It Was A Musical, But...I Am Not Beating The Allegations.

....They're COUSINS!!?!

(Source: Dream of Rhonabwy)

(Source: A Welsh Classical Dictionary)

I once saw a crossover between BBC Merlin and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, presumably based around the fact that both have characters named Arthur. It worked well—there are more overlaps—but in general it seems like bad policy. If we keep on mashing up television shows with classic literature based on names, sooner or later, the world will end up with Gilligan’s Wake, and what will we all do then?

The knights as YouTube comments, No. 1

I can’t decide which knight is saying this, but it explains a lot.

( A comment on “i accidentally read the worst book of the year so far” by The Book Leo, beginning with a quote from the video)

Edit: Never mind. Knights kiss all the time in some texts. Most of the Arthurian texts I’ve read are weird and random (Gawain plays tennis, Galahad gets married, Guinevere’s mother’s ghost issues prophecies of doom…) and gave the impression that being turned into a murder-dog was more common than physical affection.

The Death-song/Elegy of Uther Pendragon: New Translations

(Credit to @wandrenowle (awesome person) who gave me this excerpt from a recent translation of The Book of Taliesin)

A few points to make:

There's a certain ambiguity about whether or not the narrator here really is Uther Pendragon himself.

The part where Uther is named "Shining Armor" - I believe this is the translation for the original word in the poem, "Gorlassar". From what I can research online, "Gorlassar" could also mean "Bright Blue/Very Blue" or even "Higher than the sky". I've heard some theories online before that Geoffrey of Monmouth created the character "Duke Gorlois of Cornwall" from this epithet of Uther's.

If so, that means the possibility of Igraine always having been Uther's wife and Igraine only ever had one husband. Huh.

Wow, apparently Arthur is not as badass as his dad, being only a ninth of Uther's prowess. This is the very same Arthur who, in Welsh Myth, can destroy armies by the hundreds, go toe-to-toe with giants and is the standard of comparison for warrior excellence ("...although he was no Arthur"). This elegy implies Uther is leagues more powerful than that.

It reminds of Sir Branor, the Dragon Knight, from Palamedes, a 120-year old knight of the Round Table from Uther's era. When he shows up to Arthur's court, he challenges everyone in Camelot, including Lancelot, Gawain and Tristan, and soundly kicks their asses. The general impression is that however OP King Arthur and his knights are, Uther and his boys are waaaaaay more OP. Very Anime.

(It also has shades of Nestor from the Iliad, talking about how the heroes of the "Seven against Thebes" would kick anyone's ass in the Trojan War)

The part where Uther boasts of his Poetic Prowess - "as great as that, of seven score poets". This, in particular, fascinates me. See, in an older translation, that particular segment is phrased as such:

There is a tradition Uther Pendragon really does magical abilities:

In the new translation, Uther is primarily hyping his skills in the Bardic arts, but personally, I think that doesn't preclude Uther's magic powers.

In Celtic Myth, Bards, because their status as lore-keepers, often had magical powers, like Prophecy, shapeshifting (Taliesin and Myrddin/Merlin) or having the power to harm and curse using satires:

I believe there's even a term for Bardic Prophecy in Welsh: "Canu Darogan".

This sort of loops back to "Uther>Arthur" again, seeing as how Arthur is one of "the Three Frivolous Bards of the Island of Britain"

Jeez, can imagine being at your death bed, and like, decide " I'm gonna write an entire poem about how awesome I am and how my prophesized, magic son ain't shit compared to me"

Proof That Jughead is Aromantic - Masterpost

*so we know he’s asexual in canon. but he could still feel romantic attraction!!1!1

what’s this? a screenshot from the writer’s twitter??? doesn’t prove anything. that’s just one comic. i’ll put an asterisk next to the comics by this guy to prove he’s the only one writing Juggie as aro.

i’m not convinced. that’s pretty open to interpretation; he’s probably interested

well… maybe that could mean he’s aro?

Keep reading

do any of my beautiful mutuals know if kay is called cai wyn anywhere other than in culhwch and olwen? what does wyn mean?? is it a surname or an epithet or like a place of origin or something?

