“It was Friday morn when we set sail…”

Friday! A fine day for maritime disasters, casual clothes—and some quick weekend links.

Steven Hart calls Aleksandr Solzhenetsyn “unanswerably correct about one huge subject…and buffoonishly wrong about almost everything else.” I’m struck by how many great writers he could be describing.

JLJ at Per Omnia Saecula collaborates with her sister to bake medieval cookies.

The Economist notes the destruction of Beijing’s medieval streets and explains “why it still pays to study medieval English landholding and Sahelian nomadism.”

Planning a Roman holiday? Studenda Mira recommends the new Julius Caesar bio. (I do, too, by the way.)

If you didn’t get to take a summer vacation, let Wil Cone show you Provence and Switzerland.

Ephemeral in New York discovers the Jeanne d’Arc Home for “friendless French girls.”

Jake Seliger suggests that media pundits would benefit from reading The Best Software Writing.

How ’bout a Roger Miller video? Here’s Leroy Powell, giving “River in the Rain” the heartfelt cover it deserves.

“Red are the sunsets in mystical places…”

Over at Unlocked Wordhoard, Scott Nokes is getting ready to teach Old English this fall. I’ve seen the excellent rapport Scott has with his undergraduates; his current crop of students can look forward to a memorable semester.

But why dabble in a dead language, especially if you’re not a medievalist? Scott has spelled out several pragmatic reasons for studying Old English, all of which I heartily endorse. Here’s an addendum to his list; naturally, the actual pragmatism of each entry is in the eye of the beholder.

To get to know your native language better. You understand that “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” and “to attempt, to quest, to locate, and not to quit” convey the same basic meaning even as you sense that these phrases resonate with wildly different tones. There are historical reasons why that’s so—and dabbling in Old English will allow you to look at any snippet of modern English and behold those gnarled medieval roots. If you’re a writer, you’ll benefit immeasurably from this wisdom. It’s one thing to have vague feelings about the implications of diction; it’s quite another to know exactly why you choose the words you do.

Because you’re paying how much per credit hour? You can spend $1,500 to have some TA explain the obvious (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is totally about society’s destruction of natural human impulses”), or you can learn to read the poetry and prose of a lost medieval world. The English curriculum is stereotyped as being easy, and often deservedly so, but when you study Old English you enter a less forgiving realm of history and hard grammar. It’s not always hospitable, but it does have its charms. For one thing, no one ever starts a sentence with, “What this poem made me feel was, like…”

Because Old English is a gateway drug. You do eight or nine lines—think “Caedmon’s Hymn”—and you figure that’ll be it: youthful experimentation. But you can’t quit, and soon you’re taking Middle English, or studying German, or dabbling in (Bože moj!) linguistics. Filthy, filthy linguistics. Your parents pray it’s a phase. How will they explain to your grandmother than you’re a…medievalist? When she was growing up, the world was a different place; people didn’t talk openly about such things…

To gather new data points about human nature. Old English poetry is like nothing else you’ll read in college: stoic, brooding, high-minded, unfrivolous, and formal. Sometimes, even my students who’ve served in the military are baffled by the foreignness of the Anglo-Saxon heroic code but haunted by the elegies, while irreligious students are often surprised to find themselves impressed by the inventiveness of “The Dream of the Rood.” That first encounter with Old English poetry can be unnerving, like the rustling of soil on a grave, but Anglo-Saxon poetry prepares you to think more deeply about the difference between the transient aspects of culture and traits that are timelessly human.

To learn something no one else knows. At some point after you graduate, someone—cousins, co-workers—will be musing about a quirk of modern English, and they’ll decide it’s time to ask the English major. Wouldn’t it be nice to wow them with a technical explanation about i-mutation or strong Germanic verbs?

Because it’s not as difficult as you think it is. Some English majors—and professors—are impressed when a medievalist can rattle off the opening lines of Beowulf from memory. They shouldn’t be. Study Old English and you’ll learn much about mnemonic devices and the amazing human capacity for memorization and oral composition—and you’ll stop being one of the easily impressed.

Because you can earn valuable prizes. Last year, I won a Major Award in the trivia contest at my office Christmas party because I knew the Old English cognate of “wassail.” Sure, the Major Award was a florescent green T-shirt with a cartoon monkey on it, but you don’t have one, do you?

