Deeds of the Franks, Book One, Section One

The following is my own translation of the text from Latin Library:

When now that time approached, for which the Lord Jesus had daily shown his own acts of faiths, especially by evangelizing saying, "If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny disagreement and let him take up his own cross and follow me", there had been thereafter a strong movement throughout the entire regions of the Gauls. If anyone would desire to follow God zealously with a pure heart and mind, and he wished to bear his own cross faithfully, let him not be lazy to quickly take the road of the Sacred Sepulcher. The apostle of the Roman seat set out the sooner the better over the mountainous parts and, with his archbishops, overseers, Abbots and priests, he began plainly to lecture and foretell, saying that if any man wished to save his own soul, he should not be in doubt to humbly begin on the way of the Lord, and, if he lacked an abundance of money, he would give enough in excellent mercy. For the lord apostle said , "Brothers, it is proper for you to endure many things in the name of the Annointed One, clearly poverty, exposure, persecution, want, sickness, hunger, thirst and other wretchedness of this kind just as the Lord said to his disciples:'It is proper to you to endure much on behalf of my name', and 'Do not be ashamed to speak before the faces of men; I will give to you the voice and eloquence to speak the truth.', and after this 'Abundance will follow you in repayment'." And, when this sermon began to gain strength little by little across all the regions and homelands of the Gauls, the Franks, hearing this, on the spot stitched together such a cross on their right shoulder, saying unanimously they would follow the footsteps of the Annointed One, by whom personally the infernal regions had been redeemed. At this time now, the Gauls are far from their homes.

Clash of the Titans

I was going to start on the Gesta Francorum today but I went to the movies yesterday and changed my mind. In 1981, when the first Clash of the Titans came out, I was one of the few people take saw it and I enjoyed it. So, I was looking forward to the updated version with 'special effects' since the kraken in the first one was clearly a guy in a rubber suit and he looked like the creature from the black lagoon.

If a movie is called a 'remake' of an earlier movie, then should it not be very similar to the first one? This 'remake' was not only loosely based on Greek myth but also loosely based on the 1981 film. Okay, there was a guy called Perseus, he killed Medusa, flew on Pegasus and saved Andromeda. That is where the similarity ends to myth or movie.

The movie was clearly about the special effects and violence. My 13 year old son loved it. My daughter and I, who both have some familiarity with Greek myth, sat there gnashing our teeth. This is a list of the things that annoyed me (with spoilers):

• Perseus marries Andromeda, that is why he saves her.
• Andromeda is chained to a rock not suspended over the harbor. It is a huge part of the imagery about her, she is chained nude to a rock.
• Perseus does not run off with Io, who is literally a cow
• Perseus is conceived when Zeus appears to his mother in a shower of gold, she was not raped as punishment for her husbands' impiety. She did not have a husband.
• His mother survived being thrown into the sea
• Perseus did not hate Zeus, the gods helped him all along to kill Medusa.
• Hades did not hate Zeus and attempt to overthrow the government.
• There are no Jinn in Greek myth. They are Arabic. And I am certain they are not zombies.
• Perseus was pursued by Thetis and no one else
• Zeus did not create humans, Prometheus did.
• The only Olympian to have created something like the Kraken was Poseiden and his monster was called Cretus.

I would like to say on that last point that I did not mind the Kraken being the sea beast sent out to kill Andromeda. The best part of the film is when Liam Neeson says "Release the Kraken".

Now that I have mentioned Liam Neeson, I have to say that I have never seen a more Biblical Zeus. He looked like Moses and acted like the Judeo Christian God. It was nauseating how he kept saying that he 'loved humans' and did not want to punish them for their impiety. Perseus, who insisted that he was not a son of Zeus, kept insisting he was a simple fisherman. Jesus was a fisher of souls.

In the end, out comes the Kraken, deadly scorpions, a deadly disfigured monster and because, every movie has to have zombies or vampires, the undead Jinn. With all that divine anger and death, it seemed so very Old Testament and nothing like the Iliad. Anyway, I thought it sucked. Shame on the producers of this 'remake'; I do not think they ever saw the film they were basing this on.

Medieval Latin

I have been studying Classical Latin for 3 years, getting straight A's and I feel ready to tackle Medieval Latin. So I looked at two texts and straight away noticed words that are not in my Oxford Latin Dictionary. The dictionary is exclusively Classical Latin but I thought the whole point of using Latin as the language of scholarship meant that clerics and scholars could always speak a common language no matter where they came from. And, by using a dead language as the language of choice, one would always be able to read latin texts no matter which century they were written in. Silly me.

Oxford does not have a dictionary of Medieval Latin. They do have a dictionary of Medieval Latin from English sources. There are dictionaries with German and French sources. Time and place do matter in translating Medieval Latin. It is a bit of a shock to me. I thought it might be fun for a summer project to read Walter Map's De Nugis Curialium in the original latin or Gesta Francorum.

The Bodleian Library, which owns the only manuscript of De Nugis Curialium, jealously guards it. I could shell out $170 American for their book. This is better than the version I saw on Amazon last year that was going for close to $300. At the same time, Gesta Francorum is on Latin Library for free. Gesta Francorum features one of my favorite characters - Bohemond of Taranto, the studmuffin, who , if a movie is ever made of the First Crusade featuring him, should be played by Brad Pitt. That movie should be made soon before Brad gets too old.

Gestae Francorum it is. Chapter One, Book One will be posted tomorrow. It is already done as best as I can.

And I think a link to Latin Library is in order.

More People Should Read Ovid

There are two books that we know for certain Shakespeare has owned: Ovid's Metamorphoses and Michel de Montaigne's Essaies. One does not have to read much Ovid, especially his poems to see that Shakespeare was a devotee. Milton was not as dedicated to Ovid's poetry because Ovid was too naughty for Milton but he was still influenced by Ovid. Even more than Ovid, Milton was influenced by Horace and Virgil.

Few Renaissance writers, apart from Jonson and Milton read the other three elegist Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius. I think they are worth reading too. Milton was lucky enough to be able to read Greek and so he was also able to read Homer.

Why should we care about the Romans and the Greeks? Because by reading them, we get all the Easter eggs hidden in the texts. By reading them, you can get what Milton was trying to do with his incredibly complicated way of stating things. By reading them, you understand so much more and not just Shakespeare and Ovid. If you can, read them in Latin.

I am thinking of taking Ovid in translation and putting him back into Latin and see how close to his own words I get. That is studying Latin old school. They did it like that in Milton and Shakespeare's day. That is how they got to be so good at it.