how do i get to the middle ages? some starting points for medieval poetry, queerness and strangeness

a handful of starting points with links and recommendations for accessibly getting texts, translations and criticism

I’m always quite cautious about social media content that offers ‘[genre] for beginners’ or ‘how to get started with [literary period]’. I love the sentiment from both the offerers and the consumers but then I always think, ‘What type of beginner is this for? Are they twelve years old? Is English not their first language? Do they have a Harvard biochemistry degree but they don’t read fiction much?’. I’m never sure who is enough of an authority figure to decide what a ‘good way in’ to a genre or a period is. I certainly don’t feel like I’m that authority figure.

But then I was really flattered and encouraged by the response to my post ‘fascists can’t have the middle ages’ (read it, it’s good). Not only did I not have to block any white supremacists, I got a lot of comments from people who shared my love and fascination with the medieval period. Particularly, I was so happy to see people share my belief in the Middle Ages’ capacity to show us the world can be different, people can relate to the earth, society and the non-human world in strange ways, and the things that seem like ‘common sense’ or ‘the way things are’ didn’t always look like that. Some of these comments came from medieval studies students, grad students, graduates and academics but a lot more came from ‘civilians’. A lot of people asked me for recommendations and starting points on getting face to face with the Middle Ages.

There are two main problems a lot of people face when reading medieval texts: language barriers and access. Even if we restrict ourselves to just the British Isles, medieval texts are written in multiple languages and multiple versions of English that aren’t intelligible to us or to each other. This is really cool - the medieval British Isles was a more multilingual place than today. The Middle English of Chaucer in London and the Middle English of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the north west are hard to put next to each other and see much in common. Translations have different levels of quality, poetic-ness and fidelity to the original. Like with translations from any language, you can read one translation of a text and find it beautiful and another translation that makes it all boring and pointless. Every medievalist I know relies on translations a lot - even within the British Isles, I’ve never met anyone who can confidently read all the relevant languages, then you get outside the British Isles and all hell breaks loose. So finding good translations is important.

Finding them can be hard. Medieval books are expensive if you want to buy them. A lot of resources are available for free, somewhere, but they might have been digitised in 2001 by a team of three people at a university you’ve never heard of. As well as knowing what texts are where, it can be hard to know what texts will appeal to the part of the Middle Ages you’re trying to access. For people like me who were raised on Tolkien and otherworldly fae princes (thanks Holly Black), it can be hard to work out what texts appeal to the part of the past you want to get back to. The criticism, too, is expensive to buy and some of it isn’t even available to try and mortgage a limb to fund.

So in this post I want to give some recommendations and links on accessible places to find the Middle Ages. I don’t want to label it as being ‘for beginners’ because I don’t know who’s reading this or what kinds of things you’ve already begun. I will provide some context for each rec - I hope it won’t be too much or too little detail, but please do comment and I’ll be happy to give more context or apologise for droning on too long.

One more quick note before we start - it’s important to me for this post to have no paywall. It would kind of defeat the point to make a post about finding accessible resources available only to people with money to spend. At the same time, it’s the longest and most research-intensive post I’ve ever written for substack and PhDs are horrifically expensive, so if anybody finds this useful and feels able to become a paid subscriber (for whatever length of time), I’d literally

sob with gratitude.

Primary texts - Old English

I firmly believe reading the original texts themselves is the best way to get to know a period. History, cultural criticism and criticism are all well and good but the literature is, really, the point. The literary texts are where you can see the worldview and Big Themes that mattered to a people and also the linguistic flourishes and ways of using language that make it ‘other’ than what you’re used to in the twenty-first century.

Old English is the oldest version of a Germanic ‘English’ language spoken in the British Isles. It can also be called Anglo-Saxon, and you’ll see it referred to that way in older editions or commentaries. It’s not a language that speakers of modern English can look at and easily understand, well, anything. There are odd words that look like their modern forms and a lot of words that make you go, ‘oh yeah, I see that’, but trying to read a text start to finish in Old English with no annotations or translation isn’t something I’d attempt for fun. All the texts I talk about below have multiple good translations, but I’d really recommend looking at the original even if all you do is try to read it out loud and listen to the sounds.

Old English poetry is built out of complicated patterns of alliteration, rhythm and pauses. Reading it out loud is all hushing, stopping and starting, carving out silent spaces then rushing around them like water. It’s a beautiful language to hear and it’s incredible to see a version of English poetry from before rhyme was an idea anyone had had. (Some theorists think rhyme was the worst thing ever imported into English poetry, and it’s an an extreme way to put it but I’m listening).

