From the archives: How to make a paper snowflake

[A version of this post was first published December 17, 2014]

These photographs were taken by a man named Wilson Bentley, who was born in 1865. He took his first photo of a snowflake in 1885 and went on to take over 5000 more before his death in 1931.

Images via Wikipedia

As you can see, real snowflakes have six points and so do the best paper snowflakes.  

 

Mostly made by Violin Daughter

 

Making snowflakes out of paper is a great activity, but it's pretty hard to manage six points.

This is a doily, not a snowflake.

This is pretty in its way, but it's not a snowflake.

To make a six-sided flake, you have to start with a six-sided piece of paper.  Getting there is kind of tricky, so I'm going to show you the way my daddy taught me do it.

This isn't a snowflake yet, but it will be.

Read the instructions below:

Grammar speaks

 "I have four parts: letters, literature, the man of letters, and literary style. Letters are what I teach, literature is I who teach, the man of letters is the person whom I have taught, and literary style is the skill of a person whom I form. I claim to speak also about the nature and practice of poetry. Nature is that from which speech is formed. Practice occurs when we put that material into use. To these we add the matter, so as to know what we must talk about. Speech itself is taught in three steps; that is, from letters [i.e. phonemes, the basic units of sound in a particular language], syllables, and words."
~Grammar, explaining her profession and field of study in The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, by Martianus Capella (fl. A.D. 410-420)

"... angry passion yields to wisdom and Ares stands in awe of the Muses"

 "Not only during peacetime but also in war, the Gauls obey with great care these Druids and singing poets, both friend and enemy alike. Often when the two armies have come together with swords drawn these men have stepped between the battle-lines and stopped the conflict, as if they held wild animals spell-bound. Thus even among the most brutal barbarians angry passion yields to wisdom and Ares stands in awe of the Muses."

~ Diodorus Siculus (fl. c. 60-c. 30 BC)
Bibliotheca Historica, Book V.31

Formative influences: Books

Some Lewis-inspired reading

 

Last week a group of my internet friends and I were talking about books that had a formative influence on us so I thought I’d rework it into a blog post. These books are a few of the earliest influences that are still with me, in roughly chronological order of reading.

1. The big, gorgeously illustrated book of fairy tales from around the world, which was part of my steady reading diet for most of the first decade of my life. There are a couple I first met in that book that I still enjoy reading – they’re both in Andrew Lang’s books. “The Bones of Djulung” is a Polynesian tale that’s in the Lilac Fairy Book, and “The Song of the Yara” is a Brazilian tale found in the Brown Fairy Book (Lang calls it “The Story of the Yara,” but I’m pretty sure my book called it a song). I’ve long since lost this book, but boy I wish I could find another copy of it! It was big and orange and had a paisley pattern on it, and it’s probably why orange was my favorite color as a child and I still love paisley.

2. An illustrated edition of King Arthur stories. I didn’t read it as much as the fairy tale book, but it was one of my early favorites and led me to read lots more of the same kind of thing. This book and the big fairy tale book were on the bookshelf in my room in my earliest memories. I have a feeling that these two books and the others were put there at the same time as the crib, changing table, and rocking chair. The fairy tales and King Arthur stories really shaped my taste in story, and to this day the stories I love best are the Romances, the stories that have a fairy tale shape.

3. Mere Christianity, which I first read when I was 15 or 16 years old. I grew up Baptist, and that meant that I was very familiar with the Bible, but I’d never had anything remotely resembling a systematic theology taught to me. Not that MC is exactly that, but it was the first clear, logical explanation of key elements of the Faith that I’d ever come across and it was like drinking water from a clear mountain spring. After reading that I searched out more of Lewis’s non-fiction and I feel like he’s been my spiritual father ever since then. I like to call him Saint Jack. :-D

4. Surprised by Joy, which I first read about a year after Mere Christianity. This is when I discovered that Lewis was a kindred spirit, and I’ve spent most of the rest of my intellectual life alternating between wanting to read everything he wrote and wanting to read everything he read. The former might be possible, but the latter never will. My interest in the last few years has been reading things he talks about in The Discarded Image, which is why I’m now reading Martianus Capella, as I mentioned in my last post. It was Lewis’s love of The Faerie Queene that first led me to read it, and you can see how the foundation for my own love of it was laid in my childhood. I’ve written so much about FQ here that it has its own tag.

