Triple Nerd Score!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laying Down Markers

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

I'll keep you posted. 

Crazy Sheep DNA Project on Video

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

The Secret Language of Department Chairs

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

One moment really got me:

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


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

Things only amusing to academics

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

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





Well, I thought it was funny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The World We Now Live In

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

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

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

Daughter: Mama will text you.

A Remarkable Life

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

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

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

ETHELIND ELBERT AUSTIN
1909-2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anglo-Saxon Aloud wins an award.
Thank you!

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

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

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

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





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

Hippos Go Berserk is a Forgery!



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheep DNA and Manuscripts (Again)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a paraphrase of a conversation at a meeting.

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

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

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

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

[Long pause while people look uncomfortable.]

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

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

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

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

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

[another uncomfortable pause]

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

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

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

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

X: (Gives up in exasperation).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beowulf Aloud: Why so Popular?

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

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

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

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

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

Beowulf and the Critics

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

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

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

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

Miracles of Medicine

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

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

Good Rhetoric = Bad Argument?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 'Canterbury Charm'?

[See below for updates]

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

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

Here's what I have figured out:

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

171. Canterbury Charm:

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

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

But...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Thank you!!

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

So here are the enrollment totals for my official classes:

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

Spring 2009: Medieval Literature: 37.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syzygy

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

1. An NEH grant application being due;

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

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

4. My daughter having a week off from school;

5. Halloween: costumes, pumpkins, class parties;

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

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

has left me completely weeded with regard to email.

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

The Only Political Post I'll Do

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

I got publicly corrected twice in class today.

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

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

About philological principles?

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

About literary theory?

Nope.

About spiders.

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

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

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

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

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

Later the second student emailed me:

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



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

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

My students so totally rock.

Why Memorizing is Good

An email I received the other day: 

Dear Professor Drout,

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

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

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

Too many Psalms!

Dear King Alfred,

Did you really have to translate so many Psalms? 

Sincerely,

Mike Drout

(Anglo-Saxon Aloud is now up to Psalm 110.  Not only are there still 40 to go, but 118 is an absolute monster.  My goal is still to have everything done by Christmas, but right now that's looking like a stretch if I also include those poems not included in the ASPR like "Instructions for Christians" and "The Grave" and if I go back and re-record the first 18 Psalms in spoken rather than sung form...)

My Trip to the Shire

This past weekend I got a chance to visit the Shire. It was re-created in Kentucky, and it was amazing.

The Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, is about 30 miles south of Lexington. This was a thriving village up until the Civil War but then fell into decay. In 1961 it was saved and has since be refurbished, with costumed actors playing the parts of Shakers. But for this one weekend, it became Middle-earth.

The rolling Kentucky countryside, the old buildings, the stone walls, the quiet (away from traffic) and darkness at night (away from street lights), combined with 144 Tolkien enthusiasts (most in costume), made the leap of imagination from contemporary America to Tolkien's Shire a very short one indeed. The people who organized A Long Expected Party brought Tolkien's vision of a joyful rural idyll to life.

I gave one of my talks in a gigantic barn, performed a bit of Beowulf in that same barn, and then got to give another talk in a 19th-century house. The audiences were amazing: incredibly informed about Tolkien (and about medieval literature), eager for more, and full of challenging and interesting questions. Even more importantly, every single person I met (and I feel like I met all 144) was interesting, kind and just a pleasure to talk to. I had originally thought that I would sneak back to my room, which was in an incredible little wash house built around 1850, and grade papers between talks, but I got caught up in all that was going on and ended up learning about armor from Michael Cook, listening to costumers discuss sewing techniques and riding a riverboat with hobbits, elves and rangers (Quote of the trip: "Spider in the boobs! Spider in the boobs!" -- the dangers of certain costumes).

Several of the organizers are involved in theatre, and it showed. The weekend never felt like a real convention event (it was not commercial, we weren't jammed into a hotel, there weren't long lines to get actors to autograph things), but by the second day it was becoming something else entirely. The only way I can describe it is to say that the organizers were in some ways putting on a play, but all the rest of us in the "audience" were becoming part of it. By the time we reached the climactic celebration of Bilbo's and Frodo's birthdays, we were pretty much integrated into a single show, the fundamental division between audience and performers completely blurred.

