I Like the NEH a Lot More Today

Today I just learned that with two colleagues I am a recipient of an NEH startup grant for "Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond." The project has been led by my friend and collaborator (in our linked classes "Anglo-Saxon Literature" and "Computing for Poets"), Prof. of Computer Science Mark LeBlanc, and we are working with Prof. of Mathematics Mike Kahn. Our idea is to take some techniques that have been very successful for the study of bioinformatics and apply them to the Old English corpus (I've pasted in the short description of the project below).  Key idea:  we don't subordinate traditional humanistic goals to science, and we don't limit the science to making tools.  We respect both and get them to work together. 

I now have a really fun summer ahead of me, and a new goal:  I will now have done a collaborative project with four different faculty in Math/Computer Science (with one more project on tap) and now think it's not unreasonable to think that, before I retire, I could work with all of them.  Mathematicians and Computer Scientists are just as much fun to hang out with as Biologists (and I have the ongoing Sheep DNA project there -- getting some minor results), and these projects give me an excuse to lurk around the science center.   Fun! (and my kids will be thrilled that they get to run around there this summer).  

Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond

Abstract
Entire new worlds of scholarship and research are emerging from a synergy of technology, problem solving, and statistical analysis. This interdisciplinary proposal joins researchers in Old English, statistics, and computer science to show by example how the development and application of computational stylistic tools across an entire corpus enables the large scale exploration and discovery of patterns and trends that go undetected by the unassisted eye and brain, yet generate novel sets of hypotheses for subsequent scholarship both digital (through further pattern recognition and analysis) and traditionally humanistic.

From one direction this proposal approaches texts in the same way as genomics  (the analysis of DNA texts): we seek information-rich patterns in a long string of letters. From the other direction we come from literary studies, looking for meaning, influence, symbolism, reference, source material, and interpretation. We then meet in the middle, providing a way for literary scholars, computer scientists, and statisticians to work collaboratively to solve complex problems, problems that are so new and so difficult that we really need all the tools we can get. We posit this interdisciplinary tack as a significant contribution to Humanities scholarship: a myriad of new questions can be expected by embracing the tools and techniques that require computational and statistical expertise and linking these approaches with some of the traditional methods of humanistic research.  

In particular, such an approach is needed to augment the large and ongoing Dictionary of Old English project (the Dictionary of Old English corpus, the DOE itself, and its new link with the OED). We aim to go beyond traditional lexicography—the painstaking method of looking, individually, at every single word in the corpus—by using statistical models based on relative word frequencies across all texts in a corpus. We can then, forexample, generate data that can shed new light on questions such as: Is there a Winchester vocabulary, in slightly different form, in other texts than those previous identified? Is there a “poetic language” statistically different from prose Old English in all poems or only some poems? Are the poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, given their age and manuscript context, fundamentally different from those of the Exeter Book, Vercelli Book or Junius Manuscript? Was there a Southeastern ‘koine’ spread by Dunstan? Do writers of similar documents exhibit similar patterns on the
very small level as well as in specific vocabulary?

Anticipated outcomes include scalable, open-source software to facilitate the computation and organization of word frequencies and other patterns and empirical measures of success when using various statistical analyses on the condensed data. An additional and essential outcome from our perspective is how this research leads to and impacts the development of interdisciplinary course materials for our “connected” (interdisciplinary) undergraduate courses in English, Statistics, and Computer Science in order that computational analyses become a more inviting option for faculty and advanced research students in the Humanities.

Crabby Post on Hating teh Internets

Anglo-Saxon Aloud is going to be hiatus for a couple of days as I rehab my voice. Yes, the dread upper respiratory infection that has been patiently marching through my family finally got me--we managed to cover 2.5 weeks with at least one person sick with this stupid germ but never two people sick. Fun. So I've got to get over my laryngitis before I get back to recording the Meters of Boethius.

And because I'm sick, I'm crabby. Also because a stupid internet-based phenomenon is in the process of ruining ANSAX-NET (the Anglo-Saxonists' listerv) for the second time (and it really hasn't recovered from the first time). People who don't participate in ANSAX-NET will have no idea of this, but there is a small and completely logorrheaic group of individuals who have what I can only describe as crackpot theories about the secret messages hidden in Beowulf and other poems through various means involving either scribal practice or numerology. No, I am not making this up, and it caused the decay of ANSAX-NET from an incredible resource in which many of the giants of the field engaged in really interesting discussions of matters Anglo-Saxon to today's relatively simple mechanism for making announcements.

