{"id":7652,"date":"2020-02-23T13:15:58","date_gmt":"2020-02-23T13:15:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=7652"},"modified":"2020-02-23T13:15:58","modified_gmt":"2020-02-23T13:15:58","slug":"the-man-in-the-moon-ludlow-circa-1314-1349","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2020\/02\/23\/the-man-in-the-moon-ludlow-circa-1314-1349\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Man in the Moon&#8221;, Ludlow, circa 1314-1349"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In my readings on Tolkien I&#8217;ve been pleased to discover another supernatural lyric narrative poem from the Midlands, which in time and spirit seems to sit alongside <em>Gawain and the Green Knight<\/em> on which I recently wrote a book.  The &#8220;Man in the Moon&#8221; lyric is from the Harley MS. 2253, also known as &#8220;The Harley Lyrics&#8221;.  The best authorities say this performative verse is from &#8220;a single scribe working in Ludlow, south Shropshire&#8221; (now in Shropshire) and must have been written by a scribe who was active c. 1314 to c. 1349.  Which puts it about a generation before <em>Gawain<\/em>, and in a similarly liminal border-place in the Western Midlands. A touch of Welsh, apparently detectable in a few words, also pins it to the English fringe of the Welsh Marches. It thus has the same difficulty of language and translation that <em>Gawain<\/em> has, but is just as lively. It has the Man in The Moon coming down to earth, and behaving in a strange &#8216;alien from the stars&#8217; manner, and thus in a way it&#8217;s sort of weird &#8216;proto science-fiction&#8217;. I&#8217;ve made a free translation of it that some may enjoy.<\/p>\n<p><em>This post is now superseded by the new fuller version <a href=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2022\/03\/29\/the-man-in-the-moon-3-0\/\">The Man in the Moon 3.0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my readings on Tolkien I&#8217;ve been pleased to discover another supernatural lyric narrative poem from the Midlands, which in time and spirit seems to sit alongside Gawain and the Green Knight on which I recently wrote a book. The &#8220;Man in the Moon&#8221; lyric is from the Harley MS. 2253, also known as &#8220;The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}