Before that needful-journey no-one becomes
wiser than it is necessary for him
to consider, before his going-hence,
what his soul by way of good or evil
may be deemed, after the death-day.

These are the lines spoken by Bede in his last hours, according to a letter written by his pupil Cuthbert. The original letter only gave a Latin paraphrase, but there is an English tradition from the 9thC onwards that includes the lines in Old Englisc. A good percentage of these are in the Northumbrian dialect (as is the version above); others are in the almost-standard West Saxon.

I decided to try and translate the Northumbrian version as a challenge- the orthography is horribly different from the West Saxon to which I am used. Quite a lot of the OE corpus is in WS, and textbooks for OE tend to normalise the differences when they arise. I can see why! Aside from none of the pretty thorns (Þ, þ) and eths (Ð, ð) to which I am used, replaced with ‘th’, it uses ‘uu’ for ‘w’ or the OE wynn character (Ƿ ƿ). More significantly, the spelling is like some sort of hideous bizzaro-land. It required a bit of detective work to determine that uueorthae was the subjunctive mood of weorþe or that doemid was, in fact a form of ‘to judge/deem’ (deman). Admittedly, it felt pretty obvious, and I pretty silly, when I did figure it out.

I have used the fifteenth edition from Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader (ed. Dorothy Whitelock), pp. 182-183, and the only change I have made was to drop Sweet’s accent markers… mostly because the make the text look untidy, but also because I sincerely doubt the original MS (St. Gall MS. 254) had them. I also relied on The Cambridge Old English Reader, Richard Marsden (Cambridge: 2004) which has an excellent commentary on the poem as well as a West Saxon edition. You can find it on Google Books if you click this link right here.

I find it to be a beautiful little poem, and one I can certainly imagine the Venerable Bede reciting before his death. Themes of death and one’s consideration of what waits beyond it are regular themes in Bede’s work (and, naturally, a lot of poetry in the period). There are some who claim that Bede composed the poem on his deathbed, but the evidence for that is spurious.

For more reading on the poem, I’d advise following that link to The Cambridge Old English Reader, where Marsden offers a few lines of quite spot-on analysis. I think for next week, I shall offer something a little more chirpy.

So today, when I came across David Korten’s article “The End of Empire” at Yes! Magazine, I had only one response: Citation Needed.

As the institutions of Empire took root, humans turned from a reverence for the generative power of life to a reverence for hierarchy and the power of the sword. The wisdom of the elder and the priestess gave way to the arbitrary rule of often ruthless kings. Social pathology became the norm and society’s creative energy focused on perfecting the instruments of war and domination. Priority in the use of available resources went to military, prisons, palaces, temples, and patronage.

Citation needed.

Seriously. ‘Turned from a reverence for the generative power of life’? What? I don’t even know what that means. Is he trying to say that pre-monarchical societies revered life? The human sacrifice of captured enemies practiced by pre-Christian Germanic peoples puts paid to that particular lie. What makes the so-called ‘wisdom’ of a priestess or an ‘elder’ any less arbitrary or ruthless than that of a king or emperor? For that matter, the Roman Republic is one of the clearest examples of the kind of dominating ‘Empire’ that Korten is blithering about, and that wasn’t ruled by anything resembling a King! It was expressely founded to avoid kingship, and yet had no problems at all with dominating neighbouring cultures and civilisations.

I, too, have many issues with the modern world and its emphasis on greed and destruction of the Other to further itself. I readily agree that many of our modern concepts of fair play and ‘freedom’ (.i. freedom for those on top, and fair play for those who rule) were forged in the corrupting and sadistic smithies of ancient empires. Any student of any period of history can see these things play out.

Yet human history covers a period some five thousand years long, and our species has experiemented with many types of governance and systems of rulership- some fairer than others. If one wishes to discuss the historicity of modern imperialism, then get the fucking history right.

