Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Three Impressionists (Part I)"

The seventh in the series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, returns to looking at individual poets working in alliterative verse. As before, editorial intrusion is minimal.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

Too, please let us know if you've got ideas for guest-posts or series of your own; we'd love to hear from you!

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𝔖o, last week, I described my purist-impressionist scale as a 1–10 spectrum of historical metrical fidelity. Yet I know some people will naturally (and automatically) discount certain impressionists solely on the suspicion that they don’t know much, if anything, about genuine medieval alliterative poetics. And, granted, some revivalists do not, but even if true, I suggested this doesn’t necessarily impact a text’s literary merit one way or another.

Proof is always in the pudding, though, so let’s prepare to be slathered in pudding. We’ll be turning to three exciting revivalists whose deviations from the historical meters are, bluntly, less than fully intentional, yet their texts are both fascinating and critically interesting. Without further ado, our first poet is…

PATRICK ROTHFUSS

Call me biased (and I probably am), but the honor of most metrically bonkers revivalist goes to Patrick Rothfuss. He included two poems in The Wise Man’s Fear (2011), and from a purist’s perspective it would be hard for anyone to flout the traditional restrictions of Old English prosody any more egregiously. Given issues of copyright, I’ll quote just one line, but that’ll be plenty:

Hot comes the huntress     Fela, flushed with finding

A source.
Image provided by Wise.

By itself, maybe this line doesn’t seem all that bonkers. The first half-line, at least, can be read as Sievers type A, but that’s likely a pure accident. Tellingly, the character who recites this poem – a young student-scholar by name of Simmon – specifically disavows any claim to knowledge about the meter. This random remark, though, which Rothfuss didn’t have to include for character or plot reasons, reads to me like an authorial insert. Rothfuss knows he isn’t a medievalist. He probably suspects his metrics stink, but if any pedants or college professors out there don’t like what he’s doing, well, there’s several places where they can stick those complaints…and none will be particularly well-lighted.

In fact, Rothfuss breaks quite a few metrical restrictions in an impressively brief span of time. His second half-line has three lifts, all of which alliterate, including the last, and this half-line accordingly turns up its nose up to every Sievers type to known to man. Likewise, Rothfuss’s line apparently considers verse-linking alliteration optional. So the only thing known for certain about Rothfuss’s grasp of Old English meter is that it includes

1. caesuras;
2. compounded words like “fast-found” (found in a later line); and
3. alliteration…lots and lots of alliteration.

Nor is there anything wrong with that. As the writer of a fantasy novel, Rothfuss has a specific rhetorical purpose in mind: to suggest an archaic medieval meter for the non-academic readers reading his book, who maybe need hitting over the head with the meter’s most blatantly obvious features. Rothfuss’s metrical excess does exactly what he needs it to do – and who cares, anyway, he seems to suggest, about the real Old English rules?

(B y the way, for a slightly different take on Rothfuss’s two poems, check out Lancelot Schaubert’s brief review on Forgotten Ground Regained.)

PAUL EDWIN ZIMMER

Somehow looking the part...
Image provided by Wise.

As this series continues, I’ll talk more about Zimmer, a deeply underappreciated author of heroic fantasy whose impact on the Modern Revival runs wide. Like C. S. Lewis, he began as a poet, but unlike that Oxford Inkling, Zimmer was neither Christian nor a scholar. In fact, he never even attended college. He learned about medieval poetic forms largely on his own as part of his antiquarian leanings and Neo-Pagan spirituality, but one result is that what Zimmer knows about the Middle Ages bears several noticeable gaps. For instance, let’s sneak a peek at one of the Modern Revival’s more intriguing texts, his twelve-line poem, “The Son of Harold’s Hoarfrost.”

For some context, back in the late 1970s, a university professor of Scandinavian and German Studies, Jere Fleck, began publishing several long alliterative poems in the Society of Creative Anachronism’s official magazine, Tournaments Illuminated. Most of these long poems, called drápur (sing. drápa), use an exceedingly complex skaldic meter, and I personally consider them the most exciting amateur productions of the Modern Alliterative Revival.

