more on the spancel
Thanks to Eamonn Kelly, some more info on the spancel has finally come ’round to this blog. Thanks so much, Eamonn!
MEARCSTAPA info, MEARCSTAPA swag, and 21st century Blemmye
What, you may ask, is MEARCSTAPA?
The acronym stands for Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application.
The word is from Old English, and is used to describe Grendel in the poem Beowulf:
Wæs se grimma gæst Grendel haten,
mære mearcstapa, se þe moras heold,
fen ond fæsten…
A mearc is a limit, boundary, borderland, “mark” – a liminal space.
A mearcstapa is one who walks those spaces – a mark-stepper, a border-walker.
The organization has a blog and a mission statement.
MEARCSTAPA officers and founding members Asa Mittman and Jeff Massey were seen sporting cool logo t-shirts in Kalamazoo, Michigan the other day. Trust me, you want one.
You can get your own shirt or other cool swag at cafepress.
In other news, when I got home from Kalamazoo, my mother and daughter had something to show me. They said they’d found a modern-day blemmye. What do you think?
Blemmye from the Cotton Vitellius MS.A
An Adipose (a short little villain from the 2008 Dr. Who series. These adorable little things are made out of human body fat. They form themselves and walk away from the body of their, er, ‘hosts,’ killing them in the process).
kalamazoo
Someone here at Kalamazoo mentioned this blog to me yesterday, saying, “I remember your old blog, yeah.”
Oy. Yeah, it’s been a while.
But after two back to back panels today, right on the heels of the final Latin exam last Monday and 100 pages of more or less polished prose that had to be turned in in the last half of this semester, I am officially done jumping through hoops and can breathe again. At least until Monday, when I get back home and have to get my orals list together in a big damn hurry before all the people on my committee scurry off to England for the summer.
Then I have to read everything on the damned thing by September.
But that’s ok – I’m not complaining. I just made it through the Worst Semester Yet and I am still in one piece. If this semester didn’t kill me, nothing will. I just opened a beer, but I think my real reward might be going to sleep before midnight for the first time in over four months.
I have been in my room for most of my stay here trying to finish the paper I gave today but couldn’t really start until my coursework crap was done Monday, so I can’t tell you a great deal about this Kalamazoo experience, except that the brief foray out into the Wide World (well, the BABEL party) was a great deal of fun. The panel I was on had very good papers on the Grendelkin and on serpent women with scarlet lips, and the MEARCSTAPA roundtable on Monster Theory was thought-provoking, productive, invigorating, and inspiring – it was a pleasure to talk with those folks and with the people who attended, who brought brilliant comments and perspectives to the discussion and who helped me get my mental groove back in a big way.
I am actually going to go to *other people’s sessions* tomorrow! The pressure is off! I have two glorious days of relative freedom! I get to crack endless Beowulf jokes!
Ok, I got all that enthusiasm out of my system. Back to the usual Crankiness, Doom, and Gloom 
Whatcha whatcha whatcha want
I got up at 4 a.m. to study for a Latin test, finish reading Troilus and Criseyde, draft a “philosophy of teaching comp” thing, finish up a little Malory, and start a little Tennyson before the sun came up today, and now I’m so exhausted I can’t sleep. Funny that.
Since I can’t sleep but my brain is so fried I can’t possibly say anything intelligent, I thought I’d take a long overdue peek at what brings people to this blog, and see if I can’t help them find what they’re looking for since I know they didn’t find it when they got here.
As usual, one of the top search terms is “Sir Marrok.” Poor Sir Marrok. As usual, I have to say that 1) I don’t know why this blog turns up among the first five hits when you Google Sir Marrok, and 2) Malory did not write a Tale of Sir Marrok if Google is bringing you here. I should put up a Sir Marrok bibliography in case any of these hits come from students slouching towards research topics. Jeff Massey should help me; I hear he knows a thing or two about medieval werewolves.
“bibliography beowulf seamus norton”
I’m not sure what you’re looking for.
