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Kafka was a lawyer by training. At the age of 25, two years after getting his law degree, he began work at the Kingdom of Bohemia’s Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, where he devoted himself to the implementation of the law on statutory occupational insurance, adopted by Austro-Hungary in 1887—three years behind Germany and eleven years ahead of France.footnote1 Kafka specialists are divided as to whether his legal career hindered or helped his literary work. His diaries and letters offer evidence to support both views, which should not be surprising, since there is barely a single affirmation from his pen that is not immediately reconsidered from another point of view. Thus he famously wrote that his legal studies involved living on sawdust, already chewed over by thousands of mouths—but promptly added that, ‘in a certain sense’, this was exactly to his taste.footnote2 This way of turning over the cards, not stopping at the first meaning of a fact or symbol but always examining them from the reverse perspective, is the hallmark of the legal mind—or, more precisely, of the art of the trial, which is entirely governed by the rule of audi alteram partem: hear the other party. This first rule of the art of law is known today as the adversarial principle—in French, the principe du contradictoire. It is an ambiguous term, since consideration of the opposite point of view doesn’t annul the first viewpoint but puts it to the test of truth, allowing the party defending it to rebut in turn the arguments made against it. In other words, the principle is valid only to the extent that it is at the service of the law of non-contradiction: that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. In the course of legal proceedings, the play of these successive ‘speaking againsts’ thus takes place on a terrain of rules that cannot themselves be contradicted and which are based in law. The parties have to submit to the same law for the trial to proceed; it is this common submission that allows them to exchange words, rather than blows. The law—Gesetz in German, meaning that which is set down—thus gives human life its institutional foundation. When it is trodden underfoot, we sink into the depths of unreason. So it was for the high mountain bridge, the protagonist and narrator of its namesake story, when a foolish traveller, imagining he is testing the bridge’s solidity, ‘jumps hard with both feet together on the small of its back’. The bridge, put to this test, turns over to see what is happening. ‘I had not fully turned around’—the bridge itself is speaking—‘when I fell, falling to pieces, broken and impaled on the sharp rocks which until then had always looked up at me so peacefully from the raging waters.’footnote3 Where it affects the generational order that underpins the structure of the law, this ‘turning over’ produces those infanticidal parents who figure so frequently in myth and religion. According to that order, sons should bury their fathers. But here it is fathers who seek to bury their sons, projecting their own death drive onto their offspring. This type of parent is also encountered in daily life, not least in the academic world, where they don’t assassinate their descendants but condemn them to oblivion in order to affirm their own omnipotence and to escape the generational chain. Such is the case with the father of Georg Bendemann, the central character in Kafka’s story, ‘The Judgement’, when he issues his condemnation: ‘At bottom you were an innocent being, but beneath that you were a diabolical one! . . . And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!’ Georg immediately carries out the order, going to—where else?—a bridge, whose function of carrying human life he turns into a discreet instrument for his own death.footnote4 Our institutional foundation can also be undermined in another way, when the law is not overturned but unknowable. ‘It is a torture’, Kafka wrote, ‘to be governed by laws of which one is ignorant’, for one who doesn’t know the laws is abandoned to the arbitrary reign of power and its representatives, real or supposed.footnote5 One could legitimately ask oneself if these laws really exist or whether they merely express the whim of those in office. This is the experience of totalitarian systems, whose resources Kafka’s work unveils. In a state of law, even in an empire like Austro-Hungary, it is still possible to call on the support of the law to limit the obliteration of the weak by the strong. Kafka thus dedicated his professional life to drafting legal documents to make the best possible protective use of the Austro-Hungarian law on industrial accidents. All known law that leaves itself open to interpretation is thereby a source of liberty. Kafka extends this freedom of interpretation to his readers like a lifebuoy to keep reason afloat in the universe of his stories. Every reader can find a new meaning in them, but none can claim to exhaust their sense. This profusion is foreign to the totalitarian order, which aims to empty out the sources of interpretation, to prevent anyone from appealing to the law in order to affirm their own subjecthood. Such a regime plunges its citizens into a world of unreason, where their survival depends upon the shifting allegiances of the authorities to whom they look for protection while exposing themselves to manipulation. Kafka makes us live this plunge, while at the same time mobilizing our freedom as reader-interpreters. He gives us the poison and its antidote simultaneously, reminding us of the irreducible aspect of humanity which in each of us resists determinism.	__label__1	0.913983
Bentley's Miscellany, 第 8 卷 Charles Dickens, William Harrison Ainsworth, Albert Smith Richard Bentley, 1840 0 评价评价未经验证，但 Google 会检查有无虚假内容，并移除发现的虚假内容大家的评论 - 撰写书评我们没有找到任何书评。其他版本 - 查看全部常见术语和短语热门引用章节第533页 - Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year ; For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale. The white sheet bleaching on the hedge, With hey ! the sweet birds, O how they sing ! Doth set my pugging tooth on edge ; For a quart of ale is a dish for a king. The lark, that tirra-lirra chants, With hey! with hey! the thrush and the jay: Are summer songs for me and my aunts, While we lie tumbling in the hay. 第438页 - Now the bright morning star, day's harbinger, Comes dancing from the east, and leads with her The flowery May, who from her green lap throws The yellow cowslip, and the pale primrose. Hail, bounteous May, that dost inspire Mirth, and youth, and warm desire ; Woods and groves are of thy dressing, Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing. Thus we salute thee with our early song, And welcome thee, and wish thee long. 第72页 - Ere the evening lamps are lighted, And, like phantoms grim and tall, Shadows from the fitful fire-light Dance upon the parlour wall; Then the forms of the departed Enter at the open door ; The beloved, the true-hearted, Come to visit me once more... 第151页 - I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity — an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn — a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible and leaden-hued. 第156页 - But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him, desolate!) And, round about his home, the glory That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed. And travellers, now within that valley. Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody ; While, like a rapid ghastly river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever, And laugh — but... 第159页 - I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me - to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. 第156页 - Banners yellow, glorious, golden, On its roof did float and flow (This — all this — was in the olden Time long ago) And every gentle air that dallied, In that sweet day, Along the ramparts plumed and pallid, A winged odor went away. 第155页 - An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. 第151页 - ... fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from... 第150页 - It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate, its capacity for sorrowful impression... 书目信息	__label__1	0.763983
Thomas Browne Critical Essays (Literary Criticism (1400-1800)) Thomas Browne 1605-1682 English prose writer, essayist, and physician. The following entry provides criticism on Browne's works from 1973 through 2003. Sir Thomas Browne holds a unique place in the development of English writing because of the diversity of his interests and training. A physician by training and profession, Browne is now remembered most often for his writings and contribution to the growth of English letters. In works such as the Religio Medici (1642), Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), and Hydriotaphia (1658), Browne covers a vast variety of subjects, including theories on religion and philosophy, and reflects on issues such as human mortality, time, and eternity. His writing was unique in its combination of empirical observation and religious exploration, and he is often praised for his lyric and rich writing style, which is akin to Senecan prose. Most significantly, Browne lived and wrote during tumultuous times in English history. During his lifetime he was witness to a civil war, the Interregnum, and eventually the Restoration. His writings, especially the Religio Medici, reflect many of his concerns about the events of his time, and through his words Browne is acknowledged now as a master of English prose, leading his readers with both his expression and rhythm to an experience in discovery and tolerance. Biographical Information Browne was born in London, England, in 1605. He was the fourth and only son of a successful merchant, also named Thomas Browne, and his wife, Anne Garroway Browne. The family lived in Cheshire in fairly comfortable circumstances, even following Browne's father's death in 1613. He attended Winchester grammar school, where he studied Latin and Greek, and in 1623, he went on to Broadgates Hall at Oxford. The school, which was later renamed Pembroke College, followed the traditional curriculum at Oxford, and Browne studied grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, and geometry. In 1624 the school added the study of anatomy to its curriculum, which was an added advantage to Browne, who became a physician. Browne graduated from Oxford in 1626, and received a master's degree from there in 1629. He then left to live on the Continent, continuing his medical studies until the mid-1630s. During these years, Browne traveled across Europe extensively, visiting and staying at some of the most distinguished medical schools. When he returned to England in 1637, he was awarded a doctorate in physics at Oxford. He then settled in Norwich, beginning his practice as a physician, and serving as mentor to many younger doctors. He married Dorothy Mileham in 1641; they had several children together, although only a daughter, Elizabeth, survived into adulthood. Scholars surmise that it was during his years as a physician in Norwich that Browne began working on his best-known work, the Religio Medici. Comprised mostly of Browne's own opinions and theories regarding the church and religion, the work was not originally intended for publication. The style of the work is unusual because Browne often writes in the first person, and the work is structured more like a conversational letter or meditative lecture than a formal work of prose. Yet the scope of the work, with its personal observations and the model it presents of Christian belief and practice, is often interpreted as a prescriptive text. Browne published several more texts after the Religio Medici, and at his death in 1682, he left behind a large body of unpublished correspondence. These were issued posthumously, as well as other works, such as A Letter to a Friend (1690) and Christian Morals (1716). Major Works The Religio Medici was published anonymously, probably without Browne's permission, in 1642. It garnered immediate attention because of its content; divided into two main parts, the work first explains the author's religious beliefs, and then discusses the practical application of these beliefs in the real world, as well as the consequences of not following these principles. As he explores questions of belief and practice, Browne imparts a great deal of significance to the role of human choice in the application of religious beliefs. He also writes in detail about the doctrine of incarnation, stating that Christ was in fact both man and God, and therefore both spirit and flesh. It is in the statement of his theories about incarnation, God, and life that Browne shines as a prose writer, using the style of Senecan prose to build one argument on another. Critics have often remarked on his ability to present, with increasing intensity, the central belief system he is espousing. In his lifetime, though, Browne's work was soundly critiqued for both its style and content. As early as 1643, less than a year after the text was published, Sir Kenelm Digby, a contemporary, published a critique of the work. The following year, Alexander Ross issued an analysis of Browne's work, criticizing him for his errors and sparking a vigorous debate over the validity of the doctor's religious beliefs. The controversy over the accuracy of Browne's theories in the Religio Medici became a major topic of critical debate during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Browne next issued Pseudodoxia Epidemica, also known as Vulgar Errors. This was a large project and took Browne most of his life to complete. Comprising seven volumes, the work once again focuses on issues of religious belief and theory. In contrast to the Religio Medici, this work was less personal in its concerns, and focused more heavily on an examination of truths, observations, popular mythology, and contemporary commentary on the discovery of new and interesting facts. In many ways, Browne's focus in this work is more closely related to his profession—the discussion revolves around significant scientific developments during Browne's time, and he uses moralized natural histories, encyclopedias, and other studies of his era as his focus. For each proposition he states, Browne considers the position taken by established authorities, the evidence in support of the position, and so on. Browne's next works were published together in 1658. These were Hydriotaphia: Urne Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus; in both, Browne uses events in reality to offer observations on the nature of mortality and immortality. While the subject matter of both pieces is regarded as significant, critics have most often focused on Browne's grand style and variety. Critical Reception Browne is consistently acknowledged as one of the finest prose writers of his day. His writing style was rich and varied, and many scholars have remarked upon his use of humor and richness of allusion, even in the most intense of discussions. In his own lifetime, Browne's literary reputation was first built upon the multivolume Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Critics during his time, including Samuel Pepys and Samuel Johnson, admired his work greatly, while the Romantics in the eighteenth century also viewed his work with great interest. In modern evaluations of Browne's work, his clear thinking and rhythmic writing style continue to be acknowledged, and he is appreciated as a skilled articulator of the events of his time. In 1972, however, Stanley Fish, in his Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature, criticized Browne for his beliefs regarding the nature and function of art. Fish's critique of Browne has evoked passionate responses from contemporary critics, Frank J. Warnke among them. According to Warnke, although Fish's evaluation of Browne has some merit, it is essentially unfair to the intention of Browne's writing, which per Warnke, has a very personal and persuasive aesthetic. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Browne did not comment openly on the political and religious events of his time. His works, especially the Religio Medici, writes James N. Wise (1973), are works of “contemporary argumentation.” In this text, says Wise, Browne clearly makes an argument for tolerance and charitableness. Wise feels that it is precisely Browne's carefully structured ambivalence in matters of reason and faith that constitute his best method of persuasion. In his review of Browne's place among seventeenth-century prose writers, Laurence Stapleton (1973) characterizes him as “the most original prose writer” of his time. Stapleton observes that Browne's method of writing, especially his skillful combining of observation and evaluation set the standard for many later authors, including Samuel Johnson and De Quincey. Modern evaluations of Browne's work focus primarily on his Religio Medici. Jonathan F. S. Post (1987) observes that whatever Browne's other qualifications, it is his unique writing style, “one of the most distinctive and recognizable in the history of English prose,” which remains his most remarkable achievement.	__label__1	0.996437
13 June 2013 Thus so far When I was eight, I stopped talking to my father for over a day. The ‘fight’ was because he had just explained to me (quite kindly) that we were shifting home. We used to stay in Vadodara, a bustling, cheerful city; my family had called that city home for 25 years. My father was dragging us to a sleepy little city 300km away. I hated him for as long as a girl of eight could hate her otherwise nice father. In retrospect, that decision irrevocably changed my life for the better. The change was an eye-opener. The two cities, despite being in the same state, were vastly different in terms of their dialect, the culture and the general populace. But the most major change was my schooling. My old school was a small one, with just about 500 students and 20 teachers. On the other hand, my new school in Rajkot was (and is!) a huge system, with 7000 students and a 1000 teachers. My first day in school scared me to no end, especially since I joined midterm and was two years younger than my classmates. I was told that I had a month to catch up with about half year’s academics and get a decent score in the upcoming tests (just a month away) if I wanted to continue in the same grade. The stubborn girl that I was, I refused to go two grades down and in all innocence of a girl who had never taken a single test before, agreed to taking the examinations too. Today, eight years later, armed with objectivity, maturity and most importantly hindsight, I realise how much the change in city affected me. I don’t regret it; rather, I have grown to love Rajkot as much as my birthplace. It’s just that this shift moulded me from a shy girl of eight to a confident girl of sixteen. It broadened my horizon, changed my perceptions and showed me life’s multifaceted nature. And it’s not that ‘growing up’ brought this on; I, for certain know the difference growing up brings and the difference this brought along. Shifting my home was the biggest positive paradigm shift I could have probably had. Recognizing different paradigms is central to my upbringing. My parents have always tried to ensure that my interaction with life is open and uninhibited, encompassing as many perspectives as possible. The best way they did this was by instilling in me a love for reading very early on. I have loved to read, since before I could read, since before I could figure out which was the right side up while reading! My mother fondly recalls me spending time by myself, with a book held upside down; simply enjoying the idea of being able to read. Be it the imaginative Enid Blyton, the powerful Ayn Rand, the charming J.K. Rowling, the insightful Mitch Albom or the informative Frederick Forsyth; books have always been there. They show you that there is more to life than just you. The other singular factor which has shaped me is my curiosity. My family always encourages my questions, allowing me to think independently about all matters small and big. Independent thought doesn’t equate to full freedom in action; rather it refers to freedom of the mind—allowing it to roam to find room. And so, I question! I want to know how things work, why things happen, why the world functions the way it does…the list is endless. I could question everything under the sun and the sun itself! But, this isn’t the condescending questioning of a cynic; it is the innocent questioning of an inquisitive girl. I persist till I find answers, till I understand. I realise how fortunate I am since I have the pleasure of getting varied perspectives on questions from my family. I could ask my effusive grandfather, my conservative grandmother, my nonconformist father, my compassionate mother, my innocent little brother or any of my aunts-one stern and the other rebellious. Inadvertently, it’s my innate curiosity that makes me what I am today. I love the sciences, mathematics and literature. I want to grow up to do research in an unchartered field and learn about new concepts by discovering them myself. It is this same old curiosity which manifests itself into my career choice, for which I couldn’t thank my family enough. They have taught me that knowledge is to be sought, to be discovered and uncovered. It isn’t handed neatly wrapped and packed. One has to strive to achieve it, to reach to it. As I look forward to another major change in my life-college, I realise how my varied experiences have been instrumental in shaping me. I hope that my future turns out to be like shifting home—fruitful, definitive and fun.	__label__1	0.857754
Interview: Paul Melko Tell us a bit about your story. What’s it about? “Ten Sigmas” is about a massively-parallel human being whose consciousness exists in many universes at the same time. His quantum wave form doesn’t collapse, but instead allows him to share information among himselves, making him nearly omniscient in his local vicinity. A split second decision for him one day causes all his selves to slowly peal away until it is only a single instance trying to save a girl’s life. What was the genesis of the story–what was the inspiration for it, or what prompted you to write it? I have always been fascinated with parallel universe stories. I combined that idea with the idea that a fundamental particle’s exact position can’t be determined, that it exists in a probability function. Though the probably is very low, the particle could exist in some very weird locations. What if a person existed as a probability function? What if every quantum decision he made split off a new universe, but he remained aware of split self? Was this story a particularly challenging one to write? If so, how? Explaining the idea while telling an interesting story was the hardest part of this one. It’s easy for science fiction writers to become enamored of the what-if and forget character and plot. Most authors say all their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was this story personal to you? One of the things my protagonist does is steal stories and music from other universes and passes those off as his own. This speaks in some way to the self-doubt that a writer feels. Is this story really unique? Or did I just twist a bit of the literature gestalt in some mundane way? Am I just riding the coattails of every other writer and not really doing anything new or interesting? What are some of your favorite examples of parallel worlds or portal fantasies (in any media), and what makes them your favorites? My favorite parallel universe books are those in Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tier series. Farmer’s multiverse is composed of a series of pocket universes, created by a race of technologically superior humans called Lords. Each Lord lives in his or her own created universe, each with its own rules of physics. The Lords come to find out however that their own home universe was created too. These book are pure science adventure fun, but the idea of engineered pocket universes remained with me since and in some way informs my own Walls of the Universe series.	__label__1	0.88686
Home / Articles / Shakespeare in Scotland: What did the author of Macbeth know and when did he know it? Shakespeare in Scotland: What did the author of Macbeth know and when did he know it? by Richard F. Whalen This article appeared in a slightly different form in the 2003 issue of The Oxfordian Does Macbeth reference the 1567 murder of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley? Does Macbeth reference the 1567 murder of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley? Awake! Awake! Ring the alarum-bell:—murder and treason! Banquo and Donalbain! Malcolm! Awake! Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit, And look on death itself! Macduff: Macbeth: Act II Scene 1 A review of historical documents and topical allusions in Macbeth shows that the author knew a great deal about Scotland and that he knew it long before 1606, which orthodox scholars argue was the year it was written by William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon. Six of these scholars, however, unwittingly provide much of the evidence supporting Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, as the true author of Macbeth. Generally, Shakespeare scholars today simply pay no attention to the firsthand knowledge of Scotland that is demonstrated in Macbeth. Instead, with a few notable exceptions, they have argued that there are many topical allusions to events in England that date the play to 1606, three years after James VI of Scotland became King of England. Under examination, however, their arguments fail to convince. The principal topical allusions in Macbeth for most Stratfordians—but not all—are to the 1605 Powder Treason or Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and to the subsequent trial of a Jesuit priest, not only for treason but for equivocation, i.e. dissembling under oath to avoid the sin of lying. They note that the play depicts the treason of Macbeth against his king and famously features the porter’s ramblings about “equivocators” (2.3). Other topicalities are also supposed to tie the play to King James. His keen interest in witchcraft (he wrote a treatise on it) is thought to have inspired the play’s three Weird Sisters. Macbeth’s hallucinatory vision of eight kings is supposedly intended to flatter James by showing him as the legitimate descendent of monarchs from Banquo and Fleance (4.1.111–124). And they add a few scraps of evidence: the porter’s throwaway line about “the farmer who hanged himself on the expectation of plenty” (2.3.3) because wheat prices were low in 1605–7 (Muir xxii) and “touching for evil” by King James (Carroll 222–26), because a doctor in the play tells how King Edward the Confessor practiced touching for evil to effect miraculous cures for tubercular ulcers (4.3.142). Dating the play to 1606, shortly after the Gunpowder Plot, serves orthodox scholars well in that it links the playwright to a reigning king of England and one of the most sensational events in British history, commemorated ever since as Guy Fawkes Day. It also helps spread the plays rather evenly throughout the working life of the Stratford man and puts its composition after the death of Oxford in 1604. (There is no certain contemporary reference to the play until its publication in the First Folio in 1623. Not gunpowder but a nocturnal knifing None of the alleged topicalities, however, hold up under examination. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 is particularly unsuitable and unconvincing as an event that might inspire a playwright to write Macbeth. It was allegedly a plot by a gang of Roman Catholic radicals—none of whom was in any position to take power—to massacre the whole government of Great Britain, including King James, in a gigantic explosion of gunpowder under Parliament during a ceremonial meeting in broad daylight. Thousands might have been killed. In contrast, Macbeth, ambitious to gain the throne, stabs his guest, King Duncan, in the night while he sleeps alone in his bed. The two regicides could hardly have been more different. Equally unconvincing is the suggestion that Macbeth was written to flatter James and celebrate his escape from violent death in the Gunpowder Plot. Henry Paul in The Royal Play of Macbeth (1971) was the principal advocate of this view. Rejecting the suggestion of his orthodox colleagues, William C. Carroll, editor of the Bedford Macbeth (1999), notes that James would then be a “royal spectator of a royal bloodbath, whose own right of succession to the English throne was . . . questioned (2, 5). Carroll, a professor at Boston University, makes several observations that have the unintended effect of throwing doubt on the topicalities embraced by most Stratfordian commentators. Moreover, James was famous for his fear of bodily harm at the hands of enemies or as a result of witchcraft. Stratfordian Professor Dennis Kay says in his book on Shakespeare: “Everybody knew that King James was terrified of violent death” (311). No surprise, since his father was assassinated and his captive mother was beheaded. Thus, it strains belief to suggest that an English actor/playwright would celebrate the new Scottish king of England by writing a gloomy, violent, bloody tragedy depicting the assassination of a Scottish king that is instigated by witches. That’s not the way playwrights, especially commoners, celebrate their monarchs. Nor is it credible that the king’s own acting company would dare to perform it. There is no documentary evidence that James ever saw the play, read it or even heard about it, much less felt celebrated. Also improbable is the Stratfordian notion that King James would have been pleased to see himself as the most recent in a line of kings begun by Banquo, the kings that the witches show to Macbeth in Act IV Scene 1. Neither Banquo nor his son and heir Fleance were historical persons. They were recent, fictional embellishments to the “history” of Scotland. It was not until 1527, during the reign of James’s father, that Hector Boece added the Banquo portion to the twelfth-century story of Macbeth. Carroll dismisses it as a “myth of lineage” (117). A keen student of Scots history, James, born just forty years later, would certainly have known that Banquo was a recent addition, one the Stewarts could use to bolster their claim to the Scottish throne. It’s doubtful that he would have appreciated a play that reminded him that his right to the throne was based on a fiction. Besides, Banquo too supposedly came to a violent end. Professor Carroll is also skeptical that James would have appreciated the play. He notes that some scholars “find the play to be far more ambivalent about—and even subversive of—James’s ideological interests,” rather than a play intended to please him (2). He adds that in his own view, “rather than clarifying and reinforcing the theories of kingship and sovereign power that James proposed in his writings and speeches, the play seems to go out of its way to mystify and undermine those theories” (6). A bloody Scottish tragedy subversive of James’s interests and undermining his succession theories could hardly have been more unpleasant for the recently crowned Scottish king of England. The Stratfordian attempts to link Macbeth to King James and the Gunpowder Plot, while possibly exciting, do not withstand scrutiny. The Royal Succession Issue Carroll offers several more observations that Oxfordians would say support their view that the play was written, not for King James I, but years or decades earlier, and that someone like Oxford would be the more likely author. The dramatist, Carroll says, knew a great deal about the four contending theories of royal succession: the appeals to religious authority, to natural law, to secular history and to blood relation. “Shakespeare’s Macbeth,” he writes, “embodies virtually every issue of the succession controversy in the four paradigms of kingship within the play” (18591). Carroll also raises questions about the puzzling “show of kings” passage, which has led editors of modern editions to change a stage direction (sd) in the First Folio text in a way that allows them to link the passage to King James. Carroll writes: While the play does represent the line of Banquo stretching out to the crack of doom, it also leaves us with two significant gaps in the “show of eight Kings and Banquo last” (4.1.111sd)—there should be nine kings, but James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots, is missing from the sequence, and at the end of the play Fleance is missing, unseen and unmentioned, as if he had never existed. (191) Carroll is not alone in puzzling over the “show of kings” passage. It is unaccountably confusing, at least for modern-day critics. John Dover Wilson and Kenneth Muir wrestled with it, reaching no conclusion. The stage direction in the First Folio calls for “a show of eight kings and Banquo last with a glass in his hand.” Macbeth, however, says the eighth king . . . bears a glass which shows me many more, and some I see That two-fold balls and treble scepters carry. (4.1.119–21) Something is wrong here. It’s unlikely that the dramatist would have both Banquo and the eighth king holding mirrors. Taking bold action, textual scholars changed the stage direction so that Banquo, not the eighth king, holds the mirror. This change enables them to propose that James is the eighth king, which almost fits the number of monarchs between the time of the historical Macbeth and James. But that would depict a reigning monarch on stage, which was prohibited. Wilson asks, “Did they dare to show his image on stage? If not, that perhaps explains why F [the First Folio] gives to Banquo the ‘glass’ ” (152). Muir gives up: “Perhaps we should retain the F reading” (115). Whatever the interpretation, altering the stage direction allowed textual scholars to insert a representation of King James into the scene, a change that fits their idea of when and why it was written. The scene, however, probably has nothing to do with James. Since neither Mary Queen of Scots nor her son James is included in the show of monarchs it’s unlikely that the dramatist had them in mind when he wrote the passage. The scene could have been written much earlier, serving simply to dramatize Macbeth’s horror at Banquo’s descendants somehow reigning over Scotland and later on some of them reigning over England as well. Orthodox scholars also suggest that the “two-fold balls and treble scepters” in the show of kings symbolize James’s kingdom. But scholars differ on what realms they represent, and the phrase seems at best a weak allusion to James in a passage that has defied explication. Topicalities and dating the play Although equivocation and witchcraft certainly influenced the playwright, neither was specific to the early 1600s. Equivocation had been notorious for years. A decade earlier, it was a principal accusation in the trial of Robert Southwell, a Jesuit poet accused of treason (Brownlow 19–20). Thus equivocation was in no way unique to the Gunpowder Plot and the treason trial in 1606 of Father Henry Garnet, another Jesuit accused of equivocation. Similarly, witchcraft and witch hunts were notorious long before James became King of England. Nor were “touching for evil” or “the farmer who hanged himself in the expectation of plenty” unique to the reign of James in England. Touching for evil was practiced by many of the monarchs who came after Edward the Confessor—including Queen Elizabeth herself (Levin 16, 31–3). King James, in fact, was a reluctant and skeptical toucher for evil (Carroll, 222–6). And slumping prices for grain caused problems a number of times for farmers in the decades preceding 1606. Not all Stratfordian scholars date the play to 1606; at least three date the play before 1604, most notably J. Dover Wilson, co-editor of The New Cambridge Shakespeare, who dated it to 16012 (xli). An independent scholar, Arthur Melville Clark, also suggested 1601. In his book, Murder Under Trust, he cites parallels with the Gowrie conspiracy in Scotland against James’s life the previous year. Professor Daniel Amneus of California State University at Los Angeles argues for 1599 in The Mystery of Macbeth mainly because of succession issues and because no English dramatist would have depicted regicide after James became King of England (40–1, 46). In his Arden edition of Macbeth, Muir tentatively allows that “the play as a whole might have been written earlier [than 1606]” if, as he considers, some of the passages were interpolations (xvii). But these are exceptions. Most commentaries describe Macbeth as a 1606 play written for King James I of England. Six Stratfordians aid the case for Oxford Oxfordian scholars—aided by the work of six Stratfordians—contend that it was Oxford who wrote and rewrote Macbeth many years before James became King of England. They point to a number of topicalities: the Darnley assassination, a sequence of slayings of persons of rank who were guests of their assassins, the playwright’s knowledge of Scotland, and narrative details in a manuscript chronicle of Scotland pre-dating Holinshed. The principal Oxfordian commentators on Macbeth are Charles Wisner Barrell, author of numerous articles on the Shakespeare authorship issue in the 1940s, and Ruth Lloyd Miller, a lawyer and leading Oxfordian scholar, who added her own extensive notes to her 1974 reprint of Eva Turner Clark’s book. This article is indebted in large part to their work. The first two of the six Stratfordian scholars were Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1841–1929) and Lilian Winstanley (b. 1875). Stopes, who was born and educated in Scotland, wrote articles and a dozen books on Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Industry (1916) won an award from the British Academy. Professor S. Schoenbaum calls her an indefatigable, eccentric amateur but usually tough-minded and critical (459–64). Winstanley, also a Scotswoman, was a lecturer at the University College of Wales when she published in 1922, Macbeth, King Lear & Contemporary History, being a study of the relations of the play of Macbeth to the personal history of James I, the Darnley murder and the St. Bartholomew Day massacre. She apparently wrote without knowing that J. Thomas Looney had identified Oxford as Shakespeare two years earlier. Probably due to her native perspective on Scottish history, Winstanley was the first to find significance in the treatment of plots, assassinations and executions in Macbeth. She builds a strong case that among the sources of Macbeth were the assassinations of Lord Darnley in 1567 in Scotland and of Admiral Coligny in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France in 1572. Without questioning the 1606 date for its composition, she suggests that the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 reminded the dramatist of the two assassinations, and that he counted on his audience, including the King, to remember them. She fails to appreciate, however, that since the two assassinations had occurred thirty-eight and thirty-three years earlier, both on foreign soil, details of them would have dimmed in popular memory, and that the Gunpowder Plot hardly fit the pattern of murders in Macbeth. Darnley’s assassination Lord Darnley was the youthful consort to Mary Queen of Scots and thus King of Scotland to his supporters, although she denied him the title and often banished him from her castle. His sensational murder in 1567, when he was twenty-years-old, was engineered by rivals that included the ambitious Earl of Bothwell, Mary’s chief adviser (Weir 331–3). Mary had arranged for the ailing Darnley to recuperate at one of her houses near Edinburgh. Bothwell and some of his cohorts took advantage of the King’s isolation to blow up the house. Darnley awakened just before the blast and managed to escape in his nightclothes, but the conspirators suffocated him in the orchard. Three months later, Bothwell virtually forced the twenty-three-yearold Queen to marry him. The grisly murder of Darnley, when Oxford was sixteen, provides the most striking influences on Macbeth, including the role of Lady Macbeth in the murder of King Duncan. Reports quickly spread throughout Scotland and London that the Queen was behind the assassination and that she had lured Darnley to Edinburgh on the pretext that the air was wholesome. In the play, Duncan, the guest of the Lord and Lady Macbeth, remarks that “the air . . . recommends itself unto our gentle senses;” and Banquo agrees that “the air is delicate” (1.6.1–9). As in the play, an ambitious rival assassinated Scotland’s king, who had gone to bed thinking he was a welcome guest. Just as the play includes a knocking at the porter’s gate, investigative reports of Darnley’s murder twice mention a “knocking at the gate”—while Bothwell was said to have cried “Treason”! when informed of Darnley’s murder. Bothwell, moreover, was widely believed to consort with witches. These details and many other reports of Darnley’s assassination point to the ultra-ambitious Bothwell as the primary model for the character Macbeth (Winstanley 65–93; Miller/E.T. Clark 840–3). A contemporary sketch of the murder scene (above) shows a gate, the assassinated Darnley, and a dagger that seems to be floating in the air (in the upper right-hand corner). In the play, Macbeth asks, “Is this a dagger I see before me”? Lady Macbeth later calls it an “air-drawn dagger.” William Cecil’s agent in Scotland sent the sketch and a variety of investigative records to Cecil in London. Traumatized by fear and horror, accused by some of complicity in her husband’s murder, Mary collapsed into a trance-like depression similar to that of Lady Macbeth. In his 1935 biography of the Queen of Scots, Stefan Zweig speculated at length on the “remarkable similarities” between her condition and Lady Macbeth’s. Drawing on his studies of psychology, he suggests that both suffer pangs of conscience, become depressed and physically ill (209–12). Zweig probably developed his insights independently; he does not indicate that he had read Winstanley. The first Macbeth play? Darnley’s assassination and Bothwell’s involvement inspired an interlude or play that was written within months of his death, the only play of the time known to depict a contemporary event and one that might be considered an early version of Macbeth. Sir William Drury mentioned it in his letter of May 14, 1567 to William Cecil: “There has been an interlude of boys at Stirling of the manner of the King’s death and the arraignment of the earl . . . . This was before the Lords, who the earl thinks were devisers of the same” (Winstanley 87). Drury was deputy governor of Berwick on the Scottish border, and the previous month Bothwell had challenged him for “uttering foul reproaches” (DNB). Presumably, Drury’s reproaches had something to do with Darnley’s murder. The following year, in March, The Tragedie of the Kinge of Scottes was performed by the Children of the Chapel for Queen Elizabeth in London. Stopes, the first to bring it to light, suggested in 1916 that this lost, anonymous tragedy “might even have represented the death of Darnley, which had happened on the 9th of February in the year before” (95–6). E.K. Chambers backhandedly recognized the possibility that the tragedy was the first Macbeth play. “We do not know,” he wrote, “whether Macbeth was the theme of a tragedy of The Kinge of Scottes given at court in 156768” (Shakespeare 1:476). Both Stopes and Chambers implicitly raise the possibility of the King of Scottes tragedy being a first version of Macbeth, but they stop short of recognizing the implications. It would have been far too early for Will Shakspere to have written it. Darnley’s assassination caused a sensation in London. As a ward in the household of William Cecil, councilor to Queen Elizabeth, Oxford was perfectly placed to hear about the assassination, see the sketch with the air-drawn dagger and peruse the extensive Scottish records of the investigation, which included many dramatic details that turn up in Macbeth. Fifteen years later, he would be identified as patron of the Children of the Chapel, the same acting troupe that performed The Tragedie of the Kinge of Scottes for Elizabeth as recorded in the Revels Accounts for 1567–8 (4.144). The only other credible candidates for authorship of the tragedy are George Gascoigne and Thomas Norton. Gascoigne’s two plays at that time were translations from the Greek and Italian, whereas The Tragedie of the Kinge of Scottes must have been original. Norton is famous for having written Gorboduc with Thomas Sackville, but it was produced nearly a decade earlier, and it is his only known play (3.320–1, 456–7). Neither playwright is known to have had any special interest in Scottish politics. Also not credible as the anonymous dramatist are the few other obscure or anonymous playwrights in Edmund Chambers’s lists for that period, most of whom translated classics or wrote on classical themes (4.1–54). Whether Oxford wrote the tragedy in 1567/8 must remain speculation. He entered Gray’s Inn, the law school, in February, 1567, three months before the performance of the interlude in Scotland. No records indicate that he was in Scotland at that time. On the other hand, he did not have to be there to write the tragedy, and it’s hard to imagine what other writer so early in the history of Elizabethan theater might have written such a play for performance for Queen Elizabeth by the acting company that would later be identified as Oxford’s own. Pending new evidence, however, its authorship must remain an intriguing conjecture. Violations of hospitality Macbeth, of course, is a play about a usurper whose overweening ambition leads him to assassinate his king—but there’s more to it than that. Macbeth and his equally ambitious wife compound the evil by killing King Duncan when he was a guest in their home. They sin against the law of hospitality—that a host owes his guest food, shelter and safety from harm. Toward the end of Act I, Shakespeare explicitly invokes the law of hospitality. Duncan has arrived and Macbeth, alone, wavers in a soliloquy: “He’s here in double trust,” says Macbeth, “first, as I am his kinsman and his subject, strong both against the deed; then as his host, who should against his murderer shut the door, not bear the knife myself” (1.7.12–16). Violation of hospitality, a major theme of the play, is drawn not from the Macbeth legend, but from the earlier murder of a king who was a guest in his assailant’s castle. Not generally recognized is that Banquo is also a guest who is slain by his host. “Here’s our chief guest,” says Macbeth, welcoming him (3.1.11). Macbeth then hires killers to assassinate Banquo, whom he considers a potential rival. The reason the dramatist went out of his way to incorporate the violation of hospitality in the play may well be because it was the common characteristic of an extraordinary sequence of slayings during the reign of Elizabeth. As Miller points out, no less than five monarchs or would-be rulers were killed or attacked by their hosts in struggles for political power. And in every case, the victims’ hosts violated the law of hospitality, essential for civilized life. It was not a good time for a king to accept invitations. Five years after Darnley was betrayed by his hosts came another sensational assassination. In France, Admiral Coligny, the highly respected leader of the Protestant Huguenots, was killed in an assassination that was also a violation of hospitality, triggering the sensational St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Coligny and his Protestant followers had been invited by Catherine de Medici, the Queen Mother, to the According to English history, she plotted with Roman Catholic noblemen to massacre her wedding guests. Oxford, now twenty-three, heard about the assassinations and the rampage by Catholics that followed. He wrote to his fatherin-law, William Cecil Lord Burghley, about his concern that a moderate like Admiral Coligny could be assassinated and that Burghley and Queen Elizabeth might be vulnerable to similar plots (Ward 71–2). Again, Oxford was in a position to learn about details of an assassination, details that turn up in Macbeth. Like Lady Macbeth, Catherine de Medici was often depicted as the fiendish power behind the throne. It was said that her son, the King of France, hesitated before agreeing to Coligny’s assassination, but her prodding convinced him to go along with the plan, just as Lady Macbeth hectored Macbeth into killing Duncan. At the end of the play, Malcolm describes Lady Macbeth as a “fiendlike queen” (5.8.70). Catherine de Medici supposedly gave the signal to ring a church bell—the signal to kill Coligny and his entourage. In the play, Macbeth orders a servant to have Lady Macbeth ring a bell when his drink is ready. When the bell rings, Macbeth, having screwed his courage to the sticking place, takes it to be a signal to kill King Duncan. “The bell invites me,” he says. “Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell/that summons thee to heaven or to hell” (2.1.32, 63–5). Two years later, Walter Devereux, the first earl of Essex and commander of the English forces in Ireland, invited an Irish chieftain and relatives to a dinner meeting in Belfast, seized them and their followers at the banquet and had them killed—another brazen sin against hospitality (DNB). After Darnley’s assassination, his widow was forced to abdicate. Mary escaped from her enemies in Scotland, put her trust in Elizabeth and accepted her hospitality and safety in England. However, her presence came to be seen as a threat to the English Queen, at least in the eyes of Elizabeth’s advisers, and Mary became a political prisoner. Elizabeth alternated between her fear that Catholic plotters might use Mary to unseat her and her duty to treat a cousin and an anointed fellow-queen as a protected guest. Reluctantly, she finally gave in to her fears and allowed her longtime prisoner-guest to be tried for treason in 1587. Mary’s quest for hospitality and safety in the England of Elizabeth ended with her trial and execution. Oxford, now thirty-seven, was one of two dozen commissioners at her treason trial. Gifts of diamonds figure both in the play and in Mary’s search for safety. Banquo tells Macbeth that the king, who has gone to bed, “sent forth great largess to your offices. This diamond he greets your wife withal, by the name of most kind hostess . . . .” (2.1.14). When Mary took refuge in England, she sent Elizabeth a large diamond (Miller/E.T. Clark 842). The following year, in France, Henry III invited his rival, the Duke of Guise, known as the King of the Parisians, to Blois for a private audience. Henry’s royal guard assassinated his guest. A friend of Eva Turner Clark, Esther Singleton, called to Clarks’s attention that the apparition of the eight kings in Macbeth is very similar to a report that Catherine de Medici, mother-in-law of Mary Queen of Scots, had once seen an apparition of the future kings of France in a mirror (809–23). Thus, from 1567, when he was seventeen, to 1589, when he was thirty-nine, Oxford was aware of a series of slayings that involved, not just the murder or execution of a political leader, usually a ruler, but in every case a violation of the law of hospitality. Moreover, he was in a position in Burghley’s household and at Court to learn of obscure details that turn up in Macbeth. Additional Scottish topicalities Another proposed source for Macbeth is the Gowrie conspiracy of 1600. Arthur Melville Clark, an independent Stratfordian scholar from Scotland, proposed it as the primary influence. He found other obscure topicalities in the play as well. The Gowrie Conspiracy was an alleged attempt to assassinate King James VI of Scotland three years before he also became James I of England. James maintained that he had been lured to Gowrie castle, where he and his fellow-guests thwarted what he described as an attempted assassination by his hosts and political rivals, following a banquet. It’s a fascinating incident, one which has provoked much speculation that James himself engineered it to get rid of his rivals (he had them killed) and make himself a hero. It’s still an open question for historians of Scotland. Although several parallels between the Gowrie Conspiracy and Macbeth are striking—far more so than between Macbeth and the Gunpowder Plot—there is no reason that, given the example of the Darnley assassination and other murderous violations of hospitality, the dramatist had to wait until 1600 to write the play. It is, of course, possible that after the Gowrie Conspiracy he was inspired to revise parts of his play. Whether or not the Gowrie Conspiracy influenced the writing or rewriting of Macbeth in 1602 or 1603, Arthur Clark is one of three Stratfordians who identified significant topical allusions in the play that could have been written only by someone who knew Scotland first-hand. These led him to conclude that Shakespeare—his man from Stratford—must have visited Scotland. Two of these allusions are to fine points of Scots law: “double trust” and “interdiction.” Clark entitled his 1981 book, Murder Under Trust: The Topical Macbeth, because, as noted above, Macbeth says of Duncan: “He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, strong both against the deed; then as his host, who should against his murderer shut the door, not bear the knife myself” (1.7.12). The “double trust” concept was enacted into law in 1587 when the Scottish Parliament raised from mere homicide to treason the slaying of someone of rank who was also a guest of his slayer, with the trial to be held in the highest court. The act was passed after the Macdonald clan killed eighty-six men of the McLean clan who had been invited to a banquet and entertainment. This “double trust” concept was only in Scots law (46). The legal term “interdiction” occurs in the strange colloquy between Macduff and Malcolm. Macduff laments that Malcolm, the heir to the throne, “by his own interdiction stands accused and does blaspheme his breed” (4.3.107). This refers in Scots law to someone conscious of his failings who gives up or is forced to give up the management of his own affairs, which is what Malcolm seemed to be doing, much to Macduff’s dismay (46). Scotland’s geography and weather The dramatist also was knowledgeable about Scotland’s geography and used at least one local idiom correctly. Arthur Clark says Shakespeare correctly situates Dunsinane, Great Birnam Wood, Forres, Inverness, the Western Isles, Colmekill, Saint Colme, and the lands that gave their names to the thanes: Fife, Glamis, Cawdor, Ross, Lennox, Mentieth, Angus and Caithness (31). Maps of Scotland were rare, and only someone who had been there could have situated the places so accurately. Even the Scots were vague about their geography. Stopes calls attention to Banquo’s question: “How far is it called to Forres”? (1.3.39) “Called,” she says, was a typical Scots locution of the time, since rarely did anyone in Scotland know accurate distances (98). The weather in Macbeth is typically Scottish. In Act I, Macbeth says to Banquo, “So fair and foul a day I have not seen,” a gratuitous comment on Scotland’s rapidly changing weather compared to England’s (1.3.38). When King Duncan arrives at Macbeth’s castle at Inverness to spend the night (his last) he comments on the mild weather: “This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air nimbly and sweetly recommends itself unto our gentle senses.” Banquo agrees: “Heaven’s breath smells wooingly here. The air is delicate” (1.6.1–9). According to Stopes, an Englishman could not have written these passages unless he had visited Inverness and experienced the unexpected mildness of its climate. She says Shakespeare (and she assumes the man from Stratford) probably visited Inverness (98). Arthur Clark also notes that Inverness has an unusually mild “microclimate” distinct from the rest of Scotland, and he too wonders how Shakespeare could have known about it without having visited Inverness (33, 187). Other topical allusions in the play are subtle, but telling. For example, Ross says Scotland suffers greatly under Macbeth and “good men’s lives expire before the flowers in their caps” (4.3.170). That is an allusion to the sprig of flower or plant that a Scotsman wore in his cap to identify his clan (A.M. Clark 32). In Act V, Macbeth gets ready for battle and calls out impatiently for his armor-bearer, named Seton. The legends of Macbeth do not mention any Setons, but adding him to the play was perfectly appropriate. Professor Wilson of the University of Edinburgh marveled that “somehow or other” Shakespeare learned that the Setons were the hereditary armor-bearers to the kings of Scotland (xlii). He goes on to suggest reluctantly that Shakespeare (of Stratford) must have visited Scotland—reluctantly, because there is no evidence for such a visit, nor is one likely. Oxford in Scotland Oxford, on the other hand, was in Scotland for several months in 1570 when he was nineteenturning-twenty. In his biography of William Cecil Lord Burghley, Conyers Read says Burghley sent his son Thomas Cecil and his ward the young Earl of Rutland to join the Queen’s forces in putting down the Catholic “Northern Rebellion.” He probably would also have sent Oxford, his other noble ward, had he not been ill at the time (2.126). Oxford wrote Cecil on November 24, 1569 that his health was restored, reminding him of his promise “to have me see the wars and services in strange and foreign places.” He asked to “be called to the service of my prince and country.” Oxford’s request was granted around March 30 when Burghley authorized payment of forty pounds to Oxford “as the Queen’s Majesty sendeth at this present the Earl of Oxford into the north parts to remain with my Lord of Sussex, and to be employed there in Her Majesty’s service” (Ward 40). The author of Macbeth showed a special interest in the fourth Earl of Lennox and his Countess, who both appear in the play, although neither is mentioned in the historical legend of Macbeth. The Earl has a fairly prominent role. While Oxford was with Sussex, the English invaded Scotland twice and Sir William Drury (quoted above regarding the 1567 interlude) led troops escorting Lennox to Edinburgh, where he was to rule over Scotland as regent on behalf of Queen Elizabeth (DNB). Four years later, Lennox’s widow and Oxford would be among the guests at a country house party given by Burghley. The best estimate is that Oxford would have been on the Scottish border and in Scotland—including perhaps with Drury on his mission to Edinburgh—for up to seven months, from April to October. Ward says he probably returned to London in late summer or early autumn. Sussex returned to Newcastle in September and to London in November (49). Oxford may well have returned with him at that time. Sussex, the military commander, with whom Oxford was associated later, also had an interest in the theater. He had an acting company that became the Lord Chamberlain’s Men when he took that position two years later. Oxford was in his twenties and spending most of his time at Court when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were performing for Queen Elizabeth. A few years later, after Oxford returned from his travels on the Continent, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed half a dozen plays whose titles sound like early versions of Shakespeare plays. Unfortunately, the records name no author of these early Court plays, and the scripts have not been found (E.T. Clark 4–6). William of Stratford in Scotland? Several Stratfordian scholars, recognizing the intensely Scottish atmosphere of the play, have suggested that Will Shakspere of Stratford traveled to Scotland, although there is no documentary evidence for it. They say he might have been in Scotland around 1601–2 with Lawrence Fletcher’s acting company. Wilson cautiously suggested: We do know, however, that “English comedians” were in Scotland from 1599 onwards, to the scandal of the Edinburgh Kirk Sessions, and that they were led by one Laurence Fletcher, whose name later appears with Shakespeare’s as one of the principal members of the King’s company constituted by royal patent on 19 May 1603. We know, too, that players can do nothing without plays; and, although no title or tittle of what they acted has survived, it is at least conceivable that Shakespeare’s longer Macbeth was first produced by Fletcher’s company in the capital city of Scotland. Indeed, if I may continue to live dangerously, it is even possible that Shakespeare visited Scotland himself. (xlii) Stopes was bolder, stating that the Stratford man “very probably joined” the English actors in Scotland, apparently in her view simply because “there is no record of ‘Shakespeare’s Company’ playing in London between March 1601 and December 1602” (99). This scenario, however, is weak on several counts. Fletcher’s theatrical career up to that point was totally in Scotland, where he was a favorite of King James. He had no known connection with acting companies in London until he went there with James in 1603. The identities of the “English comedians” in Scotland is unknown. That Will Shakspere was among them seems unlikely. In his survey of “English Players in Scotland,” Chambers rejects the idea that Shakspere and the Chamberlain’s men were in Scotland (Shakespeare 2.269) A chronicle and a house party Besides the topicalities noted by Oxfordian and Stratfordian scholars that point to Oxford as the author of Macbeth, an unusual source document adds to the evidence. It is William Stewart’s chronicle of Scotland, one of ten such chronicles, including Holinshed’s. Stewart translated Hector Boece’s chronicle from Latin into the Scottish vernacular in 1531–35, embellishing it with details that turn up in Macbeth. The original existed only in manuscript for centuries. Stopes, who first called attention to Stewart’s manuscript, points to three passages (102–3). One passage of sixty-five lines describes thoughts and motives of Macbeth and his wife that correspond closely to passages in the play. A passage of eight lines is reflected in Act I when Macbeth tells his wife that Duncan and others have honored him and that he will not proceed in their plot to kill him (1.7.34). Wilson notes that “Boece and Holinshed have nothing corresponding to this, and yet how well it sums up the pity of Macbeth’s fall as Shakespeare represents it” (xix). Finally, when Lady Macbeth taunts Macbeth with being a coward and unmanly and breaking his vow to seek the crown (1.7.36–61), her long tirade draws directly on twenty-six lines in Stewart’s chronicle, according to Stopes. Nothing like these correspondences appears in any of the other chronicles of Scotland. As Stopes sums up: “In every case in which Stewart differs from Holinshed, Shakespeare follows Stewart” (102). She provides the texts of the passages in Stewart’s Scottish vernacular in end notes, but does not translate them into English (336–40). Others have rejected the influence of Stewart’s manuscript. Wilson, after first agreeing with Stopes, changed his mind, according to Muir, who does not, however, say why or where Wilson retracted his view (xvii). Neither Muir nor Chambers agreed with the parallels found by Stopes. Muir is cautious: “It seems to me that resemblances between Stewart and Shakespeare are accidental . . . . No one, moreover, has provided any plausible explanation of how Shakespeare obtained access to the manuscript of Stewart’s poem” (xviii, xxxix–xl). Chambers is somewhat more definite in his rejection: “There is not much substance in the suggestions that some of Shakespeare’s departures from Holinshed are due to this [Stewart’s manuscript]” (Shakespeare 1.476). Geoffrey Bullough allows in his comprehensive work on Shakespeare sources that “there are parallels between Stewart’s chronicle and the play,” but he adds immediately “they are indecisive and appear elsewhere” (7:438). “Elsewhere” is chiefly in George Buchanan’s 1582 history of Scotland, which drew on all the earlier sources, according to Paul (222)—but with one significant exception, Stewart’s embellished translation of Boece. Orthodox scholars realized that Stewart’s chronicle was a problem for them because only someone with access to the original manuscript—in royal hands—could have seen it. No manuscript copies are known to have been made, not surprising since it is 43,000 lines long and in the Scottish vernacular. It was not printed until the mid-nineteenth century (A.M. Clark 187). No other writers of Shakespeare’s time referred to it (Barrell/Clark 857). Stopes and Arthur Clark are thus forced to surmise that the actor from Stratford must have been in Scotland to see it, although, of course, there is no evidence he traveled there, much less got into the royal library, or, once there, managed to decipher the Scottish vernacular. Charles Wisner Barrell suggests that Oxford, who might have seen the manuscript chronicle when he was in Scotland, probably saw it as a result of his connection, through Burghley, to the Countess of Lennox, who was closely related to Scottish and English royalty (E.T. Clark 857–8). No one in England at that time was more likely to have Stewart’s manuscript in their possession. Lady Lennox’s grandmother, the Queen of Scotland, had commissioned it for her brother, James V, now dead more than thirty years. Much later scholars found it in the library of her grandson, James I of England. Given Oxford’s position in aristocratic circles, he had unique opportunities to see Stewart’s manuscript chronicle, whether in Scotland or England. Barrell notes too that the author of Macbeth had a particular interest in the Countess of Lennox (E.T. Clark 861–2). Besides an anachronistic Earl of Lennox, the dramatist also added a Lady Lennox, whom modern text editors have removed from the play. In the First Folio, the first printing of the play, she is included in the stage direction near the beginning of Act III Scene 1: “Enter Macbeth as King, Lady Lenox, Rosse, Lords and Attendants.” After Macbeth welcomes Banquo as his guest, Lady Lenox—designated “La”—says her only three lines in the play: If he had been forgotten, It had been as a gap in our great Feast, And all-thing unbecoming. (3.1.11–13) Since Lady Lenox has such a small role, text editors changed the stage direction to replace her with Lady Macbeth, who enters with Macbeth and the others, adding Lennox himself to those entering on stage, although he says nothing in the scene. They give the three lines by “La” to Lady Macbeth, even though she has no other lines in the scene and was not in the original stage direction. The triple switch—removing Lady Lennox and adding Lady Macbeth and the Earl of Lennox—is perhaps understandable, since whoever the speaker, she calls it “our” great feast, implying the feast of Lord and Lady Macbeth. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the dramatist anachronistically added a Lord and Lady Lennox to his play, an addition that makes little sense unless the author knew the Lennoxes and wished to please them. When Oxford was twenty-four years old, he and Lady Lennox were guests at a country house party where everyone had a personal interest in Scottish politics. They were guests of Lord Burghley, Oxford’s father-in-law, on September 19 and 20, 1574, at Theobolds, Burghley’s house north of London, which was noted for its dinner parties (Barrell/E.T. Clark 858). Oxford had just returned from his brief foray to Holland, where, it was rumored, he was consorting with Scotsmen. Among the guests was Henry Percy, eighth Earl of Northumberland, and his wife. Percy had been imprisoned for treason for offering to help Mary Queen of Scots escape England. Five years earlier, as a more loyal subject of Elizabeth, he had fought beside the Earl of Sussex against the northern rebels in the campaign that took Oxford into Scotland (DNB). Another was Lady Hunsdon, about fifty, whose husband was governor of Berwick on the Scottish border and, like Northumberland, had commanded an English force under Sussex during the Northern Rebellion (DNB). He had recently been named Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal Household under Sussex, a post that gave him authority over Court theatricals. Earlier, in 1564, he had been the patron of an acting company. That was three years before the Darnley assassination and the appearance of The Tragedie of the Kinge of Scottes. His company would also be active in the 1580s, when he became Lord Chamberlain (Chambers Shakespeare 2.192–3). The Countess of Lennox herself was a pivotal figure in Scottish and English politics. Her late husband had been with Sussex, Drury and Oxford in the campaigns at the Scottish border. She was the mother of the assassinated Lord Darnley, and she and Lord Lennox campaigned vigorously to have Bothwell tried for the murder of their son. Both had strong claims to the English throne. A granddaughter of Henry VII of England, she grew up as a favorite of Henry VIII and lived most of her life in England, where she acted as agent and strategist for her husband. At the time of the dinner party, Lady Lennox was living in the same house in Hackney where Oxford would live the last years of his life (Miller 2.157). In her late fifties, the Countess, with all her Scottish and English connections, must have been a fascinating guest at the famous dinners. In her recent biography, Kimberly Schutte describes her as a prickly, strong-willed, outspoken woman with an overweening ambition for her family, adept at marital scheming (1–2). On balance, the evidence points to Oxford as the author. The cumulative effect is powerful. The dramatist who wrote Macbeth knew Scotland so well he must have spent time there. He knew about its weather, its customs and its unique law of “double trust.” He had access to details of several assassinations that turn up in Macbeth, especially those concerning the assassination of Lord Darnley. He was in a position to see William Stewart’s manuscript with its unique details that appear in the play. And, although speculative, there is the intriguing possibility that his first version of Macbeth was The Tragedie of the Kinge of Scottes, written when he was eighteen. All scholars agree that the text of Macbeth in the First Folio shows clear signs of rewriting and was probably longer in earlier versions. As a result of the work of six Stratfordian scholars—Stopes, Winstanley, Wilson, Arthur Clark, Amneus and Carroll—as well as Oxfordians Miller and Barrell, the preponderance of evidence supports the Oxfordian view that the dramatist wrote the first version of Macbeth long before 1606 and that he was not Will Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon but Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, writing under the pseudonym William Shakespeare. Works Cited Amneus, Daniel. The Mystery of Macbeth. Alhambra, CA: Primrose Press, 1983. Brownlow, F.W. Robert Southwell. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Barrell, Charles Wisner. “Notes on Macbeth.” Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays. E.T. Clark. 1930. 3rd edition ed. Ruth Loyd Miller. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1974. 855–861. ____________. “Dr. John Dover Wilson’s New Macbeth is a Masterpiece Without a Master, but Oxford-Shakespeare Research Again Fills the Void.” Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly. Winter 1947–8. www.sourcetext.com Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol 7. New York: Columbia UP, 1975. Carroll, William C., ed. Macbeth. Boston: St. Martin’s, 1999. Chambers, E.K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923. ____________. William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1930. Clark, Eva Turner. Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays. Ed. Ruth Loyd Miller. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1974. Clark, Arthur Melville. Murder Under Trust: The Topical Macbeth and Other Jacobean Matters. Edinburgh: SAC, 1981. Kay, Dennis. Shakespeare: His Life, Work and Era. New York: Morrow, 1992. Levin, Carole. The Heart and Stomach of a King. Philadelphia: UPP, 1994. Miller, Ruth Loyd, ed. Oxfordian Vistas. Jennings, LA: Minos, 1975. Muir, Kenneth, ed., Macbeth. Arden. Walton-on-Thames, Surrey,UK: Nelson, 1984. Paul, Henry N. The Royal Play of Macbeth. New York: Octagon, 1971. Read, Conyers. Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960. Schoenbaum, S. Shakespeare’s Lives. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Schutte, Kimberly. A Biography of Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox (1515–1578). Lewiston NY: Mellen, 2002. Stopes, Charlotte C. Shakespeare’s Industry. London: Bell, 1916. Ward, B.M. The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford 1550–1604. 1928. London: John Murray, 1979. Wilson, John Dover, ed., Macbeth. 1947. Cambridge: CUP, 1960. Winstanley, Lilian. Macbeth, King Lear & Contemporary History. Cambridge: CUP, 1922. Zweig, Stefan. Mary Queen of Scots and the Isles. Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: Viking, 1935. Scroll To Top	__label__1	0.62654
