A while back, a friend asked on Cohost for a list of some of the older textual influences on Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright with advice about where to find/read them. In response, I wrote something—on Cohost—which various people thought helpful and interesting. This itch devlog has duplicated most of my writing relating to CWKB on Cohost, but not that particular listing, so I'm putting a refurbished and improved version up here.

Classical epic and its Scots and English translations

Classical epics formed one group of influences. The Aeneid and the Iliad stand out most here, and the Aeneid most of all: in some ways CWKB rewrites parts of the Aeneid, because aspects of Vergil's work amaze me and other aspects frustrate me. If you want a grasp on where parts of CWKB Books II and III—and parts of the final books of the poem—come from, and a sense for where I've pointedly changed things, this is the big one.

There're decent prose translations of these into English; for me, the canonical modern English prose translations are E. V. Rieu's Iliad and David West's Aeneid, but that's just because I grew up with them.

I studied Homer at school, but my Greek's rusty, so I've only very occasionally looked in detail at the Greek text for moments in Iliad. I did look at some earlier English translations for inspiration (and in a few places, phrases that I steal), and the most important of these to me was George Chapman's sixteenth-century translation, which is on Project Gutenberg. I wouldn't suggest trying to use Chapman to read Homer start to finish, but if you're reading a modern translation and want a point of comparison, Chapman's super interesting and—to my mind!—rather fun. He writes in a long, thumping, thundering—or ponderous, when it doesn't work—verse line.

Some of my thinking about the Iliad draws on Simone Weil's famous essay ‘L’Iliade ou le poème de la force’. I don't find Weil's account of the poem convincing as, like, informed literary criticism of Homer. But I think it has a lot of merit as a passionate and thoughtful response to the Iliad from the crucible of the middle of the last century. Look out for a few lines in CWKB which nod to it. You can find an old and somewhat contested English translation of it circulated widely online for free; you can compare that translation to a newer one and, in parallel, the French text in Holoka's Critical Edition of the essay, published by Peter Lang.

I did consult the Aeneid in Latin, but again I also looked at some earlier translations. The most significant of these is Gavin Douglas's Eneados, a sixteenth-century Scots translation. That's on PG too. Again, if you're not used to earlier Anglic-language verse, I wouldn't necessarily say this is the optimal way to read Vergil, but it's a fun thing to sample.

Also in the first half of the sixteenth century, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, translated the second and fourth books of the Aeneid. (He cribbed quite substantially from Douglas!) Surrey's translation forms one of the early examples of the metrical model for the 'normal bits' of CWKB, blank verse: simple, unrhymed five-beat lines ('blank' because it has neither regular rhyme nor regular alliteration). Surrey's choice helped lay down the tie between blank verse and epic in English, a tie that ossified with Paradise Lost in the seventeenth century. When I say 'ossified' I mean that both positively and negatively!

The Odyssey had much less influence on CWKB, though some details in Odysseus' conversations with the dead in Book XI did make it into the analogous passage in CWKB Book IX; I discussed that in my devlog post on the underworld.

The tradition of classical epic and its later reception together inspired the various long similes in CWKB, which I wrote about in a previous devlog post.

Early English works

English before about 1500 is more my bread and butter than early Greek and Latin. While Old and Middle English works provided less of the plot model, they supply a lot of the vocabulary used in Kin-Bright, for reasons I wrote about a while back, to do with making English seem less like a default, normative language today. So, for instance, in a passage I'm writing at present, I call an encrypted comms channel token-holstered, and I choose the phrase with an eye to those words' etymologies.

Alliterative-verse poems also supply some of the formal models for the more stylised high speech that some of the characters use. Most often, this is later Middle English alliterative verse on the model of poems from c. 1350 on (I discussed the metrical details before). The high speech of the Herald in Book IV, though, draws on Old English alliterative-verse metre, which is a bit different; that passage also riffs in its content on the hail offered by the herald early in the Old English poem we now call Beowulf. A few other passages in the poem use something modelled on the earlier, Old English, style of alliterative verse: the speech of the Queen of Worm-Spine Hall in Book X is another example.

So the works I'll list in this section will be source of more diffuse influence. (And at least one will be prose!)

Old English

Something I teach but don't research. Often a source of vocabulary and compounds for me.

• Beowulf

Beowulf sits in the background to various parts of the poem. It comes to the fore in the lament for one character at the end of Book VIII, and in a passage in Book XI that reworks the allusions in Beowulf to the story that seems also partially told in the Finnesburg Fragment.

It's easy enough to find editions of the original text of Beowulf online, both born-digital ones and old out-of-copyright ones. They won't have the very latest emendations but editors don't emend Beowulf all that much anyway.

As far as translations go, both Heaneywulf and Headleywulf achieve, in different ways, big contributions to English poetry and both are, in different ways, very good fun. Neither is especially faithful to the raw semantic matter of the original, and for that I'd suggest Roy Liuzza's translation or—even flatter and more straightforward—E. Talbot Donaldson's translation.

