Forgotten Ground Regained
The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: Charles R. Sleeth
The two-part article which follows was first published in Wiðowinde (Bindweed), the journal of Đa Engliscan Gesiþas (The English Companions), sponsors of the Cædmon Prize for the best poem in the Old English style. Part 1 appeared in Wiðowinde 213, Spring, 2025. Part 2 appeared in Wiðowinde 214. Summer, 2025. Charles R. Sleeth’s poem After the Flood (1984) was the first winner of the Cædmon Prize.
Back in January 2024, I started a blog series for the Tales after Tolkien Society called The New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf. My premise was simple: highlight specific texts by specific poets in a way accessible to the general lay reader. Although my critical introduction for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival (2024) emphasized the movement in broad strokes, there wasn’t much room for good old-fashioned practical criticism. Which, I thought, was a shame.
So this series offered me an excuse to chat about the Modern Revival’s most fascinating texts and poets. Plus, I could now address the kinds of things that normally wouldn’t merit the “academic article” treatment.
I had a second goal, too, namely highlighting those alliterative poets I missed the first time around. Though to be fair, I always knew that would happen. Honestly, when discovering an underground literary movement, nobody’s going to find everything on the first pass. Yet my biggest miss, by far, was Wiðowinde.
In fact, I’m still kicking myself over this one. Yet it’s safe to say that even if none of Wiðowinde’s poets falls into the “speculative” camp properly speaking, meaning they don’t count as fantasy, horror, or science fiction, still, their output ranks among the very best in the Modern Revival.
For anyone without access to back issues of Wiðowinde, you can find most of its poets – including every Cædmon Prize winner – on Forgotten Ground Regained, the website run by Paul Douglas Deane. For this series here, however, I’d like to shine a spotlight on several English Companions whose verse resonates particularly strongly with certain notable trends in the Modern Revival.
And my first featured poet is none other than Charles R. Sleeth, the very first Cædmon Prize winner, and his fabulously rich text, After the Flood.
CHARLES R. SLEETH (1915-1997)
As far as prize-winning poets go, Sleeth has an unusual backstory. When he became the inaugural recipient of the Cædmon Prize in 1984, he was nearly seventy years old … and so far as I can tell, “After the Flood” was his first published poem.
Mind you, that isn’t uncommon among revivalists. Frida Westford comes to mind, as does Pat Masson (another Wiðowinde poet) and the outstanding Ron Snow, whose first published poem – a rollicking drápa called Blardrengir Saga – appeared in print almost three decades after Snow himself had passed away.
But what makes Professor Sleeth so notable is how he stumbled, quite belatedly, upon the Modern Revival through the movement’s greatest medievalism hotspot: the University of Oxford.
As many people might already guess, the Modern Revival owes a massive debt to J. R. R. Tolkien. Yet even more so than his original alliterative poetry, Tolkien teaching at Oxford arguably had a greater impact. Besides his influential guide to Old English meter called “On Translating Beowulf,” Tolkien was a philologist, a lover of words and languages. As such, when he became Oxford’s Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in 1925, he set instantly to work strengthening the language side of Oxford’s English Syllabus.
Except he failed – miserably. At least at first. For most folks, philology is … well, let’s just say it’s something of an acquired taste. While certain individuals with impeccably good looks, taste, and breeding all admire the inherent value of i-mutations and monophthongization – you know, folks like you and me – humanity’s less enlightened members still perhaps require some convincing. And one such person, rather infamously, was C. S. Lewis.
Yup. That C. S. Lewis – Tolkien’s future best friend and fellow Inkling. When they first met during a faculty meeting in 1926, however, Lewis rather peremptorily downvoted Tolkien’s proposal for a stronger philological component to the syllabus. Yet Tolkien was nothing if not determined, and over the next six years, he eventually collected enough faculty allies that, by 1931, he had corralled enough votes to implement his desired reforms.
