Team Bisclavret

In honor of Halloween, I present to you the story of Bisclavret, a werewolf tale by Marie de France from the 12th Century. While others are on Team Edward or Team Jacob, as a medievalist I'm on Team Bisclavret.

A Very Viking Halloween

Feel like terrorizing northern Europe this Halloween? Feel like settling strange new lands to the west? I know I do!

The copy on this website selling Viking Halloween costumes sounds like it was plucked from a middle school paper on the Vikings, and liberally sprinkled with the word "fierce."

For example:

They used Longboats which allowed them to cross open seas or sail up shallow rivers to expand their conquests. Known to be highly skilled sailors the Vikings used Longboats which had both sails and oars.

Uh huh. OK, aside from the redundancy and the terrible rhetoric, how is this supposed to make me want to buy a viking costume? It isn't like any of them come with sails and oars.

Maybe I'm supposed to think, "Hmmmm, I want to go as a seafaring barbarian for Halloween this year, but I cannot choose between one who prefers oars or one who prefers sails. Wait! Look at that! The vikings used both? You had me at 'longboats!'"

So, just remember, if you're not certain who to be for Halloween, "Dress up and be Cnut the Great who was possibly the greatest Viking King who has been nicknamed the Emperor of the North."

Talk Like an Early-Modern Sea-Going Outlaw Day

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.* It got me thinking about why there's no "International Talk Like a Knight Day" or some similar equivalent.

Our sense of what it means to "Talk Like a Pirate" comes from Robert Newton's performance of Long John Silver in Disney's 1950 version of Treasure Island. You can get a sense of it from these clips:



So, in the popular imagination, what do people in the Middle Ages talk like? Having attended enough SCA events and Ren Faires, I'm thinking it's supposed to be some approximation of Early Modern courtly speech, but is there some common origin like "pirate" talk that can be traced back to some Errol Flynn movie or something? Has anyone out there done any research on this?


*Or, "Arrr, it be International Talk Like a Pirate Day."

“Ovide moralisé” Translation Grant

At first I thought $210k was an absurd amount for a translation of an obscure* medieval text, but then when I realized it was 72,000 lines of poetry (!) I thought, daaaaang! That's about 25 times longer than the longest thing I've ever translated (Beowulf), and no doubt will be challenging as heck -- at least I had the benefit of a century of other people translating those pesky hapax legomena in Beowulf to help me out.

So, congratulations to Dr. Sarah-Jane Murray! I'm looking forward to reading that paperback when it comes out.


*To be fair, it may be obscure because it hasn't been translated.

New Edition of Beowulf

Here's the new edition of Beowulf I'd like to see.

http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_105_23-situations-about-to-go-horribly-awry_p23/#18

Snorri the Muppet

You'll have to get to the end of this Cracked article for the medieval pay-off, but my favorite line:

Pretty much everything we know about Scandinavian paganism comes from the Eddas, two books compiled in the 13th century by a guy with the hilarious, Muppet-like name of Snorri Sturluson.

Farai Chansoneta Nueva

A translation and original verse can be found here. The opening:

I shall write a new little song
before it turns windy, cold and rainy:
let my mistress assay and test me
so she'll learn in which fashion I love her;
and certainly, come hell and high water,
she won't free me from her snares.

Cracked on Medieval Sieges

The 6 Craziest Sieges in History over at cracked starts out with a take on a medieval siege that sounds like the way people talk at Biblo's Saturday night at the Congress after the third pitcher of beer has been emptied. My favorite line:

So after two months of watching the tower get taller and the people inside it get fatter, the Vikings came up with a very Viking plan: fill the river with dead bodies so they could attack from every side.

K'zoo Friday

We were really, really busy at the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo today. We had a lot of people who were just curious, a lot who wanted us to save their journals (which we will), and a lot who had monographs to pitch.

So, let me take this time to honor an early adopter of Witan Publishing, Larry Swain. Larry's book should be out in June (pending editing stuff), so he's on the cutting edge of academic publishing. He's got a really fine edition of Aelfric's Letter to Sigeweard we can't wait to make available.

Larry with the sign promoting his book. More promotions to come online!

Patricia Bracewell, "Royal Hostage"

We're doing brisk traffic here at the Witan Publishing book at Kalamazoo, and one of the nice things about being set in a central location is that I'm getting to meet everyone I know.

