Daily Archives: July 28, 2025

Top Tens – Poetry & Literature: Top 10 Poetry (Special Mention) (4) Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

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Yes – I couldn’t resist this pun from Rocky & Bulwinkle for the Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam. And yes – the metafictional canned audience groaned too

 

 

(4) RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

 

Not bad for a Persian poet getting pissed – which is what the Rubaiyat is when you boil it down.

Of course, there’s more to it than that, given the religious prohibition on alcohol in Islam – which lends itself as the springboard for existential ennui or philosophical musings on religion and life itself.

The Rubaiyat is “the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains (rubaiyat) attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed the Astronomer-Poet of Persia”.

Translation that is in the very loosest sense – indeed, FitzGerald himself apparently referred to it as a ‘transmogrification’.

“Many of the verses are paraphrased, and some of them cannot be confidently traced to his source material at all…To a large extent, the Rubaiyat can be considered original poetry by FitzGerald loosely based on Omar’s quatrains rather than a translation in the narrow sense.”

For that matter, “the authenticity of the poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam is highly uncertain” – he was famed as an astronomer and mathematician, with the earliest references to his poetry being substantially after his death and “the extant manuscripts containing collections attributed to Omar are dated much too late to enable a reconstruction of a body of authentic verses”. There is an implausibly large number of quatrains attributed to him – varying from 1,200 to more than 2,000 – and “sceptical scholars point out that the entire tradition may be pseudigraphic”.

Fortunately, FitzGerald didn’t ‘translate’ or write that many quatrains. His original 1859 edition was a much more modest 75 quatrains, expanded in subsequent editions to the final edition of 101 quatrains – or a mere 404 lines.

Although “commercially unsuccessful at first”, the Rubaiyat subsequently became both highly popular and influential, albeit peaking in the 1880s – “the book was extremely popular throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous Omar Khayyam clubs were formed and there was a fin de siècle cult of the Rubaiyat”.

Of course, it helps that the quatrains are so eminently quotable.

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Stark Ravings – 8 D & D Schools of Magic for Bling & Booty (Introduction)

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Sorcerer Seoni, one of the so-called iconics or iconic characters for Pathfinder, essentially the spinoff game from Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition, as she appears in her profile art from the Player’s Handbook – bringing the bling and booty to the schools of magic. I’m assuming she has to wear that for her magic to work.

 

 

8 D & D SCHOOLS OF MAGIC FOR BLING & BOOTY

 

No – we’re not talking about Hogwarts. We’re talking about the ‘schools’ of arcane power, classifying functional magic in fantasy by its type or effect. Now there’s probably as many such schools of magic as there are works of fantasy – black magic, blood magic, white magic, wild magic and so on – but perhaps the most comprehensive are the eight schools of magic in Dungeons & Dragons, at least in its peak 3.5 edition, which is not surprising for something that attempts to systematically codify the genre of fantasy for obsessive-compulsive rules-lawyering geeks to play as a game.

 

 

I mean, dear God, do the rules of chance need so many sides…or is that dimensions? And, dear God, what’s in the bag? WHAT”S IN THE BAG?! (Promotional image of GWHOLE brand D & D dice for sale on Amazon)

 

In the game, wizards can specialize in one of the schools of magic (at the expense of others), so it is a matter of some importance to pick the more powerful or versatile schools. However, this begs the most important question – for users of magic in the game or the genre of fantasy in general – which schools of magic are best for bling and booty (in every sense of the word)? After all, if you’re going to play with forces that put you at risk of some eldritch abomination sniffing out your scent, sucking out your soul with a straw and wearing your skin like a suit, then it better come with fabulous rewards – preferably the fantasy equivalent of the Fortune 500 and the Playboy Mansion. And just remember with the last, magic is equal opportunity – the sorceress Circe in Homer’s Odyssey essentially used her magic to have her own private island equivalent of the Playboy Mansion filled with her favorite, ah, manimals.

And so we take a stroll through the eight schools of magic, looking at which are the more powerful or versatile – including the extent to which they can effectively function as other schools of magic – and more importantly, which ones are the best for bling and booty…