The Epic Badness of Grendel

I have now seen the SciFi Channel original movie, "Grendel." A team of therapists, after much debate, has reluctantly permitted me to write a review. If the writing of this review should kill me, please donate my body to religion.*

This is a bad movie. I have been trying to decide if it dethroned Christopher Lambert's futuristic "Beowulf" as the worst Beowulf adaptation ever, and I finally came to the decision that this movie is marginally ... very marginally ... better. This film has three things going for it:

• First is the theme. "All we have are our stories" is the refrain, and there is a kind of Beowulfian call to glory found there. That's not a bad theme if you are going to be doing a Beowulf film. It's relatively close to the poem in terms of thematic elements.
• The film follows the basic outline of the story. The Danes are attacked by Grendel, Beowulf and friends come to defeat him. After they kill him, they celebrate, only to find out that Grendel's mother (called by the name "Hag" in the film) isn't too happy, so they have to kill her as well.
• There is a sly reference to Burton Raffel at the outset of the film. An old man is showing Beowulf a cave in which a giant snake lives, and as Beowulf goes on to kill the snake, he turns to one of his companions and warns them to keep an eye on "Raffel," because he does not trust him. I assume this is an homage to Burton Raffel -- perhaps they used his translation to write the screenplay.

Despite these things, the film manages to be awful. The acting is unbelievably bad, and the writing isn't much better. For example, we had this delightful line: "The monster's thirst of flesh is unquenchable." OK, Intro to Freshman Composition error here -- either the monster's thirst for blood is unquenchable, or the monster's hunger for flesh is insatiable, but the monster cannot have a thirst for flesh, unless he has a blender and makes flesh into protein shakes. Besides such lines, the movie never shows you something happening when it can offer dull exposition instead. When my wife asked me how the movie was, I told her it was bad. She then said, "How can it be bad? You are laughing so loud!", to which I had to reply, "I don't think I'm supposed to be laughing. It's funny only unintentionally."

The great badness of the film, though, was not the mixing of metaphors or the cue-card-reading acting; it was the "King's Weapon." Early in the film King Higlac gives a special weapon to Beowulf to use in defeating Grendel. The weapon looks like a crossbow with a rifle stock, three strings, and big Cadillac-looking fins/blades at the front. I started laughing as soon as I saw the thing, and nearly fell out of my chair when Beowulf took a practice shot at a wooden dingy, which exploded.

Yes, "the King's Weapon" is a crossbow that fires explosive bolts. Every time it seems like the action of the film might be slowing, the movie makes an excuse to whip out the Weapon and blow something up -- usually a tree. When Beowulf does kill Grendel, it is by shooting him with the weapon (which merely burns him, rather than killing him) before chopping his arm off with his sword "Nagling." No hand-to-hand combat here. This is, by the way, the third time Beowulf gets a point-blank shot at Grendel. Since the King's Weapon has a scope (no, I'm not kidding), we can only conclude that Beowulf is the world's worst shot.

The setting was strangely interesting. Heorot Hall was designed to look very Roman, and indeed Beowulf compares the Golden Age of Hrothgar's kingdom to that of Rome. The Viking ship seems to have been lifted from the set of a pirate movie. Rather than the cliche dragon-prowed ship, they go with a three-masted vessel that looks like it should have been sailing the Spanish Main. Wouldn't Jack Sparrow have been surprised to get a shot from the King's Weapon across his bow?

Some other interesting things to note:

Though IMDb lists Marina Sirtis as "Queen Wealhtheow," they change her name to "Queen Onela" in the film. They also transform her from a strong, politically-saavy woman into a madwoman with some limited prophetic powers. Her madness seems to disappear after the first quarter of the movie, though. Apparently Beowulf brought her some anti-schizophrenia medication.

Hrothgar has two sons, one named "Renn," and the other named "Unferth." Unferth has the characteristics of the person by that name in the poem (he gets into a drunken debate with Beowulf over the Brecca swimming contest, he has a partial rehabilitation by the end, etc.). When they were young men, Renn and Unferth went off to battle Grendel, but Unferth abandoned Renn and he was killed.

The film has a "dark secret" that is introduced and revealed near the end. The secret doesn't really make a lot of sense, and it unnecessarily besmirches the name of Shild Scheffing, so I suspect it is in there to make Hrothgar a more complicated figure.

Grendel and his mother look pretty good. Grendel looks more like a giant werwolf with a monkey tail than a troll. He has these things dangling from his elbows which at first appeared to be additional tails, but which I later took to be long tufts of hair. Grendel's mother, on the other hand, looks like a giant bat. Neither she nor Grendel is aquatic; Grendel lives in the woods and strings up his victims like a spider, and Hag (Grendel's mother) lives in a kind of canyon.

The King's Weapon, though it does wound Hag, is not the killing weapon. Instead there is a special sword in her lair (conveniently displayed, lest Beowulf miss it) which is named "Eotens."

One of Beowulf's companions is named "Finn," and he is Higlac's nephew. He and Unferth are the only interesting characters in the film, and indeed, by the end we realize it is Finn who has been telling the story. Finn's main job is to be our eyes and ears, as well as doing normal sidekick duty (e.g. getting captured to give the hero motivation to save the day).

So, in summary, Grendel is not quite as bad as Beowulf, but in the same league.

*I know the cliche is to donate one's body to science. Screw science. Once you're dead, what good is it to you? At that point, you'll need religious brownie points.

More on the State of the Field

It's the first week of classes here, which explains the paucity of posting. Michael Drout has an interesting post responding to this post on Tiruncula about the state of Anglo-Saxon studies. Since I'm part of the "nest of Saxonists" online, I figure I ought to have something to say. Indeed, I have a lot to say, but not the time in which to say it.

So, let me instead make a couple of unsupported statements -- more a bit of bomb-throwing than actual argument.

It strikes me that the problem is that we have abandoned literature. Too often, the study of Anglo-Saxon literature is that it has been abandoned for the practice of philosophy-lite and history-lite.

First off, philosophy-lite. This problem is more pronounced in the rest of literary studies, the problem in which one can have semesters in grad school, getting degree in "English Literature," in which one spends more time talking about Kristeva and Spivak than one does talking about Milton and Austen. The trouble with this is that we already have people who do philosophy and do it better than those in English departments do it. We call these people "philosophers" and house them in philosophy departments.

History-lite is also found in the field at large, but Anglo-Saxon literary studies is especially prone to it. Besides (old) Historicism and New Historicism, darn near every faddish theory to come around "situating" everything wants to do so from a historical perspective, though often only implicitly. We seem to have forgotten that history is situated IN LANGUAGE, and that the discipline of history is itself situated in narrative storytelling (i.e. literature). In other words, history is the younger child of literature, not the other way around.

There you go. No argument, just bomb-throwing. Let the angry comments commence.

Grendel Comes Loping Toward Us

Sometimes I hate my life.

SciFi channel is premiering a movie entitled "Grendel" on January 13th. I'm going to have to watch it, despite the facts, which are:

• All movies on SciFi stink, though they often have good series.
• Marina Sirtis is in it.
• It has a character named "Ingrid."
• The promo video has both catapaults AND flaming crossbows.
• It also has a giant snake. Perhaps it is meant to be a dragon.

I'm hoping for some kind of crisis Friday night, to save me from this fate -- or my wyrd, if you will.

RPGs and Medievalism

I spent this evening watching a group play a tabletop role-playing game (RPG) called "Ars Magica." For those of you unfamiliar with RPGs, these are basically the "Dungeons and Dragons" style games, where players create characters and run those characters through adventures. The games are refereed by someone who is not playing, generally called the "Game Master," though the GM has only limited control over how the story will play out -- if the characters decide to do something different than the GM had expected, the GM has to be flexible enough to make that story adjustment work. In many ways, RPGs are collaborative storytelling.

"Ars Magica" is set in mythical Europe, which is nearly the very same as the medieval Europe we all know, except that in this world magic is real (and the players generally play characters who are mages). Unlike games in pure fantasy settings, however, "Ars Magica" is expected to stick pretty closely to our own historical world. The game I saw (I was able to participate a little) took place in Germany, along the Rhine in the 13th century.

I was struck by how much more educational this tabletop RPG was than any MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online games are the online roleplaying games like Everquest and World of Warcraft). Because of the collaborative storytelling aspect, tabletop RPGs allow the players to be more deeply involved in the creation of the world in ways that MMORPGs cannot allow. In the game I observered, the players and GM had the following discussions about the 13th century Rhineland:

• How does one arrange a dowry?
• How much would a dowry cost?
• How would one initiate contact with a high-ranking Church official?
• How would one initiate contact with mid-ranking nobility?
• Would a mill or a forge be more effective for starting a community?
• How fast would river travel have been?
• How far and fast could a medieval peasant walk?
• If there had been mages in the 13th Century, would they have pronounced Latin in the Classical way or the ecclesiastical way?

...etc, etc. I don't want to offer the impression that this game was a bunch of people sitting around having academic discussions, nor do I want to offer the impression that they always came up with the "right" answer (I have no idea how the dowry system worked at that time, for example). These little blanks had to be filled in, though, in order for the players to decide how their characters should proceed. Not one of them was a trained medievalist, yet each showed a greater degree of understanding of the medieval era than the average person would. I'm convinced that this was largly due to tabletop RPGs, and that had this been a group of people playing a medieval-themed MMORPG, they would have shown a lesser degree of sophistication, relying more heavily on the game design and mechanics to make decisions for them.