CWKB borrows from and alludes to several other OE poems, including (these are, it's worth remembering, modern titles):

• The Dream of the Rood
• The Wanderer
• The Battle of Maldon
• Andreas
• and the 'Battle of Brunanburh' passage from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Translations of these can be found swiftly online; you might want to read several translations. In some cases the allusions in Kin-Bright are pretty fleeting.

If you want to get into reading Old English extensively, the following might be useful:

• Marsden's Cambridge Old English Reader
• the Mitchell and Robinson Guide to Old English—good if you have some pre-existing linguistics/philology
• Old English Aerobics and Baker's Introduction to Old English

Basic Old English reading proficiency takes a little bit of discipline and study, and has to be treated like learning another foreign language, with all the (dis)pleasures of a dead language: hapax legomena, a lack of living speakers to solve our problems for us, &c. But if you have present-day English, it's not a terribly hard foreign language. (If you're lucky enough to have present-day English and one of present-day German, Dutch, Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, or Frisian, it's pretty easy.) Once acquired, suddenly a lot of the maddening quirks of present-day English make a bit more sense, although they remain just as maddening.

If you're interested in parallel-text hard copy, a fairly recent (i.e. third-millennium) feature of Old English studies are the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library volumes which present Old English text and present-day English translation side-by-side, and have rather nice typesetting. These're worth a look if you have access to a good university library, or enough spare cash for book buying. They don't do local glossing, though, and their notes tend to be concise. 

Middle English

A big source of formal models. The end of the Arthurian legend as transmitted in Middle English also played a key role in the initial idea for CWKB. With glossing and a bit of patience—it gets easier every hour—anyone with present-day English can read later Middle English.

• the Alliterative Morte Arthure

Listed in part first because, unusually, this is a long Middle English poem with a good, modern, student-focused online edition, featuring some spelling regularisation and frequent, sensitive glossing. You can find this edition here.

The AMA poet loves writing a good battle, and has a typical fourteenth-century chauvinism about anyone who's not English, but also keeps up a sharp, bleeding sense of the hubris, cost, and final failures of empire. Only Fortune rules; she strikes knights and kings as cruelly as the lowest pauper. An extended passage in Book XI reworks a dream sequence from the Alliterative Morte.

Translations of the Alliterative Morte lie thin on the ground, but Simon Armitage did a decent verse translation fairly recently. During covid's first waves, Siân Echard recorded a rough-and-ready reading of the poem aloud; it's not exactly how I would do it, but she put in the effort and the points on which I differ are not, as they say, salvation issues.

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

SGGK, by contrast, is pretty famous! If I had to pick one translation of this, I'd pick Keith Harrison's for Oxford World's Classics, partly because it's clear and doesn't grow over-ambitious, and partly because it comes with an excellent introduction from Helen Cooper, a titan of Middle English romance studies. But I've not read a modern translation of this from a reputable publisher that wasn't, like, at least okay.

The original text can be found in various places online and is a marvel of formal construction, with, unusually and astonishingly, a stanza form that manages to be internally stichic and to marry alliterative-verse metre and alternating metre. If you want to invest in a print copy, the Penguin Classics Putter-Stokes edition of all four of the poems found in the relevant manuscript presents the Middle English with sensible emendations, regularised spelling, and great glossing and notes.

Although the poem emerged roughly contemporary to Chaucer's career, it offers more of a challenge to present-day readers, in part because its dialect sat further from the ancestor-variety of present-day English than Chaucer's dialect, and in part thanks to the poet's love of abstruse poeticisms. It's worth persisting, though: people grow obsessed with it for good reason. The loose 2021 film adaptation, The Green Knight, makes for a fun point of comparison, and wisely doesn't stick too close to its source. It doesn't even spoil the poem's ending!

Pearl, another poem possibly by the same poet as SGGK in (confusingly) lines that alliterate but don't use alliterative-verse metre, influenced one detail in the underworld.

• Troilus and Criseyde

Chaucer's best poem, a doomed love affair set almost entirely within the besieged walls of Tar Troy, funny, sad, and uncomfortably exploring the messiness of power, consent, and free will in human affection. T&C uses seven-line ababbcc 'rhyme royal' stanzas, but metrically it's pretty close to CWKB, in five-beat lines. I use the same stanza form, Chaucer's invention, for most of Books IX and X of CWKB (I wrote more about that in a different devlog post).

The Middle English text of T&C can be found in Skeat's older but acceptable (for reading for pleasure) edition on Project Gutenberg. The Norton Critical Edition of the original text of Troilus and Criseyde has very helpful glossing and is a friendly, convenient paperback; the same text and gloss appear in the Norton Chaucer.

Barry Windeatt published a prose translation which stays very faithful to direct meaning and consequently reads very flatly. If you get into T&C and want a modern poet's response, Lavinia Greenlaw's Double Sorrow is a good time.

