Unthinkable Wings

There's a lot of good music for Epiphany, which unfortunately often doesn't get heard as much (unless, like my first choice, it gets co-opted for carol services).

So: here's King's Cambridge doing Cornelius' "Three Kings." The soloist is more forward than he often is in performance/ recordings, but I don't think it's a bad thing, though it may be partly explained by the difficulties of recording in Kings, which has a rotten acoustic.*



I tried to find a decent recording of "Brightest and Best" - an unusual hymn, in that the first verse is addressed to a star, although one might chose to read the star as an image for John the Baptist, the forerunner of Christ, who is often linked with the star in patristic (and later) writings.** But this is surprisingly difficult, and not helped by the proliferation of tunes. The following recording, a bluegrass tune sung by the McLain Family Band, was not what I was looking for, but I think it's rather charming:




And, although the Russian Orthodox don't celebrate Epiphany for another thirteen days, I like this snippet of the Epiphany liturgy, the troparion (a stanza chanted at various points in the services throughout the day, if I have got that right - Orthodox liturgy is a bit of a closed book to me, as it's very different to the Western tradition):



You will notice that the troparion seems to be more appropriate to the Baptism of Christ, but this is because, as the name suggests, the fundamental point of the Epiphany is not the wise men or the gifts, but the simple idea of Christ revealed to the world, and thus revealing God to the world; so there's an obvious thematic link. This is also picked up in the very Anglican hymn, Songs of Thankfulness and Praise (horrible audio warning!), which goes from the visit of the kings, to the baptism of Christ, to his first miracle at the Wedding at Cana, to his healing ministry, and looks forward to his 'great Epiphany' at the end of time, when he will judge the world and be recognised by it. It's actually one of my favourite Epiphany hymns from the point of view of lyrics, although Salzburg is not an exciting tune, and on balance "Brightest and Best" still just wins...


(This is a poor quality recording, but there wasn't a lot of choice!)

* It's not as bad as St Paul's but few things are. I have never understood the psalms, or even the readings, there, and it's not down to the failures of the choir.

** There is, for instance, a plausible interpretation of the famous line from Crist:
Éala, Éarendel, engla beorhtast,
ofer middangeard monnum sended,
(Hail, Earendel, brightest of angels, sent to men over the earth) where, although Earendel seems to be the name for the morning star, it would refer to John as the herald of Christ, as is certainly the case in the Blickling Homilies.

I'm awfully behind the curve on this, but you were supposed to list 15 OTPs amd draw conclusions from them. Or were you supposed to let your flist do so? IDK.

Anyway, my conclusions are (i) I have a great tendency just to follow canon (though the fact that a pairing is canonical doesn't mean I'll necessarily be interested in it)
(ii) I like my romantic heroes, by and large, to be intellectual, but also to know one end of a sword from each other (metaphorically speaking)
(iii) I may also have a thing about older men and younger women (though this is not reflected in my own romantic history, such as it is). Although to an extent this may just reflect that in older fiction the men are always older than the women.
(iv) there are friendships which I find fascinating but that I don't see as sexual, so I made a separate heading for them.

( Ten ships, and five friendships )

You may or may not know that iTunes has launched a... thing they call iTunes University, where universities offer podcasts of lectures, etc, for free download. I was poking about, and discovered that as well as, e.g. Cambridge offering videos on history by Simon Schama and David Starkey, the Oxford section has two podcasts on Tolkien at Oxford, and Tolkien and languages. No idea what they're like, as I haven't listened yet, but it might be worth a look. You can also find such goodies as someone reading Beowulf aloud, or a recording of a first year tutorial from Mansfield on Old English grammar. Even as an Old Anglophile (?) I find it hard to understand why you would want the latter, but perhaps true grammarians will be thrilled by the prospect (and, I suppose, if you're considering Oxford, it could be interesting).

You should be able to find the Tolkien stuff by searching on Tolkien Oxford.

Of course, it's all basically advertising, but -

OOOH - free downloads of music from St Johns Cambridge! Including Byrd! Run, don't walk!

I can has first edition of "The Road Goes Ever On", the Donald Swann Tolkien song cycle, with dust jacket, and a very beautiful book.

Also, the AHRC have now agreed that they ought to start paying me again. Once college had notified them that I'm registered.... Why is nothing straightforward? Still, at least I can be sure I will get money at some point, even if not for another month :(

OK, I probably shouldn't be buying rare-ish books in these circumstances, but I tend to agree with Erasmus about spending priorities....

Quote from LotR when you read this

"It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."

Gandalf, at the Council of Elrond.

And, of course:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

A verse which I find almost embarassingly moving, but in an encouraging sort of way.

On a related subject: I have just realised that I am coming back from the conference a day earlier than I thought (boo). I know booking has closed for Oxenmoot, but does anyone know if it possible to go as a 'day vistor' to some or all of it?

Must go and read this, perhaps tomorrow: Fabula 48 (2007), vol 3/4, Jeroen de Kloet, Giselinde Kuipers: Spirituality and Fan Culture around the Lord of the Rings Film Trilogy. it has nothing to do with work, but since when did that matter?

Also, I managed to find a copy of the old (decent) translation of the Lord of the Rings into German. This makes me ridiculously happy.

And now I will stop spamming and go to bed.

Because I'm bored, I've borrowed the Character Love Meme from dolorous_ett

Name a character from one of my fandoms, and I will write no more than 100 words on why I love them.

Fot the purposes of this exercise, my fandoms are defined as Harry Potter, Tolkien, Doctor Who (but please bear in mind that I have never seen an episode of Six and my knowledge of Old Who is somewhat patchy), Patrick O'Brian, Dorothy L Sayers, Terry Prachett, and Star Trek (TOS and DS9).

I'm not doing the B2MEM thing, because I don't feel organised enough to commit to regular ficcish posts; but on the other hand it made me think about share-worthy things in Tolkien.

I've recently bought a copy of the Hammond and Scull line-by-line commentary on LOTR (well, it's not quite line by line, but it's that style) which is full of interesting nuggets of information. I was particularly taken by Tolkien's reasons, as explained in a letter, for choosing 'nazg' as the Black Speech word for 'ring'. It is vaguely based on Gaelic 'nasc', meaning 'ring', but also with a strong semantic link to verbs to do with binding. That's fun: not knowing the Gaelic cognate won't stop you understanding the text, but if you do, it adds an additional bit of linguistic pleasure. There are so few works of literature out there which cater to philology nerds.

( On Aragorn, a star, and a coincidence )