boydster
Native English here. Have some passing familiarity with Spanish from back in school. With a recent dive into ancient cultures and mythologies, now I’m beginning to learn Old English so I can one day hopefully read and understand Beowulf in the way in which it was originally written. I’d also like to learn Old Norse for a similar reason and dive through the eddas and sagas. Hebrew, Greek, and Latin are all on my target list, too.
And here I thought I included the image of the map itself… oops! Here it is
Presently working through 2 books:
- The Silmarillion
- Le Morte D’Arthur volume II
The Silm is a reread, and I’m in the Flight of the Noldor section early on so stuff is about to get real in Alqualonde. Arthur, though, is a first for me, and it’s been a fun ride so far. It’s really easy to imagine it as a Monty Python sketch in a lot of parts, just with how over-the-top it leans into the pomp and chivalry of being a Knight of the Round Table.
The Dark Tower series for me. I enjoyed Stephen King as a teenager, but had never read any of the Dark Tower books until a few year ago when a friend gave me a copy of The Gunslinger. And I really enjoyed it! It’s a quick read, I thought it was compelling enough to start working through the rest of the series. I made it through book 2, a little slower of a pace but I made it, book 3 was the same I feel like, maybe it dragged a little more even. By the first few chapters of book 4 , I just wasn’t having fun with it any more and put it down.
I mean, the article refers to them having “retrieved ‘non-human’ biological matter from the pilots of the crafts.” It seems somehow even more farfetched to assume it was animals flying a UAP than aliens or some future descendant of humanity, at least to me. There’s a Gary Larson comic for this though, I’m sure.
Thank yod someone finally said it!
That’s a great question, and one I should have probably anticipated, so apologies! In the book, the editor (Verlyn Flieger) gives the context there. I don’t have the book in front of me right now, so I’ll have to paraphrase, but if I’m appealing to brevity of words: it’s a witch.
More specifically, it’s a fey creature that usually lives in a magical part of the woods and lures men to her. Her intent varies, it’s usually one of either a) trying to get the man to leave a recently-wedded wife in order to marry the corrigan, or b) trying to get a recently-married man to promise a future child or children. She can shape-change from an ugly form into a more beautiful one to help trick her victim.
Just had a chance to open the book back up, and from the note on the text by Christopher Tolkien, corrigan is a Breton word for fairy. From the introduction by Verlyn Flieger, she expands a bit more to say:
In the Lay she represents a particular subset of this type [of Celtic seductive otherworldly female figures] called a corrigan, malevolent, sometimes seductive, whose dangerous attraction embodies both the lure and terror, the ‘fear of the beautiful fay’…
I am just reading the Caxton version of Malory’s stuff now - still near the beginning of the second volume, which is to say: about halfway through. I can’t help but envision the Monty Python crew as the main cast of characters, and that probably helps with getting through some of it that might otherwise seem too dry or repetitive. They take their chivalric pomp intensely seriously!
