My Immortal
My Immortal is an epic poem in 44 cantos, widely considered one of the masterpieces of classical Western literature. The humanistic, reflective, and above all profoundly moral nature of its message has made it an inspiration for countless generations of scholars and admirers.
Both the date and place of composition are shrouded in mystery. The author identifies himself or herself in a lengthy prologue to the reader as XXX_DeathCult_HailSatanSpawn_MouthfulOfSemen_ZZZ, but this is considered[1][2][3] likely to be a pseudonym. Internal evidence (such as acrostics, birthday wishes, and credit card details concealed in the rot13 cipher) suggests the author may have been a 12th-century abbess of Norfolk, the Venerable Tara Gilesbie, a contemporary, correspondent, and quondam lover[4] of St Hildegard of Bingen, and who is known to have composed homilies and diegetical extracts under transparent pseudonyms such as XXX_DieMotherfucker_RectalChainsaw_ABC123, **my_var1 and __main__. Linguistic details point[5] to an East Anglian, Northern Connecticut, or Sea of Tranquillity origin, but much depends on the direction of manuscript transmission. Ultrafluorescent biomagnetic testing[6] of the earliest surviving versions (such as Fanfiction.net Cotton Vitellius 2.0) reveal pictures of erect cocks in a style that can be traced to Northumbrian monks on the isle of Lindisfarne during the reign of Alfred the Great, suggesting that either the author had access to a time machine or some modern commentators have got their sums wrong.
Plot[edit | edit source]
The poem is a reflection on human destiny, and an expression of confidence in the ultimate power of goodness and clean living to triumph over the nastier elements of human nature. It is presented in the form of a love triangle between the beautiful, innocent virgin Ebony Willow Yumyum Unicorn Krikkit, her ambiguously genderless true love Sebastian Snipe, and the scheming but seductively plausible villain Harpy Rotter.
Ebony (who is also allegorically referred to as Raven, Crow, Spider, the Trickster, the Mistress of the Wet Mouth, and the Hot Hot Banshee of the Rio Grande) is a slim, studious girl who is training for the novitiate at a nunnery. In her spare time she loves horse riding, swimming, pressing wildflowers, prayer, teaching her kittens badminton, and helping the elderly get more exercise by crossing streets more often than necessary. She dresses plainly in a simple unbleached linen shift, and enjoys rubbing ashes and shredded glass over the more private parts of her skin as a reminder of humility in the face of the untold vastness of galaxies and the inexplicable behaviour of grown-ups. The whole poem is framed as a dream which she narrates to her elder sister.
In the first canto she meets Draco Malfoy, an apprentice monk, and their accidental discovery of a shared fondness for Gregorian chant as long as it's not too loud leads to an easy friendship based on him putting his parsnip into her valentine. A number of strangely deformed children arise from the union, which Ebony never manages to explain satisfactorily to her teachers or her parents. In the poem, it is widely assumed she wrote off for them enclosing coupons, but scholars suspect an allegorical meaning of worldly concupiscence is hinted at.
Conflict arises when she begins taking Gothic lessons with Professor Ulfilas, in a class with Harpy Rotter and Sebastian Snipe. She finds them each to be strangely alluring, taking her mind off the thornier strong verbs. Sebastian has a teddy bear but Harpy has a sack of shrunken heads. The dramatic peak of the poem comes when Harpy severs and shrinks the teddy bear's head, leaving the semi-naked lovers covered in kapok and sawdust.
There's an awful lot more of this sort of thing, but writing about it would require re-reading it, which, frankly, not even the most enthusiastic of scholars have yet managed to do. Anyway, it ends abruptly and happily with Ebony facing a firing squad in an unnamed South American country.
