Anglo-Saxon Aloud

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

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

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

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

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

So welcome, to Anglo-Saxon Aloud.

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

My Kalamazoo paper will answer the pressing question:

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

All that remains is the writing and more research.

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

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

The Most Exciting Topic Ever!!!!
Indexing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia Patches

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

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

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

Thematic List

Contributors and Articles

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

Corrigenda

Articles and Authors

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

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

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

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

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

Review of How Tradition Works

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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



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

The Big Picture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Take-away

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

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

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

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



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


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

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

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

Gatekeeping?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visual Display of Manuscript Information

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Example

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again with the State of the Field

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what is to be done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Anglo-Saxonist's Library

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

An Anglo-Saxonist's Library

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned for...

The Library of Solomon and Saturn...

State of the Field

When I was in graduate school, a spate of "The Current State of Old English Studies..." articles came out, inspired, no doubt, by the criticisms of the field made in Allen Frantzen's Desire for Origins. Allen (who directed my dissertation) had argued that Old English Studies needed to reinvent itself and come into dialogue with other sub-fields in the profession by investigating contemporary literary theory. Not surprisingly, not everyone agreed that this was the way to go. Some scholars argued that the problems in Old English Studies were indeed there, but had other causes, and that engagement with contemporary theory was not likely to solve them. Of all these responses, I thought that Tom Shippey's was the best (but then again, I agree with Tom about an embarrassingly large number of things). Tom argued that many of the problems in Old English (a steady reduction in the number of positions, increasing marginalization of the field) could be credited to the bad teaching that was generated by compulsory Old English at elite institutions (and, following their example, elsewhere): since teachers had a captive audience, they were able to be really, really bad. Thus a new generation came to hate Old English. When they got into power, they dismantled as much as they could, putting the resources towards things they cared about. (There's actually a lot more to Tom's argument, and he looks some what prescient in places, so you should read it).

But a great many other scholars argued that nothing was wrong at all in Old English Studies. 'Old English is in much better shape than its 'detractors' would admit: Look, X was hired at Y, and Z got a grant from the A agency, and Q university just paid M all that money, and look there's a new project, and three new grammar books, and an edition of V, and ooo, a database..." The idea is that the field was/is in good shape. If I'm feeling cynical, I note that many of the people who wrote those articles already had elevated positions at elite institutions and, when I'm feeling even more cynical, I start to note that many of them made jumps into administration or even more elite places, suggesting that for them times were indeed good. But for the field as a whole, well, I'm not so sure.

This is a long set-up for a disappointing ending to a post, but my plan is to revisit this topic multiple times over the next year, so I'll be pulling out specific data that support my idea (which is really a gut feeling) that, although the free-fall may have stopped, and although in some ways we are positioned very well, there is a still a lot of trouble in Old English Studies and in the related Old Norse Studies (I can only really speak informedly about America, though I have a few ideas of the situation in the UK; obviously, when it comes to Old Norse, Rome is in the North, and the real heart of the field is not England or America but Scandinavia--I don't know the situation there).

Today's data: The Tools for Scholarship are Becoming Impossible to Get

My Professorship at Wheaton carries with it a nice little stipend that has one stipulation: I don't just get the money, I have to spend it on something. So, because I am not yet ready for Japanese lessons (for a long-term project dealing with the Tale of Genji), I have been buying books, filling out my library. This has been, as you might imagine, a lot of fun, and I've now got my Old English bookcases in good enough shape that I don't really have to leave the house to do most of my research. Two weeks ago I finally got a Ker catalogue (N. R. Ker's Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon), an essential book that has taken me at least five years (and $300) to buy. My own college's library didn't have one, so I had to drive up to Boston College when I needed to consult it. A number of years back I was able to snag a Bosworth-Toller dictionary off of eBay (before too many Anglo-Saxonists learned about eBay, and yes, I got a complete, 2-volume BT for $120 dollars). And this is my point: although one can patch together a decent research library (the ASPR, Beowulf, the EETS editions of key prose texts -- and I hope to do a post on what a basic library for Old English Studies would be), some of the fundamental tools for research are not just out of print, but are impossible to get. Bosworth-Toller is, wonderfully, now on line, but the Ker catalogue isn't, and in Old Norse the Cleasby-Vigfusson Old Norse/English Dictionary is impossible to get (though I found a beat-up one for $300 and a good-condition one for $600), and half the texts and editions one would want in ON are out of print as well.

