Middle English

Here's the word used in a sentence from Variety: "My whole attitude has been because all I care about is the music, I don't need to make the scene.

I don't need to hobnob with the executives, because I see them all the rest of the year." In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch warns Viola that Sir Andrew wants to duel, telling her, "Hob nob is his word," and then adding the gloss, "Give't or take't." In today's English, he might have said, "Take it or leave it." Sir Toby's hob nob is an alteration of hab nab, hit or miss, however things may turn out, itself likely a shortening of the Middle English phrase habba or nabba, meaning whether I have or I don't have.

After Shakespeare's day, hobnob and hob or nob were used adverbially to mean randomly, and to drink hobnob or hob or nob was to take turns with one's drinking buddies toasting each other's health.

Later, hobnob, as well as hob or nob, hob a nob, et cetera, was verbified to mean to drink socially, and then, dropping the booze, to spend time with someone in a friendly way.

But I kind of, I went away and I pondered this and thought, "Well, maybe that's my experience of Arthur had..." Apart from the Disney Sword in the Stone, I hadn't read much modern Arthurian material.

But while I was doing my PhD, I was working on a 14th-century English manuscript, made in England as opposed to in English, actually.

It is written in Anglo-Norman French.

Uh, it's got many illustrations, very rough-and-ready illustrations on every double page spread.

But Malory is a 15th-century writer.

He brought us Le Morte d'Arthur, and it is really the blueprint for most modern retellings, and it gives us that high medieval, pointy-shoed, wimples and high headdresses, and knights in shining armor Arthur, that aesthetic that we're so familiar with.

So I thought, "Well, what if I spun a life of Arthur, a fictional life of Arthur from pre-Malory sources that reflected that world of Breton saints' lives and Anglo-Norman chronicles and Middle English Brut chronicles, early Welsh poetry? What if I did that and interspersed it with commentaries and just st- and stuck with the, the world of Arthur that I so loved?"

Yeah.

So, while I was doing all the research on Englehardt, it took me down a path to a medieval story called Amis and Aemilius.

And that one, in the Middle English version we found, Aemilius is suffering from leprosy.

Amos learns that the blood of his two children can cure him.

He enters the room where the children are sleeping and cuts their throats and collects their blood.

Right.

The source notes it is heavily inspired by Arthurian legends, specifically Sir Thomas Malory's 15th century Middle English work, Le Morte d'Arthur

It's a brilliant fusion of concepts

But how does an author combine King Arthur with interstellar space travel? That sounds like a crazy mashup

like that.

Are you not going to sing one of your Middle English history rhymes?

I might

do.