Category: Slow learner Page 1 of 2

Monty Python cribs from Aristotle

On September 7, 2024

According to Monty Python¹ King Arthur, when asked how he could have coconuts in a temperate climate like England’s, replied “The swallow may fly south with the sun, or the house martin or the plover seek hot lands in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land.” (page 2) In my copy of the screenplay, which is a facsimile, lots of lines are scratched out, hand-written, or otherwise edited in production. Not this speech. It is unchanged from the first typewritten copy.

Eleanor Parker (the scholar, not Lenore from Scaramouche) on the approach of autumn, directs us to the Secreta Secretorum²:

In herust fallyth the contrary. In this tyme the eeyre wixeth colde and dry, the wynde of the Northe oftymes turnyth, Wellis wythdrawen ham, grene thynges fadyth, Frutes fallyth, the Eeyre lesyth his beute, the byrdys shechyn hote regions, the bestis desyryth hare receptis, Serpentes gone to hare dichis. (P. 245)

This is an odd book. Wikipedia refers to it as a pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, which implies there are more things like it in the world. Let’s see how rusty my Middle English is: “In harvest the contrary happens. In this time the year grows cold and dry, the wind often comes from the north, water levels in the rivers drop, green things fade, fruits fall, the year loses its beauty, the birds seek hot regions, the beasts desire their burrows, serpents go to their holes.”

Monty Python’s line about birds “seeking hot lands in winter” clearly came from here.³ The more I learn about history, the more I wonder if Monty Python actually made up anything at all.

Time-traveling pronunciation

By Joe

On May 30, 2024

In Alliterative Verse, Slow learner

While thinking about alliterative verse, I came across an interesting case. Alliteration, in the traditional Old English form, doesn’t have to be on the first consonant in the words — it’s on the first consonant in the stressed syllables. A thousand years later, in Modern English it’s not rare to have more than one syllable in a word that gets stress, though the others are less emphasized. (24% of the words in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary have a secondary stress in them.) We still alliterate on the stressed syllable, in principle. Which brings me to the word “technological”. The way I say it, the primary stress is on “log”, and the Wise Clerks of Pittsburgh agree with me. Let’s try to alliterate with it:

“Technological Language” sounds like alliteration, and it matches the Old English form.
“Technological Treatise” sounds like alliteration, too.

It’s like the second word causes a change in how we hear the first. The secondary stress on “tech” gets promoted. The presence of “Treatise” seems to move the primary accent from the third syllable “log” to the first syllable “tech”. But I’ve already read the first word — This is time travel!

Light cone, showing the accessible past an future of any event where the speed of light is the limit.

By: K. Aainsqatsi at Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Maybe I can see a physical mechanism here. When I read, I “hear” the words in my head, but I sight-read the words much faster than that. Reading is different from systems described by the Theory of Relativity, because signals are primarily at the speed of (thinking about) sound, but there are also light signals that can exceed that maximum speed. Which makes the “sound cone” permeable, unlike the light cone we know about from Relativity.

So my eyes see the next word before I read the line into memory, and therefore later words in a line can affect the earlier ones. I’m sure every theater director already knew this.

Post Scriptum

The same thing happens with “proctological”, but in this case the dilemma can be resolved easily by never using that word in a poem.

High-dimensional space is weird

By Joe

On May 8, 2022

In Digital Humanities, Slow learner

There was a mathematically unsatisfactory bit in the last post about measuring the relationships among mentions of color in The Lord of the Rings. When I used the Euclidean distance between the 62-dimensional vectors to calculate the relationship between color mentions, the dendrogram had some connections in it that don’t make much sense visually or textually, e.g., brown was clustered with black and red. The connections with a linear “Manhattan” distance measure made much more sense. I asked Digital Tolkien about it, as one does, and he assured me that the L1 metric was better. But why?

It turns out this is something that mathematicians know: in high-dimensional spaces, using the Pythagorean Theorem causes near neighbors and far-away neighbors to be all about the same distance apart! ⁴ In fact, the choice of which of your neighbors is nearest isn’t even stable. The unavoidable numerical errors that come from using digital computers can dominate the real differences in the input data.⁵

Effect measured by L1 distance is more detectable at high dimension

Relative effect as a function of measure dimension

Of course, now that I’ve read a couple of papers about it, it’s obvious. Simplest possible case: suppose a book mentions one word once per chapter, and another word twice in one chapter and once in all the others. The relative difference between those two vectors, as a function of the number of chapters, looks like this.

