Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

2.2 Examples of the use of information sources
Unit 2 Using information sources
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

Information sources come in many forms and include footnotes to a poem, a dictionary of symbols in the library, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Modern Language Association bibliography on CD-ROM, or the Internet. Information sources have many uses in literary study, and this chapter illustrates some of them. We begin by looking at some sample problems that can be solved by consulting information sources.

(1) An old English folk poem begins ’A frog he would a-wooing go’. One question you might ask about this is: why a frog? A useful type of reference book if you are concerned with the meanings of objects is a dictionary of symbols. For example, if you look up ’frog’ in de Vries’ Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, you are given the following meanings:

a frog is amphibious and therefore often ambivalent in meaning; its natural enemy is the serpent; it has a number of favourable meanings - it symbolises fertility and lasciviousness, creation, the highest form of evolution (hence princes turn into frogs), wisdom, and poetic inspiration; it also has unfavourable meanings - in religious terms it is considered unclean, and it is said to have a powerful voice but no strength.

This dictionary also tells us that ’Frogs are great wooers’: there are several songs about frogs who go ’a-wooing’ a mouse; perhaps a spinning song as the mouse itself is referred to as ’spinning’ several times. So we have a possible answer: frogs are symbols of fertility and lasciviousness, hence wooers. The other meanings do not seem to be relevant here (e.g. creation, wisdom, uncleanness). Similar results can be found by using a search engine (such as Google™) on the Internet, but you would need to search for ’frog as symbol’ (just searching for ’frog’ or for ’frog wooing’ will not be productive). The next question we could ask is: why does he woo a mouse? By looking for ’frog as symbol’ we have begun to explain the text and opened up another question to ask about the text, both of which are potentially productive; but at the same time we need to acknowledge the risks of doing this: frogs have many other meanings attached to them, and furthermore the meaning of ’fertility’ turns out to be attached to many animals (including a mouse). Thus there is some looseness about this first stage of interpretation, which we might want to pin down by trying to find out whether frogs were associated with fertility in the specific English folk tradition from which this poem probably emerged; a possible reference here might be the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore. It is often worth using a dictionary of symbolism to investigate the symbolic implications of natural things that are mentioned in texts: body parts, animals and plants, planets and stars, weather, geographical phenomena, etc.

(2) A sonnet by Christina Rossetti (1881) begins with the following lines:

’I, if I perish, perish’ - Esther spake:

And bride of life or death she made her fair.

In order to understand the poem, the reader needs to know that Esther is a historical character and to realize who she is. Some editions of the poem will explain this in a footnote, but, if there is no footnote, what do you do? Many information sources are useful for finding out about names. A classical dictionary lists all the names from Greek and Roman mythology; a Bible concordance lists all the names from the Bible; and many names are also listed in general reference works, such as Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. You need to guess which reference source will be useful, or alternatively decide how to search for it on the Internet. As it happens, Brewer’s has nothing about Esther, but a Bible concordance will (i.e. it is a name from the Bible). (Similarly if you search for the combination of the two words ’Esther’ and ’Bible’ on a search engine, you will find her.) If you look up ’Esther’ in a Bible concordance you see all the lines listed that include this name, with references to the parts of the Bible where the lines are found; in fact they all occur in the Book of Esther, and you could look at this part of the Bible in order to find out about the character. You might also notice that one line listed in the concordance under ’Esther’ is ’and Esther spake yet again’, which is echoed in Rossetti’s poem in the words ’Esther spake’. So you have found a biblical allusion (see Unit 13) in the language as well as finding out who the character is.

(3) Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, written in 1611-12, has among its themes those of sea travel, bad weather, the wrecking of ships (and loss of travellers) and the discovery of strange things in distant places. If you want to place these themes in their historical context, you could use annals, which are lists of events, organized by date. For example, if you look up 1611 in The Teach Yourself Encyclopaedia of Dates and Events, you find that in this year the Dutch began trading with Japan, the British explorer Hudson was lost in Hudson Bay in North America, and there were publications of a scientific explanation of the rainbow, a book of maps of Britain and an autobiographical travel book by Thomas Coryate. These facts may or may not be significant; the point is that it is very easy to find them using this information source (you would have to decide whether to investigate any that seem to be particularly relevant).

Because information sources are random collections of fragmentary knowledge, the risk in consulting an information source (that you are wasting your time) is balanced by the possible rewards (that you might find a richly rewarding clue for very little effort). Information sources can generally act as ways of generating ideas and getting you unstuck if you do not know how to begin to work with a text.