Little Reminder That In At Least One Version Of This Story, Tristan Shoved The Tongue Of A Dragon He

So the only English translation I've been able to find online of the Irish Arthurian romance Eachtra Mhelóra agus Orlando ("The Adventures of Melora and Orlando") is on this old website, which I'll link here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20121222212746/http://www.literatefreedom.org/prae-9.4.htm#Adventure

However, I've copy-pasted the text and footnotes onto this PDF for anyone who wants to finally read it:

Hope both links work for everyone. Let me know if they don't.

Also let me know if you want me to adjust the format of the PDF if there are any readibility issues.

why are all the Jews suddenly posting about cheesecake, you ask? because it’s Shavuot!

sorry, let me give you a quick guide to Jewish holidays

Rosh Hashanah: dip apples in honey, contemplate feeling guilty

Yom Kippur: feel guilty, don’t eat

Sukkot: build a treehouse, shake a lemon at God

Simchat Torah: dance with a Torah scroll

Hanukkah: resist tyranny, eat fried food, set things on fire

Tu B’shvat: hug trees, eat every type of fruit and nut you can acquire, do complicated wine math

Purim: put on a drunken play about a teenage beauty queen, cast shade at tyrants

Passover: don’t eat pastry

Maimuna: eat a ton of pastry

Lag B’omer: set things on fire, shoot arrows, learn about rabbis with laser eyes

Shavuot: eat cheese and stay up all night reading with your female friends

Tisha B’av: mourn, preferably AT people

Hope that clears up any confusion

Dagbert Endless’ mother should look like this.

Mermaid’s Face by David Delamare (American artist, 1951-2016)

At one point, Dagbert describes his curse by saying that in his thirteenth year, the firstborn son of “the Lord Grimwald” must kill or be killed by his father, which suggests that, if the character referred to as Lord Grimwald has multiple names, the title Lord Grimwald is the most official, the one he most favors, or the one which is most closely linked to his identity. Regardless, it’s a hereditary title, which means that, by the end, Dagbert is the Lord Grimwald and has his own castle. (This is never additionally ).

From the way Dagbert and Lord Grimwald describe it, it sounds like they started calling Dagbert “Dagbert Endless” for the heck of it. It would be very cool if his many names came from his mother—there is so much untapped potential that comes with the half-mermaid thing—and it would also make sense if Dagbert’s many names were a necessity. If he keeps committing murder/magical manslaughter (depending on how much control he’s in), he might be a wanted criminal under some name(s) and need aliases.

Dagbert having endless surnames but Lord Grimwald only having "Grimwald" implies Dagbert either inherited his many surnames from his mother, or Lord Grimwald also has many surnames but managed to pick one. If they're from his mother, it implies that mermaids all have long names. If they're from his father, then I think it's safe to say that a man who chose the name "Grimwald" is likely to be the idiot who decided to name a baby "Dagbert". In this essay I will

This is a crime.

One I didn’t like at first but which really grew on me as I read more of his poems is Edwin Arlington Robinson’s characterization of Gawain. He appears in Tristram, Merlin, and Lancelot, always as a side character who’s only there for a fairly short time, so you have to fit his arc together from the fragments. At the start, everyone sees him as cheerful and careless—he’s called “gay Gawaine” in the old sense of the word more than once—but he’s more insightful than most of the others give him credit for, and, after his brothers are dead and he becomes unhinged in his quest for revenge, you realize that he was already unhinged and his cheerful flippancy was a coping mechanism/mask. He also has a delightful way with words. In Tristram, he tells Isolt of Brittany that he isn’t sure whether he’s hitting on her or not but it doesn’t matter because “Tristram, off his proper suavity, has fervor to slice whales, and I, from childhood, have always liked this life.” During his last conversation with Lancelot, Gawaine tells him, “A gloomy curiosity was our Modred, from his first intimation of existence. God made him as He made the crocodile, to prove He was omnipotent.”

Tell me about the best modern characterization of your favorite Orkney brother(s).

Pick and choose from whatever adaptations or retellings you know of, they don’t all have to appear in the same story. No wrong answers. :^)

I can remember, a few years back, getting in a taxi with my grandfather in New York City. He’s one of the kindest, most courteous to strangers people I’ve ever known and was able to establish a good rapport with the taxi driver until the taxi driver put his subtly Jewish name and face together and started blasting a radio channel saying that “all Jews are donkeys”. Even then, even in New York City, you could turn your head and there was antisemitism.

