Oh WOW, thank you for sharing this with us! This is silly of me but I feel like this is so different from what I expected of Old English literature. But it’s giving me a lot of really interesting things to think about in my own field of Indigenous studies—the way white Americans in the early 1800s wrote about encountering the remains of earthen cityscapes built by Indigenous people in the midwest like Cahokia.
Also, I meant to comment this on your previous post but I loooove your commitment to doing medieval studies with multiple languages and just generally how you describe it as important to recognize that the medieval British Isles were home to multiple languages ❤️
thank you so much this means a huge amount to hear!! a lot of people ask me why i’m causing myself so much extra work doing extra languages (particularly when I’m not very good at them) so i’m always really over the moon when someone agrees with me it’s important and meaningful
I’ve never heard of cahokia i must go and do some googling now. i love the comparisons that can be made across cultures even where the cultures probably or absolutely definitely didn’t meet
I was recommended this post through Robin Reid’s newsletter and I was taken aback in the most delightful way to see my translation cited in your post — it prompted me to actually set up a Substack account to comment! I adore the Old English elegies, and my translation of The Ruin is easily the highlight of my time as an undergraduate, and so I’m happy you enjoyed it. ❤️ Looking back recently I wondered if I should have translated more of the fragmentary bits but the complementary comment on the sputtering out and dying really lends confidence to that creative choice.
wow thank you so much for linking this for me - even the wikipedia page makes it so fascinating and haunting. i love the connections that can be found across texts, buildings and art objects so far apart in the world. one of my favourite professors ever specialised in armenian and central asian archaeology and she always encouraged us to think in terms of links we could make and echoes we could see even where there was no reason to think the people creating this art were ever aware of each other.
I love that the silver and jewels are things the ground gave up. The building stones too, they aren't mentioned this way that I saw, but they are the ground, raised up and now becoming part of the ground again.
this is so interesting and i love it - i hadn’t thought that before but i really like the idea that the stones of the ruin are now as we read completely taken back by the ground, and the traces of even the ruins they were looking at have been swallowed back up and reburied
This is great. Tell us more about this poem? Who wrote it? How was it preserved? What ruin is it commenting on, if that is known? I've never heard of this before!
i might need to take some time to work out some of these things a bit more specifically! a lot of the answers to these questions are 'no one knows for sure but people have some guesses'. the only manuscript copy is in the exeter book from the 10th century, so it's certainly from before then, but i don't know nearly enough about it to say anything beyond there. the exeter book is our only source text for a lot of these very beautiful melancholy elegies in old english. i just looked at wikipedia and saw them saying it could be eighth or ninth century but i know nothing about who said that or what evidence it's based on. none of the texts in the exeter book have named writers but there is some writing (that i haven't read) about the scribes, who was copying the poems into the book in what style and when.
it's easy to read the ruin as being the city of Bath or a similar roman town on natural springs -- it certainly seems to be somewhere that has natural springs and baths built above them. i resist that reading a bit in my heart of hearts, just because it's not how i picture it when i read the poem and i want my romantic notion of the poem to be true, but bath is probably the simplest answer
It's funny to imagine that the ruins you speak of later become the site of the social preening featured in Northanger Abbey! To the Pump Room, everyone!
This is a beautiful poem. Thank you for this translation. I also had no idea this poem existed and now I'm very interested in what other poems exist from the time period.
i’m so glad you liked it! if you want to read some more poems with some similar vibes, you can google the exeter book elegies or old english elegies more broadly and there’s a small corpus of really haunting and gorgeous poems like the wanderer, wulf and eadwacer, the seafarer, the wife’s lament
this has always been my most favourite Old English poem (possibly favourite poem of all time) and it got me into studying the Anglo Saxon period as an archaeologist, so seeing this pop up after having enjoyed all of your parts of the Green Knight felt like the most wonderful treat ever!! Brilliant work as always!!
As someone who studied romantic literature, I absolutely loved when you said “every old english poem has something Ozymandias about it.” It’s so true, there comes a point where the poem on ruins becomes a ruin itself.
God, The Ruin is so beautiful. One of my favorite poems. I think it has such a haunting quality because of our current position in time—it's been said that our time is resonant with the Roman Empire (maybe the empire on brink of collapse; it depends on your perspective). I look around my context, and everything has been created within a hundred or so years of the present. I wonder what people of the future will think about this time in history. Will there be a patina of greatness and nostalgia, or will they see us the way we see ourselves?
As a child, there was this great television program that explored the future if all humans suddenly disappeared. I was entranced by the way nature took over the steel and concrete, vines running up cracked walls and telephone poles. I also loved the idea of time capsules, of burying something into the dirt in the hopes that someone in the future will truly be able to see us as fellow humans. It all has something to do with growing up, I suppose, of realizing that what you see around you can't last forever; your home will become someone's future ruins. Now I find myself fascinated by history, of tracing my ancestry and marveling at what humanity remains in these kinds of structures that have been sacked and rebuilt several times over.
I loved your translation, and thank you for the reminder of this beautiful piece!
Oh WOW, thank you for sharing this with us! This is silly of me but I feel like this is so different from what I expected of Old English literature. But it’s giving me a lot of really interesting things to think about in my own field of Indigenous studies—the way white Americans in the early 1800s wrote about encountering the remains of earthen cityscapes built by Indigenous people in the midwest like Cahokia.