“If I had a million dirhams…”

What did history taste like?

In Becoming Charlemagne, I used a pile of sources to speculate about how eighth-century Baghdad looked and felt. Scholars are fond of mentioning that the smells of medieval cities would have overwhelmed the modern nose—but the kitchens of the caliphs would have been a revelation.

As Charles Perry has pointed out, the cuisine of early medieval Baghdad was unlike the Middle Eastern menu of today. Rice wasn’t steamed but was mashed into porridge; dishes contained a medley of aromatic herbs; and stews were flavored with murri, the juice from moldy barley—which, Perry informs us, tasted exactly like soy sauce. “There’s no hummus or tabouli, no stuffed grape leaves, no kibbe, no baklava,” he explains. “Many dishes have strange, clanking medieval names like bazmaawurd, kardanaaj, isfiidhabaaj and diikbariika.”

Since Perry, author of Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World, was kind enough to adapt several medieval Islamic dishes for modern ingredients and measurements, I thought I’d whip up some tabaahaja, a sweet lamb dish recorded by Yahya ibn Khalid ibn Barmak.

Yahya was an interesting guy. His family, the Barmakids, were the protectors of a Buddhist shrine in what’s now Afghanistan. After the family converted to Islam, Yahya’s father, Khalid, helped fund the revolution that brought the Abbasid caliphs into power, thus leading to the founding of Baghdad in A.D. 762. Yahya himself was tutor and mentor to the caliph Harun al-Rashid, who sent Charlemagne an elephant; Yahya’s sons, Fadl and Jafar, were two of the most powerful men in the caliphate.

Reveling in the Persianized culture of the urban elite, the Barmakids threw the best parties in Baghdad—until Harun, for reasons no one really understands, destroyed the family and hung Jafar in pieces from a bridge.

Today, when movies feature a sinister vizier named Jafar, that’s a distant echo of the Barmakid story as filtered through the Arabian Nights and 19th-century Orientalism. You also may be familiar with those irreverent early-Islamic pop singers, the Barmakid Ladies.

Okay, okay, back to Yahya’s recipe.

A pound of lamb leg waits to be smothered in a marinade of soy sauce (murri substitute), honey, cinnamon, coriander, and black pepper. I splurged on good lamb, but iffy kitchen experiments warrant only cheap-ish spices.

Fun fact: the Islamic world was centuries ahead of medieval Europe in its adoption of bear-shaped plastic containers.

Here are the lamb-leg bits and pieces, soaking like harem girls in a hot tub.

Two hours later, the marinade hits the oil in the Le Creuset saucepan with an excited sizzle.

In an alternate universe where Charles Martel failed to stop the Muslim advance at Poitiers, the French never invented pricey cookware. Also, I would have a goatee.

Half an hour later, the lamb is ready for the vizier’s table. It’s been garnished with cilantro, but I left off the optional mustard greens and rue, the latter because finding a bitter abortifacent anywhere but in a garden store is difficult even in an area full of Asian markets, and hunting for it is too creepy to be worth the trouble.

Behold: tabaahaja. If lamb were candy, it would be this. The marinade has become a glaze so sweet it’s wince-inducing; the most prominent flavor is cinnamon; and the overall taste is reminiscent of spare ribs at a Chinese restaurant.

The vizier and his entourage would have eaten tabaahaja with flatbread and washed it down with fruit juice. (I opted for a tortilla and black cherry soda.) Harun himself was partial to gazelle milk, so let’s spare a sympathetic thought for history’s forgotten hero: the servant whose job was to milk the gazelle.

“Ipse galeos, O cara, bellos dentes habet…”

For more than twenty years, one annual event has made television more lurid, more gruesome, and increasingly frenzied for ratings. I refer, of course, to Shark Week.

Last year, any given Shark Week program was watched by four million people. I can’t recall ever having seen a single minute of Shark Week—but it occurred to me that some of those four million pairs of eyeballs are mounted in the skulls of indiscriminate Googlers with a passion for bloodthirsty monsters of the deep.

And so, good lords and gentle ladies, I bid ye welcome to

“Hey, Jeff,” I hear yon straw man cry, “what’s Medieval Shark Week all about?”