5. Our Marvelous Native Tongue: The Life and Times of the English Language, by Robert Claiborne. My mom bought this for me when I was 17 or 18 because I was already a word-nerd but I had no idea that there could be a biography of a language. It expanded my word-nerdery into love of languages and how they work. Even though I haven’t had many opportunities to study that kind of thing it’s always on my radar, even to this day (hence this post last week on the life of the word galaxy). Mike has memories from early in our acquaintance (I was 19 when we met) of me talking about this book a lot and he says that one time brought it with me to some singles group activity. I don’t remember any of that specifically, but I’ve been taking books to social evens since I was a child. Being a grown up I try not to do that anymore. :-D
 

Word-nerd fun: Galaxy

Photo of the Milky Way
taken by my son John
10 November 2023

Yesterday I was reading Chaucer’s delightful Parliament of Fouls. Early on, the narrator says he fell asleep reading Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,” and he retells the story for the reader. In the dream, Scipio meets his grandfather who “showed him the Galaxy.”

Then today I was reading The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, a 5th century Latin work by Martianus Capella. In Book II, Philology is ascending through the heavenly spheres on her way to the wedding. When she reaches the upper limits of the cosmos, the narrator says, “The incandescence of a milk-white river gradually flowed down from the burning stars. Full of joy and thanksgiving she turned toward the Galaxy where she knew that Jove had assembled the divine senate.”

I wondered whether the word “galaxy” was used in the original Latin so I looked it up and sure enough it says, “iter in Galaxeum flectit.” Galaxias is itself a borrowing from Greek.

The story behind the word galaxy is a fun one, so I thought I’d share it.

Prior to modern astronomy, Galaxy simply meant the Milky Way, γάλα [gala] being the Greek word for milk. The story is that after Zeus’s son Heracles was born to the mortal woman Alcmene, Zeus waited till his wife, Hera, was asleep and put the newborn to nurse from her so he could partake of the divine quality of her milk and become divine himself. When Hera woke up and found she was nursing a strange infant, she thrust him away causing milk to spurt from her out into the heavens, and that’s the origin of the Milky Way.

If you study the word “galactic,” you’ll see “lac” in the middle of it. This is because the Latin root lac, milk, seems to have come from an earlier word which has been reconstructed as either *g(a)lag- or *g(a)lakt-. In English, we get from this root lactate, latte, and even lettuce.

Our word milk comes from the Indo-European root melg- which is a verb and means “to rub off,” and also “to milk.” It’s related to the word emulsion which comes from the Latin emulgeo, “to milk out.” In English, the verb milk seems to predate the noun milk. It’s been used from the beginning to refer specifically to human or animal milk. Incidentally, mammals and the mammary glands are named after mamma, which means mother in English, but it means breast in Latin. They both come from the same root, ma-, which means mother, and gives us the Greek Maia (good mother) and also maieutic, which means to act as a midwife, and is the word 17th century philosophers used to describe the Socratic method.

The Old English language also used the word milk to refer to the milky juice you can get from a plant. The 2nd century text Herbarium by Pseudo-Apuleius describes getting milk from wyrte/wort, meaning from a plant (think of the “wort” in St. John’s Wort). “Almond milk” has been used since at least the 1300s, so keep this in mind next time one of your friends scoffs at people talking about almond milk, and insists that milk can only properly refer to that which is produced by the mammary glands. :-D

 

* In linguistics, the asterisk before a word means that the word can’t be found written anywhere, so scholars have made an educated guess about what it probably was.

Of knights and snails

One the funnest parts of looking at medieval art is running across an illustration of a knight fighting a snail. 

There are many theories as to what these snails are doing in the art, but not a one of them matches my own, which I came up with this year while reading through the Psalms with my family. Take a look at this:

Psalm 58

1 Do ye indeed speak righteousness, O congregation? do ye judge uprightly, O ye sons of men?
2 Yea, in heart ye work wickedness; ye weigh the violence of your hands in the earth.
3 The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies.
4 Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear;
5 Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely.
6 Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great teeth of the young lions, O Lord.
7 Let them melt away as waters which run continually: when he bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows, let them be as cut in pieces.
8 As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away: like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.
9 Before your pots can feel the thorns, he shall take them away as with a whirlwind, both living, and in his wrath.
10 The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.
11 So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth.

