Category: literature

“…gearowe oþþe na, her cumað cnihtas suðan.”

Beowulf is out, reviews are in, and blogs will soon be abuzz with the input of Anglo-Saxonists. Compared to other medievalists, Anglo-Saxonists are numerous on the Web, but then they’ve long been a forward-looking bunch. More than a decade ago, the now-vanished Old English Pages at Georgetown were some of the earliest online resources for studying any medieval language; the Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus was digitized even before most academics had personal e-mail addresses; and graduate students in the mid-1990s were already exploring the potential of hypertext editions.

Given access to the same technology as their fellow humanities scholars, why are Anglo-Saxonists such early adapters? A 1952 Time magazine article suggests one reason: they’re heirs to a decades-old “Anglo-Saxon boom”:

After, next week, Beowulf scholars will not have to worry too much about the fate of the original, nor will they have to travel thousands of miles to pursue their studies of Thorkelin, whose mistakes in copying (e.g., 599 “d’s” for “eth”) will still take years to untangle. But Beowulf is only the opening salvo of the new Anglo-Saxon boom. Within the next few years, scholars all over the world will have reproductions of everything from St. Gregory’s Pastoral Care to King Alfred’s translation of Orosins’ History of the World. Next volume on the list: an 8th century manuscript of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the original of which is now in the Leningrad Public Library, where Western scholars would have a hard time getting at it.

After reading the entire article, which summarizes postwar efforts to preserve and publish Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, I wanted to see if the magazine’s coverage of Old English literature had changed in the past half century. I poked around the Time archive and was struck by these excerpts from the magazine’s review of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf in the year 2000:

“Just don’t take any course where they make you read Beowulf,” Woody Allen advised Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1977). The throwaway line elicited laughs from Allen’s core audience of college grads, especially the one-time English majors among them who had learned to dread—if not actually read—what they had heard was a grim Anglo-Saxon epic filled with odd names and a lot of gory hewing and hacking.

The joke, it turns out, was on the chucklers…

Heaney’s Beowulf…has now been published in the U.S., giving American readers the chance to take the measure of this Harry Potter slayer, the deadest white European male in the politically incorrect literary canon. Judging by the electronic-sales ratings updated constantly by Amazon.com Beowulf is becoming boffo on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Note the difference in tone. The reporter in 1952 may have been ignorant of the continuing value of the Beowulf manuscript even after its copying and reproduction, but he reports on the state of Anglo-Saxon manuscript preservation without any snark. Amazingly, he even refers to “the famed Thorkelin transcripts” with no trace of irony. Time magazine didn’t expect its readers to know who Grí­mur Jónsson Thorkelin was, but the mid-century reporter kindly explains the scholar’s importance in four concise sentences—without jokes, without dismissive anecdotes, without caveats about political incorrectness, and without calling anything “boffo.”

Maybe the contrast is unfair. After all, a straight news article serves a different purpose than a book review that takes its subject seriously after three paragraphs of irony. But those three paragraphs sure are telling. The reporter in 1952 takes for granted that Anglo-Saxon manuscripts are important, and he assumes that the average Time reader, when briefed on the basics, is likely to agree. By contrast, the reviewer in 2000 assumes that the reader is inclined to think an Anglo-Saxon poem irrelevant based on a quip in a Woody Allen movie; that the reader needs a Harry Potter reference to make this material palatable; and that the reader requires inoculation against—or permission to enjoy, I’m not sure which—the work of “the deadest white European male.” The 1952 article respects the discernment of its readers, who may be receptive to the obscure. The 2000 review condescends. Really: “boffo”?

What’s especially strange to me is that Time magazine is so out of sync with the literate public’s genuine interest in the past. Except for bored patients in doctors’ offices, most of the people who still read general-interest news magazines must be doing so because they’re at least somewhat curious about the world. I don’t want to overstate the number of readers who might be interested in medieval manuscripts, but the massive success of the Beowulf translation tagged as “boffo” by Time magazine suggests that we shouldn’t understate their numbers either. Why preface a review with cutesy language that camouflages an implicit apology to the larger, incurious public? They’re not going to see the article anyway. How strange to let non-readers set the tone of a book review.

