An update on my thesis

Singing along to: Iron & Wine, Resurrection Fern

I like to say that I am drowning in my thesis. This is actually an (unintentionally) appropriate metaphor, since my thesis is all about the meaning of the sea in Old English poetry.* I have about sixteen pages written, out of the thirty-ish I need to turn in. The problem with this is that while I am halfway done in terms of page count, I am about two-thirds done in terms of "things I need to talk about." Which means I will probably feel as though I've said everything I want to say around page 25, but with some creative stretching and padding might make it to page 27, while my adviser continues to talk about 30-35 pages. I don't think she realizes that I'm having this problem, and she has said she dislikes "fluff," so hopefully the finished product will be such a shining example of Strunk & White's Rule 17** that she'll sign off on 27 pages or whatever I actually produce.

On the bright side, while I hate writing my thesis, I still don't hate my thesis, precisely. The topic is kind of lame, and totally obvious if you read the poems (wow. they talk about the ocean. a lot.), and the secondary sources are a pain in the butt, but at least I still love the poetry. Here are my two favorites:

The Wanderer: five minutes of searching didn't turn up a poetic translation that I liked, but this prose translation by Robert E. Diamond is pretty good. (Here it is in Old English if you're fancy. I'm not fancy.***) PS: If you know your Tolkien, you might find some familiar words here.

The Seafarer: Modern English translation by Jonathan A. Glenn; original Old English.

*Does that sound as fascinating to you as it does to me? Probably not, since even I don't find it all that fascinating.

**"Omit needless words."

***I cannot actually read Old English, a fact both my adviser and I sort of forgot when we decided on a topic that requires an analysis of the poets' (not the translators') word-choice. Thank goodness for side-by-side Old English/Modern English editions and the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon dictionary, even if it using it will probably make me blind.