📄 Fletcher, Rachael, Thijs Porck, and Oliver M. Traxel, eds. 2022. Old English Medievalism: Reception in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Pp. 312. ISBN 9781843846505.

Summary

This is Nelson Goering's review of an edited collection on how Old English has been reused and reimagined in modern culture. The book has an introduction and thirteen essays in four parts. The first part covers reworked poetry, children's fiction, a New Zealand novel and the museum presentation of Sutton Hoo. The second covers invented "shadow" languages in historical novels, especially Kingsnorth's The Wake. The third covers new writing and translation into Old English. The fourth covers teaching: textbooks and the use of film and TV. Goering praises how the editors ordered the chapters, with contrasting views placed side by side and cross-references linking parts. He notes recurring themes, including far-right misuse of medievalism and reflections from the writers themselves. He also points out gaps:

• a narrow focus on prize-winning literary novels, with Griffith's Hild largely overlooked;
• little on music, games or reenactment;
• thin coverage of reception outside Britain and North America.

He treats these omissions as a map of where future research could go. Overall he calls the volume a valuable snapshot of the field.

Key points

• The volume was published by D. S. Brewer in 2022 (312 pp.), edited by Fletcher, Porck and Traxel. It has 13 essays in four sections.
• Traxel formally analyses the "shadow tongues" of Kingsnorth's The Wake and Terry's tapestry. He finds that Kingsnorth's language often feels closer to Middle English and to stereotyped northern dialects than to Old English.
• Kemmler discusses his own Old English renderings of Le Petit Prince and Der Struwwelpeter. Ferhatović examines Peter Baker's Old English Alice, in which the tea party becomes a bēorscipe.
• Pascual publishes for the first time The Fall of the King, a 98-line poem. Each half-line is annotated with its Sievers type, followed by a translation and notes.
• Blanquer, Ellard, Hitchcock and Sweany link Sweet's Primer and Mitchell & Robinson's Guide to colonial ideology. Knappe reviews Merlin, Vikings and The Lord of the Rings films as teaching material, noting limits such as poor audio.

Interesting ideas

• I1. Traxel judges each invented "shadow tongue" against what its author said it was meant to do, rather than against an absolute standard of authenticity.
• I2. Readers may perceive forms as "archaic" when they are really regional dialect features, because dialects keep different old forms than the standard does.
• I3. Pascual's poem comes with layered annotation: a metrical type for every half-line, a parallel translation and explanatory notes.
• I4. Baker's translation substitutes a cultural near-equivalent (tea party as beer-party) and openly flags the substitution in his introduction.
• I5. Goering treats what the collection omits as a useful diagnostic of where scholarly attention is missing.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

• I1 (learn): Evaluate generated or converted outputs against the stated goal of each component, so a failure is reported as a mismatch with a declared objective.
• I2 (tokens): Give the tagger and lemmatizer a separate register or dialect label, so that unusual forms are not automatically treated as archaic.
• I3 (tree): Treebank entries could carry structured labels, a gloss and a short rationale, so every annotation decision stays explainable and reviewable.
• I4 (back): When translating through the meta-world and the target lacks a concept, map it to the nearest frame and record the substitution explicitly in the output trace.
• I5 (answer): Regularly audit test sets for missing genres and question types, using the gaps to decide where to add evaluation material.