Medieval Shark Week is about food!

Eat shark like the Vikings did! Here’s a recipe for hákarl, the famous rotten-shark delicacy of the Icelanders. All you need is a shark, a gravel hole near the seashore, and someplace to hang a cadaver for four months. “Don’t try this at home,” the recipe advises, “unless you know what the end product is supposed to taste like.”

Medieval Shark Week is about fun!

If you’re a gamer, you’ll want to play TIMESHARK II: Medieval Shark Strike Force, in which you become a time-traveling shark transported back to medieval Germany to feast on clones of Adolf Hitler.

Download the game for Mac or PC here. You’ll find instructions on the second page of this thread, where the game’s author reveals that TIMESHARK is an acronym for “Time-travelling Intimidation and Mastication Expert: Sharks Have Ample Reason to Kill.”

Medieval Shark Week is about scholarship!

The New York Times reports that the International Shark Attack File “holds approximately 3,200 reports of shark attacks, from medieval times to the present,” but that “[o]nly qualified researchers are allowed access to the documents themselves.” Huzzah! A dissertation topic for anyone who can’t bear to read another word about monastic reform.

The “fossils” entry in Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs has this to say:

Fossil shark teeth, taken for petrified serpents’ tongues, were named glossopetrae (tongue stones) or St. Paul’s tongues and were worn as amulets to neutralize poisons. Beginning in the fifteenth century it was fashionable to suspend an array of sharks’ teeth on a gilded and bejeweled tree-shaped rack, called a languier or Natternzungenbaum, on one’s dining table ready for dipping into wine. Languiers were also hung over baby’s cots for protection.

I hope you’re all taking notes, because there’s going to be a short quiz next period.

Medieval Shark Week is about irony!

A suit of armor was once found inside a shark’s stomach—but were it not for medieval chainmail, we might never have learned how to protect ourselves from shark bites.

Medieval Shark Week is about making a lame joke jump itself!

The Tudor Shoppe, “purveyors of fine wares for 16th-century enthusiasts,” sells a shark hand puppet.

Why not buy a medieval shark dagger?

A manticore was often said to possess shark-like teeth.

Medieval Shark Week is about running out of material on the first day!

So maybe we could make it Shark and Manticore Week? Because really, who doesn’t love a lion with a human face? Hey, wait—where’s everybody going? Uh, guys, wait up! Guys?

“Two-one-zero, der Alarm ist rod…”

Basking in the sun? Reading? Wrangling children? Whatever your weekend plans, here are some spiffy links if you find yourself indoors.

Heather Domin continues her tour of the Roman garden with cumin and dill. (Click the “in hortum” tag for her entire series.)

Geoffrey Chaucer re-brands his blog.

Brandon ponders The Historian’s Craft.

Open Letters Monthly mourns Lyall Watson and revisits The Last Unicorn.

Got Medieval finds a medieval law book with not-safe-for-work drawings that put the “stare” in “stare decisis.”

Linda finds the humble remains of a monastery founded by Charlemagne’s dad—and proof that the French drink boxed wine.

The Hogwarts Professor contemplates the medievalism of Harry Potter.

Time magazine describes the lives of recent poets laureate. (Link via Books, Inq.)

Scott Nokes invites you to learn Old English this fall.

Ephemeral New York finds mythical sea creatures on Manhattan buildings and farm animals in Central Park.

Finally, here’s Jose Iturbi conducting an abridged version of Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1, with Larry Adler on harmonica. (Come on, who else is gonna link to that?)

“He brewed a song of love and hatred…”

In his English translation of The Battle of Kosovo, John Matthias commends his co-translator, Vladeta Vučković, and offers this passage from Vučković’s modern poem about Serbian legend and history:

The Serbs quieted down, but they did not shut their mouths. Idled by the time on their hands they started to sing and sang themselves hoarse in endless poems accompanied by the mourning sounds of the sobbing gusle. The blind guslars gazed into the future, and those who could see covered themselves out of shame and became the leaders of the blind. But what kind of music is this, my poor soul, reduced to just one string!

