So you want to be a medievalist...

...that's awesome! Congrats, and welcome. 

I'm about to take exams, and I'd like to share with you some resources that I knew nothing about until I found out I'd be tested on them. In a perfect world I'd have time to explain them all to you. For now, here's a rough sketch of what they do. And please forgive the strange formatting errors. I've spent far too much time trying to html my way out of them already.

Until soon, stay savvy, friends!

Primary Sources: What do you want to find?*

                                   Old English                                                        Middle English

                                          |                                                                             |

Prose                Poetry               MS            Drama                            Verse             Prose                 ?

|                           |                          |                      |                                   |             |                           /

                                                             Record of Early English                                  Manual of Writing

|                           |                          |                   Drama                            /             |      in Middle Eng.           

             Online Corpus of Old                                            (Digital) Index of                      

             English Poetry;                                                      Middle English Verse                                                             

             Anglo-Saxon Poetic                                                                                           

|            Records                             |                                                                        |

English                                      Catalogue of MSs                                      Index of Printed

Historical                                   Containing Anglo-Saxon;                          Middle Eng Prose;

Documents;                               Early English MSs in                                 Index of Middle

Die Gesetze der                         Facsimile                                                    English Prose

Angelsachsen;

Rolls Series;

PASE database

              

            Patrologia Latina

            /

*Latin? --Repertorium Biblium Medii Aevi

            \

                  Acta Sanctorum

Secondary Sources: What kind of question do you have?*      

                        About sources                                                About influence or interpretation

                                |                                                                                       |

Fontes Anglo-Saxonici;                                                                                Anglo-Saxon England; Year's Work in English

Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture;                                                Studies; Studies in the Age of Chaucer; Variorum

Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales                         Edition (Chaucer); Arthurian Lit in the Middle Ages

*Old English Newsletter Online and Digital Medievalist are also great sources for sources

Tertiary Sources, etc.: For the very specific, or very general search

Bibliographies: 

International Medieval Bibliography; Bibliography of Publications on Old English through 1972; Bulletin Bibliografique (Societe Internationale Arthurienne)

Indices (indexes?), Surveys, Concordances, etc:

Motif Index of English Metrical Romances; Survey of English Place-Names; Index of Arthurian Names in Middle English; Biographical Register of University of Oxford to AD 1500; Medieval Libraries of Great Britain; Monumenta Germaniae Historica; Dictionary of National Biography; Dictionary of the Middle Ages

Linguistic Aides:
Cambridge History of the English Language, Grammar of Old English (Hogg), Handbook of Middle English Grammar;  A Middle English Syntax; Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English, Microfiche Concordance to Old English, Historical Outlines of English Sounds and Inflections; Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary; Dictionary of Old English (Toronto)

Gliding along

Hello, all!
It's a cold, wet day here in Durham-- perfect for reading and prepping for exams. One of my favorite tools, as I've recently tweeted, is timeglider.com.
Here's an example of what I've done with it:

http://timeglider.com/t/be6d0401f891f426?min_zoom=1&max_zoom=100

As you can see, I've laid out the medieval and early modern drama I'm responsible for. What's great is that I can add images, text, etc to each entry. And this is all in the free version!

Until soon, wishing everyone a cozy evening-- no matter where (or when) you are.

Hyperbole indulged: On hidden horrors

Nothing academic here--just a quick image from a WSJ article a dear friend sent me. 

Meniere's makes me unable to tolerate more than 1300-1500 mg of sodium per day. I've gotten a hang of cooking and traveling with this limitation, but dining out is another matter entirely! Here's how I read menus (and why I eat at home so often).

Until next time,  wishing everyone health and happiness!

Norge!

Happy new year to all, readers!
I'd usually try to connect my reading (Chaucer and Milton) with my trip (2 weeks in Norway), but I'm a bit short on time.
I take exams in February, so my posts between now and then will likely be about my reading material, my studying process, or absent altogether.
For now, I'll just share some photos. I'd really like to post about museums in Norway-- fingers crossed I can get some other work done first!
In the meantime, you can find more photos and comments on my twitter and intstagram accounts (@RebeccaShores)

Until soon, wishing everyone a new start if they need it and continued success if they don't.


Oslo:

The Scream(!)

Reindeer at Christmas Fair

View from the Maritime Museum

Viking Ship Museum

Moved stave church at Folk Museum

Folk Museum

Folk Museum

Natural History Museum

Natural History Museum

Natural History Museum

Akershus Fortress

Cathedral

Skiing in Voss:

View from Bavallstunet cabin

Same, Christmas

Wood-burning stove

Christmas Eve service (Vangskyrkja)

Bergen:

Hanseatic Museum (AMAZING)

Hanseatic Museum: cubbied bunkbeds (totally doing this for kids' room one day)

Hanseatic Museum: corner desk

Bryggens Museum: site of the oldest settlements in Bergen (12th c)

Bryggen 

View from the top of Mt Floyen

University Museum of Bergen: Blue Whale Skeleton 

University Museum of Bergen: playroom

Bergen Maritime Museum

Bergen Maritime Museum

St Olaf's Church, Vestry

Bergen square

"Clive Owen" and "King Arthur" kind of alliterate

Welcome back, readers!

