Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I taught the Old English Apollonius of Tyre followed by Gower's Apollonius, over a two week block earlier this month. It was really striking how much the students found the OE Apollonius inaccessible - unemotional, lacking in character development (true, i'll grant, for most characters), and Gower's more accessible on account of it's greater degree of emotionality.

What I found really odd was that *I* saw emotions in the OE - especially in the part of the narrative where Apollonius is overcome with homesickness in the great hall, and his hosts observe his grief and send the princess to talk to him. He's reluctant to talk, but he does give some of his story, and then he finds solace in music.

My boss-colleague had taught the Old English elegies (two of - The Wanderer and the Seafarer) in a two week block before that, and we'd spent ages talking about the passage in the Wanderer where the speaker remarks that it is an 'indryhten Þeaw' to 'bind fast' one's 'ferðloca' and keep his thoughts to himself. Now, MF and I had a bit of a wrangle in class over indryhten Þeaw, which the Longman edition translates as 'courtly virtue'. Virtue, I'll grant, but I want to translate that as... 'with-lorded', I think. I see why the translation 'courtly' works, but still, it's so lexically anchored to the concept of having a dryhten. ANYWAY. One who is worthy to belong to a lord will exhibit the virtue of binding fast his soul-locker.

I never did care for the elegies much; I hadn't re-read them since literally undergrad (and I couldn't swear I'd actually read them all; certainly not translated them) before this. But even without that, I guess I'd picked up, partly from the ethos of OE prose and partly from secondary lit, how this works - that it's exposing and shameful to have to exteriorise your emotions. The elegies are a particular exception, in that while they have a LOT of emotion going on, they're specifically designed to lament - to give shape to the emotions otherwise bound in the soul-locker.

The end result was I had a WILDLY different experience of the two Apolloniuses to my students. I've taught these two together before, and I don't recall being so struck by this part. (A current student has really interesting ideas about a throughline between the Seafarer and Gower's Apollonius, which I would never have thought of!) And I just... really struggled, I think, to get across what I saw.

Something I thought of, in the shower later, was that the OE prose narratives, and to a certain extent the *narrative* poetry, reminds me of modern Japanese fiction, in the way it handles emotion. Hard to say, I've read a lot more of the former than the latter, and I haven't read the big names (Murakami, etc) that people will immediately think of. But in my mind are things like Banana Yoshimoto and Sayaka Murata, Takaishi Hiraide, and even this short story by Aoka Matsuda I read this week. Apparently I didn't comment on this when I finished Convenience Store Woman but I remember thinking about it at the time: how Japanese first person narratives manage to be immediate, close first person, but still give the speaking protagonist a sort of... emotional privacy. You can tell there are emotions there, but you don't get the up close nitty-gritty of it. I forget the words for the distinction between emotional-bubble and emotional out-bubble people, but I don't think it's that the audience are emotional out-bubble. It's that the audience are expected to do some WORK, as emotional-in-bubble, and not demand complete cathartic emotional immersion.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I've become close with someone who's a native German speaker (although not Swiss), and discovered that my emotional expression arsenal is wildly ill-suited to people who are neither Australians/Kiwis nor Brits nor steeped in Old English lit. I LOVE understatement, you see. 'You're not so bad yourself', for instance, is a well known example, meaning 'I am quite fond of you' (insert US-UK problems for quite - Australians use both meanings, although mostly the UK, and usually intuit which). I use all those 'praising with faint praise' idioms and then have just... wildly overcommited to litotes as a rhetorical device. 'Not the worst thing that happened to me' is probably Pretty Damn Good. And I think it's, in my case, actually partly influenced by OE lit, where pronouncements like 'he was not unworthy to ...' are high praise. (Right after having a communication fail on this axis I opened something to find bedlamsbard describing a moderately useful work event as 'not unuseful'. It's the medievalism, I tell you. But I would use that phrase for either something moderately useful or something AMAZINGLY useful, and I'm not sure Bedlam would for the latter. I wouldn't for something *fairly* useful, though. LITOTES!)

There's a whole complex here where I'm BOTH someone who is emotionally transparent, and someone who has trouble emoting on *purpose* (let alone co-emoting. I don't like people seeing me to the airport, oh no). And where I'm someone who has, let us say, not the most stellar track record with social nuance, AND a huge love of figurative language, especially for emotion. I am enormously on team 'straight up explicit communication' and also intensely into oblique communication, especially as expression of care.

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Currently Reading: Much the same as last time, honestly. I... read stuff. Every second day at least? But I never finish anything.
Fiction for fun: 'Three Daughters of Eve' is coming along. It's not what I really want to be reading right now (I feel like brain candy, but very little of that is ON my tbr, since I took an indefinite break from indie romance, so here we are). I'm enjoying the retrospective timeline and finding the grown-adult one tedious, but I assume that's intentional. I can also tell, loud as a clanging bell, the retrospective is going to end with a student/teacher affair, which is... not what I signed up for, but I suppose it's a strength of Shafak's craft that I'm still on board even though that's obviously how it's going to pan out?
Poetry: Still enjoying The World's Wife. Still not sure that ANYTHING in here beats Mrs Icarus. I am making headway again with Paradise Lost courtesy Anthony Oliveira; just got to the critical splitting point in Book 9.
Lit Mag: Hey I read THREE whole things from the autumn Meanjin. Never mind that it's nearly time for the summer issue and I haven't read winter or spring.
Non-fiction for fun: All on hiatus.
For work: still puttering through Jost's collection on Chaucerian humour, which remains stuffy (but sometimes in useful ways). Almost finished Heng's The Invention of Race but got stalled halfway through the Mongol chapter, a bit... o_0 about the way she writes about them. Certainly she doesn't execute the same careful disambiguation between what her Latin SOURCES say about barely-human Mongols and her own narrator voice as she does with the Arabs. (Also... clashes wildly with Lomuto's take in 'The Mongol Princess of Tars'???)

Recently Finished: Two whole things!

Trelawny of the 'Wells': A Comedietta In Four Acts by Arthur Wing Pinero

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I made it to the last of wildeabandon's playreadings and I'm really glad I did. This was a whacky play, SIMULTANEOUSLY a 19th c melodrama and a late 19th c drawing room comedy, and if I was a 19th century-ist I would be putting it on undergrad syllabi at once. A++ work, Arthur Wing Pinero, whoever you were.

Would LOVE to be involved in a production, but as it would lose ALL its attractions if it had anything less than full 1860s dress, I doubt I ever will be.



View all my reviews

I also finished Miroirs arthuriens entre images et mirages, with... mixed feelings. Next week will be devoted to figuring out how to give a mixed review that showcases its best aspects (as I think a bilingual french/english collection that's mostly French in... approach? I guess? is an important thing to exist) without overselling it. I think my basic takeaway is: if your institution TEACHES both medieval French and Medieval English, order it. If not, perhaps not.

Online Fiction:

Aoko Matsuda, trans. Polly Barton, introduced Carmen Maria Machado (Electric Lit), Peony Lanterns. A ghost story. A story of an unemployed salaryman.

Eris Young (The Selkie), The Archivist. Dark; several kinds of violence. But oh. It's... a thing. Oh yes. I think it will appeal to people who liked My Love, Our Lady of Slaughter in particular, although in some ways it has more in common with A voyage to Queensthroat.

Up Next: So many things I feel dizzy. I really want to finish either Three Daughters or Meanjin so I can move on to something else for fun. For work and work-adjacent I just have an Endless Pile. I'm trying to install a half hour reading segment each day, with... less than total success.

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Links of Note:

Barbara Caine (History Workshop), Reading and writing friendship: Ruth Slate and Eva Slawson. This is the GOOD SHIT, yes.

Lorrie Moore (The New Yorker), Face Time. On COVID, care, and death.

Michael Blair Mount (Longreads), My year on a shrinking island. For some reason I missed the author's name and (inferred) gender and for 2/3 of this thought it was by a woman. It's interesting, though not surprising, how my response changed when I realised not. Oh, right, you're (read as) a MAN, that explains how you can up and move to Martha's Vineyard with no context. Oh, right the women you're going home with make you STRAIGHT, that's why there's no ~extra guff~ about partner choice. Right. Regardless, as an essay, it has the thing I most value: sense of place.

Therese Mailhot (Guernica), I used to give men mercy. This is... notable. I'll be adding her memoir to my (unfeasible) TBR.

Rachel Sugar (Vice), What was fun. This is both interesting and unsatisfying. I hope to come back to it and write a post on Fun.

Lidia Thorpe (Crikey, 2019), Djab Warrung people have been failed at every turn. If you've been keeping tabs on the destruction of the Djab Warruing trees, and like me were wondering what was up with the Vic govt claiming they had consulted traditional owners while many Djab Warrung claim they hadn't: here's an explanation.

Roland Betancourt (Time), The Hidden Queer History of Medieval Christianity. Some of this is same old, same old, but really !! is Betancourt's account of a document *condemning* the Byzantine adoption-of-brotherhood rite as inviting immorality. It goes a long way to confirming Boswell's reading of that rite, and, like... I was so suspicious. So were many other people. It was the LEAST supported part of Boswell's second book. Anyway. Will be reading Betancourt's book as soon as I beat down the TBR a bit.

