Search results for ""caedmon""

One Great Author. One Great CD.A poem by Whitman may be whoops and hollers, or beating of drums, or the ebb of the tide singing to itself among the stones, or laments in the night or cries of ecstasy. Indeed, Whitman was the wind which blew poetry from its moorings in tradition and sent it into fresher waters; his poems celebrating the grandness of the human condition are cadenced for the voice and meant to be spoken aloud. In this recording drawn from the Caedmon archives, reader Ed Begley, Sr. performs selections from Whitman’s lifelong work, Leaves of Grass.

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Twelve-year-old Ellie can't help that she's a witch, the most hated member of society. Determined to prove her worth and eschew her heritage, Ellie applies to the Fairy Godmother Academy-her golden ticket to societal acceptance. But Ellie's dreams are squashed when she receives the dreaded draft letter to serve as a knight of King Arthur's legendary Round Table. She can get out of the draft-but only if she saves a lost cause.Enter Caedmon, a boy from Wisconsin struggling with the death of his best friend. He first dismisses the draft as ridiculous; magic can't possibly exist. But when Merlin's ancient magic foretells his family's death if he doesn't follow through, he travels to the knights' castle, where he learns of a wicked curse leeching the knights of their power. To break the curse, Ellie and Caedmon must pass a series of deathly trials and reforge the lost, shattered sword of Excalibur. And unless Ellie accepts her witch magic and Caedmon rises to become the knight he's meant to be, they will both fail-and the world will fall to the same darkness that brought King Arthur and Camelot to ruin.

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Perfect for fans of The School for Good and Evil and A Tale of Magic..., this Barnes & Noble Children's Book Award finalist and Amazon Best Book of the Month is a charming fantasy debut that puts a new spin on the legend of Camelot -- now in paperback!Twelve-year-old Ellie can't help that she's a witch, the most hated member of society. Determined to prove her worth and eschew her heritage, Ellie applies to the Fairy Godmother Academy-her golden ticket to societal acceptance. But Ellie's dreams are squashed when she receives the dreaded draft letter to serve as a knight of King Arthur's legendary Round Table. She can get out of the draft-but only if she saves a lost cause.Enter Caedmon, a boy from Wisconsin struggling with the death of his best friend. He first dismisses the draft as ridiculous; magic can't possibly exist. But when Merlin's ancient magic foretells his family's death if he doesn't follow through, he travels to the knights' castle, where he learns of a wicked curse leeching the knights of their power. To break the curse, Ellie and Caedmon must pass a series of deathly trials and reforge the lost, shattered sword of Excalibur. And unless Ellie accepts her witch magic and Caedmon rises to become the knight he's meant to be, they will both fail-and the world will fall to the same darkness that brought King Arthur and Camelot to ruin.

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American Charles Hayden came to England to forget the past. Failed father, failed husband, and failed scholar, Charles hopes to put his life back together with a biography of Caedmon Hollow, the long-dead author of a legendary Victorian children’s book, In the Night Wood. But soon after settling into Hollow’s remote Yorkshire home, Charles learns that the past isn’t dead. In the neighbouring village, Charles meets a woman he might have loved, a child who could have been his own lost daughter, and the ghost of a self he thought he’d put behind him. And in the primeval forest surrounding Caedmon Hollow’s ancestral home, an ancient power is stirring. The horned figure of a long-forgotten king haunts Charles Hayden’s dreams. And every morning the fringe of darkling trees presses closer. Soon enough, Charles will venture into the night wood. Soon enough, he’ll learn that the darkness under the trees is but a shadow of the darkness that waits inside us all.

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The thrilling sequel to The Witch, the Sword, and the Cursed Knights, which takes readers even deeper into the legend of Camelot!Best friends Ellie Bettlebump and Caedmon Tuggle are different as the day is long. Caedmon's a human, from a non-magical realm known as Wisconsin. Ellie, on the other hand, is full of magic-illegal magic. What they have in common is far more important, however. After the adventure of a lifetime, they are both officially Knights of the Round Table...in training. To graduate to the next level at the Knights Academy, they must complete three quests proving their heroism. If they fail, they'll have to achieve the dreaded Impossible Quest, and repeat the same year forever.Unfortunately, their quests prove more than a little difficult. Ellie is exposed as a witch and her magic is locked away by the powerful DeJoie family. In an effort to free herself from their control, Ellie winds up embroiled in a plan that could ruin the Knights of the Round Table: steal the source of the knights' power, and a wicked sorcerer will restore her magic.As fate would have it, one of Caedmon's quests leads him to protect the source of the knights' power. If Caedmon wants to graduate-not to mention save the realms from certain disaster-he'll have to betray his best friend, forcing him to choose what truly matters most to him: knighthood or friendship.As centuries of secrets collide and an ancient evil arises, Ellie and Caedmon must overcome this test of loyalty and friendship. If they don't, they will lose more than their battle against evil forces keeping them apart.They will lose each other.

