DiGlossia in Anglo-Saxon England

As regular passers-by know, I'm interested somewhat avidly in the Adventus period. One of the issues of that period has been what happened to the Celtic speakers so that few Celtic words became part of Old English. The old model of course was that the English came in and pushed the Celts west to Wales and Cornwall, north into Scotland, and off the island to Brittany. That view has been undergoing something of a revision in recent years, sped by the genetic studies of earlier this millenium, but still there is a lack of clarity on the issue of language borrowing and contact. I've written about some of this previously here and here.

So, I finally got around to doing some reading. Believe it or not, I have made inroads into the pile of books and articles that have stacked up since coming to Chicago to finish the ol' PhD and dissertation and all that. An article that was on that pile and is now in the "file" pile is "Diglossia in Anglo-Saxon England, or What Was Spoken Old English like?" by Hildegard Tristram in Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 40 (2004): 87-110. The article essentially argues that the differences between Middle English and Old English are due to the main population of Anglo-Saxon England being "between two languages" to steal a book title (just not the two languages of the that book).

1) Written Old English was likely kept relatively unchanged over the long period of 550 years of the period by deliberate efforts. Dialectal variations are remarkably few; there is very little grammatical change in the structure of the language. It isn't until the reign of Henry I that evidence of such change begins to appear.

2) The earliest Middle English texts show great typological change, grammatically and phonologically. "With apparent suddenness appeared the drift away from syntheticity to analycity."

The paper addresses the over all explanation of this sudden and accelerated movement in the 12th century. Tristram proposes four possible scenarios to explain this.

A) Punctuated Equilibrium Model proposed by Robert M. W. Dixon The Rise and Fall of Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997. Just like in evolution, this model says that the rate of change in the evolution of languages. A language may change slowly over time and then be subject to radical typological changes caused by a number of factors. There are a number of unanswered problems with this view.

B) A traditional explanation that says that the reduction of unstressed vowels was caused by strong stress accents on the first syllable in Old English words. This led over time to the loss of inflectional endings. (In contrast Tristram notes that German with the same type of stress pattern did not undergo the same type of erosion of the inflectional endings, and notes the same pattern in Old Norse, and even in modern Icelandic.)

C) This explanation says that many endings in OE were simply redundant, and so lost any meaning, and were discarded. Tristram again points to other languages in the Germanic group where the same conditions apply, but the same results did not occur.

D) Language contact with Old Norse caused the change, creating a "creole" situation as the languages were fused. However, Tristram rightly notes, ON and OE were close enough that with minimal effort the two linguistic groups could understand each other. Far more interesting to me and in my mind far more important is that the earliest Northumbrian poems we have from the eighth century already shows signs of "inflectional attrition." (I love that term!)

Tristram naturally has a different explanation. First to be noted is that the areas that deviated the most from what had become in 10th, 11th, 12th centuries "Standard Written Old English" in terms of the inflectional endings were Northumbria and the South and South West(though the degree of deviation is much different in each area). These are areas btw in which the Celtic peoples seemed to have maintained a longer period of influence culturally and linguistically. It is in the SW for example that the "periphrastic-Do" construction arose and periphrastic verbal aspect.

Tristram bases her conclusions on a number of factors, most importantly the recent genetic results showing that in large areas of England the British population remained unchanged except for their political affiliation to Anglo-Saxon overlords rather than the Romans. These Brits depending on where they lived in the island spoke British Latin and Brittonic or solely Brittonic at the time of the Adventus Saxonum. The areas where Brittonic was strongest and British Latin least strong are those areas in which we see the earliest and most sweeping change in Old English, including loss of inflectional morphology. Under the Anglo-Saxons, they likely maintained their native language, in some areas 7-8 generations before making a complete shift to only Old English.

This resulted in Brittonicisms entering Old English, but becoming exhibited in the written language in the early Middle English period. In the North: invariable case and gender inflection of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives just like in Brittonic; invariable article, and fixed word order both features of Brittonic. In the SW early Middle English, there is the previously mentioned rise of periphrastic aspect like Middle Welsh and the periphrastic DO in a variety of uses all matched in Middle Welsh. There are other features that appear later in Middle English that are shared with Brittonic or Middle Welsh. Tristram points to one example of this: clefting. She notes that clefting appears in OE in the late West Saxon Gospels, but only more commonly in ME in the 13th century. It already appears in Old Irish and Old Welsh.

Finally, Tristram outlines "levels" of Old English: the written language which was somewhat artificial, the language of the elites, the ruling class, and the "low" level, the language of the common person in Anglo-Saxon England. Middle English's differences from Old English are to be explained largely by the third level coming into the foreground after the removal of the Anglo-Saxon elite, post-11th century invasions. Thus, the elite control of the written language was lost, and the elites were gone to be replaced by a new elite, but this elite spoke and then wrote the language that had been that of the "common man" in Anglo-Saxon England.

Codex Sinaiticus: Late Antiquitism?

As most are aware by now, Codex Sinaiticus is online now. Since it's been in the news frequently the last couple of weeks, enough to crash the servers once news was released, there have been many reports on it in the media. Dan Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary, and far more interesting and important to me, of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) has collated various incorrect statements by the media about the manuscript on his blog. And he corrects them; it does make for interesting reading.

Wallace does make one, well mistake isn't the right word, but nor is oversight or exaggeration. Well, gentle readers, you decide what it is. But Wallace states toward the beginning of his post that "Sinaiticus contains the oldest complete New Testament in the world; the next oldest is half a millennium younger." Well, not quite.....

Even if we emphasize, as I have above, the word complete...meaning there are no missing pieces as in Codex Vaticanus or Alexandrinus etc... there is a manuscript containing the whole New Testament that is vitally important and that is younger than Sinaiticus, but is not 500 years younger. Sinaiticus is dated to the "fourth century", sometimes to the middle part of that century, c. 350. The manuscript of which I speak came into being no later than 716. Codex Amiatinus from Wearmouth-Jarrow is complete, important even for helping to establish the Greek text of the autograph of NT documents (even if not as important as Sinaiticus and Vaticanus in that regard), and is 300-350 years younger than Sinaiticus, produced on the other side of the Roman Empire from Amiatinus.

The problem is that Amiatinus is a Latin manuscript. While yet important and consulted in NT criticism, other language versions by and large do take a back seat to Greek copies in NT textual criticism. Still, it would have been more accurate for Wallace to say that Sinaiticus is oldest complete copy of the NT in Greek and the next oldest in Greek is half a millenium younger. But such is predominance of Greek in the field that such specification among the experts is unnecessary. And that's fine, though interesting, and I thought I'd take opportunity to raise the Medievalist flag once more, and draw attention to Amiatinus and Bede and Monkwearmouth-Jarrow.

Speaking of which, we use the term Medievalist to describe, well, medievalists, and Medievalism to talk about the use and application of things medieval in modern media of all kinds. So what do we call Late Antiquity scholars and the use and application of thing Late Antique in modern media of all kinds? For the former, I originally thought of Late Antiquarians, but for the associations of "antiquarian." So how about Late Antiquitian? And for the -ism, Late Antiquitism(s)? Since the field now properly comes out and stands between Classical, Classicism, Classicizing etc, and (early)Medieval, Medievalism, Medievalizing (ok, I haven't actually seen that last one) I thought the field might need its own set of descriptor terms. Wonder if they'll catch on?

First the Bad News, then some Good News

I'm a bit late on some of this, but here goes:

First, I found out this week that I am but a second choice for a position I had applied for and some one else will be filling the bill. Congratulations to that person whomever he or she may be.

Second, Martin Hengel died last week, Thursday I think, after a bout with cancer at age 82. Hengel was instrumental in Second Temple Judaism, Christian Origins, and early Rabbinics. He reopened the door to consideration of the shape of late Second Temple Judaism(s) as the mileau of the early Christian movement in his magisterial Judaism and Hellenism, the translation of his 1973 Judentum und Hellenismus. In that work, Hengel set the groundwork that has now become the shape of the field. Before his work, it was customary to talk about "Hellenistic Judaism" in the Diaspora, particularly at Alexandria, and "Palestinian Judaism" as differing approaches to being Jewish in the Greco-Roman world. Palestinian Judaism was largely seen as more consertive, Semitic, Temple oriented etc while Hellenistic Judaism was seen as more liberal, taking part in the larger Hellenistic culture, and concerned with merging the Torah and Greek philosophy as in the works of Philo. Hengel's work showed that it was not a question of "Hellenism vs. Resistance to Hellenism" in late Judaism, but rather "how Hellenistic was X", that is, all Second Temple Jews of whatever group in the Roman Empire were to some degree Hellenistic, even the Sadducees who oversaw the Temple and some of the early Rabbis in Palestine. Likewise, one finds conservative "Semitizing" elements in Diaspora Judaism as well. So he argued that a simple dichotomy of Diaspora vs. Palestine, Hellenistic vs. Semitizing was not a valid approach.

I read that book first in 1986, and read it through twice and have read in it many times. Masterful. If only I had the gifts to create such a work. Hengel wrote other influential works, or at least ones that questioned current assumptions such as his Acts and Earliest Christian History that to some degree bucked the trend to reading Acts purely as fiction, The Zealots is a very good book, and there are others spanning the field. It is sad to see him go.

Carin Ruff blogging at Ruff Notes notes the passing of Virginia Brown of PIMS. She too apparently has had a bout of cancer. I never knew her personally, but I do know that when I wanted to go to Toronto that she was one whom various contacts said I should get to know and be sure to take her palaeography class. Generations of PIMS and U Toronto students have done so, and her impact can be seen in their work, though she doesn't seem to have published extensively herself. She translated Boccacio's "Famous Women" and was apparently working on some Caesar Bellum Civile. Nonetheless, my condolences to all who knew her.