It was, of course, very fun for me to have so many people enjoy Beowulf in Old English (and let me tell you, an old barn, filled with 144 people and surrounded by pitch blackness--it was a new moon--is the perfect place to perform the part of Beowulf where Grendel enters Heorot and eats Hondscio), and it was gratifying to have so many people interested in medieval literature and its links to Tolkien. It was even better to have a chance to spend some time with the parents of one of my best students ever, and I loved listening to the ethereal singing of Kate Brown.
But the very best moment for me came towards the end. Bilbo's party was set up, with paper lanterns strung between trees. The Brobdingnagian Bards were performing on the stage. A large group of people, in full costume, were dancing reels and jigs. I walked pretty far away from the party, into the darkness, until I was far enough from the lights that I could look up and clearly see the stars, so incredibly bright, the milky way clouding the entire middle of the sky. I looked back, and there was the patch of gold light, surrounded by darkness, the people dancing and laughing, the music just barely reaching me. I looked back at all that, and I saw and felt what dream was for the Anglo-Saxons, the joy of people and companionship and music, the joy of the little circle of light. We feel dream, but we rarely can step back and watch it. Tolkien's works give us one way. Seeing what some people inspired by his works could create gave me another.

þær wæs gesiþa dream, duguð unlytel, holbyltla ond ylfa and manig monna and wifmanna.

Off to the Shire

If I don't answer email for a few days, it's because hobbits don't have internet access (I don't know this for a fact; I am only guessing).  

I'm off to speak at A Long-Expected Party in the Shaker Village outside of Lexington, KY.   I'll be talking about Tolkien's "mythology for England" (even though he never wrote those exact words) and reading Beowulf in Old English at a huge bonfire, among other things.  Should be fun.  

I anticipate a massive email backlog when I return, so don't think I am ignoring you (unless you were rude, and then I am), but ping me if I don't respond by Thursday afternoon. 

Poor Results at Emulating Tolkien's Style
(but it does show that the "Mythology for X" has moved a bit more deeply into the culture)

Today the WSJ has an editorial that begins:

Once upon a time, in the land that FDR built, there was the rule of “regulation” and all was right on Wall and Main Streets. Wise 27-year-old bank examiners looked down upon the banks and saw that they were sound. America’s Hobbits lived happily in homes financed by 30-year-mortgages that never left their local banker’s balance sheet, and nary a crisis did we have.
Then, lo, came the evil Reagan marching from Mordor with his horde of Orcs, short for “market fundamentalists.” Reagan’s apprentice, Gramm of Texas and later of McCain, unleashed the scourge of “deregulation,” and thus were “greed,” short-selling, securitization, McMansions, liar loans and other horrors loosed upon the world of men.

Now, however, comes Obama of Illinois, Schumer of New York and others in the fellowship of the Beltway to slay the Orcs and restore the rule of the regulator. So once more will the Hobbits be able to sleep peacefully in the shire.

With apologies to Tolkien, or at least Peter Jackson, something like this tale is now being sold to the American people to explain the financial panic of the past year.

Well, they really do have a lot to apologize for in that lede, mostly for butchering Tolkien's style so badly that it's not even recognizable except for the words Hobbits, Mordor and Orcs. It interests me how people do this so frequently. They recognize something different in the style, and they glom onto that, but they haven't been paying enough attention.

So here, WSJ, is how it should have been done (I make no comment on the actual content of the editorial. Not related to my purpose here):

Then all listened while X in his clear voice spoke of America, the land built by FDR, and of the Regulations of Power, and for time, peace and prosperity were on Wall and Main Streets. Wise where the regulators in those days, and young bank-examiners performed their duties well and bravely, seeing that their banks were sound. In those times the Hobbits lived quietly in the Shire in 30-year-mortgaged homes, and they meddled not at all in the balance sheets of their bankers, who were not troubled by the world outside.

But that time ended, and evil things began to stir again in the land or Mordor. And the shadow that arose was "Reagan," and his Orcs, and his "Market fundamentalists," spread across the lands. At the same time, Gramm of Texas, in flattery and imitation of the greater Reagan, began his "deregulation," a smaller shadow under his master's great shadow. “Greed,” was multiplying in the mountains, and short-sellers were abroad, now armed with securitization. And there were murmured hints of still worse creatures: McMansions, liar loans and other horrors.