WIP Amnesty - This Well-nightingaled Place

This is a fic for Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, so it isn't wholly about Oscar Wilde and A.E. Housman, it's more about Stoppard's heavily fictionalised, definitely surreal take on them.

Fog. Twilight. A boat, with two men sitting back to back, gazing statue-still in opposite directions.

The world awakens, the fog is lit by a greenish glow. Sounds of sloshing water, birdsong, faraway churchbells, maybe baa-ing sheep, whatever is necessary to give the impression of a nondescript but idyllic English dawn.

One of the men startles, then the other. They both stand up, the boat rocks, they both hurry to sit down.

A moment of silence as they consider their situation.

One of them moves carefully, and without fully straightening up, turns around, and sits back down, on the other bench. Then the other – they are now on opposite ends of the boat, staring at one another. WILDE is dressed in somewhat ostentatious velvets, HOUSMAN in a deliberately boring suit. They are of a similar, but indeterminate age.

WILDE Mr Housman?

HOUSMAN Yes, I believe so. Mr Wilde?

WILDE Delighted to make your acquaintance again. We’ve met before, but we may not quite have been ourselves, that is to say, not these selves, and not in this place.

HOUSMAN This place?

WILDE Just a moment.

He peers around. Shields his eyes with his hand, looks again.

The light is morning light, but it comes from no particular direction.

Sniffs the air.

Sage and fresh-cut grass.

Licks his finger and holds it up to feel the wind.

The breeze is fresh, and westerly.

Dips his hand in the water to feel the current, then as an afterthought, brings his hand to his mouth and takes a sip, then splashes the remainder on his neck.

The waters of Isis, but clearer than they ought to be.

HOUSMAN Where are we then?

WILDE I would say we are where all writers end up sometime after they’re dead.

HOUSMAN (sceptical) Elysium?

WILDE I’m afraid not. We are in the Public Domain.

HOUSMAN

Why do you reckon?

WILDE I’ve been here before, many times. Mostly miserable biographies, and even more miserable fictionalized biographies, but not exclusively. It is fortunate that my creation, Dorian Grey, stands in for me when the writer merely wants to make a point about beauty or decadence or carnal sin, and I am left in peace. I am only here when they want me in person. A clever young man made an exquisitely drawn comic book about my final days before moving on to woefully mischaracterize Hemingway. I’ve been here in a story about Bosie wearing a green carnation, fighting for my last lost book against a host of batlike tyrants who have stolen the very city of London. There was a radio play of sorts that gave me a government job, impressive magical powers, and a handsome young man in plate armour to grovel at my feet. EMPIRE STAR And of course there was the business with young Mr Stoppard, where unless I am mistaken we last met.

HOUSMAN We did.  It has been a long time.

WILDE It has been no time at all. HOUSMAN Maybe not for you – my sleep is deeper. I am not here unless they sing one of my poems, and even then, I only walk these hills as if in a dream. Most days I am only here to the extent the Shropshire Lad is myself, that is to say, hardly at all.

WILDE So we are in Shropshire?

HOUSMAN The Shropshire I wrote is not the Shropshire you may have been to.

WILDE I have been to your Shorpshire more times than I have been to the Shropshire outside your pages. I have no objection to this Shropshirish, Oxfordish, Arcadia-ish place. It is a little dull, maybe, a little too pastoral, but there are worse places to be.

HOUSMAN What- ah, Reading.

WILDE And Paris, and Naples, and Berneval-le-Grand, and every jewel-bright city one visits as an exile and not as a guest.

Silence.

WILDE Don’t be quite so glum, you are souring the English countryside for me, although I suppose that is the highest and truest aim of all your poetry. To hang murderers from every tree, bury suicides at every crossroads and fill the churchyards with dead heroes, which ultimately seem to be the only sort of hero you really care about. To hell with it, show me what’s in that basket!

Housman looks around, and finds a wicker basket underneath his seat. Brings it out, looks into it, slides the whole thing over to Wilde. He rummages through it.

