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Of Gawaine and carrots
First the carrots. These carrots come with a Fluffeh Cyuteness Alert. ;)
Merlinses is a good boy and yoinks his piece right off and sits there nomming until it's all gone.
Sockses won't eat outside the cage, which puzzles and worries me a bit, so here he is nomming his carrot in the cage.
And so to Gawaine. On the BBC at the moment, it's Poetry season, and last night I watched a wonderfully atmospheric programme about one of my favourites. Written 600 years ago and untitled, it came to be known as Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight. Simon Armitage, who has translated the poem from Middle English in a new version that follows the alliterative spirit of the original, took us with him on an exploration of the country through which Gawaine travels. Use of dialect words suggest that the author of 'Gawaine' lived in (or was familiar with) the area and dialect around the Peak District. Leek was mentioned. He followed the way that Gawaine could have taken using clues from the text and his knowledge of the area. We go from Camelot to Holywell in Wales and then to the Peaks.
You can read what Mess Armitage has to say on the how and the why of his translation, which is fairly poetic reading of itself, here: Guardian book review.
In this clip, you can hear Mess Armitage reading what he'd written during this journey in Gawaine's footsteps. It would make more sense if you'd seen the programme; seen him trudging up t'fells in the occluding veil of penetrating drizzle, thick as sea fog, and camping at night under wintry trees in a forest clearing, but it's still two-and-a-quarter minutes of highly descriptive language with some great imagery.
To keep up the time travelling feel, a bit of archaeology news. Oldest Pottery in China
Merlinses is a good boy and yoinks his piece right off and sits there nomming until it's all gone.
Sockses won't eat outside the cage, which puzzles and worries me a bit, so here he is nomming his carrot in the cage.
And so to Gawaine. On the BBC at the moment, it's Poetry season, and last night I watched a wonderfully atmospheric programme about one of my favourites. Written 600 years ago and untitled, it came to be known as Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight. Simon Armitage, who has translated the poem from Middle English in a new version that follows the alliterative spirit of the original, took us with him on an exploration of the country through which Gawaine travels. Use of dialect words suggest that the author of 'Gawaine' lived in (or was familiar with) the area and dialect around the Peak District. Leek was mentioned. He followed the way that Gawaine could have taken using clues from the text and his knowledge of the area. We go from Camelot to Holywell in Wales and then to the Peaks.
You can read what Mess Armitage has to say on the how and the why of his translation, which is fairly poetic reading of itself, here: Guardian book review.
In this clip, you can hear Mess Armitage reading what he'd written during this journey in Gawaine's footsteps. It would make more sense if you'd seen the programme; seen him trudging up t'fells in the occluding veil of penetrating drizzle, thick as sea fog, and camping at night under wintry trees in a forest clearing, but it's still two-and-a-quarter minutes of highly descriptive language with some great imagery.
To keep up the time travelling feel, a bit of archaeology news. Oldest Pottery in China