Wyruld-Cyninga (I'm a Double BA!)

I graduated from college!

I finished Bachelors of Arts degrees in both Medieval Studies and English (British Literature), with a minor in Art History (because I'm not hardcore enough for the Art History major - seriously, it's a super tough major at Truman). To celebrate this achievement, I decided to paint an applicable portion of the Old English epic, Beowulf, onto my graduation cap. I chose Beowulf because it not only represents my English degree, but also the Northern European focus of my Medieval Studies degree, plus, I had just finished a course where we spent the entire semester translating the 3182-line poem from the original Anglo-Saxon. What I didn't expect, was that this project would take about 10 hours, keeping me up until 3 A.M. on the morning of my graduation.

I chose the very last sentence of the poem, its last three lines:

cwæðon þæt he wære   wyruld-cyninga,
manna mildust   ond mon-ðwærust,
leodum liðost   ond loft-geornost.

They said that of  all the kings in the world,
of men he [Beowulf] was the mildest and most beloved,
to his kin the kindest, and most eager for praise.

I painted these lines, and several preceding lines, on my cap based on a high resolution scan of the original manuscript page, available for free online, published by the British Library. This part of the Nowell Codex (the manuscript in which Beowulf covers folios 132r - 201v, dated to roughly 1000 AD) is heavily damaged, but it was still incredibly valuable and fascinating to get to work with a scan of the actual manuscript so that my finished product might be a more accurate representation of the original. For instance, the manuscript is not divided into metered lines, as in most translations and transcriptions, so I reflected this aspect with my painting. The orthography is also significantly different from Modern English.

This sentence gives a good picture into the contemporary culture of Anglo-Saxon England, especially with the phrase "most eager for praise." Today, living with the goal of earning other people's praise may sound self-righteous or arrogant, but in a highly community-focused culture (such as Beowulf's) where reputation was everything, it makes perfect sense. In general, decent people will praise that which is decent and good, so by being "most eager for praise," Beowulf would have been striving to live honorably and nobly.

This sentence means a lot to me because it is not only a highly honoring eulogy for the legendary monster and dragon-slaying king, Beowulf son of Ecgtheow, but it is also a standard worth striving for even today. Though the poem was not a Christian poem, this sentence exudes qualities I want to display in my own life. I strive to live such that the love that Christ showed to me by paying a debt I owed but could never pay would overflow from me in the form of a love and kindness for all people. I can't earn this redemption, but I want to glorify God with my life, thereby living such that I'll earn His praise and one day He'll say to me "well done, my good and faithful servant."

Anglo-Saxon Saturdays: Wulfes-Heafod

This Thursday, the History Channel series, Vikings, opened Season 2 with an episode called "Brother's War." Aside from the fantastic Viking shield-wall battle, gorgeous scenery, and imaginative costumes, the episode dealt boldly with the issue of betrayal. Without giving too much away, I thought it strange that when the traitor came to trial in this episode, the punishment everyone expected to be carried out was death. Death is certainly a terrible punishment, and probably fitting for such a grievous betrayal, but I had expected the verdict would be the Germanic institution of wulfes-heafod.

wulfes-heafod

(wolf-es heh-av-od)



a wolf-headed creature in the 15th c. Nuremberg Chronicle

Wulfes-heafod translates literally to "wolf's head," and no, this is not a mythic creature or monster, some sort of human with a wolf's head. Wolf's-head was a severe punishment for severe crime. When someone committed a crime serious enough to warrant a verdict of wulfes-heafod, such as murder or betrayal of one's lord, a priest (or other leader) would place his hand on the convicted criminal and declare him a wolf's-head.

Last week, I talked about Anglo-Saxon agoraphobia and how they did not like open places, but instead felt secure under a roof - both a literal one and the figurative roof of societal laws. This is exactly why being declared wolf's-head was such a terrible punishment; a wolf's-head was declared to be a wolf.

If you were declared a wulfes-heafod, you were no longer considered human. You were an "outlaw," that is, you were no longer under the protection of the law. No one was allowed to acknowledge you as a person; they couldn't talk to you, or give you food or shelter. Worst of all, they could, and were almost obligated to, kill you. Wolves were a threat, they were pests who attacked livestock and sometimes people, so whenever a wolf was spotted, it would be hunted. The same idea was supposed to apply to a wolf's-head, if seen, he would be hunted.

This, alone, would be a horrible fate for anyone at any period in history, but it was especially terrible for Anglo-Saxons (and in other Germanic cultures, such as in Vikings) because of their agoraphobia, their fear of open spaces. Being declared a wulfes-heafod exiled you only to open spaces, and away from the protection of the law. Being an "outlaw" was not freedom, it was a punishment worse than death.