His faculty allies included Lewis, of course, but also Hugo Dyson, Nevill Coghill, and C. L. Wrenn – all eventual core members of the Inklings. Looking back now, it’s hard to remember exactly how odd this new Oxford syllabus was, even for the 1930s. The mandatory papers on Old English and Middle English were actually the least of it. This new syllabus also proscribed teaching any literature published after 1830, which, in today’s terms, is like running an English Department but refusing to teach anything after James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Oxford’s heavy focus on medievalism swam against the tide in other ways as well. By way of comparison, Cambridge was then busily ditching its requirements in medieval literature, and their curriculum – led by F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards, and others – instead took the Cambridge English School into a firmly modernist direction.
No matter how unusual Oxford’s English syllabus, though, it still helped guide several generations of bright young students – and, notably, poets – through an uncommonly robust education in medieval languages and literature. Poets such as John Heath-Stubbs (Artorius, 1973) and Geoffrey Hill (Mercian Hymns, 1971), for example. Another byproduct was O. D. Macrae-Gibson, an esteemed scholar of Old English whose six-part article in Wiðowinde, “The Natural Poetry of English,” in fact, helped launch the Cædmon Prize (“The Natural Poetry of English” has been reprinted on Forgotten Ground Regained, and can be accessed from the site’s resource page.).
But back to Sleeth. Unfortunately, I couldn’t uncover much biographical information on him. (There’s a 563-page autobiography in the West Virginia University Library archives, but it sadly hasn’t been digitized.) Still, we can paint a reasonably good broad-strokes picture of his career.
For starters, Sleeth was born in Barracksville, West Virginia, a semi-rural Appalachian town, and he was the son of an ordained minister. In high school, a teacher introduced him to Old English literature in translation, and when he later attended West Virginia University, he decided to major in Old English and German. He clearly excelled at both subjects, too, because in 1934 –just twenty years old – he won a highly competitive Rhodes Scholarship to continue his education at Oriel College, Oxford.
No doubt you see where this is going. Just three years after Tolkien and crew implemented their new syllabus at the Oxford English School, a curriculum heavy on medieval languages and literature, Sleeth arrived ready to sink his teeth into precisely those kinds of studies. Nor was he alone. An even more famous American medievalist and revivalist poet, Carter Revard, likewise underwent the Inklings’ curriculum while on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford.
All told, Sleeth greatly profited from his time there. With his philological skills, for example, he worked later as an etymology editor for Websters 3rd New International Dictionary. Afterward, as a professor at Brooklyn College (1962-1984), he actively participated in the American Society of Geolinguistics; in fact, he probably helped organize their first international conference in New York in 1985.
And actually, we know with definitive certainty exactly how much Sleeth’s time at Oxford mattered to him. If you look at his preface to Studies in Christ and Satan (1982), his lone academic monograph, Sleeth names the “late Professors C. L. Wrenn and J. R. R. Tolkien, who gave me the benefit of their learning and love of literature in my years at Oxford” (“Preface” x). Tolkien we already know, but Wrenn was himself a keen specialist in languages. As one former student recalls, Wrenn covered everything from “Old Icelandic to Anglo-Saxon, Old French to Danish, Scandinavian to Oriental.” The passage of almost fifty years, apparently, had done nothing to dim Sleeth’s fond memories of either gentleman. (The Inklings, in fact, cast very long shadows. Earlier I mentioned Professor O.D. Macrae-Gibson. Notably, his dedication for Of Arthur and Merlin: Volume 1: Text, reads, “To the memory of Gandalf the Grey and in Honour of his Chronicler is Dedicated this story of a Brother-wizard.” The “chronicler” he references, of course, is none other than Tolkien.)
So that, as they say, is that. In the Modern Revival, one perennial question is always how revivalists learn an archaic medieval meter in the first place. Significantly for Sleeth and for us, even if his own inaugural alliterative poem wouldn’t arrive until many decades later, his unlikely career path brought Sleeth into direct orbit with some of the most brilliant medievalists – and revivalists – of his generation.
All that remains is to discuss the prize-winning poem itself: “After the Flood.” So let’s see how the combination of Sleeth’s personal piety and his lifetime of studying medieval literature helped produce this short, rich, dazzling revivalist text.
Part 2
In popular culture, of course, almost any reference to “the flood” most likely means Noah’s flood. And Charles R. Sleeth’s prize-winning, 25-line poem, “After the Flood,” is no exception.
First things first. Despite its meter, Sleeth’s poem isn’t actually an Old English poem. Technically. In form it’s a small verse drama, a genre unknown to the Anglo-Saxons; basically, a short playlet complete with stage directions and a dramatic soliloquy by Noah himself.
In fact, I’d bet fair odds that Sleeth originally wrote this playlet for a small church function. Either way, his scene takes place shortly after God’s torrential rains have finally stopped. The scene contains an open window in Noah’s cabin that reveals clear skies over a blue world, and our favorite boat-building patriarch has just awoken. After puttering around some, Noah opens his soliloquy with an absolute banger of a line. As he says,
My dreams are still ‧ of the dry ages.
Honestly, I love this. It’s powerful, short, and direct. Already we see Noah as someone haunted by cataclysm. His horror is fresh. And while scholars, maybe, have grown accustomed to Latinate phrases such “antediluvian,” that hardly conveys the sheer impact of Noah’s soul-shaking shell-shock. But the Dry Ages? For me, that phrase evokes an absolute break in historical time, a sense of radical disjunction. An unfathomable feeling of destruction and loss – all almost unbearably fresh.
Noah’s second spoken line (“Waking, I weep ‧ for the world’s drowning”) then transitions into the soliloquy proper. His dream-horror transforms into several stream-of-consciousness ruminations … and this second line of speech, moreover, invites us to compare the human against the divine: Noah’s tears with the catastrophic rains brought by God.
As much as I love this opening, though, rather than a line-by-line analysis, I’ll concentrate on three subjects in particular. In order: (1) how Sleeth uses Old English meter; (2) one classic problem of Biblical exegesis; and (3) how Sleeth subtly reimagines Noah’s story in light of the Old English poem, Genesis A, from the Junius manuscript.
#1 SLEETH’S POETICS
Granted, most readers probably don’t share my enthusiasm for the gorier details of alliterative poetics. Still, a few quick words on Sleeth’s metrics might be worthwhile.
First off, although there’s no special reason revivalists must reproduce medieval meters with full fidelity (as I’ve argued elsewhere), Sleeth himself certainly leans “purist.” Out of fifty verses in total, most follow either Sievers type B (38%) or Sievers type C (28%). Merely five fail to scan according to the classical rules. Of those five, they all follow the same SxxS pattern seen in verse 2a: “WAKing, I WEEP.”
So this pattern seems like a genuine concession by Sleeth to Modern English, a language that tends naturally toward that “SxxS” rhythm. Overall, Sleeth ranks around a “four” on my private 1–10 scale of metrical fidelity, one being highly purist, ten being highly impressionistic.
The Cædmon Prize committee, apparently, noticed this fidelity as well. In their official commentary, they praise Sleeth for demonstrating the “vigorous poetic life the old metre can still show when the action of its varied rhythms is allowed to play unmuffled by too many unstressed syllables.”
That last phrase, “unstressed syllables,” plays a key role here. Unlike some other languages I can name (ahem, Modern English), the early English tongue tends toward concision. On average, Sleeth achieves a compact 4.72 syllables per verse. By way of comparison, Tolkien manages the same rate in “Song of the Mounds of Mundberg,” in my view the best alliterative poem in The Lord of the Rings.
#2 WILL THE REAL NOAH PLEASE STAND UP?
Next, let me turn to a classic problem of Biblical exegesis, something I like to call the “two Noahs.” That is to say, the Book of Genesis seemingly presents two different visions of its Ark-building patriarch: (a) a wholly righteous, antediluvian Noah, and (b) a dissolute, postdiluvian, passed-out-drunk-in-his-tent Noah.
Needless to say, neither depiction seems easily reconcilable with the other.
