“Businessmen, they drink my wine…”

The following is an open letter to the Sci Fi Channel people.

Dear Sci Fi Channel People:

I write to you with the dogged affection of a spurned but hopeful suitor. Your Sci Fi Channel Original Movies have long provided me with superb background noise for otherwise dreary weekends of writing. I admired Sharks in Venice, I thought Dragon Dynasty was a hoot, and SS Doomtrooper more than satisfied my nostalgia for the entirely unrelated video-game franchise I’m sure you didn’t intend it to resemble at all. You even made an awful sequel to the awful Dungeons and Dragons movie! I should be grateful.

Instead, like the Mansquito tending the juice bar at a Dracula family reunion, I sense a distinct lack of opportunity, and the only sound I hear is forlorn and fruitless sucking.

Let facts be submitted to a candid world: Battlestar Galactica has ended, your parent company is unsteady, and your new name sounds like a social disease. I get that your monster-and-disaster B-movies turn a profit, but when even I can no longer distinguish Croc from Supergator or Frankenfish from Snakehead Terror, then your future is bleak.

With fingers bloody from clinging to the bottom of the midlist, I’m writing to offer two magic words that will rescue your faltering network:

Becoming Charlemagne.

We’ll start, as Battlestar Galactica did, with a miniseries—but unlike effects-driven productions that require custom sets and scores of Canadian character actors, Becoming Charlemagne: The Miniseries will be a model of parsimony. Given Sci Fi’s substantial catalog of wholly owned intellectual property, we can easily edit and re-dub scenes from Minotaur, Ogre, Gryphon, Grendel, Wyvern, Dragon Sword, Dragon Storm, and Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy to craft a Charlemagne narrative that is as entertaining as it is astonishingly thrifty.

After the miniseries proves viable, we’ll frugally film the resulting Becoming Charlemagne: The Series on location in the Balkans. My contacts in the Belgrade suburbs can ply our army of extras with homemade moonshine, perhaps in lieu of pay. To ensure a smooth transition, the miniseries should establish the existence of Brutalist architecture in ninth-century Aachen, an anachronism that only inflexible purists will decry.

I understand that television executives don’t leap gaily into edgy, cerebral projects—so if it helps, think of Becoming Charlemagne: The Series as “Battlestar Galactica in the woods.” The parallel with Charlemagne’s legendary Twelve Peers speaks for itself (“there are many copies, and they have a plan”), but if medieval jargon leaves you cold, feel free to substitute more familiar language. A Saxon, for example, might profitably be thought of as a tree Cylon. An angel in a hot red dress is hardly out of the question.

While you ponder my proposal, I’ll continue my vigil outside the bedroom windows of Sci Fi executives, raising my boom box aloft in an attempt to sell you on my other marketable idea: a starkly “reimagined” version of the failed 1992 series Covington Cross. Graphic medieval violence is, I believe, the resolution of all your fruitless searches, and while there are certainly worse shows we could remake, market research proves that the smart money flocks to projects in which the Skye is always the color of Ione.

Yours in sacré Charlemania,

Jeff

cc: Steven Spielberg; Peter Jackson; Christopher Tolkien; Rosamund McKitterick; Pierre Riché; John Rhys-Davies; Mirek Topolánek, President, European Union; Steve Voigt, President, King Arthur Flour Company; Coolio

“Er war ein Punker, und er lebte in der großen Stadt…”

Charlemagne is everywhere—he’s in real-estate stories, cigarette advertisements , and quite possibly in your shower—and this week he popped up again in the news.

The “Charlemagne” columnist at The Economist now has a blog, “Charlemagne’s Notebook”:

At a European Union summit not long ago, a visiting reporter from Poland saw “The Economist” on my press accreditation, and asked: “Oh, are you Charlemagne?” When I nodded, and said that I did write that column, her face fell.

“You should be taller,” she said, with feeling.