62 dimensions counts as “high-dimensional”. Both ways of measuring distance have dropped a lot from our 3-dimensional experience, but the effect in our test case is twice as easy to compare when we use the Manhattan distance measure.

Notes

On the legal utility of horns

By Joe

On September 18, 2021

In fantasy, Slow learner

This week’s post from Stephen Winter reminded me of this.

To scholars of Saxon law, Boromir’s horn-blowing in “The Ring Goes South” has a completely different meaning. I was delighted to read this paper by Thijs Porck ⁶ that explains what Boromir was doing:

Gif feorcund mon oððe fremde butan wege geond wudu gonge & ne hrieme ne horn blawe, for ðeof he bið to profianne: oððe to sleanne oððe to aliesanne.

This is from the laws of Ine, King of the West Saxons. In modern English, it says, “If a stranger from afar journey through a wood, off the road, and neither call out nor blow his horn, he is to be taken for a thief, either to be killed or set free.”

So when Boromir said, “I will not go forth as a thief in the night,” he was just following the law.

Blogger’s note: This post has three purposes: (a) because I use this blog as a prosthetic long-term memory; (b) to circumvent the terrible sharing functions of the Reddit iOS app; and (c) to try out the “easy footnote” plug-in.

How to make a dictionary

By Joe

On September 26, 2020

In Slow learner, Vive la France

In which we once again find our Idiosopher using insanely-powerful Internet research tools for frivolous ends.

A while back, Prof. Emily Steiner, who seems to be familiar with every medieval manuscript that’s survived to the modern era, tweeted an image of what she asserted to be a debate between a cockatrice and a wyvern. It’s a snippet from Brunetto Latini, Livre du Trésor (1230?-1294). Manuscript BnF Fr 568, folio 48v (available via Gallica).

I can’t resist reading the captions on medieval illuminations, just to see if I can. The red letters looked to me like “De toutes maines de serpens”. Obviously this means “Concerning all kinds of serpents”, except for the word “maines”– what’s that?

“Why did it have to be snakes?” – Prof. Henry Jones, Jr.

I consulted the Dictionary of medieval French, and found definition 2 for “maine” is “manière, espèce”, with a citation to Le Roman de Tristan. So, fine. [1] But there’s one thing I overlooked: that red curlicue over top of the word I’m puzzling over is a scribal abbreviation. After a couple of us got ourselves confused, Prof. Steiner let us know it stands for “re”, and the pen-strokes I read as “in” are actually “ni”. Properly read, that word is actually “manière” itself, and it hasn’t changed in 800 years.

That implies a nuance that hadn’t occurred to me about the lexicographer’s art: the scholar who wrote the dictionary included a word he knew didn’t exist and wasn’t used, just because it’s easy for students to read it that way in the text. Awfully considerate of him.

[1] The Romance of Tristan is attributed to an author called Béroul, about whom nothing is known. The manuscript is in poor condition. The dictionary tells me the word “maine” is used in the phrase “male maine”, meaning intransigence or evil will, not bad manners. I tried to find the word in the manuscript, but failed. Maybe it’s underneath one of the coffee spills.

Lowbrow Rhyming

By Joe

On March 2, 2020

In Slow learner

I needed some terms and history about rhyming for my Mythmoot paper, so off I went to JSTOR. This article by William Harmon at UNC turned out to be a lot of fun. He cites “The Flintstones”. And in a discussion about how hard it is to do quantitative metrical verse in English (compared to Latin or Greek), he begins the sentence, “Some notable poets attempted the feat but…”. Galloping amphibrachs! (Link to Wikipedia because I love their examples.)

