Nice, good to see a place for translations & discussion! Some great sounds & rhythms here - I especially like the first line of the last stanza: "All in this way, my wisdom overarches well-schooled scholars".
I hope you don't mind a very general question about a very specific thing regarding this poem & its handling in OE.
I've been thinking/reading/writing about the figure of the "ent" in OE (poems & prose), and somewhere (probably Bosworth-Toller online) it was pointed out that in one of the manuscripts of this riddle, Cyclops ("ciclopum") is glossed "enta" (according to Napier - https://archive.org/details/oldenglishgloss00napi/page/190/mode/2up) - but I'm not quite sure what to make of that.
The Exeter Book version of this riddle has "thyrs" in the same place. To me, "thyrs" makes sense. We see them in Maxims II as swamp-dwelling monsters; the term is used of Grendel; it fits to have a "thyrs" when you're talking about something with an immense appetite.
"Enta" as a gloss here doesn't sit right. "Entas" are "giants", sure, but they're also Goliath, Hercules, Nimrod, Mercury. They're builders of old things. They seem to be giants of a specific type, with particular associations that don't fit well with what Aldhelm is going for here.
So my question is something like - how do you approach evidence from a gloss? How much weight should we put on what might have been the last note a distracted scribe made before lunch? Should we say that this glossator knew what he was talking about, just as much as whoever wrote all the other occurrences of "ent"? Or should we weigh the evidence from the poets more?
(Of course there's also the problem of words changing meaning/associations over time, in different contexts, etc. So many problems!)
Brava!
Nice, good to see a place for translations & discussion! Some great sounds & rhythms here - I especially like the first line of the last stanza: "All in this way, my wisdom overarches well-schooled scholars".
I hope you don't mind a very general question about a very specific thing regarding this poem & its handling in OE.
I've been thinking/reading/writing about the figure of the "ent" in OE (poems & prose), and somewhere (probably Bosworth-Toller online) it was pointed out that in one of the manuscripts of this riddle, Cyclops ("ciclopum") is glossed "enta" (according to Napier - https://archive.org/details/oldenglishgloss00napi/page/190/mode/2up) - but I'm not quite sure what to make of that.
The Exeter Book version of this riddle has "thyrs" in the same place. To me, "thyrs" makes sense. We see them in Maxims II as swamp-dwelling monsters; the term is used of Grendel; it fits to have a "thyrs" when you're talking about something with an immense appetite.
"Enta" as a gloss here doesn't sit right. "Entas" are "giants", sure, but they're also Goliath, Hercules, Nimrod, Mercury. They're builders of old things. They seem to be giants of a specific type, with particular associations that don't fit well with what Aldhelm is going for here.
So my question is something like - how do you approach evidence from a gloss? How much weight should we put on what might have been the last note a distracted scribe made before lunch? Should we say that this glossator knew what he was talking about, just as much as whoever wrote all the other occurrences of "ent"? Or should we weigh the evidence from the poets more?
(Of course there's also the problem of words changing meaning/associations over time, in different contexts, etc. So many problems!)
Terrific!
Fucking love this!