I was inspired to hunt for this gloomy passage after the Guardian reported that prior to his capture on Monday, Radovan Karadžić liked to jam on the gusle in a Belgrade pub:

In retrospect, it is hardly surprising it was his favourite pub. The walls and bar of the Luda Kuca (the name means madhouse) are adorned with the Serb pantheon – Slobodan Milosevic, Vojislav Seselj, Ratko Mladic and of course, Radovan Karadzic – each one a nationalist hero. For the hardline clientele, the fact that they also shared the distinction of having been charged by The Hague war crimes tribunal only enhanced their status as warriors.

There were many stories being told yesterday about the man the locals knew as Doctor David, psychiatrist holistic health guru and mystic. But one winter’s night in particular was passing speedily into folklore.

That night, there was a jamming session on the gusle, the one-string fiddle played across the Balkans to accompany epic poetry. Dabic turned up to listen and was eventually persuaded to join in. Those present that night shook their heads yesterday in disbelief at the memory. There was Radovan Karadzic, their hero and icon, playing the gusle for them under his own portrait, and no one had a clue who he was. It was the stuff of legend.

Raso Vucinic, a young Serb nationalist who had been playing the gusle that night, was burnishing a tale he would one day tell his grandchildren.

Balkan epic poems are a gift to the world. Early in the 20th century, recorded performances of epics such as The Wedding of Smailagić Meho helped a generation of scholars better understand the compositional techniques behind Beowulf and other medieval works, and the surviving fragments of the Kosovo cycle are tinged with wistful eloquence. The stories they tell are exciting and sad—but these songs can’t be sung in a vacuum.

Five years ago, while visiting Serbian friends, I found myself in an ancient city on the Montenegrin coast. To escape the midday sun, we ducked into a run-down shop full of pirated software and used compact discs. On a high shelf, safe behind glass, was a special item: a cassette case adorned with a somber portrait of Slobodan Milošević. My host squinted at the title and explained, ruefully, that the cassette was a recording of epic poems lamenting the tragic downfall of Milošević, performed in the traditional manner and set to the screech of the gusle. It wasn’t on sale for its philological interest.

Karadžić, by contrast, composed his own tale. In 1992, for the benefit of documentarians, he played the gusle in the house of his 19th-century forefather Vuk Karadžić, a philologist whose work gave Serbian nationalists something to sing about. A poet himself, Radovan knew that moving incognito among his own people as a bearded mystic would be reminiscent of epic, a motif so cleverly adapted that even his own capture would make for a beguiling story.

Medievalists, take note: sometimes, this is how epic heroes are made, under conditions so ugly that lawyers start to wonder whether poetry can be a war crime. If nothing else, the long-overdue capture of Karadžić, dramatic though it is, refutes that old Joseph Campbell baloney: sometimes the hero has only two faces, and neither one is really worth a damn.

“Into the sea, you and me…”

[Here’s the latest in an ongoing series of reviews of all of Lloyd Alexander’s non-Prydain books. To see all posts in this series, click on the “Lloyd Alexander” tag.]

At your local Barnes & Noble, the Lloyd Alexander selection is probably small. You’ll find all five books in the Prydain series and rarely anything else—but these days, if the store stocks any other Alexander novel, you will see, inexplicably, Time Cat.

By 1963, Alexander had written five books for adults and two books for children, but Time Cat was his first attempt at young-adult fantasy. He sets up the premise hastily: While hiding in his bedroom, a boy named Jason convinces his cat, Gareth, to spend his nine lives taking him on a tour of history. By the fourth page, with no further explanation, Jason and Gareth are romping through ancient Egypt and Roman Britain; soon they’re offering advice to Saint Patrick and posing for Leonardo da Vinci.

Unfortunately, Jason and Gareth never stay anywhere long enough for Alexander to turn his favorite historical figures into memorable characters, and his writing is sometimes awkward. Sentences like “Jason, expecting he didn’t know what, breathed a sigh of relief,” are oddly informal, and the emotion in Time Cat feels false:

“You know, Gareth,” he said, “your whiskers do look like the rays of the sun. And I do think you could hold the moon in your eyes if you wanted to.”
“So the Egyptians say,” Gareth answered.
“Oh, Gareth,” Jason whispered, “why don’t you try?”

