mike's web log

Here's the final exercise that I did for our Old English poetry class. During that week we read something written in what's called metrical prose — it's essentially prose, but apparently Anglo-Saxon writers still liked their rhythms and their alliteration. ("Prose shaped like song" — Paull Franklin Baum) Unlike poetry, metrical prose isn't too concerned about the fussier metrical rules, and it doesn't include fancy kennings/metaphors.

A frequent topic of metrical prose was the life of a saint, such as Ælfric's Life of Saint Oswald. It's easy to imagine these pieces as entertaining (and, importantly, edifying) texts that were read out loud while monks ate their meals.

Our assignment was to write something in metrical prose that was kind of hagiographic. Here you go! :)

Wæs on þām tīdum yfel ealdum, micel unsibb wæs on þām lande,
In those days there was ancient evil, great unrest was in the land,

mǣnige fīend wǣron feorrancumen and āfeohtan woldon.
many enemies were come from far away and wanted to fight.

Se eþelweard Engla, Uther wæs hē gehāten,
The king of the English, he was named Uther

on weg gehworfen wæs, þus wearþ rīce hlāforde bedroren.
had passed away, thus the realm was bereaved of a lord.

Cnapa on þām lande lifde, cnihte tō his brēþer.
A boy lived in that land, a squire to his brother.

Artur wæs his nama; þes esne his mǣge wel þēowode.
His name was Arthur; this servant served his relative well.

Medmicel wæs byre geþōht fram manigum geond þām lande
The youth was considered insignificant by many throughout the land

ac hagosteald sceolde habban micelne hrēþ tōweardlīce.
but the bachelor was to have great glory in the future.

Āne sumera ætīewde sweord; þe wæs seldcūþ wundersīen
One summer a sword appeared; it was a strange and wonderful sight

forþam ecg wæs innan anfilte and þæt anfilte sæt uppan stāne.
because the blade was in an anvil, and the anvil sat upon a stone.

On sweorde wāron stafas þa syndrigne stǣr ābudon:
On the sword were letters that proclaimed a remarkable story:

"Se gūþrinc þe mē grīpan cann, sīe hē gamolfeax oþþe geong,
"The warrior who can grip me, be he gray-haired or young,

and þæt bil ābregdan mihte and bealde fram þone stān ātēon,
and can remove the blade and boldly draw it from the stone,

Fela þā fandodon þæt fæsthealde sweord to tēonne,
Many then tried to draw that fast-held sword,

and woldon hira cræft ācunnian. Ac þā cēnan swuncon on īdel;
and wanted to try out their strength. But the keen ones labored in vain;

þæt īsen næs āwegd, hine nān wīga ne brǣgd.
the iron was not moved, no man drew it.

Āne dæge wæs lāc on Londenbyrig þær lēodan tōgædre cōmon
One day there was sport in Londontown where people came together

on gefeohtplegan frēolsunge þone betestan fierdrinc tō nemnenne.
in a fight-play festival [joust] to name the best warrior.

Betweox þām beornum wæs Artures brōþor.
Among the warriors was Arthur's brother.

Artur wolde gearwian geatwa and byrnan
Arthur wanted to ready the equipment and armor

þæt se hæleþ mid his hildum sylfne healdan mihte.
so that the hero could protect himself with his sword.

Þā ongeat se geonga þæt þe hē forgietan hæfde —
Then the youngster realized what he had forgotten —

hē þā secge on morgen on setle forlēt.
he left behind the sword that morning in the residence.

"Wā-lā!" cwæþ se cnapa and fram campstede efste,
"Alas!" said the boy and hurried from the fight-place,

wende hræþe tō tūne þær wunodon þā brōþor.
he returned hurriedly to town where the brothers lived.

On sīþe geseah hē fǣringa sīen:
On the journey he suddenly saw a sight:

sweord innan stāne ūplang standan.
a sword standing upright in a stone.