Beowulf is the crowning achievement of Old English poetry in a lot of ways. It’s a full epic poem with intense, eldritch monsters, wild landscapes, poignant nostalgia and haunting questions about how heroes get remembered, if they get remembered at all. It has its share of violence, arm-ripping and dragon-fighting, but it begins with calling back to a lost past and closes with the image of a gravesite built on a high cliff, to try and stay visible through time and distance. It’s the single surviving epic of a culture where heroes asked to be remembered, written in a land where all poets knew that the Roman ruins around them were the product of a heroic culture that had not been remembered. There’s something wistful in its heroism, something that already knows glory passes away into nothing, and that’s something we see over and over again in Old English poetry. But also, arm ripping.

Seamus Heaney’s translation is rhythmic and propulsive to read. It can be found in many free accessible PDFs around the internet is also widely published and available in any form you like - second hand copies of the Faber poetry edition, ebooks and audiobook formats are all easy to have. This translation works hard to keep that odd slow-fast-slow-fast rhythm and pauses running in modern English. It’s not the most most accurate translation ever, but it’s immersive. The first word of the Old English text is ‘hwæt’ - literally ‘what’ but we could take it as a ‘lo!’, ‘hey!’, ‘o!’, ‘listen up!’. Heaney makes this into ‘So.’ and then launches into the story. I’m a big fan of that willingness to fit modern ways of speaking into the rhythm and preserve that sense that someone has sat down with you on a long night to share an old story.

Two other translations that bear talking about are J.R.R. Tolkien’s and Maria Dahvana Headley’s. Tolkien’s is not a modernising translation, but it has the stately ‘this is an important myth’ feel of his Middle Earth poetry. It was only dug out of his drawers and published in 2014 so it’s not as widely available as you might expect and it’s probably something you’d have to pay for, but the 2014 edition does come with a long commentary of his thoughts on the poem which is very worth having. I love looking at his language choices and how we can see in his translation the way he viewed and interpreted the Anglo-Saxon world he loved. I feel like you learn a lot about the Lord of the Rings world by understanding what chords the medieval primary texts struck in his head. I cited this translation a lot in my conference paper on how Tolkien reinterprets medieval landscapes and soils, and it’s fantastic background to understanding Middle Earth.

Maria Dahvana Headley’s is marketed as a ‘feminist’ translation, but it’s only feminist in the way Emily Wilson’s Iliad and Odyssey translations are. Does it make it automatically a feminist rewriting to be the first woman ever to have a full length translation of a text published? This was published for the first time the year after I graduated from my first degree - so I am the last generation of female students to study in a world where no woman had translated Beowulf. All the same discourse that has happened about Emily Wilson could just as easily be said about Maria Dahvana Headley, except that people don’t talk about Old English as much as they talk about Ancient Greek. Aside from being an important book to exist at all, it’s also just a good translation. She’s interested in monstrosity and how porous and delicate the line between heroes and monsters are - if the same word is used to describe Beowulf and Grendel, should we automatically choose a lovely translation for the hero and a creepy translation for the monster? Are they so very different? It’s a great translation for questioning those grey areas. Because this is a more recent translation, it’s not as cheaply available everywhere as Heaney and Tolkien, but it was published in the mainstream press and has a kindle edition.

The other Old English poetry I recommend for ‘beginners’ is the elegies. I spoke a bit at the start of this section about the wistful melancholy of Old English writing and that sense of mournfulness gets dialled up to eleven here. These are short, confused and confusing poems written in a world where the stories attached to Roman and pre-Roman ruins have been lost but the stones still look at you out of the past. From what I’ve read so far, I don’t think there’s any poetry from any time or any place in the world that has such a complex relationship with space and time.

The other wonderful thing about the elegies is that they’re all really short. If you aren’t a fluent reader of Old English (and no one including me is a fluent reader of Old English) you can easily find them in parallel translation and go word by word matching the translation to the original, working out what words fit together where. Old English compound nouns are strange and beautiful - the demands of rhythm and alliteration turn the ‘sea’ into the ‘whale-road’. The elegies are a fantastic place to pick out a cool word and stare at it. You can even use the excellent, free, slightly old but still good Bosworth-Toller dictionary online for your word-staring.

