“‘And join with us, please,’ valkyrie maidens cry…”

Jet lag, a busy week, and other responsibilities conspire to keep me away from the keyboard. In the meantime, dear readers, here’s some worthwhile reading from around the Web.

Tributes to the late Gary Gygax abound, but this one is my favorite, at least conceptually: some players of the game EVE Online purchased a ship and gave the co-inventor of Dungeons & Dragons an online Viking space funeral. (At least that’s what they claim they were doing. I’ll have to take their word for it.)

The link between D&D and online gaming is nothing new. In fact, Dragon magazine once published a prescient short story on the subject: “Catacomb” by Henry Melton. Judging by the number of online message-board requests from people trying to track it down, this story made a huge impression on readers in 1985.

Open Letters Monthly has posted the third installment of “Green,” Adam Golaski’s strange and delightful translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (Part one is here. Part two is here.)

Steven Hart considers the best swordfight movie of all time.

At University Diaries, they’re debating the efficacy of Powerpoint in the classroom. Here’s a quoteworthy snippet from UD herself:

You know the happiest thing I experience teaching? The thing I’m going to remember most vividly from my years of teaching? The looks of open wonder, eager skepticism, scoffing disbelief, amusement, boredom, intense analytical energy, on my students’ faces. They show me those faces and I see them and they see that I see them… And that is the only way I know to begin serious intellectual study — mutual vulnerability, openness to the other person as a restless mind reaching out to other minds in real time and space.

I love most of all the first thing: open wonder. Students are quite unself-conscious when they show me that one. Their heads are tilted to the side. Their mouths are slightly open. Their eyes are narrowed. On me. These are the students who come up to me after class and want to know if Nietzsche really meant what he said when he said… Because it seems to me that…

Meanwhile, Brandon at Point of Know Return responds thoughtfully to a potentially hostile question: “What are you going to do with a degree in medieval studies?”

Thanks for stopping by! New posts—and maybe even an Aachen update—are coming soon.