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Philology Archive
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Chasing Krüger’s Dream: Studying the Transmission of Classical and Medieval Manuscripts Using Lattice Theory and Information Entropy
Posted on May 17, 2013 | No CommentsNew computational techniques show how modern digital philology is changing the way we think of the transmission of medieval manuscripts through space and time. -
Heorot and the Plundered Hoard: A Study of Beowulf
Posted on March 31, 2013 | No CommentsTime and again the Beowulf poet's choice of words and details reveals that he practised his craft within a tradition in which his creativeness was bound and disciplined by the objectiveness of a particular structure of images. We perceive in all the rich variety of his work the unifying effect of the typological imagination. It is in the typological mode of Beowulf that the key to its meaning and artistry is to be found. -
Conquest, Contact, and Convention: Simulating the Norman Invasion’s Impact on Linguistic Usage
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsHow do conventions arise? Lewis adressed this in his work Convention via signaling games, a mathematical model of communication where a sender sends a message to a receiver who then interprets it. When we say conventions, we mean by that a system of coor- dinated behavior pairing information states with actions -
The Development of Predicative Possession in Slavic Languages
Posted on January 7, 2013 | No CommentsAs an active language, Early Proto-Indo-European (Pre-Indo-Euro- pean) had no category of syntactic transitivity (Subject-Object relation), which is the central characteristic of nominative (accusative) languages, and no verb ‘have’. -
A Christological reading of The Ruin
Posted on December 30, 2012 | No CommentsWe should be aware that the semantic scope of each word may vary drastically and that the reader is influenced by many variables in attaching the meaning to a given word. The question becomes trickier if we take the allegorical viewpoint, because polysemy is concerned with the entire text, not with just a word. Thus, we should not consider the surface meaning of the words, but look more carefully for the covert meanings. -
Property Rights in Celtic Irish Law
Posted on December 16, 2012 | No CommentsUnfortunately, many historians not specializing in the study of the ancient Irish law tracts have been unaware of the textual inaccuracies of the O'Curry - O'Donovan translations and have continued to incorporate their older unscientific work, and that of their editors, into their own work. -
Language and Legend in the Fantasy Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien
Posted on December 12, 2012 | No CommentsThere was something so real in the languages that he created, and critics wanted to find the inspirations behind Tolkien‘s worlds. Elves, dwarves, men, hobbits, and various other creatures occupied the pages of his books, but the languages he created were complex and had real elements in them. Examples of his invented languages were those spoken by the Elves, Sindarin and Quenya. -
“My trouthe for to holde—allas, allas!”: Dorigen and Honor in “The Franklin’s Tale”
Posted on November 18, 2012 | No CommentsWe can see from the beginning of the Franklin’s Tale that honor as pub- lic esteem is an overriding concern for Arveragus, who qualifies his exceedingly courtly marriage vow, swearing always to remain Dorigen’s servant in love, with the condition that he retain the public appearance of lordly husband, “That wolde he have for shame of his degree”. -
Medieval Book History Week Lecture: “Practical Latin and Formal English in the 14th-15th Centuries”
Posted on November 13, 2012 | No CommentsThis lecture is part of Medieval Book History Week. Renown Professor Jeremy Catto spoke about literacy and language in England during the later Middle Ages at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto. -
Re-writing discourse features: speech acts in Heliand
Posted on September 30, 2012 | No CommentsThough extremely fascinating and very appealing, the theory of the saxonization and northernization of the Gospel has ended up permeating every single level upon which an analysis of the poem can be carried out, becoming a sort of a priori starting point that may lead scholars to over-interpretation and, therefore, hinder them from developing a perhaps deeper insight into the poem. -
The Riddle of Gollum: Was Tolkien Inspired by Old Norse Gold, the Jewish Golem, and the Christian Gospel?
Posted on August 23, 2012 | No CommentsI would like to speculate on Tolkien's sources for Gollum. As a start, it is likely that Tolkien's conscious sources for Gollum were the same as his sources for ents. -
Hopkins and Early English Riddling: Solving The Windhover?