Around the MLA that was held in Chicago when I was a grad student there, so probably around 1995 or 1996, I was at the Anglo-Saxonist open bar talking to several giants of the field. I mentioned ANSAX. "I decided to un-subscribe," whispered one extremely senior professor at a glamorous midwestern university. "Oh, me too," said someone from the southwestern part of the US. It turned out that half of the senior Anglo-Saxonists were no longer subscribed to ANSAX net. I was quite upset, because I had seen ANSAX as an incredibly valuable resource. Now it turned out that a lot of the people who knew most were not contributing. Why?

Letter counting for secret messages in Beowulf. Seriously. One Oxford-based scholar wrote (and I not exaggerating) hundreds and hundreds of messages purporting to demonstrate that if you counted up the words and letters in Beowulf, imposed ratios, did calculations, fixed all the errors that the scribe wrote, etc., you would find the key messages of the poem and the author's hidden name. When many of us tried the calculations and found that they would work just as well for a flight manual, the yellow pages, or a book about cabbage, simply more logorrhea about the letter- and word-counting poured forth.

Other people got into the act. There was the idea that the spacing between letters held clues to deep meaning. Others suggested that by carefully measuring the heights of all the letters, you got a sonogram that told you how to pronounce them. Every time someone pointed out a flaw in the argument, you got back page after page of explanation that never addressed the central questions of:

a) if you fish in the pond of random numbers, you will catch something
b) the argument is circular if you are trying to show these patterns but then emend due to "incompetent scribe" every time something doesn't fit your argument.



I have decided that the "counters" are the Anglo-Saxon studies equivalent of 911 "Truthers," "Thimersol causes autism" cranks, and "Ron Pauls says the Federal Reserve is ruining our lives" people. Similarities: simple questions never get simple answers but instead generate massive core dumps of material. Circular arguments are not rejected for being circular and the circularity is never addressed. Stacks of links to other websites or projects rather than citations of published material are used for support. There is some kind of "establishment" that is keeping the truth from getting out there. Serious scholars who have worked on, say, paleography, have no idea what they've been looking at. No piece of evidence, no argument will actually change these peoples' minds. And worst of all, they never stop talking and soon every sane person who is interested in other topics backs slowly away and unsubscribes.

It drives me crazy that this has happened to Anglo-Saxon once and is now in the process of happening again. Even if any of the counting theories were right (I've actually looked into them; I'm sure they are wrong), they never have anything but the most banal things to say: the central message of a poem is that "God is great" or "Christ redeemed us" or some utterly tedious and predictable Christian commonplace. Let me try to express better how I feel about this:

There are thousands of things to discuss and debate about Beowulf (I just spent a week of classes doing this and having amazing fun with it). The numbers of letters, words, spaces, heights or lines or even numbers of lines are the most boring things possible to talk about! This latest flurry started just as an interesting discussion about orality and literacy was getting going and when Adam Brooke Davis had made a really remarkable post that I thought showed exactly how meme theory could help show that the oral/literate debate can be resolved. Then boom! we're back to how many letters, words, spaces are in various lines. Argh!!!

I am not going to unsubscribe from ANSAX (yet), but I hope that we can talk about, well, interesting things (and there are so many of them) and not this stuff, yet again.

P.S.: A colleague I really respect, who knows more real philology than I'll ever learn, makes some provocative arguments about the overall number of lines in the poem and the certain things that happen at key points. I am still not at all convinced by the numerology. I think instead that what we have is a critic intuitively sensing key moments in the structure (the narratology) of the poem) and then finding a set of numbers that matches that intuition. Yvette Kisor's brilliant article in ASE, where she shows how many, many scholars, working from very different premises, have found the same structural patterns in the poem, shows how some pattern might be there (and almost certainly is), but I think that the numerology used to describe it is not convincing, because if things had been shifted by any number of lines, a smart enough critic (and the person working on this is certainly smart enough) could still get some kind of numerology to work. It's just--to use English lit jargon--an overdetermined system.

Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems finished at Anglo-Saxon Aloud

It seems like forever ago when I started recording volume VI of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, but that volume is now finished and every single poem, fragment, charm, etc. is now recorded, edited and posted at Anglo-Saxon Aloud. I hope you enjoy them.

The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems is a somewhat misleading name, because although the volume contains much that is "minor" in the regular sense of the word ("A Prayer" or "Latin-English Proverbs," for example), some of the most "major" and well-studied poems in the corpus are in this volume, including The Battle of Maldon, The Battle of Brunanburh and Cædmon's Hymn. But I guess that the title Anglo-Saxon Poems that Aren't in one of the Major Poetic Codices wouldn't have fit on the spine of the book.

Now I go back to volume V of the ASPR The Paris Psalter and the Meters of Boethius and start working through that volume. And since I'm violating chronological order anyway, I'm going to do the Boethius first, because that gives me more time to work up to trying to sing the Psalms. I think Boethius will take three weeks and the Psalter will take five (if I only do one psalm per day), so that would have Anglo-Saxon Aloud finishing up right around Kalamazoo time (which was why I was going to give a paper on it, but, oops. I will be chairing a session on something totally unrelated).