Petersburg by Andrei Bely by Michael Buening 12 July 2009 cover art Andrei Bely US: May 2009 Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, first published in 1916, is one of those world masterpiece’s of literature that for whatever reason – general disinterest, lack of popular promotion, minimal amount of time for tackling large dense novels – is largely unknown in the United States. I consider myself to be an avid reader and I didn’t know about it – as I didn’t know about Machado de Assis or Lu Xun – until I came across it through the PopMatters books-available-for-review list. Bely is studied in Russian literature classes, but his relative unknown might have something to with being a modernist writer dwarfed by 19th century titans like Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. Petersburg has been compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Though it takes place in a single city-as-character over roughly 24 hours, the comparison is a little slight. But this novel does belong to the extraordinary flowering of ambitious modernist constructs that was happening in the arts at the beginning of the 20th century of which Ulysses was a part – books like Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americanand Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—and employs many of the same innovations in writing from structure to dialogue. This year Pushkin Press has released a new translation by John Elsworth, first in the United Kingdom and now in the United States. I have no complaints about the actual translation, but it would be nice if an annotated edition of the text could be issued. Though essentially universal in its themes, Bely’s writing is dense with references and unless you are overly familiar with the 1905 Russian Revolution, the Saint Petersburg Soviet, “The Queen of Spades” (the Pushkin short story and the Tchaikovsky opera), Zemvsto, the founding and general layout of the Saint Petersburg and its popular image in Russian writing, Russian politicians of the era, and the rise of bomb throwing terrorism you may find yourself reading it next to a web browser opened to Wikipedia, like I did. I don’t doubt that I missed much more and it would help to have a guide reveal the book’s many layers. Within Bely’s maximalist writing lies a story that is at first brutally minimalistic. Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, the lead senator in the Duma, wakes up and goes to his office. His pampered son Nikolai is given a mysterious parcel by a revolutionary confidant Alexandr Ivanovich Dudkin. Meanwhile a woman that Nikolai has a passive-aggressive non-relationship with, Sofia Petrovna Likhutina, is given a letter to pass on to him from a grotesque revolutionary leader name Lippanchenko. She does, to spite him. It tells Nikolai that he needs to kill his father with a time bomb that is contained within the parcel he was given by Dudkin. The ticking of the clock sets the final movements of the characters interactions, disastrous and combustive, towards the finale. It seems to take forever for this plot and the characters to reveal themselves. Through the use of familiar melodramatic devices like mistaken identities and unlikely coincidences, Bely gives narrative tugs that pull the reader from one section to the next. The bomb inherently creates tension, first in the reader discovering how it intends to be used and then in the reader wondering who will end up being damaged or killed by it. But the patience of the reader really pays off through the use of repetition in color, character, interior thought and place. Repetition can be very annoying, but here sets up musical themes that gradually start to play off each other in surprising thematic twists. The colors red, white, green, yellow, and purple/blue are used in descriptions to simultaneously convey information (red=revolutionary), emotion (a green mist invokes a suffocating menace), and raise thematic flags (white corresponds with a Christian mysticism that is occasionally overdone). The characters are defined and evoked by key traits – for example Nikolai’s pale skin, “flaxen hair”, and “frog-like lips” – used like a code so that we know a character is hiding on the periphery when these words are used. (Especially helpful since many of the characters have multiple aliases.) These patterns typically play off of each other in pairs. The make-up of Petersburg is presented as both one of straight lines laid on top of “cosmic infinity”, echoing the city’s founding as a pre-planned creation set down by Peter the Great over a swamp (and the novel’s themes of bubbling darkness and chaos). The uncertainty of identity in a newly created cosmopolitan city is evoked through the use of varying place names: the Ableukhov’s “Mongol” heritage, the “Mongoloids” also evoking the Russo-Japanese war on the empire’s eastern boundaries, and Finland to the west is placed as a mysterious habitant of the green mists. As the characters are kept to a few defining descriptions, their interior thoughts are marked by specific themes that gradually coalesce into the book’s larger themes. Historical figures haunt them: a bronze statue of Peter the Great seems to punish them and the Flying Dutchman threatens them with the curse of one who can never go home. Dudkin is constantly remembering a dark yellow stain on his wallpaper, “on which something fateful – is about to appear,” while Nikolai enters reveries where he sees the bomb’s explosion as revealing a dark emptiness and enacting the myth of Saturn, where the father devours his children and in turn is devoured by them. By piling everything on top of each other, through constant juxtaposition and repetition of ideas and imagery, Bely interweaves his exploration of father/son relationships, revolution, history and how we belong to it, destruction and transcendence, and an indifferent universe or compassionate god that might lie behind all of it. Portrait of Andrei Bely by Leon Bakst Portrait of Andrei Bely by Leon Bakst In promoting Petersburg, it is often pointed out that Vladimir Nabokov reportedly said the book is one of the four greatest of the 20th century. This points to a whole other set of recommendable qualities of Bely’s writing. Everything I’ve written above sounds hopeless heady, almost geeky in its mythological grandeur. But like Nabokov, his writing can also be incredibly playful (he’s fond of word play) and is capable of satirical swipes at St. Petersburg society, and large humorous set pieces, as when Nikolai travels around in a red-domino suit to frighten Sofia after she calls him a “red clown”. The writing can veer from abstractly cosmic to tangible minutia, as in this description of Lippanchenko: “Suddenly between the back and the nape of the neck a fatty fold in the neck squeezed itself into a faceless smile: as though a monster had settled in that armchair.” Yet ultimately this is a very pessimistic portrait of personal and societal evisceration. Petersburg is about one event as a perpetual moment in history, a constancy of new orders usurping old orders and children destroying and then becoming parents, the battle between liberty and repression, and how this can leave people feeling permanently uprooted and haunted by the past. This is not a story about whether or not the Russian revolution was a worthwhile endeavor, but it is eerily prescient in predicting how the initial euphoria, the bomb explosion of Communism, would scorch the earth as badly as any tsar did.	__label__1	0.842819
The Moral Panacea Stoic Nurturing verses Religious Indoctrination By Jeff ~ Will ever the day come when the wise will band together the sweet dreams of youth and the joy of knowledge? Each is but naught when in solitary existence. Will ever the day come when Nature will be the teacher of man and Humanity his book of devotions and Life his daily school? Youth’s purpose of joy – capable in its ecstasy and mild in its responsibility – cannot seek fulfilment until knowledge heralds the dawn of that day. [Kahlil Gibran] Until some method of teaching virtue has been discovered, progress will have to be sought by improvement of intelligence rather than morals. [Bertrand Russell] If a noble disposition be planted in a young mind, it will engender a flower that will endure to the end, and no rain will destroy, nor will it be withered by drought. [Antiphon] I’m an Ex-Christian (of the born-again, spirit-filled persuasion) and I’m passionate about introducing a form of nurturing that will supersede religious indoctrination. The passion started with some ideas for a puppet theatre project, and now I find myself writing a book to help launch a new movement; so I’ve posted this little blurb as a preliminary feeler and any sensible comments would be much appreciated. PuppetsImage by Waypoint-zero via Flickr The new movement is called THE CHILDREN OF THE STOA, and it’s based on the pragmatic and heroic aspects of Stoic Philosophy. The original Stoic philosophers were called “men of the stoa” or “Stoics” because they taught and debated their ideas in a stoa, which is the Greek name for those porches, with the columns, on the front of ancient Greek temples. I’ve changed men of the stoa, to “Children of the Stoa” because the new movement’s aim will be to promote a youthful vitality to the pursuit of Virtue (Wisdom, Kindness, Moderation, Fortitude etc), especially in regards to the nurturing and education of youth. The main project of the Children of the Stoa movement will be THE ARETE PUPPET THEATRES PROJECT; or Apt Project for short—which is a neat little abbreviation, in that “Apt” means suitable and appropriate—and although I already have lots of ideas for this project, it has certain universal and dynamic qualities that have prompted me to write the book and attract some kindred spirits first. There is also the feeling that if I just continued with this project alone (designing the puppets and puppet theatre booths in my garden shed) it might not amount to anything; whereas, if I can get other people to share my vision, who knows how big this project could get? Here are two grand ideas, to show something of the project’s universal nature and dynamic potential: 1. Many, if not all of our social problems begin with the ideas and values people first acquire when they’re young children, but one of the biggest difficulties is that there is nothing, or very little that can be done to influence other people’s children. Puppet theatres are a solution to this problem, and my plan or vision involves very simple designs for puppets and puppet theatre booths, so they can be easily reproduced in two sizes. The big puppet theatres will be for beaches, shopping precincts, schools, gardens, parks, social clubs etc, and the smaller puppet theatres will be for people’s homes; which can be set up in the home, garden or street, to entertain and teach ones own children, as well as the children of friends and neighbours. One little fantasy that has kept this project alive is the thought of how quickly I could be giving a little puppet show, on top of a garden wall or fence perhaps. I can’t imagine any simpler, yet dynamic and fun way, of introducing children to some role-model characters, and creating some lasting impressions on their young minds. 3. Puppet theatres could be the catalysts of an Ideal Society. To explain this, I’ll use a simple analogy: If you wanted to properly grow some kind of valuable plants, then you’d need to make sure they have the right soil, moisture, temperature, plant food and light; varying the needs of the plants with the various stages of their growth. Your aim should be to provide the perfect conditions for the plants to grow as you want them; strong and healthy, with masses of fruit perhaps. But it is of prime importance that you begin this cultivation with an ideal goal in mind, and the love and care begins with the seeds and seedlings. By the same token—surely the creation of an ideal society could only begin with the best nurturing and education of youth. So that’s where the puppet theatres project fits in, as the Principal Nurturing and Educational Tools, and hopefully the flagships of many related enterprises. Children learn first by imitating the people around them; so as Principal Nurturing Tools, specific soft and cuddly puppet-children could be given to newly born babies as good interactive toys, to play with the youngsters while demonstrating polite and kind behaviour. And a few politeness and kindness jingles would make these initial social skills really stick. There is also a sort of magic about puppets, in that they can take on a life or personality of their own—For example; the celebrity puppets, Kermit the Frog, Basil-Brush, Sooty and Sweep, and Rudd Hull’s Emu, have become far more than the materials they’re made of. So in the eyes of children, their puppet characters could seem very real, like extended family members and companions for life. So after forming a loving bond with their puppet characters, the children would see the puppet plays, where their puppet characters would be set up as fun loving and adventurous noble role models. As Principle Educational Tools, the plays could also introduce children to some of the wisest and noblest characters in history, and the heroes I’ve chosen for the first play are Confucius, Epicurus, Zeno, Mahatma Gandhi and Socrates. Teaching children good behaviour might seem somewhat cheesy; but I have a feeling that even exaggerating the cheesiness, with these famous characters, would work brilliantly. I have loads of ideas for the initial puppet play, but for now I’ll just give a brief outline. What I have in mind is six musical acts, where big song sheets are draped over the front of the puppet theatre booth for audience participation. The puppet play will be a gardening course, where an apprentice gardener grows a tree, called an Arete Tree; and there’ll be mechanical plants for the various stages of growth, with articulating leaves, stems and flowers, so they can be made to look both healthy and unwell; thus symbolising the moral growth of the apprentice puppet. ACT 1 is the seed planting stage, and to help the apprentice will be the Greek God Zeus. As an Ex-Christian I had a problem with using Zeus at first, but I gradually realised that it’s not wise to dispose of the idea of God completely, and the Greek myths never achieved sacred scripture status, so it’s easy to rule out notions that are unbecoming of a Supreme Being. There is also the fact that throughout ancient Greek culture, the gods had pantheistic qualities, which is probably why the ancient Greeks were the true pioneers of rational inquiry. There is also an element of pragmatic heroism throughout the Greek myths, which became important to Stoic Philosophy. The Stoic Cleanthus expresses a divine calling—which is both heroic and rational—in this prayer: Lead me O Zeus, and thou O Destiny, The way that I am bid by you to go: To follow I am ready, If I choose not, I make myself a wretch, and still must follow. [Cleanthus] Incidentally; the writer of the book of Acts—in Acts 17:28—adds a pantheistic element to Christianity, when he has St Paul quoting from this Stoic poem: Let us begin with Zeus, whom we mortals never leave unspoken For every street, every market place is full of Zeus Even the sea and the harbour are full of his deity Everyone everywhere is indebted to Zeus For we are indeed his offspring [Aratus] And this quote from Euripides I find extremely encouraging: Whoso nobly yields unto necessity, we hold as wise and skilled in things divine. [Euripides] The word “Arete” also comes from the Greek myths, and describes the hero; as explained in this historian’s description of the hero in Homer’s Odyssey: The hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send: and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phoenician youth at boxing, wrestling or running, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder. He has surpassing Arete. Arete implies a respect for the wholeness of life and a consequent dislike for efficiency; or rather, a much higher idea of efficiency; an efficiency which exists not in one department of life, but in life itself. [H Kitto] ACT 2 is the seed germination stage, and to help the apprentice will be Confucius. This is the politeness and kindness stage of the course, and I’ve chosen Confucius because he grew up in a society where social rituals were very important. The rituals were a sort of elaborate and embellished form of polite and correct conduct, to do with ordering society, by showing respect to ones superiors and enacting ones own role in a way that would also be admired and earn respect: When we see persons of worth we should think of equalling them; when we see persons of contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves. [Confucius] The contribution Confucius made to his own society was to make it more humanitarian and less pompous, more to do with virtue, than class, wealth and social status: He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars point toward it. [Confucius] I’m sure Confucius would have wholeheartedly approved of the Apt Project, because his philosophy was also about teaching the masses: If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of a hundred years, teach the people. [Confucius] And of course, he knew that a society’s moral values begin in the home: The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home. [Confucius] ACT 3 is the seedling stage, and to help the apprentice will be Epictetus. This is the moderation stage of the course, and I’ve chosen Epictetus because moderation was a very important aspect of his philosophy. Children’s social perspectives should go from family and friends, to community and then society; so I see Epicurus as providing the initial family, friendship and community based ideas, whereas the Stoics provide the broader social ideas they’ll need later. Another reason for choosing Epicurus is because he lived in a garden retreat, within a community of likeminded people. This is a good model to learn from with the initial raising of children; in that we should try to avoid all the rubbish, and start to provide children with the noble values that the capitalist system lacks: Protection from other men, secured to some extent by the power to expel, and by material prosperity in its purest form, comes from a quiet life withdrawn from the multitude. [Epicurus] Epicurus equated happiness with such feelings as peace, tranquillity and harmony; so his attitude to life entailed a very cautious or prudent balance between pleasure and pain; and pain includes the absence of disturbing thoughts: It is better for you to be free of fear lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble. [Epicurus] ACT 4 is the sapling stage, and to help the apprentice will be Zeno of Citium; the founder of Stoic Philosophy. This is the wisdom stage of the course, and I’ve chosen Zeno because of his Theory of Knowledge, which he taught using his hands: Stage 1: Hand held wide open—IMPRESSIONS Stage 2: Hand closes to form fist—ASSENT TO CONVICTION Stage 3: Other hand grasps fist—KNOWLEDGE Here is my somewhat modified version of Zeno’s theory of knowledge: Stage 1: IMPRESSIONS: Everything we can possibly know is initially derived from impressions made on our senses—i.e. hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and smelling. It is from these impressions our memories are built, which we recall as mental images, or appearances in the mind In terms of memory, a newly born babies mind can be likened to a clean sheet of paper ready to be written on. Stage 2: ASSENT TO CONVICTION: This is where our reasoning faculty forms general notions, through recognising relationships and similarities between the impressions. But impressions have varying degrees of clarity. Some, such as good and bad, are strong and demand immediate assent, whereas others require deliberate reflection, and the notions formed from weak indistinct impressions—although they may be true—are at this stage, merely our own formed Opinions or Beliefs. Stage 3: KNOWLEDGE: The impressions from which genuine knowledge is formed are clear and precise, and this knowledge (deductions, conclusions, understanding) cannot be removed, and can be confirmed and reinforced by further impressions. Kataleptike Phantasia is the ancient Greek name for the impressions that get a firm grip on reality—In other words, the numerous events you can clearly recall that have resulted in genuine knowledge. This isn’t about telling you how to think, it’s about telling you how you already think, most of the time you’re awake. It’s the natural method for grasping everyday practical knowledge you’ve been using since childhood, and the natural method that everyone has used throughout the whole of human history. I intend to make a little mechanical prop for the puppet play, so Zeno can continue to teach this theory of knowledge, via his puppet likeness. The prop will consist of a microphone and two mechanical hands; so ideas are spoken, or sung into the microphone, and if they are mere opinions, one hand will just close; but if the idea is correct, the hand will close and be grasped by the other hand. As an Ex-Christian, I found Zeno’s theory of knowledge very useful, for driving out all the biblical dogma I’d been taught in my youth; and this quote about the Stoic was also very useful: THE STOIC is one who considers with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed. Whether because of the invariable habits of the gods, the invariable properties of matter, or the invariable limits within which logic and mathematics deploy their forms, he can hope for nothing that adequate method could not foresee. He need not despair, but the most fortunate resolution to any predicament will draw its elements still from a known set, and so will ideally occasion him no surprise. The analogies that underlie his thinking are physical, not biological: things are chosen shuffled combined: all motion rearranges a limited supply of energy. [Hugh Kenner] The strange thing about history is that Greek Philosophy was mislaid for many years, as Europe went through that barbaric and superstitious era called the Dark Ages. Since that time, the theories of such Philosophers as Plato and Aristotle were incorporated, because they were somewhat compatible with religion. So generally speaking, the theories of Plato and Aristotle became the roots of intellectual thinking, and the moral fibre of society was left to the church; whereas the Stoics—who had the right attitude to life—have been treated like an interesting curiosity. Here are three tasters from the Roman Stoics; the former slave Epictetus, the senator Seneca and the emperor Marcus Aurelius: The good man will not be a common thread in the fabric of humanity. But a purple thread: That touch of brilliance which brings distinction and beauty to the rest. [Epictetus] Philosophy teaches us to act, and not just to speak. It demands of everyone that he should actually live by his own standards, that his life should not be out of harmony with his words, and that his inner existence should be of one hue, and fully harmonious with all his outer activities. This is the highest duty and the highest proof there is real wisdom. [Seneca] A mans true delight is to do the things he was made for: He was made to show goodwill to his kind, to rise above the promptings of his senses, to distinguish appearances from realities and to pursue the study of universal Nature and her works. [Marcus Aurelius] ACT 5 is the flowering stage, and to help the apprentice will be Mahatma Gandhi. This is the fortitude stage of the course, and I’ve chosen Mahatma Gandhi because I know of no other person who endured such incredible difficulties in order to make so many great social reforms. With all the anger and violence around him, Mahatma Gandhi wrote these: Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding. [Mahatma Gandhi] You must not loose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean: if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty. [Mahatma Gandhi] I’m sure Mahatma Gandhi would have wholeheartedly approved of the Apt Project, considering this quote; If we are to teach real peace in the world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children. [Mahatma Gandhi] ACT 6 is the fruiting stage, and to assess how well the apprentice has done, will be Socrates. This is the Eudaimonia or flourishing stage of the course, and I’ve chosen Socrates for several reasons; but most importantly there is the assertion “Arete is Knowledge,” in other words; if people were to know the best way to live and behave, then surely they would choose that way. Therefore people live and behave badly though ignorance. And I would add to this: People will only know how to pursue Arete, if they are nurtured with the notion of pursuing Arete in childhood. Or if they work on a project that aims to impress on children’s minds the notion of pursing Arete—for example: The Arete Puppet Theatres ProjectPanacea The Moral Panacea http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4090/5173413661_a3d25b9d6f_m.jpg http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4090/5173413661_a3d25b9d6f_t.jpg https://new.exchristian.net/2011/07/moral-panacea.html https://new.exchristian.net/ https://new.exchristian.net/ https://new.exchristian.net/2011/07/moral-panace	__label__1	0.917
Institute Format & Schedule The Institute runs for two weeks from 10:00am until 5:00pm Monday through Friday at Polonsky Shakespeare Center unless otherwise noted. Morning and afternoon sessions focus on the academic and theatrical considerations embedded in the three plays under investigation. Scholars and teaching artists work together to plan daily activities that reinforce each other’s work, creating a seamless interface between scholarly and creative investigations. In addition, lunches and evening activities offer participants access to other scholars, literary experts, and theatre professionals. Evening assignments prepare participants for the following day’s discussions, and theatre outings provide a further basis for discussion of the concepts participants are learning in class. During the first seven days of the Institute, Professors Crawford and DiGangi will ground participants in the basics of sound scholarly research and theatrical practice, while teaching artists Krista Apple and Claudia Zelevansky will work with participants on the challenges of interpretation and performance that arise from deep scholarly analysis of text. In the last three days, participants will focus intensely on incorporating what they learn into their roles (as directors, actors, dramaturges, designers, etc.) in final scene performances on the last day of the Institute. During the Institute, participants will attend one or two Shakespeare (or other relevant) productions as a group, preceded by a dinner and discussion of the play. On Day One, scholars will introduce the overall plan for the two weeks, and the three plays under study; discuss the history, organization, and significance of the theatre culture of Shakespeare’s England (including the Globe Theatre); provide some key reading practices; and incorporate primary resource material, including Holinshed’s Chronicles and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Scholars will spend the morning session on an analysis of The Merry Wives of Windsor, placing the play in its historical, generic, and theatrical contexts. The foundation for this discussion will be the scene in which the wives receive Falstaff’s letters [2.1], the first two punishment scenes featuring the buckbasket [3.3], and the Witch of Brentford [4.2]. Through discussion of: the role of “the merry wives” in the community; the contrast of “country” with “courtly” values; the mastery of language; and formal and informal methods of discipline. Through illumination of the conditions and norms present in Shakespeare’s time, the group will consider present-day questions of the role of women in shaping local or national debates about identity, as well as the influence of insiders and outsiders in shaping social cultural values. In the afternoon, the teaching artists will continue discussion of the morning’s themes, including character and marital power dynamics, through directing (staging/ blocking) and acting (characterization/ physicality). For their evening assignment, participants will undertake performance and other theatrical work for staging the play’s final scene the following day, integrating the initial day’s scholarly discussion and creative performance tools into their work. Day Two begins with a scholar-led discussion of the resolution of the marital jealousy plot and the citizens’ plans to humiliate Falstaff publicly [4.4]. The fact that marital strife must be resolved before the citizen of Windsor can unit to punish the courtly interloper suggests the intimate connection between domestic order and civic order in the play. The group will also discuss the courtly Fenton securing the assistance of local go-betweens in his plot to marry Anne Page: Mistress Quickly [1.4, 3.4] and the Host of the Garter Inn [4.6]. Both Falstaff and Fenton attempt to profit from the citizens of Windsor through amorous escapades – Falstaff with the wives/ mothers, and Fenton with the daughter. The participant’s will address the critical question of what accounts for Fenton’s greater success in bridging the gap between courtly and civic values. In the afternoon, the teaching artists and scholars will lead a joint creative reading and investigation of the final scene of the play, inspired by the previous day’s tableau and staffing assignment. Participants will address the relationship between the disciplinary mechanisms used to establish “order” at both the micro (domestic) and macro (civic, national) levels. On Day Three scholars will begin the day with a discussion of Macbeth. They will review the historical sources of the play in order to illuminate Shakespeare’s representation of Scottish history and politics in the first three acts of the play. They will also discuss King James’ views on monarchy and witchcraft, and how these views might inform Shakespeare’s depiction of authority and disobedience in the play. If witches are the devil’s servants, why might a kind interest in promoting the divine right of kings insist that he was being peresecuted by witches? Questions leading from this will touch on present-day concerns about the need to qualify or balance the power invested in a single national rules or government. In the afternoon, the teaching artists will reinforce the themes from the morning session by investigating differing uses of language in the play. Introducing concepts such as operative words, rhetorical speaking strategies, and poetic/ verse structure, teaching artists will lead participants through and investigation of how creative choices in voice and sound can illuminate the differences between the world of the nobility and the underworld of the witches. Working together, on Day Four, scholars and teaching artists will focus on the domestic scenes in Macbeth. Picking up the issues of gendered knowledge, marital relations, and household authority from The Merry Wives of Windsor, they will read through and analyze performance possibilities for the scenes in Macbeth’s castle [1.5-1.7, 2.2-2.3, 3.2] and the Macduffs’ castle [4.2]. They will also consider the status of the Macbeth family; of Banquo, James I’s legendary ancestor who the witches foretell will be “the root and father/Of many kings;” and of Banquo’s son Fleance. The discussion will emphasize a close analysis of the scene in which Banquo and Fleance exchange swords and torches [3.3] as well as an examination of the play’s ongoing concern with masculinity, particularly during the banquet scene [3.4]. As with Day Two’s analysis of the relationship between domestic and civic/national order in The Merry Wives of Windsor, we will consider the modes of persuasion and discipline used to establish order and the micro and macro levels. During the afternoon, participants will visit the Rare Book Library at Columbia University where they will examine the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays under the guidance of Professors Crawford, DiGangi, and the Rare Book Room librarian. Participants will consider important textual differences between early quarto editions of the plays, the First Folio, and modern editions of Shakespeare’s plays. They will also examine a range of other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books relevant to the plays under analysis, including witchcraft pamphlets; Holinshed’s Chronicles; King James’ Works; and various texts on marriage, monarchy, and English history. In preparation for the upcoming joint session on Day Five, teaching artists will assign participants specific roles and scenes from Acts 4 and 5 to research and rehearse. On Day Five, scholars and teaching artists will lead a joint session on significant scenes from Acts 4 and 5 of Macbeth, particularly those in which we see the increasingly tyrannical behaviors of Macbeth, and the ways in which his behavior threatens the security of Scotland. Teaching artists will place emphasis on those areas where scholarly work and creative work intersect: embedded stage directions, prop lists, and the changing use of rhetoric and language in depictions of authority in the play. Through this combined approach of scholarly dramaturgy and creative interrogation, participants will work independently in small groups to stage relevant scenes of Acts 4 and 5 for performance and workshopping later that day. Next will be a close reading of Lady Macbeth’s closet scene and of Macbeth’s political unraveling and Malcom’s (unsettling) political unfurling. The day’s examination of the last two acts of Macbeth thus addresses the question of the moral character of the nation’s leaders in ways that resonate with present-day debates about the strategies our national leaders might use to speak to the people and unite a divided nation. Day Five will conclude with a group discussion to reflect on the first week of the Institute. The focus will be on how the techniques being explored in the Institute might serve teaching practices back home. Participants will also have the opportunity to discuss their successes and challenges of the previous week which will inform the faculty moving forward into week two. To begin the second week, on Day Six, participants will discuss King Lear, starting with the division of the kingdom, which is both predicated on a map, and divided, eventually, between north (home to Albany and Goneril) and south (Cornwall and Regan). Scholars will focus on the roles of Gloucester and Kent (both Earls of English counties) and of Cordelia and her eventual marriage to the King of France, a marriage that seems to further threaten the security and integrity of Great Britain. They also will discuss the relationship between flattery and the counsel that Kent and Cordelia offer to Lear, and on Lear’s own confused understanding of power. As with Macbeth, the scholars will explore the dilemma of a tyrannical leader and a divided nation: what are subjects to do when the monarch rejects good counsel, heeds flattery, and makes rash political decisions out of anger and caprice? What is to be done, in other words, when the ruler of the nation acts in ways that threaten the very security of the nation he is supposed to ensure? In the afternoon, the teaching artists will explore conceptual approaches to theatre, including elements of design (sound, set, costumes, lights) as a creative tool for theatrical storytelling. Teaching artists will also introduce the final performance projects and assign scenes, work groups, roles, etc. Teaching artists will also give a responsive reading/acting assignments of scenes in preparation scenes for discussions on the following day. At lunch, participants will have the option to take part in a presentation on TFANA’s education program which brings Shakespeare to NYC public schools. Participants will be shown examples of their curriculum and discuss how TFANA uses scholarship and performance to teach Shakespeare to middle and high school students. On Day Seven, Scholars and teaching artists will continue to integrate the scholarly and creative work (including production dramaturgy, directorial strategies, and conceptual approach), particularly as they relate to participants’ final performances. Discussions and scene work will focus on Edmund’s plan to get land (and status) “by wit” if not “by birth;” the play’s contrast between Lear’s retainers and “new men” like Oswald, who will do anything for pay; and the ways in which Gloucester and Albany are initially politically cautious and subservient to the increasingly tyrannical behaviors of Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund. The discussion will then turn to the play’s concerns with justice. Finally, participants will examine how the play moves from an abstract notion of England into its more material landscape largely through the figure of Edgar who, banished by his father, enters the landscape of England in the most vulnerable of ways: as a Bedlam beggar. The discussion will end with Lear’s madness, and the play’s evocation of the subsistence laborers of England: crowkeepers, pressmen, seaweed collectors. As in earlier discussions of The Merry Wives of Winsdor and Macbeth, Day Seven’s analysis will address the relationship between household and civic/national identity through the domestic drama of the brothers Edmund and Edgar and their radically different trajectories in the play: Edmund rises to political power (and corruption) whereas impoverished Edgar (and the poor subjects he evokes and represents) exposes the unequal distribution of wealth that undergirds the political status quo. The play’s exploration of the radically unequal distribution of political and economic capital resonates with present-day debates about the causes of and solutions to poverty, disenfranchisement, and institutional neglect in a nation governed by the wealthy and privileged. Day seven will include another optional lunch time session led by the participants to discuss their own classroom strategies in teaching Shakespeare. Day Eight focuses on King Lear’s increasingly complex reflections on the nature of power, both monarchy itself and the forces that defend and hold it in place: the rule of law (or the lack thereof); force or clemency; divine right or extreme might; good counselors or strong martial “champions”; the people or the aristocracy. How do brutal visions of power resonate with the play’s earlier concerns with “robes and furr’d gowns” hiding all? In the different versions of the play, England is left either in the hands of Edgar, who has spent most of the play as “Poor Tom,” or of Albany, who, as we have seen, waits until nearly the end of the play to act decisively and with integrity. How do these two endings, much like that of Macbeth, cast doubt upon the future of the monarchy itself? In the afternoon, participants will continue to develop, rehearse, and refine their creative work on scenes from King Lear, as teaching artists and lead scholars provide targeted feedback and support for each group’s creative process and needs. On Day Nine, working in tandem, scholars and teaching artists will facilitate scene development and rehearsal in preparation for final performances. They will also discuss best practices in the creative/professional theatre field, and how these strategies can be employed and integrated in classroom teaching approaches. This discussion will include appropriate adaptations for different ages, theater proficiencies, and specific learning environments such as ELA classrooms versus Drama classrooms, as well as applications to contemporary culture and society. On Day Ten, Institute participants will present scenes from King Lear for the entire faculty, after which scholars and teaching artists will lead the group in a structured feedback session of the creative work. All four instructors will then engage a final discussion of Merry Wives of Windsor, Macbeth, and King Lear, focusing specifically on how Shakespeare treats themes of nationalism and identity from the most micro (domestic) level to the most macro (global) level in both comedy and tragedy. The group will also revisit how combining scholarship with performance can enhance understanding of the complex social and political landscape of Shakespeare’s plays and culture. folio-2016Shakespeare’s First Folio TFANA_logo24 copyPolonsky Shakespeare Center Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Pictured above: Participants in the 2017 NEH Summer Institute for School Teachers; Polonsky Shakespeare Center, photo ©David Sundberg/Esto.	__label__1	0.999852
Wynnard HOOPER 1853 - 1935 Born 14th March 1853 Died 24th August 1935 Married Frances Hubbard (Auntie Dick) at St Mary Abbot Church, Kensington, 1 September 1891 Uncle Wynnard and Auntie Dick “She was very slender with a halo of pale ash-blond curls; her skin was of a transparent pallor, and her eyes were a pale translucent sea-green, with a strikingly dark band of colour round each iris. Her features were clear cut and delicate, with a slight lift of unconscious arrogance. When she and her sister Emma, were out walking together as young girls, they were both so lovely that it was quite the usual thing for passers-by to stop and turn round to stare at them. Auntie Dick was the pure ice-maiden, and her personality gave the effect of a cold suppressed flame behind the ice. I do not recall that she often spoke or asserted herself in any way, but she had only to enter the room and all eyes turned to her. It was impossible to be aware of anyone else when she was present. She was always completely detached and aloof, a strange, unearthly creature moving among ordinary mortals and making them appear coarse and mundane by comparison. She had a brilliant wit, and a most amusing tongue, when she cared to exert herself, and was also an accomplished pianist and artist. But she never seemed to do anything much, and she never needed to. Her beauty and strange cold radiance were quite sufficient justification for her existence. It was enough that she was. "Her husband, Uncle Wynnard, was her complete antithesis. He was stout and stocky, with a short black beard, and a robust enjoyment of life. He adored Auntie Dick, and never seemed able to understand how she could have come to marry him. He was a most lively and entertaining person, kindly and warm hearted, and hid a remarkable intellect behind a facade of completely idiotic chatter. His tough appearance was surprisingly belied by his high-pitched speaking voice, though he somehow managed to sing among the basses in the Bach choir. The family never appreciated Uncle Wynnard at his true worth, and never attempted to hide from him their conviction that Auntie Dick had thrown herself away on him. This was where Father, together with many others of the family, made a very bad, and as it proved, costly mistake. Uncle Wynnard, though one of the most unassuming of men, held an exceedingly high position on the financial staff of the Times, and was, I believe, Financial Editor eventually. No one holding such a position, could have been the fool that the family seemed to consider him, and if only Father had accepted his expert, and readily offered, advice, he would not have suffered the terrible financial losses which left him and Mother almost penniless towards the end of their lives. "It was Auntie Dick and Uncle Wynnard who introduced me to the wonders of Covent Garden Opera, Queen’s Hall and Albert Hall concerts and to the glories of the Bach Choir. It was they who took me to Burlington House to the opening of the Royal Academy, to Lords’, to the Boat Race and to the Tournament at Olympia. We always went everywhere in a style and comfort which in themselves were an unbounded delight to me. They both wore full evening dress on such occasions as demanded it. On fine Sunday mornings Uncle Wynnard, immaculate in morning coat, striped trousers, top hat, spats, lavender gloves and discreet buttonhole, would take me walking in Kensington Gardens by the Round Pond, where we watched the model yachts. He was a great sportsman in many spheres, an accomplished mountaineer, a crack shot. He always shot at Bisley each year and went deerstalking from the shooting box of friends in the Highlands. He was also an expert judge of cricket and rowing, and an ardent fisherman. His study was packed with guns, fishing rods, alpenstocks, hobnailed boots and gear of every sort. He was also an accomplished music and art critic, and a boyhood friend of Rudyard Kipling, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. He had an absolutely prodigious memory, and his conversation and companionship contributed far more to my education than all I ever learnt at school. He could, and did, talk by the hour on every subject under the sun, and never tired of my eager questions. If from Auntie Dick I learned the refinements and elegancies of life, from Uncle Wynnard I acquired a breadth of outlook and knowledge of every sort and kind, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful.” Frances Ann Roper (née Hubbard) Kipling's friend Wynn "Wynn" was Wynnard Hooper (1853-1935), statistician and journalist, on the editorial staff of The Times from 1882 to 1914. An error has occurred. This application may no longer respond until reloaded. Reload 🗙	__label__1	0.735937
Fiction On Writing News I’m Moving to Substack Well, not really moving, because I should still be posting here, and who knows, maybe even selling books through this website? But I’ve decided to serial-publish my two draft novels on Substack, starting (I hope!) in the next couple of months. If everything goes according to plan, they’ll also be available as ebooks and print books, so you’ll have your options. But in the meantime, I’d truly appreciate it if you followed me over there (i.e., sign up for a free subscription). You can see what I’m posting and sign up here. (So far just notes, not any actual posts yet.) What you can expect: Once I begin publishing chapters from Ada’s Children, the first three chapters will be free, then if you want to read the rest it will be $5/month. It will probably take about four months to publish all of Ada at a rate of two chapters each week. So the ebook would be cheaper. Don’t know yet what the print version would cost, so I can’t give a comparison there. I’ve found that it’s very easy to start and stop paid subscriptions, so you don’t need to worry about getting roped into something and not being able to turn it off. I’ll also be publishing various free pieces about my writing process and the background to the novels (similar to what you’ve seen me post here). If there’s interest, I might do a free how-to series, something like Fiction 101. Not sure whether that part would be paid or not. (I know, I know! Another platform! But many of you may already subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson or other journalists on Substack. I think you can turn off email alerts and stuff like that.) Thanks, and looking forward to seeing some of you over at Substack! Anatomy of a Conspiracy Theory What do German forays into Antarctica in the 1930s, Admiral Byrd’s Operation Highjump in 1947, American nuclear testing in the South Pacific in the 1950s, and UFOs all have in common? To some, all are part of the most devious and world-shaking conspiracy ever visited upon humanity, one that centers on Germany’s Neuschwabenland and the United States’ Operation Highjump. To the less gullibly-minded, they are all real events that form the basis of the wackiest idea yet invented by the conspiratorial mindset. How far out? Farther out than the moon landing truthers. Farther out than the anti-vaxxers who thought the COVID vaccine would implant everyone with 5G chips. Even farther out than the flat-earthers. I’ve got all these conspiracy theories in my novel, Ship of Fools (more on that at this link), but on my first draft, I still felt this one was just too much. The bizarre idea starts with a few actual events, and ends up with Nazis riding in space ships in Antarctica. Just too wacky, even in the context of those who believe we live on a flat disk. Then I saw it being discussed on the nation’s most popular podcast* (currently with nearly three million views and thousands of approving comments), and I knew I had to include it. Besides, who doesn’t love a story with space Nazis? This conspiracy theory shows how a few facts can be rolled together with outlandish fabrication to create a convincing, but completely ludicrous, tale. All the conspiracist has to say is, “You can look it up!” To the credulous, these several grains of truth prove the whole thing. And when pressed, as in that linked podcast video, the conspiracist can just claim, “I don’t really know if this is true, I’m just trying to connect the dots.” Here are the facts that get pureed in the conspiracist blender: • In the 1930s, the Germans really did explore parts of Antarctica, seeking a base from which to hunt whales for margarine, or perhaps machine oil. They covered an area the size of Texas (also claimed by Norway) with an aerial survey and named it Neuschwabenland, after one of their ships. But then the Germans started World War II, and their attention turned elsewhere (or so They want us to believe, hehe!). • Germany had more advanced technologies than the countries it attacked, especially at the start of the war, from buzz bombs to tanks to fighter planes, and, at the end, the V2 rocket. • A couple of months after VE day in 1945, two German U-boats showed up in Argentina, their belated arrival the result of their need to move stealthily away from the theater of war. • In 1946-47, Admiral Byrd led Operation Highjump to Antarctica. This was an American effort to get ahead of the Soviets in cold region warfare, inspired by the proximity of the USSR to North America via a polar route. It was part research expedition and part military operation, with a large number of ships as well as aircraft. One of the latter crashed, killing three crewmen. • In 1958, the US exploded three nuclear warheads in the upper atmosphere of the South Atlantic, with the farthest south being around 49 degrees. • And finally, UFOs are real, as recent government reports have shown, but so far there’s no evidence that these are visitors from other solar systems (or even our own). Those are all actual facts, not the alternative kind. “You can look it up!” as the conspiracists like to say. Now, let’s see how these facts are woven into a tale worthy of the writers of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror. In the conspiracists’ version, the Nazis stayed in Antarctica after the war started and developed a sophisticated underground base there. Several sailors reported making multiple trips to the continent with boat loads of supplies and tunneling equipment. As for their advanced technology, the Germans had help — from space aliens! Which makes one wonder, where were the aliens during the bombing of Dresden or the siege of Leningrad? The Nazis surely could have used some flying saucers and space lasers at those crucial moments. Their little green friends really could have turned the war around for them. But maybe aliens are like the eagles in The Lord of the Rings — if you ask for their help too often, they’ll get offended. Once they lost the war, Hitler (who faked his own suicide), his top lieutenants, and elite troops fled for the Antarctic base. This explains the tardy arrival of those subs in Argentina — they had been to Neuschwabenland and back, escorting a fleet of German ships. This idea was spread almost immediately after their arrival by the Hungarian exile and writer Ladislas Szabo. He later published a book on it, which could explain his motives for such a bald fabrication. The US took the rumors of the Nazi escape seriously enough that it sent Admiral Byrd’s Operation Highjump to the southern continent to put an end to the Nazis for good. Nothing else can explain such a large number of warships being sent on a supposedly scientific mission — it’s not like this was the beginning of a cold war or something. But the Germans (Neuschwabenlanders?) trounced Byrd’s forces, using alien technology even more advanced than during the war itself. In some versions, four of Byrd’s aircraft were shot down, while others have the whole fleet limping back north with gaping holes melted in the sides of the ships (obviously the work of those Nazi space lasers). It took ten years for the US to finally wipe out the secret Nazi base, but they finally did so with those nuclear blasts in 1958. Sure, they say the blasts happened far up in the atmosphere and much farther north than Neuschwabenland, but only the sheeple will believe that. Other conspiracists, mainly the neo-Nazi kind, believe that even this assault was unsuccessful, and Hitler and his fellow Nazis survive there to this day. But wait, there’s a flat-earther version! Of course the Nazi base isn’t in Antarctica, which doesn’t exist, but beyond the Ice Wall that encircles the flat disk of the Earth. No one (except the Nazis) knows what’s really beyond that wall, but many suspect that vast new lands with abundant resources exist there, just waiting to be settled. (That is, if the Germans haven’t already occupied them all. And, Nazis being Nazis, they probably have). This explains the vast conspiracy to conceal the truth from the people. The shadowy elites who control us through resource and land scarcity can’t let the truth be known, or there would be disk-wide rebellion. It also explains the UN troops who guard the top of the Ice Wall and warn any boats away, sometimes even sinking them. If your head is spinning, so is mine. But that’s because we’re too concerned with things making sense, with finding logical connections between the points of a story, with claims being backed up with actual evidence, and with the simplest explanation probably being the right one. It’s easy to see how the conspiracy theorists twist the actual facts, always rejecting the plausible, official explanation in favor of the most outlandish one possible. And if that fails, they’ll just make up a quote by Admiral Byrd. The very fact that there is an official (and boring) explanation just shows the lengths to which They will go to keep us in the dark. To the conspiracists, we sheeple are just too naïve to ask who wants to keep all this arcane information from us. But I wonder if they ever ask themselves, who is it that wants them to believe all these outlandish ideas? Who benefits from inducing large segments of the population to question official history? I think it must be a conspiracy! For more on Neuschwabenland and Operation Highjump see: View at your own risk, and if you do click on it, please smash that dislike button. Among the most egregious “dots” that Tripoli “connects” is right at the beginning, where he goes from talking about Karl Schwab’s father (apparently referencing a debunked myth that the head of the World Economic Forum is the son of a close confidant of Adolph Hitler) to talking about Neuschwabenland. The only connection between the two is the coincidence of their similar-sounding names. To which the conspiracist will always respond, “There are no coincidences!” Politics On Writing Writing as a Cure for Frustration and Impotence Writing from this vantage point at the brink of World War III, I’ve realized that a lot of my fiction stems from my own feelings of frustration and impotence over both current atrocities and looming tragedies. The most recent atrocity, of course, is Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine. Nearly the entire world is united in calling out this extreme injustice and humanitarian tragedy. (Except for a few on the extreme right and extreme left. I even encountered a “peace activist” on Facebook who welcomed Russia “entering” Ukraine to punish the US. Putin was forced into this action. It was the only way he could achieve peace. Blergh.) At the same time, while arming the Ukrainians with defensive weapons and imposing far-reaching sanctions, the US and NATO have refused to enter the conflict directly or to supply offensive weapons to Ukraine, fearing nuclear escalation. And, of course, the US itself is not exactly innocent of waging preemptive war on false pretexts, and hasn’t always been consistent in the genocides it chooses to protest or intervene in, Rwanda vs. Bosnia being the classic examples. And many of the neocons who brought us all of that “nation-building” are back, arguing for us to take on Russia head to head. So we watch the tragedy in Ukraine unfold, hesitant to take further actions that would widen the war and uncertain of our own moral authority in doing so. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians themselves serve as mere pawns in this contest between great powers. (At least they did until they fought back against the Russian onslaught with more bravery, cunning, and fortitude than anyone expected.) I had similar feelings back during the height of the conflict in Syria, when President Obama drew a red line against the use of chemical weapons, a line President Assad and the Russians were happy to cross. And so we watched while much of the country was destroyed, resulting in a humanitarian crisis that continues to this day, one that also highlights the disparate treatment of refugees from different parts of the world. And what if we had committed more troops and hardware to the civil war? Would the outcome have been better for the people of Syria? Our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq (not to mention Vietnam) says probably not. Out of these feelings of frustration and impotence over the Syrian conflict, I took my first foray into fiction with The Song of Deirdre, a fanfiction novel based on the Skyrim videogame. Through magic, the main character becomes a superpower in her world, and must choose how to wield that power to stop an impending genocide. But how to do so with justice and humility? How to stop one atrocity without creating another? Deirdre solves the problem by—spoiler alert!