5 Amazing Things I Learned About English Literature While Writing English Literature 101

I recently published a book called English Lit 101: A Crash Course in English Literature. “Crash course” is a pretty apt term, because it’s an overview (albeit a detailed one) of 50 or so of the most vital authors and their works to ever come out of the staggeringly good British literary tradition. It covers the last, oh, 700 years or so of British literature, all the way back to when it was in a language that’s barely recognizable as English. But it’s not dry in the least, and I learned a lot of really interesting stuff about some of the most important English authors of all time, stuff that made them seem not only human, but which also informed how I felt about their works, which I already knew inside and out. Here are just a few tidbits I learned while making English Lit 101 that were new to me.

King Arthur wasn’t English (at first)
Along with Robin Hood, the King Arthur stories form the bulk of a decidedly English cultural mythology and also provide a lot of the details of what we think about when we think about “medieval England.” And yet, the stories of Arthur, Lancelot, Merlin, and the Lady of the Lake did not originate in England—they’re from Wales and France. In eighth century Wales, a monk named Nennius hand-wrote the story of a warlord named Arthur who was said to have led Britons in defense against invading Saxon hordes in the Fifth Century. Those stories inspired an orally-passed down French epic poem that had solidified by the 1300s, which is what actually English writer Thomas Malory used to create the first English-language narrative of the King Arthur legends in 1484. (Confusingly, he gave them the confusingly French name of Le Morte d’Arthur, or, spoiler alert, “The Death of Arthur.”)

J.R.R. Tolkien is why Beowulf is well known
In addition to writing The Lord of the Rings and other tales of kings and quests, J.R.R Tolkien was a professor of literature and languages at England’s prestigious Oxford University. He was one of the leading experts in the world on Old English, to the extent that he wrote a paper called “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” in 1936. Literary historians credit Tolkien and his essay with single-handedly igniting 20th century interest into the study of the 1,000-year-old Beowulf as an important work, and the first written in (an early form of) English. The epic poem, about a warrior-king named Beowulf and his fight with a monster named Grendel, is actually what inspired Tolkien to write fiction. He wanted to write an old-fashioned tale of heroes and villains, too, and so he created Middle-Earth.

Frankenstein and the first vampire novel are the result of a writing contest
While most literary movements are proclaimed later on, and based upon a loose collection of similar authors writing apart, the Romantic era can be defined by a handful of writers who were all close friends. For example, one day in 1818, Lord Byron was hanging out with his friends, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his wife, Mary Shelley, on a house on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It was raining, and so the group killed some time by reading dark German stories; Mary Shelley was already a fan of the Brothers Grimm’s grim fairy tales. That inspired Byron to suggest a ghost story contest, from which Shelley wrote an entire novella: Frankenstein. Also hanging out on Lake Geneva that rainy day was author John William Polidori, who a year later published his own bit of darkness: The Vampyre, which introduced the concept of the bloodsucking vampire.

George Orwell invented Internet writing
Well, the guy behind classics like Animal Farm and 1984 didn’t really invent Internet-style journalism, because he died in 1950, which is before even AOL dialup was a thing. But he did pioneer the concept of writing passionately and at length about mundane subjects…which would definitely make him at home in today’s online world of listicles, roundups, and blogging. Among the things Orwell (which is just a “handle” for the man whose real name was Eric Blair) ruminated on: postcards, the proper and only way to make a cup of tea, and the many amusing differences between American and British pulp novels.

Lewis Carroll was even more clever than we thought
I knew Lewis Carroll was a man obsessed with wordplay. How could anybody not? He created Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with its many bizarre and baffling riddles, as well as the nonsensical masterpiece of “Jabberwocky.” (“Twas brilling and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.”) And I knew that “Lewis Carroll” was a pen name for Charles Dodgson, used so that he could create some distance from his proper job as a math lecturer at Oxford, and his other proper job as a deacon in the Church of England. What I didn’t know about “Lewis Carroll” is that it’s basically a riddled-up version of his real first and middle names. He translated those into Latin, and then back into English, and then reversed. So, Charles Lutwidge became Carolus Ludovicus, which then became Carroll Lewis…and then Lewis Carroll.
What are some of your favorite fascinating tidbits about English Literature?