My 2024 summer yard meadow.
The end of the lazy summer days approaches and the sun and humidity have blessedly agreed to allow us to open the back windows of our Southern New Hampshire home to soft breezes and the chirping of daytime crickets. It has been a summer of work with my hands, often in short bursts, outside, tending to my overgrown bushes and my aging apple tree. I’ve tracked several stories that deserve more attention than I will grant them here, but the school year threatens and I will soon turn my energies back to teaching.
I have given myself permission to be lazy about writing this summer. I started a new teaching position last year and all of the changes made for a tougher time. I needed relaxation and feel that I got it. My work on bard-related projects has continued, but more behind the scenes, hopefully building to some public reveals in the future.
The Lyre
I have been on vocal rest since the spring because of a growth on my vocal chords (called a granuloma) that may be the result of acid reflux, but is likely also related to an expansion of reading aloud for longer periods of time in the classroom. This led to working on instrumental pieces on my lyres, which has tested and grown my lyre-playing chops. I have learned six new tunes (which I do not believe Terry Bell of Longhouse Lyres has recorded!) and have begun to be able to play them in succession, a set of sorts, that I can play without singing. I found the songs in Cantiga’s Renaissance Festival Favorites, two that can be played with an ACDEFGA tuning and four that can be played with a GABCDE. I finally filmed myself playing and hope to do some more.
Summer Reading
I spent a good six months studying the mythological background to the poem Gilgamesh, which I was lucky enough to teach for the first time. I have wanted to be able to give students a bit of a better understanding of the gods that appear in the story. I believe that Samuel Noah Kramer’s Sumarian Mythology has given me the clearest understanding of what is known about Mesopotamian mythology, because of Kramer. I then started a Homeric reading project and finished Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey and then moved on to her Iliad. Having returned to the school year, I am spending too much time creating lesson materials and grading student work to spare the time to write about them now.
Regarding this Blog
This blog was born of the pretense that I was writing for the mythology beat of a large regional newspaper. It came about during the pandemic, when school had ground to a halt and then restarted at about half speed. They say to dress for the job you want, and “Practical Mythology,” is at least one job I would like. I’ve done nothing (as of this writing) to try to develop a revenue stream associated with NewEnglandBard.com because I am not particularly entrepreneurial, but if there were such a time when I could augment my income doing work like this, I would be able to do more of it. It’s in my nature to be a perfectionist and have extremely polished posts, but that has limited how often I can post here and perhaps it is time to allow myself a simpler format for a busier time!
Of Hobyds and Hobbits
Topics on the Welsh Translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit
A story I worked hardest to produce was about Adam Pearce’s Welsh translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I don’t speak Welsh, but various articles shared how Pearce chose to translate certain names. Tolkien was very thoughtful about how he developed names in his novels, so I found this to be interesting. For example, Pearce translated Bilbo Baggins’s home Bag End as Pen-y-Bag, which is a fairly direct translation that is structured like other place names.
Tolkien Scholar Tom Shippey has written that Bag End itself is a linguistic curiosity that Tolkien perhaps meant to comment upon the English expression cul-de-sac. What distinguishes cul-de-sac as an oddity is that it is an English expression using French rather than a French expression itself. To live on a cul-de-sac suggests wealth, which Bilbo has. The name Baggins itself sounds like a derivation from Bag End, and we must recall Bilbo’s hated relatives, the Sackville-Baggins, who are covetous of Bilbo’s property.
Pearce says the Welsh have no elves, so he repurposed the more villainous, hobgolin-y ellylon or ellylod, respelling it Ellyllyn (Ellyl plural). I have only found ellylon glossed as elf in English, but their associations with toadstools, flowers and Queen Mab suggest to me the little-people version of elves. I first thought that Ellyllyn, with its repetitive els, sounds like a word Tolkien could have invented in his Elvish tongues, but I then recalled that the double-l in Welsh is voiced quite differently than in English and Tolkien was particularly interested in the sounds of his languages. The very concept of elves in folklore is interesting. Tolkien repurposed the word to describe a tall (by fair folk standards) noble creature conspicuously un-elf-like, at least by the standards of European folklore.
Finally, Pearce used a Welsh runic system to recreate the dwarvish runes in the text instead of using the Anglo-Saxon runes Tolkien originally used. With the colonial history of England and Wales, this makes sense to me. However, the Welsh runic system used, called Coelbren y Beird runes, is an 18th century invention by the Welsh poet and antiquarian Iolo Morganwg, as opposed to the ancient runes Tolkien used. I am not disparaging Pearce’s choice, Coelbren y Beird runes, or Morganwg and I don’t know what I think Tolkien would have wanted. Tolkien loved the Welsh language, but he was very picky about translations of his works. It is a topic worth discussion.
Beowulf Fighting the Dragon Window
Let me close with an image of a piece of stained glass I am making for my New England home. It is from a cover illustration of Beowulf, translated by Burton Raffel, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. I plan to fit this to a small window on my back sun room where I began writing this post. I will share more images of it when I get ready to put it up.
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