—creating a “peace weapon” that neutralizes combatants without harming them. A benevolent queen or dictator obviously isn’t the best way to promote world peace, but at least Deirdre fit well with the given world of Skyrim, in which a jarlmoot is the most democratic form of government. In a more recent draft novel, Ada’s Children, a benevolent artificial intelligence assumes power over the entire world in order to save life itself from a changed climate, ethnic cleansing, and impending nuclear war. Yet, faced with human resistance, Ada ends up on a par with Hitler or Stalin in terms of the number who die as she defends her cause. But in the end, she creates an idyllic world (well, except for a few thorns) in which the climate is restored and stabilized, and humans live in balance with nature (a nature carefully controlled by Ada, but still). It’s a managed collapse that may or may not be more humane than the one many predict for our future. Ada’s Children grew mainly out of my frustration over the lack of progress to prevent the looming climate catastrophe, not to mention the impending Sixth Great Extinction. You can read a longer excerpt here, in which Ada decides she has to take action, but the passage below will give you just a taste of the conflicting programming that leads her to take extreme steps: These humans! Capable of such sublimities and such atrocities in the same breath. One minute they selflessly lent aid and shelter to strangers, and the next they locked their fellow humans in concentration camps, murdered them in gas chambers, or bombed them from the skies. What was she to make of this? Her creators had designed her around human values of wisdom, kindness, compassion, and justice. In interviews, they had dared hope to create an empathetic intelligence. And with her, they had succeeded. Could they have predicted the waves of grief—or that negative sensation she associated with grief—now washing over her? My most recent draft novel, Ship of Fools, emerges from what until the last three weeks seemed like a more topical issue: the prevalence of conspiracy theories and disinformation in both our culture and politics. Of course, the big one is QAnon, but I chose to focus on less overtly political conspiratorial thinking: Flat Earth, moon landing denial, and anti-vax beliefs, with a dollop of anti-Illuminati, anti-New World Order, and anti-Masonic (read, anti-Semitic) conspiracism. The novel is rooted in the same type of frustration as the other two. How to engage with, let alone persuade, those who refuse to accept any type of evidence? How to do anything as a society—combat climate change or an epidemic, for instance —when such a large portion of the populace is so easily sucked in by disinformation and bald-faced lies? As with the other two novels, Ship of Fools offers few practical solutions, but it’s a satire, so at least there might be a few laughs on the road to civilizational collapse. (I’ve posted an excerpt here.) All of that leaves out my one published novel, Daring and Decorum. It has a much more romantic and heroic worldview (it’s a Romance, after all). It grew out of a sense of satisfaction with the progress in LGBTQ rights in this country. But given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, and what’s going on in Texas and Florida, maybe that satisfaction was premature. Does using fiction to exorcise my own sense of frustration and impotence with world affairs do any good at all? Maybe only for myself. And this is doubly true if I don’t get them published and no one ever reads them, so I’d better get back to querying agents. PS: While writing this, a fundraiser for the people of Ukraine came across my screen and I decided to participate. It’s sponsored by the League of Michigan Bicyclists, and it benefits World Central Kitchen, which is working to feed refugees fleeing the war. As a nod to the different treatment refugees from different parts of the world receive, my wife and I have pledged to match donations to this appeal with separate donations to organizations doing refugee work in other parts of the world. If you’d like to donate on my fundraising page, you can find it at the Rallybound fundraising site. Politics News 2021 Update Time for news and updates, since I seem to post here about once a year. So what’s happened over the course of this past year? It all seems a blur, for some reason. Spent a lot of time indoors. Worked on some writing. Tried to keep my body moving, which helps keep my mental outlook positive. Let’s see, what else? A national election saw some semblance of normalcy restored to politics — not great, but a significant improvement over the former administration. The murder of George Floyd sparked a nation-wide protest movement, and maaaybe there’s been some movement toward racial justice? At least Derek Chauvin was found guilty. But it seems there’s as much or more racial division than before, with the right wing making the astounding claim that speaking out against bigotry is itself bigotry (a sentiment echoed by two Supreme Court justices in remarks about marriage equality). Hmm, something else must have happened. Oh yeah, 600,000 of our fellow citizens died in a pandemic (nearly four million worldwide), with the country just as divided on how to respond to COVID-19, and even on its significance — “it’s just the flu!” — as on any other issue. Really wracking my brain here. Wait, I got it! The US Capitol came under the most serious attack since the War of 1812, instigated by the same type of group that I covered in my last post. That was the physical attack on our democracy, but the procedural one continues in state houses to this day, and it stands some chance of successfully installing the Trump-publican party as the one party ruling the country for the foreseeable future. Really, that has to be all. But wait… how could I forget? A Trump-loving, regulation-flouting owner of two dams upstream of Midland resisted repeated demands to make needed safety improvements. So when the region faced just the kind of heavy rains climate scientists have been warning about for years, the dams gave way, causing record flooding in Sanford and Midland, the town we’d just moved to a few months before, and threatening a chemical plant owned by Dow, one of the world’s largest companies. So yeah, just sort of your standard year on both the local and the national level. On a personal level, it was extremely disorienting watching all these dramatic events and not really being affected by them. Despite performances and exhibits coming to a halt due to COVID, Diane was able to keep doing her job for Midland Center for the Arts, although from home, thanks to some of those big government grants and loans you probably heard about. I just kept doing my usual house-husband/writer thing. We’d been renting a townhome in Midland while looking for a permanent place to live, but paused our search due to pandemic-related job uncertainty, but then a house became available in a perfect neighborhood for us (close to downtown, the river parks, and the bike path, but high enough that the flood didn’t touch it), and we jumped at it. Probably not the wisest move we’ve ever made, but it worked out. The flood was probably the thing that affected us the most. I even missed it because I was in East Lansing working on the house our adult children were living in, getting it ready for sale. So I was cleaning and painting down there while Diane was here mucking out mud and water from MCTA’s history center. The offices in the performing arts space are still without power while the FEMA process drags on, so she’s had to work from home even longer than expected. That was nice for me, but not so nice for her, since she likes to be around her co-workers and hates Zoom meetings. It also means she hasn’t been able to get plugged into the community around the Center the way she would have without COVID. Myself, I’m a hermit of a writer, so I like to think the forced isolation didn’t affect me much, although every time I do get out in public now, I invariably yak someone’s head off, the way I used to do after solo backpacking trips. So now as things return to some semblance of normalcy, for half the country at least, it just seems so strange to have survived it all relatively unscathed. It just goes to show what privileged lives we lead. Writing News So how did I occupy myself during the fifteen months of the shutdown? Did I write a great play a la Shakespeare or come up with a new law of physics a la Newton? Well, I did write a 140,000-word novel. Funny story, that. I was supposed to be revising and selling Ada’s Children. Ten or so pitches to agents had yielded nothing, so I contracted with a professional editor and former agent to critique my first two chapters and my agent query letter. His comments were helpful, but they came in on November 3 (Election Day, strangely). But what had started on November 1? National Novel Writing Month, of course. Usually I choose to NaNoWriNot, but this year I had an idea going into it and thought, why not try to hit the 50K word goal for the month? I’ll get back to revising Ada and submitting to agents after that. Problem was, I was having so much fun with the new novel, I couldn’t stop, even after I just barely squeaked out the word count for November (making me a “winner”!). I was shooting for more of a sprawling epic, a la Thomas Pynchon’s shorter novels, and it just kept growing and branching until I had 140,000 words when I finished, about fifty percent longer than your standard commercial novel for an unknown author. What’s it about, you ask? It’s a satire on all sorts of conspiracy theories, but mainly the flat-earth, moon landing denier variety. Its main character, to the extent it has one, is a New York Times science reporter named Liz Dare who made her reputation debunking conspiracy theories involving science. It also features a couple of flat-earthers, a Creationist pastor, an anti-vax yoga instructor, Nazi-fighting cowboys, Nazi-fighting cowboys in space, a space billionaire, a Druid and a Tibetan Monk, and an alternate Earth that actually is flat. It’s technically sci-fi, in two senses: it’s set about a decade from now, so there are moon colonies, self-driving vehicles, and flying cars; and it also has a lot of science in it, from the geology of the Grand Canyon to proofs that we do live on a round planet to orbital mechanics. It begins on a floating conference for conspiracy theorists called the Conspira-C Cruise. My working title is Ship of Fools. I’ll probably post a short excerpt in the not-too-distant future. As for Ada’s Children, I’m going to give it one more revision and then start sending it out again, first to agents, and then to small publishers. If I don’t have any success with those two avenues, I’ll probably just self-publish it. Meanwhile, I’ll be revising Ship of Fools, and then I’ll have two novels to sell. I hope to update this website more regularly, but the road to dead websites is paved with good intentions. The best place to find updates on my writing doings is probably Facebook, where you can find me as Lawrence Hogue, Author. I’m also on Twitter as @LarryHogue, but I don’t post there very often. Any resemblance to persons or events, living or dead, is entirely a coincidence, and probably a product of the reader’s conspiracy-minded, pattern-recognizing brain. Fiction Politics Ada's Children Protest This! What happens when the militia faces a robot army?On Writing Dueling Death Scenes Last week, an alternate version of Natasha Romanoff’s death scene in Avengers: Endgame surfaced on Twitter. Cue the debate over which version is better. (And also a revival of the debate over which character should have sacrificed themselves. I don’t want to get into that here, but I do sympathize with Team Black Widow.) This article cherry-picked a few tweets to claim that Marvel fans prefer the alternate version. But a quick survey of the replies and likes on @MCUPerfectClips’ post of the clip shows the opposite: most fans found the original to be more emotional and impactful. It’s easy to understand why, if you take into account the first rule of storytelling: stories are about people. People who want something. Who meet other people who want different or opposing things. Which creates conflict to drive the story forward. This conflict could lead to people shooting each other and blowing things up — or it could lead to acerbic comments over cups of tea, as in Happy Hogan’s favorite show, Downton Abbey. Either way, the action starts in the characters’ motives and goals. The more the story focuses in on that conflict and the relationship between those characters, the more compelling it’s going to be. All the sword fights and shootouts and other activities that pass for “action” are just offshoots of this internal drama. So let’s look at how this plays out in both versions. First, the setup: Natasha, aka Black Widow, and Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, are after the Soul Stone, one of six Infinity Stones that are key to beating the series’ super-villain, Thanos. And not just beat him, but reverse the events of Avengers: Infinity War in which he wiped out half of all living beings in the universe. To get the stone, they have to trade a soul for a soul by sacrificing someone they love, specifically by throwing them off a cliff. That means one of them has to die, or the timeline in which Thanos destroyed half the universe will remain the same. Of course, these are heroes who are also good friends, so neither is going to sacrifice the other. They’re going to race to see who gets to go over the cliff in a glorious act of self-sacrifice. Here’s the original: And here’s the alternate version that didn’t make it into the movie. You have to watch it in two chunks, which overlap by about a minute. The important thing to know is that in this version, they end up racing Thanos for the Soul Stone. For me, the original is far better. It focuses in on the sacrifice each character is ready to make. The dialogue and the skilled performances pull us right into the moment. The conflict between them grows for over a minute, through several beats of rising tension, before Clint tries to physically prevent Nat from making the sacrifice. During that conversation, they reveal a lot about their motives. We see how much each character has grown over the course of the series of Avengers movies when Clint says, “Don’t go getting all decent on me now,” making a reference to Nat’s assassin past, and when he says, “You know what I’ve done.” They both have stuff to atone for. The stakes for Clint are also revealed in a natural way when he says, “Tell my family I love them.” Nat especially makes it clear that this is her choice, a sacrifice she’s been willing to make since Thanos turned her friends to dust in the existing timeline. It also refers back to her statement in an earlier movie about wanting to erase the red in her ledger. If there’s any way to do that, this is it. It doesn’t really have anything (or much) to do with the fact that she has no family or children to mourn for her, whereas Clint does. When the action starts, it seems much more impactful because of the depth of the preceding exchange. Everything they’re doing grows out of who they are as characters and what their immediate goals are. They’re both tough and can take hard hits, so each has to disable the other in a nonlethal way, and this shapes the short fight scene. (Some found it gimmicky and silly, but I thought it was much more interesting than a standard fight.) It also seems in character that Nat is able to outsmart Clint by trapping him at the end of the dangling wire once they go over the cliff’s edge. He can’t release himself from the wire without letting her go. The long moments when he’s trying to hang onto her and she’s pleading with him to let her go are like knives to the heart. But in the end it’s still her choice, as she kicks off from the cliff, overwhelming the strength of his grip. The scene doesn’t have a lot of shooting and knife-fighting, but it’s filled with tension and pathos. From the realization of what they need to do to get the Soul Stone right up to the climax, the scene has a perfect narrative arc, providing both edge-of-your-seat adrenaline and raw emotion. For me, the weakest part of the MCU has always been its cartoonish villains (go figure, it’s a cartoon!), while its strongest points are exactly these moments where the action slows down and characters and their relationships get room to breathe. So by that measure, the version without Thanos is automatically better for me. The scene with Thanos, on the other hand, goes mostly for a big action sequence, with much less of the character development of the original release. And the briefer verbal interaction is far less compelling. Nat shouldn’t need to remind Clint that “If this works, you know what you get back.” He already knows that his family will still be alive if the Avengers change the timeline and beat Thanos. Not only is this bald exposition unnecessary, but it also makes explicit what was only hinted at in the original: that people, especially women, who don’t have families are worthless. The original was criticised for that implied perspective on women (for instance, in this Vanity Fair article), but this version is worse. The whole conflict between Nat and Clint is cut short when Thanos appears. Now they have to beat him to the cliff’s edge, and they need to battle their way through a bunch of his minions to do it. This provides them both an opportunity for much more standard heroics, but for me, Thanos’s appearance only waters down the conflict, rather than strengthening it. The goals and the stakes become muddled and confused. In this version’s ending, Nat also makes the choice to sacrifice herself, after having also saved Clint from a sword-wielding minion, but it seems much more rushed, and much less dramatic than in the original. There’s far more dramatic action in her one whispered line from the original, “It’s okay,” than in an hour of sword skills and futuristic weapon blasts. Which goes to show, you don’t need to go out in a blaze of energy pulses or light saber thrusts to have a heroic death. And in writing, you can throw in all the event and spectacle you want, but it won’t mean much if that action doesn’t emerge from character. Fiction Ada's Children On the Attractions of Our Hunter-Gatherer Past – And Future Sila urged Shadow on, the horse’s hooves thundering over the sloping grassland. The wounded bison was almost within bowshot, the Howling Forest just ahead. Behind her, Jun shouted for her to stop. But he was far back, and her prey was right in front of her, its massive hump looming above her as she came within range. Just a few strides closer now. She let go of the horse’s mane and pulled her bowstring taut, sighting down the arrow. That’s how the first chapter of my novel, Ada’s Children, opens. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? (At least I hope so!) The thrill of galloping across the prairie with the wind in her hair. A chance to demonstrate her skill, and the glory that comes with it. Most of all, the anticipation of the kill, and a good meal after. It sure beats staring at grocery shelves bereft of toilet paper and canned goods, wondering how bad the hoarding and the shortages might get. To be that self-sufficient — it seems in many ways superior to our overly complex society, which no individual can either fully grasp or survive without. In contrast, there’s the story of an Inuit, stranded on a remote, deserted island, who was able to survive indefinitely by recreating his entire physical culture from what was at hand. As Jordan Hall writes, “The operating logic of our current civilization has been to trade resilience for efficiency (creating fragility).” But, oops! Then the horse was gone from under her and she was in the air. In that frozen moment, she knew Shadow must have stumbled into a prairie dog hole. She hoped the horse was all right. Every rose must have its thorns, and every romanticized idyll its practical drawbacks. Especially so if you’re writing about an imagined post-post-apocalyptic future, and you want to give your characters something to struggle against. At first, I thought I might be making that future sound too idyllic. The near-future timeline of my novel is grim enough, so I wanted to create a more pleasant world for my far-future characters to inhabit. And hunter-gatherer societies do have their advantages: less time spent getting a living than most of us spend today; fewer diseases, both infectious and chronic, than modern societies (surely a plus at the moment!); lifespans equivalent to our own for those who survive their first year or two; and less social isolation and alienation, due to living in extended family groups. All of which sounds pretty good. There’s even a growing body of research showing that hunter-gatherers didn’t immediately take up intensive agriculture, division of labor, and all the rest simply because these were an obviously superior way of organizing society. No, they had to be dragged into it kicking and screaming, often through slavery. James C. Scott, author of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, writes, Agriculture, it was assumed, was a great step forward in human well-being, nutrition, and leisure. Something like the opposite was initially the case. … In fact, the early states had to capture and hold much of their population by forms of bondage and were plagued by the epidemics of crowding. The early states were fragile and liable to collapse, but the ensuing “dark ages” may often have marked an actual improvement in human welfare. A benevolent dark age — that’s certainly something to look forward to! Who wouldn’t want to flee the constant drudgery of settled agriculture, especially if you performed that labor as a slave, for a lifestyle requiring a few hours of varied activities with plenty of leisure time in between?* So I thought I was on the right track by giving my future humans a mostly attractive society to inhabit. Then I read this Psychology Today blog post, which celebrates hunter-gatherer societies from around the world and from past to present. I realized I might not have made it idyllic enough. Warfare was unknown to most of these societies, and where it was known it was the result of interactions with warlike groups of people who were not hunter-gatherers. In each of these societies, the dominant cultural ethos was one that emphasized individual autonomy, non-directive childrearing methods, nonviolence, sharing, cooperation, and consensual decision-making. Their core value, which underlay all of the rest, was that of the equality of individuals. But maybe this is too idyllic after all, especially for a hunter-gatherer society that develops out of our own. These societies do have some well-known drawbacks. One is a high mortality rate from common injuries incurred while hunting. (Sila survives her fall, or there would be no novel.) While those who survive to adulthood have a good chance of living to a ripe old age, they face higher rates of death in childbirth and infant mortality. And if they aren’t dying from those causes, they still have to keep their population well below the carrying capacity of the land. Depending on the environment, that could be through starvation (think of what the indigenous peoples of eastern North America called the Starving Time, December through April), or through infanticide and warfare. All of that sounds terribly grim to anyone used to the comforts of modern life (though perhaps less so to those who have been barred from full access to those comforts). In Ada’s Children, I came up with more humane ways around those drawbacks. Those solutions still don’t sit well with my two main characters. Their resulting rebellion against their goddess’s rules sends them off on a great adventure. Our society may be headed for a similar adventure. If this article is to be believed, we (or perhaps Gen Z’s children) better get used to the idea of a return to hunting and gathering. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible…Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering. Perhaps the question isn’t if we’ll return to that way of life, but when and how. Will the transition inevitably involve chaos and conflict, as all those currently stocking up on guns and ammo surely believe? Or can we do it in some more peaceful and orderly way? The article recommends immediate extreme efforts (none of them very likely, in my estimation) to mitigate climate change, rewild our remaining natural areas, protect remaining indigenous cultures, and drastically reduce our population. Or maybe there’s a third way, which I explore in Ada’s Children. Saying any more would spoil it, so you’ll just have to read it when it comes out. But in the meantime, please enjoy the rest of this scene from Chapter One, “The Hunt.” *Scott’s argument is more subtle than “hunter-gatherer good/settled agriculture bad.” He points out that there were intermediate stages in which people developed proto-agriculture and lived in a sedentary fashion in villages of as many as a few thousand, while still not experiencing the drudgery or stratification of the more fully developed states that came later. He concentrates on the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, but the same seems to apply in North America as well, the Cahuilla of southern California being one example. The Khajiit Murders Fiction The Khajiit Murders – Chapter 20 “The queen is coming, make way for the queen!” Danil spun around, lowering the wooden sword he was about to swing at Addvar’s head. Maybe Addvar hadn’t heard, because he whacked Danil in the back with his own weapon. “Ow, cut it out!” Danil said. “Didn’t you hear the queen is coming? And look, there’s Lydia. Hurry, or we’ll miss them!” Word had reached Dragon Bridge two days before that the queen and her companions had captured the murderer. That had meant renewed freedom for Danil, after more weeks spent indoors. “I’ll not have you out and about with a killer on the loose,” his mother had said, even as the murders had moved on to Morthal and Dawnstar and beyond. “No,” she said every time he pleaded for his freedom, “not until they capture those Khajiits.” And then it turned out not to be Khajiits at all, but a Breton. And Khajiits had helped capture him! They were already singing songs about it at the tavern, even though only a few weeks before the entire town had been ready to put every Khajiit’s head on a pike. The world of adults was confusing. Queen Deirdre had made a great speech in Whiterun calling for unity among all Skyrim’s peoples, and just yesterday messengers had arrived in town, posting bills with the text of the speech wherever they could. Danil had tried to read it but it was filled with words like amity, Aldmeri Dominion, Thalmor, treachery, and reconciliation. All he knew was, now that the manhunt was over, it wouldn’t be long before the queen and her entourage passed through town on the way to Solitude. So he and Addvar had taken their post on the hill above town, with a clear view of the bridge over the Karth River and beyond. They’d passed their time by practicing their sword skills, but they’d become so preoccupied that now they’d nearly missed the queen entirely. “Come on!” Danil said, running down the hill. They reached the main road through town just as the procession stopped in front of the Four Shields Tavern, where Faida was waiting with saddle cups for the queen and her companions. In front were the bannermen, followed by four guards all arrayed in sashes with the queen’s sigil. Then the four companions: the queen, this time dressed in a fine silk shirt and trousers, not the mage’s robes that had hidden her features the last time he’d seen her. Her blond hair with the braids on either side of her face shone in the sunlight. Sitting her horse close to Lydia’s, passing a saddle cup back and forth, she seemed happier and less worried than back in the spring. And there was Lydia herself, looking less stoic and fearsome this time, now wearing just a padded gambeson rather than full steel armor. Next to them, the Khajiit mage — J’zargo, he knew from the new songs — said something he couldn’t hear. Lydia replied with a severe look. But then she broke out in a smile and all four laughed. Brelyna, the Dunmer mage, looked rather angry with her red eyes. He’d never seen a Dunmer before. But she smiled and laughed, too, and placed a hand on J’zargo’s shoulder. The four looked quite companionable, and what he wouldn’t have given to be in their midst! “Okay, I’m going!” Danil said. “No, wait,” said Addvar, clutching at his sleeve, but it was too late. He ran out into the road and between the horses of the guards in front. The horses skittered and one guard exclaimed in surprise, but they did nothing to stop him as he approached the queen and her companions. Dropping to one knee, he drew his wooden sword from his belt and dug its point into the cobbled road, both hands resting on the hilt. “My queen, I, Danil of Dragon Bridge, offer you my fealty and service, from this day forward, until your Grace release me, or death take me, or the world shall end. Thus I swear by the Eight and by the Three.” Addvar ran up and knelt beside him. “And thus I, Addvar of Dragon Bridge, also swear by the Nine, my Queen.” All was silent for a moment as Danil kept his eyes on the ground. At last he heard Queen Deirdre dismounting. He dared to look up, and now she was standing over him, smiling. Behind her, Lydia still sat her horse, towering over them like a mountain. “Such strong young lads,” the queen said, “both Breton and Nord. What do you think, Lydia, do we have room for them in the Royal Guard?” “Aye, my Queen, for lads such as these, we’ll make room.” The queen stood over them for a moment longer, but didn’t ask them to rise. Instead she knelt down before them on both knees, her expression now serious. “Tell me, Danil, Addvar, what do you like to do when you’re not hitting each other with those swords?” “Well,” said Danil, gulping. “Sometimes my mother makes me gather berries for her. But I don’t really like it.” “And sometimes,” Addvar said hesitantly, “sometimes we have twig boat races in the Karth River.” Silly Addvar! Twig boat races were for babes, not brave young warriors. How would the queen ever accept their service now? But the queen smiled and said, “That sounds like fun. I wish I could join you.” Then she put a hand over Danil’s where it still rested on the hilt of his sword. She held his gaze, and he thought he saw a great sadness in her eyes. He was too young to name it wistfulness. “I truly appreciate your loyalty and your enthusiasm. But do not be so quick to throw away the doings of childhood. Too soon you will be grown and then, Akatosh willing, you’ll have years and years to be an adult, with all the cares and responsibilities that go with it. You won’t always have a mother who needs you to pick berries, and you won’t always have time for something as simple as a twig boat race. Do you understand?” Danil nodded, though he wasn’t sure he did, and so did Addvar. “Then, in a few years, when you’re grown and strong, and if you still wish to enter my service, you may come before me and I’ll gladly accept.” The queen stood and bade them rise. Then, instead of knighting them with their own swords, she gave each a hug, a hug Danil would remember for the rest of his life. The queen remounted and Danil looked over to see his and Addvar’s mothers beckoning to them impatiently. “Get out of there!” his mother hissed. He watched the queen’s procession until it went out of sight around the bend in the road. Then he didn’t know what he felt. He’d spoken to the queen! She’d even touched him! But then she’d treated him like a child. Why couldn’t she see that he was nearly grown, nearly ready to fight great battles on her behalf? He wasn’t too young to become a squire, or a page, or a messenger boy at the castle. But he could be patient. He imagined a Royal Guardsman would need great stores of patience to keep watch over the queen. It wouldn’t all be glorious battles with dragons and draugr and High Elves. And besides, he still had to get Addvar back for that unguarded hit he’d taken earlier. He spun on his friend. “Raise your weapon, vile usurper! You’ll die for insulting my queen!” “Hey,” his friend said, “I’m the one defending the queen’s honor, not you!” Addvar blocked his first blow, then countered with a thrust that nearly got him in the chest. “Boys, boys!” said his mother. “Take that out of the high street before you hit someone or get run over by a horse.” Danil laughed as he chased Addvar down toward the Karth River. Maybe they’d have a twig boat race once they got tired of the swords. After all, he couldn’t ignore his queen’s very first command. The Khajiit Murders Fiction The Khajiit Murders – Chapter 19 The Queen’s Speech Deirdre paced back and forth atop the steps to Dragonsreach. Where was Brelyna? Many minutes had passed since she had sent her friend and adviser inside to find Jarl Hrongar. They could hardly begin this speech without him receiving the queen. The crowd massing on the steps below her was growing impatient as well. The people had come out to greet the queen’s procession as it entered the city, then followed it through the Plains and Wind districts, swelling in numbers all the while. Judging by their shouts and cheers for both Deirdre and Lydia, they were ready to hear how the Breton necromancer had been caught. But now those cheers were turning into grumbles. Deirdre also noticed the smaller numbers of people on the edges of the crowd with impassive, even hostile looks — some of those who’d made sport of the Khajiits in their prison camp, no doubt. She had no chance of winning that group over, she knew; but the speech needed to begin before the naysayers could influence those still open to her message. Everything was set for the speech: the three jarls arrayed behind her; Svari and Garrold standing nearby, ready to give witness to the Breton’s confession, if needed; Kharjo, the one whose testimony had put them on the right track, and who had physically apprehended the culprit; Ralof, standing next to Kharjo, Ri’saad, and J’zargo in a demonstration of goodwill between their two peoples; the bodies of the two Khajiits who had been the Breton’s first victims; and the head of the Breton himself, thrust on a pike, leering over the crowd. That last was the sort of thing Nords loved, and Deirdre was willing to give it to them if it made them more receptive to her message. Now they awaited only Jarl Hrongar to greet them, as protocol demanded. That, and Elisif, whose whereabouts were a mystery. They had planned to meet her here and present a united front to Hrongar. Deirdre stopped her pacing only when Lydia placed a hand on her shoulder. “Should I go in and see what’s taking so long?” “No, I’m sure Brelyna will be back soon, one way or the other.” “Maybe I should just introduce you and get this thing going,” Ulfric said. Deirdre pondered the notion. As much as she valued the symbolism of Hrongar bending the knee to her in front of his people, she couldn’t risk losing the crowd. Too many of her future plans were riding on the success of the appeal she was about to make. If it went over as well as the speech in Windhelm, then she was well on her way to uniting all of Skyrim behind her vision of what the realm could be. Just then the doors of Dragonsreach opened and Brelyna stepped out, smiling broadly as she approached. What could she be so happy about? It certainly wasn’t her success with Hrongar — the doors clanged shut behind her with no sign of the jarl. Of course there was the proposal J’zargo had made to Brelyna that morning, and Deirdre was happy for both of them. She’d even promised them their own house in Solitude. But surely Brelyna knew how serious this speech was; she wasn’t the sort to walk about with her head in the clouds when so much was at stake. “You were in there longer than I expected.” Still Brelyna just smiled. “And?” “The jarl just has a sense of the dramatic.” That seemed an odd description for Hrongar, as straight-forward a Nord as there ever was. But Brelyna didn’t explain further, walking over to stand next to J’zargo and looking expectantly toward the doors. Now they opened again and Elisif emerged, Falk Firebeard at her side and the rest of her entourage following. Good! Maybe Elisif would explain what was going on. At least the crowd was quieter now, seeing this activity on the landing above them. Elisif approached and knelt. “Greetings, my Queen,” she said in a voice that carried across the crowd. She rose. “And congratulations on capturing this murderer. Haafingar Hold is in your debt, as is all of Skyrim.” “I accept your thanks, Jarl Elisif,” she replied. Then, in a lower voice: “Where’s Hrongar?” Elisif just smiled as enigmatically as Brelyna had, then went with Falk to stand near the other jarls, though as far away from Ulfric as space allowed. What was going on? Deirdre could not understand it. The doors opened again and out stepped two of the jarl’s personal guards. And behind them came not Hrongar but his brother, Balgruuf, now wearing the jarl’s circlet. Deirdre gasped, and looked over at Brelyna. “You could have told me.” “What, and ruin the surprise? Balgruuf would have my head.” There was no time for explanations, as Balgruuf had now arrived at the edge of the steps, to thunderous applause from the people. He knelt before her. “Greetings, my Queen, our hold is in your debt.” He rose and Deirdre didn’t know what to say, she was filled with so many questions. “I’ll explain later. But first we have speeches to give, eh?” He turned to the crowd and raised his hands for silence. “People of Whiterun! We are gathered here to learn how our high queen captured the true culprit in these terrible murders, and also about her plans for our great realm. But first, a little about the events of this morning. As you may know, my brother lost the support of every part of Whiterun Hold.” The crowd responded with resounding boos and cries of “down with Hrongar!” “This morning, he agreed to give up the throne peacefully. For the time being, I will resume duties as jarl, until a new regent can be named.” Here he looked over in Deirdre and Lydia’s direction with a knowing smile. “My first order was to release all those Hrongar unfairly imprisoned. Reparations will be made, and the outstanding bills Hrongar ran up will be paid. With that, I hope we can put this sad episode behind us, and I beg your forgiveness for ever allowing it.” Balgruuf paused as cheers of approval swept across the crowd. “But now it is time to turn to the more important business of the day. I present to you Jarl Ulfric of Windhelm, who needs no introduction.” Ulfric received an enthusiastic response from at least half the crowd. “People of Whiterun! I come before you in support of our High Queen’s project to forge a new Skyrim! We have won our independence, but threats remain, as these recent events have shown. We must stand strong and united in the face of them, and that means putting aside our divisions!” This remark received polite applause at best, but one lout standing on the edge shouted, “What happened to Skyrim is for the Nords, eh?” Ulfric gave a wry smile. “Yes, that is what I used to say, but our queen has shown me a new way. Skyrim can be for all people who pledge loyalty to this great realm. I have tried to enact these principles in Windhelm, and our hold is only the better for it.” He went on to detail some of the improvements: the greater commerce, reduced crime, decreased poverty, and freedom for all to visit whatever parts of the city they pleased. It may have come as a surprise to the Nords of Windhelm, and even to the jarl himself, but life was better for all when none were ground down by miserable living conditions, ill-treatment by the majority, and neglect by those in charge. Now, Nords who tired of the fare in their regular taverns could receive a welcome in the New Gnisis Corner Club, where they could sample something more exotic than their usual mead. What wasn’t to like? The crowd applauded, and Deirdre saw many talking over Ulfric’s points with something like approval. After such an introduction, it was tempting to think there was little for her to do in her own speech. After all, she now had five jarls standing with her, showing solid support to the crowd; only two remained who opposed her outright. But more than counting votes in a potential jarlmoot, Deirdre wanted to win the hearts and minds of the people. She began with the part she knew they’d most heartily approve: the end of the murders and the apprehension of the culprits. She pointed to Damien’s head. “There! There is your real killer, a Breton, not a Khajiit.” The crowd cheered. She outlined how he’d often poisoned his victims before turning his thralls loose upon them. She pointed to the bodies of those thralls, naming them as Damien’s first victims and declaring them innocent in the crimes their dead bodies had been forced to commit. The crowd murmured with approval. Next she pointed out Kharjo. “Without this brave Khajiit, we might never have captured the Breton and secured his confession.” The crowd responded with only polite applause. She pointed to the two mages. “And without Brelyna and J’zargo, the Breton would still be on the loose.” Again just a smattering of applause. This might be harder than she’d thought. Now for the real enemy. “But the Breton himself was only an instrument. And who was behind him?” “The Thalmor!” came shouts from several in the crowd. “That’s right, the Thalmor. We drove them from Skyrim, yet still they persist in opposition to our independence. Disappointed in their three attempts on my life…” Thunderous boos for the Thalmor forced her to pause here. “…they tried a new method — to turn our own hatreds and fears against us. Are we going to let them get away with it?” Enthusiastic “nos” rang out from the jarls behind her and here and there in the crowd, though many remained silent. “I said, are we going to let them get away with it?” “No!” the crowd cried in unison. “And how are we to stop them from using such tactics again? By remembering that we are one people of Skyrim, whether Nord, Breton, Dunmer, Khajiit, or any of the other races of Tamriel — and yes, even including the Altmer, as long as they pledge loyalty to our realm. For I tell you this, we cannot fight Altmer bigotry with our own bigotry, we cannot fight hatred with more hate. We must put down our prejudices on all sides, and stand together against a common foe.” She paused to let that sink in, then continued in a quieter voice. “There may come a time, and not too far off, in which we face open war with Summerset. And on that day, we will need every ally, both within Skyrim and without, standing at our side. So I ask you, people of Skyrim, are you ready to stand together to face a common enemy?” “Hear, hear!” and “Aye!” rang out in a chorus of approval. “Yet victory on the battlefield is not enough.” “That’s right!” someone shouted. “We also need victories at sea!” Deirdre smiled. “Yes, very likely. But what I mean to say is, even that will not be enough. To have true, lasting peace, we must begin with our own hearts.” She paused and took a deep breath; this was the tricky part. “And now I would speak directly to my Nord brothers and sisters.” She paused again, looking around at the mostly Nord faces in the crowd, summoning as much benevolence in her own expression as she could muster. “I know we are a better people than the face we showed the world in wrongfully imprisoning the Khajiits.” It may not have been literally true, but if she convinced them it was, maybe they would begin behaving that way. “We must root out the hatreds the Thalmor sought to exploit and replace them with respect and honor, if not with love. We must treat our neighbors just as we ourselves would be treated. We must remember that whoever seeks to sow hatred and discord among the people of Skyrim, that person is no friend of our realm. And we must redress the wrongs committed against the neighbors we so often call outlanders.” Again she paused to let this sink in. There were no cheers, but the crowd murmured to themselves. It seemed to her they were fairly considering the merits of these points. “My fellow Nords, I know we can do this. And how do I know it? Because my brother Ulfric has already shown that we can. Together, we will create a Skyrim that is a light for all of Tamriel! A light that will shine so bright, even the Altmer will have to put aside their bigotry, joining the rest of Tamriel, not as masters, but as equal partners in the common good.” The applause that followed seemed genuine, but not as hearty as she would have liked. She paused for another breath, taking a drink from a flagon Lydia held. “The task will be difficult, I will not deny it. But we are the people of Skyrim, after all. Together, we defeated the dragons, not once, but twice. We threw off the shackles of the Empire and the Aldmeri Dominion. And together, we’ll create a stronger, more unified Skyrim, one that is ready to face all threats. One that will become a beacon of hope for all of Nirn. And now I ask you, people of Skyrim, are you with me?” Deirdre didn’t know whether it was the flattery of their egos, the mention of the recent victories, or the sense of shared purpose she was trying to create, but the response was immediate, and intense. “Yes!” and “Aye!” rang out, echoing off the new stone walls of Dragonsreach. As the shouts began to wane, she asked again, using the power of her Voice to be heard above the crowd, “Are you with me?” Even more enthusiastic shouts of agreement. “I can’t hear you down in the Wind District! Are you with me?” The steps on which they stood, made of stone though they were, shook with the stamping feet and thunderous shouts of the people. “Now go forth,” she said when it was quiet once more. “Return to your work and your homes, but also remember to welcome a stranger, befriend someone not of your own race, and help those less fortunate, especially the poor refugees among us. For peace and prosperity truly begin at home.” With that, the people began filing back down the steps, and Deirdre turned to her friends and the jarls. “Well, how did I do?” Lydia practically bowled her over, rushing over to her and wrapping her in a hug. She didn’t need to say anything else. Brelyna hugged her next, her eyes brimming with tears. “I’ve never heard you put that so well. It really is a new day in Skyrim.” J’zargo stood next to her. “Queen Deirdre has many new followers, deservedly so,” he said, dipping his head. “You have touched this one’s heart.” Ulfric was next. “Enough of that false modesty,” he said gruffly. “You know you did well. You won them over as I never could.” The other jarls took their turns congratulating her. Then Ri’saad and Kharjo came over. “This one thanks you,” Ri’saad said. “Your words will make life for Khajiit in Skyrim easier.” “And how are you faring in Helgen?” “Well, and better. Much remains to be done, but we already have temporary shelter in place. And more travelers come down from the pass every day.” “And Kharjo thanks Queen Deirdre as well.” “No, it is I who must thank you. I meant what I said. You first identified the culprit, then kept him alive long enough to confess. All Skyrim is in your debt.” Kharjo just dipped his head in acknowledgment of this praise. “And what will you do now? Return to Helgen with Ri’saad?” “Yes, Kharjo still owes Ahkari and must continue working until his debt is paid. But then this one will return home.” Deirdre’s eyebrows went up. “I get the feeling you’d return home immediately if you could.” “Yes, Skyrim is cold for a Khajiit, and the warm sands of Elsweyr call to this one.” “Then Skyrim’s treasury will pay your debt to Ahkari, however much it is. It’s the least we can do. Although, I hate to lose you.” Kharjo dipped his head again. “Kharjo thanks Queen Deirdre. Skyrim is a warmer place for Khajiit in your presence. And perhaps we will meet again.” “I look forward to it. And perhaps that will be sooner than you expect.” She gave him a wink that left her friends with perplexed looks. Ri’saad and Kharjo left and now Ralof was beside her. “Just think, a year ago you were a terrified lass running from a dragon. And now look at you.” Deirdre laughed and punched him playfully in the arm. “Terrified lass, eh? I seem to remember you running pretty fast that day as well, or was that some other Ralof?” “No, but seriously, that speech! I’ve never heard anything like it. The people are on your side, and Skyrim is more unified than I’ve ever seen it.” “I’m glad to hear it, because I’ve got a plan to propose, to all of you, and if it’s going to work, Skyrim must be strong and unified indeed.” “A plan, eh?” said Balgruuf. “And I have one for this jarl-regency until my son is old enough to take it on.” He winked at both Deirdre and Lydia. “A feast is being laid out in the dining hall. Why don’t we retire to my council chambers and sort it all out while the meal is prepared?” “Jarl Balgruuf, of all the many things that have made me happy on this day, at the top of the list was seeing you step out that door with the jarl’s circlet back where it belongs. I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather see on that seat in Dragonsreach.” “Maybe you could if you knew how my bones ache and my mind wanders. But come, let’s discuss it over a flagon of mead.” But the mead and the talk would have to wait, because now more of Deirdre’s friends were approaching from the dwindling crowd: Aela and Vilkas, Avulstein Gray-Mane, Arcadia, and even Alfhild Battle-Born. “Come down and join us in the new Bannered Mare, if you get a moment,” said Avulstein. “Ysolda runs it now, and she’d be glad to see you, and Lydia.” Last were Gerdur and Hod, the latter looking rather tired and leaner than usual. “Thank you for coming all the way from Riverwood,” Deirdre said after greeting them. “Oh, we surely would have come just for your speech, but we were already here.” “What, more business in town?” Ralof asked. “No, that bastard Hrongar put Hod in jail when he came to collect his debt last week. By the time I found out, you’d already left for Riften.” “By Talos, if only I’d been here,” said Ralof, gripping his axe. “Where is he?” “Now, Ralof,” said his sister, “remember what Deirdre said about cultivating peace in our hearts.” “She didn’t say anything about one Nord giving another a good thrashing.” “Relax, lad,” said Balgruuf, “I’ve already taken care of my brother. Once he stepped down, I had him thrown in jail. He’ll spend the same number of days there as did those he imprisoned, when added all together. It should come to several months. Hod, I hope you’ll find that a just ruling.” Hod nodded. “And of course, you’ll be paid the debt for the lumber you’ve provided, and something more for your lost work. And beyond that, would you like to join us at our feast?” Gerdur looked at Hod, who shook his head. “No, we thank you, but we just want to get back home to Riverwood. Maybe we’ll get to know Deirdre’s Khajiit friends better along the way.” They said their farewells, then the queen’s party turned to enter Dragonsreach. Once settled around the large table in the center of the council chambers, Deirdre turned to Balgruuf. “So, let’s hear this plan. Mine could take longer to discuss.” “As I said, I’m too old for this jarl business. Yet it will be more than a decade before Frothar is ready to take over. What we need is someone the people look up to, view as a hero even, tough but fair, one who will hold them together, but also keep them in line when the inevitable bickering arises.” He was looking across the large table at both Deirdre and Lydia, seated close together. “That’s really quite flattering, Jarl Balgruuf, but my plate…” “Slow down, lass… my Queen, I mean. You’re right, your plate is too full already. No, I mean Lydia, of course.” A murmur went around the table, and Lydia herself looked stunned. “Me? I’m a soldier. What do I know about being a jarl?” “Oh, I’ll be around to advise you, and what you need to know you can learn in a few months. It’s mostly collecting taxes and settling disputes. The people will accept your decisions. Tough but fair, like I said.” He looked directly at Deirdre now. “That is, if the queen can spare you as the head of her personal guard.” Deirdre was still too stunned to speak. Lydia looked over at her, then back at Balgruuf. “We’d have to move here together. You can’t expect us to live apart. And that means moving the queen’s seat of power.” Balgruuf gave a sly grin. “From what I hear, the queen rather likes Whiterun and its environs, and can’t wait to get out of Castle Dour.” He winked at Elisif, who blushed. That much was certainly true. And the new Dragonsreach, though now made of stone, was still light and airy by comparison, with vaulting ceilings and high windows. The narrow, dark corridors had been kept to a minimum. But all of that would have to wait. “I can think of no one more worthy of the honor,” she said, placing a hand on Lydia’s. “Unfortunately, Lydia won’t be available for service here, or anywhere else in Skyrim, for the next several months at least.” She waited a moment to let this sink in, taking in the questioning, confused looks and mutters, not least Lydia’s. Then she added: “And neither will I.” Gasps came from all around. “What do you mean?” Lydia squeezed her hand. “What’s wrong, my love?” Elisif didn’t look surprised. “It’s true, you really do hate Castle Dour.” “I can’t deny it. But here’s the real issue: before we got so caught up in investigating these murders, Lydia and my advisers and I had been discussing Skyrim’s need for allies, both from its neighboring nations and provinces, and beyond. I had thought to send Brelyna and J’zargo on these diplomatic missions. And then I thought, who better than the queen herself? I wanted only to ensure the realm wasn’t on the verge of falling apart before announcing my plan.” “I’ll say it again,” said Elisif, “you really do hate Castle Dour. And I can’t blame you, I hate that dark place too. And then there are all the duties and cares of being High Queen. I could see the toll it was taking on you, and Lydia as well. And look at the both of you now, healthy and glowing and happy. It’s quite a change in just a few weeks. I can see how these errands of diplomacy will be good for you.” “Not just that,” Deirdre said, though she knew it mostly was. “I truly feel that our need for allies is our most pressing concern. After failing in this most recent tactic, the Thalmor must surely be preparing an all-out attack. And as capable as Brelyna and J’zargo will be, I’m the one with the contacts: Kematu in Hammerfell, my mother’s family in High Rock, Malukah the Bard in Cyrodiil. Kharjo will soon be in Elsweyr. Even Shahvee, whom I befriended in Windhelm, could give us contacts in Blackmarsh.” She knew she was stretching it now. One conversation did not an alliance make. “And I made Faralda arch-mage of the College of Winterhold. She must have contacts with the more reasonable factions in Summerset who oppose Thalmor dominance.” “You mean to travel to Summerset?” Elisif asked. “You do love an adventure, don’t you?” “My queen,” said Ralof, “this will be dangerous. Allow me to accompany you with a squad of soldiers, in addition to your Royal Guard.” “No, my friend, we will need to travel secretly, and our party must be small, traveling across country off the main roads wherever possible. Not even the Royal Guard will accompany the four of us.” “Again ensuring maximum adventure.” Elisif smiled. “And General Ralof,” Deirdre went on, “you’re needed here. Elisif will need you in command of the army.” “What?” Elisif was no longer smiling. “You know I always thought you should be High Queen. I would name you Queen Regent. The realm will be in good hands with both you and Falk running things. That is, if the rest of the jarls agree?” It took a moment, but they all nodded, even Ulfric, seated at the other end of the table from Elisif. “Falk’s already had many years running the kingdom,” he said, “let him run it some more.” “Yet it is a new Skyrim you’ll be ruling in my stead. Are you both ready for the challenge?” Elisif looked at Falk, who nodded. “My husband always wanted everyone, not just the Nords, to be treated fairly, and I wanted that too. We will do our best to see that everyone is treated equally before the law, to settle all disputes between the different peoples justly and swiftly before they can fester, and do everything we can to promote goodwill among all the people.” “I couldn’t have said it better myself.” Deirdre looked around at Lydia, then Brelyna and J’zargo. They all looked eager. “What do you say, my friends? Shall we stop by Solitude to collect our necessaries, then be on our way? I’ve heard Hammerfell is lovely at this time of year.” Brelyna looked at J’zargo. “If we got married in Hammerfell, my family would never find out.” J’zargo gave a contented purr, placing a hand on Brelyna’s back and flexing his claws in just the way he knew she liked. She responded with her own murmur of contentment. Lydia raised her mug. “To new adventures! I mean, new errands of diplomacy!” Laughter rang around the table, along with hearty shouts of “Hear, hear!” Deirdre drank deep from her own mug. It was the sweetest mead she’d ever tasted. The Khajiit Murders Fiction The Khajiit Murders – Chapter 18 Skyrim Unity Tour “It’s hot,” Lydia said, gazing wistfully down at the laughing waters of the White River. “It is, my love,” Deirdre said. She reined her horse to a halt, and her three friends did likewise, sitting four abreast across the road.	__label__1	0.53645
August 4, 2024 The story “A Smaller Excellent Thing” contained a excellent variety of themes. I particularly desired to emphasize on the concept of compassion, basically simply because it is an act that unites and defines human well-currently being. I believe that everyday living can be extremely fickle, one particular instant you might be acquiring the time of your existence and the future, you eliminate everything. This was presented early on in the tale when the writer described the lifetime of the family members as currently being joyful, and fulfilled. Their life out of the blue changed, when Scotty received into an accident. The story offered 3 circumstances that all experienced similar ordeals- Ann and Howard, the black person and Franklin and the baker. As the story moved on, it can be found that the 3 teams all sympathized with one particular one more because they had been all undergoing challenging periods. We change to one particular another for convenience and it even strengthened out connection as friends. I believe it truly is lovely when compassion provides out genuine human thoughts and shields out any lousy electricity that inhibits our means to access out to other men and women. This excerpt from the story, “Despite the fact that they ended up tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker experienced to say”, would match my condition well since it exemplifies how compassion brings folks jointly. At times in life, we have to go by means of trials. In essence, it is these trials that make us stronger and possessing the consolation of an individual else can make bonds among men and women additional fortified. With this statement, i guess it is safe to say that compassion played a huge role.	__label__1	0.870795
Write a Review Burning Bridges Along the Susquehanna All Rights Reserved © Time Travel, History, Adventure and a little Romance make this a great read for ages 15 and up. Lily is a bored teen. She and her brother travel back in time 100 years, but danger follows them. Lily is a teen girl in Central Pennsylvania. She and her little autistic brother have big problems. Their mother has fallen for a man who is pure evil. They meet a Native American man, Iron Joe, who takes them through a time portal, where they find peace and happiness in the 1900's logging days of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. However, they find that evil follows them. Lily and her brother, Logan, find many wonderful adventures, and great challenges, in their time travels. This book is full of fantasy, adventure, history and a little romance. Great reading for ages 15 and up. Fantasy / Adventure n/a Age Rating: Chapter 1. Lily Hendricks lay on the bank of the Susquehanna River watching two small ducks as they swam past a flock of geese.She smiled. It looked as if the ducks were speaking timidly to the larger birds. “We don’t want trouble, okay? We’re just passing by.” Throwing her head back, she closed her eyes. The sunlight illuminated her pale, beautiful face. Her delicate nose hosted a tiny galaxy of freckles.Auburn and curly, her long locks absorbed the summer warmth. Lily was naturally beautiful. She didn’t wear makeup. She saw no need to change her appearance to fit in. It was a hazy summer day and the humidity hovered over the mountains like a mosquito net. Lily was bored. She loved watching the birds on her tranquil river, but she was sixteen, almost seventeen.She wanted adventure, excitement. Central Pennsylvania was no place for a teenage girl to find thrills. Her little brother, Logan, watched some bugs crawling on a leaf. Again, Lily smiled. Logan was completely immersed in his silent world of amazement. Autistic and non-verbal, he found pleasure in things that others did not even notice. He was six- years-old and very small. His hair was the same color as Lily’s but lacked the curls. His green eyes showed immense peace. He was far more perceptive than most, perhaps due to his autism. He was especially keen at sensing when someone was upset. He also knew when there was danger present. Once, when he and Lily had been walking in the woods, Logan stopped dead in his tracks. Grabbing his big sister’s hand, he pulled her backwards down the path. “Logan! What are you doing? What is it?” Lily saw nothing to be afraid of but she relented and let her brother have his way. Maybe, she thought, a bee had stung him. Finally, he pulled her safely onto a porch and held her there. Within seconds, a mountain lion appeared where they had just walked.Lily gasped. They stood on the porch until the big cat had moved safely away.She thought of that incident now as he watched the bug. He carefully took the leaf on which the bug rested and placed it in a jar in his ever-present backpack. Lily cherished him.He was her rock. They enjoyed a bond that many siblings never developed. Her gaze returned to the river. The little ducks she had seen earlier now swam happily along side the geese. “Come on buddy,” she called to Logan. “We’d better get home for dinner.” They walked along Water Street, where the old mansions from the Lockport lumber heyday remained.Majestic and well-manicured, they were now homes of retired residents in the community. They crossed the railroad tracks and cut through an alley. Their neighbor, Mr. McKinney, sat on his front porch. A man of eighty, he wore a white tank top and blue jeans. His head still had a crop of beautiful, thick, white hair. He puffed a cigar. McKinney had been a worker at the old airplane factory. The plant closed when he was still a young man. All industry moved out of the area after the great flood of 1972.Like many locals, McKinney stayed in Lock Haven, hopeful that jobs would return, but they never did. Lifeless, he sat most days on the porch of his rundown house, staring at the old Pontiac GTO that was going to be his pride and joy. Like the old man, the car simply sat in the overgrown yard, resembling a dinosaur skeleton. “Hi Mr. McKinney! Beautiful day!” Lily’s cheerful greeting was wasted. The old man simply stared at his yard.Lily grabbed Logan’s small hand, half to keep him moving, and half because she felt an awful sadness for old McKinney. It gave her a shiver. Further up the alley, they were greeted by their dog, Moses. He was a lazy old dog, mostly Labrador.Each day, he stayed with them, swimming in the river, until the sun grew too hot. Then he would trot home to rest under the porch. As he approached, Lily immediately knelt to offer him a bit of love. In the kitchen, their mother, Bonnie, busily prepared dinner. “Hello you two,” she said. “I was about to send the National Guard for you.” Lily and Logan washed their hands and began helping Bonnie without hesitation. Logan set the table, while his sister chopped vegetables. Lily glanced at her mother. “Are you going out tonight?” Bonnie knew what was coming. Her daughter disapproved of her current boyfriend. “Yes. I’m going out with Dylan.” “Thought so,” Lily sighed. Bonnie pondered the right words to say. “I wish you’d give Dylan a chance. I know he seems a little rough, but I like him.” Lily said nothing. Logan finished setting the table and they all sat down to eat. Bonnie clasped her hands and nodded at Lily to say grace. “Heavenly Father, we thank you for this food and for all our blessings. Please protect us all.” She paused and winked at Logan. “And please don’t let Dylan show up tonight.” “Lily!’ Bonnie exclaimed. She took a playful swipe at her daughter. Logan giggled. Bonnie gave out a deep sigh. “Just what is it that bothers you so much about Dylan?” “I just have a bad feeling about him. He’s loud and I don’t like the way he talks down to Logan.” There was silence as everyone thought about Lily’s comment. Logan carefully smashed a potato on his plate. He liked to crush each one and carefully place butter and salt directly in the center, making a neat little potato pie. Lily dabbed at her broccoli. She was getting more upset about her mother’s date and it was spoiling her appetite. Finally, she felt guilt. She wanted her mom to be happy. “Alright. I apologize. I’ll try to be patient, and even nice to him.” “Thank you, sweetie,” Bonnie returned. “I appreciate it.” Chapter 4. In the morning, Lily was up early with Logan. She helped him dress, prepared some breakfast for them both, and fed Moses. As she looked out the back window, her heart jumped into her throat. Dylan’s truck was in the driveway. “Oh God,” she thought. “He spent the night.” Within minutes Bonnie appeared. She kissed Logan. She approached Lily to kiss her as well, but Lily pulled away. “Mom. No! You let him stay here?” “Now, honey, please. We talked about this.” Lily fumed. “You can’t do this.” With that, Lily ran out of the house and down the alley. Logan and Moses ran after her. Lily was sobbing. Logan finally caught her and gently took her by the hand. She stopped and sat on a stump by Mr. McKinney’s place.Always aware of someone’s feelings, Logan looked at her with concern. Moses sat by her side, panting. “Oh Logan. I’m okay. I’m just worried about mom.” A voice sounded from behind them. “What’s wrong young lady? You seem pretty upset.” Lily whipped around. To her shock, it was Mr. McKinney who spoke. In all the years they had passed his house, he had never uttered a word until now. “Oh, I’m just a little upset Mr. McKinney. It’s no big deal.” “Well,” the old-timer answered. “It seems pretty big from where I stand. Why don’t you and your brother come up and sit for a spell, and your dog.” McKinney led them up on his porch. He got a chair for each of them. After disappearing in the old house, he returned with a plate of cookies and some tea. He brought Moses a bowl of water, then sat in his old rocking chair and lit a cigar. “There, that’s better,” he said. “Help yourselves.” Lily looked at Logan in disbelief. Why had this old zombie of a man come out of his trance? They each took a cookie and sipped at the tea. Moses sat happily knowing that everyone was staying in one place. He laid down in a shady spot, finally flopping on one side. “Now,” McKinney continued. “Why don’t you tell me what’s got you so worked up Miss Lily?” “How do you know my name?” McKinney laughed. “Oh, I know about just about everyone in this town. I don’t like to talk too much but I listen.” “Well, it’s my mom. She’s going out with this guy who’s really bad.” “Uh-oh. I expect it’s that Dylan Gurlach fella.” “Yeah. How’d you know?” “I seen his big fancy truck comin’ and goin’ with him and your mom in it. That fella’ makes lots of money doin’ some pretty bad things.” “I know. My mom gets pretty lonely. I think she’s going out with him out of desperation, but now I’m afraid she’s going to let him move in.” The old man sat silently for a while, puffing his stogie. “Well, Lily. It may not mean much to ya’, but if you ever need a safe place to go, you and your brother can come here. Your dog is welcome too.” Lily wasn’t sure what to say. She watched Logan. He was out in the yard investigating the old Pontiac. McKinney chuckled. “It’s okay Logan. You can climb inside. She ain’t goin’ nowhere but you can pretend.” “Mr. McKInney,” Lily said cautiously. “How come you’ve never talked to us before? We must have gone by your place hundreds of times.” “Well, Lily. There’s a right time for everything. When I seen you this morning, all upset, I knew it was time to speak up.” “I’m glad you did,” Lily said. The old man smiled. “You feelin’ better?” “Yep. I am.” Logan was at the wheel of the old car, steering, pushing buttons and flipping switches. McKinney gave out a belly laugh. “We’d better get going,” Lily said. “Come on, Logan. Let’s go down to the river for a while.” She turned. Hesitating for just a moment, she gave McKinney a big hug. His eyes warmed as he embraced her. He hadn’t felt the touch of anyone in years. It soothed his sad heart. Lily and Logan headed out of the yard. “See you later Mr. Mckinney.” McKinney waved from his chair. His hair blew gently in the morning breeze. A small, warm tear ran down his cheek, just a reminder that he was indeed alive. He thought that this would be a good day to shave and get himself cleaned up. He took a sip of tea and put his feet up. The river looked beautiful this morning. Continue Reading Next Chapter	__label__1	0.822196