The lessons of Time Cat are simple and repetitive. Jason and Gareth humble the Pharaoh when he learns that cats won’t heed his commands; they teach the emperor of Japan the same lesson; and in 16th-century Peru, they frustrate a Spanish captain who also wants cats to do tricks. When Jason and Gareth return to the present, Gareth declares, “If you think back, everybody we met had something to tell you—about themselves, and about yourself. It’s a way of finding out a part of what you have to know to be a grown-up.” Alexander’s later novels made this same point with eloquence and wit; in Time Cat, Gareth’s conclusion isn’t supported by a hasty field trip through history.

For some readers, that field trip may be enough, and I’m sure Time Cat has introduced many children to the study of history. But in the past 45 years, young-adult literature has grown so sophisticated—and Alexander’s later novels are such fine examples of their genre—that the current marketing push behind Time Cat is peculiar. It’s troubling to see Alexander at his most tentative, but I’m heartened by how quickly he bounced back: The Book of Three was published one year later.

“And near me on the grass lies Glanvil’s book…”

[Here’s the latest in an ongoing series of reviews of all of Lloyd Alexander’s non-Prydain books. To see all posts in this series, click on the “Lloyd Alexander” tag.]

Lloyd Alexander described Gypsy Rizka best. “The main character is a young half-gypsy girl named Rizka, as the title says,” he told Scholastic in 1999:

She is so bright and smart and sassy and clever that she outwits the solemn and overblown townsfolk who are trying to do her in. It’s a very funny book because Rizka’s schemes—and she’s brilliant at them—are very comical. I should add that she always wins! And those idiot town dignitaries always lose, which is exactly the way it ought to be.

In this preview for young readers, Alexander highlights the most charming aspect of Gypsy Rizka; he also points out the novel’s significant flaw.

Considered a blot on Greater Dunitsa by the ruling elite, Rizka lives in a wagon on the edge of town. While she waits for her father to return with the rest of the gypsies, she sneaks around town with her tomcat and finds a father figure in the local blacksmith, the only person in Greater Dunitsa who’s even remotely sensible. Rizka, for her part, is implausibly competent: when she plays matchmaker, she unites two feuding families and finds homes for five stray kittens; she out-argues the local magistrate in court; she becomes the unofficial town doctor; and when an absurd law against insulting other people lands the entire fleabag aristocracy of Greater Dunitsa in the town’s only jail cell, Rizka is appointed mayor—and shows the good sense to abdicate for the sake of the greater good.

As the locals bicker, assert themselves, put on airs, and go about their pompous, petty lives, Alexander makes clear that disorder and discord are inevitable symptoms of human nature. Supernaturally clever, Rizka rises above it all, dispensing justice and righting wrongs. Her confidence never falters, and her outlandish schemes never fail. The world of Gypsy Rizka is, of course, inherently comic, but the residents of Greater Dunitsa are presented as fools right from the start; Rizka easily humiliates them, and she never faces any real danger. Alexander may have delighted in a heroine who “always wins,” but her perfection obviates any real dramatic tension.

Fortunately, Alexander also delights in the telling. He describes Rizka as “skinny as a smoked herring; long-shanked, bright-eyed, with cheekbones sharp enough to whittle a stick.” Beginning authors who try to convey character through clothing could learn from his concise, witty descriptions:

Rizka wore her usual costume: a pair of homeless breeches she had rescued; boots cracked and split, hardly a memory of their former selves; an old army coat so outnumbered by patches the original garment had surrendered; her black hair tied with a string; a felt hat cocked on top.

A goulash of indeterminate Slavic, Germanic, Hungarian, and generically Balkan ingredients, the ramshackle town of Greater Dunitsa serves as a fine stage for a shabby comic retelling of Romeo and Juliet, and the perceptive reader may notice a nod or two to Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale.” As in fabliau, the locals are amusingly provincial: Only one resident, the local war hero, has ever been outside of town, and the city fathers think nothing of putting a cat on trial for burglary. Smiling all the way, Alexander skirts the issue of human evil, asserts the harmlessness of fools, and opts for a comic conclusion: “No one’s as bad as they seem—or as good as they think they are.”