Se hyse on þone stān āstāg and snellice þæt sweord ābrægd.
The squire climbed on the stone and quickly drew the sword.

Lungre þā ācierde hē, tō cempanstōwe hwearf
Quickly then he returne, he went back to the warriors-place

and tō þām mǣge him āgeaf þone wundorlīcan mǣce.
and to his relative gave the wonderful sword.

"Hwanon hæfst þū þisne?" āscodon þā hæleþ;
"Whence have you this?" asked the heroes;

andette se geonga; Artur sceolde reccan
the youngster confessed; Arthur had to recount

hū cnǣpling būtan swāte swelce sweord begieten hæfde.
how a lad had without sweat obtained a sword like that.

Nān wer þæs belīefde þæt cnapa swa wāc
No man believed it that a boy that weak

drȳ-sweord of heolstre āna ūtdragan mihte.
could remove the magical sword from its covering by himself.

Hīe þæt sweord eft on stān stellan dydon
They had the sword set again in the stone

and hēton Artur þā ecge nīwen stefne ālynian.
and told Arthur to free the blade a second time.

Eft se handþegn tēah and þone heoru brægd.
Again the squire pulled and drew the sword.

Þā wundrodon ealle þǣra worda on hilte.
Then they all marveled at the words on the hilt.

Hwæt, þā burgwaras sōna bugon and cnēowlodon,
Lo, the citizens immediately bowed and kneeled,

oncnēowon sweotole þæt Artur cnapa sceolde cyning bēon.
recgonized clearly that Arthur the boy should be king.

Some folks these days write up year-end pieces on 52 things they've learned in the preceding months — Tom Whitwell was the first one I encountered, and Nancy Friedman has written roundups as well. This year I managed my own! A 52-item list of things I learned is offered here for your inspection and possible amusement/enjoyment.

1. The Wikipedia article about the Ship of Theseus has been edited so many times that not a single original sentence remains. I've seen this claim several times, but I don't know how you'd verify it. From a Reddit thread.

2. The word squeegee is older than I thought. If you'd asked me, I would have guessed that it was a genericized trademark. But no; it's probably a nautical term from as early as the 1840s that might have referred to a mop or mopping. From Etymonline.

3. In the US, pickup trucks have gotten much bigger, and the cabin size has gotten much bigger in proportion to bed (cargo) size. This is best illustrated by a couple of charts. Here's a size comparison over time from Business Insider:

   

   And here's the change in the proportion of cab to bed from the Diminished Value of Georgia site:

   

   More on the evolution of pickup trucks, including why they're so popular now, in Axios.

4. Once a seed "decides" to germinate, it's on a tight timeline. "The baby plant root has forty-eight hours after it decides to emerge to locate water and nutrients, and then push out a leaf or two and begin photosynthesizing, before it runs out of resources and dies." From the book The Light Eaters.

5. Do you have a zither? It's probably either 60 or 110 years old. Because the instrument has experienced a couple of revivals, "… it has become something of a truism that most zithers seen today are either 60 or 110 years old." From Wikipedia.

6. The Seattle suburb named White Center was almost named Green Center. "In 1918 [developers] George White and Hiram Green good naturedly resolved the question of what to call the booming community. White won a coin toss with Green, and thereafter the community was called White Center." The area is also informally known as Rat City (hence the team name Rat City Roller Derby). From HistoryLink.org.

7. Fire once helped preserve library contents that were written in cuneiform. Usually, of course, a library fire is a disaster. However, when the library at Nineveh burned 612 BCE, the fire hardened the clay on which scribes had written in cuneiform. Because of this, we know a lot about everyday life in Neo-Assyria. From the 99 Percent Invisible site.

8. How much energy does AI really take? Not as much as other common activities. One claim: "So if you’re skipping a simple GPT query thinking you are 'saving the environment,' understand that you’re making a choice equivalent to not eating ~1/17,000th of one burger. The environmental impact of consumer AI use pales in comparison to transportation and is utterly dwarfed by beef consumption alone". From a thread on Threads.