This is, I would suggest, evidence of a field in trouble. Not simply because beginning scholars can't get essential research tools (because they can, especially if out-of-copyright texts migrate to on-line versions), but because of what that lack says about the relationship of our field to other studies: presses can't be bothered to keep things in print because there is not enough demand. That is not a comforting thought. In future posts I'll try to discuss why this is, but for now I just want to try to establish this one particular point.

Happy Holidays

I have a post about being an academic with children in the works, and one on a minor indicator of the state of Old English and Old Norse studies, but neither is quite done, and actually having children plus end-of-semester plus Christmas has pretty much taken away all free time I might have (in a good way). If something is going to be neglected, it's going to be the blog.

So I hope to have a post in a day or two or at least when the kids get back to school and the grades are turned in.

Best wishes for a happy and prosperous new year.

(and I'm particularly happy because I finally managed to get a copy of Ker's Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon! After more than five years of trying! (Now the big question is whether it's worth it to buy the Copus Poeticum Boreale reprint, or a Cleasby-Vigfusson Dictionary, or the Lapidge St. Swithun book... any advice?)

More on the Research Group

In this post I talked about how we in the humanities generally do not have research groups the way that the sciences do. I got an interesting comment from Tiruncula that I hope to follow up, and a few private emails as well. So I thought it would be worth it to discuss this further (I should do that more often, but I'm not a very good blogger, as you will have noticed).

There are now on the web very good "virtual" research groups using different kinds of content-management software. ANSAX-net used to be a quasi research group before it was first hijacked by loonies and then lost a lot of steam as many of the more senior and serious people deserted it. There are groups like the Reading Room at TheOneRing.net and Livejournal collectives, etc. I am involved in different "virtual" research groups, and they are absolutely essential to my work (my co-editors for Tolkien Studies have only gotten together about five times in four years; I never met my editors for The Tolkien Encyclopedia). But there is something very different about a physical, meatspace working group.

So I have tried to build one. I don't have graduate students at Wheaton, so I decided to treat my best undergraduates like graduate students and see what happened. I'm pretty happy with the results, which include a decent pile of publications, one of my very best research assistant just about ABD in the best medieval program in the world, another recently returned from a Fulbright to Iceland, another in grad school in Kansas, another just out of law school, etc. There is no way we could have gotten Tolkien Studies up and running without the research group, and the bibliography project and few other things that we haven't unveiled yet are all due to the group.

Let me explain how it works. About five or six years ago, Prof. of Biology Ed Tong and I went to our previous Provost and proposed the formation of Wheaton Research Partners. The Provost supported--and got the Work Study office to support--assigning about 25 positions (8 hours per week at, I think, $7 per hour) to the program. The first 25 faculty who apply with a decent proposal get a Wheaton Research Partner. I find it most effective to split the job in half (i.e., 4 hr per week) and hire two WRP students each year. These are my immediate research assistants.

Then, I recruit a few more students at the job fair. I point out that I don't actually have a paid position this year (it's already filled by the WRP person), but that if someone volunteers for an hour or two per week, he or she will certainly have the inside track for a WRP slot in the future. Then I hold a group meeting and see who shows up. I have always managed to have two to four very good students working with me.

It's really important not to assign these students monkey work, but to teach them and the trust them to do real research. This takes a while, and we definitely treat it as an apprenticeship program: students start out with basic things (entering articles into the database, filing them, reading and summarizing) and move up as they get more skills to researching bibliography, requesting materials ILL, and then actually writing and proofing the final bibliography with me. The most advanced students proof each issue of Tolkien Studies with me. I also will do independent studies with advanced students who want to, and for the very most advanced seniors, an honors thesis if appropriate. So the "career path" is:

Volunteer -- gets experience
Wheaton Research Partner -- gets paid
Independent Research -- gets course credit
Honors Thesis -- gets honors

At each stage students get intellectual credit for what they do, presenting at Academic Festival, being co-author with me on something when they earn it, getting to present at a conference (and then I hit up the Provost's office for money for them to travel), etc.

