There will be several multilingual jokes coming from this news, many (all) of them Elvish, I’m afraid. (I apologise for nothing.)

In short: as of Lammas, I will be a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Grenfell campus of Memorial University of Newfoundland in Corner Brook!

I’m very excited to arrive (we’re aiming for the Feast of St Bartholomew) and to officially meet my new colleagues in-person for the first time. I will be the Department’s first medievalist, so I’m quite excited to further studies of the pre-modern world at Grenfell and to add to studies of the Middle Ages in the wider MUN community. (Thanks go out to my friend, John Geck, at the St John’s campus for help with the move. I look forward to working with John and with Bill Schipper, who was at PIMS as a visiting fellow whilst I was a Mellon fellow in 2018-2019.) It’s going to be quite the opportunity to be teaching at the university closest to the only (known, acknowledged) Viking settlement in North America. (More on that below, perhaps–and certainly more in the future.)

This coming term, I will be teaching “Intro to English I”, the department’s (and university’s) introduction to literary and critical reading and writing, as well as “Literary Survey I (Beginnings to 1700)” [which should obviously be re-named British Literary Survey, given the subject matter; but, remember, they were a Dominion until 1949]. I’m excited for both classes, even if I’m feeling under-prepared at this moment as I grapple with the manifold stresses of moving and home-purchase and so on.

Grenfell is a small campus of about 1400 students (smaller than my high school!), but is, by all accounts a very lively community. It is the heart of Memorial University’s Fine Arts programmes, and so the English department has close links with our students and colleagues in Theatre. (I guess I’ll be diving deeper into Passion Plays! And I’m definitely teaching the Second Shepherd’s Play in Survey now.) As a town, Corner Brook is traditionally closely tied to natural resources, principally forestry (we’ll be living in a house built for the fancier mill workers about a century ago) and the fisheries (shout-out to my buddy Dave Barry!), so Grenfell also has strong departments in NR management but also Sustainability, and our Associate VP Research–who was a delight in the interview–is all about soil sustainability as well as food security. (Hello, Dr Cheema!) There is a Nursing programme that is growing, too. In addition, I understand that about 300 students have First Nations ancestry, so there is a strong interest in Reconciliation on campus. In sum: I am very excited, and I think the Department of English (and pre-modern studies) has a lot to contribute. As at the beginning of each new academic undertaking, I will be re-reading The Educated Imagination.

Our journey out East will not be exactly easy, but we’ve a lot of support from many people. My department and faculty have been great, not least my chair, Adam Beardsworth, and our dean, Ken Jacobsen, but also my new colleagues, Shoshanna Ganz, for being so very welcoming and helpful, and Stephanie McKenzie (to whom I owe an email), who has offered home help and whom I will always thank for giving me a nod and thumbs up when I accidentally swore whilst answering a question during the interview. Thanks also go to the Scott Murphy at MUN who has the ungracious job of wrangling academics in a move, never mind the COVIDs, and likewise to Eileen Greenslade at HHMovers–darlings both.

We will also be helped in our journey by a new addition to the family: Pallando.

As wise readers will know, Pallando was one of the two Ithryn Luin (the Blue Wizards) who accompanied Saruman, Gandalf, and Radagast to Middle-earth c. TA 1000. (The other’s name was Alatar. Maybe the next vehicle?) The name means “One who travels far and wide.” HOWEVER, Pallando’s other name was Rómestámo, which means “East Helper,” so how could I not, right? Plus we will need the 8.7″ clearance and AWD to contend with the Corner Brook winters.

Despite the terrible (and terrifying) excitement to get to Corner Brook and to start up at Grenfell, I am going to miss Leiden University, most especially the students with whom I had the pleasure of working with this past year. It was a difficult period for all concerned, but I do believe we made the best of it. I truly enjoyed all my classes and think they did too. We managed to build little digital communities in our meetings each week, to get to know each other across spatial and temporal divides (in one class, I was in Sask [GMT – 6] and one student was in Saudi [GMT + 3]–and that was before silly DST started). Some days it was negative 49 Celsius where I was whilst it was plus 12 for most of the class in Leiden; other days much of the Netherlands was under a once-in-a-generation snowstorm shutdown (minus 12…) and Saskatchewan was enjoying an unseasonable plus one. We often shared these little differences as a way of breaking the, er, ice and just commenting on the strangeness of our situations, but it often served to put us all at ease. As one of my Philology 6 students suggested, we started simply greeting each other with “Good Timezone!” (Pronounce as you see fit; I do something like Teamocil.)

The future is going to be strange–and I’m not even thinking about the incessant fires, civil unrest, water shortages, right-wing-driven violence, etc. I just mean personally. I bought a house today…. Guess I’m an adult now. (St Praexed’s Day, for reference. There better be no onion stone in that foundation, not like at Gandolf’s place!) Many changes, many of them coming very fast. I’m very lucky to have a wonderful person to be facing them with–and one who doesn’t mind the pinball machines.

The ever-labouring team at Western Michigan University have announced the schedule for the 2021 International Congress on Medieval Studies, and Kalamazoo is back with a bang! The International Pearl-poet Society is thrilled to be sponsoring and co-sponsoring a number of great sessions this time around. As ever, they are full of insightful and thoughtful contributions from scholars at all levels of the vocation. The Society’s deepest thanks go out to our tireless VP, Ashley Bartelt (Northern Illinois University), for her excellent work in gathering these contributions, organising the panels, and grappling with the manifold COVID-related issues that reared their awful heads throughout this past year. Thank you, Ashley!

The IPpS sessions are listed below. You can also download a PDF of the same here: .

The full ICMS programme is available here.

Thank you, all, as ever, for your support of the Society and for your interest in this best of poets. Very much looking forward to gathering in-person when we can do so again!

============

International Pearl-poet Society Sessions at ICMS 2021

Session 83: Monday, 10 May, 1700 EDT

Ain’t Misbehaving: Medieval English Women Who Do Good Work by Nefarious Means

Co-sponsored with the Medieval Association of the Midwest (MAM)

Presider: Alison Langdon, Western Kentucky Univ.

“The Brides of Christ: The Lethal Chastity of Consecrated Nuns”

Amy Cawood, Pittsburg State Univ.

“Good Women, Bad Men: The Cost of Saving Souls”

Mickey M. Sweeney, Dominican Univ.

“I Aim to Misbehave: Morgan LeFey, Feminist Outreach, and Agency in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

Kara L. Maloney, Canisius College

“Malory’s Dame Brusen: Good or Evil?”

Katharine Mudd, Northern Illinois Univ

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Thursday, 13 May, 1300 EDT

International Pearl-poet Society Business Meeting

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Session 329: Friday, 14 May, 0900 EDT

The Pearl-poet: Modern Connections, Adaptations, and Evolutions

Sponsor: Pearl-poet Society

Presider: Lisa M. Horton, Univ. of Minnesota–Duluth

“Young Brightblade and the Green Knight: An Appropriation of the Pearl-Poet in Modern Fantasy Fiction”

Carl B. Sell, Lock Haven Univ.

“Women’s Presence and Power in Children’s Versions of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

Amber Dunai, Texas A&M Univ.–Central Texas

“The Forest Haven Episode: How Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’s Hautdesert Shaped Lord of the Rings’ Caras

Galadhon”

Andoni Cossio, Univ. of the Basque Country

“The Mysterious Affair at Camelot: Whodunit Narrativity and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

Celine Vezina, Yale Univ.

============

Session 350: Friday, 14 May, 1300 EDT

“In aventure þer mervayles meven”: The Mystical Tradition in the Pearl-Poet and Analogues

Sponsor: Pearl-poet Society

Presider: Mickey M. Sweeney, Dominican Univ.

“The Pearl-Poet in the Platonic Mystical Tradition”

Matthew W. Brumit, Univ. of Mary

“‘Hit is to dere a date’: Mystical Language and Its Limit in Pearl”

André Roman Babyn, Univ. of Toronto

Sin and Redemption in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Gregory W. Bronson, Cumberland Univ.

Respondent: Ann Brodeur, Univ. of Mary

============

Session 381: Friday, 14 May, 1700 EDT

Form and Structure in the Cotton Nero A.x Manuscript (A Roundtable)

Sponsor: Pearl-poet Society

Presider: Kimberly Jack, Athens State Univ.

A roundtable discussion with David O’Neil, Univ. of Southern Indiana; Caleb Molstad, Univ. of Minnesota–Twin Cities; Jennifer K. Robertson, Texas Tech Univ.; and William M. Storm, Eastern Univ.

============

Session 407: Saturday, 15 May, 1100 EDT

Acceptance and Resistance: Emotional Tension in the Pearl-Poet

Sponsor: Pearl-poet Society

Presider: Amber Dunai, Texas A&M Univ.–Central Texas

“‘In a stonen statue þat salt sauor habbes’: Anger and the Lithic Body of Lot’s Wife in Cleanness”

Christopher Queen, Univ. of California–Riverside

“Virtue and Activity in Patience”

Joseph Turner, Univ. of Louisville

“Suffering Sele: Jonah and the Worm”

Jo Nixon, Univ. of Chicago

“Chivalric Performance and Hollow Faith: Gawain’s Three Confessions in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

Marsalene E. Robbins, Ohio State Univ.

