Grǣġhama

Graham Scheper - Medievalist studying Old English (BA: @UofMaryland) and Latin literature

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

The Writings of the Venerable Bede is available now!

Read selections from his History, educational treatises, biblical commentaries, homilies, poems, letters, and even a few riddles, all in facing-page translation.

Link below ⬇️⬇️

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

@sofiartworks So cool. Here I picture him as halfway through his reign, maybe currently worrying about the political situation with the Swedes. Great job!

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

@megievalist They ruin everything 😔

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

The word ‘work’ comes from Old English weorc, which meant something that had been built/made/wrought (wrought itself comes from a verb ‘wyrċan,’ which is from the same root as ‘work’).

An alternate form was ‘ġeweorc,’ which survives in MnE handiwork (hand + ‘iwork’).

[Michael Drout @MikeDrout]

David Bratman has passed away after an illness that he kept absolutely private (so I will, also).
Even though I knew this was coming, I am having a lot of trouble processing this loss because I have been working with David since 2004, when he wrote his first Year's Work in Tolkien Studies for the journal. I had this big idea to write up in Tolkien Studies what we used to have in the Old English Newsletter: a brief evaluative summary of all the major work published in a given year so that new scholars or scholars entering a new subdivision could easily orient themselves to the field. The deadline for TS2 was rapidly approaching and I had not even started the systematic reading I would need to do when Doug Anderson said "You know, David Bratman already does something a lot like that. We should see if he would do it for Tolkien Studies." And, being David, he wildly exceeded my highest hopes for the Year's Work, which under his author- and then editorship synthesized the entire rapidly growing field of Tolkien Studies from 2005-2024 (the final Year's Work had 6 contributing authors and was over 60 pages long).
In 2011 David took over the annual Bibliography from me and my students when the combination of students graduating and my family responsibilities put me far behind on that chore. From that moment on I never had to worry about the completeness or accuracy of the Bibliography.
After Doug Anderson stepped away from the journal in 2012, Verlyn and I asked David to join us as co-editor, and in 2013 he agreed. In addition to evaluating and editing every submitted article (multiple times in most cases), David took special responsibility for the "back of the book" parts of the journal: not only the Year's Work and Bibliography, but all the Book Reviews that Doug had handled.
So for eleven years David, Verlyn, and I exchanged several dozen emails per week--sometimes 5-10 per day--as we put together Tolkien Studies volumes 10-20. You get used to 'hearing' someone's voice that way, and then hearing it again on the few conference calls or in-person meetings we managed to have as we put out the journal--no issue was ever entirely drama-free.
In 2025, when Verlyn retired, I begged David not to step down at the same time (which had been his plan), and despite even then being substantially affected by his illness, he worked with me to recruit Yvette Kisor as co-editor; the three of us co-edited volume 21. David then helped us recruit Kris Larsen to replace himself as co-editor, and even in what must have been close to in extremis, he completed the Bibliography for 2025, which will be printed in Tolkien Studies volume 22 (to be released any day now (some people may have already received their copies).
This bare summary--and even the somewhat more fleshed-out announcement in TS26 cannot possibly communicate what it was like to work with a scholar like David on a day-to-day basis for so long. I have never met anyone who held to standards of scholarly integrity with such meticulous accuracy and attention to detail. David had a reputation for being prickly, and he often was with me, but NEVER in a case in which he was unsure: if he told you you were wrong, you almost certainly were, and he knew how to draw bright lines between facts and opinions, interpretations, and evaluations (and much preferred the former). I wince at the thought of the number of emails of his that started "No. That was NOT what I meant, which was what I said ..." as a response to my sometimes awkward efforts to smooth over a rough interaction. It was not that David didn't care about people's feelings--you'll note that he never embarrassed junior scholars or students when they made public mistakes--but that he cared so intensely about scholarly accuracy, down to the last Elvish spelling, inverted comma, and extra white space (or last thereof). He had no patience for anyone calling him- or herself a "Tolkien scholar" who didn't know that Middle-earth has a hyphen and a lower-case e. And he rode herd on my tendency to be "flip" and "dismissive" even of people like Edmund "Bunny" Wilson, who didn't give JRRT the same respect David demanded we show them (he was right about this, also).
All that meticulous attention to detail, solid librarianship and bibliographic skill, however, should not distract from how subtle, nuanced, and sophisticated David's readings were. He was really the first person to explain how to use--and how to READ--the History of Middle-earth volumes, identifying the different voices Tolkien uses and explaining how each produces different kinds of aesthetic effects and has different levels of authority in the texts. The same 'ear' that made him such a connoisseur of Classical music made David a superb editor. Whereas I would get frustrated with authors and edit with a heavy hand, David was much better at nudging writers to develop the more effective arguments that lay unrecognized in their drafts. He was particularly good with the few undergraduate writers who have ended up publishing in Tolkien Studies and, perhaps even more importantly, in encouraging those we had to reject.
David was so rigorous about his very high standards that he could be trusted to judge his friends--and even his co-editors--just as strictly as he judged everyone else. At times this led to some tension among the co-editors, as David kept rejecting our articles for not making 100% of the revisions that he (and the anonymous outside reviewers) had demanded, but he never wavered, and he was right, and what was published in the journal met the highest standards regardless of who wrote it. If David Bratman said that your work was good, you should feel a warm glow inside, because there was no higher praise, and you could only receive it if you deserved to have it said about you.
I know David was very happy that Yvette and Kris had replaced him and Verlyn as co-editors and that Andy Higgins agreed to become the Book Review Editor of Tolkien Studies, and he was relieved that the changes planned for the Year's Work, Bibliography, and Book Reviews would preserve the Tolkien Studies "back of the book."
I know I am going on and on in a way that David would have made me cut if he were editing this, and he would probably be right, but it is really impossible to imagine that he is not going to be on the other side of the computer screen, meticulously catching even the slightest errors, cheerfully looking up all the page numbers for the standard reference editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and resolving and combining all the suggestions of the co-editors into one document for the press. It's impossible to think that if I include a "flip" comment or try to sneak an unsupported argument by through rhetorical tricks David won't be there to call me out and suggest more "measured" language. Most of all, I can't believe that I'll never again feel a smile creeping across my face as I recognize one of his subtle, understated, but perfectly on-point jokes or sarcastic asides or wry observations. I don't think they make scholars like David Bratman anymore, and even if they did, there will never be another David, and I really, really miss him.
Rest in Peace, my friend. I hope you are enjoying having all your Tolkien questions AND all your music questions answered.

