Stratofanatic's Emporium

Exciting news from the world of the Modern Alliterative Revival! So, the poetry of Pat Masson , who died in 1994, was re-discovered by Paul Deane, who subsequently published all her alliterative poetry -- much of it for the first time -- in his online journal Forgotten Ground Regained . He only discovered her because of something he'd seen in  Withywinde, a journal for the Old English Companions. Then after scouring the internet (one of Paul's specialties), he eventually dug up a scan of a booklet her mother had put together for her funeral containing all poetry and short stories on ancestry.com, where one of Masson's relatives posted it. Most had never before been published.  The only other comparable story is Ron Snow , a SCA poet who passed away in 1997. He never had any of his alliterative poems published during his lifetime, but I'd tracked down his widow, who gave me his unpublished collected poetry, including his long drapa "Blardrengir Saga", which end...

For poetry fans, the NPR program The Academic Minute  just featured my research on the Modern Alliterative Revival on an episode. Basically, The Academic  highlights a new academic every day for brief, 2-minute long episodes. At the very least, it's a good way of spreading the word about one movement in speculative verse. Since I can't bear the sound of my own voice, I only made it through the first 30 seconds, but they seem to have done a good job with it.

New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf: The Hitches [ Last week, I discussed Tolkien’s poem in dróttkvætt meter, “The Derelicts,” and showed how “Bleak Heave the Billows” is in ljódaháttr meter. This helps date both texts to 1932-1934. As I’ll show here, however, the picture is actually more complicated than that . ] Click here to read Parts 1 & 2 for this entry. Click here to  read Part 3 . The Problem To pick up where I left off last week, I’ve been arguing that Tolkien’s four poems in Norse meters all appeared roughly together during the period of 1932–1933. By relying on metrical form rather than subject matter, I also avoid the problem of why Tolkien might have chosen Old Norse meters for Old English subject matter. That problem is mainly why I hesitate with the dating provided by Scull and Hammond. After all, they linked “The Derelicts” with Tolkien’s first lectures on the old Germanic legend of Finn and Hengest, which in my view puts the poem two years too soon, and they also l...

New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf:  Tolkien the Skald [ Last week, I outlined the shape of Tolkien’s career as an alliterative poet and noted his immense productivity between 1932 and 1934 – the moment he turned to Old Norse meters. Now I’ll tackle specific issues with his two shorter Old Norse poems . ] Click here to read Parts 1 & 2 of this entry. Click here to read Part 4 . Tolkien’s “Lost” Stanzas: The Derelicts If your puppy ever runs away from home, everyone knows what to do. First you search. Then you plaster posters on telephone poles. Then you panic. Though not in that order. Personally, I prefer panic first. But if your poem runs away from home, well, that’s a tougher situation. To be fair, the story behind Tolkien’s dróttkvætt sequence “The Derelicts” doesn’t relate directly to whenever he wrote anything, but the tale’s too good to pass up. These stanzas first came to my attention when researching skaldic meters for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative R...

New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: The Norse Connection Click here to read Part 3  for this entry. Click here to  read Part 4 . Introduction: The Versatile Revivalist So far in this series, I’ve tended to tackle either individual poets (C. S. Lewis, Amit Majmudar, etc.) or specific issues such as SF or fan verse. Now let’s sneak a peek at what happens by focusing on a specific alliterative tradition in the Modern Revival – namely, Old Norse. So here’s a riddle for you. What do medieval Norse skalds – folks like Thjódólf of Hvinir or the legendary Bragi Boddason – have in common with medieval English poets wise in the ways of alliterative poetics? People like Cædmon, William Langland, and whoever the hell wrote Beowulf. Not much, actually. Got you with a trick question! So, yeah … this riddle’s somewhat like Bilbo asking Gollum what’s in his pockets. Although us moderns might study a wide range of medieval texts side by side – thank you, anthologies – in the Middle Ages, obviousl...

[Last week in Part II of “Troubles in SF Poetry,” I discussed poems by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff and Math Jones. Here in Part III, we now discuss Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series for how it incorporates alliterative poetry into a science-fictional setting.] Click here to see Part I or Part II of "Troubles in SF Poetry." Kirstein is one of those hidden gems of a writer who has flown, as sometimes happens, unfortunately, under the radar. For myself, I discovered her thanks to Paul Deane, but in addition to the alliterative verse in Kirstein’s Steerswoman series (1989-2004), she also published with Del Rey Books … a major second research interest of mine. What to say about Del Rey? Well, if you – like me – grew up reading fantasy in the 1980s or 1990s, chances are that more than a few Del Rey titles lined your home bookshelves. These books were everywhere. Del Rey published big-name SF authors like Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov, not to mention Alan Dean Foster’s ghostwr...

