*Appears out of nowhere, bearing Lulz*

UUHEREAS ðe English alphabet haþ been in an vnchanging, ſtatic ſtate for ſome centuries nouu,

KNOUUING ðat flexibility breeds creatiuity and innouation,

IT IS RESOLUED ðat a reuiual and reintroduccioun of certain loſt elements of orthography and the alphabet uuould lead to a flouriſhing of the arts and diuerse intellectual endeauors;

THEREFORE þis post urges all and ſundry to once again integrate þose letters heretofore ſet aſide:

Full explanation at Cliosfolly

Your Semi-Medieval Humour for Today is…

> REYKJAVIK (AP) — Snorri Sturluson, a 12th-century Icelandic poet,
> today filed suit against J.R.R. Tolkien for plagiarizing dwarf-names
> from his work, The Prose Edda.

> Mr. Sturluson, who emerged from a volcano in western Iceland where
> he has been hibernating for 800 years, said that he had only recently
> learned of the similarities between his work and Prof. Tolkien’s The
> Hobbit.

> “Just look at it,” said Mr. Sturluson when interviewed today. “I’ve
> got a Thorin; he’s got a Thorin. I’ve got a Gandalf; he’s got a
> Gandalf. I’ve got Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Dori, Nori, and Ori: so has
> he. Coincidence? I think not!”

Full report at calimac’s livejournal.

Professorial Quote of the Day:

The Bocera explains to his second-year class why Anglo-Saxons create themselves a ‘martial-arts version of Christianity’ (that’s not his quote, that’s from a paper K, my insider source on all things second year Anglo-Saxon studies, was reading):

It is necessary to construct a warrior Christ, as in Dream of the Rood and Christ and Satan, because the Anglo-Saxon heroic ethos respects courage, defiance, and most definitely not letting yourself get murdered by your enemies.

This, the Bocera intones, is because Christianity is a religion for looooosers.

(In the best Germanic sense, that is.)

St Edmund: Christian martyr, Germanic loooooser.

Full credit to the Goblin, K, Eggs Maledict and Pixie, who reported this gem of professorial insight to me.

Three Things:

1. You have no idea how much I hate the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos right now (unless of course you read my LJ, in which case you saw all the frothing at the mouth). Every time I think I have an idea, I can’t pin it down; it turns out to be wrong; it turns out I have two contradictory ideas; it turns out someone else already thought it and it’s not quite right; or despite the fact that my gut and a reasonable amount of historical evidence tells me that Wulfstan did not particularly want AEthelred back in 1014, I still can’t figure out how to read the Sermo except as advocating the return of AEthelred. What kind of person presides over the ordination of a new bishop of London, despite said bishop not being in your province, and despite the current bishop of London being in exile with your exiled king, and then turns around the next day and says ‘you know, it’s very sinful to kick out the king, we should get him back’. AND THEN KEEPS PREACHING SAID SERMON FOR FOUR OR FIVE YEARS, even after said king has been exiled and the young Viking dude you rejected in 1014 is now on the throne.  WTF, Wulfstan, WTF?

Oh, and the Thing is due in three weeks. Someone please preside over my execution immediately.

2. Hey, a medieval blog I didn’t know about! Hannah is studying at Melbourne with Stephanie Trigg, and is writing her honours thesis on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. She’s talking about “Duality and Ambiguity”, being the ways in which the poet sets things up with two possible interpretations; and about the relationships between devotional and romantic literature in SGGK. Gawain, however, is not all she talks about: check out her blogo-biography of Henry VI.

3. Oh, and I can tell my blog’s up and running again when I start getting loopy porn search hits on a daily basis. To the person hunting for Gawain slash fic, try a Google advanced search restricted to livejournal.com, that should do the trick.

For the benefit of the person who wanted to see medieval women naked, here are both Eve AND Adam naked. Eve is the one on the right, who appears to have two nipple rings. Adam is the one with the pot belly. (Apologies to the illuminator of MS Junius 11 for my terrible LOLmanuscript):

Who would YOU be in Beowulf?