One last note: As I mentioned to the players, I have seen real medieval codices of "magic," and they were far less complicated than the magical practices outlined in the Ars Magica books!

Rudolph, Tundra-Wanderer

As part of my own Christmas tradition, I offer you "Rudolph, Tundra-Wanderer," a.k.a. "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" in Old English.

Medieval Tech & American History

Penn State just announced its new project, "Building Community: Medieval Technology and American History," a site that appears to be aimed at promoting the study of medieval technology among by providing resources for high school students and teachers. The site still has a lot of kinks in it (like XXXX where material is missing, and links that go nowhere yet), but they just announced it today.

It looks like the project is aimed at a non-scholarly audience, with such essays as "Who was Geoffrey Chaucer?"* If you're a history teacher, though, this should be right up your alley.

*My answer: A prominent blogger.

Hypertext II: How Electronic Texts Will Change Us

It’s been about a month now since Jeffery Hodges of Gypsy Scholar asked me about hypertext and medieval studies at a conference, and, since it was drawing close to lunch, I dodged the question and promised to answer it later. In order to get closer to answering the question, I posted an historical model to use in thinking about the development of textual technologies.

Though much has been made of the ways in with electronic literacy more closely unites visual images with text, I think the more important element of electronic literacy is hypertext.

Let’s begin with manuscript culture (my personal favorite). Because all texts had to be copied by hand, it placed a great emphasis on lack of error. The importance of error-free copying was even greater, perhaps, when copying important religious texts – after all, if you are copying the Bible and get sloppy with what HE said, you don’t want Him getting mad at you.*

No matter how accurately the words were copied, however, there would be no way that the pages would look the same. To see how this works, try transcribing the first paragraph of this blog post to paper. Then, write it again on another piece of paper. Even without error, you’ll see that the two look very different. On one, maybe the first line ends with “Hodges,” while on another, it might end in “of” or “Gypsy.” In manuscript culture, then, sameness was not a virtue; it was not even really an option. Instead, it was more important to be free of error.

Besides its low error rate, good manuscripts are marked by the way they look. Today we equate lined paper with unimportant writing such as high school essays, but in medieval manuscript culture, better manuscripts were ruled (often by creasing the lines across the page with a dry stylus or pricking them with an awl). Today, books with pictures are considered children’s books, but illuminated manuscripts, with ornate initial letters, written in beautiful hand along carefully-lined, high-quality parchment – Þæt wæs god boc. For this reason, each codex is its own unique work of art. Even codices on mundane topics would each have been unique.

Print culture, then, eliminates the emphasis on being error free, but it also eliminates the emphasis on original art. It was important for print texts to avoid error (just ask the printer of the “Wicked Bible”), but once an error was introduced, it would be replicated in each of the copies. Uniformity became the primary virtue of print culture; every copy of a book had to look as similar as possible to every other copy of that book. In fact, print culture gave rise to “editions,” that is, the same book organized in a slightly different way. As a student, my professors would often insist that we all have the same edition of a book so that they could refer to page numbers. The very idea of an edition seems silly in manuscript culture. Now the seriousness of a book was marked, in part, by its lack of illustration, in sharp contrast to medieval texts.

Hypertext emphasizes neither. On the one hand, hypertext provides the same uniformity as print text (until I update the Wordhoard, every time you hit the reload button, it will look the same), but it also allows for a close connection between image and text. With hypertext, though, the important element is intertextuality – the connections between one hypertext and other texts. In manuscript culture this could be achieved through interlinear glosses, and in print culture this could be achieved through footnoted references, but neither matches electronic culture for emphasis on non-linear reading. I would argue, in fact, that readers’ intolerance for long texts (such as long blog posts) is not, as is so often suggested, a function of short attention spans, but rather that it is the result of expectations that the hypertext should be referring away from itself more often. Someone who refuses to read more than, say 500 words on a particular page might read 5000 words in a sitting by clicking through various hypertext links.

The word “hypertext” isn’t a particularly good description of what it is. I would think something like “intertext” would be more descriptive, because of the way that hypertext promotes and redefines intertextuality. Think of all the other possible things we could ask of our computer texts – we could ask that when we click on them, the definition of the word pops up, or it is pronounced, or it is translated, or statistics on the word are provided (such as how many times it is used in a document, etc.). Though there are sites and applications that do these things, those are considered above-and-beyond the usual role of hypertext. The dominant feature of the hypertext is that intertextual link.

We had ways to provide intertextuality in manuscript and print culture, too. The dominant way in manuscript culture was the gloss or marginalia, in which someone would comment on or translate the main text. In print culture, we had the footnote or the parenthetical comment. Still, neither offered the same potential toward intertextuality because of the practical limits of the technologies.

Not surprisingly, then, as readers have become more attuned to intertextuality through hypertext, they have begun to demand more intertextuality out of print culture. Perhaps this is anecdotal, but over my career I’ve seen an increase in the number of discursive footnotes in student papers – and I find myself more likely to use them too. Textbooks are more often accompanied by CDs or websites with images or sound clips, in order that the print text not stand alone. I’m convinced that the success of the “For Dummies” series of books isn’t the presentation of basic material, but rather the non-linear presentation of the subject matter.

So, in answer to the question “how with hypertext affect medieval studies,” all we can do is speculate. It may be that future scholars are more interested in interlinear glosses and their presentation. We may also see a revival of source-text studies, particularly when the source is extant and can be linked to the primary text. We may see the death of footnotes; but then again, we may see an explosion of discursive footnotes. We may find that the new “trot” or “pony” students consult is a hypertext version that links to a translation of the text.

The difficulty of speculating is that it often relies on straight-line thinking that tends to obscure that new technologies change us. Sometimes I wonder if projects that aim at being definitive electronic editions of texts (I’m thinking of such big projects as the Electronic Beowulf Project) might not make all the wrong assumptions about what scholars in the near future will be like. As I pointed out earlier, the idea of the “edition” didn’t make a whole lot of sense in the manuscript context (with the exception of different translations), so perhaps the idea of the “definitive edition” might disappear as well. Who will need, or even want, a definitive edition, when a scholar can call up a dozen different editions with ease? Perhaps instead we should be working on definitive annotated bibliographies of electronic texts. A Google search on the phrase “definitive bibliography” today yields only about 16,900 hits, whereas a search on “definitive edition” yields 628,000. In twenty years, that ratio may be reversed.

I invite commentators to speculate on this issue of how electronic texts will change medievalists as well as medieval studies.

*By the way, a lot of scorn has been thrown at “lazy and indolent” scribes by medievalists. Have you ever tried to transcribe a manuscript? It’s HARD. Whenever I transcribe a long manuscript, my hand is curled up like a claw and I have an error rate that would no doubt get me driven out of any self-respecting scriptorium. So let’s just give those scribes a little credit, OK?

Professor Shoeless Joe

In "End of Term Follies," I promised a forthcoming post on memorable student bribes. In an effort to distract you all from the fact that I still haven't written "Hypertext II" as promised in "Hypertext I: Textual History," I present to you the following:

After undergrad, my first three years of academic life were split between corrupt communist systems and Confucian systems. My first gig was in Korea at a language institute, which was a sort of tutoring center for college students and businessmen who needed more practice in their conversational English. We didn't do any grading or evaluation; we just taught. For that first month, I was really surprised by how often students were offering to take me to dinner or bringing me little gifts. Being a nice, ethical Hoosier boy, I politely turned them down, all the time wondering why they would try to bribe me when I wasn't grading them.

Then a more experienced colleague took me aside. He explained to me that, yes, the students were offering gifts in the hope that I would offer them special attention, but that such gifts were not only tolerated in a Confucian education system -- they were expected. Furthermore, since the language institute was a for-profit school that needed its students to be happy if it wanted to stay in business, if the institute owners found out I was constantly turning down these little gifts and dinners, I could find myself in trouble. Clearly, I had to make a change, so I decided that, since I wasn't giving any grades, there wasn't really an ethical problem with accepting the little gifts. Such gifts were simply a way to honor the teacher, and if the students also hoped to get a little extra attention because of them, that was simply human nature.

My next gig was at a university in the former Soviet Union. By this time, Lithuania had technically gained its independence, but it was still occupied by the Red Army and still flailing around trying to find its footing in a capitalist global market. This brought out the worst of communist thuggery and, while bribery had always been a big part of the communist education system, now that bribery was backed by a greater flow of capital.

I couldn't understand why my Lithuanian students, who were all failing miserably, didn't seem at all concerned. Not even the ones who were the stars of the class seemed to care. I grew more and more frustrated, until one day I confided my frustration in a colleague from the history faculty. He explained to me that the reason they weren't concerned is that they expected to offer me a bribe at the end of the semester, and from that they would each pass.

So I made a little speech in my class the next day. I gave me usual "You're all failing so you'll have a buckle down" speech, and the students were literally yawning with boredom. I ended the speech this way: "And if you think that at the end of the semester you're just going to offer me some vodka or sausages or imported chocolates to pass the class, you are terribly mistaken." You could have heard a pin drop -- it was as if I had announced that I was an alien who had come to suck out their brains through a straw. After class, the students rushed to the front of the room clamoring for extra credit.