Yet, thanks to their difficulty, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend Fleck’s drápur to first-timers. Zimmer evidently had similar objections. In 1976, he penned a playful poetic response whose title, “The Son of Harold’s Hoarfrost,” alludes to the name of Fleck’s medieval persona, Geirr Bassi Haraldsson. We can glean the general gist of Zimmer’s grumbles from the following:

The runes he [Fleck] writes, with     rime all a-glitter,
Are Icelandic to excess,     and over-ornate:
Poor Kvasir is cold in     such Celtic adornment (l. 3-5)

Metrically, this text leans well onto the impressionist side: a seven or eight on my 1–10 scale. We can forego the specifics, but several factors lead to me to suspect Zimmer’s deviations from the historical Old English meter are less than fully self-aware. One major hint is that none of Zimmer’s other alliterative poems demonstrate a purist sensibility. That’s always a major clue. Another major clue is that “The Son of Harold’s Hoarfrost” is filled with niggling historical inaccuracies sure to raise the eyebrows of any trained medievalist.

And raise Fleck’s eyebrows they surely did. In a friendly open letter published a few months afterward, Fleck defends himself against Zimmer’s “wrathful ribbing” (as he calls it) by observing that, if the two men differ in their poetic tastes, it’s probably because their respective SCA persons hail from different historical periods. As “Geirr Bassi Haraldsson,” Fleck hails from 10th-century Iceland, and he guesses that Zimmer’s persona, “Master Edwin Bersark,” belongs to the pre-Christian Saxon era. As evidence, he cites Zimmer’s usage of “Harold” (the English spelling of Fleck’s patronymic) and “Woden” in line 6. A Norseman would have said Óðinn, and a Christian Saxon would not have mentioned this Germanic god at all.

Moreover, any 10th-century Saxon would have clearly recognized Fleck’s long poems as skaldic. At that time, northern England was dominated by Scandinavian York and the Danelaw, and the skalds enjoyed a wide renown. As Fleck remarks, there is nothing “excessive” about their poetry. Drápur are an historically appropriate way to praise kings. Any simpler meter would cause offense, so skaldic poetry is exactly as “ornate” as it needs to be. Nonetheless, if Zimmer’s medieval persona belongs to the early Saxon period, the 6th or 7th century, Fleck magnanimously concedes that there’s no reason for him to know such things…even if Fleck still can’t explain why any early Saxon bard would mention “Kvasir” (a Norse name) or describe Norse poetry as “Celtic.”

Of course, the real reason for such discrepancies is that Zimmer – an amateur enthusiast, not a Professor of Scandinavian and Germanic Studies – just got his medieval details mixed up. But Fleck is too polite to say so, and, anyway, nobody in the SCA wants to break the customary ludic framework that surrounds their discourse. Despite the historical confusions behind “The Son of Harold’s Hoarfrost,” however, which also explain Zimmer’s loose impressionist metrics, what makes this text so useful for the Modern Revival? Mainly this: although Zimmer’s poem isn’t the first modern alliterative poem written in direct response to another revivalist text – that mystery I’ll save for later – “The Son of Harold’s Hoarfrost” offers a rare glimpse at revivalist reception history: how a reader contemporary with Fleck viewed his scholarly drápur. In other words, Zimmer provides a direct and pointed response from one self-aware, ambitious revivalist to another.

This concludes my discussion of Zimmer. To find out who my third impressionist is, the “most perfect” example of my argument, tune in next week…

Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Purists vs. Impressionists"

The sixth in the series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, lays out some of the critical underpinnings of the overall project. As before, editorial intrusion is minimal.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

Too, please let us know if you've got ideas for guest-posts or series of your own; we'd love to hear from you!