Anglo-Saxon Saturdays: Weox Under Wolcnum

Last time, I wrote about one way in which the Anglo-Saxon conception of the world is different from ours in Modern America. This week, I'd like to share another, and this one is also illustrated with the help of a phrase from the proem to Beowulf:

Weox under wolcnum

(way-ox oon-der wohlk-num)

This phrase is the first half of line 8 in Beowulf and refers to the legendary king, Scyld Scefing, as he grew into a man. Weox under wolcnum translates to "waxed under welkin" or with more familiar vocabulary, "grew under the heavens." The poet chose the word "wolcnum" to fit the alliteration* but the concept, not the particular word, is what is important here. The idea is that Scyld grew up under the protection of the heavens, under the safety of the skies. This is a sort of verbal fencing-in, giving the impression of a sheep fold or fenced pasture that was a safe and happy place in which to grow up.

The Anglo-Saxons were an agoraphobic people. They saw rules and boundaries and a roof over the head as safe and protective. This plays into how community-oriented the Anglo-Saxon culture was as well. They were closely tied with their local communities and the idea of leaving those ties was terrifying (as I will expand upon in the next Anglo-Saxon Saturdays post, wulfes heafod). The happiest scenes in Anglo-Saxon literature fall under the theme of "joys of the hall" or the eating and drinking and singing and boasting and general merriment that went on in the safety of an Anglo-Saxon mead-hall.

When Grendel comes to attack Heorot in Beowulf, he comes from the wilderness, from the fens. This is where monsters and dragons dwell and you don't have the protection of your fences or home or your fighting companions anymore. The laws of man and common decency do not apply there, and the wild is a dangerous place where the weather, the landscape, and the animals seem to conspire together for your destruction.

This is the exact opposite of how most modern Americans feel. Our culture is claustrophobic. We tend to see boundaries and walls as confining, as something to be challenged. We tend to see wide open spaces as places of freedom and adventure, where anything is possible (think of the genre of American Westerns). But this is exactly what scared Anglo-Saxons about open spaces: if anything can happen, then anything can go wrong.


*Alliteration is a convention of Anglo-Saxon poetry; rather than rhyme, in which words sound alike at the end (i.e. - walker, knocker, sock her), when words alliterate, they sound alike at the beginning (i.e. - Will would wish to wail?).

Creating a new "Middle Ages"

Even before I knew I wanted to be a medievalist, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I started writing a short story eight years ago, when I was twelve, and quickly decided that it could make an interesting book, though I had no idea where the rest of the plot was headed. The story is about a young woman who wakes up in a prison and has absolutely no memory of who she is or why she is there. She learns that she was captured as a prisoner of a war which has been raging for six years, and she has a long internal battle left just to figure out who she is and what the nature of her involvement in the conflict was before her capture. While she is piecing her past together and trying to escape the prison, an enigmatic sort-of-assassin is searching for something which is very valuable to his king - something worth a massacre just to get his hands on it. He, too, struggles with deep internal conflict and piecing together the mystery of his own past, but his is a vastly different sort of history.

The two have no knowledge of the other's existence, nor any idea of just how closely intertwined their stories already are - nor any hint of the devastating results if they fail to find their purpose.

When people learn that I'm writing a book, they want to know what it is about, and the first thing I tell them is that it is a work of "Historical Fantasy," meaning that it's only "fantasy" in that the story does not take place in our world. Absent are all other aspects of a typical fantasy story: the Fire-Breathing Dragon, Magic, Goblins, or any other fantastic creatures or races. I've christened this story world, "Tellus," which is an ancient name for our own Earth, used most notably in C. S. Lewis' The Space Trilogy. I want to show the relationship between this world and ours; my story takes place when [at least a part of] Tellus is going through her own "middle ages" and the technologies, culture, and societal structures are similar to those of our world's middle ages. That's where the "historical" part of "Historical Fiction" comes into play. And that's what this post is all about: Tellus is not identical to Earth (and no, there will never be any travelling from here to there in any of my stories regarding it. It's not Narnia, it's just another sort of Earth, another sort of idea of what might very well have happened here if our own history was different).

So I have this task of creating a new and alternate sort of "middle ages," one that captures the ideals, histories, and hopes of a world which only vaguely exists in my mind and a little bit on paper. I have this task to bring to vivid and breathing life a world rich enough that my readers could imagine themselves exploring it and having their own adventures, far away from the story I'm telling. I have this task to weave an intricate fabric of societies, clashing cultures, landscapes, architectures, martial arts, religions, languages, and histories. I have this task that is so vast and daunting that it scares the bejeebers out of me. But it also lures me in to seek out the exotic and unknown reaches of this place called "Tellus," to have my own adventure exploring it and filling in the misty blank places with the rich detail of the veins in the leaves of ancient trees and the crumbling grout between the stones of a changing civilization.

The interesting and slightly disappointing part about all of this planning and creating and imagining, is that my readers will only get a little part of it. You see, by creating this vast and detailed description and history for Tellus, I am better equipped to dwell fully in this imagined world while writing the story in my book: better able to articulate why certain people act as they do, or speak with different accents, or hold cultural grudges, or are darker or stockier in build, or why the borders have been drawn as they are. The readers may never get even a quarter of all of the backstories and descriptions, but they will get enough of a taste in my book that their imaginations can freely and wonderfully fill in the rest. And that is exactly the fantastic beauty of reading a book, after all, isn't it?

