Ah, dear readers, when last I posted I was a poor, poor graduate student, but now I am a rich member of the new media revolution. For you see, bumping around in the Yale mail system over the holidays was a present for me from one of you, the first wages that I’ve earned doing this blogger thing. It is a book with a fan letter attached. According to the back cover, it cost $14.00. And according to the letter, the fan wanted to express his appreciation for my review of Kingdom of Heaven from some months back, which means that I made about $30 an hour for writing it. This is a pay scale I highly approve of.*

But I’m afraid to say, dear readers who did not write the book The Last Duel, that the largesse of the reader who did write that book really makes you look bad. You haven’t sent me anything in the mail. And you may not have written a book, either. So you look twice as bad.

My wife suspects that the man who wrote the book sent it to me so that I would plug it on my blog. And if that is the case, then all of you look thrice as bad. Not only have you fallen down on the book-writing and (much more important) gift-giving jobs, you also haven’t come up with any good guerrilla marketing campaigns lately, either. Really, the longer I write this, the worse things go for you. I should stop.

But I feel compelled to at least write a few kind words about the book. I will not write lots of kind words, because the author did not send me the hardback copy or autograph it, so I have to keep the fan letter inside it so that when I leave it lying around casually on my coffee table it will fall out and reveal to my friends how I get fan letters.

Begin kind words now: The book is 242 pages long, including index, and has a map of Paris in 1380 on the eighty-fifth of those pages–but there are twelve un-numbered pages up front, so adjust your page totals accordingly. ** If you are planning a trip to Paris, you may find that some things have changed, so it’s probably best to buy a separate map. I recommend the popout variety. According to the back cover, which is about all I read of any book anyway, the book is “a gripping, atmospheric true story,” so I expect that the troposphere plays some role at some point. Or maybe ozone. You never can tell. The hardback edition of The Last Duel will look very nice on your shelf next to The Last Knight, The Last Templar, and The Last Templar. And whatever book I decide to write to cash in on The Last trend. Possibly, it will be called, The Last Trend. I will definitely send the author of The Last Duel a hardback copy of whatever it is.

According to the fan letter, the book has been turned into a BBC documentary which will be airing soon. Check your local listings. This fact actually makes me burn with jealousy of the author, as the last thing I wrote was a chapter of my thesis, and I’m pretty sure that the BBC isn’t going to turn that into a documentary any time soon.

End kind comments. Now, readers, let me close by offering you a shot at redemption. It’s not too late to feel the holiday spirit. And it’s never too early to start shopping for Christmas 2006. All gifts should be sent to:

That Guy What Has That Blog***
Center for Medieval Studies
Yale University
New Haven, CT 06520

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*Of which I highly approve, for you grammar snobs out there.*
**Oh, and while counting up the pages to make that smartass joke, I just discovered that he did autograph it, just not where I autograph books. So don’t I look like a jackass now? Too bad this is the Internet and I can’t go back and edit my pages. For the record, the inscription says: “With many thanks and all best wishes! –Eric Jager 11/05.”
***Actually, you probably should disguise the to: line by using my real name, which I’ve cleverly hidden at the top of this page. I live in fear of the day my DGS discovers I’ve got a blog. He’s Swedish, and more like the Swedish Chef**** than a Viking, but you never know when he’s going to grab a pointy hat and an axe and just lose it.
****Fun fact: In Sweden, the Swedish Chef is called the Norwegian Chef. And if you mention the Swedish Chef to your Swedish DGS, he will stare down at you witheringly. He is very tall, your Swedish DGS.

“It is easier for a kite to be made to act like a sparrow-hawk than for a wise man to be fashioned at short notice from a peasant.”

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britannie (1136)

The best thing about the Wikipedia* is how easy it is to use it to accuse someone of assassinating someone famous. The second best thing is when you catch someone editing a page nefariously for comedy effect in the moments before some Good Samaritan of Internet Encyclopedias shows up to fix it.

While doing a spot check on which Pope was in charge during the 1130’s (Innocent II), I spotted this tiny bit of attempted hilarity. Instead of Pope Benedict XVI, the list of popes ended with:

For the record, by the time I reloaded the page, the entry had been changed back. According to the edit history, it took about twenty-four minutes for someone to spot the change and put right what once went wrong. But thanks to said edit history, the joke will remain as eternal as the page.

Someone should start a blog devoted to wiki-jokes. I’m sure there have been some good ones that don’t involve the JFK assassination. On the pope page alone, I found the attempted creation of a pope named Tin Tin XVI (“the first pope to covet a french cartoon character”) which lasted all of a minute, and then repeated attempts of a person called Schizoider to change the entire list of popes to a ten entry list helpfully entitled “THIS IS NOT VANDALISM”. Supporters of the popes rejected by the tyrrany of Wikipedia, like Pope Jew, Pope Hitler, Pope Queen Elizabeth II, and Pope Willy on Wheels were probably upset to find that said list only lasted for two hours before it was labeled vandalism by someone who clearly did not read the title. The war lasted for a couple of days back in October of 2005 before, presumably, the jokesters lost interest.