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This study explores the somewhat neglected area of dramatic genres of early English religious lyric and illuminates the functions of dialogue as an instrument of devotion and cognition in the context of medieval culture. The book focuses on short poems in dialogue form, semi-dialogic prayers and dramatic monologues, and alleged dialogic configurations of the lyrics, stressing their potential for performance. Devotional dialogues, as between Jesus and Mary, are shown to have the form of mutual begging, in accordance with the central medieval ritual of supplication. Dialogue as heteroglossia provides the basis for readings of selected prayers from Cædmon to Lydgate, highlighting a variety of cultural transactions involved in addressing heaven. Tracing the ways the poems overcome the limits of language in search of transcendent communication leads to insights into vernacular poetics and theology inherent in early English religious verse.

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Eleven-year-old Josh never expected to be a hero. But after finding the Bergen Prophecy and discovering that his destiny has been chosen for him, Josh’s life is changed forever. Having previously defeated the brutal Viking, Harald Greycloak, Josh and his friend Rainbow must travel once more to the mythological Viking Mistworld with the fate of Whitby resting on their shoulders. Josh’s friend, Anders, has been taken hostage by the evil Viking queen Gunnhild and her son Greycloak. In return for his safety, they demand the Cross of Caedmon as ransom. But the Cross guarantees the safety of Whitby and to hand it over would place everyone in danger. Josh must make an impossible decision. Will he be able to rescue his friend and uphold his destiny? Or will Greycloak’s long-awaited revenge finally be enacted?

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A young man is killed in a traffic accident at a Welsh seaside resort of Caedmon. Drawing inspiration from the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet and Duras, Williams gives us the intensive reality of the scene through a small group of witnesses: inhabitants and visitors – and a ghostly revenant. One of these is Joss Banks, the retired English owner of a printing works. He is on a mission to placate his estranged wife, Bid, by recovering the artwork of her late first husband and his former employee. He, we learn, committed suicide when he discovers that Bid is carrying Banks's child. During the three hours of the novel's time-frame we are privy to a series of startling encounters involving Josh and the evidence of his bad conscience. Denis Williams lived for a time in North Wales – the subject also of his daughter Charlotte Williams's memoir Sugar and Slate – and here, in one of the most daringly experimental of Caribbean novels, he transposes his Guyanese concerns with power (the third temptation of Christ), the colonial relationship, passion, betrayal and guilt to the Welsh environment, bringing to it a vibrant Caribbean artist's eye.Denis Williams was a highly accomplished artist, who also taught and published in the fields of West Indian and African art and anthropology, and, from 1974, was Director of Art and Archaeology with Guyana's Ministry of Education and Culture.

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In her quest to live a vibrant spiritual life, Karen Wright Marsh had a revelation: she didn't need to find and follow the perfect plan; she needed people she could follow. In Wake Up to Wonder, Marsh introduces you to those people--faithful yet oh-so-human Christians from across centuries and cultures. Inspired by their example, she offers playful, simple practices that bring deeper meaning and purpose to everyday life. In the company of diverse spiritual companions, you'll journey through physical health, prayer, activism, Scripture reading, creativity, and beyond. Each chapter includes hands-on invitations such as writing prompts, space for personal reflection, and "Try This," a collage of spiritual and personal experiments anyone can do. As you wake up to wonder, you'll discover what these twenty-two historical figures already knew: that a life of spiritual depth, amazement, and connection is within reach--today and every day. Historical Figures Covered Henri J. M. Nouwen Martin Luther Thomas Merton Hildegard von Bingen Margery Kempe Wangari Maathai Caedmon Amanda Berry Smith Augustine Lilias Trotter Fannie Lou Hamer Patrick of Ireland Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl Howard Thurman Pandita Ramabai Ephrem the Syrian Ignatius of Loyola Benedict and Scholastica Brother Lawrence Francis of Assisi and Clare of Assisi Dorothy Day Mabel Ping-Hua Lee

