Howling Frog Books

The Fall of Arthur, by J. R. R. Tolkien (Question for you at the end, so be sure to read it!) J. R. R. Tolkien seems to have had a penchant for unfinished projects, and this is one of them, newly edited and annotated by the untiring pen of Christopher Tolkien.  Looking at the number of amazing unfinished stories and poems he wrote, I think we should all be grateful to C. S. Lewis for pressuring him to finish the Lord of the Rings. This  is an incredible thing--Tolkien was writing the story of King Arthur's doom, the final tale of Mordred's treachery and the battle at Camlann--and he was doing it in the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse form that Beowulf was written in,, only of course in (somewhat) modern English.  I'm sure he could have written it IN Old English, but luckily he didn't go quite that far.  The whole thing  really does read (to my untrained eye) about as much like the real thing as modern English can be.  It's got all the atmosphere and ...

Tighe haunts Hairy-Faced Dick Three, yes three narrative poems!  I finished my poetry challenge! I have been fretting about my narrative poetry challenge.  Plus it's almost Halloween.  I put the two together and found the perfect solution-- The Ingoldsby Legends ! The Ingoldsby Legends is a sort of miscellaneous collection of poetry, myth, ghost story, and legend, most of it told in a humorous style.  They were written by "Thomas Ingoldsby" (really a Victorian clergyman named Barham) and published in magazines, and were so popular that they were collected and published.  It's the sort of book that was hugely popular and well-known a century ago, but no one reads it now unless they are a little weird like me.  When I was a kid, I used to see it mentioned in books by E. Nesbit and wonder what it was, so I bought an old copy when I got the chance. The stories and poetry are funny, but of course very, very Victorian.  I got tired of the poems pre...

I'm supposed to do a check-in for Lemon Tree's Narrative Poem Reading Challenge .  So it's a good thing that I finally got around to reading one the other day!  (Although I then realized that I read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" aloud with my daughter a month ago.  Too late now, oh well.)  Lemon Tree asks: Have you enjoyed any narrative poem this year? Which one? I'm not sure I enjoyed the chapter of The Trail  that I read.  It was interesting, it was well worth reading, but it was also difficult and unhappy poetry. How's your progress through the challenge? I planned to read four poems, and I've read one, so I'm pretty good I think. Do you have any plan to read any narrative poem in the near future? I haven't picked another one yet.  So many possibilities!  I think I'm going to have to do some Spenser.  Or should I try Milton? Sorry Lemon Tree, it's not much of a check-in. :)

I have this selection of Solzhenitsyn's writings , and I've read the first section, so I'm going to talk about the bits I read.  There were three lyric poems as well, which I thought were very good, but I'm not going to say anything much about them. "Besed," chapter 5 of The Trail While Solzhenitsyn was in the Soviet prison camp for 5 years, he composed a narrative poem of over 7,000 lines, and he did it without any pens or paper.  He composed and memorized the poem with the help of a rosary that acted as a mnemonic device.  Which is just stunning .  It's an autobiographical poem in which Solzhenitsyn gives himself the name of Sergei Nerzhin.  Most of the poem has not been translated into English (as of the time this book was published), so only one chapter is included.  That's still a good long narrative, so I'm going to count this for my poetry challenge. Besed (say BAYset) is a Belorussian village where Solzhenitsyn's unit fought in ...

Lemon Tree (aka Listra) at Half-Filled Attic says: I have always loved narrative poems. I do, I like them. But somehow reading narrative poems is more challenging than reading normal poems or normal narratives. Looking at my TBR list, there are many narrative poems that I promise to read, both from the Classic Club's Project, and also from my own curiosity. So, to share the joy of reading narrative poems, I'd like to propose a challenge: What about reading narrative poems in 2013? I know that some of you must have joined several reading challenges by now. It can be hectic, reading all those book in a year. To make sure that everybody has fun instead of burden, instead of giving a number of poems you have to finish, I'd just give the levels of reading. Feel free to read just as much as you can. The point of all this is having fun, anyway. Levels of reading: Homer (< 4 narrative poems) Orpheus (5 – 8 narrative poems) Muses (9 – 12 narrative p...