saint george and the dragon

Last week in Medieval Lit, we were supposed to surf the web a little and bring to class our favorite visual represenation of Saint George, of dragon-slaying, maiden-saving fame. There were so many great ones that I decided I had five favorites. I did narrow it down to one for class, but I thought I’d post the rest of them here. Because I’m a geek.

I have especially enjoyed seeing how the maiden, the king’s daughter whom George saves by slaying the dragon, appears so differently in each version. In many, she is a frail, swooning creature standing meekly off to the side, out of George’s way. I favor Uccello’s depiction of the maiden: here, she plays an active—albeit small—part in the dragon’s demise by slinging her girdle around the beast’s neck to lead it into the city and showcase the power of George’s God.

I also find it fascinating that in nearly every case, George’s steed is white—perhaps the predecessor to the good-guy white hats in old Western films?

1. By far my favorite depiction of St. George was this one, Peter Paul Rubens’ “Saint George terrassant le dragon” (1606-07). I love its depiction of George as an older and very powerful man, as opposed to the simpering, lovely young man of so many paintings. Just look at those muscles! I also appreciate the sheep that the maiden is holding, and the dragon’s hand curled tightly around the end of George’s shattered spear, trying to pull it out before George can do more damage.

2. Of course, Paolo Uccello’s 1460 depiction is a classic. I particularly like the maiden holding her girdle, which she has thrown around the dragon’s neck (at George’s request) before leading it into the city. I also enjoy the serenity of this scene—it’s so contradictory to the later versions of the legend (esp. Barclay’s “Life of Saint George”).

3. I don’t know who painted this one, but I enjoy the shattered spear lying on the ground and George’s determined look as he wields his sword to finish off the dragon.

4. “Saint George and the Dragon” (1505-06) by Raphael, of Renaissance fame, has an especially small dragon. I’m always surprised, in fact, by the size of the dragon in portrayals of St. George. I also love George’s cape, flying behind him in the wind, and the maiden standing with clasped hands off to the side.

5. And, finally, I appreciated this depiction for its unusual portrayal of a gentle, refined George. Nearly every depiction of St. George shows him slaying the dragon, but this one has him caring for the maiden afterward. And how can you not love the gold armor? Again, I don’t know who created this image, but I nicked it from Catholic Forum’s online Patron Saints Index.

A: I see you got one of them new 45-caliber swords.

B: That’s about the size of it.

(61 points)

The last quote, from before “Parentheses,” was from the first chapter of Stephenie Meyer’s Eclipse, which is now available, and which Erin read to me over the phone last week. What a great friend. Although Erin wasn’t allowed points for guessing on that one, she does get an extra 133 points for calling me as soon as she got her hands on it. Well, almost as soon.

 

Alfred and Welsh

Since Kimberly has resorted to begging, I decided I’d go ahead and post a new entry so everyone can see the source of the last quote. It was a toughie — I only know one person who would have gotten it, and she doesn’t read my blog — which is why I gave it such a high point-value. It was Elder David A. Bednar, during a BYU devotional entitled “Quick to Observe.”

I have taken a deep interest in King Alfred. After translating a short passage of his writings from Old English into Modern English last semester, I was deeply impressed with his personal morality. This semester, in a medieval literature class, we are reading several of the important sources on Alfred, both those written by him and those written about him by others. For tonight’s class, we’re supposed to write a character sketch of him, with references to the sources, and I just can’t help but be more and more impressed by him. He was a warrior, inventor, statesman, innovator, scholar, translator, philosopher, hunter, supporter of the arts — and above all, a deeply pious man. A true renaissance man if ever there was one, and he lived a good half-century before the Renaissance even took place. I will be very excited to meet him in the next life.

Another recent interest is the Welsh language. I’ve thought for years that Welsh would be fun to learn, and I really wanted to do so at BYU, but never managed to fit it into my schedule. The BBC has some Welsh language webpages, designed for teaching basic Welsh to both children and parents (and particularly to help parents keep up with their children, as there is a big Welsh-instruction movement on in the schools these days). They’ll do, but they’re certainly not the best language instruction activities. In the meantime, I did find a page on Omniglot all about Welsh pronunciation, which cleared up a lot of confusion I’d been having. Like the fact that Ioan Gruffudd’s name is not pronounced “grufud” or even “grufuth,” as I had been saying it, but “grifith” (with a voiced ‘th’ at the end) — in fact, Ioan Central has a sound clip of him saying his own name, which makes me wish that it was much easier to find clips of him speaking with his lovely Welsh accent. *sigh* The poor Welsh really get overlooked, you know.

So if you’ve a date in Constantinople, she’ll be waiting in Istanbul. (15 points)

 

Yay!

From a friend …

Take the Quiz here!

Another “yay!”: During the next two days, there’s a Medieval Symposium on campus, and I’m totally going to go and geek out with my friend NM.