I was looking for an explanation of how rhyme and alliteration seemed to switch roles in poetry, and when it happened. It turns out that it wasn’t a switch, it was a long fight between the pop poets and the highbrows. Here’s a fact of which I didn’t have an inkling: rhyme was “shunned by versifiers in all major literatures of classical antiquity (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin) and all other ancient Indo-European literatures including the Germanic, and in Hebrew and other Semitic languages”. (p.26). Here’s one I did: “No sooner was rhymed qualitative verse established in England than it was attacked as vulgar and cheap.” (p. 29) Today’s hip-hop poets are in if not “good” then at least long-established company. The source of the fight is something everyone who learns French, German, Spanish, or Italian notices: everything rhymes in an inflected language. It’s too easy, so unworthy of a highbrow poet.

The biggest thing I learned from this paper is not the thing I came to read it for. Have you ever noticed that poets aren’t very good at meter? Even Shakespeare, for crying out loud: “When my love swears that she is made of truth”, despite what my high-school English teacher said, isn’t iambic pentameter. It’s not “x/x/x/x/x/”, it’s “xx//xxx/x/”. Harmon says that’s OK because the importance of adhering to the meter is low at the beginning of a line, and high at the end. Quantifying the importance is a topic for digital humanities, I would imagine. The other thing we can see there is the persistence of the four-beat line from Old English alliterative verse. Even when Modern English poets are trying to write pentameter, one stress usually gets short-changed. The language seems to relax naturally back into four.

Here’s the thing I really wanted to learn: when a rhyme is between sets of syllables that span across several words, it’s called “heteromerous” or “mosaic rhyme”. (For obvious reasons involving immunity from tenure review, I prefer the latter.) When Edith Sitwell rhymes “gourd and the” with “gardener”, or Eminem rhymes “mom’s spaghetti” with “calm and ready”, that’s mosaic rhyme. Harmon says Gerard Manley Hopkins was the first poet of note to use it. (p. 33)

Another new kind of rhyme has to do with disyllabic words in which both syllables are stressed, requiring rhymes on both. His examples include “hobnailed/bobtailed” (Sitwell), “suitcase/bootlace” (McCartney). This seems to have appeared around 1850. When I look through the pronouncing dictionary for words like that, I find lots of words like “lugnut”, “airport”, “workshop”, “starship”, “broadband”, “deadline”, and so forth. Very modern concepts — I wonder if this is a mode of speech brought to prominence by the Industrial Revolution?

Works Cited

Harmon, William. “English versification: fifteen hundred years of continuity and change.” Studies in Philology 94.1 (1997): 1-37.

Can’t Hear the Forest for the Trees

By Joe

On January 21, 2020

In Slow learner

I have been reading things I thought were selected without pattern from across my range of dilettantish interests. But not so — they’ve turned out to be a lot more connected than I was expecting.

Item: A permaculturist has suggested that I plant a chestnut orchard at the farm. The soil isn’t ideal for that, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading to find out how possible that can be. Penn State knows a lot about disease-resistant hybrids. The American Chestnut Foundation has an interesting program to back-cross resistant hybrids with native chestnuts to try and restore something like the original tree to its original range. Chestnuts sound interesting, and tasty.

Item: From reading various tweets about Native American politics, I came to hear about a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer called Braiding Sweetgrass. Dr. Kimmerer is a botanist who wrote about the interface between Native lore and our emerging understanding of ecological dynamics. A great deal of it is about forests. There’s a chapter entitled “Learning the Grammar of Animacy”, in which she talks about learning the language of a place, by listening. (Some form of the word “listen” occurs 78 times in 350 e-book pages.) Her thesis is that tens of thousands of years 0f coevolution gave Natives the language they need to understand their ecosystem, and “language” is used literally.

“The very best scientists are humble enough to listen.”

“The language scientists speak, however precise,is based on a profound error in grammar, an omission, a grave loss in translation from the native languages of these shores.”

“I come here to listen, to nestle in the curve of the roots in a soft hollow of pine needles…”

Item: The Overstory by Richard Powers has been sitting on my bookshelf for a year. It begins and ends with a chestnut tree. (no spoiler) It has oblique references to J.R.R. Tolkien in several places, as much of the environmentalist movement does. This is a brilliant novel, and reading it immediately after Braiding Sweetgrass was a shock of familiarity. Kimmerer’s ideas underlie Powers’s novel like a hyporheic flow. Towards the end, this line jumped out:

His hand goes out, gesturing toward the conifers. “It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They’re not that hard to hear.” The man chuckles. “We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492.” (p.493)

Item: Megan Fontenot talks about apocalypse and healing in the latest issue of Tolkien Studies. She draws connections between Tolkien and the shamanic tradition. She says our lack of communication with the forest is a consequence of the Fall.