I could go on, but it gets tedious, and I don't really agree either with the satire or with what the WSJ is satirizing. But my point is that it is possible to create a "Tolkienian" feel without immediately reaching for the "Lo!"

Now, because I'm a hopeless geek, I decided to see how many times Tolkien uses "Lo!" and in what situations. They are:

1. FR: Galadriel shrinks back to regular elf woman after "All shall love me and despair." 
   
2. TT: none
   
3. RK: passing of the Grey Company -- this one seems unnecessary. They just go through a rock wall and there's a stream. 
   
4. RK: sun on Théoden's shield -- appropriate, as the battle is taking the epic turn. 
   
5. RK: Nazgûl's shadow blocks sun -- balance to previous example
   
6. RK: Éowyn's fight with the Nazgûl -- if there's one place where you need a "Lo!", it's here. 
   
7. RK: Théoden opens eyes when Merry thinks he's dead -- I don't think this one is necessary or that it works, though note part of epic scene
   
8. RK:Éomer defies black ships -- works here. 
   
9. RK: Denethor is holding a palantír -- don't think it's necessary to express the surprise. But does preserve the epic tone. 
   
10. RK: In the retelling of the Passing of the Grey Company -- maybe, but I don't think it fitswith retell by Legolas and Gimli, though you could argue that they are influenced by the awe of Aragorn. 
    
11. RK: When Aragorn seizes the black fleet -- appropriate for epic action, though again, this is in the indirect voices of Legolas and Gimli.
    
12. RK: The Field of Cormallen, when the Minstrel sings the Song of Frodo. Utterly appropriate. 
    
13. RK: When Aragorn finds the sapling of the white tree. 2 times.  Don't know if it needed both, but this is meant to be a moment where we get the Strider/Aragorn contrast, the feeling that he will not be able to be an epic king and the sign of the tree that shows he has been transformed that way. 
    

So, 1 example of "Lo!" in Fellowship, none in Two Towers, but 11 in RK. These are mostly in the "high epic" modes of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields and the events surrounding that, so the epic style is at work. If I (perish the thought) were Tolkien's editor, I would have suggested he drop the one with Theoden's eyes, the entering the cave in the Passing of the Grey Company, and probably the two in the re-telling by Legolas and Gimli. But the rest work really, really well (and the ones I object to probably work well for others).

But the larger point is that Tolkien would never (as you can see) use "Lo!" simply for the kind of background narration that happens in the Preface, The Shadow of the Past or The Council of Elrond. And that's the analogous style-situation that the WSJ writers are trying to conjure up.

Grade: C- . Needs closer study. Do the reading again and come see me in office hours. 

Anglo-Saxon Aloud Greatest Hits: Now Available

The studio called today, and the CDs are finished. I will be able to start shipping them on Tuesday or perhaps sooner. If you would like a copy, you can order them by using this PayPal button. Cost is $30.00 USD ($25.00 for the CD and $5.00 for domestic US shipping)

Anglo-Saxon Aloud Greatest Hits is a 2-CD set that includes ten poems in Old English, their Modern English translations, and commentaries on each of them as well as an introductory lecture. The poems included are: Cædmon's Hymn, The Battle of Brunanburh, The Wanderer, The Ruin, The Wife's Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer, Deor, The Fortunes of Men, Riddle 47 ('Book-Moth') and The Dream of the Rood.



I will have copies with me at A Long-Expected Party in Kentucky next weekend. For listeners who don't use PayPal or who are overseas, email me at mdrout@wheatoncollege.edu and we can make arrangements. You can also send me land mail at Prof. M. Drout, Wheaton College, 26 E. Main Street, Norton, MA 02766, USA. Thanks to all the listeners and readers who have given me so much encouragement. And if people like Anglo-Saxon Aloud Greatest Hits, I can maybe someday put together Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Unplugged.

Medieval History Job at Wheaton

Come here to Wheaton and be my colleague.

