Tally Ho on a Gushing Love Letter to a Sexagenarian Absolute Monarch
One of the few benefits of continuing to be so sporadically employed is that I have a lot of time to read. A lot of time, which is arguably not particularly productive but at least is more intellectually active than watching hours of tv every day. If my jumble of records are right, I hit somewhere in the 160-170 books/plays mark in 2010. Even I think that's a little insane.
That said, I don't think I really found a real "challenge" book since the beginning of last year when I was doing Camus in French. Though I suppose it's natural to gravitate to more difficult stuff when it's too cold to be out and about. That's why my mom likes having a Dostoevsky or Tolstoy from me in the winter. Anyway, I don't think I've done something challenging in English since Finnegan's Wake, so I'm due. This year's victim is Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, notorious in most modern circles as being one of the absolutely most boring of all classics. I'm guessing this is because of its rather lethal combination of monstrous War and Peace length, archaic quasi-Chaucerean language, and antiquated Bunyanesque allegories.
Though as with Finnegan, using "in English" to describe The Faerie Queen is probably generous as well as misleading. Spenser, like Shakespeare and Marlowe, was writing in a period where what we consider modern English wasn't a fixed idea yet. Words have eighty different spellings, individual letters have multiple separate uses. Which is why people who treat lolspeak as the end of western civilization are clearly people without any kind of meaningful background in medieval or renaissance literature {and my parents probably thought that certification was useless).
Anyway, Spenser's text uses the semi-familiar "f" sometimes means "s", as well as the probably more familiar Roman "v" sometimes means "u." It took me nearly thirty canto lines to realize part of the reason I was still struggling with individual words was that in the reverse, "u" meant "v" that I have never seen in anything I've ever read...even from this period. So I thought that if V meant U and U meant V, that the swap should hold throughout the text. Oh, no. That would be too simple. So as far as I can tell, so far the rules are as follows:
V sometimes means V or U
U sometimes means V, occasionally means U
F sometimes means S
S means S
I sometimes means J
The whole U as V thing did initially exasperate me, to the point of complaining about it out loud to a staggeringly uninterested Steve who said I should just stop reading, duh. But that's not my way, as I'm sure all of you know. A book pushes back, I have to wrestle it into submission. And I'd much rather sit and tease meaning out of obsolete vernacular than have my better judgment melt out the side of my head when Dan Brown starts up on his "albino shadows."
Basically, it's reading a work that is sitting at the crossroads of Middle English and Shakespearean English/early modern English. The interesting part is how it highlights just how truly revolutionary Shakespeare's use of language was. I know Shakespearean English can be difficult, but it's clear as day compared to Spenser's prose. Despite writing at the same time, I would so far say that The Faerie Queen is much closer linguistically to The Canterbury Tales than it is to Macbeth. My guess is I'll tire of the story pretty quickly, but I'll stay sufficiently diverted by the textual structure to stick it out. That said, the Red Crosse Knight of Holinesse did just explode a dragon, so who knows.
*As a side note, pretty much the minute I figured out the framework linguistic issues, I was nearly cursing aloud again because it only took a page or two to realize that I should have read this three years ago when I was prepping for Ahab's Wife by finally reading Moby Dick. The titular character in the former is named Una, a name derived from the The Faerie Queen, who is introduced to us in the text riding a donkey led by a dwarf. Which my mom would recognize as something Sena Jeter Naslund directly places into the events of the novel. A reference that probably five people got because as I said no one reads this The Faerie Queen. I just feel embarrassed because I knew there were a lot of layers in Naslund's writing, but one that I'm sure was a major one flew right over my (and pretty much everyone else's) head and that feels negligent. Probably because I usually pride myself on being a thorough reader. Though if a result of making it through The Faerie Queen is going back and reading Ahab's Wife again, that's no bad thing.
That said, I don't think I really found a real "challenge" book since the beginning of last year when I was doing Camus in French. Though I suppose it's natural to gravitate to more difficult stuff when it's too cold to be out and about. That's why my mom likes having a Dostoevsky or Tolstoy from me in the winter. Anyway, I don't think I've done something challenging in English since Finnegan's Wake, so I'm due. This year's victim is Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, notorious in most modern circles as being one of the absolutely most boring of all classics. I'm guessing this is because of its rather lethal combination of monstrous War and Peace length, archaic quasi-Chaucerean language, and antiquated Bunyanesque allegories.
Though as with Finnegan, using "in English" to describe The Faerie Queen is probably generous as well as misleading. Spenser, like Shakespeare and Marlowe, was writing in a period where what we consider modern English wasn't a fixed idea yet. Words have eighty different spellings, individual letters have multiple separate uses. Which is why people who treat lolspeak as the end of western civilization are clearly people without any kind of meaningful background in medieval or renaissance literature {and my parents probably thought that certification was useless).
Anyway, Spenser's text uses the semi-familiar "f" sometimes means "s", as well as the probably more familiar Roman "v" sometimes means "u." It took me nearly thirty canto lines to realize part of the reason I was still struggling with individual words was that in the reverse, "u" meant "v" that I have never seen in anything I've ever read...even from this period. So I thought that if V meant U and U meant V, that the swap should hold throughout the text. Oh, no. That would be too simple. So as far as I can tell, so far the rules are as follows:
V sometimes means V or U
U sometimes means V, occasionally means U
F sometimes means S
S means S
I sometimes means J
The whole U as V thing did initially exasperate me, to the point of complaining about it out loud to a staggeringly uninterested Steve who said I should just stop reading, duh. But that's not my way, as I'm sure all of you know. A book pushes back, I have to wrestle it into submission. And I'd much rather sit and tease meaning out of obsolete vernacular than have my better judgment melt out the side of my head when Dan Brown starts up on his "albino shadows."
Basically, it's reading a work that is sitting at the crossroads of Middle English and Shakespearean English/early modern English. The interesting part is how it highlights just how truly revolutionary Shakespeare's use of language was. I know Shakespearean English can be difficult, but it's clear as day compared to Spenser's prose. Despite writing at the same time, I would so far say that The Faerie Queen is much closer linguistically to The Canterbury Tales than it is to Macbeth. My guess is I'll tire of the story pretty quickly, but I'll stay sufficiently diverted by the textual structure to stick it out. That said, the Red Crosse Knight of Holinesse did just explode a dragon, so who knows.
*As a side note, pretty much the minute I figured out the framework linguistic issues, I was nearly cursing aloud again because it only took a page or two to realize that I should have read this three years ago when I was prepping for Ahab's Wife by finally reading Moby Dick. The titular character in the former is named Una, a name derived from the The Faerie Queen, who is introduced to us in the text riding a donkey led by a dwarf. Which my mom would recognize as something Sena Jeter Naslund directly places into the events of the novel. A reference that probably five people got because as I said no one reads this The Faerie Queen. I just feel embarrassed because I knew there were a lot of layers in Naslund's writing, but one that I'm sure was a major one flew right over my (and pretty much everyone else's) head and that feels negligent. Probably because I usually pride myself on being a thorough reader. Though if a result of making it through The Faerie Queen is going back and reading Ahab's Wife again, that's no bad thing.