Then again, this is the same magazine whose technology bloggers write movie reviews with skittish disclaimers like this: “The little I remember about Beowulf the poem, which is nothing, since I never read it, is that it was incredibly boring.” Perhaps the writers and editors at a magazine with plummeting subscription rates should think twice before suggesting that reading is somehow uncool.

At the end of Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, Rosamond McKitterick writes, in a line I love to cite, that the Carolingians “imparted to future generations…the conviction that the past not only mattered but was a priceless hoard of treasure to be guarded, conserved, augmented, enriched and passed on.” That isn’t only a ninth-century sentiment. In the past year, I’ve spoken about Charlemagne in church basements full of senior citizens and I’ve met enthusiastic high-school kids who plan to become medievalists. This passion for history is hardly confined to the Middle Ages: One of my colleagues, a photographer and IT professional from Hawaii, recently drove through the Northeast visiting lesser known Revolutionary War sites; another toured ancient cities in Turkey. All of these people honor the memory of McKitterick’s monks and universalize their motives: To seek wisdom in the past is simply the impulse of civilized, literate people.

The big-screen Beowulf looks pretty silly, but its existence was inevitable, a function of the rampant public fascination with the Middle Ages that many of us witness firsthand. If this movie turns out to be one of medievalism’s more lamentable mooncalves, that’s fine; other opportunities will present themselves—at libraries, in classrooms, in the stillness of a museum gallery or in the raucousness of a Renaissance festival. No wonder that after fifty years, Old English experts, so often derided as fusty and dull, now have a better sense of the popular culture than do the editors of Time. The “Anglo-Saxon boom” continues; scholars are happy, but hardly surprised.

“Strut on a line, it’s discord and rhyme…”

Halloween approacheth, and if your family is anything like mine, you’ll observe the holiday amid sentiment and song as you gather ’round the giant plastic animatronic mummy. But when the cackling stops and the sobbing of toddlers subsides, why not turn to a little seasonal reading—for example, a medieval werewolf romance?

Thanks to Google Books, you can, if you’re so inclined, partake of the Middle English romance “William of Palerne” without having to visit the library. I’ll let W.R.J. Barron summarize the plot:

William, Prince of Apulia, is stolen in infancy by a werewolf who, to protect him from the murderous designs of his uncle, carries him from Sicily to a wood near Rome where he is brought up by a cowherd until the Emperor, struck by the lad’s promising appearance, appoints him page to his daughter Melior who inevitably falls in love with him.

There’s more; there’s always more in medieval romance. The poets who wrote these works were, thank goodness, only dimly acquainted with the merits of parsimony. Why serve fillet mignon when you can pile on the folklore motifs, stock situations, and encounters with wild animals and grill up the literary equivalent of a Hardee’s Monster Thickburger instead?

If you want to learn what becomes of young William, you’ll have to check out the book, which was edited in 1867 by the indefatigable W.W. Skeat, and wade through more than 5,000 lines of crisis and universal brouhaha—plus a neat five-page scholarly digression on medieval werewolf lore.

Fortunately, things end on a high note, especially for the werewolf, whose name turns out to be Alphonse, and whose subsequent wedding requires him to ponder the most challenging demande d’amour of all: chicken or beef?

UPDATE: Halloween werewolves have also been spotted at Per Omnia Saecula and Unlocked Wordhoard.

“And you touch the distant beaches…”

I haven’t had a chance to see Ken Burns’ new take on World War II, but I was intrigued by a review in Monday’s New York Times that suggests the limitations of The War as a documentary:

The intention, apparently, was to see the war anew, to see it not from the vistas of generals’ maps and geopolitics, not from the perspective given by the doctrines of nations and the lures of ideologies, not even from the war’s context in history. The intention was to view it from the experiences of those who fought in it and those who knew them. If war happens “inside a man,” Mr. Burns wants to bring it home.

[…]

Yet for all the particularity, these are the generic facts of war, not very different from those chronicled by Homer almost 3,000 years ago. They tell us nothing about why this fighting was going on; they give us little information to judge or understand it.

The article mentions that Burns hoped to make an “epic poem,” an ambition I find odd. Ken Burns is good at being a filmmaker who records history from below, a thoughtful, perceptive soul who would gladly bypass Beowulf to squint instead at the peasants in the Luttrell Psalter. It’s comical to imagine him taking up the gusle or praising royalty with soaring tales of “fierce warres and faithfull loves”; his desire to shrink an epic event to human scale is an oddly anti-Homeric endeavor.

It’s also not a thing unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. In fact, Christopher Logue beat him to it.

Who is Christopher Logue? He’s an activist, autodidact, occasional actor—but he’s also the guy who for nearly half a century has used all the gimmicks of modern poetry to craft a loose, idiomatic version of Homer’s Iliad.

Literally irreverent, Logue frees himself from the tyranny of his source material through one curious disadvantage: he’s ignorant of ancient Greek. As a result, his Homer—currently collected in three separate volumes—easily comes into its own as a fresh modern poem. Recent additions include scenes that aren’t in the Iliad; at one point, Logue even cribs a passage from Milton. Sensitive to the distinction between scholarship and artistry, the poet calls what he’s doing an “account,” not a translation—and if that makes classicists cringe, they may be missing the point.

Known for his gleeful use of anachronisms—like his description, often cited by reviewers, of Ajax “[g]rim underneath his tan as Rommel after ‘Alamein”—Logue deploys evocative modern language to create quick, crisp snapshots. Here’s his description of Agamemnon’s champions in “All Day Permanent Red”:

Nestor, his evening star.
Ajax, his silent fortress. Good—even on soft sand.
Odysseus (you know him), small but big.
Fourth—grizzled and hook-tap nosed—the king of Crete,
Idomeneo, who:
“Come on!”
Would sign a five-war-contract on the nod.

Logue’s Homer resounds with the diction of war, but he can also craft domestic scenes with a deftness that other poets should envy. In “The Husbands,” an exchange between Zeus and a petulant Athena neatly reveals the condescension that defines their relationship:

The armies wait. “Dearest Pa-pa, the oath said one should die.
The Trojan was about to die. He did not die.
Nobody died. Therefore the oath is dead.
Killed by a Trojan. Therefore Troy goes down.”

Drivers conducting underbody maintenance.

“Father, You must act.
Side with the Trojans, Greece will say,
Were we fools to believe in His thunder?
Why serve a God who will not serve His own?”

And giving her a kiss, He said:

“Child, I am God,
Please do not bother me with practicalities.”

Ah, but when battle calls, Logue can craft a passage as thrilling as anything in 300, combining heroic deeds with colloquial diction while never undercutting the tone, as in this passage from “Patrocleia”:

The air near Ajax was so thick with arrows, that,
As they came, their shanks tickered against each other;
And under them the Trojans swarmed so thick
Ajax outspread his arms, turned his spear flat,
And simply pushed. Yet they came clamouring back until
So many Trojans had a go at him
The iron chaps of Ajax’ helmet slapped his cheeks
To soft red pulp, and his head reached back and forth
Like a clapper inside a bell made out of sword blades.
Maybe, even with no breath left,
Big Ajax might have stood it yet; yet
Big and all as he was, Prince Hector meant to burn that ship:
And God was pleased to let him.

Is this campy, even ironic? You bet. But this is also poetry that moves, and thrills, and entertains. It makes you feel just a little queasy for reveling in verse about war, but it also makes the timeless colloquial without impugning the dignity of its ancient source.

Why did Logue, a self-described pacifist, decide to take on Homer? Unlike many of his contemporaries, Logue deliberately sought out a vast external subject for his work. “I would not like to be a writer whose only subject is themselves,” he told an interviewer in 1994. “You need something else.” For Logue, that “something else” is war—not merely the Trojan War, but the capacity for war and violence at the core of human nature. Fortunately, Logue is under no pressure to put that experience in context, unlike Ken Burns. Logue is also unencumbered by public familiarity with his own artistic tics—again, unlike Burns, whose reverent pacing and signature quirks have lately become the stuff of parody.

Burns and Logue have similar purposes. Both use epic material to craft lengthy narratives about love, loss, anger, envy, family, patriotism, loyalty, and power. But Logue is clever enough not to try crafting a epic in the proper sense of the term. To show how war happens “inside a man,” he’s exploited his sources, developed a style, and mastered a medium that suits his particular genius; at 80, he has yet to exhaust himself.

As for Ken Burns—well, reviews of The War make me wonder if he’s attempting something that, while not beyond his intellect, may exceed the limitations of documentary, even if the film is successful by other standards. Having mastered the conventions of a genre that can easily stifle the loftiest intentions, Ken Burns could learn a few things from Christopher Logue, who, by sprinkling his verse with references to camera angles, points out the difference between documenting human nature and interpreting human nature in art. Burns is ambitious—“What in me is dark, illumine,” he seems to be praying, “what is low raise and support”—but his premise undercuts his purpose. A documentary surely may be art, but it’s just no way to write an epic poem.

“Rent a flat above a shop, cut your hair and get a job…”

Via The Heroic Age comes word of a clever project: according to the Lincolnshire Echo, an archaeological group is adapting a medieval work for film. Interestingly, they’ve chosen not an epic, a romance, a ballad, or a saga; instead, they’re recreating scenes from the Luttrell Psalter, a 14th-century manuscript that depicts the people of Lincolnshire living and working through the changing of the seasons.

You can learn more about the Luttrell Psalter at the Web site of the British Library, which also offers an online, page-turnable version. Compare its illuminated pages with some rough footage of the Luttrell Psalter movie that’s already posted to YouTube. I’ve just spent four weeks teaching Arthurian romance, and I’m gearing up to teach an Icelandic saga, so for me these placid, rural scenes are a timely reminder that medieval hands were far less likely to be gripping a truncheon at a Winchester tourney and far more likely to be holding a shovel or milking a cow—the work that often goes unseen in “the kitchens of history.”

“We are detective, we are select…”

Occasionally, my students ask me what I read for fun. The question makes me smile, because it’s been years since I’ve had much time for recreational reading.

But once in a while, I discover a series of books that makes me remember why I used to enjoy reading—a series that makes me feel like I did when I plowed through novels as a kid, rapaciously seeking plot, desperate to find out only what happened next. A few months ago, I lucked out: I stumbled across the blog of author Olen Steinhauer, discovered his Yalta Boulevard series, and was hooked.

Steinhauer’s five novels center on a squad of homicide investigators who work in the capital of an unnamed Soviet Bloc country, a two-bit nation that seems to border every other Eastern European country while not fully resembling any one of them. The first novel, The Bridge of Sighs, is set in 1948; each subsequent novel leaps ahead a decade to tell the story of a different character. The fifth and final book, Victory Square, comes out today; it’s set in 1989, as the detective from the first book prepares to retire, and as the nation Steinhauer built in four previous novels begins to crumble.

Last week, the New York Times referred to Steinhauer’s “grim but fascinating police procedurals,” but that description, even in the context of a positive review, makes the Yalta Boulevard novels sound more beholden to the conventions of the genre than they actually are. The murder investigations are rarely the actual subjects of the story; often, the usual crimes fade into the background, giving way to worse transgressions, terrible choices, and mordant tributes to the people who endured Eastern European communism—”the puppets of history,” as one character explains in The Confession, “playing out a tragedy.” With their carefully crafted dialogue, relentlessly Slavic mood, and complex, fatalistic characters, the Yalta Boulevard novels remind me of the terrific 1990s TV show Homicide—which, most of the time, wasn’t about police procedure either.

If the constraints of so-called literary fiction weren’t so narrow, and if its readers were less terrified of being seen as slumming, Steinhauer’s books—especially The Confession and Liberation Movements, his two best—would garner more than 150 words in the Times. Those blurry spy-thriller covers probably dissuade book-browsers who aren’t naturally drawn to the genre, and few people these days are clamoring for Cold War novels. So be it—but those realities only further ensure that the Yalta Boulevard novels are elegies to overlooked places and times. Memorable, engrossing, and frequently sad, they’re also top-notch work by a novelist who isn’t really writing genre fiction at all.