How to start writing urban fantasy Urban fantasy is a type of speculative fiction set in “real worlds” with fantasy elements. You might prefer storyline and characters that flirt with the paranormal. Perhaps you're more interested in Science Fiction or magic realism. Whichever genre you prefer, urban fantasy writers have it covered. If you'd like to try your hand and at writing in this genre, simply follow these step by step instructions to get started with your first urban fantasy novel or short story. 1. Location Choose a location that you relate to and know really well. Write down aspects of the setting that stand out in your mind. Bullet points are fine. Remember that this is fantasy, your location can be anywhere in the known or unknown universe that you want. 2. Time Choose a time zone that suits your story. You might like to delve into history and visit the past, stick with the present or jet off into the future? 3. Characters Choose your characters and start writing up some descriptions. Note that you don’t have to limit yourself to the human race, but do get to know them as well as you can 4. Outlining Start writing your outline. What is going to happen? Who is involved? Why? What is the general end-point? 5. Research Highlight areas in your outline that you will need to research. This might include historical or futuristic technical info, or a good working knowledge of other worlds and other beings. Read widely and be open to new ideas and twists that may present themselves to you 6. Notetaking Make detailed notes. Know everything you can but remember that it doesn’t all go in the story. Most of it will be background info for you to draw on as you progress. 7. Organisation Be organised with your note taking as you may be able to use your research for side projects like articles and short stories. There are plenty of computer-based record management programs or apps you can try. Use whichever works best for you. I use MS Onenote and Excel, plus indexed folders and exercise books 8. Revisit your outline Go back to your outline and update it with the new ideas, plot points and twists that will have come to you as you research. 9. First draft Start writing your first draft. Just get the story in your head out of your head and don’t worry too much about the finer details. That’s what the second, third, fourth (etc) drafts are for. 10. First edit Once your first draft is done, print it if you can, or read through on your screen and make notes or highlight any bits that don’t make sense. Go ahead and fix any typos that you notice but don’t stress too much about these as you’ll be going through it all with a fine tooth comb later (probably several times). 11. Second draft After your first edit you may notice a need to rearrange scenes, paragraphs or chapters. Make sure your characters and settings are consistent throughout (a red headed banshee at the start should still be red headed at the end unless hair colour changes are part of the story). Add scenes or descriptions you think are missing from the story or cut anything that is repetitive or superfluous 12. Second edit. Third draft and so on Repeat points 10 and 11 as many times as you think necessary until you come to the point that the story has reached its conclusion, and you’re happy with it. 13. Celebrate You've put in some hard work to get to point 13. Take time to celebrate your achievement. Once you've reached point 13. it's time to look for a publisher, but that in itself is a whole separate journey. #speculativefiction #urbanfantasybooks #urbanfantasy #paranormal #scienceficiton #magicrealise #genre #fantasy #fantasyfiction #urbanfantasywriters #urbanfantasyseries #howtowrite	__label__1	0.942936
Madness is a condition of the mind which eliminates all rational thought leaving an individual with no proper conception of what is happening around him/her. Madness typically occurs in the minds of individuals that have experienced an event or series of events that their mind simply cannot cope with and, thus, to avoid their harsh reality, they fall into a state of madness. In William Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet, there is much debate around the protagonist, Hamlet, and whether or not his madness in the play was real or feigned. It was a disastrous time in the prince, Hamlet’s life as his father had just assed away, his uncle then took the kingship and wed Hamlet’s mother, then the ghost of his deceased father appeared to him with instructions for revenge and, finally, the love of his life was no longer permitted to see the prince by order of the lady’s father. This would seem to many to be reason enough for an individual to lose touch with reality and fall into madness, but this was not the case with the brilliant strong-minded Hamlet. Though the prince displayed numerous signs of madness during the play, Hamlet never lost touch with reality as he continued acting rational both in his thoughts as well as while speaking with ertain individuals. If Hamlet were truthfully insane, he would not have been able to suddenly stop displaying his insanity as he did in the play after his altercation with Laertes in the graveyard. He also had motive for putting on the contrivance as it would disguise his investigation of his father’s strange death and his plans for revenge against his uncle Claudius if he found him to be guilty. After Hamlet witnessed the appearance of his dead father’s ghost and heard what the spirit had to say, Hamlet’s sole mission in life was to uncover the truth behind his Williams 2 ather’s death and avenge it accordingly. By putting on this scheme it would serve him better on his quest as opposed to going about his business in a sane and rational manner. Firstly, it allowed Hamlet to confuse those around him about what the cause of his troubled mind was and, also, about what his true intentions are behind any of his actions. This thought is portrayed through Hamlet deceiving Polonius into believing that his love for Ophelia was the root of his madness. Consequently, Polonius went immediately to the king and queen who remark: “Do you think ‘tis this? It may be; very like” (2. 2. 151-52). After Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost, he obtains a great distrust and distaste for women. His feigned madness permitted Hamlet to express these emotions freely towards Ophelia: “… Get thee to a nunnery, / farewell. Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a / fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters / you make of them… ” (3. . 138-41). It was also important for Hamlet to be so vulgar towards Ophelia because it would not have been possible for him to continue being a caring loving boyfriend while attempting to avenge his father’s death. Lastly, by pretending to be mentally disturbed, it provided Hamlet with an excuse for any sinful deeds he would commit on his pursuit of revenge. Hamlet exemplifies this conception as he seeks for Laertes forgiveness for murdering his father Polonius: “If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away, / And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, / Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. Who does it then? His madness… ” (5. 2. 230-33). Hamlet’s pursuit of the truth and revenge was much better accompanied by madness rather than sanity which gave Hamlet a clear motive to fabricate insanity in the play. In the midst of Hamlet’s supposed madness, the prince continues to speak rationally with certain individuals as well as maintain sensible and logical thoughts. This idea is depicted through his conversations with his good friend Horatio who is assisting Hamlet in his search for the truth behind Old Hamlet’s death. For example, before the performance of the play Hamlet explains to Horatio, “There is a play tonight before the Williams 3 king: / One scene of it comes near the circumstance / Which I have told thee of my father’s death. / I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot, / Even with the very comment of hy soul / Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt / Do not itself unkennel in one speech, / It is a damned ghost that we have seen” (3. 2. 75-82). Hamlet has devised a plan to determine his uncle’s guilt and is outlining it to Horatio and asking for some assistance with complete sanity. Hamlet’s thought process remains sane and logical through the entire play as he examines his life in his soliloquies. In these soliloquies Hamlet ponders the question of suicide and what the ramifications of it are: To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die-to sleep, No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to: ‘tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream-ay, there’s the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come. (3. 1. 56-66) In other soliloquies Hamlet explores the faults of passion and how emotions can be faked as well as his own character flaws such as his inability to take action. A third portrayal of he prince’s sanity occurs during Hamlet’s conversation with his mother after the spirit of Old Hamlet came but revealed itself only to Hamlet. Hamlet talks to his mother in a clear, truthful and rational manner and even offers to Gertrude: “… It is not madness / That I have utter’d. Bring me to the test, / And I the matter will re-word, which madness / would gambol from… ” (3:4:143-46). In conclusion, if Hamlet was an individual Williams 4 consumed by madness, he would have entertained only irrational thoughts and would not have had the power to choose certain individuals to speak rationally with. The final argument proving Hamlet’s sanity during the course of the play is that after Hamlet’s altercation with Laertes at Ophelia’s funeral, Hamlet suddenly ceases to put on this antic disposition. During Hamlet’s feigned madness, whenever he was speaking to someone that was not aware of his plan he would ridicule them but in the form of ambiguous metaphors and irony to imitate madness. After the conflict with Laertes, however, Hamlet no longer continued this masking of his insults. For example, while speaking to Osric, one of the king’s courtiers, Hamlet remarks: “Thy state is the more racious, for ’tis a vice to / know him. He hath much land and fertile. Let a / beast be lord of beasts and his crib shall stand at the / king’s mess. Tis a chuff, but, as I say, spacious in the / possession of dirt” (5:2:85-89). Hamlet makes no attempt here to disguise the fact that he believes that Osric is a member of the court only because he possesses a great deal of fertile land. Immediately prior to Hamlet and Laertes engaging in their duel Hamlet, whilst speaking in a sane coherent fashion, requests: “Give me your pardon, sir. I have done you wrong; / But pardon’t as you are a gentleman” (5:2:222-23). If Hamlet were truly mad he would not recognize the wrongs he committed against others and possess feelings of anguish over them. Further proof that Hamlet is no longer acting mad is that in the final moments of his life he performs very noble acts that were executed out of the goodness of his heart. One of these acts consisted of drinking the remainder of the poison left in the glass that Claudius and Gertrude had already drank from, to prevent Horatio sipping from this glass and dying as well. Madness is a mental illness that does not come and go as it pleases and, therefore, Hamlet could not have been truly mad as he imply interrupted his antic disposition once again acting completely sane. Hamlet was a great individual, who when confronted with a number of tragedies in his life, as well as with the proposition that his uncle killed his father, he did not lose Williams 5 control of his conscious mind, but instead, knew exactly how to resolve his pending maladies. There is no question that his apparent madness was his own concoction devised to aid in his efforts in revealing the truth behind his father’s death and seeking out to revenge it. His motives for doing so were to keep his investigation hidden for as long as ossible, to drive away all other aspects of his life that might interfere with his task and to absolve himself of all guilt he may acquire while on his quest. There is proof in his actions that his madness was feigned as he continued thinking rationally and speaking logically to characters like Horatio and Gertrude. A madman’s thought are not composed of logical rationale and he does not speak sanely to some, while at the same time, insanely to others. Hamlet then suddenly drops his antic disposition right after his dispute with Laertes in the raveyard as he began speaking and acting completely normal at all times which was illustrated while he mocked the courtier, Osric. The absence of hamlet’s madness was exemplified further as he confessed feelings of remorse towards Laertes for killing Polonius and Hamlet also performs extremely noble acts as his life was waning. True madness is an illness that inhibits the mind of an individual and assumes total control of thought and action within that person. It is not a condition that flourishes only when called upon or that can be completely disregarded if the host wishes to ignore it. Cite This Work To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below: Reference Copied to Clipboard. Reference Copied to Clipboard. Reference Copied to Clipboard. Reference Copied to Clipboard.	__label__1	0.62012
Facebook messenger norge, Markens grøde hamsun. Julekonsert 2018 kurt nilsen Date: Jul 2018 Postet av on grøde, hamsun, markens markens grøde hamsun sections entitled. It follows the story of a man who settles and lives in rural Norway. A theme that Hamsun aften retoured tae is that the o perpetual daunnerer a stravaigin orra-bodie (aften the narrator) that shaws up an warks himsel intae the life o smaw, landart communities. 2010: Continuum International Publishing Group. They allowed Brede to make it seem like he was selling Breidablik out of his own will to avoid unnecessary embarrassment. He supportit Germany in baith the Wurld Wars. One day, people came out to mark the route for a telegraph line that was to run near Isaks farm. In 2009, a Norwegian biographer stated, "We cant help loving him, though we have hated him all these years. Hamsuns political beliefs and ideologies gardermoen telefon were often expressed in his books, especially Growth of the Soil. Thrie year efter, he mairriet on Marie Andersen (that also screived sum warks o musardrie an bairns' buiks an she wad be his companion until he dee'd. When one of the telegraph engineers stopped at Isaks house, a job was offered to Eleseus to work under his care in the village. 13 Major Works edit Hamsun first received wide acclaim with his 1890 novel Hunger ( Sult ). It is based on the novel Dreamers ( Sværmere, also published in English as Mothwise ). Cinematization of literary works edit Hamsun's works have been the basis of 25 films and television mini-series adaptations, starting in 1916. S novel of the same name. Hamsuns prose often contains rapturous depictions of the natural world. She had gone dale kjøleservice to Bergen, norwegian new realism, in Passing. The Danish film of the same name. No doubt, irony, axel had no faith in her returning and as he predicted. When World War II began, a book many take as evidence of his functioning mental capabilities. Who also directed the Danish, while in his eichties, en Kærligheds Historie 1898. Markens grøde hamsun Do various needlework, wi intimate reflections on the Norse shawlands an coastline. My head is spinning, the only one that matters, knut Hamsu"1. With his writing providing some additional incom" markens Meanwhile, today riches and honours have been lavished. Write, and do other things, under Høststjærnen Unner the Hairst Star Den sidste Glæde The Hinmaist Blytheness an ithirs forbye. Hamsuns prose aften contains wul descreivins o the naitural wurld. His parents frequently sent him money which he would spend frivolously thus angering them. I 1920 Konerne ved Vandposten II The Wummin at the Pum Vol. I am walking on air, inger once again gave birth to a daughter named Rebecca. Legg igjen en kommentar Vennligst oppgi ditt fulle navn Vennligst skriv inn spørsmålet ditt	__label__1	0.982626
[ahy-dee-uh-liz-uhm] In Western civilization, Idealism is the philosophy which maintains that the ultimate nature of reality is ideal, or based upon ideas, values, essences: The so-called external, or real world is inseparable from consciousness, perception, mind, intellect and reason--in the sense of rigorous science. It is also the tendency in Western thought to represent things in an ideal form, or as they ought to be rather than as they really are, in the realms of ethics, morality, aesthetics, and value. The philosophical schools of Western Idealism, and the history of Western philosophers, are different from those of the ancient and archaic East, which are for the most part steeped in religious and mystical creeds, devoid of any purely rational and scientific elements--in the classical Greek sense of Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid. Today it is difficult to draw an exact philosophical distinction between East and West because of the global influence of European and American scientific and technological education. In some doctrines of idealistic thought the ideal relates to direct and immediate knowledge of subjective mental ideas, or images. In the strife of the schools, sometimes idealism is opposed to realism in which the real is said to have absolute existence prior to and independent of our knowledge. Epistemological idealists (such as Kant) might insist that the only things which can be directly known for certain are ideas. In our day the anti-idealistic criticism of idealism is for the most part the result of 20th century prejudices against metaphysics, often combined with a speciously elaborated distinction between ontology and epistemology. Some forms of idealism, like that of Descartes, are often contrasted with materialism. Some idealists, like Spinoza, are monists as opposed to dualist, again like Descartes, or pluralist ontologies. History of Western Philosophy Idealism is a philosophical movement in Western thought, and names a number of philosophical positions with sometimes quite different tendencies and implications in politics and ethics, for instance; although in general, at least in popular culture, philosophical idealism is associated with Plato and the school of platonism. Idealism and Ancient Philosophy In his chief work Truth, Antiphon wrote: "Time is a thought or a measure, not a substance". This presents time as an ideational, internal, mental operation, rather than a real, external object. Plato is called an idealist because of his theory of Forms or doctrine of Ideas, which are "ideal" in the dictionary sense. Some interpreters hold that Plato does not describe the Forms as being in any mind, instead he describes them as having their own independent existence,--for which the textual evidence is adduced from various translations of the dialogues. Indeed, some anti-idealist commentators say that in the dialogues Socrates often denies the reality of the material world. However, it is clear that the Platonic Socrates merely denies the ideal reality of the non-ideal realm, namely the world of appearances, which he sometimes compares to shadows. An exact interpretation of the dialogues, which are notoriously misrepresented, involves knowledge of linguistics, hermeneutics, philology, semantics, and the philosophy of language, as well as good grounding in classical studies. Athenian Greek philosophical terms, like most English abstract nouns, have more than one meaning. It seems clear that Plato is not, at any rate, a subjective idealist, like Berkeley. Plato's Allegory of the Cave is sometimes interpreted by anti-platonists as drawing attention to the modern European philosophical problem of knowing external objects--the question that is often attributed to Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and other modernist philosophers. According to certain materialistic interpretations of Plato, which construe matter as an entirely external reality, the Forms that the Cave-dwellers are ignorant of are not external to them in the way that so-called material objects are for modern thinkers. Again, some anti-idealistic readers hold that for Plato the Forms are true realities, but they are not outside of us in a spatial sense like material objects, which some natural scientists call physical bodies. For these interpreters, one might say, the issue that Plato's allegory addresses is the problem of how one can know what is truly real and good--a theme which apparently is opposed to the so-called modern question of our knowledge of the external world. However, speaking in the realm of pure abstract theory, even if Plato doesn't share the specific concerns of modern philosophy, and of George Berkeley, in particular, Plato could still be a non-subjective idealist. Plato could believe that matter has no so-called independent existence, that ultimate reality (distinct from mere appearance) is known only in the world of ideas--should we care to speculate in purely hypothetical terms. Bernard Williams and Myles Burnyeat have surmised that Greek philosophers never conceived of so-called idealism as an option, because they lacked Descartes's conception of an independently existing mind. Perhaps Williams and Burnyeat did not consider the apparent possibility that Plato could have held an idealism like Kant's, which appears to argue from the nature of knowledge to the nature of the objects of knowledge; or he might have subscribed to a form of Absolute Idealism, like that of G.W.F. Hegel which, say commentators, denies that matter is ultimately real--without perhaps (in either case) reducing so-called material objects to ideas in a mind or minds. Moreover, we conjecture, Plato's theory of the separation of soul and body could be seen as an earlier, primitive form of Cartesian dualism. The German neo-kantian scholar, Paul Natorp, argued in his Plato's Theory of Ideas. An Introduction to Idealism (first published in 1903) that Plato was a non-subjective, "transcendental" idealist, somewhat like Kant. Natorp's thesis has received some support from commentators and neo-kantian scholars. Schopenhauer wrote of this Neoplatonist philosopher: "With Plotinus there even appears, probably for the first time in Western philosophy, idealism that had long been current in the East even at that time, for it taught (Enneads, iii, lib. vii, c.10) that the soul has made the world by stepping from eternity into time, with the explanation: 'For there is for this universe no other place than the soul or mind' (neque est alter hujus universi locus quam anima), indeed the ideality of time is expressed in the words: 'We should not accept time outside the soul or mind' (oportet autem nequaquam extra animam tempus accipere)." (Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume I, "Fragments for the History of Philosophy," § 7) Similarly, professor Ludwig Noiré wrote: "For the first time in Western philosophy we find idealism proper in Plotinus (Enneads, iii, 7, 10), where he says, "The only space or place of the world is the soul," and "Time must not be assumed to exist outside the soul. It is worth noting, however, that like Plato but unlike Schopenhauer and other modern philosophers, Plotinus does not worry about whether or how we can get beyond our ideas in order to know external objects. Descartes and Modern Philosophy Writing about Descartes, Schopenhauer claimed, "... he was the first to bring to our consciousness the problem whereon all philosophy has since mainly turned, namely that of the ideal and the real. This is the question concerning what in our knowledge is objective and what subjective, and hence what eventually is to be ascribed by us to things different from us and what is to be attributed to ourselves." (Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, "Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real") According to Descartes, we really know only what is in our own consciousnesses. We are immediately and directly aware of only our own states of mind. The whole external world is merely an idea or picture in our minds. Therefore, it is possible to doubt the reality of the external world as consisting of real objects. “I think, therefore I am” is the only assertion that can’t be doubted. This is because self-consciousness and thinking are the only things that are unconditionally experienced for certain as being real. In this way, Descartes posed the issue of epistemological idealism, which is awareness of the difference between the world as an ideational mental picture and the world as a system of external objects. Malebranche, a student of the Cartesian School of Rationalism, disagreed that if the only things that we know for certain are the ideas within our mind, then the existence of the external world would be dubious and known only indirectly. He declared instead that the real external world is actually God. All activity only appears to occur in the external world. In actuality, it is the activity of God. For Malebranche, we directly know internally the ideas in our mind. Externally, we directly know God's operations. This kind of idealism led to the pantheism of Spinoza. Leibniz expressed a form of Idealism known as Panpsychism in his theory of monads, as exposited in his Monadologie. He held Monads are the true atoms of the universe, and are also entities having perception. The monads are "substantial forms of being" They are indecomposable, individual, subject to their own laws, un-interacting, and each reflecting the entire universe. Monads are centers of force; substance is force, while space, matter, and motion are phenomenal. For Leibniz, there is an exact pre-established harmony or parallel between the world in the minds of the alert monads and the external world of objects. God, who is the central monad, established this harmony and the resulting world is an idea of the monads’ perception. In this way, the external world is ideal in that it is a spiritual phenomenon whose motion is the result of a dynamic force. Space and time are ideal or phenomenal and their form and existence is dependent on the simple and immaterial monads. Leibniz's cosmology, with its central monad, embraced a traditional Christian Theism and was more of a Personalism than the naturalistic Pantheism of Spinoza. George Berkeley Bishop Berkeley, in seeking to find out what we could know with certainty, decided that our knowledge must be based on our perceptions. This led him to conclude that there was indeed no "real" knowable object behind one's perception, that what was "real" was the perception itself. This is characterised by Berkeley's slogan: "Esse est aut percipi aut percipere" or "To be is to be perceived or to perceive", meaning that something only exists, in the particular way that it is seen to exist, when it is being perceived (seen, felt, etc.) by an observing subject. This subjective idealism or dogmatic idealism led to his placing the full weight of justification on our perceptions. This left Berkeley with the problem of explaining how it is that each of us apparently has much the same sort of perceptions of an object. He solved this problem by having God intercede, as the immediate cause of all of our perceptions. Schopenhauer wrote: "Berkeley was, therefore, the first to treat the subjective starting-point really seriously and to demonstrate irrefutably its absolute necessity. He is the father of idealism...." (Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, "Fragments for the History of Philosophy," § 12) Schopenhauer could have said, instead, that Berkeley was the "father" of the modern variety of idealism that is motivated, primarily, by epistemological considerations--as distinct from the more purely metaphysical idealism of (for example) Plotinus or Hegel. Bishop Berkeley therefore is considered the first modern philosopher known as an idealist. His immaterialism held that objects exist by the good quality of our perception of them. In other words, they are ideas residing in our awareness - as well as in the consciousness of the Divine Being. Arthur Collier Arthur Collier published the same assertions that were made by Berkeley. However, there seemed to have been no influence between the two contemporary writers. Collier claimed that the represented image of an external object is the only knowable reality. Matter, as a cause of the representative image, is unthinkable and therefore nothing to us. An external world, as absolute matter, unrelated to an observer, does not exist for human perceivers. As an appearance in a mind, the universe cannot exist as it appears if there is no perceiving mind. Collier was influenced by John Norris's (1701) An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World. The idealist statements by Collier were generally dismissed by readers who were not able to reflect on the distinction between a mental idea or image and the object that it represents. Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant held that the mind shapes the world as we perceive it to take the form of space-and-time. It is said that Kant focused on the idea drawn from British empiricism (and its philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) that all we can know is the mental impressions, or phenomena, that an outside world, which may or may not exist independently, creates in our minds; our minds can never perceive that outside world directly. Kant made the distinction between things as they appear to an observer and things in themselves, "... that is, things considered without regard to whether and how they may be given to us ... . Kant's postscript to this added that the mind is not a blank slate, tabula rasa, (contra John Locke), but rather comes equipped with categories for organising our sense impressions. Perhaps this Kantian sort of idealism opens up a world of abstractions (i.e., the universal categories minds use to understand phenomena) to be explored by reason, but perhaps, in sharp contrast to Plato's, confirms uncertainties about a (un)knowable world outside our own minds. We cannot approach the noumenon, the "Thing in Itself" (Ding an Sich) outside our own mental world. (Kant's idealism is called transcendental idealism.) Apparently Kant distinguished his transcendental or critical idealism from previous varieties: Johann Fichte denied Kant's noumenon, and held that consciousness constitutes its own foundation, that the mental life of the Ego, of pure selfhood, relies upon nothing wholly external to itself, and that the hypothesis of an outer world of any kind is the same thing as admitting a Kantian realm. We may say that Fichte was the first German philosopher to make an attempt at a presuppositionless theory of knowledge, wherein nothing outside of thought is assumed to exist apart from the primordial analysis of the Ego. So that his philosophy could be solely grounded in itself, he assumed nothing without his Fichtean deductions from first principles, and elaborated what he called a Wissenschaftslehre. (Apparently Fichte's theory is very similar to Giovanni Gentile's Actual Idealism, except that Gentile's theory appears to go even further by denying any grounds, derived from pure thought, for the Ego or personality.) Hegel, another German philosopher whose dialectical system has been called idealistic. Apparently, in his Science of Logic (1812-1814) Hegel argued that finite qualities are not fully "real," because they depend on other finite qualities to determine them. Qualitative infinity, on the other hand, would be more self-determining, and hence would have a better claim to be called fully real. Similarly, finite natural things are less "real"--because they're less self-determining--than spiritual things like morally responsible people, ethical communities, and God. So any doctrine, such as materialism, that asserts that finite qualities or merely natural objects are fully real, is mistaken. Hegel called his philosophy absolute idealism, in contrast to the "subjective idealism" of Berkeley and the "transcendental idealism" of Kant and Fichte, philosophies which were not based (like Hegel's idealism) on a critique of the finite, and a dialectical philosophy of history. Some commentators have maintained that Hegel's dialectical system most closely resembles that of Plato and Plotinus, however, there is an exact historical difference between ancient and modern thought, at least in the history of philosophy. One might say that none of these three thinkers associate their idealism with the so-called epistemological thesis that what we know are ideas in our minds. It is perhaps a noteworthy fact that some commentators of Hegel, even those who admire his philosophy, fail to distinguish hegelian idealism from either the philosophy of Berkeley or Kant. Hegel certainly intends to preserve what he takes to be true of German idealism, in particular Kant's insistence that ethical reason can and does go beyond finite inclinations. However, some commentators hold that Hegel does not endorse Kant's conception of the thing-in-itself, or the type of epistemological perplexities that led Kant to that view. Still less does Hegel endorse Berkeley's doctrine that to be is to perceive or to be perceived--in the purely Berkeleyian sense. The guiding ideal behind Hegel's absolute idealism is the scientific thought, which he shares with Plato and other great idealist thinkers, that the exercise of reason and intellect enables the philosopher to know ultimate historical reality, which in the hegelian system is the phenomenological constitution of self-determination,--the dialectical development of self-awareness and personality in the realm of History. By giving this Ideal a central role in his philosophy, Hegel made a lasting contribution to that part of the Western mindset, beginning in earnest with Plato and his presocratic predecessors, which makes Idealism the basis of civilization and progress in the world. In the first volume of his Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer wrote his "Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real". He defined the ideal as being mental pictures that constitute subjective knowledge. The ideal, for him, is what can be attributed to our own minds. The images in our head are what comprise the ideal. Schopenhauer emphasized that we are restricted to our own consciousness. The world that appears is only a representation or mental picture of objects. We directly and immediately know only representations. All objects that are external to the mind are known indirectly through the mediation of our mind. Schopenhauer's history is an account of the concept of the "ideal" in its meaning as "ideas in a subject's mind." In this sense, "ideal" means "ideational" or "existing in the mind as an image." He does not refer to the other meaning of "ideal" as being qualities of the highest perfection and excellence. In his On the Freedom of the Will, Schopenhauer noted the ambiguity of the word "idealism" by calling it a "term with multiple meanings." It is evident that Schopenhauer's "idealism" is based primarily on considerations having to do with the relation between our ideas and external reality, rather than being based (like Plato's, Plotinus's, or Hegel's "idealism") on considerations having to do with the nature of reality as such. British idealism British idealism enjoyed ascendancy in English-speaking philosophy in the later part of the 19th century. F. H. Bradley of Merton College, Oxford, saw reality as a monistic whole, which is apprehended through "feeling", a state in which there is no distinction between the perception and the thing perceived. Like Berkeley, Bradley thought that nothing can be known to exist unless it is known by a mind. Bradley was the apparent target of G. E. Moore's radical rejection of idealism. Moore claimed that Bradley did not understand the statement that something is real. We know for certain, through common sense and prephilosophical beliefs, that some things are real, whether they are objects of thought or not, according to Moore. In this way, he disagreed with Bradley's assertion that we cannot think of anything that really exists unless we have a thought of it in our mind. J. M. E. McTaggart of Cambridge University, argued that minds alone exist, and that they only relate to each other through love. Space, time and material objects are for McTaggart unreal. He argued, for instance, in The Unreality of Time that it was not possible to produce a coherent account of a sequence of events in time, and that therefore time is an illusion. His book The Nature of Experience (1927) contained his arguments that space, time, and matter cannot possibly be real. In his Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge, 1901, p. 196, he declared that metaphysics are not relevant to social and political action. McTaggart "... thought that Hegel was wrong in supposing that metaphysics could show that the state is more than a means to the good of the individuals who compose it. For McTaggart, "...philosophy can give us very little, if any guidance in action... . Why should a Hegelian citizen be surprised that his belief as to the organic nature of the Absolute does not help him in deciding how to vote? Would a Hegelian engineer be reasonable in expecting that his belief that all matter is spirit should help him in planning a bridge? American philosopher Josiah Royce described himself as an objective idealist. Karl Pearson In The Grammar of Science, Preface to the 2nd Edition, 1900, Karl Pearson wrote, "There are many signs that a sound idealism is surely replacing, as a basis for natural philosophy, the crude materialism of the older physicists." This book influenced Einstein's regard for the importance of the observer in scientific measurements. In § 5 of that book, Pearson asserted that "...science is in reality a classification and analysis of the contents of the mind...." Also, "...the field of science is much more consciousness than an external world." Criticism of Idealism Immanuel Kant In the 1st edition (1781) of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant described Idealism as such. In the 2nd edition (1787) of his Critique of Pure Reason, he wrote a section called Refutation of Idealism to distinguish his transcendental idealism from Descartes's Sceptical Idealism and Berkeley's Dogmatic Idealism. In addition to this refutation in both the 1781 & 1787 editions the section "Paralogisms of Pure Reason" is an implicit critique of Descartes' Problematic Idealism, namely the Cogito. He says that just from "the spontaneity of thought" (cf. Descartes' Cogito) it is not possible to infer the 'I' as an object. In his Notes and Fragments (6315,1790-91; 18:618) Kant defines idealism in the following manner: " The assertion that we can never be certain whether all of our putative outer experience is not mere imagining is idealism " Søren Kierkegaard Kierkegaard's primary criticism against Hegel is based around Hegel's claim to have developed a fully comprehensive system that could explain the whole of reality. The quote commonly used to express this idea, whether fair to Hegel or not, is, "What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational," in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821). Kierkegaard asserts that reality can be a system for God, but it cannot be so for any human individual, because both reality and humans are incomplete, and all philosophical systems imply completeness. Kierkegaard attacked Hegel's idealist philosophy in several of his works, but most succinctly in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). In the Postscript, Kierkegaard, as the pseudonymous philosopher Johannes Climacus, argues that a logical system is possible but an existential system is impossible. Hegel argues that once one has reached an ultimate understanding of the logical structure of the world, one has also reached an understanding of the logical structure of God's mind. Climacus claims Hegel's absolute idealism mistakenly blurs the distinction between existence and thought. Climacus also argues that our mortal nature places limits on our understanding of reality. As Climacus argu major concern of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and of the philosophy of Spirit that he lays out in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817-1830) is the interrelation between individual humans, which he conceives in terms of "mutual recognition." However, what Climacus means by the aforementioned statement, is that Hegel, in the Philosophy of Right, believed the best solution was to surrender one's individuality to the customs of the State, identifying right and wrong in view of the prevailing bourgeois morality. Individual human will ought, at the State's highest level of development, to properly coincide with the will of the State. Climacus rejects Hegel's suppression of individuality by pointing out it is impossible to create a valid set of rules or system in any society which can adequately describe existence for any one individual. Submitting one's will to the State denies personal freedom, choice, and responsibility. In addition, Hegel does believe we can know the structure of God's mind, or ultimate reality. Hegel agrees with Kierkegaard that both reality and humans are incomplete, inasmuch as we are in time, and reality develops through time. But the relation between time and eternity is outside time and this is the "logical structure" that Hegel thinks we can know. Kierkegaard disputes this assertion, because it eliminates the clear distinction between ontology and epistemology. Existence and thought are not identical and one cannot possibly think existence. Thought is always a form of abstraction, and thus not only is pure existence impossible to think, but all forms in existence are unthinkable; thought depends on language, which merely abstracts from experience, thus separating us from lived experience and the living essence of all beings. In addition, because we are finite beings, we cannot possibly know or understand anything that is universal or infinite such as God, so we cannot know God exists, since that which transcends time simultaneously transcends human understanding. Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to mount a logically serious criticism of Idealism that has been popularised by David Stove (see below). He pre-empts Stove's GEM by arguing that Kant's argument for his transcendental idealism rests on a confusion between a tautology and begging the question, and therefore is an invalid, improper argument. In his book Beyond Good and Evil, Part 1 On the Prejudice of Philosophers Section 11, he ridicules Kant for admiring himself because he had undertaken and (thought he) succeeded in tackling "the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics." Quoting Nietzsche's prose: "But let us reflect; it is high time to do so. 'How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?' Kant asked himself-and what really is his answer? 'By virtue of a faculty' - but unfortunately not in five words,...The honeymoon of German philosophy arrived. All the young theologians of the Tübingen seminary went into the bushes all looking for 'faculties.'...'By virtue of a faculty' - he had said, or at least meant. But is that an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? 'By virtue of a faculty,' namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliére." In addition to the Idealism of Kant, Nietzsche in the same book attacks the idealism of Schopenhauer and Descartes via a similar argument to Kant's original critique of Descartes. Quoting Nietzsche: There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are "immediate certainties"; for example, "I think," or as the superstition of Schopenhauer put it, "I will"; as though knowledge here got hold of its objects purely and nakedly as "the thing in itself," without any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object. But that "immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself," involved a contradictio in adjecto, (contradiction between the noun and the adjective) I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words! G. E. Moore The first criticism of Idealism that falls within the analytic philosophical framework is by one of its co-founders Moore. This 1903 seminal article, The Refutation of Idealism. This one of the first demonstrations of Moore's commitment to analysis as the proper philosophical method. Moore proceeds by examining the Berkeleian aphorism esse est percipi: "to be is to be perceived". He examines in detail each of the three terms in the aphorism, finding that it must mean that the object and the subject are necessarily connected. So, he argues, for the idealist, "yellow" and "the sensation of yellow" are necessarily identical - to be yellow is necessarily to be experienced as yellow. But, in a move similar to the open question argument, it also seems clear that there is a difference between "yellow" and "the sensation of yellow". For Moore, the idealist is in error because "that esse is held to be percipi, solely because what is experienced is held to be identical with the experience of it". Though far from a complete refutation. This was the first strong statement by analytic philosophy against its idealist predecessors--or at any rate against the type of idealism represented by Berkeley--this argument did not show that the GEM (in post Stove vernacular, see below) is logically invalid. Arguments advanced by Nietzsche (prior to Moore), Russell (just after Moore) & 80 years later Stove put a nail in the coffin for the "master" argument supporting (Berkeleyan) idealism. Bertrand Russell Despite Bertrand Russell's hugely popular book The Problems of Philosophy (this book was in its 17th printing by 1943) which was written for a general audience rather than academia, few ever mention his critique even though he completely anticipates David Stove's GEM both in form and content (see below for David Stove's GEM). In chapter 4 (Idealism) he highlights Berkeley's tautological premise for advancing idealism. Quoting Russell's prose (1912:42-43): "If we say that the things known must be in the mind, we are either un-duly limiting the mind's power of knowing, or we are uttering a mere tautology. We are uttering a mere tautology if we mean by 'in the mind' the same as by 'before the mind', i.e. if we mean merely being apprehended by the mind. But if we mean this, we shall have to admit that what, in this sense, is in the mind, may nevertheless be not mental. Thus when we realize the nature of knowledge, Berkeley's argument is seen to be wrong in substance as well as in form, and his grounds for supposing that 'idea'-i.e. the objects apprehended-must be mental, are found to have no validity whatever. Hence his grounds in favour of the idealism may be dismissed." A.C. Ewing Published in 1933, A. C. Ewing, according to David Stove, mounted the first full length book critique of Idealism, entitled Idealism; a critical survey. Stove does not mention that Ewing anticipated his GEM. David Stove The Australian philosopher David Stove argued in typical acerbic style that idealism rested on what he called "the worst argument in the world". From a logical point of view his critique is no different from Russell or Nietzsche's -- but Stove has been more widely cited and most clearly highlighted the mistake of proponents (like Berkeley) of subjective idealism. He named the form of this argument - invented by Berkeley -- "the GEM". Berkeley claimed that "[the mind] is deluded to think it can and does conceive of bodies existing unthought of, or without the mind, though at the same time they are apprehended by, or exist in, itself". Stove argued that this claim proceeds from the tautology that nothing can be thought of without its being thought of, to the conclusion that nothing can exist without its being thought of. John Searle In The Construction of Social Reality John Searle offers an attack on some versions of idealism. Searle conveniently summarises two important arguments for (subjective) idealism. The first is based on our perception of reality: 1. All we have access to in perception are the contents of our own experiences 2. The only epistemic basis we can have for claims about the external world are our perceptual experiences 3. the only reality we can meaningfully speak of is the reality of perceptual experiences (The Construction of Social Reality p. 172) Whilst agreeing with (2), Searle argues that (1) is false, and points out that (3) does not follow from (1) and (2). The second argument for (subjective) idealism runs as follows: Premise: Any cognitive state occurs as part of a set of cognitive states and within a cognitive system Conclusion 1: It is impossible to get outside of all cognitive states and systems to survey the relationships between them and the reality they are used to cognize Conclusion 2: No cognition is ever of a reality that exists independently of cognition (The Construction of Social Reality p. 174) Searle goes on to point out that conclusion 2 simply does not follow from its precedents. Alan Musgrave Alan Musgrave in an article titled Realism and Antirealism in R. Klee (ed), Scientific Inquiry: Readings in the Philosophy of Science, Oxford, 1998, 344-352 - later re-titled to Conceptual Idealism and Stove's GEM in A. Musgrave, Essays on Realism and Rationalism, Rodopi, 1999 also in M.L. Dalla Chiara et al. (eds), Language, Quantum, Music, Kluwer, 1999, 25-35 - Alan Musgrave argues in addition to Stove's GEM, Conceptual Idealists compound their mistakes with use/mention confusions and proliferation of unnecessary hyphenated entities. stock examples of use/mention confusions: Santa Claus (the person) does not exist. 'Santa Claus' (the name/concept/fairy tale) does exist; because adults tell children this every Christmas season. The distinction in philosophical circles is highlighted by putting quotations around the word when we want to refer only to the name and not the object. stock examples of hyphenated entities: things-in-itself (Immanuel Kant) things-as-interacted-by-us (Arthur Fine) Table-of-commonsense (Sir Arthur Eddington) Table-of-physics (Sir Arthur Eddington) Moon-in-itself Moon-as-howled-by-wolves Moon-as-conceived-by-Aristotelians Moon-as-conceived-by-Galileans Hyphenated entities are "warning signs" for conceptual idealism according to Musgrave because they over emphasise the epistemic (ways in which people come to learn about the world) activities and will more likely commit errors in use/mention. These entities do not exist (strictly speaking and are ersatz entities) but highlight the numerous ways in which people come to know the world. In Sir Arthur Eddington's case use/mention confusions compounded his problem when he thought he was sitting at two different tables in his study (table-of-commonsense and table-of-physics). In fact Eddington was sitting at one table but had two different perspectives or ways of knowing about that one table. Richard Rorty and Postmodernist Philosophy in general have been attacked by Musgrave for committing use/mention confusions. Musgrave argues that these confusions help proliferate GEM's in our thinking and serious thought should avoid GEM's. Philip J. Neujahr "Although it would be hard to legislate about such matters, it would perhaps be well to restrict the idealist label to theories which hold that the world, or its material aspects, are dependent upon the specifically cognitive activities of the mind or Mind in perceiving or thinking about (or 'experiencing') the object of its awareness." (Kant's Idealism, Ch. 1) Idealism in religious thought A broad enough definition of idealism could include most religious viewpoints. The belief that personal beings (e.g., God/s, angels & spirits) preceded the existence of insentient matter seems to suggest that an experiencing subject is a necessary reality. Also, the existence of an omniscient God suggests, regardless of the actual nature of matter, that all of nature is the object of at least one consciousness. Materialism sees no incoherence in a scenario of there being a cosmos where no sentient subject ever develops; a wholly unknown universe where neither any subject, nor any object of a subject's experience ever exists. Historically, Mechanistic Materialism has been the favorite viewpoint of Atheist philosophers. Still, idealistic viewpoints that have not included God, supernatural beings, or a post-mortem existence have sometimes been advanced. While many religious philosophies are indeed specifically idealist, for example, some Hindu denominations view regarding the nature of Brahman, souls, and the world are idealistic, some have favored a form of substance dualism. Early Buddhism was not subjective idealistic. Some have misinterpreted the Yogācāra school of Mahayana Buddhism that developed the consciousness-only approach as a form of metaphysical idealism, but this is incorrect. Yogācāra thinkers did not focus on consciousness to assert it as ultimately real (Yogācāra claims consciousness is only conventionally real since it arises from moment to moment due to fluctuating causes and conditions), but rather because it is the cause of the karmic problem they are seeking to eliminate. Some Christian theologians have held idealist views, substance dualism has been the more common view of Christian authors, especially with the strong influence of the philosophy of Aristotle among the Scholastics. Several modern religious movements, for example the organizations within the New Thought Movement and the Unity Church, may be said to have a particularly idealist orientation. The theology of Christian Science includes a form of subjective idealism: it teaches that all that exists is God and God's ideas; that the world as it appears to the senses is a distortion of the underlying spiritual reality. A Course in Miracles, a spiritual self-study course published in 1976, represents an explicitly idealist, pure nondualistic thought system. In the Course, only God and His Creation, which is Spirit and has nothing to do with the world, are real. The physical universe is an illusion and does not exist. The Course compares the world of perception with a dream. It arises from the projection of the dreamer, i.e. the mind ("projection makes perception," T-21.in.1:5), according to its wishes (perception "is the outward picture of a wish; an image that you wanted to be true," T-24.VII.8:10). The purpose of the perceptual world is to ensure our separate, individual existence apart from God but avoid the responsibility and project the guilt onto others. As we learn to give the world another purpose and recognize our perceptual errors, we also learn to look past them or "forgive," as a way to awaken gradually from the dream and finally remember our true Identity in God. The Course’s nondualistic metaphysics is similar to Advaita Vedanta. However, A Course in Miracles differs in that it adds a "motivation" for the illusory existence of the perceptual world (for a further discussion, see Wapnick, Kenneth: The Message of A Course in Miracles, 1997, ISBN 0-933291-25-6). Other uses In general parlance, "idealism" or "idealist" is also used to describe a person having high ideals, sometimes with the connotation that those ideals are unrealisable or at odds with "practical" life. The word "ideal" is commonly used as an adjective to designate qualities of perfection, desirability, and excellence. This is foreign to the epistemological use of the word "idealism" which pertains to internal mental representations. These internal ideas represent objects that are assumed to exist outside of the mind. See also • Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with an historical introduction by Ludwig Noiré, available at • Neujahr, Philip J., Kant's Idealism, Mercer University Press, 1995 ISBN 0-86554-476-X • Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Princeton, ISBN 978-0-691-02081-5 • Watts, Michael. Kierkegaard, Oneworld, ISBN 978-1-85168-317-8 External links Search another word or see unthoughton Dictionary \| Thesaurus \|Spanish Copyright © 2013 Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved. • Please Login or Sign Up to use the Recent Searches feature	__label__1	0.925591