So here’s the story. When God decides to wipe out humanity via flood, He also decides to spare Noah alone, allegedly due to Noah’s righteousness. Some while afterward, however, Noah plants a vineyard and goes slightly heavy on the wine. He passes out drunk, forgetting to cover his nakedness. Then his middle son Ham walks in, witnesses his father au naturel, and … well, something something. But when Noah sobers up, he lays a devastating curse on Ham. No wait, I’m kidding. For reasons unexplained, Noah lays his devastating curse on Canaan, Ham’s son. Plus, for good measure, all Canaan’s descendants too.
This strange sequence of events has long puzzled Biblical scholars, and they’ve accordingly offered various explanations. My personal favorite comes from two early Church fathers, Origen and St. John Chrysostom. They argue that the reason Noah becomes so horribly sloshed despite his virtue is that, well, vineyards are a postdiluvian invention. Poor innocent Noah simply didn’t know the consequences of drinking wine to excess, so please, let’s just quit trying to trash the dude, ’alright?
Other authors gloss over the Two-Noahs problem entirely. This occurs in Genesis A, our best account in Old English of the Flood. According to the poet, the antediluvian Noah is righteous without qualification: “Noe wæs god” (1285a), “Ic þe godne wat” (1346b), and so on. Yet when the Genesis-poet comes to the Ham incident, he diplomatically avoids any direct explanation for how, exactly, a righteous man can get so disastrously besotted.
In “After the Flood,” Sleeth himself offers an innovative solution to this problem. Namely, his Noah is a raging alcoholic.
True. As Noah launches into his soliloquy, he starts reflecting on the times when he had preached against his countrymen’s sins. They accused him of hypocrisy, Noah remembers, and of setting himself in judgement of “their wills and their ways.” Worse, Noah cannot completely deny those charges. He had, as he admits, adored “soft life, liquor, love, revelry.” Even more particularly,
I so dote on drink ‧ that I dream this moment of grapes growing ‧ in a great vineyard. (lines 13-14)
Mind you, Noah’s been trapped in the Ark a solid week by this point – and he still can’t stop yearning for a drink. To me, that sure sounds like alcoholism. Thus while his nightmares are haunted by God’s anger, his daydreams are haunted by wine.
That seems a wholly plausible solution to the apparent discrepancy in Noah’s righteousness. And quite modern, too. Perhaps Genesis A is a worthy comparison here. In that text, medievalists have long observed that the poet portrays God as a kind of Germanic warlord. For instance, God is a vengeful destroyer who commands a “water-host” (egorhere, 1402a); the Ark is a “sea-hall” (sundreced, 1335b); and Noah is God’s loyal thane. Furthermore, when Ham sins against his father, his crime revolves around laughing disloyally at the one person to whom he owes absolute allegiance.
Sleeth naturally removes those ancient Germanic connotations from “After the Flood,” just as he removes the notion of Noah as fully virtuous. Instead, what seemingly attracts Sleeth to this story is the notion of a flawed man called to do God’s work. In that sense, Genesis A doesn’t seem to have much direct influence on “After the Flood.”
Yet one small wrinkle remains – the little matter of Noah’s wife’s name.
#3 ANOTHER SOLUTION
Before getting to Mrs. Noah, however, let’s detour back to Ham … and what in the tarnation he did, exactly, to merit such an extraordinary punishment from his father.
Given that merely “looking” upon his naked father seems like a trivial offense, theologians have proposed various more melodramatic explanations over the years. Perhaps looking is a euphemism for Ham castrating his dear old papa. Or maybe it implies paternal or maternal incest. In any event, neither position enjoys any textual support. Yet the oddities don’t stop there. For one thing, the Biblical text explicitly calls Ham Noah’s youngest son (Genesis 9:23) when it had earlier called him Noah’s middle son (Genesis 7:13).
And we still don’t know why Noah curses Canaan, his blameless grandson, rather than the actual voyeur.
