is less useful without a good table of contents that includes a list of authors and entries.

Well, my internet friends have solved that problem. Here, courtesy of Lara Sookoo, are links to a thematic list of entries and a list of contributors with their contributions, all with page numbers. These are pdf documents, so you can print then and put them with the Encyclopedia.

Thematic List

Contributors and Articles

And here, courtesy of Merlin deTardo, are links to a Word document of corrections and an Excel spreadsheet that lists articles and authors.

Corrigenda

Articles and Authors

As I've written before, I'd like to set up some kind of wiki-like entity for corrections and additions, and perhaps it will be possible, as some commenters have noted, for me to purchase the rights to the Encyclopedia from Taylor and Francis, finish editing it properly, and republish it, perhaps even with the illustrations that I spent weeks finding and soliciting. But that's in the future, as is my Beowulf Aloud CD (at the studio being duplicated) and upcoming daily podcast intended to cover the entire Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records over the course of a year or so. In the meanwhile, I want to thank Lara, Merlin and the on-line communities of Tolkien enthusiasts who have so effectively helped me.

Reading and Review of J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia

Since I'm posting reviews of my own work, I wanted to give a link to Squiretalk, where Squire is posting a link to a reader's diary for the Encyclopedia.

I'm very gratified by how closely and carefully people are reading and only wish that Routledge's promised "team of professional copy-editors" had been so thorough (or that they'd incorporated any of my final round of corrections, or that they'd not told me not to bother marking "little things" like faulty spacing, etc., or that they'd even accurately incorporated my first round of corrections, the implementation of which, I've discovered, was haphazard at best. But I digress...). I also think that the reader's diary is a particularly interesting way to go about working through a reference work. I am reading very carefully and learning a great deal about how to improve my writing and editing (a never-ending process).

Again, I stand by my original estimation of the work when I finally saw a copy: it could have been a great resources, but the errors and problems prevent that. Nevertheless it is a very good resource, and should be interesting and valuable to readers. Squire's augmentation through the reader's diary makes it even more useful. And once I get permission from the compiler, I'm going to post a Table of Contents, etc. that should improve things still more.

Review of How Tradition Works

As I've learned, there are a lot of very weird things about publishing books (let's leave out, for the time being, publishers who refuse to incorporate an entire round of corrections an editor has made, telling that editor that they're sure all of those things were caught by the "team of professional copy-editors." They weren't. But anyway...).

The biggest weirdness, for me, is the lag. Not so much the waiting (i.e., I waited 11 months for a reader's report on Beowulf and the Critics, although that's frustrating, it's not so bad) but the lag between when you were doing the work and when anyone actually reads the work and responds to it.

For example, I began working on the ideas in How Tradition Works over a decade ago. I put them into their current form by the end of 2001 or the beginning of 2002. The book was published in May 2006. It's now January 2007 and the only reviews I have are on amazon.com.

This is all weird because it's difficult to move on to the next thing before you get feedback on the first one, but if you wait that long, well, it'll be years and years between books. I have tried to avoid this problem in several ways, including writing articles for journals like Modern Philology, Neophilologus, Oral Tradition and Anglo-Saxon England as well as doing editing (Tolkien Studies, Tolkien Encyclopedia) and other projects, and I've also just tried to plug on ahead on the new book, From Tradition to Culture, which has finally started rolling along. But I've felt a little stuck, because the new book builds on the old, and I want to incorporate criticism (and refute arguments if need be).

So I was very grateful when Squire of TheOneRing.net's Reading Room wrote a review of HTW. And I was even more grateful when, as you can see if you click on this link to the follow-up discussion, folks at TORN read his review and raised some very interesting points (and Squire then provided some additional information to them). This kind of feedback makes a big difference in changing the feeling that one labors in a vacuum versus working as part of an intellectual community (the other thing that made a big difference was that I used HTW in my senior seminar this year, and my brilliant students really helped me clarify my ideas still further). The proof (for me at least) is that now I've suddenly gotten un-stuck on a part of From Tradition to Culture, which all of a sudden is coming along nicely again.

With his permission, I've posted Squire's review here for anyone else to read, but I do recommend following the link above so that you can see the discussion. I'm not going to use the "blockquote" tag here, because that will make everything below format poorly, but everything in this post from this point on is by Squire:


//Most people here, if they’ve heard of Michael Drout, know him as a leading Tolkien scholar. He is the editor of Tolkien’s Beowulf lecture manuscript; he is the editor of the journal Tolkien Studies; and he is the editor of the recently issued J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia.

Fewer may know what his ‘day job’ is. He is professor of Old and Middle English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. As such he teaches courses in Old English, Beowulf, and Chaucer to undergraduates. If you’ve read his article, “Tolkien’s Prose Style and its Literary and Rhetorical Effects” (Tolkien Studies, I, 2004), you know that his knowledge of Old English allows him to approach Tolkien in a way that few here on TORn have even considered learning.