Take a university course! Read some books! Understand what the hell you are talking of before you seek to condemn it. Because every time I see a fellow member of the so-called ‘Left’ blithering about history in such ignorance, I cover my face in my hands and start to gently weep.

I am willing to be your ally. I want to stand alongside you against government corruption, against hierarchical hatred, be for the people. While you continue to be wrong, I will not. I cannot, in good academic conscience, be willing to nod my head alongside people who are wrong. When people in the atheist movement get a matter of religion wrong, I call them on it. When feminist activists get scientific matters wrong, Jen McCreight calls them on it. If one can get basic facts simply wrong, or one overextends a generalisation, it calls the entire movement into disrepute.

So. Citation fucking needed. Bring me your evidence, and then I will call you my ally again. But until you know, shut up.

In the song, Judas Iscariot rises and condemns Magdalene and Jesus for using the ‘fine ointment / brand new and expensive’ instead. Instead he advocates selling the stuff and using the ‘three hundred… or more’ pieces of silver they could have acquired to assistant the poor and starving in Roman-occupied Judea. Jesus’ condescending response is that there will always be poor folk, ‘pathetically struggling’ and that it’s better to appreciate the ‘fine things’ that one already has. Meanwhile in the background, Magdalene and the chorus (the wives of the apostles) chant:

APOSTLES’ WIVES

Everything’s alright, yes, everything’s alright, yes.

MARY MAGDALENE

Close your eyes, close your eyes, and relax

What a hideous piece of music.  Of course Jesus advocates that one should appreciate what one has. He is the one getting his feet massaged with oils! He is the leader of the motley crew, with all the power and authority. And, of course, he is the all-powerful Son of God, one third of the Trinity, with the power to overturn all the earth and make it into a paradise. His sneering contempt for the helpless poverty of the people he was sent to save sends paroxysms of anger and hatred down my spine.

Helpless only because he refuses to help them! There will always be poor of the world because the Almighty refuses to do anything to stop it. When one of his closest companions offers to help relieve some of the poor of their cruel lot, he refuses- why help anyone at all, when there are others? Why indeed, especially when one can spent such exorbitant wealth on oneself. Gah.

This is without even addressing the myopic bleating of the chorus lines. Close your eyes and relax! Pay no heed to those who are desperately trying to wake you up from your heartless selfishness. Everything’s all right. Just relax.

It perfectly encapsulates my issues with religious thinking.

Of course, Superstar isn’t exactly an accurate depiction of the New Testament. Yet even a straightforward reading of the texts of Jesus reveals him to be anything other than a powerful figure for social change. Rather than advocating the freedom of his people from Roman rule, he said to render unto Caesar what was his. Rather than compelling his followers to improve their lives and those of their neighbours in the here and now, he declared that he was a sword to set brother against brother.

What a lovely chap. I much prefer Judas.

Gosh. How did no-one tell me of HistoryTeachers, the best channel on the whole of the YouTubes? Dozens of tubes, covering topics ranging from prehistoric anthropology through the classical and medieval worlds up to the modern period. The formula might be simple (take pop song, make historical, profit) but damn if this isn’t relevant to my interests.

Okay, so the formula means that a few of the more interesting tidbits get sliced away to cram things into three-to-five minutes. She mispronounces scop (hint: it’s like ‘ship’) in the Beowulf video. The Crusades falls into traps about the Children’s Crusade and old-fashioned claims that it was about land-grabbing economics. These are the sorts of things that annoy me.

On the other hand, they acknowledgin’ the tradin’ inherent to goin’ a-vikin’.

The project is a great way to break folks into history-learnin’, and that is the point. You can open up the discussions about historical nuances and the more obscure facts after you get bored high-schoolers with their facetwitters and tumbooks to actually pay attention. Which these do. They are so much damn FUN, guys. SO MUCH. I wound up singing along to Charlemagne the first time I listened to it.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Mrs. B, the star of the videos, is gorgeous.

Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,
qui me ex versiculis meis putastis,
quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.
nam castum esse decet pium poetam
ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est;
qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem
si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici
et quod pruriat incitare possunt,
non dico pueris sed his pilosis
qui duras nequeunt movere lumbos.
vos, quod milia multa basiorum
legistis, male me marem putatis?
pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.

-Gaius Valerius Catullus

Catullus 16

I will sodomise and face-fuck you,
cocksucking Aurelius and poofter Fucius,
because you thought me, because of my little verses,
which are a bit sissy, indecent.
For a proper poet should be pure,
himself, but his poems don’t need to be;
indeed, they have salt and wit
if they’re sissified and indecent,
and only when they can arose an itch,
not, I say, in boys, but those hairy men
who cannot move their rough cocks.
Because you’ve read of my thousands of kisses,
you suppose I’m a soft man?
I will sodomise and then skull-fuck you.

-Catullus

A somewhat freer translation than usual, mostly because of the difficulties of some of the Latin vulgarities involved. Ah, Latin. What other language has such… powerfully vulgar words. People say that German sounds like one is permanently angry, but recite Catullus 16 at someone and see how much they like you afterwards.

The Wikipedia entry for the poem actually discusses the terminology used here quite well, so I encourage you to read that if you are curious about the precise meanings of the Latin. As so often is the case, translation really fails to capture the cleverness of Catullus’ plays upon words here. One cannot appreciate the chiasm in the English. Sigh.

It’s worth noting, speaking of translation, that this particular piece of work escaped full transference into modern English for many, many years. For some reason that I cannot fathom, Victorian academics preferred to skip over the first and final lines, as well as other sections in the middle. Philistines.

Of course, XVI is not just about the insults and clever use of Latin terms for inserting penises in orifices. The poem points out that a poet -or any artist, I suppose- is distinct from the work. I wish more people would realise that, actually. Especially on the internet.

The edition is that of Guy Lee, from The Poems of Catullus, the Oxford’s World Classics series, paperback edition, 1992. The translation, as always, is my own (as is the tendency to use both ‘v’ and ‘u’), although I did look at Lee’s as well as various others to get a feel for the more unusual words such as pathice and cinaede. For some reason the vocabulary for ‘catamite’ wasn’t really covered in depth during my semesters of Latin.

So harsh.

The Guardian reports that the Tolkien Estate are suing the American author Steve Hillard of Mirkwood: A Novel about JRR Tolkien because they never granted the author “permission to use the name and personality of JRR Tolkien in the novel, nor would they in any foreseeable circumstances.” Which seems like a pretty solid reason to sue someone, frankly.

Hillard and his lawyer spring to his defence by claiming that it’s awful unfair that they had to get permission to use Tolkien’s likeness as a key portion of the novel- after all, there are movies about World War Two which feature Churchill! No-one ever has to get permission for that, do they? I wonder if that is even true?

Unfortunately, it is a bit of a false comparison. Tolkien is a dead author, one whose Estate keeps a very firm (if generally quite fair) grip upon his literary legacy. Part of that literary legacy is the man himself, who, as an Oxford professor, wrote letters and lectures and other items which must be protected as intellectual property. I know nothing about intellectual property law, but I wager that the name itself bears such weight that it is trademarked.

Contrast Churchill- a powerful political figure, the war-time leader of a nation, a man who shaped history with his bare hands. Using anything Churchill wrote without the permission of his heirs (or the government, whomever has the rights to it), but I seriously doubt that the personage himself would have the same protections.

Tolkien, for all that he helped bring ‘fantasy’ into the modern world, and for all of his excellent academic credentials, simply is not an historical figure on the same scale. He is just some chap’s grandfather- and as someone who also had a grandfather, I’d be a mite annoyed if his likeness was a major supporting role in a novel. I might not sue over it, but my grandfather did not leave me a legacy which must be maintained against the ravening hordes.

