gogmagog | (no subject)

Today I made a sort of interesting scholarly discovery, which was new to me if to no one else.

As y'all may know, I'm a medievalist specializing in monstrosity and space. (The two are frequently connected, because in medieval thought all the crazy monsters like Blemmyae and Cynocephali lived at the edge of the known world.) My specific interest, however, has generally been two-fold, looking at the medieval perception of the biblical tribes of Gog and Magog, and at the similarly named but very different English figure of Gogmagog, a native British giant. As such, I've also done work with other things that are related more or less to gigantism.

Another thing you may or may not know: a year or so ago, for a seminar on medieval space a couple of years ago, I wrote a paper on height and elevation and general upward movement in the poem Cleanness (by the person known as the Pearl-poet, best known for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or for being Geoffrey Chaucer's Brokeback lover on the Internets). As such, I ended up looking a lot at the story of the Tower of Babel, one of the major incidents described in Cleanness.

Today, while reading the very awesomely titled Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript, I discovered that apparently in medieval thought, Nimrod, the king who ordered the Tower of Babel to be built, was in fact a giant. (This is one of the facts Orchard musters to support his claim that at least in Anglo-Saxon thought, giants were historically associated with the sin of pride and arrogance.)

So basically all of my interests are now converging, and I'm getting ideas of perhaps a second post-dissertation book on general "reaching upwards" in medieval literature that can incorporate both giants and Babel through the figure of Nimrod.

(Interestingly, if you're wondering how "nimrod" came to mean "idiot"? Biblically, Nimrod was "a mighty hunter in the eyes of God." In Bugs Bunny cartoons, Bugs called Elmer Fudd "Nimrod," presumably mocking his hunting skills; people took it as some sort of insult to his intelligence, it caught on, and now "nimrod" is just a standard word for "idiot" or somesuch.)

By the way, as I work on more reading for my comps (which includes both original medieval texts and scholarly discussion of them), I'm hoping to make more posts along these lines here. However, I'm not entirely certain I should ~~bore~~ entertain my entire flist with it, so I think I'm going to set up a friendspost filter for this sort of stuff (i.e., "interesting medieval historical/literary stuff"). So, er, comment to this post if you'd like to be on it?

Mmm, cookies. Er, wait. Yeah, add me to the filter, it sounds interesting. :D

...huh I thought I already commented to this. Anyway, add me too please! :D

Don't know if I can contribute much to the discussion (all of my (meager) medieval reading was in French medieval lit, not English), but I'd like to be in on the filter.

This is cool stuff. The whole genre of pseudo-religious mythology that surrounds the Bible fascinates me, as well as medieval lit in general, although I must confess that I like reading about it much more than I like reading it.

Put me on that filter.