A Book of Books of Books

On Monday, I had my first Research Skills for Medievalists class. It was probably one of the most exciting classes I've ever had. Not the most exciting, but I'm definitely putting it in the College Top Ten because of it's overwhelming usefulness.

We learned about bibliography books and concordances. Prof. Putter gave us each a booklet, a bibliography book of bibliography books, so to speak, containing all of the concordances and bibliography books pertaining to the Western Middle Ages.

Bibliography books are books that list every book written on a particular subject, along with a brief description of what that book covers. Think of them as almanacs. There are bibliography books on everything from Hispanic Arthurian Literature to Biographies of St. Augustine to Iconography of Christian Art. If you want to research, say, 12th century wool trade between England and Normandy, you could go to the Handbook of Medieval Exchange, where it would list all of the known documents and manuscripts pertaining to your topic and which libraries to find them in.

Then there are motif books. These books are a bit like thesauruses. They list all instances in which certain motifs show up in medieval literature. For example, there is the "Rash Boon" motif, where a person asks an unspecified favor of someone else, who grants it too quickly with no questions asked, and then finds the favor not to his or her liking. The motif book would list the motif (and description), and then give you all the variations on the theme. Variation one: The Lady of the Lake tells King Arthur that she will give him Excalibur in exchange for granting her a favor at a later date. Arthur, anxious to get his hands on a magical sword, agrees. A little while later, the Lady of the Lake rides into Arthur's court, where she tells the king that she wants him to decapitate his best knight and give her the head. Now Arthur seriously regrets granting the Lady of the Lake such a rash boon that day out on the pond, because he's unwilling to kill his best knight, unwilling to give up Excalibur, and unwilling to break his promise to a lady.

"King Arthur Asks the Lady of the Lake for the Sword Excalibur," Walter Crane

Variation two: Gwawl ap Clud tricks Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, into granting him any one thing within his power to give. Pwyll agrees, only to find out that this "one thing" is his bride-to-be, Rhiannon. He is forced to hand her over. It's up to Rhiannon to save the day, outwitting Gwawl and marrying her true love.

"Rhiannon," Alan Lee

Then there are concordances. The authors of these are sad little men and women with no social life and a sick sense of fun, for which we all thank them profusely. Concordances are like indices. They list every time a certain word or phrase is used in a text and on which line and page in the text each one can be found. This would have saved me so much time if I had known of these when I was doing my undergraduate thesis. There are over 800 instances in which a sword is mentioned in Beowulf, not to mention the swords in The Song of Roland, or worse yet, Le Morte d'Arthur (a book whose size gives the Bible a run for it's money). And I counted them all by myself. Now, come to find out, I could have just typed "sword*" into a concordance database (or found a hard copy, if need be) and voila! Now the only question that remains is: why were my earlier professors holding out on me?