But if the jokesters had picked a less prominent target, wouldn’t it be very likely to remain for days and days? The Vatican probably has a rapid response team of crack commandos dedicated to keeping relavent wikipedia entries clean, holy, and doctrinal. But can the same be said of obscure U.S. Vice Presidents? Or twelfth century Swiss nobility? Or pretty much anything medieval? I’m the most techno-literate medievalist I know, and if I’m a good example, techno-literate medievalists are more interested in saving the Mushroom Kingdom from alien invasion than patrolling the Wikipedia.

I’ve long considered the article on the folk motif of the King in the Mountain to be an elaborate** wiki-joke, because it lists Teddy Roosevelt as one of those sleeping heroes, like King Arthur or Frederick Barbarossa, who will one day return to unite his land. I’m often tempted to change this entry, but always shot through with the doubt–What if there actually is a legend about the Once and Future Teddy Roosevelt? Or worse, what if it’s actually true? I don’t want to have to answer to a Zombie President who returns from the grave.

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*Other than how its existence ensures that I have no need to even pretend that I have memorized the names and dates of rule of the medieval English monarchs.
**Elaborate, because according to the edit history, Teddy Roosevelt has been on the list of Kings in the Mountain since it was first created.

Fresh off his successful appearance in a footnote on my blog, Wil Wheaton has done the medieval retro gaming enthusiast community a great service by reviewing the early arcade game King and Balloon. Here’s a clip to whet your appetite:

Just like in real medieval times, your crossbow shoots laser bolts, and the balloons can move around without regard to the laws of physics, thermodynamics, or gravity.

News that Edward the Confessor’s tomb has been found under Westminster Abby was buried under this awful headline by The Telegraph: “Medieval king pops up in new location.”

It makes the man sound like a Whack-A-Mole target.

I suppose I could file this instead under ‘They’ll Publish Anything in the Denver Post,” but since the article is currently sitting in Google’s top five results for a medieval news search, it’s worth at least a light mocking:

From “Harry Potter” appeal is medieval by James Pinkerton*

So while one must give credit to the skill of author J.K. Rowling and the filmmakers, one also might note they have tapped into a deeper pattern: to the continuing allure of the Middle Ages, to the mystic-memory chords of Americans, most of whom trace ethnic and/or religious ancestry back to Europe. […]

So while “Potter” is set in the present day, the appeal is strictly medieval. The characters live in a world of stained-glass castles and flickering candles, but even more powerfully, they inhabit a land of enchantment – just as our ancestors did, before the gather-by-the-hearth collective reverie of olden times was punctured, at least for many, by the cold steel of science and rationality.

Ah, I, too, long for the Middle Ages, when faith reigned supreme and those uppity scientists knew their place. Wait–actually, I don’t. And why would you think that the middle ages was a time of “gather-by-the-hearth collective reverie” in the first place?

I, for one, don’t even know what gather-by the hearth collective reverie is, but I imagine it’s something like the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, with everyone singing “Nanoo Nanoo” with linked arms. This is a conception of the Middle Ages that I’ve never come across in my studies, but perhaps that’s because I’m study mostly matters of illegitimacy and succession and the civil wars that inevitably followed and all that non-gather-by-the-hearth collective non-reverie that accompanies them. But surely, since the Middle Ages wasn’t homogeneous, I suppose that at some point someone did grab some other someones and go stand around the fire in reverie holding hands with them.***

So maybe a better question is why someone would associate “stained glass castles” with the Middle Ages. Stained glass is a horrible material for building a castle out of, what with how often castles end up on the receiving end of the occasional light, glass-shattering tap. Oh, yes, and the catapults, too.

Ok, so the real question is why he thinks that Harry Potter is particularly medieval. There are wizards and witches in it, and wands and crystal balls, and, of course, British people, but are these things really exclusively medieval? I thought Harry Potter was mostly a British school boy’s novel with magic tacked on top and the institutional sodomy hidden around back somewhere, in a broom closet perhaps. Frankly, I don’t know why we associate magic with Middle Ages. Their magic was more along the lines of commuion wafers that cause people to get stuck together in hilarious chains, or beds that shoot fire and daggers at knights bold enough to lie down in them, or little clergens who keep singing even though they’ve had their throats slit. Waving a wand and shouting out in fake Latin is strictly Dungeons & Dragons. But then, if you wrote an article talking about the ancient memory-chords that connect us to our past as 13-year olds in basements rolling absurdly shaped dice, you wouldn’t get published in the Denver Post.****

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*This may be the James P. Pinkerton who’s a (somewhat) notorious** Conservative-with-a-big-C columnist, or it might be James no-P. Pinkerton, who’s a regional reporter in the West and Mid-West. But what do I know? It could be the James Pinkerton who’s a harpist in Austin, TX, or even the Rev. James Pinkerton who appears to have died in the 1800’s. This is why, students, we don’t use Google for real research.
**And by “notorious,” I mean that his name pops up at Newsday.com and the New America Foundation.
***Whether this was ever preceded by an attempted Christmas heist, I can’t say. I think Christmas’s being in constant danger of being stolen/skipped/ruined/etc. is one of those conditions of post-modernity that you hear so much about these days, like alienation and ironic detatchment.
****Unless maybe you’re Wil Wheaton, and even then, your best bet is going to be a blog.

