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.

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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.

Because I’m a well-intentioned but incorrigible nerd…

And nothing if not a loyal fangirl student… I made this as a present for someone this afternoon, and I thought it might strike a few chords in the blogosphere:

More early modern than medieval… But oh so entertaining

Scribal Terror reports:

Futility Closet tells the story of a 16th century French attorney who was placed in an unenviable position by the “the authorities in Autun [who] asked him to advocate for the rats, which they put on trial in 1510 for eating the harvest of Burgundy”:

In his defence, Chasseneux showed that the rats had not received formal notice; and, before proceeding with the case, he obtained a decision that all the priests of the afflicted parishes should announce an adjournment, and summon the defendants to appear on a fixed day.

At the adjourned trial, he complained that the delay accorded his clients had been too short to allow of their appearing, in consequence of the roads being infested with cats. Chasseneux made an able defence, and finally obtained a second adjournment. We believe that no verdict was given. — Sabine Baring-Gould*, Curiosities of Olden Times, 1896

The Hilarious (After)Life of St Eadmund, with still more apologies to AElfric.

King Eadmund lived a boring life full of piety, generosity and justice. Things hotted up when Vikings stalked in his land and ran off with his head. But wait, it doesn’t stop there! What Eadmund’s life lacked in action and adventure, he made up for in the afterlife.

Last week, we left the East Angles as they ventured into the forest in search of Eadmund’s missing head. Off they went, into the deep dark forest, and, as sensible woodsmen do, they shouted out to one another as they went:

Where are you, comrade?

Where are you, comrade?

And the head shouted back to them:

Over here! Over here!

As often as one of them shouted out Where are you, comrade?, the head of King Eadmund shouted back: Over here! Over here! And soon enough they came across the head, nestled between the paws of a slavering, ravening wolf. This wolf really, really, desperately wanted to eat the head. Om nom nom, tasty head. However, luckily for the East Angles, God had given the wolf divine orders not to eat the head of king Eadmund. Not even a little bit. Not even a tiny snacking around the ears. (Unlike the Wolfish stalking Hinguar, real wolves obey God. Vikings are mean and nasty and diabolical. Subtlety and tolerance? Not Aelfric’s cup of tea.)

The East Angles were quite pleased to have the head back, and they grabbed it out of the wolf’s paws and scurried back to the castle. The wolf followed them all the way back to the town, and, realising that it wasn’t going to get even a nibble of the head, finally gave up and went home. Poor wolf.

Delighted with the way things were going (despite the obliteration of their king and most of their countrymen), the East Angles got together and put up a church over Eadmund’s body. Some time later, (in 869) their descendants decided that a shoddy job and been done, and built a grand shiny new church. Predictably, when they pulled out Eadmund’s body, it was all perfectly intact, head attatched, wounds healed, the whole works. (’Now, if I were a skeptical person,’ says a devout audience, ‘which I’m not, that might suggest to me that it wasn’t the same body.‘) What’s more, there’s a nice silk thread around his red throat. (’If I were a skeptical person,’ says my devout listener, ‘I might be inclined to think it was the body of a recently hanged man…’)

The ruins of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, est. 869.

At any rate, miraculous preservation of body achieved, King Eadmund is set up in a brand spanking new church, with a holy widow to keep him company and clip his fingernails. (Her name was Oswyn, and her fondness for barbering and manicuring dead saints is all we know of her.) All the locals brought gifts and offerings in Eadmund’s honour, and Bishop Theodred decked the church out in gold and silver. The afterlife was going well for King Eadmund, but a rich church will attract unwonted attention, and one night, eight ‘unblessed’ theives turned up, bent on knicking off with the offerings.

Some of them slogged at the door haspe with sledge-hammers; some filed around it with files; some of them got spades and tried to dig under the door; and some of them brought ladders and tried to get in by the windows. For a mere eight thieves, they were swarming all over the place like flies. But for naught- St Eadmund, it turns out, was the best kind of saint: better than a closed-circuit video camera. He froze those theives in their tracks, and held them there all night. When the townspeople (and presumably the monks) turned up in the morning, they found eight thieves- some hanging from ladders, some frozen over spades, and so on, stuck fast in their tracks. They picked them up (apparently without un-freezing them) and dragged them off to Bishop Theodred.

Now, Bishop Theodred was a pretty good bishop, but not the best bishop around. He was good about donating silver and gold to churches, not so good on his canon law. And so he (conveniently?) forgot that he, as a bishop, shouldn’t be sentencing anyone to death, and ordered the poor frozen thieves to be hung. And hung they were, nowhere does AElfric mention any un-freezing.

After the thieves were good and dead, Bishop Theodred thought to look in his books¹, and suddenly remembered that he was a churchman, and not supposed to be orchestrating hangings. He was properly sad, and feared for his immortal soul, and ordered the East Angles to fast with him for three days and pray for his salvation. (Salvation: so much easier if you have minions!)

Next up, a fellow named Leofstan, of a more skeptical bent than was generally good for you in Anglo-Saxon England, came along and demanded to see the intact body of St Eadmund. The monks were obliging, and opened up the tomb for him to have a looksee. Leofstan looked, and saw, and went barking mad and ran off and committed suicide. I’ve no idea what was going on there, but AElfric assures us it was a copycat miracle, in the model of St Lawrence, who sent mad seven men who dared to look upon his intact body.

Apparently many more hilarious miraculous things happened to St Eadmund in his afterlife, but AElfric didn’t feel like writing them down for us, and so we don’t get to find out what they were.

~

1. Look, look, books! AElfric and Wulfstan seem to be on common ground here: books (ie, canon law books) are crucial to proper bishoply behavior.

Suck you too!

LOL!Manuscripts reflects on the humourous properties of the Long S.

The “Descending” or “Long S” is ubiquitous in Renaissance publications; a holdover from Carolingian minuscule handwriting and black letter print. Usually, it just makes reading original texts a bit more difficult, but on rare occasions, when you least expect it, the EEBO Gods will give you a spectacular typographical gift. Therefore, I give you examples of the “long s” paired with variations of the totally innocent word “suck.” The results — outstanding.

I was going to complement this with a short clip from the Vicar of Dibley 102 ‘Songs of Praise’, but for some reason (unlike every other Vicar episode known to mankind), that episode has been completely removed from YouTube. All I can offer you is the entire thirty minute episode here.

Ye are the falt of the earth, and fainted…

I shall sit on the right hand of the Lord and he shall be my… ‘Succour. And he shall be my succour, thank you Alice!’

The Hilarious Death of St Eadmund, part two

Firstly, allow me to gloat about three things:

1. I finally finished the dratted chapter. It was supposed to be half a chapter but blew itself out to around 4000 words. I sat down to write 800 or so concluding words last night and ended up writing 2500 words. But I think they’re bloody good words, so that’s happy.

2. I have been relieved of the deadline (which, to be fair, I nominated in the first place) for my Anglo-Saxon essay. Apparently since there’s only me in the class, I can write whatever I want and hand it in whenever I want.

3. The University appear to have put five hundred dollars in my bank account without warning or explanation. This is exciting (pays for flights to the Australian Early Medieval Association conference in October…), but also somewhat disconcerting (what if I wasn’t meant to get five hundred dollars?). I am supposing that it is the same prize I won last year, and that information to that effect will turn up eventually.

And now, on to

The Hilarious Death of St Eadmund, with apologies to AElfric:

Last week, Stalking Hinguar and his ravening Vikings were on their way to take King Eadmund of East Anglia captive. Scary stuff.

King Eadmund stood in his royal hall, resolute and noble, and completely without backup. Into the hall came Hinguar and his Vikings, and Eadmund raised up his weapons and….

Hurled them. Not at the Vikings; just away. This, AElfric opines, is because he was imitating Christ, who wouldn’t let Peter defend him with weapons, when Christ was under attack. Christ’s example or no, this is not a good way to deal with Vikings.

Hinguar and his Vikings marched straight up to the dais, grabbed King Eadmund and trussed him up like a christmas ham. They poked fun at him and battered him with cudgels, and then stuck him under their arms, dragged him out of the hall, and shackled him to a tree. Then, moderation not being a traditional virtue of pillaging Vikings, they proceeded to whip him with scourges. AElfric tells us that King Eadmund ‘cried out to the Savior Christ’ the whole time. I’m not sure why this is surprising, really. If someone was thrashing me with a scourge, I would certainly be shouting ‘JESUS CHRIST!’, and every other swear word I knew.

Eadmund’s caterwauling eventually pissed off the Vikings. Taking a few steps back, they shot him repeatedly with spears, until he was stuck all over with them, just like hedgehog’s bristles, not unlike St Sebastian.

