Poetry Archive
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Human Monstrosity in Terminator II: Judgement Day, Beowulf and The Passion of St Christopher
Posted on May 6, 2013 | No CommentsThe idea of a humanoid monster that can be reluctantly empathized with can be traced back to various source texts. For example, Grendel in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf is a bloodthirsty savage, however upon a close reading of the poem he appears more human. -
Welsh Poetry and the War of the Roses
Posted on May 5, 2013 | No CommentsThis is a brief summary of a paper on Welsh poetry, patronage and politics. It was given at the Celtic Studies Association of North America Annual Conference at the University of Toronto April 18 - 21, 2013. -
Medieval Astrology and The Buke of the Sevyne Sagis
Posted on April 20, 2013 | No CommentsIt is useful to begin by comparing the way the sages are initially described to the Emperor in the Latin, Middle English, and Middle Scots texts. Although the Middle Scots text is not connected to the English ones, they serve as a useful backdrop to illustrate the singular nature of the Scottish version of the story. -
The “Battle with the Monster”: Transformation of a Traditional Pattern in “The Dream of the Rood”
Posted on April 14, 2013 | No CommentsThus, although I would not suggest that “The Dream of the Rood” was composed orally in performance, it is, I would contend, oral-derived, and it is that presumption upon which this analysis is founded. The poem, in other words, straddles both worlds, having ties to both textuality and orality. -
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. -
Egil Skallagrimsson and the Viking Ideal
Posted on March 18, 2013 | No CommentsHow did the Vikings want to be perceived--by other members of their own culture, and by posterity? -
Viking poetry of love and war – new book by Judith Jesch
Posted on March 18, 2013 | No CommentsThey are most famous for being violent invaders of foreign shores but a new book by a University of Nottingham Viking expert shows they were also poetry lovers with a wicked sense of humour! -
The Persuasive Power of a Mother’s Breast: The Most Desperate Act of the Virgin Mary’s Advocacy
Posted on March 17, 2013 | No CommentsThe image of the Virgo Lactans orMaria Lactans (the image of the Virgin Mary suckling the Child Jesus), which occurs as early as the third century in the catacomb of Priscilla inRome, later spread ing across Europe, is found in a number of Irish sources. -
Bernard of Morlaix: the literature of complaint, the Latin tradition and the twelfth-century “Renaissance”
Posted on March 9, 2013 | No CommentsBernard of Morlaix was a monk of the order of Cluny who flourished around 1140. Excerpts from one of his poems appear in some anthologies of medieval Latin verse1 and he is briefly noticed in some works on the twelfth-century renaissance, but he has received little critical attention and only one of his poems has been translated from the Latin. -
Novgorod the Great in Baltic Trade before 1300
Posted on March 3, 2013 | No CommentsThe information on trade contacts between Novgorod and Scandinavian countries preserved in the works of Old Norse -
Traditions of Courtly Love and the Canterbury Tales
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsChaucer uses both common and courtly love in the Canterbury Tales. His pilgrims represent nearly every level of the social scale and range anywhere from a knight to a miller to a parson to a pardoner. Thererfore, their status will determine what kind of tale they will tell. -
The Old English Rune Poem – Semantics, Structure, and Symmetry
Posted on February 17, 2013 | No CommentsThe later runic alphabets do, of course, follow the basic pattern of the earlier Germanic Fupark though considerably modified by the late eighth century, decreasing in the number of runes in Scandinavia whilst increasing in number in the runic alphabets of England. -
Musical Characteristics of the Songs Attributed to Peter of Blois (c. 1135-1211)
Posted on January 15, 2013 | No CommentsToward the end of the twelfth century, moral conflict was rampant in the Catholic Church regarding the conduct (and misconduct) of all levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, though especially at the two extremes on the scale of power. Music and literature from the period have immortalized the mischievous and impious escapades of certain members of the lower orders of clergy, termed satirically the ordo vagorum. -
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. -
Women in Troubadour Song: Of the Comtessa and the Vilana
Posted on December 30, 2012 | No CommentsSince we have melodies for both songs, the question of what “feminine” voices we are hearing is a musi- cal as well as a poetic issue. -
Aspects of the English royal succession, 1066-1199: the death of the king
Posted on December 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe death of any ruler in the twelfth century, even if it were expected, caused a considerable amount of shock and disquiet amongst those who were left behind. -
The Cross as Tree: The Wood-of-the-Cross Legends in Middle English and Latin Texts in Medieval England
Posted on December 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe wood-of-the-cross legend is actually a group of narratives that trace the pre- history of the wood used to make Christ's cross back to Old Testament figures, or in some cases back to paradise itself. -
Fleas, Flies, and Friars: Children’s Poetry from the Middle Ages
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsIn Fleas, Flies, and Friars, Nicholas Orme, an expert on childhood in the Middle Ages, has gathered a wide variety of children's verse that circulated in England beginning in the 1400s, providing a way for modern readers of all ages to experience the medieval world through the eyes of its children. -
Looking Back: Medieval French Romance and the Dynamics of Seeing
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation builds upon the work of feminist medievalists and other literary and cultural scholars to argue that sight, and objects that are seen, articulate love relationships between characters in medieval romances, and that seeing is frequently a locus of resistance to gender norms the texts both establish and refuse to accept. -
Tolkien’s Heroic Criticism: A Developing Application of Anglo-Saxon Ofermod to the Monsters of Modernity
Posted on December 12, 2012 | No CommentsThe structure of this study follows the development of Tolkien’s social criticism and heroic aesthetic. The study begins by looking at some biographical elements of Tolkien’s life and how those elements shaped the creation of Tolkien’s anti-hero, the Hobbit. -
Talk to the Dragon: Tolkien as Translator
Posted on December 11, 2012 | No CommentsWhen Bilbo, and the readers of The Hobbit, are confronted with the dragon, they are in for a surprise, as Smaug’s behaviour is somewhat unusual for a dragon. -
”Beowulf” and the Influence of Old English on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
Posted on December 11, 2012 | No CommentsThe Lord of the Rings is set in the fictional but incredibly vast and detailed universe of Middle-Earth. Tolkien has put great effort in developing an impossibly gigantic realm peopled by many diverse races. Of the immeasurable number of characters and locations present in Tolkien’s work, many bear a name deeply rooted in Old English. -
A Single Leaf: Tolkien’s Visual Art and Fantasy
Posted on December 10, 2012 | No CommentsWith such a model in mind, then, we have entered into a discussion of art, myth‐making, and the Primary World from a combined academic and artistic perspective. -
Sacrificial and Un-sacrificial Epics: An Examination of El Cid
Posted on December 9, 2012 | No CommentsI want to focus my attention here in another text, the Lay of el Cid, the only fully preserved Castilian epic poem. -
John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsRead our interview with Mary C. Flannery about her new book
