Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Susan Edwards ('Tuilinde')"

The tenth in the series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, continues looking at individual poets working in alliterative verse. As before, editorial intrusion is minimal, consisting mostly of inserting links for ease of reference.

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!

Also, happy Tolkien Reading Day!

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𝔏ast week, when comparing medieval retellings of the Trojan War to contemporary fan fiction, my reason involved more than there simply being folks like M. Wendy Hennequin around, people for whom medievalism and creative fan activity are deeply entwined. My other reason is that the Middle Ages can seem so distant to my students. Popular culture helps them grasp some aspects of medieval life and culture, albeit often in distorted form, for instance feudalism and chivalry, but otherwise? The instinctive concern for rank, the holy awe of kingship, the ubiquity of religion in daily life…all these things tend to be beyond the everyday experience of college students in the 21st century. As a teacher, you have to find a bridge. Calling stories about the Trojan War or King Arthur “fanfic” therefore breaks down a historical barrier. Students know what fan fiction is. They understand the conventions. So while it’s easy to be intimidated by a syllabus that contains Dante’s Inferno with the ghosts of Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler staring down at you, sermonizing about the Great Books, it’s another matter entirely when you can start thinking about Dante as a Mary Sue.

Still, such iconoclasm only works because students know that medieval literature isn’t “real” fanfic. The real stuff is what happens when contemporary fans take copyrighted material from well-known franchises, Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings for example, and compose artworks based on that content. Thanks to the internet, too, sharing such work is easier than ever before. Huge repositories of such stuff can be found on sites such as Commaful, Wattpad, or Archive of Our Own.

Just as fandom, though, is the unsung hero of the Modern Revival, its King Arthur, fanfic is fandom’s Excalibur. The most obvious stepping stone has been Tolkien. Although the Tolkien Estate frowns deeply on fan fiction – the most recent (and most hilarious) instance happened after one deeply clueless fan self-published an unauthorized sequel to The Lord of the Rings and then, disastrously, tried to sue the Estate for copyright infringement – but that hasn’t stopped a large cohort of fans from producing Tolkien-related fanfic. Scholars of popular culture have even started studying it. For example, Dawn M. Walls-Thumma has surveyed Silmarillion-based fan fiction looking mainly for historical bias in Tolkien’s legendarium, or at least what fan writers imagine such historical bias to be, but one of her more fascinating side discoveries is that an overwhelming percentage of authors in her sample size (88.5%) identified as women. Nonbinary gender identities pulled a distant second at 6.0%, and male-identified authors constituted a mere 3.6%.

Long before the internet, however, Tolkien fan publications such as Mallorn, Orcrist, Mythic Circle, and Mythlore were producing fanfic…and some of this fanfic includes poetry composed in an alliterative meter. One of the better revivalist fan poems belongs to “Tuilinde” (aka, Susan Edwards). I haven’t managed to track down any solid biographical information on Edwards yet, but her name “Tuilinde” is the word in Quenya for swallow, the bird. Anyway, I’ve found two of her alliterative poems, both well-crafted: “Slaying the Dragon” (Mallorn, 2010) and “The Paths of the Dead” (Mallorn, 2011). Long-time Tolkien fans can easily guess their subjects by titles alone. Each represents an excellent example of an impressionist-leaning poetics – caesuras and heavy alliteration, but no Sievers types or formal alliterative patterning – but, of the two, “Slaying the Dragon” is much stronger. The other poem is a straightforward retelling of Aragorn’s passage through the haunted Dwimorberg, free from surprises or notable innovations, but her Smaug poem is fresher, darker, moodier…and strangely, atmospherically, grim. 

A typical depiction
Image provided by Wise

In The Hobbit, you see, the central action is one Tolkien borrowed directly from Beowulf: Bilbo stealing a golden cup from Smaug’s hoard. Since it is a truth universally acknowledged that “dragons gonna dragon,” Smaug imitates his Old English model by laying waste the surrounding countryside, including Lake-town. Although this city has many virtues, dragon-proof fortifications are, sadly, not one of them. Only the heroic Bard the Bowman prevents total destruction, and this he accomplishes by shooting the Black Arrow – a family heirloom – straight into Smaug’s undefended underbelly. The great wyrm’s carcass plunges into the waters of the lake, and Lake-town survives, although now more than a little crispy.