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𝔒ne oddity about the Modern Revival is that, historically, critics don’t normally categorize literary movements according to poetic form alone. For instance, we don’t talk about the “Rhyming Octosyllabic Revolution” of Anglo-Norman England, or the “Blank Verse-ism” of the Elizabethan stage. This oddity has been one reason (out of several) some medievalists have challenged the notion of an “alliterative revival” in the mid-14^th century at all. After all, no medieval source ever mentions such a movement. The whole idea is a hypothesis put forth by modern scholars. Although my Brit Lit I survey course in college confidently taught the mid-14^th century revival as accepted fact, quite a few recent scholars have argued that just because various late medieval poems share a certain set of metrical similarities, they needn’t constitute an actual community of poets with similar attitudes or aims. The whole notion of metrical revivalism in the later Middle Ages is, therefore, a shot in the dark that misses – badly. Or so the argument goes.

It's a hot time...
Image provided by Wise

Luckily, with everyone’s favorite modern revival, we stand on surer ground. Even if William Langland, say, didn’t necessarily rub elbows with the Gawain-poet, many contemporary revivalists believe he did…and most have no trouble imagining their own revivalism in parallel terms with the alleged 14th-century movement.

That raises an interesting question, though. Despite the alliterative meter fading out of common usage by the 16^th century, alliteration itself has remained a tried-and-true device for English-language poets. What, then, separates a genuine revivalist poet from one who merely adds a little ornamental alliteration to their lines – i.e., an extra flourish of “rum ram ruf” for special effect?

Just my last two blog entries alone show how tricky this question can be. In “Dear Tolkien Estate,” Schaubert’s metrics would have made any Old English poet proud. No medieval poet, however, would recognize Majmudar’s “The Grail Quest” as a valid alliterative text. Yet it clearly is a 21^st-century revivalist poem. The problem isn’t only that the alliterative meter requires more than just alliteration (although some medievalists such Eric Weiskott, in fact, have argued against alliteration serving any real metrical function in the co-called “alliterative” meter). The problem is that individual revivalists can vary widely – and inconveniently, at least for critics who want to study this stuff – on exactly which features of the medieval alliterative meter they wish to revive.

One way to tackle this conundrum is by imagining an informal metrical scale that ranges 1 through 10, from arch-purists to extreme impressionists. Generally speaking, the latter group has little interest in faithfully reproducing the historical meter. For the purists, though, such fidelity does matter because they necessarily consider metrical fidelity a part of their overall literary goal. The key distinction lies in how many features from a particular tradition a poet chooses to replicate, and to what extent. The main traditions are Old English, Old Norse, or Middle English. Purist poets reproduce more features than not…and more strictly. Impressionist poets reproduce fewer features and less strictly. If a poem contains no recognizable metrical features from a particular tradition, though…well then, maybe it can file a membership claim for the Rhyming Octosyllabic Revolution or Blank Verse-ism, but the Modern Alliterative Revival will have to pass.

My qualifier about a metrical feature, though, is an important one. Poems that merely borrow content from medieval history or (more commonly) adopt phrasing or diction often associated with alliterative verse, such as kennings, don’t qualify as revivalist, at least for me, unless some concrete metrical feature is present. Features may include Sievers types, structural alliteration, a bipartite line structure, an accentual contour, or more. To my eye, most of Seamus Heaney’s medieval-flavored poetry falls into the non-revivalist category. Although he often uses Old English phrases such as “bone-house” (OE: bānhūs), it’s hard to see him applying medieval alliterative poetics in any consistent, discernible fashion.

Under my scale, then, I’d rank “Dear Tolkien Estate” as a purist-leaning poem, a 2 or a 3 (for reference, The Fall of Arthur by Tolkien would be 1.5), and “The Grail Quest” as 6 or 7. There’s nothing especially scientific about these numbers; they’re only meant to jumpstart the conversation. And poets can easily move along the scale at will, up or down. Going back to Poul Anderson, I’d rank “J.R.R.T” a two and “Route Song of the Winged Folk” a nine. Although this latter text clearly shares kinship with the ljoðaháttr form, it’s a long, long way from its Norse roots.

