This Month at the Library: July's Staff Picks

The last year has been incredibly busy for me, since I've been working at the local library in a number of positions. I haven't had much time to sit down and write the kind of long articles I would like to (and after that insanely long review of The Green Knight you're probably thankful. But don't get comfortable, I fully intend to subject you to a deep dive into Jurassic Park and the writing of Michael Crichton in the future). This month also experienced the bane of every librarian's existence: bad eyesight, which significantly cut down on my reading and writing. However, I have new glasses and what's more, July was my birthday month (was, since I'm finishing this up in August).

At our library, every month there is a staff birthday, the said birthday staffers get to take over one of the displays with their recommendations. I thought it'd be fun to discuss my recommendations and my reasoning behind them-- what appealed to me about them and what may appeal to you. As explained by NoveList, a book database from EBSCO, "Appeal is a way of determining why people enjoy the books they read."[1] So, why did I enjoy these books, and why might you enjoy them? This list is in no particular order, and I was obviously limited to only books at our library, so consider this a list of what I might recommend if you were to stop me at work and ask me for a random suggestion.

Note: while we were allowed a potential 10 items, only a few would be chosen by the person in charge of the display due to space available. I've included the books that got on the shelves. I was also informed that I could not, in fact, display the CPR dummy from the Library of Things as one of my staff recommendations, so consider this my endorsement of our vinyl and polyurethane friends dedicated to CPR education.

The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

This book is, most simply put, an animal fable starring a rooster and his barnyard fighting against evil. At the beginning of creation, God sealed an evil creature called the Wyrm underground, but now it's out and it's up to Chaunticleer and the other animals to defeat this literal hell breaking loose. The main character, Chaunticleer, as well as his wife Pertelot, and the fox Lord Russell, all come from Chaucer's "Nun's Priest's Tale," and the book draws inspiration from John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and the Bible. The title refers to the Dun Cow, a legendary creature from English folklore, as well as sharing its name with a real (though unrelated) medieval Irish manuscript, Lebor na hUidre. Wangerin weaves a unique cosmology and musings on the nature of God, good, evil, and leadership into what at first seems like a standard Redwall or Watership Down -style animal novel. While it is based in part on Christian scripture and tradition, it doesn't beat the reader over their head and it can be enjoyed regardless of religious interest.

I recommend it to readers who: like allegory, comparative literature, Early Modern poetry, and warrior chickens. Must be in the mood for a story more intense than Narnia since it gets dark. Also be ready to take notes. 

Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi

The source for the 1985 OVA Vampire Hunter D, which has become a cult classic of both anime and horror in general, is the long-running novel series of the same name. The series is a mixture of horror, science fiction, and western-- taking place in the far future of our world, after the rise and fall of our vampire overlords. The eponymous D is a mysterious, miraculously powerful and handsome dhampir (half vampire, half human) who occasionally lends his vampire hunting services to the people of the Frontier. The worldbuilding is endlessly fascinating and expanded upon throughout the series-- and has plenty of Easter eggs for fans of horror, like "Summers Montague" and "T. Fisher" being authors of books on vampires (based on the real-life folklorist and apparent vampire believer Montague Summers, and Terence Fisher, the Hammer Horror film director). D himself is a great protagonist -- stoic, steadfast, and equipped with a deadly blade and a wise-cracking second face in his left hand. He's a gunslinger (or swordslinger?) who hunts monsters rather than outlaws.

I recommend it to readers who: enjoy vampire media like Dracula, Hellsing, and Castlevania, like sci-fi elements and futuristic westerns. Liking cool, stoic male protagonists is a plus. Must be looking for a fast-paced ride through the weird and the wonderful.

How to Bake an American Pie by Karma Wilson

It certainly has been... a few years here in my home country of the United States. While I won't discuss politics or current events, suffice it to say it can sometimes take some work to remember the things we're promised about America when we're young -- liberty, equality, unity. Wilson's picture book is a rhyming set of instructions for the baking process, guided by an adorable dog and cat team. Raúl Colón's soft, colored pencil-style artwork perfectly accompanies the text, with such ingredients as a "crust of fruited plains" and "spacious skies" (like in the song "America the Beautiful," get it?), as well as more intangible things like meekness and might. Perhaps we should review this recipe and adjust our baking as needed.

I recommend it to readers who: like baking, American history, and children's books, especially those with intricate rhymes and complex ideas. It will probably appeal to you if you have a likewise complex view of patriotism, or would just like to see a cat and dog baking.

Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Midnight In the Garden is a nonfiction-novel that not only is a cult classic for fans of true crime and Southern Gothic, it's been so influential in Savannah, Georgia, that it's known simply as The Book. The setup is simple: Berendt travels to Savannah to write a magazine feature on the work of historical preservationist Jim Williams – who, partway through the book, is accused of murder. This introduces the outsider narrator, and the audience, to the world of Southern Gothic – the houses are old, the characters are eccentric, everyone has secrets, Spanish moss hangs from the trees, and there’s hoodoo to be done. Savannah is portrayed vividly, so much that the Book is often attributed with more than doubling tourism to the city[2]. It’s the perfect mix of literary true crime and American regionalism and is a quick read (I read it in one sitting) that never the less will leave an impression.

I recommend it to readers who: like true crime that centers on one event, Southern Gothic and Southern Regional literature, and stories with unusual characters where the narrator is the straight man. Also recommended as a relatively short book that won't take too long to read.

Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn

Finally, we return to horror and myth with an anthology of Lafcadio Hearn's work on the kaidan, or strange stories. Hearn was an unusual character -- born on a Greek island, raised in Ireland, and spending time in the French East Indies and United States as a journalist before finally settling in Japan, he had a deep interest in folklore and ghost stories. This collection is a crash-course in the best of Japanese weird tales, including Hoichi the Earless; yuki-onna, the snow woman; and Botan-Doro, the Peony Lantern. These will be familiar to readers interested in Japanese culture, especially Hoichi the Earless, which is the basis for the 1965 film Kwaidan. Hearn's strengths lie in his eye for detail and his interest in the very nature of fear-- he takes a whole chapter to reflect on his own childhood experiences of the sensation. However, there is no explanation for why the cover of this book appears to have a decapitated Bobby Hill.

I recommend it to readers who: enjoy folklore, Japanese culture, and good old-fashioned ghost stories. The chapters can be read on their own, so it's good for when you just want a quick read.

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[1] “Appeal Terms,” EBSCO Help, accessed July 30, 2022, http://support.ebsco.com/help/?int=novp&ver=live&lang=en&feature_id=Appeal.

[2] W.C Wertz, “20 Years After Midnight: A Look Back,” South Magazine, October 7, 2017, https://www.southmag.com/20-years-after-midnight-a-look-back/.

Bliss and Blunder: A Review of The Green Knight (2021)

Arthurian literature is a tricky thing. While the general image of King Arthur, Merlin, and Camelot have been ingrained in the minds of most anglophone people, there is no real "canon" of authoritative versions of the legends in the way there is a Shakespearian canon. While the most familiar version of Arthur began with England's Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century, Welsh and Breton sources date even further back. After Geoffrey, French and English-language authors wrote their own adaptations, including Chrétien de Troyes, who introduced the Grail Quest, and most pertinent to this discussion, the anonymous author of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Each new version adds something to the legend, resulting in hundreds of different plots and variations on them, often contradictory characterizations, and no "correct" version of whatever story a modern bard will present. Even I, a certified The Book Was Better Than The Movie Snob, must admit that any adaptation of the Matter of Britain will be both its own thing and an addition to the ever-evolving state of Arthurian fiction.

Enter The Green Knight.

The Charles Translation Project Transcribed!

It's been a while since I've made an update. Work has kept me busy for the last few months, but I've had some time in between jobs to work on transcribing the text of BL Harley MS 682, the English poetry of Charles d'Orleans. It's been my goal for several years now to produce a modern English edition, and making my own transcription wasn't possible until the British Library got the manuscript digitized and up on their site. I've been working on the transcription in Transkribus (I talked a little about using Transkribus in this post last year) and thanks to some encouragement on Twitter, I've finally had the confidence to post it on my Charles website, Strangeness On the Ground. The site is a mess and some of the links pages are in need of a massive overhaul, but it's a start. I was paralyzed by it not being presentable and I didn't want to even start thinking about posting the transcription til it was complete and I had a nice site to put it on, but hey, the manuscript itself is messy and not ready for presentation 580 years later, so what am I worried about?

You can see the transcription in progress here: https://sites.google.com/site/charlesdukeoforleans/harley-682

How Easy is it to Read Chaucer?

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is often used as an example of how much the English language has changed in 600 years. If anyone knows any Middle English, it's probably the opening of the Tales, the first 18 lines of the General Prologue: "Whan that aprill with hise shoures soote...". English has changed a great deal since Chaucer's medieval tour bus pulled out of Southwark on its way to Canterbury, but how much has it changed? How difficult (or easy) is it to read Chaucer? 

The answer is subjective. However easy or difficult it is to read a text depends on the reader's knowledge of the language used. Despite this, I became interested in how Chaucer's English, dating from the last quarter of the 14th century, compared to 21st century English. I hypothesized that, turns of phrase, cultural references, and pronunciation differences aside, the closer a word was to modern spelling and meaning, the "easier" it would be for someone with no experience in Middle English to read. To test this, I took a simple section of the Canterbury Tales-- The first 18 lines of the General Prologue-- and compared it to modern English. While it is not representative of the Tales as a whole, it is the most well-known part and most commonly used as an example of what I wanted to investigate-- how different it is from English spoken today. I split words into three categories: 1) words that have the same meaning and spelling in Middle English as they do in modern English, 2) words that have Middle English spellings but are recognizable from modern English, and 3) words that are not recognizable with just a knowledge of modern English. This is the result of my study.

Part 1 - The Middle English

To get the Middle English, I decided to use my own transcription rather than one published by someone else. This is because published editions often have spelling changed to some degree, even if still in Middle English. I wanted to be sure that the Middle English I was comparing was as Middle English as possible. To do this, I used the "Ellesmere Chaucer" manuscript, Huntington MssEL 26 C 9 as my source. I transcribed the lines using a program called Transkribus.

Transcribing San Marino, Huntington MssEL 26 C f.1r on Transkribus

My completed transcription, with a few abbreviations filled out:

Whan that aprill with hise shoures soote

The droghte of march hath perced to the roote

And bathed euery veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour

Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in euery holt and heeth

The tendre croppes and the younge sonne

hath in the Ram his half cours yronne

And smale foweles maken melodye

That slepen al the nyght with open eye

So priketh hem nature in hir corages

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes

To ferne halwes kouthe in soundry londes

And specially from euery shires ende

Of engelond to caunterbury they wende

The hooly blissful martyr for to seke

That hem hath holpen whan þat they were seeke

Part 2 - Asking someone who knows nothing about Middle English

To get an idea of what could be understood by someone with no experience in Middle English, I showed the transcription to my mother, who is not familiar with Chaucer or his language. She marked what she could more or less understand and what she didn't understand at all.

Yellow highlights indicate what someone with no experience in Middle English understood, blue for what wasn't understood.

The only things marked were things understood and things not understood. Surprisingly, most of the language was understood to some degree. I didn't count things like whatever "hath in the Ram his half cours yronne" (GP.l.8) actually means in context (halfway through the sign of Ares), just that the reader could understand the words in general. The things that weren't understood were extreme variations in spelling (like "shoures," "seken," and "holpen") and words that have no modern English equivalent (e.g., "yronne," "ferne," and "kouthe").

This only answered part of my question. I had identified three kinds of words and this part only gave me two of them-- things understood and things not understood. What about the in-between of words that were similar to modern English but spelled differently? That led me to:

Part 3 - Breaking things down further

I took the transcription and looked back at my original three criteria-- words that were the same in Middle and modern English, words that had spelling variations but same or similar meanings, and words that were not recognizable from modern English at all. Applying these three criteria, I marked the section according to my own understanding of modern English.

Lines 1-18 with three categories of words

Words marked in yellow are spelled the same as their modern English counterparts, green indicates a Middle English word similar to a modern English word but spelled differently, and blue for words that are either spelled so differently from modern English (like "hem" for "them," "þat" for "that," and "seeke" for "sick") that they are unrecognizable or have no modern English equivalent (like "halwes" and "eek").

There are 128 words in total in the first 18 lines of the General Prologue, and 90 unique words (counting spelling variations, like "his" and "hise"). Of these 90 unique words, 33 were the same as modern English, 42 were similar but with variations in spelling, and 15 were unrecognizable.

A chart representing the distribution of unique words in lines 1-18 of the General Prologue

I was surprised to find that the majority of unique words were similar to modern English, just with spelling variations (like "Caunterbury" for "Canterbury" and "droghte" for "drought"). I was also surprised to find that only a small portion of this text was completely unrecognizable. 