The weekend I discovered Gypsy Rizka in a secondhand bookshop, The Economist published a disheartening report on “the dismal lives and unhappy prospects of Europe’s biggest stateless minority,” the Roma. If you’ve seen real gypsies on the streets of Eastern Europe, you’ve surely never seen a Rizka. The gulf between the lives of actual Roma and the whimsical gypsies of literature is a worthwhile subject, but it’s primarily a concern for adults, who can’t help but sigh over fiction. Gypsy Rizka is a charming book for the way it captures the fantasy of a child: the wish to get one over on the grown-ups.

“…where the reading light was better, meow-meow-meow.”

[Here’s the latest in an ongoing series of reviews of all of Lloyd Alexander’s non-Prydain books. To see all posts in this series, click on the “Lloyd Alexander” tag.]

I had expected to kick off this review of My Five Tigers with a story about my own childhood cat: a plump, patient tabby named Scritchy who let us dress her in babushkas, who often sat upright like a human, and who clearly enunciated the word “ham.” I planned to deploy these and similar anecdotes more out of sarcasm than nostalgia, prepared as I was to cringe my way through Lloyd Alexander’s second book. How, in 1956, could a publisher commission an unknown author to write a 118-page account of his five house cats for adult readers? With a dismissive review half-composed in my head, I opened the book and braced for a great wave of treacle.

A few pages in, I grew downright reflective. In a chapter or two, I was near-elegiac. O Scritchy, why did you have to die?

Lloyd Alexander started out skeptical, too. As he explains in My Five Tigers, he and his wife returned from France after World War II and decided to take in a dog. Only when the dog ran away did they stumble into the enigmatic world of the feline. “[A]s I was to realize, humans are not always the most important features in a cat’s life,” Alexander muses, recalling his first encounter with a purring cat. “A strange kitten, in particular, has a number of affairs to settle. There are times, with cats, when we may only watch and try to understand.”

My Five Tigers is a patient philosophical exercise. Alexander admits to barely understanding cats, but he seeks greater understanding by describing what cats are like. New similes spring from every page: his cats are like Dickensian street waifs, Civil War soldiers, and African game beaters. His cat David is “respectful as an Etonian, a proper lower-form boy in a black suit” who, when caught bringing local strays into the house, starts “grinning like a night-club manager.” Moira, Alexander’s only female cat, is Annie Oakley when she’s active but remains at heart “a boudoir revolutionist, a violator of established order, a maker of exceptions who played by boys’ rules when it pleased her—and fell back on female prerogatives the rest of the time.” In keeping with Alexander’s insistence on similes, his conclusions are both tentative and characteristically humble. “At bottom,” he suggests, “cats are like music. The reason for their appeal to us can never be expressed too clearly.”

When My Five Tigers was published, The New York Times noted that the book was graceful but unsentimental. Reviewers might have said that about most of Alexander’s books; throughout his career, he steered free of cloying sentimentality by knowing how to make readers feel without telling them what to feel. Near the end of My Five Tigers, when Alexander introduces Solomon, a neglected and half-starved city kitten, he writes that “[h]is body had the shape of a half-deflated football and his spine showed through his red fur like a string of beads.” This one vivid sentence suggests cruelty and indifference, but it also offers an antidote: a tiny dose of basic human tenderness.

Thanks to Alexander’s talent for making readers care about the mundane—will Rabbit recover from his torn tendon? Can David Blacklamb adjust to new feline housemates?—My Five Tigers is more than a trifle. I can’t imagine a more eloquent first-person narrative about house cats, but Alexander’s discovery of love, heartache, adventure, and mystery in the world of suburban felines also hints at the wonderful novels he hadn’t yet written. This book shows that he already knew how to make a tale timeless: by dabbling in something like myth.

“Try to stop my world from turning…”

Thanks for stopping by the site, despite its dormancy. For a few days, I skipped town to sojourn in the glorious motherland (New Jersey), where I gave up books, the Internet, and medievalism in exchange for adventures with family and friends.

But during vacations, the past stays in sight; you just have to find the right angle. Behold: the main intersection of New Brunswick, New Jersey, sometime before 1940.

Subjected to urban churn, New Brunswick has been continuously redeveloped, with entire blocks giving way to newer, larger buildings. Today, if your ultimate goal is to picture the past, the view from above is perplexing.