jsburbidge | Entries tagged with history

Odd how things come up together...

I had just finished West's book on Indo-European myth and in particular noted at the end of it his identification of the deep roots of the comitatus in Indo-European culture - the king as the leader of a band of warriors whom he attached via, essentially, handing out booty or providing the opportunity to pillage.

The next day I was reading a book dealing with (inter alia) the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England, and read: "Seventh-century English kings did not 'govern' in any sense that we should recognize today. Their primary business was predatory warfare and the exaction of tribute from those they defeated. The spoils of successful war - treasure, weapons, horses, slaves, cattle - were distributed to their retainers as payment for past and lien upon future loyalty."

So the pattern described above has deep roots in Indo-European culture. Traditional poetry, whether about the Trojan War or a successful cattle-raid, reflects this.

In Europe generally, it is the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries which see the movement away from this pattern, at least at the local leader level. Prior to that point it was common for leaders well below the level of monarch to carry out raids and low-level warfare against their neighbours; it is in this period that the state begins to exert its centralizing powers to curtail this activity. In areas where national borders were involved it persisted for rather longer (such as the Scots Borders). The general basis for lordship becomes, not the distribution of booty, but the conferring and defending of rights to land (or patents, or other privileges) which can generate a continuing stream of revenue for the holders.

(Booty doesn't entirely go away. Soldiers continued to be given the implicit, and sometimes explicit, permission to pillage on campaign, and even after it became entirely frowned upon (consider Wellington's army in the Peninsular War) remained (and remains) a problem. (How many Allied homes have "souvenirs", like the Roman bust discovered recently in Texas, picked up by soldiers in the Second World War?) But it was no longer the systematic basis of lordship.)

I usually review books because I find something positive in them worth pointing out. Most books which fall to the bottom of my personal rankings are merely boring, or badly written. Rarely does one occasion enough of a negative reaction to energise me enough to write and then post a negative review.

Well, one has now crossed my path, bought because of good reviews combined with a (temporary) bargain from the publisher: The Invention of Yesterday, by Tamim Ansary.

There used to be a meme about Jared Diamond: that he sounded convincing until he started to deal with one's own discipline, at which point one wanted suddenly to qualify everything he said heavily. Ansary's book is like that, except that it doesn't have to wait for one's own discipline. A decent familiarity with the subject is all it takes.

Ansary's handling of the origin of language, at best, reflects one of a competing set of arguments, none of which can currently be said to be conclusive; he does not even hint at this.

His treatment of Indo-European origins is not very good. His treatment of Israelite origins is utterly uninformed and uncritical. I can't say much for his treatment of the Republican Romans.

But what finally led me to the classic "This is not a book to be put down lightly. It should be thrown with great force" was the following excerpt: "Hercules and Achilles, for example, had supernatural gifts because they were born of human mothers impregnated by gods".

Why should I accept anything he says about the ancient Greeks when he gets something like the above - which is fundamental to the plot of the Iliad - wrong? No Thetis, no Shield of Achilles.

Can one possibly even have skimmed the Iliad without knowing who Thetis is, or be accepted as speaking with any authority about Archaic Greece who has not read it, and discussions if it, with some attention? (And his historical treatment of Archaic Greece is grossly oversimplified and inaccurate.)

His theses about interconnection between cultures are at least in their face interesting. But to be at all convincing he has to get a lot more right about specifics and be a lot less lazy about how he processes his sources, or, better, change his sources.

From a BBC article on recent DNA studies in European archaeology:

"In a paper published in the journal Genetics in 2012 , Reich and his colleagues had spotted that Northern and Central Europeans appeared to have received genetic input from a population related to Native Americans.
Further evidence from ancient DNA would confirm that this distinctive genetic signature had entered Europe for the first time during a mass migration of people from the steppe , on Europe's eastern periphery.
These nomadic steppe pastoralists, known as the Yamnaya, moved west in the late Neolithic and Bronze Age, around 5,000 years ago. In some areas of Europe, they replaced around 75% of the ancestry of existing populations."

What the article doesn't mention is that the Yamnaya are the people who, following the Kurgan hypothesis, spoke PIE; this provides some fairly good backup for the theory. It indicates, as well, that the language overlay came with an influx of a significant body of people, and not simply as a cultural overlay associated with the wheel and a sky-father based religion.

The Yamnaya - Western Europe's cultural as well as genetic ancestors - look like an early instance of the later waves of pastoralists who came west (and east - don't forget Tokharian) as migrant conquerors: Huns, Magyars, Mongols, and Turks.

The findings reported on in the article, in general, suggest that models of prehistory emphasizing peaceful transfer of cultures (such as that in Francis Pryor's Home) are unfortunately wildly optomistic: just as there's evidence for continuity of populations, there's also now evidence for the types of admixture which come from conquest. (The combination is quite believable: if you come riding in as a conqueror you're more likely to want to keep the locals to provide rents in the form of food and service rather than putting them to the sword.)

I visited Toronto's Mackenzie House on Saturday. It included a tour of the house, a demonstration in the print shop, and a potted history of Mackenzie from his arrival in Canada (1828) until his death.

I was reminded of one of the real failings of the Ontario history curriculum. The two rebellions (Papineau's and Mackenzie's)[1] are always taught only in their local context.

The Mackenzie Rebellion (at least) has a significant ideological overlap with the Chartist movement, which began in England in 1838. The following decade would see a series of revolutions and rebellions throughout western Europe: France's Second Republic, uprisings throughout the German states, Chartist rebellions in the U.K. (as memorialized for SFF readers by Brust's and Bull's Freedom and Necessity). We were taught nothing about this in school.

Mackenzie himself was a product of Scotland, not Canada, and his views reflect Dundee far more than they do any local sources.

Indeed, it looks very little like a true grassroots revolt. The bulk of the opposition to Mackenzie was low-level, not high-level (not that the ruling classes were precisely friendly). The population was dominated by Loyalists (well, their children and grandchildren) and by Orangemen, who rallied around the established order. (The rebellion in Toronto was defeated by militia with a very small sprinkling of professional troops.)

The natural soil of the protests of the 1830s and 1840s was the new industrial classes and the cities (with a side of agricultural workers who were threatened by mechanization, as with the Swing riots - which has obvious linkages with other forms of unrest driven by technological change, and with Luddism): the Upper Canadian rebellions were based on independent farmers and tradesmen.

There was a true local context - still not covered much in the curriculum - which was the proximity of the United States. Mackenzie, before, during, and after the rebellion, was in favour, not of moderate reform of the colonial government and finances, but of the establishment of a Republic embodying many of the traits of Jacksonian democracy (Jackson finished his second term in 1837). As a second alternative he was willing to accept an American takeover. This had the tacit backing of the US - this was only a few years after the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine and only shortly before the US formulation of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny; there's a continuity between the networks fomenting rebellion and the Fenian raids of the 1860s.

In addition, the economic conditions for farmers were poor; the rebels who did come out were playing out the age-old script of trying to kill the King when the crops fail.

The response to the rebellions had a larger context as well: the Whigs took power under Lord Melbourne in the mid-1830s, and their response to the rebellion (aside from giving them an opportunity of shipping "Radical Jack" Lambton, Earl of Durham out to the colonies for a while to keep him out of their hair) reflects in part the fact that their views were more sympathetic with some of the issues raised than those of, say, Peel or Wellington would have been. (Even Bond Head's appointment, which had provided support for moderate reformers like Baldwin, was a result of the change in English government.) We weren't taught about that, either, despite the fact that Melbourne's background was far more interesting than anything in Canada (consider Lady Caroline Lamb, his (deceased) wife).

It does nobody any good to teach history in a deracinated, decontextualized manner. It renders it less interesting, less comprehensible, and more liable to gross oversimplification.

[1]Actually 3, given Duncombe's Rebellion, which I wouldn't even know about had my father not grown up in Scotland, Ontario.