============

Session 440: Saturday, 15 May, 1500 EDT

The Final Frontier: Embodied Space in the Works of the Pearl-Poet

Sponsor: Pearl-poet Society

Organizer: Ashley E. Bartelt, Northern Illinois Univ.

Presider: Matthew Boyd Goldie, Rider Univ.

“Dancing in Place: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Arthurian Dance Spaces”

Clint E. Morrison Jr., Ohio State Univ.

2020 Karrer Travel Award Winner

“Penance, Labor, and the Land in Cleanness and Pearl”

Rafael Jaime, Univ. of California–Los Angeles

“Turning Space into Place: The Transformation of an Impersonal Garden into an Embodied Erber”

William M. Storm, Eastern Univ.

“Communion Ecclesiology and Simultaneous Selfhood in Pearl”

Katie Jo LaRiviere, Mount Angel Seminary

As a fan of the nova festa, I reckoned the (Sarum) feast of the Visitation was an appropriate time to post some significant career news. (I wasn’t going to wait until the Transfiguration.)

This autumn I will be joining the Centre for the Arts in Society and the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University where I will be teaching medieval English language and literature. I am, of course, beyond excited. My courses—all classed under ‘Philology’!—will cover Old and Middle English, medieval literature of England and beyond, and the history of the English language. The position, which is slated for three years, was created to cover for fellow Canadian Krista Murchison, who will be pursuing her fantastic project, ‘Righting and Rewriting History: Recovering and Analyzing Manuscript Archives Destroyed During World War II.’ I will be teaching alongside Thijs Porck, who until now I have only known through Twitter, journal-related correspondence, and Tolkien matters.

Leiden is home to Neophilologus, where I published my very first article. Rolf Bremmer, who has since retired but I know is still very much present and active, is also one of the great attendees at the Wednesday night at Waldo’s tradition at Kalamazoo.

I’m so thrilled with this appointment and welcome the adventure and the opportunity. Many, many thanks go to out to so many folks, but especially Michael Van Dussen, Kevin Whetter, Jamie Fumo, and Ann Hutchison.

This semester I tried something new. For the past several years, I have taught “Reading the Middle Ages: the Heroic and the Chivalric” at Brock University’s Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In past classes, the assignments have consisted of a midterm test, a term paper, and a final exam. (While this is a literature-focused class, it’s not an English class per se; similarly, it’s a course that attracts students from many disciplines, so there’s a wide range of skills, interests, and time commitments.) I wanted to offer them more chances to write, especially early in the semester, and to get more feedback going into the term paper, so I opted for a short assignment on the Old English elegies due just before our reading week break at the end of Week 6 (mid-February).

In class, we had studied the usual Big Three of the Old English elegies—The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Ruin—so I uploaded the six other elegies (Deor, The Husband’s Message, The Wife’s Lament, The Riming Poem, Resignation, and Wulf and Eadwacer) to our course website and asked the students to offer a response to one or two of these elegies. Responses could take the form of a more-traditional, literature-course approach, offering a critical, close reading. Others might investigate a historical aspect of Anglo-Saxon culture raised in the elegies, such as the scops’ use of harps: I imagined the possibility of a student, probably a History major (I have lots of these), investigating the design of Germanic harps. A third approach could be a transhistorical or cross-cultural analysis. (Indeed, one student produced a very interesting comparison of The Wife’s Lament and “Where I Live” by Woodkid.) All these options would take the form of a three- or four-page short essay.

But then I tried something even more radical (for me), too.

Inspired by several colleagues’ successes in various courses at their schools, I gave students the option to pursue a creative response to the Anglo-Saxon elegies. In this case, respondents were welcome to select their medium of choice (language, paint, pencil, video, RPG, song, stone, etc.). Creative responses had to be accompanied by a written component (minimum 1.5 pages) detailing the relationship of the artistic work to the elegy.

I thought perhaps a couple of students would be intrigued by this possibility, and some might even (erringly) see it as easy marks. I wasn’t really expecting to get 10 submissions—one quarter of the class enrollment—and the many different and fascinating ways that these students engaged with the poems.

I got a short story about the Husband (of ~ Message fame) and the contest he holds among his thegns to find the largest piece of driftwood on which to carve the runes he sends over the waves. Another student wrote an alliterating elegy of their own, The Lord’s Woe, which responds to and occasionally inverts, many of the poetic devices found in The Wife’s Lament. This clever piece includes some great, and very Anglo-Saxon, turns of phrase, including “Tis true that twilight turns triumph to tragedy” and the coined kenning “the violent swan mountains”.