Mary C. Flannery (TLS), Does that star-spangled banner yet wave?. There are, I suspect, things missing from this, but I know writing it meant a lot to MF and going by Twitter it has spoken deeply to other Americans (and not all of them white). I'm still a bit ??? at the idea of having feelings about one's anthem other than an impulse to satire that ends up more moving than the original, so I am ill equipped to comment.

Carmen Maria Machado (Guernica, 2017), The trash heap has spoken. On fat women taking up space.

This language is going to drive me mad¹. I think modern German may have been designed to bamboozle whatever weird people learn Anglo-Saxon first.

Consider the matter of first person pronouns:

1. Anglo Saxon: Ic - pronounced "ick" or "ich", there might even be a rule to which one you use, but I've forgotten it (Sorry, Venerable Alex.)
2. Middle English: Ich - pronounched "ich" or "i-ch", depending on who you're listening to.
3. German: Ich - prounounced some way I can't possibly reproduce, but which is most definitely not "ich" or "i-ch".

And then tonight, because I'm weird, I was reading the grammar at the back of my dictionary, and discovered that the past participle is formed by whacking 'ge-' onto the present tense. I HAVE BEEN TRAINED TO IGNORE RANDOM GE- prefixes, people!
... although, glod, what wouldn't I give to know what this wandering ge- thing did in Proto-Germanic...

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1. For those new to the world of Me Learning New Languages, this is my battle-cry and expression of glee.

Do you think I could marry the Dictionary of Old English Corpus online? Can I? Please?

Failing that, I shall swear eternal fealty to it and serve it forever.

*quivers* When I leave uni I won't ever be able to play with the DOEC again. WAAAAH.

Does anyone know if Anglo-Saxon language was ever on the British school curriculum?

If one were being educated in a prestigious school in the early 1900s, and going to university in the 19-teens or early 20s, would one first encounter AS language at school or university? I wants to know, precious.

(Rymenhild- this is for your requested fic. I haven't forgotten, promise. Just taking a while to figure out how to work in my RIDICULOUS MEDIEVAL JOKE.)

(But Rule 34 means, now that I've said it, someone has written it and it's probably graphic. This isn't.)
The latest thing keeping me awake o' nights is character fragments. This is Hell.

Sorry the formatting's a  bit screwey.

Canon notes: I read the Anglo-Saxon translation of the Gospel of Nichodemus. I can't tell you if Hell is a woman in the Latin verion, but she's definitely a female creature of some sort in the AS.
You can find a translation of both the AS version and its immediate Latin source in 'Two Old English Apocrypha' edited by J.E. Cross.

Infanticides and Stillbirths in Anglo-Saxon England. Just some things the Bocera told me today... One gruesome, one sweet.

Also, The Gaze in Sir Gawain.

So I set out to create a manuscript description, happy in the knowledge that no easy-to-use description of Cotton Nero A.i has already been made.
What I want in a MS description:
* items clearly laid out, with modern English descriptions where appropriate
* first lines of homilies in Old English
* texts identified by their common title as well as their MS title
* clear quire divisions within the list
* references to editions
* the ability to scan the description either quire-by-quire OR by content type

Which means a table. Vertical axis numbering items and listing foliation. Horizontal axis listing content type (Insitiutes, laws, homilies, other). So one can scan down the 'homily' column if one so desires, or one can isolate the fifth quire, or whatever. FABULOUS.

BLOODY DIFFICULT TO CREATE IN MS WORD.
An exel table would be fine. Lovely. But difficult to print out and bind into a thesis.
So we have lots of individual one-page tables, which have to be prevented from binding themselves together and aligning cell widths (the Homilies column, for example, having been squashed up when there are no homilies on the page, so as to make space for Institutes).

And then I discover that you can't footnote a table.

This, people, explains why no one has made a user-friendly Manuscript Description of Cotton Nero A.i.
But I will not be defeated! When I am done, the Reader will be able to flick through my table with ease!
Sigh. The Reader will be me, and whatever unfortunate souls mark the thing. Oh, the futility.

So, I'm obsessed with the Old English verb thyncan (yes, it has a thorn or an eth, but i'm too tired to type them). Happily for me, when I have to prepare comments on three aspects of vocabulary in Sir Gawain, i found its Middle English equivalent, and i went a bit nuts. My commentary on the other two bits of vocab won't be nearly this long, I swear.

THINKEN (v.1)

The verb thinken in Middle English in fact consists of two separate verbs with a similar range of spellings and- to the modern reader- similar semantic fields, which nevertheless remain distinct according to the grammatical constructions in which they are used.

• The first (v.1, according to the Middle English dictionary) appears on line 49:
With lordez and ladies, as leuest him Þoȝt. (With lords and ladies, as seemed dearest to him)

• The second thinken, which also appears in our text- is in fact in the same glossary entry- is the ancestor of our modern verb to think, and descends from the Old English Þencan, to think, to exercise cognitive faculty. Semantically and gramattically it is closer to the Middle English/ early modern ‘to ween’ than to its homophone thinken.

• The first thinken, as it appears in line 49, should be thought of in terms of the early modern methinks.
The important thing to note is the difference in the case of the pronoun. Dative case pronouns (me, you, him- these are also the accusative case pronouns in modern english, but OE has a distinction in the third person, not sure about ME) are used to express an indirect object. The thinker does not initiate the cognitive process- is not the subject- but is the recipient of a fully formed impression.

• An impersonal verb has no subject, nothing seeming. The Middle English Dictionary lists two personal constructions of thinken (v. 1): ‘to present the appearance of, to seem to be’; or ‘to seem proper, to seem good’. These two meanings occur in Old English as well, but they do not survive in the early modern methinks. The example here in line 49 is a personal construction; the lords and ladies are seeming dearest to Arthur.

• The Middle English Dictionary lists a further six impersonal uses of thinken, variations on ‘it seems (to me) that’, ‘as it seemed to him’, and so forth. An interesting use of thinken in both Old and Middle English is to present something which ‘seemed to him’ in a dream or vision- a phrase which would now present a sense of unreality, but I think conveys something more like passivity, lack of concious control, in the Old and Middle English. You can also find methinks associated with this sort of context in Shakespeare- there’s a nice big batch of methinkses used as the dreamers in Midsummer Nights regain their wits and marvel at their experiences.

Finally, coming back to our line 49 here, lordez and ladies, as leuest him þoȝt. It tells us about Arthur’s mind- his affection for the lords and ladies- and, rather than expressing the sort of doubt that would go with ‘to seem’ in modern english (well, they seemed lovely to him at the time…), I think it constructs Arthur’s attatchment to these lords and ladies as almost instinctive, a response bypassing cognition.

As another note- I can’t seem to see much in the way of personal verbs of cognition in this first 250 words. Lots of seeing and appearing, little thinking. Does this mean something? I don’t know…

Cotton Nero A.i contains the oldest version of the Cnut law codes. I have this on the authority of A.G. Kennedy's article in Anglo-Saxon England 11. Dorothy Bethurum also describes Nero A.i as containing some ten law codes.

However, Neil Ker's immensely detailed list of the contents of Nero A.i does not appear to include I-II Cnut, II Edgar or the laws of Alfred-Ine. None of the missing law codes are described in Gneuss' short description of the manuscript EITHER.

I am distressed by this.

(also, my pet MS was nine books from the Pearl/Gawain MS in Cotton's libary. I wonder what his library filing logic was?)

My somewhat obsessive friend MrsBacon, who has spent much of the last couple of months chasing down crusader letters by haphazard chains of catalogue searches, word of mouth, the history of french libraries after the Revolution, and midnight telephone calls to confused non-english speaking librarians who just might have something in a 'little box' downstairs, assures me that I am blessed in my choice of field, because the English generally and Anglo-Saxonists in particular are obsessed with cataloguing and record-keeping, and that I should be overjoyed to have access to big fat manuscript catalogues and so forth.

Nevertheless, having finally laid hands on Helmut Gneuss' Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, i found it immensely frustrating. It didn't take much to discover that 'Cotton Nero' wouldn't be in the list, and that it would be found headed by its location. After peering at the index for some time, wondering why 'British Library' doesn't appear before 'Cambridge University Library', i noticed the neat little comma: 'Cambridge, University Library'. Deft use of the index took me through the various manuscripts containing "Wulfstan, Archbishop of York: homilies" and brought me at last to 'London, British Library, Cotton Nero A.i". So far so good- all inconveniences at the feet of my own incompetence.

Gneuss turns out to contain a very short paragraph and no more information than I could have rattled off from the top of my head, save for the size of the MS itself. Perhaps useful for cross-referencing across manuscripts, it was quite disapointing for my current purposes. (What are they? I'm not sure... )

Next i turned to Neil Ker's Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, which DID contain useful- if barely comprehensible- information, several pages of it. This, however, took me another half an hour to find, as I stared at the gap between Lincoln, Cathedral 298 no. 2 and London, British Museum, Additional 9381, wondering where the British Library had got to. I checked at the other end of British Museum, and L had not been mysteriously moved to after M. To the indexes i returned, and sifted through manuscripts containing the handwriting of Wulfstan- which was at least a vaugely relevant tour- only to end up at London, British Museum, Cotton Nero A.i.

Why has no one told me that the British Museum and the British Library are the same thing? Furthermore, how does one figure out which to refer to?