WILDE Cheese sandwiches. Sponge cake. Strawberries. What are these supposed to be?

He holds up a red metal cylinder.

HOUSMAN (glad to have something to explain) This is an anachronism. A deliberate one at that. I’ve seen prototypes at the Patent Office, but they didn’t start manufacturing stay-tab drinking cans like this until the sixties. Nineteen-sixties, that is.

Wilde still looks nonplussed. Housman takes it from his hand.

HOUSEMAN Here, you push the tab, and you drink from there.

Hands it back. Wilde takes a careful sip from the can, considers it, then takes a longer pull.

WILDE Gin and lemonade, with some spice to it. Pimms, maybe. I suppose absinthe would be too much to ask for.

He picks up a piece of sponge cake, eats it. Housman has not yet touched the food.

HOUSMAN There remains the question of why we’re here.

WILDE Someone clearly thinks we have something of relevance to say to one another. Or at least that my fictionalized, much-distorted form has something to say to your fictionalized, much-distorted form.

HOUSMAN So you have noticed.

WILDE What.

HOUSMAN That you’re not quite yourself.

WILDE I feel like myself, but I cannot do myself justice. I am slower, my words less exact. We are diminished, flattened in the hands of an inferior author.

HOUSMAN A corrupted text?

WILDE Worse. An interpolation.

HOUSMAN We might escape the worst of the corruption by limiting ourselves to things we have said before – things we had the time and means to edit beforehand, whenever possible.

WILDE Agreed. Now, why do you suppose you are here with me?

HOUSMAN I cannot think of anything. Not that I mind this boat on this river in this early morning light…

WILDE But you would much prefer to share it with someone else, or, failing that, much rather spend it alone.

HOUSMAN Quite. I am a textual critic first and a poet only by chance. You are an aesthete first and a poet only by circumstance. We have very little common ground.

WILDE You are too polite to mention that I whole-heartedly believe in a Christ that you find at best slightly ridiculous. I am rude enough to remind you that you declare your devotion to a queen and country that I can no longer bring myself to even jest about.

HOUSMAN So it is going to be…

WILDE There’s nothing else.

HOUSMAN It’s not what I wanted to be remembered for. I do not deny it, but I do not want my life’s work overshadowed by one quirk of my temperament. You too deserve better than to have your name tied permanently to scandal.

WILDE I don’t. I gave my own name to scandal, so now people have something to call it, the poor unnameable thing.

*

And that is how far I got with this story - if you want to get a sense of how it would have continued, I suggest you read all of Housman's poems (there aren't very many, it's three slim volumes), read the Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis, they say anything I could have wanted to say much better than I can say it.

Brangain’s family in Arthuriana

As we all know, Brangain is Isolde’s handmaid, who helps her mistress with the whole affair shenanigans with Tristan. It was of interest for me to find out all there was to know about this minor character. This led me to research three different Arthuriana, two from the 13th century and the other from the 16th century.

The earliest of these Arthuriana is the French one, “Tristan en Prose” (which is also known as the Prose Tristan), written by Luce de Gat & Helie de Boron in the 13th century. According to Löseth (1890) and Curtis (1994), Brangain is a young lady of noble birth under the service of then Princess Isolde of Ireland (later Queen Isolde of Cornwall). She serves as one of her ladies-in-waiting. Interestingly, she’s not the only member of her family that comes to Cornwall as part of Isolde’s royal retinue.

In the part of Prose Tristan in which Tristan is hiding his identity in Ireland, there’s a tournament going down in which he disguises himself as a white knight. Brangaine helps him by providing him with armor and assigns her younger brothers, Mathael and Perrin (also called Perynin/Perinis), as his squires. After he’s discovered, he leaves for Cornwall in the company of Brangain’s brothers who laments their departing (Löseth, 1890; Curtis, 1994).