The majority of the artistic responses were visual but these took many forms indeed. Illustrating the stages of the lamenting lord’s life in The Rhyming Poem, Murray Wilcox presented a miniature illumination bringing together many examples of Germanic symbolism.

© Murray Wilcox

Several students created responses to the scop’s song Deor, each capturing the message of the refrain, Þæs ofereode,   þisses swa mæg (That passed over, so may this), in a different medium.

Owen Barton fashioned a clay ring with the translated inscription This Shall Pass and placed it in a small wooden gift box; this creation represented a final gift to the one-time scop from the lord of the Heodenings.

    © Owen Barton

 

 

Briana Bullett made a Deor sun-catcher out of stained glass. As she writes, the hourglass, like the skull and the rose, represents the transience of this world, but an hourglass can be flipped over and so a new cycle can begin anew. The choice of a sun-catcher was likewise part of her reading of the poem and response, for the passage of the sun also marks the passage of time that Deor comments on in the elegy.

© Briana Bullett

Kalina Oullette also explored cycles and transience in her Deor-inspired drawing. She incorporates the symbol of the ouroboros to form the border of a clock-like circle; placing the Wyrd rune at the centre of her circle, she extended six rays from it to divide her ‘clock’ into portions representing each of the six stanzas of Deor.

© Kalina Oullette

Claire Dafoe crafted a painting in pieces to reflect the “friendless exile” of The Wife’s Lament.  For example, the juxtaposition of regular and jagged edges contrast the separation between the man-made world from which the Wife has been outcast and the wild forest she now inhabits. Similarly, the Wife, now a shadow of her former self, is set among the landscape of her exile but is not of it.

© Claire Dafoe

Sydney Engel tackled the long-standing question of whether Resignation A and Resignation B form one poem in two parts or are two separate poems in a novel fashion: through cookies. She read both pieces and subsequently created a set of cookies responding to each (part of the?) poem; she then interpreted her cookie-based response as a means of inquiring how the two poetic pieces relate. The conclusion of her analysis of these cookie-based datasets was that, whether or not we are dealing with a poem in two parts or two separate poems (and we cannot know, due to the missing folios), “it is at least clear that there are two distinct speakers in Resignation.” (I would be a bad medievalist if I didn’t doff my cap to her title: “A Batch Made in Heaven.”)

© Syndey Engel

Raneem Blaibel focused on the theme of darkness in Wulf and Eadwacer. She used charcoal, which, she writes, allowed her to best capture the gloomy and sombre tone of the elegy. The line that Raneem inscribes at the bottom of her piece drew her attention to the pathetic fallacy that becomes a centrepoint of her artwork, whereby she aims to capture the “mourning mind” of the speaker.

© Raneem Blaibel

These creative pieces were not the only wonders that crossed my desk this February by any means. There were many excellent essays on the elegies too, including Wulf and Eadwacer as a reflection on poisoned love between just two individuals; The Husband’s Message as a “counter-elegy”; and the transformative effect of hope in Deor. What stands out most for me about the creative responses—besides the obvious beauty of the works and the inspiration they exemplify and offer—is the lesson they provide about how there are many ways to think about, and through, these complex and rewarding poems. As an instructor, this was a very productive and rewarding assignment, and I hope to have to the opportunity to do it (and similar projects) again.

 

 

 

The International Pearl-poet Society is thrilled to have a strong presence at the 2019 Congress at Kalamazoo: five sessions, plus a co-sponsored session with the International Piers Plowman Society (shout out to Noelle Phillips and Michael Johnston).

Below are listed our sessions for the coming ICMS. We’ve got a strong block of relatively back-to-back sessions (a slight break after our BUSINESS MEETING AT 12.00 on SATURDAY), from early Friday through Saturday. Many exciting topics to be covered, indeed! I’m very much looking forward to seeing familiar faces and meeting new members–it only takes a friendly nod, maybe a handshake, to join. The pentangle tattoo comes later.

Acknowledging that the website will not respect my careful positioning of tabs etc, if you care about theses things, please refer to the PDF here.

The Pearl-poet Society is looking forward to another great year at Kalamzoo. So many great discussions await!

 

Friday @ 10.00 (Session 188)

188 SCHNEIDER 1235

Is There a Class in This Text? Teaching the Pearl-Poet (A Roundtable)

Sponsor: Pearl-Poet Society

Organizer: B. S. W. Barootes, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies

Presider: B. S. W. Barootes

 

“The Pearl-Poet and Non-Conformist Religious Ideas in the First Year Seminar”

Felisa Baynes-Ross, Yale Univ.

