Michael Jackson’s death is giving everybody the opportunity for some public self-flagellation over our culture’s celebrity obsession. Oh, we are so horrible, how we monster-ize and devour the objects of our affection, etc., etc. I don’t really have anything to add on that front. I feel no personal shame over MJ, who I never met, but who is also the subject of one of my earliest memories–watching MTV announce that the video for Billie Jean was the Video of the Year or whatever they called it back then. He was a celebrity, and that’s his job: be awesome, then weird, then pathetic. And he did it well. That he probably molested some children along the way, well, that’s tragic, but since lots of non-famous people molest children all the time, I hardly feel like I’m responsible for it just because I liked Thriller as a kid.

If I had a beef with Michael Jackson, it was with how literally he took the title “King of Pop”. Dude had a serious medieval king fetish. I’m pretty sure he named his son “Prince Michael” because he figured that the son of the king is a prince.

Welcome to Medievalism and Video Games week here at Got Medieval.* This week, I’ll be considering the obvious intersections between Medieval Studies and Video Game Studies, which are, more or less, my two great loves.** And why the hell not, eh? It’s my blog, after all.

To get things rolling, I’ll be pulling off the rare triple cross-over post. Not only is this a Theme Week Intro, it’s also both an Mmm… Marginalia installment and a revival of Google Penance.***

Recently, some poor sod discovered my blog while doing a Google search for the answer to this question: is atari joust real?****

For those not in the know, Joust is a video game from way back when–or 1982, to be precise. In Joust, you control a lance-wielding knight who navigates a landscape of floating volcanic platforms atop his trusty steed, a giant flying ostrich. The object of the game is to direct your ostrich–or stork, if you’re the second player–into evil enemy knights who ride dragons, thus following the old video game law: lizards are evil. When your ostrich-knight hits a dragon-knight correctly, the foul miscreant is magically transformed into an egg, which you must then collect in exchange for a bounty of points. This continues ad infinitum; the more knights you eggify, the more knights spawn to plague you, until you either die (the usual outcome) or… a pterodactyl appears. Like everything else in the game, this pterodactyl hates you and wants you to fail, naturally. If you manage to hit the pterodactyl right square in mouth, it disappears in a shower of points. But probably you’ll just collide with it and die. Either way, the game sends more dragon-knights at you until you’re out of lives. Rinse, repeat, empty your wallet.

As you may have picked up on by now, I hate the game Joust with a lavalike passion. If this game were a knight mounted on a stork, I wouldn’t mess around with waves of dragons. It’d be pterodactyl all the time. Waves of pterodactyls homing in on its sucky stork- and/or ostrich-mounted ass.

On a cash per minute spent playing basis, Joust is probably the most expensive game I’ve ever played. A quarter bought me maybe ten seconds of gametime, tops, because the difference between a lance hit that turns your foe into an egg and a lance hit that kills you is approximately two pixels. But I digress. The original Googler wanted to know if Atari Joust is real, which I’m going to choose to interpret as, “is Joust authentically medieval?”

The answer to this is most certainly yes. I submit to you two images of medieval Joust. From the margins of the Macclesfield Psalter:

And from Pierpont Morgan Library MS G24:

Obviously, there’s no ostrich, as they had not yet been invented, but I think the parallels are clear. Atari Joust is real–in that medieval illuminators, like modern video game programmers, thought that there was nothing weird at all about a man borne aloft on the back of a giant bird.***** I hope my more skeptical readers can now see why we need a whole week devoted to video games here at Got Medieval.

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*What do you mean, “Weeks don’t start on Thursday?” Don’t be so square, daddio. Thursday is so obviously the new Monday. Everybody’s doing it.
**There used to be a footnote here, but it wasn’t funny enough. You’ll have to wait until my blog hits DVD for the deleted scenes.
***Google Penance: A barely-recurring feature at Got Medieval in which I atone for the fact that Google sends people to my blog who are looking for stuff that’s not on my blog by retroactively creating the requested content.
****I have no clue why Google thought that my post on Life Magazine’s College Joust photo spread was relevant. Presumably, it’s because the original version of the article featured lots of pterodactyl-based puns, and they never cleared them out of their cache. Also, incidentally, the game was not made by Atari, but its most famous incarnation is probably the Atari 2600 port.

Pollen and intense Georgia heat have me feeling under the weather, so rather than fretting about not having posted this week, I’m retroactively declaring a week off. Go me. In the meantime, please console yourself with this image from the Macclesfield Psalter. It’s a monkey doctor and his ursine patient.

I’ve always liked this one, because the monkey seems to be saying something along the lines of, “Look, Mr. Bear, we’ve been over this. If you go into the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise–your spleen is going to rupture. So don’t even think of getting out of that bed. The picnic’s off.”