Meanwhile, the science blogger at the New York Times offers up a mathematical puzzle attributed to Alcuin. You really never know when you’ll need to get across a river with a wolf, a goat, and a head of cabbage…

“I like hammering nails, and speaking in tongues…”

“To have another language is to possess a second soul.” The Internet, in its collective wisdom, attributes this chestnut to Charlemagne, even though the old emperor seems to have uttered it no earlier than a UPI “thought for the day” distributed to newspapers on April 2, 1989. (A 1920 article about the study of French inexplicably attributes this same saying to “the great Spanish monarch, if it be he.”) Like other things Charlemagne supposedly said, it’s the sort of thing Einhard or Notker might have wanted him to say, and several quotation dictionaries and educational treatises have accepted that he did. People love this quip because it seems to say something profound. I’m just not certain it’s true.

Ten months ago, I decided it was time to learn German—not dabble in German to pass a watered-down reading exam, not fake it by squinting at German hard enough to sweat out the Old English cognates, but really learn the language at the fastest pace my schedule and the local curriculum allowed. Since then, I’ve taken classes that have raised my fluency from “feeble” to “mostly feeble,” I’ve learned love songs, hymns, and party tunes, and and I’ve looked upon lists of irregular participles and despaired. I’ve also remembered what it’s like to be a student.

After you spend ten years as an adjunct, familiar texts come around just often enough for an awkward reunion; they’re the old friends with whom you have too much history but also too little in common. Meanwhile, you stare past those piles of personal reading: novels that somebody forced on you; books bought on a whim; discards from strangers who passed through your life. Back then, the thrill of ignorance made everything a mystery, and each new book promised wisdom. Now, folded pages lead you back to useless secrets: verses and lines that were, for a while, the language you shared with someone who probably doesn’t remember. Trace a swirl in the dust; whole shelves smell like bookstores that long ago closed.

And so, ich lerne Deutsch. I download old pop songs that torture German ears; they’re fresh and intriguing to me. I despise crosswords—but I finish my first childish kreuzworträtsel in German with pride, having done what I couldn’t do a year ago. I flip through collections of Rilke, dictionary handy, wandering with pleasure through century-old poems that carry no personal associations, only the ones they acquire today. Sometimes I’m stopped by an opening line: Ich glaube an alles noch nie Gesagte…

The books on my syllabus all seem a little more strange to me now. Thomas Malory, William Morris, Tennyson—to my surprise, they each have something new to say. They tell me that Charlemagne had it all wrong: A new language doesn’t give you a second soul; it refreshes the one you’d forgotten you already had.

“He’s got this dream about buying some land…”

As regular readers know, Charlemagne was not, by nature, an urbanite. “This city desert makes you feel so cold,” he wrote to Alcuin from Rome in the year 800. “It’s got so many people, but it’s got no soul.” (Tot cives, sed animam non habet.) Frankly, I think the old emperor was onto something. After all, what’s the real value of having mass transit and a post office within walking distance when instead, with sound financial planning, you can spend your golden years pacing the ramparts of a mountaintop fortress while scanning the horizon for orcs?

Apparently, one European real-estate firm believes Charlemagne’s name can help sell such a castle:

A castle which straddles the border between Tuscany and Umbria and whose first known owner was Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, has been launched on the market.

The location is on the old road between Rome to Florence passed here and famous travellers, among them Goethe, Byron and Hawthorne, visited the castle.

Many of the castle’s original features such as gunports, battlements, moat, dungeon are still intact or carefully restored to the highest standards. The circular courtyard encloses five buildings: the main palace, the guest house, the church, the old dungeon and the garage.The grounds extend to 32 acres of olive groves and woods.

The castle is a short drive from central Italy’s main historical cities, 45 minutes from Siena, 1 hour from Florence and Orvieto, 1hr 45 from Rome, 10 mn from Cortona and 30 mn from Perugia and Montepulciano. There is also a helipad on site.

According to the International Herald Tribune, the castle dates from 802, so even if Charlemagne did own the property, he didn’t spend a single night there, because he never returned to Italy after his imperial coronation. For €13 million, I’d want proof that the emperor once admired those olive groves—or at least evidence that he used the helipad.

