Summer Research

Cambridge friends might be under the impression that I'm whiling away the lazy summer days in Californian sunshine, feasting on succulent strawberries as I lounge in the garden.  Well, there is sunshine, but cold breezes have temporarily banished my shorts.  And I am feasting on the finest berries that Whole Foods can provide (mostly blackberries) -- but my summer is hardly lazy.

This is because I (perhaps foolishly) submitted a proposal for a conference paper on a person I didn't know much about.  It was accepted -- hurray!  But now I have to learn all about this guy, mostly reading everything he ever wrote.  I'm actually enjoying it a great deal, but time is of the essence in digesting a lot of material so that I can form some kind of argument or summary.

Meet John Mitchell Kemble.

  

He was part of the same secret society as Tennyson at Trinity College, Cambridge.  He's considered the first modern scholar of Old English, and he did a lot to bring good practices to translation and interpretation.  (First scholarly translation of Beowulf, and only the second one ever in England!)  He also didn't mince words when he thought other scholars had blundered.  This makes for some moments of pretty amusing reading.  For example:

"I beg once and for all to say that Norse forms have nothing whatever to do with Anglo-Saxon inscriptions.  It was by trusting to Norse forms that Thorkelin misread every line and mistranslated nearly every word of Beowulf.  It is by trusting to Norse forms that Dr. Repp has plunged himself into his ludicrous Christ-basin, and that Finn Magnusen has recorded his own rashness throughout 105 of the most adventurous pages I ever remember to have read."

Other times, he's pretty dry.  The other day I scrolled through a chapter that meticulously compared sources to figure out how big an Anglo-Saxon acre was compared to a modern one.  Zzzzzz...

Anyway, I'm going to talk about him at a conference on how people have looked back at the Middle Ages for their own purposes.  I expected Kemble to be much more nationalistic, but he's kind of all over the map.  He wants to get his fellow Englishmen interested in their own national treasures and emulate the good parts of the past, but here's what he thinks of the Anglo-Saxons' sense of humor:

They were an extremely dull, calm, sober, common-sense people, and as for satire, God help them! they had not an atom.

So I continue reading, and eventually I'll put something together to talk about.  It might just be a list of how he was a nexus of conflicting interpretations of medieval England.  But I'll bet that very few in the audience will know as much as I do already about Kemble, so I'm not too nervous.  But maybe that's just his arrogance rubbing off on me... :)