I’m six pages into A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry by Carolyne Larrington3, and I’ve run into a swamp. Scholars from 50 years ago got themselves wrapped around the axle, trying to figure out the difference between maxims that have “bið” in them and those that have “sceal” in them. “Bið” is a fancy word for “is”. “Sceal” is our modern word “shall”, among other things. Those other things are making a me...| Idiosophy
As I mentioned the other day, I’m reading about Old English wisdom poetry. What with the all the references to winter in the examples there, I suddenly realized that Bilbo’s little quatrain in Rivendell is just such a seasonal wisdom poem: When winter first begins to bite,and stones crack in the frosty night,When pools are […]| Idiosophy
I’m six pages into A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry by Carolyne Larrington, and I’ve run into a swamp. Scholars from 50 yea…| Idiosophy
On September 1st I participated in a conference on New Perspectives on Alliteration in Poetry and Cultural History. It was organized by Tim Anderson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of East Anglia. It was a fascinating experience — a topic like “alliteration” doesn’t have a tight connection to any particular academic discipline, so people can come at it from any direction. And did we! It was a great opportunity to meet people I only knew from reading their poems, like Paul...| Idiosophy
On September 1st I participated in a conference on New Perspectives on Alliteration in Poetry and Cultural History. It was organized by Tim Anderson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of …| Idiosophy
As presented at “New Perspectives on Alliteration in Poetry and Cultural History”, University of East Anglia, 1 September 2025 1. Introduction What’s the purpose of alliteration in modern poetry? The oldest answer I could find to that question is from 1902. Talking about Shakespeare’s sonnets, Thomas R. Price said, “As the result of the caesura […]| Idiosophy
Corey Olsen gave a talk at Mythmoot XI on the subject of Gimli’s song about the glory days of Moria. (LotR, II iv.) He began with the fact that the song’s rhythm is iambic tetrameter, s…| Idiosophy
Occasionally I wonder how valuable computerized analysis of works of literature will ever be. To reassure me that I’m not wasting my time, Jan Christoph Meister tells me what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe thought: Goethe discusses the pros and cons of morphology as a science, and eventually concludes: “Its arrangement of phenomena calls upon activities […]| Idiosophy
Daniel Stride, kiwi clarissimus, points us to a YouTuber who does a not-bad job of speculating on what JRR Tolkien would have thought about generative AI. A useful application of AI would be to turn that 20-minute talking-head video into a blog post I could read in five. A really useful application of AI would […]| Idiosophy
This is the finest title of a scholarly volume that I have ever encountered, and I feel sure it has not since been surpassed: Studies in Honor of Basil L. Gildersleeve. Anything using the name “Gildersleeve” is going to be aesthetically pleasing, but putting it into dactylic tetrameter makes it a work of genius.| Idiosophy
Poetry assistant and archaeologist Martin Rundqvist has published a follow-up to his last November’s post about how the standard software for carbon-dating gives its answers in an idiosyncratic way. In a nutshell, the answer to “how old is this sample” comes out with confidence intervals of 68.2% and 95.4%. These intervals aren’t necessarily things that […]| Idiosophy
I just re-read Protector by Larry Niven in the Ballantine paperback edition. It’s a great example of classic science fiction. The reader is barraged with one cool idea after another. Just the thing for a nerdy teen-aged boy. In one scene, set on the artificial moon Kobold, Brennan has constructed a Moebius strip that’s as […]| Idiosophy
Two thoughts that suddenly got connected. Thought 1: In Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings we learn that in his youth Aragorn journeyed through Rohan and Gondor and won fame under the name of Thor…| Idiosophy
I just re-read That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis for the first time since I started studying the Inklings. It’s a completely different experience, now that I know the subtexts of what he&#…| Idiosophy
