Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Paul Douglas Deane"

The eleventh 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 link-making.

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!

No fooling.

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Man of the hour
Image provided by Wise

𝔚hen talking about original fan works of the Modern Revival, no discussion is complete without Paul Douglas Deane. If you’ve heard of him before, it’s no doubt thanks to his website founded in 1999, Forgotten Ground Regained – the largest and best collection of alliterative verse on the interwebz. Originally, Deane envisioned his site as a combination blog, fanzine, and content index, running things on that model for about a decade before life (as they say) intervened. But then Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival appeared, and this event motivated Deane to give his website a major overhaul. Now the layout is sleeker and snazzier than ever before, and Deane’s talent for finding new alliterative poets has been on full display. In the last few months alone, he’s discovered several new revivalists, and a few of them – Lancelot Schaubert, Amit Majmudar, Susan Edwards – have already been discussed in this series.

The thing is, Forgotten Ground Regained – as important a resource for the Modern Revival as there is – wouldn’t even exist without fandom. Contemporary revivalists, you see, share one thing in common with Marvel Comics superheroes: everyone has their own unique origin story. The alliterative meter enchanted the Inklings through its Englishness; Poul Anderson discovered it through Norse saga; and other poets have turned to the meter through a sincere religious devotion to Odin and the northern Germanic deities.

As for Paul Douglas Deane’s origin story, we can blame video games. 

Ah, the classics!
Image provided by Wise

Well, maybe not video games exactly, but rather a single, text-based, fantasy roleplaying game called Elendor MUSH. Although basically a ghost town these days, at least since the obsolescence of telnet, their client-server protocol, Elendor still advertises itself as the oldest Tolkien-based RPG on the internet – it has run continuously since 1991. Over the decades, the Elendor gaming world has become quite massive. Players can explore twenty different cultures and over 5,000 distinct areas. Deane’s involvement began back in Elendor’s heyday in the 1990s, and he developed Rhunedhel – an Elvish bard from Rivendell – as his main character. As everyone knows, though, bards are apt to go a-barding, especially in Rivendell, so Deane also composed several long poems in a meter uniquely suited to a Tolkienian fantasy setting: the alliterative meter, of course. In due time, “Rhunedhel” would create a five-poem epic cycle called Tales of the Avari.

If your memory for The Silmarillion is a little rusty, here’s the backstory on Tolkien’s Elves. Calling themselves the Quendi, they first “awakened” at Cuiviénen in the east of Middle-earth. In due time, one of the Valar, Oromë, happened upon them and, after consulting with his fellow Valar, he summoned them westward to Valinor. Many Elves heeded this call. These became the Eldar, and during their journey they eventually separated into the Three Kindreds: the Vanyar, the Noldor, and the Teleri. But what about the Elves who didn’t obey Oromë’s summons to Valinor – the ones who stayed behind at Cuiviénen?

Well, Tolkien doesn’t tell us much, but these stay-at-home Elves became the Avari, aka the “Unwilling,” and this blank spot in the legendarium is where Deane enters the fray. His epic alliterative cycle shares as its connecting thread Cordil, son of Fithurin, an Avarin Elf who fled imprisonment in Angband in order to return home to Cuiviénen. There he meets and marries Féhaglin the Fair; eventually, they found a secret Avarin stronghold called Gonnmar.

The masterwork in Tales of the Avari, according to Deane, is “The Redemption of Daeron.” Cordil and Féhaglin appear briefly as Gonnmar’s rulers, but Deane’s story actually focuses on a minor character from The Silmarillion, Daeron, a Sindarin Elf who loves Lúthien and, jealous of her lover Beren, twice betrays her to her father, King Thingol. After Beren is captured by Morgoth and Lúthien vows to rescue him, Daeron almost betrays Lúthien a third time…but then refuses. Convinced that this forbearance means certain death for her, however, a guilt-wracked Daeron disappears into the east. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien never represents him as learning his unrequited love’s fate.

