My wife just got back from the annual medieval conference at Kalamazoo and among the more entertaining sessions she went to during the four days was a parody of conferences papers given at these things. Her favorite was an exegesis on that old Anglo-Saxon poem, "Beowabbit: New Light on an Ancient Tradition".

Among the topics under consideration for next year's parodies:

1. You Can See the Stars, but Still Not See the Light: The Eagles, St. Augustine, and Book I of De doctrina Christiana in Its Classical Rock Context.

2. Wash, Spin, Dry: Three New Approaches to Teaching the Arthurian Cycles.

3. One Tolkien Over the Line, Sweet Jesus: Suffer the Serious Medievalist to Listen to Yet More Inane Papers about Medieval Stuff and the [/i]The Lord of the Rings. (My wife's favorite since she teaches a course on Tolkien and medieval literature.)

4. The Saracens Made Us Do It: How Medieval Weapons of Mass Destruction Necessitated the Crusades Post-1066.
(My favorite.)

Regards

Maybe a bow that could shoot five arrows at one time.

Regards

ahhh.. I hope she went to the lecture on "Beowulf waltzs to Edoras: How we can fit Tolkien into our Medieval Studies 1 curriculum" :D

Now was it the Saracens that trained the killer bunny or the Byzantines...?

David,

Actually she did. (Beowulf comes, not waltzes. I kind of like waltzes better.) She heard three papers on how to apply Tolkien to get students interested in medieval literature. One of her closest friends at the conference delivered a paper on using Tolkien to teach languages.

Leigh wants to know how you knew about this session.

Regards

Oh, I'm a Tolkien nut myself, and a medieval nut to boot (of course, which is why I'm here) so I've been to the International Medieval Congress site and have browsed the topics ;) Sounds like it was great - wish I could go

David,

There's always next year. My wife's already working on her abstract for next year's conference. Perhaps she'll see tyou there.

Regards