9. Zildjian [the cymbal company] is the oldest manufacturer of musical instruments in the world. It's also one of the oldest continuously operating companies in the world; it's been in business since 1618. From Wikipedia.

   

10. The Smart Cow problem sounds like a joke but it's serious. The Smart Cow problem "… is the concept that when a group is faced with a problem, only one person has to figure it out and the rest will learn it by watching him". This problem has implications for things like computer security: it takes only one person to crack a cypher that is then cracked for everyone. Why a cow? Because when one cow figures out how to cross a barrier, the other cows will follow. From Reddit.

11. Icelandic speakers would rather create an Icelandic word than borrow one. "We have a very good old word for that." When Icelanders need a term for something, they like to reach back into their language rather than borrowing a word. From the Subtitle podcast.

12. How "I'm not a robot" checks work. At one point, AI was much better at solving old-style CAPTCHA tests — the mangled letters — than humans were. Now we have "I'm not a robot" checkboxes that can detect robots. "The click isn't the test. The test comes before the click." Fun video via Reddit.

13. Can brands of salt differ in how salty they are? Yes. The salt crystals in different brands of salt aren't just different sizes; they have different shapes as well, which is why one brand can seem saltier than another for the same quantity of salt. From America's Test Kitchen.

    

14. A few case inflections from Old English are still hiding out (albeit fossilized) in modern English. Examples include alive (OE on life with a dative singular ending); olden (ealdum, dative plural); the more the merrier (þy/þy, instrumental). From Reddit.

15. Why libraries can't lend out an infinite number of ebooks. "You'd think a digital product would have an infinite lifespan, but no. Publishers often set an expiration date or limit the number of borrows an ebook can go through before it has to be purchased again." From a thread on Threads.

16. People have been braiding their hair for as long as 30,000 years. From Wikipedia.

17. The word ambisinister means "awkward with both hands". It's the opposite of ambidextrous. The Latin root sinistr means "left" and metaphorically "inauspicious"; the root dexter means "right" and metaphorically "skillful". I'm not sure how widely accepted ambisinister is, but it's listed in some dictionaries, e.g. Dictionary.com.

18. What "QR" in QR code stands for. Give yourself a second to think about this. Me, I had no idea. Answer: it stands for "quick response". From a fun history of QR codes on the GovTech Singapore site.

19. The printing press might have ruined English spelling. "If only the first printing presses had been delayed by a generation, English spelling would likely look completely different — and a lot more sensible." From Colin Gorrie's Substack.

20. OnlyFans makes incredible amounts of money. "In 2023, OnlyFans creators received a stunning $5.3B in payouts (more than the total NBA salaries of $4.9B for 2023-24 season)". From Trung Phan's Substack.

21. The most frequent injury in the US military is hearing loss. "Hearing problems are by far the most prevalent service-connected disability among American veterans." This has led the military to start adding suppressors ("silencers") to rifles. From the US Defense Department.

22. The weird little flap in cat ears is called Henry's pocket. More formally known as the cutaneous marginal pouch. The function of the pouch isn't clear, but "common conjecture regarding the usefulness of the Henry’s Pocket is that it helps aid a cat in detecting higher pitched sounds by acting as a muffler to lower pitched sounds." Who was Henry? Not known. From the Rover.com site.

    

23. Gas-electric hybrid vehicles have been around since the 1890s. Maybe not surprisingly, a pioneer in this design was Ferdinand Porsche. From Wikipedia.

24. Official multilingualism is the norm. "More than 80% of the world’s countries are officially bi- or multilingual." From the Linguistic Society of America.

25. English has a lot more vowels than many other languages. "In the sample of languages surveyed for this chapter, the average number of vowels in a language is just fractionally below 6". English has 13 or so (depending on how you count). German has even more. From The World Atlas of Language Structures Online.

26. The Mona Lisa (painting) didn't become famous-slash-iconic until it was stolen in 1911. More specifically, the painting was known but hadn't reached a wide audience, and it wasn't iconic the way it is now. There's a quick history on Reddit.

