“I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies…”

Five years ago, I tinkered with a template, raised this blog’s roof-beams, and wrote a hasty first post promising “a place to ponder books, writing, teaching, and medievalism.”

To my ever-renewing amazement, people continue to read this site, leave comments, and email me about gargoyles or curiously unignorable Charlemagne ephemera. Amid the mass stampede to social media, blogs are still valuable places to explore untrendy cultural niches or stretch a notion beyond the epigrammatic—so even if I update this site unpredictably, I’m in it for the long haul.

Thanks to all of you whose eyeballs make “QP?” a pleasure to write! I hope you’ll continue to find it worth your time. For now, here’s a sort of “greatest hits” anthology from the half-decade that was.

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Every day, new readers find the blog through these posts:

• Indiana Jones and the Best Thing Charlemagne Never Said.
• An appreciation of the Pogues.
• Tolkien’s Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun and its Wagnerian connection.
• Is Grendel the most delightfully reactionary book an English major will read?
• My lonely defense of the Miles O’Keeffe-Sean Connery film Sword of the Valiant.

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Poems inspired by the National Cathedral gargoyles have lately dominated this blog. The poems will end soon, but this summer I’ll collect them in a small book to raise funds for post-earthquake repairs. Stay tuned.

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Meet some medievalists who left their mark on the world:

• American polymath Henry Adams
• Anna Julia Cooper, the most inspiring medievalist you’ve never heard of
• Ralph Adams Cram, the architect who implored us to move into medieval towns
• Danish polymath and Beowulf scholar N.S.F. Grundtvig
• Gary Gygax, one of the most influential medievalists of the 20th century
• Belgian historian and national hero Henri Pirenne

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We found that Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan, was a prolific poet, while one of the great female voices in science fiction has been disowned by her alma mater.

In 2008, I started reading all of Lloyd Alexander’s non-Prydain books and writing capsule reviews. (Five more to go!)

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The lighter side of medievalism:

• In Ocean City, Maryland: Vikings, a dragon temple, and hobbits in the soup
• Courtly love on General Hospital
• On cable: Medieval Shark Week

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Applied paleobromatology:

• the sweet scents of medieval Baghdad
• the rueful quacking of late-medieval England
• a quest to find the holy grail in the cupboard
• Inventing a new soft drink, galangal ale

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When you visit the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, what sex are the angels?

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In Louisiana, my family and I found medieval saints in the Lower Ninth Ward, explored the castle Mark Twain loathed, chased monsters in New Orleans, found medievalism by Lake Pontchartrain, and tailgated at a Cajun ring-joust.

Of course, medievalism abounds in the South. Just look for a Gothic synagogue in Georgia.

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Amid Ren Faires and the umpteenth Arthurian novel, we may forget that medievalism is often grim stuff. Remember the Balkans, where medieval nostalgia stirs unnerving memories of the Battle of Kosovo and puts the capture of Radovan Karadzic in context.

Likewise, the 2008 war the Caucasus meant rediscovering the medievalist nationalism of South Ossetia and muddling through the baffling history of Georgia.

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In 2008, the credit crunch reminded us that financial derivatives have medieval roots.

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 Of course, anything Charlemagne-themed is blog-fodder here:

• Still available in print and on Kindle: The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier
• From 2007: several translated poems by Theodulf of Orleans (which eventually became an article)
• What’s the verdict on the big Charlemagne heavy-metal concept album?
• Charlemagne’s ghost haunts at least one country song.
• Question of the millennium: What hath Charlemagne to do with SpaghettiOs?

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Is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao not only a Dominican-American story, but also a New Jersey novel?

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What are we losing, perhaps, in the rush to digitize?

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Can filmmaker Oscar Micheaux teach us something about the Middle Ages?

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Which medieval poem was translated by Langston Hughes and T.S. Eliot?

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The late Christopher Logue, adapter of The Iliad, knew how poetry sounds with a mouth full of blood.