Threads of Writing

I changed Merlyn’s written narration from Brendan Voyage to Mere Christianity. I’ve been having trouble getting to all the oral narrations, so I’ve had to choose the most important ones. Mere Christianity is one book that I don’t want to leave out so I’m having him keep a journal on it. After he reads, he has to jot down his opinion, thoughts, or note something that he doesn’t want to forget. Maybe it’s the 15 year old male in him, but he’s just not interested in keeping a journal on his own. This will be a way to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak; I don’t miss the narration, and he practices keeping a journal. This is his latest journal entry (a very rough draft):

Charity is love. If you don’t love, act as if you do, and eventually you will. Hope is looking forward, to heaven, to many things. Those who want heaven do good in this world and get the earth right. Faith is doing your best always. You make the effort to your best ability and God will help always.

After I read his journal, we discussed that last line. I’m glad he got that from the book. Actually, he said that this book was really helping him.

Assignment: Put yourself in Gurth’s mind as he was being robbed and retell the event in 1st person.

Once again, Merlyn surpassed my expectations. I finally got more than five lines out of the kid. This was an assignment that he really enjoyed, as writing a ‘story’ comes easy to him. He is still doing a character sketch by using the events to help us ‘see’ the character. (A word of warning – he spent two weeks on this and it is long.)

I left the Jew’s house in high spirits, my master’s money-bag jangling and clinking quietly by my side as I hurried along the road. As the Jewess had handed me a small purse, (which was now in a side pocket of the bag) she had offered some parting advice. It was still bouncing around in my mind. Hurry home, many people haunt this area. She was right, I could hear some drunken merry-makers on their way home; any of them could spot my bulging cloak and guess what was underneath.
I managed to safely make my way to the woods separating me from the jousting-field. Now If only I could make it through those woods without getting mugged (woods were capital places for burglars to hide). Stealthily, I made my way through them until, finally, I could see the field through the trees. Now I hurried even quicker along the path; but too late.
I was near the edge when four men jumped out of the forest, two on each side and grabbed me. They knocked me unconscious and when I woke, I was being dragged heaven knows where. Then we reached a clearing, but only stayed around the outside. One of the men called softly and slowly more men materialized. There were maybe eight men altogether, give or take a few and they wore visors to mask their identity. Two of my escort brought me before one of the men, who appeared to be the captain. Everybody gathered around to watch.
“What are doing out in the woods on a night like this?” the Captain asked me.
“I am going to my master.” I replied.
“Who is your master?”
“I am not allowed to say.”
“What does your master do?”
“He fought at the tournament today.”
“What did he send you out for?” I had hoped that this question would not come up.
“To go to Isaac the Jew and pay him for his services” 
The Captain took the money-bag from around my waist.
“This is a lot of money for just paying”
“Yes, but the Jew paid back a hundred zecchins.”
“What did your master pay for?”
“The horse and armor that the Jew gave him.”
The Captain looked thoughtful as he weighed the pouch in his hand. “Hmmmm” he said after a while, but before he could say anything else I said “I have thirty zecchins, you may have them, if you will give me back my master’s money.” The Captain turned his visored head in my direction and said incredulously, “ You have money in here and didn’t spend any on drink?”
I said “I was saving it to buy my freedom.”
Captain & Co. thought that that was a good joke and laughed uproariously. At last, the Captain wiped tears of mirth from his eyes and said “Alright lets see these thirty zecchins.” and opened the pouch.
The two men holding me loosened their grip when they leaned forward to see what was in the bag, so, I didn’t wait, but grabbed the staff one of them was holding, and knocked them out of the way. I would have had ample chance to get away while the rest stood in shock, but I wasn’t going without my master’s money. I stepped forward to snatch back the purse, but now they had gathered their senses. They jumped on me and took the staff.
The other men who had not been close enough to stop me, were now jeering at the dazed men laying on the ground. They got up rather dizzily, but when their wits were in right order, the first one joined the teasing crowd. However, the owner of the staff was quite angry, and wanted to duel with me, so, the Captain made a deal: I fight the man whom I had knocked down and I go away with the money, all of it. Or they could just take the money anyway and have done with it. So I volunteered to fight, knowing that I would have a fair chance with staves.
We ventured out into the clearing, and when the Captain said go, he leapt at me. And so we fought, giving a blow for a blow, neither I nor him giving quarter, wandering around the moonlit meadow as we drove each other back and forth, our staves echoing off the trees as they hit. My opponent was very good, we were about evenly matched for a while. But soon his fellows started taunting him for lack of anything better to do, he grew angry, and started swinging rashly. I still having a clear head quickly took the advantage, and the fight was over. I laid him low with a swift blow to the legs, knocked his staff out of his hands and put my foot on his chest. He looked at me with defeat written all around his head.
The Captain came out of the trees, and said “Well fought, well fought indeed; now we will guide you to the path as a favor for granting us such a good fight. I only ask this; do not ask our names. Now, here is the purse, you’ll find nothing amiss.” He then called to two other men for my escort and gave me one more piece of advice, “Hurry to the tournament grounds, there are others in this wood who are not as kindhearted as we. Good luck.”
On the way back to the path, I honored the Captain’s advice and did not ask for names. When we did reach the path, my guides turned back the way they had come and I hurried out of the woods and reached my master’s tent with no event.