Hinguar then got really fed up with Eadmund, who was still kicking up a stink and shouting about Jesus. He waved a commanding Viking hand, and someone lopped off Eadmund’s head. Eadmund died crying out to Christ, and we know this because, conveniently, there was a watching Anglo-Saxon nearby, miraculously hidden from the Vikings.

Soon enough, what remains of Eadmund’s people come along, and, shock and alarm, they find the body of King Eadmund, but Hinguar and co have nicked off with the head. (Leave a body with its head, after all, and it’s only a matter of time before you have a zombie on your hands…) The Mysterious Watcher chooses this moment to unveil himself, and to conveniently announce that he saw the Vikings peg the head off into the forest somewhere.

So off they go into the forest, the remnant of the East Angles, poking around in the bushes for a decorpsed head. What will happen next? Tune in next week to find out!

Gentlemen, man your wives!

No, wait, I can’t not blog this. Welcome to Humourous Translation Mistakes 101, or Idioms You Really Wish Your Dead Language Had.

Misreading of the day: þurh hæmedþing wife gemanan- through sexy things to man (a) wife. Gentlemen, man your wives!

Anglo-Saxon regular verbs end in –an or –ian. So gemanan being the last word I copied out, I instinctively went to treat it as the verb, and wife as the object. What sort of verb would it be? A cognate of the modern ‘to man’, I assumed (“Man the guns!”). Sadly, gemanan is not a verb at all, but a weak noun of some kind (genitive? doesn’t matter, they all look the same…)

The law code V Æþelred says, of priests, þæt hy nagon mid rihte þurh hæmedþing wife gemanan: ‘That they may not have (nagon) with/in justice, through sexual intercourse (hæmedþing), the company (gemanan) of a wife.’

Or possibly through marriage. The definition is a bit circular- hæmed is ‘sexual intercourse, marriage’, and hæmedþing would be… ‘marital activities’? I quite like ‘through sexy things’, myself.

So, these priests aren’t allowed to boink their wives, basically. Which is exactly what my Humourous Translation Mistake said, but said in a much more amusing fashion. (No one bothered to write down what the wives thought about all this…)

The hilarious death of St Eadmund: Part One

I’ve been translating AElfric’s Life of St Eadmund this past week. Which is funny, because it contains very little of Eadmund’s life at all, but a whole lot of hilarity surrounding his death. Tonight, because sleep is for the weak, I present to you: St Eadmund Without the Boring Bits

King Eadmund ruled in East Anglia, and he was the most awesome king you could possibly imagine. He was gentle and generous and just, he was pious and princely, he was faithful and fair. He ruled over his people like a father and a shepherd.

Unfortunately for Eadmund, East Anglia had a sudden case of Vikings. A fellow named Hinguar stalked on the land, like a wolf, and then slew the people. Interestingly, this same Hinguar was Ivarr, son of Ragnar Loðborok (’Hairy-Pants’, or more stodgily, ‘Shaggy-breeches’). Ragnar had been busy sacking Paris, and Ivarr later went on to cause havoc in Ireland. And while Hinguar was stalking around in East Anglia, his brother Hubba was controlling Northumbria. Quite a respectable lineage of Vikings, they were.

But you don’t want to know about Hinguar’s family tree. What you want to know is that he sent Eadmund a message saying:

You are powerless, and my army need somewhere to stay for the winter. Give me all your goldhoards, and I will let you live as my underking.

Eadmund was a little taken aback by this, and he called a nearby bishop. This bishop was a pragmatic sort of fellow, and he said to King Eadmund: ‘Look, your kingliness: you’re outnumbered, you have no army, and you’re going to die. Either agree to his terms or run away.’

Eadmund thought about this for a while, and then he said to the bishop: ‘Hang on, bishop! I’ve never run away from my enemies yet, and I’m not about to start now!’

So king Eadmund went back to the messenger and said:

You’re an arrogant bastard of a Viking, and I ought to kill you, but I won’t defile my hands with your blood. You tell your chief Hinguar to bugger off- I won’t serve him, unless he converts to Christianity first.

So the messenger trotted back the way he had come, and along the way, he met Hinguar, with his bloodthirsty band of Vikings, all ready to take Eadmund down.

‘No luck,’ says the messenger. ‘The snotty little English king is going to be all honourable about things.’

Whereupon Hinguar smirks, and gives orders that his henchmen go after the unprotected Eadmund and take him captive.

What will happen next? Tune in to the Naked Philologist for talking heads, miraculous uncorrupted bodies, bumbling theives, and a madman.