This sounds like a dark tale, and many critics have noted how Tolkien’s later chapters in The Hobbit, including the vengeance of Smaug and the Battle of the Five Armies, are tonally darker than his earlier ones. Still, The Hobbit remains a story for children. It never subscribes for long to the horror and fear that surround the tensest moments in The Lord of the Rings, and, devastating though Smaug’s vengeance may be, it lasts but a single chapter.

In “Slaying the Dragon,” though, Edwards exploits her fan-fiction medium well, accentuating two separate affects muted within Tolkien’s original novel: the core direness of Lake-town’s situation, and its resolute bravery, each focalized through Bard’s humorless perspective. Edwards’s alliterative meter contributes greatly to this effect. Generally speaking, light-hearted poems in the Old English measure are few and far between. One successful example is Lewis’s The Nameless Isle but, otherwise, this alliterative tradition gravitates naturally toward a slow, sonorous kind of stoic heroism, especially in the face of desperate odds. The effect is something like what happens when we read extended passage of interior monologue in prose fiction; we see Bard’s perspective in a way that Tolkien never gives us for long…and this perspective, even when shown by Tolkien, is one heavily mitigated by other factors in The Hobbit.

For one thing, by the time readers reach the Smaug chapters in The Hobbit, we’ve come to rather like Thorin Oakenshield and his company of his dwarves. Sure, they’re not perfect, but we’ve learned to agree with the narrator when he says (after none of them volunteers to follow Bilbo on his first foray into Smaug’s lair): “Dwarves are not heroes…but are decent enough people…if you don’t expect too much.” Plus, we still remember the humor and good-fun of Tolkien’s first chapter when the dwarves farcically invite themselves – Gandalf presiding – into Bilbo’s home. 

No fiddler, he
Image provided by Wise

None of this is known to Bard. Nor would he care. He cannot afford to. Upon their entry into Lake-town, bedraggled yet proud, Bard sees Thorin and his dwarves clearly for their “graceless grandeur, their greed and foolishness” (l.2). And if Bard views them without sympathy, it is only because he anticipates all too well the consequences of such unmerited self-importance. The opening lines of Edwards’s text capture his grim foreknowledge with a powerful concision:

Then the Dwarves came     with confusion and controversy.
Ragged refugees,     claiming royal rights.
Hopes were heard,     and were hurriedly believed—
Rich and poor saw     a bold brightness brandished. (l.12-15, emphasis added)

In Edwards’s text, as the original, the citizens of Lake-town mock Bard for his caution. They can see only the possibilities, not the inevitable consequences, of promised wealth and glory. These citizens are in “excitement bound · to their unreal dreams” (l.24 ), enchanted by false glamour, the new King Under the Mountain.

Focalizing her text through Bard, Edwards removes any mitigating sympathy for Thorin’s bedraggled royal hauteur. She also removes the mitigating perspective of Lake-town itself. As Tolkien says almost explicitly in The Hobbit, Bard the Bowman – a descendent of Girion, lord of Dale – hails from the ancient world of heroes, the world Beowulf, Hrothgar, and King Alfred. However, Bard’s actual home is Lake-town…and Tolkien presents this city-state as essentially modern, a polity full of middle-class citizens for whom material acquisition – not glory, not old songs – matters most. For these citizens, their major concerns are tolls and trade, gold and cargoes, and that is why they elect as their leader the merchant-friendly Master.

In “Slaying the Dragon,” Edwards takes all that away. She leaves us only with Bard’s ancient heroism, his grimness, his resolution to withstand the dragon though it cost him his life. Although modernity cannot withstand the terror of a dragon, Edwards grants us one heart-stopping glimpse into how, even for Bard, the theory of northern courage extolled by Tolkien is never something to take for granted. Against Smaug’s fiery holocaust, Edwards intimately evokes a steadfast courage-under-fire (pun intended) that Peter Jackson tried – but failed – to produce in his cinematic Hobbit trilogy. Tolkien, at least, hinted at it…but never for long. He had his child readership to consider. Yet Edwards brings this terror and this heroism to full flower.