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

@tolkienthoughts @UppsalaBooks Yes!

[Thoughts on Tolkien @tolkienthoughts]

Congrats to @grahamscheper on his new book with @UppsalaBooks! Happy to add it to my library and very much looking forward to reading it.

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

@Tvetaren Figuratively yes, but literally no, in the same way that in the sentence ‘I’m on a trip,’ the word trip means the act of traveling, not any physical location. It would be like referring to a battlefield as ‘the knight’s charge’ or referring to a mountain as ‘the climber’s ascent’

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

The word ‘road’ comes from Old English rād, which did not mean road (though it often gets translated that way) but rather a ‘riding.’

It could have a martial sense as well, whence (through Scots) we get ‘raid.’

So a ‘swanrād’ was not a ‘swan-road’ but the ‘riding of the swan.’

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

@Tom_Rowsell I don’t know, I think that kind of thing can be useful in studying an academic field, but in active debates, accusations of bias are unscientific and unnecessary. Logically it adds nothing to the argument

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

Yeah, I should say that plenty of scholars do say things like ‘Geoffrey and Gildas are just propagandists, we can’t listen to them,’ which is unprofessional and unproductive. The craziest propagandist can still be right.

The problem isn’t that Geoffrey of Monmouth is biased, it’s that he says King Arthur conquered the world and established a global British empire in the 6th century. Idk about you but for me that casts doubt on his credibility 😂

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

But you’re disagreeing with Pryor, not me. Yes, historians were wrong to suggest that there wasn’t a large-scale migration. But that doesn’t mean Gildas isn’t also wrong in his account, which describes a simple and quick genocidal murder spree executed by mercenaries under Vortigern. The picture Gildas paints is of entire cities being put to the sword and a wall of fire spreading across the entire island. The picture that Gretzinger et al. paints is much more complicated and gradual

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

We also have to admit that this is not always true. E.g., the closest account to the Adventus Saxonum (Gildas) is so exaggerated that it borders on fiction. We can’t trust it at all.

It’s not wrong to question sources, and it doesn’t reflect ‘hate’; just a desire for the truth.

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

Wow, no one could have possibly predicted that late-20th century “historiography” would be less accurate than the ancient sources that they hate so much.

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

@Caleb_Howells25 @rueghosts Overwhelmingly? How do you figure? Are you referring to Gretzinger et. al.? I think ‘overwhelmingly’ is a bit of a stretch; they conclude that their findings suggest a “complex, regionally contingent migration with partial integration.” Nothing at all like what Gildas describes.

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

@Elofiest Yeah, the notion that modern academics are motivated by hatred is incredibly naïve. It’s like saying Socrates was motivated by hatred for the gods

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

@rueghosts DNA and archaeological evidence is objective 🤷‍♂️

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

@oghofer Great choice!

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

@Adam100kg Haha, the misconception is that the Icelandic word is cognate with OE hron. Hron does mean a (small) whale

[Grǣġhama @grahamscheper]

Old English had at least three words for ‘wave’:

wǣġ (cognate 🇩🇪 Woge)
hærn (“ 🇮🇸 hrönn)
ȳþ (“ 🇳🇱 onde)

By the 16th century, the latter two had been lost, and wǣġ had been confused (seemingly) with the verb ‘wave’ (move back and forth). Thence the modern form.