“importance of loyalty in lay of the were”
I am just going to assume that wordpress is truncating the search term, and this was actually “Lay of the Werewolf,” aka Bisclavret. I’ve got nothing on this that I haven’t already posted, and most of that in a strange mixture of jest and haste. If you’re looking for an online text of the lai, you could do worse than Judith Shoaf’s translation here. If you’re looking for a web page discussing ideals and complications of loyalty in Marie de France’s lai, and you’re fortunate enough to be enrolled in a college course in which you have a professor available to you for consultation, then I strongly recommend you ask your professor for recommendations on resources, because Google is going to get you nothing more than a bunch of role playing game hits (and, apparently, my blog, and frankly, I’ve seen role playing games that were better researched than my blog).
“marrok”
I have *got* to come up with some new material.
“a summary for the second shepherd’s’ “
What I like best here is the way the searcher covered all the bases with punctuation. It’s a pesky play to punctuate, and this person was taking no chances. Hint: if you search with no punctuation, you’ll still get decent hits; amusingly, Google will ask you if you’re sure you don’t mean “second shepherd’s play.” Dear readers coming here via Google: you *don’t* mean “second shepherd’s play.”
Here’s an edition of the text. If you want a summary, here’s one that’s short and sweet (but that is probably not the shortcut you wanted). If you’re looking for a modern English “translation,” you could do worse than this one.
“latin word obsess history”
Cool! See, these “radical homosexual agenda” people have it all wrong. The most dangerous people I know are the radical philologists – we’re lying in wait, poised to corrupt your freshmen with OED homework assignments, your elderly Christian aunts with copies of Louise M. Burkhart’s Holy Wednesday, and your neighborhood film-goers with Angelina Jolie doing philology naked.
In my mind, that was all going to have a rousing and funny punchline involving The Naked Philologist. Somewhere between brain, fingers, and screen, it didn’t quite work out. Must mean the sleep dep is catching up with me.
update, and a plea
No, I’m not posting much these days. In fact, I’m not reading much these days (well, that isn’t about Myrmidons or King Arthur or Pedagogy or Crashaw or St. Foy). Coursework is kicking my rear end.
Note to those thinking about grad school in medieval anything: beg, borrow, or steal to do some of your languages before you start coursework. I started a PhD program in my mid-30s, and I didn’t know I wanted to be a medievalist until fairly late in the game in my MA program. I had French from my first undergrad institution in the early 90s, and it needed some serious dusting off before I could pass my MA exam, but the good news was PhD Institution accepted that exam for its department requirements. Fine. Great, even. If I weren’t trying to be a medievalist, I would be all done with everything the department wanted me to do.
But I’m not I came here with no Latin (and no Anglo Saxon) and you wouldn’t believe the course juggling the last two years trying to get undergrad-level language classes to fit in around weekly grad seminars and TA assignments (well, if you’re reading this, maybe you would believe it). I have the system-override equivalent of a Time Turner this semester, which enables me to take two classes that happen at the same time. It gets pretty confusing when you’re sleep-deprived.
Anyway, if I’d known then what I know etc.
In theory, I should be done with coursework after this semester. In practice, I’ll be picking up another year of Latin, a semester of medieval Latin, and a summer paleography somewhere, as well as a distribution requirement in 18th or 19th century lit that I haven’t been able to make work before now. I’m hoping there will be some directed reading in Anglo-Saxon happening too, as my Latin is *already* better than my Anglo-Saxon, and that is not saying a lot.
I have to put together a committee for the PhD exam this semester, in order to get my reading lists together and then take the exam early next Spring. So I’m at a point where I’m looking up from the trenches a bit and saying to myself, “How did it happen that all that stuff you intended to do didn’t get done?”
That leads me to the “plea” section of this post, which is in some ways a plea for perspective. What do you wish you’d gotten to in your PhD program that you didn’t? Would it actually have been easier to pick up that Art History knowledge in coursework, in retrospect? Or do you find yourself thinking you wish you’d spent more time getting the hell out of dodge (dodge being grad school) and less time trying to take every class under the sun? Do you wonder what would have happened if you’d published more, or less, or spent more time thinking about teaching philosophies (or less)? Eternally regret not taking that Victorian poetry class, or not starting some independent study of Old Norse, or not playing more badminton?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Saxon burial ground discovered…
…by two members of the Eastbourne District Metal Detecting Club: Bob White and Cliff Smith. The skeletons of a man and two women were accompanied by weapons and jewelry, among other artifacts.
annotated bibliographies
Ah, the end of the semester. What better way to procrastinate on writing final seminar papers and grading essays on Paradise Lost than to tinker with one’s blog? Yes, so…
I’ve put up my Kin of Cain annotated bibliography, as a “page,” so there is a little link to the right under the Pages heading.