Last year, as we in the Reading Room group were working on our contributions to the Encyclopedia under Drout’s editorship, I learned from Drout’s blog that he was simultaneously publishing another book. The title, How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), was daunting, but I was intrigued. The cover showed a funny illustration of three medieval figures, seated on thrones, contemplating a long ribbon of Old English print that morphed into a DNA molecule and then bits of genetic code.



Drout swore that the book was aimed at an educated general audience, and I’ve always loved genetic code stuff, so I took a chance and read the book. This is my report to you about my expedition into some serious Medieval studies, and into the mind of Michael Drout.

The Big Picture

The big picture is that Drout is trying to cross-fertilize two academic disciplines that are about as far apart as you can imagine: medievalists and evolutionary biologists. To put it more generally, he is trying to re-insert the humanities, which in his opinion are lost in their intricate and abstract literary theories, into the intellectual mainstream that is dominated these days by the cutting-edge empirical hard sciences, quantitative disciplines that prove things and get results.

His vehicle is the meme. What is a meme? A meme is the “cultural” equivalent of a gene. If a gene is a molecular-scale entity that controls some aspect of an organism’s physical, bodily, development, then a meme is a highly discrete cultural act performed by humans: a word in a language, a way of cutting meat with a knife, a song always sung at birthdays. The essence of the meme is that it is transmitted: people learn cultural acts from other people.

The argument by memetic proponents is that, just as genes are transmitted by reproduction, and are multiplied or diminished by the test of natural selection in the environment, so memes are transmitted by teaching or imitation and are multiplied and diminished by how well they serve the people who acquire them. Much of memetic theory is deliberately modeled on genetic theory, and a perfect storm of debate is now raging in certain circles about whether memes 1) exist; 2) have more than metaphorical meaning; and/or 3) explain everything about the development of human culture since apes stood up and used a stick to scratch their backs.

Drout the medieval language scholar confesses up front that he is a secret science-lover. His childhood ambition was to be a synthesist or a polymath, someone who can learn all current knowledge, and explain it to you. One of his heroes is the late Stephen Jay Gould (one of mine, too, another reason I took a chance on this book), whose lucid and erudite essays from Natural History are things of epistolary beauty. So although Drout primarily loves and studies medieval literature, he refuses to let that put him in some ghetto where other branches of the Arts and Sciences do not exist, or do not have value -- particularly when he perceives their value to his discipline, if only he can stretch his mind around non-literary concepts.

The upshot is that he has decided to try to apply memetic theory to the old problem of what “tradition” is in literature and culture. Derived from this is the more detailed problem of detecting, interpreting and explaining “influences” in literary works: examples of usage that recur in different artists’ works in different places or times that presumably show that one artist is “influenced” by another.

And since he is a specialist in 10th century English literature and culture, he naturally wants to use his own hoary old subdiscipline as an example of a how a literary-cultural memetic theory ought to work. (Thus the meaning of his subtitle: “A meme-based cultural poetics”.) He sets out to show how the very new theory of memetics can help us understand the patterns of cultural behavior, innovation, and tradition that are found in very old texts.

The Fine Grain: How Memes conserve Content, Style, and Aesthetics

So, how does he do this? First, Drout takes us on an exquisitely thorough background tour of modern memetic theory, and the history of the Benedictine monastic reform that transformed England in the 900s A.D. Then we get to the heart of the book: a sequence of six chapters of close analysis of Anglo-Saxon literature. They show the various ways that the language and behavior of the Benedictine reform, embodied in the Rule (an amazingly detailed proscription of exactly what Benedictine monks were to do with themselves for, literally, every minute of every day of every year, forever), spread out and infiltrated not just ecclesiastical but also secular life and culture in England.

And these chapters are hard. Drout admits that he had done much of the academic work here before he got interested in memetic theory, and that this book is a possibly “ungainly” post-facto integration of theory and scutlike field work in pure Anglo-Saxon studies. You don’t have to know Anglo-Saxon to read this book, but you’ll be skimming, or taking the author’s word on, propositions that Drout’s academic peers will be scanning for potentially fatal semantic or interpretational mistakes. My rusty Latin definitely helped me along at times; though, again, you don’t strictly need to know any dead languages to get the gist of the arguments.

He reviews the effect of the Rule itself on the idea of tradition: how the Rule “replicates” itself explicitly by requiring that it be regularly read aloud to the monks who live by it, a classic example of memetic “self-preservation”.

He analyzes the extant corpus of wills from the period, showing how their content, as measured by word-usage, was affected by the ideology of the Rule after it arrived in England.