No matter where a poem falls on my revivalist-impressionist scale, though, let me stress that its ranking has nothing to do with literary merit. As mentioned before, “J.R.R.T” seems rather bland to me but “Route Song” quite impressive. About the only undeniably true thing we can say about purist-leaning texts is that their authors, one way or another, consider authenticity important. As Boromir might say, one does not simply walk into Mordor. The alliterative meter takes effort, hard effort, and simply understanding the metrics behind the historical meter takes research and pain-staking application. If a poet goes to all that effort, they darn well have a reason…and that reason often (but not always) involves subject.

For instance, Anderson normally prefers Old Norse meters, but “J.R.R.T” appears in Old English meter because he is honoring an author, Tolkien, who himself prefers the Old English tradition. Ironically, given what I said earlier about the importance of concrete metrical features, subject matter is often a better indicator than metrics of the alliterative tradition being revived. This obviously holds true for impressionists, who rarely care much about historical metrical exactness, but context clues can even help with purists. For instance, metrically, there isn’t much to distinguish Old English meter from Old Norse fornyrðislag, so without an extra-metrical hint such as subject matter, it’s incredibly difficult to make that important interpretative distinction.

So that’s my revivalist-impressionist scale. At this point, I can imagine one potentially loud objection, not against the scale itself, maybe, but against my claim that metrical fidelity has little to do with literary merit. Here goes: what if an impressionist is deviating from the historical metrics, not in deference to some special literary or linguistic reason, but because they don’t have the foggiest notion what the historical metrics are? Any poet, after all, can start off a poem with “bibbidi-bobbidi-boo,” but such nonsense does not an alliterative poem make.

...as opposed to the pizza.
Image provided by Wise

To which I respond…yeah. Sure. This could be true of an impressionist. Not every revivalist is a medievalist, and some revivalists know virtually nothing about the historical meters. No less an authority than W. H. Auden in The Age of Anxiety had to contend with accusations that he didn’t properly understand Old English prosody, and even though he in fact did, the Modern Revival contains scores of poets who don’t. For such folks, The Wanderer might as well be skaldic verse, and Piers Plowman is virtually identical with Peter Piper with his peck of pickled peppers.

Yet that doesn’t usually matter. For a fun experiment, I want to tackle three different alliterative poems that fall quite heavily on the impressionist side of the scale…and all by poets who, let us say, have a questionable grasp on their chosen alliterative tradition. To find out who I mean, though, tune in next week for the exciting reveal.

Planning for #Kzoo2024

𝔗o follow up on an earlier post, registration for the 2024 International Congress on Medieval Studies is open. Registration is here, and it's a sliding scale.

The Society has a few things on offer for the Congress this time around, all virtual, and all in US Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4):

• Business Meeting- Thursday, 9 May 2024, 8:30pm
• Alternative Medievalisms against the Tolkienian Tradition- Friday, 10 May 2024, 1:30pm
• Tolkien and Twenty-First Century Challenges: A Roundtable- Saturday, 11 May 2024, 3:30pm
  

Items on the agenda for the business meeting, which will serve as the AGM called for by §5.1 of the Society Constitution, remain

• Determination of the Society offerings for the 2025 Congress;
• Election of the Society President, 2024-2027, per §4.2.2 of the Society Constitution and the 2021 AGM; and
  
• Other business as the Society decides to treat and as time permits.
  

Incumbent Society President Geoffrey B. Elliott notes that he is not willing to stand for reelection, having already served in the capacity for six years.

Please send Congress offering ideas and nominations for President to talesaftertolkien@gmail.com, and we'll see you at the 'zoo!

Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Amit Majmudar, 'The Grail Quest'"

The fifth in the series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, discusses an interesting iteration of anachronistic medievalism. As before, editorial intrusion is minimal.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

Too, please let us know if you've got ideas for guest-posts or series of your own; we'd love to hear from you!

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𝔄fter my last blog post on the nearly perfect Old English metrics of “Dear Tolkien Estate,” I can’t resist tackling another new (to me) poet with more experimental tendencies: Amit Majmudar.

The laureate
Image provided by Wise

As Ohio’s first poet laureate and the author of a verse translation of the Bhagavad Gita (named Godsong, 2011), Majmudar – a diagnostic radiologist in his spare time – is someone whom I’m kicking myself for having missed during my first hunt for revivalists. And he’s good. Although “The Grail Quest” isn’t technically a speculative poem, it shows exactly what someone can accomplish merely by hinting at the old alliterative prosody – that is, by practicing a meter unconcerned with strict Sievers types or full-scale structural alliteration.

As its title indicates, “The Grail Quest” is another Arthurian poem, and Majmudar refers initially to both Chrétien de Troyes, the French romancer who created the Grail legend, and Sir Perceval, its original quester. (Later Arthurian tradition would eventually replace Perceval as central quester with the pure-in-heart Sir Galahad.) You can read the full text of “The Grail Quest” here; America Magazine published it just last December. For your convenience, the first five lines are an excellent gateway into Majmudar’s metrical abracadabra:

Perceval almost     pierced the veil,
never uttered     a Christ-laced curse.
Purity of heart     is to will one thing,
wrote Kierkegaard      before the churchyards
turned charnel houses     in excruciated Europe. (lines 1-5)

The tell-tale caesuras are readily apparent to anyone, but they’re about the only aspect of Old English poetics Majmudar reproduces. Although his first line creates something like an “establishing shot” for good structural alliteration (that is, “Perceval” and “pierced” link his a-verse to his b-verse), the next two lines break that patterning decisively.

In lines 2 and 3, the b-verses only alliterate internally – an unhistorical practice that Majmudar frequently repeats. He likewise shows little interest in following standard Sieversian rhythms. Although some half-lines display a valid pattern, for instance “Perceval almost” (type A), “pierced the veil” fails the Sievers test by having only three syllables, and “Purity of heart” deploys the SxxS pattern that Old English poets considered improper.

I could go on. For example, besides intra-verse alliterations, Majmudar deploys other quasi-historical deviations such as delayed alliteration, interlinear alliteration, and crossed alliteration. Yet, at this point, part of me almost wishes to apologize for all this detailed talk of prosody … yet the metrics behind Majmudar’s poem truly are different from those found in “Dear Tolkien Estate,” and I can’t help but mention them: they create such a radically different style of revivalist text. By way of comparison, imagine the difference between jaguars and tigers. Both animals, clearly, belong to the big cat family, but each is fundamentally its own beast. In a similar way, Majmudar’s metrics make his poem unique, and this uniqueness has a profound effect on what meanings we can (or should) take away from his poem.

In one sense, “The Grail Quest” is a text that meditates on poetic form itself. To that end, Majmudar joins a host of other revivalists who reflect upon the core weirdness of resurrecting an archaic medieval meter for modern times. In particular I’m thinking of Richard Wilbur (“Junk”) and Edwin Morgan (“Spacepoem 3: Off Course”). All three of their poems diverge strongly from strict Old English meter, but for the way I read “The Grail Quest,” Majmudar’s thematic justification for his unhistorical poetics is particularly fascinating.

Look at Majmudar’s first stanza. There, his speaker questions the status of the Holy Grail as literal physical object – perhaps it is merely a lure, he says, an imaginary MacGuffin in pursuit of which Galahad will “attempt and test / truth by joust” (l.17-18). However, in the second stanza, the Grail Quest transforms into a personal quest for the speaker. For a poet especially, this private quest leads not to an “impossible castle” (l.19) but to the perfect poem: a text shaped by its ideal form, faultlessly conveying what its intrepid speaker – who wonders hesitantly “whether ⸱ my words were worthy” (l.25) wishes to express.