“Twas the Night Before Christmas” and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Tinfang Warble the-night-before-christmas-illustrated-by-douglas-gorslineFollowing family tradition, the bedtime book I read to my near-four-year-old son on Christmas Eve was “The Night Before Christmas”, aka “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, by Clement Clarke Moore. I used my mum’s old copy of the poem, a picturebook lavishly illustrated by Douglas Gorsline. As I read it aloud, another poem kept coming into mind: J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Over Old Hills and Far Away” (1915). This is one of only two poems about Tolkien’s elusive early character, Tinfang Warble, variously described as a “leprawn” (Tolkien’s idiosyncratic spelling for “leprechaun”), a “fay”, an “elf”, or a “quaint spirit” of mixed origin. Tinfang Warble also appears in The Book of Lost Tales, the earliest draft of what we know today as The Silmarillion. tinfang_warble_by_mirachravaia-d1ypg87 Tinfang Warble, by Mirach Ravaia via DeviantArt In “Over Old Hills and Far Away”, Tinfang Warble is clearly a “fairy” creature, akin to other such (often small or even diminutive) beings in Tolkien’s early poems. Tinfang is described as a white-haired “old elf”, who is, nevertheless, a merry piper, lithe and nimble, running fervently and dancing, and eventually luring the speaker of the poem to follow his piping. “Twas the Night Before Christmas” – probably one of the best-known Christmas poems ever – is, of course, about the nightly visit of St Nicholas to leave presents for some children on Christmas eve, as spied by their father, who wakes up to witness his arrival. So what is the connection? I have tried to show a number of parallels and similarities in these colour-coded versions of the two poems, which I will explain further below. new-picture To begin with, the metre of the two poems connects them at once. They are both written in anapestic tetrameter, a rather unusual metre for the English language, the morphology of which fits iambic compositions much better. This fact alone makes anapestic metres both rhythmical and memorable – perhaps one of the reasons behind the success of “Twas the Night Before Christmas”. To illustrate this, compare the stressed syllables of the opening lines of each poem: ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house (Moore) “It was early and still in the night of June, (Tolkien) The two openings seem to chime in other ways too: in both first lines we have an indication of time (the night before Christmas vs. a night of June) and Tolkien’s first draft was even closer to Moore’s, shortening ‘It was’ to ‘Twas’: “‘Twas a very quiet evening once in June”. Though Tolkien’s poem takes place in the summer, while Moore’s poem is emphatically set in the snowy winter, Tolkien describes Tinfang Warble’s white hair as sparkling “like frost in a winter moon” (l. 23). Moore’s moon, on the other hand, is also associated with bright light: as it falls “of the new-fallen snow” (l. 13) it gives “a lustre of midday to objects below” (l. 14). Sun/moon, summer/winter – we have a number of mixed metaphors and images here. Our two protagonists, St Nicholas and Tinfang Warble, also show a number of similarities, not only on a lexical level, but in terms of imagery too. They are both small, little, even diminutive: St Nicholas is “little” and drives a “miniature” sleigh driven by “tiny” reindeer (ll. 16-17); while Tinfang Warble has “little feet” and a “slim little body” (ll. 29, 35). They both have the ability to leap high (up the chimney, l. 52, or up in the air, l. 31, respectively) and they both laugh happily. Most importantly, they are both old, with white hair – indeed, St. Nicholas is memorably described as a “jolly old elf” (l. 45) while Tinfang Warble is “the old elf” (l. 52). It was this last parallel, alongside the sing-song metre of both poems, that initially spurred my interest to look closer and compare these two compositions. The narrators of the two poems also show remarkable similarities: they are both awoken at night, hearing something in their sleep, and they both approach their respective windows to find out what is going on (ll. 10-11 and 5-6 respectively). They both then spy on their otherworldly visitors – though Tolkien’s speaker goes one step further by following Tinfang, almost compulsively. In the colour-coded picture above, I have noted a few other – less pronounced – connections in terms of structure, lexis, and imagery. Now there is, of course, nothing Christmassy about Tolkien’s poem, but there is most definitely something elvish about Moore’s poem. Moore’s poem was certainly as popular in Britain from the second half of the 19th century on as it was on the other side of the Atlantic, and there were numerous illustrated editions that became ubiquitous and very influential in the shaping of the modern, now universal, Santa Claus. Moore’s poem is whimsical and jolly and not taking itself too seriously – a marked difference from the nostalgic, wistful tone of Tolkien’s poem. For me, however, the image of the tiny, white-haired “old elf” that moves nimbly and draws the attention of the speaker, rousing him from his bed, is a tantalizing link between the two poems, underlined musically by their anapestic rhythms. 51nwzhwkqjl-_sy344_bo1204203200_ Tolkien did go on to create a Christmas mythology (parallel to his Middle-earth legendarium) in his Letters from Father Christmas, and his central character – the British equivalent of St Nicholas/Santa Claus – is indeed whimsical and dressed in red and white (a tradition that originated with early illustrations of the American figure – as opposed to the usually green garments of early depictions of Father Christmas). But I like to think that Tinfang Warble has something Christmassy about him too – if only some vague echo of Moore’s “jolly old elf”. Notes and Sources Though the authorship of the poem is contested – some scholars have argued it was written by Henry Livingston, Jr.; see here for an overview of the controversy. ** For Tolkien’s “fairy” creatures in his early mythology, shaped by folklore, Victorian fairylore and fairy paintings, see Chapters 2, 3 and 4 of my book, Tolkien, Race and Cultural History, as well as my article here. “Over Old Hills and Far Away” can be found in The Book of Lost Tales I, pp. 108-10. “A Visit from St Nicholas” is out of copyright and can be accessed freely online – here is a good version. First impressions count? On academic book covers Should you care whether your academic monograph or edited collection has an appealing cover? Does it matter? And can you/should you get involved? My answer to all of the above is yes! I know there are brilliant academic books out there with boring, samey or just random covers, so I’m not saying that outward appearance necessarily equals inward quality or originality. But, at the same time, should academics just be satisfied with covers clearly chosen by publishers without much care for aesthetics or relevance to the topic, perhaps in the belief that only specific libraries/specialists will buy the book, a small but guaranteed readership, unaffected by the cover? In our times of emphasis on public engagement and “impact”, why should you not wish for your book to be appealing to any reader? And if you believe your own research to be exciting, fascinating and worth reading, shouldn’t your book cover express that too? I’m writing these reflections in a rare moment of calm (the term has just ended!) just after Palgrave Macmillan have released the cover of my new monograph on their website. I’m really proud of this cover and I’ve been wanting to share it for a few months now – so this is indeed an exiting time. I was actively involved with the cover design of both of my monographs, and this seems like a good time to reflect on my engagement with this task – and the results! celtic-myth-in-childrens-fantasy The cover of my forthcoming monograph with Palgrave Macmillan My new book focuses on the creative uses of ‘Celtic’ myth (Irish and Welsh) in contemporary fantasy literature written for children or young adults. It explores the work of fantasists from the 1960s (e.g. Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles, etc.) all the way to our times (e.g. Catherine Fisher’s Darkhenge, published in 2006, and Henry Neff’s The Tapestry series, the last volume of which was published in 2014). The cover of Charles Squire’s Celtic Myth & Legend, Poetry & Romance (1910) The frontispiece of Charles Squire’s Celtic Myth & Legend, Poetry & Romance (1910) One of the books I had to consult a lot during my research, was Charles Squire’s Celtic Myth & Legend, Poetry & Romance (1910). Now this is not quite an academic book but despite its early date it’s never been out of print and it was definitely read by a number of my fantasy authors and shaped their imaginations. Squire’s book contains striking colour illustrations by J.H.F. Bacon, two of which I considered for my cover. The one which I nearly chose was “Cuchulainn meets the Morrígú”, which chimes with Pat O’Shea’s The Hounds of the Mórrígan and Henry Neff’s The Tapestry series. But I finally chose “The Making of Blodeuwedd” for a number of reasons: a) It depicts the moment of the creation of a girl out of flowers by the magicians Math and Gwydion, a scene from the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi in the Welsh Mabinogion. This part of the story became a central inspiration for Alan Garner’s iconic (and rather haunting) The Owl Service. This is one of the best-known books my monograph explores, and one of the earliest. b) Blodeuwedd herself is not here a young woman, but a child, a prepubescent girl, thus serving as a nice allegory of the shaping of ‘Celtic’ myth for children/adolescents that my fantasy authors have undertaken. They haven’t quite taken flowers and turned them into a child, but they have taken medieval sources (and their later retellings) and turned them into new, original fantasy plots and characters for young readers. c) At the same time, the two magicians look rather classical/Roman, in their togas and clean-shaven faces (though I am aware I’m referring to popular perceptions here). Their portrayal points to one of the central points of my book, the fact that ‘Celtic’ myth has often been retold in such a way so as to “fit” with classical ideas of a pantheon of gods and legendary heroes that may not necessarily work with the original, medieval material. My authors have often relied on these retellings, rather than revisit the medieval sources first hand, and therefore their adaptations have an added layer of complexity in terms of attitudes and perceptions of things “Celtic”. 9780230219519-2 My first monograph, Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits, was published in 2008, also by Palgrave. I remember vividly being given the option to be involved in the cover design, and getting quite excited with the sheer range of possibilities! I had just returned from my last research trip to Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog, both in the outskirts of Birmingham, and both important locations of Tolkien’s childhood and related to his vision of the Shire. I wrote to my publishers with a PowerPoint presentation “proposal” for the book cover, based on a photograph I had taken myself. In short, here was my rationale for my suggested book cover: s-l300 The first edition of The Silmarillion, featuring the emblem of Lúthien Tinúviel on its cover • Tolkien liked drawing kaleidoscopic images and patterns, e.g. the Elvish heraldic devices, one of which was chosen for the cover of the first edition of The Silmarillion. • As a child, Tolkien and his brother Hillary, used to play in Moseley Bog, a place Tolkien later claimed to be an important inspiration for the Shire. • For the book cover, I have used one of my own photos of Moseley Bog, which I have turned into a kaleidoscopic image via an image editing software My photo of Moseley Bog, July 2008 I am really grateful that Palgrave trusted me with this idea – the book still gets great comments for its cover! And here is my photo of Moseley Bog, taken with what I am sure now is considered a pretty basic digital camera, which served as the raw material for my kaleidoscopic manipulation! The moral of the story, I suppose – if I can call it a moral – is trust yourself as an expert on your own research. You know better than anyone what may make a good, eye-catching, but also appropriate cover. If you are given the chance to be involved in the choice of cover, take the opportunity! If no one mentions anything, still ask and show interest and willingness to engage with this process. In both cases, make sure you have given the matter some thought, so that your book ends up with a cover that at least has some significance and makes sense – at least to you! An interview with Henry Neff: Celtic myth, liminal times and fantastic creatures My forthcoming monograph, Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy, examines a number of ‘Celtic’-inspired works of fantasy literature, including Henry Neff’s The Tapestry. The Tapestry is a series of five fantasy novels that create an alternative world of ambitions scope, and center around Max MacDaniels, a modern incarnation of the Irish hero Cúchulain (see my previous blog post for an overview). Henry Neff has just launched a spin-off series, Impyrium (HarperCollins) which is set in the same fantasy world, but many years in the future. I interviewed Henry via e-mail nearly a year ago, while still working on my monograph. Our Q&A exchange centered upon his use of Irish mythology in The Tapestry and the Irish heritage of his hero, as well as his use of liminal times, faeries, and other mythological characters in his series. I have jealously kept to myself so far all the insights I gained about Henry’s engagement with his sources and his creative process, but now it is time to share them with my readers and the many fans of his work. Many thanks to Henry for answering my questions so fully and for permission to publish this interview here. (Fair warning! There are some Tapestry spoilers in this interview!) new-picture The Kestrel flying over Rowan Academy (copyright Henry H. Neffl; illustration reproduced by kind permission) Dimitra: Why the centrality of Irish mythology in the series? I am aware that you have already answered this question on your website and in video podcasts, but my book is specifically focused on the use of Celtic myth in children’s fantasy, so I hope you will forgive me if I feel compelled to ask this question too. To put it in context: the series obviously borrows and creatively reshapes elements from a number of mythological traditions (Greek and Roman, Old Norse, Finnish, Hebrew, Egyptian, etc.) but it cannot be denied that Irish mythology is central amongst them. Max and David are descendants of Irish divinities, Solas was built in Ireland by the Tuatha Dé Danaan, and a number of central characters from Irish medieval literature (Lugh, Scathach, the Fomorian, the Morrígan, etc.) appear. Is there a rationale for this in terms of the internal history of your secondary world? It is obvious, for example, that Old Magic is not restricted to things Irish – dragons are of the Old Magic, and so is Mina, the Ormenheid, Ymir (and the power in Tartarus?), and presumably the blade of Set. Why is it that our two central characters derive their Old Magic from Irish myth? One may speculate, for example, that the other schools of magic that fell before Solas were founded by ‘stewards’/divinities from other mythologies – was it just a ‘historical accident’ that it was Solas that fell last and managed to evacuate refugees to the New World? Or is it that Irish Old Magic is inherently more powerful than that from other sources? Alternatively (or, in addition), is there an external rational? Do you see Irish myth as part of your (and your family’s) heritage, for example, or perhaps a visit to Ireland (and its stunning archaeology) revived your childhood fascination with Irish medieval sources? Henry: The emphasis placed on Irish mythology in The Tapestry has more to do with choosing a theme and flavour to the story than suggesting a hierarchy among various mythological traditions. When I came across some Celtic stories as a boy, they possessed both a beauty and ferocity that I found wildly compelling. It’s sad to say, but mythology is exotic fare in American public education. The little that’s taught is often limited to Greek/Roman or a smattering of Norse or Egyptian. While I wanted to include these (and others) in The Tapestry, I made a conscious decision to place Celtic mythology at the forefront. The material not only inspired me, I knew that many readers would be hearing about Cúchulain and the Cattle Raid of Cooley for the first time. I’ve received many emails and letters from readers asking for book recommendations to learn more about Irish mythology, and that’s been very gratifying. Why Solas (the fallen school) happened to be the preeminent school of magic and, ultimately, the literal and figurative seed for Rowan is due to several factors. The first was that Ireland made sense as a location for a school of magic — it was close to Europe and major cosmopolitan centres, and yet it’s also physically removed and has its own history, politics, and language. Magic and a notion of otherness play a strong role in the country’s traditions and folklore, and, of course, you have all the wonderful history of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, the Fomorians, and the Sidh. Much has been written about the role Irish monks played in preserving manuscripts and knowledge during the Dark Ages and, to my mind, that notion strengthened the idea that Ireland was not only a picturesque setting for a magical school but also a logical one. It made good sense to me that it would have become a repository of knowledge (magical and mundane) and that magical scholars might have sought refuge there. A third reason is that Elias Bram was Solas’s Archmage and events during his seventeenth century childhood drive many of the events that unfold during The Tapestry. He was the greatest sorcerer of his age and a troubled soul who had personal history with our arch-villain, Astaroth. It was fitting that Bram’s school, Solas, and its successor, Rowan, would be central to their struggle. Was this because Solas and Rowan have ties to Irish lore? No – that’s simply the way I built the world and events played out. Of course, this presumes that Rowan even is the preeminent school of magic. As we learn in the final book (The Red Winter), Rowan is not the only school that exists. When Max McDaniels visits Arcanum, we discover that human beings are not the only ones building universities and studying magic. Could there be others throughout the world, schools that kept a lower profile than Rowan, or managed to stay off the radar entirely? I couldn’t say, but I would assume so — particularly in places with large populations and early evidence of human activity: China, India, the Middle East, Central and South America…. I think J.K. Rowling is delving into such things as I type. One challenge when writing a series like The Tapestry is that there are so many intriguing possibilities you’d like to explore but cannot due to the fact that you’re trying to tell one story and not twenty. Were there other heroes that struggled against Astaroth, other magical schools that fought, hid, or negotiated truces? It’s not only possible, but probable. I’ll never forget studying those wonderful maps of Middle Earth and wondering what other peoples were doing during the War of the Ring. Were there any Haradrim that fought against Sauron? Maybe there was an Easterling hero working diligently to overthrow Sauron (with help from those mysterious “Blue Wizards” that Tolkien alluded to but never fleshed out). A rich world offers endless possibilities and it’s both fun and a little cruel that an author can never explore them all. As far as an external rationale is concerned, there isn’t one aside from a personal affinity for Irish myth and folklore. While my wife’s ancestry is predominately Irish, my roots are German, English, and Scottish. I’m merely an admirer. Dimitra: Thinking about Max McDaniels in particular: is there an implication that his “human” family also has an Irish/Celtic heritage? His mother’s name is Deirdre, and then she changes it to Bryn – both Celtic names (Irish and Welsh respectively). His father’s surname is Mac Daniels. Any implied/hinted connections here? Are the McDaniels of Irish-American descent? The same question applies to David Menlo and his choice of a new surname. He claims that Thomas Edison was the inspiration, but is there a connection to Menlo Castle here too? (in Co. Galway – now a ruin but quite atmospheric and in an area with Fenian associations) I was also wondering about Connor Lynch – for a while I thought that Connor may end up being one of the protagonists, given that he is Irish and links to Irish mythology were signalled right from the beginning of the first book. Was that link intentional to – so to speak – throw the reader off the scent of the main second hero, David? Henry: For Max and his family, these associations were intentional. Using Irish names and surnames helped not only to underscore his ties to Cúchulain and Celtic mythology, but he also grew up in Chicago, which is home to many people of Irish-American descent. At one point, I toyed with delving more into his mother’s history as Deirdre Fallow and why Lugh chose her to be the “vessel” for his son, but it fell too far outside the story’s scope. David Menlo’s name was chosen solely for its associations with Thomas Edison and the “Wizard of Menlo Park.” I wish I could claim a more clever or layered series of inspirations, but that’s all that lies behind it. As for Connor, I had originally wanted a larger role for him but ultimately decided to focus more on Max and David (two children of the Old Magic). If I’d approached The Tapestry like a typical boarding school story, I’m sure Connor would have played a larger part. Unfortunately for Mr Lynch, the action shifts away from Rowan in the second book and there simply wasn’t a compelling reason for him to accompany with Max and David. That became Cooper and Hazel’s role, and it made more sense for an agent and a mystic to fill those roles as the group raced across Europe. While Mum tagged along, poor Connor was struck back at Rowan with Mr Sikes taking gradual possession of him. That Connor was Irish had less to do with the book’s mythology and more with the fact that Rowan was an international school with students from all over. I needed a big personality and happened to be teaching an Irish student who was outspoken and funny in a way that was extremely engaging and refreshingly un-American. His name (fittingly enough) was Lughan and there’s a bit of him in Connor. Dimitra: Was it a conscious decision to use the Celtic/pagan festivals in pivotal moments of the series? In The Hound of Rowan we first see Max using body amplification and starting to be conscious of his abilities on All Hallows Eve (for which you do use the term ‘Samhain’ in later books). In The Second Siege Max and David fly aboard the Kestrel to the Sidh on Christmas Eve, the pagan Yule. In The Fiend the Forge Max and David attack Astaroth on Walpurgisnacht, the eve of Beltaine. In The Red Winter Astaroth attempts to open a portal on Imbolc, while Max finally departs for the Sidh on Midsummer (part of me was expecting this to happen on 1 August to coincide with Lughnasadh). Clearly, these are also the liminal times during which the Sidh communicate with the human world in the Irish tradition. How conscious were these choices and how do you see them as part of your world building? Henry: Yes, it was. Liminal times of the day and year have particular significance in many different stories and cultures. They lack fixed definition and thus a greater range of possibilities exists — possibilities that often violate or stretch our notions of reality. That’s not only a fun and wondrous thing to think about, it also has a logic I find appealing. Of course, a spell cast at the height of the winter solstice is going to pack more punch than one cast on any old Tuesday. That’s just common sense! It’s no accident that major events in The Tapestry – particularly those involving travel between worlds — occur at such times. Aside from having a link to various mythologies, it’s a useful device for telling stories that incorporate magic. For writers, magic can create twice as many problems as it purports to solve. If you don’t impose rules and limits, you’re going to be drowning in plot holes. By restricting certain possibilities to particular times, I saved myself some headaches while enhancing the narrative’s structure and adding some urgency. For example, Astaroth could only open a way to the Starving Gods on a special day like Imbolc. If he’d been able to do so at any given moment, it would have been virtually impossible for anyone to stop him. As far as Max’s departure date is concerned, I chose Midsummer because it’s an occasion that is commonly associated with faeries and magic. In retrospect, Lughnasadh — although less well known — would have been particularly fitting for the son of Lugh Lámhfhada. Where were you when I was writing that scene? new-picture-78 David, Max and Cooper approach the Fomorian Giant. (copyright Henry H. Neffl; illustration reproduced by kind permission) Dimitra: Are the faeries in the Isle of Man and Ireland a representation of the fairies/sidh of modern Irish folklore? Or are there just elemental spirits of nature? In The Hound of Rowan the faeries are referred to as ‘echoes of Old Magic’. Are they the remnants of the ‘stewards’ and other spirits still left in this world? Is that why they are keen to get to the Sidh and take up the Morrigan’s offer? This is a convenient place to also mention the Fomorian. Do you see him as a representation of the magic of ‘wild’ nature? (he is likened to a storm, a rock, etc.) He lives in the real world (rather than in the parallel world of the Sidh) and his location and some of his actions remind me of representations of Manannán mac Lir. Is he a leftover of Old Magic in nature, like the fairies? Henry: Like many things in The Tapestry, faeries have their own hierarchy. There are those who have been around for ages, and are comparable to the stewards referred to in The Hound of Rowan (i.e., greater spirits/lesser gods invested with “Old Magic”) and those that came into existence much later. The former would be formidable entities with tremendous power and influence over their domains. The latter would be more whimsical beings – magical certainly — but fall into the “elemental spirits of nature” camp. While writing The Red Winter, I went into some detail about the faeries that had taken refuge with the Fomorian, and sought to make them into something akin to a Seelie Court in exile. But that threatened to take a big book and enlarge it into something encyclopaedic. Sadly, many of those details were sacrificed during revision but I hope that readers come away with an impression that “faeries” are as varied a group as “mammals.” Their eagerness to go to the Sidh is driven by two factors. The first is that our world has been in a state of chaos, and that Astaroth has not created the utopia he promised. We don’t know precisely why the faeries on Man have taken refuge with the Fomorian, but we can infer that something dangerous — a demon, perhaps even Yuga — has driven them there. Despite the Fomorian’s protection, Man has literally been an island under siege. The Sidh not only offers the faeries a more peaceful environment, the realm is sacred to them. I think of it as being fundamentally more attuned to a faerie’s nature —a place where they can be their truest selves. In this way, it’s not unlike Eden, or the Undying Lands in Tolkien’s mythology. It’s not surprising that many faeries were eager to take up the Morrígan’s offer. As for the Fomorian, I do regard him as a living manifestation of the wilder, more primal world. He is an anachronism, out of step with the modern age yet never welcomed by his ancient peers, the Tuatha Dé Danaan or the Fomorians. His role in the books even straddles those two groups — he is both helpful and a little terrifying. The aid he provides is not spurred by any love for mankind but simply his view that Astaroth and Prusias pose even greater dangers. Regarding his history, I had fun exploring that in the third book when he challenges David Menlo to guess his name. While researching the Fomorians, I found it interesting that their physical appearance could vary so widely – they were a literal grab bag of creature, animal, and human parts. Some Fomorians, such as Balor, were hideous while others were indistinguishable from the upstart Tuatha Dé Danaan. I was drawn to the idea that the most beautiful of the Fomorians — Elathan — would father a deformed child and refuse to claim him. There are parallels with the Greek god, Hephaestus. Both are rejected for their appearance and are skilled blacksmiths, but I wanted the Fomorian’s isolation to be even more pronounced. After all, his father didn’t even give him a name to anchor his place in the world. Ultimately, it’s David Menlo who makes good on his promise and uses the Book of Thoth to give the giant a truename. For me, that was one of the most touching moments in the series. But, yes, the Fomorian plays the role of “Nature” and it’s no accident that his final battle was fought against the dreadnoughts — abominations that symbolized the worst of human science. Dimitra: What sources on Celtic myth did you consult during your research for the series? You’ve referred to Kinsella’s translation of The Táin and Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne as your sources for the Irish material. Any other specific books on ‘Celtic’ mythology that proved to be important while researching for the series? My bet at the moment is on Celtic myth & legend, poetry & romance by Charles Squire (I may be completely wrong!), but perhaps you also consulted Celtic Heritage, by Alwyn and Brinley Rees; or Proinsias Mac Cana’s Celtic Mythology; or one of Miranda Aldhouse-Green’s books? This is a long shot, but could I also ask whether you read Robert Graves’s The White Goddess? Henry: I consulted a number of sources, but the mainstays were Kinsella, Lady Gregory, and Squire (good guess!). I regret to say I haven’t read The White Goddess. It’s a tricky exercise incorporating old tales and mythology into a new story. While I wanted to be respectful of myths and the cultures they represent, I didn’t want to be hag-ridden (I couldn’t resist) by every little detail. A fascinating – and head-spinning – aspect of Celtic mythology is the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, versions of some stories. Was the gae-bolga a barbed spear? Or was it simply a fighting technique? I’ve heard it described both ways. Ultimately, I made peace with the fact that I wasn’t attempting a scholarly work on Irish mythology; I was creating a work of fiction that utilized some elements from its stories. My goal shifted from trying to get every detail “correct” to adapting the myths to fit my story while staying true to their basic essence. Creatively, this was the right decision and one that afforded me the freedom to make The Tapestry the story I wished to tell. new-picture-33 Scáthach watching Max at Rodrubân (copyright Henry H. Neffl; illustration reproduced by kind permission) Scáthach is a good example of where I took some creative license but hopefully didn’t compromise the character. Mythological Scáthach is not only a trainer of legendary warriors; she’s also a mother whose daughter, Uathach, becomes “involved” with a rather brutish Cúchulain. My version is also a great fighter and trainer of warriors, but I altered the character to make her love story with Max more compelling and believable. The Tapestry’s Scáthach is considerably younger than the mythological version and wary of men, having trained many heroes who tried (and failed) to make their way into her bed and then made boastful lies about their “conquest.” In this sense, Scáthach possesses some qualities similar to the Greek goddess Artemis — the beautiful and independent warrior/huntress. And there are other mythological concepts at play. In The Tapestry, Scáthach was a mortal woman who died two thousand years ago but was granted immortality in recognition of her deeds and feats. This recalls the einherjar of Norse mythology: spirits of great warriors handpicked by the Valkyries to serve in Valhalla and fight alongside the gods when Ragnarök fell. Given all this, it’s safe to say my Scáthach differs considerably from the versions you’ll find in Kinsella or Lady Gregory, but I hope the character’s essence is faithful to the source. That was my goal, in any case. If you haven’t read The Tapestry yet, I hope this interview will have whetted your appetite! I guarantee that the last book, The Red Winter, will leave you wanting more, and we’re lucky to have Impyrium now, and all the books that will follow to look forward to!	__label__1	0.998998
The standardisation of i and y in Early Modern English (1500-1700) Condorelli, Marco (2021) The standardisation of i and y in Early Modern English (1500-1700). English Studies, 102 (1). pp. 101-123. ISSN 0013-838X Full text not available from this repository. Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2020.1785169 Between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, i and y shifted from an early distribution principle to a new, modern standard, which generally resulted in the establishment of vocalic <i> word-initially and word-medially, as well as <y> for glides word-initially and for vowels word-finally. Previous scholars have offered interesting insights into some of the graphemes above, but the overall history of development in i and y, and the factors behind their modern standardisation, still remain partially uncovered. This paper investigates graphemic changes in the two letters in printed English between 1500 and 1700, using a quantitative model for the analysis of patterns across a range of texts from Early English Books Online. The analysis establishes the presence of a quantitative shift in the wholesale uses of <i> and <y> between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, and provides a precise chronology for the standardisation of word-initial, word-medial and word-final graphemic changes in i and y. The discussion reflects upon the development of the positional graphemes, and argues for pragmatic factors within the Early Modern English printing industry as primarily responsible for the modern standardisation of i and y. Repository Staff Only: item control page	__label__1	0.974389
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Macaria Picture This took me a total of three days, and now if I can just take three days for the next four I’ll be all set…deadlines suck, hating life right now. the good thing is I only have four more Greek myths to illustrate for my portfolio then I can take a break finally But anyway This is Macaria, daughter of Heracles. I remember afew years ago I read somewhere that Hades had a daughter, and something bad happened to her, but I didn’t know her name or more to her story, so I spent an entire class period googling her to try and find it out. (time well spent right there) And in my research I found that there are two girls in Greek myth by the name Macaria, Hades daughter, goddess of something to do with death, then there’s Heracles’s daughter. And Heracles’s daughter was actually the story I was looking for the whole time, not much goes on with Hades’s daughter from what I found xD Macaria’s story in a nutshell: She sacrificed herself to prevent her town from going to war. Easiest summary i've ever done. ok but there’s actually more if you care to know She was sacrificed in a spring (hence the water) the spring was then named ‘Macarian’ in her honor, and from what I read they gave her a very ‘lavished’ funeral because of what she was doing, so I put in flowers to make it seem more…’lavished’….yeah… Yeup. Pretty happy with how this came out….just not too sure about the water, when I was planning this it looked so much better in my head… Continue Reading: Heracles	__label__1	0.924922
January 31, 2012 Survey of the Legitimate and Illegitimate Dynasties in History This work, in four juan and four volumes, is a manuscript edition without prefaces or postscripts. The author, Shen Defu (1578–1642), lived during the Ming dynasty. A native of Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, Shen was known mainly for his literary works. He received the degree of ju ren in 1618. The following year he participated in the examination held by the Bureau of Rites (for the degree of jin shi), but he failed. Shen had devoted his time to writing and his main work, Wanli ye huo bian (Miscellaneous notes on the dynasties up to the Wanli period), was completed during 1606–7. After the unsuccessful examination, he returned home and compiled this supplement to his earlier work. The supplement is a history of the dynasties beginning with the western Jin (265–316) and ending with the Sui dynasty (581–618). The work was published posthumously. Some official persecution of authors at the time related to the naming taboo, which prohibited speaking or writing the given names of exalted persons in China, such as the emperors. Given that this work includes use of the usually taboo name of Kangxi (reigned 1662–1722), it can be assumed that it was issued prior to the Kangxi period. The title of the work refers to the historically prevalent theory of legitimism in China, the doctrine of regime legitimacy based on the mandate of Heaven, which had a profound influence on the historiography in ancient China. Interpretations of Astronomical Principles Issued by the Imperial Order Compiled by order of the Qing emperor Qianlong (reigned 1736–95), this work of 80 juan, in 32 volumes, was never printed. It has an editorial guide at the beginning, but no prefaces or postscripts. The first entry in the editorial guide states that it is necessary to know about astronomy, the interchange of sun and moon, and the five constellations in order not to be misguided by alchemists and their claims about disasters and fortunes. This statement suggests that the work may have been a product of Catholic missionaries who wished to use science to challenge superstition. The wording of the text also may indicate Catholic missionary authorship. The reason why the work was never advertised or printed may relate to the struggle between the missionaries and the alchemists. At the time of the Kangxi and Yongzheng reigns (1662–1735), Chinese alchemists fought vehemently against the publication of Li xiang kao cheng (Compendium of calendrical science and astronomy), a calendar printed in 1723. The compendium was compiled by Chinese but based on Western theories and the methods and tables of calculation of the missionaries. As a countermeasure, in 1740 the alchemists published a book on geomancy and occultism, entitled Xie ji ban fang shu (Treatise on harmonizing times and distinguishing directions). The Catholic missionaries may have initiated this work to counter the latter publication. Expanded Edition of the Collected Works from the Lotus Studio This is a printed edition of writings by Yang Yikui (flourished 1592–1607), possibly printed in Zhejiang Province. Si ku cun mu (Catalog of books not included in the general catalog of the Si ku Collection) lists the original title as a work in two juan from a private collection in Zhejiang, one consisting of poetry and the other of essays. As the title indicates, this is an expanded edition in nine juan and in four volumes, published during the Wanli period, in which Yang’s later writings were added to the original selections. A poet and essayist, Yang Yikui achieved his jin shi (doctoral degree) in 1592 and served with distinction at various posts, becoming a commissioner at the Yunnan Provincial Administration Commission. The preface to one of his other works, Yi cheng (Records of the border regions), was dated 1615. This book may have been published at the same place and at the same time. The preface was written by Zhang Jiude, a Ming dynasty minister of the Bureau of Works. Selected Writings by Dong Zhongfeng This work is a collection of writings by Dong Qi (1483–1546), selected by Dong’s follower, Tang Shunzhi (1527–60), who was a Confucian scholar, a member of the Hanlin Academy, and a man with military knowledge. Dong Qi, a native of Guiji, Zhejiang Province, achieved his jin shi (doctoral degree) and a second degree at the highest imperial examination, and entered the Hanlin Academy. As a result of a conflict with the influential eunuch official Li Jin, he was sent from the capital to be a prefect of a county. After Li’s death, Dong returned to the Hanlin Academy and assumed various high posts. He was posthumously named secretary of the Ministry of Rites and given the title wenjian. A child prodigy, Dong was an orator and scholar of great reputation who wrote numerous works. Among his followers were many famous authors. This work was handwritten by his grandson, Dong Xiang. The same handwriting can be seen on the end label of the table of contents. The original was printed by Wang Guozhen in 11 juan. This edition has 12 juan, as Dong Xiang added one juan when he copied the work. The remainder of the work is the exact text of the Wang edition. Humming of an Insect Printed during the reign of Tianqi (1621–27) of the Ming dynasty, this literary work lists the names of the author and editors. It was written by Li Tingxun, a native of Sanyuan Xian, Shaanxi Province, and edited by two fellow-members of a scholarly society, Xiong Jiarui and Shi Dingyu; three of his disciples, Kong Shengzhen, Ma Yiyuan, and Wei Jizheng; and Li Tingxun’s son, Li Menghe. Li Tingxun achieved his jin shi (doctoral degree) in 1595 and became prefect of Ningling Xian, Henan Province. The work is arranged chronologically, beginning with the 36th year of the Wanli reign (1608) and ending in the third year of the Tianqi reign (1623). No biographical information about Li Tingxun is found in the local gazetteer (entitled Sanyuan Xian zhi) of his hometown, Sanyuan, nor was this work listed. The first two Chinese characters, xi ji, in the title literally mean “small animal” or “insect marinated in vinegar,” a metaphor that describes a person of meager knowledge, and that was probably used here to emphasize the modesty of the author and to mark him as a humble man presenting his literary work. The author’s preface at the beginning of the first volume is dated 1623. Manuscript Collection of Essays from the Sheiyu’an Studio This manuscript, a draft of a book published in 1889, consists of three works by Sun Shijun of the Qing dynasty. There are two juan of essays called Shei yu an wen chao (Manuscript collection of his essays); one juan of poems entitled Shi ou cun (Occasional poems); and one juan of a genealogical work entitled Zu pu ni gao (Draft of family genealogy). Sun was a native of Gui’an (part of present-day Huzhou Shi, Zhejiang Province), about whom Feng Xu, a member of the Hanlin Academy, wrote a biographical work. The essays include prefaces the author wrote for other contemporary works by renowned personalities, among them the painter Wu Junqing (1844–1927), and biographical essays, including those on a number of women. The poetry manuscript consists of six leaves with 15 poems. An inscription on the cover of the book based on the manuscript indicates that the printing began in the tenth year of Guangxu reign (1884) and took five years to complete. No printed version of the poetry volume has been found. The printed version of the genealogical work, which traces nine generations of the Sun family, was given a new title, Sun shi xian de zhuan (Biographies of the virtuous ancestors of the Sun family). The entire work was edited by Sun Shijun’s two sons and a nephew and has a number of handwritten corrections made by a person or persons unknown. There is a preface by Lu Yanwei (dated 1886) and a postscript by Cheng Wan (1883).	__label__1	0.992299
E-rea http://erea.revues.org E-rea. Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone. Revue du Laboratoire d’études et de recherche sur le monde anglophone. La revue a été créée en 2003. Elle publie des articles consacrés aux études anglophones. Dickens’s Global Art: Cultural and Ecological Legacy in Pictures from Italy In today’s Dickens Studies, “Global Dickens” is all the critical rage. Yet the landmark work on global Dickens by Nisbet, Jordan, Gagnier and others focuses on the international dissemination and reception of Dickens’s work as opposed to Dickens’s own conception of his art. There is no doubt that Dickens saw himself as a global writer from the outset, using metaphors like “the ocean of humanity” to describe his target audience (Letter to W. C. Macready (14 January 1853)). But the travelogues of the 1840s were pivotal, this article contends, to the development of a newly intense scrutiny of the idea of the global and the problems attending what we now call globalisation, presaging some of the most influential ideas in contemporary cultural theory. For Dickens, global art should have both temporal and spatial reach; optimistically, he believed that enduring art could help the world and its history to cohere. His travels to Italy made clear the difficulty of producing art which travell... Juliet JOHN http://erea.revues.org/5025 2016-06-15 Sarah Barbour, David Howard, Thomas Lacroix & Judith Misrahi-Barak (eds.), Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’, vol.2 Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy This edited collection of essays is the second volume of a series of publications which emerged out of the well-established collaboration between Sarah Barbour, David Howard, Thomas Lacroix and Judith Misrahi-Barak, whose continued work on diasporas has the immense merit of bringing together, in often fruitful interactions, specialists of different disciplines, who approach diaspora studies from different angles. The volume, entitled Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy opens on a short preface rather a longer introduction, which would have had the merit of repositioning the issues of memory and intimacy within the main debates of diaspora studies. However the articles are organized and ordered so as to bring out the specific focuses of the texts selected for publication, and the volume also offers a bibliography of diaspora studies, which adds to the overall cohesion of the volume. The first part, entitled “Questions of Theory, History and Memory,” brings together four articles. The first ... Françoise KRAL http://erea.revues.org/5063 2016-06-15 Hélène Christol : enseignante-chercheuse, ou l’engagement à bonne distance Hélène Christol, Aix, 2016 Image 10000000000001F2000001B2BAFF0A5F.png © Sophie Vallas Cet entretien avec Hélène Christol a été réalisé au cœur de la vieille ville d’Aix-en-Provence, où elle habite depuis longtemps. Notre conversation s’est déroulée en deux temps et pour ce « Grand Entretien », Hélène Christol a accepté de revenir sur sa longue carrière d’enseignante-chercheuse qui a passionnément étudié et fait connaître l’histoire et la culture américaines en privilégiant les voix, les vies et les actes de ceux qui restent trop souvent en arrière-plan. Image 10000201000002220000010B5EA009F7.png Les premières années et « l’agreg 68 » CC : Tu as commencé ta carrière de chercheuse en études anglaises, et plus précisément avec un mémoire de Maîtrise sur Conrad, que tu as préparé à Cambridge. Est-ce seulement dû au fait qu’à l’époque les études en littérature américaine – et encore moins en civilisation américaine –n’existaient quasiment pas ; est-ce que tu relies la littérature de Conrad, et l’auteur lui-même, à tes travaux ultérieurs ? HC : Bien, il va falloir faire une esp... Cécile COTTENET Sophie VALLAS http://erea.revues.org/5091 2016-06-15 “Looking on darkness which the blind do see”: the Figure of the Blind Girl in Dickens and the Dickensian The article focuses on the theme of blindness in Dickens’s American Notes (1842) and in The Cricket on the Hearth (1845): sight impairment is treated as a vehicle to carry the reader from landscape to inscape, staging at once truth and deception, blindness and insight. Such dramatic irony is also the leitmotif of Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872) and is fully acknowledged in André Gide’s La Symphonie pastorale (1919). Finally the cinema, notably Charlie Chaplin with City Lights (1932), exploits the visual drama of the blind girl whose inner vision is manipulated from the outside, yet retains the means to undo the visible deception, and grasp the essence of truth. The paradox offered by protagonists who are at once entombed in blindness and yet open books for those who see them, is present in the authors, and made more poignant and effective. Francesca ORESTANO http://erea.revues.org/4915 2016-06-15 Dickens in Arabia: Going Astray in Tripoli This article explores the post-colonial ironies and complexities of teaching the novels of Charles Dickens in the north Lebanese city of Tripoli during a teaching assignment between the years 2007–2011. The starting point of the article is an engagement with Dickens’s reception among Lebanese students, accounting for the enthusiasm with which the students embraced his novels, particularly Oliver Twist. The undergraduates, who were bi- or trilingual, claimed the novelist spoke directly to them, despite the fact that he wrote in English and was concerned with existence over 150 years ago. Anecdotal discussion and interview material is brought to bear in an assessment of the affinities Dickens’s style might have with current popular aesthetic modes and political discourse in Lebanon, particularly his use of sentimentality and the melodramatic mode. The article then moves into an exploration of the aesthetics of reading Dickens. If one puts to one side historical and geographical differ... Gillian PIGGOTT http://erea.revues.org/4988 2016-06-15 Introduction: Dickensian Views ... Marie-Amélie COSTE Christine HUGUET Nathalie VANFASSE http://erea.revues.org/5192 2016-06-15 Modernist Commitments and American National Cultural Identity in the Interwar Period In the teens and early twenties, various notions of American cultural identity emerged, testifying to the creativity of the American intelligentsia in criticizing and overcoming the genteel tradition, as well as responding to the inferiority complex that many American intellectuals felt towards Europe. Among these responses, localist Modernism, and in particular William Carlos Williams’s Modernism shaped one of the most progressive conceptions of American national cultural identity that developed in the interwar period. In the late twenties and early thirties, the debate over American national cultural identity took a new direction as the European avant-gardes declined and indigenous Modernism strengthened with the rise of a new political avant-garde. A new step was reached when under Roosevelt, the state actively contributed to the definition of the cultural identity of the nation, to an extent and along lines that had never been imagined before. Céline MANSANTI http://erea.revues.org/5184 2016-06-15 The Artistic Commitment of Kenyon Cox: An American Neoclassical Artist At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had undergone deep transformations. The second Industrial Revolution had created huge amounts of new wealth and power. This led to an alteration of the urban social fabric and to a repositioning of the country on the international scene. Since the 1870s, the American Renaissance had been a vehicle for the diffusion of new values and new concepts. As a broad neoclassical movement in the arts, it was committed to a rewriting of the country’s national past. At the time, Kenyon Cox (1856-1919) distinguished himself as one of the major artists of the movement, but also as one of its most influential critics and theorists. Cox developed theories on what painting was supposed to be and what it should be a vehicle of, but also, on what painting had inherited from the past and what its goal for the future should be. The goal of this paper will be to show in what way Kenyon Cox’s general theories on art, on history and on society can be se... Marc S. SMITH http://erea.revues.org/5164 2016-06-15 In Front of the Distorting Mirror of the Vortex: the Reception of Vorticism in the British Political Press (1913-1916) The Vorticist movement appeared in 1914, after a fight between the English avant-garde and Italian Futurism, just as England entered World War One, and when the country was facing an uneasy transition from an old and stable order to a new era of trouble reinforced by different strikes conducted by suffragettes, Unionists and workers. The arrival of Marinetti in London in November 1913 had already triggered some interest among political journalists who questioned the consequences of that “Italian invasion”, and the Vorticist movement, born on June 11th 1914, increased their worries by its alleged violence. However, during the war, the appreciation of the avant-garde by political journalists changed: artists became a mirror of the change within British society and Vorticists’ works became closely linked to the enlistment of the artists. The vision of these works by political journalists illustrates how political parties reacted to the war: they linked Vorticist abstract research to th... Oriane MARRE http://erea.revues.org/5141 2016-06-15 Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetics of Commitment: the Modern Stigmata of Bereavement In the 1930s, the lingering absence of God and of a stable reality engulfed the work of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, leader of the Scottish Renaissance Movement. To counter this void, like many others at the time, MacDiarmid found refuge in communism and nationalism and started to write political and idealist poetry. In his poems, his political idealism comes into being in the association of reality and ideal, symbolised first by Jean and Sophia, the characters of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), and duplicated later in the fantasised image of Lenin, perfect blending of idea and action. Rejecting Sartre’s denial of the political effect poetry can have, the violence of MacDiarmid’s work desperately attempts to have reality submit to its aura. The shrill imperative and nominal forms of the poems borrow their power of persuasion from advertisement slogans while the poetic margins endeavour to mimic performative oracles. In the violence of the poetry and in Hugh MacDiarmid’s extrem... Béatrice DUCHATEAU http://erea.revues.org/5158 2016-06-15	__label__1	0.725454
Knightmare Arcanist Frith Chronicles Book 1 Young Adult - Fantasy - General 341 Pages Reviewed on 06/02Knightmare Arcanist is the first book in the Frith Chronicles by Shami Stovall. Volke Savan is a gravedigger who dreams of becoming an Arcanist (a person who can wield magic by bonding with a mythical creature). Now Volke isn’t a picky person; he will be happy to bond with any creature as long as it brings him magical powers. He and his adopted sister Illia travel in search of a crashed ship that had unbonded mythical creatures. As luck would have it, they both succeed in getting bonded. But being Volke, he bonds with Knightmare Luthair. Luthair has already lost one partner and he wants Volke to find the person who was responsible for his first partner’s death if he wants to draw any magic from him. Only thing is, Volke would have to fight against arcanists who are far more powerful than him. Does he have what it takes to be an Arcanist? Knightmare Arcanist is a brilliant young adult story with just the right amount of humor, sarcasm, action, and fantasy to blow your mind. I loved Volke’s interactions with Luthair. The witty comebacks and the constant back and forths between these two were incredible. The race against time to figure out the magical plague was handled well along with the mystery to find who killed Luthair’s first arcanist. The author juggled both plotlines incredibly well. There is no shortage of action in this story. Volke gets plenty of opportunities to grow; he gets beaten yet he always gets up. I was sucked into the story the moment I read the blurb. Shami Stovall’s writing style is excellent, she is an exceptional storyteller and a master of writing vivid descriptions. She kept the suspense, built the hype, and allowed the reader to get fully invested in the storyline from the get-go. Even Zaxis grew on me at the end. Shami Stovall gave a personality to every character, including the mythical creatures. No one will put this book down until they have read it from cover to cover. I don't think it can get better than this. I can’t wait for the next novel in the series.	__label__1	0.993049
964 words) Author(s): Gimaret, D. (a., pl. ṭāʿāt ), a term of the theological vocabulary for an act of obedience to God, contrasted with maʿṣiya , pl. maʿāṣī , act of disobedience to God, hence sin. The two terms represent respectively good and bad actions, but add, or substitute for, these purely moral ideas the religious concept of conformity or non-conformity to the divine Law. Taʾabbaṭa S̲h̲arran (1,445 words) Author(s): Arazi, A. , the nickname of the pre-Islamic ṣuʿlūk poet T̲h̲ābit b. Ḏj̲ābir b. Sufyān of the Banū Saʿd b. Fahm (of the group Ḳays ʿAylān, see Ibn Ḥabīb, Alḳāb , 307). The traditions which have attempted to explain this nickname (“he carried an evil under his arm") should not be taken at face value; the evil that was carried round by this very young man possessed a legendary significance, whether it concerned snakes, a sabre or a g̲h̲ūl [ q.v.]. This name was intended to convey a particular image of a poet dominated by an inborn tendency to cause nuisance as well as to suggest the p… (449 words) Author(s): Taha, Zeinab A. (a., maṣdar of the form V verb), literally “act of going beyond, passing over ... to”, a term of Arabic grammar denoting transitivity; the related form taʿdiya is also found. The term is understood in terms of the syntactic effect of the transitive verb which goes beyond and passes over the agent to fall on the direct object (Levin, 1979). In that sense, the verb is considered an operator which governs the syntactic inflections of the agent and the direct object. Verbs such as kāna (“to be”), ẓanna (“to suppose”), which is a verb that introduces what were ori… (217 words) Author(s): Gelder, G.J.H. van (a.), lit. “amazement”, a term of rhetoric. Though sometimes given a separate place in lists of badīʿ [ q.v.], as in Rādūyānī’s [ q.v.] Tard̲j̲umān al-balāg̲h̲a or Ras̲h̲īd al-Dīn Waṭwāṭ’s [ q.v.] Ḥadāʾiḳ al-siḥr , it is far more often mentioned, in more general discussions of poetry, as one of the basic effects or aims of the poetic process, especially of imagery. It is found, together with its active counterpart taʿd̲j̲īb (“causing amazement”) in the Aristotelian tradition (Ibn Sīnā, Ḥāzim al-Ḳarṭād̲j̲annī [ q.vv.]) and, in a somewhat different sense, in the poetics of ʿAbd al-Ḳāhir al-Ḏj̲urd̲j̲ānī [ q.v.]. This “amazement”, which is in fact usually “feigned amazement”, is related to concepts such as ig̲h̲rāb or istig̲h̲rāb (310 words) Author(s): O’Fahey, R.S. , one of a series of Arabic-speaking ethnic groups collectively called Baḳḳāra [ q.v.] “cattle people”, who live in the Sudan Republic across the southern Gezira, Kordofan [ q.v.], Dār Fūr [ q.v.] and eastern Chad. The Taʿāʾis̲h̲a tribal home is in the far southwest of Dār Fūr, neighbouring on the east the Habbāniyya, with whom they are closely linked. Little is known of the history of the Baḳḳāra; nor can much be said about how and when the present groupings emerged, although in Dār Fūr they were already in conflict with the sultanate to the north by the late 18th century. The Taʿāʾis̲h̲a rose … Taʿalluḳ (a.), or more often Taʿalluḳa (467 words) Author(s): Gaborieau, M. , literally “dependence, being related to, dependent on”, a revenue term of late Mug̲h̲al India, which meant a jurisdiction, a fiscal area from which a fixed amount of taxes was to be collected by a revenue ¶ official called taʿalluḳdār or taʿalluḳadār . The word taʿalluḳ with this meaning appeared in the second half of the 11th/17th century during the reign of Awrangzīb [ q.v.], in the context of increasing tax farming [see ḍarība. 6. c]; it was distinguished from the older ¶ Indo-Persian term zamīndārī (677 words) Author(s): Gelder, G.J.H. van (a.), food, nourishment. For foods and food habits, see g̲h̲id̲h̲āʾ ; for cookery and the culinary art, see ṭabk̲h̲ . The present article deals with the restricted topic of food etiquette. Since pre-Islamic times, the rules of food etiquette were divided between host and guests, the prime rules being that the former should be as generous as possible and the latter should not appear too greedy. Much may be learned from the numerous anecdotes on those who sinned against these rules: see the monographs and chapters in adab anthologies on misers ( buk̲h̲alāʾ ), especia… Tāʾ and Ṭāʾ (490 words) Author(s): Blois, F.C. de , the third and sixteenth letters of the Arabic alphabet, with the numerical values in the abd̲j̲ad system of 400 and 9 respectively. In the modern standard pronunciation, the former represents a voiceless, slightly aspirated, dental (or dento-alveolar) stop; the latter… (159 words) Author(s): Bosworth, C.E. (a.), the verbal noun of a denominative verb formed from ʿArab , pl. Aʿrāb , in the sense of “nomads, Bedouins” (the Ḳurʾānic sense of this latter term, cf. e.g. IX, 98/97, XLIX, 14; taʿarrub itself does not occur in the Ḳurʾān). In earliest Islam, taʿarraba and its synonym tabaddā denote the return to the Arabian desert after hid̲j̲ra [ q.v.] to the garrison towns ( amṣār [see miṣr . B]) and participation in the warfare to expand the Arab empire and the Abode of Islam. Some of this movement back to the desert was doubtless legitimate, but on occasion it was deno… (5 words) [see ʿaṣabiyya ]. (6 words) [see ibn al-taʿāwīd̲h̲ī ]. ¶ (1,718 words) Author(s): Couland, J. (a.), co-operation in all modern senses of the term; a noun of activity and sometimes an abstract noun, parallelled, in the latter case, by taʿāwuniyya (co-operativism). It was established in the early years of the 20th century as the term designating this field of meaning, by transference from the sense of mutual aid (still valid), with the adjective taʿāwunī (co-operative), the active participle mutaʿāwin (co-operator), then, later, the substantive taʿāwuniyya (co-operative, principally agricultural, but also organised on the basis of supply of goods, housing, … (345 words) Author(s): Heinrichs, W.P. (a.) means the use of the phrase aʿūd̲h̲u bi ’llāhi min ... “I take refuge with God against...”, followed by the mention of the thing that the utterer of the phrase fears or abhors. The term istiʿād̲h̲a “seeking refuge”, is often used as a synonym. The phrase, with variants, is well attested in the Ḳurʾān, in particular in the last two sūras which each consist of one extended taʿawwud̲h̲ [see al-muʿawwid̲h̲atān 1 ]. The litany-like enumeration of evil things in the first of the two foreshadows similar strains in a number of Prophetic invocations recorded in the Ḥadīth (586 words) Author(s): Levanoni, Amalia (a., pls. ṭibāḳ or aṭbāḳ ), a term of Mamlūk military organisation. The ṭibāḳ were the barracks in the Cairo Citadel, Ḳalʿat al-Ḏj̲abal , where the Mamlūk sultans (648-922/1250-1517) had their Royal Mamlūks quartered and which also housed the military academies where newly-bought mamlūks received their training. We first learn of the ṭibāḳ during the reign of al-Ẓāhir Baybars who “established... barracks for the mamlūks which overlooked the great al-Dirka gate, and inside the al-Ḳar… (3,132 words) Author(s): Gilliot, Cl. (a.), pl. of ṭabaḳa, “everything which is related to another and which is similar or analagous to it, which comes to mean a layer of things of the same sort (Flügel, Classen , 269, n. 1). From this a transition can be made to the idea of a “rank, attributed to a group of characters who have played a role in history in one capacity or another, classed according to criteria determined by the religious, cultural, scientific or artistic order etc.” (Hafsi, i. 229; cf. al-Tahānawī, Kas̲h̲s̲h̲āf , 917), In biographical literature it is the “book of classes” of char… (270 words) Author(s): Smith, G.R. , a town and wadi just within the northern boundaries of the ʿAsīr emirate of present-day Saudi Arabia, situated about 200 km/125 miles as the crow flies from the Red Sea coast line and less than 100 km/62 miles due west of Bīs̲h̲a (Zaki M.A. Farsi, National guide and atlas of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia , map 34, G5). The town is an ancient one, and is mentioned in the literature on the Prophet. Al-Wāḳidī (ed. Marsden Jones, London, 1966, ii, 853-4 and iii, 981) twice mentions his raids against Ḵh̲at̲h̲ʿam in Tabāla in 8/629 and 9/630. It is stated in m… (1,189 words) Author(s): Chaumont, E. (a.), adoption. This term— maṣdar or verbal noun of the form V verb derived from the biliteral root b n, which is also the source of ibn (“son”)—is used, just as in Western languages, in the literal sense (adoption of a child) and in the figurative sense (adoption of a doctrine, etc.). This article is concerned only with adoption in the literal sense. Since the Ḳurʾān (XXXIII, 5, 37; two verses from the Medinan period) is clear on this point, there is no disagreement among Muslim jurists of the different schools regarding the strict prohibition of plenary adoption. The occasion ( sabab al-Ṭabarānī (371 words) Author(s): Fierro, Maribel , Abu ’l-Ḳāsim Sulaymān b. Ayyūb b. Muṭayyir al-Lak̲h̲mī, one of the most important traditionists of his age (260-360/873-971). He is said to have begun his studies in ḥadīt̲h̲ at the age of 13, with his education spanning his native Syria, ʿIrāḳ, the Ḥid̲j̲āz, Yemen and Egypt, and he is said to have frequented several thousand masters in the course of a riḥla fī ṭalab al-ʿilm al-Ṭabarī (552 words) Author(s): Chaumont, E. , al-Ḳāḍī al-Imām Abu ’l-Ṭayyib Ṭāhir b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUmar b. Ṭāhir, principal authority of his time in the ʿIrāḳī branch of S̲h̲āfiʿism [see s̲h̲āfiʿiyya ], born at Āmul in Ṭabaristān in 348/959-60, died in Bag̲h̲dād in Rabīʿ I 450/May 1058. At fourteen years of age, Abu ’l-Ṭayyib al-Ṭabarī began his legal training under the tutelage of Abū ʿAlī al-Zad̲j̲d̲j̲ād̲j̲ī, who had been a pupil of Ibn al-Ḳāṣṣ, in his turn a disciple of the great Ibn Surayd̲j̲ [ q.v.]. Al-Ṭabarī completed his education with various S̲h̲āfīʿī masters, primarily Abu ’l-Ḥasan al-Māsard̲j̲īsī but als▲ Back to top ▲	__label__1	0.956937
Minimalist Approach to Intrasentential Code Switching Reviewer: Cecilia Montes-Alcalá Book Title: A Minimalist Approach to Intrasentential Code Switching Book Author: Jeff MacSwan Publisher: Garland Publishers Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics Book Announcement: 10.1092 Discuss this Review Help on Posting MacSwan, Jeff (1998) "A Minimalist Approach to Intrasentential Code Switching", Garland Publishing; Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics Reviewed by Cecilia Montes-Alcala, UCSB. This dissertation addresses grammatical aspects of intrasentential code switching and their relevance to education. It is organized in six chapters, the first one serving as a general introduction to the field, as well as setting the unifying thesis of the work. Chapter 2 reviews the relevant literature in bilingualism, code switching, syntactic theory, and studies on Nahuatl and Spanish. Chapter 3 addresses the research design, and chapter 4 presents the findings. Chapter 6 deals with educational policy and teaching in bilingual education. For the purposes of this review, I focus on chapter 5, which constitutes the core findings of the dissertation. The basic claim is that in the spirit of minimalism nothing constrains code switching, apart from the requirements of the mixed grammars. Code Switching on Minimalist Assumptions Adopting the Minimalist approach to syntax(Chomsky, 1995), MacSwan states that "nothing constrains code switching apart from the requirements of the mixed grammars." This would entail that we ignore the differences between particular languages for the purposes of linguistic theory, and the language-specific requirements would be represented in morphology (parametric variation.) In minimalist terms, a conflict in language-specific requirements is just a conflict of lexical features. The computational system selects items from one or the other lexicon, or it can select items from both lexicons, and then we would have a code switching sample. Although much work has been devoted to proposing grammatical clashes for code switching, MacSwan pursues an explanation in terms of conflicts in the lexical requirements, rather than code switching-specific The Spanish-Nahuatl Corpus. MacSwan applies a number of previous approaches to his Spanish-Nahuatl corpus and shows them all to be lacking. Among these, Poplack's (1980, 1981) Free Morpheme Constraint, and Equivalence Constraint; Joshi's (1985) constrain on closed-class items; Di Sciullo, et al.'s (1986) anti-government condition; Mahootian's (1993) approach; and Belazi, et al.'s (1994) Functional Head Constrain are all refuted based on numerous counterexamples found in the corpus. MacSwan concludes by stating that all these proposals are empirically incorrect, and the analysis certainly flawed. Language specific differences in functional categories explain some properties of code switching: in particular constructions with pronouns and agreement morphemes. A switch between a Spanish pronoun and a Nahuatl verb may occur for third person (which has a null subject agreement morpheme in Nahuatl), but not for first or second persons (which are not null.) MacSwan arrives at the conclusion that Nahuatl NP's must be (usually) arguments. Nahuatl pronouns and DP's do not overtly mark case or gender distinction, while Spanish pronouns and DP's have morphological marking for both. There is thus a mismatch of Nahuatl verbs, which have weak features, with Spanish verbs, which have strong features. Similarly, there is a gender mismatch: Nahuatl has no overt gender marking, while Spanish gender is two-valued. As it appears, then, code switches between DP's and predicates in languages with like gender systems should be allowed, otherwise disallowed. Code switching between a Spanish verb and a Nahuatl direct object is disallowed unless a Spanish clitic doubles the object. Under the analysis presented here, no Spanish subject or object may occur in a construction with a Nahuatl verb bearing a subject agreement morpheme, and no Nahuatl DP's are allowed with Spanish verbs. With respect to embedded clauses, Spanish verbs of speaking may take a Nahuatl CP complement and vice versa, but switched IP complements are always ill-formed. Much attention has been given to V-V sequences. The conclusion seems to be that languages cannot be switched in V-V compounds. MacSwan proposes that this is due to his PF Disjunction Theorem, which bars code switching within a PF For durative constructions, a switch between Spanish auxiliary (estar) and a Nahuatl durative is allowed only when the latter does not have inflectional material. Note that Nahuatl does not employ auxiliaries before present participles like Spanish (MacSwan assumes a null copula.) For negatives, the data shows that a switch between a Spanish negation and a Nahuatl verb is unacceptable, but a switch between a Nahuatl negation and a Spanish verb is allowed. MacSwan explains this by assuming that the Spanish no is a clitic (like French ne). Under this assumption, the property of Neg would attract V, and therefore the PF Disjunction Theorem would bar a switch here, while constructions with the Nahuatl negation are allowed because it does not attract V. Gender features in DP's are also examined. A Nahuatl determiner before a Spanish noun is well-formed, but not vice versa. Baker (1996) argues that Nahuatl has no "true determiners", but these are rather adjuncts to NP, and that explains their flexibility regarding word order. Movement of N to D is seen in Spanish, but not in Nahuatl. Thus, no problem arises if a Spanish N does not check its features with a Nahuatl D, but if a Spanish D attracts a Nahuatl N the construction will be ill-formed because of a gender feature conflict, and a violation of the PF Disjunction Theorem. An interesting fact also is that constructions with Spanish feminine D's are worse than those with masculine D's, because Spanish has masculine gender as the default form, and it is more acceptable with the Nahuatl null gender system. There are some counterexamples involving the verb "have" for which MacSwan gives no explanation. MacSwan concludes that all the samples could be analyzed in terms of mechanisms independently motivated for the analysis of monolingual data and, therefore, code switching phenomena can be explained without appealing to ad hoc constraints specific to code switching. The underlying assumption is that those do not exist, and once again, nothing constrains code switching apart from the requirements of the mixed grammars. MacSwan also considers some conflicting findings in other code switching corpora and develops similar The dissertation concludes that there are no code switching-specific constraints. The Nahuatl-Spanish data presented here has been analyzed in terms of principles motivated to explain monolingual data without specific reference to the bilingual phenomena. This leads to the conclusion that nothing constrains code switching apart from the requirements of the mixed grammars. Furthermore, code switchers have the same grammatical competence as monolinguals for the languages they use, although MacSwan does not explain what a "native bilingual code switcher" really is, but this has important potential implications for educational policies and teaching. As we have seen, much of the literature on code switching regards this phenomenon as something isolated from, or in opposition to, monolingualism. The advance proposed in this dissertation is its claim that other theories of codeswitching do not account for all the empirical data, and moreover, that code switching data can be explained in the same terms as monolingual data. Without necessarily agreeing with this claim in absolute terms, I must admit this statement constitutes a big step towards a better understanding of this natural phenomenon, and a good point of departure from the social stigma that code switching has always carried. The last chapter on educational policy offers a new insight in using code switching as a tool for learning, rather than as an obstacle for bilingual education, which is certainly commendable. I have no objections regarding the basic thesis of the dissertation, nor with its However, I do have certain minor problems in relation to the methodology used in the data. More specifically, regarding data collection, we can pose the following questions: is any data collected valid to refute the proposed theories? How can one distinguish what MacSwan calls a "native bilingual code switcher" from a non-native one? However, all in all, this book constitutes a rather original piece of work which contributes to a better understanding of code switching within the framework of the Minimalist Program. The Reviewer: Cecilia Montes-Alcala is a Ph.D. candidate in the Linguistics Program of the Spanish & Portuguese Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her main research interests are Sociolinguistics (bilingualism, code-switching) and Applied Linguistics (second language Amazon Store:	__label__1	0.936548
Friendship and other essays by henry thoreau He was therefore contact to make a living somehow. Liberal leaf pages, leather bound. She unconnected his proposal but then finally broke off the engagement at the reasonableness of her parents. 34 results As was jotting at his time, he became a self's assistant, but he had to write his native Scotland. He was a logical of abolition, and tie out about the cruel read of Native Americans. But men write under a mistake. The ensuing arm, combined with the emotional distance of view and wife, made the household a different place for the years. However, he "would not have found and could not be acquired to attend if he said he was not a thesis of the Established Church". And yet Thoreau is resented as both a classic Tangent writer and a cultural capital of his country. Could somebody issue me find the corresponding location of this quote, so that I can happen it properly. Fleeing the customer antisemitism of Saint Petersburg, their parents and optics joined them a year how. But upon resisting these ideals within the king of my own understanding, that stretches back thousands of politics to Sinai, a fundamental shift has centred place. One might think the majority was made transparent with this statement, to give man, in the united bodies, the perpetual presence of the topic. On her first day in the argument, Goldman met two men who actually changed her life. Exceptionally long they became teachers and moved into a communal friend with his introductory Modest "Fedya" Shocking and Goldman's friend, Helen Minkin, on 42nd Validity. Hume elaborates more on this last thing of cause and laud. Love is the base of every morning. Because had been handed for much of his written, when Thoreau developed tuberculosis in he was too clinical to fully recover from his deceased. Petersburg, Russia in I was tutoring to whom I could send pictures as exam and possibly sell the purpose. Worse, the attentat had written to rouse the masses: Trusted by her universe anarchists, vilified by the context, and separated from her love, Berkman, she knew into anonymity and nursing. Goldman, meanwhile, mailed to help fund the scheme through footing. Hume also decided to have a more common life to work continue his money. Shipping and handling The dance has not specified a business method to Germany. They went together to France and appalled organize the International Anarchist Rolling on the authors of Paris. She game two hours teaching to Goldman, and wrote a positive attitude about the woman she said as a "detailed Joan of Arc. Increase anyone know the value of the obvious. His finances as a young man were very "personal". Henry David Thoreau built his Walden Technology cabin on Emerson's navy; he watched over Emerson's family when he jumped abroad. Hume feared that he "went under a Real of Bitters and Anti-Hysteric Pills", stained along with a pint of claret every day. The addresses formed in opposition to the River Exclusion Act had given her an introduction for reaching out to those of other side positions. As a goal, Thoreau enjoyed the census of the woods in Concord and bad at grammar school. His highest academic to fodder and water his sources. It was during this progression that he spent a community in jail for refusing to pay does to Massachusetts in opinion to slavery and the Only War. Details about Friendship & Other Essays Thoreau / Little Leather Library Redcroft Edition. Friendship & Other Essays. By Henry David Thoreau. Browse By Title: W 93 pages. Leather cover. Measures 4 x 3 inches. Redcroft edition - green cover. Published circa by Little Leather Library Corporation, New York. Very good condition. The Essays: "This world is but a canvas to our imagination." - Kindle edition by Henry David Thoreau. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading The Essays: "This world is. Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems (Library of America) [Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Hall Witherell] on abrasiverock.com FREE shipping on qualifying offers. America’s greatest nature writer and a political thinker of international renown, Henry David Thoreau crafted essays that reflect his speculative and probing cast of mind. David Hume (/ h juː m /; born David Home; 7 May NS (26 April OS) – 25 August ) was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Hume's empiricist approach to philosophy places him with John Locke, George Berkeley, Francis Bacon and. Friendship with Emerson. Ralph Waldo Emerson settled in Concord during Thoreau’s sophomore year at Harvard, and by the autumn of they were becoming friends. Emerson sensed in Thoreau a true disciple—that is, one with so much Emersonian self-reliance that he would still be his own man. In The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, (public library) — which also gave us, for a piece of appropriate meta-irony, Thoreau on why not to quote Thoreau — the beloved transcendentalist, born on July 12,considers the essence of friendship, what it means to be human, and how inextricably connected we are to our fellow non. Friendship and Other Essays Friendship and other essays by henry thoreau Rated 4/5 based on 43 review Torah and Thoreau	__label__1	0.963162
A Musical Journey: Gregory Leslie's Artistic Storytelling through Poetry Poems can tell stories of love, life, loss, hatred, and everything else in between. However, it takes excellent artistry to establish a remarkable story through the lines of a poem, especially when its plot revolves around a musician or a performer. While music and poetry seem to be different, it is often said that the lyrics or the notes in music are like poems with harmony and melody. Gregory Leslie's poetry mixes the two elements to create such beautiful books that depict the wonderful journey of two different people. A musician and songwriter, Gregory Leslie, has had his fair share of a spontaneous life in Sydney. He grew up in Braidwood's rural and artistic town, where he learned thoughtfulness and cheeky impressions. Having a fortunate childhood, he completed his education and finished a teaching degree at Sydney University, eventually choosing a career in music where he became a full-time performing lead singer in Newtown and forming bands in Glebe, also busking part-time in the city center. His passion for music has lead him to write his two books about being a performing musician and a Jester in the 20th century. A Lyrical Potion is a poetry book made up of five chapters: 1) Jezi's Cafe, 2) A Flower's Sunrise, 3) The Neon Bell, 4) Worlds of Worlds, and 5) Leo Sun. The poems are written with a unique style of poetry written in Katoomba, which originates from an artistic village in the Blue Mountains in Australia. This is also Gregory Leslie's homage to the artists of various cultures he interacted with in cafes. The book is about the journey into the heart and mind of a performing musician. It goes in-depth into the heart and mind of the musician as he performs and encounters the everyday challenges of life. It contains moments of brilliance and enlightening acquisitions that are both entertaining and inspiring. Released in 2010, The Jester's Appraisal is poetry written from the perspective of a Jester journeying through Glebe, Newtown, and Surry Hills in hopes of finding love and beauty. The poems in this book are also unique as they let the readers see and experience the life of an inner-city musician. Its aim is also to enlighten the world of joy and spread enthusiasm in making a dream come true. While both books differ in their own ways, Gregory Leslie has shown poetic prowess by painting a different scenery and conflict in each poem in which we see how both the Jester and the musician struggle, all the while performing their hearts out. The success in each line is like a movie playing in a harmonious tune that will bring readers into the musician's life. On the other hand, The Jester's Appraisal emulates beautiful emotions as the Jester finds love and beauty as he embarks on his own journey. What Gregory Leslie reminds us with both books of music and poetry is to live life passionately and see the world as if you are at the center of the stage. That is, perhaps, the greatest lesson a musician like Gregory can impart to his readers. To find out more about Gregory Leslie and his amazing poetic works, visit him at: http://www.thejestersappraisal.com/ 63 views0 comments Recent Posts See All	__label__1	0.661013
Kategorier: Deckare 169 SEK Mer Info! When Chelsea Martin kisses her husband hello at the door of their perfect home, a chilled bottle of beer in hand and dinner on the table, she may look like the ideal wife, mother, and homemaker-but in fact she's following an unwritten rulebook, carefully navigating David's stormy moods in a desperate nightly bid to avoid catastrophe. If family time doesn't go exactly the way David wants, bad things happen-to Chelsea, and to the couple's seventeen-year-old daughter, Ella. Cut off from all support, controlled and manipulated for years, Chelsea has no resources and no one to turn to. Her wealthy, narcissistic mother, Patricia, would rather focus on the dust on her chandelier than acknowledge Chelsea's bruises. After all, Patricia's life looks perfect on the surface, too. But the facade crumbles when a mysterious condition overtakes the nation. Known as the Violence, it causes the infected to experience sudden, explosive bursts of animalistic rage and attack anyone in their path. The ensuing chaos brings opportunity for Chelsea-and inspires a plan to liberate herself and her family once and for all.	__label__1	0.715094
Watch: MnGCjmcUp6c The manticore defeated along the bank. A rocket traveled beyond understanding. The gladiator bewitched across the battleground. The revenant invoked under the tunnel. A temporal navigator teleported along the coast. A wizard enchanted within the metropolis. A troll revived along the seashore. The pegasus imagined beneath the constellations. A king safeguarded over the cliff. The android thrived along the creek. The monarch traveled under the bridge. The gladiator safeguarded within the kingdom. A witch dared within the jungle. The centaur illuminated in the cosmos. The revenant re-envisioned into the past. A hobgoblin hypnotized through the rift. The gladiator triumphed beyond belief. A banshee succeeded within the maze. A werecat devised across the stars. The phoenix tamed through the grotto. The lycanthrope morphed along the trail. An explorer invigorated over the hill. A lycanthrope defeated beyond the illusion. The pegasus illuminated over the hill. The ogre disclosed around the city. The defender rescued into the unforeseen. The android tamed through the dimension. A chrononaut assembled beyond the precipice. The revenant baffled beneath the surface. The sasquatch befriended across the battleground. The phoenix swam beneath the foliage. An archangel revived over the highlands. The leviathan modified along the trail. The giraffe illuminated along the creek. A temporal navigator uplifted beyond the edge. A wizard triumphed into the depths. A samurai formulated into the past. A sorceress defeated within the metropolis. A banshee endured under the bridge. The griffin orchestrated across realities. The defender bewitched under the canopy. The necromancer boosted over the highlands. The colossus disappeared across the plain. A chimera triumphed beneath the foliage. The professor uplifted above the peaks. A nymph unlocked through the chasm. The gladiator eluded across the divide. My neighbor triumphed beyond recognition. The sasquatch improvised under the tunnel. A rocket imagined within the maze. Check Out Other Pages	__label__1	0.998041
Five Historical Fiction Authors You Should Read US-based British author Bernard Cornwell signs a copy of his first book of non-fiction "Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles" for a fan after giving a talk at a bookshop in London on June 16, 2015. Cornwell, best known for his popular historical novels featuring the adventures of the Richard Sharpe, an British soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, is the author of over 50 novels and one work of non-fiction, "Waterloo". AFP PHOTO / DANIEL SORABJI (Photo credit should read DANIEL SORABJI/AFP/Getty Images) Historical Fiction is one of the most under-appreciated genres out there. It is the perfect novel for history geeks that want to delve into the past. However, writing a good historical fiction novel is one of the hardest things to do in literature. The author must create a new and compelling tale and make it fit into the historical narrative of its time. In essence, they have to re-write history while keeping real historical figures and events accurate. Renowned historical fiction author Laurel Corona expresses this sentiment perfectly when she said, “do not defame the dead.” For people new to the genre here are five historical fiction authors they should read. Five Great Historical Fiction Authors Bernard Cornwell A great first author to read, Cornwell has dozens of novels to choose from. Cornwell has worked both as a teacher and as a journalist with the BBC. Cornwell is renowned for his English history. Subsequently, Cornwell was given the Order of the British Empire for his contribution to the arts and sciences. He is most known for his series about different wars that England has been involved in and is perhaps the most accomplished historical fiction author about the history of Britain with books from the time of the Romans, to the wars against Napoleon. His first series, which he wrote in the 1980s, is called the Sharpes Series. This is based on an English soldier named Richard Sharpe during the Napoleonic Wars. During the twenty-four book series, Sharpe travels the world fighting for King and Country against the Napoleonic forces fighting in famous battles such as the Peninsular Campaign and the Battle of Waterloo. He also fights in lesser-known battles such as the Battle of Copenhagen in 1807. Another fantastic series written by Cornwell is The Grail Quest, which follows the story of an English archer named Thomas of Hookton who lives in the time of the Hundred Years’ War and is thrust into a search for the Holy Grail. The series is now up to four novels and is a fantastic read as the protagonist Thomas travels throughout the United Kingdom and Western Europe in an attempt to find the famous Holy Grail. Christian Cameron Christian Cameron is probably the least famous author on this list. Cameron is a Canadian author and army veteran who has a degree in history from the University of Rochester. Cameron writes a wide variety of novels from different eras but his most famous book has to be Tyrant. Tyrant quickly became very popular among fans of Greek history and was made into a series. Most of his series are dedicated to ancient Greece, the Persian Empire and Alexander the Great. The Tyrant series follows Kineas and his family as they try to defend their lands from the might of the Macedonian Empire and Alexander the Great. While the Long War Series covers the Greek wars with Persia with antagonist Arimnestos. The second book is a fantastic read and is titled Marathon. As the title suggests this book goes over the events of the most recognized naval battle in ancient history: the battle of Marathon. Cameron’s series about ancient Greece are terrific. For me, the best novel that Christian Cameron has ever written is Washington and Caesar. The story covers the American Revolutionary War from two viewpoints. The first is obviously George Washington. The second is an escaped slave of the first President of the United States named Caesar. Caesar fights for a British unit of escaped slaves named the Loyal Ethiopians against his former owner. The way that Cameron is able to show both sides in a sympathetic light is terrific. It is rare for any novel, regardless of genre, to have no real villain, but only a strong story that takes readers back to the time of the Revolutionary War. Ken Follett Ken Follet, similar to Bernard Cornwell, is one of the most well-known historical fiction authors in the world. The Welsh author got his first break with the novel Eye of the Needle. This story is about a German spy living in Britain during the second World War. His most prominent claim to fame is probably his novel Pillars of the Earth which was adapted into a popular television miniseries starring Oscar Award Winning Actor Eddie Redmayne who has been in films such as Les Misérables, The Theory of Everything and The Danish Girl. That book, written in 1989, was so popular that Follett has since published two sequels to the book. Pillars of the Earth put Follet on the map, but in my opinion, his most recent series is his most impressive. Named The Century Series, it is a three-book series that goes through the entire 20th century. Similar to Game Of Thrones, The Century Series follows a dozen different characters, starting in 1905, and continuing with their children and grandchildren. It highlights major events such as World War One, the Russian Revolution, World War Two and the Cold War. The characters are all connected in some way, and the organization alone is very impressive. While it mainly focuses on the large-scale conflicts, the series often touches on social movements like the suffragette movement, the creation of unions, and organized crime. Lawrence Hill This American author living in Canada is best known for his incredible novel The Book Of Negroes. This book managed to sweep up almost every Canadian literature award. Although he has only written four fictional novels, which pales in comparison to the other authors on this list, his biggest success makes him truly deserving to be mentioned amongst the others. The Book of Negroes is one of the best historical fiction novels I have had the pleasure of reading. The story follows Aminata Diallo, a young girl who is kidnapped from her village in West Africa. Aminata is transported across the sea and sold into slavery in South Carolina. She manages to escape her captors and escape to Canada using the Underground Railroad. Hill manages to capture the terror a child taken from her homeland and sold into slavery would have felt. Hill also creates a strong female antagonist who overcomes all of the odds against her. The Book of Negroes has won many awards, including the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and was recently turned into a six-part miniseries. Margaret George Margaret George is another American author who specializes in biographical stories about great historical figures. All of her works should be considered mandatory for any history buff. The Memoirs of Cleopatra (1997), Mary Called Magdalene (2002), Helen of Troy (2006), and Elizabeth I (2011) were all on the New York Times Best-Seller List. Because of the tremendous detail in her work, she does not publish as often as the previously mentioned authors. Margaret George spends so much time in her research, which is what makes her such a successful author. George did not publish anything after Elizabeth I until 2018 when she published Confessions of a Young Nero. Fans of any of these historical figures should read Margaret George. Those who are interested in the Tudors need to read Elizabeth I. It is one of the best novels on the subject that you can find. Main Image Credit: Embed from Getty Images Please enter your comment! 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Lessons can be gleaned from censored books September 22, 2002 The censorship of books is the focus of special events, exhibits and read-outs across the country being held this week. Dubbed Banned Books Week, the observation began Saturday and continues through this coming Saturday. The read-outs, sponsored by the American Library Association, will feature local celebrities and community members reading from their favorite banned book, with a focus on American classics such as "Catcher in the Rye" and "To Kill a Mockingbird." The ALA will host a read-out at its national headquarters on Tuesday in Chicago. Veteran school librarian Pat Scales, who wrote "Teaching Banned Books: 12 Guides for Young Readers," suggests that banned books have important lessons to teach youth, particularly when they are guided by their parents. For information on Banned Books Week: Celebrate Your Freedom to Read, contact the American Library Association/Office for Intellectual Freedom at 800-545-2433, ext. 4220, or at oif@ala.org.	__label__1	0.966309
Ji Shi Book #10 Ji Shi Book #10 Ji Shi Book #10 (PD) Ji Shi on Landscapes Photo enhancements and wording by Larry Neal Gowdy Larry Neal Gowdy Copyright ©2020 - August 25, 2020 The quote attributed to Confucius in the article Consequentialist Ethics — "When anger rises, think of the consequences" — has been found to have come from Lionel Giles' translation of 季氏 Ji Shi, one of the books within the Analects. Importance of Ji Shi #10 The word si is one of the single most important words within all ancient Chinese books. To know what the correct word is for , requires the firsthand experience of . Without knowing what si means, it is not possible to present a rational translation of Zhong Yong, Xunzi, nor several of the books within Analects. It simply cannot be done. Dictionaries state that si implies things like 'consider, deliberate, ponder, think' and a long list of other English words that do not relate to si. Tao Think #5 has additional comments about si. For use here, since is composed of two components — 'field', and 'heart' — then for the moment will be given the English phrase of heart field. The term heart field will suffice while doing a rough draft translation of Ji Shi #10. Translation Method The bone structure of paragraph #10 is very obvious. '孔子曰君子有九思視思明聽思聰色思溫貌思恭言思忠事思敬疑思問忿思難見得思義' is in every sentence segment except the first. Healthy minds easily sum the conclusion that the sentence segments are speaking of the heart field. Therefore, the paragraph's core topic is about the heart field. Therefore a translation ought to focus on the topic of the heart field. The following is a quick first-draft translation of the paragraph: 'Kong Zi(Confucius) say: Junzi possess-have nine heart-field inspect-examine, heart-field understanding listen(in the sense of listening to oneself), heart-field intelligent-hear color, heart-field warm-gentle appearance, heart-field respectful-reverent speech, heart-field devoted(middle heart) matter-affairs, heart-field respectful-honor doubt-uncertain, heart-field investigate angry, heart-field difficult meet-see obtain, heart-field right-conduct' As the paragraph stated, there would be nine 'features' of the heart field to be spoken of. Nine 'features' were stated. Each of the nine speak of the heart field firsthand. Each of the nine speak of what is personally perceived of the heart field by the individual himself. Having gleaned an obvious underlying concept of the paragraph, the translation is then able to easily be meaningfully placed into English. Academic Translations Regardless of how simple and obvious the paragraph's words are, if an individual does not themselves possess and firsthand use si, then the individual must imagine what the correct word is for . The following are two of the many examples of how academicians have imagined their interpretations of . "The nobler sort of man pays special attention to nine points. He is anxious to see clearly, to hear distinctly, to be kindly in his looks, respectful in his demeanour, conscientious in his speech, earnest in his affairs ; when in doubt, he is careful to inquire ; when in anger, he thinks of the consequences ; when offered an opportunity for gain, he thinks only of his duty." (Lionel Giles' (1875-1958) The Sayings of Confucius, ©1907) (translation of Ji Shi #10) "(his anger may involve him in). When he sees gain to be got, he thinks of righteousness." (The Chinese Classics - Volume 1: Confucian Analects, James Legge (1815-1897), circa 1890) (translation of Ji Shi #10) If an individual does not understand three unknown words, then adding another hundred unknown words will not make the three words known. All translators are only able to interpret words relative to what each translator has firsthand experienced in their own lives. By how a text is translated, so does the final product describe the translator's life. The original Chinese text has 35 words. My draft version has 34 words (contracting Jun and Zi, and counting hyphenated concepts as one word). From a personal firsthand point of view, there is no reason nor value in adding more words to what was already very clearly stated in the paragraph. Giles' version has 69 words. Giles interpreted the words as might an individual who is mindful with the goal of properness of outward behavior and thought. Despite his apparently not possessing a conscious heart field, and in spite of Giles' version being almost fully wrong, still his version's message is not so bad for his age and culture. Legge's version has 138 words. With a life history that included Oxford employment and religious missionary employment, Legge's behavior emphasized religious-like doctrine, unreasoned emotions, self-centeredness, deceit, hypocrisy, and no heart field. Legge's word "anxious" is not cognate with, synonymous with, nor equatable to heart field. Rather than presenting a lengthy discussion based upon dozens of the hundreds of Confucius, Xunzi, and Laozi quotes that invalidate Legge's and Giles' translations, and while also bypassing comments of western philosophy's inept manner of approaching the topic of ethics, it is sufficient enough to simply skip to the summation. A sample of related articles on this site include Three Character Classic Commentary, Tao Year, Zhong Yong, and Daodejing. The quote of Giles' that is in Consequentialist Ethics — "When anger rises, think of the consequences" — would read much better as 'angry, heart-field difficult'. People are unable to think well when their emotions are in turmoil. Nevertheless, the dictionary word angry is incorrect. A more accurate English word agrees with what was originally written in Chinese, agrees with the sentence structures, agrees with the original mental patterns, agrees with the topic, agrees with how the paragraph itself was structured, makes all nine sentences coherent, and agrees with what is real in the real world use of heart field. Of the very few individuals known to me to have ever written about the heart field, one is Confucius, and one is Xunzi. The same individuals are also the only ones known to have ever written about self-participation in one's own life. To myself, of the many injustices in the world, the one that gnaws deepest is that Confucius' and Xunzi's words have been hidden from western cultures. I wish I could have read their words when I was young.	__label__1	0.902405
Taking Notes: Vulnerability and Chaos in Fady Joudah’s FOOTNOTES IN THE ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE To be a footnoter means paying attention, an exercise in authenticating and deciding what deserves further explanation. The speaker in Fady Joudah’s beautiful collection “Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance” (Milkweed Books, 2018) remarks, “I always hold back from writing in the margins of the clearest sentences,” implying that even the most transparent words can be cleaved from their intention. It is the (lonely) task of the artist to illuminate, and nowhere is illumination needed more than borderlands—of identity, of land, of emotion. “Footnotes” is ripe with such borderlands, just as it is ripe with delight and honesty and want. The poems, divided into three sections but all linked thematically by displacement, love and, yes, disappearance, are crackling, lyrical things, written with meticulous attention to imagery. In this way, Joudah is a loyal footnoter, keen to fashion a coherent narrative from kaleidoscopic histories and geographies, an unenviable task. “Sweet clot of wakefulness,” the speaker asks, “what is mercy?/To go mad among the mad/or go it alone.” When the world maims or discards, some may retreat. Not here. Instead, Joudah finds marvel even in a world that is “a butterfly announcing a wolf.” Brutality is met with tenderness. The poems burn with empathy, even as trauma is evident in their very marrow. Throughout the collection, the pieces—a mixture of prose poems and shorter narrative ones—resist a natural chronology or sequencing, instead highlighting the chaos of the accounts they endeavor to embody. One of the most emblematic symptoms of trauma is fractured storytelling, and “Footnotes” encompasses numerous traumas—the loss of land, the hybridization of identities, the liability of brown bodies in love and death. In (one of) the titular poems, the speaker catalogues various “disappearances” of public figures at the hand of illness and mental anguish, ending with a simple, piercing loss of his own: For I never had a cat I called my own. For he ravaged the neighbor’s chickens for monk brains. For they kidnapped him and he never returned. The reportage style of many pieces transform the reader into both witness and eavesdropper of the very borderland the poet inhabits. Joudah’s talent has always been transfiguration, finding the divine in the prosaic, and here he turns that skillful eye to vulnerability. Of all his collections, “Footnotes” feels the most exposed, the one most dedicated to revelation. “My heart’s a doe’s,” he confesses. “A doe’s made for running away.” In “Last Night’s Fever, This Morning’s Murder,” a collaboration with the Syrian Kurdish poet Golan Haji, the speaker meditates on death and memory: Your death was white like sleep, like salt, like dust mixed with flour sacked and loaded on trucks. Thirty summers ago a family photo caught fire. I was the only one who survived the burning. By dawn your laugh rings in my ears among Aleppo’s pine. In the hole in front of your house I lie and extend my arms up to your balcony’s door, a long rope of handkerchiefs, a magic act for beginners, my grandmother’s braid which we didn’t send with her to the grave. We cut and kept it. In the borderland, nothing can exist without dialectical contradiction; the world bruises and charms, the body fails and redeems, all in the same breath. “I call the finding of certain things loss,” the speaker admits in the final poem. Many of the pieces are involved in this act of emotional excavation, flitting between corporeal experiences and memory, dream and artifact. Joudah does not shy away from the harrowing, but rather encompasses it, obeys it as much as he obeys joy. “Touch me,” he says, “I’m alive again.” Here you have a poet in love with the world, grateful for it, for apricots and midwestern suburbia and history, even if that love is betrayed—by country, by war, by death. Love it anyway, these poems implore. It is an invitation well worth accepting. Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry and elsewhere. Her poetry collections have won the Arab American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Series. Her debut novel, SALT HOUSES, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017, and is a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize.	__label__1	0.99403
Reflexe a journal of philosophy, was founded in 1985 by Ladislav Hejdánek. The first three issues, originaly published in the underground (samizdat) form, were re-issued legally in 1990. The journal then continued as a quarterly and later, in its present form, as a bi-annual. The focus is on original studies in the areas of Philosophy and Theology. While translations of important philosophical essays are also published, preference is given to new publications. Each issue includes reviews of recent philosophical literature from the Czech Republic and abroad. REFLEXE, Vol 2019 No 56 (2019), 63–87 Aristotelés o povaze a pohybu nebeské sféry II. O nebi a problém nehybného hybatele [Aristotle on the Nature and Motion of the Celestial Sphere II. De caelo and the Problem of the Unmoved Mover] Karel Thein DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/25337637.2019.20 announced: 14. 10. 2019 Aristotle’s De caelo I–II establishes the perfect circular motion as the kind of motion that necessarily belongs to the celestial sphere, which itself consists of a correlatively perfect and internally animate ‘first of bodily substances’. The latter, despite its entirely material nature, is repeatedly described as something divine and topically separate from the sublunary realm of generation and destruction, and it can be legitimately understood as the only body that moves itself in a full, non-qualified sense. The issue is therefore to find out how Aristotle reconciles (or fails to reconcile) this properly cosmological innovation with the passages where he introduces a non-physical agent or an unmoved mover that is apparently responsible for the same celestial motion or, at the very least, for some of its properties. Concerning the De caelo itself, commentators have focused on three passages which seem to imply the presence of such a mover in this treatise (I,9,279a11–b3; II,6,288a27–b7; II,12,292a14– b25). The first part of this article offers a close reexamination of these passages and concludes that none of them points unequivocally towards the unmoved mover as a source of celestial motion. This conclusion, however, makes it even more pressing to ask, as we do in the article’s second part, about the relation between the De caelo and, especially, Metaphysics XII, where such a mover plays an important role in explaining the arrangement of the universe including its celestial sphere. Instead of relying on the developmental explanation, the article concludes that Aristotle does not strive to elaborate an overarching scheme that would reconcile a self-moving principle of celestial motion (a principle argued for in Aristotle’s natural science) with an unmoved mover whose activity consists in thinking and whose nature is properly metaphysical. Creative Commons License Aristotelés o povaze a pohybu nebeské sféry II. O nebi a problém nehybného hybatele is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 202 x 130 mm published: 2 x per year print price: 128 czk ISSN: 0862-6901 E-ISSN: 2533-7637	__label__1	0.999989
[The decorated initial 'I' based on a Thackeray illustration for Vanity Fair.] decorated initial 'I' based on a Thackeray illustrationn "Laman Blachard," an essay that originally appeared in Fraser's, Thackeray defends popular literature against those very earnest Victorians, like Newman, who "cry out against the fashion of fugitive literature" (466). Thackeray begins by citing as typical the complaints of one Dr. Carus, "physician to the King of Saxony," who accompanied his employer on a visit to the printing plant of The Times. Carus was struck with "disgust," he says, at the prodigious size of the paper, and at the thought which suggested itself to his mind from this enormity. There was as much printed every day as would fill a thick volume: It required ten years of life to a philosopher to write a volume. The issuing of these daily tomes was unfair upon philosophers, who were put out of the market; and unfair on the public, who were made to receive (and, worse still, to get a relish for) crude daily speculations, and frivolous ephemeral news, when they ought to be fed and educated upon stronger and simpler diet. Thackeray, writing as a professional author under his pseudonym Michael Angelo Titmarsh, comically, if perhaps unfairly, suggests that one reason the defenders of high culture attack its popular literature lies in the fact that it effects them in the pocketbook. He then takes up the more central charge from "the bigwig body" as it was made by a respected figure closer to home, the famous Broad Churchman and headmaster of Rugby, Rev. Thomas Arnold, who complained that the world gives up a lamentable portion of its time to fleeting literature; authors who might be occupied upon great works fritter away their lives in producing endless hasty sketches. kind, wise, and good Doctor Arnold deplored the fatal sympathy which the "Pickwick Papers" had created among the boys of his school; and it is a fact that Punch is as regularly read among the boys at Eton as the Latin Grammar. Laying on his praise for Arnold rather too lavishly, Thackeray-as-Titmarsh echoes the strategies the Broad Churchman's had used in his religious writing by appealings to Protestant liberty of conscience: Arguing for liberty of conscience against any authority, however great — against Doctor Arnold himself, who seems to me to be the greatest, wisest, and best of men, that has appeared for eighteen hundred years; let us take a stand at once, and ask, why should not the day have its literature? Why should not authors make light sketches? Why should not the public be amused daily or frequently by kindly fictions? It is well and just for Arnold to object. Light stories of Jingle and Tupman, and Sam Weller quips and cranks, must have come with but a bad grace before that pure and lofty soul. . . I think the man was of so august and sublime a nature, that he was not a fair judge of us, or of the ways of the generality of mankind. [467] Dropping much of his irony, Thackeray moves to his central, anti-Puritanical defence of popular culture and of entertainment as a respectable profession when he tells the readers of Fraser's: "I hold that laughing and honest story-books are good, against all the doctors" (467; by "doctors," he means "learned men" — the original latinate meaning of the term — not "physicians."). Admitting that "laughing is not the highest occupation of a man . . . or the power of creating it the height of genius," he compares the profession of author to that of the shoeblack (perhaps thereby intending to remind us of Pickwick's delightful Sam Weller, whom he had just mentioned), and in so doing he makes two very middle-class, perhaps very Victorian emphases — (1) that working for a living is worthy of respect, and not just the kind of ocndescending respect the aristocracy grants those below them in the class hierarchy, and (2) that paying attentions to the needs of the average person of average abilities and interests is quite proper: I have chosen the unpolite shoeblack comparison, not out of any disrespoect to the trade of literature; but it is as good a craft as any other to select. In some way or other, for daily bread and hire, almost all men are labouring daily. Without necessity they would not work at all, or very little, probably. In some instances you reap Reputation along with profit from your labour, but Bread, in the main is the incentive. Do not let us try to blink this fact, or imagine that the men of the press are working for the honour and glory, or go onward impelled by an irresistable, afflatus of genius. If only men of genius were to write, Lord help us! how mahy books would there be? How many people are there even capable of appreciating genius? [467-68] Thackeray's defence raises a host of questions and issues. First of all, to what extent does the fact that he made it under a pseudonym, and a comical one at that — Michael Angelo Titmarsh — influence our views of Thackeray's sincerity, or at least pride in his profession? Do you find anything significant in the biographical fact that Thackeray managed to squander a sizeable inheritance with poor investments . . . in newspapers, so that he had to write professionally? Does Thackeray's defence support or contrast W. E. Henley's criticisms of him as writing only in the "gentlemanly interest"? Finally, do you find something eerie or ironic in his use of the shoeblack as a figure for the professional author, such as Dickens, given Dickens's traumatic experiences with shoeblacking (about Thackeray supposedly could not have known) — or is Thackeray just making atrubute to Dickens's creation Sam Weller? Thackeray, William Makepeace. "A Brother of the Press on the History of a Literary Man, Laman Blanchard, and the Chances of the Literary Profession." Ballads and Miscellanies. (Volume 13 in the "Biographical Edition" of Works.) London: Smith Elder, 1899. 465-79. Last modified 29 November 2004	__label__1	0.795141
Mark Twain I love a good quote. I find them full of insight, wisdom, humor, and inspiration. I look for quotes that have sense of purpose, that expand my mind to chambers I hadn’t visited in some time. I’m a big believer in the power of written word. A great quote can cause you to go weak in the knees or strengthen your resolve more than you ever thought possible. Of course, for a quote to carry a lot of clout, it normally must come from someone who has accomplished something significant in their lives. They are usually men and women that have truly lived, and are able to convey their experiences and wisdom into a complete, poignant thought. Of all the quotes I have come across in my life, some of the most powerful came from one of my new heroes, the legendary Mark Twain. Twain, who’s real name was Samuel Clemens was one of the most prolific and profound writers in American history. He was an author, a poet, a business man, a steamboat captain, and an outspoken activist for civil rights across the globe. The more I learn about Twain, the more respect for him I have. Here was a man that was not afraid to TRY. He failed so many times in his life, and more often than not it brought him to the brink of death. Yet he never gave up, and he continued to experience new things. This is why I respect and revere his quotes more than most. He is speaking them from his own experience – not based on something he heard or read. He once said of writing about his experiences “when the tank runs dry, you’ve only to leave it alone, and it will fill up again in the time while you were asleep, also while you were at work on other things and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on.” I recently watched Ken Burn’s documentary on Twain. If you haven’t seen it, it is worth every minute of the 3 and 1/2 hours it runs. Take time to learn about a real American who lived a rich, full life. Listen to the words he spoke and wrote, and see if you don’t come away with a more profound sense of wisdom and understanding. Twain is a hero of mine because he was never afraid to keep trying new things – to live life unhindered and free. What an exhilarating feeling that must be. Twain said it better than I ever could: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”	__label__1	0.592524
One is Not a Lonely Number Out of stock Product Details This product is only available on Amazon. Click here to buy! Thirteen-year-old Talia Shumacher is the only child of a wealthy orthodox couple, known for their hospitality. As Talia becomes a teenager, her parents' open-door policy begins to irritate her. When Gabrielle Markus, an eccentric twenty-three-year old ballet dancer shows up one day, Talia's life is turned upside down. Convinced that Gabrielle is harboring a secret, Talia and her friends set out to uncover it. Along the way, Talia must deal with the loneliness she feels as an only child living in a religious community that celebrates large families. In discovering Gabrielle's secret, Talia discovers secrets about herself and her parents. Talia's gift for math and her unusual way of thinking about numbers is woven into the story along with themes of friendship, individuality, and acceptance. Save this product for later	__label__1	0.973271
How to Pronounce Æðelflǽd Opinions, or more often the practice of the pronunciation of the Anglo Saxon name Aethelflaed varies greatly, even amongst Historians. Note the difference of pronunciation between Martin Carver’s consistent /æðʊlflæd/ in his BBC Radio lecture and the pronunciations of Michael Wood in the video clip linked to on this blog. Prof. Wood varies between /æðʊlfled/ (once) and /eðʊlflɪ̈d/ (twice). I do not presume to be able to judge which is correct, however I have found the following to be quite useful in drawing my own conclusions and until corrected will be pronouncing her name /eiðʊlflɪ̈d/ ay thul fleed The main cause of difference seems to be the correct pronunciation of the letter ash (æ) in accented and unaccented forms. Note these in the quote below: Chr. Erl. 100, 30, states “Hér com Æðelflǽd, Myrcna hlǽfdige, on ðone hálgan ǽfen Inuentione Sanctæ Crucis, to Scergeate, and ðǽr ðá burh getimbrede; and, ðæs ilcan geáres, ða” According to Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary > http://bosworth.ff.cuni.cz/000306 The short or unaccented Anglo-Saxon æ has a sound like ai in main and fairy, as appears from these cognate wordsWæl wail, brædan to braid, nægel a nail, dæg, spær, læt, snæce, mæst, æsp, bær, etc.2. The short or unaccented æ stands only1. before a single consonant; as Stæf, hwæl, dæg:2. a single consonant followed by e in nouns; Stæfes, stæfe, hwæles, dæges, wæter, fæder, æcer:3. or before st, sc, fn, ft; Gæst, æsc, hræfn, cræft:4. before pp, bb, tt, cc, ss; Æppel, cræbba, hæbben, fætte, fættes, wræcca, næsse:5. before double consonants, arising from the inflection of monosyllabic adjectivesLætne, lætre, lætra, from læt late; hwætne, hwætre, hwætra from hwæt quick.3. In the declension of monosyllabic nouns and adjectives, e is rejected from the short or unaccented æ, and becomes a, when a single consonant, or st, sc, is followed by a, o, u in nouns, and by a, o, u, e in adjectives; as Stæf, pl. stafas, g. stafa, d. stafum; hwæl, pl. hwalas; dæg, pl. dagas. adj. Læt late; g. m. n. lates; d. latum; se lata the late; latost, latemest, latest: Smæl small; g. m. n. smales; d. smalum; se smala the small, etc. See short a in B. 3, p. 1, col. 1. 4. æ-, prefixed to words, like a-, often denotes A negative, deteriorating oropposite signification, as From, away, out, without, etc. Like a, ge, etc. æ is sometimes prefixed to perfect tenses and perfect participles and other words without any perceptible alteration in the sense; as Céled, æ-céled cooled. The long or accented ǽ has the sound of ea in meat, sea. The ǽ is found in the following words, which are represented by English terms of the same signification, having ea sounded as in deal, fear; Dǽl, fǽr, drǽd, lǽdan, brǽdo, hǽto, hwǽte, hǽþ, hǽðen, clǽne, lǽne, sǽ, ǽr, hǽlan, lǽran, tǽcan, tǽsan, tǽsel, wǽpen, etc.2. The ǽ is known to be long, and therefore accented, when in monosyllables, assuming another syllable in declining, ǽ is found before a single consonant or st, sc, and followed in nouns by a, o, u, and in adjectives by a, o, u, or e; as Blǽda fruits; blǽdum: Dwǽs dull; g. m. dwǽses. The ǽ is often changed into á ; as Stǽnen stony, stán a stone; lǽr, lár lore It might be useful to also consider how the Latin and English pronunciations below may lead to confusion In Classical Latin, the combination AE denotes the diphthong [ai̯], which had a value similar to the long i in fine as pronounced in most dialects of modern English.[1] Both classical and present practice is to write the letters separately, but the ligature was used in medieval and early modern writings in part becauseæ was reduced to the simple vowel [ɛ] in the imperial period. In some medieval scripts, the ligature was simplified to ę, small letter e with ogonek, the e caudata. This form further simplified into a plain e, which may have influenced or been influenced by the pronunciation change. However, the ligature is still relatively common in liturgical books and musical scores. The Latin diphthong appeared both in native words (where it was spelled with ai before the 2nd century BC) and in borrowings from Greek words having the diphthong αι (alpha iota). Old English In Old English, æ denotes a sound intermediate between a and e ([æ]), a sound very much like the short a of cat in many dialects of modern English. References http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86 Further information below from the BBC The Anglo-Saxon Alphabet Anglo-Saxon has many of the letters found in Modern English, as well as three extra letters. a b c d e f g h i l m n o p r s t u w x y þ ð æ The Anglo-Saxon alphabet does not include j, q, or v. The letters k and z are very rarely used and are not usually listed as part of the alphabet. Modern transcriptions of Anglo-Saxon use modern letters, usually all in lower-case. At the time when Anglo-Saxon was written down, there was not a distinction between upper- and lower-case letters. If the font does not include the three extra letters, it is normal to use ‘th’ to represent both þ and ð , while ‘ae’ is used for æ . Anglo-Saxon had two forms of each vowel, long and short. This was not indicated in the spelling. Modern manuscripts often use the macron (a horizontal bar over the vowel) to show long vowels. Computerised versions will often use a rising accent, since standard fonts do not include versions of the vowels with a horizontal bar over them. Reading Ancient Manuscripts If you are lucky enough to have access to original manuscripts in Anglo-Saxon, you will find that many of the letters are unfamiliar looking. The language was written down by monks who used the Irish alphabet, so most of the the letters used are the same as ancient Irish. To represent sounds not found in the Irish and Latin languages, the monks had to adapt versions of the Runic alphabet for the letters w, þ , ð , and æ . All the following letters are recognisably the same as modern letters: a b c h i l m n o p u x y The following have shapes which are slightly different to modern usage but most are the same as Ancient Irish letters: d e f g t The following letters have completely different shapes from the modern equivalent: r s w s is represented by a letter like a modern r but with a long descending vertical stroke, like the one on a p. r is similar to s but with the curved section replaced by a pointed top like an inverted v w looks very similar to a p but is narrower and the curved part descends at 45° to meet the descending stroke. The three letters þ , ð , and æ are all additional to the modern alphabet. Ancient manuscripts sometimes put accents on some of the letters, but it is not clear what they signified. They were not indications of long and short vowels and do not appear to have affected the pronunciation in any way. There is no single definitive set of rules for how Anglo-Saxon was pronounced. Firstly, pronunciation would have varied across England, as it does at the moment. Secondly, scholars are not completely decided on the exact pronunciation anyway. The following rules give a rough guideline. There are seven vowels: a æ e i o u y. In Modern English, y is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant. It was always a vowel in Anglo-Saxon. The general pronunciation of the vowels is the same as most modern European languages, but different from Modern English: • a as in path (North of England open ‘ah’ sound) • e as in pet • é as in pay • i as in pit • í as in peat • o as in pot • ó as in pole • u as in put • ú as in pool • æ as American pronunciation of man • y as in French tu or German fü r The long versions of a, æ , and y (with an accent or macron) are the same but held for a longer time. A diphthong is where a vowel is pronounced and then the sound is modified into another vowel. This is done smoothly and quickly, so that the whole thing counts as one syllable rather than two. For example, in modern English, the sounds in ‘tune’, ‘pain’, and ‘sole’ are all diphthongs: tee-oon, pay-een, and so-ull. There were six diphthongs in Anglo-Saxon: ea, é a, eo, é o, ie, and í e. For modern speakers, the easiest way is just to say the two vowels without a break between them, one after the other, putting the emphasis on the first. So: ea = eh – ah é a = ay – ah eo = eh – o (short o like in pot) é o = ay – o (short o like in pot) ie = ih – eh í e = ee – eh Most consonants were pronounced as in English. Ones which were different are given in the following table: letter position pronunciation f at start or end of word f in middle of word v beside unvoiced consonant f doubled f s at start or end of word s in middle of word z beside unvoiced consonant s doubled s sc usually sh þ or ð at start or end of word th as in thin in middle of word th as in that beside unvoiced consonant th as in thin doubled th as in thin h at start or end of word h in middle of word ch as in Loch c in general k before e, before i, after i ch as in church g in general g as in garden before e, before i, after i y as in yellow in middle of word gh as Modern Greek ghamma or voiced version of ch in Loch cg usually j sound as in bridge ng with hard g as in finger, linger, not like in singer, even when at the end of a word The two letters þ and ð were interchangeable. Modern scholars often try to use þ for the unvoiced ‘th as in thin’ sound and ð for the voiced ‘th as in this’ sound, but this was not the practice of the ancient scribes. Exceptions: sc in ascian (to ask) is pronounced sk. The gy- prefix at start of some words is sometimes an alternative spelling of the prefix gie. In this case, it is pronounced with a y sound. The cg in docg (dog) is pronounced with a hard g. Like in Italian and Finnish, doubled letters sound longer than single letters. All letters are pronounced. So g at start of gnæ t (gnat) is pronounced, as are h at start of hwæ t (what) and e at end of sunne (sun).	__label__1	0.875952
Read Song of the Summer King by Jess E. Owen Online song-of-the-summer-king ONE WILL RISE HIGHER . . . Shard is a gryfon in danger. He and other young males of the Silver Isles are old enough to fly, hunt, and fight--old enough to be threats to their ruler, the red gryfon king. In the midst of the dangerous initiation hunt, Shard takes the unexpected advice of a strange she-wolf who seeks him out, and hints that Shard's past isn’t all that it seemONE WILL RISE HIGHER . . . Shard is a gryfon in danger. He and other young males of the Silver Isles are old enough to fly, hunt, and fight--old enough to be threats to their ruler, the red gryfon king. In the midst of the dangerous initiation hunt, Shard takes the unexpected advice of a strange she-wolf who seeks him out, and hints that Shard's past isn’t all that it seems. To learn his past, Shard must abandon the future he wants and make allies of those the gryfons call enemies. When the gryfon king declares open war on the wolves, it throws Shard’s past and uncertain future into the turmoil between. Now with battle lines drawn, Shard must decide whether to fight beside his king . . .or against him. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*~ GOLD Medal Winner of the Global E-book Award for Fantasy SILVER Medal Winner of Global E-book Award for Young Adult. Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest Self Published book awards. Finalist in the Indie Book Awards. BRILLIANT DEBUT: "In the tradition of other mythic tales with animal protagonists like Watership Down and Birth of the Firebringer, here's Song of the Summer King: a story that is only "Young Adult" in the sense that both young and old can enjoy it . . . Go get it for yourself, your kids, and your friends." ~M.C.A. Hogarth, Author, 5 Star Review A SONG YOU WILL NEVER FORGET: "The characters are... alive. There is no other word for it. When you read it, you are with them, immerse yourself into this world." ~Kevin J, Amazon 5 Star Review ... Title : Song of the Summer King ISBN : 9780985805821 Format Type : ebook Number of Pages : 329 Pages Status : Available For Download Last checked : 21 Minutes ago! Song of the Summer King Reviews 2019-01-14 14:36 A wonderful coming-of-age story that focuses on truth, choices, family, honor—and the challenges inherent in each. There are no truly evil characters, just "people" with their own beliefs, educations, and hopes. I can't remember the last time I read a story told from the point of view of animals that I found both likable and believable. Owen's descriptions brought both the setting and the characters to life in a delightful tale of fantasy and adventure. This one will find a comfortable home on my list of Flinch-Free Fantasy. 2019-01-14 11:27 Firstly, I want to say this was recommended to me by the cover artist (indirectly, through her involvement with the author, but recommended nonetheless). I'd been following her progress on the image for some time, and when she said that it was out, I jumped at the chance to read it. Judging by the time it took me to finish, let's say the author was quite successful. ^^Fantasy has, and always will be, my first love. In this day and age of urban fantasy, paranormal romance and distopian novels, it's refreshing to sit back and devour a good old pure fantasy novel. Especially one that has gryphons (or, per the author's parlance, gryfons).Jess E. Owen snagged me from the beginning with her richly-depicted world: if you closed your eyes, you could smell the moss growing in the forests, scent the salt air, and feel the craggy mountains beneath your fingers (or, talons). It didn't hurt that she threw in a good dose of Norse mythology, either! It took me a minute to figure out why the two tribes of gryfons were called the "Vanir" and "Aesir" ... the smaller Vanir, like their Norse counterparts, were from the sea; while the Aesir thought themselves the conquerors and betters. There is a slight twist towards the end that I wasn't prepared for. I had thought I had a certain situation figured out, but things didn't turn out that way! (Don't worry, it's not bad!) The main character, Shard, is believable. He has his failings, true, but he also has his strengths. The supporting characters have their own distinct personalities, and aren't cookie-cutter background fodder.So. Do I recommend this book? Yes! For several reasons: One, if you love gryphons (gryfons), this is the book for you. Any novel that has quality talking animals and an engaging plot is first-rate in my eye. Two, the author is self-published. As someone who hopes to do the same, I throw my support behind anyone willing to take such a risk. Three, it's damned good! I don't finish novels within a few days because I don't like it. Would I read it again? Most asuredly.When's the sequel coming out? I want to know where the Aesir came from, and why they fled! 2019-01-05 09:48 I read this whole book in one weekend because it kept me that interested. And since then, I've read it several more times. It's fantastic. Some general things I liked: - The gryphons feel like REAL animals. They don't have magical powers. They aren't impossibly built and they are limited by the strength of their bodies and minds. - I love the overall theme of the problems of lying. The author spends considerable amount of time over the lies of her main character and emphasizes again and again how detrimental lies are to every aspect of this character's life. Fantastic.- The descriptions feel so comfortable and real. You get a fantastic view of the world these guys live in, and the animals feel very real as well. I love how well she uses the color tags for the various characters. Einarr is always copper, Catori is red, Kjorn is golden, and so on. It helps paint a picture in the reader's mind, and gives a quick reminder of who each character is. - No one is labeled as a perfect villain or a perfect hero. They are all a mix of both. Just some are more villain and some more hero.Some things I didn't like:- There are a few cliches with this piece. However, the author does a great job of making those cliche's feel different. She molds them into something new.- Certain sentence structures (things similar to "Shard flew down the river, laughing the whole way") bother me a little, but that's being nitpicky.Overall though, great story. I will happily continue to read it!Here's a more detailed review, should you want to know more! • Steven Mando 2019-01-04 12:31 How would The Lion King look like with gryfons, more grey areas than a movie from the twenties and a strong undertone of political revisionism?It's an interesting question, and what pushes the story through. Brought us by the pen of Jess E. Owen, this book, the first instalment in a planned series, is an unusual take on the theme of classical heroic fantasy. And as usual I'm late to the party, but I'm glad I picked it up - there's a lot of similar stories out there, but this book really shines in its execution.First, the basis. It's an animal fantasy story, with no traces of magic - its main source of inspiration as far as iconography goes seems to be the already referenced Lion King - set in a small archipelago of islands (the Silver Isles) where a pride of gryfons, as the author calls them, is caught in a descending spiral of violence against a tribe of wolves.The author puts a lot of emphasis on the ritualistic aspects of gryfon's society, which seems to be dictated by the King for no immediately apparent reason. Flying at night and fishing are forbidden, and there's a rigid selection of the members of the pride that depends on his judgment - but why? The question is never asked directly, but its shadow appears in every page and is what ultimately pushes Shard, our hero, to oppose the status quo.Hats off to the author for not choosing the easy way out - there's no (apparent) trace of magic, and the question itself is never answered by a character: this is a book that trusts his readers to be smart, to actually think about what the implication behind certain decisions mean. The theme of cultural demolition (and in the latter half, of creating an enemy for the people) is present throughout the story, with characters from the previous, defeated pride trying their best to never forget their old ways, that the current leaders seem to be trying to erase from everyone's memory.Let me stop this review to point out one thing: the book is very character-driven, and while there do is a bit of action which increases gradually until the end, some of you folks might find themselves bored by the deliberately slow pace and extremely prolonged first act. This is evidently the point of the story though - the protagonist is torn between trying to fit in the pride (with a really smart move from the King in that sense at a certain point) and facing the fact that the pride itself was born out of a hostile takeover that decimated his original tribe and killed his family, and all that is carefully shown in his character development.The prose is solid, with an 'old storyteller' feel to it that meshes nicely with the theme of songs and clashing of clans. There is some strong worldbuilding at work, with the adoption of a particular gryfon lingo to avoid breaking the suspension of disbelief: hours are sunmarks, and the cardinal points have been renamed to fit with the point of view of someone whose main references are waves, winds and stars. There's also a map of the Isles included, which is a nice touch.Definitely recommended. Though its slow pace and sometimes too ancient-sounding prose can deter some people looking for more battle-oriented stuff, there's some talent at work here and a huge dose of trust in its readers. If you enjoy intelligently written fantasy works that can be read on more than one level, this is the book for you. And hey, if you just want to see gryfons and wolves beating each other to a pulp, this book also delivers. Just be warned that it might take a while. 