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tafeanornI just posted my last entry and ran downstairs to get some coffee. I have just shy of an hour more to type before the Dealer’s Room opens and I have another two hour window to shop and take pictures.
But upon getting down there (and being truly amazed by the number of empties) I realized that coffee doesn’t open for another 20 minutes. Oh well.
After having had trouble the first two days making sure I ate two solid meals, I hand wrote into my schedule when, how and where I was going to eat. I bought a ticket for dinner (Beef Stroganoff is one of my favorites and can’t be screwed up too bad, even in a school cafeteria) and decided that while I was at Bernhard for the Plenary Lecture, I would buy a Subway sandwich and carry it around until it was lunch time.
My dinner ticket purchased and some coffee obtained I headed over to the Plenary Lecture, “Fictions of Conduct in Medieval France”. It was held in a large ballroom and the turnout was huge -- 200+ people. The topic was late medieval morality books -- sort of self-help books for lords, ladies and the bourgeois. The thesis was that many of them were self-contradictory and the presenter showed that very well. Much of the lecture was about the works of Antoine de la Sale and especially his _Little John of Saintré_ which is one I may have to go out and read.
She was also able to speak/write quite expertly, making what could have been a very boring subject interesting, and finding a way to use French jargon in a way that included the audience, even if they weren’t initially familiar with her field of speciality. She does, however, lose points for using the word “didactic” 13 times (I started counting after the third in the first 5 minutes) during her talk.
The next Session was “Urban Life and Culture I: Commerce and the Use of Public Space”. The first paper, was about town legislation regulating commerce in Denmark, and had many interesting tidbits of information. I’m not entirely sure what the talk was supposed to be arguing, but it was the first of the day’s papers to go over crime and punishment, and showed the 12th Century Danes to be much more lenient in their thievery laws than the 11th Century Anglo-Saxons. By lenient, I mean that punishment wasn’t capital until the _second_ offense . . .
The second paper was so bad that I’m still not sure what it was even about, even though it came with a handout. The third was interesting and interpreted Chaucer’s _The Merchant’s Tale_ as an allegorical and didactic (hehehe) work directed to the emerging merchant class and the existing nobility.
After a quick lunch at Subway and a hour’s nap, I was off to “Words and Deeds in Anglo-Saxon England”. The first paper was about oaths and pledges and argued that the words “oath” and “pledge”, though they have much the modern meaning even in Old English, once had different meanings in Germanic culture. Although those meanings have been largely lost, “pledge” seems to involve the giving of a physical item or token as a symbol of the oral statement or agreement. He was able to point to linguistic studies that show how when two ideas are ritually or legally linked (as with oath and pledge) their meanings merge or one takes on the meaning of the other.
The second lecture of the day on theft involved the laws of Cnut in 1020 and had a lot of useful information that I didn’t know anything about, though some of it did tie in with some of the thing I had read in Anglo-Saxon Food, by Hagen. I will try to adapt some of this for Ellis before the final edition.
The last lecture talked about the ritual of drinking beer or mead in the poetic works of the Anglo-Saxon world. In these stories, the men accepting the hospitality of Hrothgar or another king are taking part in a ritual where they accept the mead, tie their loyalty to the king and make boasts of fidelity to him and boasts of their own greatness (and by extension Hrothgar’s greatness). Over-drinking leading to loss of memory (so that you can’t remember your boasts), quarrelling, or the making of bad boasts was a breach of etiquette, but the greater breach was to not honor one’s oath made while drunk.
The last set of lectures for the day was “Studies on the Road to Santiago and Galacia in the Middle Ages”. The first lecture was the most interesting and talked about food and food production in the region in the 10-13th Centuries. The second was about various pilgrimage paths through Portugal. That one had many nice pictures but there wasn’t much to take away from them. I skipped out on the last two papers because they were presented in Spanish.
After calling home, I went up to dinner and had a passable meal of Beef Stroganoff (but not nearly as good as my Mother’s). Then I went to the Gaming Neo-medievally demonstration. I was expecting this to be dismissive of video gaming and it’s use of the symbolism of the middle ages without the use of it depth, but I got more than I bargained for.