“Little lines, in the ice, splitting, splitting sound…”

So yesterday, Washington got snowed on; tonight, freezing rain has encrusted the city in ice, which, while all sparkly and picturesque, is sufficiently treacherous to prevent a muddle-headed, flu-fighting medievalist from hitting the streets at 2 a.m. in search of his remedy of choice: an assortment of donuts from 7-Eleven.

And so, donut-deprived, frosting-forlorn, bereft of blueberry filling, I can only squint pensively at the snow from my window and be glad I’m not Charlemagne, who likewise tries to settle his brain with a bit of twilight snow-gazing in Longfellow’s “Eginhard and Emma”:

That night the Emperor, sleepless with the cares
And troubles that attend on state affairs,
Had risen before the dawn, and musing gazed
Into the silent night, as one amazed
To see the calm that reigned o’er all supreme,
When his own reign was but a troubled dream.
The moon lit up the gables capped with snow,
And the white roofs, and half the court below,
And he beheld a form, that seemed to cower
Beneath a burden, come from Emma’s tower…

You’ll have to read the whole thing to find out what Charlemagne spied with his imperial eye. (Hint: it wasn’t a donut.)

The story of Eginhard and Emma was popular during the 19th century: It was retold in corny books about Rhineland legends, Strindberg turned it into a short story, and Schubert made it part of his opera Fierrabras. How the actual fling between Charlemagne’s daughter Berta and his adviser Angilbert got transformed into a romance between Charlemagne’s biographer and a wholly fictional daughter is a mystery to me, but it’s a ready-made thesis for a dissertation, or at least the starting point for an ambitious novelist with a penchant for romantic fantasy.

To his credit, Longfellow kept his version both eloquent and concise, giving us lots of memorable couplets and a lovely description of Alcuin. It’s no donut—but really, what is?

“They make you believe it’s the status quo…”

The well-informed readers of this blog know that Charlemagne was famously supportive of commerce and trade. First as king and later as emperor, he enacted policies he hoped would nurture the feeble European economy and generate wealth. “Share it fairly,” he wittily decreed in the Capitula obscuri lateris lunae, “but don’t take a slice of my pie.”

So while I’ve never thought it peculiar to see the Frankish king shilling for shower gel, Plexo Suspenders, and Budweiser, I confess I was a little surprised by this: Charlemagne starring in his own cigarette commercial.

(Link via the Houston Press, which notes that this same series of ads included Catherine the Great, Genghis Khan, and an oddly un-threatening Ivan the Terrible. Am I seeing things, or does the mighty Temujin look and sound a little bit like Michael Palin?)

“…with kitchen prose and gutter rhymes.”

[UPDATE: As of January 2010, information on purchasing or downloading The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier can be found here.]

Last December, I posted a PDF of “The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier,” a translation of a 972-line Middle Scots romance from the 15th century. This translation was, in part, an attempt to prove to myself that I could turn 75 of those complex, thirteen-line, rhyming, alliterative stanzas into modern English poetry.

Sharp-eyed readers sent me useful comments, and although I hadn’t expected anyone to be looking for a translation of this obscure poem, quite a few people do regularly search for it and find it via Google. As a result, I’ve corrected two typos, made minor edits, and posted a second revision of the text. You can download the new low-res PDF (for free!) from this page.

For students of medieval literature, “Ralph the Collier” has much to recommend it: combat, class warfare, burlesque humor, inclement weather, Yuletide feasts, politically incorrect proselytizing—plus it rhymes and alliterates. As another Christmas hero named Ralph observed, “sometimes, at the height of our revelries, when our joy is at its zenith, when all is most right with the world, the most unthinkable disasters descend upon us.” The hard-earned but ultimately comic lessons learned by Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier suggest that sometimes, a sad tale’s not best for winter after all.

“The music keeps them quiet; there is no other way.”

