Monthly Archives: June 2011

When I first read The Lord of the Rings as a kid, I was absolutely spellbound. Gandalf and the balrog! Frodo and Sam! Sauron and the Dark Tower and the Ring and the Mountain of Doom! And the Ents, man – the Ents!

Amidst all that excitement, I thought something else, too: I could do that.

I could write a novel. It’s only words on a page; I totally know how to write words. Besides, Tolkien had left plenty of room for improvement. Boromir? More like Boring-mir. And all those endless pages about Gondor or Rohan or Minas whatever when I was just going Come on, get back to Frodo and Sam, I would totally leave out all that stuff.

Some standup comedian (Seinfeld, maybe?) has a joke about the black box on a plane. It always survives, so why don’t they just make the whole plane out of that stuff? This was basically my feeling about LotR. If Tolkien can write scenes of pure awesomeness (like the Ents attacking Isengard), why doesn’t he just make the whole book like that?

I didn’t attempt my own novel until high school, and it turned out just as bad as you’d expect. Discouraged? Me? No way! For one thing, I didn’t realize right away that it was horrible. That realization was a very gradual process. By the time I did figure it out, I was already on to my next writing project, and that one was going to be totally awesome. I was always just on the brink of awesomeness, perpetually on that final effort that would push my work into something amazing.

By now, of course, the rational side of my brain has figured out my place in the universe; I don’t write as well as Tolkien, and if I ever want to get that good, it’ll take many more years of hard work. But the irrational (read: crazy) side of my brain is still gleefully convinced that this is easy, this is so easy, I’m so smart, I’m so close, I’ve just gotta get there!

I think this insanity is basically a good thing.

See, somebody could have told me early on that I was crazy. (Heck, maybe they did.) Perhaps, when I was young and impressionable, they could even have steered me away from writing entirely, just by making me understand how very difficult it is. But because I was (and still am) caught up in the joy of hubris, I just kept on going, and by now I’ve figured out that I’m never going to stop.

A year ago, I read two books about Zen Buddhism that gave me a great overview of the history, the philosophy, and most importantly, the practice of Zen. I was very curious about meditation, and absolutely fascinated by the concept of enlightenment. And I thought: I could do that.

Blah blah, decades of hard work, apex of spiritual awareness, almost everyone who tries it fails, blah blah blah. My rational brain knew that stuff, but whatever. Sit and stare at a wall for thirty minutes? Man, that’s easy. I am in. I am, like, all over this enlightenment stuff. And you know what? I’m still meditating, still hoping to achieve enlightenment someday. My quest to extinguish the ego is fueled by overwhelming ignorance and pride. I’m sure Siddhartha would have a good laugh over that one.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you’re training to run a marathon, maybe you don’t realize right away just how crazy hard it is to run twenty-six miles. And maybe that’s all right.

Okay, Reader: is there anything crazy you’ve been driven to attempt by your own blissful ignorance? Tell me in the comments!

Languages change. Modern English stretches back to roughly the time of Shakespeare; before that was Middle English, Chaucer’s language. Middle English was not so different from what we speak today. But before Middle English was Old English, and that was a very different creature.

Old English was what the Anglo-Saxons spoke before William the Conqueror took over the island in 1066, before some Norman dog put an arrow in poor King Harold‘s eye at the Battle of Hastings. Old English was a rough, Germanic language, the stuff that was around before the influx of French (with its Latin roots) turned it into Middle English. Most of the long words used by today’s bureaucrats and businessmen come from Latin or French through Middle English, whereas many of our shorter, more basic words are Old English.

We got “precipitation” from the Norman Invasion; but Old English gave us “rain.”

And the very oldest surviving poem in Old English is Cædmon’s Hymn, a song praising God, composed by a man who couldn’t read or write. Here it is in its entirety:

Nu sculon herigean      heofonrices weard,
meotodes meahte      and his modgeþanc,
weorc wuldorfæder,      swa he wundra gehwæs,
ece drihten,      or onstealde.
He ærest sceop      eorðan bearnum
heofon to hrofe,      halig scyppend;
þa middangeard      moncynnes weard,
ece drihten,      æfter teode
firum foldan,      frea ælmihtig.

(Source)

This is it. This is the earliest poem we have that’s written in anything we could still call “our” language.

To the modern reader, of course, it’s almost completely gibberish; we no longer even recognize all the letters. But this is English. In its earliest, most primal form, this is English. Even today, you can pick out bits that remain virtually unchanged after thirteen centuries: “æfter” for “after,” “ælmihtig” for “almighty,” the same three letters for “and.”

Old English fascinates me for a lot of reasons. Partly I’m intrigued because Tolkien loved it, and his love for it permeates The Lord of the Rings. Partly I’m intrigued because Old English is the language of Beowulf, England’s original epic. But mostly I’m intrigued because I, myself, am deeply in love with modern English, and Cædmon’s Hymn is its cradle.