Peter Godman

Peter Godman is a fellow and tutor of Pembroke College, Oxford. His Alcuin: The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York was published last January.

Letter

Carmina Europae

17 October 1985

SIR: Your correspondent, John May (Letters, 21 November), takes exception to Professor Burrow’s remarks on Orff’s Carmina Burana in his review of my Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (LRB, 17 October). I have not asked John Burrow why he describes Orff’s music as awful (not as bad a pun as May claims), but I imagine that one of his reasons for choosing that accurate epithet is the ponderous...

Calves

Peter Godman, 17 November 1983

‘Knights should be naturally endowed with slim calves and neat feet whose length exceeds their width as if moulded by a craftsman, but I observe that your calves are on the contrary pudgy, bulging, round and stunted, and your feet are as broad as long, and gigantic to boot,’ jibes a countess to a commoner, referring not to his shoe-size (‘gigantic to boot’) but to the dimensions of his feet, in this stylish but not always lucid translation. The commoner replies:

Tolkien’s Spell

Peter Godman, 21 July 1983

Among the terms of abuse which J.R.R. Tolkien was accustomed to apply to an Oxford college of which he was (and I am) a member, there is one that makes an odd impression. It is the adjective ‘medieval’, pointedly used in its pejorative sense by this philologist and professor of Anglo-Saxon.

Carmina Europae

J.A. Burrow, 17 October 1985

It is hard to imagine how a future United Europe (supposing there is ever such a thing) could grow a literature of its own – distinct, that is, from the literatures of the nations which...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences