the heroic task of sweeping a crowded bunny room

We have accomplished stuff this weekend! We did not take apart & put back together the greenhouse cabinet (as I hoped), but we did switch out all the living room rugs, which takes a couple of hours due to moving all the furniture and bunny furniture and then putting it all back.

As usual, the bunnies thought we were having a party and cutely celebrated (excited zooming and binkies). Bunnies actually do clean things - they rearrange stuff in their area that is not where they want it, sometimes making hilarious little angry grunts. They don't seem to regard it as fun when they do it, but when we do, they always love it. They might just like that things are happening? Or maybe it's like they get a whole new territory to explore because the furniture is so big compared to them? Anyway.

We've been doing all this in order to sweep the living room for ten years, but we haven't ever found a way to make the process more streamlined. So I suppose there probably isn't one, although if we had a builder with a garage full of power tools they could make us a modular bunny fence that would be easier to move and rearrange, but that would only shave off five or ten minutes.

The "medieval eclectic" pastiche language of William Morris's quest novels

When I first picked up one of the so-called "quest novels" of admired comrade William Morris (socialist, furniture and wallpaper designer, passionate medievalist fanperson), I was a little put off by the density and wordiness, as well as the ways they deviate from the modern novel. These are Victorian adventure novels inspired largely by medieval romance (eg Arthuriana), written in an artificially archaic style sprinkled with Middle English vocabulary (although I have since learned that a lot of it was actually from Scots, or rather was both, and he probably picked it up from Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels, which were apparently his childhood favorites).

But after a while it was just this language - which I saw an academic in a Youtube lecture call "medieval eclectic" - that enchanted me the most about them. ( Read more... )

This is partly why I'm currently rereading all of them, after finishing the last one last year - I didn't have anything else to read that sounds like them. (But it's interesting reading them when I know more of the context, too.) In order of publication, then, this is where it stands: The Hollow Land (1856), A Tale of the House of the Wolfings, and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse (1889) & its sequel The Roots of the Mountains (1889), The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), The Wood Beyond the World (1894), Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1895), The Well at the World's End (1896), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897), The Sundering Flood (1897).

So why are The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains in italics? Well, that's because I have tried three times before to read The House of the Wolfings and I kept failing out of it because (1) it's about 30% rhyming poetry instead of prose, like a musical: the characters sometimes just break out into rhyming poems. (2) it's one of the least fantastic of his novels: it's about germanic tribes fighting the roman expansion from the tribes' point of view, and the fantastic elements are limited to the existence of magical dwarf-forged armor and seers with true visions of the future. (The Roots of the Mountains is a sequel, but generations later.) These are the only ones that aren't rereads, but I ran out of other ones, so I am determined this time. Also, I read Graham Seaman's 2003 introduction to The Roots of the Mountains:

If The House of the Wolfings was an admiring reconstruction of old Germanic clan-based society as a self-contained world, The Roots of the Mountains shows the ability of that society to revitalise others. The "others" in this case are another Germanic people; one settled in small towns and villages in the valleys at the foot of the mountains. They are a people in the process of losing their past[... ]; the heroic age is over for [them] [...]. Into this quiet, unromantic rural world come two outside forces: the descendants of the Sons of the Wolf themselves [...] who have migrated west to the mountains [...]; and the Huns, or 'Dusky Men'. Depleted in numbers (many have gone to fight as mercenaries for the Romans), evicted from their settlement by the Huns, the Sons of the Wolf still remember Thiodulf and their heroic past [...]. The Roots of the Mountains seems to be the story that inspired the subplot of the Dunedain, wanderers of fading heroic past defending the frontiers of the Shire against the Orcs, and the loves of Aragorn, Eowyn, Faramir, and Arwen in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

This sounds like it won't be mostly battles, hopefully, and it also sounds different from any of the other quest novels! But I have to finish the first one first.