Update and Clarification: Carin Ruff dropped this comment in, where else, the comments and I thought it best to have it here so that others will see it:


Thanks for the link about VB. To clarify: the focus of Prof. Brown's life's work was manuscripts in Beneventan script, and her extensive publications were mainly notices of new manuscript discoveries, many published over the years in Mediaeval Studies and collected in Terra Sancti Benedicti: Studies in the Palaeography, History and Liturgy of Medieval Southern Italy. VB was one of E.A. Lowe's last assistants on CLA. It's an interesting metacomment on the intersection of our interdisciplinary profession with disciplinary databases that the products of such a monumental life's work can lie all but hidden even from other medievalists. (I mean this not as a criticism of you, but a rumination on the balkanization of our field.)


Like Intel, our Medieval Rock Stars aren't like other rock stars (Michael Jackson), but no less rock stars for all that.

But now the good news:

Friend and co-blogger (though he owns it) at Modern Medieval Matthew Gabriele appears twice, count it, twice in the latest issue of Speculum! His review of Rosamund McKitterick's Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity appears on pg. 753 and Matt's own book The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade made it into the Brief Notices section. Congratulations Matt!

PostMedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies now has a website as well as a cover design. Kudos to Eileen Joy and all involved.


If you've been just wondering what to do over the weekend, let me suggest some Altoid catapults and binder clip trebuchets. Lifehacker saves the day AGAIN!

And utterly unrelated to anything medieval or scholarly, but Eureka returns this evening with a new season AND I've hooked the Spouse so I don't have to wrestle with her for the remote.

Also, test your knowledge of current events at McSweeney's Star Wars or Iran quiz.

Medieval Literature I Didn't Know IV: Codex Boernerianus

Returning to the series at last, I'd like to introduce you to Codex Boernerianus. Now the two of you reading this might be thinking, "Hey, that's not "literature", its a manuscript. Swain, you ruminate you, you're stretching the meaning of literature here." And you wouldn't be wrong to say so. But this codex is of interest for several literary reasons.

Boernerianus is a ninth century diglot (well, as we'll see a diglot plus) manuscript probably from St. Gall. For the most part, its contents are the Letters of Paul from the New Testament, though there are lacunae, present in the manuscript's exemplar. The Greek text of the NT is the main text with the Latin text written interlinearly, and is much smaller in size. The Greek text is fairly unique in many ways and belongs to the "Western" text type. Other interesting features are the attempts at word and clause separation,clauses often marked at the beginning with a simple punctus. The Latin text has multiple Insular features, though quite cramped in the interlinear space. Boernerianus is connected to the gospel manuscript Codex Sangallensis, also a Greek/Latin diglot and to another codex containing the letters of Paul, Codex Augiensis.

Anyway, my purpose here isn't to talk about the New Testament text. There are two quite different pieces of literature that interest me. The first is that in the back of this manuscript is a brief commentary on the gospel of Matthew that to date NO ONE has published anything on. I was alerted by email a while back that there is a student in Europe working on it, but I emailed back to inquire if said student wished to do something about the text for Heroic Age or if he would at least alert me when his work was finished. I was met with silence. So should it ever happen that I find myself in a stable job in academia and some time on my hands, I fully intend on offering a diplomatic edition and translation of it. Unless someone publishes one first.

The second literary work I wish to talk about has had some work done on it and some may even recognize the piece from anthologies and such. On folio 23 verso an Old Irish poem is written in the bottom margin. The letter forms bear some similarity to the Latin letter forms suggesting that the scribe is responsible for both. However, I have read that the scribe both was and was not an Irish or native Irish speaker. I haven't reviewed the evidence in detail myself, though so far as I know Old Irish was not a taught language on the continent in the ninth century, and one wonders why a scribe at St. Gall's would write this poem with its message in Old Irish if that were not his native tongue. For a future post, I hope to talk about the provenance of several Old Irish pieces in Latin manuscripts and by then I hope to know more about the details of the debate as to whether this scribe was a native Old Irish speaker. At any rate, here's an English translation of the poem:

To come to Rome, to come to Rome,
Much of trouble, little of profit,
The thing thou seekest here,
If thou bring not with thee, thou
findest not.

Great folly, great madness,
Great ruin of sense, great insanity,
Since thou has set out for death,
That thou shouldest be in disobedience
to the Son of Mary.

Taken from: B. M. Metzger, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Palaeography, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1981, p. 104. He's getting it from somewhere else too, but I've forgotten where and can't find my copy at the moment to check.

Folio 23 verso contains I Corinthians 2:9-3:3. The verse *MIGHT* be connected loosely to the passage in that the passage speaks of having received the "spirit of Christ" rather than the spirit of the world. But there is nothing explicit to tie them together. One might speculate that the poet had but recently returned from a pilgrimage to Rome and was disappointed by what he found there. I know only the barest outlines of what was going on at Rome during the ninth century, but considering how much difficulty the popes were having with the senatorial families and Byzantine politics and Frankish politics etc, that might give a monk in search of spiritual things pause. I think others probably can fill in that picture better than I at the moment, but I'll see what I can dig up for a follow-up post on the piece.

Congress 2010

The CFP for Congress 2010 seems to be up. http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/Assets/pdf/congress/Sessions10.pdf

headwords bleg

I'm hoping to enlist your help. I'm generating headwords for an upcoming encyclopedia from Brill on NW Europe in the period 400-1100. I'll likely be posting other groups of headwords and asking for input and even a reader or two (dozen?)to contribute articles. Anyway, the headwords may be found here: headwords for Languages and Linguistics and related matters; just send comments to larsprec@gmail.com.

A brief word about format: its a spreadsheet in Open Office at the moment saved as an html file. Perfectly readable, but not as smooth as I would like it to be.

Connections: Early Medieval and Enlightenment Edition

I've been reading a book about Capt. Cook that I referred to in an earlier post and when I finish the book, I will post here a bit more. Ok, so I've also just finished The University in Ruins which will earn a post over at Modern Medieval, but I digress. Anyway, I like Bede. I like thinking about Bede, and early Anglo-Saxon England, writing about Bede and early Anglo-Saxon England, talking about Bede and Early Anglo-Saxon England.....

So I was a bit surprised to learn that Capt. James Cook (not Kirk who was from Iowa) was not only a Yorkshireman, but spent some time working in Whitby and it is from that town that he first took ship and the fledgling steps on his way to becoming the Captain Cook of well deserved fame. The author refers to the "7th century ruins of an abbey" on an outcrop of hill overlooking the town (ahem: Hild's place). He also attended services as part of a Cook celebration at a Norman era church, St. Mary's that has furnishings and additions that date from many subsequent eras. Being largely a fishing and shipping town, the church has pews made from lumber salvaged from ships and other such features.

I personally have little direct "Cook" connection. I've been to the Bering Sea where he sailed on his third voyage searching for the NW Passage. I've been to Cook's Inlet in AK, and to Vancouver Island, though admittedly I never made it to Nootka Sound...I was too preoccupied then with other beauties on the island and the wonderful city of Victoria (or at least it was 25 years ago). I have more connection in that sense with one of Cook's men, George Vancouver, having sailed and/or driven over much of the territory Vancouver explored after Cook's death.

Nonetheless, the personal connection of having been where Cook went myself as a deckhand, my interest in Whitby, Bede, and Hild, only to find another connection in that way to Cook who lived in the town early in his career. My one and only trip into Yorkshire so far only took me to York, but not to Whitby. So I guess I'm just going to have to go again.

Another item of interest to me in connection to Whitby is that apparently Bram Stoker used the town as a model for the seaside town in Dracula. I had no idea. I have to say that I've never been into vampires and the like, but the of a medievalist I become the more I've come to appreciate Stoker's work in Dracula as a medievalism. Anyway, it was another medievalesque connection that piqued my interest.

Hrolf Kraki: Impressions

I mentioned awhile back reading Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide and made some comments on its contents and usefulness. I read somewhere in the long ago, in the before time, either by or about C. S. Lewis that for every modern book one reads, one should read an old work. Especially in my reading for my chosen profession, I try to keep this as a rule of thumb: for every scholarly tome I read, I also read a text in primary literature and a journal issue of some journal to which I subscribe or would like to subscribe. So, after reading ONIL mentioned above, I picked up a saga I've read bits in, even translated some from the selection in Gordon's Old Norse I've mentioned previously: The Saga of Hrolf Kraki. I had on hand, on the altar to Penguin, a copy of Penguin Classics' translation and introduction by Jesse Byock, whose web site I only discovered just now while creating this post. I'll have to have a close look at that and I'll enter comments about it then. But anyway, to the saga.....

Written in the 14th century, like so much else in Old Norse, the saga is one of the "tales of ancient times" or fornaldar . The scene is largely the Danish kingdom of the Scyldinga (Skjoldung in ON), and relates the rise of Rolf, the gathering of his heroes, and their final fall.

Its a great story full of all sorts of goodies: heroes, incest, evil lords and husbands, witches and dangerous Finns, a dragon, shape-shifting, magic, revenge, trickery.....all the stuff of a corker! Spoiler alert! If you haven't read it and don't want to know what happens, stop reading here.




There are connections to England: some of the early part of the story takes place in Northumbria. And of course there are connections to Old English literature, specifically Widsith and Beowulf.

Rather than review the story or stories or even the scholarship, I thought I'd just jot down some of my impressions and points that I'd like to teach someday. The thing that I think struck me most was the finale. Seriously, the last battle scene in which all the heroes die is poignant. It brought a brief choke to my throat.