I started this blog because my academic life is so often reflected by my suburban one. Coincidences happen as often as you look for them, as it turns out.

Yesterday I finished prepping for Malory's Le Morte Dartur. Once I wrote it up on my wall of triumph, I took my congratulatory wine glass up to bed and looked for a TiVo'd movie. And what did  I find? The 2004 not-even-near-blockbuster, "King Arthur."

This was clearly an act of fate. And I'm an Anglo-Saxonist, so I know allllll about fate.

Starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley, the movie boasts some pretty sexy characters.

Behold, the ever-furrowed brow of the tormented but resilient hero:

And the rescued, single-parent, sex maven/ liaison to Merlin:

I was surprised-- tickled, even-- that the director had stuck to the "original" (ahem) 5th century setting, around time of the sack of Rome.

Most people associate Arthur with the later Middle Ages because writers like Malory were 14th or 15th century authors of chivalric romance. Though writing of better days long past, they imported their own cultural necessities into the stories, bringing tales of long ago into contemporary frameworks.

But still, how did this transition happen?

Here's a brief run-down of the Arthurian tradition, derived from Shepherd's critical edition of Malory:

410: Rome withdraws from Britain

5th-6th centuries: "Various historical records" make note of an unnamed British warlord's successes against invading Angles and Saxons

late 6th century: Welsh poems attribute supernatural powers to a warrior named Arthur

c 800: Welsh chronicle Historia Brittonum documents a dozen victories of Arthur, dux bellorum (leader of battles), over the Saxons.

c 1000-1100: "Development of a body of Welsh Arthurian tales with much marvellous content," some of which may indicate "the Celtic origin aspects of the Grail quest"

1140: Geoffrey of Monmouth cobbles together different bits of Arthurian lore and becomes the source for most subsequent treatments of the legend.

1155: Wace's Anglo-Norman Brut incorporates much of Monmouth, adds the Round Table, and, perhaps most importantly, "'moderniz[es] Arthur's court into a chivalric institution."

1190: Layamon translates Wace's work, making the "first Arthurian retelling in England"

The rest of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the development of "non-courtly" renderings as well as highly Christianized stories of the individual knights, all in addition to the French prose Vulgate Cycle.

The fourteenth century witnessed the construction of the Winchester Round Table, the establishment of The Order of the Garter, and the composition of Middle English's alliterative Morte Arthure and stanzaic Morte Arthur.

Malory began (and probably finished) his Morte Darthur in prison in 1470. He died a year later, in the middle of the Wars of the Roses.

For a more in-depth look at some of these sources (as well as some sources I've left out), check out the inimitably awesome blog of Medieval Bex:http://medievalbex.wordpress.com/

So now, back to the movie, appropriately set at the autumn of the ancient ages (Huizinga wink).

We're off to a good start with the handsome cast and the approximate historical time period. But it all kind of crumbles from there.
I worried that watching this after reading so much of the Arthurian tradition would confuse me, but it turned out to be a great test of my knowledge. Consider, for instance,  Lancelot, depicted with two swords:

I saw this and proudly told Drew, "No! The knight with the two swords is Balyn!" Yay me.

But Arthurian legends--in any of their countless iterations-- are not ever really about accuracy, anyway. The earliest stories were tales of bravery in the face of slaughtering invaders; the later authors replaced episodes martial valor with those of marital fidelity as the concerns of the works became increasingly interested in courtly affairs.

Taking its cue from Braveheart, our 2004 rendition takes freedom as its primary lesson/ theme.

And this anachronistic emphasis on personal (yet also national?) freedom isn't all these two movies share. They share something else: face paint.

We all know that Braveheart is about a 13th century Scotsman who rides around trying to act like Mel Gibson. Nevertheless, there is some measure of authenticity in the iconic face paint the warriors wear. This tradition came from the Picts-- the pre-Scotland Scots, if you will-- who were so named for being "painted."

And guess what? GUINEVERE IS ONE OF THEM. Yep. Guinevere sheds her already ill-fitting clothes for a battle bikini, paints her whole body blue, and goes crazy on some blonde-haired viking invaders.

And that reminded me of someone else:

I know, I know. Your mind is blown.

Well, there's much more to be said about the Arthurian tradition, and hopefully I'll be able to share more thoughts on Malory, Launfal, the Lady of Shallot, Havelok, and Horn.

But for now, I must return to the reading list.

Until next time,
wishing one everyone a surprisingly relevant TiVo experience.