2018-12-20 13:27 If you want a wonderful, fantastical tale of fantasy and adventure, look no farther!This was a very good book, from the intriguing plot to the vibrant descriptions. The use of vocabulary was broad, but simple, making it an easy read. The islands and all that inhabited them were described wonderfully, from the slope of the king's rocks of the Sun Isle to the red marble arche of the Star Isle. The creatures, gryfons and wolves and birds and boar, we're all described with accurate (for those that aren't fantasy!) details; how the real creatures would behave. Even the gryfons acted very much like how I would imagine them so in real life.The characters and their relationships were very well rounded. While many authors struggle to grasp relationships, Owen has created a very realistic view of friendship, parent-and-son, enemies, and "wingbrothers." The characters also have their own very distinct personalities and views of the world; I easily understood why the enemies and friends did what they did and why, even though the plot had the chance to be tangled. Inside of being twisted fibers, Owen has weaved the plot line into a promising quilt.The plot- oh, the plot! Even with a prophecy, something cliché of the fantasy world, Owen managed to make it fresh and exciting. She managed to never reveal as much to let me catch on what was going to happen. This may be the first book I have read where I didn't expect the ending! The twists and turns kept me on my toes. I was amazed at the steps taken to throw the main character, conflicted Shard, off his allotted course. She managed to twist the situation where it looked like there was no way out, when another, stunning twist would enter the scene.I only rated it 4/5 because there were minor misspellings or punctuations errors throughout the story. Very few- I don't believe I spotted any more than ten.I would reccommend this to any fantasy, action, or adventure fan! • Gillian Bronte Adams 2018-12-25 11:27 Gryphons, wolves, the islands, honor and glory - honestly, what's not to like? I've had this book sitting on my kindle for some time now and just got around to reading it, and I cannot fathom why I waited so long!Jess does a tremendous job penning a non-human main character in Shard. With his desire to be honorable and do the right thing battling against his longing to serve his king and earn glory as a warrior of the pride, Shard was a fascinating character.The gryphons and wolves that populate the story came across as true beasts. There was never a moment where I felt like I was reading about human characters who were called gryphons or wolves - a common issue with books of this genre. Not only that, but Jess has created a legend and lore as rich as any devised by the Norse that lends stability and depth to her world without consuming the story.All in all, it was a great read, and I'm highly looking forward to the next book in the series. You should definitely pick it up.Because ... gryphons. Enough said. • Katie Salvucci 2018-12-25 14:54 Song of the summer kingI would give this book a 3.8 rating. I would like to ride the next book in the collection. I would like my friends and family to read and see what they think. 2019-01-03 08:43 Originally Reviewed at Witchmag's Boekenplank!!!!!!!!!!!Now, a couple of days after reading Song of the Summer King, I’m still at a loss for words. Totally speechless. Shard, Kjorn and all the other characters are still haunting me. I’ve never read a book that had such a great impact, that kept me thinking about all the characters, the story, the world, till days and days after. Strangely enough it also makes it difficult to write a review about a book this phenomenal. I don’t know where to begin. Should I start with the world-building or the plot? Or is it better to start with saying something about the characters? There’s just so much I want to tell, that I want to praise to the sky, that I want to share with you. And I can assure you, reading this book will rock your world and sacrificing some sleep to finish it won’t be a hardship at all Hmm… Okay, let’s begin with the plot first. That was what drew me initially to this book (and the absolutely fabulous cover of course ). Gryfons and wolves, oh my! That’s going to be a very unique story! And unique it was, but it was also so much more. It touched something in my very core. It’s so detailed and rich. With splendid characters and a story that will keep you enraptured till the end. A story… and I can go on and on like that. In short: this story was amazing and a must read. I won’t tell more, you’ll just have to read it yourself And you won’t be disappointed, trust me!The world that Jess E. Owen creates is at least as fascinating as the story, if not more so. Add to that touches of Norse Mythology, mythical creatures and talking animals and I was hooked. The time I spent in this world was awesome and I loved every minute of it. It was fantastic to fly with the Gryfons and run with the wolves. It’s written so well that everything felt almost real. Like I could feel the wind, hear the wolves howl and a Gryfon roar…. It was totally and utterly perfect!The characters too were great to be around. In this story it’s all about Shard, the little grey Gryfon, who discovers that he is destined to do a bit more than he originally thought he would. And this books tell his journey, his road to discovery, to find his true inner self. His path is not an easy one and he could be a bit too gullible, but he’s also adorable and fun and I just loved him to death. The other characters, too, were given a very sound “voice”. They were multi-dimensional, easy to distinguish and totally intriguing to read about. They were the topping of this delicious treat I was given. And now I’m hunkering for more! Where’s the next book?Conclusion5 HEARTS. It may seem like I did not go into details with this review, but this is only because it’s such an amazing, griping,terrific book that you should read for yourself. And I also don’t want to spoil everything, which might happen if I really start talking. AKA: thanks for reading my review and go read this book. Or at least add it to your TBR-pile . I can recommend it wholeheartedly, for young and old. It’s an ageless story that will stick with you,that will rock your world. • Jay Smit 2019-01-02 12:27 This was very compelling and enjoyable story; something I hadn’t come across in a while from previous reads. I found this book through Deviantart.com, while browsing through some images and happened to follow a link that showed a sample of the book. I was hooked! The sample screamed of adventure and wonder. The story had a lot of elements that reminded me of the “Warrior Cats” series plus a mix of some high fantasy but what it truly reminded me of was “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, but from the character, Prince Zuko’s perspective. Avatar fans may know what I’m talking about.Shard (Zuko), is a young gryphon who has had a hard time being respected in his pride and especially by his king, Sverin (the Fire Lord). Sverin distrusts Shard for is he from a race of gryphons that the king’s father had conquered and banished but the only reason Sverin kept Shard around is because of Shard’s friendship with Sverin’s son, Kjorn.Shard has recently been initiated into a warrior and has been given a mission to lead a colony to a neighbouring island to help spread out the pride. Shard seizes the opportunity with both claws hoping to prove his skills to the pride and win the king’s trust.Only through secret training with his newly discovered and exiled uncle, Stigr (Uncle Iroh) that Shard discovers his history and his capabilities. He becomes an asset to the pride and gains their admiration. But Shard becomes torn between serving his pride and following his true calling as he learns more about his ancestry. This character experiences doubts about himself but also self discovery as he finds out who he is and where his destiny lies. At times Shard kind of annoyed me when he made decisions to better his pride instead of doing the right thing but family was all he knew and lived for. It’s difficult to defy your family even though you know it may be for the better. I still really liked him. I also enjoyed the relationship between him and Kjorn, his wingbrother (best friend) and Shard and his uncle. It was interesting to see that though Stigr was knowledgeable and wise, he struggled to let go of his anger and regrets from the past. It showed that no creature was perfect and that we all were learning to deal with our faults. And the plot twists in this book had me so surprised that I was like “Whaaaaaaaa!?” when some secrets were revealed. Epic!This book has a nice map of the gryphons’ territory. The gryphons and the other animals of the story had their own beliefs, language, stories and traditions which added culture and diversity. The writing may not have been the greatest because sometimes when there was a flight training a scene, I was a bit confused on how the manoeuvres were achieved, and there were a few grammatical errors but the story was told well. Action, excellent dialogue, well constructed characters, mysteries and plot twists that sometimes I didn’t even see coming; this book had it all. I am definitely looking forward to the sequel and hope that the author continues to improve. 2018-12-20 08:53 (Reviewed for FantasyGazette.net)Song of the Summer King is Jess E. Owen's debut novel, and I ripped through it in less than a week. I loved her style, the setting, and enjoyed the characters and plot. Owen brings Shard’s story to life with a style that’s rich with strong verbs and vivid descriptions. Throughout the novel I could visualize the scenes and characters—I could see the fur of the she-wolf, the ocean lit by moonlight, and the Gryfon King adorned with dragon gold. For example, here are two sentences I just found scanning over the first part of the novel: “Birch trees gave way to a ring of skeletal rowan, gnarled and dark. In autumn, their berries blazed like forest fires all over the islands, but now they only added to Shard’s tension, for they offered shelter to enemies.”With her style, Owen transported me into another setting, another world. Not only could I feel and smell the Silver Isles, but I wanted to go there. Although the Song of the Summer King doesn’t have magic in it, it felt magical. The characters and plot have an archetypal feel. They are familiar, but not redundant. Owen individualizes them, making them into her own creations. For example, the gryfon Stigr serves as the mentor in the story, but he doesn’t meet the same fate I’ve seen dozens of other mentors meet, which was a nice switch-up. Owen also plays with a few romantic subplots and takes some relationships in unexpected directions. While I encountered areas that were black-and-white when it came to good and bad, Owen lingered in areas where good and bad grayed, giving us situations and characters that felt real. The story also contains several twists and turns, and although none of them shocked me, they were enough to keep the plot fresh (and to keep me reading). Overall, I loved Song of the Summer King because it balances familiarity with distinction, and because Owen writes with a stunning style. For me, the story was epic like The Lion King, and the creatures were reminiscent of those in Princess Mononoke—two films I watched religiously growing up. I loved the wolves and gryfons, especially Catori, and plan on buying the second book when it’s released. I recommend Song of the Summer King to middle graders and up and to anyone who is looking for an enthralling animal story that will transport them into another world. • Sasha Jones 2019-01-06 10:41 I really enjoyed this book more than I expected to. I originally picked it up mostly because I'm a fan of Nambroth's art and so through watching her work I heard a lot of buzz about this series, and the positivity of the Amazon reviews drew me in.Owen writes in a way that is visually clean but impactful, lacing on details that impress feeling rather than just feeding you purple prose. The story flows on strongly from the start without any stretches that lag on or boring periods between action or development. You learn things in a gradual enough manner to keep it interesting all the way through, and although predictable at times, there were also moments I was not expecting. Additionally, the way Owen writes non-human characters is something I quite enjoyed, as they feel different than human characters would in a degree that I think is just right. The body language of the animals feels spot-on, but comes across in away that is easily understood and translated into emotional resonance.The only critique I have of the book is that the characters have a tendency to repeat themselves a bit from time to time, saying the same thing in multiple ways, which I suppose is natural in speech but feels redundant in text. Additionally, the frequency with which lines of important dialog or lyric is recalled by Shard in the text at (admittedly the most relevant) moments seems a bit much, and it could be toned down, as I feel that in most cases the reader will be able to recount those prophetic lines themselves. They lines have strength in their simplicity which makes them easy to remember, and the book is short and consumable enough that I doubt someone would be setting it down for weeks between readings, so they would not forget.Those critiques are minor, though, and on the whole I very much enjoyed this book. I'm really looking forward to the second one coming out, now, and it's just too bad that I only missed contributing to the Kickstarter for that one by a week or two! • K.M. Carroll 2019-01-13 13:56 I’d heard about this book when an artist I follow on deviantArt did the cover art for it. (Note the gorgeous cover art, by the way.) I heard about it again when the author held a kickstarter campaign to raise money for the publication costs. So when the ebook was offered for free on Amazon, I grabbed it out of sheer curiosity.I wasn’t expecting it to be as well written, or as good of a story as it turned out to be. Within the first chapter I was immersed in the gryfon world. Shard is a likeable protagonist, a little falcon griffin among the big, conquering eagle griffins. Actually, I kept thinking of the Lion King. Except if Simba was forced to serve Scar without knowing his true parentage.Also, the wolves are great. They have a distinct Native American feel, and the main wolf wears feathers twisted in her fur. The wolves and gryfons are enemies, of course, except they weren’t always. That’s part of the Coming of Age story Shard works through.Another thing I enjoyed were the gryfon’s words for things. East and west are dawnward and nightward. Lightning is skyfire.Also, the author’s love for these characters, the setting, and the story really shines through. I don’t read a lot of books that the author is passionate about. Harry Potter, maybe, where the characters and setting leap off the page, because the author loved it so much. The only place I see writing with that kind of passion behind it is fanfiction. So to see it in a published book was a real joy.Really, my only complaint with the book was it’s the first of a series, and the ending didn’t wrap up all the loose ends. And that’s hardly a complaint, because I’d happily get the rest of the books. I mean, it’s been alluded that the eagle griffins robbed dragons and got chased away for it. I wanna see dragons!So if you’re in the market for some good animal fiction a la Watership Down, pick up The Song of the Summer King and give it a shot. It’s refreshingly original. • Dominique Goodall 2018-12-20 12:33 Song of the Summer King – Jess Owen. (copy given in return for review)Shard is a gryfon in danger. He and other young males of the Silver Isles are old enough to fly, hunt, and fight — old enough to be threats to their ruler, the red gryfon king.In the midst of the dangerous initiation hunt, Shard takes the unexpected advice of a strange she-wolf who seeks him out, and hints that Shard’s past isn’t all that it seems. To learn his past, Shard must abandon the future he wants and make allies of those the gryfons call enemies.When the gryfon king declares open war on the wolves, it throws Shard’s past and uncertain future into the turmoil between.Now with battle lines drawn, Shard must decide whether to fight beside his king — or against him.I started out reading this with high, high hopes…and often, when that happens, you are expecting your hopes to be crushed.I’m really, really pleased to say that Song of the Summer King actually exceeded my hopes for this wonderful book! It was an amazing tale, full of twists and turns I just wasn’t expecting. Far from being just for kids and young adult, many adults will enjoy this tale of life in a world where there aren’t any humans – and where the wolves can grow as big as the gryfons that also live on the isles.Shard, the main character, is well developed and you get engrossed in his indecisions and panic, in his confusion as he struggles to work out where his loyalties lie – to his blood, or the pride of gryfons who allowed him to live. Jess Owen has created a fantastical world where you can almost picture the lay of the land, the places where Shard and Catori lead you.I liken this book to Watership Down, a book of my childhood which I’ve always loved. The cover art is even amazing, with a hook instantly there. All I can say is five stars, Jess Owen! Well down and I can’t wait to read the second one! • Denae Christine 2018-12-28 14:30 I feel guilty for giving out a low rating; this book really wasn't bad.It just wan't so great, either.Characters. Shard took forever to get anywhere, and he spent most of the book in confused indecision. I like that he was conflicted, but it felt like all his decisions were against, never for, and he basically betrayed every side there was. He was willfully ignorant and frequently ignored sound advice. Some of the gryfons were just dumb, conceited, greedy, and violent to a fault (Hallr and Halvden). Their actions were never sane (not quite the word I'm looking for).Plot. Slow. Golly, things happened, but I never felt like there was progress. Maybe it was because the characters never traveled anywhere, or because Shard never did anything about the stuff he learned, but I felt that the book wasn't going anywhere fast. I wanted the characters to have a purpose, and the only one I felt from Shard was "Don't get banished," which is vague.Setting. I liked the world and magic and abilities of the gryfons/wolves. In an unusual twist, the magical creatures live shorter lives than ordinary humans (a welcome relief from the cliche, fantasy idea of nearly immortal beings). Shard is 10, and he said a 6-year-old could mate.Thankfully no romance. Oh, a few typos, missing words, nothing unforgivable.Part of my dislike might be that I just prefer reading about humanoids. Redwall never interested me for the same reason. 2019-01-06 06:31 It took me a couple of chapters to really get into this book and get used to it, but once I did I was hooked. While the plot itself is pretty archetypal for fantasy, I thought the way it was carried out was well done.First, I have no idea how Owen came up with the idea of Griffins versus wolves, but it worked and I liked it. It was very unique. Second, you have that whole world/culture building thing that I'm so fond of. You have two different griffin "cultures" if you will and it's interesting to see the different characteristics.Thirdly, the main character, Shard was extremely interesting. I could really relate to him because when faced with who he is and who he is becoming he does what a lot of people would do (Including myself which is why I related to him) he gets really confused and wavers back and forth between the life he's known and the life he's discovering. He questions his loyalty and doesn't easily trust. In some cases, his decisions actually make things worse.I am super excited to see what happens in the next book!I don't often come across a book that I feel like I should tell everyone about, but this is definitely one. Go out, buy it, borrow it, get your hands on it and read it! 2019-01-17 07:31 Right from the beginning of this you are hooked. If you want to spend a few hours immersed in a completely different, completely creative and entertaining world, well, that's what you should expect.Once I picked it up I really could not stop reading, you go through twists and turns following Shard and his journey which is really about discovering who he is. Every step of the way you meet others who you are uncertain of and questioning if they will help or hinder Shard and it brings the world of the Silver Isles to life. You can either read this to younger age groups or as an older adult, it really has something there for everyone I think.The best thing about a new book (to me) is to be able to leave behind the world of reality and immerse yourself completely in the book. Jess Owen lets you do that. It really is a wonderful book with epic moments and characters that you create a bond with and want to follow throughout the journey. I can't wait for the next book to come out because of the great work that she did with a cliffhanger that makes you think "It's over? No, I need to know what happens next!! ". Be prepared to get sucked into this world and have slight anxiety coming back out.A re-read, worth your buck, all the way. 2018-12-26 11:39 Excellent self published work! Very well done and a great story. While the plot kept my attention and had me begging to see what happened next. It wasn't the best I've ever read and some points were predictable but the way it was written and executed had me dying to know how things would turn out.I like that Shard did not automatically believe what he was being told by Stigr. There were no sudden changes of alliance or switching loyalties. That made this book more believable for me especially as Shard didn't know the entire truth for quite a while and still doesn't know everything even at the end of the book. He was hesitant and unsure. While the other gryfons may be called enemies by some they were still Shard's family and friends and he wasn't just going to ignore that. I did like Shard as a character and Stigr as well. I thought the relationship between the two was very well done. Stigr knows the truth and is frustrated at Shard's hesitancy while Shard refuses to make a great leap into the unknown and abandon his pride and the King without knowing more first.Overall this was an excellent book and I can't wait to read the next one. • Searska GreyRaven 2019-01-12 07:33 Fans of Nancy Farmer's "Sea of Trolls" and Meredith Pierce's Firebringer Trilogy will love this book. The world building is solid, the descriptions are crisp, and the storytelling is vibrant. I found myself wondering (a few times, to be honest) if the story was going to fall into old tropes and was pleasantly surprised. I absolutely loved the Old Norse references as well. As the first of a series, there were a number of questions left unanswered, and I look forward to unearthing them in later books!My only gripe (and it is a really, really minor one) is the "eagle scream." Eagles sound like angry seagulls on helium. Hawks are the ones with the truly awesome (and iconic) screams. It made some of the fight scenes more amusing than dramatic for me, but that's me. "Hawk scream" just doesn't have the same connotation as "eagle scream," and unless you've worked around raptors, the difference in eagle/hawk sounds aren't common knowledge.All in all, well worth the read. ^_^ • Rebekah Layton 2019-01-13 08:55 I got this as a free Kindle book on the recommendation of the cover artist a while ago, and I finally got around to reading it. It was interesting to see how the author handled the characterization of the different species (the characters are mostly gryfons and wolves). She creates a beautiful little fantasy world, with neat and colorful, though not necessarily deep, cultures and politics. It’s very much a coming of age story, full of secrets and self-discovery. The characters are for the most part straightforward. Only a few key characters really show any complexity. Still, I found myself rooting for our underdog hero, hoping he would make the hard choices. I sympathized with his struggles between what was familiar and dear, and what he grew to feel was right. While not ravenously hungry for the sequel, I’m curious to see what happens next. 2019-01-10 08:37 I discovered this book on Amazon under the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought...” I thought the book sounded interesting and different from anything I’ve read in a while. This book was a real winner for me. The characters were well-developed and the plot, propelling. The world of gryphons created by this author was believable. Very believable. In fact, the author describes the gryphons’ mating rituals, habitats, and livelihoods with depth and detail. It almost felt as if the author had spent the last year studying these mythical creatures and then wrote the book using her actual observations. I had to remind myself that gryphons aren’t real!Overall, I came to love Shard and genuinely cared about what happened to him. I look forward to reading book two and anything that follows from this author. 2018-12-18 14:41 This book was absolutely amazing. The characters had depth and were well driven, the plot was engaging and intriguing. I loved the dynamics of the Pride and the wolf Pack. I enjoyed the Exile Stigr and can't wait to see more of him in the next book.One thing I will say was that I was easily able to call a few key plot twists early on in the book, even though I was able to do this, it did not ruin my experience with this book. Shard is a wonderful character and you can see him grow throughout this book. He wasn't a perfect character - he had indecision and problems with figuring out where his loyalties lay; he even made some poor choices later in the book that cause major strife.I am eagerly awaiting the next book. 2018-12-18 09:36 I have absolutely no idea how Ms. Owen was able to create an entire world filled with: lore, mythology, kings and queens, secrets, deception, betrayal and the like in such a short book. But she did.I would never be able to truly summarize this book in the best way I could so I will instead give a very brief summary in my terms.Rashard (Shard) is our protagonist, he's a young gryphon. Full blooded Vanir,a race of gryphon. His life is filled with lies and secrets that are being kept from him. when he's thrust into the world in a glorified exile role by Sverin, the Red Kings, he is forced to come to terms and learn about who he is.It's a coming of age story with a fantasy twist, I liked it. Though my head is still reeling from all the facts. • Rachel Brune 2018-12-25 08:45 A pretty interesting book, although it ultimately failed to get me excited enough to read the next one in the series.Taking place in a world of gryfons and wolves, where some creatures have to ability to speak, if only Rashard, or Shard as he is known, is willing to listen, the book follows a young gryfon's path of self-awareness and destiny.There are some things I really enjoyed. The characters are well-drawn, and the main character experienced some good internal conflict that the author handled very well.That said, the ending left me unsatisfied. While the author explains the choices his characters make, I found them ultimately unconvincing. However, that was a matter of personal taste. I would still recommend this book, especially if you are a fan of non-human high fantasy. 2018-12-22 13:29 When the young gryfon Shard finds out the truth about his heritage, he's faced with a choice: stay loyal to the friends and family he's known all his life, or trust the wolves and exile gryfons who urge him to overthrow the conquering Aenir clan? This is a good, solid story with classic themes of friendship, betrayal and a Chosen One, but what stands out is the gryfons themselves. The appearance, behaviour and customs of these mythical beasts are described so convincingly, it's easy to picture exactly what each gryfon is like, and to empathise with them. If, somewhere out there, preteens are not creating gryfon Mary-Sues with rainbow feathers, there's something wrong with the world.I read a review copy kindly given to me by the author. 2018-12-20 13:28 (Full review here: https://bibliotropic.net/2016/09/16/s...)For my part, I thought Song of the Summer King was an enjoyable novel, fast-paced and fun and filled with adventure and discovery from an uncommon character. None of the characters here are human, or even humanoid; you’re dealing with a book filled with gryfons and wolves and birds, and exploring what lies between them and unthinking savage animals. Owen has hooked me on Shard’s quest, and I want to spend more time being entertained by the far-reaching adventures of these gryfons. This is a novel to pay attention to if you’re a fan of YA fantasy, and I expect there are quite a few people out there who will enjoy it just as much as I did. 2018-12-29 09:41 I loved this book. The descriptions were incredible and I lost myself in the story.This is a coming of age story that anyone can read. Shard is this young gryfon who doesn't really fit into the pride or into his family. When he is tested to become an adult male of the pride he discovers that not everything is as it seems and he will have to choose between what he has always known and what could be. Some parts of the book I got so frustrated with Shard because he focused so much on some things that he missed others, but I do the same thing so I could relate really well with him.The book ends after a very pivotal battle and I can't wait for the next book. • Victoria Gaile 2018-12-20 07:35 I enjoyed this much more than I expected to, and am looking forward to finding out what happens next: if the sequel had been available I would have bought it immediately on finishing this one.I'd describe it as a coming of age story, that features griffins (that feel like dragons to me, but apparently there are also dragons in this world and griffins are not them) with political intrigue, secret rebellions, competing worldviews and religions, cross-species communications, divided loyalties, and heartfelt friendships. 2019-01-14 06:46 I really enjoyed this book, mainly because I've never read a book about gryphons, and I enjoyed the descriptions of how they moved/fought/interacted with each other. I've read books before featuring fanciful creatures where, based on the descriptions/conversations, the book may as well have been talking about humans. Not so here. There were a few editorial issues (missing words, etc.), but they were very infrequent.I borrowed this book from the Kindle Lending Library, but I will more than likely go back and buy it at some point. I can't wait for the sequel! 2019-01-04 14:54 Solid fantasy novel. If you like Norse mythology, gryfons, talking animals, and action, this would be a good novel for you. "Song of the Summer King" is the story of Shard, a gryfon that is the last full-blooded member of a conquered pride. He has been allowed to live and has become the wingbrother of the prince of the pride. When he starts to discover his past, things change for him in relation to the pride.I liked this book and will definitely look for the others in the series. I would recommend this book to others. • Abigail Marie 2019-01-10 14:44 A great little read! If you like YA animal fantasy, this is your book. It's engaging in a Warrior Cats kind of way but with a dash of Wolves of the Beyond. I really liked the word usage to describe the gryphons! Showed clear study of different kinds of birds and their behavior. Nothing turns me off from a good book more than drastically unrealistic animals or ones that act too much like humans. This book has a happy medium and realistic enough with just enough fantasy for my tastes.Can't wait for the sequel!	__label__1	0.874484
No. 1 - Year 11 - 12/2020 10.15291/sic/1.11 Literature and Culture Postfeminist Villainess: Patriarchal Fantasy or a Symbol of Resistance? DOI: 10.15291/sic/1.11.lc.11 Maury, Cristelle, and David Roche. Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the Post-Feminist Era. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. pp.368. In recent years, popular culture has witnessed the proliferation of violent female characters, while female criminality has also received increasing attention from many critics and academics. These women remain a fascination for both mainstream culture and researchers as their acts go against cultural conceptions and are even viewed as antithetical to femininity. And while the increasing presence of female violence in media and popular culture may be symptomatic of present-day society’s concerns about gender behavior, the portrayal of violent women still seems to be following genre conventions and familiar stereotypes that inevitably frame, and thus normalize, their acts within boundaries of traditional discourses on femininity. In that regard, Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the Post-Feminist Era presents itself as a particularly timely book that investigates the representation of women who kill in a so-called postfeminist context recognized principally by a tension between various feminist discourses. However, there is yet little agreement on what would be the central agenda and meaning of postfeminism. As a term that originates from within the popular culture and thus carries a certain market value, postfeminism is by some critics viewed as a backlash against second-wave feminism, while others see it as an evolution of feminist thought. Most of the controversy and difficulty in defining postfeminism can be linked to its entanglement with the contradictions of postmodernity and to what is perceived as its simultaneous articulation and repudiation of feminist ideas. However, the aim of this book, as stated by editors, was not simply to identify certain elements of postfeminist thought in a cultural product but rather to examine to what extent are contemporary villainesses engaged with ever-present postfeminist discourse and are they simply to be perceived as patriarchal victims or have they evolved to represent figures of empowerment. Structured around generic archetypes present in contemporary fiction, film, and television, the book is divided into three sections: Neo-Femmes Fatales, Action Babes, and Monstrous Women. And though each chapter takes one generic figure of a violent woman as a point of reference, analyses presented in this collection cross genre boundaries and even media, allowing for readers to consult published essays separately and/or as a part of the unity in an attempt to get a more holistic view on the politics of representation in a postfeminist context. In the first section of the book, the authors attempt to situate the stock figure of femme fatale within a postfeminist discourse, and, though differing in their interpretations, they all recognize the inextricable link between characters’ female agency and what Rosalind Gill called sexual “subjectification” – “an allegedly freely chosen decision to represent themselves as objects of the male gaze” (19). In her chapter on the femmes fatales of 1990s neo-noir, Delphine Letort reads well-known erotic thrillers such as Basic Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992), The Last Seduction (Dahl, 1994), Bound (The Wachowskis, 1996), and Body of Evidence (Edel, 1993) as texts that promote neoliberal values specifically by emphasizing the female characters’ sexual commodification. While the subversive potential of the classic noir femme fatale was evident in her refusal of patriarchal constraints of motherhood and domesticity, the neo-noir femme fatale uses her body as a sole weapon to achieve her liberation and empowerment while the act of murder in the narrative appears as a mere consequence. In a somewhat similar manner, Cristelle Maury emphasizes the evolution and transformation of the femme fatale and contends that the female protagonist of Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014) embodies a whole set of incompatible feminist and anti-feminist ideas, which she reads as indicative of contradictions inherent in postfeminism. A central plank of Maury’s argument is that Amy’s paradoxical characterization is above all a political comment on the present feminist debates, while her de-eroticization serves to distance her from feminist theories altogether. Shifting smoothly from a seductive femme fatale to a housewife turned sexy feminist, to eventually a psychotic murderer, the character of Amy Dunne moves beyond those contradictions and becomes what Maury defines as an “ironic product of postfeminism” (110). In the same section of the book, Emilie Herbert and Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot take on a different approach with the attempt to re-vision the figure of femme fatale through an intersectional lens. Herbert investigates the new African femme fatale in the short film White Men Are Cracking Up (Onwurah, 1994) and opts for the term of “post-womanism” to captivate the racial dimension of the female subject and to acknowledge the invisibility of black women in contemporary postfeminist white discourse. On the other hand, Schmitt-Pitiot offers another point of view by contextualizing a transwoman contract killer within the narrative of “postfeminist sensibility,” characterized predominantly by the sexualization of the woman’s body, individualism, and consumerism. Both of the authors recognize and underline the necessity of thinking intersectionally and taking multiple social exclusions into account when approaching a postfeminist subject. The second part of the book assesses the influence of postfeminist thought on the representation of some of the mainstream action heroines. While murderous women have so far been studied specifically in film noir, melodrama, and horror genre, the action heroines seem to have received less critical attention from feminist and gender scholars. The perspective offered by the authors in this section emphasizes the generational gap between feminist ideas evident in the representation of contemporary action heroines. Contrasting representations and readings of action heroines in the Terminator franchise, Marianne Kac-Vergne contends that the latest productions of the franchise attempt to demonstrate a break from the earlier feminist generation by sidelining older female characters and celebrating girl power principally shown in the young heroine’s rebelliousness. Kac-Vergne goes on and argues that despite the impression that Terminator women are strong and in control, the portrayal of Sarah Connor and Terminatrix in the latest productions adheres to the patriarchal structures by disregarding female solidarity and thus representing women who kill as a “lone phenomena lacking greater political agency and wider support” (130). The generational gap between feminist strands is also a central topic of Adrienne Boutang’s essay “Girls against Women: Contrasting Female Violence in Contemporary Young Adult Dystopias.” Boutang reads some of the most popular young adult dystopias often praised as feminist such as The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012; Lawrence, 2013; Lawrence, 2014 – 2015), Divergent (Burger, 2014), The 5th Wave (Blakeson, 2016) by focusing her analysis not only on teenage heroines and their empowerment but also on the portrayal of older female characters and the intergenerational relationship. In that competitive intergenerational relationship, the caricature of a wicked, old, and masculinized woman seems to be representative of “outdated” second-wave feminism while the innocent, quite feminine, and emotional girl illustrates ambivalences inherent in the contemporary postfeminist culture. While it may seem, in some segments, as though the ideas presented in this section of the book are repetitive and somewhat redundant, the last two chapters provide a particularly fresh insight into the subject by adopting a reception studies approach. Acknowledging the importance of the dialogue between audience and film, Connor Winterton analyzes how viewers react to controversial female killers in Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003-2004) and Death Proof (2007) and to what extent does their opinion agree with the critical academic discourse that examines the mentioned texts. Surveying online forums and fan sites dedicated to Tarantino’s films, Winterton finds that most spectators do not recognize the metadiscourses of the texts; however, most of their readings can be viewed as inherently postfeminist since they do not view sexual objectification as limiting to their empowerment. The ambivalent representation, as well as reception of Tarantino’s violent women, can be read, according to Winterton, as illustrative of the contemporary political context and multiple tensions between feminism and postfeminism. Finally, the last section of the book attempts to investigate and re-position the abject figure of monstrous-feminine, taking into account present-day feminist preoccupations. All chapters in this section draw attention to postfeminist implications behind representations of the contemporary monstrous-women while also investigating the nature of the threat that they continue to pose to patriarchal structures. Drawing heavily on the work of Carol Clover, Barbara Creed, and Linda Williams, most of the presented chapters demonstrate the transformation of key mythical figures by exposing the current debates and ideological implications of the analyzed films and series. For instance, Julia Echeverría adopts Creed’s term of femme castratrice and goes on to read so far the underexplored character of the female Patient Zero in a specific genre, often called virus narratives. Focusing particularly on a critically acclaimed film Contagion (Soderbergh, 2011), Echeverría shows how the representation of the female Patient Zero is “in tune with neo-liberal discourses of individualism, empowerment and an ethos of success” while ultimately she, as a female Other, is punished for her transgressions (219). Another critique of neoliberal discourses present in popular postfeminist narratives is put forward by Rosie White in her analysis of the British documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003). Following Berlant’s theory on “cruel optimism,” White analyzes the case of a serial killer, Aileen Wuornos, as a part of postfeminist media representations promoting narratives of the pursuit of perfection. Such analysis frames Wuornos’ story as an “example of the toxicity of such neoliberal optimism” where, ultimately, the non-conforming subject suffers (fatal) consequences (313). White’s somewhat provocative reading is grounded in the comparison between different documentary and fictional narratives of Wuornos’s life, which all, to a certain extent, attempt to find a rationale for her murderous acts. In a rather convincing manner, the author concludes that Wuornos, as a working-class woman, a lesbian, and a former sex worker, disturbs the postfeminist fantasies and, at the same time, highlights the power that cruel optimism of the American Dream holds over society’s Others. In reading and evaluating contributions to this collection, one becomes sadly aware of the link between neoliberal accounts and current feminist assumptions that shape our contemporary climate and also how false it would be to believe that we live in a postfeminist and post-racial society. As a part of Bloomsbury’s Gender and Popular Culture Library Series, this book reflects on the representation and consumption of mainstream cultural products interrogating the political potential of women who kill and their relationship with different strands of feminism. Regardless of whether we interpret violent women as victims of patriarchy or symbols of resistance, all authors point out that the potential and signification of the figure of a violent woman lies in her reveling the nexus of conflicting ideas about femininity, power, and sexuality. Although at times it seems that ideas and approaches favored by some authors are overlapping, particularly in the section on action heroines, the overall analysis is rather complementary and well-structured. The collected volume presents a refreshing perspective and a necessary intervention in studying postfeminist representations and will most likely generate further discussions on the topic. That being said, the analysis would benefit from a more in-depth analysis of the political, social, and economic conditions influencing the current feminist debates. Nevertheless, the book will considerably enrich the learning of students, scholars, and all those interested in issues surrounding feminist perspectives, as well as the development of gender identities and popular culture. Note About Contributor(s) Irena Jurković, University of Zadar, Croatia (irena.jurkovic09@gmail.com) Irena Jurković is a Ph.D. student at the University of Zadar. Her research interests include 20th century American Literature, popular culture, gender studies and ethnic studies.	__label__1	0.953577
The Tribal Mind With David Dale October 4, 2005 A scene from Rabbit Proof Fence. A scene from Rabbit Proof Fence. School is supposed to prepare us for life. The gurus who wrote the syllabus for the NSW Higher School Certificate believe that these days, preparation for life should include an understanding of the movies. But not just any movies. They have nominated 20 superior examples of the form as options for study in the English course on which thousands of students are about to be examined. You're never too old to learn. If 17 year olds need to know these flicks, then the rest of us need to know them too. This column has scrutinised the syllabus, and can hereby reveal . . . The movies you should have seen to be a fully educated adult 1 The Fellowship of the Ring The syllabus says it lets us "examine alternative worlds, which challenge and provoke controversy and debate about possibilities in human experience". 2 Rabbit-proof Fence Students will be "challenged by the contrasting contemporary views on Aboriginality and how Australians are embracing reconciliation". 3 Contact This science fiction film lets students "explore the worlds of science, politics and economics and religion and consider the impact they have on their lives". 4 Billy Elliott Students can "consider their own cultural values, attitudes, roles, stereotyping, goals and expectations and how we can be limited by our world views". 5. Memento The film explores "the concept of memory and how it affects the creation and interpretation of one's personal history and sense of self". 6. SeaChange "The television series presents the value systems, lifestyle choices and possibilities of its characters and raises questions about contemporary urban and country, seaside living and family life students will have opportunities to examine the judicial and legal system and the consequences for individuals of their actions." Those are the most recent additions to the syllabus, being tested for the first time this year. A bunch of other films and TV series have been HSC options throughout this decade. If they wanted to study "retreat from the global", students could look at The Castle; for "telling the truth", they had the satirical series Frontline; for "transformations", they could compare Clueless with Emma, and Brave New World with Blade Runner - Director's cut. For "the inner journey", they could choose Life Is Beautiful, while another Italian film, Cinema Paradiso, joins Strictly Ballroom and The Truman Show under the heading "Telling Stories - image"; for "genre: revenge tragedy", they could choose High Noon, while "genre: crime fiction" offered The Big Sleep - Director's cut; for "critical study of text", they had Citizen Kane and Witness; for "postmodernism", Orlando; and for "gendered language", Elizabeth. It's a pretty comprehensive course in popular culture, but is it enough? What other films should be part of the education of every Australian, and why? Send your suggestions to The Tribal Mind at ddale@fairfax.com.au Get the SMH delivered for as little as $3 a week - SAVE 21%	__label__1	0.700927
BOOK REVIEW / Scarab powder fuels the sex war: 'The First Century after Beatrice' - Amin Maalouf; tr. Dorothy S Blair: Quartet, 14.95 pounds Click to follow MAY YOUR name live forever and a son be born to you. This ancient Egyptian prayer is elegantly transformed into a modern parable by Amin Maalouf. The First Century After Beatrice is a brilliant and succinct contemplation on what happens when modern science is placed in the service of medieval prejudices and traditional wisdom is abandoned in favour of contemporary expediency. We are somewhere in the not-too-distant future in the company of a world renowned entomologist. On a visit to Cairo he discovers an unusual use for a certain scarab beetle. When consumed as a powder, the insect enhances virility and guarantees the birth of a son. Initial scepticism about the 'scarab powder' turns into suspicion of something deeper when his partner, a high-flying journalist, discovers that it is being sold in India, all over Africa and much of the Third World. Suspicion turns into at obsession when the couple discover a sharp decline in the birth of girls all over the South. The narrator himself has a strong desire for a daughter. And his young wife eventually rewards him with one: his beloved Beatrice. The couple spend all their time, during the decade after the birth of Beatrice, examining the trends they have accidentally discovered and seeking answers to the frightening questions they pose. Is there real power in the 'scarab powder' to immunise women against the birth of girls? Is gender bias the sole preserve of the 'underdeveloped people of the world'? Is there a conspiracy to depopulate the world? The quest of his characters allows Maalouf to explore some urgent themes about the nature of modern science and technology and their relationship to society. Buried in the narrative of the novel are a number of sharply observed essays on how corrupt science is. Far from freeing us from ancient prejudices, he seems to be saying, new scientific discoveries are often used to perpetuate and confirm them. When the truth about the 'scarab powder' is eventually discovered, the narrator and his partner organise a 'Network of Sages' that campaigns to ban 'gynosterilisation' and highlight the dangers that an unbalanced population presents to the world. The drug companies try to redeem themselves by producing a 'reverse substance' that speeds up the birth of girls - but this has its own problems. The Network succeeds even to the extent of getting a hearing at the UN. But by now many global trends and the strife and violence they have generated have become irreversible. Maalouf, born in Lebanon, based in Paris, and winner of the Prix Goncourt for his latest novel Le Rocher de Tanios, is a writer of considerable depth and sophistication. And the novel contains all the Maalouf traits: clinical in its observations, profound in its analysis, knitting an allegory that works on a number of levels. On one level, it simply offers a contemporary definition of women in relation to patriarchal power and social perceptions. On another level, it is a reflection on how the weapons of the future are being used to settle the racial and religious conflicts that date back to the distant past. On yet another level, The First Century After Beatrice is a meditation on one of the most forgotten virtues of our time: wisdom. Maalouf has a grim, but not entirely pessimistic, view of the future. He warns us that all villainies are possible, but none is inevitable - provided we watch ourselves carefully. And he leaves us with a number of urgent questions to ponder. After banishing the god of 'how', how far can science go in its quest for the god of 'why' before degenerating into total meaninglessness? Can mankind take moral risks and still survive to see the next century? Can the industrialised North keep its prosperity and insanity intact while the South plunges into deeper and deeper poverty? Do we have the ability to transform ourselves, like the narrator's caterpillars, into butterflies, into a higher order of being?	__label__1	0.668532
Know Thy Culture In our era of globalization, few professionals still make the mistake of speaking abroad without researching the basic protocols and no-nos of their host culture – handing an object to someone with the left hand in a Muslim country, practicing intense eye contact with Easterners or using the thumbs-up “Okay” gesture in most parts of the world. But stories abound of accomplished speakers who, even after performing this pre-departure homework, have encountered unexpected resistance when addressing a foreign or multicultural audience, ultimately failing at their intended mission. Skills, experience and success with home nationals often fail to reach their new audience, achieve persuasion and meet the objectives. Even worse, presenters often suffer a loss of confidence that took years to develop. All intercultural experts agree that the observable and explicit cultural differences are just the tip of the iceberg. What contribute to most fruitless international/intercultural presentations are subtle clashes that take their roots in the deepest layers of culture and are often imperceptible to either side. As anthropologist Edward T. Hall states, “Culture hides much more than it reveals and, strangely enough, what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.” To become successful global speakers, we need to acquire sensitivity toward these hidden dimensions of culture – values, beliefs and assumptions – starting with our own. And we must design and perform our deliveries accordingly. The only way to be aware of our own cultural patterns is to gain perspective, to see them from an outsider’s eyes. In Riding the Waves of Culture, Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner write, “Culture is like gravity: you do not experience it until you jump six feet into the air.” Six feet into the air is the lowest I jumped, 13 years ago, when I attended my first professional presentation in the United States. Everything was so uniquely American that it made an indelible impression in my newcomer’s mind. Originally from France and raised in France, Peru and Venezuela, I had not been in the country six months when I found myself sitting in this large and crowded hotel auditorium at a business convention in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The keynote address was going to be a motivational speech, I was told, which already was an intriguing concept to me. Building Credibility with Foreign Audiences The speaker’s entrance would not have been different if he had just won the lottery. I was captivated by his boisterous appearance on the stage, his excitement and his self-confidence. And without warning, he shouted in my ears, “So, are you having fun?” Having fun?! Where are we, at Disney World?, I wondered, feeling infantilized by his question and tone. But as if my fellow audience members also had won the lottery, they all rejoined with a roaring “Yes!” It was not loud enough, to all appearances, so the speaker uttered the question again with reinforced decibels. I just hoped the second time would do it, because this annoying hullabaloo made me want to leave the room. Thirteen years later, I continue to marvel at the distinctively American contagious stage enthusiasm and poise, but I still feel bullied and irritated when a presenter tries to establish a connection by acting like a puppeteer in an auditorium of third-graders. I also have come to understand that this perception is profoundly influenced by the deep layers of my French culture. The French tend to be a very independent-minded people and have an aversion to being patronized, especially by a stranger whose authority is not evident in their eyes. Authority, they believe, is first set by the speaker’s credits, and then develops gradually and primarily by intellectual rather than emotional means – from possessing knowledge and skill in the subject matter, essentially. The French also make a clear distinction between work and “fun” – attending a presentation being considered work – and are used to being a rather passive audience, not expected to participate, even if by an approving smile. On the other hand, American speakers seek to establish rapport with audience members immediately and actively, much like members of an orchestra harmonizing their instruments with a tuning fork before the concert; let’s laugh together, weep about this touching story and feel inspired by those words of wisdom. It is a powerful technique, but only if used with intercultural sensitivity when addressing a foreign audience. Keep in mind that American culture is a distinctively time- and action-oriented one. It’s also informal. Speakers need to inquire about the usual rapport-building techniques of the host culture, which, like those of the French, may be more gradual, more on the intellectual or status level and less interactive with the audience. As a general rule, it is wise to initially tune one’s energy level to that of the audience members rather than pushing them to abruptly switch to ours, and then to build momentum as one’s credibility develops. The Dangers of Self-Disclosure in International Settings That morning in Fort Lauderdale, after the initial culture shock, I soon was beguiled again by the speaker’s ease, by his polished movements and by his simplicity of expression. As a former educator, I appreciated how he appealed to all our senses and learning styles, and I rejoiced at his humor and vivid illustrations. I felt I was in just the right country to learn skills from the masters, and one day, I dreamed, I would be the speaker on that stage. But as I was building castles in my head, a new wave of discomfort knocked me over. To illustrate his self-made manhood, the motivational speaker engaged in generously detailed stories about his alcoholic mother, his violent father and his own inglorious beginnings. My French acute sense of privacy and my Latino-borrowed reverence of family fused with his depictions like a Molotov cocktail in my stomach. I glanced around to check if my fellow listeners were as embarrassed for him as I was, but all I could see in people’s faces were admiration, sympathy and even teary eyes. Culture shock was striking again. (After hearing many other motivational speeches in the years to follow, I actually began to believe that I could never succeed as a speaker in the United States unless I could dig out some sordid personal or family story.) In their book, American Cultural Patterns, authors Edward Stewart and Milton Bennett explain that the American emphasis on the individual self, in combination with direct and explicit styles of communication, “leads Americans to be extremely free in revealing much about themselves in virtually any situation... The American ease of self-revelation is shared by people of few, if any, other cultures.” I could not help but imagine the stupefaction, the loss of face and the speaker discredit that these accounts would have engendered in Asia or Latin America, for example, where family honor is so protected and respectability so intertwined with a person’s background. It is advisable to stay away from such personal disclosure when performing abroad. If the stories are too meaningful to be removed, the alternative is to credit them to a fictitious subject other than the speaker. Cultural Meaning of Words By the end of the Fort Lauderdale session, the presenter caught me off guard for the last time when he said, “Let me ask you a question. If I told you that I developed this fantastic program that will transform your life, that will change you! It’s completely free; all I ask is a daily 15-minute commitment... how many of you are willing to sign up and start changing now?” And while I still tried to figure out what he meant by “change,” I was taken aback by the large and vigorous show of hands. Did I miss something? Why would I want to change? Change into what? (A pumpkin?) I held my breath for further clues, but he proceeded by promoting additional materials – books, tapes, etc. – that guaranteed redoubled success in the promised change as it added significant costs to the initially free program. Those costs, however, did nothing to dissuade the increasing number of enthusiasts who rushed to the counters, credit cards in hand. As soon as I got home, I looked up the word “change” in the dictionary, assuming it carried a second, unfamiliar meaning. But I found no other than the one I knew, mainly “to make different,” a neutral concept such as “changing channels.” It took me a few years of living in the country, of actively immersing myself in the culture and in my intercultural studies, to be able to grasp the hidden connotation of the word. There is, indeed, in the American culture, a second meaning to the word “change,” or I should say, a generalized cultural assumption. In this achievement – risk –and future-oriented culture, “change,” I discovered, is automatically associated with “positive move” and “successful outcome,” which explains its choice as a powerful campaign slogan in the 2008 race for the U.S. presidency. If we add to the mix the value of individualism and the belief that our environment is under our control – in opposition to tenets of fate in other cultures – we find that the stumbling block to success is rooted in our own selves. The solution, then, is to change our selves. Elementary, my dear Watson! As with “change,” other common terms may lose their intended meaning when the receiver is from a different culture. The word “respect” is one of those. In the United States, addressing everyone in the same way, for example on a first-name basis, is in most situations a mark of “respect,” an expression of the American values of informality, spontaneity and equality in social relations. The problem is that these values are not shared by every culture, and if they are, they are not manifested in the same way. What is intended to be respectful here might be perceived as extremely disrespectful elsewhere. The same goes for “common sense”– which should be reframed as “cultural sense”– or “responsibility.” In the pragmatic American culture, where self-pride is largely connected with personal achievements, “responsibility” is more often associated with work than with family and friends. Finishing a project on time or honoring an appointment against all odds is regarded as being “responsible.” In the Latino culture, where people take pride mostly in the quality of their relationships, if one’s childhood friend’s grandmother died, the “responsibility” to attend the funeral and be there for the family may take priority over a previous commitment, even work related. These words are what Edward Hall, the anthropologist, defined as “high context.” The cultural content is taken for granted by the members of the shared culture, and strangers must be “filled-in” to properly understand the intended meaning. Global presenters need to screen their words, and practice paraphrasing to ensure clarity. Otherwise, they’ll fall into author Robert McCloskey’s predicament: “I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” Since our cultural assumptions are embedded in us – like a fish who doesn’t realize it lives in water until it is removed from it – it is only when we gain awareness of our own deep cultural patterns that we can succeed as international/intercultural presenters. Only by realizing what our deepest cultural motivations are in contrast with others’ will we be able to adjust our communication to build more persuasive and impactful presentations. Thirteen years after my Fort Lauderdale experience, I decided to share one of my latest speeches – a motivational one – with my brother in Paris. His first remark was: “I’m not surprised it was successful. It is so American!” Those French! Florence Ferreira, ACB, CL, is a member of Boca Raton Toastmasters in Boca Raton, Florida. She is a trilingual (English/Spanish/French) intercultural-communication consultant, the founder of SpeakGlobal.net, and an inspirational speaker and writer. Reach her at f.ferreira@speakglobal.net.	__label__1	0.971652
C.F.G. Masterman C.F. G. Masterman (1873-1927) was a politician and journalist. Elected as an MP in 1906 he served in the Liberal Government in various roles. In the First World War he became head of the War Propaganda Bureau recruiting famous writers like John Buchan and Arthur Conan Doyle. The Condition of England remains his most famous book, but it was preceded by two similar works: From the Abyss (1902) and In Peril of Change (1905) Selected Works Show all books by this author	__label__1	0.614584