Here, the break that Eliade identifies between heaven and earth appears also between humankind and “nature”. Communication has been broken off in this relationship also, is indeed impossible, save to a privileged few.

So, are we buying into the idea that Native Americans are prelapsarian? The subject is well represented on line; Google would be happy to provide me with a few thousand documents. I don’t think I’ll read them. Such matters are too subtle for me, and better left to the theologians. I’m just going to marvel at how I thought I was randomly choosing books and papers from a broad set of interests, and ended up instead with a tightly-coupled network. I’ve included two vertices on the graph without grey circles, to represent influences mentioned by the authors, but which I haven’t read myself.

Network of recent reading

Works Cited

Fontenot, Megan N. “The Art of Eternal Disaster: Tolkien’s Apocalypse and the Road to Healing.” Tolkien Studies, vol. 16, 2019, p. 91-109. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/tks.2019.0008.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. United States, Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Powers, Richard. The Overstory: A Novel. United States, W. W. Norton, 2018.

Reading Tolkien with Old English

By Joe

On December 7, 2019

In Alliterative Verse, fantasy, Slow learner

This past year I’ve had the experience of hearing The Lord of the Rings with fresh ears, now that I’ve learned Old English. The first thing that jumps out differently is the names, like seeing “Haleth” in a list, and recognizing a word for “warrior”. At the Council of Elrond we meet Galdor, whose name means a magic charm.

In Rohan, the Old English echoes become louder. Merry is knighted as “Holdwine”, which I now see is a nice double entendre: sure, he can hold his drink, but also hold means “loyal” and wine means “friend”. Here’s another thing I would never have done before: I’ve searched the Old English corpus for historical figures named “holdwine”, just to see if there’s a reference I’m missing. (Can’t find any.)

Treebeard and Legolas like alliterative proverbs. So do I. Perhaps it’s a function of age. Even Gimli gets into the act: “indeed, sooner would I bear a horse than be borne by one.” The first word is modern English that could have been spoken by anyone in the book. After the first two words, though, the sentence turns into a good alliterative line. Now that I’ve read a lot of old English verse, Gimli’s motivation in saying this sounds different. It sounds like he began the sentence in his usual idiom, but when he got two words in he noticed that he could make a witty epigram in the Rohirric style.

That style permeates Book III. Gandalf, making introductions at Meduseld: “And here beside me is Aragorn son of Arathorn, the heir of Kings, and it is to Mundburg that he goes”. On first reading, that sentence sounded weird to a teen-aged idiosopher. Now I get it. Describing a character three different ways in a row is a technique that’s all over Anglo-Saxon poetry. It’s reinforced by the alliteration++ on “Aragorn”, “Arathorn”, and “heir”. (Is there a word for going beyond alliteration, matching the whole first syllable, like a modern English rhyme turned backwards?)

The ancient roots of that sentence go deeper, though. What really struck me when I first read LotR was that weird comma-spliced extra sentence at the end, with the second part just barely related to the first part. English teachers constantly correct their students for doing that. JRRT was an English teacher. What gives? It turns out Anglo-Saxons loved conjunction splices. For example, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 888: “Queen Æthelswith who was King Alfred’s sister died on the way to Rome, and her body lies at Pavia.”

This is the first of several ways Gandalf is being more British than the Queen in this chapter. “It is the will of Théoden King that none should enter his gates, save those who know our tongue and are our friends,” says the guard, so Gandalf lays it on thick.

There was one disappointment. “Éomer” is in Beowulf. Where did Éowyn come from? Her name doesn’t exist in the corpus, but “Þeowen” does. It’s a common variant of “Þeow”. “Handmaiden” is the nicest translation of that word (the others all connote slavery). Not cool! However, that word is part of Queen Wealhþeow‘s name. Maybe there’s a positive meaning we don’t have in the surviving literature. It wouldn’t surprise me if Tolkien inferred an unattested name that must have existed somewhere.