In middle school, I had been spat at and called slurs—but only after I told the other students that I was a Jew. My father’s Scottish surname and ambiguous appearance give me the option of invisibility. I’ve never chosen to hide who I am, but it’s also not immediately obvious, and that made a difference even before the current horrific spike in antisemitism.

Non-Jews, yes, it really is a serious problem. It really should go without saying at this point. It should have gone without saying an incredibly long time ago, but my cousins are receiving death threats and there was a pogrom in California and a twelve-year-old girl got raped and the people doing these horrific (that word doesn’t seem strong enough but I can’t think of a stronger one) things still somehow think they’re in the right and all I can do is try striking metaphorical matches in the dark while knowing the matches are almost certainly dead and that even if they light it’s unlikely that anyone will open their eyes whose eyes weren’t open already.

Jews, stay strong. We will survive this. I hope.

"Ashkenazi" doesn't mean "white-passing." My mother's husband has pale pink skin, blue eyes, and light brown hair. And he is INCREDIBLY visibly Jewish, even before he opens his mouth. His hair is a super curly mess and his facial features are very, very obviously Jewish. When he says anything at all, you can tell that he's a New York City Jew. No kippah, no Magen David (though that might change soon), but his appearance is JEW.

I have been living in fear every day since October 7th. It never occurred to me before then to be afraid for my mother and her husband because of his visible Jewishness in New York City. Yeah, if they were driving through Alabama or something. But in NYC? If someone had suggested it to me, I'd have laughed.

Now I just want to cry.

The people who are with Arthur in Avalon or are in a Cave alongside him:

(Disclaimer: Not including Morgan, the other fairies and/or Merlin)

La Bataille Loquifer: Gawain, Ywain, Percival and Guinevere (Guest Star: Roland from the Charlemagne series)

Lanzelet: Lout (Loholt)

Craig-y-Ddinas: Ywain, Kay, Bedivere, Gawain, Percival, Geraint/Erec, Tristan, Culhwch, Yder and Calogrenant (Source: The Welsh Fairy Book, by Willaim Jenkyn Thomas)

Sewingshields Folklore: Guinevere

Tally:

Queen Guinevere: 2

Sir Gawain: 2

Sir Ywain: 2

Sir Percival: 2

Sir Loholt: 1

Sir Kay: 1

Sir Bedivere: 1

Sir Geraint/Erec: 1

Sir Yder/Edern ap Nudd: 1

Sir Tristan: 1

Sir Culhwch: 1

Sir Calogrenant: 1

In the end, Arthur won't be alone...

Of course, none of the later French characters - Lancelot, Bors, Galahad, Palamedes, Dinadan, etc. - made it to Avalon or the Enchanted Cave. It's the older tradition characters who have a chance.

Fun fact: the musician who sang “Puberty Love” in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Of course, he’s also the drummer for Pearl Jam, but it’s less entertaining when you put it that way.

if the sight of a jew doing culturally jewish things and/or practicing the religion makes a person go 🫵 POTENTIAL EVIL LYING CHILD KILLING ZIONIST, APPROACH WITH CAUTION🫵 they are already antisemitic. and it’s going to take a lot of research and self-reckoning and uhh talking to jews in good faith for them to come back from that mindset. and many won’t undergo that process because it’s uncomfortable and shame-producing. and i honestly can’t show grace to folks who have unknowingly fallen down that rabbit hole because the conflation of “jewish” with “evil and bad” has already gotten jews killed this year. and it’s gotten jews killed for thousands of years. and unless gentiles start unpacking that long-ingrained cultural assumption that Jew = Suspicious, Probably Evil, Destroy Now we’ll see more pogroms in the future.

and before you come into my mentions with “but israel,” please understand that gentiles have never needed proof to believe jews are evil and murder them. right now, antisemites are gleeful that they have a “reason” and too many of y’all are just following their lead because you refuse to engage with this information. because you’re not an antisemite, right? you just hate zionists, not jews. and you definitely know what zionism is and you definitely can surmise when zionist is being used as a dogwhistle. right! of course! there is no historical precedent that would lead me to not believe a single word you say.

so like. if you truly want to help fight antisemitism, you have to engage with these ideas even if the process is uncomfortable and shame-producing. you have to unlearn 2,000 years of lies about us and the deeply ingrained instinct to believe we are evil. idk why i’m making this post i just wish gentiles would be believe us when we say It’s Really That Fucking Dire.