Here, though, I think Sleeth is up to something subtle. It’s well known, for instance, that various elements in Tolkien’s creative writing were fueled by gaps or problems in scholarly knowledge. One classic example is the Old English word orcnéas. Although the Beowulf-poet informs us that these monsters are descended from Cain, we don’t otherwise know much about them. From this mystery word, however, Tolkien invented “orcs” for his legendarium. Thus can scholarly gaps lead to creative opportunities.
Something similar happens in “After the Flood,” I think, and it specifically addresses the nature of Ham’s crime.
Notably, in the Book of Genesis, Noah’s wife goes unnamed. Sleeth won’t have none of that, however, and he takes it upon himself to compose the following:
And my maid Miriam, mother of Ham, her embrace in bed ‧ made my beard tingle; losing her, I lost ‧ my life, nearly. (lines 15-17)
On one hand, yes: Sleeth is building sympathy points for Noah by having him reminisce about a lost love. On the other hand – wowsa. There’s a lot to unpack here.
Our first piece of information concerns Miriam herself. Not only do we learn that she bore Ham, we learn as well that she died prior to the Flood. That obviously means Miriam isn’t the wife who accompanies dear old Noah onto the Ark itself.
It’s also significant that Sleeth explicitly calls Miriam the “mother of Ham.” Metrically, this creates an SxxS pattern, which – going back briefly to Old English poetics – must be considered unmetrical according to traditional rules. However, had Sleeth wanted to, he could easily have written “mother of Japheth” instead, which would have formed a perfect Sievers type A. For Sleeth, though, adding this reference to Ham seems more important than adhering exactly to the classical rules of Old English meter … a point leading to me suspect that while Miriam may have been Ham’s mother, she was not likewise Japheth’s mother. [Although fifty total verses isn’t a large sample size, Sleeth doesn’t seem to avail himself of resolution, the process by which certain two-syllable phrases are combined into a single heavy syllable. Thus I leave words like “mother” and “Japheth” unresolved; otherwise, they’d be candidates for resolution.]
The mother of Japheth, in that case, must be the wife who accompanies Noah onto the Ark.
Although not stated within the Biblical Genesis, we nevertheless know this second wife’s name – so long as we remember Genesis A, at least, as Sleeth certainly did. Here are lines 1545-1549 from Genesis A:
Thus was the prudent son of Lamech, the keeper of the heritage, disembarked from his ship after the flood with his three sons; and their four wives were named Percoba, Olla, Olliua, Olliuani.
As surely as Sleeth invented “Miriam,” the Genesis A-poet invents these four names (or at least follows some now-lost tradition). Yet these two sets of invented names solve two classic problems of exegesis. First, if Ham’s mother is Miriam, then Percoba must be his stepmother. So when the Biblical Genesis calls him Noah’s “youngest” son, Sleeth thereby hints that Ham must be Noah’s youngest son by Miriam, the beloved first wife. So, cool.
Second: the problem of Ham’s crime. If “looking” is a euphemism for something more drastic, as seems logical, Sleeth’s invented name means that we need not hypothesize anything so melodramatic – or unmotivated – as paternal castration or paternal incest.
Instead, Ham’s crime might more simply involve sleeping with (or assaulting) his stepmother, Percoba, while his father was indisposed. With Percoba as a non-blood relative presumably somewhat closer in age to Ham himself, the reader doesn’t have to imagine a criminal motivation that’s too outlandish or psychologically abnormal; sadly, the implied sin is all too common. Moreover, in a patriarchal society, the corresponding dishonor to Noah might be great enough to justify his curse on Ham’s son Canaan and all his descendants.
Of course, Sleeth doesn’t (and cannot) spell any of this out explicitly in “After the Flood.” The soliloquy by Noah occurs well before any of these soap-opera-like postdiluvian events occur. Yet many readers undoubtedly know the biblical story well, and Sleeth’s text thus suggests one plausible explanation for a sorely perplexing scholarly problem.
So there you have it. In all honesty, every time I read “After the Flood,” I enjoy Sleeth’s text more and more, and it’s hard to imagine a better inaugural winner for the Cædmon Prize.
Copyright © Dennis Wilson Wise, 2025
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