Happy St. David's Day

By -
To all my Welsh readers. :) (Fun fact: Diana Wynne Jones was partly Welsh.)




Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 2, 2014 at 7:22 AM

    Happy St. David's Day to you as well!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The White Goddess

By -
Image
My 14yo asked me to hide the cover The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth , by Robert Graves Oh, wow.  I could talk about this fabulously nutty book all day!  I had no idea when I picked it up what I was getting into. The short version: Graves was looking for evidence of a European-wide goddess-worshiping  Ur-religion that he believed existed before all that male god patriarchy stuff came along.  He found his material in myth and poetry, and claimed that bards and poets disguised their lore by deliberately mixing it up.  All true poetry is based on the Triple White Goddess as Muse, and no monotheist can be a true poet.  Graves, being a true poet, realized all this through poetic intuition. Now the long version: This is 500 extremely dense pages of speculation about myth, poetry, and ancient tribal movements, presented as plain fact deduced by intuition and research.  It's from the same school of...scholarship...as The Golden B...
Read more

The History of the Franks

By -
Image
  The History of the Franks , by Gregory of Tours I was pretty scared of this book, which is a solid 600 pages of early medieval history.  I should not have been nervous at all, because this history is crammed full of gripping stuff!  Feuds, intrigues, miracles, and weird stories spill out all over the place.  I had about as much fun with this as it is possible to have with 600 pages of early medieval history. Gregory was the bishop of Tours in the late 6th century, during the Merovingian dynasty of Frankish kings.  He served through four reigns.  His history is in ten books, and starts with the creation of the world, moving to Frankish history, and then to the history he personally witnessed.  Of course he wrote in Latin. Book I is a summary of Biblical history, pretty much, except that Gregory continues through early Christian history up to the death of St. Martin of Tours in 397.  I will admit to skimming this one, since I am already pr...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more