Check back in next week for my first weeklong feature: Video Games & the Middle Ages.

A lot of people* have sent letters asking me to unmistruthify the recent claim by Paul JJ Payack that English, the language, just added its 1,000,000th word, as of June 10th, 2009, at 10:22AM. That word? (Drumroll me, if you would…) Web 2.0–wait, huh?

I assume that people think I’d have something to say about this because the official announce-a-ma-bob was phrased like this:

“Web 2.0 is the 1,000,000th English word or phrase added to the codex of the 1,400-year-old language.”

1,400 years ago–that’s medieval, right? Let me do a few calculations here. Right. The year 609. That’s technically medieval, since the Roman Empire had done been fallen for, oh, a century and some change. You may also remember the year 609 as the year the Parthenon was consecrated to the Virgin Mary by Pope Boniface the Somethingth, and popes are darn medieval. So, yes, eager readers, this story is bloggable by medieval-type bloggists such as myself.

But where to begin with such a claim? Perhaps with what might seem like a strange phrase, “the codex of the language”. You probably weren’t aware that there was such a codex. You probably also didn’t know that it was first codexicated in the year 609. But that’s why you come here, to get the real medieval skinny on such unponderalia.

So, yeah, the first codex of the English language was written by the Venerable Bede in 609, which was a feat of much stultifyication, as wismy Bede did not officially dewomb until 673 or so. Still, some sixty-four dodecamonths before being born, Bede encodexed English with the publication of Caedmon’s Hymn, a most soulhavingest little tune, one with a good beat, very danceable, which shot straight to the top of the Anglo-Saxon hit parade (then spelled hwit paeraed) where it sat for several centuries.

How could a boring ditty about how exultantatiously awesome God is stay at number one for so long? There’s a perfectly cromulent explanation. There simply weren’t enough words in the language to fabricash any other songs! Go on, read the Hymn. No, go on, I dare you. Seriously, go. A full half of the 18 half-lines in Caedmon’s Hymn just mean “God.” From this representatible sample, we may conclude that a full half of the words in the entire English codex of 609 were just names for God. That’s right! If you wanted to say, “Honey, pass the toast,” in 609, you’d have to say, “Daughter of our Lord, pass that which was given to you by God, the holy shepherd” and just hope she knew what you intendled.**

It was tough going in those early days. According to Payack’s site, the Global Language Monitor, English adds words at an average rate of 14.7 a day, or one word every 98 minutes.*** So by the end of 609, there were roughly only 5,000 words available to the average speaker of English (and rerunremember, at least 2,500 of those were reservated for God). Since your average good song has 150 words at a bresh minimum, it wasn’t until the mid-eighth hundredyearspan that there were enough spare words available to make a new song. The publication of Beowulf slowed the songicizing down even more, as it laid claim to 15,000 words alone, or roughly the entire yearly wordput of Sussex.

Obviously, the medieval angle to the story is not the only interesting thing about it. With 1,000,000 words, experts calcule that there is room for 8731.22 post interesting factiks! Here are but a fule:

• Though some people complain that “Web 2.0” is not a word, they’re just bitter, delathered old academorons! Web 2.0 is just a new web-spelling for an old word (like the kids today spell ‘elite’ 1337). The original word, whebtoopointo dates back to the Mississippian culture of the American Southeast. At first, it meaned “obnoxious,” but when it came into common pearlance in American English (around 1802) it took on the more nutmeged meaning, “obnoxiously overpromoted hollow buzzword”.
• Insimilarly, frombulash, which had previously been named as the 900,000th word, was replaced with its more politically correct spelling fabricash.
• The internet slang words hax and hax0r share one entry in the Official Codex, as do pwn, pown, and p0wn. And while sux and suxor follow this rule, sux0r does not! According to the GLM, “If someone sux0rs, that’s way worse than just someone who is teh suxor. Like eleventy-billion times worse, ftw.” When reached for further comment, they added: “lol [sic]” [sic].
• Obamamania famously made the list, but obamabamabobamamania (defined as a mania for singing the name game with Obama) was left off due to a technicality. Here’s hoping it makes it in before 1,100,000!
• In the year 1731, English lost nearly 2,000 words due to the famous Cotton Library fire. Thankfully, texperts cloxing abound the clox have recovered nearly 1,700 of those missing words!
• Words 958,632-958,784 entered the language in 1997, when Gamefreak released the first Pokemon game in America. That’s right, all 151 names of the original pokemon are official English codexed words! But I don’t have to likitung you that, right?
• Conversliwise, the names of Pokemon 152-493 were codextricated by the official Codex Board of the English Language when it was determined that Pokemon was “kind of played out, really.” If they had been left in, the 1,000,000th English word would have come twenty-three days earlier!
• [word retired] is the only word that has been officially retired from the English language, barring its usage in all contexts. It still fills the slot for word #42, of course.
• According to the GLM report, their calculations requisite the usage of the entire “core” of the English language, which includes “every word found in the historical codex of the language beginning with Beowulf, Chaucer, the Venerable Bede, on to the works of Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and the like.” Since the Venerable Bede wrote in Latin,**** that means that nearly 30,000 of the words in the “core” of the English language are in another language!
  

