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.

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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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reasons for Radio Silence: Some Equations


Swine Flu Virus Circulating

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Government Ineptitude with Vaccine Distribution

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Family Very Sick for Very Long

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New Puppy

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Revising Two Major Articles

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No Blogging

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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).

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.

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?

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!]