Our History department is starting a search for a medieval historian. This is the search that go put on hold last year due to health issues in the department (which have, thankfully, all turned out ok). It's a tenure-track job, teaching load of 5 courses per year (four the first year), fully funded junior leave (1 semester at full pay or 1 year at 1/2 pay), fully funded post-tenure sabbatical (same), good yearly research/travel budget and a clear path to tenure (the tenure line is for this particular job; it's not one of those situations where three people are hired for two lines).

Although the job ad (given below) lists a variety of areas, I know that they are in strong support of medieval (but they've left their options open, depending on which classical and late antique applications they come across), and they are particularly interested in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Carolingian history.

Wheaton is a small, highly selective liberal arts college in Massachusetts, 30 minutes south of Boston and 25 minutes (or less) north of Providence, RI. We have about 1400 students and around 120 tenured/tenure-track faculty. Average class size is 15-19 students, though that can vary depending on the subject.

For Anglo-Saxonists, it may be encouraging to know that around 25-30 students regularly take Old English (though I've had as many as 40 in a semester) and 15 or so of those go on to do an advanced class in Beowulf, so there would be a reasonably sized body of students who could do work with primary texts in Old English. Our Latinist is Joel Relihan (translator of Boethius, among many other things), and our medieval Art Historian Evie Lane (of the Corpus Vitrearum project), so we have a good community of medievalists who work closely together on our "Connected" courses and regularly visit each other's classes.

Wheaton is also a very good place for collaboration across disciplines. The scientists and mathematicians are easy to work with and interested in pursuing complex, trans-disciplinary projects (including thus far those linking English, Biology, Math, Computer Science and, soon, Psychology). We're in the process of building a beautiful new Science Center, which should be done in 2011.

Wheaton departments are fiercely autonomous in matters of hiring (as they should be), so I won't be a part of the search formally. I will be constantly lobbying for a medievalist, though.

Medieval/Ancient World

The Department of History at Wheaton College (MA) seeks a tenure-track assistant professor with scholarly and teaching expertise in the fields of classical, late antique, and/or medieval history. The History Department is especially interested in social or cultural historians whose thematic expertise includes gender, popular religion, material culture, cross-cultural contact, or the history of science or the environment. Geographic field open; preference for Celtic world, northwestern Europe, or southeastern Europe. Ph.D must be in hand at time of appointment. Send letter of interest, CV, and three letters of reference by November 15, 2008 to Anni Baker, Chair, Department of History, Wheaton College, Norton, MA, 02766. Preliminary interviews will be conducted at the 2009 AHA annual meeting. AA/EOE. Wheaton College seeks educational excellence through diversity and strongly encourages applications from women and men from historically underrepresented groups. Wheaton offers a competitive benefits package, including benefits for domestic partners.

Publishers!

[update: possible communications failure, either on my part or on the part of the publisher. Hard copy MS arrived today, probably too soon to have only been sent when I emailed back saying I couldn't evaluate a >200-page MS in electronic form. So all is good and I will be able to evaluate something that looks interesting].

I know that the publishing industry is a difficult one right now, that academics are a pain in the butt to work with (for example, deadlines are absolute for students, only a suggestion for many academics), and that the economic climate is very bleak right now.

But, jeez. Ask someone to review a manuscript, which, if you do a good job, is at least ten hours of work for $100.00. That's ok. It's the going rate, and it's important to the field to review, so I pretty much always say 'yes.'

But then to send the MS as an email attachment? So, I'm either supposed to read 200 pages on screen, or I'm supposed to print the 200 page MS on my own dime and my own time? You've got to be kidding me.

It's not even the money; it's the rudeness.

(So now it's time to see how a nice passive-aggressive response works. I've written back saying, "I've received your various forms and guidelines. You can mail the MS to this address." If the editor then comes back with "I already sent the attachment," then I say, "Oh, I can't read 200 pages on screen." We'll see if the editor gets the point).

Anglo-Saxon Aloud Greatest Hits

[UPDATE: As soon as I actually have the CDs in hand, I will link in the PayPal page for ordering as well as ways to order in other ways. I have to see what the final cost is on the whole business before I can set a price. I anticipate that this will be around September 23rd]

Well, that was fun.

I've been working for a while on:


Then, on Wednesday, I checked in with the studio about when they would need the final edited master CDs and the cover art if I needed my first press run before A Long-Expected Party. "Friday morning," was the answer. So I had a pretty sleepless Wednesday night and an exhausting, fifteen-hour Thursday. But everything is now done.

Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Greatest Hits is not just stuff pulled from Anglo-Saxon Aloud, but also what many emailers have asked for: poems not only in Old English, but in Modern English translation with short introductions. It is a 2-CD set, with almost exactly two hours of material. It took me so long because I had to write the translations and do notes for the introductions. Then, because my former student who did the graphic design for Beowulf Aloud has selfishly graduated, I had to do the cover art myself. Me and Photoshop: not a good match.



But it's done. And assuming all goes well, I'll have copies with me at A Long-Expected Party.
Contents: General Introduction. Cædmon's Hymn (all poems have an intro, Old English version and Modern English translation), The Battle of Brunanburh, The Wanderer, The Ruin, The Wife's Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer, Deor, The Fortunes of Men, Riddle 47 (Book-Moth), The Dream of the Rood.

Alaric Hall's Elves in Anglo-Saxon England

This is the first paragraph of my review of this excellent book for The Medieval Review. When the full text is up on their website, you should be able to find it here.

Hall, Alaric. Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief,
Health, Gender and Identity. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press,
2007. Pp. xi, 226. $80.00. ISBN: 1843832941, ISBN-13:
9781843832942.

Reviewed by Michael D.C. Drout
Wheaton College
mdrout@wheatonma.edu


Despite its seemingly hyper-specialized title, Alaric Hall's Elves
in Anglo-Saxon England is a book that should be read by all
medievalists. Hall's conclusions about his subject are significant,
but far more important is his methodological approach, which is a new
model for early medieval scholarship. His demonstration of the ways
that rock-solid philology can be combined with cross-cultural
historical scholarship, folkloristic analysis of later material and
some contemporary literary theory is far more deserving of the title
"New Philology" than any turn to manuscript studies and variants in
the 1980s ever was. Hall's exceedingly careful reconstruction of the
cultural categories in which ælf existed shows how comparative
philology can be extended to become comparative cultural studies. By
putting linguistic history into an anthropological framework and using
as comparanda folklore dating from as late as the seventeenth
century, Hall is able to recover information about medieval cultures
that would otherwise be lost forever. The genuine excitement of such
recovery and the technical precision with which it is done are both
inspiring.

"Fox" is a shade of pink?
Once more, philology illuminates language and culture

In Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum, I learned that the plants we call fuschias are named after an early botanist, Professor Fuchs (and "Forsythia" is named after a Mr. Forsythe).

I thought it was interesting that what is now a color name as much as a plant name (I'll bet it is now used more frequently as a color name), was a personal name, and that that personal name meant "fox." So I did a little digging in my trusty copy of Onions and elsewhere.

Leonhart Fuchs was a professor of Medicine at the Tübingen University in the 16th century. In 1703 Charles Plumier named a plant after him, the Fuchsia (the "world's most carefully spelled flower").

In Modern German, Prof. Fuch's name means "fox." In Old High German, the word for fox is fuhs. In Old Saxon vuhs, Dutch vos, and in Old English, of course, fox, all implying a West Germanic ancestor, *fuxs.

There would then be a feminine form in common Germanic, such as Old English focge, Middle Low German vohe or Old High German foha (which according to Onions, appears in German dialect as fohe). Other related words, Old Norse fóa, Gothic fauho (final vowel is long), thus a Common Germanic ancestor of fux-, arising from *puk-. This is assumed to be the basis for Sanskrit púcchas, which means "tail."

There are parallels in Russian and Polish: pukh, meaning hair or down. Onions speculates that the origin of the word may be "the tailed one."

So, if you describe a dress as being "fuschia" (to use the American spelling), you are, through a long train, connected to a furry tailed animal that looks nothing like an exotic pink plant.

And there is another weird connection between foxes and plants. Digitalis, "foxglove" goes back to Old English, foxenglofa (second o is long) and there must somehow be a deeper connection between foxes and this particular plant, because in Norwegian revbjelde, "fox-bell" is the name for the same plant. So the "fox" is the common part: you can see how the flower can look like a glove, or look like a bell, but why associate it with the fox? I wonder.

No science is more romantic or inspiring as philology, and none better illuminates the mysteries of the past.

(Marcel, maybe we can translate that into 19th-Century German...)