The Conception of Arthur. Sex Gilgamesh and Uther Pendragon part two

See Previous post.

Part two:

 

I also assume that human history is a record of brutality interrupted by occasional attempts at idealism. And despite the common orthodoxy, this doesn’t just apply to white male patriarchal societies…fear, greed and stupidity seem to characterise all societies at all times. So the past is always going to be dangerous territory. 

 

The danger of dealing with past texts is succinctly expressed by Corinne Saunders in ‘Rape and ravishment in the literature of medieval England’:

 

'[…] by contrasting past and present, and assessing the past according to contemporary ideologies, we validate our own political assumptions. The temptation is to assume the transhistoric nature of contemporary premises and therefore to fit the evidently ‘misogynistic’ structures of the middle ages into a pattern to be censured and exposed…’

 

Such an approach, eager to find fault, inevitably misses the often complex nature of medieval narrative. Combine that with the typically ignorant assumption that medieval story tellers are inferior to modern ones and you get the classic rewrite of ‘Beowulf ‘or ‘Gawain and the Green Knight’ to ‘problematicise the heroic ideology of the poem’ which misses the fact that the poems already do that. 

 

But to return to Uther and the story of the conception of King Arthur. 

 

Laȝamon's version is not straightforward: the birth of the Great Hero is A GOOD THING, but His conception is an act of treachery, a sin, and a failure of a King who should have put duty before desire. 

 

At the core of this complex layering is our recognition that the story of Arthur’s conception is shaped by the Gospel narratives of the Nativity, which in turn echo Greek hero stories. There have also been attempts to reconstruct ‘Celtic’ stories in which a divine character pretends to be a woman’s husband so that a hero can be conceived.  More of this later. This understanding pulls the reader’s response in one direction: Whatever the morality of the act, the consequence is good.

 

But  Laȝamon’s version presents Arthur's conception as a troubling and problematic act. 

 

In Malory, Uther and Gorlois have been at war. The underlying tensions of the feast don’t require too much to set both men at each other’s throats. 

 

Laȝamon emphasises a double betrayal. Gorlois has previously saved Uther from a military disaster. His piety and loyalty have been emphasised. The feast at which Uther meets Ygraene is to celebrate that victory. Uther repays his debts by going to war with Gorlois and disguising himself as her husband so he can f#ck Ygaerne. 

 

It’s that brutal. It is not a love story. 

 

So morally and legally this is wrong. 

 

In Malory, Lancelot is morally and legally wrong but it’s difficult not to admire him. 

 

However, the assumptions that love is good, that there’s something heroic about someone who thinks ‘the world well lost for love’, even that romance should be a part of life, are not ‘transhistorical’ but the result of a cultural progression that shapes modern readers’ expectations. Laȝamon is writing before that expectation takes hold.

 

For Laȝamon ‘love’ is not ‘admirable’; it’s a diseased state in which people, notably kings, fail to fulfil the demands of their role. Locrin’s infatuation with Aestrild, and Vortigern’s with Rowena, bring disaster to themselves and their kingdom. The accumulation of previous stories critique Uther’s actions even if no character does. 

 

Throughout the Brut a social role, whether King, King’s Daughter, Queen or Knight, is almost a verb. In the Brut you do kinging. What defines a King as good or bad is established by all the examples of all the previous kings, and the reiterated lesson is that one who puts his own desire before his duty is a BAD KING. His actions will have disastrous consequences for himself and/or his country. 

 

Uther is therefore not only morally wrong: the church would condemn him as an adulterer, but the text in no way asks us to sympathise or condone his actions. Being overwhelmed by desire is not heroic; it’s wrong. 

 

Despite the assumption that a medieval priest would be stained with clerical misogyny, in this case, the woman is explicitly exonerated: not only does she not know it’s Uther, but there is some complicated manoeuvring so that Gorlois is dead before Arthur is conceived . Her innocence is emphasised. 

 

And then, to complicate matters further, at the centre of this tangle of contradictions, Laȝamon manages what is probably the quietest moment in the whole of the Brut. 