 

The psalmist is describing how ferocious and dangerous the enemies of God appear, but then in verse 8 he says, "As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away."

In other words, they appear unconquerable, but they really aren't. 

The popular idea about this image is that the knight has given up and is begging mercy of the victorious snail, but I believe he has recognized that this is spiritual warfare, so he has laid down his sword and is praying to God for deliverance.

What's your favorite theory?

Recommended editions of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

This is the third post in a series.

• Part 1: “How to read The Faerie Queene”
• Part 2: “Strategies for reading Spenser’s Faerie Queene”

 

Some of the editions I recommend below come with scholarly essays, but the important thing to keep in mind is what C.S. Lewis says about reading it in his chapter on Edmund Spenser in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. He says that while reading commentaries can be helpful, they demand a certain kind of mindset that’s the opposite of the way we need to approach the poem itself.

Its primary appeal is to the most naïve and innocent tastes…. It demands of us a child’s love of marvels and dread of bogies, a boy’s thirst for adventures, a young man’s passion for physical beauty. If you have lost or cannot re-arouse these attitudes, all the commentaries, all your scholarship about “the Renaissance” or “Platonism” or Elizabeth’s Irish policy, will not avail. The poem is a great palace, but the door into it is so low that you must stoop to go in. No prig can be a Spenserian. It is of course much more than a fairy-tale, but unless we can enjoy it as a fairy-tale first of all, we shall not really care for it (132-3).

Audio

I haven’t mentioned this before, but another great way to experience The Faerie Queene is to let someone else read it to you. I highly recommend two versions:

• Thomas Copeland on Librivox
• David Timson on Audible

Print

Free:

The Faerie Queene at Luminarium
This is the complete text in an easily navigable format. The drawbacks are that it has all the original spellings, and there are no notes on difficult words. Includes the letter to Raleigh and the commendatory verses and sonnets.



Low cost:

The single-volume Penguin Classics edition edited by Thomas Roche is the one I use when I’m reading aloud. It does not have the footnotes and marginal notes that I find distracting, but the margins are wide enough for me to add the notes that I do need.

• All spellings are original, which includes many instances of swapping V and U, using I instead of J, and swapping I and Y. Examples: Vna for Una, Sansioy for Sansjoy, Ioue for Jove, Yuory for Ivory.
• Includes all the commendatory verses, dedicatory sonnets, and Spenser’s letter to Raleigh explaining his plan when writing the story.
• No footnotes.
• Endnotes are fairly minimal, defining unfamiliar words and giving some Biblical, Classical, and literary explanation of Spenser’s allusions.
• Textual notes in an appendix. This is a section that tells all the variants in different manuscripts and how they’ve been reconciled in the text of the poem.
• Helpful glossary of common words.
• No essays or study guides.

Moderately priced:

The Routledge Press edition, edited by A.C. Hamilton, who is a respected and reliable Spenser scholar. This large, single-volume edition includes a general introduction which is very helpful to the reader who’s just getting started in Spenser scholarship.

• Original spellings as described above.
• Includes all commendatory verses, dedicatory sonnets, and the letter to Raleigh.
• Extensive footnotes defining archaic words and explaining Spenser’s allusions.
• Textual notes in the back.
• Character list, including brief descriptions and where they first appear in the story.
• Extensive and valuable bibliography.
• Chronology of Spenser’s life and work.

 The Hackett Classics edition in five volumes (Book 1, Book 2, Books 3 and 4, Book 5, Book 6 and the Mutability Cantos), various editors. Each volume has its own introduction, which is not always sympathetic to the work, depending on the editor—some are pretty good, some are downright awful, so this edition is best for the reader who isn’t especially interested in those extra essays.

• Slightly updated spellings: uses of U, V, I, J, and Y are all regularized and some words use standard modern spellings to avoid confusion, e.g. “bee” updated to “be” because it’s the verb, not the insect.
• Includes letter to Raleigh, but commendatory verses and dedicatory sonnets are missing.
• Footnotes are minimal and generally helpful, defining difficult words and giving brief explanations of the allusions. When dealing with more “adult” allusions in the text, these notes tend to be more explicit than the notes in either Penguin or Hamilton.
• Textual notes in the back.
• Glossary of most commonly used difficult words.
• Index of characters.
• Bibliography.

