Spelling

Spelling has been in the news a lot lately, so to test your skills here is a fiendishly hard quiz.

Shamefully, I only got half of it right, so it is back to the dictionary for me!

Guardian spelling quiz

Another important thing to learn is the correct spellings of homophones(words which sound (phone) the same (homo) but are spelled differently. The BBC has a quiz where you can check your skills

BBC Homophone quiz

Frankenstein

Many of you have enjoyed reading the story of Frankenstein, and now know a bit more about this famous story. The original novel was written in 1816 by an 18 year old Mary Shelley as a result of a story telling contest. The internet has many resources to do with this novel. You can read the original here, or if that is too daunting, a good summary can be seen on this site.

Thomas Edison (who invented the light bulb!) made a short film in 1910 about Frankenstein. Obviously the quality is not that of today's films, but it makes for an interesting 12 minutes!

A Shakespeare game online

The BBC has a fantastic MURDER MYSTERY Shakespeare game called the Seven Noble Kinsmen for you to play online. It has over 2 hours of game play and lots of mini games. You have to become a member bbc online which is very easy (and free!). You can also find out which male or female Shakespearean character you are most like.

This site has 4 games to play

• How well do you understand Elizabethan English? Test your brain with the SAT—Shakespeare Aptitude Test.
• Are you ready for Hamlet's Duel? Only your knowledge of Shakespeare trivia and quick responses can help Hamlet defeat Laertes (or else he'll be skewered by his opponent).
• Think you really know Shakespeare's memorable quotes? Find out in Name That Play.
• Truly, What's In A Name? Help Juliet find out as she plays a Shakespearean dating game to uncover the identity of three potential suitors

Could YOU have been a success like Shakespeare if you'd lived in the 16th century? This game will let you make the choices- see if you are a winner!

Another quick game to play, especially if you like figuring out words is this fill-in-the -gaps game. You can choose from several plays.

Happy Birthday Shakespeare!

Wednesday 23rd of April is William Shakespeare's 444th birthday. Well, at least we THINK it is. We know that Shakespeare DIED on April 23 1616 because we have a record of his death, but we only assume his his birthday is on the 23 because he was baptised 3 days later on the 26th of April. It is probably no coincidence that St George's day falls on the 23 April as well!

Shakespeare wrote fantastic plays and poems, and is regarded as England's best and most famous playwright. Some of is most famous plays are A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth and Richard III. You may even have heard some of his sonnets at weddings such as Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment..) or the very famous Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?).

One thing which Shakespeare did really well was reinvent the English language. He used 29,066 different words in his works in around 100,000 lines of writing- pretty impressive. Did you know tht Shakespeare actually invented a lot of words that we use today? Words like advertising, caked, compromise, elbow, eyeball, lonely, worthless and gossip. If you follow the link you can even see where abouts in his works they appear.
But it's not just words, Shakespeare also invented a lot of phrases we use all the time in our everyday speech. If you've talked about finding out the naked truth, talked about your flesh and blood or turned into a green eyed monster, then you've used a Shakespearean phrase!

Finally, entertain yourself by generating some genuine Shakespearian insults- lots of fun!

Book Review- The Ruby in The Smoke

"On a cold, fretful afternoon in early October, 1872, a hansom cab drew up outside the offices of Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents in the financial heart of London, and a young girl got out and paid the driver.

She was a person of sixteen or so -alone, and uncommonly pretty. She was slender and pale, and dressed in mourning, with a black bonnet under which she tucked back a straying twist of blonde hair that the wind had teased loose. She had unusually dark brown eyes for one so fair. Her name was Sally Lockhart; and within fifteen minutes, she was going to kill a man."

That opening to Philip Pullman's first Sally Lockhart adventure, The Ruby in the Smoke packed a narrative punch. As soon as I read it, questions flooded my brain. I had been scared to read this as I enjoyed the Northern Lights trilogy so much that anything without Lyra and Will in seemed pointless. I didn't see the BBC adaptation of the novel, so I went in blind, my favourite way to read a book. The story is set in Victorian London and follows the adventures of the recently orphaned Sally Lockhart, 16 and a more unconventional Victorian heroine you could not imagine. Sally is clever, good with a gun, can speak Hindustani and balance an account book as well as an accountant. Her adventure starts when she receives a mysterious message from a friend of her recently drowned father who was involved in the world of shipping. The words "the Seven Blessings" lead to a world of secrets, Chinese gangsters, opium, riddles, extreme danger and of course, the mysterious ruby in the title. Along the way Sally is befriended by a photographer and his equally unconventional sister who try to help her make sense of the mysterious dangers that surround her.
This book gripped me from the start, and I was soon thrust into Sally's world. There is a real sense of danger and menace, this is not a Victorian world of lace curtains and tea shops; villainy lurks on every corner. I can't wait to read the remaining books in the series!

Hobbit book fetches high price

A first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit sold for £6,000 at an auction in Norfolk. The book was first published in September 1937, and only 1,500 were ever printed. They sold out by December and so are very, very rare. ABEBooks sold a first edition in the original dust jacket for $65,000. If you look here, you can see how expensive these editions are. This article will fill you in on all the various editions. If you are interested in seeing various different covers, then this website has many different examples of cover art.

Beowulf

Beowulf is one of the oldest poems in the English language. Written sometime between 800 and 1100 AD, it tells the story of Beowulf, a brave warrior who fought many monsters. The British Library holds the only remaining copy of the poem, pictured on the left. This was nearly destroyed in a fire in the 1700s, so it's a good job the library has digitised it!

Beowulf is written in Old English which looks very different to the Modern English which we use today.
If you listen carefully, you can hear some similarities with the English we speak 1,000 years later. The British library has a link to a reading of a passage from Beowulf in the original Old English here. In this passage, reproduced here from the website,

The Danish king speaks to Beowulf, telling him of the terrible place where Grendel's mother lived. He describes the desolate landscape: the wolf-haunted slopes, perilous paths through the marshes, a mountain stream that plunges into the earth, and a lake overhung with trees bound in eternal frost, whose waters burn at night with a dreadful fire. A stag chased by hounds allows itself to be torn apart rather than plunge into those waters. It is a dark, misty and fearful place. Hrothgar offers rich rewards of twisted gold if Beowulf can find and kill the monster and escape with his life.

Can you find any similarities with Modern English?

If you want to read a translation into Modern English, you can find several online. This one is known as the Gummere translation and was done in 1910. It is very poetic and uses a lot of alliteration, just like the oiginal.
Below is a selection from the text, describing Grendel's attack on Beowulf's men

He spied in hall the hero-band,
kin and clansmen clustered asleep,
hardy liegemen. Then laughed his heart;
for the monster was minded, ere morn should dawn,
savage, to sever the soul of each,
life from body, since lusty banquet
waited his will! But Wyrd forbade him
to seize any more of men on earth
after that evening. Eagerly watched
Hygelac's kinsman his cursed foe,
how he would fare in fell attack.
Not that the monster was minded to pause!
Straightway he seized a sleeping warrior
for the first, and tore him fiercely asunder,
the bone-frame bit, drank blood in streams,
swallowed him piecemeal: swiftly thus
the lifeless corse was clear devoured,
e'en feet and hands.