[Disclosure: I’ve never met Olen Steinhauer, I’ve never exchanged a single e-mail with him, we don’t share a publisher, and to my knowledge we have no publishing contacts in common. Just in case anyone was wondering.]

“He couldn’t quite explain it, they’d always just gone there…”

Ignatius J. Reilly may not be back at his post, but my spies in New Orleans have alerted me to two Ignatius sightings in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

The first, a letter to the editor, remembers the meeting between Thelma Toole and the recently deceased Tom Snyder:

When that amazing novel was drawing attention from readers all over the world, Mrs. Toole flew with a friend, Joel Fletcher, to New York one morning and flew back that night—like Ignatius Reilly, unwilling to spend more time out of her native city. As Ignatius proclaimed, “Out there is the heart of darkness.”

She bantered and flirted with Snyder, who repeatedly called her “Mrs. O’Toole.” They joked about their Irishness and discussed the novel that had made her son posthumously famous. I’m not sure Snyder, who probably expected to interview some sedate elderly lady, was prepared for the phenomenon that was Thelma Toole on her mission to keep the memory of her son and his work before the public.

The other sighting occurs in this article about the Church of St. Henry, where the church, the pastor, the deacon, and the custodian are all named Henry. Unsurprisingly, this “confederacy of Henrys” is the church that convinced Ignatius to stop attending mass. The parish, the reporter tells us, is “as New Orleans as it gets.”

Can the return of Ignatius to Canal Street be far behind? Stay tuned…

“Flying birds, excellent birds…”

When you keep an eye on the media for references to Charlemagne, the results are sometimes peculiar—for example, this recent leadership profile in, of all places, Investor’s Business Daily—but even I didn’t expect to find Charlemagne in a preview of a video game based on the Lego version of Indiana Jones.

But there he is, mentioned by a writer who lists the scenes he hopes will be included in an Indiana Jones Lego video game:

A favourite funny moment from The Last Crusade… Indiana and his father, Professor Henry Jones, are in a car being chased by a couple of German aeroplanes and end up crashing on a beach. One plane turns through the air and bears down on the hapless pair. Professor Jones suddenly opens up his umbrella, flaps it around and starts clucking like a chicken while advancing on birds on the sand.

Indy looks at him as if he’s saying, ‘WTF?’, but the birds are scared into flight and the plane collides with the flock and crashes and burns. “I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne”, says Professor Jones. “Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky…” What a guy.

The line attributed to Charlemagne by Sean Connery’s character has proven to be remarkably durable. It’s a favorite epigram on quotation sites, .sig files, and MySpace pages, and Wikipedia cites it as an example of Charlemagne’s “cultural significance.”

I’ve never seen any evidence that Charlemagne actually said it.

Granted, I haven’t read every word written about Charlemagne, nor have I read every romance, chanson, or miscellaneous fragment of the Matter of France. However, I have read everything that an inquisitive screenwriter with a Charlemagne fixation might have encountered, such as sources translated into English. But the line cited by Dr. Henry Jones, Sr., isn’t in Einhard or Notker; it isn’t in any of the commonly republished capitularies, annals, or letters; it’s not in The Song of Roland or in popular translations of the Italian Charlemagne stories; and it’s not in the main American source for modern, fictionalized Charlemagniana: Bulfinch’s Legends of Charlemagne.

Furthermore, the line doesn’t even appear in major literary and historical sources that would have been unfamiliar to most non-scholars when the movie was made in 1989. “The Battle of the Birds,” a political allegory by Theodulf of Orleans, sounds like the first place to look, doesn’t it? But Theodulf wrote his poem three years after Charlemagne’s death, and while he does liken flocks of birds to warring armies, he doesn’t much dwell on the rocks and the trees. The Visio Wettini, in which Walahfrid Strabo recounts the deathbed visions of his mentor, also seems like a likely source for philosophical musings, but even though Walahfrid does include a vision of Charlemagne in Hell, the emperor is too busy having his genitals eaten by an animal to utter anything as lovely as the line from the film.