The biggest weaknesses with this system are the lack of guaranteed funding, lack of space and large time committment for both administering the project and for uncompensated teaching (but I teach a ton of Independent Studies anyway). But the rewards are very great. I have six different articles and bibliographies co-published with eight students. All the research for the Anglo-Saxon medicine project was also supported by Wheaton Research Partners, and that led to a publication in Anglo-Saxon England with an undergraduate as co-author. I'm never at a loss for things to do or people to talk to about my work, and the social environment of the group is constantly energizing.

Of course things would be even better if I had the equivalent of a laboratory in biology: if I could afford to pay a Tolkien scholar from overseas (like Marcel Bülles or Gergely Nagy, both of whom were part of the group, but who had other funding) to come each year, and if I had an advanced grad student or two, and a post-doc, then we would really do something. And of course the big limitation is that the group is (mostly) limited to working on Tolkien, as undergrads just aren't quite ready, linguistically, for research in Old English until they are seniors. But I guess I have years to put such a program together, and in the meanwhile I am having a great deal of fun with some pretty incredible students: the four who are working with me this year, two freshmen, a sophomore and a junior, are stellar, and I'm hoping that with their energy, we can do even more things in the spring semester.

Missing the Research Group

In yet another recent triumph for Wheaton (the New York Times recently called us a "hidden gem" and the Boston Globe asked our president what it's like to run a "red-hot" school), a research group in the Science Center has contributed to the decoding of the sea urchin genome and were co-authors on the paper in Nature. This is, of course, great news in its own right, and Bob Morris, who led the team at Wheaton, is always good to give my daughter a nice sea urchin test (the dried exoskeleton of the animal, but he does ask her questions, also) when we visit his labs.

But it's more important because this success illustrates something that scientists do really, really well and that we in the humanities are not so good at.

Jonathan Weiner, the star science writer who authored The Beak of the Finch, also published a long examination of the unwinding of the genetics of drosophila melanogaster, the friut fly. Weiner's book, Time, Love and Memory is of course mainly the story of Seymour Benzer, who was one of the pioneers in the analysis of the molecular biological bases for behavior. But it also the story of the people Benzer assembled, for decades, in his Cal Tech labs. They formed an ongoing research group that cracked some of the most difficult problems in molecular genetics, and their group was the source of many, many successful scientists. It is still going strong today.

We don't really have research groups in the humanities. Oh, at times people to get together for a presentation or a colloquium, and there's certainly a decent amount of water-cooler chat and sending email links to resources. But as a whole, you go into an English department and you do your own work. For some this is the dream life, and for others it is what drives them out of academia: those long, lonely nights with an open word-processing file that as yet has no words in it. This is certainly the romantic image of the academic, sitting up nights in his study, thinking and writing. And there's nothing wrong with the image; I even follow it sometimes.

But scientists have something that, at times, works even better, and I think we should figure out how to steal it from them.

The Research Group, a collection of different-level intellectual workers, gathered in a single lab with a single large and complex problem (the kind that sheds smaller projects like a maple sheds leaves), can, when it works well, harness social and even physical entergies and bring them to bear on these problems. Ideas are quickly vetted and cross-fertilized. New projects bud off from the original project and in turn spawn more projects. Eventually, in the best groups, everyone from undergraduate lab assistants to visiting Full Professors, is engaged in expanding human knowledge. It is a beautiful thing to behold.

But there are really very few functioning Research Groups in English. There seems to be one at the University of Toronto, centered around (of course) the Dictionary of Old English. Some larger programs, Notre Dame, for instance, seem to develop strong cameraderie among their grad students, and they do tend to work on very similar projects, so maybe it is working there. But in general, to paraphrase a line from noted philosopher Mr. Incredible: We Work Alone!

I brought up the Sea Urchin group earlier because they did not have many of the fundamentals upon which good research groups are built. They were part of a multi-institution team, there were not unlimited amounts of money to support many labs and different experiments, communication was almost all by email and rarely (with the larger team) face-to-face. But they still managed to form a productive group that included faculty from multiple departments (and multiple faculty within Biology) and even extended to the scientist spouse of one of the professors. Their energy was enormous, and the students picked up on it as they struggled on the project as well. So for now, even at a tiny place like Wheaton, with a strong, strong emphasis on teaching and not the kinds of resources possessed by the big labs, we were able to put together an effective research group.