Altogether, this has been a profitable exercise. It’s not easy to have a fresh perspective, the ~50th time one reads a book. When I signed up for Intro to Anglo-Saxon at Signum last winter, the universal reaction of my friends was, “Why?” Maybe now I know the answer.

Elves & Dwarves & How to Prevent Them

By Joe

On April 18, 2019

In Alliterative Verse, Slow learner

“That’s enough to begin with; there are plenty of hard words there.” – Humpty Dumpty

This is my term paper from the Signum University “Introduction to Anglo-Saxon” class. (Except that I deleted the jokes from the copy I actually turned in.) These are two healing charms, more or less in alliterative verse. I’m posting it here because I kept getting Tolkien connections as I did the translation. T. S. Eliot said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal;” from which I extrapolate that a truly great writer steals from things that would otherwise be forgotten.

Dubious Tolkien references herein: Lembas, Elrond, barrow-wights, giant spiders, Galdor.

These are two charms to prevent illnesses that are ostensibly caused by supernatural intervention. The first is a sharp pain due to elf-shot. The second is sleep disturbance due to dwarf-riding. To effect a cure, the arsenal that a healer brings to bear on the problem includes knowledge of the natural world, familiarity with the supernatural, word-play, and personal authority.

The first modern scholarly edition of Lacnunga “of Leechcraft” was made by a Rev. Cockayne in 1866. (This has no relevance to the current translation project, but the medical aptonym is irresistible.) The original also contained a cure for cancer; alas, that part of the manuscript is now illegible. A 21^st-century critical edition by Edward Pettit is the source for these texts, altered as necessary by reference to the digitized Harley manuscript 585 made available by the British Library. Line numbers are from Pettit.

Wið Færstice: A charm against a stabbing pain

Lacnunga, CXXVII

This charm has three parts. First is an oily preparation of herbs that (as we now know) actually do relieve pain. The second is a chant in pretty-good alliterative form, interspersed with periodic imperatives commanding the elf-shot to get out of the body, and some lawyerly-sounding enumerations to make sure all the possibilities are covered. The third is a real knife, which plays a sympathetic role to help pull out the little elf-spear.

This charm may pre-date the Christian conversion. It has only the tiniest hint of Christianity, in a place where it could easily have been pasted on, long after the charm was originally written.

Notes on translation

760: Transcription error for feferfuge = “feverfew”, Tanacetum parthenium, which is still recommended as a cure for migraines. (I believe this to be the first citation of WebMD in a Signum term paper.)

reade netel is called purple deadnettle today; it’s an invasive weed that takes over fields between harvest and planting. inwyxð I take to relate to the invasiveness, by analogy with in-weaxan, because that takes an accusative object, and purple deadnettles are really invasive.

“wegbrade”= “waybread”; not lembas, just a plantain. Plantago is not a pain-killer according to St. Hildegard von Bingen or Macer Floridus; the Anglo-Saxons must have had a different physiology from the continentals.

Line 775: Six is a pun on “seax”, I think. Also 6+1=7 smiths total, and any time you can use the number 7 in a spell, you’re doing great.

Line 777: Even a small splinter of iron might be the problem, so the spell includes it. Elrond clearly knew this spell.

Line 784: ic wille ðin helpan: “yours” means “your afflicted body-part”, which isn’t written out in full because it would destroy the meter.

Line 787: Lacnunga LXXVI mentions Woden, which I’m taking as permission to run with Bosworth-Toller and say “Thor’s house” for “fyrgenhæfde”. Following that line of thought, the genetive plural “esa” who are as likely as elves to shoot someone, I translate as “gods”, cognate with Norse Æsir.

Line 788: “the liquid” refers to the herbed butter made in line 760.

