mike's web log

This week I start an Old English class in which we begin our reading of Beowulf. I believe that the arc for most (all?) Old English courses is to start with the basics, work one's way through shorter pieces, and culminate with reading the big B.

This week's assignment is to read the first 79 lines, in which Hrothgar has the great hall Heorot built. (Soon, as many of us know, it will be visited by Grendel ...)

I had to think for a bit about whether I even wanted to take this Beowulf class. Back in 1980, I took the Old English series at the University of Washington. That consisted of two parts: part 1 was grammar and shorter readings, part 2 was Beowulf, one semester (quarter?) each. As I've been taking OE classes again over the last couple of years, I marvel at how rapidly we must have worked our way through the readings. I absolutely could not keep that pace up now in my dotage.

The experience back in the day also must have traumatized me a little, because ever since I restarted Old English classes, I've been stressed about the prospect of revisiting Beowulf. I expressed this hesitancy to our instructor, who has assured us multiple times that the readings we've done so far — including "The Battle of Maldon", "The Wanderer", "The Seafarer", and the horrible (to me) "Andreas" poem — have prepared us well for tackling Beowulf.

But I also had to stop and think about a question that several people have asked me: why am I taking Old English classes at all? The answer at first was easy — because it's fun! I've had enough German to recognize and be delighted by the resemblance between OE and German, not to mention the joy of finding ancestral and fossil words of modern English.[1]

The text for our first year of OE was written by our instructor: a book about Osweald the Bear, a talking bear who has adventures in Anglo-Saxon England at a particularly interesting time in history. The text starts simple and becomes increasingly sophisticated, at times including snippets of "real" OE literature. It was a blast to read and discuss, with all of us keenly invested in what happens to Osweald and his friends.

After that we turned to existing literature, including bits from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, gospel translations, and various poems. These were more challenging, of course. That's especially true for the poems, which are syntactically complex — the subject of a sentence might be several lines after the verb and object(s), for example.

Plus poems rely on a broad vocabulary. As I heard somewhere, the alliteration used in Old English poems means poets needed a selection of synonyms that all started with different sounds. Thus, for example, the poem about the battle of Maldon has about two dozen words for "warrior", basically.[2] Until one has mastered all of this vocab (not so far, me), it can be a bit of a slog to stop and look up yet another unfamiliar word.

As the readings got harder and it took longer to get through them, I had to ask myself again whether I was having fun — or enough fun to continue. Did I actually want to read Beowulf?

I know from talking to some of the other students that many of them came to Old English through Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. There are discussions sometimes in class about how Tolkien borrowed elements of Old English literature for his works. But I'm not a Tolkien guy (never read any of the books), so I do not get the pleasure of appreciating how the literature we're reading in class was echoed in LOTR.[3]

The joy of discovering correspondences and fossil vocabulary has faded a bit as I've gotten more used to Old English. I do still find pleasing word bits, though, like this from "The Wanderer":

Gemon hē selesecgas ond sincþege,
hū hine on geoguðe his goldwine
wenede tō wiste.

He remembered the hall warriors and treasure-receiving
How in his youth his gold-friend [lord]
Accustomed him to feasting.

... and learning that wenian ("accustom") is the source of our verb to wean [from].

But an unanticipated joy (unanticipated by me, that is) is that I have come to like some of the poetry a great deal. I've discovered a fondness for the fatalistic Saxon outlook on life, as well as for their pithy and wry observations. For example, the narrator of "The Wanderer", a poem in the persona of someone treading the paths of exile, makes this relatable observation:

… ne mæg weorþan wīs wer, ǣr hē āge
wintra dǣl in woruldrīce.

A man cannot become wise before he's had a share of winters in this world.

And there's this ubi sunt lamentation from later in the poem:

Hwǣr cwōm mearg? Hwǣr cwōm mago? Hwǣr cwōm māþþumgyfa?
Hwǣr cwōm symbla gesetu? Hwǣr sindon seledrēamas?

What's become of the horse?
What's become of the young warrior?
What's become of the treasure-giver?
What's become of the seats at the feast?
Where are the hall-joys?[4]

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed "The Battle of Maldon", a poem about how a troop of Saxon militia lost a battle against marauding Vikings, apparently recording a real incident. The poem is practically cinematic; you could make a movie of it today and it would hit all the tropes we're used to — the old commander rallying his inexperienced troops; the young man who sends away his beloved hunting falcon and turns to join the ranks; the ravens circling in anticipation; the old warrior who gets wounded but kills his attacker; the cowardly brothers who turn and run; the sad ends of individual courageous fighters.

