20131228.0751

As I was returning home from taking my wife to work yesterday, I heard comments on the radio about skaldic poetry, the highly allusive and complicated verse typified by the works of Snorri Sturluson and Egill Skallagrímsson.  In them, the speaker (whose name I sadly forget) noted the deep background knowledge that audiences of skaldic verse had to have to understand what the skalds were saying to them.  (As the skalds were usually saying nice things about the lords who supported them, the audiences usually had reason to know what was being said; even the doughty Nordic folks liked hearing people speak well of them.)

I know of people who might say that we have lost the ability to have such things, that we do not teach our children enough of the old ways and common backgrounds for us to have such a body of work.  But I think those people are wrong; we do still have the ability to make such works happen, to refer to things in arcane kennings, through obscure metonymy and synecdoche.  Indeed, we are more able to do so; more people can be counted on to know more things or, failing that, to know where to go to learn of those things.  For instance, when I wrote some days ago that "The Muse is far away / On Oreb or on Sinai," I expected that my readers would either mark the association with Milton's Paradise Lost (Book I, lines 6-7), already having the knowledge or running a simple search for "Oreb or on Sinai," and so would understand what I wrote without my having to write it.  Or when I wrote earlier that "Jeff Lynne's cheery call has been answered abundantly," people would know who Lynne is or would find out quickly.  And there are other examples besides.

We still refer to things form our past, and we recognize now that our past is far more complicated and glorious than we had been led to believe in that same past.  More value is ascribed to more things, not less, and so more is referenced now than once was.  Not only in poetry: are there not Arthurian overtones in the Zelda series (perhaps an essay for another time), and do we not still celebrate retellings of old tales on screens silver, small, and digital?  It is because there are more symbols to navigate that my part of The Work, my study of the academic humanities and teaching of the same, remains valuable.  My colleagues and I are the ones who examine what is done for what works well and what works poorly, writing of how they function and what those functions assert about both the people who produce and the people who consume.  It is only through looking to the past that we can do so; without knowing that Oreb and Sinai are linked by Milton, the repetition of that link makes little sense, and without the training in looking for such things and looking at them in ways admittedly esoteric, what they reveal of writer and reader is hardly evident.

And it needs to be.  For one, there is the link to the cultures of the past from which the cultures of the present are sprung, a link that may lead at times to uncomfortable realizations of ancestral errors but that still serves to ground people in the long line of humanity.  For another, the presentation and manipulation of such symbols as my colleagues and I are wont to explicate serves to influence the thoughts and perspectives of people; media saturation ensures that it is so.  Being able to recognize the symbols that are presented and understand their contexts of origin allows for greater self-control, greater immunity from the ploys of marketers and demagogues, and greater ability of the self to be the self.  And that is certainly a worthy thing.

20140101.0900

It has been three years now since I have made a blog post on Hangover Day.  While I had thought to wax rhapsodic about past New Year's experiences, I realized as I attempted to write several that I would be ill-served by doing so.  There are enough such narratives about already, narratives better documented than any I might muster and doubtlessly far more entertaining that any I have yet experienced, holiday or otherwise.  I need not add to them; I will write otherwise, instead.

My beloved wife and I traveled to the City of Thunder once again yesterday, passing over the wind-swept plains in haste to return to the offices of our perinatologist.  Our child was weighed and measured, and found sufficient; the physician noted that all looks well with the life growing inside my wife.  It is a comfort to know that things appear to proceed as they ought to for the baby.

In the above paragraph, I once again use one of the kennings of which I am fond and which I recall having discussed recently.  The device, a poetic renaming of a thing based upon its qualities and cultural associations it has (so a form of metonymy, really), is one typical of Germanic poetries; Beowulf uses it abundantly, as do the Icelandic sagas, and I, as a student of such things, find that it creeps into my usage as well.  It is not a roach that I seek to eliminate it but despair of ever doing so, but a gem unlooked-for that enriches whoever picks it up.

Such devices do move away from the literal, I know.  They are bits of figurative language that require background knowledge and understanding to untangle, and so they are in some senses distractions from the thrust of what is being put across.  For that reason, they are disfavored in technical writing and reporting.  Yet they are a means through which features of culture are passed forward, and they are a means through which the use of language may be made beautiful.  They allow writers and readers to exceed themselves, engaging more fully in the dialogue that the best writing is and thereby entering into the greater communion of the world.

If, then, I write of the City of Thunder as it sits as the chosen seat of the chosen rulers of the wind-swept plains of sweet-smelling wheat, then I write in a place not only where I write but that acknowledges the NBA, theoretically-representative federated government, and Rogers and Hammerstein, and I am connected thereby to the communities that understand and engage with such things.  It is far more interesting than to simply state that my wife and I went to Oklahoma City, and this context of writing is one in which interest is rewarded.