What will be next, I'm not sure. On the one hand, I've kind of gotten used to spending time recording and editing. It's good, fun, somewhat mindless work and gave me the excuse to read through the entire ASPR carefully (twice, actually: once when I recorded each poem and then again while editing). I've got more research questions to answer and new ideas about the poetry than I'll ever get to address. But it's also been tiring at times, so I don't know how much I'll continue. The prose sections of the Charms were harder to record than the poetry (less obvious breath points, for one thing), so I would hesitate to jump into a large prose project. But I'll almost certainly do the Sermo Lupi, and perhaps I'll start doing daily readings from the Chronicle.

Reasons for Current Radio Silence

My apologies for having no posts for a very long time. It has been a rather insane month (or year or something). I don't think I have had a block of free time larger than 20 minutes since Christmas. My research days keep getting eaten up with exciting things like our department doing a search, various meetings, scheduling the classes for next year (which killed an entire research day), taking my son to the dentist, my daughter having time off from school, etc. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of clear spots on the horizon: I just depressed myself by looking at the calendar for May because everything was filled up until then.

On the positive side, my classes this semester are excellent. Both the students in Beowulf and the students in the Math/Science Fiction course are the same students that I had in the fall. That's the first time that has ever happened, and it's pretty cool (though a little highschool-ish) to have the same kids all year. They're doing an amazing job in both courses, despite the problems with Beowulf, which we've been doing withing a stinking book for three weeks. Why, you ask? Because a) even though Klaeber IV was not ready yet, publishers stopped printing Klaeber III b) our stupid bookstore didn't order the book on time or didn't inform me that it was out of print and then tried to lie and tell me that I didn't put the order in (thank you, email confirmation). So, publishers of Klaeber III and IV: thanks, morons, for not coordinating yourselves. And to the bookstore: thanks also, morons, for not letting me know in advance. The upshot is that my poor students have been translating Beowulf with photocopies of Klaeber but using the excreble Clark Hall dictionary instead of Klaeber's glossary! And we are only 100 lines behind my schedule. I think my students deserve a freakin medal for doing this.

In other news, Tolkien Studies volume V is just about ready for the printer and there will be some very cool surpises in it. And my trainwreck of an entry on "Maxims, Aphorisms" turns out not to be as bad as I though: basically I am making a pretty good case that there aren't any unequivocal maxims in Old English except for the two poems by that name. So my entry will be bifurcated: half on the two poems and the other half saying that we shouldn't call anything a maxim (everything that's been called a maxim has more commonly been labeled a "proverb").

I also signed contracts for two new courses on CD from Recorded Books: I'll be doing a course on grammar in March and a course on Poetry in June. It's always fun to work with them, and the fact that they think that courses on Grammar and Poetry will be good sellers says good things about both the company and the wider world of listeners and readers.

Speaking of listeners, Anglo-Saxon Aloud continues to roll along. The Minor Poems should be done in two weeks, then Boethius, and then the Paris Psalter (which I'm working on learning to sing). The week of February 18 will feature the metrical charms, which should be at least amusing to Scott Nokes.

I now just have to finish the second chapter of the Science Fiction novel I was commissioned to write, finish my paper on aesthetic selection and then prepare the two lectures I'm giving in Utah in April.

I guess it's better to be overworked than to be bored. I do plan to write about the movement to make colleges spend more of their endowments, Stanley Fish's lame defense of the liberal arts, and more. Eating, sleeping and exercising? I plan on looking into those things. Some day I will read a book for pleasure again, too.

When an essay rolls off a cliff

Well, back from Christmas "break" with the need now to bring in and interview three candidates before classes start. I did manage to get a few pieces finished and into the mail (including the Philology column that Scott Kleinman and I are writing for The Heroic Age) and really my "break" is just starting, as my daughter only went back to school today.

But I'm already in hell. A while back I agreed to do a SASLC entry on "Maxims, Aphorisms" and it has turned out to have a couple of those little implicit and embedded problems that can either destroy an article or bloat it to the point where the editor prints it out, rolls it up, and beats you with it. The problem here is that no one can differentiate between a Maxim, an Aphorism, a Proverb or a Gnome (unless it's wearing the red pointy hat and collecting underpants). So there is no good bibliographic method for finding articles tracing maxims, et. al. And the very nature of maxims and proverbs is that they are hard to tell if they've been translated or are original developments (homologies and analogies are hopelessly confused). The conventions of the wisdom genre (whatever those are), tend to make it very difficult to tell if we've got an independently arising maxim or one that is translated. Look at the translation of Ephesians 4. 5-6 in "Homiletic Fragment II" and tell me that if you didn't know the Ephesians piece, you would have guessed that "Homiletic Fragment II" had a Latin source rather than simply being an indigenous collection of Christian commonplaces (it reads like "The Fortunes of Men" or "The Gifts of Men").