Expensive, and out of print, but glorious if you can afford them:

The Folio edition, with illustrations by Walter Crane.

• Walter Crane’s enchanting illustrations and the excellent physical quality of the book are the main reasons for owning this one.
• Very slightly updated spellings (they’ve modernized the usage of I/J and U/V), but otherwise original. 
• No notes or essays.
  

The Variorum Complete Works of Edmund Spenser, in eleven volumes, ed. Erwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford, 1932. The first six volumes contain all the books of The Faerie Queene. The remaining five are all of Spenser’s prose and poetic works, a Life of Edmund Spenser by Alexander Judson, and an index to the poetry.

• The main attraction of this one is all the scholarly commentary. I mean ALL the scholarly commentary. It contains everything in every language (untranslated) that was available when it was published.
• Original spellings.
• Includes all commendatory verses, dedicatory sonnets, and the letter to Raleigh.
• No footnotes.
• Extensive endnotes explaining literary allusions, historical background, the allegory, the roles of certain major characters, and more. Each volume has one book of the Faerie Queene that takes up about a third of the volume. The other two-thirds is commentary.
• Ideal for the uber-nerd like me who wants all the commentaries!
• Have I mentioned all the commentaries?
  

Of interest:

Oxford edition, published 1909, edited by J. C. Smith. This is meant to be an authoritative text, so it contains all original spellings. The introduction gives some historical background on the publication and revisions of the poem and explains the editor’s philosophy and method. The footnotes are all differences in the texts of the various manuscripts. Contains the letter to Raleigh, commendatory verses and dedicatory sonnets, and has an appendix with longer critical notes.

And now, unfortunately, I have two anti-recommendations.

The first one is the one published by Canon Press. So far they only have the first three books out, and I’ve only read the first one, Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves, edited by Roy Maynard. This is the updated and annotated edition that I bought when I first wanted to read the Real Deal. The updated spellings are the only thing this edition has going for it. Where Maynard updates the language he sometimes errs, and he frequently gives bad definitions in the margins, so it seems that he doesn’t actually understand the language of Spenser. Worse, his explanatory notes are heavily agenda-driven—he makes it seem like Spenser was an anti-Catholic Puritan. Lewis says that this was not the case. In Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Lewis says that although Spenser was educated at Cambridge, he never became attached to the two intellectual movements of the day, Puritanism and what we now call the Neo-Classical movement, the “young, fierce, progressive intellectuals, very fashionable and up-to-date,” who were united by their “hatred for everything medieval: for scholastic philosophy, medieval Latin, romance, fairies, and chivalry.” This one probably won’t kill your love of Spenser if you read, but I can’t recommend it since there are so many better options.
This edition is missing the letter to Raleigh and the commendatory verses and sonnets.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

The second one hasn’t been published yet, but it’s received a lot of publicity in my circles. This is the “modern prose rendering” by Rebecca Reynolds. I have read one of the cantos, which Reynolds forwarded me so my son and I could read it. I’m not at liberty to share anything about the text, but I will note that if you’ve read Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf, you’ll have an idea what to expect from this edition. Tolkien first made that translation early in his career as an Old English scholar and revised it continuously for the rest of his life. It was his personal study of the language of the poem, and should be seen as an exercise in linguistics, not as a work of art. That is, Tolkien’s Beowulf  is not a literary translation meant to delight the reader. Rather, it’s a textual and linguistic study of the poem, which is why so many people were disappointed when they finally received their much-anticipated copy of it.

Where Maynard in his Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves seems not to understand the language of Spenser, Reynolds seems not to understand the form of Romance itself, including its use of stock characters and its way of using metaphor to point to transcendent reality. In her “Introduction to Books Five and Six,” while explaining that all of Spenser’s knights fail in their quests to one degree or another, Reynolds says that

the title knights of Book Four would have killed one another, had not their lethal conflict been resolved through a magic potion inaccessible to the average reader. (Spenser has claimed that the Faerie Queene instructs readers how to live virtuously. Where does he expect them to find such a potion?)