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Tracing life from a childhood in an Italian-English family on Tyneside to becoming a Welsh-speaking freelance writer in Cardiff, Eisteddfod-winning author Tony Bianchi leads the reader through a series of increasingly bizarre vignettes. Each section is a free-standing short story but read together they form a ludic, untrustworthy autobiography where the rug of humdrum normality is constantly pulled from under our feet. Lured into trusting belief by the narrator’s direct, confiding tone, by the sometimes overwhelming weight of circumstantial geographical and historical detail, and by the photos and documents that seem to guarantee authenticity, again and again the reader is suddenly left rudderless, unsure of the boundaries between truth and fiction. Did Bianchi ever play football in a Cardiff park with notorious Serbian war-lord Arkan? Is the floor of his local pub a concrete realisation of an M.C. Escher painting?In England, Wales, and beyond, Bianchi introduces a series of extraordinary characters, from the devout, indulgence-collecting, organ-playing grandfather, to the plumber and Cumbrian nationalist Caedmon, or the piano-playing pharmacist with carpal tunnel syndrome. And whether at the centre of the narrative or reporting from the sidelines, there, constantly leading us on from one potentially disastrous situation to another, is the author as anti-hero, always earnestly self-deprecating, always reinventing himself, always challenging our assumptions about identity, time and memory.

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Why is there such a striking difference between English spelling and English pronunciation? How did our seemingly relatively simple grammar rules develop? What are the origins of regional dialect, literary language, and everyday speech, and what do they have to do with you? Seth Lerer's Inventing English is a masterful, engaging history of the English language from the age of Beowulf to the rap of Eminem. Many have written about the evolution of our grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, but only Lerer situates these developments in the larger history of English, America, and literature. Lerer begins in the seventh century with the poet Caedmon learning to sing what would become the earliest poem in English. He then looks at the medieval scribes and poets who gave shape to Middle English. He finds the traces of the Great Vowel Shift in the spelling choices of letter writers of the fifteenth century and explores the achievements of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of 1755 and The Oxford English Dictionary of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He describes the differences between English and American usage and, through the example of Mark Twain, the link between regional dialect and race, class, and gender. Finally, he muses on the ways in which contact with foreign languages, popular culture, advertising, the Internet, and e-mail continue to shape English for future generations. Each concise chapter illuminates a moment of invention-a time when people discovered a new form of expression or changed the way they spoke or wrote. In conclusion, Lerer wonders whether globalization and technology have turned English into a world language and reflects on what has been preserved and what has been lost. A unique blend of historical and personal narrative, Inventing English is the surprising tale of a language that is as dynamic as the people to whom it belongs.

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Land of Three Rivers is a celebration of North-East England in poetry, featuring its places and people, culture, history, language and stories in poems and songs with both rural and urban settings. Taking its bearings from the Tyne, Wear and Tees of the title (from Vin Garbutt's song 'John North'), the book maps the region in poems relating to past and present, depicting life from Roman times through medieval Northumbria and the industrial era of mining and shipbuilding up to the present-day. The anthology has modern perspectives on historical subjects, such as W.H. Auden's 'Roman Wall Blues' and Alistair Elliot on the aftermath of the Battle of Heavenfield in the 7th century, as well as poets from past ages, starting with Caedmon, the first English poet, writing in the 8th century. There are classic North-East songs from the oral tradition of balladeers and pitmen poets alongside the work of literary chroniclers like Mark Akenside from the 18th century, followed by evocations of Northumberland by decadent gentry poet Algernon Charles Swinburne contrasting with grim tales of life down the pit by Tommy Armstrong, Joseph Skipsey and Thomas Wilson in the 19th century. The region's favourite tipple is championed by 18th-century poet John Cunningham in his eulogy 'Newcastle Beer', while 200 years later, Tony Harrison's defences are 'broken down / on nine or ten Newcastle Brown' in his 'Newcastle Is Peru' (1969). Durham is celebrated in a 12th-century priest's poem but is a trinity of 'University, Cathedral, Gaol' for Tony Harrison. The River Tyne flows through poems by Wilfrid Gibson, James Kirkup, Michael Roberts, Francis Scarfe from early to mid-20th century, while the region's dialects (from Northumbrian to Geordie and Pitmatic) are heard in poems by Basil Bunting, William Martin, Tom Pickard, Katrina Porteous and Fred Reed. Other modern and contemporary poets and songwriters featured include Gillian Allnutt, Peter Armstrong, Peter Bennet, Robyn Bolam, George Charlton, Julia Darling, Richard Dawson, the Elliotts of Birtley, W.N. Herbert, Alan Hull, James Kirkup, Mark Knopfler, Barry MacSweeney, Sean O'Brien, Rodney Pybus, Kathleen Raine, Jon Silkin and Anne Stevenson, as well as poets who've spent time in the North-East, such as Fleur Adcock, David Constantine, Fred D'Aguiar, Frances Horovitz, Philip Larkin, Michael Longley and Carol Rumens, writing highly memorable poems in response to the place, its people and their stories. The book's introduction is in two parts, with Rodney Pybus covering the historical background and Neil Astley the last 50 years. This emphasises the importance of the oral tradition during the centuries when little "written poetry" of note was produced in the region. There are also fascinating commentaries on key historical figures by the late Alan Myers.

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