The primary station in the room was a powerpoint by the session’s organizer. It’s thesis was that all fantasy since the publishing of the Lord of the Rings was Neo-Tolkienain. Neo-Tolkienists could be broken up into two camps, purists and non-purists. Purists tried to emulate Tolkien by creating their own languages (and implied cultures, histories, races etc., but she was really hung up on Tolkien’s languages), but they would always fail because none of them would be philologists and no commercial project could ever spend the lifetime that Tolkien had spent creating those. Non-Purists didn’t even try to create their own languages. She used WoW to illustrate her points.
Another table looked at guilds and tried to show how much time and effort gamer’s put into their MMOs. While the two guys running this table seemed to really enjoy playing WoW, they picked some of the videos that really show gamers at their worse (I’m looking at you Leroy Jenkins!), so it too came off as superior and dismissive (at least of the content if somewhat impressed by the amount of time people put into their games).
A lonely young lady sat at a table playing the music from Civ 4 and had a list of which works appeared in the game, but had nothing more than her list. There was another woman who was equally dismissive of Dark Age of Camelot and it’s use of Celtic imagery, but since I had never played the game I didn’t listen very long. There was another WoW demo going on, but it seemed to be more of a walkthrough of how the game worked and how it was played for the non-gamers of the world.
I went straight from there to the Tolkien Unbound Reader’s Theater. This was a fun event with Tolkienists singing from Tolkien, et al’s _Songs for Philologists_ and then performing a radio play format of _Balgor’s Saga._ John Rateliff was there and got roped into replacing someone in the singing. It was much fun.
The last stop of the night was to swing by the sword and armor demo being put on by the Belle Compagnie, a living history group (the same one that put on the textile display the day before). The program listed the demo as being put on by Robert Charrette. Now that’s a name I have heard before and not in a medievalist context. A Robert Charrette wrote some of my favorite roleplaying games, _Daredevils_, _Aftermath!_, _Bushido_ and _Shadowrun, first edition_. So I went over there and got to shake his hand and tell him how much those games had meant to me.
After that, I went back to my room and collapsed. It was a long day.
But upon getting down there (and being truly amazed by the number of empties) I realized that coffee doesn’t open for another 20 minutes. Oh well.
After having had trouble the first two days making sure I ate two solid meals, I hand wrote into my schedule when, how and where I was going to eat. I bought a ticket for dinner (Beef Stroganoff is one of my favorites and can’t be screwed up too bad, even in a school cafeteria) and decided that while I was at Bernhard for the Plenary Lecture, I would buy a Subway sandwich and carry it around until it was lunch time.
My dinner ticket purchased and some coffee obtained I headed over to the Plenary Lecture, “Fictions of Conduct in Medieval France”. It was held in a large ballroom and the turnout was huge -- 200+ people. The topic was late medieval morality books -- sort of self-help books for lords, ladies and the bourgeois. The thesis was that many of them were self-contradictory and the presenter showed that very well. Much of the lecture was about the works of Antoine de la Sale and especially his _Little John of Saintré_ which is one I may have to go out and read.
She was also able to speak/write quite expertly, making what could have been a very boring subject interesting, and finding a way to use French jargon in a way that included the audience, even if they weren’t initially familiar with her field of speciality. She does, however, lose points for using the word “didactic” 13 times (I started counting after the third in the first 5 minutes) during her talk.
The next Session was “Urban Life and Culture I: Commerce and the Use of Public Space”. The first paper, was about town legislation regulating commerce in Denmark, and had many interesting tidbits of information. I’m not entirely sure what the talk was supposed to be arguing, but it was the first of the day’s papers to go over crime and punishment, and showed the 12th Century Danes to be much more lenient in their thievery laws than the 11th Century Anglo-Saxons. By lenient, I mean that punishment wasn’t capital until the _second_ offense . . .
The second paper was so bad that I’m still not sure what it was even about, even though it came with a handout. The third was interesting and interpreted Chaucer’s _The Merchant’s Tale_ as an allegorical and didactic (hehehe) work directed to the emerging merchant class and the existing nobility.
