Thursday 19 November 2009

Epic treatment

Back in 1993, I was hunting down a lengthy treatment of the Rudel legend by an obscure 19th-century poet named John Graham (a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford), and finally found a copy in the British Library. I ordered the whole, epic thing on microfiche. That was what you had to do back then.

I reproduced a few stanzas in the Outremer anthology and thought about transcribing the whole thing at some point. Good thing I didn't, because Jaufré Rudel or, The Pilgrim of Love is now online at openlibrary.org. All 137 pages of it. It isn't all that bad, in fact. Some nice imagery and turns of phrase. It's just very long.

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