 

The story presents Arthur’s conception as anything other than straightforward for the reader.  Perhaps medieval story tellers were willing to give their readers freedom to come to their own conclusions. They were writing for adults. To read it simply as ‘a rape story’, to assume a medieval writer would have little sympathy for a female victim and would condone an act of male aggression, wilfully misses its complex presentation.  

 

In the next post, rewriting the past as a form of lying. 

Vortigern part three: The Historia Bruttonum, the Pillar of Eisleg and the Medieval Imagination.

Vortigern becomes a character. 

The Historia Bruttonum, was written or complied around the beginning of the ninth century (Current dates are to the 820s, localised or at least connected to the court of Gwynedd in the reign of Merfyn Frych).  It is the oldest surviving, developed Vortigern story.  

Although the narrative is sometimes confused and self-contradictory, Vortigern has become a character with something approaching a biography. It is he who is responsible for the ruin of Britain. He is a weak and evil man. The external manifestation of his evil is sexual. He has a son by his daughter, and his infatuation with Hengist’s daughter, who appears here for the first time, allows Hengist to outwit him. 

However, by the ninth century, there were competing versions of the story: a Good King Vortigern and the HB’s Bad King. 

 Early Welsh Genealogies preserve Vortigern’s name as an honored ancestor who adds luster and legitimacy to the royal dynasties, even claiming him as the eponymous founder of a Welsh Kingdom. 

Neither Arthur nor Ambrosius appear in the genealogies. Vortigern’s presence not only suggests that he was considered historical at the time, but also proves the HB’s version of his life was not the only one in circulation. David Dumville pointed out, a long time ago, that Vortigern disappears from the genealogies after the tenth century, suggesting that the Bad King version proved the stronger.

The ‘Biography’.

In the HB Vortigern is now ‘King of the Britons’.  He doesn’t invite the Saxons.  Hengist and Horsa have been exiled from Germany. Vortigern gives them Thanet and in return for food and clothing they offer Vortigern their services in his wars against the Picts. As they become more of a threat, Vortigern is outmaneuvered by Hengist who uses his daughter, (who is not named in the version I've been reading) as a bargaining tool. The devil enters Vortigern's heart and he is so besotted he is prepared to give up half his kingdom for the girl.  

However, Vortigern is also in an incestuous relationship with his own daughter, and they produce a son. Confronted and humiliated by Saint Germanus, Vortigern flees with his wizards. He meets Ambrosius, a boy without a father, who advises him, and makes a prediction about the British and Saxons based on some worms they find in a pond. Given that this is written in a Welsh context, it’s hardly surprising the prophecy ends with a prediction that the British will eventually expel the English. 

In his absence Vortimer, Vortigern’s eldest son, fights against the Anglo-Saxons, but although victorious at first, dies. Hengist comes back and treacherously slays the leading Britons. Vortigern dies. 

In outline, and in some of the details, this is the story Geoffrey of Monmouth will use. But there are at least three centuries between Gildas and the Historia Bruttonum and that is really all that needs to be said about the historical value of the HB’s account. 

The Medieval approach to the past.

It is obvious that the story tellers have been at work. The story of Ambrosius, the boy without a father but with the gift of prophecy (a story which Geoffrey will elaborate and shift to Merlin) is straight out of a folk tale. The HB also records three versions of Vortigern’s death. He is burnt to death ‘with his wives’ as a result of St Germanus’ prayers. He wanders alone and forgotten and dies of heartbreak. The earth swallows him up.

It’s difficult for modern readers to understand how different the early medieval attitude towards ‘history’ was to the thing we learn in school or at the library. The medieval tolerance for obvious inconsistency within a single text can be astonishing. 

The HB contains the miraculous, the marvelous and is internally inconsistent. The whole point of the story of Ambrosius is that Vortigern has to find a boy who has no father. But after he’s prophesized, Vortigern asks him: ’What family do you come from?’ and the boy replies ‘My father is one of the consuls of the Roman people’. You could try and rationalize this but you’d be missing the point. 