Hillard seems to think that Tolkien would be on his side in this, saying that “His stories were unearthed from his research,” so therefore he “would be somewhat concerned about attempts to stifle works that borrow from history.” Considering how private a man Tolkein was, I find this declaration highly suspect. Tolkien’s historical (more like mythological) borrowings were from anglo-saxon history. The professor would certainly be on Hillard’s side if Hillard had published the book in the year 3012 CE; by then the Estate would be as defunct as the Scefingas, descended from Scyld.

My favourite part of this is what Hillard’s lawyer had to say:

His lawyer, Daniel Scardino, said: “Just imagine a world where you can’t talk about celebrities, where you can’t put celebrities in works of authorship, whether fiction, non-fiction, literary criticism or otherwise, where somehow their celebrity status insulates them from criticism … That’s the real concern.” The estate’s demands were “wholly without legal basis”, he added.

Actually, I can imagine such a world. What a wonderful world! None of those ridiculous magazines, newspapers which dispense news, television news broadcasters who talk about something I actually fucking care about. Oh, for such halcyon days to come again!

More seriously, the Tolkien Estate is not demanding that Hillard -or anyone else- cease talking about Tolkien, or putting him in works of non-fiction, literary criticism, or shielding the man from criticism in any way. That’s ridiculous. The man made a career out of academia; neither he nor his estate are demanding that you no longer cite his works in appropriate non-fiction contexts! For one thing, the field of Tolkien Studies would disappear overnight, and that’s never happening.

No, the Estate just wants Hillard to leave their literary grandfather out of his little, self-published, barely-selling, author-insert, piece of pulp.

Frankly, I wish the same.

Int én bec

Int én bec
ro·léic feit
do rind guip
glanbuidi
fo·ceird faíd
ós Loch Laíg
lon do craíb
charnbuidi.

The Blackbird of Belfast Lough

The little bird
lets a whistle go
from the point of a beak,
bright yellow:
throws out a cry
above Loch Laíg,
a blackbird from branch
(a cairn of yellow).

As a special treat, a translation into Modern Irish:

An t-éan beag
a lig fead
de rinn ghoib
ghlanbhuí;
caitheann [sé] faí
os Loch Laoi
lon de chraobh
charnbhuí.

-Nollag Ó Muiríle (2007)

This is a new first- a translation which I did not do in class, and is solely for the purposes of this here blog. Unfortunately, as I have not studied the poem formally, I don’t know the first damn thing about it. A quick google search reveals that it’s quite the popular little piece. The blackbird of the poem is the symbol of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, and in 2008 the Centre held an exhibition on the poem.

According to the Guardian’s article about the show, this lovely little poem was used in the 11th century to illustrate a metre called ‘snám súad’, about which I know… nothing. I suppose my Old Irish professor must have covered this during a period when I was (surprise!) ill. Although I appear to be ignorant about the poem in all the ways that matter, it is a charming little thing, isn’t it?

Everyone seems to translate Loch Laíg as some variant of ‘Belfast Lough’, but my knowledge of Irish geography fails me here. I know of the Lagan River, near Belfast- but no lake, or anything of the like. Loch can also mean ‘inlet’ I gather, so presumably the poem refers to that region of the river? I have decided to leave the blasted phrase untranslated out of sheer stubborness. On the other hand, charnbuidi is a charming little compound of the words for ‘cairn’ (carn) and ‘yellow’ (buide); the branch is somewhat literally a ‘cairn of yellow’. What a delightfully whimsical phrase! Gerard Murphy’s ‘yellow-heaped’ is quite lovely in it’s own way, but something about a brightly coloured cairn appeals to me.

For some other translations, take a look at that Guardian article I mentioned- and skim through the comments, too. At least one clever fellow has his own MnE translation. Similarly, pop over here (and the comments); or the webjournal archipelago over here.