27. The three dots (or other glyph) that separate subsections or scenes in a text are called a dinkus. From a thread on Threads.

    

28. The number of threads of corn silk in an ear of corn is the same as the number of kernels. File this one under "makes sense once someone tells you". From Serious Eats.

29. Among famous bands are several "two-hit wonders". We all know about one-hit wonders, but it turns out that there are some well-known artists that are technically two-hit wonders (having top-30 songs), including Pink Floyd, Phil Collins, Jimmy Buffet, and The Clash. Fun (sad) fact: Creedence Clearwater Revival never had a #1 hit. From the Can't Get Much Higher Substack.

30. There's a shortage of carpenters in the US. "Builders have more trouble finding carpenters than roofers, electricians, or just about anything else, and by a wide margin." Part of the problem is that carpentry doesn't pay as well as other trades. From The Hustle.

31. You don't just go to the Hermès store and buy a Birkin bag. Customers "have to purchase a number of ancillary items and build relationships with a sales associate to get the opportunity to buy a bag". High-end fashion is a mystery to me in many ways. From the SatPost Substack.

    

32. Picking your nose might increase your chances of developing Alzheimer's and dementia. "The authors suggest that nose-picking damages the nasal mucosa, making it easier for the bacteria to reach the olfactory nerve and enter the brain." From Medical News Today.

33. Where do babies come from? People have disagreed. The notion that babies come from the union of an egg and a sperm (congenerism) has not been a universal understanding, and a variety of sometimes interesting theories have had influence over time. Sometimes it's been because congenerism was politically inconvenient or (probably more often) just plain uncomfortable. "According to al-Saghir, he himself had been conceived when his parents played a particularly hard-fought game of chess." From Asterisk.

34. Tuberculosis was once strongly associated with creative genius. In fact, "when TB rates declined in the U.S. toward the end of the nineteenth century, some physicians worried it would harm the quality of American literature." This and many other amazing facts about TB (like, TB has killed more people than any other disease in history) from the book Everything is Tuberculosis.

35. The second-most spoken language on the Titanic (after English) was Swedish; the third-most was Arabic. Ten percent of the passengers on the Titanic were Lebanese. From the Titanic Ship of Dreams podcast.

36. Most Canadians live south of Seattle. Not in the state of Washington, of course, but in terms of latitude. From an Atlas Obscura article on what the author calls "Mental Map Oversimplification (MMO)", which includes several other fun (and unintuitive) geographical facts like this.

    

37. Stripes on zebras repel flies. "Stomoxys flies released in an enclosure strongly preferred to land on uniform tan impala pelts over striped zebra pelts". From Nature.

38. Google didn't start out as a search-engine project. "Larry proposes that they’re going to work on this idea of a system that will allow people to make annotations and notes directly on websites instead of in a centralized directory like Yahoo." When they turned their attention to search, though, they nailed it. From the Acquired podcast.

39. Head lice are becoming resistant to lice shampoo. "Given that the drugs don’t work, the only viable debugging option is mechanical removal and surveillance—that is, adopting a primate’s steely rigour and using a literal fine-toothed comb to tease out both the lice and their future offspring." From The Local (Toronto)

40. Coolerators kept things cool, in various ways. The name Coolerator was used by a Duluth-based company for an early form of mechanical refrigerator. But the term coolerator was also used in windy and dry parts of the western US for a "cooler cabinet" that used screened openings and wet cloth to channel evaporation. There's a description in the Colorado County Citizen. Fun fact: The word coolerator shows up in Chuck Berry's song "You Never Can Tell" ("The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale"), no doubt referring to the mechanical fridge.

41. Foods are deliberately engineered with vanishing caloric density. "When a food melts down quickly in the mouth, your brain interprets the food as having no calories — as if once the food has disappeared, so have the calories". The result, psychologically speaking, is that it's way too easy to keep eating, how very convenient for snack-food companies. From the How Stuff Works site.

42. The filter+cone approach to making coffee was invented in 1908 by a German housewife named Melitta Bentz. "She punched holes in a brass pot and used a piece of paper to create a two-part filtration system. She put the pot on a cup, filled it with ground coffee and poured in hot water. The coffee filter and drip coffee were born." From the Melitta site.

    

43. The oldest Chinese restaurant in the US is in Butte, Montana. "The oldest continuously operated Chinese restaurant in America is not in San Francisco or New York, but in Butte, Montana, where 47-year-old Jerry Tam, the great-great-grandson of the original owner, presides over the Pekin Noodle Parlor." From Smithsonian Magazine.

44. The word strike, as in labor strike, came from sailors who lowered their sails. "… sailors would stage one of the first general strikes in labor history. The word 'strike' itself derives from their strategy of 'striking,' or lowering, the sails of anchored ships as a sign of their refusal to work." From the book Enemy of All Mankind; Etymonline tentatively concurs.

45. Netflix produces shows specifically for background TV. A second-screen show (also known as ambient TV) is one that's "optimized for casual viewing, meaning intentionally scripted for distracted viewers". The formula involves "overly expository dialogue, repeating plot points and adding lots of voice-overs to narrate the action and help the distracted viewer follow along". I personally find that screens distract me and I can't look away. From The Conversation.

46. Jersey numbers in the NFL are based in part on the player's assignment. For example, quarterback numbers are between 0 and 19; offensive linesman numbers are between 50 and 79. (It's more complicated than this, and players can change positions without changing numbers, but there are basic ranges.) The number can help referees, for example, by making it possible at a glance to determine whether an offensive lineman is illegally downfield. From Wikipedia.

    

47. When you burn body fat, 84% of it leaves your body as carbon dioxide that you exhale. I would have guessed as heat or as excretions. From NBC News.

48. Your lip print is unique. It's the fingerprint of your face, sort of, so if you're going to, like, murder someone, probably best not to kiss them. The use of lip prints as a forensic investigation tool is known as cheiloscopy, from Greek kheilos ("lip") plus also Greek scopeo ("to see"). On the National Library of Medicine site, and via Erin McKean's perennially interesting Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things.

49. Refrigerated truck trailers were invented based on a bet. In 1938, Frederick McKinley Jones's boss made a bet with a friend that his employee, Jones, could design a portable refrigeration system. The boss was right. Jones went on to develop the Thermo Control Model C, which revolutionized the trucking industry, and by extension, the food industry. Jones was a prolific inventor: he invented a portable X-ray machine, an early version of the snowmobile, a way to project movies with sound, and a ticket-dispensing machine. On the Hagerty site and via the book Frostbite.

50. Every part of the potato plant is poisonous except the part we eat. Also true of tomatoes and eggplant. "Solanine is a toxic compound with fungicidal and insecticidal properties. It can naturally occur in any part of the plant, including the leaves, fruits, and tubers." The good news is that it's not very poisonous; that said, don’t eat green or sprouted potatoes. From the Journal of Experimental and Basic Medical Sciences.

51. Adult cows don't have upper teeth. This is true also of other ruminants. Cows do have molars both top and bottom, though. Every once in a while I realize how much I don't know about animal husbandry. Maybe the fact that cows can't bite you has helped make cow cuddling popular, wherein you snuggle with a therapy bovine. (And which helps dairy farmers get a bit of income.) Cow teeth facts from the Clover Meadows Beef site.

52. October 2, 2025 was the 75th anniversary of the comic strip Peanuts. From the official Peanuts website.

    

A few notes. I've included sources that verify the Interesting Fact, but I did not always record where I first heard the Interesting Fact. I get a lot of roundup-type emails and whatnot — Kottke, Ten Tabs, Erin McKean's Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things, etc. There's a good chance that one of these initially led me to some of these Interesting Facts, but I did not record that, so I am unable to credit them. Sorry about that.