More pedantically, the line quoted by the elder Dr. Jones is a dubious thing for the real Charlemagne to have said. According to Bernard Bachrach, the Carolingian army drew on a pool of approximately 2 million men between the ages of 15 and 55. They had inherited late Roman military tactics, the troops were well trained, and morale was high. Despite the wise observations his scholars sometimes attributed to him, Charlemagne had no pressing reason, beyond accounting for the role of topography and weather in military planning, to speculate about nature either as an aid to military power or as a peaceful, metaphysical alternative to it.

But those aren’t the only plausible readings of the pseudo-Carolingian quote. It might be the cry of a Luddite, the sigh of a nature lover, or the reassuring mantra of a pacifist. It might also be the credo of a Christian warlord who wants God’s creation to be his ally—or who fervently believes that it already is.

In the movie, the bemused reaction of Indiana Jones to the bird episode suggests that we’re meant to see his father’s literal enactment of the line as surprising, even ironic, as if its original context were more solemn or noble. Adding to the allure of the quote is its meter: it’s a pentameter line, but the final four feet are anapests; that many anapests signal formal poetic intentions to the ear of an English speaker. Finally, by attributing the quote to a medieval figure whose name is synonymous with legend—or whose French name is at least a euphonious enigma—the screenwriter cleverly evokes a mystical past while hinting at credible history behind lots of implausible fantasy. By seeming to allude to religion, nature, legend, and poetry, this little line plays right into modern assumptions about things medieval. It seems authentic, even if it’s not.

For centuries, medieval storytellers used Charlemagne to evoke a mythic past, and while it’s fittingly medieval of their modern counterparts to do the same by citing sources that never existed—just like Sir Thomas Malory claiming that “the Freynsh booke makyth mencion” of something that the French book maketh no such mention of at all—I find it charming that the Indiana Jones screenwriter wound up inventing the only Charlemagne “quote” that most people are likely to remember.

A few years ago, someone on the Mediev-L listserv asked about this elusive quote. The list archive is offline, but I do remember that the question stumped the scholars who responded. Dr. Jones’s pseudo-scholarly quip may have a genuine source; if so, I’d be pleased if a sharp-eyed scholar could come along to render this blog post obsolete.

In the meantime, I can easily see why a plausible but spurious reference to Charlemagne by an elderly, fictional medievalist has intrigued and enamored so many. Before 1989, this lyrical line didn’t mean anything to anyone, so today you can say it—let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky—and evoke a universe of medieval mystery, while really saying nothing at all.

[January 12, 2008: I posted an update of sorts here.]

[November 30, 2025: With the recent death of Tom Stoppard, people have been discussing his role as an uncredited script doctor for “Last Crusade.” Could he have added this line to the script? Perhaps a Stoppard scholar might offer a clue or two.]

“All around the world, statues crumble for me…”

Two weeks ago, while visiting family in Louisiana, I posted about the unfortunate removal of the Ignatius J. Reilly statue from its place of prominence on Canal Street in New Orleans.

Yesterday, an intrepid and inquisitive relative informed me that Ignatius hasn’t yet resumed waiting for his mother under the clock outside the old D.H. Holmes department store. However, the clock—which had been removed earlier this month—is now back in place. Can Ignatius (who is, perhaps, just off shopping for lute strings) be far behind?

I’ll await word of further developments from my family—and I invite updates from any New Orleans-based readers as well. Keep checking this blog for all your breaking cult-novel-protagonist-statue-restoration news.

“Just a slob like one of us…”

“In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress.”

But wait. Where’s Ignatius?

According to the desk clerk at the former D.H. Holmes—now the Chateau Sonesta Hotel—Ignatius was removed two days ago because “someone kept tryin’ to steal him.”

Such an offense against taste and decency! Clearly it reflects the would-be thief’s lack of theology and geometry. Why, it even casts doubts upon one’s soul…