Is it a good sign when your Obscure Medieval Text is popular enough to have an online quiz?

You Scored as The Dragon Ancient, chaotic, and a bit mysterious is the Dragon figure. Awakened from your happy slumber upon a pile of gold, you go about the country slaying its occupants. Beowulf manages to kill you, but not before you ensure his death. Congrats. The Dragon 83% Beowulf 58% Grendel 42% Hrothgar 42% Wealhtheow 42% Wiglaf 33% Grendel’s Mother 25%

Tomorrow I fly to Brisbane for the Australian Early Medieval Association’s conference. See you all next weekend

These rude yokels…

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it, but I’m currently a student librarian in my residential college. Now, our library is a bit out-of-date, and we’re still sorting through and cataloguing the many very old and very weird books we have down in Stack.

Witness this book K catalogued the the other day, and which I (foolish I) thought I would open up and have a look through:

The invading Saxons, a rude and barbarous people, but a stop to all this refinement [of Romano-British society]. Their own social customs were very different; they disliked town life: all the use they had for a town was to sack it and murder its inhabitants. Having successfully achieved this, they settled in the country outside it and built themselves uncomfortable log huts and villages, while the corpse-littered city mouldered in desolation. These rude yokels seldom occupied even the country villas of their victims; these were not the kind of dwellings they cared about or felt at home in; perhaps too they percieved them to be haunted by their slain owners, and thought it safer to keep their distance. Anyhow, they preferred to build timber houses in the clearings, which reminded them of the homes that had so bored them beyond the seas, and in these they settled down to agriculture and hunting. Like the British, the practised family life to savage excess; the social unit was the village community, and dwellers in other villages were rightly suspect; strangers entered the bounds of the tribal homestead at their peril. Such excessive solidarity made social life in some ways very awkward, violent and uneasy.
- Dame Rose Macaulay, Life Among the English (London: Collins, 2nd Impression 1946), p. 8

So there you have it. Anglo-Saxon society as you never knew it before. (And flagrant abuse of the semi-colon. Act now, stop inhuman treatment of innocent punctuation!)

Next time I’m obliged to attend family reunions, I shall say until my relatives: “You practice family life to savage excess!”

Mum, I think I’m a Medievalist…

If you haven’t seen Blogenspiel’s “You Might Be A Medievalist If…” post, you should. And even if you haven’t, you DEFINITELY should appreciate Owlfish’s celebration of medievalism in rhyming couplets. I reproduce it here in full for your entertainment:

You may very well a medievalist be
if you have a best-loved Lateran decree.
The same may be true if a one-car collision
could wipe out your whole academic division.
A giveaway token is if you add “yet”
to “I don’t know that language”; you will soon, I bet.
At conferences, all other folk in your session
have made holy orders their lifelong profession.
Your second’ry sources, for some other student,
are primary sources, selected, most prudent.
You must know the truth about Arthur and Cei?
You don’t? Well, why not? Please do tell me, I pray.
For you, the Americans fought revolution
for freedom, a recent and modern solution.
The Renaissance? That’s just a dirty, late lie;
it’s one that we all resolutely deny.
And when you’ve bad day, when hellbound all ways,
you can say in which infernal ring’s your malaise.

Copyright Owlfish/S. Worthen, 28.8.08

As promised… grammar jokes!

Once upon a time, I promised that this blog would be ‘like the naked chef, but with more grammar jokes and less chance of embarrassing burns’. To that end, I spent tonight learning to use GIMP image editing program.

001

002

003

004

005

006

Created with angelamaria’s Icon Table Generator @ Bauble

These and variations on these themes can be found in my LJ

Oh, and tip of the hat to Michael Drout, whose Beowulf movie review gave me the blog name and the desire for an icon that said ‘Do Philology Naked’. Now I have the blog AND the icons, I am a happy nerd.