I also liked the beginning which is much different in character, but that is the section that explicitly mentions England and has the story well connected in Northumbria, which since I like studying Northumbria, and am fascinated with the Adventus period, suits me just fine!

There is plenty to entertain the folklorist and keep him busy. Totemism, magic of various kinds and from various sources, men given mammalian forms and abilities, magical objects etc.

The role of women is interesting here as well: nefarious magic all stems from a female person. The little "good" magic comes from men.

There's a dragon!

Beware men who throw bones at you at dinner! Gives whole new meaning to the barbecues of summer!

There is much to keep the Anglo-Saxonist busy: connections galore to Beowulf and Widsith including same setting, same characters or names in some cases, similar difficulties facing the heros, similar name meanings, and so on. There's even a burning hall!

There is also plenty to keep the Tolkienista busy: incestuous relationships originally unknown to the partners and later revealed, rings, dragons, burning halls, unlikely heroes, a final battle scene complete with a bear, of sorts. Most of all though there is a sublime beauty to some of the tragic scenes that I can only imagine is what Tolkien and Lewis meant when they referred to the beauty of northern myth. There were several places where I was honestly moved.

As mentioned above, I translated a short portion in Gordon, but I think someday I'd like to return to this saga and read the whole in Old Norse. I know even with just going through the English translation, there is much to think on and consider and this will be a text that I return to again and again.

Connections: Early Modern Edition

So....this might be a long shot. But I was reading my daily dose of the Bestaria Latina Blog and noted that one of today's proverbs is: Induis me leonis exuvium...you dress me in a lion's skin....

This is from Erasmus' Adagia and he there gives it two interpretations, one from myth, the other on fable. In mythology, Hercules is depicted draped in a lion's skin: the first task of Hercules' 12 was to kill the Nemean lion that had been terrorizing, well, Nemea. Hence the skin....imitated later by Alexander the Great, who stressed Herculean connections among others. But later, Hercules becomes reinterpreted as a type of Christ, and so there come to be Christological associations (sorry, an old Dante paper coming in there, but I digress.) Erasmus doesn't really go into that aspect though....

From fable, Erasmus notes Aesop's fable about the ass dressed as a lion. The donkeys note that they are whipped and treated badly by humans, but that humans fear lions. So they decide that they will go and put on lion's skins, and when people see them, they run away. Alas, the donkeys bray, the people realize when they see their feet that they have donkeys in lions' skins and not lions, and the lot of the donkeys is as bad if not worse than previously.

So....now we come to C. S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. The last book, The Last Battle opens with Shift the ape convincing Puzzle the Donkey that he should wear a lion's skin, improve his and everyone else's lot, and imitate the Narnian Christ figure Aslan. Puzzle, simple though he is, goes along at first and by the time his misgivings come to the fore, it is too late.

I'm sure that others have been here before me, I'm a bit slow like ol' puzzle (hence the name of the blog). Now we have here I think the sources for this part of Lewis' tale. Lewis was familiar with Aesop, Dante, and Erasmus (he quotes them all often enough in his non-fiction that there is no doubt on the question). And Puzzle, like Hercules, is a type of Christ: the falsehood comes in when the type is passed off as the real thing. And of course we have donkeys in lion's skin, just as the fable. And we have both together in the same context just as in Erasmus.

A nice set of connections: a chance reading of a blog entry on a daily Latin fable, brings me to Erasmus who brought me to Greek myth, Christian typology and my beloved Dante (oh, yes, I love my Dante!), and Erasmus, and finally, Lewis. Well done, Jack, well done.

Boethius

There are some texts that one returns to again and again. For me, Boethius' Consolatio is one of them. I first encountered this work in undergrad, lo, these many years ago, and have returned to it periodically over the years, both personally and professionally.

I recently returned to the text after some 5-6 years since I've really looked at it, using this time the Penguin translation. Back in 2001, I worked through the first book and part of the second in Latin, and I read P. Walsh's translation in 2003.

Its been a difficult period, both professionally and personally. The dissertation process is one that has nearly removed me any pleasure or desire to ever be in academia. Were it not for an adjunct gig reminding me how much I love being in the classroom, and a couple of projects reminding how much I love to do research, I'd have ended my bid for an academic career. That other than my adjunct gig I don't have an academic career is at the moment beside the point. So, I needed some Consolation.

But it isn't just that that spurred me....there are some texts that I think both personally and professionally I need to return to, to be steeped in, to let those authors and texts become a significant part of me. The Consolation of Philosophy is one such text for me. Now, some of these texts, some of us are able to teach from time to time, Beowulf, The Odyssey, etc are two such texts for me. But there are others that I have yet to be able to teach, the Consolation, Augustine's Confessions and On Christian Doctrine, Dante are a few of these on my list. (Perhaps this is a good time to start a new meme: what texts do you find yourself revisiting often (by desire, not force) and that are important to you.)

So, serendipity struck again and I found myself wanting to return to this text at the intersections of professional and personal needs. I was surprised after all this time how much of the Latin text I remembered and naturally how much more of those portions I recalled than the parts I've only ever known in translation. Of course, I know this to be true, nothing sticks in your memory as well as some text on which you've worked in another language. Still though, since its been 8 years now since I've even looked at the Latin, I was a bit surprised.

Boethius is always an odd read, I think. He posits a divine figure that controls all things, and in that we should take comfort because even those things that are evil are not so, but simply part of the plan so to speak. It is such a view that gave rise to Calvinism and that system's strict predestination, like Boethius, meant to be a comfort to the believer that God has it all in hand. There is no theology of accident. Unlike Calvinism and other deterministic views, though, for Boethius there seems to be plenty of room for free choice of individuals. Evil people choose to do evil things, but doing so is still part of the plan.

And I always laugh at Philosophy's rebuke of the Muses in Book I, so very Platonic in form and tone. Yet I've found that literature, and poetry in particular, often help me more that Plato or Aristotle....and poets I think probably overall had a greater impact on how people view themselves and the world that philosophy ever did, no matter how highly philosophy is held. Nonetheless, it is an amusing scene, particularly since in rejecting the Muses Philosophy herself engages in the Muses' activity by composing and singing poetry in largely traditional Classical meters!

As I read the text again I was reminded too of many things in manuscripts: coming across a phrase in the text where a manuscript gets the Greek wrong, and then tracing where that particular error arose...yet the interlinear commentary on the Greek phrase renders it's meaning correctly.....or in how many manuscripts I looked at, there is significant evidence of the first couple of books having been read carefully, but much less evidence of it thereafter...so as highly influential as Boethius was on Medieval thought, I would hazard a guess that it was the first two books that were the most influential and most well known.

I've always meant to get to the 14 or so Boethius manuscripts from A-S England, but this whole PhD and dissertation thing got in the way and has taken my time. Since then Malcolm Godden and other scholars have done a lot of work on them and Bruce Gilchrist informed me that Godden's work on the Old English Boethius, with Susan Irvine, book is now out and weighs in at over $200. Just looking it up, it's $365 from Oxford here. Just let me say how very jealous I am....but nonetheless I think there is still some great work to be done on the Latin commentary tradition, both within and without England. No one has really done substantial work on that since Edmund Silk's 1935 Saeculi Noni Auctoris in Boetii Consolationem Philosophiae Commentarius--a magnificent piece of work, but Silk was wrong in many of his conclusions, and there is still a great deal of work to do. I confess that I've always had an interest in Alfred's Boethius, mentioned above, but when I started looking at Boethius, Nicole Discenza had already been doing her dissertation on it, and has now published a book based on her work and published other materials. With Godden and Irvine's work, Discenza's, and a couple of conferences on Alfred's Boethius, there seems to be quite a lot of attention going that way these days...and that's a good thing even if I'm sitting on the sidelines.

In another vein, I can't help but think of Boethius' influence on Tolkien and Lewis. In Lewis, I think the influence much more obvious and even in some ways acknowledged. I think the influence on Tolkien much more subtle. Unless some has or will beat me to it, I do plan an article someday on Boethius and Tolkien. A few comments here though: one place where I've always seen such an influence is a comparison between Lady Philosophy and Galadriel. Many have drawn the parallels between Galadriel and Mary, and a few others have seen the influence of the Middle English poem The Pearl on the conception of Lothlorien, especially as we enter Lothlorien from Moria. And in many ways, the "pearl" character of the poem, who stands in the place of Mary, is influenced by Dante's Beatrice, both as standins for Mary, and all three I'd maintain influenced by Boethius' Philosophia. More directly I think Galadriel, for example, in seeming both young and old, changing in size, her role as healer of hurts of body, but even more so of soul and spirit, font of wisdom and knowledge, who sees into hearts and minds, owes a great deal to Boethius' Philosophia.

The Heroic Age Issue 12

Please forward the following:

The Editorial Board of The Heroic Age is very pleased to announce the publication of our twelfth issue. Point your browsers to http://www.heroicage.org and click on "Current Issue." Information elsewhere on the site has also been updated including the staff, links pages, and the Call for Papers. Please take a look; comments are always welcome. I have taken the liberty of pasting below the Letter from the Editor which has some items of interest in it.

§1. Sumer is icumen in! Or so said the poet, in agreement with the weather prognosticators for once. It is both a frustration and an embarrassment that the Winter issue is seeing the light of day as summer is fast approaching, but regrettably that is too often the state of affairs in academic publishing. But it isn't for lack of trying.

