Howling Frog Books

Two Lives of Charlemagne , by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer Charlemagne, King of the Franks, lived from 742 to 814 and was practically a legend in his own time--which is illustrated by these two accounts of his life. The first is by Einhard, who actually served under Charlemagne as a diplomat.  It's a straightforward, factual account, not very long, that still manages to get several major things a bit wrong.  Of course, Einhard also glides over some of the less heroic details of court life too; he is strongly biased.  The entire account is strictly realistic; for example, I noticed the incident that was later turned into the Song of Roland.  In the poem, written centuries later, Roland and his men fight off hordes of attacking Moors; Einhard's account shows it to have been a guerrilla-style attack on the rear baggage train by Basques. Notker the Stammerer was a monk, writing his account for the benefit of Charlemagne's great-grandson, Charles the Fat....

  Tristan, by Gottfried von Strassburg Here's my third version of the Tristan and Iseult story, but the first one that has been available as a complete manuscript.  Gottfried von Strassburg was one of the great German Arthurian writers of the Middle Ages, and though we don't know much about him, he probably wasn't a courtier or a knight.  He seems to have been something more along the lines of a prominent town official. He might not have been a courtier, but his story is more 'courtly' than the other two I've read, which are more straightforward and rough.  This Tristan has a lot in it about manners and rich clothing, and it's generally more elaborate, with fancy little touches.  It's not so detailed on the fighting; Gottfried is clearly more interested in clothes than in war (maybe he came from a family of textile merchants?). Tristan gets a whole long backstory, with parents who fall in love and a foster father and a childhood.  That was quite...

Culhwch and Olwen , trans. Patrick K. Ford This is one of the very early Arthurian tales, and of course it is Welsh.  It dates from something like the 11th century. The story has Culhwch, a king's son, put under a curse by his stepmother that he will never marry anyone but Olwen Giants-daughter.  Culhwch promptly becomes enamored of the girl he has never seen, but the task of winning Olwen is impossible; her father will never give permission for her marriage, as he is fated to die as soon as it happens.  Culhwch asks his cousin Arthur for help in the name of every single one of his warriors, which takes pages, but is very fun to read because they come with amazing descriptions.  (Sometimes you might see a familiar name some later author has lifted--there is for example a Fflewdwr Fflam.)  Arthur gladly agrees to help Culhwch, and together with the best men of the court, they set out. Culhwch asks the giant for Olwen, and is given forty impossible tasks to...

Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas , ed. Gwyn Jones I've had this little old collection of sagas sitting on my bookshelf for years--longer than I had realized, in fact, since inside it I found a receipt from Black Oak Books (now sadly closed), dating from 1995.  I probably bought it on a date with the guy who is now my husband.  Like the Tolstoy  book I just read, it's an old hardbound Oxford World Classics title from the 1960s, very small and engaging, but with the price cut out of the book jacket. This is a collection of  eight sagas about Icelandic people--mostly their feuds--and one "saga of times past."  The historical sagas are careful-sounding records that give lots of detail about exactly where farms were and just who owned them, and the stories contained in them all sound like the Hatfields and the McCoys.  A feud will start with something small and escalate very fast, until it all ends in someone's manor going up in flames with everyone...