Stock up on the ginger

This will be fun. Today is History AND Craft Project Wednesday.
The Prude wants to share this delightful little idea to make history enjoyable and edible.
Turn your historical figures into gingerbread men.
The folks on the platter were created by the Prude to give to her English history and lit class.
They represent some of our favorite real or fictional personages.

See if you can tell who is who.

-which is the Pictish warrior at the vanguard of the body paint/tattoo craze?
-which is  Celtic Queen Boudicca, a woman with a vendetta against the Romans?
-which is the Green Knight who lost his head over Sir Gawain?
-which is King Alfred the Great and his burned griddle cake, whose greatness did not extend to baking?
-which is the  Monster Grendal who would have given his right arm to defeat Beowulf?
-which one, with his Merry Men, robbed from the rich? (hint: the answer is not the US government)

Think of the fun you can have. You can make Lord of the Rings gingerbread men.
US Presidents.
American Idol contestants.
You could even move beyond human form and make the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
The Prude has dibs on the pyramid.

Tomorrow is Quirks of the Cosmos Thursday, and we may just have more fun looking at the results of the Iowa Caucus.

Beowulf Beef

The Prude’s high school English class has a beef with Beowulf.

They don’t mind that the author consistently tells us what will happen before it actually occurs.

They like the alliteration and they can comprehend the kennings.

Their intelligence can handle the meandering of historical insertions and they were patient with Beowulf’s never ever ending death scene.

But the author really let us down when he ran out of blood, guts and gore sometime after the slaughter of Grendal’s mother.

Any high schooler knows a good writer shouldn't peak too early.

Don’t give the reader copious amounts of gushing innards at the beginning of the story and then retreat to tossed-off references about bloody water late in game.

By the time poor old desperately-trying-to-regain-his-youth Beowulf is fighting the

dragon, our author also seems to have run out of steam.  The slashing, the limb-tearing, the bodily-fluids spurting is discreetly minimalistic.

It’s almost as though the writer wanted to restrain himself, and focus on the pathos of the dying king and his faithful thane instead of indulging readers in the delights of melting brain matter and severed sinews.

Pathos is all very nice in small doses. But The Prude’s English class knows that it should never overpower the glory of gore.

Unleash the word-hoard!

If The Prude told you that a kenning is a metaphorical circumlocution, signifying a person or thing by a characteristic or quality, would you get flesh creeps up and down your back rod?

Oh dear, she meant to say ‘shivers up and down your spine.’

Honestly. Once you get started at kennings, they are a hard habit to break.

Just look at the author of ‘Beowulf’. He used over a 1000. He recounts how Beowulf sailed over the whale-road under the sky candle wearing his mail-shirt to protect his bone-house.

Ahhh. Sheer poetry.

Kennings, my friend, are everywhere. Just allow your thought-abode to open the kenning-door.

The dog didn’t go to the groomer,

the flea-transporter went to the fur-tamer.

The Prude isn’t having her coffee in front of her computer,

she is drinking her snooze-defeater while observing her universe-repository.

(Her husband has other names for the computer:

time-waster, wife-thief, cuss-inducer are the most printable)

It is supposed to rain tonight at The Prude’s. And while rain is many things to many people (heaven’s-beaker, ((technically the rain CLOUD would be heaven’s beaker, but The Prude likes it)) puddle-creator, earth-refresher) tonight, since it will ruin her social activity plan, it is a bonfire-assassinator.

Are you getting excited to toss a few kennings around today? The Prude is just positive that your family will have endless hours of fun figuring them out. (Did mom just tell us to clean our sleep-domains of all the slop-mountains or she would remove all our brain-drainer privileges? That mom–what a kenning-card!)

Maybe The Prude will try to patent a new game. What do you think- Kenning-opoly? Kennings to Kennings? Chutes and Kennings? Or Kenning Pursuit?

Please come back next ‘Readin’, ‘wRitin’, ‘Rithmetic and histoRy Wednesday' when we talk about spurting blood and guts in Beowulf.