§2. So, I'd like to begin by mentioning the important people who volunteer their time to make The Heroic Age happen each issue. First, and foremost, there are three people who work very hard to make each issue come together, edited, polished, and coded. Deanna Forsman, our webster, formats and codes each page on our website, including each issue, taking time from her own academic duties and courses, family, and leisure to do so. Without her efforts, there would be no The Heroic Age. Eileen Joy has done an enormous amount of work for the journal. Not only is she now editing a column for us, but she has been a reader, an editor, and copy editor. It is not as if she is not busy elsewhere: in addition to her work for us, she has been editing volumes of essays (http://www.siue.edu/babel/ProspectusFragmentsVolume.htm), putting together a new journal (www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/), blogging at In the Middle (www.inthemedievalmiddle.com), and other activities. I am very grateful for all her efforts with The Heroic Age. Last but certainly not least, Bill Schipper is our archivist and is another of those wonderful people whose helping hand is everywhere. In addition to his work with us, Bill is planning and hosting the next meeting of The International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, hosts and manages several well-known email lists in early Medieval Studies, and of course has his own work to undertake. My very grateful thanks to each of these three for their very hard work on my behalf.

§3. In addition to those three, others have had a hand in producing this issue who should be mentioned: Rolf Bremer, Tim Clarkson, Michael Treschow, Linda Malcor, Rolf Bremmer, Dan O'Donnell, and Michel Aaij have all undertaken editing at several levels. Finally, I will mention our readers, who will remain nameless for obvious reasons, but they know who they are. The only reward I can offer all these people is my sincere gratitude. If you have a moment whether via email or at a conference, please say "thanks" to these folk who have made this issue possible.

§4. Before turning to the issue itself, there are some exciting developments in connection with the links pages hosted at the journal's site. For this issue, the Anglo-Saxon links have been culled, weeded, and expanded. Ten years ago, in winter 1999, when I first split the Anglo-Saxon links off into their own subpage, I had grand plans to do the same for other subfields within the journal's purview. While it won't make it for Issue 12, there is at least one subsection and possibly two in development that will make debut appearances in Issue 13.

§5. More importantly, and in my view far more exciting, is a new development for some older but useful tools. As many know, the Richard Rawlinson Center at the Medieval Institute (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval) of Western Michigan University once hosted several online bibliographies and other projects that covered a range of subjects in Early Medieval Studies. A few years ago, some decisions were made that caused the removal of these tools from the Richard Rawlinson Center website, at that time intended to be a temporary situation. Several years later, however, the bibliographies remain inaccessible to the medieval researcher. These bibliographies are now in the process of being migrated to The Heroic Age site and will be linked off the HA links pages. There are many to thank for these developments. First, and foremost, Paul E. Szarmach, now Director of the Medieval Academy of America (http://www.medievalacademy.org), James M. Murray and Elizabeth Teviotdale of the Medieval Institute, and Bill Schipper and the good folks at Memorial University of Newfoundland (http://www.mun.ca) are all owed a deep debt of gratitude for allowing this to happen and making the migration possible. As of this writing, the first such bibliography, Robert Fulk and Kari Ellen Gade's online edition of A Bibliography of Germanic Alliterative Meters, is almost ready to go to its new home and may be included in Issue 12's update links release.

§6. Turning to our regular features for this issue, I would like to draw your attention to a new column: Philological Inquiry written by Michael Drout and Scott Kleinman. The plan is for this to be a recurring column on philological approaches to the field. This first foray examines the word "Merovingian" in Beowulf in order to "illuminate culture, history and politics and shed new light on an old problem." Please join me in welcoming Mike and Scott and this new contribution to our columns.

§7. Eileen Joy has edited a second offering in our still new "babelisms" column. The column is devoted to publishing essays that explore convergences between early medieval and modern texts and ideas. In this issue's column, Helen T. Bennett offers a meditation on halls in Beowulf: "The Postmodern Hall in Beowulf: Endings Embedded in Beginnings."

§8. In Michel Aaij's Continental Business column, Michel reviews and discusses recent scholarly works on Rabanus Maurus, and Dan O'Donnell returns as columnist of Electronic Medievalia with "Byte me: Technological Education and the Humanities." This rounds out our recurring columns.

§9. Elsewhere in this issue's Forum, Jonathan Jarrett, well-known to many as the blogger behind A Corner of Tenth Century Europe (http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com) and author of the forthcoming Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia: Charters and Connections on a medieval frontier from the Royal Historical Society, contributes to our ongoing series about current developments in subfields of medieval studies. He offers us "Digitizing Numismatics: getting the Fitzwilliam Museum's coins to the world-wide web." As this issue's installment of our series introducing projects in the field, Margaret Cormack introduces us to her site and asks for readers' aid in a column titled "Saints and Sacred Space: An Interactive Database—A Call for Collaborators." Howard Wiseman offers a review essay on a fiction novel, Albion. Finally, Cullen Chandler offers a review essay discussing several recent books on things Carolingian in his contribution titled "Regna et Regnum: Studies of Regions within the Carolingian Empire."

§10. We have three excellent articles in this issue. Karmen Lenz examines the liturgy for St. Cuthbert in her Liturgical Readings of the Cathedral Office for Saint Cuthbert. This is followed by Douglas Simms who contributes an article focused on linguistics titled Heavy Hypermetrical Foregrounding in the Old Saxon Heliand and Genesis Poems. Rounding out the General Article section is a team-sponsored article titled King Alfred's Scholarly Writings and the Authorship of the First Fifty Prose Psalms by Michael Treschow, Paramjit Gill, and Tim B. Swartz that examines the attribution of these psalms to Alfred. These three very solid and interesting articles complete the issue.

§11. Looking ahead, Issue 13 is already well under way. Originally imagined as an issue to focus on medieval manuscripts, as it turns out, the issue will instead focus on translations from early medieval texts! Nonetheless, the issue will also include articles on Old Norse, Hincmar, and Arthur plus our usual columns.

§12. Issue 14 is in development as well. Its a twin-themed issue guest-edited by Andrew Rabin and Eileen Joy. Andrew is collecting and editing a group of essays on Early Medieval Law. Eileen has gathered and is editing a number of essays on the topic of theory and early medeival literature. I myself enjoy the juxtaposition of a traditional topic with a more cutting-edge, perhaps even edgeless topic and placing these in conversation. If all goes well, this issue should be published in early 2010.

§13. The Heroic Age will celebrate its first decade in 2010. We formed the board in late 1999 and published our inaugural issue in Spring 2000, imagined then as appearing quarterly. That first issue was all about Arthur. Our fifteenth issue is scheduled to be published in mid-2010 and is seeking papers on "Arthur-related" topics, revisiting the edges of that first issue. The three sections currently planned for that issue will cover the world of Late Antique Britain and Gaul, connections with the rest of the continent in Late Antiquity, and new views of the Adventus Saxonum. The second section will examine Arthur and Arthurian literature. The third section will include studies of Late Antique and Early Medieval authors.

§14. Even further ahead, Issue 16 is already gathering papers. A special section on Alcuin is being guest-edited by James LePree. Issues 17 and 18 are in the planning stages as well. One will be guest-edited by Jonathan Jarrett, mentioned above, on "Carolingian Border-lands" and Issue 18 will focus on Old French/Provencal/Occitan studies. That takes the editorial planning up through the beginning of 2012.

§15. As always, feedback is appreciated. I now turn you over to the issue itself, lest this note become as long as what it introduces! On behalf of the editorial board, our readers, and editors, I hope you the reader enjoy the issue.

Medieval Literature I Didn't Know III.b Bibliography

Way back a long, long time ago now, I introduced Within, aka as De quodam piscatore quem ballena absorbuit. I eventually followed it up with some discussion that suggested that the Latin poem written by Letaldus may actually be a lost Old English piece of literature. I close off my dear Within poem with the following bibliography. It certainly isn't a vast collection of works, nor is the following necessarily complete. It is interesting to note that even those items I don't list here, what interest there has been in the poem generally is from French scholarship by and large. Paul Pascal, by the way, is the professor of the course in which I first encountered this poem mentioned in the first post. Anyway, here it is....


Ziolkowski, Jan. "Folklore and Learned Lore in Letaldus's Whale Poem" in Viator v. 15 (1984), 107-18.

Haureau, Barthelemy, "Versus Laetaldi monachi de quodam piscatore quem ballena absorbuit," in Bulletin du Comite historique des monuments ecrits de l'histoire de France (1849) 178-83.

Wilmart, Andre, "Le poeme heroique de Letald sur Within le pecheur." Studi Medievali n. s. 9 (1936) 188-203.

Pascal, Paul, "The Poem of Letaldus: A New Edition," in Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Rara Avis in Saxonia ed. Katherina M. Wilson, Medieval and Renaissance Monograph Series 7 (Ann Arbor: MARC, 1987) 211-28.

Ziolkowski, Jan M. Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Musing on the One Footed

I've mentioned previously that I'm working my way slowly through the readings in E. V. Gordon's An Introduction to Old Norse. I know a few Tolkienistas occasionally check in here who are not otherwise medievalists, so I'll mention that just in case the Gordon name rings a bell that he was a friend, colleague, and collaborator with Tolkien. Gordon was tutored by Tolkien in 1920, and then followed Tolkien to Leeds where together they formed a reading group for undergrads in Old Norse at Leeds. There's more, but this is about the one-footed, so if you're curious, the best place to look is here.

ANYWAY...in reading Throfinn's saga I've come to the spot where Thorvald, Erik's son is killed by a Einfoetingr, a one-footer, who shoots Thorvald with an arrow and then outruns his Viking pursuers and gets away. In a footnote, Gordon remarks on how historically there is no such being, and that the Einfoetingr are not native to Norse folklore but borrowed from Latin. The "monocoli" from Greek monokwloi, the one-legged, make an appearance in Pliny's Natural History who says, citing a Greek author Ctesias, "...he speaks also of another race of men, who are known as Monocoli, who have only one leg, but are able to leap with surprising agility. The same people are also called Sciapodæ: because they are in the habit of lying on their backs, during the time of the extreme heat, and protect themselves from the sun by the shade of their feet." Isidore of Seville takes up the tale and passes it on to the Middle Ages where these chaps live on in folklore.

