Literary Soup

I take English Lit 12 through SIDES, our local distance education school. It is a very exciting course...I had been looking forward to taking Lit 12 at GNS with one of my favorite teachers since grade 9. He read for us passages from Chaucers' "Canterbury Tales" in the traditional old English, and "Beowulf" in the Anglo-Saxon tongue. I was inspired and enthralled that something someone hundreds of years ago had spoken and written had survived, and that I could still connect to the characters, and laugh at the follies of the pilgrimages and their fascinating glimpse of 14th century life, and cry on the beach as Beowulf lay, dying, but triumphant against his last fire-breathing foe. I had been hooked on reading ever since I got past the first big hurdle of actually learning to read. I was against the idea, determined to never read, but instead work at a gas station or McDonalds. Times have changed.

I am currently working my way through the "Canterbury Tales", which I spent the greater part of today working on. I have a wonderful audio-book version of the poem, which saves me the headache of wading through the soup of old-English's abundance of odd vowels and consonants, whose sound has evolved over the years.
To complete a 'literary-ily' perfect day, I scored big points with the rare word qiviut, coming to us from the Inuktitut word ᕿᕕᐅᖅ. I feel like such a fibre nerd. I am slowly picking up drops of energy, but am trying to rest up for whatever excitements of life await me this week!

Qiviut: the wool of the musk-ox