[MR] medieval poetry links (Fwd: Aoife-Links Digest, Vol 6, Issue 3)

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In a message dated 3/17/2005 12:03:27 PM Eastern Standard Time,  
aoife-links-request at scatoday.net writes:

1. Lend Me Thine Ears: Medieval Poetry  (Aoife)


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Message:  1
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 22:28:18 -0500
From: "Aoife"  <aoife at scatoday.net>
Subject: [Aoife-Links] Lend Me Thine Ears:  Medieval Poetry
To: <aoife-links at scatoday.net>
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Greetings My Faithful Readers! This week's Links  List is about Medieval 
Poetry. Not a Poetry fan? Read on:

A Sonnet  for the Reader         Aoife Finn

Sweet to  read and sweeter yet to hear,
Or, sour and fusty, as grapes too long  aripe;
Bring your selves in, and lightly please draw near
but not to  doze nor even yet to gripe;

Poetry is color to the mind,
Spirits to  thy lips, which taste compares
To the Hell-bound and to the Divine,
and  brings to thee my passion and despair.

Do not nap whilst I still  serenade!
Well I know that Bards do prate and preach.
But some will  speak and cause us to be glad,
Wouldst you run in fear, as from the  Leech?

There's naught to fear but sweet perfection's grace,
Inspired  by thy dear, familiar face.


Adieu,

Aoife

Dame Aoife  Finn of Ynos Mon
Riverouge
Endless Hills
Aethelemarc

MEDIAEVAL  POETRY AND HOW TO WRITE IT
Alisoun MacCoul of  Elphane
http://www.tirbriste.org/dmir/BardicArts/0308/0308.html
(Site  Excerpt) To us poetry is a technical art best left to the experts, to  
scholars and men of genius in the mundane world, to ambitious minstrels  and 
wordsmiths in the Society. To them poetry was merely another way of  
speaking, not necessarily set apart from other modes of speech by content  or 
context (and indeed it was extremely common throughout much of the  Middle 
Ages for the same writer to render the same saint's life or battle  
description or romantic tale in prose or verse as the audience of the  moment 
preferred).

Medieval Welsh  Poetry
http://www.webexcel.ndirect.co.uk/gwarnant/
(Site Excerpt)  Gwarnant has the texts of poems by the famous (and the 
obscure) from the  earliest surviving works up to the fifteenth century. 
Mostly in the  original Welsh with notes on the manuscript sources, but with 
many  translations as well.

Medieval Irish  Poetry
http://www.dnaco.net/~mobrien/irishptr/index.html
(Site Excerpt)  I invoke the land of Eire:
much coursed by the fertile sea.
Fertile is  the fruit-strewn mountain
fruit strewn by the showery wood showery is the  river of waterfalls
of waterfalls by the lake of deep pools  ...

Regia Anglorum: Music and Verse in Anglo-Saxon and Viking  Times
http://www.regia.org/music.htm
(Site Excerpt) Often these poems  were composed to record a particular event
such as 'The Battle of Maldon',  others, such as 'Widsith' and 'Deor' appear
to be fiction or folklore. Much  history and custom was passed on by word of
mouth. It is easier to remember  things exactly when in the form of poetry
than as prose. Therefore history  was often recorded in the form of poetry.

Viking Answer Lady: Norse and  Finnish Poetry
http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/meters.htm
(Site Excerpt)  You are suffering from a misapprehension that is, alas, all 
too common.  Kalevala is NOT a "saga." By definition, a saga is a prose form 
Kalevala  is poetry, set in unrhymed, non-strophic trochaic tetrameter, which 
is now  referred to by scholars as "Kalevala meter". Outside of Finland, this 
type  of verse is most familiar from Longfellow's Hiawatha.