This is where Deane takes up the master’s mantle. Given that Tolkien’s character is a famed minstrel and linguist, Daeron’s situation is a natural one for an Elvish bard such as “Rhunedhel.” (Notably, Deane himself holds a doctorate in linguistics and has published or co-published dozens of papers in the field.) Metrically speaking, though, “Redemption” is most notable for developing what Deane calls his “Daeron stanza” – a four-stress accentual meter with an aa/bb alliterative pattern and a final rhyming couplet. Although the poem has several quotable passages, one of Deane’s more lyrical stanzas appears in Book IV where Daeron, grieving for Lúthien, says

If duty’s dark and love is loss
Our souls are storms where tempest-tossed
We spin uncertain webs whose warp
     Unraveling
     – we grasp in sudden –
     – incandescence dazzling –

To me, these Daeron stanzas read like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in miniature: an alliterative body finished off by a bob-and-wheel. Nonetheless, whereas the alliterative meter traditionally confers an air of formality and slow elegance, Deane’s Daeron stanzas read much more quickly (and more musically) than in SGGK. Measured in total lines, the bob-and-wheels in Deane’s stanzas enjoy roughly equal weight to the truncated alliterative bodies, meaning that end-rhyme – not alliteration – tends to dominate the ear. This tendency, notably, creates an impact I more often associate with formal rhyming verse, and the ornamental rhyme here in Deane’s first two lines only reinforces that tendency.

Whereas alliteration, in other words, supplies the “bones” of a Daeron stanza, rhyme supplies the glitz and the glamor. This seems almost exactly opposite SGGK. There, the bob-and-wheels prevent the more substantial alliterative bodies (complete with traditional “long lines”) from becoming aurally monotonous. The Gawain-poet therefore uses rhyme not as the main show but as a metrical variant. For anyone used to reading alliterative verse from the Middle Ages, then, Deane’s Daeron stanzas produce an unusually rapid effect, but an intriguing one, too, especially as it seems so uniquely adapted to an English language greatly changed since the time of the Gawain-poet.

Deane gets good mileage out of this stanzaic form as well, despite its formal strictness. Probably my single favorite text is “The Song of Shadows.” Whereas “Redemption” is an introspective poem about grief and guilt, “Song” is a straightforward heroic fantasy where the good guys are good, the bad guys bad, and the hero becomes one wonderous MacGuffin richer. Alongside his wife Féhaglin, Cordil seeks to regain a family heirloom – a coronet called Mirloth – stored within the eastern stronghold of an evil supporter of “Annatar” (hint: Sauron). As many medievalists agree, the alliterative meter has always been well suited to narrative verse, and Deane heightens his brisk plotting through several deft allusions to Tolkien’s larger legendarium.

For instance, besides the reference to Annatar, Féhaglin wins their escape by singing a song that lulls everyone in the stronghold asleep – the exact method used by Lúthien when rescuing Beren from Sauron’s dungeons in Tol-in-Gaurhoth. Furthermore, Deane’s two heroes – the Beren and Lúthien of eastern Middle-earth – also found, as mentioned, the hidden city of Gonnmar. This Avarin city recalls Tolkien’s rich tradition of hidden realms in Beleriand. The special “unbreakable” armor that Cordil forges in exchange for Mirloth is another legendarium tie-in (and one I initially missed until Deane himself kindly pointed it out): it eventually becomes the armor worn by the Witch-King of Angmar whom Éowyn slays.

All in all, we have much to thank fandom and Elendor MUSH for – not only Forgotten Ground Regained, but also Deane’s robust epic cycle of alliterative fanfic poems. This cycle accomplishes much, and it does so while developing an innovative new type of alliterative stanza. Even if Deane’s website remains his ultimate legacy to the Modern Alliterative Revival, we owe online gaming communities and fandom a massive debt.

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.

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.

Author Interview - Bethany Atazadeh

Hello and welcome to our latest author interview with YA fantasy author, Bethany Atazadeh!

Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing.

Back in 2016 I was laid off from a corporate job with a whole team, and I took the opportunity to pursue writing and self-publishing on a whim. Here I am seven years later, thankful I did! At this point in my career, I have written 10 novels (published 9), as well as published a children's book, five nonfiction books on marketing with a co-author (two of which I personally wrote), and a writing planner. While I've loved every single book-shaped project, my absolute favorite is young adult fantasy books, especially if they have a touch of fairytale retelling elements to them.

Your favorite thing you've written or published?

Honestly, I almost always say my most recent book—and because I love The Secret Curse (book 3 in The Queen's Rise series) so much, I have to say that's true this time as well.

Who would you say your biggest literary influences are?

So many... Every book that I read influences me (whether good or bad!) by impacting my writing and my understanding of good story. I wish I could point to a specific person, but it's really every author I know or enjoy reading!

Do you feel like your writing has been impacted/influenced by Tolkien? If so, in what way(s)?

Hmm, while I have to admit I didn't read in full and watched the movies instead (don't hate!) I can still say he has an incredible ability to create believable characters and worlds that every author should aspire to. I have no idea how he does it, but at least one element might be that he's not afraid to give them flaws (and big ones sometimes!) amidst all the good.

How has the history of the middle ages impacted/influenced your work?

I guess maybe in a backwards way? A lot of fantasy has middle ages vibes, and I specifically wanted to do something different so I tried to intentionally create a fantasy world in The Stolen Kingdom series (and now The Queen's Rise series) that was based in a very different time/culture (or multiple cultures at this point). 

What do you think the current innovations in your genre(s) are?

There are two big innovations currently that I see: romantasy (aka fantasy books that are mainly about the romance) and having "spice" in books (aka sexual scenes to some extent). Personally I love the romantasy vibes and have really enjoyed adding more romance to my fantasy books to embrace that trend. But I strongly dislike the way that the "spice" trend is affecting young adult age books in particular, because that content doesn't belong in young adult books.

What is something in your genre(s) you'd like to see more of?

I love unique fantasy worlds that branch out from the typical King Arthur and the round table / middle ages style worlds. 

What is something in your genre(s) you'd like to see less of?

I already got on my soapbox a little, but I believe young adult books should be more innocent for the age group, and that there's too much adult content in them these days, specifically spicy scenes. 

What are your favorite themes to work with or write?

Hope. Overcoming. Loving yourself the way you are. Faith.

Where online can our readers find you and your work?

Website: https://www.bethanyatazadeh.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorbethanyatazadeh

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/bethanyatazadeh 

My books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B077FRKJGW/allbooks

My books on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/bethanyatazadeh

Bethany, thank you so much for the interview and sharing your fun and insightful answers with us!

Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Lancelot Schaubert, 'Dear Tolkien Estate'"

The fourth in the series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, treats a response to Tolkien and is therefore eminently suited to presentation here. 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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𝔒f all the new alliterative poems I’ve recently seen, Lancelot Schaubert’s “Dear Tolkien Estate” is one of the more delightful. To give this one some context, if you’re a regular reader of Tales After Tolkien, you might have already heard of a little-known fantasy author by the name of J.R.R. Tolkien. Well, back in May 2013, the executor of Tolkien’s estate (his son Christopher) posthumously published one of his father’s longest original works in strict Old English meter, The Fall of Arthur.

If you’ve not read it before, it’s a remarkable achievement, but alas…as holds true for most of Tolkien’s major projects, he never completed it. Only four cantos plus portions of a fifth are finished. Nevertheless, in 1934, he shared a draft of The Fall of Arthur with his trusted friend and colleague, the medievalist R. W. Chambers (1874-1942), who praised the poem highly. Yet this encouragement was apparently insufficient to entice Tolkien towards completion, and despite hinting a few decades later that he wished to return to his “long poem,” Tolkien never did. When discussing another incomplete story by his father, “Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin,” Christopher Tolkien laments, “For me it is perhaps the most grievous of his many abandonments.” To that mix I would also add The Fall of Arthur.