 The idea of establishing facts, sorted into a chronological sequence that could be dated, or critically evaluating available sources, rejecting alternative narratives to establish which is the most likely, was not wide spread medieval practice. Even when it was attempted, the attempt was complicated by the difficulty of dating anything outside living memory.  

The HB for example uses at least three different dating methods: from the Incarnation, which we have inherited as BC/AD, from the Passion, and the Roman way of dating by naming the consuls in the year. 

It’s worth remembering that Bede’s date for the Adventus was nothing more than an educated guess. The HB gives two dates for the arrival of Hengist and Horsa and makes no attempt to reconcile them. The first is 347 years after the Passion, which puts the date somewhere around 370-380.  

Later, the HB uses consulships to date the reign of Vortigern to 425, claiming the English came in the fourth year of his reign, which would be 428/9, ‘four hundred years after the Passion’. 

The difference between modern and medieval thinking can be swiftly demonstrated by using the inscription on the Pillar of Eisleg. There Vortigern is named as the father of a line of kings, friend of St Germanus and son-in-law of Magnus Maximus. This is the Good King version. 

We know from other sources that Magnus Maximus was an historical character, a soldier of Spanish descent who took troops from Britain to invade Europe, was briefly Western Emperor until he was executed in 388.

We know daughters were used to extend family influence and establish alliances. When Magnus was on the rise, he would have chosen her husband carefully: someone with enough power to be attractive as an ally. On the other hand, she would have had no value to anyone in the aftermath of his defeat. 

So, if Vortigern married her, it’s likely he did so before 388 and it’s also likely that he would have been an adult and a significant player in the political landscape by that date. How old would that make him in 449? 

Ironically, Guy Halsall, doesn’t use this to support his argument for a fourth century Adventus because he has already suggested that Vortigern and Magnus are the same person. On the other hand….

But such a thinking process is not medieval. In the Annales Cambraie the entry immediately before the famous reference to the battle of Badon records the death of Bishop Ebur at the age of 350. The writer saw nothing odd about this.

And therefore

The value of these stories as ‘historical evidence’ may be negligible. Watching anyone trying to tease out some historical ‘facts’ from the tangled mess is an entertaining spectator sport, but the activity is ultimately futile.  The Historia Bruttonum and the Pillar of Eisleg, the early Welsh Genealogies, Bede, Gildas, and the Anglo-Saxon chronicle tell us little or nothing about the historical reality of the fifth century, but reveal a great deal about what Peter Hanning called ‘the historical imagination’ of their tellers. 

In the imaginations of the story tellers, Vortigern, who may never have existed, moves towards his role as the great national villain in Laȝamon's Brut (where all these post have been heading.) The last steps in the process are the adjustments Geoffrey of Monmouth had to make to fit him into a coherent chronology and tidy up the narrative's loose ends. 

But, as the Historia Bruttonum says, for now: ‘Enough has been said of Vortigern and his family’.

Vortigern part two: Gildas, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

This is the second of three posts tracking how a story involving a ‘Vortigern’, which runs clearly from Gildas, to Bede to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, will become a story about Vortigern, which can be traced from the Historia Britonnum to its elaboration under Geoffrey of Monmouth and from him to Laȝamon.

In what becomes the ‘English’ version of the story, the events remain the same: three ship loads of Germanic warriors are invited to Britain and then turn on their employers. But there are important shifts in emphasis across these three texts. 

As in all Medieval sources, genre, purpose and context have a significant impact on the information and as in so many early medieval sources, they give the frustrating sense that we are reading eye-witnesses to important events who could have told us what we want to know but who, instead, are obsessed with telling us about their neighbours’ hats.  

Gildas (A very brief introduction)

The De Excidio Britannia of Gildas is a notoriously difficult text to use as an historical source. When it was written and where it was written and how reliable it is are ‘sources of scholarly contention’.   

