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Location: Austin, TX, United States

Scholar, Writer, Mother, Dreamer. Editor of Luminarium, an online library for English Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Prologus

I've been thinking about doing a blog for some time, and my friend Corr convinced me tonight that it was time. So here goes. I feel like adding some sort of disclaimer here, à la the Renaissance writers who would pen a "To the Gentle Reader" to beg for forgiveness in advance for the supposed unworthiness of their output. But, perhaps I'll just quote Gottfried of Strassburg instead who, in the prologue to his "Tristan" wrote:


“I have undertaken a labor, a labor out of love for
the world, and to comfort noble hearts: those that I
hold dear, and the world to which my heart goes
out. Not the common world do I mean, of those
who (as I have heard) cannot bear grief and desire
but to bathe in bliss. (May God then let them dwell
in bliss!) Their world and manner of life my tale
does not regard: its life and mine lie apart. Another
world do I hold in mind, which bears together in
one heart its bitter sweetness and its dear grief, its
heart's delight and its pain of longing, dear life and
sorrowful death, dear death and sorrowful life. In
this world let me have my world, to be damned
with it, or to be saved.”


—GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG



So thus, gentle reader, I remain,
Ani



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