There’s a new program in Britain for unruly youths called “knight school,” where hoodlums learn lessons on life inspired by medieval knights. In response to this apparently successful program, a BBC reporter “canvassed opinion among medieval experts” to divine what lessons we today could learn from the medieval knight. He manage to scrape together a list of 10 lessons, half of which are best summarized as “don’t do what knights did.” Once again, I’ve done the work of reading the article for you, so that you don’t have to.

1. Generosity was important to knights, so this means kids today should share.
2. Mercy is chivalric, which means so go easy on people you beat up.
3. Loyalty to the king means respect your elders.
4. Exercise power responsibly means don’t get into fights.
5. Protect the weak means stand up to bullies.
6. Seek justice means fight for what’s right.
7. Be humble means give credit to your pals.
8. Crusading teaches us to tolerate religions.
9. Carrying a sword means don’t carry knives.
10. Courtly love means girls will likely find you unimpressive.

It really is that trippy in the original. Kids! Be like knights! Don’t get into fights. But in the fights you do get into, be merciful! Also, beat up bullies! But tell people your friends did it!

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but this semester I’m TAing* in Shakespeare: Histories and Tragedies. Being “Early Modern,” Shakes is almost medieval, after all, even though the official word is that he’s a Renaissance writer and the Renaissance marks the point where Europe collectively came to its senses, washed its hair, invented science, and stopped believing in superstitions.

Anyway, if you wonder where I’ve been the last few months, I’ve been spending half my time reading Shakespeare plays and criticism in order to be able to lead my weekly discussion section without looking like a complete ass.** And as part of my lesson plan, I’ve been giving my students a quiz each week. This seemed like a good idea back when I was worried about filling up fifty minutes of class time, but each week it’s gotten harder and harder to write the darn thing.

It’s my own fault; I’ve set an unreasonable standard. Half the quiz each week is just quote identification, though I do my best to mix it up on them. I don’t have quotes from Othello of Othello talking about vengeance, or of Hamlet being a whiny philosophical wet blanket. Instead I’ll give Hamlet talking about vengeance and Othello being philosophical. The other half of the quiz is supposed to be more clever. (If any of my students happen upon my blog, I’m sure they’ll protest this point.) When we covered Henry IV, part 1, I gave them “Name that Henry,” a list of traits they had to attribute to Hal, Hotspur, both, or neither. This was a sequel to the “Which Richard?” quiz that followed our discussion of Richards II and III.

I should mention that these quizzes have absolutely no effect on the students’ grades. I’m totalling up the points from the quizzes, and the student with the highest total gets movie tickets to the local art house theater.

But this past week, I went too far, apparently, and made a quiz that was undoable.*** I’ve been wallowing in it the past few days, but now I’ve decided to do something positive and give my quiz to the world. It all works out, really, if you just start with the earl of __________.

Part 1: Blanks and Banks: Use only words from the bank, and only use each word ONCE. Score 1 point for a double, or two blanks correctly filled, 3 for a triple, and 4 for all four answers correct in a sequence.****

At/In _____________, the thane of ____________ fought with ____________ and _____________.

At/In _____________, the thane of ____________ brings word of____________’s defeat by _____________’s son.

At/In _____________, the thane of ____________ killed _____________’s father ______________.

At/In _____________, the earl of _____________ and _____________ attack ______________.

If anybody actually enjoys this quiz, I’ll post the answers later.

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*Teaching Assistant-ing, though for some reason at Yale we’re called TFs, or Teaching Fellows–probably an attempt to appease the graduate union or something, but a hollow gesture nonetheness; we’re always called TA’s by our students, professors, and usually even each other.
**The other half, as always, has gone to video game plumbers. Right now, I’m enthralled with making the plumber play tennis.
***That is, unable to be done, not able to be undone.
****If I was really bright, I’d be able to make this into a little web-app that would have dropdown boxes that depopulated once you used a word from the bank. But I’m not.

Some dude with a livejournal has translated the lyrics to the Shaft themesong into Middle English. It doesn’t scan exactly right, but given the lack of native Middle English speakers out there, this detracts little from the funny. Go here for the rest, but this is a small taste:

Alle clepe tha carl ane badde mooder–
SOFTE!
Speken of Shafte bene I.
THAN KONNE ALLES WE!