The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is in the news again due to Brexit, as is the continuing state of (many of) the indigenous groups in Canada. Catalan wishes for independence occasionally reach a level of international attention, and, of course, the Middle East, where the modern State of Israel looks in many ways like the ghost of Outremer returned, continues to provide its own intractable problems.

These have in common a background in conquest. Occasionally this is obscured for political or rhetorical purposes - the typical discussion of the Aboriginal situation tends to turn on the polite fiction of treaties between independent powers rather than recognizing explicitly the state of subjugation by main force underlying that history.

The push-pull tug-of-war over Brexit can be traced back through the centuries to the profoundly ambiguous effects of the Norman Conquest, which tangled up English government with continental concerns. (Apprentice riots against the French Huguenots in late 16th Century London are eerily similar to the eruptions of anti-European sentiment associated with the Leavers.)

The current structure of Europe is a direct consequence of three relatively recent waves of conquest: the Napoleonic Wars (which destroyed the Holy Roman Empire and set the stage for the later unification of Germany and Italy, both carried out in their own ways by military force); the First World War, which extracted old ethnic nations from the corpses of empires; and the Second World War, which rearranged borders yet again and incidentally resulted in a mass process of ethnic migrations / ethnic cleansing glossed over as "refugees" post-war (regarding which, Tony Judt's Postwar is illuminating).

It used to be considered legitimate to derive right "de bello jure"; now it is generally rejected by the overall consensus of the international order (though it still takes place: witness the Crimea).

We frequently focus on the most recent examples of this and try to set up moral high grounds based on it; indeed, much of the formulation of privilege along ethnic lines, where it is not grounded in the slave trade, can be traced back to more recent instances. However, the traces of conquest go back in a cascading chain into prehistory and no area of the world seems to be immune (a purely New World example would be the expansion of the Inca empire in the period shortly before contact with the Europeans) - small enough polities tend to generate inter-group violence in a raiding rather than conquest style, but there's a continuity even there.) If we really want to untangle the effects of conquest, we not only have to disengage England from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but the Norman heritage from England. The French are resented in Brittany, Languedoc, and the Basque regions of France, but the Franks themselves were conquerors of a Romano-Celtic region which itself reflected Caesar's Gallic wars. (Or we can set an arbitrary horizon of some number of generations after which we view such impositions as normalized, but that has its own perils: where do we set it? Do we tell the Irish to stop complaining because the Anglo-Normans came over in the Twelfth Century and we've decided to ignore anything before 1492, 1815, 1870, or 1945?)

If you want to have a much better sense of the earlier layer of conquest and internal colonization - not always purely military - underlying the later European emergence from their corner of the globe, Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe is almost certainly the best place to start. Bartlett sets out the process of colonization of the fringes of Europe from its Carolingian centre - Normans to England, Anglo-Normans to Ireland and Scotland, Germans to the Baltic states, Crusaders to Outremer and the Western Mediterranean, the Reconquista in Spain. In a few cases these were "by invitation"- the Scots monarchy deliberately anglicized its aristocracy as a way of countering having England intervene as a polity across the border, and the Irish situation began with Hibernian rulers inviting Norman fighters in to assist in internal wars. In many others they were straightforwardly military in nature. (The most aggressively hostile relation between intruders and "natives" having been in Ireland: the split over religion is merely a calque over much older hostility; in many other places there was a much less adversarial relation (although that tended to sour towards the end of the High Middle Ages as well)).

Although Bartlett's book focusses on the period from 950 - 1350, one of the best places to get a fictional acquaintance with the world it depicts is in Dunnett's House of Niccolo series - which reflects how much that particular series is "about" the endings of earlier places and patterns - Trebizond, the Venetian and Genoan trading patterns of the earlier period (and connections with the Byzantine society) , Burgundy, Rus. (The Rus proper, let us remember, were Vikings, not Slavs, product of a process of conquest outside Bartlett's scope).

This is why actual historical settings have to be researched properly, at the risk of violating WSOD:

This is from V. E. Schwab's A Gathering of Shadows. The speaker is George IV, in our world.

"It would be proper to say a prayer, " said the king.

Kell frowned, confused. "To what end?"

"For his soul, of course." Kell's confusion must have showed. "Don't you have God in your world?"...

In the early 19th Century, no member of the Church of England (and certainly no member of the House of Hanover) would have suggested prayer for the souls of the dead - that would have been considered papist. Furthermore, George IV would probably not have thought of asking about prayer, or discussing religion at all (as he goes on to do). He was a very worldly man.

Fustel de Coulanges' La Cité Antique, published in 1864, can be considered the first major attempt to get behind the historically recorded Indo-European classical cultures to find a root culture. (A parallel enterprise on the Germanic front may be seen in its opening stages in Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (1835) and Deutsche Wörterbuch (1854), regarding which, see Tom Shippey on Tolkien's philological background.)

There are reasons that it is still referred to. Aside from the fact that Coulanges had a graceful, classic prose style, the basic argument (unwelcome to the enlightenment) that religion is/was central to the structure of society - in particular, that the core structures of Roman, Greek, and Indic societies were shaped by religion - has been qualified considerably since then but has not been replaced by a generally better model (much of the history of the US republic can be read as an attempt to create and make functional a civic religion to replace the old monarchies of Crown and Altar; a great deal of modern professional sports snaps into place once one recognizes the team identification of committed fans as a variant of religious zeal).

That being said, it was an early stab in that direction, and it would be dangerous simply to take it as a guide, a clue for finding one's way back to an ur-society of the Indo-European culture. (Still less can it be taken as a reference to classical culture: a recent popular history of liberal individualism, Larry Siedentop's Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism shows its tendency towards slovenly research at a surface level only in part by its almost entire reliance on Coulanges as a guide to the individual in classical antiquity.)

Modern refinements run in two directions. For those (the majority of those with expertise, it seems) who accept the kurgan hypothesis for the origins of Indo-European, archaeological evidence of the Yamnaya culture provides direct evidence of the parent culture. (For elaboration of this from an archaeologist's perspective, see David Anthony's The Horse, The Wheel, and Language.) The other route is by very careful, painstaking, working backwards from the earliest Greek and Indic poetry towards common roots.

The common origin of Greek and Vedic metres has been recognized since Meillet's Les origines indo-européennes des mètres grecs in the 1920s. This has been the foundation for various extended approaches including Calvert Watkins (How to Kill a Dragon) and Gregory Nagy, whose Greek Mythology and Poetics collects a number of narrowly focussed studies of phrasing and imagery. This generates less sweeping, but more certain, insights into the cultural patterns of the PIE world.

This sort of focus on origins - whether Indo-European or simply archaic and prehistoric successor cultures - has two sides. It's fascinating because it gives us glimpses of otherwise lost worlds, and in a few cases it highlights traits which not only started out prominent but have remained important through western societies' various later histories. It also illuminates (for example) both Homer and Sappho to knows that the adjective poikilos does not just mean "richly-woven" but a particular kind of weaving, and has specific cultic overtones.

On the other hand, there's sometimes a danger of treating origins, especially philological ones, as the mediaevals tended to - treating the origin as a controlling, rather than supplementing, force in one's understanding. To take a trivial case, hlafdige -> levedy -> lady no longer has even the ghost of loaves of bread hovering around its meaning. Worse, even very real arguments deriving from a philologist's idiolect frequently find no parallel in those of others. Consider: there is a fairly important Indo-European root *men- with a meaning roughly of "think, be aware". It's left traces all over Italic, Greek, and Germanic branches: reminiscere, mimnesco, memorial, minion. In particular, there's a very old Germanic or pre-Germanic word meaning "a thinking being"[1], mann, the direct ancestor of the English word man. It's also clear, looking at the OED, that this remained the only meaning until the Middle English period, and the primary meaning well into the modern English period. However, a secondary meaning, male as opposed to "woman", developed in the ME period, and many NE uses are ambiguous, sometimes deliberately ("No living man may hinder me", says the Nazgûl) and sometimes simply by blurring of the general original meaning with male as the unmarked state. By now, though, the secondary meaning (historically) has become so dominant that it is not only pointless but either clueless or malicious to continue using it in the old way - leaving us to fall back on Latinisms like person ("mask") or human for non-gendered nouns representing a member of the species Homo sapiens.