In poetry, needless to say, metrics are welded to form, and one ideal way to convey Arthurian content so heavily associated with the Middle Ages is through a specifically medieval meter: the alliterative. The Alliterative Morte Arthure comes readily to mind; so does Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Hence Majmudar’s poem. But there’s a problem. For poets writing in the 21st century, a totally faithful historical restoration of the medieval alliterative meter is coming about six centuries too late.

Quite early in Majmudar’s poem, history enters the text through a subtle reference to the First World War, i.e., “the churchyards / turned charnel houses” of an excruciated Europe. This war has often been viewed as a cultural diremption between late modernity and the earlier Edwardian and Victorian eras, and thus, under my reading of “The Grail Quest,” the Great War also implies a nearly unbridgeable chasm between modernity and the Middle Ages. Simply too much has come to pass in the last 600 years; nobody today can revive a literary form established by a long-dead era without irony. This realization is partly what drove Ezra Pound’s famous revolution against traditional poetics, and although Pound also drew inspiration from Old English poetry, he lengthened and loosened the Old English poetic line in radically new, modernist ways.

In this context, I thus cannot help but see Majmudar’s reference to lapis lazuli in line 7 as a deft allusion to Yeats, whose poem by that name provides one more modernist meditation on life and art.

Because new worlds require new poetics, however (or so the argument goes; C. S. Lewis wouldn’t agree), what I find enthralling about “The Grail Quest” is how Majmudar seems to suggest a historical and cultural justification for his “impressionistic” revival of the alliterative meter. According to most medievalists, linguistic changes are to blame for why alliterative poetry disappeared after the 16th century, and I’ve elsewhere claimed that one of the stronger arguments for impressionism in the Modern Revival is how Modern English differs from its earlier cognate languages. There’s still a good basis for this claim, I believe, but let’s also consider one strong parallel within the history of Arthurian literature. 

He's so dreamy...
Image provided by Wise

This parallel even seems to be suggested by “The Grail Quest.” Notably, when speaking of Arthurian legend, it’s often helpful to remember that Arthuriana is the original “fan fiction.” New authors constantly re-write characters, invent them, or modify their core qualities. Chrétien de Troyes is a case in point. As mentioned before, he created Sir Perceval as the original Grail knight. But Majmudar does not trust any “poet ⸱ pimping a tale” (l. 11), as he says, and neither, apparently, did several late medieval authors. Once the Grail transformed into the Holy Grail, the tradition quickly needed someone who better exemplified Christian virtue. Thus the Vulgate Cycle (13th-century) was born, and it soon replaced Sir Perceval as principal quester with the supremely virtuous (and markedly virginal) Sir Galahad. His companions became Bors and Perceval; poor Sir Perceval had quested himself into a demotion.

In other words, the times they were a-changin’. No longer did the original Grail knight from de Troyes’s romances – never exactly the sharpest tool in the shed – suffice. Perceval had lost his “it” factor, so the tradition required a revision. All this seems implied by “The Grail Quest.” In Majmudar’s first stanza, his speaker begins explicitly with de Troyes’s version of Perceval before quickly pivoting to Sir Galahad, his literary replacement. And just as Arthurian tradition has rewritten Sir Perceval, Majmudar is rewriting the Holy Grail, transforming this Christian symbol from a cup filled with Christ’s blood to a poem fitted perfectly by its form.

All this helps explain Majmudar’s revisions on the traditional poetics of the alliterative meter; the old poetics no longer suffice. One can agree or disagree with this assessment as you please. After all, the Modern Revival will always have its purist poets, those folks supremely interested in historical authenticity: Rahul Gupta, Jere Fleck, Math Jones, Adam Bolivar, the Inklings. But Majmudar isn’t one of them…and “The Grail Quest” partly explains why.