Just to give one more example, Susan Deskis' really excellent book Beowulf and the Medieval Proverb Tradition shows a ton of interesting similarities between Latin medieval proverb collections and the statements in Beowulf that are taken to be in the "proverb" register. Her book is really convincing, but (and note I'm re-reading the book right now, and it's been five years or so since I last read it, so I still may stumble across something that I've forgotten and don't have in my notes) I can't find a single specific Latin proverb or maxim that can be traced from a specific Anglo-Saxon proverb, maxim, gnome, aphorism or sententious saying.

So I either have to write a really broad entry that argues that Latin Maxims, et. al. would have influenced Anglo-Saxon in an indirect way, or I have to try to track down specific ones that I have thus far been unable to find (though I've got a piles of clues from the Ker catalogue; the Gneuss handlist has been less helpful for this project than it usually is).

Argh!!

(on the other hand, my daughter is now a level 24 hobbit hunter on Lord of the Rings online and is quite a formidable little hobbit: you should see her slaughter giant wargs, spiders and orcs)

lolmartyrs

Things I Said in Anglo-Saxon Literature

One of my students in Anglo-Saxon Literature this semester kept a list of things I said that he found amusing. Maybe you will as well.

On false impressions of the Middle Ages) Well, you tell Prof. Mulholland [specialist in 18th-C] that everyone in the Eighteenth Century had syphilis.

(In Yoda voice): Told you I did. Listen you did not. Now screwed we all shall be. There. I just showed you why natural languages don't use VSO order and summarized the Star Wars I-III.

The Finnish language looks like someone threw some vowels on a plate and shook it real hard.

I went through grammar school in the 70's and 80's when they didn't teach us any actual content--we just expressed ourselves all the time.

(On bloodletting) You get a nice slash from a dirty lancet, and you'll feet better--until you get festering gangrene.

It's a happy day when you have vowels. Otherwise it's like speaking Eastern European languages that only have consonants.

I definitely get the impression that Dutch and Finnish used up all the vowels and so there were none left when the other languages got to pick.

(On the wolf in The Passion of St. Edmund) "I am in ur woodz, garding ma haid."

(On circumcision and conversion) "I have to cut off what? I'll stay pagan, thanks."

(On why Athelstan's not having children does not mean he was gay) There were plenty of European rulers who were gay and had children... they just closed their eyes and thought of England for a few minutes.

I've always said that Beowulf should have beaten Grendel with the arm after he ripped it off while yelling at the monster "Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself, huh?" -- Yes, I have a little brother. Why do you ask?

If you want to know what a gusla sounds like, imagine a cat being fed through a wood-chipper.

(Repeatedly) We in medieval studies often make a fuss about how intellectually studly we are.

Unless you are Nathaniel Hawthorne, you don't need to use the word "sepulcher." And if you are Nathaniel Hawthorne, you use it every six lines.

It's always good to have a talk about cannibalism. Plus, it's in the Vercelli Book, so Score! I'm all set.

Athelthryth -- I can't imagine why that name hasn't made a comeback.

Anglo-Saxon fun: "Let's go drink a lot. And: let's bring weapons!"

My Anglo-Saxon class this year is more intelligent and motivated than my Anglo-Saxon class eight years ago. Don't pat yourself on the back -- I'm still going to make you suffer.

More on Anglo-Saxon Aloud, Singing, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

Paris Psalter Singing

Well, thanks to some good suggestions by Derek the Ænglican (including a pointer to the really interesting Chantblog), and the work of one of my students (a brilliant English/Music double major with a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Studies), I now know what I need to do in order to chant the Paris Psalter at Anglo-Saxon Aloud. Unfortunately, I also know that I'm not ready to do it. I need to listen to more chant, particularly monophonic chant, and get the patterns in my head so that I can improvise around the natural Old English rhythm of the lines. This is going to take some practice and some work. So while I do that, I am going to post volume 6 of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. That's often considered a silly title for a volume that includes the Battle of Maldon, the Battle of Brunanburh, The Fight at Finnsburh, and Cædmon's Hymn, which are certainly not "minor" in the sense of being trivial or less important. So I hope you'll enjoy those "minor" poem for the next few weeks. Then, when I've gotten to the "fragments of Psalms" in the Minor Poems volume, I should be up to the task of singing those and then the Paris Psalter. And I'll conclude the project, honor of my friend Joel Relihan, with the Meters of Boethius.

I'm hoping this will be done by Kalamazoo, so that I can give my paper on the project (assuming it is accepted). And then I hope to add some other things (like female voices for female-narrated poems) and harmony singing for some of the Psalms (I have two double majors in Voice and English who have taken Anglo-Saxon and are taking Beowulf in the spring). Then maybe a few of the more popular prose texts, like the Sermo Lupi. Suggestions are always welcome.

Judith Complete at Anglo-Saxon Aloud

I've now posted the last bit of Judith over at Anglo-Saxon Aloud, which completes the first four volumes of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (Junius Manuscript, Vercelli Book, Exeter Book, Beowulf Manuscript [Nowell Codex]).

I hadn't gone over Judith in OE (except for the Holofernes in hell part that seems to have Old Norse analogues) for some time, and it really is a pretty excellent poem. I would put Judith's Braveheart-esque speech up there with Maldon in terms of inspirational battle oratory in the Anglo-Saxon corpus. And it seems to me that Judith, despite it being about a victory rather than a defeat, is a lot more like Maldon than Brunanburh in tone and "feel," more in touch with some tradition of living poetry and less a pseudo-pangyric for the purpose of politics (just wanted to get the alliteration in there).

Tomorrow I'll make my first post from the Paris Psalter. I'd really appreciate comments, because, although I've done some reading, etc., I really know nothing about medieval music and don't know if what I've produced is acceptable. If it turns out that the Psalter is too hard to do right now, I may skip ahead to the Minor Poems and then come back to the Psalter. Your comments tomorrow will really help.

Review of Beowulf (the film)

My favorite part of the Beowulf film (which I saw in 3D on Sunday) was the moment when, in her watery lair, Angelina Jolie shows herself and starts speaking to our hero:

"Are you the one they call Beowulf?" She asks. "The wolf of the bees? The bear?

At that particular moment I wanted to jump up in the theater and yell:

Angelina Jolie is doing philology!!! Angelina Jolie is doing philology naked!!!

(Does it get any better than that?)

And then I thought, wouldn't it be great if Beowulf replied:

"You'd think that, wouldn't you?" Beowulf said, clutching Unferth's sword. "But actually it means 'Woodpecker'(as Grimm and Skeat guessed)-- and there's a good reason for that." [cue dumb sexual puns on "Woodpecker].

[The above is probably a good explanation of why I haven't won any awards for film scripts].


But the opportunity to make insider-jokes about philology is just one of the many opportunities lost in this movie, which is a weird cross between a serious attempt to envision the Northern early medieval past and "Ye Olde Medieval Worlde" of Shrek. Although I had at least moderately high hopes going in becaues Neil Gaiman was one of the screenwriters, I was pretty disappointed with how it came out.

There are a number of good visual moments in the film: Grendel is the most horrifyingly disgusting monster that has ever appeared on screeen, the sword Hrunting dissolving into little mercury blobs was great, Angelina Jolie's "tail" being her hair was a good choice, and Heorot beseiged by the elements worked very well. But there were also too large a number of absolutely false notes: Hrothgar's drunkenness and absolute lack of dignity, Wealhtheow's cold shoulder both to Hrothgar and Beowulf in public venues, the Beowulf vs. Finn confrontation, Hrothgar's suicide, the introduction of a young girl, Ursa, and the tedious and predictable use of visual and situational cliches with her and Wealhtheow (falling off of collapsing bridges only to be grabbed by the strong hand of Wiglaf, etc.).

But I think I was most disappointed by the theme of the film, which is nothing like the theme of the poem (which is fine), but which was a tedious cliche. I think that people are giving the film way too much credit when they say that it is about unreliable storytelling. Or, rather, they are mistaken in thinking that making Beowulf into a film about unreliable storytelling is anything new, interesting or important. The problem is that there are two many different levels of truth and falsity to make the twists work: On the one hand, we have to believe that everyone is lying when they tell their stories. On the other, there really are Grendel monsters, lamias and dragons. The whole "here is what really happened" approach just doesn't work very well when there really are monsters in the world of the film. I think the combination of these two pieces—the "explanation" of Beowulf's ripping off Grendel's arm with the chain pulley system [which was used in Shrek I] with the "sense of the marvellous" of living monsters (not just confusions about Neanderthals or T.Rexes or whatever)—simply injects some postmodern cynicism without doing anything interesting with it.

Secondly, I wonder if Hollywood directors all have very serious Daddy issues. So the great sin of Hrothgar is that he cheated on Mommy? There are more, and more important sins in the world, and this particular sin is so completely brought into the contemporary socio-psychological context that the story, dialogue and acting could have been out of American Beauty and not from a poem that deals with kings and queens and dynasties--Hrothgar, Wealtheow, Beowulf and Ursula live, for this part of the film, on Wysteria Lane, not in Heorot. If we are in the heroic world or the 6th-century historical world, then the idea that Wealhtheow is being cold to Hrothgar and refusing his sexual advances both in public and for the long term, is absolutely ridiculous. So instead, for those elements of the story, we are in a modern, post-psychological world even though we have dragons, monsters, dynasties, magic drinking cups, etc. Having written at least one bad fantasy novel that tried to take this approach, I think it is doomed to failure.

There is a core of an interesting interpretation that could be centered around Beowulf making a bargain with Grendel's mother for the fame and success that he has later on: he would then be seen as not having earned it, and the film could be an examination of that bargain and its pitfalls (which could have worked if Grendel's mother was the dragon, rather than the dragon being Beowulf's son). Set against the dishonesty that Beowulf would have exhibited in making this bargain would have been the 50 years of peace and prosperity (no mean thing) he gave his kingdom: the failed raids by the Frisians in the film should have been seen as being good: it means that the Frisians are not able to burn, rape, pillage and murder Beowulf's people. Who cares if they are slaughtered on the beach of a country that they are invading? But that's not the film we have, which is focused almost exclusively on the "Daddy cheated on Mommy" sin. This sin might have been made more interesting if Hrothgar and Beowulf had refused to acknowledge their mutant offspring in some way (I don't know how you'd do it), which could then do the (tedious; but a lot of people seem to like it) John Gardner turn-around that Grendel really does have some kind of grievance. But that's not in this film, either.

The back-stories and connections of Beowulf are even more complicated than those of The Godfather, and there are all kinds of opportunities to work on the other sins that can be found in Beowulf (though note in the poem that Beowulf himself, as John Hill points out, is remarkably free of these sins, which is why he is so appealing -- but he is only so appealing in that context of all the other scheming, murdering and manipulating people in the background and the tradition. Hollywood does know how to do stories about pride, ambition and the net of fate woven by early promises, but for some reason when it comes to the fantasy genre, all of that goes out the window. The villains have to be all straight-out-of-Central-Casting: Saruman as generic "Eeville Wizard" or Denethor stuffing grapes in his mouth and slavering or Hrothgar's drunken ineptitude. There's no subtlety of the kind we get with Vito and Michael Corleone or the Martin Sheen character in Apocalypse Now or any number of complex, somewhat compelling villains or flawed men. I wish Hollywood would take a chance on respecting the audience in the fantasy genre. Or, just make pure, escapist fantasy (which I like very much; and I'll note that the 80's film Dragonslayer was better than Beowulf in this regard -- kudos to Vinny A for pointing this out to me).

There is also the problem of narrative 'tighness' vs. 'slackness'. The poem Beowulf has a loose feel that is lost in the film (the suicide of Hrothgar and Beowulf picking up the kingdom of the Danes right there is another example of "tightness" that makes a viewer/reader lose the "feel" of Beowulf). The Lord of the Rings book has this same kind of slackness, with characters appearing out of nowhere, the introduction of new plot points or problems that are not anticipated at the beginning, etc., and it was significantly tightened in the film versions. The radical simplification of Beowulf thus may have been necessary for the tightening of the narrative (no Geatland, no Hygelac, strictly tight connection between all monsters) and may be a demand of the genre. But 'tightness' is not in itself necessarily a virtue, and many of us who love Tolkien or love the old materials (Beowulf, Sagas), love exactly that leisurely and loose feel of the narrative). And all this, in a very round-about way, brings me to a general comment about the film.

Different genres and different time periods have different sets of aesthetic expectations. My major criticism of this Beowulf film is that it bounced from the comic-book-heroic, fight-by-wire, visual-cliches everywhere action-movie aesthetic to the post-modern, psychologized, we-all-know-that-heroes-aren't-reallyheroes cynical aesthetic. I think a film or even an adapted story that couldn't find a Hollywood audience could find some interesting middle ground to occupy, but this film did not reach that ground. And if we are to have cliches, visual or narrative, I would prefer the old cliches of Beowulf (and there are plenty, probably more than we recognize) than the newer cliches of late 20th-century visual media, middle-brow psychologizing narrative, and superficial and cynical ideology.

Posts whose citation I should have worked into this main post, but didn't:

Dr. Virago.
Scott Nokes.
John Walter.

The Exeter Book is Complete at Anglo-Saxon Aloud

Dear compiler of the Exeter Book,

There are simply too many riddles. Please remove some.

Thank you.

