Recent auction purchases

Two auction lots, still in cardboard flats.

I buy a lot of stuff at auctions. Well, to tell the truth, I try to do my best to buy wisely: I really don’t want to fill the house up with junk just because it’s cheap. But antique auctions and eBay are two of my favorite places to buy, and it strikes me that, in some ways, they couldn’t be more different.

When you go to a real, old fashioned antique auction, you never know what will be there to buy. Some antique auctions, of course, now produce detailed catalogues or on-line listings, in which case you know exactly what you’ll find, but I prefer the sort of auction where you can discover something you never expected to find or even to see. Where you end up buying something you didn’t even know you wanted until you saw it. On eBay, by contrast, you can usually only find what you are looking for: you put search terms into the eBay search engine, and only those things that match your search terms usually show up. 

Despite the differences, though, I had a remarkable experience this week in which I bought two things that are, in many ways remarkably similar, and both were things I found by not looking for them. The first I found on eBay by searching through all the auction listings that include the word “manuscript” in the title. 

Usually there’s close to a thousand such things, including stamps with manuscript cancellations, medieval manuscripts and fragments, and just about everything in between. But when I found the eBay listing for this manuscript of Lord Dunsany’s one-act play, The Compromise of the King of the Golden Isles, I couldn’t resist it.

The pages are all one-sided, and they were formerly glued together on the left hand side. Now they've mostly separated, and the glue has stained the pages. 

This is not, of course, an authorial manuscript, but rather a kind of work of art, a hand-lettered manuscript of the entire play, accompanied by a number of full-page gouache-and ink paintings or illustrations.

The play dates from the 1920s; I think this manuscript must date from the 1930s, based on its art deco style. The artist signs her name Louise Womack; my Google searches haven’t been able to identify her. I especially like the illustration, "The gods are asleep," but "The king's questioners" and "assistant priest" are also striking.

My second purchase was at an antique auction in Ohio I often go to with my folks. On the day of the preview, I saw these two stacks of paintings in cardboard “flats,” (as shown at the top of the post) and I thought I’d like to get them if they weren’t too pricey. It turned out I got them for five bucks a box, which I was pretty happy about. When I got them home, where I could take the time to get a closer look at them, I saw that they were a college student’s (possibly a graduate student’s) semester portfolio of sixty paintings of historical costumes, probably the final project for a class in costume design for dramatic productions. 

Late Medieval

Each painting is on onion-skin, now somewhat wrinkled, usually mounted to a card, and with a typed or hand-written notation about the published source from which the picture is derived. 

Medieval Peasant Woman

Some class notes taken by the student are dated January 1950, giving a clear indication of these paintings’ age. But I was especially interested to find as many pictures of medieval costumes as I did.

In fact, some of the medieval pictures were distinctly familiar to me: though I don't know what original source might lie behind the romanticized picture of the medieval peasant woman, I am pretty sure I recognize this Anglo-Saxon monarch, and however many intermediaries there are, the painting still resembles its Anglo-Saxon manuscript original to a surprising degree. Those colors, though!

Anglo-Saxon Monarch

Romantic

These costume paintings are not high-quality original art, but they are still impressive in their own way, especially when you see all sixty pieces together, and think that they were student work.

In the end, I like the one-of-a-kindness of these things, and the hand-work and care that always goes into a piece of art or a manuscript.

And, it seems to me, finding things like this is itself an important thing to do, or to allow oneself to do: it's a great experience to find something no one else knows about, to come to a feeling of appreciation for it, to share it--or try to--with others. 

Chice are going to England

A couple of years ago, I was having a very hard time both sleeping well and sleeping enough.  So I started taking Benadryl (or, actually, a generic equivalent) at night to help me sleep, and then this spring, I started taking two pills a night: it's made a big difference, and I get a lot more full nights of sleep now.

For better or worse, the Benadryl doesn't really seem to alter my dreams: I still rarely remember having any, and while I don't recall any recent alien-invasion dreams, I never did have them very frequently.