Archipelago actually has a whole host of Irish poems, including everyone’s favourite Pangur Bán- and audio for several of them, which gives one a rare chance to hear poems such as that one about the scholar’s white cat recited in the Old Irish. I’ve yet to get the knack, having almost no ability to pronounce that wretchedly difficult tongue.

Would like to know what makes Borders think they can charge $80 for a hardcover novel (not signed or anything). No wonder they’ve gone into receivership.¹

Naturally, the owner of the book chain blames THE INTERNET (dun dun dun) for its woes. A simple glance at Amazon tells you that this opinion has its merits: the famous webstore has been selling books online for over fifteen years, and it’s estimated net income of 2010 was US$1.152 billion. That is a lot of money, and it is money that Borders Australia and Angus & Robertson lost.

Of course, Amazon and The Book Depository (my preferred online retailer) don’t have to deal with Australian publishing restrictions. Essentially, booksellers in Australia have to deal with ‘parallel import restrictions’. Good ol’ protectionism: a brick-and-mortar bookseller cannot source books from overseas authors on the cheap and sell them below fixed prices within this country.

This means that the international online book market is easily able to maintain prices well below those of their real-world Australian competitors. This harms even local online sellers such as Fishpond.com.au.

So for all the problems online stores pose to sellers such as Borders and Angus & Robertson, the Australian Government’s protection racket is a more significant problem. In late 2009, the Government decided to keep these restrictions despite the Productivity Commission ruling that “the ban was effectively a trade barrier, resulting in some readers paying up to 35 per cent more for their books than readers overseas.”

herp derp derp

I am somewhat saddened to see Angus & Robertson go out of business, as they are one of Australia’s great book sellers (since 1886). Much of my childhood was spent lurking in their stores, browsing through their SF sections, bored out of my tiny adolescent skull.

Except. Except that their selection was awful. Their prices tremendous. Their staff insulting. Did I mention their poor selection? Because it was pretty dreadful.

John Birmingham notes that, back in the day, Borders had a great backlist. Why, one could wander in and find novels that were unfindable anywhere else- a feature of which I availed myself of quite regularly, when I had the money (and boy, did one need the money). That stopped being the case at some point over the last decade. Angus & Robertson got even worse:

I’m not sure whether you’ve been into an A&R store the last couple of years. Jesus, talk about depressing. They became giant dump bins for failed remainder copies imported directly from the US. Shit books by no-name authors, poorly printed on cheap stock.

Well said, John. I carefully avoid A&R stores nowadays for this exact reason: they suck. It is actively depressing to walk into a bookstore and see precisely nothing that I have not either read before or would rather burn than see on my home shelf.²

Mister Birmingham and myself are not the only ones who see the deadly combination of sucky stores and pernicious prices as murdering the local book industry. Personally, I prefer to browse in a real bookshop- especially those with music and coffee and lovely wooden shelves and attractive young men and women with cheerful grins offering to help:

Derek Dryden, owner of a Newtown bookshop, Better Read Than Dead, said it is hard to compete with online outlets like the Book Depository offering titles at half the price he has to charge.

“When the difference is $25 you can’t really blame the customer for going for the cheaper option,” he said. “You can be as nice as you want and have as much ambience as you want but you still can’t be half price.”

Exactly. And Better Read than Dead is a pretty nice shop, too. I always try to stop in whenever wandering by. It is one of the joys of Newtown, all the bookstores scattered among her streets.

It has been pointed out it is all very well to talk about one’s fondness for local bookstores- quite another to decide to shop there. For all that indie bookshop owner Corrie Perkin claims that the lovely stores, witty staff and all that comes at a price- the simple fact is that I, like so many others, am poor.

I cannot afford to buy a novel at a lovely store with polished wooden floors and a handsome young man with a goatee and a PhD in literature discussing the flaws of the Beowulf movie with me³ when said novel comes at double the cost of getting it from thebookdepository.co.uk. I simply cannot.

