John Lindal’s Blog

Medieval Poetry

I read up on Wagner’s Ring Cycle this weekend, so I guess it’s not surprising that I dreamt of epic poetry. Normally, I don’t remember anything I read in my dreams, but in the dream, my wife asked me to explain the first line, and I woke up immediately afterwards, so I was able to reconstruct it from the explanation:

As proceeded the lancing of night’s knees,

My interpretation is that, since lancing the knees would cripple rather than kill, this must refer to the pre-dawn.