Much later in the narrative, Tristan is wounded by an arrow. King Mark sends one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting, who is very much loved by the queen and is also a relative of Brangain (most likely a cousin) as his messenger. This cousin is very fond of Tristan and Tristan is fond of her as well. And she comes in the company of her younger brother, who is a squire (Löseth, 1890; Curtis, 1994).

Fast forward once more, another scene features Brangain’s niece, accompanied by her younger brother, a squire, whom she raised since he was an infant. Isolde sent her to Logres with a message for Tristan in order to meet to have some, ahem, alone time (Löseth, 1890).

By the end of Prose Tristan, though, out of all the relatives mentioned, only Perrin makes a reappearance. He sends a letter to his sister and her husband Governal telling them where Tristan and Isolde’s graves are located. Brangain and her husband come to the graveyard to mourn for Tristan and Isolde. Afterwards, Perrin and Tristan’s dog Husdent leave with Brangaine and her husband to the kingdom of Lyonesse (which Tristan gave to Governal) where he serves as his sister’s seneschal (Spector, 1973).

On the other hand, in the German Arthuriana “Tristan” by Gottfried von Strassburg (which was also written in the 13th century), Brangain is called Brangwen in the narrative. She’s most probably a niece of Queen Iseult the Wise (Iseult’s mother) from the maternal side of the family and a first cousin of Isolde (Iseult the Fair in the narrative) as well. She’s also called the Full Moon to Iseult the Wise’s sun and Iseult (Isolde) the Fair’s dawn. Moreover, she advises her aunt not to kill Tristan, accompanies Iseult to Cornwall and we all know the rest of the story (Von Strassburg, 2020).

In contrast, in the 16th century Spanish Arthuriana “Tristan de Leonis y el rey don Tristan el joven, su hijo” by an unknown author, Brangain is called Brangel. Brangel is Iseo la Brunda’s (Isolde in the narrative) handmaid and she has two younger brothers, who are assigned by Iseo to be Tristan’s squires in the tournament (which coincides with Prose Tristan) (Cuesta Torre, 1997).

Long story short, on the voyage to Cornwall Tristan and Iseo drink the love potion and consummate the passion they feel for one another. Iseo falls pregnant and they land in this island called “Ploto.”  Brangel and another of the ladies help Iseo give birth to her first child with Tristan, whom they also called Tristan. They also have a daughter named Iseo like her mother (because Tristan and Isolde can’t keep their hands off each other) (Cuesta Torre, 1997).

We all know the rest of the story. Anyways, Gorvalán (as in Governal in the narrative) and Brangel get married, but they don’t rule over Lyonesse. Instead, according to the will Tristan left, Governal is to be his son’s regent until he comes of age. Fast forward a few years, young Tristan becomes king and he and his sister Iseo become the godparents of Gorvalán and Brangel’s son Leonelo (in English Lionel) named after the city he was born in (Cuesta Torre, 1997).

If these sources are consolidated, the following can be thus concluded:

Brangaine is of noble birth and a first cousin of Isolde from the maternal side of the family. She’s the eldest of her two younger brothers, Perrin and Mathael. Moreover, she has a niece and a nephew from an older sibling. In addition, she also has cousins, one of them a lady-in-waiting and the other a squire.

Brangaine later marries Governal with whom she has a son named Lionel. She and her husband are King and Queen of Lyonesse after Tristan gave it to his tutor before he died. Her brother Perrin is their seneschal.

References

Cuesta Torre, M. L. (1997). Tristán de Leonís y el rey don Tristán el joven, su hijo: (Sevilla, 1534). Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Curtis, R. L. (1994). The Romance of Tristan: The Thirteenth-century Old French “prose Tristan.” Oxford University Press.

Löseth, E. (1890). Le roman en prose de Tristan, le roman de Palamède et la compilation de Rusticien de Pise: Analyse critique d’après les manuscrits de Paris (E. Bouillon, Ed.). Macon, Protat Frères, Imprimeurs.

Spector, N. B. (1973). The romance of Tristan and Isolt. Northwestern University Press.

Von Strassburg, G. (2020). Tristan (A. S. Kline, Trans.). Poetry in Translation. https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/Tristanhome.php