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