But in other cases, I just stumbled across these things in my random readings or listenings. There's nothing like stopping a podcast while you're listening and scrambling to note down something they said for future consideration. :) I've really enjoyed the process of compiling these, and I can recommend it.

This week's Old English reading was a poem that goes by the name "Precepts", in which a father lectures his son dispenses life wisdom. You can read a modern English translation; here's a sample:

A fourth time the father taught again
his mind-beloved son, so that he remembered this:
“Abandon not your most intimate friend,
but ever always keep him close—
as is rightly fitting. Perform this courtesy,
so that you never become vile to your own friend.”

... and so on.

Well, heck, I knew someone around our own household who attempts to dispense wisdom in this way every morning. Thus my attempt at a precept.

When I started on this, I solicited ideas from nearby family for kennings to describe a cat. I was pretty pleased with the results.

I was particularly tickled by the word uht-hlemm ("a din made in the early morning"), which I thought every cat owner could relate to. It seems possible, however, that nobody in our class has cats (only dogs)! Oh well.

One more, I think. Our assignment for the Old English class this week was …

People retold some excellent fables — The Scorpion and the Frog, The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, and The Peacock and the Crane. One person retold Schleicher's fable (!), which was originally a fable written in reconstructed Proto Indo-European about a sheep and some horses.[1]

Anyway, I (as usual) didn't entirely follow the assignment, and I retold a more modern "fable" about capitalism written in 1971. The tale concerns a greedy Once-ler, a forest of profitable Truffula trees, the inhabitants of the woods, and a moralizing Lorax.

Gieddaþ glēomann     fram gēardagum
Sings the minstrel     from days gone by

bē wuda wrǣtlicum,     wealde geþūfum,
about the wondrous woods,     the leafy forest,

grāfe geapum     grēne standan,
the spacious grove     standing green,

trēowa getrumum,     Truffula hāten.
the troop of trees     called Truffula.

Ofermōd Anselre,     ǣhtum grædig,
The arrogant Once-ler,     greedy for possessions,

feohgīfre fengel,     fremman wolde
the wealth-eager prince,     wanted to achieve

þusenda þūfta     on Þnēdu wendan,
a thousand thickets     into Thneeds turn,

bearwas mierran.     Mete Barbalūtan
to waste the woods.     The Bar-ba-loots of food

bedǣlan dyde;     dægmete wanode,
did he deprive;     their daily bread waned,

wealdbūende wudu     on wōh forlēton.
the forest-dwellers the woods     woefully abandoned.

Ne wæs gebǣru brega     bisn þām witum!
The conduct of the ruler     was not an example to the wise!

Hæleþa Hleorax     hleoþrian cām nū,
A hero, the Lorax,     now came proclaiming,

mōdig maþelian     maþem-þeof grētende:
courageously declared,     addressing the treasure-thief:

"Eom boda bēama,     tō gebeorge stande;
I am the messenger of the trees,     I stand to their defense,

nabbaþ trēowu nē tungan,     and for þȳ tacn spelian sceal,
trees don't have tongues,     therefore I shall substitute as token,

mund wiþ mān-weorce."     Swā mann sceal drohtnian!
a mouth against the evil-work.     So shall a man conduct himself!

Ac þearflease þingode;     þancas ne wæs giefen.
But in vain he interceded;     he was not given thanks.

Þiccet orþances fielde     þeoden unsnotor,
Heedlessly the thicket he felled,     the unwise lord,

ne wolde Hleoraxes hēdan,     forhodian þōhte,
he wouldn't heed the Lorax,     thought to neglect him,

ungleaw Anselre.     Onweg flēah Hleorax.
the unclever Once-ler.     Away fled the Lorax.