“Playing the Manuscript: Teaching the Games of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,”

Julie Nelson Couch, Texas Tech Univ.; Kimberly K. Bell, Sam Houston State Univ.

“An Intertextual Approach to Courtliness and the Divine in Pearl,”

Amber Dunai, Texas A&M Univ.-Central Texas

“Defamiliarizing the Pearl-Poet: Rejecting Translation and Broadening the Course,”

Stephen D. Powell, Univ. of Guelph

“Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the Context of Rhetorical and Linguistic Traditions

of the Middle Ages,” Scott D. Troyan, Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison

 

 

Friday @ 1.30 (Session 247)

SCHNEIDER 1235

Gender and Engendering in the Works of the Pearl-Poet

Sponsor: Pearl-Poet Society

Organizer: B. S. W. Barootes, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies

Presider: Kimberly Jack, Athens State Univ.

 

“Nurturing Fathers and Supportive Authorities: Reconsidering Paternal Affection in the Pearl-Poet’s

Works” Ashley E. Bartelt, Northern Illinois Univ.

“Untying and Re-Tying the ‘Endles Knot’: Retroactively Reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

as a Woman’s Narrative” Jonathan Juilfs, Redeemer Univ. College

“‘He Said, She Said,’” He Said: Gendered Dialogue in Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

Florence Newman, Towson Univ.

“The Emotional Intelligence of Pearl: Purging the Jeweler of Gendered Irrationality”

William M. Storm, Eastern Univ.

 

 

Friday @ 3.30 (Session 322)

VALLEY 2 GARNEAU LOUNGE

Fifty Shades of Green: Hagiography and Demonology in the Pearl-Poet Corpus

Sponsor: Pearl-Poet Society

Organizer: B. S. W. Barootes, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies

Presider: Ashley E. Bartelt, Northern Illinois Univ.

 

“Confessing to Fairies” Richard Firth Green, Ohio State Univ.

“Romance in Saint Erkenwald: Blending the Pagan Past and Christian Present”

Jenna Schoen, Columbia Univ

 

 

Saturday @ 10.00 (Session 361)

SCHNEIDER 1160

Visual Rhetoric in the Works of the Pearl-Poet I: New Frontiers

Sponsor: Pearl-Poet Society

Organizer: B. S. W. Barootes, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies

Presider: Denise A. Stodola, Kettering Univ.

 

“The Green Knight without the Green: Re-Investigating the Multispectral Illustrations of MS Cotton Nero A.x art. 3”

Matthew R. Higgins, Georgia State Univ.

“Visible Thoughts: The Spontaneous Gesture and Imaging Identity in Pearl”

Misho Ishikawa, Univ. of California–Los Angeles

“Peripheral Vision: Choreographing Description through Dance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

Clint Morrison Jr., Ohio State Univ.

“Crashing by Dasein: Neurorhetoric Supplying the Vision for “Being There” at the Green Chapel”
Scott Troyan (University of Wisconsin—Madison)

 

 

Saturday @ 3.30 (Session 487)

VALLEY 2 HARVEY 204

Visual Rhetoric in the Works of the Pearl-Poet II: Looking Closer

Sponsor: Pearl-Poet Society

Organizer: B. S. W. Barootes, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies

Presider: Julie Nelson Couch, Texas Tech Univ.

 

“Spaces for Seeing: Sight as a Function of Moral Space in the Works of the Pearl-Poet”

Andrew Roos Bell, Univ. of Connecticut

“Inside the Whale and Outside the Ark: Reconsidering Enclosure in Patience and Cleanness”

David K. Coley, Simon Fraser Univ.

“Visual Rhetoric and Argumentation in Pearl” Denise A. Stodola, Kettering Univ.

“Of schyr goulez: Red as Complement to Green in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

Witt Womack, Univ. of Leeds

 

Co-sponsored with the International Piers Plowman Society

 

Thursday @ 3.30 (Session 134)

SCHNEIDER 1325

The Places and Spaces of Alliterative Verse

Sponsor: International Piers Plowman Society; Pearl-Poet Society

Organizer: Michael Johnston, Purdue Univ.

Presider: Ashley E. Bartelt, Northern Illinois Univ.

 

“Piers Plowman and the Field of Vision”

Richard Bergen, Univ. of British Columbia

“Mountainous Couplings in Piers Plowman and Other Writings”

Matthew Boyd Goldie, Rider Univ.

“Continuity and Bifurcation: A Metrical Study of Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

David O’Neil, Univ. of Southern Indiana