[1]Which leads to an observation about what I think is a philologist's joke by C. S. Lewis. In Out of the Silent Planet he introduces the Malacandrian word "hnau", with exactly this meaning. But not only does Weston not get the identification with the original root meaning ("No care for hnau. Care for man.") but Ransom, the philologist, doesn't seem to make the connection either. If the withholding of the equivalency isn't a joke on Lewis' part, then I can only conclude that as a Lit. rather than Lang. person he didn't know it and could have used some help here from Tolkien.

Deep in the common past of Indo-European history, both Hellenic and Germanic poetry point to a social pattern of poetry being sung (later declaimed) in the lord's hall among retainers by a bard / scop / aoidos.[1]

For Greek epic this was later displaced by differing forms of public performance, partly due to the scale of Homeric poetry; likewise, Beowulf itself, a lengthy text showing the influence of Virgil, is unlikely ever to have had the type of oral performance it describes for the inset "Fight at Finnsburg" story. It is nevertheless reasonable to see it as having been composed for oral delivery and an aristocratic audience.

At least in the English royal and aristocratic courts, there are pointers to many of the extant non-religious poems (and some of the religious - recall Caedmon) being originally composed for public recital in the hall, in a more or less formal manner (depending on scale and occasion). It does not require oral composition to have a poem like "The Seafarer" composed for performance in writing, especially in a period when even private reading was frequently aloud.

This is, of course, not unique to England. There is little evidence regarding French vernacular poetry before the Eleventh Century, but the very first troubadour was not only a courtier but a Duke (Guillaume IX of Poitiers, the grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II Plantagenet's wife). The Franks inherited Germanic traditions along with their courts, and the Normans also inherited them from their Viking ancestors.

Most early French poetry is "English", odd as that may sound. The Chanson de Roland is written in Anglo-Norman and the earliest MS is English, at Oxford University. The Roman d'Enéas is Anglo-Norman. Marie de France lived and worked in England. Benoît de Sainte-Maure wrote for Eleanor. (Chretien de Troyes, with Marie de Champagne as a patroness, is the obvious outlier.) French was the language of the Royal Court down to the time of Richard II, at which point there are clear indications, not least in the life of Chaucer, that English was supplanting it but was not yet the exclusive language of the Court. Chaucer is the poet who is able to transfer the content of French court poetry into English, and after him the transition is taken as a given.

From a social point of view there is a definite continuity between the pre-Norman courtly poetry, the Norman courts with their Anglo-Norman poetry, and the courts of Richard II and following with the Englished form of French courtly poetry pioneered by Chaucer. This is especially visible at the "join" points: Wace's Norman French is translated by Layamon into alliterative verse because, at that early period, there was still a demand - in northern or old-fashioned contexts - for the alliterative form of the pre-conquest traditions. The Gawain-poet's work has recently had a place argued for it in relation to Richard II's Court for all that the form would have been viewed as rustic: it would at the least have been in place in a northern noble Court.

This sort of model for poetry persisted into the Renaissance in at least three ways:

1) Short poems, lyrics, were (as they always had been) set to music, as well as shared privately in letters and manuscripts. You can see this inside Shakespeare's plays: look at the performance of "Sigh no more" or "It was a lover and his lass", for example. This merges into a more general, widely-spread, and long-lived tradition of musical performance at court, which persists at least into the Nineteenth Century. (As harmony develops the single voice gets edged out by instrumental ensembles, until the norm becomes chamber music rather than song.)

2) As non-religious drama develops (and as the multiplication of printed copies shoves narrative verse in the direction of a private experience), recitation at court becomes superseded by dramatic performance at court. Some of this can be tracked by the accounts of the Master of the Revels as the Tudor period continues for the Royal Court. Dramas at noble courts are represented by plays like Youth and Hick Scorner.

Eventually you get to the familiar situation of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres, where the companies were allowed to exist by virtue of their being in the retinue of a great noble (or, after James' accession, being actual members of the Royal Court for the King's Men), and there are regular performances at court. (There are at least two plays which can be argued fairly easily to be written "for" the monarch: The Merry Wives of Windsor, responding to Elizabeth's wish for more Falstaff, and Macbeth, a mini-Aeneid for James I.) The players are in an odd situation: on one hand, excluded from London proper and having their theatres in Southwark, but on the other part of the court.

Indeed, we may, for much of the Twentieth Century, have been looking at the players of Burbage's company backwards: rather than popular actors who occasionally played at court, they may have viewed themselves as courtiers who extended their income by acting for the public as well as the court. Certainly Shakespeare's view of society (witness Ulysses and Menenius Agrippa) is essentially courtly and it may be a corrective to Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture to note that elements may have been a self-justifying aristocratic world picture rather than universally Elizabethan.

This relation lasts, essentially, until the closing of the theatres. After the Restoration, changes to the mode of theatrical presentation (proscenium arch, more elaborate set effects) worked to end the pattern of performance at court in favour of the Royal Box at London theatres.

3) The other branch is that of (professionally assisted) amateur one-time productions: the masques of the Jacobean and Caroline period (these were not only royal but occurred in regional courts, as Comus reminds us). There's an argument to be made that they are contributory ancestors to ballet and opera (similarly, a mix of spectacle, music, and elaborate staging) as patronized by George II but it may be more accurate to view it as having no descendants, having died in England as Charles lost his head in front of the banqueting hall where so many masques had been performed.

It is interesting to think of Beowulf, The Chanson de Roland, Troilus and Criseyde, and Macbeth as successors in the same, now extinct, social tradition, even if the purely literary relationships between them are minimal.

[1]Given the strong evidence for the common heritage of PIE metres in the oldest Greek Lyric and Indic verse forms, this was probably a pattern in Indo-Iranian as well, but the differing context of the oldest surviving Indic poetry obscures this.

By coincidence of finding them in different places second-hand, I just finished Tolkien's Finn and Hengest back to back with Sisam's Studies in Old English Literature.

Together with some other texts (I also read Matthew Wright's The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy recently as well), they set me thinking about the cultural erasure which occurred between the mid Eleventh Century and the Sixteenth, and more generally about loss associated with both classical and old Germanic cultures.

Most of this will be about history or fiction, but let me start with something smaller: a name. The odds are good that, unless you're an Anglo-Saxonist, you've never run into the name Wynfrith; although the man with that name is better known than, say, St. Wilfrid or St. Edmund Martyr, his principal cultus was on the Continent, and he is referenced in the histories as Boniface - a calqued Latin translation of his name - even in English.

Before 1066, of course, this was not the case. In letters translated from Latin into late Old English in about the Tenth Century, the Latin form (which would have been original in the Latin letters) is reverted to its native English form.

A similar but less drastic Latinization means that most readers of The Lord of The Rings, even those who have taken a history of the British Isles from Caesar onward, will not connect The Mark with the Anglian form underlying the Latin Mercia.

With a very few small exceptions such as Caedmon's hymn we have only one MS witness for any given poem in the surviving Old English poetic corpus. Worse, they are typically poor witnesses; they record texts the majority of which may have been written in a different dialect and certainly a couple of centuries - at least - before the MS date, in a period in which the form of writing itself was in flux, and the scribes - the latest ones, at least - were inexpert in poetic vocabulary and metre.

The poems themselves were written for an audience which understood a set of conventions, and a literary and historical background, to which we have only the barest access. They are full of hapax legomena words or entire expressions. Beowulf is almost composed of interpretative cruxes.

The matériel of the OE poetic corpus was once a coherent body on which poets could draw, confident in their audience's recognition. Its preservation had already come under pressure from a high culture which looked askance at old pagan or heroic stories (Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?); after Hastings the changeover in patrons meant its eclipse. The nobility were not interested in the old stories any more. (The next substantial poem in alliterative verse we have, the Brut, only a century later, follows the Matter of Britain and a Norman French original in Wace.)