Two interesting things from the blogosphere

Dr Nokes posted this clip, from a most hilarious French TV show, about medieval music:

Giggle. Giggle.

And on an entirely unrelated note, Dr Rundkvist posted, as a side note in his notice about an Antro/Archaeo blog carnival, this fascinating tidbit:

The Rota System, from the Old Church Slavic word for “ladder” or “staircase”, was a system of collateral succession practiced (though imperfectly) in Kievan Rus’ and later Appanage and early Muscovite Russia, in which the throne passed not linearly from father to son, but laterally from brother to brother (usually to the fourth brother) and then to the eldest son of the eldest brother who had held the throne. The system was begun by Yaroslav the Wise.

Looks a little like the supposed Pictish succession, from uncle to nephew down the matrilinear line, which, as Michelle has discussed before, may not have been a proper system but an emergency measure.

The Wiki article on the Rota System goes on to say:

The system was begun by Yaroslav the Wise, who assigned each of his sons a principality based on seniority. When the Grand Prince died, the next most senior prince moved to Kiev and all others moved to the principality next up the ladder.[1] Only those princes whose fathers had held the throne were eligible for placement in the rota; those whose fathers predeceased their grandfathers were known as izgoi, “excluded” or “orphaned” princes.

Apparently some scholars doubt this was such an organised system at all, as always. If it were, it would create an interesting mix of sibling and cousin rivalries, and loyalties as well. It would behove a king to treat his nephew or brother well, lest said heir’s succession be artificially accelerated. The king’s *son*, meanwhile, who might see his uncle or cousin as a threat, would be well advised to demonstrate his loyalty thereto in order to survive the years between his father’s succession and his own intact. But what of second sons, who would probably not live long enough to inherit? What of these orphan princes?
Your fourth sons wouldn’t be the expendable end of the royal family, as they would be under direct patrilinear succession systems. Instead, they’d be the ones likely to live long enough to take the throne. How very, very interesting.

I wonder, in this system, how the precedence is worked out? Simply by age? Does your father’s age also count?
Let’s say King A dies, and his throne passes first to his son A1, and then to his son A4, A2 and A3 having died in the meantime. When A4 dies, A1’s eldest son, A1.1, inherits. Presumably he is succeeded by one of his brothers, ≥A1.2, in turn. When ≥A1.2 dies, does the throne necessarily pass back to A1.1.1? Or does it pass to A2.1? if A2.1 were older than ≥A1.2, would he have had seniority on the death of A1.1?
What if A1’s first wife had been barren, and A2.1 were older than A1.1? If the position of princes on the ‘ladder’ were based simply on their age, A2.1 would succeed A2. If on the other hand the system were designed to ensure that each branch of the family had their place on the ladder in turn, he wouldn’t.

I wants to know, precious…

St AEthelthryth: Some entertaining pictures

AEthelthryth’s amusing afterlife will have to wait for next week, I think. I’m still settling into Awesome’s house, where I’m cat-sitting for a few weeks, and I was going to make a quick post with some images, inspired by the exciting discovery of a facsimile Benedictional of St AEthelwold on her bookshelf, before knuckling down to work:

St AEthelthryth, bearing a flower, which refers to Bede’s hymn in her honour, which is full of floral imagery. AEthelthryth is the only Anglo-Saxon woman in the Choir of Virgins, depicted in the opening folios of the Benedictional- she and St Swithun, I think, are the only Anglo-Saxon saints in the whole thing.
She doesn’t look too happy, really. You’d think, having got what she wanted (a habit), she’d look a little more serene. Joyful in the lord, and all that. But apparently not. Can anyone tell me who the preachy lookin’ fellow on the page opposite her is? And what he’s carrying?

My intention to do some work was defeated by the possibilities of humourous hagiographical icons. Some teasers:

Plus a few more in my LJ.