This, in a teacher of literature, is inexcusable ignorance of the way magic works in a Romance. A Romance is essentially a long, literary fairy tale, and fairy-tale magic of this sort works in the fairy-tale world the way the grace of God works in our world—you don’t find it; it finds you. She consistently discusses Spenser’s treatment of characters as if they were people living in our world, and not characters in a secondary world, an imaginative world of Spenser’s creation, and specifically characters in a story with a long literary tradition behind it. In the “Introduction to Book One,” she says, “Spenser’s treatment of women sometimes employs the extremes of angelic young ladies and wicked old enchantresses, females typed instead of embodied.” But this is exactly the way the medieval Romance works. It’s not a modern realistic novel.

Reynolds repeatedly makes the biographical fallacy of thinking that understanding the author helps you understand the story. In her “Introduction to Book One,” she writes pages of commentary explaining “Spenser’s questionable treatment of race, religion, gender, and nationality,” saying he glorifies whiteness and objectifies women, and writes extensively on “Spenser’s Anti-Irish Behavior,” among other atrocities. This is the topic of “Elizabeth’s Irish policy” that I mentioned when quoting Lewis at the top of the blog post. In Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Lewis says, “The many generations who have read and re-read The Faerie Queene with delight paid very little attention to the historical allegory; the modern student, at his first reading, will be well advised to pay it none at all.” Reynolds is taking exactly the opposite approach, pointing out all of Spenser’s supposed flaws, according to very modern (may I even say “woke”?) standards.

Which brings me to the last area of concern that I’ll be addressing here. The major issue with this edition is the same as with Maynard’s: it’s highly agenda-driven. I have read all the introductions that are available on the website, and I encourage you to do a web search and download and read the essays for yourself for more information. The introductions are quite long, so I will include here a longer selection from the “Introduction to Book One” to illustrate this agenda.

Spenser made some grave mistakes as a writer and as an Englishman living in Ireland. Perhaps it could be helpful for you to read about some of his shortcomings and how I handled them before beginning this book. Where I didn’t sterilize Spenser, it was out of a conviction that we need an accurate record of the past to help us make our present and future better; I don’t think we can overcome wrongs by denying they existed. Where I muted him a bit, it was out of a desire to instill respect where there was once hostility….

As a reader, I’ve given myself permission to shout disagreements with Spenser here and there.... I welcome you to both rage at him with me and glean alongside me as we read his tale. May our journey through this and all old stories be indignant and supple at all the right moments.

...

Throughout the text, I couldn’t resist including a few maternal footnotes for young female readers who may be encountering the jolt of objectification in a historic work of literature for the first time. Though I couldn’t address every instance of sexism, I want these intermittent messages to serve as a little hand squeeze for the youth wandering through these stories. Ladies, if you feel angry over how a female is treated in a given scene, I’m likely right there with you. Let’s stare unflinchingly into the hard realities that our foremothers have faced. Let’s learn from the past.

In summary, Reynolds claims to love The Faerie Queene. She says she hopes that “this rendering will help both younger students and curious adults with busy lives who simply don’t have the time or training to untangle four-hundred-year-old language.” She says that she hopes people will read her prose rendering and then go on to read an edition such as Hamilton’s. But it seems to me that Reynolds’ approach will have the opposite of the intended effect.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

To read other things I’ve written about The Faerie Queene over the years, please click the Faerie Queene tag. Happy reading!
 

Strategies for reading Spenser's Faerie Queene

In my last post I described how I prepared to read aloud Spenser’s Faerie Queene to my children. It took some time, but it didn’t cost me any money at all, as the high quality, literary retellings for children that I used were written over a century ago and are available for free on the internet.

In this post, I’ll describe how I read the whole thing aloud over the course of two years. It took us that long partly because since we’d never read the longer children’s versions before, we were reading them before reading each book of Spenser. Subsequent readings have taken us a little over a year, reading two or three cantos a week during our school year.  

But before that I want to mention briefly how I first tried and failed to read The Faerie Queene so that you can avoid those pitfalls.

