Chretien's not fairy tales!! It's Arthurian lit! It's a legitimate literary tradition! RRARRG!
Sorry, Arthurian lit.'s kinda important to my existence; in fact it's a major aspect of my job- take a look at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cphome.stm
Unfortunately our server seems to be having major issues right now, but it's a GREAT resource if you want to learn more about this literary genre.
And to keep this on-topic: hmmm, interesting point about the ring of invisibility in, i think, the Yvain story. Tolkien would almost *certainly* have known it; he was a medievalist, and it's rather difficult to be a medievalist and escape those darn French authors, even if your main focus is Anglo-Saxon.
"Strong resemblance to Germanic mythology"? Heheh. Try "exact resemblance" in some cases. One of my close friends- who, like me, is a fantasy/ mythology addict and is currently in the midst of working on a grad degree in lit.- was poking through a book of Norse mythology, came up a listing of the dwarves present at some major point in the mythology, and realized that Tolkien had lifted the list wholesale to be the names of the dwarves in "The Hobbit". Beautiful, that.:) Really quite cool, and a smart way to avoid the annoyance of trying to make up realistic-sounding names.
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
on
Review: Harry Potter
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· Score: 1
Hon, there're a total of 2 characters in Wuthering Heights who use _19th century_ Yorkshire dialect. It _is_ modern English. Shakespeare, by-the-by, also wrote in Modern English. If you want Middle English, you have to go all the way back to the 14th century and Chaucer. Go read some Tolkien, brush up on the vocab.
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 1
Hey, now...don't pick on the Brontes... try reading some Carlyle and then say that Emily and Charlotte are boring- there's so much worse out there. At any rate, tho, you're right- there's no bloody use comparing Victorian and Classical literature with what is essentially a children's book...but a darn GOOD children's book. How on earth could anyone get bored reading them? I'm in my 20's and working on a Lit PhD, and I LOVE the HP books. Frankly, I'm very glad that so many kids are reading them- they'll work very nicely as a stepping stone. Rowling works in quite a bit of myth and legend that readers will recognize should they by some miracle decide to read the *sources* of those myths and legends. Now if only the first book had kept the British title even here in the States... There is NO such thing as a 'sorceror's stone', whereas the Philosopher's Stone can be found in any text with a reference to alchemy. "But americans won't read something with 'philosopher' in the title...they'll think it's too academic..." Grrrrr....
People give you funny looks for buying Discworld? Poor fools, they don't know what they're missing. So you can't bring yourself to buy the HP's in a bookstore. Buy it online.;) Seriously, tho, they're worth the momentary self-image damage if you're one of those who takes himself that seriously. And *plenty* of adults read these things- fr'instance, the group i went with yesterday to see the movie was a batch of 11 20-somethings, 9 of whom are currently working on literature PhDs. If the denizens of the cutthroat world of academia can do it, anyone can!
No, i think the point of noticing this particularly stupid Quayle line is that the actual saying going something like this: "Give a man a fish, and he'll have food for a day; teach a man to fish, and he'll have food his entire lifetime."
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Chretien's not fairy tales!! It's Arthurian lit! It's a legitimate literary tradition! RRARRG!
Sorry, Arthurian lit.'s kinda important to my existence; in fact it's a major aspect of my job- take a look at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cphome.stm
Unfortunately our server seems to be having major issues right now, but it's a GREAT resource if you want to learn more about this literary genre.
And to keep this on-topic: hmmm, interesting point about the ring of invisibility in, i think, the Yvain story. Tolkien would almost *certainly* have known it; he was a medievalist, and it's rather difficult to be a medievalist and escape those darn French authors, even if your main focus is Anglo-Saxon.
"Strong resemblance to Germanic mythology"? Heheh. Try "exact resemblance" in some cases. One of my close friends- who, like me, is a fantasy/ mythology addict and is currently in the midst of working on a grad degree in lit.- was poking through a book of Norse mythology, came up a listing of the dwarves present at some major point in the mythology, and realized that Tolkien had lifted the list wholesale to be the names of the dwarves in "The Hobbit". Beautiful, that. :) Really quite cool, and a smart way to avoid the annoyance of trying to make up realistic-sounding names.
Hon, there're a total of 2 characters in Wuthering Heights who use _19th century_ Yorkshire dialect. It _is_ modern English. Shakespeare, by-the-by, also wrote in Modern English. If you want Middle English, you have to go all the way back to the 14th century and Chaucer. Go read some Tolkien, brush up on the vocab.
Hey, now...don't pick on the Brontes... try reading some Carlyle and then say that Emily and Charlotte are boring- there's so much worse out there. At any rate, tho, you're right- there's no bloody use comparing Victorian and Classical literature with what is essentially a children's book...but a darn GOOD children's book. How on earth could anyone get bored reading them? I'm in my 20's and working on a Lit PhD, and I LOVE the HP books. Frankly, I'm very glad that so many kids are reading them- they'll work very nicely as a stepping stone. Rowling works in quite a bit of myth and legend that readers will recognize should they by some miracle decide to read the *sources* of those myths and legends. Now if only the first book had kept the British title even here in the States... There is NO such thing as a 'sorceror's stone', whereas the Philosopher's Stone can be found in any text with a reference to alchemy. "But americans won't read something with 'philosopher' in the title...they'll think it's too academic..." Grrrrr....
People give you funny looks for buying Discworld? Poor fools, they don't know what they're missing. So you can't bring yourself to buy the HP's in a bookstore. Buy it online. ;) Seriously, tho, they're worth the momentary self-image damage if you're one of those who takes himself that seriously. And *plenty* of adults read these things- fr'instance, the group i went with yesterday to see the movie was a batch of 11 20-somethings, 9 of whom are currently working on literature PhDs. If the denizens of the cutthroat world of academia can do it, anyone can!
No, i think the point of noticing this particularly stupid Quayle line is that the actual saying going something like this: "Give a man a fish, and he'll have food for a day; teach a man to fish, and he'll have food his entire lifetime."
I have to say that this is one of the reasons I'm happy to be young and foolish. My blood pressure's nice and low anyway. Caffeine forever!