Tim White of Books for Cooks describes the bookseller as “a bespoke retailer. The experience of being in an independent bookstore is a bit like saying, ‘I don’t want to buy a suit off the rack, I want one that is made to fit me.’ A good bookseller will match you with your book, and the book fits.”

This never happens. I suppose it would be nice if it did- but is it worth paying nearly double? I doubt it.

On the other hand, one can get this kind of service, along with the ambience, atmosphere, useful assistance and all that: at your local second-hand store.

Elizabeth’s, in Newtown and Sydney City, or Urchin Books in Marrickville, or Sappho Books in Glebe or- well, feel free to comment with your own local favourite.

Second hand bookstores are where you can get bespoke books. The classics with old, faded annotations in the corner; the favourite hardback with the spine cracked; yellowing pages and that wonderful, musty ancient-book-smell. Unique books for unique individuals.

Plus, super cheap.

Save getting brand new books for online shopping- cheap, reliable, straight to your door (or held at the post office because you live in a flat, dammit). For individual sales and support of local business, and to get that personalised book like no-one else has: head down to a second hand local.

Alternative hypothesis: I am just annoyed, bitter because Borders never stocks anything on Old Irish.

1: Best comment: “was it magical? did it produce some sort of dizzying high?”
2: I say this tongue firmly in cheek. Book burning is a vile crime, the last resort of the religious and the fascist.
3: Although if there are any such young men out there, do let me know. Or women. I’m just sayin’.

Is acher in gaíth innocht,
fu·fúasna fairggae findḟolt:
ni·ágor réimm mora minn
dond láechraid lainn úa Lothlind.

Detail from "The Viking Terror" by Denis Brown

Sharp the Wind

The wind is sharp tonight,
it tosses the white hare of the ocean:
I fear not the coursing of the clear sea
by the fierce warriors from Lothlainn.

[Just a short poem while I'm still trying to get back into the habit of things.]

I thought I had hardly any translation work for this one, but discovered to my joy that I had nearly the whole piece translated! Just a few words required checking, and we were good to go. As always with Old Irish texts, the edition is that of the teaching materials prepared by Professor A.A of my university; he has taught me everything I know of Old Irish.

This piece comes from a 9thC MS of Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae known as ‘The St. Gall Priscian’. You can find all sorts of interesting things about it here, in a thoroughly beautiful and accessible online edition. The wonders of the modern age! This really is the best time to be into medieval studies (or it would be if our field had any funding). Our anonymous poet scrawled this poem about his homeland in the margins of the text- presumably recalling the poem itself from home, as I do not believe the St. Gall monastery had any number of Viking raids.

For Vikings are, of course, ‘the fierce warriors from Lothlainn’ of the final line. My notes claim that ‘Lothlainn’ means something like ‘lake-country’, while the Irish Language Dictionary simply notes it as “The name of some part of Scandinavia; Norway; sometimes Denmark; …`used vaguely for Germany or Scandinavia’.” Either way, it is clear that the placename refers to Scandinavia in some way.

The poet does not fear these fierce chaps because it storms outside, making the seas impassable. Vikings rarely raided during storm seasons because it is a good way to drown. Later in the so-called ‘viking age’ Scandinavian raiders set up local bases in order to raid all year.

A final note on language: both fairggae (gen. s. of fairrge) and mora (gen. s. of muir) appear to mean ‘sea’ or ‘ocean’; my notes have both words as ‘sea’. Yet the Irish Language Dictionary notes that muir is the word used when referring to a specific sea (cf. Modern Irish Muir Éireann (Irish Sea), Mhuir Chaisp (Caspian Sea)). The stock phrase mora minn (here ‘clear sea’) also appears to be interpreted or refer specifically to the Irish Sea in some texts. As is my usual policy, I translate such terms literally rather than figuratively- but one could interpret the third line to mean ‘Irish Sea’ specifically rather than a general ‘clear sea’.