Its an interesting intrusion into the Eirik Saga. It is likely that if Thorvald's death were real by arrow, that a native got him from behind a tree, and that is something that the saga writers have no difficulty reporting. I have no real answer as to why these mythical beings show up in the saga and there may be no answer.

Attentive readers will have noticed that Pliny's and Isidore's Monopods or Monocoli are the source for C. S. Lewis' Dufflepuds in Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Umberto Eco in Baudolino also has a monopod character.

Anyway, there you have it, at least as far as I've gone at the moment. Narratively I can't think of how the Einfoetingr adds to the tale in any way. The other version of Thorvald's death in the Greenland Saga simply has him die in a skirmish with the Skraeling, the word used to describe the North American peoples the Vikings encounter. Here, he is killed not in a skirmish, but by being shot in the groin with an arrow by the Einfoetingr. Now, if we apply some notions of "the other" we can interpret and look at the Norse encounters with the North Americans as a series of encounters with the "monstrous" and with "outcasts". Thus, I'm told many have thought that the intrusion of the Einfoetingr into the story is a later embroidery and likely motivated by reducing the North Americans to a level with other strange and outlandish tribes and beasts who dwell in unknown, uncolonized, borderplaces. Of course, the attraction to this approach is that one need not dwell overlong on the question of historicity...did a one-legged man kill Thorvald. (Not to be confused with the One-Armed man of The Fugitive).

My thought is that coupled with the distance that they note as they chase the One-Footer (the mountains look like those of Hop, too far from their winter quarters), Thorvald's comment as he lay dieing that they've found a land of plenty that they'll never be able to utilize, seems an etiology for why they did not settle permanently in North America, the "otherness" of the One-Footer adding versimilitude to the excuse. Interesting stuff though.

Not the Post I Intended

I have another post almost ready to go, but while the two of you who read this wait with o, such bated breath for the pearls of my wisdom, I thought I'd share this gem from McSweeneys titled Norse Spirituals.

Serendipities

At long last catching up on some posts. This is a strange set of coincidences that only has a smidge of medieval content, but here goes anyway.

I'm reading a book recommended by Favorite Spouse, in fact she made me promise that once the diss was done and in that this was the book that I would read. Well, I did promise, though I didn't actually start any book until pretty recently, and I'm now reading this one. I'll post on it later so I can render a full review.

But the topic of the book is in part about the voyages of Captain Cook in the Pacific. The chapter I'm reading now talks about the Maori and Cook meeting the first time in New Zealand in what is now called Poverty Bay.

The first serendipity is that on Saturday just as I was beginning this chapter, Favorite Spouse found a new TV show to entertain us. On the Spike channel is a show called "Deadliest Warrior" in which some computer guy, a medic, and another guy pit two of histories warriors against each other. The categories they measure are: short, medium, and long range weapons, defense, strength etc, and they enter numbers into a computer program, and then they run 1000 simulated battles and based on the outcome of the battles, declare a winner. We viewed five episodes, Viking vs. Samurai, Spartan vs. Ninja, Pirate vs. Knight, Green Beret vs. Soviet Spetnaz, and last but not least, Maori vs. Shaolin. Those of you who recall the TV series Kung Fu will recall that Kane the hero was a Shaolin. SO I learned all about Maori weapons and psych warfare....and then picked up my book to read about Cook encountering the Maori and those very weapons. It was much easier to visualize the weapons having just seen them on TV.

The second serendipity is that I've been reading--well, ok, reading isn't the word--, uh, wrestling my way through the readings E. V. Gordon's Old Norse textbook in an effort to gain greater facility in the language. I'm on the section from Eirik the Red's saga where the saga writer details the various encounters with Native Americans: curiosity, trade, battle. It is interesting to note the similarities in the encounters between Erik and and his men with the Americans and Cook and his men with the Maori. Certainly there are differences in detail, but overall the encounters are not unlike each other and its hard not to think of Erik when reading Cook and vice versa at the moment.

HA CFP

Call for Papers


The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe invites submissions for our upcoming issues. In each issue, we plan to publish papers on any topic that falls approximately in the era between 300 and 1200 CE and within the general geographical region of Northwestern Europe and periods, and areas. Each issue contains:

*a general section of papers and notes that covers any topic in our range of dates and geography;
*a themed section of papers on an announced topic;
*a Forum section of review essays, special topics, and the like;
*a number of columns dealing with aspects of Early Medieval scholarship and research

Thus, The Heroic Age publishes the following types of materials:
*Feature Articles;
*Notes;
*Review Essays;
*Editions and Translations;
*History by Biography;*Book Reviews;
*Film and Television Reviews.

The following special sections are planned for future issues:

Issue 15: Ten Year Anniversary Issue: The World of Late Antique Britain.
For our ten-year anniversary, The Heroic Age is planning to revisit the topic of its first issue, the Matter of Arthur. Issue 15 will have three sections. The first will be historical, examining the world of Late Antique Britain, connections with the rest of the continent in Late Antiquity, and new views of the Adventus Saxonum. The second section will examine Arthur and Arthurian literature. The third section will include studies of "understudied" early medieval authors. Deadline for submissions is November 2009.

Issue 16: Alcuin and His Impact
Alcuin spans the Anglo-Saxon and Continental worlds and his influence is felt far beyond his own period and place. This issue seeks to explore the man, his times, and his influence on his contemporaries and on subsequent generations.The Heroic Age

Issue 17: Carolingian Border-Lands.
This issue seeks to explore the lands and peoples surrounding the Carolingian kingdom(s) and their impact on the Carolingians.

Future planned issues include themed sections on Old French/Provencal/Occitan studies, Charlemagne, Rise of the Normans, and Study of the Bible in Late Antiquity and Early Medieval Europe.

Articles should be 7000 words including bibliography and endnotes, and conform to The Heroic Age's in-house style. Instructions may be found under Submission Instructions. All submissions will be reviewed by two readers according to a double-blind policy. All submission should be sent to Larry Swain at haediting@yahoo.com

Its that time....

Ah, April's showers have given way to the darling buds of May, and the annual medievalization of thousands of conference goers occurs, wending their winding ways to Kalamazoo. For the first time since I began attending 12 years ago, I will not be going this year. So I wish all those who are a very safe journey and a terrific conference. Color me green with envy.

Bede's Brits: Part the First

A while back over at In the Middle, the intellectually redoubtable Karl Steele queried about Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale wherein part of the tale takes place in the kingdom of Bede's Aelle, and a "British gospel book" is mentioned. The discussion was interesting, I think, and covered some good ground.

It was suggested somewhere in the comments that Bede and Chaucer are attempting to "forget" pre-Anglo-Saxon British Christianity, an active process of erasing and overwriting it with "Roman" Anglo-Saxon Christianity. I remarked that Bede and co. are not forgetting, but rather remembering, remembering in order to indict the British (and not the CELTIC!) Christians with failure to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons.

A few weeks later, J. J. Cohen offered a reaction to my statement, though I'm not sure why since he agreed with the veracity of my comments. I offer here then a reaction to the reaction reacting to my reaction to Karl's post posted over a month ago. I will say at the outset that overall, I like the direction Jeffrey has taken, my reaction is mostly regarding how he gets there.

Jeffrey begins his comments that contrast with my own with: "But indicting can be a form of forgetting, especially if the condemnation fundamentally alters the terms of judgment. Moreover, just because Bede and Chaucer state or imply that the Britons did not influence the conversion of the English, should we believe them? Don't both have something at stake in imagining that Northumbrian/Anglian/English Christianity comes not from the Britons but directly from Rome?"

Ok, several things here. While I agree that indicting, especially when done literarily, can be a way of both forgetting and/or altering the terms of judgment. I
By its very nature, such an indictment can never be objective or pure. But I think that there are layers here to uncover about indictment, forgetting, Bede's program, sources, and so on.

First, there's Bede's sources for this indictment. It is well known that Bede is using Gildas the Wise's famous De Excidio Britanniae. In that work, Gildas, a Briton, indicts his own people and blames the Anglo-Saxon invasions on the rebellion and sin of the Britons themselves: sometimes rebellion against God, sometimes against her own citizens, sometimes again foreign kings and rulers.. but rebels all the same. He compares the Britons and the British church to Israel in the Old Testament and says more than once that just as they were tested for their disobedience to God, so the Britons are being tested by the Saxons whom they invited foolishly into their midst.

Gildas describes the supposed depredations inflicted on the Britons by the Saxons. But he nowhere speaks of any kind of evangelism of the Saxons.

Bede takes up Gildas' themes and information into his first book of the history. For this "dark" period of sub-Roman Britain, Bede had three sources: Gildas, the Vita of Germanus of Auxerre, and oral traditions. As regards the British church, Gildas gives us a negative view. The Vita also gives a negative view, presenting Germanus' visits to the island as undertaken to correct heresy that was exploding in the island. Oral traditions it may be safely assumed also presented a fairly negative view since the oral traditions Bede would have known were those of his own people rather than the Britons, and as such, would typically present "the other" in less than positive terms. Thus, all Bede's sources for this period presented the British church in less than a favorable light. As a man of his times, can we really blame Bede then for his image or his indictment, or in other words, do we really have a basis on which to indict Bede for forgetfulness? But before really addressing this question, let's turn to another, related one.

Second, how Christian was Gildas' Britain? Now that is an important question. It is well known that at least since the late second century, there had been Christians on the island. We know they had bishops, churches, dioceses, and there are Christian artifacts etc. And like the rest of the empire, even as late as the fourth century, there were Christians, and there were pagans....mostly pagans. In 382, the emperor Theodosius declared the whole of the empire Christian and began force converting those who weren't (as Augustine would say, and I admittedly paraphrase here, baptize them now, worry about the rest later). But such a program was obviously not thorough, nor completely carried out, and even those who did "convert" did so in pagan fashion--one could and often did observe the rites and beliefs of many gods/religious sects, adding another in the form of the Christian was a political necessity but nothing more. A generation or so later both Jerome and Augustine speak of the pagans amongst the populace of the Empire and write to convince such pagans on various points of truth of the Christian faith. The pagans are still there, in other words, when the Romans withdraw from Britain. That is, the image Gildas gives as a result of his Christian audience is not an accurate image of the religion of sub-Roman Britain.

Now let me be clear here. I'm not saying that there was no British Christianity or that the Christian faith was not well established in Britain by 410. It was. But so was "paganism", or better yet, "pre-Christian religions". Both were there. And interestingly, if Gildas is truly from Strathclyde as the earliest life has it and we compare Patrick also from the Western parts of the island, Ninian traditionally from Cumbrian, Samson of Dol from Gwent in Wales etc. it would seem that the most heavily Christianized area of the island at the time of the Adventus Saxonum was the West, and least Romanized (the Romans were able to only establish one city in Wales, Caerwent).

Thus, when the Saxons began their take over (I've written on a model of it http://theruminate.blogspot.com/2008/03/model-of-sub-roman-britain.htmlhere) they found a significant population of Romano-Celts only nominally Christian if Christian at all and more open to Germanic, non-Christian religion as being more akin to both their native Celtic as well as Roman polytheism than Christianity. It was very easy for them to make the switch in those areas where German or Germanic tribes were taking over.

Romano-Brits of the Christian persuasion continued the depopulation movements that had already been underway in Britain since the late 3rd century, probably now accelerated by the pull out of Rome and moved to more comfortable areas such as Brittany and Gaul. Others who remained carved out kingdoms like other Romano-Celts and early Anglo-Saxons, based on villas or Roman era towns that over time either were swallowed or coalesced into other kingdoms...and either converted, were killed, or fled westward or across the channel.

In short, when the Anglo-Saxons, both those who came as Roman mercenaries, and those who came later, entered Britain they found a religiously diverse populace, and the results of their kingdoms over the course of two centuries was to attract the pagan and repel the Christian.

Third, did the British church evangelize the incoming Saxons? That's a good question, and to some degree unanswerable on the evidence. But some generalizations might be able to be made. If we look at the world of the Western Roman Empire as a whole, we find very little missionary activity. Rodney Stark's model of the spread of Christianity through familial and social networks is the most likely explanation of the growth of the Christian church rather than a great deal of preaching and missions. Even so, missionary activity after the Great Persecution under Diocletian shows a remarkable drop off, Christianity's energies being focused elsewhere in the Empire during the fourth and fifth centuries rather than evangelizing those outside. Even the Germanic tribes had by this time become Christian, at least those that had been in contact with Rome, such as the Goths who became Christianized in the latter half of the third century. Thus, by the time we get to the Roman pull out from Britain etc, there isn't a strong missionary impulse in Late Antique Christianity. Even the mission of Palladius to Ireland was, if the sources are to be believed, not a mission undertaken specifically to convert, but to bolster an already Christian community in Ireland, probably Christianized through contacts with Christians in Britain via trade or even like Patrick through slaves and captives. And Patrick himself is an exception: it would seem to be his own special mission to the Irish, and the church in Gaul reluctantly sent him out, rather than an impulse of British, or even Roman Christianity.

Thus, a) there was likely very little Christianity surviving in Anglo-Saxon areas due to people dieing, fleeing, and being a small part of the population anyway and b) Christianity in general didn't have a strong impulse to evangelize at the time and so we can't really have expected the British Christians to have done so, and c) if Christianity truly spread largely through associations, networks, and family, it would take a strong Christian network in Anglo-Saxon controlled areas to make strong enough inroads to effect Christianization: otherwise there was no benefit by the Anglo-Saxons to entertain the idea. There don't seem to have been such Christian networks in Anglo-Saxon areas of the early period.

Fourth, related to this is the issue of ethnography and religion. Ok, I'm not expressing that well. But this is a tribal culture. Conversions of the various Germanic peoples largely took place en masse....the leadership converts and so did everyone else who was in the tribe...whether by "ethnicity" or by allegiance. And when they did, they did so for multiple reasons that seemed advantageous to them, not just because they suddenly thought the message was better. If there were missionary efforts by the Celts in Britain or Gaul to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons (and there is no known evidence that there were), those efforts seem to have made no inroads and are lost to history. But if there were, what possible reason could the Anglo-Saxons have for converting? They were successfully setting up kingdoms and the Celtic population coming over to their side. They had no need to convert to gain entry to the Empire or to trade with the empire; and later in the late fifth and sixth centuries when the Merovingians rose, they obviously had no problems being allies with the Christian Merovingians. There was simply no advantage to conversion. So any attempts to evangelize would likely have failed anyway.

It isn't until St. Augustine's mission, which gives Æthelberht a reason to convert. He's allied with the Franks. He's married one of their house, Bertha, daughter of f Charibert I. Frankish influence at this point was high: cultural, political, and economic. The Franks, Burgundians, and other Germanic tribes including the Goths were all Christian at this period, and across the Irish Sea, the Irish were embracing the faith as well. Already on Britain's northern shores, Columba had founded Iona. So there is a great deal of pressure, economic, social, cultural, territorial that hadn't existed before. But this mission direct from Rome offers an advantage: Æthelberht can convert and become a Christian WITHOUT in any way, shape, or form, giving the Franks any claim to hegemony over him. It is evident from Bede's recording of Gregory's letter accompanying Augustine and his gaggle of monks that some in Frankia felt that they did have a claim of overlordship over the SE British kingdoms, of which Æthelberht was the chief (himself being according to Bede the overlord south of the Humber). And a Frankish bishop officiating at a conversion of a Saxon king would surely enforce that claim from across the channel. BUT, even with the help of the Franks, the presence of an Italian monk sent from the Bishop of Rome offers an advantage of being to convert without acknowledging or even implying Frankish overlordship: Æthelberht becomes a Christian equal, not a Christian subservient king. Never before from what we know had this confluence of forces offered an opportunity for an Anglo-Saxon king to convert to Christianity: they certainly weren't going to convert to a religion of only a small portion of the people they conquered.

So where does all this leave vis a vis Jeffery's comments? Well, first, indictment can be a method of forgetting, especially if that indictment changes the terms of judgment. Jeffery's absolutely correct. But in the case of Bede, he's not forgetting or changing the terms of judgment. Rather, he's reporting what he's inherited from a representative of the British Church: Gildas. Beyond Gildas, there is no evidence for Celtic attempts or even Gaulish/Frankish attempts to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons. Bede is kinder in some ways to the Frankish Liudbrand, but then he's presented as attempting to convert the king, even if he failed. Nor are Bede and Gildas lying: there would have been little impetus to evangelize. What either author makes of that fact is a bit different than the fact itself. Jeffrey asks whether we should believe Bede (and Chaucer), and leaving Chaucer out of it for the moment, yes, we should. While the spin Bede puts on the historical facts and his sources is obviously driven by something other than "pure" history, the facts he reports seem borne out by modern historical research and archeology.

Now admittedly, Jeffrey continues and quotes from his book Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles that at least on the surface would seem to respond to some of what I've written here. But this post is already quite long and I want to deal with another issue in the brief quote cited above. So I will table that discussion for a follow up post; this one has been 3 weeks in the making with other posts backing up behind it. Thus, I'll finish this one, post the others, and return to this topic (and to Karl's Man of Law bit on which I have further thoughts too) in the near future, probably whilst you all are in K'zoo. All 2 of you who've read this far.

So, the other issue Jeffrey raises is that Bede and Chaucer, lumped together in his comment, have "something at stake" in "imagining" that Christianity in the island came from Rome. So let's deal with Bede first.

What does Bede have at stake? On the one hand, not much at all. While the Bishop of Rome is probably the most important of those in the West and certainly has influence, he is nowhere at the time of Bede as central as he will be in the age of Chaucer. By the time Bede dies in 735, it is still some 20 years from the beginning of the Franco-Papal alliance that will help shape political events in Europe for 1100 years; and almost 50 years from Charlemagne's direct involvement in papal affairs. So, Bede and the Anglo-Saxons on this view have little to gain from such an association with Rome.

Culturally and intellectually, however, the story is a bit different. Once they adopted Christianity, they more or less went "neutral" you could say. Bede tells us that Northumbrian Christianity came from Ireland, Southumbrian from Rome and that eventually on certain matters of doctrine (Easter calculation, monastic tonsure), the North aligned itself with Rome (though Bede and other Northumbrian writers record a large number of practices and interpretations of the Bible, world etc. that very obviously have Irish and/or British roots). But, there was a great deal to gain in cultural, Christian economy by having the Anglo-Saxon church beholden to Rome rather than Frankia or Ireland much less British Christians. As already stated with Æthelberht, it gave the Anglo-Saxon churches freedom: they were not under the aegis of Merovingian or Carolingian bishops, however much the continentals influenced the Anglo-Saxons culturally. Likewise, in the North, it meant that the Nortumbrians would be able to keep independence not only from the Continentals but from the Irish, since many a king and nobleman went to Ireland to be fostered, as monks, or to escape negative, political climes. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, a topic I hope to return to. But yes, Bede has a stake in presenting the English church as aligned with Rome.