This morning, for whatever reason (Rosemary diagnoses the reason as anxiety: you can be the judge), I work up with a very clear memory of parts of a dream I had.  In the early part of the dream, I was somehow working as an Antiques Roadshow-style appraiser, where I was supposedly the specialist in identifying medieval things: I remember conducting one appraisal (in French, of course) for a small grouping of children's stuffed-cloth toys, printed on the cloth to look like pea-pods filled with peas.  I told the disappointed owner that they appeared to date from about 1890, and thus were definitely not medieval: I specifically recall saying: "look how these images are printed: if these were medieval we'd expect to see them look more like woodcuts."

Somehow, later in the dream, I was working with a group of students, and for some reason I needed to persuade them of the quality and value of their knowledge of the English pronoun system.  "Who knows all the forms of 'I'" I asked.  "I, me, my, mine?"  Everybody raised their hands.  "Who knows all the forms of 'you'?" I asked and followed it up with "he," she," we," and "they."  Everybody knew them all.

Then one student piped up with a question: "What about 'chice'?"

Of course I was dumbfounded. 

"Chice" I thought; "what the hell is 'chice'?"  But, in that dream way, all the students were looking around and nodding.  "What about 'chice'?" seemed to be a question on everybody's minds.

So I started in on a spiel: "Well, there's an old saying," I began, "that there's an idiot in every crowd, and maybe I'm the idiot here--but I've never heard of 'chice.'  What kind of pronoun is it?"  Of course, there wasn't much clear answer forthcoming, until one student brought me a grammar textbook of some kind, and there was "chice" printed right in black and white in the middle of a table of English pronouns.

Of course when I saw it on the chart I recognized it right away as doing the work of the Old English dual pronouns like "wit" (= "we two" or "you and I"--a kind of plural that can only include two members).  Naturally, I started in on a kind of historical explanation, but with the problem of "chice" apparently solved in my own mind, I woke right up. 

So: there it is--antiques and valuation, English linguistics, the value of knowledge about medieval matters and Old English.  I guess that's what's on my mind these days. 

But I think Rosemary and I may be using sentences like "Chice are going to England" for the next few days, perhaps.  Wish us luck!

Kalamazoo Update

Just got back from the big medieval conference in Kalamazoo: as usual, I went to the dance, but I did not dance.

The dance at Kalamazoo remains an institution, though the beer is no longer free, and one must show one's conference registration badge to get in the door: they actually have people guarding the entrances. One rarely if ever needs to show the badge to attend a panel, go to the book room, or virtually anything else, in my experience, but the dance is another thing.

It's probably a wise policy, and it's probably intended to keep local kids and others from sneaking in and drinking up the cheap beer, but it's hard not to also imagine that the guards also serve to protect unsuspecting innocents from seeing hundreds of medievalists, of all ages and types, gyrating and jumping, and singing along with Bon Jovi at the highest possible volume. That's a sight that only a medievalist could endure, I suppose, but the cheap beer helps, even so. And some of my closest friends always dance at the dance, so perhaps I shouldn't mock it too harshly.

But I did all the things that one goes to Kalamazoo for: I gave a paper (about medieval poetry, no less), went to a few panels, spent money in the book room, got way too little sleep, and drank way too much beer. And I talked, talked, talked, with a few old friends and a few new strangers. And I didn't have time or occasion to talk to many other old friends, which is too bad, but that's also Kalamazoo.

I carpooled there and back with one old and good friend and fifteen hours together in the car was just barely enough time to get a little caught up. Except when I called her to retrieve my cell phone from her (I left it in her car), I literally did not even see her at the conference until I went to her panel, from which we jumped straight into the car for the return trip.

Talked to another dear friend at dinner one night, as part of a party of six, and we had our heads together so much that when the waitress brought us all our separate checks, ours were combined, as if we were a couple.