You have no idea how much I want to jump right into the world of Tellus and describe to you the gorgeous landscapes and rise and development of the current cultures, and give you a taste of the whole complicated story of my book, but I can't. Wouldn't you rather see it for yourself? Wouldn't you rather read it in the faces and travels and fights of Eladar and Kaael, the amnesiac soldieress and tortured assassin of Tellus, as they embark on their life-voyages? While you are waiting for them to be ready to tell their story, why not set out for the exotic corners of your own mind and see what adventures await?

Egyptian Hieroglyphics: the Basics

When I was younger, I loved to study the Ancient Egyptians. I'm still not sure why, but their art, architecture, and culture fascinated me. I could spend hours as a ten-year-old, reading my dad's four inch thick college textbook about Ancient Egypt. Some time later, my interests shifted into the Middle Ages and I abandoned researching Egypt for several years, forgetting much of my knowledge with time.

My interest was renewed, however, when I signed up for a Middle East Study Abroad Trip with my university for this summer. The trip was scheduled to tour Egypt, Jordan, Syria, a touch of Turkey and maybe Lebanon, (Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon we had to cut because of the revolution in Syria) and then Israel. It would last for six weeks, two of which would be spent working on the Bethsaida Archaeological Dig in Israel.

Wow.

Luxor Temple facade

What an amazing opportunity! The group of students and the professor leading the trip met every other week over the spring semester leading up to the trip, and it was not until a few weeks before our departure date that it finally sunk in that I would actually be going. With the realization that I would truly observe monuments such as the Giza Pyramids, Luxor, Petra, and countless Biblical sites (including Jerusalem), came the realization that I had a lot of research to do! I needed to brush up on all that precious Egyptian history and my Biblical geography. With studying for finals, and then a busy family vacation in Florida filling my time before the trip, the victorious flight of my researching glider barely got off to a running start and never quite leapt over the cliff's edge and into the air.

I did, however, begin learning the basics of deciphering Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics.

At the most basic level, Egyptian Hieroglyphics are alphabetic letters. They are difficult to correspond to the sounds of the English language, and scholars can really only speculate as to how they were really originally pronounced. The chart at right shows the generally-agreed-upon Hieroglyphic alphabet. It's not too difficult to learn, as it is comprised of only thirty characters, some of which roughly arbitrarily (for English-speakers, anyway) relate to their represented sound, such as the lion representing the "L."

Rosetta Stone

Archaeologists and historians studied Ancient Egyptians throughout the Middle Ages and into modern times. Many people claimed to have deciphered hieroglyphics, such as Arab historians in the ninth and tenth centuries, but their meanings remained mysterious until 1799, when Napoleon discovered the Rosetta Stone during his invasion of Egypt. The Stone is a basalt stele with the same inscription in three different scripts. The first language was Greek, the second was Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the third was a sort of cursive Egyptian script (though not the same as cursive hieroglyphics). It was not until 1820, when Jean-Francois Champollion noticed that the hieroglyphics contained certain characters in little bubbles (called cartouches) which roughly corresponded to the placement of the names Cleopatra and Ptolemy in the Greek inscription...

Through comparing the names and the way in which they were spelled in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Champollion was able to determine ten of the letters of the Egyptian alphabet. From there, he deciphered the rest of the alphabet, as seen above, and the rest is "history!"

One thing that makes Egyptian hieroglyphics a bit confusing, though, is the direction in which it is read. hieroglyphics can be written both in columns and rows, and it can be read from right to left, or left to right. Confusing, isn't it? Well, the Ancient Egyptians did leave us two clues for knowing in what direction to read:
First, you always read from top to bottom. Easy.
Second, notice which way the characters (people, animals, etc) are facing. Read toward them.

The relief above is from the inner sanctum of the Luxor Temple, and the characters in the inscription face left, so you read them from left to right, top to bottom.

Now you can read Egyptian hieroglyphics, right? Well, of course, it's not that easy. The problem is that the characters can be alphabetic, phonetic, or determiners, even in the same word. Yeah. It is quite a bit more complicated than I thought, too! Let me give you a demonstration.

In the above sample, only the "kh" and "r" are alphabetic. The loaf/brick/thing, scythe, arm, and spear are phonetic, and the man is the determiner (telling us that this word relates to the mouth).

So, yes. Egyptian Hieroglyphics are actually rather sophisticated and very difficult to understand. I had no idea what I was getting myself into by diving into the world of hieroglyphics, but I now have a greater appreciation for the innovation of the Ancient Egyptians.

Now that you've got the bare basics of reading Egyptian hieroglyphics, you should attempt to master it with the book Egyptian Language: Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge.