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

Anne and Louis: Rulers and Lovers - A Review

I received a free ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

Title: Anne and Louis: Rulers and Lovers
Series: Anne of Brittany, book 3
Author: Rozsa Gaston
Rating: 2/5

I intended to have this read and reviewed much earlier in the year. Unfortunately everything that's happened in the last few months, coupled with school and work has put me very behind in reading and reviewing.

This book, like its predecessors Anne and Charles and Anne and Louis: Passion and Politics in Early Renaissance France: The First Years of Anne of Brittany's Marriage to Louis XII, follows the life of Anne of Brittany, the last fully independent Duke of Brittany. Rulers and Lovers begins in 1501, with the proceedings for the engagement of Claude of France and Charles of Luxembourg and ends, leaving us in suspense, with Anne pregnant in January 1508. It focuses on Anne's marriage to Louis XII of France, their daughter Claude, and Anne's struggles to secure the independence of her people of Brittany.

This book frustrated me a great deal. It has a great deal of potential, and there were several parts I enjoyed-- Anne's tour of her duchy was done well and I especially liked the conversation between her and Philippe de Montauban about the bond between father and daughter-- what she is frustrated with, Claude's adoration of her father, is the same thing she had for her own father Francis. I also liked the acknowledgement of the heartbreak of loss- Anne losing so many babies and Louis seeing his men die in combat. Louis seeing the similarities and differences of the two was moving-- it made me think how both have to suffer and see people they love be lost for them to do their duties. Little Claude was adorable and I accept her as my queen already. If I were a romance fan (kind of the target audience, people who like historical romance), I probably would have enjoyed Anne and Louis's relationship.
Despite these strengths, there was a great deal in it that disappointed me and prevents me from rating it higher-- which I really wanted to do. I had two main issues with this book.

First, the exposition. Exposition is admittedly difficult to avoid when writing historical fiction, and in fact impossible when writing historical fiction that covers long periods of time. The first few chapters were strong from a narrative standpoint and I hoped that would continue throughout the book, and it did intermittently, but so much of it was expository, especially Louis's campaigns in Italy. I got the feeling that I was reading an essay on the war, not a novel (or I was having quarantine-induced flashbacks to when I taught history, that may also be a possibility). My mind wandered frequently during these sections, and I would have enjoyed more of them had there been actual scenes of the wars-- battles, Louis planning, anything more than just telling me where the troops moved. However, these parts are, as far as I know, accurate. I confess I don't know a lot about Louis XII, I know far more about his father, but nothing seemed hugely amiss. This holds true for the whole book, and the ones before it. Gaston studied history and she does a great job of getting the facts down, which is far more than I can say for most historical novels I've read. As I'm a historian by trade, I read a lot of nonfictional treatments of things like these, and I would have enjoyed a break from that and had more story to go with the history.

The other issue, and probably the most serious, was Anne herself. I found myself several times asking myself "Why do I like Anne again?" which is a terrifying question. Gaston is kind to Anne, and one of the overarching themes of her writing is, as her biography says, is "women getting what they want out of life." Anne had a very rough life, and to her credit Gaston does not make it worse, and she seeks to find happy moments for the queen. However, while she's portrayed positively, I didn't enjoy Anne as a character. The narration tells us that she's feisty and smart, but most of that comes out just with her arguing with Louis. She rarely actually works with Louis, since the central issues are his campaigns in Italy (which she thinks are stupid) and the question of Claude's betrothal to Charles of Luxembourg or Francis the Dauphin, on which they disagree to say the least. I think this missed out on what makes them an interesting paring historically-- they worked well together, despite their disagreements about Claude's future, and I had looked forward to seeing that in story form. Anne also never seems to take any part in ruling, all she does is order works of art made, make matches for her cordelières, and try to make babies. Historically she served as regent for Louis twice when he was away at war or sick, but that never comes into the story. She also doesn't do any administrative work for Brittany, except fight against Claude being married into France. I forgot what it was that made Anne such a fascinating figure and was sorely disappointed with that part.

There were parts I enjoyed, as I say above, and Gaston has a strong footing in the history of the era, which as a historian I greatly appreciate. You can also tell she very much cares about Anne and wants to tell her story, which is also very important in historical fiction. This book is perhaps best suited to readers who just want an overview of the era without having to read a 700 page nonfiction book, and readers looking for a light romance with a historical setting. My impressions of Anne in this book will probably be completely different than those of the next person to read it. I hope Gaston continues to write about this era, each successive book in the series has improved on the last. This book as a whole just didn't work for me.

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. 

Don't Let the Beasties Escape This Book! - A Review

I received a free digital ARC of this book from NetGalley.com in exchange for a fair review.

Title: Don't Let the Beasties Escape This Book! 
Author: Julie Berry
Illustrator: April Lee
Rating: 5/5

This is a delightful book for anyone who likes manuscripts, beasts both real and fantastic, and stories about kids with overactive imaginations. Godfrey (or, as he sees himself, SIR Godfrey) is a medieval boy who would rather look at the bestiary in production for the lady of the castle than do his chores, and much like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, he imagines the creatures described in the bestiary helping him.

The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous, in part based on manuscripts in an exhibit at the Getty, and somehow April Lee manages to draw in a modern style that feels medieval. The one drawback of having to read this on my computer is that it's meant to be read as a physical book, with illustrations often spanning a two-page spread, which is frustrating when you have to zoom in to read the text. This is no fault of the book or its creators, just a comment that you should get a physical copy (I have no idea if it will be released digitally) because that's the best way to read something like this. Like the bestiaries they replicate, the pictures are colorful and lively, with something fun happening even in the smallest details.

The book ends with a historical note that puts bestiaries, and what medieval people got from them, into context-- most people had no real way of knowing what was out in the world far away, and many of the creatures were actually believable-- compared to a rhino, a unicorn doesn't sound all that strange. I really like this. There's a major misconception in our popular culture that people in the Middle Ages were stupid and believed ridiculous things like unicorns, dog-headed people, that the Earth is flat (which they didn't, by the way). The truth is they weren't stupid, they just didn't have the cumulative knowledge we have today, and many things medieval people believed, or at least what they presented as some level of factual, aren't really that strange considering the information they had. Bestiaries are a good example of this, and this book portrays that well. It also includes a section of descriptions and images of creatures from actual bestiaries, which is another good historical note.

This is definitely a book I hope to someday have a physical copy of to read to my young cousins in the hopes that they'll become medievalists. Or at least in the hopes they'll like it.