Talked with a couple other great friends at the dance, as the conference was wrapping up, and I realized that some of these people are among my very best and closest friends, though I may see them only once a year or sometimes less. And there we all were, trying to cram in a year's worth of friendship and fellowship into one long weekend. No wonder I slept too little and drank too much. That's what a conference is for.

Let's hope we all get to do it all again next year.

First Thoughts about the Hoard

Last evening, as I was sharing digital images of the Staffordshire Hoard with Rosemary, she said “It's too bad Nick didn't live to see this.” I agreed, and as I've thought about the hoard further today, I agree all the more. In this brief and informal essay, I hope to explore some of what the hoard may end up meaning for our understanding of the Anglo-Saxon past and of Beowulf in particular.

[For those who make it this far into this entry, but who still haven't heard of the Staffordshire Hoard, please check out this site, where the pictures are beautiful and brand new. The hoard was discovered in July 2009 and announced last week; it is the single largest discovering of Anglo-Saxon gold treasure of the modern era, with about eleven pounds of gold alone.]

Staffordshire hoard excavation from Dan Pett on Vimeo.

Nick Howe, of course, knew as well as anyone how problematic the date of Beowulf has been for Anglo-Saxon scholars, and how important: it was from Nick that I first heard the argument that the controversies over dating and historicizing the poem are perhaps our most productive strategy for making meaning from it. And as is well, known, Beowulf is a poem whose narrator seems fairly obsessed with golden treasure: the descriptions of treasure in the poem are frequnet, lovingly detailed, and thorough. What the Staffordshire Hoard tells us, if nothing else, is that hoards of (primarily) golden treasure were, in fact, possible in at least one seventh-century Anglo-Saxon kingdom, and one at least partially accommodated to Christian monotheism, and at least in this case associated with war.

Elizabeth Tyler's wonderful discussion of treasure words in Old English poetry makes part of my point here beautifully: in her discussion of The Battle of Maldon (about a battle fought in 991), Tyler notes that Maldon uses a highly conventional vocabulary of treasure, in which references to gold far outweigh references to silver. Significantly, exactly the opposite situation obtained in reality at the time: when the Danes were bought off in 991 and succeeding years, the payoff was in silver, and the coinage of the time is exclusively silver, with little gold in evidence anywhere.

If Beowulf is as late as its manuscript, of course, then it too simply uses a conventional vocabulary for treasure, in which gold is far more prominent than silver, except when the two are linked in formulas like “silver and gold.” But it's the details of the Staffordshire Hoard that then stand out: the gold literally outweighs the silver, by a four-to-one ration. Further, the assemblage of materials seems clearly to have been made in the context of war: the prominence (and sheer number) of sword-fittings makes any other context seem unlikely. And sure enough, we see warriors stripped of their gear in the poem. Likewise, when Beowulf's troop arrives at Heorot, their spears are foregrounded, but when Weohstan kills Onela's nephew Eanmund, he takes the sword to Onela and is given it as a reward—the uncle rewarding the slayer of his nephew because of a family feud. Hrothgar's hilt, of course, is the sign of Grendel's mother's death (far more so than the head of Grendel), and we see in the Staffordshire hoard some 80 gold pommel mounts, stripped, it seems, from sword hilts.

And there are hoards in Beowulf: the dragon guards a hoard, and when Beowulf kills it, he believes that the hoard will be a treasure to buy his people's future safety: a doomed hope, as it turns out, but a clear claim is made about what a hoard might be thought to do. The dragon hoard, of course, has been laid in the ground by the “last survivor” the final living member of a now-long-gone tribe, the hoard a kind of national treasury, useless to an individual. Likewise, the hoard of the dragon slain by Sigemund provides an opportunity for a discussion of good and bad kingship: hoards are to be used by lords who are gold-friends to their thanes—a source of wealth to be shared.