But does it then follow that Bede is "imagining"? Imaging, ok, that is probably more accurate. But as we've seen above, there was little if any evangelization coming from the British church or the Gaulish/Frankish church. And Bede is quite explicitly clear that in Northumbria, Christianity was *successfully* planted by the Irish and King Oswald--the mission of Paulinus is presented by Bede as having failed (another topic I intend to return to). And we know that the so-called Council of Whitby changed orientation of the Northumbrian church somewhat (not completely: while there was embrasure of Roman Easter dating and tonsure styles, there is still a great deal that is "Irish" in Northumbrian Christianity). We see the results in the manuscripts and archeology. It isn't merely a view dependent on Bede. So is Bede "imagining" this? I'd have to say no. He is certainly using history to construct an image and put a certain spin, to emphasize and embellish even, but not imagine.

Now what about Chaucer? Does he have a stake? Sure. By the 14th century, Bede's history is taken as "gospel". Bede has become in the intervening 7 centuries an "auctoritas" of the distant past that educated readers in Chaucer's day read, respect, and who passes down to them what they need to know. And of course in those centuries, the Roman pontiff had risen to become the head of *the* international superpower of the day. Does Chaucer really "imagine" that the English church has roots in the Augustinian mission from Rome? Of course not. Why should he? From his point of view, its history, and in the gaps in the history, he's able to compose a story that isn't really based in history but takes what he knows of as historical elements. And of course, it isn't really Chaucer at all....Chaucer himself is dependent on Trevet's Anglo-Norman world history from the 1330s and on Gower who also tells a version of the tale; all the sources however see the "Roman mission" to England as historical fact. So yes, Chaucer too has something at stake.

But does that mean that Bede should not be believed? Did the British church influence the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons? If it did, it's lost to history, not simply because Bede forgot, but his sources forgot to...and his source, Gildas let us remember, is a British Christian leader and is in a position to know. So did Gildas forget? That's another question altogether. But given the considerations briefly outlined above, I don't think so.

But clearly Bede is up to something that does skew the view a bit. He indicts the British church. BUt a) he does not so indict the Irish church which did not evangelize apparently until invited to do so and b) nor the Gaulish church who seemingly only sent a bishop over with Bertha and not a mission team. Clearly then, Bede's indictment is a skewing of the picture, but Bede is uneven in his treatment of the Britons and the British church which complicates the view even more.

23 days since I first began this post, I think its time to post it already. Having said that, let me mention that in the course of composing this a paragraph at a time, that there are some subjects worth returning to in the future.

1) Jeffrey as mentioned cites from his book some material that seems to go to addressing some of the points I've raised here. A hopefully near future post will address that citation and its contents

2) We have to ask what Bede is up to and what is he influenced by in the "Roman centric" picture he gives

3) Medieval Ethnography

4) I'd like to return to Karl Steele's original query about the British gospel in the story; I've had some additional thoughts there.

SO that's it.

Ending with a whimper

Posts have been few and far between again, the result of teaching writing and reading papers and midterms. I have a longish post in process that hopefully will be up by end of the week.

In the meantime, I thought I would share that the paperwork hoops (in their own way far more exhausting and frustrating than a 400 page dissertation) have been completed successfully, deadlines met, fees paid, and I have the graduate school's stamp of approval and they want to know where to send the diploma. 10 years and way too much money in loans, and 15 years of angst, life, and preparation before that, not including undergraduate years and so on. The end of a long journey.

Old Norse-Iceland Lit

I've been plowing through Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide ed. Carol Clover and John Lindow. The edition I have is the second printing in 2005 of this originally 1985 work. This printing was done by U of Toronto Press in association with The Medieval Academy's MART series.

A few years back I asked Favorite Spouse to buy me some Old Norsey related materials for Christmas and birthdays and such in an effort to patch deficiencies in my knowledge of things early medieval. This guide was one of the things she got her hands on and it regrettably has been staring at me from my bookcase ever since. Finally, I got round to reading it. And let me recommend it!

There are only a few chapters:

Mythology and Mythography by John Lindow
Eddic Poetry by Joe Harris
Skaldic Poetry by Roberta Frank
Kings' Sagas by Theodore M. Anderson
Icelandic Family Sagas by Carol J. Clover
Norse-Romance by Marianne Kalinke

Each contribution is followed by a detaild bibliography. I say above that I plowed through it because like plowing, it was hard but worthwhile work. I'm no expert in either Norse language or literature. With some patience I can read Old Norse, and I know and have taught some bits of mythology, eddas, etc. But I certainly do not have the field under my belt. In other words, I know just enough to have been able to follow most of the discussions in the book. The Norse-Romances were but a whisper carried on the wind to me, so that chapter was entirely new to me and very informative too.

One of the things that struck me though, was how much more slowly the field seems to advance in contrast to other early medieval fields. The book was originally in 1985 and supposedly this printing updated the bibliography. But I have to say that overall there were precious few additions in the 20 years between the two printings. Further, so many of the major positions and works mentioned in the course of the various discussions were early 20th century, few of the major positions dated to after the 1950s (in fact, at the moment I can not recall a single one dating to the post 50s period). Seems to me to be a field that could be fruitful to a student or 20.

At any rate, I'm not in a position to offer a real review. Still, I found the book useful for outlining the major positions in the field of Old Norse lit and giving the basic bibliography to look into various questions and issues. One weakness though is that it included no discussion of religious literature: homilies, commentaries, hagiography etc; and other than the Romances, offered no discussion of translations: not from Latin, Old English, or other vernacular. Yet we know there were plenty of both. And while not technically "literature", a chapter on language would have been helpful too (though with index and bibliography the thing clocks in at 386 pages already! Suppose the ol' print process can't do everything!). And admittedly the preface acknowledges that many a subfield is necessarily omitted.

So I learned a great deal, didn't understand or grasp a great deal more, and am glad I read it. One reviewer of the original made nice noises about the book being destined to be a classic on every bookshelf of those who work in Old Norse and adjacent fields. And there I have to agree. Kudos to the Favorite Spouse! In fact, I've used just today in updating a paper I'm writing. So it is a good one to have to hand.

So now the interactive question: outside Anglo-Saxon studies, what are the standard bibliographic books (books that give overviews) in other early medieval fields?

Medieval Literature I Didn't Know III.a: Within Again

Over two months ago now I wrote about a great little poem by Letaldus about an English fisherman who gets swallowed by a whale, who escapes by burning his boat in the belly of the beast, but once ashore needs the aid of the townspeople to finally be set free. In his delightful little tale, Letaldus overlays his narration with references to Vergil and comments frequently on Jonah and the typological significance of Jonah and takes Within in the same vein.

Jan M. Ziolkowski has written the most in English on the poem. There are some recent Italian works that I've not seen but will include in the bibliography. But Ziolkowski takes on the typical dismissal of the poem as a delightful, and beautifully done, fable and otherwise little to no attention paid to it. Ziolkowski argues that Letaldus and his audience would have thought this "historical" in some sense: 1) plenty of whale stories around 2) Letaldus treats this story just as he does his other "historical" works 3) Letaldus says at the beginning of the poem that a worthy elder told him this story. Among other reasons, Ziolkowski then believes that Letaldus and his audience would have accepted this as a "true story" and took opportunity to treat it as an "exemplum."

Ziolkowski however considers a possibility that I don't believe anyone else has previously, and then sets it aside. That possibility is that the story Letaldus received might be an oral poem, since he says that an elder reported the tale to him. Ziolkowski dismisses the idea eventually, after noting that other than the possibility that the leonine rhymes that sometimes occur may be an attempted reflection of alliteration but may just as plausibly be rhetorical flourish learned in school. So he thinks that the story itself might be historical or at least reported as historical, is in origin a "fisherman's tale" and Letaldus took it and make a lesson of it, himself also considering itself historical.

I happen to disagree. What I wonder and am thinking about and have done so for some time, is whether we have a Norman Latinization of an Old English literary work. Quite apart from tales with whales, etc, here's the case as I currently think.

1) Letaldus tells us that he got this story from someone else, an elder of great age. Since Letaldus is writing this c. 1000, such an elder would likely have been a young man in the beginning of the English Benedictine Reform. And since part of the story depends on a punning in Old English that a non-speaker of English likely will not get, it isn't a stretch to say that Letaldus' source is an Englishman.

2) The relationship between oral and written traditions is more fluid than I think Ziolkowski allows. Much of the poetry and other types of literature we have in Old English and Anglo-Latin comes to us in written form, but was likely oral in origin. The most famous example well-known to all is Beowulf, but that is not the only example.

3) We also know of some translations of works from Old English to Latin. Two are poetic in nature, Caedmon's Hymn and the Waltharius (recognizing that this may come not from the Old English Waldere but from another Germanic form of the story, nonetheless, as the plethora of works in the Fulk-Gade Bibliography of Alliterative Germanic Verse (think I have that title right) shows that Germanic poetry shared many common elements). Neither truly reflects the Old English or Germanic penchant for alliteration and the latter in fact has been utterly recast into Vergilian hexameters and diction, yet remains at heart a Germanic, originally vernacular poem. So we need not see in Letaldus' treatment of the story evidence of alliteration or other Old English poetic features.

4) We do know as well that the late tenth century in England was producing a number of contacts between England and the continent. In terms of "Frankia", there is linguistic borrowing and influence, translations, and of course the borrowing of Letaldus' sometime opponent, Abbo of Fleury, and of course the influence of the Benedictine Reform on the reform movement spawned in England itself.