"Slaying the Dragon,” in my view, is therefore an incredibly effective fan poem, a formidable addition to the Modern Alliterative Revival. Her text’s focalization through Bard, humorless and grim-faced yet prescient, is deepened greatly by Edwards’s choice of meter. Free verse or rhyme, the two lighter options, would not have achieved the same thing in the same way. As a result, by combining an innovative narrative perspective with an archaic medieval meter, Edwards finds the Holy Grail of fan poetry: a new text that heightens the aims and themes of the original.

Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: M. Wendy Hennequin and Fan Fiction"

The ninth in the series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, continues looking at individual poets working in alliterative verse. As before, editorial intrusion is minimal (mostly inserting links).

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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ℑn my introduction to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, my first section is called “The Story of the Modern Revival.” Every story needs a hero, though, and our story’s unsung hero is undeniably contemporary fandom. Many years ago, I once read an essay by Harlan Ellison praising SF for having so many big-name authors emerge from the ranks of SF fandom. He considered this situation distinct from mainstream, non-genre literature, and while I won’t agree with Ellison completely – as one of my students once told me, she has an older brother named Geoffrey because of how much their mother loves The Canterbury Tales – but still, genre fandom seems special.

Such fandom has been a guiding light for the Modern Revival, too. We’ve already touched upon several revivalists with impeccable fan roots: Fletcher Pratt, Poul Anderson, Patrick Rothfuss, Paul Edwin Zimmer. Nonetheless, most people tend to think of fandom as a modern 20th-century thing, strongly linked in its earliest days to conventions and printed fanzines, but some aspects of fandom go a long, long way back – and, here, I’m thinking specifically of “fan fiction.”

Take, for instance, Paradise Lost. If contemporary “fanfic” is essentially what happens when someone takes material from a favorite franchise and produces their own creative, non-official artwork, well then…John Milton is basically writing Biblical fan fiction. And this is precisely how I explain Paradise Lost to my students, too. In fact, most medieval literature can be considered fanfic under this broad conception. Arthurian literature is the ultimate example, since it’s nothing but a history of authors borrowing, modifying, and expanding the same core set of content – the lack of copyright laws during the Middle Ages was a wonderful thing.

The poet herself
Image provided by Wise

Next to Arthurian literature, though, the most popular medieval “franchise” was the Trojan War, and reviving this old tradition for the Modern Revival is a contemporary fan writer and professional medievalist: M. Wendy Hennequin.

As a young author, Hennequin cut her teeth working on Star Wars and Star Trek fanfic before, in college, graduating to the Dargon Project – a shared-universe setting inspired by Robert Aspirin’s Thieves’ World anthology series. Now she’s a professor at Tennessee State University where she’s been teaching for several years. Even as a medievalist, though, her fandom has continued. One of the Society for Creative Anachronism’s most delightful mini-traditions involves tales from the “Boreal Master,” a fictional medieval Icelandic poet whose compositions are all terrible. Hennequin wrote one such “Boreal” poem herself, complete with a pseudo-scholarly gloss, and presented both at the major conference for medievalists held annually in Kalamazoo, Michigan; the poem also appears in my anthology.

For today, however, I’m after juicier fruit than faux tales by the Boreal Master – in fact, Hennequin’s unexpectedly powerful revivalist text: “Guðrinc’s Lament.”

Within Old English poetry, elegies are a common genre. The most relevant example is probably “The Wife’s Lament,” an anonymous poem preserved in the Exeter Book, and this is the tradition followed by “Guðrinc’s Lament.” For Hennequin, her eponymous speaker is actually Andromache, the wife of the Trojan hero Hector. In contrast to revivalists with a less-than-firm grasp of medieval history or poetics (as recounted in my last few posts), Hennequin distinguishes herself by her strong sense of historicity. In one sense, “Guðrinc’s Lament” is a literary forgery, a text presented as if it were composed by an Old English scop, yet one that nevertheless skillfully reflects the style, epithets, misunderstandings, and assumptions that might have marked a genuine Old English poet writing about ancient Greek history.

Andromache and Astyanax
Image provided by Wise

For instance, the wife of Hector in The Iliad is no warrior woman…yet, in Greek, Andromache literally means “fighter of men.” This etymology evidently misleads (or inspires) the Old English author of “Guðrinc’s Lament” to transform his female speaker – whose name “Guðrinc” means “fighter of men” in Old English as well – into a battle-hardened warrior queen. In addition, medieval poets usually lacked a strong historical sense, so they’re prone to anachronism, often projecting their contemporary social institutions and practices onto the distant past. Accordingly, in Hennequin’s text, King Priam of Troy is framed as a “ring-giver,” an epithet more appropriate to Beowulf than to Homeric Greece, and Guðrinc describes the Greeks as “the heathen foe” (l.74), a phrase that obviously meant nothing twelve-hundred years before the birth of Christ. Moreover, Guðrinc laments Troy’s destruction by saying

Gone is the mead-hall,     gleaming with gold,
Where the high-lord sat,     longing for war,
The noble youths     yearning for battle.

Mead-halls, of course, are famously Germanic a type of building…and the Greeks, in any event, would have drunk wine.

All these little details create an impressive historically authentic aura for “Guðrinc’s Lament.” What’s even more impressive, too, is how Hennequin shapes her narrative events according to early medieval (mis)understandings of the Trojan War. In most classical accounts, the son of Andromache and Hector, Astyanax, is thrown to his death off Troy’s walls, and many Trojan women – Queen Hecuba, Cassandra, and Andromache herself – are all enslaved. In “Guðrinc’s Lament,” however, Astyanax survives, and Hennequin has her Trojan women survive as exiles, not slaves. What gives?

Technically, we’re not completely sure if medieval poets had direct access to Homer’s Iliad, but one text that did circulate widely among the early English people was De excidio Troiae historia (The History of the Destruction of Troy) by Dares Phrygius. This “history” is one of the most famous forgeries of the entire Middle Ages, and its multiple layers of attributed authorship would make any postmodernist proud. It is allegedly an eye-witness account to the Trojan War by a Trojan priest, Dares Phyrgius, whom Homer briefly mentions in The Iliad’s fifth book. Yet such an eye-witness account would obviously have been written in Greek, not Latin. Accordingly, the introductory epistle declares its translator to be Cornelius Nepos, a famous Roman biographer contemporary with Cicero. However, although it’s theoretically possible that whoever wrote Dare’s short book in Latin was working from some kind of Greek original, Cornelius Nepos was definitely not that person. Instead, scholars agree that De excidio Troiae historia was probably written in the 5th century AD…but medieval authors didn’t know that. Instead, although they sometimes questioned the alleged role of Nepos due to the manuscript’s simplistic Latin, the original authorship of Dares continued to be taken at face value.

For anyone interested in the fascinating story of this famous medieval forgery, I’d highly recommend Frederick Clark’s book, The First Pagan Historian (2020). Whoever the real author may have been, however, “Dares” enjoyed wide circulation during the Middle Ages partly because of how he directly challenged two ancient authorities: Homer himself, who did not witness the events at Troy himself, and the great Virgil, who praised the piety of Aeneas, Rome’s founder. In contrast, Dares claims that Aeneas only survived the destruction of Troy because he betrayed his city to the Greeks.

Neither of these unique challenges to ancient authority appears in Hennequin’s poem, but she does borrow several incidents directly from De excidio Troiae historia – or, rather, the purported Old English author of her text does. This is why Hecuba, Cassandra, and Andromache all survive the war as exiles, not slaves, and although Dares does not specify the fate of Astyanax specifically, we can reasonably infer his survival from Andromache’s own.

Of course, Dares cannot have been the sole “source” for the Old English poet who purportedly composes “Guðrinc’s Lament.” Dares never mentions the defilement of Hector’s body, for instance, and he famously rationalizes the Trojan War to exclude any reference to gods or the Trojan horse ruse – in contrast, Hennequin has Guðrinc say, “The city-dwellers, seeing no harm, / Opened the gates” (l.84). Still, medieval authors often had multiple sources themselves, so that checks out. Ultimately, the combination of Old English meter – a slow and solemn measure that tends naturally toward elegy – and one of Homer’s most tragic tales is quite powerful, and “Guðrinc’s Lament” works as a revivalist text on several levels. As my last few posts have indicated, revivalists need not necessarily be medievalists in order to produce work meaningful to the Modern Alliterative Revival…but when they are, like Hennequin, good things can happen.

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

The eighth in the series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, continues 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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𝔏ast week, I promised to discuss three impressionists who created important revivalist texts despite knowing comparatively little about medieval poetry in itself. In this week, I reveal who my final – and best – example is. And the answer is…

JOSHUA GAGE

My final example is also maybe the most perfect: Joshua Gage and “Demetrius Yardley, Fire Nurse.” Gage’s greater personal interest lies in short-form speculative verse, scifaiku and horrorku in particular, and he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University and its Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics…a school I know sounds fictional, but it is entirely real and fully accredited by the Higher Learning Commission; Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman founded their MFA program back in 1974.  

Something like this?
Image provided by Wise

Anyway, Gage’s text – an alliterative steampunk poem – is our primary example of how someone without even a smidgeon of contact with real medieval literature can create an exciting revivalist text nonetheless. At least for Rothfuss and Zimmer, we can safely assume they had some encounters with authentic medieval poetry in translation, even if the finer metrical details escaped their notice. This definitely isn’t the route taken by Gage, though. His guide to the meter was neither Beowulf nor Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, even in translation, but a teaching anthology for poets, The Practice of Poetry (1992). Only one “chapter” in the book – a mere two pages – discusses Old English meter. The description it provides is accurate, if unsophisticated, but notably, the chapter’s author provides only three total lines of alliterative verse as an example…and unless Richard Wilbur is fibbing on his birth certificate, “The Lilacs” – a text of about average metrical fidelity, probably a “4” or “5” on my scale – is about as far from authentic medieval poetry as they come.

With this source text and book chapter in mind, I’d probably rank Gage’s metrics in “Demetrius Yardley, Fire Nurse” as an overall nine on my scale. He has caesuras and sporadic attempts at alliteration in each line, but the greater intricacies of Old English poetics are simply missing. Gage just had no way of knowing what they are. Sure, he’s in the right ballpark, but it’s not exactly a homerun – or even a bunt single – of historical faithfulness to the meter.

If we get hung up on that, however, we’d be missing the bigger picture. In my introduction to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, I described Gage’s text as a “kind of metrical retro-futurism.” What I meant is that, if you think about it, steampunk aesthetics are a strangely appropriate vehicle to pair with an archaic medieval meter. As a SF subgenre, steampunk blends futuristic settings with a Victorian level of technology that nowadays seem decidedly antique. Nobody today thinks that steam locomotives are the cutting-edge of human achievement; they lack the “gosh-wow” factor that once made H. G. Wells’s fiction seem so impressively cutting-edge. And this old-fashioned steampunk aesthetic thoroughly inundates “Demetrius Yardley.” Its eponymous hero belongs to a toiling underclass, shoveling coal into the furnaces that maintain the magnificent floating city of Potetopolis. As Demetrius explains,

          …We dwell
in lands caliginous,
          looking after
gas hoses, altimeters,
          and the holocaust that holds
this city aloft
          and its boulevards illuminated.

What steampunk hopes to accomplish on the genre level, Old English meter accomplishes on the metrical level. Alliterative poetics are the steam locomotives of a post-nuclear age: archaic and antique in themselves but presentable as new, exciting, and “futuristic” in a poetic world now dominated by free verse and formal rhyming poetry. If readers wish to experience the heady rush of the future and the past together, what better way than a text written in a newly rediscovered archaic meter but welded simultaneously onto a retro-futuristic steampunk setting?

Gage’s poem thus resonates for me, as a critic, in ways I’m sure he doesn’t even realize. As mentioned, his choice of meter is about as random as any such choice can be. Yet, thematically, his conjunction of genre and meter works in a surprisingly effective fashion, and it opens the way of pregnant possibility for future revivalists.