Classical literature, honestly, isn't a lot better, though it has some advantages. Although some works survive with one witness - Catullus' Carmina survived in one MS when it was printed - most of the core works have multiple witnesses - but except in the very richest areas (Virgil, for example) the witnesses we have frequently go back to a common source at some remove from the original. (For any Classical Greek texts, pretty much by definition, our MSS reflect the edited texts if the Alexandrian scholiasts, which is good in one way - we inherit their scholarship and sometimes some of their editorial apparatus - but bad in another, as we have a hard time getting behind the homogenized texts to earlier versions[1].)

What we do have is a continuous tradition of interpretation for (some of) the major texts we have. (There were effectively no Anglo Saxon studies between the late 11th Century and the mid 16th Century[2], and it was only in the early 18th century that even a useful grammar was produced.) Still, even Virgil has numerous cruxes which have bothered interpreters since at least the late Classical period.

Most of Greek literature is irretrievable, barring a miracle from Herculaneum or the like. (The sole play by Menander of which we have the full text was unearthed from the sands of Egyptian in the mid-20th Century.) The same is true of most of the Latin Literature Virgil knew; we have only fragments of Ennius.

We grow up thinking we know Roman history, but even it looks more uncertain the more you know about the details. We have Cicero, Caesar, Sallust and Tacitus, but they all have agendas which makes them biased witnesses. We lack chunks of Livy, because he ceased to be popular in the late Roman Empire - complete sets of his history were already rare in the Fifth Century - and people didn't bother copying him. And we have none of the variant histories which qualified Livy.

In a manuscript culture nobody has to suppress unwanted texts. Texts in which nobody is particularly interested don't get copied into the future. It's not that anyone was hostile to Agathon, or Asinius Pollo, or the vast quantity of Anglo-Saxon writers; they just had other things to do.

And the texts we do have came out of a different world.

Tolkien considered it likely that the Hengest of the Finn episode in Beowulf is the Hengest of Bede's history; other historians have considered Hengest and Horsa to be entirely mythical. Either way, the whole fabric of historical and allusory background that informed, say, Alfred, has dropped out from around the texts we have, leaving us to scrabble for the bits of what Tom Shippey has called "asterisk-history" to piece together what we can.

The same is true, although there is a difference in degree, for the classical world. We have Cicero's letters, but we have to reconstruct the laws of the late Republic under which he litigated his cases; Virgil (probably) knew Etruscan; even the records of awarded triumphs hide much that we cannot now know. Even for very well documented figures like St. Augustine, random discoveries (such as the Divjak letters) can change our understanding a great deal.

Of course, context drops out all the time, even for far more recent cases. Much of Elizabethan drama never made it to the printing-press; we have no text of Kyd's Hamlet, or Shakespeare's Cardenio. Arguments fly over exactly how the Tudor Reformation was greeted on the ground because for all that we have Roper and More and the Petition of Right and the Protestant controversialists there was a strict censorship with the Star Chamber behind it to prevent a general and accurate landscape of reaction from emerging into the records.

This is part of why I distrust and dislike translations.

It is not simply the interlingual gap, the "traddutore traditore", which is present for even contemporary texts. (Eliot's "Anabasis" cannot be Perse's "Anabase", no matter how hard it tries.) It is the way in which the translator's need to resolve cruxes hides them, the false veneer of certainty when a reader takes the translation as standing for the original. I make two exceptions: cribs (which (a) are meant to be read with the original and (b) frequently preserve cruxes with notes referring back to their complexity in the text) and translations which make no pretence to represent the original closely (some of Pound comes to mind) and have to be evaluated as works on their own with the original as a pattern at best.

[1]The same problem applies in spades to the Masoretic text of the Tanach, as the Masoretes had no interest in recording variants, and our main witness to alternative earlier forms is the Septuagint (plus some later Targums). This is one area where the Dead Sea Scrolls were greatly of use.

[2]We owe the rebirth of Old English studies partly to the fact that in the wake of the English Reformation some people thought that they could uncover a pure pre-RC English Christianity by reading AElfric and Wulfstan. (They were wrong, but they ended up republishing some important prose sources and collecting and preserving MSS which turned out to be important as poetry sources.)

There's also a sudden blossoming of interest in pre-Conquest history in poetry and drama, whence Lear.

In the mid-1970's while living in France I learned the words and music to a traditional song, "Les Filles des Forges" (which had been covered by the band Tri Yann). The lyrics were a mild joke at the expense of the priest in the song, but with no obvious connection to any deeper tradition.

However, it turns out that the lyrics had been heavily reworked. A footnote in Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen led me to the original version, collected by Adolphe Orain in the late 19th Century:

Ce sont les filles des forges (bis)
Des forges de Paimpont,
Falaridon, falaridaine,
Des forges de Paimpont,
Falaridain', falaridon.

Qui furent à confesse (bis)
Au curé de Beignon.
Falaridon, falaridaine,
Au curé de Beignon,
Falaridain', falaridon.

En entrant dans l'église (bis)
Ont demandé pardon,
Falaridon, falaridaine,
Ont demandé pardon,
Falaridain', falaridon.

Qu'avez-vous fait, les filles (bis)
Pour demander pardon ?
Falaridon, falaridaine,
Pour demander pardon,
Falaridain', falaridon.

J'avons couru les danses (bis)
En habit de garçons,
Falaridon, falaridaine,
En habit de garçons,
Falaridain, falaridon.

Vous aviez des culottes (bis)
Dessous vos blancs jupons,
Falaridon, falaridaine,
Dessous vos blancs jupons,
Falaridain, falaridon.

J'avions ben des culottes (bis)
Mais point de cotillons,
Falaridon, falaridaine,
Mais point de cotillons,
Falaridain' falaridon.

Allez-vous-en, les filles (bis)
Pour vous point de pardon,
Falaridon, falaridaine,
Pour vous point de pardon,
Falaridain', falaridon.

Il faut aller à Rome (bis)
Chercher l'absolution,
Falaridon. falaridaine.
Chercher l'absolution,
Falaridain', falaridon.

Si je l'avons à Rome
Je l'aurons ben à Beignon,
Falaridon, Falaridaine,
J' l'aurons ben à Beignon,
Falaridain', falaridon.

There are two things to note about this completely different story: first, the lyrics distinguish between the correct French of the curé and the patois of the girls (which has been lost in the recent version); secondly, the topic is the festal custom (highly disapproved of by the church, though not to the point of requiring a papal indulgence for absolution) of dancing in the clothes of the opposite sex; in this specific case, according to Orain, on the Feast of St-Eloi, the first of December.

This and other similar feasts were in decline in rural France throughout the latter part of the 19th Century, and were largely extinct by the beginning of the 20th.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, it was World War I that had all the literary heft: Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Jones, Remarque, Céline, Ford.[1] By contrast, the Second World War seemed to have generated much in the way of history but little in the way of literature, aside from F.T. Prince's "Soldiers Bathing": Isherwood's Goodbye To Berlin was pre-war; Smith's Last Train From Berlin and Shirer's Berlin Diary are both more at the journalism end of the memoir scale than the literary one. If we half-discount Michener's Tales of the South Pacific (1947), at the popular novel end of its spectrum, the major exception was Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-1961); Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet was set during the war but was not principally concerned with it. During the 1960s this was joined by the third "season" of Dance to the Music of Time (1964-1968) and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969). Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, arguably the most important literary work dealing with WWII, came out in 1973, nearly thirty years after the war ended: by contrast, In Parenthesis, the last of the major literary works on the Great War, came out just under twenty years after its end.

There is a sense in which "Little Gidding" is a Second World War poem; the same can be said of The Pisan Cantos. In neither case, however, is the core subject matter the war, even though they incorporate experiences directly tied to the war. Auden grapples with facets of it, and its precursor and successor events, in short poems -- "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", "September 1, 1939", "The Shield of Achilles". The war as a whole may have seemed too large, too terrible, for a writer to attempt to deal with it, as such, until considerable time had passed.