Others look for the concision above other concerns, and there is nothing wrong with that.  I am capable of writing in such a way, which I know from having done a fair bit of it and having taught others to do so (unlike Shaw and unfortunately many others, I do not think that teaching allows me to not know what I am doing).  But this is not one of those circumstances.  This is more hortatory and epideictic, and if I am to praise a thing that demands skill in the writing and the reading, I ought to show that skill, myself.  Hence the several metonymies in the piece--and the many others that will follow after.

20140123.0703

I have addressed the use of kennings before, at least as the device exists in the world (and as it occurs to me to look over once again in preparation for discussing with my students works which include them as a matter of course).  They are in many cases metonym or synecdoche, references to things by association or by component part, and I note that I use some variant upon them to describe the places I have been and those in which I live and have lived.  The City of Thunder, Bedfordside Garden, Sherwood Cottage, and their like occur to me as being such references, even if their meanings are perhaps obscured by the specificity of their fields of reference.  (But only perhaps.  I have few secrets.)

They are forms of encryption, such devices, methods of reducing certainty and clarity and therefore methods used to hide--although in such a way as asks to be found, as with the embedding of Cynewulf's name in runes in his verse (you can guess what I have been teaching, yes?).  If I call the place where I grew up Nimitz's schooltown, it will not take much to figure out what and where I mean.  Similarly if I say I studied at Gaines's school, or the Chaucerian Allen's.  And with that ease comes the suggestion that the task is to be done, the puzzle solved; it is not much of a cover that so readily falls to the floor.

And in such a case, why would it be used to hide?  (As might be guessed, this line of thought proceeds from what happened in my classroom.  Say what it is that I have been teaching.)  If the mask accents but does not obfuscate, to what end is it as a device for hiding?  For when I put the question to my students, they suggested almost to the last and least of them that the slanted embedding of identity amid anonymity surrounded by riddles and elegies and the talk of the best of trees was meant to hide the writer in the work.  I know that my place on the ground floor of the ivory tower limits my view sharply; there are walls about the grounds over which I cannot see, and my students still stand at the gates, having not yet fully entered, so that they can yet see the streets surrounding.  There may well be a thing in the text of which I am unaware but that their circumstances make obvious to them; if there is, it is knowledge I wish to possess.

I wish to possess all knowledge, actually.

Perhaps, however, there is a cultural current among my students that suggests to them that the only reason to hide a thing, however badly it may be hidden, is to actually conceal it from the casual viewer.  And if there is such a thing as that, I sorrow, for it is a means by which to isolate people from the wondrous intricacies in the depths of things.  The solid stone beneath us is by no means simple; its structure is complex and glorious if we but look closely enough at it.

20131120.0622

I understand that the last couple of posts made to this blog have been a bit briefer than usual.  Today's should be back to regular length, or thereabouts, although it may be a bit random in its structure; this one is a news post (with commentary, of course, because it is my writing).

My lovely wife and I went to our perinatologist in the City of Thunder (kennings make things better!) to have a checkup done on our forthcoming child.  The child is developing nicely, for which I am thankful; all ten fingers and all ten toes are present, and the limbs to which they are attached are moving about fairly freely.  The child's face is developing well, as are the many vital organs in the human body.  Too, we have positive confirmation of which pronoun we will need to use, having gotten ultrasound images (something about the term strikes the eye oddly) of the relevant equipment.  The grandparents have been notified, and others will be advised when the time is right.

There seems to be a baby boom going on at my workplace.  The last few weeks have seen several of my colleagues bring children into the world; I have not heard that any of them are doing poorly, for which I and others are grateful.  Unlike other such booms I have seen, there is not a commonality of names.  Many of the babies born to members of one of my former departments in the past few years have been named after the same line of English monarchs, which makes sense given that I have worked in English departments and the cultural cachet of the Bard, but it does set up a potentially confusing situation.  Overlapping names can be problematic.

One of my colleagues, Dr. Helen Young, at the time of this writing a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney (information here), has released a call for papers that seems to have originated in the Tales after Tolkien Society of which she is the head and of which I am part.  The project seems interesting, and I will most certainly be offering an abstract in support of it.  For one, I need the publication.  For another, I am committed to the kind of scholarship that the call suggests (as well as to other projects, including Humanities Directory and my own proposed SCMLA special session, both of which could use submissions).

The semester at my current institution is rapidly approaching its end.  Accordingly, there is panic in the classes as students realize that they have not done so well as they might have hoped, and there are few assignments and little time in which to correct matters.  For many, it is at this point too late, and a semester of slacking off is about to have the just and appropriate consequences.  Few contacts from parents are expected, although such things have been known to happen from time to time.  Comments about the phenomenon, which I am certain is not as recent as it typically assumed but has been less widespread in the past, are welcome.

Tomorrow may well have a more "normal" post, something more like a regular essay than today's few bits of unrelated comment.  But I make no promises.