So what does it take, and how can we do it? I haven't been able to get running the kind of research group I'd really like, but I've had some hints of it: I've assembled students through the Wheaton Research Partner's Program and gathered additonal volunteers. Then I've hosted visiting scholars Gergely Nagy and Marcel Bülles from overseas. We therefore had some moments when we really were functioning as a research group, each engaged in both individual and communal problems, each sharing data and getting ideas from each other. We were transforming the lonely struggles of academics into communal struggles of academics. It was great.

But I don't know how to do things like this without money, a graduate program, a physical space and wide enough recognition to bring in the best students, junior faculty and senior faculty. I think I'd be good at running it, though, if there are any mysterious billionaires reading this blog who would like to make a huge contribution to the study of culture.

But we do the best that we can with the time we have, and I'm happy that my research group, rudimentary as it is this year, is accomplishing more and better work that we would have had we not worked with each other.

[How I'll ever explain to school security about the number of people with keys to my office... well, let's just say I hope I don't ever have to make that explanation.]

Free to a Good Home: Ph.D. Dissertation Topic

The Liber Aphorismorum is the Latin translation of Hippocrates' Aphorisms, one of the most-studied texts in the history of medicine. Learning the Aphorisms, and how to interpret them, was one of the major tasks facing apprentice physicians in the Middle Ages (the interpretation, of course, was mainly through Galen). The translation was made from a “recension or archetype of the early sixth century either at Ravenna, the center of the translating activity under Theodoric the Ostrogoth, or possibly at Corbie” (Kibre, citing Beccaria 1961, 22ff). This translation was used up through the twelfth century, when two other Latin translations were made from the Greek.

There are 22 manuscripts of this first translation, scattered throughout western Europe (the greatest number are in the BN in Paris). As far as I have been able to determine, they have not been comprehensively edited. The standard editions and translation of the Aphorisms are made directly from the Greek text (which of course makes sense).

There are also a great number of commentaries on the Aphorisms, also scattered throughout Europe. Many, if not most, of these have been edited. Some have been translated.

Here's the dissertation project:

First, produce a diplomatic edition (assemble all the manuscript evidence (i.e., in microfilm, photocopy, pdf, etc., transcribe them in machine-readable form).

Then produce a critical edition of the Latin text. For six centuries this was one of the major medical texts, yet it has been ignored because the "better" (i.e., truer to the Hippocratean source) Greek text was edited. That we have a more accurate text is wonderful, but the text that was actually used would be of great interest as well.

In doing this you will have the opportunity to do the kinds of things that the editors of the PL or the MGH did back in the nineteenth century: except you'll have computers, databases, facsimiles, etc.

You'll also be able to market yourself both as a literary scholar (in medieval Latin) and a historian of medicine: there will be more and more interesting job opportunities to come out of it, and funding should be much less of a problem. Medical schools have tons of money, and the money required to support a literary scholar is peanuts compared to what it costs to do most of their research.

And if you take this project, you don't even have to pay me. Just let me have your raw transcription/diplomatic edition.

Why? Well, the project I want to do requires this information, but I estimate that it would take me five years or so to gather it, and my own Latin is probably not good enough to produce a solid edition of a medieval Latin text without missing some significant subtleties. Also, I have about ten years worth of other projects lined up, anyway.

What am I looking for? Memes, of course. It is my gut feeling--supported by the gut feelings of others who know the Aphorism tradition much better than I do--that the Aphorisms change very, very little in their transmission over six centuries or more. They are very stable memes. Yet the commentaries vary a great deal. So the transmission and copying of the Aphorisms compared with the transmission and copying of the commentaries gives us a really interesting data set on the formal stability of prose texts. I am very interesting in finding out exactly how much they vary, what patterns can be seen in the variation and what comparisons we can make to other texts (say, poetry, laws, etc.) that have a long transmission history. The Aphorisms are in some ways on the boundary of poetry and prose, which makes them additionally interesting for my theoretical work.