Speaking from the present, though, the stream of written works on the war became a flood long ago. At the documentary level, it's become almost a joke: the typical history section in a bookstore is weighed down by WWII books. Novels set during the war -- military, spy, fictional memoirs -- are a dime a dozen, and this has spilled into speculative fiction as well.

There may be an argument to be made that speculative fiction, partly because its conterfactuals allowed it to get some sort of parallax on what was seen as a unique event, and partly becuase it could handle the absurd, was the natural choice for handling the war. The Pynchon and the Vonnegut are both, inarguably, speculative fiction.

These days, we have a good sheaf of speculative fiction regarding WWII to look at. If we use award-related examples (only) as an index, 1970 has a Hugo nomination for Slaughterhouse Five, Gravity's Rainbow was nominated for the Nebula in 1973, and then a gap of nearly thirty years passes, followed by Cryptonomicon (Hugo nomination) in 2000, Blackout / All Clear (Hugo winner) in 2011. Atkinson's Life After Life (2013: multiple awards) and A God in Ruins (2015, Locus long list) are focussed on the war.

Also, although there is ample evidence that The Lord of the Rings is not a product of WWII (but rather of the Great War), there is an argument to be made that the set of LOTR-successors with dark lords being defeated by the forces of good are refracting the experience of the fight against Nazism into a medium which could replicate the white (or at least light) against black narrative of that war in another context. (One has only to look at Eddison to see the earlier "standard" heroic model, derived from Homer, of two matched sets of heroes fighting each other.)

There's even a significant subgenre of purely alternate history WWIIs. The Man in the High Castle (1963) and The Iron Dream (1972) (neither of which deal directly with the war as such) are the obvious examples, followed by the beginning of Stirling's Draka series (Marching Through Georgia, 1988) and Turtledove's reworking (1994-1996): Life Beyond Life is merely the most recent of them. (For that matter, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August takes place largely over the span of WWII, though its primary focus is elsewhere.)

But Turtledove, Stirling, Stephenson, Willis, North, and Atkinson are all too young to remember the war. Has it gone from being too major a thing to encapsulate in writing to become a permanent constellation in the cultural firmament as it passes out of living memory?

[1] This was topped off and encapsulated by Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory in 1975.

It being Year B in the Revised Common Lectionary, we've been getting highlights of the career of David in (one version of) the OT lesson.

The David (and Solomonic) material in 2 Samuel is ... interesting. There is a modern archaeological school which would deny any historicity at all to David. (Up until the discovery of the Tel Dan Stele in the 1990s there was no archaeological evidence even for the "House of David" contemporary with its existence.) More moderate archaeologists, while entirely willing to grant that David and Solomon may very well have existed, have identified serious disconnects between the archaeological record and the building programmes associated with the two. At the same time, there is also a school of textual study which would identify the core of the narrative with a contemporary or near-contemporary "Court Historian", and sees it as a development of historical writing independent of Herodotus. ("Near-contemporary" might mean that the narrative was first assembled under Solomon or one of his immediate successors, (much of the narrative can be seen as either indicating why Solomon's own line of descent is firm (the Bathsheba story, while negative as regards David's ethical character, establishes Solomon as the child of a formalized marriage) or why the other potential lines are not attractive (the Michal and Absolom stories)).

For any part of the narrative, there are at least four possibilities: it goes back to an original source within living memory of the events; it was assembled later based on oral recollections; it is a composition dating from early in the monarchical period; it is a late composition by the Deuteronomistic school (which assembled the current books of Samuel and Kings). In any of these cases except the last, there is the certainty that the text was chosen, shaped and probably enhanced[1] by the Deuteronomist[s].

Any given text may reflect multiple reasons for being shaped as it is.

The items that caught my attention involved the anointings of David. There are actually two referred to: one which looks as though it came out of a standard chronicle ("So all the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them at Hebron before the LORD, and they anointed David king over Israel. David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned forty years. At Hebron he reigned over Judah seven years and six months; and at Jerusalem he reigned over all Israel and Judah thirty-three years.") and one, more famous, in which Samuel anoints David as a young man, long before he came to prominence as a military leader, which definitely does not read like a standard chronicle.

For the Deuteronomist, the story of Samuel's anointing of David served a straightforward purpose: it validates the line of David in general with a direct link to the pre-monarchical prophets, and it makes the Davidic line's claim to the throne dependent on Yahweh (and implicitly on the Yahwist cultus) only. (The following narrative makes it clear that whatever sacral claim David could make, it was also very much driven by his success as a military leader.) This theme is reinforced by the authority of Nathan to rebuke David (in the Bathsheba episode) -- and note that Nathan is one of the anointers of Solomon when he gains the kingship. This is the flip side of denying success to later kings who were known to have been polytheistic or at least tolerant of multiple cults, or even supportive of modes of worship which were not centred on the Temple in Jerusalem.

The original context of the story is a more interesting question. Even assuming a relatively high degree of historicity in the core David narrative, it's hard to see David, or even Solomon, wanting to push a narrative which cedes the power of making and unmaking kings entirely to the Yahwistic cultus, and (like the Goliath story, which is equally likely to be a story either composed for or transferred from another figure (Elhanan) to David -- in the Goliath story the differences between the Septuagint and Masoretic texts show the process continuing after the composition of the Books of Samuel) it is not connected at all directly to the court narrative from David's/Solomon's own day. David would have been far more likely to stress memes along the lines of "Saul hath slain his thousands and David his ten thousands" rather than an early anointing by Samuel as a basis for ruling. Its only function would be to defend against a continuing claim by the party that supported Saul regarding David's legitimacy -- Samuel bestowed Saul's legitimacy and he then took it away; but as David seems to have been careful to eliminate claimants from Saul's family to the throne (while disavowing responsibility for the actual killing), and as he had a perfectly good sacral claim based on his anointing at Hebron, that is also not very convincing.

A few generations later, however, it may have been convenient for the post-Rehoboam Kings of Judah as a way of improving their claim over against Israel to publicise, or circulate in an official capacity, the story with a possibly folkloric origin. (Certainly there is a folkloric element to this anointing which is kept secret by Samuel because he is afraid of Saul being later produced as a validation of David's legitimacy.) And it was always in the interest of the Yahwistic cultus to provide a narrative which gave primacy to their authority.

Original context for these stories will have been reformulated during the Deuteronomistic composition: bits scraped off, other bits attached.

For what it's worth, the Psalms form an independent witness that the anointing of David was a cultic focus to some degree ("I have found David my servant: with my holy oil have I anointed him"), although the dating of the psalm is uncertain: there is some disagreement over whether it should be considered pre or post-exilic. It later, of course, became an even more major focus, as it is at the root of the post-exilic development of the figure of a messiah of the House of David.

[1]Certainly much of the text describing Solomonic building has to have been added much later and assigns him construction which took place much later than Solomon; there is no reason to believe that the David story is any less enhanced by later redaction.

The original formulation of "willing suspension of disbelief" was by Coleridge, talking about writing poems regarding the supernatural. It was picked up (to my recollection) by Lin Carter in the early 1970's to talk about fantasy and has become generalized within the SFF community.

Historical novels have their own variant of WSOD as well, though, one identified by Chesterton in the Father Brown stories:

"I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable. ... It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don't understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr. Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr. Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it's only incredible. But I'm much more certain it didn't happen than that Parnell's ghost didn't appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand."

I was reading Peter Brown's biography of Augustine and was reminded of a prime example from a number of years ago.

I was reading Jack Whyte's series of books regarding Merlin/Arthur (from the library, so no money was wasted) and found that he was presenting an opposition between a fluffy, tolerant native Christianity to Great Britain (represented by Pelagius) and a rigid, intolerant Christianity associated with Roman Christianity (presumably represented by Augustinians). "That day I read no more."

It was obvious why he was doing this: he wanted to present a completely ahistorical religion for his protagonists which would make them more attractive / make them more like his 20th Century audience. It was also obvious that he didn't understand a thing he was talking about.

First, the Pelagians were more rigorist than the Augustinians. Sure, they defended natural human virtue, but they did so to insist that the only virtue worth praising was a complete ascetic rigorist monastic ideal -- that God had given everyone the capability to be saintly and that it was their own fault if they didn't make use of it. (By contrast, Augustine's views were driven explicitly to make a place for the homme moyen sensuel, the common people of his day; and his views regarding the physical creation were far more positive than those of the Pelagians -- he had grappled with this when he had rejected Manichaeanism.)

Secondly, everything we know about the Celtic Church at any period suggests that it was very rigorist.

Thirdly, by modern standards, everyone was rigorist, and nobody had views which would be sympathetic to everyday modern people. There was a brief period when there were relatively "flexible" Christians after the conversion of the Empire, and historians have come more and more to see these people as a legitimate version of Christianity rather than half-converted pagans: Lactantius would be an example. However, these people were not flexible in that they were like a secular reader of today, or even a mainline protestant; they were flexible in that they were willing to accept both the cultural practices which had come down through paganism (but were not explicitly idolatrous) such as the Lupercalia and the revelation of Christianity. (Their ethical views tended to be on the strict side, as they merged the ethics of Stoicism / Neoplatonism with that of Christianity.) In many ways they were less like us than an Augustinian thinker: we owe a great deal to the relative subtlety of Augustine's thought (as displayed, for example, in the Confessions which was alien to these people.

So, no, just not possible. It made his entire story completely unbelievable, as he was supplying motivations and alliances which were just flat-out impossible. It also showed that, no matter how much formal research Whyte had done, he just didn't grasp the world he was depicting, or trying to depict.

Nicola Griffith's Hild is a very well-done historical novel, in the sense that it deals fairly well with the historical novelist's dilemma and does not just give us modern people in a mediaeval dress. (Many if not most historical novels do.) It is also a well-written novel, with well-rounded characters, good prose, and a measured pace. I look forward to its successor.

That being said, I'm going to go on a tangent about historicity.

First, we know less about pagan East Anglia in the Seventh Century than we do about Republican Rome, especially if we want to talk about the details of everyday life. (We know the names of kings and battles, and some bits from Bede, essentially.) Every single source we have is written a generation and a half, at best, after the fact, in a Christian society. The texts we have which preserve elements of the earlier society have their own limitations -- embedded heroic stories, the "ruins" of Tolkien's allegory about the writing of Beowulf, do not have much connection with everyday life, even among the nobility. James the Deacon, a character in the novel, lived to be an old man and may have provided information regarding the Synod of Whitby which we have in Bede (which took place, be it noted, well after this first book in the projected trilogy), but even if he or any of his contemporaries told a very young Bede, or a source of Bede's, stories about the early days in the north, and what the fabric of life was like, they have not come down to us. The Chronicle has battles, royal births, and deaths, but it itself was composed rather after the fact and is in no way a primary document. We know virtually nothing about the Anglian (or indeed, general Germanic) practice of the old religion.

Writers didn't suppress details of the old society; they just weren't interested in it, for the parts that had gone away, or took for granted the continuing elements. Much of what we know about social history of the period is actually fairly recent, based on archaeology rather than history.

Griffith takes as much care as she can to get her material and social context right, but she still has a large blank space to fill in, even with all the constraints she conforms to.

Second, Griffith herself has been clear about having "taken heinous liberties with" Paulinus of York. Nothing that she's done with him has been impossible, but the probability of his having been like the man depicted in the novel is low.

Third, Much of the thread of the novel does turn around one entirely made-up character (Cian).

Fourth, the pattern of other royal abbesses of joint monasteries -- Æthelthryth / Audrey of Ely is a later contemporary of Hild's, also East Anglian, about whom we know more of her life before becoming an abbess -- suggests that one need not invoke the exceptional course of being a seer to explain a level of female agency in that society required to become a major figure of this type. Hild is not a one-of-a-kind figure. Occam's Razor leads me to posit, in reality, a rather different life arc for the early Hild.

Fifth, I doubt that the East Angles were as illiterate as depicted; futharc is older than the invasion of England in the Germanic world, was certainly preserved down to the time of (at least) the Ruthwell Cross, and would have been part of the imported culture of the Angles.

The language isn't quite right -- Griffith uses standard West Saxon forms of the Eighth/Ninth Century, as far as I can tell, and not the Northumbrian of Caedmon or Bede. Also, using "York" for the city that was the Roman Eboracum will not fit until after the Vikings name it Jorvik: it is Eoforwic during the period. Similarly, Hild would not have referred to Mercia as "Mercia", which was a Latin form used in the written texts of later Anglo-Saxon England; it would be like us referring to "Anglia" or "Francia"; nor, being Northumbrian, would she have called it "Mearc". She would have said "Marc".

Now, none of this matters all that much. Francis Lymond's world bends somewhat around him as well, to accommodate his story, as does Harry Flashman's. Griffith puts together a coherent world which does not directly contradict what we know. The internal dynamics of that world produce the recorded historical events we have without special assistance from the author. As long as you don't confuse it with the actual past, you're fine.

You could probably write an historical novel about a "most probable" Hild, but (1) it would probably be rather dull and (2) it would also probably be wrong about all sorts of stuff.

But it's worth remembering that for any imaginative recreation of a period in history, it will be shaped by the contemporary concerns of the writer, which will be as transparent to the writer's audience as they are to the writer. Then at some time, thirty, fifty, eighty years later the marks of "period" will become not only visible but inescapable.

(I was going to post something about Robert A. Heinlein generally, but then I realized that I had nothing to say that had not been said, one way or another, multiple times on Usenet and in the blogosphere. I'm not sure there is anything left to say that hasn't been said. So here's this, instead.)

In recent fannish discussions, the idea that (say, or for example) Heinlein's work has shifted from being accessible to being of "historical interest" only, at least for new or younger readers. There's been some argument about it, but I think there's a general consensus in some quarters that (in particular) the Heinlein juveniles do not now consitute an accesible gateway into SF in the way that they used to. Some people take the view of "after all, they're sixty years old by now" as a simple explanation.

As a completely separate datapoint, I have occasionally seen people writing about their reading experiences saying that (at least in general) works with what would have been a typical level of gender or racial inequality taken for granted make them "bounce off" -- in effect, that with a few exceptions, they don't enjoy reading anything older than the 1980s.

For other readers, older-style omniscient narratorial voices seem to be a barrier.

Some books which had held on as cultural standards for a very long time indeed have dropped off the map in the past generation or so. John Bunyan, Robert Louis Stephenson, and Walter Scott were omnipresent (and actually read) up to the time of my childhood; I don't think that this is true any longer.

In the preface to The Anathemata, David Jones refers to "the Break", a perceived gap between the culture post-WWI (not necessarily identifying the war itself as the (only) cause of the Break) visible as early as the 1920s. In that case, this seems not to have consituted a barrier to reading works from the earlier civilization, but more a sense of being deracinated from the preceding age.

I wonder whether we have passed over, or are in the process of passing over, a slightly different kind of break.

In general, historically, literary works do not simply "age". Better (and sometimes second-rank) works tend to hang around and remain accessible, although fashions in taste may vary. (I was happily reading John Buchan novels in the 1970s, when they were about as far away in time as Heinlein's Juveniles are now.) Sometimes, however, whole blocks of read experience drop out in a relatively quick period of time.

It has happened before.

Consider the mediaeval prose romance.[1] These were tremendously popular for centuries: and then, quite suddenly, they go "poof". Major examples include the Prose Lancelot (13th century), Amadis of Gaul (early 14th century), Palmerin of England (16th century), and the Sidneys' Arcadia (late 16th century).

A typical English-speaking reader who is not a mediaevalist will encounter only works which are spin-offs or parodies of the form. Malory (late 15th century) uses the prose romances -- he relies heavily on the Prose Lancelot, for example -- but he modifies and simplifies the form of the narratives so that Le Morte d'Arthur is really a cousin, or maybe a child, of the prose Romance rather than an example of it. Don Quixote and (in a different mode) The Knight of the Burning Pestle are both parodies / critiques of the form.