 

medieval summer and noveling November

I have been loving my Old English class, right? I think you all know this by now. Well, today, I went to see my professor to ask him some questions about changing my focus to Medieval Studies, rather than Poetics. Though I love stylistics, I have been very frustrated with my program here, and every time I have considered transferring to a different university, I have been pulled back — apparently Heavenly Father has strong reasons why He needs me here, thought it certainly is not my first choice. But Medieval Studies would give me scope for lots of the things I’m interested in, and it would be much more marketable in the end than a Poetics degree. And, I can still use my Linguistics/Stylistics background to analyze medieval texts.

Since the field is, by nature, interdisciplinary, I would be able to take classes in music, art history, history, and even law, along with my classes in Literature to round it out. Plus, it would make sense for me to learn Latin (which, geek that I am, I’ve been wanting to do for some time now). My professor recommended that I go elsewhere for an intensive summer course in Latin, since what they offer here at UNT will be very elementary and very slow. I have found about four courses that I’m really interested in, at U of Toronto, Notre Dame, CUNY, and University College Cork. My favorite option, of course, is Cork; not only does the tuition include accomodation (for the others, it’s additional), but it’s in Ireland, for crying out loud. Chances are not good with that one working, however, since in addition to the tuition and fees, I would also have to spend money for tickets. Toronto is the cheapest, but I’m not especially keen on going to Toronto (not that I don’t want to go there, just that I would rather go elsewhere). I really the options for CUNY and Notre Dame right now. I just think that would be amazingly fun.

I’m not ready to actually change my focus yet, but I am seriously considering it, and I have one more semester to mull it over before it will start affecting the classes I take.

I am also considering joining in with National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November. It’s a fun-centered program that got started in 1999, where you write a 50,000-page novel in one month. I’ve wanted to write a novel for ages now, and this summer I actually started working on one a little bit (before long I decided it was something I would need to do lots more research on …) But I did the math, and to write 50,000 words in one month, excluding Sundays, I would have to write 2,000 words a day. That’s do-able. So I’m considering it. But, if nothing else, I have at least spread the word a little further. Anyone want to join me? (elliespen, I know you’re pining to!)

Last quote was Natalie Imbruglia’s “Shiver” — a song I just love, and one that always reminds me of Lancaster (I heard it a lot over there).

I don’t like crooks. And if I did like ‘em, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool pigeons. And if I did like crooks that are stool pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you! (122 points)

 

a little update, plus some thoughts on OE, PIE, and vowels

I haven’t been feeling well, yesterday and today. I am staying home from classes today, so I’ve been sitting on the couch reading Agatha Christie and watching Murder, She Wrote.

I have been really enjoying my classes this semester. I feel like things are going a lot better in the ones I’m teaching — it really helped to have one semester of that class behind so that I could take in all my mistakes from that term and try to fix them this time around.

And I’m still having a blast with Old English, and even with Historical Linguistics, even though that one is giving me a run for my money. It’s still a struggle keeping my head above water all the time, but I don’t mind so much having to sit around and memorize Old English verb conjugations, or comparing sets of data from related languages to figure out how they have changed.

You know, speaking of OE verbs … When I tell people about Semitic languages like Hebrew, ancient Egyptian, and Arabic, and how they don’t write their vowels (except for the ‘weak’ or ’semi-’ vowels /w/ and /y/), but that they only write the consonants and then change the vowels to conjugate their verbs or decline their nouns — when I tell people about this, they seem to think it’s utterly incredible. However, English does similar things. This was brought home to me while I was studying my OE verbs the other day. See, in Old English, there were two basic types of verbs, weak and strong. The weak verbs form the past tense by adding a dental (a /d/ or /t/) to the stem, much as we do in Modern English: look, looked; rule, ruled. The strong verbs, on the other hand, form the past tense by changing their vowels: meet, met. This can (and frequently does) also include the past participle: sing, sang, sung; write, wrote, written. (I have used Modern English examples here, since our verbs have inherited these weak/strong attributes from Old English, and most of my readers, I imagine are more familiar with ModE than with OE.) As it turns out, these strong verbs, the vowel-changing verbs, were inherited from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), while the weak verbs were inherited from Proto-Germanic. That is, the strong verbs came from an ancient, unwritten language, while the weak verbs were made up later, after that language had already split into several different languages. That means that PIE verbs, like Semitic words, only alter their vowels to change their grammatical function. It seems entirely plausible to me, then, that PIE and these Semitic languages might be related to each other, at least in phonological processes if not in semantic or syntactic structure. If PIE had been written, might we find that it indicated only the consonants, and not those tricky, shifty vowels?

The last quote, correctly identified by both elliespen and emily, was from The Music Man, one of my all-time favorite movies.

Jump the tracks, can’t get back, I don’t know anyone ’round here, but I’m safe this time. (32 points)