‘Gildas’, is the only surviving insular source for the fifth century but was probably written in the first half of the sixth. Imagine trying to reconstruct the history of British settlement in Australia from one sermon delivered a hundred years after it happened, ritten by a radical evangelical who saw history in terms of divine reward and punishment. 

On the other hand, Gildas was obviously educated, part of a literary culture, and writing about events which may have occurred within three generations, which is usually considered to be the reliable span of oral history. So, tread carefully, but don’t write him off. 

He is writing an open letter to castigate his contemporary Britons for their sinful ways. The historical section at the start shows that their failures in history are a direct result of their turning away from God. The English are the instruments of God’s punishment and a sign of his disfavour. However, at the time of writing, although the English have taken much of the island. If the Britons would only repent, there is still time to get rid of them. 

You can read a translation here: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/gildas-full.asp

Or if you wish, the Latin is here, with a facing translation: http://vortigernstudies.org.uk/arthist/vortigernquotesgil.htm

The relevant text is in Part one, Chapters 22 and 23. For anyone new to early medieval texts, the fact that the translations and the texts vary, even to the extent ‘Vortigern’ is named or identified, is normal. For convenience, I’m going to quote from the second of the above links.

Vortigern in Gildas.

Abandoned by the Romans, and incapable of defending themselves. A council is held, to deliberate what means ought to be determined upon, as the best and safest to repel such fatal and frequent irruptions and plunderings…

Gildas continues, At that time all the members of the assembly along with the arrogant tyrant are blinded;such is the protection they find for their country (it was, in fact, its destruction) that those wild Saxons, of accursed name, hated by God and men, should be admitted into the island, like wolves into folds, in order to repel the northern nations.

For Gildas, the decision is not simply in keeping with the well-known, late Imperial habit of recruiting tribal allies, although his vocabulary later implies he knew about that practice. For Gildas, it’s a disaster: Nothing more hurtful, certainly, nothing more bitter happened to the island than this.  

A great deal of ink has been spilt discussing if ‘Superbus Tryannus’ (arrogant tyrant in the quote above) is a title, an insult, a nasty pun, a name or any combination of these. Some texts and translations give both the phrase and the name. Some just the phrase. You can take your pick, or mix and match, and argue your case. Later traditions would treat it as a personal name and elevate Vortigern to the status of King. 

But three things are worth noting. 

In Gildas’s version the decision to invite the three ships of Saxon mercenaries is not an individual’s, but taken by a council. 

The Saxons are presented as already known to be worse than the Picts and Scots… ‘when absent they feared [the Saxons] worse than death’ they are hated of ‘God and men’.  

The decision to invite them is a divinely sanctioned disaster. The implication is that if the Britons had turned to God, they would not have needed to invite the wolves into their home. What utter depth of darkness of soul. What hopeless and cruel darkness of mind. 

Vortigern in Bede

By the eighth century, when Bede writes his version of the coming of the English, the writer’s context has changed.  The 'English' are now not only dominant in the country, but for Bede, they are God’s chosen people. They are still His instrument of punishment for the Britons, but they are no longer feared seaborne raiders, hated by God and men, who sacrificed a percentage of their captives to ensure a safe journey home. 

Although the story is basically the same, the emphasis has also shifted. Bede is writing 3 centuries after the facts and understanding Gildas in the light of his own times. His history is dominated by great individuals: popes, saints, warrior kings, operating without or without God’s favour. His own political landscape is dominated by kings, kingdoms and their wars.

So Vortigern is no longer just a name, but a King, and it is his decision to call in the Saxons: ‘For they [the Britons] consulted how they might obtain help to avoid or repel the frequent fierce attacks of their neighbours, and all agreed with the advice of their King, Vortigern, to call on the assistance of the Saxon peoples across the sea’ [my Italics]. 

Bede repeats this in his next chapter: they came ‘at the invitation of King Vortigern’. Bede also records that the first chieftains were brothers called Hengist and Horsa.

He says nothing more about Vortigern or the brothers but that’s not surprising. From the arrival of the three ships which he dates around 449 to the arrival of the Augustine Mission in 596, he records nothing about the late fifth or most of the sixth century except a brief reference to a British victory at Mount Badon.  