760 Wið færstice: feferfuige 7 seo reade netele ðe þurh ærn inwyxð 7 wegbrade; wyll in buteran.	Against a stabbing pain: feverfew, & the purple dead-nettles that invade the fields, & plantains; boil in butter.
Hlude wæran hy la hlude ða hy ofer þone hlæw ridan wæran anmode, ð hy ofer land ridan.	Loud they were, so loud, when they rode over the barrow. Single-mindedly they rode over the land.
scyld ðu ðe nu þu ðysne nið genesan mote.	Now shield yourself from them, and you might survive this trouble.
765 ūt lytel spere gif hēr inne sīe	Out, little spear, if one be in here!
stōd under linde under lēohtum scylde þær ðā mihtigan wīf hyra mægen beræddon 7 hy gyllende gāras sændan	There he stood under linden-wood, under a light shield. The mighty women are calling on their powers to send spears on him, but their powers were nullified.
770 ic him oðerne eft wille sændan fleogende flane forane togeanes	I will send another again to defend against the flying darts.
ut lytel spere gif hit her inne sy	Out, little spear, if it be herein!
sæt smið slōh seax lytel īserna wund swīðe	A smith sat, forged a knife, little for a weapon, but quick to wound
ut lytel spere gif her inne sy	Out, little spear, if one be in here!
775 syx smiðas sætan wælspera worhtan	Six smiths sat, working on a battle-spear
ūt spere næs in spere	Out, spear, not in, spear!
gif hēr inne sy īsenes dæl hægtessan geweorc hit sceal gemyltan	If a piece of iron should be in here, a hag’s work, it shall melt.
gif ðu wære on fell scoten oððe wære on flæsc scoten 780 oððe wære on blod scoten / oððe wære on lið scoten næfre ne sy ðin lif atæsed	If you were shot in the skin, or were shot in the flesh, or were shot in the blood, or were shot in the limb, may your life never be hurt.
gif hit wære esa gescot oððe hit wære ylfa gescot oððe hit wære hægtessan gescot nu ic wille ðīn helpan	If it were god-shot or if it were elf-shot, or if it were hag-shot, now I will help yours.
785 þis ðe to bote esa gescotes ðis ðe to bote ylfa gescotes ðis ðē tō bōte hægtessan gescotes ic ðīn wille helpan	This to cure god-shot, this to cure elf-shot, this to cure hag-shot: I will help yours.
flēo þær on fyrgenhæfde hāl westū helpe ðīn drihten	Fly there to the house of Thor. Be you well, may the Lord help yours!
nim þonne þæt seax ādō on wætan	Then take the knife and put it in the liquid.

Wið dweorh – Against a dwarf

Lacnunga, LXXXVI

After thorough study, the only thing I know about dweorh is that whatever it means, it doesn’t mean a bearded guy with a pick-axe, nor a person deficient in pituitary hormones. This charm (galdor) seems to be aimed at thwarting something much more dangerous than elves or hags or Norse gods: the last lines seem to imply that the healer is in as much danger from a dweorh as the sick person, and the patient’s guardian who summoned the healer, too. It is probably not coincidence that Christian powers are called upon instead of natural forces. Like a modern doctor, when things turn serious he gets out the Latin.

This charm shows the syncretic enthusiasm for which alternative medicine is still famous today. The objective is to cure, not to adhere to any particular system. The alliterative verse is there because it’s part of the tradition, but it is metrically inept. Christian saints are a power-source, so the healer brings them in without apparent embarrassment. I agree with Matthew Lewis that this is a charm against sleep disturbance, of an apparently horrible kind.

Notes on translation

Line 645: The seven names to be written on the stolen communion wafers (!) are the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. The wafers evidently must be strung into a necklace of some kind, though this is not specifically stated.

Line 650: In the manuscript, inspidenwiht is written clearly, so no chance of a mistranscription. A scribo had an ascender where the “n” is, which was scraped off. Note that it was not a descender, which would be needed for this to be “inspiderwiht”, as most transcriptions have claimed. Here, wiht shall be translated as “creature”, and inspiden by analogy with aspide I take to mean “dangerous”, venomous, or something like that. Lewis, in common with lots of other people, think it should be translated “spider”, but there are three other objections to that besides the typographical: first, spider isn’t the Anglo-Saxon word for “spider”; second, the things that it does aren’t things a spider can do; third, it’s referred to as deor on second mention, which is an odd thing to call a spider. (Unless it’s a giant spider from Mirkwood?)

