Archive for category Academics

As announced here, I will be a featured guest speaker at the next JordanCon, a convention devoted to the works of Robert Jordan. I’ll be speaking about the impact of mythology on Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.

Adding to my excitement, the author Guest of Honor will be good friend Mary Robinette Kowal.

So if you’re a fan of Jordan or Kowal, come on down to Roswell, Georgia this April!

My article “Teaching the Medieval Orpheus: Bridging Mythology and Medieval Literature” has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching.

The article probably won’t appear for another year or so, but it’s good to know that it’s in the queue somewhere and off my desk. It’s honestly more stressful for me to keep track of submissions of such things than it is for me to write them in the first place (the writing is just pure fun for the most part).

I’m also pleased with this particular piece in that it fits well with my Quixotic aim to publish studies of as many centuries as possible. In that sense, this piece was like striking a goldmine, since it discusses classical works (Ovid, Pseudo-Apollodorus, etc.) and a range of medieval works (Sir Orfeo, Henryson’s Orpheus, etc.) that deal with the character Orpheus. That allows me to “check off” quite a few centuries all at once. Score.

I note, though, that I’m still missing those darn 1700s. Can’t even imagine what I could contribute there!

The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook

A number of folks are swinging through this site as a result of The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook. For those interested in that subject — who are also fortunate enough to live within easy reach of Nottingham — I highly suggest attending the upcoming Norse and Viking Seminar on Wednesday 26th October 2011. It’s free (though they appreciate an RSVP), and the topic is “The Battle of Brunanburh Revisited.”

I won’t be there (alas), but the participants are excellent:

Paul Cavill is Lecturer in Early English in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham, Michael Wood is a broadcaster and historian with a particular interest in the Anglo-Saxon period, and Alex Woolf is Senior Lecturer in the School of History at the University of St Andrews; all have published on the battle of Brunanburh and its linguistic, literary and historical contexts.

Paul, of course, was one of the primary contributors to the Casebook and a big proponent of a Wirral location for the battle. Wood has in the past been a strong proponent for an off-Humber battlesite (which I find highly unlikely). Woolf is a brilliant historian whose work I cited again and again in my own essay for the Casebook.

It should be an extraordinary event!

Look what I got in the mail today:

MEMPOT, with Yuengling and iPhone.

Yessir, that there’s my long-awaited (by me and some other geeky Middle English scholars!) edition of The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament (MEMPOT), available now from Medieval Institute Publications. I’d been told by the press that I’d be getting it soon, but knowing the book existed is nothing compared to the great feeling of pulling it out of the box and holding it.
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I’ve been getting a lot of email from folks interested in the search for Brunanburh. Many of them are a bit mad at me and the other contributors to The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook, and for that I blame more than anyone else a monk who died around 870 years ago.

Through the centuries the historical sources have handed down to us different, at times wildly conflicting names for the location of the Battle of Brunanburh, along with confusing (if not simply misleading) information about its topography and conduct. One of the most well-known facts about this important battle, then, is that we know disappointingly little about it.

Given Brunanburh’s historical centrality as “the moment when Englishness came of age” (Casebook, p.1), it should hardly be surprising that there has been a veritable cottage industry of attempts to identify the battlesite in one part of the British Isles or another. Many of these efforts, for better or worse, are led by local historical groups, who have a vested interest in placing this significant event in their own “backyard.”

Against many of these efforts, most of the contributors to The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook (including myself) are strongly of a mind that modern Bromborough was the location of the battle in 937.  This fact has led some of those folks writing me to complain that there’s a “Bromborough conspiracy” among the scholars. Before I get into the main point of this post, then, I want to lay down three basic principles about academia that some folks outside the so-called ivory towers might not realize:
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Gathering information for my tenure documentation packet, I recently spent a bit of time Googling my academic self. I found what I needed, but I also a lot of unrelated but surprisingly interesting bits of data, too.

Some highlights:

- My article “More Vinland Maps and Texts: Discovering the New World in Higden’s Polychronicon” was at least at one point the 23rd most popular article in the renowned Journal of Medieval History.

- My article on popular culture and Beowulf, co-written with John William Sutton, is the basis of a writing assignment at Winthrop University.

- My entire bibliography for Siege Of Jerusalem has been copied and placed on this site. (This is actually an improvement on when this site had copied my introduction and text, word-for-word, without any attribution to me.)

- My first article, a historical study of the development of Christianity in the first-century, is referenced in a German monograph under the name “Livingstone.” It is also referenced in English under that name. Odd.

- Both of my Tolkien articles are free online (here and here), but both of them are also for sale on Amazon for $9.95 (see my Amazon author’s page). (I checked my contract, and the publisher had a right to do that; as it turns out, so do I.)

- One of those articles (this one) is cited by Wikipedia’s article on The Hobbit.

- Wikipedia’s article on the Battle of Brunanburh makes heavy use of The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook, which is great news, I think. I don’t see that our findings have rolled much into the source texts (like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle poem) on Wikipedia, but that will probably come.

- The librarians at Keele University have placed my article “Aphra Behn’s ‘The Disappointment’ as Ring Composition” among the 11 “recommended” books or articles for the study of Behn and/or John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. This article is also heavily cited by a Master’s thesis issued last year at the University of Ghent in Belgium.

Small world, eh?

While most of this is pretty cool, I think, I was a bit sad about this one:

- My article explaining why H.G. Wells’ Martians in War of the Worlds use tripods seems to have fallen into a deep pool: I couldn’t find it cited once.