I started posting recordings of the poems of the Exeter Book on June 25, and although I did have a short vacation in there, I've pretty much kept it up at approximately 100 lines per weekday for nearly five months. Today I finally posted Riddle 95, so the Exeter Book is done. You can download an mp3 of any of your favorite Exeter Book poems by going to Anglo-Saxon Aloud. [Update: I did a little checking as part of a back-up, and the entire Exeter Book is 7.6 hours of poetry, or more than twice as long as Beowulf. It takes 8 CDs to store it in regular aiff format. If I ever sell Anglo-Saxon Aloud, it looks like it will have to be about a 20-24 CD set. Maybe I'll just load the entire thing onto an iPod shuffle and sell it that way].

Later I'll probably post one more excerpt from Beowulf Aloud to celebrate what has been "Beowulf Week" on the internet.

Next: On to Judith (which should be done by the end of next week), and then the Paris Psalter. Any Psalm experts out there want to give me tips on the best ways to record the OE Psalms?

Out of the mouths of babes...

[For this story to make sense, you really should watch this brilliant video, which is for the song "Mandelbrot Set" by Jonathan Coulton].

It's a song about fractals and the Mandelbrot set, which were the topic last week in our Math/Science Fiction course. Great sections include:

I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set
The Sierpinsky Gasket makes me want to cry.

But there's a small problem with having your kids learn the song:

Mandelbrot set
You're a Rorschach Test on fire
You're a day-glo pterodactyl
You're a heart-shaped box of springs and wires
You're one bad-ass #$%!!@#ing fractal.

I taught my kids to sing that last line "bad-ass monkey fractal." So that problem is temporarily solved (hey, I knew a kid in Boy Scouts who insisted that "Life in the Fast Lane" was actually a song about fishing (!): "Life in the Bass Cage." It took us weeks of making fun of him to show him he had heard it wrong).

But yesterday my 3-year-old son wanted to bring the CD to his school.

Me: I can't let you do that, big guy. There is a bad word in that song.

Him: And I can't say bad words at school, right?

Me: Right. You can't say bad words at school. You'd get in trouble and your teachers would be upset.

Him: Ok Daddy. I promise not to say Sierpinski Gasket.


I swear I am not making this up. I laughed on and off for the rest of the day.

(Am working on that Beowulf review but am trying to process lots of other commentary in other places).

Susan Cooper

I'll be posting my Beowulf review tomorrow, but what happened on Saturday was better than any movie could be: I got to meet an author I've idolized for (almost exactly) 30 years: Susan Cooper, who wrote The Dark is Rising books.

Cooper was doing a book signing at our amazing local bookstore here in the Dedham, The Blue Bunny, and we arrived early. She ended up chatting for almost half an hour with my family and me, she signed my old, falling-apart copies of The Dark is Rising and the The Grey King, and laughed when I pointed out that I'd found an inconsistency in The Dark is Rising (she said I was only the second person in the world who had noticed it).

Even more happily, she confirmed that the town I had identified as the setting for The Dark is Rising is in fact the one I thought it was (I am saving this for a publication) and that certain landmarks are still standing.

But best of all, she was one of the first famous writers I have ever met who was not disappointing (Stephen J. Gould was the other). Instead, she was charming, funny and genuinely kind.

Thank you, Ms. Cooper, for the many years of joy you've given me (and now my daughter, and soon my son) through your writing, and for the wonderful time we had on Saturday speaking to you.

Beowulf, Aloud (Wiglaf and the Dragon Fight)

To celebrate Beowulf's fifteen minutes of pop-culture fame, this week I am posting excerpts from Beowulf Aloud over at Anglo-Saxon Aloud.

Here is the final excerpt, Beowulf and Wiglaf fight with the dragon.

You can purchase the entire 3-CD set of the poem over at Beowulf Aloud (it is $25.00, including North American shipping) or email me at mdrout -at- wheatoncollege dot edu.

Dating of Beowulf in the Newspaper: 3 sentences or less

"I have seen friendships lost over this," said Michael Drout, professor of English at Wheaton College. "I have seen people raise their voices at conferences. I think the reason is there really is a right answer. But no one knows what it is."
"Beowulf" was written sometime between 515 AD and 1025 AD, said Drout. Some argue for earlier dates, for reasons such as language and references to ancient Germanic peoples, according to Drout.Others believe it was written later because of the date of the manuscript and the possible influence of Latin Christian literature.Either way, the poem describes events that took place in sixth century. So what difference does a few hundred years make?
"A lot of the things in the poem would mean very different things depending on the cultural context," said Drout.
For example, he said, "'Most eager for fame' (which is describing Beowulf in the poem), is that a good thing or a bad thing? If it's a late Christian poem, then probably 'most eager for fame' is a criticism. If it's an early warrior poem, then probably 'most eager for fame' is a good thing."

The bolded sentences are the three I refered to in this laugh-producing post

Beowulf in the Newspaper: Maybe nobody bothered to write down the happy things

This is a link to Megan Scott's story Life was Tough Back in Ye Olde Beowulf Days.

The me: The time has traditionally been known as the Dark Ages, or the early Middle Ages, because it follows the fall of the Roman Empire. The overall economy in Europe collapsed, said Michael Drout, English professor at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass."There was much less writing, much less trade, the population declined from plague," said Drout. "So there was a lower level of technology and economic activity."

More me: People also drank mead, a fermented honey drink, from hollowed out cows' horns that couldn't be set down once they were filled "so you either had to empty your horn in one drink or pass it around to others," Drout said. [W00T. I am chosen as excerpt on drinking. Insteand cred with students...]

Concluding me: "There was still a great deal of beauty and joy," Drout said. "It just seems that literature is filled with tragedy and disaster. Maybe because no one bothered to write down the happy things."

Beowulf, Aloud

To celebrate Beowulf's fifteen minutes of pop-culture fame, this week I am posting excerpts from Beowulf Aloud over at Anglo-Saxon Aloud.

The first excerpt, lines 115-164 (Grendel's first attacks on Heorot), can be found here.

You can purchase the entire 3-CD set of the poem over at Beowulf Aloud (it is $25.00, including North American shipping) or email me at mdrout -at- wheatoncollege dot edu.

The Ultimate Beowulf Question

From a reporter today:

"Is it possible in three sentences to sum up the debate over when Beowulf was written?"

(she knew I would start maniacally laughing at this point)







You know, I used to be a journalist, so I took up the challenge. I'm hoping that the reporter (who is very good and thorough and, and who had actually read this entire series of posts about the dating of Beowulf) will be able to polish my answer and that it will make the article.

But I had a student in the office when the email came in, and I showed it to her, and she laughed and laughed...

(Today in Anglo-Saxon we descended into "Philological Hell" based on a few comment on the runes on the Ruthwell Cross. That led to different European writing systems of the early Middle Ages, which led to questions about why the Anglo-Saxons used thorn and eth instead of th, used sc to indicate the sh phoneme, and used the rune wyn for w. That led us to the Merovingians in Beowulf and Shippey's excellent article. We also got deletion of intervocalic h, loss of w -- or the difficulty Latin scribes had with the Germanic w phoneme and their various ways of representing it--and finally, that Alcuin's name should be pronounced "Alc-win" but never will be. Really, really fun. Monday we do some corpus work on Maldon and ofermod.)

Beowulf Popularity

We've just completed registration for Spring 08 classes at Wheaton, and I'm happy to report that nearly half of my Anglo-Saxon students were brave enough to decide to continue on and study Beowulf with me this spring. Beowulf is the only course in the Wheaton English department that has a true pre-req --you just can't survive it without having had Anglo-Saxon, so a yield of 14 students isn't bad, particularly when at least five of the class are going away for Junior Year Abroad next semester and another four are seniors who have student teaching in the spring.

I am not attributing this largest-ever-at-Wheaton Beowulf class to the film, however. Instead, I give the students all the credit. They have worked amazingly hard this semester and are plowing through The Dream of the Rood right now. One student, who forgot to bring her translation to class, sight-translated a good long sentence and got it mostly right. (Unfortunately, she is going off Junior Year Abroad next year). All of a sudden the idea of working through all of Beowulf is exciting for them rather than daunting. Exactly as I had hoped, they are now proud of their technical and linguistic mastery and want to expand it. Watering down Beowulf never works for me. Making the technical and detailed interesting always does, whether for junior high and high school students at a lecture at a local library, for inner-city kids from Brockton, or for my own students with richer academic backgrounds. We need not fear the technical and the detailed: it's what makes us special.
(Of course we'll see how they feel when we spend at least 30 minutes of discussion on line 6a, is it reall the Heruli? Who are the Heruli? What about the loss of initial H...heh, heh, heh.

Unfortunately, getting through Beowulf in one semester can eat up a whole lot of class time, so I need to think about how to reconfigure the course for a larger number of students. I want to take some time to teach them paleography (and that means speedball pens, ink and learning to write hands -- I teach paleography the old-fashioned way of learning by doing), and the course is linked to the "Computing for Poets" course (as are the Anglo-Saxon and JRRT courses), which has also filled up, so we will need to spend some time on corpus searching, etc.

It should be great: in the spring I'll be teaching Beowulf and the second half of the Math/SciencFiction (and now also First Year Seminar and FYS course) that I teach with Bill Goldbloom Bloch, so it will be a very technical, mathematical semester in the classroom. And, unfortunately, another semester of being department Chair. But the teaching can make up for that, I hope.