My favourite Old English poem is called Wulf and Eadwacer. It’s less than twenty lines long (in fact it cuts off halfway through a line) and it’s completely bizarre. There’s one slightly old and unfashionable theory that it’s a lyric fragment of a lost epic, so these eighteen and a half lines are a foggy window into a world where this story was as expansive as Beowulf. I choose to like that theory because it’s romantic and you can’t stop me, though I’m not sure how much real evidence there is for it. Wulf and Eadwacer shows us a woman lamenting for her exiled lover who will be killed if he returns to her. Her lover is Wulf. He might be a werewolf. Eadwacer is, maybe, a person. He might also be Wulf or he might be a third person. He could be a werewolf. No one knows what Eadwacer meant. The woman and Wulf, or Eadwacer, or someone else, might have a child or the child might be a metaphor. The child might be a werewolf. The final few lines of this poem are the words I would get tattoed on me if I ever had enough slack in the budget to get some literature put on my body permanently.

I’ve been haunted by this poem for ten years. At one time I’d read every piece of scholarly literature ever published on this (though I’m sure I’m out of date now). One of my favourite essays at undergraduate level was just me getting deep into the weeds of how many characters this poem has and how we might imagine they all know each ohter. No one has yet (to my knowledge) argued that the woman is a werewolf too. But she could be. There’s a really nice annotated edition of the original Old English text available on the Old English Aerobics website and a lot of modern English translations floating around the internet such as this one on Poetry Foundation. The best translation is, of course, the one I wrote at undergrad that no one has ever read. If you’d like to stroke my ego and read that one please do DM me.

The final Old English poem I’ll mention is The Ruin. This is the Anglo-Saxon poetic mind staring at a pre-Anglo-Saxon ruin and grappling with who built it and what happened to them. How can anyone achieve glory in this world if this is what glory turns into? Video games and low budget movies want us to think of the Anglo-Saxons as unwashed and beardy war-like types. But I think all that warrior-ness can only be interpreted in the context of poems like The Ruin. You look up at something your people don’t know how to build and imagine the battle or pestilence that wiped its builders off the map. Fittingly, the poem itself is a ruin. It fades out into fragments due to manuscript damage. It sputters and dies at the end like another great achievement of the part that can’t survive to meet us now. The University of British Columbia has a nice online parallel text translation.

Primary texts - Middle English

Middle English is much more like modern English than Old English. I won’t talk in depth about the funky business that happened to English grammar in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but when we transition from Old English to Middle English we go from ‘no one can really read this at all’ to ‘anyone can read this if you relax your eyes and get in the right headspace’. I always tell people if you can read garbled texts from drunk people, you can pretty much read Middle English. All these texts are available in pure uncut Middle English, in glossed and edited Middle English, and in modern translation, but I really recommend taking a look at the original text if you’re interested in any of them.

When I started my degree in medieval studies, I was disappointed to find how un-elvish a lot of it was. My long immersion in medievalist folkloric children’s writing had led me to believe medieval literature was nothing but fae princes spiriting people off to topsy turvy worlds all day every day, then I started my course and found faeries weren’t about much and it was all translating ninth century law codes very slowly. If you’re a fan of modern romantasy and the kinds of medievalist fae stories that have been fashionable for the last couple decades, the text I think you’re looking for is Sir Orfeo. There might not be Lots of extant British faerie stories, but who needs lots when what you have is perfect?

This is a Middle English reimagining of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I prefer it to all other versions of the story, though, for its strange fairy nightmare qualities. Rather than dying and going to the underworld Eurydice (here Heurodys) is carried to t he country of an elvish king. The king presides over a world of human bodies transformed into twisted, faceless, tree-like sculptures. He’s a king of doubles and dreamworld mirror images. When Sir Orfeo locates Heurodys in this upside down kind of country, her face is rent and different from weeping, and a small part of you wonders if he has located the same wife he lost. It’s irresistibly strange. There’s a good modern English translation here on the Harvard website and the original Middle English is available in a nice annotated edition in PDF form.

Is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the best text ever written in any language? Probably. I’m not sure it’s quite long enough to count as an epic but it’s an epic in my heart. The wonderful thing about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is how well it stands on its own separate from the wider arthurian canon - you don’t need reels of background detail on every knight and sub-knight and all King Arthur’s second cousins, but it also fits beautifully in with wider and deeper canons. On its own, it’s a magically horrifying Christmas ghost story, an ecological narrative about being face to face with a natural world you can’t control, games within games within games you don’t completely understand the rules of. It’s a wonderful poem to read in winter. It was written in the vicinity of Liverpool in a variant of Middle English that isn’t a direct ancestor of the English we speak today, so its language is both familiar and a bit foreign. It’s my favourite ecological text. It’s the source text for The Green Knight (2021), my favourite medievalist film and the subject of my masters dissertation, which you can watch on Amazon Prime if, like me, you enjoy Dev Patel.