In addition to seeing old friends, I'm meeting new. I just met historical fiction author Patricia Bracewell, who is currently working on a book entitled Royal Hostage about Emma of Normandy.

Patricia Bracewell and me ... and some poor woman accidentally photobombing us.

Grrrr ... Amazon!

Amazon.com now has a new policy that you can't post books for free -- which really stinks because we intended to offer our sample book for free starting this week.

So, in the meantime, you can still buy "Old English and Samwise Gamgee's Genealogy" on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but it'll cost you a dollar. We're now going to try a work-around to allow the slightly more tech-savvy to download it for free on our website, but that's not quite available yet.

If you don't want to pay and don't want to wait, just come by our booth -- we'd be delighted to show it to you for free, without Amazon or B&N getting their cut.

Setting Up at K'zoo

Today I arrived at the Congress in Kalamazoo to set up the Witan Publishing booth. Now that I'm seeing in from the other side, I'm finding that the already helpful staff is really helpful for exhibitors. As usual it was great seeing Lisa Carnell, and Theresa Whitaker made sure everything was perfect.

I'm really hoping we're able to help a lot of people during this conference. Lots of journals are struggling financially, and we offer the ability to publish for free, distribute world-wide, and even make a little profit for the sponsoring organization. If I have my way, Witan will save a lot of scholarship that would find an audience if it only had an outlet.

Also, this is a great opportunity for all of you who have technical questions and want them answered to go straight to the source. Michael, our Tech-Sorcerer, and Nina, our Technical Editor Extraordinaire, will both be there to answer the questions I can't.

For those who worry that print culture may be entirely dead, fear not -- I for one plan to spend entirely too much money at the other publishers' booths.

On Our Way to K'zoo 2011

The Witan team is on the move! It feels weird to be going to the Congress as an exhibitor rather than a presenter.

Here are two members of our team at a rest area in Tennessee. Only about 500 more miles to go! Look at the anticipation on Michael & Nina's faces!

Guide to K'zoo

Medievalists.net has posted a really handy guide to the International Congress on Medieval Studies. If you've never been, check out their stuff.

I'll be there, of course. This year Witan Publishing will have a booth, and the heads of our technical team are coming, so all those thorny techy questions you all want to know about how we make e-publishing work you can ask them.

Don't ask me the technical questions; I don't know. After I'm done with the academic side of editing, I assume they turn it into an actual e-pub book using the magic of leprechauns or something.

It's also a good chance to pitch your book idea to us, or sign up to be a peer reviewer, or just sign up to be on our mailing list. Or, if you don't want to do any of that, it's a good place to come arrange to eat with us at Bilbo's! A word to the wise: many an important deal in medieval studies has been made at Bilbo's -- and what better place?

Dragon*Con 2011 CfP

The CfP for the Comics and Popular Art Conference at Dragon*Con is up! For those who are interested in presenting your work before a popular audience, this is a great opportunity. The conference is a legit academic conference, but since it's housed within Dragon*Con, you can expect fans to show up at your session too. I should note that even though the first word is "Comics," we have lots of work that's not about comics -- in fact, I've never presented on comics there at all. Last year my work was on the depiction of the Norse gods in Stargate, and in the past I've presented on trolls & shape-changers in medieval lit, as well as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Submit your medieval-themed topics, present at an academic conference, then mingle with 40k+ fans!

Nokes Sighting Expected in Louisville

Want to punch me in the face, but live too far away to do it conveniently? Well, if you're in the Louisville KY area, you're in luck!

This Friday I'll be giving the keynote address at the Association of Humanities Academics meeting at the University of Louisville. My address will be entitled "Professor Awesome vs. the Nazis: Mythic Transference and Fanaticism." I'll be talking about my research into popular medievalism, the experiences of my semi-comic alter-ego "Professor Awesome, PhD" in those communities, and how I ran afoul of the Nazis. The first half will be blah blah theory blah blah set up, and the second half will be the anecdotes about my misadventures.

No, I won't just skip the academic part and get straight to the anecdotes. If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?

Woruldhord Project Launched

Good news! The long-awaited Woruldhord Project (no relation to the Unlocked Wordhoard) was just launched.

It is with great pleasure that we would like to announce the launch of the Woruldhord collection, a set of free reusable resources to help with the teaching/study of Old English and the Anglo-Saxons. The project ran from July-October 2010, and asked academics, museums, and members of the public to submit - via a website - material that had to do with the period that they wouldn't mind sharing with others. The response was very impressive, and we assembled about 4,500 objects covering art, archaeology, history, language, literature, music, and modern day representations. The database actually holds over 16,500 files as some of the objects submitted were entire web sites.

Congratulations to Stuart Lee and the whole Woruldhord team!

Witan Publishing's Sample Book

A lot of the inquires we've gotten for Witan have been essentially "What are these e-pub books going to look like?" Now we have an answer for you.

Our sample "book," Old English and Samwise Gamgee's Genealogy: Eden and the Unfallen Hobbit is available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble for $1. If you don't have an e-reader but you want to see the book, you can download Kindle for PC (Amazon), Kindle for iPad (Amazon), Nook for PC (Barnes & Noble), Nook for iPad (Barnes & Noble), all sorts of apps to read it on your phone if you want.

In fact, the "book" itself is only about 15 pages long; it is truly designed to be a sample, which explains why something so short has a foreword almost as long as the main text, table of contents, dedication, etc. This sample was written, edited, and published by me, so it is the very definition of self-published, but fear not! Witan Publishing is not a vanity press; I have no plans to publish any more of my own work. We just needed something I wrote for the sample.

For those of you who buy it, please read the foreword, which is in my mind more important than the article itself. In the foreword I discuss the philosophy that led to the founding of Witan, and it will likely answer many of the questions people have regarding it.

Now that people have seen our sample, many have asked me if we would consider publishing new editions of 19th & early-20th century medieval scholarship that has fallen into public domain. Most of what is out there are so poorly-scanned and converted that they are basically unusable (for a good example of this, go look at the e-pub version of Albert S. Cook's A Concordance to Beowulf). Much of the remainder is more carefully converted, but doesn't really make use of the e-pub format, and so amounts to little more than a .pdf file.

The short answer is yes, but we don't have anything immediately in the pipeline. Since we would have to make major editorial interventions to make such texts work in the e-pub format (doing such things as converting footnotes to endnotes, etc.), we would also want an introduction by a new editor discussing the importance of the work, a new bibliography of the subsequent critical reception of the work, etc. In other words, we wouldn't simply want to slap up an old edition, we would want our new e-pub edition to be an homage to the work of our scholarly ancestors.

So, buy our sample book, read our sample book, and please give us feedback on it in the comments section below! We already see some things we'd like to improve on, but the feedback of interested readers is gold. Also, if you have something you'd like to see published, whether a work of your original scholarship or an edition of an older public domain work you'd like to see produced, please go to our Submit a Proposal page and, well, submit a proposal.

Also, don't forget to "like" Witan Publishing on Facebook, to keep up with our latest titles as they are produced, and Witan Publishing on Twitter as well.

Some of My Best Friends are Medievalists

I've spent the last three days writing personal e-mails to all my medievalist friends inviting them to submit a project to Witan (or get involved as a peer reviewer or booster), and I'm still only through the letter D.

If I've learned nothing else through this process, it's that I've got a lot of medievalist friends! It's a lot like sending out wedding invitations -- I just know I'm going to forget someone important, and since I'm using my e-mail, those who are Facebook friends but not in my e-mail contacts might slip through the cracks.

It's been heartening how many have replied with ideas for texts, but if you've already got a substantial amount written (at least one chapter or the equivalent), a personal e-mail to me isn't enough -- you're going to have to submit your proposal through our Submissions page, for reasons both bureaucratic (so our other editors get to see the proposal) and political (so hiring and tenure & promotion committees see it's all legit).

It's been exciting to see how many of you all are excited! There will be some bumps and snags at the beginning (for example, our submissions page stopped working for a few hours on the first day), but we're pushing the frontier of medieval scholarship. In five years time, I'd like to see this e-pub medium be the new normal for disseminating scholarship.

Witan Submissions Page Back Up

For those who e-mailed me to say, "Hey, I tried to submit to Witan, but it didn't work," the problem should be fixed now. Go ahead and submit your proposals.