There's very little continuity between these works and the narratives that follow. The picaresque narrative (beginning in the 16th century with Lazarillo de Tormes) plays off the romance form in its origins. The form itself just vanishes; people stopped being interested. (Even Malory is not reprinted between 1634 and 1816.)

The prose romance did not die out simply as a result of changing literary fashion; it was sandbagged by a general cultural shift which included a revolt against anything viewed as "gothic" (a term of disdain until the Romantics and Victorians came along) and in fvaour of classicism. The Seventeenth Century in England produces no major romance, verse or prose; it does produce an epic.

We have clearly not crossed over any general line involving the eclipse of a formal type: the novel, literary and popular, is still going strong. (Insofar as there was a formal gap, it lies between about 1900 and 1925 and involves narratorial technique.) We have seen the relative eclipse of the Western as a form post-Louis L'Amour.

If we have crossed over a significant gap, then it's arguable that instead of being a separate discontinuity it's "merely" a second stage of the Break that Jones refers to -- that we're at another step of a single century-long shift in values which is now making even the relatively recent past a very distant country, at least to those who were born after a certain point in time.

There's a ton of non-literary markers; the biggest and most obvious one has been the shift in accepted gender roles since the mid-60's. The role of the classics as a reference point has been eclipesd: when my father graduated from High School, Latin was required to get into university in any non-science stream; I and both my siblings have some classical language background, but it was not mandatory at the end of high school; none of my nephews and nieces have any Latin or Greek. The social changes following on (in succession) the introduction of television, home computers, the general availability of the Internet, and portable computing have a role to play, and are by no means anywhere near final yet. An increasing awareness of the concerns of indigenous peoples has to be one of the reasons for the decline of the conventional Western. A general rise in affluence during the 20th Century (even if that rise has slowed or stalled in the very recent past) has meant a radical change in living conditions for most people in the Western world (and the developing world has changed as well, although not in quite the same way or at the same pace). Better medical and public health factors have lengthened life expectancies.

So maybe its not a surprise that people born in, say, the past twenty-five years (it's been about that long since the collapse of the Soviet Union) lie in a different enough world that their reading responses will reflect it in a broad-based way. There will still be outliers, of course, (and even a reasonable number of them) who will happily read golden age SF or Scott/Stevenson/Haggard, and those authors will stay in print (Gene Stratton-Porter's Freckles is still in print, but I don't think it has a wide readership).[2]

[1]As distinct from the equally popular verse romance. These also went out of style, but earlier: their arc runs from the Roman d'Eneas (12th century), through Sir Orfeo (13th-14th century), to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th century). If you are willing to follow the arc that (covering the Matter of France) runs from middle French romances through Boiardo and Ariosto to Spenser, you can make an argument that The Faerie Queene is a late example, but you would have to push it. Ariosto really represents its last flourishing as a tour-de-force.

[2]To be fair, Scott, at least, is important and good enough to be in a more permanent category in any case, at worst like Sterne, who has "lasted", pace Dr. Johnson, for more than two centuries. But he's no longer the popular author he was a relatively short time ago.

I would like to say at the outset that the book is, overall, valuable and readable. Its general overview of scribal culture in a broadly pre-literate society [1] is an effective summary (confined to middle-eastern sources, admittedly), and many of its general observations regarding the composition of the books of the bible are of equal use.

However, van der Toorn seems to want to jump to conclusions in ways which make it inevitable that some of his conclusions, although possible, are by no means as inevitable as he makes them look; and in other cases, he doesn't seem to think things through carefully. Possible counter-positions are not set out and middle stages in arguments are missing. This may be the result of directing the book towards a general audience rather than a scholarly one, with a consequent over-attempt to make the text more easily readable.

Other reviewers have noted that his situating of the biblical scribes in the temple as opposed to the palace is highly reliant on post-Exilic evidence and is not nearly as well-founded as one moves earlier. I'll come back to this when we get to Deuteronomy.

I would like to point out as a more fundamental problem his model of the issuing of editions. He wants to see the MS of a major text as being not only private to the scribal caste but also existing in only one unique copy (so that when that copy is re-copied on wearing out there would be an automatic "new edition" created without competing exemplars).

He has not thought this through. For a text such as Deuteronomy, which is a law text, copies need to be available for local judges to refer to. You can't run a law system with a single central copy of a critical master text. Of course, by the same token, a text which has not been completely "canonized" but which is a reference document can be recalled and reissued as a working text when updated, just as we republish the Criminal Code every year for reference, so in the earlier period the distinction may make a minimal difference. Indeed, a law text in actual use and reflecting a broadly casuistic system pretty well has to be regularly reissued as new instances come up and are decided. (I think he also underestimates the likelihood of a higher degree of substantial variation between the versions of the books in the pre-Masoretic period.)

In addition, I think it unlikely that control over texts operated in the same way during the Exilic period than either before or after. At that time it may very well have been the case that texts held by Levites in exile might have had a much more minimal circulation, since there was no social infrastructure of which they were part.

So, to his treatment of Deuteronomy. His model of re-editions for this book looks to be broadly persuasive in terms of its thematic traits for each level, as well as his observations regarding additions appearing at interstitial points, beginnings and endings[2]. However, there seems to be no very good reason for seeing the original edition — focussed principally on the promulgation of the Josianic reforms — as having an origin in the temple cultus rather than the royal palace — indeed, on the plausible possibility that the Josianic reforms were driven from the palace rather than the temple, it would make more sense as a palace production. (He also skips over what to me is the most interesting question about Deuteronomy, which is the relation of its text to prior oral or written sources, although he handwaves at the relation of part of it to the older texts in Exodus.) The "Torah" and "History" editions (which he plausibly places during the exile on internal evidence) would have been developed outside the Temple context as an ideal text, not as an active law text, as would the "Wisdom" edition. The factor which set the choice of version of text in stone and finally displaced the others would then have been (following his own later argument) the choice of this fourth edition as the version which Ezra included in his Torah to be used as the local law under the Persian authority. In this case he needs no special mechanism to explain the supersession of the earlier versions.

He also makes broad jumps of logic in treating Jeremiah as a type of the prophetic literature. He seems to be quite ready to jump from the specific example of Baruch's relation to Jeremiah to a general scribal / prophetic relationship, despite the facts that (1) the example of Baruch has no explicit parallel in any other prophetic texts and (2) Jeremiah as a book is unusual in many respects and may not be the best exemplar for drawing general conclusions about the prophets. In addition, I think he may gloss over some of the factors which would have led to the production of relatively "authoritative" editions of pre-Exilic prophets during the exile (notably, the prophets who were likely to be reproduced would have been those who predicted and provided an explanatory model for the exile — and these would have been just the ones to be least appealing before the exile as compared to prophets who assured the kings of victory).

The most potentially interesting area for applying the models of scribal culture would seem to me to be the earlier phase of the formation of the bible — the assembly of the oldest sources into more general sources, with attention paid to what parts involved editing at the Deuteronomic History stage and what parts were the output of earlier scribal activity. This would also involve a longer discussion of the different ways in which oral and written sources fed into the flow of documentary creation and revision. However, this would involve focussing on the period of the monarchies (note the plural - by mainly treating the Josianic and later periods he manages to sidestep any differences between the cultures of the two kingdoms) and on the differences between Israelite and Judaean contexts during that period — a topic which van der Toorn at best gestures toward.

[1]I did do a course in manuscript culture and issues in graduate school, but it was focussed on the literate culture of the high middle ages. There are significant differences in the classical and, even more, the pre-classical periods, although there are also some commonalities.

[2]The same pattern shows up in Christian liturgical development — additions tend to have occurred at the beginning and ending of the mass, or at the join point between the old synaxis and the eucharist proper. His characterisations of the different layers are not, of course, peculiar to him. Of course, this suggests that the model for development of canonical but not invariant texts such as that of the mass may be very close to his pre-literate scribal pattern; it certainly illustrates how a sacred text can be seen as authoritative and yet be subject to change.