Like Beowulf, there are good translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Tolkien and Heaney. Tolkien was working on his translation at the same time as he was writing Middle Earth for the first time, and I think a little of its strange greenness shines through in The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring - I definitely see some Green Knight in Tom Bombadil, though that’s not something I’ve (yet) tried to prove with citations. Tolkien’s Green Knight text was published long before his Beowulf so you can find accessible PDFs on it with a quick google search. Seamus Heaney’s was the first translation I ever read so I’m quite partial to that one. There’s also a really nice illustrated hardback with a Simon Armitage text that I haven’t read all the way through. I do love it, though, as both a physical object and a translation that works hard to protect and honestly translate the essential northernness of the original language. It would make a great Christmas gift for any weirdos or angsty teenagers you may know.

The thing that made me love the Middle English period with my whole heart and soul was dream visions. I had a tutor at undergrad who was obsessed with them and I’ve been deep in that obsession ever since. The dream vision was a big genre in the later middle ages in a way that I wish they still were now. They most commonly feature a dreamer who falls asleep while reading a symbolic surrealist landscape where they learn some truth in the middle of the chaos. Symbolic strangeness and dreaminess are two of the things medieval literature does best - why should we obey the laws of physics if we can avoid it? Chaucer was a big trendsetter here. He has dream visions ranging from the relatively simple, sombre and rich in creeping dread (The Book of the Duchess) to the allegorical and filled with bizarro dream landscapes and spinning houses of ice (The House of Fame) to the densely political but also full of sexy birds (The Parliament of Fowls). I’ve just linked original text versions but these are short, widely published poems with a lot of free translations. Those translations have a lot of variation between them but I think that’s part of the magic - comparing them and looking for the gaps between them is a fantastic use of an afternoon.

Medieval gender and queerness

Gender and queerness in the Middle Ages is such a vast research topic I could never try to even gesture at all the possible areas to get obsessed with here. I feel a bit out of my depth even trying to link a couple of possible starting points.

It’s not directly queer in a modern sense, but something I want to point out to start with is that the ideal relationship between men and women in the courtly tradition was startlingly different to how we think ‘ideal’ straight men and women relate to each other today. If we’re taking queerness to mean gender roles and interrelationships that depart from what we see now as ‘normal’ then all of courtly love is queer. The courtly love tradition began in French writing with The Romance of the Rose and expanded into Arthurian writing with the romances of Chretien de Troyes. We see it in English with Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. The men in these stories are pathetic. They see a beautiful woman from a distance and immediately fall to the floor weeping. The love ideal for men, military men, soldiers with many kills under their belts, was a desperate abject mess on the floor, considering death by suicide rather than have to tell a girl she’s pretty. When Troilus and Criseyde consummate their love, Troilus has to be carried into the room. Of course we have to acknowledge this is a poetic ideal and not how actual medieval farmworkers were flirting at parties, but a culture’s romantic ideals still tell us something about them. It’s not the case that man and woman fit together in a purely natural, sensible, heterosexual way for all of time.

When I think medieval queerness, I think of the deep and odd tradition of mystic women writing about God and Jesus in idiosyncratic, sometimes heretical ways. Sometimes these women were anchoresses, living walled up in cells on the sides of churches, unable to see any human beings, literally categorised as legally dead. The most famous of these is Julian of Norwich, who wrote Revelations of Divine Love, which you can read on Project Gutenberg. The text is a long meditation on conversations and visions of God that Julian had while sick and believing she was lying on her deathbed. In her writing, she breaks boundaries in the ways people describe God that got her branded as a heretic for centuries. She calls God her mother. The same God who is her mother is also her husband. God to her is such a profound and wide-rangingly complete vision of love that it can’t be held or described with any one human relationship or human gender. The God of Julian is a figure that we can only begin to understand by applying elements of multiple genders.

A friend of mine made me sob in a reading group discussion when she pointed out that one of the only ‘real’ interactions Julian has on her sickbed is feeling her mother squeezer her hand. She then vanishes into her holy dreams and sees the highest most divine form of love as a mother God comforting a sick child. My friend Marie linked it all up in a way that struck me dumb, the touch of a mother’s hand for her dying child was enough to inspire Julian to queer God.