I would assert--and I'd like to be able to argue, even prove--that there is an inverse relationship between formal stability and interpretive stability. That is, if the form holds still, then the interpretation must continually shift (as the language and culture changes out from under the text). I think this holds true in poetry and proverbs: I'd love to test it with the Aphorisms.

So, if any grad students read this who want a dissertation topic, I'll definitely write a strong letter of support to your funding bodies (and again, this kind of research opens up additional funding opportunities).

My own tentative work suggests that it might not be necessary to scramble all over Europe to get the manuscripts either. I'm guessing that many of them might be included in Johns Hopkins' "Henry E. Sigerist Medieval Manuscript Reproduction Collection," but I won't know for sure until some ILL requests come in.

In the meanwhile, anyone who wants to set me straight about errors in the above or (even better) point out to me that someone has already done most of this work will be owed several beers at Kalamazoo.

The Dreaded (and Dreadful) Job Search

Last year I decided not to blog about the job market because we were searching. This year we are kinda searching, but not at MLA and in a really weird way, so I am blogging. (Actually, it's more because I was inspired by this post at Ancrene Wiseass about job interviews and creating the "right" image).

I've now been involved in about ten searches, once as a candidate, twice on MLA interviewing committees, and the rest of the time as part of a department that delegates only the MLA interviews to the committee (we all jointly do everything else). Of course Wheaton is weird, is a small liberal arts college, a department where people actually try to behave like human beings, etc. But I think I have a few insights into the process. I also hope that this is a good time to write, as (hopefully) my friends on the market are starting to get requests for dossiers, interviews, etc.

So, herewith, a few comments and tips.

First, the MLA hiring process is the most dehumanizing, soul-killing, loathsome job process ever invented. Cattle-call auditions for Annie, the NFL combine, and that gross scene in Showgirls are all pleasant compared to the process that has evolved for hiring for professorial jobs. From the utter bogosity of the original sorting process (in which two department members could, theoretically, decide to boot every person whose last name begins with "D", and no one could stop them unless they admitted it), to the incredibly stupid reasons that people are left in or tossed out of the MLA pool, to the ridiculous situation that is the MLA interview--all of it probably could not be worse if you hired Dr. Evil, Stanley Fish, Newt Gingrich, Sideshow Bob and Stalin to put together a process that is simultaneously bureaucratic and subject to the whims of insane people, tedious and capricious, utterly stressful and incredibly boring.

This isn't meant to be scary so much as to say that if you hate the hiring process, you are a normal human being. And if you don't hate it, please don't sit near me, k?

But that said, you need to work the process to your advantage without getting too hung up on it. And you need to recognize that despite all the intellectual effort you put in, a lot of it is a crapshoot (which is to me why the process is so horrible: we make people strive and strive and then much of the final decision is luck).

How to work the process to your advantage?

Here is my deep dark secret: Most academics like to talk. A lot. And they think very highly of their own talking. You, being an academic, probably do, too. Think about what happens when you put a lot of people who like to talk into a room and make them sit there and listen when they'd rather talk (to paraphrase Scott Adams, your mouth is much more than twice the size of your ear holes, you know). Think how you feel when forced to sit and listen to a speaker drone on and on without letting you get a word in edgewise.

Yes, you are supposed to be being interviewed, and the committee is interested in you. But think through the dynamics and play them to your advantage. It's sad but true, but the more people hear themselves talk, the more brilliant they think you are.

Prep, in advance, a pithy answer to the question: "So tell us about your dissertation/research": Think about how long you would want to sit and listen to even the most fascinating graduate student in the world talk about a dissertation. Keep your answer that short (this is a judgment call, but I would say that if you get up over 4 minutes you are heading for trouble, and if you can say what you are about in 2 minutes, you are golden).

Then, end with an entry point for another person to talk: Do you think this work would fit in with anything anyone is doing in your department? (this can be risky due to toe-stepping). You can fix it by doing research and saying "I noticed on your web site that Dr. Q published on M. I don't work on M itself, but there are some parallels--do you think Q would be able to guide me towards good resources?" This is esp. helpful if Q is on the committee.

At every opportunity, ask an intelligent question, particulalry about departmental cohesion and mentoring. Also, find out about service courses (show enthusiasm even for lower-division courses and say "that's where I recruit my majors/grad students, etc".), the path to tenure (is there an open line for this position? is the jargon term that shows you are in the know). Ask about research opportunities. Not all at once. These need to be worked into the conversation so that there is give and take. End with a question about publishing expectations and look happy about the answer, whatever it is.

When asked teaching questions, give specific anecdotes first and the principles they illustrate second. No one wants to hear "sometimes I do group work, but sometimes I lecture." Duh! We all do that. Rather, talk about a specific problem with a specific student --- I was teaching Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life and had an absolutely unexpected reaction by a student who said "I didn't come from no fish"; here's how I worked that out and made that student such a close reader of Gould's work (looking for logical errors) that he managed a B+

Gamble question: "Is there a lot of political diversity in your department?" Wait for the answer from all three interviewers, if they all speak, and observe how they interact. Then, your answer is "Oh, that's a relief. I can certainly fit in there." [I'm sorry; people don't want you to be honest about your politics; they want to fantasize that you'll agree with them about everything].

But the key is to try to listen without seeming shy or overwhelmed. You will be tagged as "thoughtful" and "genuinely interested." Make sure you express that genuine interest for the actual institution and not just for the region of the country, etc.

Physical presentation: I would say "wear what makes you feel good" (though I'm a hypocrite here, and used that nasty Rogaine until the day after I signed my contract--it worked, too). But seriously, get a suit that you like and that you are comfortable in. Accessorize the way you want. Wear your wedding ring (I think). No matter what you do, it will offend a bunch of people (too stodgy, too edgy, too New York, too young, too old, too married, not married, possibly gay, not gay enough, patches on the sleeves??? But that's a Harris Tweed!! Heels too high, heels too low, tassles on loafers good, tassels on loafer bad, etc., etc. etc.) It is not possible to win, the way it might be if you were trying to get a job in the fashion industry: here, there is just as good a chance that the person interviewing you has no knowledge whatsoever of what is a good shoe or a bad shoe. I know one eminent professor who wore gardening boots with mismatched socks to a meeting with Chancellor. So make yourself comfortable, and some of that should rub off on your confidence.

More of a gamble, especially, especially for women: think about not wearing black. The MLA looks like and has the social dynamics of the funeral of a particularly powerful but child-molesting uncle. You don't want to participate in that. If you can bear it, try not to wear a black suit. You'll stand out. You might not stand out as "I wear black on the outside because that's how I feel on the insidge", but you will stand out. It may be that going in yellow or powder blue will work--if that's really you and you're comfortable in it.

Finally, roll with the surprises. I was asked at one point if I could teach contemporary American poetry. Well, I had a copy of a new Denise Levertov book in my bathroom, so I went with that. Three minutes later someone asked another question, so I was off the hook on that one (I actually read a fair bit of contemporary poetry, but I would never presume to teach it).

The best candidates I've seen (who have been the ones we've hired) are those that are sincerely interested in our college (and if you can fake sincerity, you're set) and have thought about how they can contribute to the institution.

They are not hiring you because you're a cute kid or you're top of the class or even that you're a soon-to-be hot scholar (according to the letters of recommendation, everybody is a budding superstar) . They are hiring you to contribute to the department's mission (whatever, and however poorly articulated that is) and to be their colleagues. So present yourself as yourself: a person who does certain things in English, not a person who is a certain thing in English.

Good luck on your quests. May your mailboxes fill with dossier requests and your many interviews give you no time to go to the stupid papers (no one even giggled at my Beowulf/penis joke--and it was a good one--so I shall never again present). Go, look up your friends, drink quickly but not too heavily, and try to relax as much as you can. Like a really strong bout of rota virus, it will soon be over.

J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia

[Update]. I have learned that Taylor and Francis has only printed 800 copies of the Encyclopedia rather than the planned 2,500. I don't know if these numbers make a difference to collectors or not, but there you have them. Second, if you are a contributor you can receive (supposedly) a 20% discount on the book by emailing christine.squire@taylorandfrancis.com. Finally, thus far Taylor and Francis has absolutely refused to distribute any contributor gratis copies despite an original promise to do so; I am working on this, but without much success thus far.