After a quick lunch at Subway and a hour’s nap, I was off to “Words and Deeds in Anglo-Saxon England”. The first paper was about oaths and pledges and argued that the words “oath” and “pledge”, though they have much the modern meaning even in Old English, once had different meanings in Germanic culture. Although those meanings have been largely lost, “pledge” seems to involve the giving of a physical item or token as a symbol of the oral statement or agreement. He was able to point to linguistic studies that show how when two ideas are ritually or legally linked (as with oath and pledge) their meanings merge or one takes on the meaning of the other.
The second lecture of the day on theft involved the laws of Cnut in 1020 and had a lot of useful information that I didn’t know anything about, though some of it did tie in with some of the thing I had read in Anglo-Saxon Food, by Hagen. I will try to adapt some of this for Ellis before the final edition.
The last lecture talked about the ritual of drinking beer or mead in the poetic works of the Anglo-Saxon world. In these stories, the men accepting the hospitality of Hrothgar or another king are taking part in a ritual where they accept the mead, tie their loyalty to the king and make boasts of fidelity to him and boasts of their own greatness (and by extension Hrothgar’s greatness). Over-drinking leading to loss of memory (so that you can’t remember your boasts), quarrelling, or the making of bad boasts was a breach of etiquette, but the greater breach was to not honor one’s oath made while drunk.
The last set of lectures for the day was “Studies on the Road to Santiago and Galacia in the Middle Ages”. The first lecture was the most interesting and talked about food and food production in the region in the 10-13th Centuries. The second was about various pilgrimage paths through Portugal. That one had many nice pictures but there wasn’t much to take away from them. I skipped out on the last two papers because they were presented in Spanish.
After calling home, I went up to dinner and had a passable meal of Beef Stroganoff (but not nearly as good as my Mother’s). Then I went to the Gaming Neo-medievally demonstration. I was expecting this to be dismissive of video gaming and it’s use of the symbolism of the middle ages without the use of it depth, but I got more than I bargained for.
The primary station in the room was a powerpoint by the session’s organizer. It’s thesis was that all fantasy since the publishing of the Lord of the Rings was Neo-Tolkienain. Neo-Tolkienists could be broken up into two camps, purists and non-purists. Purists tried to emulate Tolkien by creating their own languages (and implied cultures, histories, races etc., but she was really hung up on Tolkien’s languages), but they would always fail because none of them would be philologists and no commercial project could ever spend the lifetime that Tolkien had spent creating those. Non-Purists didn’t even try to create their own languages. She used WoW to illustrate her points.
Another table looked at guilds and tried to show how much time and effort gamer’s put into their MMOs. While the two guys running this table seemed to really enjoy playing WoW, they picked some of the videos that really show gamers at their worse (I’m looking at you Leroy Jenkins!), so it too came off as superior and dismissive (at least of the content if somewhat impressed by the amount of time people put into their games).
A lonely young lady sat at a table playing the music from Civ 4 and had a list of which works appeared in the game, but had nothing more than her list. There was another woman who was equally dismissive of Dark Age of Camelot and it’s use of Celtic imagery, but since I had never played the game I didn’t listen very long. There was another WoW demo going on, but it seemed to be more of a walkthrough of how the game worked and how it was played for the non-gamers of the world.
I went straight from there to the Tolkien Unbound Reader’s Theater. This was a fun event with Tolkienists singing from Tolkien, et al’s _Songs for Philologists_ and then performing a radio play format of _Balgor’s Saga._ John Rateliff was there and got roped into replacing someone in the singing. It was much fun.
The last stop of the night was to swing by the sword and armor demo being put on by the Belle Compagnie, a living history group (the same one that put on the textile display the day before). The program listed the demo as being put on by Robert Charrette. Now that’s a name I have heard before and not in a medievalist context. A Robert Charrette wrote some of my favorite roleplaying games, _Daredevils_, _Aftermath!_, _Bushido_ and _Shadowrun, first edition_. So I went over there and got to shake his hand and tell him how much those games had meant to me.
After that, I went back to my room and collapsed. It was a long day.
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Date: 2009-05-10 02:37 pm (UTC)-- C.