Posted on August 15, 2012 | No CommentsIn this article I will demonstrate that The Windhover has strong formal similarities with early English riddling. This genre, which has very little in common with modern riddles, has a range of distinctive formal conventions which, I argue, are also present in The Windhover, including an “entitled solution,” “kennings” and the use of formulae. -
Madness and Gender in Late-Medieval English Literature
Posted on July 24, 2012 | No CommentsMadness has been long misrepresented in medieval studies. Assertions that conceptions of mental illness were unknown to medieval people, or that all madmen were assumed to be possessed by the devil, were at one time common in accounts of medieval society. -
The Evolution Of English
Posted on July 13, 2012 | No CommentsA video lecture on the origin and vagaries of the English language up to the 15th century -
Sovereign Subjects, Feudal Law, and the Writing of History
Posted on July 8, 2012 | No CommentsThe early historiography of feudal law coalesced as the point of articulation for a discourse of time (the rejection/reclamation of a “barbaric” past) and a discourse of power (the theorization of the sovereign relation), and ultimately yielded a period concept foundational to “modern” theories of state. -
Placenames and the settlement pattern of dark-age Scotland
Posted on June 3, 2012 | No CommentsThis study will examine some placename evidence for features of settlement in E Scotland, that zone which lies of the Firth of Forth and E of the main Scottish mountain mass. In this areaat least four different languages have been spoken with differing temporal and spatial extents: one non-Indo-European tongue, Celtic, Norse and English. -
The Monastic rules of Visigothic Iberia: a study of their text and language
Posted on May 30, 2012 | No CommentsStudies on early medieval monasticism have gained ground in recent scholarship.1 However, despite earlier activity,2 interest in early western monastic rules has generally lagged behind. -
A survey of the scholarship of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Posted on April 17, 2012 | No CommentsA survey of the major themes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) reveals both the poem's complexity and the poet's artistry. A general examination of the poem permits commentary upon the work's historical background, thematic unity, and narrative structure. -
The mandrake plant and its legend: a new perspective
Posted on April 8, 2012 | No CommentsAs a specialist in German mediaeval studies, until the time Peter Bierbaumer introduced me to Old English plant names and approached me with the idea of republishing and updating his Der botanische Wortschatz des AltenglischenI had no idea how fascinating Old English could be. -
VAGANTES: “What has Beowulf to do with a Christian King?” Heroic Legend as Poetic Speculum Principis
Posted on March 30, 2012 | No CommentsThrough a rhetorical analysis based in grounded theory that analyzes fifteen speeches and their contexts made by Hroðgar, Beowulf, and Wiglaf, I will show how the poet appropriated the Beowulf legend to present a dramatized speculum principis using the rhetorical devices common to oral-traditional narratives to articulate the three traits of kingship most highly valued by both secular and sacred authorities: generosity, faith, and protectiveness. -
Folk narratives and legends as sources of widespread idioms: Toward a Lexicon of Common Figurative Units
Posted on March 18, 2012 | No CommentsOn the one hand, stories (particularly fables) have been de- rived from already existing proverbs, from antiquity up to early modern times. On the other hand, a story in its summarised form can live on in a proverb or an idiom, even if the knowledge of this story has been forgotten for a long time. -
Female Discourses: Powerful and Powerless Speech in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur
Posted on January 12, 2012 | No CommentsVerbal interactions of female characters of Le Morte Darthur are analyzed in various instances of speech behavior, such as advice, apology, conflict managing, complaining, nagging and teasing. -
The emergence of the English language as an educational medium in Medieval England
Posted on January 1, 2012 | No CommentsTo better understand the relationship between linguistics, literature and education in Medieval England, some general background information is necessary to understand how these subjects intertwine... -
Lovesickness in “Troilus”
Posted on December 7, 2011 | No CommentsThe history of lovesickness in the Middle Ages is the record of physicians' attempts to understand what happens to the body and the mind when passion renders a lover a patient. -
Cultural Identity of the Russian North Settlers in the 10th – 13th Centuries: Archaeological Evidence and Written Sources
Posted on September 18, 2011 | No CommentsCultural Identity of the Russian North Settlers in the 10th – 13th Centuries: Archaeological Evidence and Written Sources Makarov, N.A. Slavica Helsingiensia, 27, Helsinki (2006) Abstract One of the most...