(it wasn't my idea to leave off the definite article)

The Encyclopedia is finally out, so if you have $175.00 and a real interest in Tolkien, you should check it out. Although there are some imperfections (to say the least) I think it is a very useful resource for people interested in Tolkien at all levels.

I also want to give you the story of the imperfections.

I've been working on the Encyclopedia for three or so years now. It was a weird process, as an editor at Routledge contacted me, but then I had to write the proposal, etc., but it basically went well with only a few major glitches (some contributors bailed out at the last second--or actually beyond the last second--and there was a bit of tension when a few important articles were late and the press wanted to boot them). Then, Taylor and Francis bought Routlege and, this summer, decided to close down the encyclopedia division as unprofitable. My editors were let go (no one told me; I found out via bounced emails) and many projects were, apparently, cancelled. The Tolkien Encyclopedia was far enough along that they decided not to cancel it, so for once in my life I lucked out on the timing.

But that didn't stop Taylor and Francis from screwing things up. Back in the early summer I began to receive fascicles of the Encyclopedia for proofing. They were a hideous mess. Everything that could be wrong—from citation format to layout to basic copy-editing mistakes—was wrong, and I spent well over a hundred hours marking up the typescript. This went back to the production people and then, for a long time I heard nothing. And I was shocked to learn that there were no plans to send individual articles back to contributors for proofing: every project I've ever been on has let contributors get a final look. Not this one.

Likewise, there was an inexplicable decision not to include the 100 illustrations I had spent weeks collating. This was never communicated to me until after I asked, and I was not consulted on the decision.

Even worse, when we originally designed the Encyclopedia, there were to be many "blind" entries. So, for example, if you looked up "balrog" it would say "see Monsters." This practice was promised to me because I was asked to aggregate a great many short entries into large pieces to make it easier to find enough contributors. Routledge then refused to put in the blind entries, and though I tried to make an end run to the compositor, that was apparently blocked. So what appear to be bizarre decisions were not so originally: there is no entry on "Ancrene Wisse and Hali Mei∂had" because that article is covered in the "AB Language" and "Ancrene Wisse" and "Katherine Group" entries, but then Routledge screwed up and didn't put in the blind entry. They claim that the index and the thematic table of contents (which sucks a bit) will solve this problem. I am not convinced, and I think that the Encyclopedia would have been much easier to use had they listened to me and followed our original agreement. But at least the content is still all there, even if it takes more work to find it.

But really much worse are the problems of corrections. Although Routledge did not send final proof copies of articles to individual contributors, I personally had been contacting people and emailing back to Routledge sets of corrections that were coming in from the editorial board, various contributors, etc. As we got further into August, I began to get very worried that I was not going to have enough time to proof the entire thing again (as it obviously needed; when you are making 8-25 corrections per column you can't expect to have gotten everything). Around August 17, the entire typescript came back, and it was still a serious mess, with a lot of basic formatting errors, etc. Unfortunately, that was right when I got pneumonia (followed by my son getting pneumonia), and I was out of action for a few weeks. When I did eventually get to proofing and started to return fasciles, I was informed that "we are sending the whole thing to press tomorrow." Really. When I objected, I was told that all the errors I had found (and spent many hours on just for the A-C fasciles) would surely have been caught by the professional copy-editors (who had somehow managed to miss them the first time). The volume went to press and I never was able to see a final version. So there are lots of corrections that were made (for example, Doug Anderson had sent me a pile of corrections that I dutifully sent on but don't seem to have been incorporated). Certainly the contributors should not be blamed, as they had no idea that the press would do something as idiotic as not sending laid-out articles back to contributors for proofing.

In the end, I'm disappointed that Routledge / Taylor and Francis marched the ball down the field almost to the end zone and then decided to punt. This is still a very, very good resource, but it could have been a great one, and I'm disappointed that it's not.

But let me conclude on a more amusing note. For a few weeks I had been badgering Routledge to send me my author's copies, or at least one author's copy, so I could see how the book came out. Finally, on Wednesday, my copies arrived. This is advising week at Wheaton, so I've had students trooping in and out of my office. I showed the Encyclopedia to one, and he said "but isn't that at the library?" Yes, the library had gotten its copy and put it on display two weeks ago and I hadn't noticed it. Doh!