Another mystic with a different angle on relating to God is the Dutch beguine Hadewijch, who took a profoundly kinky attitude to the lord. Her visions of God are full of bodies being offered up for bloody devouring, drinking the blood of Christ direct from the source rather than in transubstantiated form as wine. Multiple mystics wrote about versions of this, but Hadewijch took it one step further by inviting Jesus to drink her blood too, wanting to be consumed as she consumed him, offering herself up and vanishing into submission to the lord. Cool. Hadewijch’s complete works are available in English on archive.org and can be accessed free by any disabled person who fills out their (very accessible, not asking for medical evidence) online form. If you don’t qualify for that, there’s a 1980 edition that can be got cheap second hand.

There’s often more queerness in historical accounts than literary ones. I’m not even a tiny bit expert on these areas, but two scholarly books I can recommend that provide pointers in wildly gay directions are Constructing Medieval Sexuality, edited by Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken and James A. Schultz and A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages, edited by Ruth Evans. The Lochrie book I’m afraid I don’t have a clever way to access a free copy, so you’re looking at about £20 for a second hand paperback. The Evans book is either £23 for the ebook or is available on a subscription service I use called Perlego. I highly recommend Perlego (and I’m not being sponsored to say this, though I’d love it if they did, no one gives me money other than you lovely people). The subscription is £9 per month and while they don’t have every book in existence, they have a good selection of medieval studies books in an easily readable and annotatable format and it’s saved me a lot of money since an influencer talked me into getting it.

Disability in the Middle Ages

I’ll just slip in here at the end a recommendation of a book I’ve only just read the first couple of pages of. A commenter on my ‘No fascism in my Middle Ages’ essay asked if I could recommend anything good about disability in the medieval period and I couldn’t think of loads to say. There is a certain amount of writing in the medical humanities and related fields looking at understanding and ‘diagnosing’ medical conditions in the past. We could view this as strict medicalism where people want to work out ‘exactly what was wrong’ with medieval figures, or we could look at it as shining a light on the multiplicity of experiences of having a body that have always existed. Books like the fabulous Holy Feast and Holy Fast by my all time favourite historian Caroline Walker Bynum and also Holy Anorexia by Rudolph Bell look at how far disordered eating was part of the religious experience of some mystic nuns like Catherine of Siena. There’s also some theorising about exactly what was up with Margery Kempe and whether she could have had a form of epilepsy. I’m not really counting this as disability-minded critical material because it seems like a different category.

The book I’ve just started to learn more about disabled people in the Middle Ages is Jonathan Hsy et al’s A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages, which I found on Perlego. I’ve read one work from Jonathan Hsy before, a really excellent paper on ‘Chaucer’s Brown Faces’ interrogating race in the Canterbury Tales. I read that maybe three years ago and it was so good I found it lodged in my mind when I sat down to put this piece together. I’m inclined to think whatever he and his cowriters have to say about disability and it looks like this book contains discussion of a really wide range of literary genres. I hope I’ll be able to report back soon on what I learned from it.

Signing off

This is the longest piece I’ve ever written on Substack and if you got through all of it, I’m both impressed and very grateful. This is a set of potential starting points for heading off in some fun directions, but after almost five thousand words of writing, I’m still feeling like it’s woefully incomplete. We haven’t got through even all my favourite texts from just the British Isles, and I’ve not included anything from the Welsh tradition I loved enough to specialise in at undergrad with my one precious option paper. I haven’t managed to speak at all about ecologies, which is what my actual PhD is on, which I originally hoped to when I hoped this essay would be nice and short. There are as many potential starting points in the Middle Ages as there are pathways to commit to and spend years getting caught up in the weeds of, which is an infinite number.

I hope I haven’t come across as someone who’s trying to be an authority figure here and tell you what’s good and what’s worth reading. If any of my grad school friends had written this article, they could have subbed every text out for another one that I haven’t even read that would sound (and be) equally fascinating. I also hope I haven’t patronised you and there won’t be too many people saying ‘oh my god mum, we’ve all read Beowulf ten times’. I’m very self conscious about setting myself up as an expert when anyone reading this could become more of an expert than me on 90% of these topics with two days’ diligent reading.

If anyone is interested in any of these topics and wants any more detail or some recommendations for critical reading give me a shout and I can post about some interesting articles.

The final thing I want to say is that the Middle Ages, even in one country, even in a small handful of languages in one country, are so diverse and capable of saying so many things. This was not an era of many worldviews rather than one worldview. Any text linked here has the capacity to open ten thousand doors to strange and fascinating places. Opening a small handful of those doors has been the greatest pleasure of my life, and I hope you like it too.