The poet in question
Image provided by Wise

Cue Mr. Schaubert. For anyone unfamiliar with him, Schaubert has – despite his youth – an impressive publication record in the alliterative meter to his credit. His first book of verse, Inconveniences Rightly Considered (2017), has several poems in the meter, but it’s with The Greenwood Poet (2022) that he plunges head-first into alliterative poetics, which he often buttresses with half-rhyme and inter-verse assonance. Naturally enough, Schaubert deeply admires the Inklings, and in “Dear Tolkien Estate” he makes the ultimately quixotic offer to complete The Fall of Arthur himself.

Of course, if you know anything about the Tolkien Estate, their refusal is about as unsurprising as hobbits living in the Shire. Still, if anybody has the chops to finish an Old English alliterative poem with a Christian undertone, Schaubert seems like a strong candidate. For one thing, “Dear Tolkien Estate” demonstrates an admirable restraint, although one I could never hope to emulate: never once does the text hint about how appropriate it would be for someone named “Lancelot” to finish an Arthurian poem. (See, even in this blog post I can’t restrain myself.)

More seriously, Schaubert’s meter in “Dear Tolkien Estate” is a master-class in alliterative control. His language is entirely natural – a key component of Old English verse – but he also weaves in and out of different Sievers types at will. The alliteration holds structurally true while never becoming intrusive. His penultimate line is particularly well-done: two half-lines that scan as B-types with long dips, but which also double as four consecutive anapests. This produces an arresting regularity of rhythm distinctive because it’s so unusual within the famously irregular Old English meter.

Granted, Schaubert’s metrics don’t quite match Tolkien’s own. He has some unusual stresses (e.g., the first syllable of alliteration in line 7; we have documentary evidence that the British Tolkien stressed the second), and, thanks to some fine research by T. S. Sudell and Nelson Goering, we know that Tolkien practiced a strict compression in The Fall of Arthur. Historically, Old English poets, although occasionally willing to expand their verses, generally preferred shorter ones of 4 or 5 syllables. This is a precedent followed by Tolkien. In contrast, the verses in Schaubert’s poem tend to run slightly longer, but this (I would suggest) only contributes to their feeling of naturalness. Modern English simply isn’t as compressed a language as Old English.

As a final note, Schaubert’s reference to “reforged swords” in his third stanza – an intimation of Aragorn’s reforged blade Andúril – is one of several delicately handled references to the lore.

Overall, “Dear Tolkien Estate” is a wonderful revivalist text for anyone to peruse. Enjoy: it’s printed for the first time here with the author’s permission. 

The call prompting the response
Image provided by Wise

Dear Tolkien Estate

ℑt would take talent for Tolkien’s dirge
Of Arthur and all the old knights
Of Camelot to receive the called-for response
Its original pages rightly deserve —
The ending of ages, the altar of metre
Receiving a sacred sacrifice of devotion
Like Old English, alliterate and paced.

It would take the team of the Tolkien estate
Agreeing together that greater things
Could arise rightly from a ready pupil,
A published poet and pawn of the realm
Of the great and varied graves of scholars
Who studied the song, who savored Gondor,
Who shun Shelob and shake with anger
At the mighty men molten Balrogs
Laid asunder in the lofty heights
Of the lowest dungeons and the lakes of ice.

It would take tomes of Tolkien’s notes
And a steady hand, studying long,
And ready to write a rendered ending
Deserved by the start, daring to finish
What many missed, what most wanted,
Yet still has never starred on the list
Of finished tales, of reforged swords,
That the master half-made before making a way
To the pearly gates and the price of life.

I would take the chance if you take me in.
I would write the end of the ruined saga.
I could give you the gold of the grave of the crown:
Pendragon’s poem I dare to complete.