Saturday, October 1, 2011

Know Your English Literature Part. III



Limerick: Humorous nonsense jingle, usually consisting of two long rhyming lines followed by two short rhyming lines and a longer final line that rhymes with the first two or, more strictly, ends on the same word as the first line. Limericks often begin, ‘There was a …’, as in this one by Edward Lear:

There was a Old Man with a beard,

Who said, ‘It is just as I feared!-

Two owls and a hen,

Four larks and a wren,

Have all built their nests in my beard!


The Lord of the Rings: Fantasy novel by J.R.R.Tolkein, published in three volumes between 1954 and 1955. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The Hobbit, published in 1937. Four Hobbits, Frodo, Sam Merry and Pippin, set out on a dangerous mission to prevent the evil Sauron from obtaining a golden ring which will give him power to control the world. The hobbits’ mission is aided by the Elves and by the good wizard Gandalf, but on several occasions they almost lose their lives in doing battle with the fearsome Orcs, Ring wraiths and other agents of Sauron. Eventually the ring is destroyed, Sauron falls and benevolent human ruler established in his place.



Middle English: Form of English written and spoken from 1150 to 1500. Its basis was the Germanic language Old English- also called Anglo-Saxon- with the addition after the Norman Conquest of 1066 of a large number of Norman French words. It had no standard system of spelling and there were five dialects in Middle English: East Midland, West Midland, Southeastern, South Western and Northern. Much literature of the time was written in the two Midlands dialects, and it was a London version of East Midlands that developed into Modern English.


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