When I first started trying to read FQ, the only prior knowledge of the story I had was that “Saint George and the Dragon” was a part of it. I was intimidated by the poem, so I got an edition of Book I that had modernized spellings, and some modernized words, and included lots of footnotes and sidebars that were meant to be helpful. The biggest mistake I made was stopping to read all the footnotes and sidebars. This interrupted the flow of the story and took so much time that each time I started reading it I only made it through a few stanzas before I was too tired to carry on. By doing it this way, I lost the flow of the story so badly that I could hardly remember from one day to the next what I had read before.

Occasionally the beauty of the language caught my attention, but mostly it was unpleasant work. I don’t remember how long I struggled though it like this before I finally quit, thinking I just wasn’t capable of understanding it.

It was after that failure that I read what C.S. Lewis said about the story in various places. He said that up until the early 20th century, children’s versions of the story were pretty common, and he made it sound like something a regular person could read with pleasure—like it didn’t require any special training or knowledge, so I started over with my children, as I described last time, reading children’s versions.

This time, when it was time to read Spenser Himself, instead of reading from my modernized and annotated version, I read aloud from the fat Penguin book. This edition has a little commentary and plenty of notes explaining unfamiliar words, but they’re all located in the back of the book instead of cluttering up the pages of the text.

 

The method

Two or three times a week, during our Morning Time, I’d read aloud an entire canto, pausing occasionally to let the children narrate. Reading this much at one go is essential to the experience. Spenser’s poetry isn’t the kind where you ought to linger over individual lines or words, as you might do with Shakespeare or Donne. It is poetry, written with a very exacting meter and rhyme scheme, but the words aren’t the point—the images and the mood are. To enter this story, we must not only “surrender ourselves with childlike attention to the mood of the story,” but we must read it like Spenser’s original audience, “an audience who have settled down to hear a long story and do not much want to savour each line as a separate work of art.”

 

Preparation

The one thing I did in the way of preparation was to look over the commentary and explanatory notes in the back of the book the night before I planned to read the canto to my children. If there were any unfamiliar words, I’d make a brief entry in the margin of the text, so that I would know what the words of the text meant. In this way I could read the whole line with understanding.

Sometimes there were particular words or names or literary allusions that were going to come up in the canto that I felt my kids needed to be acquainted with before they met them in the story. In this case I’d briefly say something before we started the canto.

On very rare occasions, while I was reading I substituted the translation for the original word. I did this when the original word might cause misunderstanding, but wasn’t the kind of word I wanted to spend any teaching time on.

 

Demonstration

Since all of this is easier done than said (heh) I’m going to share a recording of myself reading the first three stanzas of Book I, Canto 1. This way I’ll be able to show you several different things. Here’s the text, with my own marginal notes added (based on the notes from the back of my Penguin edition.

 

The first thing you’ll notice from this image is the crazy spellings, and not just words like “mightie” and “deepe.” Those are easy enough to figure out. The hard ones are words like siluer/silver, euer/ever, Vpon/Upon, and iolly/jolly. You’ll get used to it in time, I promise! The U/V swap happens often enough that you’ll probably have no trouble within just a few stanzas. The I/J swap takes longer to get the hang of because it doesn’t happen as often. It really is a learning curve, but stick with it! Before too long you’ll feel like you’re mastering a new language (and really, you are—Early Modern English isn’t quite the same thing as Present Day English).

 

Kelly Cumbee · Faerie Queene I.1.1 - 3

Now you’ll notice that I’m pronouncing the words in my everyday read-aloud voice, not trying to recreate Elizabethan English or even stick to Spenser’s rhyme scheme. As I said, the poem is written according to a very strict meter and rhyme scheme, and those things are beautiful in themselves, but they aren’t the point of The Faerie Queene. The point is the story itself. I’m reading in a way that’s natural to the setting—reading aloud to my children so that they can experience the story.

 

And here’s a slightly different example from Book IV, Canto 1.

In this one, when I get to the word “sterve,” which is the word “starve,” I might go ahead and substitute “die” because the point is that the character is thriving off of her victims’ deaths, not their hunger. The meaning of the word has changed enough in the last few centuries, and this is an important enough aspect of the story, that I feel the change could be justified. Use your own judgement.

 

That’s it!  

• Do a little prep work before you read aloud. 
• Plan to read the entire canto in one sitting. 
• Pause every once in a while to let the kids narrate. You’ll be surprised how much they’ve retained from reading the children’s versions.