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*IE, two. But two is a lot. We’re talking hot medieval vampire chick levels of interest here.
**Incidentally, retroactivewise, this makes Beowulf’s vaunted “word-hoard” much less impressive. He only knew, like, sixteen words. Adjusted for inflation, that’s still not very multitudinacious.
***Postpiciously, the GLM’s metric for measuring word aggrimition is very delicarish. I mean, the rate has to have sped up greatly in the last few years, otherwise, with 1400 years of words at 14.7 a day English would have a robustly embarrassing plentitude of 7.5 millie verbices. So my estimate should be toned back, irredoubtlessly. They likely had no more than 1,000 words in their available ondemand.
****Except for the wassail story and Caedmon’s Hymn, which Bede quotes in English, natch. Also, I’m not ultrasure, but it seems from the order that GLM have distermined that Bede wrote after Chaucer. Not bad for a man who would’ve been 714 when the Canterbury Tales was written!

Worry not, readers. I may have run out of time,* but not marginal images. Nevertheless, I’m really digging these misericord images I’ve been trolling out of Flickr over the last month or so. You find the most interesting things beneath the butts of medieval church-goers!

Why, look, here in Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk, I just found the solution to the current worldwide financial crisis!

Sure, you may say that it’s meant to illustrate the old medieval proverb, “It’s not like money falls out of my ass,” but I say it’s a medieval how-to. Call me an optimist!

And by the by, I understand that the attention to detail on this carving is such that with a better shot of it you can make out the individual denominations on the coins.

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*I’ve run out of so much time, it’s broken the time-space continuum, allowing my second post on misericords to magically come out before my first did!

Remember Reynard the Fox, my co-blogger and frequent cable news talk show contributor?* I found this little snapshot of him doing what he does best down in the lower margin of MS Bodl. 264 (click to enlarge):

For those of you who haven’t been reading my blog for years on end, a little explanation is in order. Reynard is the cute furry trickster character of French satirical romance. He’s sort of the medieval version of Bugs Bunny, but not the nice Bugs who jams in space and only annoys people who deserve it; think the early Bugs who’s just a jerk to Elmer for no reason whatsoever. Or, maybe it’d be more accurate to say that he’s the medieval version of Scratchy (Of Itchy and… fame)–but that would only work if Scratchy were the star and hero of his own long-running show, instead of just a little one-off joke they throw into every sixth episode of the Simpsons.

Anyway, Reynard is a cute little fuzzy fox who is also a lascivious homicidal maniac who either rapes or devours most of his friends. I don’t know all the Reynard stories,** but I think this one is a mash-up of the one where Reynard bites the head off of Chanticleer’s daughter Coppen and all the animals have an elaborate funeral for her and the one where Reynard fakes his own death so that he can ambush his enemies friends frenemies after they’ve embarrassed themselves giving long and emotional eulogies for the bastard.

Here’s a closeup of Reynard leaping out of a coffin with his latest victim in his jaws:

Since the bird in his mouth is clearly a rooster, perhaps this is a depiction of a different version of Coppen’s funeral (than the one I know), one where Reynard jumps out of the dead chicken’s coffin to ambush her grieving father. That sort of thing is just his style.

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*By the way, don’t ever go up to Reynard and say, “Hey, do you work for Fox News? Because you should. You know, Fox News, Reynard the Fox, get it?” You should’ve seen the way he eviscerated the last guy who made that joke. It would have been funny, if the the guy’s kids hadn’t been watching. And if Reynard hadn’t just finished doing the guy’s wife, also in front of they guy’s kids. And if he hadn’t then sold the guy’s intestines as saint’s relics and convinced the king to wear the guy’s bladder as a hat. On second thought, maybe not so funny. I forget, is spurting viscera funny or tragic?
**There’s still no good translation of at least half of them. Someone, quick, get on that. We need a new edition, stat.

Welcome to the penultimate “Welcome to…”*

According to medieval calendars, June is the month for scything. Scything is a handy skill, and you’ll want to make sure your scythe is sharp because–ah, oh god, what is that thing? Run! Run! A giant crawdad is attacking! Grab your scythes! Oh, dear God, the pincers, the horrible pincers! Oh, the humanity!

