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

Sigeweard

For those interested, there's a somewhat corrected version of my diss up at my site: www.geocities.com/theswain/sigeweard/ultima. I'll be submitting this version to the graduate school on Monday. It will have to come down then, as I'm signing the piece of paper that says DIA or whatever their called has permission etc and so on. BUT I'll leave the page up with my email so that anyone who wants to circumvent that may contact me.

Announcing PEAA Awards

Award for Best Blog Entry of the Year

There is no award for this category. There were nominations: some nominated a post from a history oriented blog, some from theory blogs, some literature, our humorists gained votes. And in a few cases, some blogs received multiple votes, but utterly different individual posts were suggested! So no single blog entry received more than one vote. The problem isn't with my colleagues' blogs, methinks, but with the category's very general nature. Should I do this next year, I will refine.

Award for Blog Entry that Fueled Research

This too is a category not worded properly. But the intent is to find out what blog entry written by someone other than the nominator caused the nominator to take on some research (though there were some who nominated their own blog entries, that once written, fueled research and are now being written up into papers).

The winner getting the most votes is Jonathan Jarrett's Carolingian Charters Series.

Award for Blog That Best Serves the Medieval Community

This was a hard one, many votes. There were 2 that came out on top, but the winner by a nose is The Great Nokes' Unlocked Wordhoard. Congratulations Scott!

Recognition for Best Electronic Article on a Medieval Topic

No nominations in this category. So I'll propose one. Really 4 articles in a column, but three began as blog posts before showing up in the Heroic Age. State of the Field in Anglo-Saxon Studies

Award for Best Entry Making Fun of Ourselves

Well, the monkey manuscript images at Got Medieval received some votes, but the most votes went to Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog


Best New Medieval Book of the Year

Only one nomination in this category, and it was for a 2007 book: Alaric Hall's Elves in Anglo-Saxon England

Best Medievalism Web Site of the Year


the PEAA goes to: Got Medieval?

Best Podcast on Medieval Subject

There were several nominees in this category, which surprised me especially as I added it late. The nominees are all worth mentioning:

Scott Farrell's www.ChivalryToday.com was a frequent vote getter.

All Things Medieval also received some nods, a site I had not known about before.

Scott Nokes podcasts for Old English class was mentioned, though I don't know that he was able to finish the podcasts or get them collected into a site.

But the PEAA goes to: Anglo-Saxon Aloud--what a great project. I would love to see some similar endeavors in other Medieval literatures!

There were several categories that nothing was nominated in. Obviously some refinement is necessary.

But let me say that I always find my fellow medieval bloggers a collegial and informative group. Thank you all, even those not mentioned, for all you do for the field and for me personally. Keep writing!

Medieval Literature I Didn't Know III: Within

For this installment, I finally blog the piece that actually inspired the series! It was this poem I had in mind, but then I ran into the Worcester Fragment and was thinking a lot about it and so blogged that instead, and then I've spent the last several months on the beast, in which Worcester Frag A makes an appearance, and voila...the first two installments in the series were done. So here I return to a piece of literature that I dearly love and want to return to and write on.

More than 20 years ago now I had opportunity to take part in a course called Medieval Latin Poetry. I was already at that point thinking about grad schools and being a medievalist and how to go about that. The professor for the course advised me not to do it through a Classics dept, which was what I was thinking at the time. Anyway, one of the poems we read that semester was this one, what I personally call the Within poem, after the main character in the tale. It is technically called De quodam piscatore quem ballena absorbuit, About a Certain Fisherman Whom a Whale Swallowed.

The poem is written by a French monk named Letaldus in the late 10th century. Letaldus is a well known figure, attached to abbeys Le Mans and Micy. He entered the latter c. 960-970 (making him a contemporary of Aelfric by the way). He is best known for a series of hagiographical pieces, the first written between 970-980, the Miracula S. Maximini. In this work, he wove together a story out of previous lives of Maxminus and Carolingian era documents regarding the foundation of the house at Micy and told his story in such a way as to try to wrest Micy from the control of the bishops of Orleans. Some of his works are available here. He also wrote a life of Martin of Vertou, on St. Junianus, a heroic poem titled Versus de eversione monasterii Glomnensis, and other works. Overall his career is marked by concerns for monastic rights over against bishops and secular lords and the cult of saints and saints' lives, often using the latter to say something about the former. He even led a rebellion of sorts against Robert of Blois that Abbo of Fleury disdained calling Letaldus the "head" of the stiinking affair. It was unsuccessful.

In the midst of all this politicking and attempts to establish monastic rights in France, Letaldus writes this tale about a fisherman swallowed by a whale. The story is a fairly simple one: an English fisherman named Within from Rochester sets about his business one day in his coracle. Its a routine day of fishing in the channel, until that is Within and his coracle are swallowed by a whale. For four days and five nights the poor fisherman tries to free himself, eventually setting fire to his boat and grabbing his sword, he kills the whale. The whale washes up miraculously near Rochester, and the villagers come out to get a free meal of whale meat. Within cries out to the townspeople, and they think the whale is possessed of a demon, flee, and fetch the priest. The priest comes, performs an exorcism, and then Within is allowed to tell his story. In the scene when the priest is trying to figure out what's up, he asks who is within and the answer is "Within" which naturally causes all sorts of confusion and misunderstanding. Once all is straightened out, the townspeople free Within by cutting the whale open, and the fisherman emerges bald, blind, and his fingernails protrude, the skin having been eaten away in the whale's belly. But he shortly recovers his hair, sight, and skin and returns to a normal life.

Its a charming, graceful little poem. 208 dactylic hexameters tell the story. Its a mock heroic epic and alludes to the Aeneid and other Latin epics frequently, as well as the obvious Jonah connections. Letaldus creates then a "high literary" tale reserved usually for high matters, kings, national importance etc, and in stead applies all that "high literary" toolbox to a humble fisherman with the unlikely name Within from Rochester. The disjunction and the obvious Old English pun on the name create the humor in the piece that the author claims to have heard.

The audience is obviously one familiar with both oral traditions and stories and with the Bible and Latin epics. Not only told in dactylic hexameters and referring to Latin epic, Letaldus also employs leonine rhymes in imitation of oral poetry.

The poem survived in two manuscripts: one a twelfth century and the other an eleventh century. The 12th century manuscript was destroyed in a fire in 1940. In the 11th century, the piece survives after a copy of Bede's Ecclesiastical History. It's a lovely little poem. In my next post, I'll outline some of the things I've been thinking about it. Well, the PEAA awards need to be compiled first, then a return to Within!