On An Exegesis

I spent two and a half hours in the library today, doing preliminary source-searching and getting a bit of information for a paper/ presentation. I'm doing research for an exegesis - an in-depth analytical study of a certain passage (in this case, the Greek version of the death of Judas from the book of Matthew in the New Testament).

Also, it's not due for three weeks.

Usually I'm not so excited about paper topics. I will freely admit that I have started writing papers within 24 hours of the due date. Not every paper, but... some.

The abnormal thing about this is that I very rarely begin the researching process three weeks before the deadline. 10 days is usual for me, if it's a research-heavy topic. Three weeks is pushing the limit of what I consider a 'normal paper-writing time frame.'

So what's different about this paper?

LET'S MAKE A LIST!

1. Exegesis-writing is not to be messed with. I've never written an exegesis. My professor handed around a "general outline of basic exegesis-writing goals" in class. The outline had four sections, each with a few bullet points of Things You Should Say About This Section. The outline, with bullet points, easily fit on one side of the page. In my notes for the outline, I gave each section a full page in my notebook, for five pages total. I might need more pages for notes from my sources.
2. The page count is nerve-wracking. When the "exegesis-writing outline" was handed out, the professor didn't specify any minimum or maximum page count. He was very vague when other people asked about the page count; eventually, he said that if you write fewer than five pages, you're not giving the topic enough depth. This should not be a problem, especially if I'm doing two weeks of research and one week of writing. Given that I only got three books with a few pages of information among them, hitting the minimum page count may be worrying.
3. I've never written a paper on a language topic before. I'm surprised I made it this far, because many of my peers in modern languages have had to do papers in and on the language. I've done a few essays about Greek works, including how Xenophon's Anabasis fits into the historiographic tradition. I've never done a paper where I've had to take a close look at seven verses and concluded something about them.
4. 5 pages of analysis on 10 lines of prose is intimidating. Usually, I don't have to do a paper on so short a passage. HOWEVER, a good exegesis is comprised of a lot of research into linguistics, history, and culture of the time in which the passage was written. When was Matthew writing? Why did he include Judas's suicide? Why is he the only one who talks about Judas dying, except for Acts, which says he keeled over from internal disease? These are the things that I need to talk about.

On Sourcing Your Papers

Right, so today I'm working on a final presentation for King Arthur.  (Technically, I'll be doing that all this week, but that includes today).  Since I'm a filthy procrastinator, I only started looking for sources properly yesterday.  This means that I have very little of note so far to say about the weaponry of the Arthurian legend.
This is in part due to the fact that nobody else had anything to say about it, either.
There are very few papers about this topic anywhere online.  The only ones I could find were from the last quarter of the 19th century to the first quarter of the 20th century, and archaeology has probably caught up quite a bit since then.  I assume that nobody has written much about this in a very long time because there are two sorts of people who are interested in ancient weaponry nowadays: collectors of ancient swords and LARPers.  (this is what my web searches are telling me, anyways).  The former group should get their acts together and write some cool stuff about their artifacts, because I WANT ALL OF YOUR RESEARCH.  The latter group should name their weapons something different (well, I should probably yell at the creators of D&D for that), and get their butts out of my Medieval Weapons searches.
Since there are no academic papers on the topic, you have to go to books.  Like, actual books.  Like, my right arm is sore because I was just carrying three 500-page hardcover books around for half an hour as I looked through the library for sources on What Might Have Been Used to Kill People in the Middle Ages.  I know that Arthur was technically in the Roman era, but there's always room for authors to impose what they know.  There wasn't Google back then, so Geoffrey of Monmouth couldn't have gotten an image of the sort of sword Arthur might have used in reality, so he probably took his own mental image of a noble's sword and assumed that weapon had always been used. Same goes for Thomas Malory, Edmund Spenser, the Gawain poet, and a lot of people who wrote about the Arthurian legend.
Time to do some real-life research, though.