Skaldic Poetry of  the Scandinavian Middle Ages
An international project to edit the corpus of  medieval skaldic  poetry.
http://skaldic.arts.usyd.edu.au/bin/skaldic.cgi?f1=~edited
(Note:  The above link is not to the front page, but to the texts and 
historic  authors. Site Excerpt) It is not possible to be precise about 
either the  dates of Bragi's floruit or about the details of his life. Some 
of the  latter are almost certainly legendary. Old Icelandic sources would 
put  Bragi's birth-date at c. 830, his primary location in Norway and his  
floruit in the mid-ninth century and perhaps a little later. Skáldatal  
associates Bragi with three patrons, Ragnarr loðbrók, Eysteinn beli and  
Bjõrn á Haugi. SnSt considered him to have composed Bragi, Rdr for Ragnarr  
loðbrók, the legendary Viking, who was active in France and Britain  between 
830-45 according to European sources.

Italian and English  Madrigals of the 16th  century
http://mdmd.essortment.com/italianenglish_rjnf.htm
(Site  Excerpt) The Italian madrigal of the 16th century consisted of a 
refined  four to six parts, offering twelve lines of lyric verse with love, 
desire,  humor, satire, politics, or pastoral scenes as the theme. Madrigals 
were  Renaissance in thought and feeling, a secular expression of an  
aristocratic age. In some instances, the top part was sung while  contrasting 
parts were played on instruments. Other performances gave all  the lines to 
singers. Italian madrigal form was partial to overlapping  cadences and 
one-time through performances with no repeats.

Dante,  Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word:
Money, Images, and Reference in Late  Medieval Poetry
R. A.  Shoaf
http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/rashoaf/dccw.html\
(Site Excerpt)  They sin who make discord between wisdom and eloquence, but
what is all  eloquence without wisdom except, as Cato says, glossaries of the
dead? We  are able to live without language, although not comfortably, but
without  wisdom we are not able to live at all. He is perhaps not humane who
is  unfamiliar with polite letters, but he who is deprived of philosophy is
no  longer even a man. (Pico della Mirandola)

Troubadour & Early  Occitan  Literature
http://globegate.utm.edu/french/globegate_mirror/occit.html
(Site  Excerpt) This page contains nearly 100 links to Old Provençal or 
Occitan  troubadour culture, language and songs. It is designed to give 
patrons  access to most of the corpus of troubadour poetry. Since this is the 
lyric  poetry of the South of France in its languages of "Oc", it should 
probably  be considered and contrasted with that of the languages of "Oïl" to 
the  North, which Globe-Gate has covered in Medieval French Lyric Poetry  
(through the 14th century) http://www.utm.edu/~globeg/lyric.shtml and  since 
music is an important consideration for troubadour literature,  patrons may 
wish to consult Andy Holt Virtual Library Early Music  Periodicals 
http://www.utm.edu/vlibrary/earlymus.shtml

Stefan's  Florilegium:  Poetry
http://www.florilegium.org/files/PERFORMANCE-ARTS/poetry-msg.html
(Site  Excerpt from ONE message) Anglo-Saxon poetry is structured around 
stresses  and alliteration
rather than the syllable-counting that characterized Latin  poetry of
the same time.  The number of syllables in any given line is  less
important than the number of stresses; each line consists of  two
half-lines separated by a caesura (pause), and each half-line  contains
at least two stresses.

Medieval Poetry (A series of notes  and  information)
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/7985/medieval.htm
(Site  Excerpt) ALLITERATIVE REVIVAL.- Long poems written in an  alliterative
metre. N & W. It's an alternative to the continental form  or syllabic
rhyming verse. ALLEGORICAL : PIERS PLOWMAN.- How people  understood their
religion. William Langland. Presented with colloquial  & non-decorated
language. Complex variety of religious  themes.