[ Last week in Part I of “Troubles in SF Poetry,” I discussed a poem by Poul Anderson and how he resolved the issue of creating a science-fictional context for a poem in an alliterative meter. Here in Part II, we now discuss Marcie Lynn Tentchoff’s “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships,” with a brief excursion into a few lines from Math Jones’s “Lenctenlong.”] Click here to see  Part I  or  Part III  of "Troubles in SF Poetry." While researching Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, when I first encountered “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships,” I instantly knew that here was one of the most throat-catchingly good SF poems yet to appear in an alliterative meter. Tentchoff herself is hardly new to verse-craft. Back in 2000, her long Arthurian poem, Surrendering the Blade , won Canada’s prestigious Aurora Award, but her love for all things Norse goes back even further. She’d grown up reading Poul Anderson, for instance, but at Simon Fraser Univers...

Click here to see  Part II  or  Part III  of "Troubles in SF Poetry." For this entry, indulge me—I’d like to spend a moment on an alliterative poem that, at first glance, looks entirely humdrum. And at second glance too, in fact. Honestly, it’s a real snoozer of a poem. Still, if you remember, I once devoted a whole entry several months back to Poul Anderson, the second most prolific revivalist (after Tolkien) in the 20 th century. Several poems of his range between interesting and outstanding. Off the top of my head, I can name “Route Song of the Winged Folk,” “Autumn,” and his skaldic translations for the fanzine Amra . Nonetheless, if you picked any random poem by Anderson, I doubt most people would be impressed. One such “filler” poem is “The Scothan Queen.” This eight-liner appears in loose dróttkvætt meter, and it originated in a short story for the January 1951 issue of Planet Stories , “Tiger by the Tail,” the inaugural Dominic Flandry entry in Anderson’s...

In my ongoing efforts to support alliterative poets in the Modern Alliterative Revival, I just added online reviews for two more poets: Michael Helsem (aka, "Graywyvern") and Jeff Sypeck. These are below, but if you 'd like to support the revivalist, click on the reviews below and "upvote" them ... it's very handy for the algorithms! Lancelot Schaubert ( The Greenwood Poet ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review  . Adam Bolivar ( Ballads for the Witching Hour ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review  . Amit Majmudar ( Dothead ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review Mary Thaler ( Ulfhidr ): my  Amazon review  and my  Goodreads review Zach Weinersmith ( Bea Wolf ): my  Amazon review  and this  Goodreads review Now for Helsem and Sypeck!

Thanks to Andoni Cossio scouring the University of Leeds's Tolkien-Gordon collection, we have now discovered a new alliterative poem by C. S. Lewis: "Mód Þrýþe Ne Wæg"! This is the problem with research: I just published a whole anthology containing  all of Lewis's known alliterative poems, and now another one has been found! Grump grump. It's a pretty interesting poem, though ... Andoni actually showed it to me prior to publication, and we talked about its dating. The title refers to Beowulf , in particular the evil queen Modthryth ( although this isn't a proper name in Old English; Lewis sees the word instead as "Mood of Thyrth"). Despite the title, this 12-line text was written as a thank-you note to Eric and Ida Gordon, two philologists at Leeds, after having stayed at their home for a few days. According to Andoni, a poem by Tolkien dated June 26, 1935 references Lewis's earlier stay, which therefore puts "Mód Þrýþe Ne Wæg" to earl...

In the opening paragraph of my metrical appendix to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival , I raised a conundrum: how do revivalists today officially arrive at an alliterative meter? The question’s a good one. In every case known to me, at least in English, revivalists never “grow up” with alliterative poetics. They don’t – they cannot – know the meter on an intuitive cultural knowledge, not as medieval skalds or scopas did. In other words, the meter has been moribund for centuries, and if young poets today – those crazy kids – experiment with alliteration at all, it is only of the ornamental variety. That’s what tongue twisters teach you: the rum-ram-ruf of sounds jingle-jangling together. Accordingly, if revivalists know what they are doing at all, they deploy a poetic form learned only as an adult. Someday, though, I hope to eat those words – or at least chew them slowly. The parties responsible are author Zach Weinersmith and the artist Boulet, the creators of a w...