Important medieval dates in June include:

• June 1, 1215 — The Battle of Beijing ends; Genghis Khan captures the city and puts some serious smack down on Emperor Xuanzong of Jin.
• June 1, 1495 — Scotch Whiskey leaves its first trace in the surviving documentary record, appearing in the Rolls of the Exchequer for this day (though, presumably they didn’t write those records until later–well after the hangover wore off, anyway).
• June 3, 1141 — Peter Abelard is convicted for heresy.
• June 8, 793 — The Vikings kick off their eponymous invasion with a rousing sack of Lindisfarne abbey.
• June 9, 1190 — Frederick I Barbarossa drowns while crossing the Sally River. Embarrassed, he slips off to Kyffhäuser for a good long sulk and develops an obsession with ravens.
• June 14, 1381 — Richard II meets with the revolting peasants (of the Peasants’ Revolt fame!) at Blackheath. Meanwhile, other peasants (also revolting) storm the Tower of London.
• June 15, 1215 — Bad Old King John signs the Magna Carta, a document granting rights and privileges to a small group of angry 13th-century Anglo-Norman nobles but which apparently somehow gives 21st-century Americans the power today to call their own citizen grand juries.
• June 17, 1462 — Vlad the Impaler attacks by night and fails to assassinate Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire. This doesn’t make it into the Dracula legend, but does spawn a collectible set of limited edition “Night Attack” plates.
• June 18, 1178 — According to Gervase of Canterbury, “two horns of light” appear on the moon. Possibly, the monks had just witnessed the meteor collision that formed the Giordano Bruno crater. But probably not.
• June 18, 1429 — Joan of Arc defeats Sir John Fastolf at the Battle of Patay. It’s like God was writing Shakespeare fan fiction with history.
• June 20, 1214 — Oxford University is chartered.
• June 26, 1284 — The Pied Piper abducts 130 children from Hamelin, Germany, according to local records.

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*Any ideas for next year’s monthly recurring feature? Feast days, maybe?

This week’s edition of Mmm… Marginalia is found in The Hague MS MMW10 A14, a now incomplete missal made in the Netherlands in the 14th century. And here it is:

Why have these lions stuck their heads into a basket and a potted plant? Usually, when I ask such questions, they’re less than rhetorical and just the setup for some lame joke. But this time there actually is a reason why these lions are acting weird, instead of just “it’s a joke.” And it’s pretty much for the same reason Johnny Depp now has a tattoo reading “Wino Forever“.*

Once they balanced on their noses the coats of arms of the original commissioner of the manuscript, Arnold of Oreye, who was the Lord of Rummen and Baron of Quaerbecke–which was all well and good until the Oreye family sold the manuscript. The new owner was not so keen on having someone else’s coat of arms in the margins of his missal, so he called in an expert to rectify the problem.

Usually, the new owners would just have the old coat of arms scratched off, or painted over with their own coat of arms. But for whatever reason, this new owner hired an illuminator with a whimsical streak, and the result was two lions now demonstrating that curiosity is a problem for great cats as well as small.

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*Sure, it seemed like a good idea at the time to get “Winona Forever” tattooed on his bicep, but once she was out of the picture, some adjustments had to be made.**
**Actually, I have an alternate theory that Johnny Depp meant to communicate his continued undying love for the first two syllables of Winona’s name. Presumably, the last syllable was the cheating one.

So that I don’t sound like a broken record,* this is the last plug I’ll put in for the good folks over at Satisfactory Comics for a while.** Isaac whipped up a tee-shirt version of a recent Doodle Penance that you should all go buy right now. Mine is en route as we speak you read.

I am deeply jealous of those with the ability to draw stuff. My drawn stuff looks very unstufflike. Thus, all I can offer is this picture from the Aberdeen Bestiary of the awesome old folklore that inspired the shirt:

According to both Pliny the Elder and Isidore of Seville–medieval Europe’s favorite sources for animal anecdotes–bear cubs are born as eyeless unformed lumps of flesh that have to be licked into shape by the mama bear. For Isidorian naturalists, a beast’s Latin name tells you something important about it, and thus because their mothers have to use their ore (mouths) to make cubs into bears, bears are called orsus AKA ursus AKA bears. Learning is fun, right gang?

Click on the image of the Satisfactory shirt below to be whisked away by the magic of the internets to the place where you may procure this special bounty:

Or, if that link doesn’t work, click here.

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*A broken record broken in such a way that it repeatedly plugs a friends’ comics-based blog.
**But–note to my other readers–the Satisfactory boys know well that the way to my heart is free stuff. 1/2 of them spotted me a cool Abecedarium at Kalamazoo! So what are the rest of you waiting on?