What's changed the most is minor spelling and pronunciation. The vocabulary in the first 18 lines of the Tales is largely still understandable in the modern day, with only 15 unique words-- 16 in total-- not having a clear modern equivalent-- and that's out of a total of 128 words. 

The Persnickety Historian Vs. The History Channel

Ah yes, our old friend. The "History Channel."

At one point, I seem to remember them doing stuff on history. I also remember TLC doing educational programming. Television is a vast wasteland of entertainment and education-- call it edutainment-- and . The most infamous example of this, at least in the States, is History Channel. At one point it seemed so saturated with WWII it was jokingly called "The Hitler Channel" and today it's the home of the 100% most incredibly accurate and trustworthy show on television, Ancient Aliens. So it's unsurprising that there is a serious lack of credibility and accountability in anything they say at this point. I just didn't expect to find it in an article about one of my favorite historical figures.
A recent interest (more accurately, obsession) of mine is the 15th century French poet Charles d'Orleans, who briefly appears in Henry V and was far more interesting than Shakespeare let on. He was the nephew of Charles VI, King of France, and became duke at 13 when his father was brutally murdered. He was 21 at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 and was captured and taken to England, where he was held for 25 years. In his copious amounts of free time, Charles learned English and wrote poetry in it as well as French. His life was fraught with heartache, including the deaths of his father in 1407 and mother in 1408, the death in childbirth of his first wife, being part of a civil war, separation from his daughter, everything possible went wrong for him, but I'll talk more about his life as a whole in the rest of this article.

For background, Charles is attributed with writing the first Valentine poem, usually attributed to his years in captivity with his second wife, Bonne d'Armagnac as the recipient. It's pretty miserable as Valentines Day poetry goes.

I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine,
Since for me you were born too late,
And I for you was born too soon.
God forgives him who has estranged
Me from you for the whole year.
I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine. 

Well might I have suspected
That such a destiny,
Thus would have happened this day,
How much that Love would have commanded.
I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine. (1)

Now that I've talked a little about Charles in general, what's this got to do with the History Channel? An article that somehow managed to get almost everything wrong. History.com, the website of History Channel ran an article this Valentine's Day about Charles and this poem. I honestly have no idea how you can pack so many mistakes into one article, it's simultaneously disappointing and impressive. Here we go.

[Link to article]

1. “As the nephew of King Charles VI of France, also known as Charles the Mad (who was believed to be schizophrenic), he was caught in the crossfire between his father, Louis I, who presided over the House of Orléans, and his uncle’s family, which oversaw the House of Burgundy, in their fight for control of France.” (2)

— Charles VI and Louis I were the nephews of Philip I of Burgundy (brother of their father Charles V). Philip’s son John the Fearless was Louis’s first cousin and therefore Charles d'Orleans’s first cousin once removed. The duchy of Burgundy was more like an independent state at that time, its ruling family being part of the Valois family (the dynasty then ruling France, so Charles VI was Charles of Valois) but not of the royal primogenitor line, rather a cousin branch, the House of Valois-Burgundy. For these reasons Charles VI had no control over Burgundy. However, the Duke of Burgundy John the Fearless (the king’s first cousin) was regent for the king during periods of his illness, during which time he and Louis jockeyed for power through control over the king.
Note also the use of "was believed to be schizophrenic," which is grammatically anachronistic. That indicates people thought that in his own time.

2. “Charles and his brothers vowed revenge on their first cousin John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy, whom they accused of murdering their father in a power grab, intensifying the family civil war.”

— The civil war began after Louis’s assassination in 1407 (the article does not state the year) and as stated above, John the Fearless was Charles’s first cousin once removed. They also didn't even have to make the accusation, as Burgundy confessed to ordering Louis's death soon after. Despite the confession and the brutal nature of the murder and the fact it was the King's brother who'd been killed, Charles and his family had to forgive Burgundy, who defended his actions as killing a tyrant.

3. “It also put the young duke in his father-in-law’s Armagnac camp in the years-long French civil war between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians.”

— The Orleanist party had no leader after Louis’s death, until Bernard VII took control after Charles and Bonne were married. The party was renamed after Armagnac, so in reality Armagnac technically joined Charles’s side.