I have known for a while that my great-great grandfather Peter Anderson came from the village of St. Fillans in Perthshire, Scotland and emigrated to Canada in 1852, settling in the area of Renfrew which had been settled by the McNab setttlement ("chain migration": both he and his brother came over at different times and presumably knew settlers from Perthshire who were already in Canada: Note that the "Laird" Archibald McNab who started the Ottawa Valley settlement was connected tightly to the Trossachs area at Callendar, where his predecessor had resided and where the local hotel sitll memorializes connections with the old rogue, and before that to the Abbey associated with St. Fillan.)

I also knew that Peter's father's grave was at St.Fillans, and actually had some photographs from the 1950's and 1970's (taken, respectively, by a first cousin twice removed and by my grandmother) of the gravestones, but with no context.

So when my family went over to celebrate my brother's fiftieth birthday in the Trossachs this summer, some of us decided to go on a visit to St. Fillans.

It was interesting because it pointed to a set of information which had been, as it were, in front of the people who had previously visited St. Fillans, but were far more interesting that just "here is the grave site", but had not ben passed on.

First. St. Fillans is a relatively new town founded at/near the Port of Lochearn around 1800. The people who lived there had mainly come from the clachan of Morell as part of the Highland Clearances.

Secondly, the gravestones are in a (now ruinous: photos show it having been much better kept up in the mid-50s) churchyard for the old church associated with St. Fillan himself, which stands a little ways to the south of the town (now across the local golf course and in the middle of a meadow, fenced off from the cattle). This chapel saw active burials into the 20th century, but had been replaced for "normal" use by a church in the village itself sometime during the Victorian period. It itself dates back to the late mediaeval period, and could go back (at least as a site with a chapel and possibly, in the pre-Reformation period, with local pilgrimages) to the sixth century.

("[St. Fillan] is said to have sat in a rocky seat on the top of Dunfillan, near Comrie. [The hill is close by the chapel in question, and is the site of an iron age fort]. The stone received the name of St Fillan's Chair, and till the end of last century [i.e. the 18th century] was associated with a superstitious remedy for rheumatism in the back. The person to be cured sat in the chair, and was then dragged down the hill by the legs, the saint's influence guaranteeing recovery.": from "Traces of the Cultus of St Fillan at Killallan, Renfrewshire", by J. M. MacKinlay, Proceedings of the Archaeological Society, April 8, 1895)

Together, these items have a number of implications:

1) It would be incorrect to view St. Fillan's as any sort of "ancestral home": it housed about two (partial, in both cases) generations for a bit (my g-g-g-grandfather after he resettled in the valley, and my g-g-grandfather until he left Scotland period).

2) Any previous background on the family would be at best by luck. Because John Anderson married a Drummond, and because she was descended from some documented Carmichaels who go back a little further, there is some older information on part of the family in the Glentarkan area, but the trail of the Andersons (who would seem to have originally been crofters) peters out amid the ruins of Morell.

3) We (or at least, my recent relatives) tended to see the settlement patterns through the wrong end of the telescope. From my ancestors' perspective, moving out to the colonies was probably not the major break with the past: that break would have been the disruption of the way of life which accompanied the clearances, and the moving out to Canada -- where there was more farmland, no worse than what was available in Scotland -- would have been more of a sequel than the major shift itself.

I did not visit Morell, but there are some notes with pictures on the web: all that is left of Morell is some low ruins of old walls.

I have other Scots ancestors who were also from Perthshire via the Ottawa Valley, but they seem to have come from other areas than that near St. Fillans.

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there"

Since readers can please themselves - de gustibus, and all that -- there's no immutable law that says that you have to recognize this. But it is true that if you can't put aside your own current views you will be cutting yourself off from most of the past.

Jane Austen valorized an absence of agency in women (Mansfield Park is the high point of this). Charlotte Bronte had a serious anti-Catholic prejudice. The assumptions underlying Tom Jones are irretrievably sexist. Sayers, Chesterton, Heyer and Eliot all incorporate ant-semitic caricatures in their fiction. Almost all of Shakespeare, Jonson, Pope, Austen, Trollope, and Heyer assume that the higher your birth the better a person you are likely to be (not will necessarily be, but are likely to be). As for any classical author, the list will be by definition very long indeed.

It can also be worth remembering that in terms of material culture no culture prior to the Twentieth Century was better than a very poor developing country of the late Twentieth Century, and in some ways was almost certainly always worse (notably in medicine and public health). There were no antibiotics, no modern detergents or synthetic fabrics, and few paved roads (and those were surfaces for horse dander). Hygeine was low by modern standards until the germ theory of disease started to percolate through the populace (and through advertising) in the early 20th century. Food was expensive: for most of the population of England for most of its history the cost of food was vastly greater than the cost of lodgings.

The historical novel begins with Scott, and we've now had nearly two centuries of them. (Waverley was published in 1814.) So it's remarkable how few genuinely great examples there are of historical novels/novelists (not quite the same thing: it's arguable that Heyer was a great historical novelist but rather harder to argue for any one of her novels as being great). There's Scott himself, and Tolstoy, and Dunnett, and Eco, for Il Nomme Della Rosa, and maybe Fraser and Heyer based on their entire corpuses. Iain Pears and Hilary Mantel, perhaps, but they're still pretty recent. (Stendahl is out: La Chartreuse de Parme reflects a period he lived through; ditto for Balzac and La Comedie Humaine.)

It's interesting to note, however, the number of historical novels on the top ten bestseller lists of the past which haven't had much staying power. Sabatini, Douglas, Asch, Shellabarger, Goudge, Costain, Waltari ... It's also noticeable that some historical novels which have remained in print -- notably Doyle's The White Company, Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, and I can remember having a copy of Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days Of Pompeii in my school library -- aren't exactly well thought of critically.

Let's face it, it's difficult to write a genuinely good historical novel. You have to do a ton of research to avoid just making elementary bloopers, and a ton more to really be able to provide a feel of the period. You then have to write a genuinely good novel, which is difficult in itself. And finally, if the novel isn't just going to be a costume drama but have structural integrity, there has to be a good reason for it to occur in the past rather than the present.

Some people want historical novels because they give a candy-coated view of the past -- they strip out the hard edges of differentness which are in actual authors from the period and replace them with characters who have modern motivations and attitudes who are therefore more acceptable to the reader. I note in particular Jack Whyte and Ellis Peters here. These novels pretend to be "historical" and may reflect physical events that really took place, but they are just as much fantasy as The Lord of the Rings.

I was shopping for gifts for loot bags for my daughter's birthday party when I discovered a number of "Chinese Jump Ropes" (which I picked up, as they were on sale). However, it triggered a couple of memories:

When I was young, this was called "jumpsies" and was played with linked elastic bands.

There's a family tradition about its introduction to Canada (and not from China, but from Korea): my aunt Margaret had introduced it.

So I googled around, and sure enough, I came up with a confirming citation:

Edith Fouke, Sally Go Round the Sun, p.152:

YOKI AND THE KAISER. This rhyme, in many forms, is very popular with Canadian children. It is used for a variation on skipping in which a long piece of elastic is raised and lowered while the player goes over or under it. It is said to be a Korean children’s game that the children of missionaries brought back to Canada. Margaret Burbidge, daughter of Rev. and Mrs. W. A. Burbidge, came home to Toronto from Korea in 1939 and introduced the game into Humewood public school.

The CBC had a fulsome introduction to a lecture by the Aga Khan this evening, which gave a good deal of background both to him and to the Ismaili Muslims, but omitted mentioning anything about Hassan i Sabbah and their early background.

Profile

jsburbidge

April 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 7th, 2025 09:54 pm

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

Entries tagged with history

Plunder

That Day I Read No More

Yamnaya

The Farmers' Revolt

Conquest

Getting Details Right

Roots

One Aspect of the Continuity of English Poetry

History that drops out

The Erasure and Recreation of Tradition

World War II and SFnal Memory

Inveni David: Inexpert Reflections

WSOD and Historical Novels: a case study

Hild

The Break

Notes on Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, Karel van der Toorn

St. Fillans

History and Fiction

Minor bit of family history

How soon they are forgotten...