Also, let me say I detest wordpress’s new “add new post” screen. Maybe it’s just my computer settings, but it’s seriously driving me crazy and I am hereby registering my discontent.
Chretien de Troyes and blogging funnies
There’s this line in Chretien’s “The Story of the Grail” that has intrigued me for years. When Perceval comes back after first meeting knights in the forest, the uncouth little Welshmen tells his (appalled) mother about the experience. She says,
Tu as veu, si com je croi,
Les enges don la gent se plaignent,
Qui ocient quan qu’il ataignent.
[Fair son, I commend you to God, for I am most afraid on your account: you have seen, I believe, the angels men complain of, who kill whatever they come upon.] [1]
Now, I don’t have Old French, and my modern French is seriously rusty, but I am dying to find out what this means and I can’t find a darned thing on it. The only thing I’ve found so far is in a 1994 Gallimard French edition, [2] in which the “Percevel ou Le Conte du Graal” annotations are done by Daniel Poirion. The note says, “Ce n’est pas une critique social, mais une allusion apocalyptique dont la fugitive image est un dernier recours pour detourner le fils de son destin. Elle implique une terrible conception de la chevalerie: les chevaliers peuvent-ils passer pour des anges d’une mondaine apocalypse?” If I’m not hideously off, this says something like, “This is not a social critique, but an apocalyptic allusion whose fugitive image is a last recourse to divert the son from his destiny. She implies a terrible conception of chivalry: can the knights be regarded as the angels of an earthly apocalypse?”
Last time I read Revelation, I seemed to recall some trumpet-blowing and seal-opening, but not a lot of wholesale slaughter or even agency on the part of the angels. And even if I ignore the apocalypse commentary, this seems like an odd description of even fallen angels (setting aside for the moment the whole issue of how Perceval’s mother has hardly reared him with anything resembling orthodox catechism). Toward what “apocalyptic” matter should I be looking, if I follow Poirion’s trail? And is there some critical edition of Chretien in English that I’m not aware of that I am remiss in not looking at (ie, is there a Klaeber of Chretien?)… Should I be looking at folkloric material, and, if so, where in the world? What are “the angels men complain of,” and how do they get figured as this terrible image of masculinity from which his mother would like to save him? Yeah, so there’s my research question. Gah.
[1] Trans. William Kibler.
[2] Chretien de Troyes. Oeuvres Completes. Part of the Litterature francaise du Moyen Age series.
***
Now, in funnier news, Sir Marrok still leads in search engine terms that bring people to this blog. But this week brings a few others:
jeffrey Jerome cohen bibliography
(ETA) Here’s one, up to date, thanks to JJC himself.
free spirit 12th century
Can’t help you, sorry.
lee patterson castration
Play nice, now!
latin root word for obsess
How you ended up here is beyond me, but I hope you found what you were looking for.
revenge as a theme in icelandic folklore
Well, yeah.
reaction to second shepherds’ play
Well, if you’re like my Brit Lit students, your reaction was a little “huh” combined with a little “please don’t make me write a paper involving medieval exegesis.” I wish they could have seen the Folger production.
the tale of two hospitals by marry wake
Wow. I have absolutely no idea.
weland alfred smith beowulf
If I ever have any more kids, that’s going in the name hat.
Anglo-Saxon Kent electronic database
ASKED, the Anglo-Saxon Kent Electronic Database was built collaboratively by Stuart Brookes and Sue Harrington to facilitate our respective PhD researches at UCL Institute of Archaeology, from 1998-2000. A pared down version of its content is presented here, in order for it to act as the pilot database for a much larger corpus of material currently being gathered under the aegis of the ‘Beyond the Tribal Hidage Project’ – a Leverhulme funded research project undertaken at UCL Institute of Archaeology by director Martin Welch and research assistant Sue Harrington. It is intended that this new dataset will be deposited with the Archaeology Data Service in late 2009, retaining the same format as this version of ASKED.