Also, I meant to comment this on your previous post but I loooove your commitment to doing medieval studies with multiple languages and just generally how you describe it as important to recognize that the medieval British Isles were home to multiple languages ❤️
thank you so much this means a huge amount to hear!! a lot of people ask me why i’m causing myself so much extra work doing extra languages (particularly when I’m not very good at them) so i’m always really over the moon when someone agrees with me it’s important and meaningful
I’ve never heard of cahokia i must go and do some googling now. i love the comparisons that can be made across cultures even where the cultures probably or absolutely definitely didn’t meet
I was recommended this post through Robin Reid’s newsletter and I was taken aback in the most delightful way to see my translation cited in your post — it prompted me to actually set up a Substack account to comment! I adore the Old English elegies, and my translation of The Ruin is easily the highlight of my time as an undergraduate, and so I’m happy you enjoyed it. ❤️ Looking back recently I wondered if I should have translated more of the fragmentary bits but the complementary comment on the sputtering out and dying really lends confidence to that creative choice.
this is so exciting, i never had any idea it would reach the eyes of someone i'd linked to! your translation is so awesome, i'm so pleased i found it
Wow! That's such a haunting poem. I don't know much about the language or the time period but this has made me much more intereted in it now.
It’s far away and a different language, but when I read about the fallen tiles I think of this place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrine_of_Khwaja_Abu_Nasr_Parsa
wow thank you so much for linking this for me - even the wikipedia page makes it so fascinating and haunting. i love the connections that can be found across texts, buildings and art objects so far apart in the world. one of my favourite professors ever specialised in armenian and central asian archaeology and she always encouraged us to think in terms of links we could make and echoes we could see even where there was no reason to think the people creating this art were ever aware of each other.
I love that the silver and jewels are things the ground gave up. The building stones too, they aren't mentioned this way that I saw, but they are the ground, raised up and now becoming part of the ground again.
this is so interesting and i love it - i hadn’t thought that before but i really like the idea that the stones of the ruin are now as we read completely taken back by the ground, and the traces of even the ruins they were looking at have been swallowed back up and reburied
This is great. Tell us more about this poem? Who wrote it? How was it preserved? What ruin is it commenting on, if that is known? I've never heard of this before!
i might need to take some time to work out some of these things a bit more specifically! a lot of the answers to these questions are 'no one knows for sure but people have some guesses'. the only manuscript copy is in the exeter book from the 10th century, so it's certainly from before then, but i don't know nearly enough about it to say anything beyond there. the exeter book is our only source text for a lot of these very beautiful melancholy elegies in old english. i just looked at wikipedia and saw them saying it could be eighth or ninth century but i know nothing about who said that or what evidence it's based on. none of the texts in the exeter book have named writers but there is some writing (that i haven't read) about the scribes, who was copying the poems into the book in what style and when.
it's easy to read the ruin as being the city of Bath or a similar roman town on natural springs -- it certainly seems to be somewhere that has natural springs and baths built above them. i resist that reading a bit in my heart of hearts, just because it's not how i picture it when i read the poem and i want my romantic notion of the poem to be true, but bath is probably the simplest answer
It's funny to imagine that the ruins you speak of later become the site of the social preening featured in Northanger Abbey! To the Pump Room, everyone!
This is a beautiful poem. Thank you for this translation. I also had no idea this poem existed and now I'm very interested in what other poems exist from the time period.
i’m so glad you liked it! if you want to read some more poems with some similar vibes, you can google the exeter book elegies or old english elegies more broadly and there’s a small corpus of really haunting and gorgeous poems like the wanderer, wulf and eadwacer, the seafarer, the wife’s lament
this has always been my most favourite Old English poem (possibly favourite poem of all time) and it got me into studying the Anglo Saxon period as an archaeologist, so seeing this pop up after having enjoyed all of your parts of the Green Knight felt like the most wonderful treat ever!! Brilliant work as always!!
i’m so glad you liked it!! i’m excited to go back to gawain but i had really missed some old english
Never heard of it so that was particularly great! I'll treat our stone-cracked, tall and dangerous, 200y old garden wall with more respect now.
I’m so glad you liked it! you better go respect that wall now
As someone who studied romantic literature, I absolutely loved when you said “every old english poem has something Ozymandias about it.” It’s so true, there comes a point where the poem on ruins becomes a ruin itself.
God, The Ruin is so beautiful. One of my favorite poems. I think it has such a haunting quality because of our current position in time—it's been said that our time is resonant with the Roman Empire (maybe the empire on brink of collapse; it depends on your perspective). I look around my context, and everything has been created within a hundred or so years of the present. I wonder what people of the future will think about this time in history. Will there be a patina of greatness and nostalgia, or will they see us the way we see ourselves?
As a child, there was this great television program that explored the future if all humans suddenly disappeared. I was entranced by the way nature took over the steel and concrete, vines running up cracked walls and telephone poles. I also loved the idea of time capsules, of burying something into the dirt in the hopes that someone in the future will truly be able to see us as fellow humans. It all has something to do with growing up, I suppose, of realizing that what you see around you can't last forever; your home will become someone's future ruins. Now I find myself fascinated by history, of tracing my ancestry and marveling at what humanity remains in these kinds of structures that have been sacked and rebuilt several times over.
I loved your translation, and thank you for the reminder of this beautiful piece!