Some though, really had no hope of passing. They had bribed their way into university and didn't have the background to catch up. Others had screwed around so long that no amount of extra work would save them. Still others simply didn't believe me, and thought I was angling for larger bribes. Many offered me bribes anyway, and some went so far as to do things like sneak bribes into my office when I wasn't there, then avoid me. A couple went over my head to bribe the dean to change the grade.

From these early days, I had to adopt a Shoeless Joe Jackson approach to student bribery. Shoeless Joe Jackson, for those of you who don't know, was banned from baseball in part of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox bribery scandal. Along with several other players, Shoeless Joe had taken money from gamblers to throw the World Series, but then batted better in the series than he had during the regular season and made no fielding errors -- clearly, Shoeless Joe took the money but didn't throw the game. So now when students start to get fidgety and see bribery in their eyes (usually about 3/4 of the way through the semester), I state my policy on bribery in class, which is this: If you offer me a bribe, I'll take it -- but it won't affect your grade. Then you'll be out some money AND you'll have failed the class.

That little speech works wonders to deter would-be bribe offerers, but some still persist. So, after that long prelude, now for a series of mini-plays entitled "Bribes I Have Known."

Student: I'll do anything to pass the class.
Me: Well, apparently not, because studying qualifies as "anything," and you didn't do that.
Student: I mean anything within reason.

Student: (pulling out checkbook) How much will it cost to make this right?
Me: No amount of money will save you. You cheated, and so you have failed the course.
Student: Are you telling me that if I offer you a large check, you won't take it?
Me: No, I'm not saying that. In fact, I will take it. But you'll still fail the class.
Student: Why would I offer you a check, then?
Me: Out of the kindness of your heart?

Student: (places final exam on my desk, along with a bag of imported chocolates)
Me: What's this for?
Student: (winking so broadly it would embarrass a Vaudevillian actor)
Me: You know this won't change your grade, right?
Student: (winking and nodding like a maniac strolls out the door)
Me: (the next day, enjoying an imported chocolate while writing an "F" on his gradesheet)

Student: I just have to get a good grade in this class. Is there anything I can do?
Me: Well, not really, because ... (have to scoot away, because the student has just scooted her chair uncomfortably close to mine)
Me: Ehm. As I was saying, not really because ... (student puts her hand on my knee and leans forward suggestively)
Me: (moving back as far as I can, and speaking as quickly as I can) ... NOT REALLY BECAUSE YOU'RE ALREADY GETTING AN "A!" You'd have to completely fail the final to get anything lower, and with your grades right now, even if you failed the final you'd still pass the class!
Student: Really? Oh. (Stand up and heads out the door)

Student: You're just failing me because you hate me!
Me: No, I'm failing you because you haven't passed a single exam all semester.
Student: Well then how come you won't take a little gift from me?
Me: Because I think an education is more valuable than that.
Student: Well, then, I'll just bribe the Dean to change my grade.
Me: Feel free. I'll bribe him more to change it back ... and I can afford it.
Student: You'd do that?
Me: Watch me.

Student: How about if I wash your truck?
Me: How about if you write a 6-8 page paper on washing trucks?
Student: (after a long pause) How about if I mow your lawn?

Me: (Opening student portfolio to find a dime taped to the front. I laugh and laugh and laugh)

Student: (Once again, getting uncomfortably close) Don't you like me?
Me: Yes, of course I like you.
Student: Then what's the problem? No one has to know.
Me: I'll know.
Student: (putting on a pouty face) So you don't like me, then?
Me: I like you fine. I just like my wife more.
Student: What's she got that I don't?
Me: A college degree.*

Student: Here, sir, this is for you.
Me: What is it?
Student: It's a book of my father's poetry.
Me: (flipping through it) It's quite wonderful!
Student: So, can I get an "A" in the class?
Me: No, but if your father takes the class, I'm sure he will.

Student: Will it help my grade if I give you a piano?
Me: A piano?
Student: It's what my father had to give for me to get into university.
Me: But you are already getting an A.
Student: And I can get an A even if I don't give you a piano?
Me: Of course, but what's with the pianos? Why a piano?
Student: I just thought you professors liked pianos.


*One of my finer comebacks, don't you think?

End of Term Follies

Ah, yes, the end of the semester! The time when doom finally falls upon all students. Just like Santa, I know when you've been bad or good, and many students are writing e-mails to me because they've just gotten coal in their stocking.

Here is a sampling of some of the student complaints. Some are from this semester, and some are from previous semesters, but all have lodged in my memory:

Q: Why didn't I get an A in this class?
Me: Uuuh, because I gave you a D.
Q: But why didn't I get an A?
Me: Because your grade was between an F and a D, and I decided to be merciful and give you the D.
Q: But why didn't I get an A?
Me: The highest grade you got on any assignment was a C-! Why would you think you were getting an A?
Q: (after a long silence while he mulled this over) ... I know that, but why didn't I get an A?

Q: I had an A- average! How come I flunked?
Me: You had an A- on the one assignment you turned in. You didn't turn anything else in all semester.
Q: See? You know if I had turned in those other assignments, I'd have gotten A's on them too, so you should give me an A.

Q: How come I flunked the class? I was passing!
Me: Because you missed six weeks of class. The syllabus says that you can only miss two weeks.
Q: What?! You were serious about that?!

Q: I just looked at the final grades, and saw that I got an F. I was wondering if there was anything I could do to make it up.
Me: Who are you?
Q: I'm John Doe. I'm in your English class.
Me: Which one?
Q: The English class.
Me: All my classes are English classes. Which one were you in?
Q: Uh ... freshman writing, I think?
Me: Which section?
Q: Uh....
Me: Nevermind, let me look through all my rosters .... Ah, yes, here you are, John Doe. According to this, you only attended the first two classes, and turned in no assignments.
Q: Yeah, so I was wondering, is there any extra credit or anything I can do?

And so on ... of course, another favorite is a variation on the last one, when at the end we discover that the student was in a different professor's class.

Soon to come -- memorable student bribes!

Becoming Charlemagne

If you asked me who was the major medieval figure I know the least about, the answer is pretty easy: Charlemagne. I haven't intentionally neglected him, it's just that life is short and learning long.

Wordhoarder Jeff Sypeck seeks to change that with his new book Becoming Charlemagne, which is aimed at popular audiences rather than scholarly audiences (translation: promises not to be boring). I haven't read it yet, but you can find a review of it here.

By the way, the reason I haven't read it yet is that I don't have a copy. In a totally, completely unrelated aside, there are now only 21 shopping days until Christmas. *wink*wink*nudge*nudge*

Hypertext I: Textual History

At the recent MEMESAK conference, Horace Jeffery Hodges of Gypsy Scholar asked a question of me about the role of hypertext in the future of medieval studies. Since we were so close to lunch (never stand between academics and a meal), I commented that hypertext is an enormously complex issue, and suggested that we talk about it over lunch. Unfortunately, we never did. So, here is my belated response.

Allow me to begin with the model of textual culture I am using, a model that is spelled out in greater detail in my forthcoming article “Global Literature, Medieval Literature, and the Popol Vuh,” and is used implicitly in “Medievalists without Borders.”

Textual cultural history to date can be divided into four different periods: oral culture, manuscript culture, print culture, and electronic culture. We should note that as we move from one sort of culture into the other, each subsequent textual culture does not replace the others; it redefines them. So, for example, although I participate fully in electronic textual culture (this blog post you are reading, for example), I still read books (print culture), write notes and various other things by hand (manuscript culture), and bore those around me with my endless chatter (oral culture). My participation in print culture, though, is quite different from that of someone who lived a century ago, even though we might read the very same book.

Oral culture is pretty simple – it is a culture in which orality is the only textual form, and thus is the beginning and end of language. Oral cultures are ones in which the society structures itself around orality; just because one person living in a culture can read and write doesn’t make it a non-oral culture. A high enough degree of literacy among the social elites, however, does. When laws, or religious texts, or treaties are written down, the society begins to move into manuscript culture.

Obviously, most of human history has been governed by oral culture; unfortunately, we understand this culture perhaps the least. That the work of Lord and Parry was not until the 20th century shows how enormously difficult it is for the literate to understand illiterate orality. As a literate person, I have a very different relationship with the spoken word than does someone from oral culture. Probably a half dozen times per day, I tell someone to “write it down” or “send me a note” – something impossible in oral culture. Note the way that grades are given: I’m only allowed to give a certain amount of my grades based on participation, “participation” being the oral culture of the classroom. Most of my grading is required to be of written material. If I assigned 100% of my grade based upon a student’s oral performance in the classroom, I would probably be accused of being arbitrary and unfair. In an oral culture, though, being able to speak well is not only a valuable skill – it is the only real measure of education. Socrates stood around talking all day, and never wrote anything – try getting tenure as a professor today doing the same. Let’s face it, Socrates was not only untenurable, he’d not have even graduated from college himself.

Manuscript culture, the culture studied by medievalists, results from literacy. The invention of manuscript culture means that anything valued for its permanence in a society has to be written down. Not surprisingly, the engine of manuscript culture in medieval Europe was the Church, since the Church had a view that it was dealing with issues not just permanent, but eternal. Of course, manuscript culture did not replace oral culture – after all, people did not stop talking – but such texts as Bede’s account of the poet Caedmon demonstrate that a change had taken place. That Caedmon could compose such poetry without the tools of literacy is considered miraculous, and of course, his miraculous poems are not memorized, but are set into writing by others.

Print culture is both the best-and-least-studied of these cultures. It is the best studied because most scholars in English departments study the works of print culture; it is the least studied because most scholars take the print paradigm for granted, and don’t consider its implications. For most scholars working in the print culture medium, print culture is indistinguishable from literacy. Nevertheless, the advent of print culture transformed manuscript culture. Absolute uniformity of copies of books in print is not only assumed, but is assumed to be a virtue. Manuscript culture was pushed aside to the realm of the first draft, of the intensely personal, and of the authentic. Many formal documents now needed to be printed, to the end that with the invention of the typewriter, even things for which there would be only one copy (such as a school paper) were expected to be typed. Drafts could be hand written, and certain genres (such as the love letter or personal letter) could not be produced in print according to social conventions. Still, even such print documents as the business letter needed to be authenticated by the signature at the bottom – a little bit of manuscript culture at the bottom of a print culture document.

Now print culture is passing away, a process that will take decades (or even perhaps centuries), and is being replaced by electronic culture (sometimes called digital culture). Print culture is, at the moment, still alive and kicking, with such devices as the computer printer and scanner existing at the nexus point of electronic and print cultures. Still, electronic culture is redefining how we think about print, manuscript, and oral cultures, and the full implications will not be clear for generations. I’ll save that bit for my forthcoming post on hypertext.

Try Our Dragon -- It Tastes Just Like Pork!

According to this story, Welsh Dragon Pork Sausages will have to renamed to avoid confusing customers who might think it actually contains dragon.

In fact, I once used to own a dragon farm, where we farm-raised dragons for the sausage-making industry. Unfortunately, because of the high overhead, we could not compete with pork producers, and the business went under. The flame-retardant pens were not cheap, and neither was establishing our anti-knights-errant perimeter, but the real cost came in the importation of virgins to feed to the stock (after all, when supplies are low, prices rise).

h/t Quid Nomen Illius?

George W. Bush is Secretly Grading Freshman Essays!

Well, OK, not really, but I found this article, wherein paranoid Canadian undergrads fear that the US will mine Turnitin.com's database for gems of terrorism intel ... which I came to from the comments of this article, in which US high school students share the same fear.

Let me assure all the high school students in North America -- no one believes there is intelligence of any kind in your papers. Your subject-verb disagreement, sentence fragments, poor diction, and vacuous "ideas" are safe from the nefarious US government.

Manuscript Studies Website

Someone sent me a link to a medieval and early modern manuscript studies website. Stephen Reimer has put together a nice little page for beginners, especially under the section entitled "course notes."

MEMESAK '06

I haven't been posting of late since I've been at the Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Association of Korea Conference at Yonsei University in Seoul.

The conference (I'm still here at the moment) has been absolutely wonderful. I hadn't been able to attend MEMESAK for a few years, and the Association has really grown into a center for Asian medieval and early modern studies, now regularly drawing participants from other countries as well. The plenary speaker was Paul Szarmach, who gave a smashing paper on Aefric's Judith, and I'm happy to say that no one threw rotten produce after my own paper, "Medievalists without Borders" (spoofed as "Medievalist without Boredom" here).

Of special interest to the blogosphere is Jeffery Hodges, whose site Gypsy Scholar I read every day. Jeffery is a very nice guy with a very nice hat, for those who are wondering. In fact, I urge him to post an image of said hat post haste, so that the world may wonder at it!

I have to admit, that big, centered picture of me on Gypsy Scholar is a little scary. Even I'm intimidated!

Hate Mail

One problem with putting your work out in the public square is that you sometimes receive public criticism -- and mine often comes in the form of hate mail, sometimes through links, comments, or private e-mails. Though my hate mail usually comes from those who I refer to as Tolkienistas (a term of endearment) who feel I've slighted the good Professor in some way, I've also gotten hate mail from SpongeBob SquarePants fans, Julian of Norwich fans, and one very confused Paraguayan patriot who seemed to think I had insulted his country.*

I recently received the following e-mail from someone who appears to be a young undergrad at a large state institution -- we'll call her Judy. Beyond all the righteous indignation (ah, to be young again!) of her e-mail, I think I detected actual distress, a sort of disillusionment about this post of mine. I wanted to respond to her, but couldn't think of any way to do so without sounding mean or condescending ... so rather than just do so privately, I thought I'd enter my response here, and invite readers to help explain.

Her e-mail read:

Dear Professor Nokes,
I recently came across your blog titled, "In Favor of Banning Books" while researching for a paper in my Contemporary Mass Media class. Although as a professor of English you are more than entitled to your opinions, I find it unbelievable that you would support and blatantly promote the malicious and completely unreasonable act of banning and in your words, "burning" any piece of literature. I am surprised that a renowned professor of English, such as yourself, would fail to see the value in all pieces of literature. The blanket statements you make about "saving humanity" from "junior high poetry" clearly stand only as the naive opinions of a concretely close minded individual. Before "burning" any more literary works in the public square, perhaps you might want to take a second and analyze the deeper messages of some of the authors and works on your list of "aesthetically objectionable books". You may find that although some works may not be the most aesthetically pleasing, they may have some excruciatingly meaningful content that you have simply overlooked. Thanks for your time.
Sincerely,
Judy [the name I made up for her]

Before I get into the meat of my response, let me just say this -- "renowned professor of English?" I'm going to clip that part out and send it to my tenure & promotion committee. Just keep repeating that adjective next to my name: "renowned."

Seriously, though, I'm not sure whether or not Judy believes I am literally advocating book burning, since she puts scorn quotes around "burning." I'm going to assume that she is referring to the post itself as the "burning," but just in case there is any confusion out there, I am not really calling for public book burnings. Really. Nor am I calling for the literal banning of these books -- though I wouldn't mind if they fell out of print and were never read again. You can relax, Judy -- no real book banning or burning going on here. In fact, if you were to borrow a book from me and dog-ear the pages, I would probably burn you on the public square. The only thing I hate worse than dog-earring the pages is laying the book face down and open, cracking the spine (ooooh, how I hate that!). I don't highlight my books, I don't write in my books, and I don't use bookmarks that are so thick that they could hurt the spine.

You see, Judy, in this post I am using a literary form known as "hyperbole."** Hyperbole is exaggerating for effect. For example, when you say, "If I've told you once, I've told you a million times..." you are using hyperbole. You don't literally mean you've said it a million times; you are exaggerating to mean something like "I've told you so many times that it seems like a million, and you should really have understood it by now." When my mother came into my room as a child and told me "This is the worst pig sty I've ever seen," she wasn't really a professional pig sty critic who had mistaken my room for a barnyard. She was exaggerating for effect. Hyperbole!

You also write that you are suprised that I "would fail to see the value in all pieces of literature." Well, guilty as charged. Do you know what makes a work literature, Judy? At the end of the day, it is people like me who decide. A professor of English literature who sees value in all pieces of literature is failing at her job. Not everything that is bandied about under the heading of "literature" is great. Some of it is not even very good. Something that is considered of great value now might not even be in print in the next generation, and visa-versa. It is my job to make that decision.

See, when you suggest that I might want to "analyze the deeper messages of some of the authors and works on [my] list" -- well, I've already done that. Nothing appears on that list if I haven't read it. You'll notice that these are not popular works on my list -- they are all works of "literature," and when reading them I approached each and every one of them with respect. Unfortunately, in each case, I not only found them lacking, but I also found something so objectionable about them that I don't think they should be assigned to anyone to read.

You are young, and full of earnest vigor, Judy. Me, on the other hand, I am old enough to be aware of my own mortality, and to despair of all the things I'll never read -- this is the bitter sorrow of all English professors (and perhaps of all thinking people). You are immortal, but for me, time is a zero-sum game. Every hour spent reading one book is spent not reading another, and that time is gone forever. When I read a book of "literature" and it is lacking, that book has stolen time I could have used to read something better. Perhaps you think that I read looking for flaws and reasons to hate. Nothing could be further from the truth. I want to like the works that I read, because I want my time to be well-used, and when I can't find anything to like about it, I'm deeply disappointed.

Friends, that is my response to Judy. I give her so much space because I think I see between the lines a struggle to understand. If any others want to contribute to helping Judy understand how hyperbole and satire work, or want to explain just what it means for an English professor to read something of poor quality, please feel free to do so below. Please do not make fun of Judy, though, as I'm hoping she'll read this post, along with your comments, and come to an understanding of what that post is about.


*No, I'm not making any of those absurd examples up.
**Which is by the way, a 4 syllable word -- the last "e" is not silent, a fact I didn't realize until I went to university and, for the first time in my life heard the word pronounced that I had read my whole life.

Mercato delle Gaite

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article describing a festival in Bevagna, Italy, in which people recreate life in a late-medieval market, the Market of the Quarters (Mercato delle Gaite).

The article itself isn't that great, but you can always look at the slideshow.

Tolkien Open Thread

Houseguests, deadlines, Halloween costumes, unfathomable amounts of grading, and moving my wife's business have all led to me being unable to post much the last week. NEVERTHELESS, the Tolkien thread has been going strong in my absence.

So, I offer for your commenting pleasure a Tolkien open thread. You can say whatever you want here (within reason -- here's Da Rulz), just so long as it's about Tolkien. Don't say I never did nuttin' for da peoples.*

*Quoted from that famed philosopher, Strongbad.

England Defeated by French Invaders at Hastings ... again

A couple of weeks ago, Steve Muhlberger linked to a BBC article about a re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings. I didn't comment on it here, mostly out of disappointment that there was no video, but he has since found someone's photos of the event.

You'd think that the Anglo-Saxons would have figured out how to defeat the Normans by now, but reports are that the Normans plan a long occupation of the island.

Tolkien and Literary Tradition

I received an e-mail a week or so ago from Matt Fellows, in which he raised some issues about the relationship between Tolkien and fantasy fiction. From his comments, I realize that I left some things implied that needed to be explicitly said in "The Lord of the Rings and the Medieval Literary Tradition."

He wrote:

I have been a long time fan of your blog and was today reading through your essay entitled "The Lord of the Rings and the Medieval Literary Tradition". I found it very insightful, yet on a certain point would enjoy more detail. This being your statement that Tolkien created fantasy fiction or more specifically that in his fiction Tolkien found himself "breaking into a new cavern that we today know as fantasy fiction"(emphasis obviously mine).

Anyone with the least bit of knowledge of modern fantasy knows that much is but cloned Tolkien. That being said, I would rather say that Tolkien innovated fantasy fiction in a direction that is most characteristic of the genre today. To imply that he created the genre minimizes the genius of earlier writers such as James Branch Cabell, Lord Dunsany or E.R. Eddison, who were in my opinion all brilliant writers that simply did not break into the public scene. That Tolkien brought fantasy to its peak I will whole heartedly proclaim, yet if the writings of the aforementioned authors aren't examples of modern fantasy fiction, then what are they?

The fairly recent 'New Weird' movement in fantasy also illustrates the endurance of darker authors like Mervyn Peake and H.P. Lovecraft. I can understand not thinking the above authors important due to personal aesthetic preferences, yet that should not hinder their proper categorization in the fantasy fiction genre.

I responded:

I don't mean to minimize the work of other contemporary or early fantasy writers. As you point out, however, much of what passes as fantasy fiction is the army of Tolkien clones.For the creation of a genre, one must have many people following the work of a set of writers. While fantasy geeks like you and me might know of the contributions of these other writers, by-and-large they did not build durable followings of other authors. Their influence, then, far less than Tolkien's (and Robert E. Howard's).On the other end, of course, Tolkien is really discovering fantasy fiction for himself, not following another's work (this, of course, happens relatively often -- that a particular zeitgeist will lead thinkers independently to the same end). If Tolkien is following anyone's school of thought, it is the work of much older, medieval writers of romance (like Chretien de Troyes).

He responded:

You make a good point. If only a select few are reading your work then it really isn't reaching a large enough audience to leave a genre in its wake. In that sense we can never really look at what is 'big' in a genre to know what is the best. I mean, look at the horror genre! It's not Poe, Lovecraft or any of the masters that are big, it's third rate writers like Stephen King.

Tolkien certainly did follow his own unique path in fiction. While he mentions enjoying the works of Dunsany, and Eddison's classic Worm Ouroboros, he was always sure to mention they were not influences on him. Indeed, I am not sure where, but C.S. Lewis went as far as to say that in their Inklings meetings 'no one influenced Tolkien, he was as hard to influence as a Bandersnatch.'

I completely agree with you about Tolkien's continuation of earlier literary traditions. It was this aspect of his writings that has lead me to discover the great Medieval, and even Classical, writers.

I think Fellows was responding to a hole in my argument that I need to fill in a bit. What does it take to be an artist, and part of a tradition? I take my own position from T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (which can be read in its totality from the link). To crudely summarize Eliot, innovation of the individual talent only has value within a particular artistic tradition. Why does your love poetry from the 10th grade stink so badly? It's because you didn't read poetry, and so didn't have a good understanding of where poetry was coming from.

I understand Fellow's point about not discounting other contemporary and earlier fantasy writers. At the end of the day, though, the other writers he mentioned were admired, but not followed -- and THIS is what it takes to make a genre. The only possible exception in that group is Mervyn Peake, who, strangely enough, makes his dark vision best felt in the area of children's fantasy, in the works of Roald Dahl, Lemony Snicket, and the first Harry Potter book (no, I'm not claiming that Rowling had read Peake, but that she was following through Dahl).

On the other hand, we have people like Lovecraft ... who is much loved, much admired, but not much imitated.* Occasionally we'll see people trying to write in Lovecraft's world, using his pantheon, and this might be the beginnings of a "Lovecraft school," but it's too early to be sure. At the moment, I don't see too many fantasy writings exploring the "Unspeakable."

*Full disclosure: I'm among the fans of Lovecraft. I even taught him in a graduate seminar once, linking his "unspeakable" to Freud's "unheimlich," and the two ideas worked quite nicely together.

Medievalism Open Thread

I've gotten a couple of complaints because I haven't posted a medievalism open thread for a while. Well, consider it posted here.

Public Speaking Engagements

As regular readers of this space know, I'm available for public speaking engagements, such as civic groups, reading or book clubs, church groups, science fiction/fantasy conventions, high school English classes, etc. These tend to be on medievalist themes (like King Arthur, Tolkien, medieval magic, etc), and are aimed at popular audiences. They also tend to be very well received, so you won't be accused of arranging something boring (unless you want me as a guest speaker at a high school, where all adults are considered boring).

Looking at my schedule for this last quarter of 2006, I see that my calendar is filling up. If any Wordhoarders out there would like me to come to your convention, meeting, or whatever, I would strongly recommend you e-mail me sooner rather than later. Between engagements in Asia, end-of-year family commitments, completing research projects, and so forth, not too many days are left unaccounted for.

E-mail me soon if you want me to speak. If you have a specific subject you want me to speak on (something for which I don't already have a prepared talk with audio-visuals), you have to give me even more warning time to prepare new materials.

Beowulf Brew

I find this little video quite charming. It starts off as an enactment of the first two fights Beowulf has, and ends up a faux commercial. Perhaps what I find most charming of it is "Grendel's Mother," who seems very confused in the battle scene.

I wonder if the video is more influenced by John Gardner's Grendel than the poem. The prop that is Grendel is, at one point, in a tree, reminding me of Grendel being stuck in the crook of a tree in Gardner's book.

Back from SEMA

As I mentioned in this post, I went to the Southeastern Medieval Association (SEMA) conference to chair two sessions. If I had been paying close attention, I'd have realized that I was scheduled to chair THREE. In addition to the two I mentioned earlier, I also chaired:

Alliterative Traditions: Beginnings and Endings

• Susan E. Deskis, Northern Illinois University, “The Origins of Some Middle English Alliterative Proverbs”
• Ordelle Hill, Eastern Kentucky University, “The Alliterative Revival: A New Beginning, an Ending, or a Lateral Move?”
• John T. Sebastian, Loyola University New Orleans, “Apocalyptic Beginnings and Indeterminate Verdicts: Judgment in Wynnere and Wastoure”

I was pleased that all three of my sessions had very good papers; not a stinker in the lot.

I also got to meet William Smith of Weatherford College, who's a regular reader of this space, and even though I didn't get a chance to talk to him about the Wordhoard, I did get to hear his really interesting paper on the Benedictine Reform and private prayer.

My only disappointments were that I didn't really have a chance to chat beyond banalities with Jim Hall or Roy Liuzza (two really nice guys), I didn't get enough time to catch up with my old friend Leslie Lockett, and I didn't even realize that Eileen Joy of In the Middle was going to be there for the BABEL Working Group until after I got back from the conference. I'd like to have met Eileen.

The nice thing about being a medievalist, though, is that even when you miss someone at a conference, there's always the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo!

SEMA 2006

I'll be heading off to the Southeastern Medieval Association conference bright and early in the morning. I'll be chairing two sessions there:

Designing Images
Thursday, 2:45-4:15

• Helen T. Bennett, Eastern Kentucky University, “The Postmodern Hall in Beowulf: Endings Embedded in Beginnings”
• Lindsey N. Phillips, Florida State University, “Reconstructing Woman’s Place: Feminized Architectural Allegories in Christine de Pizan and Hildegard of Bingen”
• Elizabeth Sklar, Wayne State University, “ ‘Stuffed with Ymagarye’: Emaré’s Robe and the Construction of Desire”

and

Tenth-Century Anglo-Saxon History
Friday, 10:45-12:15

• Patrick W. Conner, West Virginia University, “Documenting Vernacular Performance in the Anglo-Saxon Parish Guild Banquets”
• William H. Smith, Weatherford College, “The Benedictine Reform and the Beginnings of English Prayer”
• Nicole Marafioti, Cornell University, “Memory and Its Obliteration in the Murder of King Edward the Martyr”

I've already gotten copies of most of the abstracts and a couple of the papers; these sessions ought to be pretty good.

Wordhoard Abierto

Ever wonder what Unlocked Wordhoard would look like in Spanish? No? Never?

Well, someone did, and here's the result.

North Korean Nuclear Test

I've been diligently restricting Wordhoard content to medievalism these days, but given how many people asked me about the North Korean nuclear test before it happened, I expect to be deluged with questions now.

Fortunately, if you want to know what the South Koreans think about all this, you don't need me as your intermediary; most (all?) major newspapers in Korea publish an English version, with varying quality of translation.

Here, then is a list of links I put together for a Korean-themed composition class we did as part of a US State Department program a few years ago. The page suffers a bit from link rot, but I think all the links to English-language versions of major dailies still work. For those of you who, like me, are great lovers of Stalinist rhetoric, I strongly recommend reading the (North) Korean Central News Agency for a feeling of nostalgia for Soviet propoganda with its over-the-top tropes and references to such songs as (I'm not kidding) "The Leader Has Come," and "He Has Come to Ryongnam Hill Again," as well as such groups as "Youth Group for the Study of the Juche Idea," "Protectors of Arts for the Century," and "Down-with-Imperialism Union." No word yet from the "Up-with Imperialism Union."

We now return to our regularly scheduled medievalist programming.

Sand Castles

I'm a liar. In class, I play the Devil's advocate so often that it moves into absurdity. A frequent trope of mine is to introduce a text by asking, "What was this about? I haven't actually read it, myself," in order to force the students to describe a work as if to someone who hasn't read it. Of course, they all know that I've read it (either that or I'm the best guesser of details in the world), but it's a fun sort of fiction to maintain. I'll often pretend that anecdotes I tell are simply random digressions, and then act surprised when, 40 minutes later in the class, some student manages to see how my apparently-unconnected story actually illustrates something important about the text we are reading. It takes a lot of work to make a lecture seem off-the-cuff (well, I suppose it takes very little work at all if it is all actually off-the-cuff, but then it isn't likely to go anywhere, is it?), but it's simply my own take on the Aristotle's dialectical pedagogy. In his case, Aristotle pretended to be an idiot who needed things explained to him. In my case, I pretend to lecture when I'm actually casting lines out for the students to use to make connections. Sneaky, huh?

Rarely, then, am I surprised by anything that comes up in class (though I frequently act surprised). My students' sudden insights are discoveries I have buried for them to find in most cases. Last week, though, I really was surprised by something a student brought up -- sand castles as medievalism.

I confess, I had never before thought about sand castles as a manifestation of medievalism -- though now that I think of it, it's painfully obvious. When you've got a beach full of sand and you decide to make a structure, why make a sand castle? Why not a sand fortress? A sand beachhouse? A sand skyscraper? Castles are not otherwise particularly associated with sand or beaches, I think.

In the class discussion that followed, we came up with two theories about this, neither of which are satisfying the more that I think about it. One theory is that certain kinds of buckets form a shape that is generally like a square structure with for "turrets," one on each side. While this is true, it doesn't seem to me that this necessarily suggests a castle, nor is it necessarily the most common form of beach bucket (I think the rounded kind is more common). The other theory was the theory of the moat. Beaches offer the opportunity to have a real moat with real water, and this suggests a castle (since their aren't many apartment buildings with moats). I favored this idea in class, but when I went online and began to look at images of sand castles, I began to reject this idea, as castles with moats seem to be in the minority.

What is it, then, about sand castles that makes them sand castles? Any suggestions from the Wordhoarders out there?

Blogger Misbehaves

I've just had to delete two posts here, because, for some reason, Blogger republished this Claymation Grendel post twice in quick succession. I'm not sure why Blogger is suddenly republishing random old posts. My apologies to Wordhoard subscribers, who must have felt as mystified as me to find old posts popping up in the e-mail.

Bad Blogger! Bad!

Kinslaying, Tolkien, and the Bible

Apparently, my mention of "kinslaying" in my Beowulf & Grendel review has sparked a thread over at The One Ring. I'm glad that N.E. Brigand still reads the Wordhoard, as he's the only One Ringer I've ever met (so far as I know), and a really charming guy.

World of Warcraft Pardoner's Tale

One of my former students sent me this link to the World of Warcraft "Pardoner's Tale." It is a pretty faithful re-enactment of Chaucer's original, "acted" out with World of Warcraft characters. According to the notes, it was a school project, and they received 120% grade on it. Well deserved, I think.

I'm curious, though, as to what the author thinks of this film version. I hope at some point Geoffrey Chaucer reviews it on his blog.

"Beowulf and Grendel" Review

Now that Beowulf and Grendel is available on DVD, here's my long-promised review/critique. Please note that there will be plenty of spoilers herein, so if you don't want spoilers, stop reading. There's also a bit of foul language quoted from the film later, too. I'm going to critique the film on two fronts: quality as a film itself, and as an interpretation of the poem Beowulf.

First, as a film -- Beowulf and Grendel is high enough quality that it would have been worth the money to see it in the theaters, but that's about it. The costuming and photography are good, with lots of wind-swept vistas of rock and snow, and the costumes have enough verisimilitude that they appeared authentic enough to me at first glance.

It has a few problems, though. I found the accents rather annoying. Along with the vaguely Scandinavian accents are mingled a few Irish accents, and one notable American accent. With the exception of the Irish missionary (who had the appropriate accent), let's just pick and accent and stick with it, OK? If the Geats and Danes had used different accents, that would have been fine, but there was no consistancy.

The pacing of the film was off, too. I was rather put off by the long stretches of angst. The action scenes are oddly short and understated. Grendel's first attack on Heorot Hall is not even shown; we just get to see the carnage. The final battle with Beowulf is very, very short. In fact, there is a scene of Grendel urinating (not, by the way, the only urination scene in the film, which has as much urine as blood) that I suspect is longer than the battle in which Grendel is mortally wounded.

Instead, we get long periods in which Beowulf broods on how terrible it is to be famous, and on the justice of killing Grendel. Even then ... and this point seems lost on everyone in the film ... Beowulf does not actually kill Grendel. The reactions of the various people to Grendel's death seem at odds with what happened in the film. It was like the characters in the film had read the poem, rather than experienced the movie. Grendel's death is an act of self-mutilation/suicide. As far as I can remember, Beowulf never actually draws blood on Grendel, which leads me to wonder why he felt so guilty about killing a troll he never actually killed. Selma (a character invented for the film) too talks about how Beowulf "killed" Grendel. I think the writers got lost, and forgot what was theirs and what was the poet's.

All this seems rather negative, but overall it was a good film. The characters of the Geats are developed enough that I was able to distinguish one from another, and when one of them died, I was able to identify who had died and why. Too often in these kinds of films "Geatish Warrior #1" and "Geatish Warrior #6" are indistinguishable.

Even better, it was a poetically beautiful film. It opens with "Hwaet!" and a few lines of Anglo-Saxon style verse that is not actually out of the poem. The character Thorkel acts as scop, developing the tale of Beowulf as it unfolds, and the quality of their fake Anglo-Saxon verse is really quite high. If I had the money, I'd get the actor who played Thorkel to come to my classes and read aloud real Old English poetry. It was delightfully evocative.

The love interest (one dare not call it "romantic interest") for Beowulf that was developed for the film is rather good, I think. Because of the complexity of the relationship Beowulf develops with the witch/whore Selma, I began to find her an interesting character. Coming into the film, my expectation was that the "Selma" figure would be a Meg Ryan-style bland, cardboard cutout love interest. I am glad to be wrong.

The film's hostility toward Christianity is distracting (and confuses the themes ... more of this in the next section). Very quickly I began not to care about the subplot of the missionary coming, and wished that Grendel would just kill all the Christians so the filmmakers could stop posturing and get on with the movie. Yes, we get it -- you think Christianity is just a bunch of lies spouted by madmen, that people accept out of desperation and fear. If you want that to be your theme, why not try doing a film of Tartuffe, or something that actually fits that premise?

The film as an interpretation of Beowulf -- as far as faithfulness to the poem goes, this is far and away the best, but then again, the competition isn't very stiff. The basics are the same -- Geatish warrior Beowulf goes to help the Danish king Hrothgar fight off a troll, Grendel, who has been attacking Heorot Hall. After the death of Grendel, Grendel's mother arrives to avenge him, so Beowulf goes into her underwater cave to confront her and kill her. The story does not go on to the dragon episode.

Any professors out there who are worried that their freshmen might watch the movie instead of reading the poem have no need to worry, though. There are enough changes that someone trying to fake having read the poem will out themselves. The time frame is stretched out quite a bit, and the character of Selma (the aforementioned witch/whore) is one of the main characters, even though she has no analogue in the poem.

Grendel is, very explicitly, a troll. He wasn't a Tolkien-style cave troll, nor a rubbery D&D style troll. Instead, he was much more like trolls seem in the old Scandinavian epics -- large, burly, hairy, and man-like. On the one hand, I think this vision gets closer to the image of Grendel that the original audience would have had.

This Grendel, though, is what I refer to as the Postmodern Grendel -- deeply misunderstood. Way back when John Gardener was re-imagining Grendel as simply misunderstood and flawed, this reading was audacious. Now, it is simply boring and pedestrian. I find that my students are incapable of understanding Grendel as evil, or as an enemy of God.* This film advances that postmodern image. Our first scenes of Grendel are of a very cute child (with a beard) playing with his father, who is pointlessly cut down by Hrothgar and his men. Again and again, Grendel's refusal to enter into a dishonorable fight is drilled into the viewers' minds.

Beowulf too, is envisioned as a foil to the poem-Beowulf. He's not a boaster. Instead, he is full of humility, and grows weary of the over-praise of him. If I can use a comparison from Shakespeare, the poem-Beowulf is an Othello -- a man who never talks when he can act. The film-Beowulf is a Hamlet -- a man who never acts when he can talk. By the end of the film, peace is possible not because Beowulf has defeated evil, but because he has made peace with that which was considered evil. While I think this worked thematically for the film, it is obviously a reversal of the ideas of the poem. Evil in the poem is to be vanquished; evil in the film is to be understood.