And now I've started Beowulf again. The poem begins with a history of Scyld Scefing, a foundling who …

... sceaþena þrēatum,
monegum mǣgþum, meodosetla oftēah,
egsode eorlas …
oð þæt him ǣghwylc þāra ymbsittendra
ofer hronrāde hȳran scolde
gomban gyldan

... from troops of enemies,
from many nations, captured their mead-benches,
(and) terrified rulers …
until him each of the surrounding nations
over the seas [whale-road] had to obey
(and) to yield tribute

To which the poet adds this conclusion:

þæt wæs gōd cyning

That was a good king!

You can imagine a hall full of Saxons having a good whoop about that.

I don't know if I'll make it through all 3182 lines of the poem, but it seems like it has a promising start.

__________

[1] One person asked why I didn't instead study a "practical" language.

[2] A selection of words for "warrior": bana, beorn, ceorl, cniht, dreng, fēond, fǣr-sceaþa, gārberend, gesīþ, gest, gram, gūþ-rinc, hæleþ, hǣþen, heorð-genēat, hyse, rinc, sǣman, scealc, sceaþa, secg, þegn, weard, wer, wīga, wīgend, wine. Observe how many different sounds these start with, very handy for the poet. Of course, these terms all have shades of meaning, but all of the senses revolve around the concept of "warrior".

[3] I’m not disdaining this, just noting that it's a facet of OE studies that I cannot participate in.

[4] Those familiar with 1950s folk music might, like me, be reminded of Where Have All the Flowers Gone? by Pete Seeger.

This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. A car mechanics’ trade association reports that repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.”

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options.

[...]

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions.

[...]

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid.

Only about 230 plays survive from the period of Shakespeare’s life, of which the First Folio represents some 15 percent, so Heminges and Condell saved for the world not only half the plays of William Shakespeare, but an appreciable portion of all Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

To aid recollection, they had much valuable material to work with—-prompt books, foul papers (as rough drafts or original copies were known) in Shakespeare’s own hand, and the company’s own fair copies.

In fact, the First Folio was a decidedly erratic piece of work.

Even to an inexpert eye its typographical curiosities are striking. Stray words appear in odd places—-a large and eminently superfluous "THE" stands near the bottom of page 38, for instance—-page numbering is wildly inconsistent, and there are many notable misprints. In one section, pages 81 and 82 appear twice, but pages 77-78, 101-108, and 157-256 don’t appear at all. In Much Ado About Nothing the lines of Dogberry and Verges abrupty cease being prefixed by the characters’ names and instead become prefixed by "Will" and "Richard," the names of the actors who took the parts in the original production.

The plays are sometimes divided into acts and scenes but sometimes not; in Hamlet the practice of scene division is abaondoned halfway through. Character lists are sometimes at the front of plays, sometimes at the back, and sometimes missing altogether. Stage directions are sometimes comprehensive and at other times almost entirely absent. A crucial line of dialog in King Lear is preceded by the abbreviated character name "Cor.," but it is impossible to know whether "Cor." refers to Cornwall or Cordelia. Either one works, but each gives a differ shading to the play. The issue has troubled directors ever since.

Mowing turfgrass quite literally cuts off the option of sexual reproduction. From the gardener’s perspective, the result is a denser, thicker mat of green. From the grasses’ point of view, the result is a perpetual state of vegetable adolescence. With every successive trim, the plants are forcibly rejuvenated.

[...] repeated applications of synthetic fertilizer could counteract turfgrasses’ seasonal cycle by, in effect, tricking the plants into putting out new growth. Sensing a potential bonanza, lawn-care companies began marketing the idea of an ever-green green. The Scotts Company recommended that customers apply its fertilizer, Turf Builder, no fewer than five times a year.

With the advent of herbicides, in the nineteen-forties, still tighter control became possible. The new herbicides allowed gardeners to kill off plants that they didn’t care for with a single spraying. One of the most popular herbicides was—and continues to be—2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, or 2,4-D, as it is commonly known, a major ingredient in Agent Orange. Regrettably, 2,4-D killed not only dandelions but also plants that were beneficial to lawns, like nitrogen-fixing clover.

To cover up this loss, any plant that the chemical eradicated was redefined as an enemy. “Once considered the ultimate in fine turf, a clover lawn is looked upon today by most authorities as not much better than a weed patch” is how one guidebook explained the change.

The greener, purer lawns that the chemical treatments made possible were, as monocultures, more vulnerable to pests. The answer to this chemically induced problem was to apply more chemicals. [...] the first pesticide popularly spread on lawns was lead arsenate. Next in line were DDT and chlordane. Once they were shown to be toxic, pesticides like diazinon and chlorpyrifos. The insecticide carbaryl, which is marketed under the trade name Sevin, is still broadly applied to lawns; it is toxic to tadpoles, salamanders, and honeybees. In “American Green” (2006), Ted Steinberg, compares the lawn to “a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs.”

Rain and irrigation carry synthetic fertilizers into streams and lakes, where the excess nutrients contribute to algae blooms that, in turn, produce aquatic “dead zones.” A 2002 report found traces of thirty-seven pesticides in streams feeding into the Croton River Watershed. A few years ago, Toronto banned the use of virtually all lawn pesticides and herbicides, including 2,4-D and carbaryl, on the ground that they pose a health risk, especially to children.

Nucleated or not, cells consist of three defining ingredients, and it so happens that one type of bioentity that fulfills the criteria is the egg. An egg has an outer membrane, a viscous cytoplasm that in the edible egg we call the yolk, and a set of genes —only half the number of genes needed to spawn an offspring, and half the number of genes found in other body cells of the egg bearer, but a gene set nonetheless. An egg, then, before it merges its DNA with a gene set supplied by a sperm and starts developing into an embryo, is a single cell, and that goes for the egg you can see well enough to scramble. Yes, believe it or not, an unfertilized chicken egg of the kind you buy at the grocery store is a single cell, although strictly speaking it’s the cheery, marmalade-colored yolk of the egg that is bounded by the plasma membrane and thus qualifies as the cell proper. The translucent, whippable, protein-rich "egg white," the hard outer shell of calcium chloride, and the thin, slippery membrane lining the shell are all bonus coats added on later, as the yolk makes its way down the mother’s cloaca. Still, chicken yolks are no joke, and they keep getting ever more jumbo even as we fret over the wisdom of eating any eggs at all.

The largest egg in the world, and thus the largest cell in the world, is the ostrich egg, which measures about eight by five inches and weighs three pounds with this extracellular shell, two pounds without. (Interestingly, the ostrich egg is also the smallest bird egg relative to the size of its mother, amounting to only 1 percent of the female ostrich’s body mass. The she-birds most deserving of every mother’s pity are the kiwis and hummingbirds, which lay eggs that are 25 percent as big as they are—the equivalent of a woman giving birth to a thirty-pound baby.)

I know a number of people who own or rent second homes, and many of those people eventually reach a point where getting away becomes something they yearn to get away from. Often that happens when their kids have grown old enough to formulate weekend plans of their own. It also happens when the thrill of mere novelty has faded—as always happens, since novelty is evanescent by definition. Fifteen years ago, some neighbors of ours bought a cabin in the mountains in another state. They visited faithfully, for a while. Then, gradually, the commute became irksome. Do we have to go to our wonderful, expensive place in the mountains again? their kids would whine. Summers were worse, because then the kids wanted to stay home, near their friends, and the parents were left to brood about wasted property taxes and mortgage payments. After a few years of increasingly reluctant visits, our neighbors sold their cabin to someone else, and good riddance.

Experiencing a therapeutic change of scene requires less actual travel than most people generally assume. One weekend when I was ten, my parents and some of their friends took my sister and me and some of our friends to a Holiday Inn. The Holiday Inn was just on the other side of town, maybe ten miles away. None of us kids had a chance to get bored or cranky in the car on the way there; fifteen minutes after leaving home, we were splashing in the pool. We played miniature golf. We ran around. The grown-ups made cocktails and glanced toward the pool occasionally, to make sure we hadn’t drowned. We stayed less than twenty-four hours, but by the time I got home I felt as though I’d had a real vacation. It was the change, not the distance, that was significant.

Replacing the pump and controller, and adding a "lightning arrester" to the well, cost roughly a thousand dollars, a sum I soon began to think of, in connection with home-repair disasters, as a "unit." A unit was a depressingly large amount of money to surrender to solve a problem that I hadn't known I needed to worry about, yet a unit, I noticed, seemed to be pretty much the minimum charge for anything that went wrong with a house. If, the day before the well disaster, my closest friend had asked to borrow a thousand dollars to pay for emergency medical care for his child, I would have explained, in desolation, that I just didn't have the money. Yet here I was, giving that same thousand dollars to a plumber. Our house was somehow able to find money we didn't know we had, and suck it from its hiding place before we'd had a chance to recognize it as ours. You buy a house for more than you can afford; then, almost immediately, the house forces you to spend even more money, generally on parts of it you didn't know it had. As my friend Jim, who also owns an old house, once told me, "If I'd known I could afford to spend this much on a house, I'd have bought a nice one to begin with."