Vox populi, vox dei: “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” Reporters and pundits haul out this Latin proverb every election year. Some find it vindicating, others deploy it ironically, but I wonder how many people know where this notion came from.

In the mid-1800s, scholars thought the first writer to record this proverb was the 12th-century historian William of Malmesbury. One Notes and Queries entry delightfully shortened it to “VPVD,” an abbreviation that suggests a lucrative market for motivational bracelets at political conventions four years hence.

My get-rich-quick schemes notwithstanding, VPVD is older than William of Malmesbury—and, like so much else worth knowing, it was first written down during the time of Charlemagne.

Flip through Ernst Dümmler, MGH, Epistolae Karolini Aevi II (Berlin, 1895), and on page 199, there it is, the ninth in a series of responses in a letter from Alcuin to Charlemagne:

VIIII. Populus iuxta sanctiones divinas ducendur est, non sequendus, et ad testimonium personae magis eliguntur honestae. Nec audiendi qui solent dicere: “Vox populi, vox Dei,” cum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.

The people must be led according to divine laws, not followed, and by the examples provided by more respectable people. Those who say “the voice of the people is the voice of God” should not be heeded, for the hubbub of the crowd is always rather close to madness.

Note that Alcuin isn’t endorsing this proverb; he’s decrying it.

As fond as I am of de-exoticizing the Middle Ages by pointing out the medieval-ness of many modern experiences (and vice-versa), I suspect most citizens of modern democracies agree that Alcuin was, as the contributor to Notes and Queries put it, “breathing the spirit of a different age.” Then again, whether or not you side with Alcuin on this proverb depends on whether your preferred candidate has prevailed—an opinion we all privately revise every four to eight years.

“And as for fame, it’s just a name…”

Sometimes, in these trying times of crisis and universal brouhaha, we’re presented with evidence that even as the pillars of civilization crumble all around us, medievalism remains a sturdy riverside mill of robust economic growth.

Behold: Charlemagne shower gel.

As the neat Roman blog Eternally Cool points out, Charlemagne is one of the worthies immortalized by the ZIRH Warrior Collection, which includes shower gels inspired by Ulysses, Alexander the Great, Cyrus of Persia, and Julius Caesar. Now, with all due respect to my amici at the eCool team, the “cooling icy scent” of Charlemagne, which offers the natural astringency of chestnut seed, totally conquers the citrusy, skin-softening properties of Caesar.

“But wait,” I hear yon straw man cry, “is Charlemagne shower gel historically accurate?” Frankly—yes, I said “Frank”-ly—the question offends me. Anyone who’s read The Life of Charlemagne ought to remember the passage where the emperor conditions his royal tresses with chestnut-seed extract. It comes right after the concubine asks him “Are all these your guitars?” and then expresses amazement that the royal baths are larger than her whole apartment. It’s in Einhard, people—look it up!

“The answers to all this lie with their psychoanalysts…”

“Quid Plura?” readers regularly suffer through evidence of my terrible taste in music—but you probably didn’t know that Becoming Charlemagne also has a hokey soundtrack all its own. It’s true!

Recently, Julie K. Rose interviewed me about the music that accompanied the writing of the book. Next week, you’ll be able to read the complete interview (with rationalizations for each song choice, I swear), but for now you can hear tantalizing snippets in the podcast on the Writers and Their Soundtracks Blog. If you’re an iTunes user, you can sample the playlist, too. No one but iTunes makes any money if you buy a song, but I assure you, these tunes weave trancelike melodies that slip over the transom of social consciousness and insinuate themselves into your dreams.

As for the weird faces you’re making as you read the playlist: Go on. Really. I’m used to it. As a deejay for my high school radio station, I shared the afternoon airwaves with a committed metalhead and his polar opposite, a lovestruck soul who punctuated our show with mellow R&B dedications to his girlfriend. They found common ground by speaking unkindly of what they called “Jeff music.” Under those conditions, you learn strength of character—because really, there’s no reason not to associate the age of Charlemagne with 1980s English synth-pop. Is there?