Stratofanatic's Emporium

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: 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 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...

When talking about original fan works of the Modern Revival, no discussion is complete without Paul Douglas Deane. If you’ve heard of him before, it’s no doubt thanks to his website founded in 1999, Forgotten Ground Regained – the largest and best collection of alliterative verse on the interwebz. Originally, Deane envisioned his site as a combination blog, fanzine, and content index, running things on that model for about a decade before life (as they say) intervened. But then Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival appeared, and this event motivated Deane to give his website a major overhaul. Now the layout is sleeker and snazzier than ever before, and Deane’s talent for finding new alliterative poets has been on full display. In the last few months alone, he’s discovered several new revivalists, and a few of them – Lancelot Schaubert, Amit Majmudar, Susan Edwards – have already been discussed in this series. The thing is, Forgotten Ground Regained – as important a...

Last week, when comparing medieval retellings of the Trojan War to contemporary fan fiction, my reason involved more than there simply being folks like M. Wendy Hennequin around, people for whom medievalism and creative fan activity are deeply entwined. My other reason is that the Middle Ages can seem so distant to my students. Popular culture helps them grasp some aspects of medieval life and culture, albeit often in distorted form, for instance feudalism and chivalry, but otherwise? The instinctive concern for rank, the holy awe of kingship, the ubiquity of religion in daily life … all these things tend to be beyond the everyday experience of college students in the 21 st century. As a teacher, you have to find a bridge. Calling stories about the Trojan War or King Arthur “fanfic” therefore breaks down a historical barrier. Students know what fan fiction is. They understand the conventions. So while it’s easy to be intimidated by a syllabus that contains Dante’s Inferno with the gho...