He pauses to comment on how Oral Theory studies have shown the power of repetition in preserving texts and by extension traditional behaviors – he interprets oral-formulaic repetition of text as the “self-replication” of word-usage memes.

He moves on from content to style, taking up the problem of dating the Latin-to-Old English translation of Chrodegang’s Rule (a precursor to the Benedictine Rule); he shows how not just individual words but entire rhetorical formulations, considered as memes and meme-plexes, can be traced and linked to parallel stylistic usages in Benedictine-era documents, to place the Chrodegang translation squarely in the early 10th century.

Finally, he tackles not just content and style, but aesthetics: the Exeter Book wisdom poems are metrical lists of proverbial dicta about medieval life, with a particular appeal to the aristocracy. Drout makes memetic connections between the underlying assumptions of the apparently secular wisdom poems and the spiritual ideology of the reform Benedictine Rule, showing how the reformers secured their position with the ruling class by projecting their monastic aesthetic into the non-monastic cultural life of literate England.

The Take-away

Whew. That was brutal. As I said, this is not a book for kids. The upshot is, Drout is trying to quantify what “tradition” is. He believes memetic theory does an end-run around a lot of literary hot air and theory about tradition, by postulating a logical and consistent assembly of many small repeated words, phrases and beliefs into larger and larger assemblages of cultural behavior, all with strong intrinsic tendencies toward “self-perpetuation”.

His literal argument is that the text of the Benedictine Rule, being both internally consistent, useful, and explicitly self-perpetuating, had a provable impact on its surrounding culture, creating an entire “era” that in retrospect constitutes a “tradition” within Anglo-Saxon history.

But by casting the entire argument in the meta-language of memetics, he is attempting to show that this specific case-study is itself replicable – that his theory is its own useful, functional, and transmittable meme-plex. Through this book, it can be “transmitted” to English departments across the land and re-engage any tired literary sub-specialty in a new theory that works not just for English but for the entire humanistic academy.

And let me conclude by saying this. I’ve radically simplified the sheer depth of this book. This is the product of literally years of hard clear thought and study. Drout’s passion for his topic is palpable. He writes fantastically well (as those who read his blog already know). If this book is hard and in places obscure, it’s also a wonderful intellectual excursion into a world that, without this author, I would probably never have gotten near. It reminded me in that sense of Hofstadter’s Goedel, Escher, Bach, a book that took me deeper into symbolic logic and recursion theory than I will ever go again -- but the memory of it as a sheer thrilling mind-adventure has never left me, after thirty years. Thirty years from now, I’m sure I will still remember the thrill of reading and understanding How Tradition Works.



P.S. What about Tolkien? Poor Tolkien? Well, Drout does work him in. Here’s part of his conclusion:


It is possible to imagine continuing such a program of research even further into the Middle Ages, perhaps going step by step through each century until we reached the present day, though I don’t know if there be world enough and time . . . I think it is more practical to try to investigate the idea of memetic “seeds” in both Victorian and twentieth-century culture, examining the ways that medieval and Anglo-Saxon memes are resurrected and how they shape the cultures in which they find themselves. Thus I can see the possibility of a memetic investigation of the pre-Raphaelites or the Gothic Revival in the nineteenth century and the development of fantasy literature, particularly the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, in the twentieth.
So there you are. Not perhaps exactly on topic, Reading Room-wise. But if Drout can do it, so can we:

A. What “memes” of traditional medieval literature do you find in The Lord of the Rings? Be specific.

B. To what degree have they been transmitted from the original texts, thanks to Tolkien’s nearly-unique acquaintance with original medieval literature? Or have they been transmitted via intermediary texts and traditions like Victorian Gothic and Romantic revivals, as Drout may be suggesting?

Gatekeeping?

A while back I posted about the difficulty of obtaining essential research tools for Anglo-Saxonists, and that led to an interesting exchange with Tiruncula and Scott Nokes about the state of the field.

I just discovered this post by Eileen Joy. Don't skip reading the comments, because that's where Eileen expands a bit more.

Unfortunately I'm pressed for time right now (and will be for the next few days, as the semester starts on Wednesday), but did want to respond to a few things.

First, I wasn't trying to be a "gatekeeper" for who is and who isn't an Anglo-Saxonist. If you can read Anglo-Saxon, you are, as far as I'm concerned an Anglo-Saxonist. I have no interest in telling people what they should be interested in: my idea of a healthy field is not a whole bunch of scholars beavering away on projects they hate but which are considered "important."

However, as the origin of this discussion in a post about the danger of losing research tools might indicate, I am very concerned with the continued viability of the field, particularly in terms of tenure lines for people who study Old English literature and history and culture. Now that it looks like I cannot get out of taking my turn as Chair of my department, I am even more focused on such matters and on problems like budgets (for libraries as well as for tenure lines), research support and, most importantly, course offerings.

