More Fun To Call It Middle Earth

Learning a Language, Fordow, Pride, Kicking Cans, &tc.

Dear Friends,

Things have been a bit topsy turvy around here. My bride had an emergency surgery over the weekend and while she’s recovering well she is recovering … slowly. So it’s been up to me hunt and gather and try to maintain the household. I’m glad to be in a position to do so. “Hunting and gathering” meant smoking two pork shoulders. Carnitas and pulled pork sandwiches every day for the next week! Could be a lot worse.

This might just be a middle-age thing: My brother has taken up learning Spanish—a very useful thing to do. I have decided to do something not nearly so useful. I’m continuing to dabble in Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, or, more specifically, West Saxon, in the hopes that it becomes more than dabbling. I got inspired again when I read in John’s gospel:

Hē wæs on middanearde, and middaneard wæs geworht þurh hine, and middaneard hine ne gecnēow

Yes, the Anglo-Saxons had it, “He was on Middle-Earth, and though Middle-Earth was made through him, Middle-Earth did not know him.” Obviously, that’s just their word for “world” and it doesn’t have the same connotations for them as it does to us, living as we do in Professor Tolkien’s world.

But the language is just too cool not to learn, and apparently when you get to around fifty that’s what you do: you learn a new language. I’ve got an Old English grammar on the way that I found on Ebay, and I’m getting help from a couple of apps: Word-Hord, a “word of the day” thing that also has a cool widget for my phone that gives the date in Old English. I’m writing this on tiwesdæg, mæd-monaþ I. Tuesday, July 1st. The word of the day is mere-þyssa, a “sea rusher, a ship.” I am also using LP Old English, a vocabulary app that tests you by way of multiple choice exercises. But mostly I am planning to really learn West Saxon by reading the gospels—the good old “immersion” method. From there I can branch out into reading other extant material from King Ælfred and poets like Cynewulf and, of course, Beowulf.

If you’d like to hear what it sounds like, click here to check out this superb recitation of the Nicene Creed!

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This is really a remarkable story that was easy to miss in the flood of news reports in the aftermath of the Iran bombing. The attack on the Fordow nuclear enrichment facility was fifteen years in the making. Specifically, two intelligence officers literally spent fifteen years eating, breathing, and sleeping while thinking about the Fordow facility. Their job was to prepare for the eventuality that the U.S. military may have to deal with it someday, at some point. Along the way they concluded that our military couldn’t deal with Fordow, so they got involved in developing a bomb designed for that specific purpose. So, when the President ordered the strike on that facility, bear in mind that someone had the foresight fifteen years earlier to prepare for it. Not many of us get that kind of "job satisfaction.” Wisdom in action.

General Caine tells the story much better than I, so give it a watch.

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