 4. “As battle after battle dragged on between the rival factions, Charles was captured and imprisoned by the Burgundians in 1415. While held prisoner in the Tower of London, he penned a poem to his wife the same year that he was captured at the Battle of Agincourt.”

— Charles was not taken prisoner by the Burgundians, he was captured by the English at the Battle of Agincourt as stated, which is why he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was imprisoned and kept imprisoned for years by King Henry V, most likely since he would be seen as a major threat to Henry's already shaky claim to the French throne.

5. “Beyond the Valentine he sent to Isabella, Charles wrote hundreds of other poems while in prison—many about love and nobility.” 

 — The recipient was Bonne d'Armagnac, his second wife. In all, Charles would be married three times: first to Isabelle d'Valois, daughter of the King (therefore Charles's cousin) and widow of King Richard II of England; second to Bonne d'Armagnac, daughter of the new head of the party Bernard VII Armagnac; and finally to Marie de Cleves in part of the end of the Burgundian-Armagnac Civil War (interestingly, she was the grandaughter of Burgundy. Yes, that Burgundy.). He and Marie would have three children, including the future King Louis XII of France.

There are also multiple omissions of things that'd be good to note, like who Isabelle was first married to, Richard II; the years of some of these events, and most disappointingly that Charles's mother was named Valentine! The most annoying omission is any form of bibliography. There are no citations, no further reading. This undermines any credibility and leaves the reader stranded. All of this information can be found in the encyclopedia.

If you're interested in Charles and his times and want a well-researched historical novel to get lost in, check out Hella S. Haasse's In a Dark Wood Wandering. I highly recommend it.

(If anything is wrong here, please contact me so I can correct it).

1“A Farewell to Love,” Wikisource, last modified November 2, 2016, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:A_Farewell_to_Love.

2“Thad Morgan, History’s Oldest-Known Valentine Was Written in Prison,” History Channel, last modified February 14, 2018, https://www.history.com/news/historys-oldest-known-valentine-was-written-in-prison.

Sonnet 116 - I Want to Know What Love Is

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

  Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 is part of the Fair Youth sequence addressed to an anonymous young man. This sonnet does not mention its recipient, instead focusing on a general theme of the nature of love. This theme is divided into four themes, one for each quatrain and the couplet. Quatrain 1 is a list of things love will not do, quatrain 2 uses nautical imagery to describe the constancy of love, and quatrain 3 is on the passage of time. The couplet finishes the sonnet with a challenge to the reader to prove the author wrong in his assessment. All of these reticulate and refer back to each other.
Quatrain 1 begins this study of what love is with a list of the things that should not happen with love. “Let me not the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” (116.1-2) is a direct reference to legal barriers to marriage but can be taken in a more general sense to mean an obstacle. “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” (116.2-3), meaning love does not try to change the perceived faults of the person who is loved. If it does, then it is not love. It also does not bend “with the remover to remove.” The other will still be loved through hardship and will not be changed by the remover, time (116.4). Time’s role in love will be expanded upon in quatrain 3.

 Quatrain 2’s description of love’s characteristics employs nautical imagery. It is “an ever-fixed mark” (116.5), bringing to mind a landmark such as a lighthouse or some other stationary landmark to guide sailors even during storms. Likewise, love is constant, even in the face of figurative “tempests” (116.6), and like the stars used to navigate, love is the “start to every wand’ring bark. It can be measured, like the stars, but its true value is “unknown” (116.7-8).

 Quatrain 3 expands upon love against the “remover” time as mentioned in line 4. “Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come” (116.9-10). The physical world, especially the human body is under the control of time, but as said in the first quatrain love does not “bend” or change with time. The “compass” in line 10 is both a description of the scythe carried by Time personified and a callback to the nautical navigational imagery of the previous quatrain. Another callback occurs in line 11, “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks” (116.11)  returning to lines 2 and 3 in the first quatrain, “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” (116.2-3). Ultimately, love lasts to “the edge of doom”-- doomsday, or the end of time (116.12).

 The ending couplet is a challenge to the reader to in turn challenge the poet. “If this be error and upon me proved / I never write, nor no man ever loved” (116.13-14). If he is wrong in his description of love, then he has never written anything and love is not real, just as he said in lines 1 and 2 to not let him “admit impediments” to the “marriage of true minds.” His claim that if he is in error he has never written is bold, especially considering the previous 115 sonnets he has just written to a fair youth.