Two themes, though, didn't work so well. One was the theme of Beowulf's fame leading to an exaggeration of his abilities, presumably leading to the epic we have today. Frankly, I'm getting sick of these materialistic, hyper-secularlized reimaginings (consider Troy, for example). What's wrong with having the gods? Even if I weren't grumpy about it, it still doesn't work for the film, and again it is a problem with consistency. OK, so Beowulf was just a normal man whose hero-myth got blown out of proportion ... then why have trolls be real? Why have sea hags be real? According to the film, Beowulf really did swim for two days in the open sea wearing armor. If he could do that, why then is he not really powerful enough to tear off Grendel's arm? Instead of magical realism, we get a film that can't decide if it wants magic or realism.

The other theme is the anti-Christian theme. An anti-Christian Beowulf could work, I think, if one replaced the Christian God with the Northern Germanic pantheon, or if you did a Thirteenth Warrior/Eaters of the Dead completely materialist Beowulf. In this case, though, it doesn't work at all. In the last scene, Thorkel is making the connections between Grendel and Cain -- connections that are essential to the poem because they allow the Christian poet to navigate through the shoals of having a pagan hero, and because they reinforce the theme of kinslaying. In the film, a character explicitly rejects the Beowulf poet's reading, referring to it as "shit." Well, OK, but THAT'S the way the poem works, not something later scholars added. By trying so hard with the anti-Christian theme, the film ends up rejecting Beowulf itself. This is, in my mind, a terrible, horrible choice, akin to making a re-telling the Odyssey in which marriage is shit, or Paradise Lost in which faithfulness is shit, or Gilgamesh in which friendship is shit. You can add and subtract characters, alter personalities, and change vital plot points, but you cannot reject the basic themes of a work when you are adapting it to film. For this reason, I think the film is ultimately an artistic failure.

Artistic failure though it may be, it is still an entertaining film, and also still the best film version of Beowulf I've seen to date. I recommend it for the entertainment value, and I especially recommend it to those who teach the poem, so that they can recognize where their postmodern students' prejudices lie.

*For more on this, see my article “Teaching Grendel as a Villain in a Post-Modern Age.” Alabama English 14 (2004): 6-17.

I'm One Hot Chili Pepper

The Chronicle of Higher Education today has an article entitled "The Art of the Bogus Rating," in which I have been accused of writing my own Rate My Professors rating.* The horror! The only evidence the Chronicle has to that end is this post and a suspicious-looking rating of me that reads,

He isn't just the best prof at TSU -- he's the best prof that ever lived! We worship Prof. Nokes as unto a god! Legend has it that touching a paper he has graded instantly raises your IQ 10 points! If you touch his bald head, you'll make the Dean's List!

Very, very weak evidence indeed.

Seriously, though, I find the idea that RateMyProfessors is the second sign of the apocalypse** kind of silly. It might bill itself as accurate, but then again, ESPN bills dog shows as a sport. By having a chili pepper "hotness" rating, RMP outs itself as a novelty site.

Is that novelty bad? I don't think so. Students need, I think, a space to blow off steam. In most cases, students aren't really foolish enough to think that professors are their enemies, but in the crush of a difficult semester, when your boyfriend has just dumped you, you have eaten nothing but ramen noodles for a week, and your roommate's drama queen antics are preventing you from getting any real studying done, when that professor springs a pop quiz on you it can feel like he's springing it on you, specifically. The easiest way to deal with that stress is by deflating the image of that professor in your own head. If not for Rate My Professors, students would simply do this in the old fashioned way -- by impersonating you for their friends.

Nor is it like Rate My Professors is the only venue out there. MySpace, for example, has a "Grade My Professor" section that looks awfully similar to Rate My Professors. Given how much Facebook is trying to emulate MySpace, I would expect it won't be long until Facebook has a rating sysem. Indeed, if these spaces didn't exist, someone would have to invent them. One college I taught at in Lithuania had a tradition that the students would put on a skit night near the end of the spring semester -- primarily composed of skits skewering the profs.

One concern raised in the article is that administrators may take these ratings seriously. I agree that could be a problem -- but that is a problem of incompetent administration, not with online ratings sites. In the example given in the article of someone allegedly fired for bad Rate My Professors reviews, the school denied RMP is a factor, and called inclusion of them in the personnel file "a mistake." Even if it were intentional, their denial is tacit admission that RMP is not an appropriate measure of an instructor's merits.

So, gentle readers, I again invite you to rate my on Rate My Professors, or on MySpace, or in any other non-official venue. Facebook has no rating system, but I do invite people to join the Nokes Bow Tie Brigade Facebook group which encourages "cult-like mindless adherence to the teachings of Dr. Nokes," as well as the wearing of bow ties.

*Full disclosure: Dr. Matt Julius, prominently mentioned in the article, has been a friend of mine since we went to undergrad together.
**The first, of course, being blogging.

Claymation Grendel

I ran into this claymation version of the fight between Beowulf and Grendel. Though I find the music itself obnoxious, I rather like the way that the creators have combined music and a minimalist approach to good effect here ... though why does Beowulf sprout wing?

Medievalism/Arthuriana Open Thread

I've found people trying to push the Arthurian envelope into general medievalism in my conversations of late, so I thought I would try to open the thread up into general medievalism. Yes, Dan, this means you can write about samurais as Eastern medievals.

Arbitrating My Hero-Myth on Netflix

I have been working my Netflix queue and the US Postal Service to try to get Beowulf and Grendel as soon as possible after its official release tomorrow. My efforts have paid off -- it now reads as "processing" on the queue. The plot summary on Internet Movie Database reads:

Adapted from the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf, BEOWULF & GRENDEL is a
medieval adventure that tells the blood-soaked tale of a Norse warrior's battle
against the great and murderous troll, Grendel. Heads will roll in this provocative take on the first major work of English literature. Out of allegiance to the King Hrothgar, the much respected Lord of the Danes, Beowulf leads a troop of warriors across the sea to rid a village of the marauding monster. The monster, Grendel, is not a creature of mythic powers, but one of flesh and blood - immense flesh and raging blood, driven by a vengeance from being wronged, while Beowulf, a victorious soldier in his own right, has become increasingly troubled by the hero-myth rising up around his exploits. Beowulf's willingness to kill on behalf of Hrothgar wavers when it becomes clear that the King is more responsible for the troll's rampages than was first apparent. As a soldier, Beowulf is unaccustomed to hesitating. His relationship with the mesmerizing witch, Selma, creates deeper confusion. Swinging his sword at a great, stinking beast is no longer such a simple act. The story is set in barbarous Northern Europe where the reign of the many-gods is giving way to one - the southern invader, Christ. Beowulf is a man caught between sides in this great shift, his simple code transforming and falling apart before his eyes. Building toward an inevitable and terrible battle, this is a tale where vengeance, loyalty and mercy powerfully entwine. A story of blood and beer and sweat, BEOWULF & GRENDEL strips away the mask of the hero-myth, leaving a raw and tangled tale that rings true through the centuries.

While the plot summary on Netflix reads:

In an adventure imbrued with blood and tragedy, the legendary Norseman Beowulf
(Gerard Butler) must command an army across the seas of ancient Northern Europe to conquer the evil troll Grendel. Anticipating his epic crusade against the wrathful monster, the warrior must arbitrate his emanating notoriety and his relationship with the enchanting Selma amid a time of barbaric turmoil and transformation with the emergence of the Christian faith.

He must "arbitrate his emanating notoriety?" Yeesh, put down the thesaurus for a moment. That use of "arbitrate" strikes me as awfully MLA-esque. I suppose I should be happy that Beowulf has finally got himself a girlfriend, but Selma? I'd have thought he could do better.

Manuel II Paleologus? Never Heard of Him.

One side effect of the flap over the Pope's comments is that people are suddenly expressing an interest in the late-medieval Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus. Several people have asked me about him, and asked me why I haven't blogged about him.

I haven't blogged about him because I don't know anything about him. Most of what I study is far, far away in both time and space from Manny II. Read this link, and you'll already know more than I do.

I implore the Pope, please start quoting Alfred the Great or Wulfstan in controversial contexts. I'd like to be considered relevant.

Shame on Medievalists

A few weeks ago, I discovered, through some e-mails and blog posts, that Crosswalk.com had on their website a piece on Beowulf called "Beowulf: Fact or Fiction?" The article seeks to argue that Beowulf is an historically accurate account, and furthermore that Grendel is a dinosaur who somehow survived into the early medieval days -- an apparent attempt to bolster creationism through the poem (I'm still not clear on how it does that, but no matter). The best that can be said about the piece is that it tries really hard, and that the author may have been misled by a book called After the Flood, which I've not read.

As a medievalist and a Christian, I found the article embarrassing. It was being cited in some rather bigoted e-mails and posts as just the kind of stupid thing those idiotic Christians think. I sent a very polite e-mail to Crosswalk, identifying myself as a medieval scholar and a Christian, and pleading with them to remove the article. I explained in as much detail as their "Contact Us" pop-up box would allow why the article was wrong.

I have not received a response, nor has the article come down. After a week went by without Crosswalk removing the article or contacting me, I began warning Christians and homeschoolers that Crosswalk was not a reliable resource. I discussed it with my Sunday School class*, talked with some people I know who homeschool about where they got their materials (I found none who used Crosswalk, incidentally), etc.

I felt I had done my part -- I had warned Crosswalk, and when they showed no interest in heeding my warnings about the flawed article, I warned Christians. I guess I did not do enough, though.

Even now, links and discussions of it are flying across the internet ether. Everytime I check my e-mail I find there are several more comments on the AnSaxNet e-mail list. Some of the comments are of the benign eye-rolling variety, while others are exercises in bigotry carried on in high dudgeon. The few temperate voices are shouted down (which is why I'll not bother posting this to AnSaxNet).

The real shame on medievalists, though is not that we have hateful ideologues among us -- heck, I'm hard-pressed to think of a group that doesn't -- the real shame is that, so far as I can tell, no one else has bothered to correct the article in a public forum. If anyone has e-mailed Crosswalk as I did, they haven't mentioned it. Since my e-mail, Crosswalk has opened up a forum to discuss it. At the moment, only one person who may be a medievalist (and I'm not sure if it is a professional medievalist or just a well-informed person), "Timo888," has bothered to post any kind of correction.

So rather than trying to correct misconceptions, we medievalists would rather sit back in our enclosed professional forums and mock the ignorant. Shame on all of us, and if you are a medievalist without the moral or scholarly clarity to understand why you should be ashamed, I am embarrassed for you.

*Yes, I teach adult Sunday School ... at an evangelical church, no less (a non-denominational Christian church, a.k.a. a "Stone-Campbell" church here in the South). No doubt many of those who have been describing Christians as evil ignoramuses will be horrified that I am gainfully employed even while carrying on these nefarious weekend activities. Those who live in the Montgomery area, horrified or not, are welcome to join our class Sundays at 9:30, at the Cornerstone Christian Church, where you can be corrupted by Christian thought and occasional Krispy Kream doughnuts.

About Medieval History

As regular readers of this space know, while I'm a friend of medieval history, I'm not a friend of excessive intrusion of history into literature, especially of the You-Can't-Understand-Chaucer-Unless-You-Understand-the-Peasants'-Revolt variety. Nevertheless, I'm pleased that the Wordhoard has been included in the short list of blogs at the About.com Medieval History page.

It's not really a history page, but rather a gateway into general medieval studies links. If you follow the links through "Arts, Literature, and Music" to "Literature and Poetry," you get a set of links that is not exhaustive by any means, but can link you to some of the better sites, like the Camelot Project, Peter Baker's Beowulf sound files, etc. Interestingly, there are more links listed to Arthurian sites (52) than all the other literary sites combined (37), and there are only two links to general Old English literature, both of which appear to be dead links. Nevertheless, if you were a high school student looking to do some research for a paper, there could be worse places to start. The trick would be in culling out the bad sources from the good -- still, better than a Google search would be.

By the way, I rather like their "This Date in Medieval History" link. Poor Hildegard of Bingen died on this day in 1179 ... and we still mourn her.

Open Arthuriana Thread 1, Facebook 3

Once again, here I post an open Arthuriana thread. Why the above title, then?

Because I previously posted an Arthuriana open thread, and all of my students who commented did so on the "Notes" feed section of my Facebook page. In other words, they posted only where Troy students could see it.

I originally tried the open thread to experiment in the ways in which the Wordhoard could be used in conjunction with classroom pedagogy. In a sense, the experiment was a success, in that it looks like students are more likely to use Facebook than an open blog page. When I asked them to post to the blog page itself, they stopped commenting on Facebook as well.

Elisabeth Carnell is putting together a blogging session on K'zoo dealing specifically with the issue of blogs and pedagogy. Looks like I'll have something interesting to say after all...

Anyway, anything interesting and Arthurian out there in popular culture, note below.

Prof. Awesome, Ph.D., comes to SMCA

As my alter-ego of Professor Awesome, Ph.D., I did a little community service today by delivering a lecture on Beowulf at the South Montgomery County Academy in Grady, Alabama. Note the rapt attention of the students, hanging on my every word. Though it appears that they are struggling to retain consciousness, do not be fooled; they are in fact deep in thought, contemplating the profundity of my insights into the poem.

Impending Death of Medieval Forum

Medieval Forum, the online medieval literary journal, has announced that its sixth issue will be its last, as the editor, George W. Tuma, is retiring.

Six issues doesn't seem like much, and the journal has only been around since 2002. Normally, the demise of an occasionally-published, non-peer reviewed journal that lasted for only a few years wouldn't be newsworthy, but MF was a trail-blazer in the internet wilderness. Scholars (and tenure & promotion committees) continue to be suspicious of online journals, so the creation of, editing of and submission to an online journal can be an act of scholarly courage, particularly when the work being edited/submitted is might find publication in a traditional bound paper venue.

Beowulf as Christ

Over at Gypsy Scholar, Jeffery Hodges has a post about reading Beowulf as a Christ figure. The Beowulf-as-Christ reading is an oldie but a goodie. I spend a little time each semester talking about it, though even Catholics here in the South don't seem to have ever heard of the Harrowing of Hell, whereas in the North I could assume every Catholic and a few Protestants would know what it is, and get the connection with the descent into Grendel's mere.

Arthuriana Open Thread

As part of an experiment in my Arthurian Legends course, I'll occasionally be posting Arthuriana open threads here. Though this is intended to be a forum for students in that class to post about modern Arthuriana they've run into, everyone is welcome to contribute.

Yes, Alan Kellogg, this means you are welcome too.

DARC Iron, not Dark Ages

Steve Muhlberger has an interesting post about the Dark Ages Re-creation Company (DARC), which got together to smelt iron with early medieval techniques. I find the whole "Dark Ages" thing a little tiresome (re-creators, more than anyone else, should understand that the "Dark Ages" weren't so dark), but I guess VARC (*Viking Age Re-creation Company) would sound a little too much like a swear word from a cheesy B science fiction flick.

Grousing about the name aside, the re-creation appears to have been more experiment than roleplay. I'm generally not too interested in the history side of medieval studies, but this looks pretty cool. Plus, in the image Muhlberger posts, the guys look like Tolkienian dwarves in plaid!

Hail to the King, Baby

In my Arthurian Legends class the other day, we were discussing some of the various man-out-of-time versions of Arthuriana, mostly of the Connecticut Yankee strain, but also containing a little bit of "some vaguely Arthurian person comes to the present" tradition. In this discussion, I brought up the film Army of Darkness. Interestingly, most of the student had seen it (though they could not have been more than around seven years old when this R-rated film was released) -- but none of them seemed to realize that it is a demonic parody of Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

First of all, I should note that sometimes when we say "demonic parody," we mean it in the figurative sense of following Milton's themes. The genre of a work does not have to be parody, nor does it have to contain characters that are literal demons. In this paper, for example, someone makes the case that Max Max: Beyond Thunderdome is a demonic parody of the present -- even though the film doesn't actually have any demons, and is not what we would normally call "parody." In the case of Paradise Lost, of course, the demons actually set up a reign in Hell that parodies Heaven ... the ur-demonic parody.

Army of Darkness, of course, is both a literal and figurative demonic parody, and then has its own embedded demonic parody as well. Ash is the Yankee, wielding Excalibur (primarily represented by his chainsaw hand, but also sometimes represented by his "boomstick"). Unlike Twain's Yankee, he does not seek to make the lives of those in Arthur's court better. Instead, as the anti-hero, he uses his superior weaponry (and undeserved sense of intellectual superiority) to make his own life easier at the expense of others. Twain's Sandy, Hank the Yankee's beloved, is replaced by Sheila, who quickly learns a bitter lesson about Ash's late-20th-century sense of commitment, when in response to her protestation, "but what about all those wonderful things you told me?" he replies, "That's just pillow talk, baby."

Here it might just be one of the better films in the tradition of Connecticut Yankee parodies, including such notable works of high art as Black Knight, A Spaceman in King Arthur's Court (originally released as Unidentified Flying Oddball, and A Kid in King Arthur's Court. Sam Raimi, though, takes it a step further, folding the parody in on itself. A demon-clone-sorta-thing of Ash abducts Sheila and transforms her into a zombie Deadite (where they actually appear to have a more committed relationship than the non-zombie Ash can manage), set up an alternative Deadite court/army, and attack the living, finally forcing the living to band together against them. The demon-Ash parodies both Ash himself (looking like an undead version of Ash), as well as King Arthur (here divided into "Lord Arthur" and "Duke Henry").

So, why haven't I published a paper on Army of Darkness as medievalism? Probably because the above is about all I have to say on that subject, but also because it is hard to write about something you love. I live my life according to the teachings of a few wise thinkers, and Ash occupies a position in the higher pantheon.

By the way, Bruce Campbell has a new book out, entitled How to Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way. This book will no doubt occupy a position of great honor on my bookshelves.

My Hip Facebook Page

Given the tone of called "Why I Registered on Facebook," I am apparently hip and cool and cutting-edge for having a Facebook page -- which is a great way to make announcements.

My own Facebook page is here.* I never felt the anxiety about numbers of "friends" on Facebook, since my "friends" aren't really friends at all -- they are all students and relatives and colleagues. By the way -- I have 83 friends, but Steven Taylor has only 27 friends. This is because he is a social outcast, no doubt a result of his penchant for wearing white after Labor Day.

The dumbest thing about Facebook? At the top of your own page, just over your picture, the heading reads "Your Name's Profile (This is you)." I like the "This is you" aside -- Facebook must have many users with identity crises.

*I'm not sure how or if that link will work for Facebook users. If it goes nowhere, my apologies.