Medieval Spanish  Poetry
http://www.spanisharts.com/books/literature/poetrymed.htm
(Site  Excerpt) Spanish medieval poetry covers four centuries. This assumes  a
considerable amount of texts of different natures: narrative poetry,  almost
Provençal lyrics, Castilian texts written in Arabic characters  -aljamiado-,
etc.  For this reason, it is convenient to split them  into distinct
sections. We offer the following five headings: PRIMITIVE  LYRICS , THE EPIC
, MESTER DE CLERECIA , COLLECTION OF VERSE (Cancionero) ,  THE SPANISH
BALLADS

Medieval Sourcebook: Selections from the legends  and Poetry of the  Turks
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/turkishpoetry1.html
(Site  Excerpt) All the universe, one mighty sign, is shown;
God hath myriads of  creative acts unknown:
None hath seen them, of the races jinn and  men,
None hath news brought from that realm far off from  ken.

Elizabethan  Poetry
http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/poetrysubj.html
(Site  Excerpt) Blank verse, the basic pattern of language in Shakespeare's  
plays, is (in its regular form) a verse line of ten syllables with five  
stresses and no rhyme (hence "blank"). It was first used in England by  Henry 
Howard, Earl of Surrey* in his translation of the Æneid  (c.1554).

Cariadoc's Miscellany: Poetry by David Freidman and Elizabeth  Cook
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cariadoc/misc_poetry.html
(Site  Excerpt) They wrote a song, and another song
And another two or  three;
They held not back from any sin
They spared them neither kith nor  kin
Nor their good lord sweet Laurelin
>From scorn and  mockery.

Portuguese Medieval  Literature
http://www.geocities.com/correia72/medieval.htm
(Site  Excerpt) The songs of the troubadours were of three types: cantigas  de
amor, or plaintive love songs; cantigas de amigo, or songs about  suitors,
put into the mouths of women in delightful native forms still  alive in oral
folk tradition; and cantigas de escarnho e de mal dizer, or  mocking and
slanderous songs. More than 2000 songs of the troubadours  survive.

Berekely: Online Medieval and Classical  Library
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/
(Site Excerpt) The Online  Medieval and Classical Library (OMACL) is a
collection of some of the most  important literary works of Classical and
Medieval  civilization.

Amazon Listmania: Medieval Poetry--Not for the  Faint-hearted!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/18NVPHFW6R7WJ/002
-4616489-8657636

Luminarium:  Anthology of Middle English  Literature
http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/

The Passionate Shepherd  to his love  (Marlowe)
http://historymedren.about.com/library/poetry/blshepherd.htm
(Site  Excerpt) Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures  prove,
That hills and valleys, dales and field,
Or woods or steepy  mountain yields.
ALSO SEE Sir Walter Raleigh's Response poem:
Her  Reply
http://historymedren.about.com/library/poetry/blraleigh.htm
(Site  Excerpt) If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every  shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with  thee and be thy Love.

Intro to Old English Poetic  Style
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/research/rawl/IOE/postyle.html
(Site  Excerpt ) Here, for example, are the first two stanzas of Thomas 
Gray's  Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:The curfew tolls the knell of  
parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the  lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves  the world to darkness and to me.....

A Brief Collection of Middle High  German Poetry
http://sps.k12.mo.us/khs/gmcling/medpoet.htm
Site is in  German

Medieval French Lyric  Poetry
http://www.utm.edu/staff/globeg/lyric.shtml
This site is the  jackpot of links on the subject. Too many links to count!

Words without  Borders: Three Hebrew Poets from Medieval  Spain
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=Hebrew
(Site  Excerpt) Moshe Ibn Ezra (c. 1055-1135) is considered the finest
craftsman  of the Andalusian period and in many ways its representative poet,
as he  fulfilled the classical ideal of biblical purity of diction and  made
exemplary use of the rhetorical ornaments that he and his  contemporaries
adapted from the Arabic tradition.

About: Medieval  Poets
http://poetry.about.com/od/medievalpoets/

Decameronweb
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/dweb.shtml
Boccaccio's  masterpiece, in it's entirety

Harvard:  Chaucer
http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/

Digital  Dante
http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/

William Langland (author of  Piers  Plowman)
http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/langland.htm

Francesco  Petrarch
http://petrarch.freeservers.com/

Classical Japanese  Poetry
http://www.classical-japanese.net/Poetry/index.html




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