Thursday, February 21, 2008

Seeking OE reader recommendations

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I've finally become wholly exasperated by the blank verse translations of my elderly edition of OE poetry. Can anyone recommend a really good collection? Bilingual would be best. I need all the usual suspects--Widsith, The Ruins, Wanderer, Fight at Finnsburgh etc., plus a few riddles--and the more I come to understand of OE, the more I realise what I have really won't do. In fact, I think it deserves a place in the dustbin...

Monday, February 18, 2008

place names/etymology

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I need to decide what to call a fortified camp south of Carlisle, that is, what the people of Rheged in the early 7th C might have called it. It's known these days as Brougham; the Romans called it Brocavum (it was the base of Danubian numerii) but now we're a few centuries on. I know nothing of Brittonic etymology. However (because, y'know, I'm always willing to take a guess), going by the change of Eboracum to Ebrauc, perhaps Brauc or Broauc might not be too far off the mark. Thoughts?

Imagery

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I spent a while yesterday morning sitting on a bench overlooking Puget Sound and was struck by how, although the water looked the same as it must have looked for thousands of years, the sky was very different. It was full of contrails--not just the sword-like slash of a just-cut trail, but also the gauzy cloud that such trails turn into. How long is it since I saw a trailless sky? Probably six or seven years (Sept 12th, 2001). It would be easy to fall into the unconscious trap of describing sky in terms of the twenty-first century.

But I'm writing about the seventh century. Skies were different, then. The smell of the air was different: no deodorant, no plumbing, no clean gas heat; no petroleum-based combustion engines, no Indian or Thai spices (not in the time and place I'm thinking of). No aniline dyes. No plastics. Lots of dung and disease. Lots of wet wool. Lots of delicately-scented weld, and the aromas of malting and oasting barley. Peat smoke. Baking bread. Bad teeth. Freshly tanned leather. Dogs. Horses. Unwashed hair.

And then there's the imagery. People can't pop up from behind a wall like balloons. They would have to pop up like, hmmn, like laundry with the air trapped in it pops from the water, like a piece of wood from a ship breaking up on the bottom of the sea. A horrible sound couldn't be like fingernails on a blackboard, it would be, well, uh, ask me later.

I love this part of the writing discovery process. It's not just about politics, or gender roles, or character or story, it's about building a world. I'm living in another time and country, and I don't need to pack.

Friday, February 8, 2008

Slavery, language, cultural annihilation

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After a careful reading of Richard Coates' Invisible Britons (thanks, Marisa) I was pondering upon slavery, language, and cultural annihilation and, frankly, getting nowhere at the speed of light. And then in the Economist this week, I encountered an article about the evolution of language that ended (in typical Economist style): "As Noah Webster, the compiler of the first American dictionary, put it: “as an independent nation, our honor [sic] requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.” In other words, if you don't speak proper, you ain't one of us." It was my way in.

Britons, I've decided, disappeared because their culture disappeared. Their culture disappeared because their language disappeared. Their language disappeared because they were slaves. Speaking Brittonic was forbidden or at least frowned upon by those with the power over life and death and to grant favour. If you wanted to belong/get fed/escape punishment/better yourself, you learnt Anglisc and used it. As those in power did not use a written language, no records were kept of interesting snippets of legends or songs. Brittonic was obliterated, just as in the twentieth century, with the advent of radio and television, many UK dialects and accents began to wither away. In the twentieth centure, if you didn't speak with something approaching the BBC accent (received pronunciation), you weren't quite the thing. You didn't belong.

I grew up in the north of England, surrounded by sturdy Yorkshire accents. My father, though, was from London, so at home I grew up using a long 'a', saying 'baath' and 'fahst' and 'grahs'. When I got to school, those around me assumed I was stuck up and trying to act better than they were because they used a short 'a'. 'Oooh,' they said, 'Miss hoity-toity.' They didn't like my being better than them--which is what they believed, simply because of the accent--but looking back it's clear I was treated differently because of it. (Sometimes this was an advantage, sometimes it really, really wasn't.) But my accent marked me. It's powerful stuff.

Coates' thesis makes complete sense to me. Brittonic died because it was not only dangerous to speak it but also painfully uncool. I'm going to have to go back to beginning of my draft and reimagine a lot. But now at least I have a way to approach the slavery issue. All very exciting.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Tribal Hidage

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Today I started flipping through Barbara Yorke's Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England and I came across her discussion of the Tribal Hidage which, she asserts, was most likely put together for use by Mercia as a guide to expected tribute payments. The thing is, this doesn't make sense to me. Why would a king of Mercia want to list his own territory in terms of tribute? The way I see it, tributary payments of subject peoples would have been the responsibility of their king. So a king would only list the kingdoms, or peoples, of kings who 'owed' him. Or have I got the wrong end of the stick altogether? This is not making sense to me...

So if this wasn't drawn up by and for Mercians, was it a Northumbrian document? (And are some of the hidage amounts, e.g. only 600 for Elmet, indicative more of the friendliness of the overlord towards those territories than of the size/ability to pay of same? If so, why such a whopping amount for Kent?)

And if Barbara Yorke is wrong about this (and of course I'm quite prepared to be corrected in this regard), what else in her fab book (and, apart from the hidage thing, it is seriously fabulous--I wish I'd found it sooner) should I be wary about?