When all we had of Anglo-Saxon treasure hoards was the Sutton Hoo burial (and other burials), we could look at Sutton Hoo as deeply continental in contents and significance and ultimately too poor to reflect the poem's gold obsession. But the Staffordshire material—some 1500 items, even if most of them are small—seems Saxon to the bone, and it's big, big, big. When Sutton Hoo is the only treasure on the horizon, we can look at the poem's depictions of gold, swords, and hoards as a highly fictionalized depiction of a golden age, a long-ago time in which gold was thick on the ground and heros could find monsters worthy of a battle. But the Staffordshire materials seem to open up a completely different perspective: as late as the seventh century real Anglo-Saxon kings (or as near to it as can be determined from stuff dug up in a field) really did or could collect remarkable hoards of gold, and presumably they usually spent them as wise gold-friends would. That is, the social economy depicted in the poem may be far more like a real, historical Anglo-Saxon social economy than has ever been realized.

When I teach Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I always point out the the historical King Arthur must have lived some eight or nine centuries before the poem, and that the poet freely anachronizes, dressing his characters in the armor, clothing, foodways, and social mores of the fourteenth century. What the Staffordshire Hoard may well suggest is that Beowulf might engage in an exactly parallel strategy: depicting a hero from centuries earlier, but dressed in gold, armor, and attitudes from very near the poet's present. It's a line of argument that Sutton Hoo does not make possible, I think: but the Staffordshire Hoard may well make it possible—the poem may get a surprisingly strong new argument for an early date: I'll go with the eighth century, putting the Hoard, perhaps, in the poet's grandfather's memory. Because what seems clear is that the conventional language of treasure may have been mobilized by the Maldon poet, but the practices (and the sheer wealth) that led to the Staffordshire Hoard seem so closely paralleled in Beowulf that it's hard to imagine that so many details are merely literary convention. The Beowulf poet's well known attention to gold may be its most remarkable point of historical accuracy. But the accuracy is not in how the fifth-century Beowulf and Hrothgar saw the world, but in how the seventh-century—and perhaps the eighth as well—saw and thought about war, treasure, and gold.

Perhaps in a year, or two, or twenty, I'll see more clearly than I do now if or how the Staffordshire Hoard changes our understanding of the poem. But right now, caught up in the excitement of the newness of discovery, it looks to me like Beowulf will never be the same. Because now we know just what an Anglo-Saxon could hoard (as opposed to bury in a grave, or lose, or throw away), and it's surprisingly like what the poem tells us. Who could have believed that the hoarding, of all things, was where the poem was telling us the truth?

Not this time, I guess

A month or so ago, when I last drove through Point Marion, PA (just a few miles up the road from us here in Morgantown), I was surprised to see an all-white deer scamper across the road and up the hillside with a normal, brown-colored deer beside it. Presumably, it may have been an albino, but as the relevant threads at the "Buck Manager" website indicate, it may have only been a "piebald deer," if it had some brown spots I didn't notice. I didn't have a camera, and while I thought I saw someone else pull off the road to snap some pictures, I don't seem to have been able to Google them.

In Marie de France's Guigemar, the poem that leads off her twelfth-century collection of Lais, the eponymic main character encounters a white deer and shoots it. His arrow bounces off the deer's hoof (believe it or not) and strikes him, causing an injury. Guigemar then goes on a great journey, has a variety of adventures, etc, etc. The white deer, though, plays the role often played by a dwarf or giant in medieval romances: the magical or mystical creature that serves as kind of gatekeeper or prompter who motivates the hero's rite de passage, sending him off on the adventure or at least ensuring that he has one.

So, anyway, for the last month or so, I've been looking over my shoulder, somewhat hopefully and anxiously holding my breath and waiting for some transition that will change my life, or at least for the start of some new adventure. But a month seems to have passed, and now I guess I've had to conclude that it's not going to happen. Maybe next time I drive through there, though, I'll get another crack at the white deer. But in the romances, you only get one shot at something like that.