On tīman wearþ wudu on wēsten,     weald geīeþed,
In time the woods became a waste,     the forest was detroyed,

libbende eall forloren.     Tō late Anselre
living things all were lost.     Too late the Once-ler

hæfde lāre geleornod.     Lǣne bēoþ on worulde
had learned the lesson.     Transitory be in the world

hreþ under heofonum,     hæfen and spēda;
glory under the heavens,     belongings and wealth;

mann ā munan sceal     Metodes gesceafte.
man should ever be mindful     of the Lord's creation.

The Lorax was published when I was past my Dr. Seuss years, so I didn't know it very well. It's written in a frame, with the bad guy (the Once-ler) as the narrator of the interior story. The nominal hero — the Lorax — keeps issuing dire environmental warnings to the Once-ler, which are ignored, but when the devastation is complete …

The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance ...
just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance …
as he lifted himself by the seat of the pants.
And I'll never forget the grim look on his face
when he heisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.

I suppose that leaving is what most people would do, but the Lorax is definitely not in the mold of a Germanic hero, haha. Still, I tried to tell the tale as it was presented, with the addition of an Anglo-Saxon style moral at the end.

__________

[1] Our instructor noted that you really need to know Schleicher's fable if you want language-nerd cred, ha.

Another fun assignment in our Old English class:

Write 6–10 lines (not a strict limit) of Old English verse paraphrasing a famous speech from history or literature. Include at least four formulae and at least one hypermetric line.

In Anglo-Saxon poetry there are 4 beats ("lifts") per line, 2 in the first half-line (the A verse) and 2 in the second half-line (the B verse). Here's an example from a modern English rendering of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the half lines are separated with a caesura marked with ||.

But sometimes poets created "hypermetrical" lines that had more beats than this 2+2 convention, typically 3+2 or 3+3. As one source puts it, "No one knows what these changes in rhythm are meant to imply." Per our instructor, it seems that hypermetrical lines sometimes set off quotations and sometimes implied a kind of elevated thought. To state a couple of theories.

Anyway, a famous speech, you say? An easy choice is the Gettysburg Address (the original is below). Here's my rendering, which is not a line-for-line restatement, given the length[1] and that the assignment has us including formulae and whatnot.

Original

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

__________

[1] A little irony, right? The GA is one of the shortest speeches (or the shortest?) in presidential history.

This semester I'm taking a class in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) poetry. In the class we read poems and learn about poetic techniques. That includes the mechanics (alliteration, meter) as well as the themes and styles that were favored by Anglo-Saxon poets.

We also compose our own poems! The assignment for our most recent class was this:

Write 6–10 lines (not a strict limit) of Old English verse likening a particular fictional character to a Germanic hero. The more incongruous the comparison, the better! Include at least 5 formulae.

A fun challenge. In addition to tending to the mechanics, there's this "formulae" thing. Poetry was an oral art in the old days; the formulae are quasi-stock phrases — things like þegnas æt þearfe ("thanes at the hour of need") and strang and stiþmod ("strong and resolute"). It seems that Anglo-Saxon poets would improvise poems and could throw in these formulae to keep the poem moving along. Our class keeps a hoard of these stock phrases, conveniently sortable by how they alliterate.

Students wrote some outstanding stuff: there were two (!) poems with Star Wars themes (people came up with Old English terms for "X-wing fighter" and "lightsaber"); one about Bugs Bunny, with the excellent twist that the hunter has a lisp (hawa instead of hara for "hare", i.e. "wabbit"); and a poem about Babe the Sheep-Pig.

I wrote about a beloved character who was about as un-warrior-like as I could imagine. I took the "not a strict limit" instruction to heart and ended up summarizing (sort of) an entire chapter of a well-known children's book. Here's the attempt:

In case you want to refresh your memory, here's the original: In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump.

Some notes. There are surely grammatical and vocabulary errors. (Alas, I'm not yet fluent.) In a few cases I violated some of the poetic rules, oh well. A couple of the more awkward lines are part of my attempt to include formulae; some of these are probably obvious?

Our next assignment is to find a well-known speech or soliloquy and render it in Old English. There is this war poem that starts with "Fourscore and seven" ...

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.