• The Destruction of Troy

The longest alliterative-verse poem surviving in Old or Middle English; almost never read today. This is the conventional medieval European historiographical version of the Trojan War legend: shorn of the heroism found (sometimes) in Homer's Iliad, presented as a piece of martial Realpolitik, and woven into some of the preceding legends (e.g. Jason and the Golden Fleece). The verse isn't as brilliant as the Gawain-Poet or the AMA-Poet, but it's solid.

There's a recent Japanese edition of this, but no one can find a copy; I've never laid eyes on it. The 1869 Panton-Donaldson edition is on Google Books, and it's, ah, okay. The transcription of the manuscript's not great, and almost nothing in the introductory material is accurate.

Fun fact: we found out, long after 1869, that the poet was called John Clerk, because he put his name acrostically into the first lines of the poem's books.

• Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur

I'm basically in the Malory-sceptic camp, in that I think quite a lot of the beauty of Malory's prose happened by accident… the beauty's still there, though, in his clipped brevity and demanding parataxis. Malory's close to comprehensible to the present-day English speaker with zero preparation. In fact, LMD is the earliest English work in the Oxford World's Classics series to be published without translation.

Caxton's version of Malory's text, significantly edited in its journey to print, can be easily found online. Editions drawing on the Winchester Manuscript and offering something close to Malory's original text are all (I think?) still in copyright. Helen Cooper did a good edition for Oxford World's Classics with light spelling modernisation and some sensitive abridgements; Dorsey Armstrong did a modernisation job heavy enough to count as a translation in her edition; P. J. C. Field's recent single-volume paperback offers a barely-modernised and carefully edited text. (Don't confuse that with Field's massive two-volume hardback scholarly edition, selling for something like £200; that's for university library shelves!)

Aubrey Beardsley's lush 1893 cycle of decoration and illustration for LMD is worth a Google.

• Sir Orfeo

A short, gnomic, strange version of the myth of Orpheus, in which Eurydice is spirited away by the King of Fairyland and Orfeo successfully retrieves her. I drew on Sir Orfeo in Book X (see, again, the devlog post on the underworld). Plus, it's a great, short poem worth reading.

You can find well-glossed, accessible presentations of two(!) different versions of the poem here and here. In print, Laura Ashe's lovely Penguin collection Early Fiction in England has a well-glossed version of the Middle English text.

Modern English

These tend to be easier to find in hard copy or online!

• the King James Version

When I've alluded to the Bible, I've alluded to the King James Version. That choice doesn't stem from confessional commitment. And it's worth remembering that the early-modern canon's heavy hitters, love 'em or hate 'em, grew up with the Geneva Bible rather than the KJV.  However, the King James did a great deal to shape what present-day English speakers find resonant and memorable; it and Shakespeare together bear a lot of responsibility for what we think of as high style today, either sincerely or in parody.

• Paradise Lost

I've mentioned Paradise Lost already. Shreds from various parts of it crop up in CWKB at the small scale, and I borrow from Milton's description of war in heaven for some of the later books in CWKB. The postmodifying adjectives and delayed verbs in CWKB might make it sound Miltonic at points, but that's rarely conscious borrowing. If the resemblance arises, it's probably the generic effect of modern English speakers imitating Latin syntax.

• Sundry others, including:

Dryden's translation of the Aeneid obviously echoes through the opening line—I don't think its fame can be avoided—but doesn't appear much elsewhere.

The poets Michael Field—not one man but two women—provided some kernels of raw material, and particularly informed the dawn-song in Book X, as described in a previous post.

A few touches in the battles were borrowed from David Jones's In Parenthesis, which might be the best English poem to emerge from the First World War. In Parenthesis itself keeps up a thickly woven dialogue with Arthurian tradition, including Malory.

In my efforts to think myself into the head of a narrating position that believes many strange and different things, I owe debts to a bunch of writers. But I want to single out particularly Mary Renault, especially her books The King Must Die, The Bull from the Sea, and The Last of the Wine (Renault was very good at titles, among other things).

Though I haven't taken much material directly from it, I also want to give a shout-out to Harry Josephine Giles's Deep Wheel Orcadia as a recent and impressive effort to sustain engaging narrative verse speculative fiction. It's very different to what I've tried to do in CWKB, but I found it encouraging.

Not writings

I lack the energy to talk in detail right now about the various anime and games that CWKB draws from. I also suspect the audience here will know more about some of these than they will about the more obscure texts discussed above, and will likely know how to find these more easily too. So, instead, a bare list of some:

Anime

• Aura Battler Dunbine
• Crest/Banner of the Stars
• Dancouga
• Dear Brother
• Gankutsuou
• Gundam
• Heroic Age
• Iria
• Panzer World Galient
• Simoun
• Space Battleship Yamato
• Space Runaway Ideon
• To Terra
• Uchuu Senshi Baldios

Games

• Heaven Will Be Mine
• House of the Dying Sun
• Homeworld and Homeworld 2
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
• Wing Commander (the first one)

(Image: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, folio 56 recto.)