Fun with Lexomics (and you can have some, too)

I've been remiss in posting, mostly because I've had so many other things to do for, well, the past couple of years.  The lexomics project, which really started as a way for Mark LeBlanc and I to connect his introductory Computer Science course with my Anglo-Saxon and Tolkien courses, has just kept growing and growing. We got two NEH grants and made some discoveries.

Then this summer everything took off. In the most remarkable intellectual experience of my academic career, a group of Wheaton students and faculty, visiting undergrads and visiting faculty started producing new discoveries and uncovering interesting problems so rapidly that we could not keep up writing about them.  A project that was supposed to run from May 25-July 1 ended up going from May 15 through August 28.  Students were showing up at the lab at 8:00 a.m. and leaving at 6:30 and working over night. At one point a visiting professor just started laughing when three people at once called out "Professor Drout! Come see this!" None of us could wait to get into the lab and tackle new problems. It was more fun than I would have ever thought possible to have doing research (and I think research is pretty fun).

At one point Wheaton's communications firm, Generation, came and made a film.  It captures some of the excitement (but the real thing was much better). 

A Successful Scholarly Sojourn

Come on a Sojourn with me.

This past summer, I gave in to urging from an old friend and agreed to be the scholarly presence on one of the "sojourns" put together by his new company, which is, not surprisingly, called Scholarly Sojourns, and whose slogan is "Think INSIDE the Vacation."

Although skeptical at first, I agreed to be part of an intrepid group of travelers who were seeking the places, the artifacts, the books and the stories of Anglo-Saxon Britain. We gathered in the north of England, in a lovely old hotel in Durham, and began to get to know each other at a delicious meal. The "students" weren't expecting an assignment right away, but, well, if you've brought a professor on your expedition, you might as well use him. So the smart and energetic students (some the same age as my Wheaton students, others older, one who should have been my department chair) began their first assignment: to memorize Cædmon's Hymn in Anglo-Saxon.  We might have started tentatively, but by the end of the evening--they have good beer and wine in Durham--we sounded quite Anglo-Saxon (and very loud!).

We then traveled to Bede's old monastery, Monkwearmouth Jarrow, and held some pieces of stained glass from his time.  I think Bede would have appreciated our studies and our practice of Cædmon's Hymn. Then it was off to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to communicate with St Cuthbert and keep our eyes peeled for approaching Viking Sails (they must have taken the weekend off).  By this point, we gotten to know each other amidst beautiful scenery of historically vital places, so the learning--and the friendship and joviality of the group--carried us along on our explorations of York, Whitby Abbey and then Whitby Village. After another excellent dinner and some sleep, we toured the Parker Library at Cambridge, the reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village at West Stowe, and then took a trip to the sites of the Battle of Maldon, Bury-St-Edmunds, and in the end, Canterbury Cathedral, where were able to wander freely because we were staying inside the Cathedral Close. The next day brought Battle Abbey, the site of the Battle of Hastings and the death of King Harald. Then a trip to Winchester for an amazingly delicious and very fun meal (We discovered the summertime British drink, Pimms). I was truly sad for the trip to end and the students to separate back into their regular life.  But they'll always have Caedmon's Hymn, some great memories, and, I hope, a joy at the accomplishments of the Anglo-Saxon culture that built so much of the culture of England.

We hope to repeat this sojourn next year, and two others:  One on J.R.R. Tolkien's world (scroll to the bottom left), and the other on the Vikings, to be held in Iceland.  Keep a eye on the Scholarly Sojourns website for more detail.  It would be a great chance to meet you, and all of us can better understand Anglo-Saxon culture if we're occupying their spaces and, perhaps just a little, feeling what they felt.

The Light Bede Saw

Dobbie is FREEEEEEEEEEE!

12:00:01 July 1, 2012

Dear English Department,

I am no longer your b*tch. 

Love,

MDCD

[UPDATE: To clarify: this just means I have completed my term as Chair of the English department, which sounds like it is a position of power, but is actually being at the beck and call of everyone from students to faculty to administrators to the geese in the pond.   I haven't left Wheaton, haven't quit academia, am not living in a yurt.  Sheesh.]

In Memory of Professor John Miles Foley, my first teacher of Old English

In Honor of John Miles Foley

“Traditions: Oral and Beyond”

International Medieval Congress, 2012

Back in 1991-93, when I was John’s M.A. student at Mizzou, I used to glom on to him during the walk back from the Arts and Sciences building to Tate Hall. Or I would trail along with him over to the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition, and other times he and I would arrive at the parking garage at the same time and I would walk along with him to class.  I must have been incredibly annoying, and it’s testament to John’s kindness and generosity that he never said “would you just leave me alone to walk to class without jabbering at me.” 