 

In my next post, I’ll list several editions I can heartily recommend, including two with updated spellings.

How to read The Faerie Queene; or, You are already qualified to read Spenser's masterpiece

Many of you know that last school year I taught a year-long class on Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. To help prepare myself for the classes, I spent hours and hours reading commentaries and scholarly essays on the poem, because I wanted to give my students (mostly adults, but a few high schoolers as well) value for their money. If you’re going to pay for a class, you should get more out of it than you can get just by reading something on your own.

Before deciding to teach the class, I had read The Faerie Queene aloud with my children three times over the previous several years. I loved the poem and wanted to share it with other homeschool families, so that, in my opinion, was my main qualification for teaching it—I was familiar with it and I loved it.

But what qualified me to read it to my kids in the first place? I don’t have a college degree, let alone a degree in English. I didn’t have any specialized knowledge of Edmund Spenser or Elizabethan England or of the kind of poetry Spenser was writing.

The only qualification I had was that I wanted to read it. And I wanted to read it because I loved C.S. Lewis, and he loved The Faerie Queene.

The only specialized knowledge I had was that I knew the Bible pretty well, I was fairly familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, and with fairy tales and the legends of King Arthur. Really you can’t even call that specialized knowledge. All of that is what every child ought to have been listening to from birth, “building blocks of story,” as Angelina Stanford says, summarizing Northrop Frye and his brilliant commentaries on literature.

So, how do you, dear Homeschool Mama, begin reading this glorious masterpiece to your own children?

Here’s what I did with my four children who were still at home with me—my fifteen year old daughter, thirteen year old son, and eleven year old daughter, plus my nineteen year old special-needs son.

Charlotte Mason suggests having younger children read from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare before reading the bard himself so that they will be familiar with the stories. I felt it was even more important to do this with Spenser’s Faerie Queene, since the language in his poem is more difficult than in Shakespeare’s plays.

Most of us are familiar with C.S. Lewis’s mention of first reading The Faerie Queene from a large illustrated volume on a rainy day. Here is the quote in full:

Beyond all doubt it is best to have made one’s first acquaintance with Spenser in a very large—and, preferably, illustrated—edition of The Faerie Queene, on a wet day, between the ages of twelve and sixteen; and if, even at that age, certain of the names aroused unidentified memories of some still earlier, some almost prehistoric, commerce with a selection of “Stories from Spenser,” heard before we could read, so much the better.
(“On Reading ‘The Faerie Queene,’” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, p. 146)

I had been reading Margaret Hodges and Trina Schart Hyman’s gorgeously illustrated edition of Saint George and the Dragon since before some of these children were born, and Lewis’s words here spurred me on to find another high quality children’s edition of the whole story, for he says that that’s where even the mature reader must start, if not with the children’s versions, at least with the child’s unjaded appetite for stories like “Jack the Giant Killer,” and his lack of awareness of any allegory or moral purpose. In the same essay, Lewis says,

It may not be necessary for all readers at all stages of the narrative to know exactly what the poet means, but it is emphatically necessary that they should surrender themselves to the sense of some dim significance in the background—that they should feel themselves to be moving in regions “where more is meant than meets the ear.”

 

I found two beautifully written editions that served us well. The first and shortest is Stories from the Faerie Queen by Jeanie Lang. Her book is just a few chapters long, roughly one chapter per book of Spenser’s FQ, each taking 15-20 minutes to read aloud. The second is Mary Macleod’s much longer Stories from the Faerie Queene. The chapters are all “read-aloud” length, like Lang’s, but Macleod’s book covers the poem in much more detail than Lang’s book.

Our method was to read a chapter of Lang one day (kids narrating), then in the following days I would read aloud the corresponding chapters from Macleod (again having the kids narrate). Then I read aloud from my Penguin edition of The Faerie Queene (pausing occasionally for narrations). In this way we worked through FQ, one book at a time.

If your kids are much younger than mine were, say all under twelve, you could read aloud the whole Lang book, and later read aloud the whole Macleod. Do be sure to have your kids narrate both books. This way they’ll be so familiar with the basic outline of the story that when you get to Spenser they’ll be able to follow the Elizabethan poetry without trouble in the way that Lewis describes.

In my next post, I’ll give some tips for reading the full edition of The Faerie Queene.