5) There is also a growing body of literature obviously composed to teach while entertaining. Some of it was composed early and was pressed back into service such as poems like Genesis A and B, Exodus, Daniel, and the like. Others were somewhat newly composed in the tenth century such as Soul and Body, etc. But there is certainly a growing body of literature, poetry and prose, designed to teach Christian catechism to the faithful. The "Within" story of Letaldus fits into that pattern very, very well.

6) The story's hero is Within. Especially when the fisherman Within answers the question of who is within the whale (Within is within), we see an obvious Old English pun (not the only place where such occurs in the Latin poem, but one of the prominent ones). It is unlikely that Letaldus, not known to have known English, introduced this element, and if this were simply a reporting of a "true" tale it is a feature not known to me from prose.

7) Further along the path of the name, we have several examples of "pun" names in Old English (and other Germanic) literature that are not attested in the historical record. Hondscio from Beowulf, hand-shoe, or glove ends up in Grendel's glove; Widsith, wide-farer, is the narrator of a poem about how he's traveled far and wide....and yet these are not attested as names of real people. And even where we have names of this nature that also appear in the historical record, such as Deor or even Wiglaf, in the poetic literature the name has significance for the theme and development of the story. Within is not recorded so far as I've been able to ascertain as a name of anyone historical, but the name very obviously has importance for the poem, especially for the climax. This fits the pattern of Old English poetry, and there are no such traces of such knowledge in Letaldus' other works.

8) Jonah was well known as a type of Christ and the sermonic elements introduced into the poem drawing attention to Jonah and his sojourn in the whale would also likely be from the source, though Letaldus was more than capable of introducing them. But such lessons in Old English poetry are also known and for those materials composed in the tenth century made rather explicit.

That is the current state of my thinking. I need to spend some time with the poem again, looking at a number of details. But at the moment, it is my belief, and belief it is rather than any thing more substantial, that Letaldus has retold a previously unknown Old English poem.

BBC Article of Note

'Oldest English words' identified: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7911645.stm

Dead Sea Scrolls and Medieval Manuscripts

I'm composing my follow up post to the Within poem I talked about almost two months ago now, in usual piecemeal fashion. But whilst I do that, the news came across my desktop today that a study was done on one of the Dead Sea Scrolls' ink, the so-called Thanksgiving Scroll. For those not up on some of the issues, the traditional view of DSS and the community that produced them has been that on the shores of the Dead Sea there was an ascetic community with a scriptorium who produced the majority if not all of the DSS and hid them at the approach of the Romans c. 68 CE. There are those who have questioned either the whole or parts of this reconstruction: little evidence of a scriptorium for example and there's the whole alternative theory by a guy at U Chicago whose name is escaping me at the moment but whose book I read some years ago that argues that the DSS are someone's (or someones') library from Jerusalem taken to the wilderness to hide as the Romans closed in, but never retrieved, and so nothing to do with an Essene community at all.

Anyway, that's a gross oversimplification, and so somewhat wrong, but it will do as a set up for the news. The study determined that at least on that scroll, the ink was prepared with waters from the Dead Sea, and so it is likely then that the scroll was written or copied in the vicinity.

Interesting evidence, and while it doesn't prove that the DSS were composed, or even that scroll, were written at Qumran, it is rather suggestive that it was. In addition to that news, though, I wonder in the face of the DNA studies on sheep and calf skin that have been in the news of late, and Michael Drout's similar project, if there might not be a need and interest in doing similar ink studies on medieval manuscripts. There are a large number of unprovenanced manuscripts in our modern repositories that could at least be given a possible point of origin by testing ink composition with the waters of rivers, lakes, etc in and around monastic sites.

There are some of course that would resolve some longstanding issues: the Vinland Map for example. That map's ink has been tested, specifically to look for modern elements in the ink, such as commercial grade anatase. But since the map and the manuscript it appears in are part of another manuscript as I recall, it might worth testing the inks of the various pieces and their composition. If one has ink with water from England in the map and ink with water from Poland in the rest, for example, it demonstrates the map wasn't produced by the same scribe in spite of the similar palaeographical features....and I'm going off my memory so may be misreporting a fact or two.

But who wouldn't want to know precisely where Junius 11 was produced? Or the Augustine Gospels? Certainly there are others, Boernianus would be a good one to consider. Anyway, worth thinking about....find the water, find the origin site.

PEAA Awards Redux

There's been enough interest I think in the PEAA awards that I think I shall do them for 2009 too. So here's the deal: rather than wait until December before asking for nominations: simply nominate now. Read a blog post, hear a podcast, see an article or book that you think deserving? Send it to me at larsprec@gmail.com In Dec I'll send out a call for nominations, but also publish all those that have come in over the course of the year for people to vote on. No limits on number of nominations per person or per blog etc....just email me what you think good and deserving of recognition.

My First Tolkien Post: How Tolkien Helped Me With Aelfric

A few people on the Usenet group rec.arts.books.tolkien, a group I joined on the first or second day of its creation back in the early 90s and first posted to in 1994 on Leaf by Niggle, found this blog through Mike Drout's reference to it regarding the PEAA awards (more on which anon). So in honor of them, this is my first Tolkien post.

I'm not sure why I haven't really had a Tolkien related post before. Tolkien and Lewis were rather influential on my early thinking and imagination and I'm hoping to continue to make both part of my academic as well as my entertainment endeavors. But here's the story:

One of the first Old English poems I read in its entirety in the original language was Exodus. I later discovered, or rather rediscovered, that Tolkien taught this poem many times, and had even worked on an edition and commentary, later edited and published by Turville-Petre. One of the oddities in that poem for those familiar with the Biblical story is that the children of Israel went south out of Egypt but couldn't go further because they encountered the land of "sigelware", too often glossed as "Ethiopian" without further ado.

I decided, out of interest, some years back to collect and read not just Tolkien and Lewis (and Sayers for that matter) professional and scholarly works and not limit myself simply to their creative output--a move that eventually moved me to consider becoming a medievalist. One that I had difficulty locating and reading was the two part "Sigelware Land" published in 1932 and '34 in Medium Aevum. But eventually I found it and read it with interest, and it made it into my discussions about Exodus in the Tolkien Encyclopedia and elsewhere.

Now, one of the things Tolkien does in those 2 articles is detail where the term occurs in Old English literature, or some form of the term. One of the most prolific users of the word is Aelfric, and this before now has elicited little comment. One of the places that Aelfric uses the term is in the Letter to Sigeweard where he talks about Matthew's demise, in Latin sources said to be among "the Ethiopians." I used Aelfric as a watershed in determining why he uses the term so often, and uses it in that specific and particular context.

Before Aelfric c. 1000, Genesis A, Exodus, and Cynewulf use the term in poetry, and in prose the Old English Martyrology and Alfred the Great in the Paris Psalter. All other instances of the word or form thereof are roughly contemporary with Aelfric or post-date him. There is no evidence that Aelfric knew the Martyrology (and if Lapidge is correct, done by Acca in the early 8th century and contemporary with Genesis and Exodus) or the Paris Psalter. But I have argued that Aelfric derives the term or at least resuscitates it in prose from Genesis, Exodus, and Cynewulf's Fates of the Apostles....all poems that I argue in the grand, sprawling, never ending dissertation influence Aelfric. Interestingly, he uses the term in exactly the same place and in the same way as Cynewulf does in the Fates, and elsewhere similarly to the Exodus poet. This to me was simply the last cherry on top of the sundae that sought to illustrate Aelfric's dependence on those poems. But I wouldn't have even thought twice about it had it not been for Tolkien's articles on the meaning of the word in Exodus 69.

I happen to think that Tolkien's study of the term has a lot to do with his mythology and LoTR, things I unfairly hinted at in articles for The Tolkien Encyclopedia ed. by Michael Drout. But perhaps if I have time I'll outline what those are in preparation to a pair of articles on Tolkien, one about Exodus and one about the study itself that I'll blog here too.

Healthy Fields? And What About the Rest of You?

Since my last post on what I'm reading, back in Sept, I've been a bit whelmed with editing, course prep, in-laws, outlaws, and the like. And my wife bought me cooking magazines and professional journals which have kept me busy and away from ancient/medieval books and such. But in the midst and process of all that, I did find the time to read through back issues of the Old English Newsletter. I'd missed reading a number of issues, 39.4 to 41.1, so six issues total.

From the perspective of the OEN, Old English and Anglo-Saxon studies is a healthy field. There's some really impressive and great work going on. One would wish to see more Names studies, but they were never great in number anyway. But the other linguistic fields receive great attention, wearying even to me who has some theoretical linguistics training! But all fields of endeavor seem to be thriving, and not just in the USA and Britain and Canada. There's a proper showing of articles/books/conference papers in Australia, South Africa, Spain, Russia, Eastern Europe, Korea, Japan, and even South America. At times energizing because some article or book or paper piqued my interest, or just seeing all that great work in the field makes me want to get more of my work out there. At other times, ennui set in: with so much good work going on, surely there's no one interested in a 55 page article on a half-line in Beowulf. Mostly though, energizing, exciting me to want to do more and look into more things. But the point is, there a lot of mind blowing good stuff being done in Anglo-Saxon studies.

This is of course of interest to me since in the last Heroic Age we published a discussion of the current state of things in Anglo-Saxon studies. And internally there are great signs of health. And from a medievalism point of view, there are great signs of health. From other perspectives, not so much. But I've talked about this before in this and other venues and what we can do about it.

It has made me wonder though. What about other fields?

1) Is there in say Carolingian studies or Old Norse studies tools like OEN? I don't mean just journals, etc, but a bibliography in the field that is regularly updated?

2) If not, would there be interest?

Congress Program

The 2009 Congress Program is live and online! Spread the word:

http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/index.html