Stratofanatic's Emporium

Oooh, this one appeared without me realizing -- my latest article, from Gothic Studies : “ Just like Henry James (Except with Cannibalism): The International Weird in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Rats in the Walls .’” As usual, I'd like to post the riveting tale of how this article came to be. It originally developed because of the ENGL 160D Monsters course I teach for the University of Arizona ( see my syllabus ). When first offered the class, I knew that there'd be Lovecraft in it .... except I didn't really know much about Lovecraft. So I picked "The Rats in the Walls" and his more famous "The Call of Cthulhu" almost at random, and then began a Lovecraft reading binge to educate myself on why Lovecraft was actually a big deal. My "eureka" moment came after my second semester teaching the course. As one knows, when you teach, you have to break stories down to help your students understand them. Well, when I broke down "The Rats in the Walls,...

I remember, when researching A. E. Housman for my prelims (concentrating on his poetry, obviously, from A Shropshire Lad ), coming across this quote from wikipedia: Many colleagues were unnerved by his scathing attacks on those he thought guilty of shoddy scholarship. ... He declared many of his contemporary scholars to be stupid, lazy, vain, or all three, saying: " Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head." Well, by happenstance, I'm looking at his introduction to Manlius's Astronomicon , and the guy really doesn't let up. This [1579 edition of Manlius] is his [Scalinger's] greatest work; and its virtues, if they had fewer vices to keep them company, are such that it is almost importunate to praise them. True, there is luck as well as merit in the achievement: many of his emendations required no Scaliger to make them, and...

So, the Inklings at Oxford. There's a couple different well-known remarks about them by famous students, primarily after they revised the English Language Syllabus in 1931. This revised syllabus featured Anglo-Saxon rather heavily (even moreso than other British universities at the time) and excluded anything later than the Romantics. Auden, for instance, said that Tolkien's lectures on Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon mesmerized him. Less kindly, Kingsley Amis -- later author of the first academic novel,  Lucky Jim -- called Tolkien "incoherent and often inaudible."  But what did students think of the course-of-study itself? Well, I was breezing through the autobiography of John Heath-Stubbs, who attended Oxford in the early 1940s, and whose major work is the long epic poem  Artorius (1972). To my knowledge, I've not seen any Tolkien scholar ever peruse this source. Anyway, Heath-Stubbs isn't much read nowadays, but if his name rings a bell, it's probably because...

So, wow.  Normally, I've never paid much attention to Nobel Prize winners, at least outside the usual Anglo-American canonical figures still taught in university curricula (so: Faulkner and Steinbeck yes, Kipling and Pearl S. Buck no), but I've recently had to read, as research, The Long Journey by Danish Nobel Laureate Johannes V. Jensen . Not sure what I was expecting, but a plotless Darwinian mythologization of the Nordic racial type told in absolutely beautiful prose wasn't exactly it. None of those elements are an exaggeration, either. The prose is absolutely breath-taking. It almost has to be, since  The Long Journey can only loosely be considered a novel. The "plot," so to speak, spans forty thousand years of human history from our primitive origins during the Ice Age, to the Germanic tribe of the Cimbrians and their robust but quasi-primitive beliefs, to the Gothic cathedrals of the Catholic Church, to the "triumphal" west-faring of Christopher ...

Thanks to an eagle-eyed peer reviewer, I just realized that Poul Anderson's epigraph to a short story "Chain of Logic," a translation of verse 45/46 of the Elder Edda's   Völuspá , is not actually his  translation. Rather, Anderson took it almost verbatim from A.G. Chater's English translation of The Long Journey by Nobel Prize-winning Danish author, Johannes V. Jensen. Except that the  Völuspá  verse isn't Jensen's own translation, either. Jensen had, in turn, borrowed the verse from H. G. Møller's original Danish translation in 1870. So this has led me on a merry-go-round of trying to compare various translations in languages I don't actually speak. Thank god for Google Translate, online ebooks, and amenable colleagues! First things first -- Jensen took the verse straight from Møller without changes, so that's simple.** Next question. We got two English-language versions of verse 45/46, one by Chater, another by Anderson. The latter, as I m...