I definitely do see "us" (i.e., people who can read Old English and want to study the culture and literature of Anglo-Saxon England, or more broadly, people who study literature and culture from before the year 1500) as having to compete for resources with other sub-specialities in our disciplines. If you want to construct this in terms of "identities," then the "them" is made up of people who want those resources for other things. I don't think these people are bad--they're my colleagues and friends. But they (and their discourses) do not put as much value on the study of the Middle Ages as I do. Therefore they want to direct finite resources elsewhere (i.e., if the English or History department gets a new tenure line, they would like it to be in rhetoric, or Asian studies, or film culture, or anything). I'd love to add a person in rhetoric, or one in Asian studies, but if History wants to replace the only medievalist tenure line with something else, then I will be making the argument that this is not a optimal use of resources.

In making that point, one has to make an argument. I believe it would be easier to make that argument, and to win that argument, along the lines that I laid out in my previous posts: medievalists do certain things particularly well (yes, better than scholars of other eras). Therefore, if you make those particular things the criteria on which one defends a tenure line or arranges for a new one or competes for resources, you are more likely to win your argument. If you accept other terms, you are less likely to win (that's the "seemingly neutral rules pre-determine the outcome" argument that is one of my big takeaways from Foucault).

I think that people in English in general and in medieval studies in specific will, on the balance, lose out to people in sociology, political science, anthropology, as well as history, if we define the "important" things in the field to be politics. Because we also have to learn multiple languages and because what we work on has the enormous challenge of being in the past, these other disciplines, on the whole, are going to out-compete us for resources (they already have over the past 75 years). But it might be possible to re-acquire some of those resources if we change the ground rules of the argument. The point being not to get rid of the analysis of politics or culture, but to augment that analysis with the deep understanding of language that all of us who work in English (actually any literary/linguistic study, but I know English best) already have.

(This is where I was unclear in my previous post, and I apologize: I don't think anyone needs to go out and jettison their own work and become a linguist. I'm not--though I would like to be, and I'd like to be a better philologist and better Latinist and be good enough at Old Norse to do Skaldic poetry the way Roberta Frank does. The very fact that one is a student of language and literature means that he or she already knows an awful lot about language and the way it works. I am arguing for foregrounding that particular expertise as a way of winning arguments and thus retaining resources in a very, very competitive environment).

Running out of time, and children need to be picked up, so I'll end this post on a quick bit that I wanted to work in, but couldn't:

One of the commenters on Eileen's post, John Walter, writes: "And we need to remember that the discipline of philology, and the greater Grimmian Revolution, as Shippey calls it, developed for nationalistic purposes."

Question: Is there some specific passage in Deutsche Grammatik that you were thinking of here? I admit I get bogged down in some of Grimm's German, but, while I can see an important analytical nexus between the Fairy Tale collection and the nationalist project (i.e., selection bias, etc.), I can't remember anything about the substance of the laws of consonant sound change that I would be able to tie in to the nationalist project.
I guess I'm really just asking for more specificity, as I've been reading a lot of 19th-century philology lately: where were you going with the "we need to remember..."?

Visual Display of Manuscript Information

I now really, really appreciate the work of Matt Cavnar, my genius sound editor for Recorded Books. I've spent the past week editing my Beowulf Aloud (n.b., that link may not take you to the website for a day or two) recording of all of Beowulf in OE. It is truly exhausting, and just a little more than three hours of recording has taken at least twenty hours to edit (and it's not done yet, and it was already been edited to some degree--it's just that a regular editor isn't going to know what to edit for dramatic effect in OE; for example, reducing or increasing the length of pauses).

But in between listening to Beowulf files, trying to finish off Tolkien Studies 4, which goes to the printer at the end of the month), and writing that "basic library for an Anglo-Saxonist" post (not quite done), I've been working on a couple of other projects, and I wanted to show the early stages of this one to my readers and solicit opinions and suggestions.

Background: whenever I've worked with manuscripts, I've been both excited and frustrated by the way that information is presented. Excited, because the traditions of manuscript description have remained (mostly) unchanged and there is a wonderful element of ritual to reading someone's formal description of a manuscript (I imagine that the feeling I get is like what Stephen J. Gould describes in Wonderful Life about reading pages of anatomical description about the Burgess Shale fossils). Frustrated, because it is very difficult for me, from the descriptions, to get a real idea of how the manuscript is put together.

If you've used Ker's Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, you may know what I mean: I read all these detailed descriptions of the manuscripts, but it is very hard (for me) to get a picture in my head of the arrangement of texts and the relationships between texts, scribes, glossators, etc. In fact, even with the manuscript in front of me (in facsimile or microfilm or even when I've been in the British Library), I have trouble really grasping the entirety of the manuscript (Ok, so I was trying with Tiberius A.iii., but still...)

So, with the help of a colleague in Computer Science, I am developing an interface that will take data about a manuscript and present it in graphic form. If this works, a user will be able to see the relationships within the manuscript. This is hard to describe but easy to show, so I've pasted in my sketch of the interface below. You'll note that you can see, immediately, the place of each text in the manuscript, the relationship of scribes to each other and to the texts (i.e., if Scribe A copies text 1 and part of text 2, while Scribe B copies the rest of text two and all of text 3). The date and provenance of the manuscript (and the Scribes, when they are identified) can then be used to link the manuscript to others of the same type (i.e., pull up all Winchester MSS from the 2nd quarter of the tenth century). These relationships will all be in the database (the design of which is the trickiest aspect of this project) and will be easily manipulated (i.e., a user can change a date or provenance on his or her own: you won't be constrained to Ker's judgements).

The basic idea is for us to design the database and the interface and then just start putting the information from Ker into it. Eventually I can imagine a huge database that could be mined by different techniques to try to identify relationships between manuscripts. But mostly I was thinking of it as a tool for me and for my students so that we could more easily understand the way any given manuscript is put together.

So, what do you think? Does the representation make sense? Is it intuitive? Would it help you to understand a given manuscript?

Specific questions include: where do you think I should put Script? I had thought about putting it along the back edge, with the capability of being separated by text, but there are additional problems if you have different scripts for texts and glosses, though I imagine that could be solved by having multiple rows.
Also, can you see a need for codicological data or additional physical description? The system is designed to have space in it for every single leaf, so pricking and ruling, dry-point drawings, etc. could be contained there. I was thinking that codicological units could somehow be marked along the front edge (where each "leaf" is, using some kind of color scheme), but I don't want things to get too out of hand, as the design is already very busy.

We're still at the early stages of the project, so there's plenty of opportunity to make changes. I'm hoping that the many eyes/many brains of the web can help make the system useful.

An Example

To illustrate the point I was making in the previous post:

I just had the opportunity to read a paper completely outside of my field, in 20th-C / contemporary ethnic literature. The paper analyses novels which depict different kinds of immigrant and second-generation ethnic experience in America (say, the genre in which The Kite Runner exists, though about different ethnic groups, etc.). This was a good paper: it held my interest, deployed its theoretical material with confidence (i.e., not endless block quotes from Major Theorists) and showed some sensitivity to the literature. This paper has obviously been well-received.

And there was, to my eye, an enormous, gaping, hideous lacuna right in the heart of it.

In a paper that for twenty pages engages with issues of language--everything from accent, English as a second language teaching, to language performance, to code switching and use of multiple linguistic registers--there was NO engagement at all with work on language acquisition, second language performance, the phonology of 'accent,' code switching or any of the multitude of analytical tools that could come from contemporary linguistics (not to mention historical linguistics). Nothing at all.

I am thus relatively certain that the author of this paper, who obviously went to a top-knotch literature program and is also obviously very smart, has not the faintest idea that there is an enormous body of knowledge that could be usefully deployed to support and enrich the arguments of the paper. The paper is instead 100% politics. Some of it sophisticated, some less so, but everything is taken as politics and nothing more.

Now I'm not arguing that there should be no politics. In fact I can imagine that earlier criticism might have characterized the novels being analyzed entirely in terms of laws of sound change, second language acquisition, etc. without ever engaging in the politics of an ethnic, immigrant experience, and that would have been unfortunate: the analysis would have been incomplete. The political discussion in the paper actually is interesting and useful. But it is radically impoverished by the lack of engagement with Language, and I think this is exceedingly unfortunate, because other departments can do politics and sociology, and probably can do them better than English professors. But only English professors are trained (or used to be trained) to be able to analyze language: that should be our great advantage, the strength we should bring to the game.

But instead, we're transforming what should be our own field into someone else's and, let's face it, we are never going to be as good at analyzing politics as the political scientists, as sharp on sociological discussion as the sociologists or as good at philosophy as the philosophers: there simply isn't enough time to learn those things and to learn about literature and culture. Thus we end up doing politics-lite or sociology-lite or philosophy-lite (see Scott Nokes here) and also not doing justice to the things we are actually good at doing. It's no wonder our departments have sunk in prestige compared to our colleagues: it's not troglodyte conservatives whipping up the alumni and the general public against leftist politics (all the departments of higher prestige are just as full of leftist academics); it's our own bizarre decision to play in their games by their rules and to pre-emptively surrender our greatest advantages.

I want to emphasize that I am not making the argument that there should be no politics or sociology or philosophy in English. And I don't actually see how one could have language analysis without history. But those other disciplines should be subordinate to what we should be able to do best: analyze language, narrative and culture in ways that are not easily accessible to political scientists, sociologists or philosophers. Our game should be played on our home field.

Again with the State of the Field

Tiruncula (whom I'm guessing I know in real life, but have really no idea about) writes a very interesting post about the "state of the field" in Anglo-Saxon studies, prompted by my post here.

Although her post is optimistic and mine was pessimistic, I think I mostly agree with what she says. Anglo-Saxon studies is very collegial, and although a few institutions are dominant (Cambridge, Toronto, Oxford), really many of the best people are scattered all over the place, which somewhat reduces overt snobbery, etc. And, as I've said before, medievalists in general and Anglo-Saxonists in particular tend to be more gregarious, fun and just plain happy than English professors in other disciplines. It's also a really intellectually exciting time to be an Anglo-Saxonist, with new areas for study opening up. All of these factors combine to make it a good time to be an Anglo-Saxonist (albeit with all the difficulties of job market, etc. that I've discussed in many other posts).

But I am not at all sanguine about the future of the field because I think it would be very easy for Old English studies to end up even further marginalized and then to become extinct in all but a few places. Twenty years ago no decent English department would have thought it acceptable not to have at least a medievalist, and probably two, one for Anglo-Saxon and one for Middle English. Now that is not the case; it's probably intellectually acceptable in many places (n.b.: I look down on those places and don't respect them, but that doesn't seem to stop anyone) to eliminate early medieval entirely and just have a Chaucerian. At other places (even less deserving of respect) medieval positions are being combined with Renaissance. The line probably gets drawn there, as Shakespeare is, one hopes, safe from tenure-line poaching by later periods, but if trends continue, I think that a lot of departments will take what should be (say) three tenure lines (Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Renaissance) and combine them into one, peeling off the other two for still more 20th-C or contemporary literature (by the way, I think that the 18th century is likewise vulnerable to poaching, and for similar reasons: it is perceived, incorrectly on both counts, as 'too hard' for students and 'too boring').

So Tiruncula's point that the field is healthy from the inside (i.e., intellectually) and my point that the field as a whole is not in the best of shape (i.e., economically, politically etc.--) can be reconciled. Using an ecology metaphor, you might say that Anglo-Saxonists are like a species that's healthy, genetically diverse and parasite free but whose habitat is being rapidly destroyed.

Two related questions, then, would be 1) Why is the field in the shape it is in? (2) What should we (or can we) do about it?

Tom Shippey's essay in Æstel, which I referenced here suggests some answers for question 1: a). poor pedagogy caused by a tradition of compulsory OE (and in response to commenter Prof. de Breeze, not that compulsory OE is intrinsically bad, but that its existence allowed for slack teaching: if you know that you've automatically got X number of sections of OE, there's less incentive to work particularly hard to teach circles around the competition, the way that Anglo-Saxonists can almost uniformly do now); b) poor teaching instruments (the craptastic Clark-Hall dictionary, grammar books aimed at students who have had four years of Latin and Greek, etc.); c) the perception that Anglo-Saxon studies is male, white, Christian and warrior-focused and the history of pan-Germanic nationalism and its connection to philology and medieval studies.
To this group of problems, Allen Frantzen added a lack of engagement with literary theory: our colleagues could feel safe in ignoring us because we were not talking in the same way: we had self-marginalized.

I agree with Tom about all of these things, and Allen was right, also (though he was far too charitable to the modernists, who did not turn around and embrace Anglo-Saxonists when we started doing theory) but I would add two other major problems that to some extent overshadow these others (and, to continue with the theme of agreeing with Tom about an embarrassing number of things, he expressed some of these ideas in a response to a set of Kalamazoo papers a couple of years back).

Anglo-Saxon studies and philology are a highly irritating rebuke to most of the rest of the sub-disciplines in English because our intellectual practices are a direct refutation of one of the central dogmas of literary studies: that all "knowledge is situated and contingent."

I already irritated people by asserting that it is not possible (or even desireable) to teach "critical thinking" by itself; "critical thinking" is taught and learned by studying some body of knowledge and practice in detail. I stand by that assertion, though I wish I had expressed myself more clearly: I do think people learn to think critically, but only as a product of learning the details and practices of some discipline. So let me be more annoying:

All knowledge is not "contingent and situated," and although Anglo-Saxonists may pay lip service to that piece of dogma, we don't actually believe it (or at least we don't act as if we believe it).

Outside of the Humanities no one believes this, anyway (except in the most pathetic, freshman-philosophy sense). There are lots of forms of knowledge that are contingent and situated (Foucault actually demonstrates some of these areas in regard to, say, sexuality or mental illness), but it is a huge intellectual mistake to take the overstatements characteristic of French philosophy (and of Foucault personally) and act as if they are true.

The discipline of philology has, since Grimm (and maybe even since Rask and Bopp) built up a great deal of knowledge that is valuable exactly because it is not contingent and situated in any meaningful sense. Grimm's and Verner's laws work; Saussure's argument for Proto-Indo-European laryngial consonants works: the theory has explanatory and predictive power. I could go on, but this post is already far too long. This knowledge is of a different order than, say, the passage below from film scholar Angela Martin, who, in discussing Film Noir, writes:

‘The American woman’ had become capable and independent, having been ‘reclassified almost overnight’ as fit for heavy industrial work, after Pearl Harbor…Hollywood addressed itself to this increasingly dominant female audience in terms of pleasure, but also in terms of war effort, showing women as workers, as well as patriotic, optimistic, and supportive wives, sweethearts and mothers (Martin 203).

Martin continues this line of argument, suggesting that, after the war, women became classified as “excess labor” (203) and that the re-emergence of the noir thriller was related to women returning to a domestic role.

Now it seems clear to me that Grimm's Law is on an entirely different level of contingency and situatedness than Martin's criticism and that we make a very large intellectual mistake when we do not recognize this. To the credit of Anglo-Saxon studies, I think it is highly unlikely that any of us could (or would try) to get away with presenting historical and economic analysis in such broad terms.

So, when we use boilerplate like "contingent and situated" (whether we believe it or not) we are in effect engaging in pre-emptive rhetorical surrender: we are deprecating our own strengths and playing to our weaknesses, for it is much harder to do the kind of broad-brush cultural/political criticism that is standard practice in 20th-century literature when you also have to establish all the kinds of historical, philological and manuscript contexts the way we do in Old English. Martin can do this stuff for Film Noir because "everybody knows" the historical/economic assertions upon which her argument rests.

This leads me to my second point, related to the first: for those of our colleagues who know how we work, philology and the kinds of historical criticism that Anglo-Saxonists do is an irritating rebuke to standard dogma. But far too many of our colleagues (and even more of their students) really have very little idea of what we do because they are appallingly ignorant about language.

I recognize that this is a red flag being waved in front of a lot of bulls, but I'll stand by the assertion: far too many English professors and graduate students don't really know much about how English works. Oh, they know all about how Language works, but this is all knowledge at an incredibly high level of abstraction (binary oppositions, prisonhouses of language). Ask a colleague to explain semantic shifts over time or phonological change or the influence of Old Norse on English and you'll get a blank look. These same colleagues can go on about Otherness, etc. but they have no idea how actual language work. Lest you think I am being too crabby, let me quote John Searle, one of the leading philosophers of language by anyone's estimation. This quote is from around 2001-2002, when Searle was reviewing work by Chomsky:

I would not wish my criticisms of Chomsky to be misunderstood. At a time when various embarrassingly incompetent accounts of language are widespread in university humanities departments under such names as "literary theory," "deconstruction," and "postmodernism" it is worth emphasising that his work in linguistics is at the highest intellectual level.

That's what a philosopher of language (and frequent interlocutor of Derrida) thinks of the English department's use of philosophy of language: "embarrassingly incompetent." His point is that there are scholars who know how language works, but they are in departments of linguistics, not departments of English. I think he is right in broad terms, but he is ignoring Anglo-Saxonists, who do know how language works (and the most important thing about how language works is that it changes in certain regular, though complex, ways). But we are a distinct and embattled minority in English departments. And, I would assert, we are in such a minority position exactly because we possess knowledge and disciplinary practices that call into question the work that other members of the profession do, and so for them the easiest thing to do is to ignore and marginalize us. This can be done visibly and visciously, by accusing racism, sexism, etc. (Shippey's comments about pan-Germanic nationalism and its implication in philology), or subtly, by insisting as dogma that all knowledge is contingent and situated. In both cases the result is to replace Anglo-Saxonists with colleagues whose sub-disciplines are more amenable to the dominant paradigm (ha! I used "dominant paradigm").

So, what is to be done?

Well, given the tone of the above, you would expect that I would be raging against other time periods and sub-disciplines, who, threatened by our intellectual superiority, are squeezing us out.

But in fact (and this is how you can tell I'm Allen Frantzen's student), I think we should keep trying to reach out to our colleages because we have something they need. But in order to offer them what they need, we have to stop playing false and agreeing to dogma about our knowledge. We practice, as one of my students said with joy and wonder "English with right and wrong answers." We should show how this is valuable and how our colleagues do need us.

According to the New York Review of Books, in the early 1980s there were 65,000 English majors in American universities. Given the population increase among students, we should have had 130,000 English majors in 2002. But the actual number was 49,000. Those are very bad numbers, and the entire profession really should take notice. Expanding the canon was intellectually good, but it has done nothing to change the direction of the change. Diversifying the faculty may have been (may still be) the right thing to do, but it is not pulling in new majors. Trying to make the major more appealing to students by focusing more and more on 20th-C and contemporary literature has not increased the popularity of English. Maybe the trick isn't to continue doing more of the same, but to try something different.

I would submit that the "something different" we should do is to focus on language and how it works in a historical sense rather than an abstract philosophical sense. Literary studies suffers from a continuous pull in two directions: towards solipsism and towards politics--you end up with "that text means this to me" or "that text illustrates this political/social phenomenon." The best English criticism resists this pull (not overcomes, just resists) keeping English as something more than the book club discussion or the dormroom bull session. Philology, detailed historical scholarship, manuscript work--these disciplines help resist that pull; they make English much more interesting. I believe that a renewed focus on language would thus re-invigorate the discipline, bringing in more students and helping us to argue to parents, legislators and critics that what we do is valuable not just in terms of some kind of nebulous "critical thinking," but in really specific terms. This would mean a serious engagement with contemporary synchronic linguistics as well as historical linguistics, and with the cognitive psychology of reading and memory, as well as with conditions of physical and economic production, distribution and evaluation of literature (the kind of work which is done outside of medieval studies).

This has been a grumpy post, but in fact I am very optimistic that our students do want to learn about how language works. My medieval lit class this semester (which will have a sizeable Old Norse component) has over 40 students and my Chaucer class 22 at a small liberal arts college where the average course size is 15. Those enrollments aren't due to my sparkling personality, but to students actually being interested in the older material and in the approach. I think there could be very good times ahead for medieval studies if we make the right kinds of arguments, if we don't surrender pre-emptively, and if we recognize and express the great value in what we do.

[Thanks, Tiruncula, for killing my productivity for an entire morning with a provocative post. I can't decide if you owe me a beer at Kalamazoo or I owe you one]

This Anglo-Saxonist's Library

I'm actually not thrilled about the way these pictures came out. We need a new digital camera, but as I just got a new computer yesterday, it may be a while. In any event, here are the most research-focused shelves of the library. I think some of the pictures are clear enough for people to be able to browse.
I'm working on a writing up the list of a basic library for the Anglo-Saxonist, but that might be a while as there are some other committments out there that have to get taken care of, and switching from one computer to the other is taking longer than I thought it would.

An Anglo-Saxonist's Library

In a previous post I discussed the difficulty of acquiring essential research tools, and in the post before that I mentioned snagging some key books and trying to determine what to buy next (a very happy fate; not soon to be repeated, I'm sure). A reader commented with a question:

Would you share a representative list of what a crusty old english professor might keep in his library (for the edification of the dilettantes frequenting your blog)?

Although I dearly hope I am not yet Crusty (though I do a good immitation of Krusty), I am clearly on the rapid train to that destination (first stop: have children; second stop, start shaving head to save time in morning; third stop: begin sentences at department meetings with "When that was proposed ten years ago....").

And I think this is an excellent question (if it's not some kind of a "humiliation game" set up, where I reveal that I have not a single book by some eminent person on my shelves). It's also a big question, so I'll tackle it in two parts. The first is easy: I'll post some pictures of my actual shelves with enough details so that you can recognize the books. This also lets me show off the shelves, which are part of a massive floor-to-ceiling bookcase that wraps around one wall of our study. My wife and I designed built them ourselves, and we will never do that again, ever. Maybe excavate a well or pour the foundation for a porch, but nothing challenging like designing and building a few hundred linear feet of bookcases.

So, if I can get the new computer running tomorrow before this one finally dies for real, I will post some bookcase Pr0n for you (and academics are terrible voyeurs about other people's books. I always know that my books will be picked over when I have someone over to visit), I'll post the pictures.

And while I'm working on that, I'll try to come up with a list (linked to Amazon for in-print titles) of the books I need to do research without having to leave the house very much. People on ANSAX have attempted to put together such lists before, but these always falter on the shoals of sucking up: you must mention your director's book and the other books you think will make you look cool, and something so minor that it appears you are cornering the market on that sub-field (Drout's hint: you know why there aren't a lot articles about the Whale and the Partridge poems in the Exeter Book? Becuase they're not that great and there's not much to say -- see my article in Neophilologus that should be out soon for a example of how much work is required to enter into a seemingly empty area of the field).

So I am going to use myself as a guide in the sense that most of the books I will list, I will have. That means that certain kinds of books--interpretations, essay collections that are uneven--may not be on my shelves because these are easy enough to get from some kind of Interlibrary Loan, even from a fairly marginal public library. I will do my best to put no up-sucking in this list, at least at the "core" area. And it will all be focused on Old rather than Middle English (mostly because I've moved a big pile of my Middle English interpretive books to my office in order to be able to loan them to students next semester).

Stay tuned for...

The Library of Solomon and Saturn...