Textual analysis[edit | edit source]
Recent computer-aided work[7] on the text has revealed a number of subtle variations from standard spelling and grammar. It has been pointed out that even the principal character's name has not wholly avoided slight alterations: in places she is referred to as Ebny, Ennobby, Rayven, EbonyXXXBluddyWrists666, GapingSlashWhore69, Melania Trump, Ebonye of Black Gables, and Nancy Drew666FellatioBatZombie.
The first letters of each chapter spell out an obscenity that was first privately noticed in 1828[8] but could not be published until 1991[9].
Imitators[edit | edit source]
Dante Alighieri spent his years in exile in Venice reading and re-reading his precious Aldine first edition of My Immortal but it is not known whether he ever considered imitating it.[10]
Robert Burns's My Luv is Laak a Reid Reid Rose is a free translation into Scots of the Boney M concert episode in Canto 24.[11]
J. K. Rowling began her Harry Potter series as a parody tribute to My Immortal, then found her characters unexpectedly taking on a life of their own. Serious Lupin even moved in with her, eating her blueberry yoghurt and leaving the unwashed spoon in the sink, and carving Satanic runes on her shoulderblades while she slept.[12]
Virgil prefigures My Immortal in Eclogues IX, when he compares the shepherd Corydon to a priestess copulating with a sacrificial goat.
Toby, in the throes of the Christian Crusade of the Holy Land, produced an imitation of My Immortal which implemented strong biblical themes as a means of conversion.
Trivia[edit | edit source]
My Immortal has been translated into 482 languages, more than any other work except the Bible and Alice in Wonderland.
It is illegal to read My Immortal in Belarus.
Ebony's full name is an anagram of Serious Girl Who Enjoys Boks Wxqlhhhhftaa.[13]
Three previous Uncyclopedians have had their articles on My Immortal huffed.
A/N[edit | edit source]
Fangs for nuffing you guys!!! Yiu are a looser and wouldnt know ggreat literaturd if it bit you on the bumn. Whoever write thi is a pelagian or a monofizzite not a true catholic, and also a blouddy plagiawrist (geddit??), becoz I own all the copywrites in my story and you are not alllowed tyo quote me that is the Digitall Minellial Copywright Act look it up!!!!111
(A/N Hildegrad if you are still reading this sweetie and haveny throuwn up at all the self-stylited textual scholars , I cant find my kets, did I leave them on ur bedsde table? xxxooo)[14]
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ Hassenschmecker, W. F., Das My-Immortalsche Problem, Augsburg, 1872
- ↑ Bees-Knott, J., and Hayden-Twill, E. H., A Polyglot Concordance to My Immortal, Cambridge, 1911
- ↑ Toadgloat, O., et al., New Light on the Authorship Controversy, Journal of My Immortal Studies, 1983, volume ix
- ↑ anon., The Sapphic Undertow, Restless Vixen Press, Eastcheap, 1878
- ↑ Stoat, the Very Rev. Mohammed Q., My Further Thoughts on the Language of My Immortal and the Connecticut Fragment, Mohammed Stoat Press, Durban, 1938
- ↑ Zhang, Y. Q., and Chu, C. Y., Some anomalies in the tungsten-germanium signatures of the Dumbarton MSS., Studies in Computational Archaeology, January 2010
- ↑ Zhang, Y. Q., et al., Frontiers of Paronomasia, arXiv lit-666, last accessed 2017-01-20
- ↑ "Blimmin heck, have you tried joining up all the first letters?" – Charles Lamb to S. T. Coleridge, (17?) March 1828
- ↑ Ford, W. Harrison, The MT-Word Decoded, Journal of My Immortal Studies, 1991, volume iii
- ↑ Peaslake, E. M., Beatrice as Ebony: Unexplained Coincidences in the Paradiso, Acta Alighierica, 1974, p.38
- ↑ Bourbaki, N., Symmetric Algebras, Scots Dialect Society, p.1075
- ↑ Rowling, p.c.
- ↑ Skandinaviska Tidskrift för Anagrammaten, 1922, volume 116, p.351
- ↑ No, I know, you can't parody it.