What I apparently do when I'm not teaching, skating, or squandering my life on the interwebs . . .
My LJ is pretty much all skating and teaching and bitching and perceived quirks of RL. So here's a snippet of what I try to do when not distracted by the rest of the world:
I study medieval literature, and I'm working on a long-ass article, the second part of which concerns these crazy (and super obscure) twelfth and thirteenth-century legends that recount how Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king, did not die on the field in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings, but survived for decades in England as a hermit. The first part of the article also disproves the legend that Harold in fact died with an arrow in the eye -- one of the most famous details in all of English history (it's kind of like arguing that Washington did not spread, spread, the Delaware). I'm trying to pull some version of this all together for a talk I'm giving in Louisiana next week. The process of research when I need to also begin writing is always a crazy one for me -- while I'm reading, these voices in my head keep starting to write sentences. A little while ago, this began to happen in my head, and it turned into what will likely be the end of my talk, and the genesis for the conclusion to the article:
How do we reconcile these two disparate accounts of Harold, one so canonical and one so fantastical? Simple: they both teach us the same incredibly valuable lesson about the process of history. Though they start at the greatest distance from each other on the spectrum of perceived historical fact, they in the end operate as the same sort of expression -- they are both very real historically and yet false to the past. Both revise and fabricate the past as they ultimately seek to confirm the historical might of the Anglo-Norman state, and yet both unpack the anxieties and strategies that underwrite this state, first throughout the consolidation of Norman power in post-Conquest England, and then again in the struggles of Anglo-Norman England to maintain suzerain dominance over its unruly, non-English neighbors.
In the Anglo-Norman writing of history, Harold never becomes a king, he only becomes a rebel, an interruption to succession, an annoying detour on the smooth line of legitimate rule. The arrow which eventually kills the last Anglo-Saxon king develops long after the fact of his demise, and reaches final form as an emphatic full-stop punctuation to the declaration of his death, and that of the Anglo-Saxon state. But in tandem, the mess of the past belied by the anxious corrective of written accounts allowed other historical realities out, such as English, Scandinavian, Welsh, Scottish, Irish and even Norman desires to challenge Anglo-Norman dominance. The myth of Harold alive after the Battle of Hastings connects in various ways with such desires, and no doubt its origins lay, Arthur-like, in the English hope and then nostalgia for the time of native rule. But the versions that have survived dramatically illustrate that legends of Harold 's afterlife could pretty much be made to do the same political work as the accounts that authoritatively killed him; here, for Anglo-Norman rule Harold alive is as good as Harold dead. In history, after all, there are no mistakes, only interpretations.
It's kinda cool when it just happens like that . . .
I study medieval literature, and I'm working on a long-ass article, the second part of which concerns these crazy (and super obscure) twelfth and thirteenth-century legends that recount how Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king, did not die on the field in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings, but survived for decades in England as a hermit. The first part of the article also disproves the legend that Harold in fact died with an arrow in the eye -- one of the most famous details in all of English history (it's kind of like arguing that Washington did not spread, spread, the Delaware). I'm trying to pull some version of this all together for a talk I'm giving in Louisiana next week. The process of research when I need to also begin writing is always a crazy one for me -- while I'm reading, these voices in my head keep starting to write sentences. A little while ago, this began to happen in my head, and it turned into what will likely be the end of my talk, and the genesis for the conclusion to the article:
How do we reconcile these two disparate accounts of Harold, one so canonical and one so fantastical? Simple: they both teach us the same incredibly valuable lesson about the process of history. Though they start at the greatest distance from each other on the spectrum of perceived historical fact, they in the end operate as the same sort of expression -- they are both very real historically and yet false to the past. Both revise and fabricate the past as they ultimately seek to confirm the historical might of the Anglo-Norman state, and yet both unpack the anxieties and strategies that underwrite this state, first throughout the consolidation of Norman power in post-Conquest England, and then again in the struggles of Anglo-Norman England to maintain suzerain dominance over its unruly, non-English neighbors.
In the Anglo-Norman writing of history, Harold never becomes a king, he only becomes a rebel, an interruption to succession, an annoying detour on the smooth line of legitimate rule. The arrow which eventually kills the last Anglo-Saxon king develops long after the fact of his demise, and reaches final form as an emphatic full-stop punctuation to the declaration of his death, and that of the Anglo-Saxon state. But in tandem, the mess of the past belied by the anxious corrective of written accounts allowed other historical realities out, such as English, Scandinavian, Welsh, Scottish, Irish and even Norman desires to challenge Anglo-Norman dominance. The myth of Harold alive after the Battle of Hastings connects in various ways with such desires, and no doubt its origins lay, Arthur-like, in the English hope and then nostalgia for the time of native rule. But the versions that have survived dramatically illustrate that legends of Harold 's afterlife could pretty much be made to do the same political work as the accounts that authoritatively killed him; here, for Anglo-Norman rule Harold alive is as good as Harold dead. In history, after all, there are no mistakes, only interpretations.
It's kinda cool when it just happens like that . . .