Line 651: Haman and teage, in keeping with the horse motif, shall be translated “saddle” and “reins”.

Line 652: the land is a metaphor for the physical world. Sleep is like a sea-voyage away from things that are familiar (and warm). A sea-voyage also lets in the pun on liþan (to sail) and ða liþu (in the limbs).

Line 654: I’m going to go out on a limb (I am not averse to continuing a pun a millenium later). Pettit, Lewis, and even Drout have com here. It’s written “cō” in the manuscript, so I’m going to replace that with con. We need a present/future-tense verb here or the spell doesn’t do anything. Also it prevents com ingangan from being redundant. (I realize that I am on shaky intellectual ground by claiming that there existed at least one Anglo-Saxon who worried about being redundant.)

Line 655: adlegan means funeral pyre, which is plainly wrong. Replace it with adlican, “the sick person” (accusative).

645 Wið dweorh man sceal niman VII lytle oflætan swylce man mid ofrað, 7 writan þas naman on ælcre oflætan: Maximianus, Malchus, Iohannes, Martimianus, Dionisius, Constantinus, Serafion.	Against a dwarf, a man shall take seven little wafers, such as one makes offerings with, and write these names, one on each: Maximianus, Malchus, Johannes, Martimianus, Dionisius, Constantinus, Serafion.
Þænne eft þæt galdor, þæt heræfter cweð man sceal singan, ærest on þæt wynstre eare, þænne on þæt swiðre eare, þænne bufan þæs mannes moldan	Next one must sing this charm that follows here, first in to one ear, then into the other ear, then above the crown of the patient’s head.
7 ga þænne an mædenman to 7 ho hit on his sweoran, 7 do man swa þry dagas; him bið sona sel.	And then let a virgin go to him and hang it about his neck, and do the same for three days; soon he will be well.
650“Her com in gangan inspidenwiht. Hæfde him his haman on handa, cwæð þæt þu his hæncgest wære, Lege þe his teage an sweoran.	“Here comes in a dangerous creature. He had his saddle in his hand, said that you were his horse, laid his reins on you and swore.
Ongunnan him of þæm lande liþan.	He started to sail himself away from the land.
Sona swa hy of þæm lande coman þa ongunnan him ða liþu colian	As soon as they came out of that land, then the limbs on him began to chill.
Þa con ingangan deores sweostar.	Then the beast’s sister can come in.
655 Þa geændade heo, 7 aðas swor / ðæt næfre þis ðæm adlegan derian ne moste, ne þæm þe þis galdor begytan mihte, oððe þe þis galdor ongalan cuþe.	She ended it and swore oaths that this gang must never harm the sick one, nor him who obtains this charm, nor him who knows knows how to sing this charm.
Amen. Fiað.”	Amen. So be it.

Works Cited:

Bosworth, Joseph, et al. “An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online.” Edited by Thomas Northcote Toller and Others, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, 21 Mar. 2010, http://www.bosworthtoller.com/ Accessed 30 Mar. 2019.

British Library Digitized Manuscripts. Harley MS 585: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=harley_ms_585_f167r for Dwarves. http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=harley_ms_585_f175r for Elves.

Drout, Michael D.C. “Against a Dwarf”, Anglo-Saxon Aloud. Feb 20, 2008. http://mdrout.webspace.wheatoncollege.edu/category/against-a-dwarf/

Hall, Alaric. “Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender, and Identity (Anglo-Saxon Studies 8).” Woodbridge: Boydell (2007).

Lewis, Matthew Charles. Dreaming of Dwarves:Nightmares and Shamanism in Anglo-Saxon Poetics and the Wið Dweorh Charm. Diss. UGA, 2009.

Macer Floridus. “Des vertus des plantes” in Les Propriétés Médicinales Des Plantes: Textes des III^e, IV^e et XI^e Siècles. Clermont-Ferrand: Éditions Paleo, 2007.

Pettit, Edward. Anglo-Saxon Remedies, Charms, and Prayers from British Library Ms Harley 585: Commentary and bibliography. Vol. 1. Edwin Mellen Press, 2001.

Throop, Priscilla, translator. Hildegard von Bingen’s Physica: The complete English translation of her classic work on health and healing. Simon and Schuster, 1998.

When are two stories the same?

By Joe

On May 4, 2018

In Slow learner

For my talk at Mythmoot, I’m comparing two exemplars of the same story. This post is a lemma in which I figure out how to show that two stories are “the same”.

If I learned anything from my safari into the jungles of literary theory, it’s that starting anywhere but absolute zero can get you into trouble. So let’s get the trivial parts out of the way, and work towards progressively more difficult cases.

👉Two copies of the same book sitting on different shelves in a bookstore are the same story.

👉Two different editions of a book are the same story.

👉A translation of a book into another language could be argued either way, but I’m going to say they’re still the same story.

Fig 1. Nephew

I’m following Douglas Hofstadter on this, but a tangible example about translation is better. Le Seigneur des Anneaux is not the same thing as The Lord of the Rings to me, but I hypothesize that its relationship to a 14-year-old nerd in France will be the same as LotR was to me. Experimental verification will take a decade or so; my nephew is just learning to read. In any case, even with a lot of differences between the original and second languages, the story can remain intact. (Assuming that’s what the translator is trying to do.) Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey, tweeted about that the other day.

Now that we’ve got the pedants safely back in their kennels, let’s look at the more-interesting case of two different novels. A story has lots of parts; some of them allow for more difference than others. What are the parts of a story? (Do I remember this from third grade? Yes, apparently I do.)

Setting

Doesn’t have to be the same. If you couldn’t tell the same story in a different setting, most of literature would never have happened. Resetting the Odyssey in 1900’s Dublin is perfectly fine. Romeo and Juliet in mid-20th-Century New York is brilliant.

Plot

The arc of the main plot has to be the same, though subplots can be different, and usually are. The presence of different minor characters is the primary driver of variation in subplots.

Characters

They don’t have to be the same, but major characters have to be isomorphic. That is, we have to be able to make a mapping of one major character in work A to exactly one character in work B. Minor characters don’t have to match at all. King Arthur stories, for example, have a literal army of extras around the perimeter. Authors use differences in minor characters to add individual flourishes to an old story. Definition: A major character is one who participates in the core conflict.

Conflict

Conflict in literature takes the form of protagonist vs. some element of the set {self, antagonist, society, nature, fate}. For these purposes, the core conflict has to remain in the same category, though I’d be willing to allow all sorts of other sub-conflicts. Conflicts with a different element of the set make a different story.

Amusing sidebar: When I was looking around the Web to make sure I’d gotten them all, I found two other possible elements of the set: technology and the supernatural. Since I’m interested in fantasy and science fiction, a.k.a. “Imaginative literature”, those two drop out. Conflicts vs. technology don’t exist — one of the most important lessons of science fiction is that technology isn’t an enemy. Any time it looks like it is, there’s a person behind it. And in fantasy, supernatural entities are just characters like anybody else.

Resolution

This one’s tricky. My first reaction was to say that the resolution has to be the same, but then I remembered the movie Roxanne . [1] This movie is unquestionably the same story as Cyrano de Bergerac, with a change of setting and the addition of a character (Dixie, played by Shelley Duvall). Adding a person to the plot who moves easily between the social classes and can talk straightforwardly to both the leads makes the resolution of Rostand’s play impossible. (Lucky for them!) I’m willing to say that the resolution can be different if the logic of the new setting and characters requires it. There are limits, certainly. Hamlet can’t have an ending where everyone lives happily ever after.

Where’s the dividing line? What kinds of stories can keep their integrity through a change in resolution? I think it’s in the core conflict. Cyrano is struggling against himself, and “snapping out of it” is always a possible outcome of such a conflict. Hamlet has a generous helping of internal conflict, but it’s subsidiary to the political battles and the inertia of armed forces. The outcome of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is constrained in ways that The Tragedy of Charlie, Small-town Fire Chief is not.

Conclusion

Two stories are the same if: Their Plot and Conflict are recognizably the same and their major Characters are isomorphic. The Resolution must be the same if the conflict requires it. Setting may change without restriction, as long as the other four properties of the story are still sensible in its context.

[1] Which contains one of my favorite cinematic sword-fights.