Wow – What could I say? Other than going over how to use semi-colons, it was perfect. But, that could just be my ‘mommy-view’.

Merlyn’s assignment for this week:

1. Zero in on one event from this week’s reading and narrate using as much detail as is necessary. (I wasn’t expecting a full-blown essay, since we haven’t ‘officially’ began writing those; I just wanted half a page to a page retelling one event.)

He did really well with this one – better than I expected. He has really struggled with narratives, so I narrowed the scope and had him choose one event to write about. He finds it hard to summarize the entire chapter when he is writing, but he has no problem doing so orally. (Maybe I should type up one of his oral narrations for us to analyze.) Anyway, he spit out a whole narrative essay that is only missing the introductory paragraph!

Here is his paper – without any editing so there are some errors.

There is a story in the Navigatio about St. Brendan landing on an island inhabited only by monks. Way back into medieval times, when all the first British saints were going around, spreading Christian religion throughout Britain, some stories of Eastern Saints came with them; how they would go into the desert to seek God’s word and do God’s bidding, and how they were purified that way. Well some people thought they ought to do that too, only they had no desert. So, they remedied by abandoning the regular lifestyle and went deep into the heart of dark forests, or setting out in boats to deserted islands that frequented the Irish and British coast. Some of those with boats even crushed their oars and rudder so as to be in God’s hands totally, and live off whatever food, drink and life he decide to give them.

It was some of these people that St. Brendan ran across on the island of Albie; they had built a monastery in their long isolation from human kind to protect them from the wind, rain and waves, and to conduct their religious rites. When St. Brendan asked them for their Abbots name, and their location, they gestured that they would not speak because they “observed the rule of silence”, not speaking for any reason other than to sing their hymns and psalms in the morning. Then St. Brendan motioned to his monks (crew) that they to must “observe the rule of silence” while they were there. St. Brendan enjoyed a thoroughly uninterrupted peaceful day, being shown around the monastery by the abbot, and a peacefully uninterrupted comfy night in one of the rooms the abbot had to spare.

St. Brendan must have run across many of these strange monks in his travels. Because there were many deserted islands with remains of monasteries on them, little medieval Irish crosses everywhere. Many of the islands are now a sea life paradise; seabirds to the right and left, and fish galore. Also, there are rocks and reefs on which lobster and crab crawl in abundance. Do you think these islands would look strange to St. Brendan if he came back in his curragh for another voyage?

When we sat down to discuss this paper, I used it to illustrate the narrative essay since it was so close to one.

Paragraph 1 begins with an excellent thesis statement for the whole essay, yet doesn’t belong with this paragraph. The next sentence begins a whole new train of thought and should be a topic sentence for a new paragraph, thus creating the body of the essay. His first detail is some background information on how the people that inhabited this island came to live there.

Paragraph 2 continues the body by telling us about St. Brendan’s visit. One thing I noticed was Merlyn’s effective use of repetition at the end of the paragraph with the words: uninterrupted and peaceful. Repeating words don’t usually sound very good, but somehow he managed to make it work. As we were discussing this part of the paper, I found out that The Wart had been bugging him while he was writing, hence the emphasis on those two words.

In his concluding paragraph, he opens with his opinion then backs it up with the topic sentence about the many deserted islands in that area. His final sentence wraps it up nicely by asking the reader for their opinion.