The Latest of the Old

I recently got the eleventh and newest edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. It was released last year and has a number of new editors and significant changes. I've been reading through Volume A, The Middle Ages--thankfully, this latest edition continues to be split up into volumes instead of being all lumped into huge cinder blocks. Volume A is the first of six volumes. Volume B covers the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, C is the Restoration and the eighteenth century (sometimes referred to as "the long eighteenth century" in English history and literature), D is the Romantic Period, E is the Victorian, and F is the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Unsurprisingly, the newer you get, the less culturally relevant the material is. Don't expect CS Lewis, Roald Dahl, JK Rowling, or Alan Moore but you will find Patience Agbabi and Simon Armitage. You know, the absence of comics in the canon of English literature seems increasingly absurd.

Anyway, as I said, I've been reading the Middle Ages. Beowulf is, as always, included in its entirety and it's the Seamus Heaney translation (from Old English) once again. Among the new inclusions are writings from King Alfred and an eleventh century sermon from the Bishop Wulfstan of York which begins:

Beloved men, know the truth: this world is in haste and it approaches the end.

And so the longer things go in this world, the worse they get. It must necessarily be the case, therefore, on account of the people's sinfulness, that our predicament will badly deteriorate before the arrival of the Antichrist. It will indeed be awful and grim widely throughout the world.

Things haven't changed so much. He may as well be talking about global warming. Certainly the Danish invasion terrifying the people at the time was just as real.

The section of Romances has been expanded and yesterday I read The Lady of the Fountain, an Arthurian romance of unknown authorship, though it tells the same story as a French version by Cretien de Troyes (it's not known who wrote the story first or if both were inspired by a third party). In it, Owain, a knight of Arthur's court, goes on a quest to vanquish a fearsome foe, encountering numerous beautiful women on the way. When he's trapped behind the portcullis of the enemy's castle, a maiden named Luned takes a fancy to him and decides to help him, only for him later to ask her to help him woo the widow of the villainous Earl. Generally the story is about how Owain's flaw is that he recklessly courted too many maidens. There's plenty of action, too, including a pretty good fight between Owain and a number of Arthur's other knights. And there's a black lion.