And I’m so glad he didn’t, because I learned an awful lot in those walks.  In particular, two things stand out, which are related to my contribution today on the theme of  Tradition: Oral and Beyond. 

The first thing that I learned on those walks was how important the comparative method was to John. I know when we look at his immense accomplishments that this point seems totally obvious, and I was certainly a bit of dullard, but it took me a long time to really understand all of what John was teaching and how important comparanda were to everything we would talk about.  I had some crazy project in mind where I would go to Finland and collect tales (setting aside that Elias Lonnrot had already done this more than a century before, that I didn’t speak the language, and that a multitude of Finnish scholars were already way ahead of where I could hope to be). John didn’t laugh out loud at the project—which collapsed due to my inability to grasp 16 noun cases in the grammatical structure of Finnish—but instead just said quietly “not enough students realize that they really need to go somewhere and listen to oral works in their own cultural situation.” Although I never did go to Finland, I took in the core of that comment, which has two parts.  The first, and the obvious, is that at some stage of your investigation you try to understand the work in the context of the situation in which a particular human being produced it, one of its many immediate cultural matrices. The second, which is less obvious but connected to my theme, is that to be a great scholar you need to stretch yourself, to go beyond what is right in front of you, to try to compare your object of study with others that might have something in common with it—because oral artforms share certain forms and dynamics—and to recognize that verbal artforms are different and particular because individual traditions have specific rules, what John identifies as tradition dependence.  You can’t figure these things out without being a comparatist.

The second important thing I learned on those walks was the sheer intellectual power of the oral-traditional approach, which is really in some important ways now (though he would disavow this label) the John Foley approach. John often quoted a line from Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales: “Oral’ tells us how, but ‘traditional’ tells us ‘what’ and even more ‘of what kind’ and ‘of what force.’” The “oral” component of oral tradition was vitally important to John not only because, as he was fond of pointing the vast, vast majority of all verbal artforms produced in human history have been oral (yet we spend all our time studying texts), but also because John simply loved oral performances.  He made us memorize and recite Caedmon’s Hymn before we could translate it, and its still his voice I hear in my head when I in turn teach it to my students this way.  But oral is just a particular kind of tradition. John was particularly interested in the constellation of features and the particular constraints that came from the oral context, but anaphora, traditional referentiality, immanence, the influence of the performance arena and other phenomena he both documented and explained were relevant not only to the gigantic corpus of oral artforms, but to those in writing, non-verbal music, visual art and behavior as well. What I learned from John, tagging along with him back to Tate Hall, asking annoying questions about Old English and Beowulf and oral tradition, was that you could take the insights that John had into oral and oral-derived texts and use them to explain other traditional phenomena, and that traditions of all sorts had an awful lot of features in common.  John at least once told me that these were just easier to see in oral traditions—but I think they were just easier to see because we had John pointing them out.

So when I say “oral and beyond” in my title for this appreciation, I want to call attention to the incredible value of John’s work for understanding how human cultures work.  Because traditions are everywhere, and they operate in strikingly similar ways, and we understand them because John took the time to be comparative, to understand the poems and the texts in their own terms and in terms of the universal phenomena embodied in them.  That is the genius of the comparative method, and of John’s work: learning more and more about South Slavic or Anglo-Saxon or Ancient Greek traditions, becoming as fully disciplinary in those fields as possible—learning the languages and the scholarship and forming opinions on the disputed questions—gives you insight into the way the world works.  And the beauty of this approach is the wide range of insights we get into the ways these processes work themselves out in disparate traditions throughout the world.

I don’t know if I ever talked with John about Darwinian approaches to culture when he was my teacher, though in editing my first article for Oral Tradition he pushed me very hard—as perhaps only a beloved teacher and mentor can— to cut, to clarify, to justify, and he made that article what it is.  But, whether or not John and I ever talked about Darwinian cultural evolution, there is a quotation from Darwin that, to me, captures not only what has been important in John’s work, but where it may lead us. This is from the very end of The Origin of Species:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.

John celebrated both the particular forms, endless and most beautiful, and the ways they were produced, with a joy in both the things he studied and the work that he did. The world is a greater place for his contributions, but a much lesser place without him in it. I will try to live up to the example he set as a scholar, a teacher, and a friend. 

How big was the dragon's head, anyway? 

At the end of Beowulf

[ Warning: Spoilers ]


                                     , the dragon attacks the hero and Wiglaf for the third time.  Hot and grim in battle, but apparently not spewing as many flames as it had in the previous two attacks (because then the heroes had to crouch behind an iron shield), it rushes on Beowulf and seizes him around his neck with bitter teeth (literally " with bones," which we reasonably take as "with teeth" and some translators use "with tusks").   Blood wells out of Beowulf's wounds.

But Wiglaf and Beowulf work together to kill the dragon: Wiglaf stabs it in the belly, which reduces the fire, and Beowulf cuts or pierces it in the middle to finish it off.

Unfortunately, the dragon turns out to have had poison venom, and so Beowulf's wound swells and swells some more, and the poison enters into the king of Geats and eventually kills him.

So my question is: How big was the dragon's head, and how long were it's teeth?  Because I'm having trouble picturing a 50-foot long dragon (we learn of this length when the Geats tip its body over the cliff ) that can get its teeth near someone's neck without just taking the head right off.

The largest Tyrannosauras rex ever found is 42 feet long.  So this dragon is longer than a full-grown T. rex. Picture the head: how do  you put a couple of teeth into Beowulf's neck and not--even by accident--just gobble him up?  The teeth are the size of bananas: if they are touching his neck, his head is coming off.

So we can conclude that the dragon must have a much smaller head and much shorter teeth.  I'm picturing something like a really large python, like the dead one in this video:

Pythons have short, needly little teeth for gripping rather than killing, so if the dragon had teeth like a python, it could latch on to Beowulf's neck without taking his head off.  My guess is that the venom must have been delivered not by injection through a hollow fang (like snakes in the families Viperidae or Elapidae), but through abrasion of the skin allowing the entry of venomous saliva (as is done by the Colubridae, most of which have back fangs and often don't inject venom but just cut the skin with sharp teeth--which is why of all the colubrids--about 67% of all snake species--only the boomslang regular kills humans).

It's still difficult to picture a 50-foot long creature that can bite a neck and not sever a head, and it makes me wonder how clear a picture the poet had in mind when he was creating the scene.

Can Grendel Talk? Does he have Pockets?

This isn't as obvious a question as it might at first appear (I assume the obvious answer would be "No, or he'd say something in the poem"), because, if Grendel can't talk, how can he put a spell on weapons so that they won't bite him? 

Now I'm not suggesting that all spells require words. In not even sure that what Grendel has done in line 804b-805a is necessarily a spell. 

But see for  yourself.  The poet says: þone synscaðan ænig ofter eorþan irenna cyst, guðbilla nan, gretan nolde, ac he sigewæpnum forsworen hæfde ecga gehwycre."

Not one of the war-swords on the earth, made of the choicest of iron, was able to greet the enemy, for he had *forsworen* victory-weapons, each of edges." 

What does this mean, exactly?

Almost every other place it appears in Anglo-Saxon,  "forsworen" means "renounced" or "gave up," so at first it's tempting to find an analogy to Beowulf, who has given up his weapons to fight Grendel.  But the problem, then, is to explain why the swords of the Geats aren't able to strike ("gretan") the monster.

Editors have solved this problem by taking "forsworen" not as "renounced," but as "enchanted with magic" or "cursed." There aren't a lot of unambiguous examples in the corpus, however, where the word works this way. In fact, the whole argument seems to be based on the context and one instance where the word glosses "devotabat" (put a spell on, cursed). But ok, let's go with "put a spell on."  How did Grendel do it? Words? Hand gestures? A magic staff? Tarot cards? 

Everywhere else in the corpus that I've had a chance to look at, when it's not obviously giving up or renouncing something (and even many times when it is), "forswor" is some kind of verbal action: I haven't yet found a single instance where the word means something physical or mental.

Hence my question about whether or not Grendel can speak: if he's casting some kind of spell that is described by "forsworen," then it seems he would have to talk in some way.

Perhaps similarly, I always wonder about the assertion by the poet that Grendel won't pay compensation for the men he killed.  Did someone ask him to?  Does he have money to pay with? Where does he keep it? We know he has a dragon-skin bag, for bringing victims back to his underwater lair, but it seems unlikely that he uses it as a purse and carries his gold with him when he goes to visit Heorot.  I can never decide if this point is a joke by the poet: he chews up and swallows people, slaughters many, wrecks the hall... oh, and he won't even pay a wergeld for it (because you know if he did, then we could all be friends...).

Reading that line as litotes help explain the lack of wergeld payment, but it doesn't bring us closer to understanding whether or not Grendel can talk. One way to read the whole situation is to say that the poet deliberately wants to make Grendel more human than his original trollish conception might have been.  That's somewhat consistent with current monster theory, which immediately makes me think it is wrong (I try to use Diax's Rake as much as possible nowadays; thanks, Neal Stephenson).

But I think I can see a way that we can deal with the "can Grendel talk problem" and the "wouldn't pay wergeld."  The latter can be a litotes.  The former could be a form of berserkr behavior. 

I was just teaching Egil's Saga, and my students noticed that in one battle King Harald has Thorolf in the prow of his ship with Brand, but the sides of the vessel are manned by the king's twelve berserks.  After the battle, Brand is mortally wounded and Thorolf is badly hurt, but the saga author (Snorri?) tells us, that all twelve berserks were unharmed, "because no iron could strike them when they were in their battle frenzy." 

Hmmmmmm.  Maybe to get into that berserkr battle frenzy, one has to give up armor (though not weapons), and then when you do, you become impervious to weapons.  Could something like this be the idea behind Grendel's having "forsworen" weapons? By giving them up, he makes himself immune to their blows, and the audience might expect this if they already had an idea that berserks could do something similar.  Then we could dispense with talking Grendel and not worry about whether or not he had pockets.

(Though I still do worry about these things). 

Come Work with Me in a 2-Year Post-Doc in Applied Linguistics Here at Wheaton

You can apply at http://jobs.wheatoncollege.edu

Position Title:	Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Applied Linguistics
Job Summary/Basic Function:	Duration: 2 years Teaching Load: 3 courses per year Salary: $50,000 + benefits + research stipend. Wheaton College, a highly selective liberal arts college in Norton, Massachusetts, invites applications for a two-year Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Applied Linguistics, to begin Fall, 2012. We seek a colleague with a PhD in Linguistics or a related field who is interested in joining the English department of a small liberal arts college and who can enrich our curriculum with contemporary perspectives and new research. Over the two-year appointment the Mellon Fellow will teach two sections of first-year writing and four linguistics courses (3 courses per year).One course, which will be taught both years, will be on Global Englishes. The others may be on Structure and Grammar of English, the History of the English Language, or other topics in applied linguistics that will help our students develop as scholars, writers and teachers of writing. The design of individual courses is left to the Fellow, although the department mentor can assist with course development. Fellows are expected to participate in the life of the department and are encouraged both to make connections across the curriculum and to participate in trans-disciplinary research that links English, Mathematics, Computer Science, Psychology, Anthropology and Modern Languages. Fellows are allocated salaries of $50,000 with full benefits and additional research funds as well as inter- and intra-departmental mentoring.
Minimum Qualifications:	PHD
Preferred Qualifications:
Physical Demands
ADA Statement:	Individuals must possess these knowledges, skills and abilities or be able to explain and demonstrate that the individual can perform the essential functions of the job, with or without reasonable accommodation, using some other combination of skills and abilities.
Posting Date:	02-17-2012
Closing Date:	03-15-2012
Required Applicant Documents:	Curriculum Vitae Letter of Application
Optional Applicant Documents:
Contact(s):	Inquiries may be sent to Professor Lisa Lebduska, Director of College Writing, at llebdusk@wheatonma.edu.
Contact Phone/Extension:
Contact Email:
Contact Fax
Special Instructions to Candidates:	Applications are due by March 15, 2012; early applications are encouraged. We anticipate that interviews will be conducted via Skype.

Tolkien Aloud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actual Dialogue at the Drout House This Evening


Dad: Time for bedtime reading.

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

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

Daughter: So?

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

Daughter: This is so not fair...

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

Tolkien and the Nobel Prize

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Return to Blogging (?)

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

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

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

NEH Supports Lexomics

We got the grant!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will post links to software and papers.

Lexomics: An Explanation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Nice Little Trick Enabled by Lexomics (and Excel)

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

Go to cell D1 and enter the following formula:

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


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





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



It will take a few moments for processing.


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


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




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

Beowulf Aloud and Anglo-Saxon Aloud Greatest Hits

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

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

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

Best Seller (!) on Audible: Understanding Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frivolous But Fun Piece in the Washington Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So What's Up with the Not Writing and Everything

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

A few things are going on. 

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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