Morning Medieval Miscellany

I have never had as much attention paid to my birthday in my adult life as I got this year. Are people just happy to see me getting closer to the grave?

While we all await the embrace of death, why don't we fill our days with wine, women, and a world of medievalism?

• The Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry Project is making progress on Guthlac.
• Want to work on an Icelandic project? Apply for a Snorri Sturluson Fellowship!
• Lisa Spangenberg wishes me a happy birthday and gives me the gift that keeps on giving: weasels.
• Speaking of bestiaries, the Weird Medieval Animal of the week is the wether, an animal whose superpower appears to be attack worms.
• Heroic Dreams discusses mazes and labyrinths, and then jumps off into a discussion of Ursula LeGuin's The Tombs of Atuan.
• Apparently, Dungeons & Dragons players were accused of being Obama supporters by the McCain campaign, prompting outrage and an apology. Insert your own saving throw joke here.
• Michael Drout has a suggestion for improving the Zemeckis Beowulf movie.
• The Medieval Historical Fiction Novel of the Week is Catherine Jinks's The Inquisitor: A Novel. I wonder what motivates subtitles like that. What if we applied that to over famous works? The Book of the City of Ladies: A Metaphorical Treatise. Beowulf: An Epic Poem. Aelfric's Colloquy: A Colloquy.
• Highly Eccentric needs help with translating a sentence from an introduction about the Chanson de Roland. I've got no French, so you folks'll have to help out.
• Derek Olsen considers core texts and canons of New Testament studies from the medieval and literary side of things.
• Jonathan Jarrett discusses how Catalonia in the 9th and 10th centuries became Carolingian.
• Larry Swain returns to the "Dark Age of Medievalism" kerfuffle at turns agreeing and disagreeing with me. I'm glad he's finally published this post -- we discussed his objections in private e-mails, but he never got the chance to develop them into a coherent post before.

Heavenfield points us to Senchus, a newish blog on early medieval Scotland. Update RSS feeds and blogrolls accordingly!