Vortigern in the ASC

Not surprisingly, for the writer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the English are neither ‘hated of God and men’ nor God’s chosen people/instrument of His punishment for the sinful Britons, nor limited to three hundred years in their rule of the Island. Vortigern is neither evil nor stupid, simply the remembered agent of the Anglo-Saxon arrival. 

The ASC mentions Vortigern in only two entries; 449 and 455. The first names him as King of the Britons, and responsible for the invitation. The second, six years later, (there are no intervening entries) records laconically that he fought against Hengest and Horsa; Horsa was killed and after that Hengist became King with his son. There is no mention of what happens to Vortigern. 

The genre of these three texts didn’t provide the opportunity for their writers to go into the who, why, how, of biography, even if the purpose behind them made that desirable, which it obviously didn’t. However, having made him into such a pivotal figure, it’s hardly surprising that stories would develop to answer those ‘biographical’ questions: who was this ‘Vortigern’? Why did he do that? What kind of man was he? What happened to him?  

In the next post, Vortigern becomes a character with a biography.  

(One thing to keep in mind, which I’ll return to later, is that as the stories develop across time the initial scale of the events becomes forgotten.) 

The Story of Vortigern

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I’m not interested in whether or not Vortigern was an historical figure. I am interested in his role in ‘The Legendary History’ or ‘The Matter of Britain’, in particular the version of his story told by Laȝamon and how that story had developed. 

Laȝamon's version, written sometime after 1155, is the earliest English version of what resembles a full life. The brief appearance of Vortigern’s name in two entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has been developed into a complicated narrative which leads to the conception of Arthur:  Vortigern first seizes power, employs Hengist but is out-maneuvered by him, he marries Hengist’s daughter, fights his own sons and brings Merlin into the Legendary History. 

Vortigern’s story seems to belong to three traditions which might be separated purely for convenience. I'm particularly interested in the story before Geoffrey (1 and 2 below).  

1)   Gildas > Bede> Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

2)   Historia Brittonum (Nennius) / 2a  [The Pillar of Eliseg] 

3)   Geoffrey of Monmouth>Wace>Laȝamon

  

1 is the ‘historical’ Vortigern. From a possible mistranslation/misreading of Gildas to the brief Chronicle entries for 449 and 455.  

2 is ‘legendary’ and British.  This version is not only ‘fuller’ but different to 1 in a number of significant ways. The inscription on the pillar of Eliseg seems to commemorate Vortigern, but as Higham (2002, p. 167) writes : it treats him ‘with great honour…as a figure of extraordinary repute to whom the current generation look back with proper reverence'. As such it may be the only positive treatment of Vortigern in any of the sources. 

Have I missed any sources from the period before Geoffrey?
(A separate post on each of the traditions to follow).
Update: It's been pointed out that I've left out William of Malmesbury. My thanks.

‘Laȝamon remembers Ireland’: the scholarship poem revisited.

‘Laȝamon remembers Ireland’ is a small part of a much bigger writing project. 

You can read the poem ‘Laȝamon remembers Ireland’ here: http://www.meniscus.org.au/Vol6Iss1.pdf on pages 72-73)

I’ve been reading and then reading and writing about the Brut since about 1981, when a disgruntled undergraduate, me, was told he couldn’t use Malory for his Honours thesis but should ‘do something with Laȝamon’.

The questions that interest me now are ones that a conventional academic approach, confined by the discipline of whatever methodology, cannot answer. This is not to denigrate scholarship. Without scholarship, mine and others, what I’m trying to do would come untethered and drift off into pseudo-historical fantasy-writing.

If writing a poem can offer a unique way of thinking through and in language, then writing poems to rethink stories can lead beyond the various walls that hedge scholarship to suggest ways of thinking about the Brut, its author and their time. A question as simple as, ‘Why does Locrin put Aestrild in an ‘earth house’ with ‘ivory doors’? lead to the Bronze age tin trade. Whatever the poem suggests can then be tested against the evidence. It’s a fascinating process because it leads into areas logic and reason might not consider.   It’s Pound’s ‘scholarship poem’, or Graves’ ‘poetic method’ taken seriously. 

I set out to retell four stories from theBrut. But as the project developed, it became a many-sided conversation with a strange variety of textual participants: the history of Dark Age Naval power, tin trade in the Bronze age, Homer, Virgil, Herodotus, the archaeology of post Roman Britain, the history of early Medieval Wales and England, the English Parish clergy in the 12th century, the writings of Gerald of Wales…and while trying to translate the prologue, I found I’d started writing about Laȝamon himself. 

You can read what that process lead to here:
http://www.liamguilar.com/blog/2018/4/10/the-laamon-project-using-poems-to-think-or-revisiting-pounds-scholarship-poem

It's too long for a blog post.

Five new Poems in Meniscus

Five new poems published online at Meniscus.....

Click here

Christopher Cannon's: The Grounds of English Literature

This is an extraordinary book.

Its excellence operates on two levels: there is a general argument about literature, literary history, and the way texts are read and valued, which is of interest to anyone who wants to think about those things and detailed readings of a group of Early Middle English texts which illustrate and support that argument and which are original and thought provoking about those texts. Anything that tempts me to reread Ancrene Wisse has to be extraordinary.

The texts Cannon reads so well may be too obscure to attract many readers, but that’s a pity because the detailed readings support the general argument and the general argument shouldn’t be lost because you could probably fit all the people who’ve willingly reread Laȝamon’s Brut on a bus and take them to Arely Regis for the day.

Put into modern terms, and shifting from Cannon’s interest in ‘Literature’ to my interest in ‘Poetry’, ‘Poetry’ exists as an idea which is greater than the total sum of all the texts identified as ‘poems’. Texts gain in value by drawing on the excess meaning the term ‘Poetry’ has. The authority of ‘Poetry’ as an idea is not undermined or even dented by the fact that there is no satisfactory definition of ‘Poetry’, or that arguments about what Poetry does are rarely if ever supported by specific examples, or that no poem does all the things Poetry is supposed to be able to do.

The same is true of the term ‘poem’. Sir Phillip Sidney knew Poesy, what we’d call fictive literature, could be easily divided into Verse and Prose. The distinction was obvious. It wasn’t obvious in the centuries before Chaucer of which he probably knew very little. Today the baffling range of texts published as ‘poems’ means such a distinction is once again no longer tenable. A poem is simply any text recognised as a poem by those with the authority and power to do so.

But because there is an aggregate of ‘poemness’, something most people would recognise as ‘having the characteristics of a poem’ even if the liminal cases are problematic, calling something a poem draws on the excess of value the term has. A ‘poem’ is an indefinable but special type of text, with a long history and a great deal of residual cultural capital which relies on a vaguely misunderstood past, rather than any present reality.  In itself ‘poem’ is drawing on the greater bank which is ‘Poetry’. (whether Literature stands above Poetry or below it in this ‘economic’ model is an interesting question.)

I wake up. I open my eyes. The world is still there. You are not.

Fifteen common words carrying a commonplace thought. Chopped into lines:

I wake up.

I open my eyes.

The world is still there

You are not.

posted to Instagram and tagged as poetry, it claims the ‘status of poem’, and if enough people ‘like’ it, the writer can claim the title of ‘poet’. Poet is another word with excess value carrying a great deal of residual cultural capital that has nothing to do with the pragmatic role of writers of texts but which can be drawn on if you want to strut.  

These two points: Poetry is an idea which exceeds the sum total of all poems ever written, but which cannot be adequately defined and ‘Poem’ is the name given to a text as the result of a learnt reading practice which recognise a text as a poem and associates it with ‘Poetry’, have implications for both the way critics and readers approach the reception of texts and how writers go about producing them.

Most, I suspect, would rather ignore the implications because they cut the ground away from so many unexamined assumptions. Or at least can force a confrontation with those assumptions. It becomes difficult to operate as critics if we start to try and take each text on its own terms because that's not the way we became 'competent readers'. But unless we do that, claims to value original or unique texts ring hollow. What passes for ‘experimental’ in modern poetry is really the repetition of characteristics that are currently recognised by those in the know as 'experimental'.  

Claiming something is ‘ground breaking’ is an easy, thoughtless critical commonplace for blurbs: proving how or why something is groundbreaking is a very different matter.

As a modern example: Thomas Dilworth, in his work on David Jones, is emphatic that although written in prose In Parenthesis is poetry. (He makes this claim in Reading David Jones and then more recently in his biography of Jones.)

The question that goes begging in the claim is what is gained by shoe horning that remarkable text into any category? If you claim the text is poetry, then you’re also saying that the learnt reading practice you developed to read ‘poems’ can be applied here. But in saying A is like B, you’re inevitably distorting A, and while you can now focus on the things that are common and familiar, you’re tending to lose sight of what makes A not B.

What shoe horning the text does is reveal the way we read. We assimilate to the familiar and in doing so reduce the threat the genuinely strange provides to our comfortable assumptions.  And Cannon’s suggestion, if I’m not wrong, is that the solidifying of this process can be seen in the period between the Conquest and the development of ‘Romance’ as a recognisable category in the 13^th Century.

In that strange period dubbed ‘Early Middle English’ it’s possible to argue these reading processes were not at work.  The text types are so different that there is no ‘aggregate’ that allows them to be lumped together as ‘Literature’ and draw on the added value that term could give them. You cannot read ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’ with the same expectations you’d read Laȝamon’s Brut. The two texts are preserved in the same manuscript. One is written out in continual lines, the other  recognisable as ‘poetry’ in its lay out.  Today they are both called ‘poems’ but if they are both ‘poems’ they are so different that the term is already so stretched as to seem useless.

Cannon argues that this is not a failure of the texts, rather, each text has to be taken on its own terms, and in doing that readers and critics become aware of how we don’t usually read in this way and how claims that the original and the unique are valued are implicitly false. 

And so that’s the general point, probably slightly distorted.  Enthusiastic discussion of specific argument to follow.  

Hug a medievalist day, with thanks

This from the New Yorker.

HUG A MEDIEVALIST
by Macy Halford

Today is International Hug a Medievalist Day. Do I really want to hug a medievalist?, you wonder. Yes! you do. Medievalists are the best kind of historian, in my opinion (which is why I majored in medieval history in college): they are always very interested in the body, the bawdy, and the beautiful, by which I mean they have a profound interest in the nitty-gritty of Western culture—in its material composition and the spiritual and intellectual urges that give rise to it. Perhaps because they delight in details and see worlds within them, medievalists are uniformly possessed of an excellent if slightly juvenile sense of humor, which becomes more pronounced when they drink and their inherent social awkwardness wears off. They drink most nights, usually at dimly lit pubs or sitting in tight clusters on the floors of grad-student apartments, and they prefer to drink red wine or ale. The caveat to this is that at least once a year, in every medievalist cluster, someone has the idea of hosting a medieval-themed party, at which they serve a) mulled wine b) mincemeat pies and c) some multi-animal mishmash like turducken. If you are very unfortunate, someone will attempt rabbit stew with cinnamon and mace, which no one will eat. But such comical failures are part and parcel of the medievalist lifestyle.


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/03/hug-a-medievalist-day.html#ixzz1IEEbKGDR
(I have never had the idea of hosting a medieval themed party, though I did once participate in an all night reading of Beowulf which was lubricated by some devastating ale brewed, we were told, to an Old Icelandic recipe.

So here's thanks to all the saints and scholars, the gentle lunatics and social misfits, the straight geniuses, the professional teachers and the ones who didn't mean to but did, to all those who preserved the field, the antiquarians, archivists, librarians, the amateurs when there was no profession, who have , one way or another, helped and hindered along the way.
Many thanks.