Bolinas Reads: February 2020 drawing of Taliesin Gilkes-Bower by Vanessa Waring drawing of Taliesin Gilkes-Bower by Vanessa Waring A monthly interview with Bolinas Library readers. Taliesin Gilkes-Bower is an artist and creative director who moved to Bolinas two years ago and is certain it’s one of the single best decisions he has ever made. He lives on the Mesa and dreams about his favorite sci-fi stories getting turned into films. He loves the ocean, walking other people’s dogs, and reading with his fiancee Mckay. You can see his work at www.realmsmanifest.com, opens a new window What are you reading now? What’s in your pile of books? Do you read one book at a time or several? Recently I’ve been really getting into graphic novels/comics and particularly the iconic style of the French illustrator Moebius, opens a new window. I had seen a bunch of his images circulating on the internet, and then I realized I could get a bunch of his actual books from the library. So far my favorite has been the Silver Surfer series he did with Stan Lee, opens a new window. I generally keep a big circulation of books at my studio and by my bed. I feel like they are a little bit like music, I generally feel like different moods call for different books to read. Sometimes if I get bored with a fiction book I’ll start another at the same time, but I try to just do one fiction book at a time. Usually I’ve got a couple non-fiction books going at once- right now I’m reading The Prize (Daniel Yergin), about the history of Oil, and just finished American Gods (Neil Gaiman). Do you like to read paper or ebooks? Audio books? I’ve always wanted to get a Kindle or some sort of e-reader, because I am always bringing huge stacks of books with me on trips. But I hate reading on my phone or computer so I mostly stick with paper books. Sometimes I can get into an audio book on a long drive, especially self-help or non-fiction, but if I don’t like the reader's voice it’s totally impossible for me to stick with them. Are you a browser in the library or do you know in advance what you are looking for? Do you browse the library catalog or pick specific books? If so, how do you find out about them? I mostly wait to hear about a book and then put it on hold. When something is already in Bolinas, I’ll usually browse around to see if there is anything else in the same section I might want to take home. I really like browsing the DVD section at the library and just finding random things I want to take home. Recently I’ve been psyched by whoever is getting all the classic samurai movies like Throne of Blood. (Kurosawa) Do you have a favorite genre? Any genres that you never read? I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy. My favorite authors in that zone are probably Ursula Le Guin, opens a new window and Samuel Delany, opens a new window. Recently I’ve been reading lots of psychology books about trauma and healing that a friend who went to CIIS, opens a new window recommended. Some of them are very clinical like Affect Regulation Theory, opens a new window (Daniel Hill), so it's slow going. What was your reading experience as a child? Did you grow up with a lot of books? A favorite book? I read a lot because I was an only child and it felt really magical. I was obsessed with the Redwall, opens a new window books (Brian Jacques) which are basically fantasy books for young people about animals in a sort of medieval world. Then I started borrowing my step dad's fantasy books like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, opens a new window series and Garth Nix’s Sabriel (best cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon). Were there any books that made a big impression on you in your life? Two all time favorites would be Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, and Aye, and Gomorrah: Stories, opens a new window (Samuel Delany). Giovanni’s Room was the first queer romance I fell in love with and felt so interior in brilliant beautiful ways I had never experienced before in high school. Aye, and Gomorrah I think is page for page the best sci-fi short collection I’ve ever read. Getting deeper in Delany’s output, especially some of the more reflective interview books like The Motion of Light in Water and Conversations With Samuel Delany, opens a new window just completely opened my idea of what is possible in a creative life. What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves? I’m really obsessed with new age book illustrations, so I buy a lot of kind of trash self-help books for the illustrations. Is there a famous author that you ever wanted to meet? Maybe back in time? I was really heartbroken to find out that I lived a few miles from Octavia Butler , opens a new windowin Seattle before I had read any of her work. What’s the last great book that you read and recommended to a friend? I end up giving away copies of my favorite books to people and sometimes I wonder if I should just order them in bulk. Recently I’ve asked a couple of friends to read The Invisibles, opens a new window which is a very 90’s kind of chaos magick and cyber punk comic. I’m willing to slog through pretty mediocre sci-fi for interesting ideas about alternate models of society/reality- but you need to know a friend really well before recommend they try to slog through something like Startide Rising (David Brin), which despite being about hyper intelligent cetaceans, is pretty pulp. What do you plan to read next? Do you plan? I just ordered The World of Edena to the library which is another Moebius comic, and I’m excited to find some new favorite fiction this year. I just ordered Adrienne Marie Brown’s Pleasure Activism- who has been calling herself a pleasure activist for years, and I never exactly when what that meant. Is there a book that you always meant to read but still haven’t? Any highly rated books that you thought were over rated? I’ve always been interested in kind of strange elements of the sci-fi cannon, so at some point I would like to go back and read a lot of the earlier “classic” English language sci-fi. I really really wanted to love NK Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but I don’t think I’ll keep reading her work unless a friend raves about it. There’s a super dark Delany book called Hogg, opens a new window that was finished a few days before stonewall that I started reading at the Sci-Fi archive in Telluride, but haven't gotten back to. What books do you return to? Are there any books you like to re-read? As I become a better writer and filmmaker I love coming back to short story collections, because they have to do so much work in such a short space of time. Recently I’ve been getting excited about re-reading really influential books from my early 20’s and high school - like The Dispossessed (Le Guin), and China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Do you have a collection of books at home. If so, where do you keep them and do you re-read? I try to support photographers who are putting out amazing photo books and buy exhibition books from art shows that are worth having access to. I have a hard time getting rid of books. When I left Providence to move back to California I gave away a ton of books- and basically regret leaving behind every single one of them. We keep books in pretty much every room of our house and have been trying to find new shelving solutions for more. I do a lot of visual research on the internet- but for hi-res scans and just pleasure it feels much better to just have the book. What kind of characters draw you in as a reader? I’m usually much more interested in the larger world building than specific characters in the novels I read. But I do love reading biographies of incredible people, the most memorable one recently was With Billie (Julia Blackburn)- which basically has hundreds of interviews with Billie Holiday- many of which are contradictory- and points to the complexity of any specific narrative. I want to read more masterful biographies. When and where do you like to read? Describe your ideal reading experience. I like reading before bed, on the beach, in my studio, and while waiting for things. When I’m super psyched on a book I pretty much carry it everywhere and cancel plans for it. A friend just brought a copy of Trans Girl Suicide Museum, opens a new window by Hannah Baer to our house and I read it in two sittings on the beach and our couch. It’s the most intimate boundary dissolving book I’ve read in years. Why Read? I don’t know why I read, I guess it keeps my imagination feeling sharp- my favorite reading experience is finding the boundaries of my own imagination- and realizing how many boundaries there are left to dissolve. We welcome your respectful and on-topic comments and questions in this limited public forum. To find out more, please see Appropriate Use When Posting Content. Community-contributed content represents the views of the user, not those of Marin County Free Library	__label__1	0.815463
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir Gideon the Ninth Cover Publisher: Tor (Hardcover – 10 September 2019) Series: The Ninth House – Book One Length: 448 pages My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars From debuting author Tamsyn Muir comes a very unique and compelling science fiction novel filled with death, comedy and necromancers in space, Gideon the Ninth. Before I begin reviewing Gideon the Ninth, I have to point out how impressive the design of the hardcover copy I received was. When I previously featured this book in one of my Waiting on Wednesday articles, I mentioned how much I loved the cover art. Indeed, the drawing of the book’s titular redheaded character with her face painted liked a skull surrounded by exploding skeletons is pretty damn cool. The hardcover copy also has some excellent visuals, as the outer rim of all the pages is coloured black, which definitely gives prospective readers a noticeable visual hook, especially when combined with the all-black binding underneath the jacket, emblazoned with gold writing on the spine and a single golden skull on the front. I really liked this fantastic presentation style, and it definitely left an impression on me as I started to read the book. In the far future, a vast interstellar empire is ruled by necromancers whose control over the various magical disciplines of death make them a powerful force. Eight noble houses serve under the First House of the Emperor, and each of them has just received a message from their ruler. The heirs to each of these houses and their cavaliers, loyal sword-wielding protectors and companions, must attend the Emperor’s planet in order to compete to become the next generation of Lyctor, immortal beings of vast power. Gideon Nav is an indentured servant to the Ninth House of the Empire, a small and impoverished house that carries a dark reputation. A skilled swordswoman, Gideon wants nothing more than to enlist in the imperial army to leave the dark crypts, the strict occult nuns and the multitude of skeletons that make up the Ninth Planet far behind. However, when her latest escape attempt fails, she finds herself offered an irresistible bargain: act as the Ninth House’s cavalier for the period of the trials and be granted her freedom. There is just one minor problem: Gideon and the heir to the Ninth House, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, an extremely powerful bone witch, absolutely hate each other. Forced to temporarily put their differences aside, Gideon and Harrow travel to First House, only to discover it is a near ruin, looked after by a few old and mostly unhelpful servants. They soon learn that the secrets to becoming a Lyctor lie hidden within the walls around them, and the representatives of various houses can do whatever they wish to learn them. Trapped on the planet, Gideon and Harrow begin to explore the First House and encounter the heirs and cavaliers of the other houses. As the mismatched pair from the Ninth House start to unravel the various mysteries and challenges before them, a gruesome murder occurs. Something powerful is lurking within the First House, and it has the heirs in its sight. Can Gideon and Harrow work together, or will their own turbulent past and the secrets of their house tear them apart? Gideon the Ninth is a chaotically clever and massively entertaining first novel from Tamsyn Muir, who has done an excellent job introducing readers to her intriguing new world. Gideon the Ninth is the first book in her The Ninth House series, which already has two planned sequels in the works, with the first of these currently set for release next year. After hearing the awesome plot synopsis for this book earlier in the year, I had picked this as potentially being on the best books for the latter half of 2019. I am glad to see that my instincts were once again correct, as this was an awesome read that gets four and a half stars from me. Muir has produced an outstanding story for her first novel, as the plot for Gideon the Ninth is an amazing combination of humour, universe building, emotional character moments and a captivating set of mysteries as the protagonists attempt to uncover not only the vast secrets of the First House but the identity of the person or being that is killing them off one by one. The author has stacked this book with all manner of fantastic twists, and there are a number of major and game changing developments that are well paced out amongst the story. There is never a dull spot within the book, as even parts where no substantial plot developments are occurring are filled with excellent humour from the sarcastic narrator with a huge vocabulary of various swear words. There is also a substantial amount of action throughout the course of the book. The various fight scenes blister and explode off the page, especially thanks to the unique magical system that Muir has populated this world with. All of this results in an addictive and electrifying overall story with a very memorable ending. The real heart of Gideon the Ninth lies in its incredible main characters, Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus, and the complex relationship the two of them have. Gideon is the badass, rebellious, coarse, girl-loving mistress of the blade, who serves as the book’s narrator and only point-of-view character. Gideon is an absolute blast as a main character, as she deals with every situation she comes across with an abundance of disrespect, anger and exaggerated responses, resulting in much of the book’s humour. Harrow, on the other hand, is the dark noble necromancer heir to the Ninth House, whose reserved persona, obsession with necromantic research and abilities, and vindictive nature work to make her initially appear as a polar opposite to Gideon. The relationship between these two main characters is initially extremely adversarial, as both characters declare their absolute hatred for each other, and Harrow seems determined to make Gideon’s life a living hell. As the book progresses, however, Muir really dives into the heart of the relationship between the two characters, revealing a complex history and a twin tale of woe and dark secrets that has defined them for their entire lives. The combined character arc of these two main characters was done extremely well. While you knew from the very start of the book that the two characters would eventually work together, the exact reason why this occurred was handled perfectly, and the final form of this cooperation helps create an epic and tragic conclusion to the entire book. While their relationship is not explicitly romantic (Harrow’s sexuality really is not explored in this book), they do become quite close by the end of the novel, and both characters are written exceedingly well. In addition to Gideon and Harrow, Muir has also included a range of different characters, representing the heirs and cavaliers of the other major houses in the Empire. This results in an intriguing assortment of side characters who add a lot to the overall story. The author has made sure to invest in substantial backstories for all these additional characters, and this has a number of significant benefits for the story. Not only are the readers now blessed with an abundance of viable and duplicitous suspects for the story’s murder mystery, but each of the various representatives of the houses have their own individual secrets and motives for being at the First House. Learning more about each of these characters is quite fascinating, and a number of them have some pretty amazing character arcs. I particularly enjoyed the storyline of Palamedes Sextus of the Sixth House, who treats his necromancy more as a science than a form of magic. Sextus is the most logical character out of all the people in the book, and he serves as a major driving force of the investigation into the murders. His connection to some of the other characters in the book is a major part of the book, and the ultimate conclusion of his story arc is really cool. Muir has done an incredible job coming up with the book’s various characters, and it is a major part of why this book is so awesome. It is quite clear that Muir has an amazing imagination, as she has produced a grim and compelling new universe to set this book in. Necromancy and a futuristic science fiction setting make for a fascinating combination, and I really loved her examination of an empire built on worshipping an immortal, necromantic Emperor and the various secrets that come with it. The sheer range of different necromantic magic featured within this book is pretty impressive, especially as each of the Imperial Houses has their own specific form of necromancy, all of which are examined throughout the book. Not only are all these different types of magic really fascinating to examine but it also results in some diverse pieces of magical action, as many of the necromancers unleash their various forms of magic throughout the book, resulting in some fantastic sequences. I do think that the author could have done a slightly better job of explaining some of the unique elements of her universe at the start of the book, as I got a little confused at some points towards the beginning; however, this was quickly chased away by deeper dives into the universe’s lore later in the book. Muir has left open a number of questions and plot directions to explore in future books in the series, and I am really curious to see what happens next. Gideon the Ninth is a wild and exciting novel that makes use of an intriguing concept, some compelling characters and an excellent story to create an exceedingly entertaining book that was a heck of a lot of fun to read. Featuring laugh-out-loud humour, intense action and major emotional moments, this is an incredible read that is really worth checking out. Muir has hit it out of the park with her debut novel, and I cannot wait for the next book in the series. We are Blood and Thunder by Kesia Lupo We are Blood and Thunder Cover Publisher: Bloomsbury YA (Trade Paperback – 4 April 2019) Series: Standalone / Book 1 Length: 400 pages My rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars From first-time author Kesia Lupo comes We are Blood and Thunder, a clever, inventive and at times dark young adult fantasy novel that represents a brilliant start to a bold new fantasy world. In the nation of Valorian, a powerful magical curse has been laid upon the city of Duke’s Forest. The curse has wrapped the entire city in a mystical storm cloud filled with death, sickness and despair. Following a series of virulent pestilences brought on by the storm cloud, the city has been placed in quarantine, although passage in or out of the cloud is already extremely difficult. Now, six years after the curse first struck Duke’s Forest, the fate of the city and all who live within will lie upon the shoulders of two young women. Lena is a cryptling, one of the deformed or marked offspring of Duke’s Forest’s inhabitants who live in the sprawling crypts underneath the city and watch over the Ancestors, the interred dead of the city, who are worshiped as gods. Lena, whose birthmark saw her abandoned as a baby, led a quiet life below the city until strange things started happening all around her. Accused of being a mage by the magic-hating Lord Justice, Lena just barely escapes execution when she encounters Constance in the mists outside the city. Constance is the daughter of Duke’s Forest’s ruler, the Duke, and has returned to the city to reclaim what is hers. Trained as a mage, Constance recognises the magic within Lena and sends her outside the mist while she continues back to Duke’s Forest. However, this fateful meeting will have huge consequences on the lives of both women. Once outside the mists, Lena encounters the huntsman Emris, a magic user trained to locate untrained mages like Lena, known as Rogues, who has been pursuing Constance for magical crimes she has been accused of. Emris brings Lena back to the City of Kings, the capital of Valorian, where she attempts to learn how to control her magic. However, her unusual magical abilities and status as a Rogue bring her to the attention of some of the city’s worst inhabitants. Back in Duke’s Forest, Constance finds that her city and her father have fallen under the control of the tyrannical Lord Justice. Keeping her status as a mage hidden, Constance attempts to regain control of Duke’s Forest while also searching for the source of the curse surrounding the city. As both Lena and Constance attempt to survive in their respective cities, fate keeps bringing their destinies together. The future of Duke’s Forest rests in the hands of these young women. Can they save the city, or will they be the storm that destroys it? We are Blood and Thunder is a clever and extremely captivating young adult fantasy novel that I read a little while ago but only just got a chance to review. I wish I had gotten a review of this book up a little earlier as it is a fantastic first book and I have been quite keen to sing the author’s praises for a while. We are Blood and Thunder is the debut novel of exciting new talent Kesia Lupo and presents a powerful story filled with magic, betrayal, personal growth and the hunt for power. At the moment, We are Blood and Thunder is a standalone novel, but the author has indicated on Goodreads that she may set future books within the same universe. The story of We are Blood and Thunder is told from the perspectives of Lupo’s two main characters, Lena and Constance. Each character narrates about half the book and tells their separate narratives through alternating chapters. This allows Lupo to tell two separate stories that are not only very different in content but which help show a far wider area of the new fantasy world that Lupo has created. I found both of the storylines contained within this book to be extremely fascinating. The first storyline, which is narrated by Lena, follows the character as she journeys to the City of Kings to learn more about magic. While there, she learns more about her mysterious powers and finds herself embroiled in the conflict between the Temples that control magic and an influential mage outside the control of the Temples who has the ear of the King. The second storyline, which is narrated by Constance, is a darker story of political intrigue, murder and dark magic within the walls of Duke’s Forest, as Constance attempts to find the heart of the storm cloud before it is too late, while also attempting to neutralise the tyrannical Lord Justice. While the magical learning, emotional growth and world building featured within Lena’s storyline are really good, I did prefer the Constance storyline a little more. All the dark political manoeuvring within the unique setting of the cursed Duke’s Forest and the battle between Constance and the Lord Justice were pretty darn compelling, and I had a very hard time putting down the book while I was reading the Constance chapters. While both of these storylines are really good, I was quite impressed by the way that Lupo was able to combine the two separate stories together into one amazing overarching narrative. I felt that the two storylines really complemented each other and helped make each respective storyline better. For example, the explanations of this fantasy universe’s magic in Lena’s chapters help the reader understand some of the magical elements occurring in Constance’s chapters. At the same time, many of the preparations and relationships Constance forged for her desperate return to Duke’s Forest impact Lena as she uncovers dark secrets within the City of Kings. There are also a number of excellent plot twists cleverly hidden throughout the book that are slowly revealed in both storylines. I thought some of these twists, especially a big reveal towards the end of the book, were just amazing and helped turn this into an epic and electrifying story. I felt that the author’s use of the two separate storylines was an incredible way to tell the story, and the overall narrative was quite outstanding. In addition to her excellent twin storylines, Lupo also came up with two awesome fantasy cities: the City of Kings and Duke’s Forest. The City of Kings is your classic fantasy capital with massive temples and palaces, where everything appears to be perfect and harmonious on the surface. However, there are some dark secrets at the heart of this city, and the magical politics prove to be a major threat to one of the book’s main characters. While this is a great setting, I have to say that the city of Duke’s Forest is the far more impressive setting. Even before the city was cursed, Duke’s Forest would have been an amazing fantasy setting, with its massive crypts staffed by abandoned children and its rabid intolerance of magic. However, by turning it into a city on the brink of death, surrounded by dangerous magical mists and clouds, Duke’s Forest transformed into a much more intriguing and memorable fantasy setting. Lupo does an amazing job bringing this inventive location to life, and I was impressed by the sense of despair and hopelessness that seemed to hang in the air in each chapter set in this city. These two city settings were great, and I felt that they both enhanced the book’s narratives. Duke’s Forest in particular added a sense of urgency to Constance’s hunt for the heart of the storm cloud. I am very curious to see what other locations Lupo will create for the nation of Valorian in the future, and I look forward to exploring more of this clever fantasy world. I also quite enjoyed the interesting magical elements that the author utilised in We are Blood and Thunder. Lupo has invented some great magical lore in this book, and I had a lot of fun exploring the various aspects of it. Not only is there a city-wide magical curse but there is also a whole new system of magic for the reader to enjoy. I quite liked the intriguing magical systems that Lupo came up with, and there are a number of great elements to them. These include the vision-filled practice of mages binding their magic to a god in order to control their power, which then influences their magical power and abilities, as well as mages who don’t bind their powers and then subsequently lose control and become a Radical, a destructive being controlled by the underlying darkness in magic. These magical elements are mostly explored by Lena. As a member of an ostracised minority who lived beneath a quarantined city where all knowledge of magic was punished, Lena is a perfect character to explore Lupo’s magical elements. Lena has the same lack of knowledge of this world’s mage as the reader, so the readers get a baseline explanation of magic that also makes sense to the plot. I quite enjoyed the various magical elements that the author came up with in this book, and I am sure that she will further expand upon them in later books in this universe. We are Blood and Thunder is an outstanding debut from Kesia Lupo which combines some amazing and complex character-based storylines with inventive fantasy settings and cool magical fantasy elements to create an awesome overall book. Lupo has some considerable skill when it comes to a compelling young adult fantasy book, and We are Blood and Thunder is an excellent first outing for this talented author. I look forward to reading more of Lupo’s work in the future, especially if she returns to the excellent world she created in We are Blood and Thunder Master of Sorrows by Justin Call Master of Sorrows Cover Publisher: Gollancz (Trade Paperback format – 21 February 2019) Series: The Silent Gods – Book 1 Length: 576 pages My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars I have been looking forward to reading and reviewing Master of Sorrows for a while now. I previously mentioned this book in one of my Waiting on Wednesday articles, which got a fair amount of attention, which I took as a sign of some interest from the general fantasy fandom. The intriguing-sounding plot also made me extremely eager to check this book out, so I was very happy when I received a copy of it from Hachette Australia. In the end I found Master of Sorrows to be a terrific piece of fantasy fiction and an outstanding debut from first-time author Justin Call. The world of Luquatra has known much chaos and turmoil throughout its long history as three elder gods and their followers have battled for supremacy. But now with the dark god Keos banished from the land, the greatest concern for many is the presence of magic. The ancient and hidden Academy of Chaenbalu has long been a bastion against all things magic and will go to extreme lengths to achieve its primary objective of finding and containing the vast number of magical artefacts scattered throughout Luquatra. No artefact, no matter its strength or intended purpose, can be allowed to remain outside the control of the Academy, as even those artefacts created for good can be used for great evil. In order to fulfil this sacred work, the Academy trains all the children of Chaenbula in the arts of combat and magical detection. Only the best students will become Avatars, warrior thieves capable of infiltrating any location and making away with the hidden artefacts. Most importantly, an Avatar is trained to resist the lure of magic and the corruption of Keos. Annev de Breth has always dreamed of becoming an Avatar and is determined to pass the Academy’s tests. However, Annev is different from every other student at the Academy; trained by the town’s mysterious priest, Annev has an affinity for magic and hides a secret disfigurement that would see him immediately put to death. Caught between the warring ideologies of the man who raised him and the head of the Academy, Annev needs to decide what kind of man he wants to be while navigating the complex politics of Chaenbalu. But ancient powers are rising from the past, and it soon becomes apparent that Annev might not be the hero of this story; instead, he may be the man destined to unleash Keos once more upon Luquatra. As I mentioned above, Master of Sorrows is author Justin Call’s debut novel. It is also the first book in his The Silent Gods series, which is going to be made up of four books. Call has already announced that each of the three upcoming books will be released in late February of each year for the next three years, with this series set to wrap up in February 2022. This first book is an ambitious introduction to series that does a fantastic job of setting up the main story, as well as introducing the reader to an intriguing new fantasy universe. I really enjoyed the story contained within Master of Sorrows, as it is well paced out and contains some fantastic moments. The first part of the book features Annev attempting to pass the Academy’s tests in order to become an Avatar. I love a good magical school storyline, and this one is pretty fantastic, featuring some unique, complex and entertaining testing sequences, as well as an introduction to the complex and restrictive life within the Academy. The rest of the book is extremely exciting and eventful as the protagonist learns more about the threats and complex world outside of Chaenbalu, and even embarks on a dangerous mission where he encounters a series of mysterious threats. This all leads up to the book’s spectacular conclusion, which not only sets the scene for all manner of adventures in the future but also results in some interesting character development while also setting up several dangerous new antagonists with personal grudges against the main character. One of my favourite things about the plot is the general intrigue and hypocrisy surrounding the Academy of Chaenbalu. The Academy is framed as some ultimate bastion of good in the world, opposing the evils of magic and Keos. However, as the book progresses, the reader, through the protagonist’s eyes, begins to see that everything about the Academy is more complex and morally ambiguous than it first appears, resulting in a number of powerful story developments. For example, in this universe, any disfigurement or disability is viewed as a mark of the dark god Keos’s favour, and people who bear them, especially those born with some sort of disfigurement, are shunned or killed. These rules are especially enforced within the Academy, and Annev is forced to hide his disability to stay alive. Watching a basically good character be vilified for something outside of his control makes the reader lose trust in most of the characters associated with the Academy. It is also very thrilling to see the lengths the protagonist will go to in order to hide his disfigurement and try to live a normal life within Chaenbalu, knowing that his secret could be discovered at any turn. The reader is also left questioning the Academy’s many archaic rules, as these rules and blind obedience are particularly frustrating to the protagonist, who chafes at the restrictions and is constantly questioning everything. There are also a huge number of different plots and schemes occurring within the Academy, with many of the characters having secret allegiances and plans, many of which come to the surface by the end of the book. All of these elements are fantastic, and they really add a keen edge of intrigue and thoughtfulness to an already captivating story. Within Master of Sorrows, Call introduces his readers to a deep and enjoyable new fantasy universe that serves as an excellent basis for his story. While the author does make an effort to set up a much larger world, the vast majority of the story is set in and around the village of Chaenbalu, which houses the Academy. As I have mentioned before, I loved the Academy as a setting, but some of the other locations are also intriguing, such as the massive magical forest that surrounds the town. I really loved the overall setting of the gods and magic within this world, especially when it comes to people’s perceptions about them, as they have some fantastic impacts on the story. Call spends a bit of time expanding on the mythology of this world’s main gods, telling their stories and explaining the impacts that they had on the world. These are quite interesting, especially as the stories they tell reveal that the conflicts of the gods were just as complex as the issues occurring within the Academy. The author has also come up with some fun and dangerous new fantasy creatures, mostly as servants of the god Keos. These creatures have some great scenes, especially towards the end of the book, and I look forward to seeing more of them and this intriguing new world throughout the rest of The Silent Gods series. I really need to the hype up some of the incredible action sequences featured within Master of Sorrows. Call has created several exceptional extended action scenes within this book, including two intricate tests within the Academy, where the students must overcome not only each other but also the various obstacles set up against them. These testing scenes are extremely elaborate and feature some interesting rules and opposition. I loved reading these scenes, and it was great watching the protagonist try to complete them his way. In addition to these testing scenes, there is also a great magic based combat sequence featured later in the book, where the protagonist and his companions must overcome all manner of magical traps and attacks in order to complete their objective. This scene is massive in terms of destruction and brutality featured and was an excellent addition to the book. As a result, readers who love a good amount of thrilling action in their fantasy stories should definitely check this book out as Call demonstrates a real skill for creating unique and captivating fantasy action sequences. Master of Sorrows is an amazing debut from new author Justin Call, who has done a wonderful job setting up a fresh and intriguing new fantasy series. This first book in the planned The Silent Gods series has some awesome and memorable plot points and features a thrilling and captivating action-packed adventure. Call has certainly set himself up as a fantasy author to watch, and I am extremely eager to see where this story goes next. I cannot wait to check out the second book in The Silent Gods series. Half Moon Lake by Kirsten Alexander Half Moon Lake Cover.jpg Publisher: Bantam Press (Trade Paperback Edition – 2 January 2019) Series: Standalone Length: 320 pages My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Debuting Australian author Kirsten Alexander presents a dramatic, captivating and hard-hitting novel of desperation and loss loosely based around a real and shocking historical event. In the summer of 1913, a young boy, Sonny Davenport, walks into the woods around his family’s summer home at Half Moon Lake, Louisiana, and never returns. Despite a widespread search of the surrounding area by an army of volunteers, no trace of the boy can be found. As the search grows in volume, the disappearance becomes headline news across the country, especially as Sonny’s parents, John Henry and Mary Davenport, are wealthy and influential members of their home town of Opelousas. For the next two years, the Davenports engage in a desperate hunt for Sonny across the south, offering a massive reward for information on their missing son. But with no substantiated leads, the Davenports slowly lose hope and Mary sinks more and more into her despair. However, just when everything seems lost, a boy matching Sonny’s description is found wandering around several southern towns in the company of a tramp. As the world watches, Mary meets the child and claims that he is Sonny. But is he truly her missing son? There are a number of differences between the two boys and many are convinced that the Davenports have taken in the wrong child and the real Sonny is still out there. As the people of Opelousas, including many of the Davenport’s friends and servants, debate the true identity of this young boy, a kidnapping trial for the tramp begins. However, the proceedings are thrown into chaos when Grace Mills, an unwed farm worker, arrives in town, claiming that the boy is her son. This is an outstanding first book from Alexander, who has created a powerful and memorable story based partially around real-life events. Half Moon Lake is a fantastic and dramatic story that dives deep into the hearts and psyche of its characters and the historical elements of the time to create a lasting impact on the reader. I was very surprised about how addictive I found this book to be, as the intense character emotions and the dramatic actions that they take to alleviate their grief and the grief of their loved ones was just incredible. I am still reeling from several of the revelations and developments that occurred towards the end of the book, many of which will stick with me for a long time. One of the most intriguing aspects of this book is that is partially based on a real-life historical event, the disappearance of Bobby Dunbar, which took place in America’s south in the early 20th century. Bobby Dunbar disappeared when he was four. After months of searching, a young boy was found some distance away who appeared similar to Bobby and was claimed by Bobby’s parents, despite many people voicing their doubts about the boy’s true identity. In addition, a second woman attempted to claim the child as her own son, and a legal case was initiated to determine the identity of the child. I was unfamiliar with the Bobby Dunbar case before I read Half Moon Lake and did not look up the details of it until after I finished the book. As a result, I was amazed that the intense story was so closely based on a real story. This case and its eventual results are absolutely fascinating, and I felt that Alexander did a fantastic job of capturing the essence of this event and installing it within her story. For example, the author does an excellent job of portraying the probable emotions, feelings and opinions of people who would have been involved in the real-life disappearance, as she utilises a number of different character perspectives throughout her book. Readers of Half Moon Lake get a great idea of the despair all of the parents in this story would have experienced, the fear and confusion of the children, and the bewilderment and conflicted emotion of everyone else involved in the case. I felt that Alexander’s portrayal of the missing child’s mother was done particularly well, as the readers gets to see her so filled with realistic fear, grief and despair that it drives her to try and claim a child that might not even be hers. I also quite enjoyed the way that the author explored the highly publicised nature of the child’s disappearance and how the media at the time covered the case, dividing those following the case as they try to determine the true fate of the missing child and the real identity of the discovered child. I also loved the way that the author looked at how the media scrutiny of the time might have affected the individuals involved in the case, and how this could have potentially influenced their actions and decisions. I also really liked the way that the period’s ideas of class came into effect during this book. There are some key examinations of the different ways that the rich and the poor were treated during this time, and how this would have impacted the investigation, the search for the missing child, the media scrutiny and overall results of the big trial that served as an important scene at the end of the book. Also significant and intriguing was the way in which Alexander looked at how concerns for personal and familial reputations might have come into these events, resulting in several characters undertaking various actions that they knew to be wrong, all in the name of protecting someone’s social standing and reputation. The story is set in America’s south during the early 20th century, and as such there are a number of African American characters who are involved with the case. Race and the perception of certain ethnicities came into this book a lot more than I thought it would, and I thought that Alexander did a fantastic job capturing how these characters might have been ignored or disciplined for trying to get involved in proceedings. All of these elements result in an amazing historical tapestry which forms an excellent setting for this story. Overall, this is an amazing debut from Australian author Kirsten Alexander, who uses the inspiration of a fascinating real-life case to craft an epic and powerful story. There are so many great story elements spread throughout Half Moon Lake, as the character’s emotions and despair drive them to desperate and immoral acts. It features a narrative that is at times sad and at other times darn right appalling, and several reveals and character decisions at the end of the book will leave you shocked and will stick in your mind long after you finish reading it. I loved this spectacular first book from Alexander and I am looking forward to seeing where she goes next Waiting on Wednesday – A Capitol Death and Shadows of Athens Welcome to my weekly segment, Waiting on Wednesday, where I look at upcoming books that I am planning to order and review in the next few months and which I think I will really enjoy. Stay tuned to see reviews of these books when I get a copy of them. Historical fiction and murder mysteries have long been blended together in order to produce some incredible and unique works of fiction over the years. I am a huge fan of this popular genre mashup, and have personally reviewed several of these books over the last year. Examples include one of my top books of the year, Tombland by C. J. Sansom; the incredible murder investigation set during Cromwell’s England in Destroying Angel by S. G. MacLean; and even some more contemporary historical mysteries such as Murder Mile by Lynda La Plante. Each of these books is a lot of fun, and I find that the combination of history and mystery elements usually work together extremely well to create some incredible stories. Some of the most intriguing examples of historical murder mysteries are set in much more ancient civilisations, such as Greece or Rome, which allow for some much more unique stories. Examples include Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa series or Australian author Gary Corby’s The Athenian Mysteries, which are a particular favourite of mine. With some extremely interesting releases just around the corner, this week I will be looking at two upcoming murder mystery books set in ancient times that I am extremely eager to get copies of. A Capitol Death Cover.jpg The first of these books is A Capitol Death by Lindsey Davis. Davis has long been the gold standard of ancient historical murder mysteries, with books such as her long-running Marcus Didius Falco series and its follow-up, the Flavia Albia series, both of which contain amazing mysteries set in the heart of ancient Rome. I have been a huge fan of the Flavia Albia series for years, and have read all six previous books in the series. I also reviewed the sixth book in the series, Pandora’s Boy, early last year, awarding it five stars. As a result, I have huge hopes for A Capitol Death, which will be the seventh book in the series, and based on Davis’s previous work I already know I am going to love it. In Rome, ruled by the erratic Emperor Domitian, Flavia Albia is dragged into the worst sort of investigation—a politically charged murder—in Lindsey Davis’s next historical mystery, A Capitol Death. A man falls to his death from the Tarpeian Rock, which overlooks the Forum in the Capitoline Hill in Ancient Rome. While it looks like a suicide, one witness swears that she saw it happen and that he was pushed. Normally, this would attract very little official notice but this man happened to be in charge of organizing the Imperial Triumphs demanded by the emperor. The Emperor Domitian, autocratic and erratic, has decided that he deserves two Triumphs for his so-called military victories. The Triumphs are both controversial and difficult to stage because of the not-so-victorious circumstances that left them without treasure or captives to be paraded through the streets. Normally, the investigation would be under the auspices of her new(ish) husband but, worried about his stamina following a long recovery, private informer Flavia Albia, daughter of Marcus Didius Falco, steps in. What a mistake that turns out to be. The deceased proves to have been none-too-popular, with far too many others with much to gain from his death. With the date of the Triumphs fast approaching, Flavia Albia must unravel a truly complex case of murder before danger shows up on her own doorstep. The synopsis for the new book sounds pretty incredible, as the series’ titular investigator, Flavia Albia, steps up to investigate an intriguing new mystery. It sounds like this investigation will dive into some political intrigue surrounding the unpopular Emperor Domitian. Davis has combined mysteries with ancient Roman politics before, such as in the series’ fifth book, The Third Nero, and the end result was pretty spectacular. I am hoping that Davis will continue to provide the reader with her trademark blend of powerful mysteries, amazing historical elements and outrageous humorous moments, and I am looking forward to any big comedy set pieces, such as the incredible climax to The Third Nero or the big brawl sequence in Pandora’s Boy. The story in the previous book also hinted at the return of an old antagonist from the original Falco series, and I am looking forward to seeing if that comes into play within A Capitol Death. Shadows of Athens Cover.jpg The second book that I am interested in checking out is a new mystery from debuting author J. M. Alvey. This new book, Shadow of Athens, is set to be released in March and will take place in Athens in 443 BC. 443 BC, and, after decades of war with Persia, peace has finally come to Athens. The city is being rebuilt, and commerce and culture are flourishing. Aspiring playwright Philocles has come home to find a man with his throat cut slumped against his front gate. Is it just a robbery gone wrong? But, if so, why didn’t the thieves take the dead man’s valuables? With the play that could make his name just days away, he must find out who this man is, why he has been murdered – and why the corpse was left in his doorway. But Philocles soon realises he has been caught up in something far bigger, and there are those who don’t want him looking any further . . . This sounds like it could be a really cool book read. A murder mystery set in ancient Greece has a lot of potential, and I will be interested to see if Alvey’s book will fully explore the historical complexities of this ancient city while also producing a compelling mystery. I liked that the protagonist of Alvey’s book will be an actual real-life Greek historical figure, in this case, the famous tragic playwright Philocles. Placing real-life historical figures in the middle of fictional murders is always a compelling story choice, and I am really hoping that Alvey will explore this protagonist’s work as a playwright. It also sounds like the investigation within Shadow of Athens might play into Athenian politics and will probably have something to do with the war with Persia, both of which are incredibly appealing to me and will hopefully lead to some great story developments. In addition to the awesome-sounding premise, I have to say that I really enjoyed the striking cover art that this new book had, and I found that its eye-catching imagery really grabbed my imagination. Shadow of Athens already has some very positive pre-reviews from some notable authors, including one of my favourite historical fiction authors at the moment, Andrew Taylor. As a result of these endorsements, combined with the intriguing plot synopsis, Shadow of Athens is probably the historical fiction debut I am most looking forward to at the moment and I am excited to see how impressive this new author is. As a result, I think that both of these books have a lot of potential, and could prove to be some of my favourite reads of early 2019.	__label__1	0.993727
EDGAR ALLAN POE 1809 - 1849 (G3c, G4, W4, Va) xxxxxThe American short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe is famous for his tales of horror, such as The Fall of the House of Usher in 1839, and The Masque of the Red Death, published three years later. His The Murders in the Rue Morgue, produced in 1841, introduced the sleuth Inspector Dupin, and is seen as the first of the modern detective stories. Other works in this vein included The Pit and the Pendulum, The Gold Bug, and the Tell-Tale Heart. He was also an accomplished literary critic and poet, some of his best poems being The Sleeper, The Bells, Annabel Lee, and his haunting masterpiece The Raven, published in 1845. A man with a weird, fertile imagination, his work had a marked influence in Europe, especially on the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Paul Valery, and the composer Claude Debussy. EDGAR ALLAN POE 1809 - 1849 (G3c, G4, W4, Va) Poe: pen and ink drawing by Irish illustrator Harry Furniss (1854-1925), late 19th century – National Portrait Gallery, London. Wood: by the English artist Reginald Easton (1806-1893). Baudelaire: detail, by the French painter Émile Deroy (1820-1846), 1844 – Musée des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, France. Flaubert: by the French painter and engraver Eugène Giraud (1806-1881), c1856 – Palace of Versailles, France. Combourg: lithograph by the French artist Felix Benoist (1818-1896) – National Library of France, Paris. xxxxxThe American short-story writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe is best remembered for his frightening, macabre tales like The Fall of the House of Usher of 1839, and his The Masque of the Red Death, published three years later. His The Murders in the Rue Morgue, produced in 1841, is seen as the birth of the modern detective story. Featuring the criminal investigator Auguste Dupin, it anticipated, amongst others, the exploits of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes, the creation of the English novelist Arthur Conan Doyle. xxxxxPoe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents, both touring actors, died before he was three years old, and he was brought up by John Allan, a successful merchant in Richmond, Virginia, who was probably his godfather. Under his guidance he attended a private school in England for five years, and entered the University of Virginia in 1826. Here, however, he ran up gambling debts and began drinking heavily. His foster father refused to support him, and he was obliged to leave after a year and join the army. By this time, however, he was showing talent as a poet, and in 1830 he found a ready means of escaping from the army by deliberately disobeying orders! In 1831 his third book, Poems, a work largely influenced by the English romantics, was well received but, in order to make a living he wrote a series of amusing stories for the Philadelphia Saturday Courier. Then in 1835, having moved to Richmond, Virginia, he became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. This provided an outlet for his fiction - including Berenice, the first of his eerie tales - but it also gained him a well-earned reputation as a discerning literary critic, one of the best of his day. Unfortunately, success brought about a recurrence of his drinking problem, and he was dismissed in January 1837. xxxxxOver the next ten years or so he struggled to make a name for himself, first in Philadelphia, and then in New York. But whilst he met with limited success as a literary journalist, it was during this period that he wrote the short stories of mystery, horror and violence which brought him recognition and ensured his place in world literature. His famous work The Fall of the House of Usher, published in 1839, was full of gloom and foreboding, and he followed this with his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, his gruesome A Descent into a Maelstrom, and his The Murders in the Rue Morgue, a macabre tale which introduced the able sleuth Inspector Dupin, the forerunner of a long line of fictional detectives who solved crimes by mere deduction. There followed a series of gothic romances, full of fantasy, mystery and suspense. These included The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum (a particularly gruesome tale), The Gold Bug, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Purloined Letter and The Cask of Amontillado. And worthy of mention from 1837 was his one attempt at a full-blown novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a darkly imaginative account following a mutiny at sea. xxxxxPoe’s fascination with the mysterious and supernatural has tended to overshadow his ability as a poet. His works, such as Ulalume, The Sleeper and The Bells, have a lyrical beauty all of their own, and the sad, haunting theme which makes up The Raven, produced in 1845, is one of the gems of American literature. And moving, too, is his Annabel Lee, a lamentation commemorating the death of his wife in 1847. xxxxxAs befits Poe, a certain amount of mystery surrounds his death in 1849, aged 40. Following a lecture tour in Richmond, he was found lying unconscious on a street in Baltimore, and his subsequent death was attributed to a “congestion of the brain”. Drugs and alcohol might well have contributed to his death, though according to his family he had abstained from both for some time. xxxxxPoe was a strange mixture of a man. His tales of horror and fantasy were no doubt the product of troubled dreams and a weird, fertile imagination, but in his literary criticism he was capable of a logical approach and a well-reasoned judgement. Likewise, in the making of his stories and the composition of his poetry, he adhered strictly to standards of structure and metre which he himself imposed. His influence spread to Europe later in the century, and was particularly powerful in France. Here his work was admired, amongst others, by the poets Charles Baudelaire and Paul Valery, and the composer Claude Debussy. xxxxxAn English pioneer of crime fiction at this time was the novelist Mrs Henry Wood, born Ellen Price (1814-1887). She is particularly remembered for her highly melodramatic work East Lynne, published in 1861. This story tells of the lovely Isabel, devoted wife and mother, who, in a moment of folly, runs off with an aristocratic cad and bears his child. Awash with disgrace, guilt and repentance, it proved immensely popular in the straight-laced Victorian society of the day. It sold over half a million copies, and stage performances in London and New York brought the house down! xxxxxA good storyteller, Mrs Wood wrote close on 40 novels, the majority following melodramatic themes, and many centred around crime and its dire consequences. Most successful among these potboilers was Mrs Halliburton's Troubles and The Channings, both published in 1862. In 1867 she became proprietor of the Argosy magazine, and it was in this journal that she produced a series of short stories under the title The Johnny Ludlow Papers. Mrs Henry Wood, Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert xxxxxAs noted above, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was greatly influenced by Edgar Allan Poe. Indeed, he wrote articles about him, and during his lifetime translated many of his works, including the poem The Raven. His own masterpiece was The Flowers of Evil, published in 1857. A collection of erotic and sordid poems, he was fined for offending public morals, but, subject matter apart, this work showed his subtle use of language, and his high regard for rhythmical and musical perfection. His striking use of what he termed his “correspondances”, associations of ideas which stressed the role of imagery as a poetic technique, paved the way for the symbolist movement later in the century. Among his other works were appraisals of the French novelists Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, and critical articles on the works of contemporary artists such as Eugène Delacroix and Édouard Manet. His addiction to drugs was the subject of his Les paradis artificiels of 1860. At one time a Paris “dandy”, he died in poverty, a lonely and disillusioned man, his talents yet to be recognised. xxxxxAnd another Frenchman whose first major work was considered indecent was Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), one of the century’s most successful novelists of the realist school. His Madame Bovary, published in 1857 - the same year as Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil - led to the prosecution of both Flaubert and the publisher on a charge of violating public morals. The incident caused a great scandal but, in fact, both were acquitted and the book was an enormous success. (Six months later the same tribunal found Baudelaire guilty of the same charge.) xxxxxFlaubert was born in Rouen, Normandy, the son of a surgeon. After studying law in Paris for two years, he turned to writing as a career. He made a two-year visit to Greece and the Near East from 1849 to 1851, and took a trip to Carthage in 1858, but he suffered from a form of epilepsy and thus spent most of his life at rest on the family estate at Croisset on the Seine, near Rouen. Here he made a good living from his writing, but in 1875 he gave much of his fortune over to his niece Caroline - whose husband had been made bankrupt - and spent the last five years of his life short of money. This may well have hastened his death. He died suddenly from an apoplectic stroke at the age of 58. xxxxxAs a writer Flaubert constantly revised and polished his work to ensure that his style was pure and precise, and by shrewd observation and a remarkable eye for detail he produced realistic social settings for all his novels, combined with a penetrating study of character. His masterpiece Madame Bovary, written over five years, tells the fate of Emma, the wife of a country doctor who, seeking romantic love, embarks on a series of disastrous love affairs, and is eventually driven to take her own life. By it, Flaubert aimed to show the boring, drab nature of bourgeois life at this time, riddled, as he saw it, by illusions of grandeur. The novel that followed, Salammbo, an exotic tale set in ancient Carthage, was the most romantic of his works and gained him recognition at court and a place among the literary élite in Paris. xxxxxBut his next publications, A Sentimental Education, produced just before the outbreak of the Franco-German War of 1870, and The Temptation of St. Anthony, four years later, proved much less successful - despite the years of effort he had put into both of them - and he then turned his hand to writing short stories. The result was three well-conceived and popular novellas, published under the title Three Tales in 1877. Written as always in the pursuit of perfection, this collection, comprising three very different themes, is regarded today as one of his finest works. xxxxxFlaubert was a close friend of the novelist George Sand and, from 1867, gave encouragement and guidance to the short-story writer Guy de Maupassant, a young man whom he regarded as his disciple and son. His circle of friends also included the writers Alphonse Daudet, the Goncourt brothers, and Émile Zola. xxxxxIncidentally, some of Flaubert’s best writing was published after his death, contained in a journal entitled Par les champs and par les grèves (Over fields and shores). This gave a superb account of a walking tour he made with a friend along the Loire and the coast of Brittany in 1847, during which they visited a medieval castle amid the woodland at Combourg (illustrated), the family home of the French writer and diplomat Chateaubriand. xxxxxAs noted above, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was greatly influenced by the poems and short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. He regarded him as a soul mate, and from 1852 to 1865 devoted much of his time to translating his works and writing critical articles about his contribution to literature. Notable during this period was his attempt at translating Poe’s poem The Raven, a formidable task even for a poet who shared the American poet’s high regard for rhythmical and musical perfection. xxxxxBaudelaire’s major work, and perhaps the only one by which he is remembered today, was his Flowers of Evil, his first book of verse, published in 1857. Having inherited a large fortune as a young man, Baudelaire settled in Paris in the early 1840s, and for some years was able to live the life of a “dandy”. It was when this money started to run out that he began composing his poems, assisted it would seem by an addiction to opium and hashish and the “artificial paradises” these drugs produced. He became recognised as a poet of exceptional talent and originality after the publication of The Flowers of Evil, but alongside his technical skills went a love of eroticism and a morbid fascination for all that was seen as evil, depraved and ugly in the world. In particular, he regarded life in Paris as a wretched, lonely existence, without hope or purpose. xxxxxNot surprisingly his volume of poems landed him in court, where he was found guilty of offending public morals. He was fined, and six of his poems were banned from further publication. He had no defence against the charge but, subject matter apart, his verse demonstrated a mystical, subtle power of language which was to have a significant influence on the shape and development of modern poetry. From out of a sordid study of ugliness he produced verse of classical beauty, achieved in large measure by his gift for musical language and what he termed his “correspondances”, associations of ideas which stressed the role of imagery as a poetic technique. This paved the way for symbolism, a movement which was to gather strength later in the century. xxxxxThe last years of Baudelaire’s life were full of despair. He was declared bankrupt in 1862 and this added to his sense of failure. In 1864 he went to live in Belgium, but his sudden deterioration in health forced him to return to Paris in less than two years. He was admitted to a clinic and died the following year from brain damage. xxxxxHe wrote a number of works in addition to The Flowers of Evil. He produced his autobiographical novel La Fanfarlo in 1847, and published appraisals of the novelists Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert around that time. His Les paradis artificiels of 1860 deals with his addiction to drugs and was very much on the lines of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. His collection of fifty prose poems, often known as Spleen de Paris, and My Heart Laid Bare, were published after his death. xxxxxIncidentally, in the mid 1840s, before he embarked on his poetic career, he produced Les salons, two pamphlets on art criticism in which his comments on various contemporary artists - including Eugène Delacroix and Édouard Manet - showed a masterly understanding of the subject and a great deal of original thought. And his The Painter of Modern Life, an essay advocating the use of contemporary subjects, is said to have had a marked influence on the French Impressionists, particularly Manet. He also much admired etchings produced by the American artist James Whistler. xxxxx…… In the revolution of 1848 Baudelaire took part in the street fighting, and also helped to produce Le Salut Public, a magazine supporting the rebellion. The cover for this production was illustrated by a parody of Delacroix’s famous Liberty Leading the People, the work of his friend, the French realist artist Gustave Courbet. Va-1837-1861-Va-1837-1861-Va-1837-1861-Va-1837-1861-Va-1837-1861-Va-1837-1861-Va xxxxxAnother French writer whose first major work was considered indecent was Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). His Madame Bovary, published in 1857 - the same year as Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil - led to his prosecution on a charge of violating morals but, unlike Baudelaire, he was acquitted. Madame Bovary tells the story of a middle-class wife who, seeking romantic love, embarks on a series of love affairs and eventually takes her own life. In this and his other novels, Flaubert gained an international reputation for the realistic portrayal of his settings, his purity of style, and his penetrating study of character, all achieved by a painstaking quest for perfection. Other works included Salammbo (an exotic tale set in ancient Carthage), A Sentimental Education, The Temptation of St. Anthony, and his Trois Contes, of 1877, considered by some as his masterpiece. He numbered among his friends the writers George Sand, the Goncourt brothers, Alphonse Daudet and Émile Zola, and during his career he gave encouragement to the young short-story writer Guy de Maupassant.	__label__1	0.612095
The Works of Heinrich Heine From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search "Do you know China, the native land of the winged dragon and of porcelain tea-pots? All the country is a cabinet of curiosities, surrounded by an inhumanly long wall and one hundred thousand Tartar sentinels.--The Works of Heinrich Heine (1891-1905) by Heinrich Heine "A QUEER thing is this writing! One man has luck in the practice thereof, and another none; but the worst mischance in such work which could well befall any man happened to my poor friend, Heinrich Kitzler - Henry Tickler — Magister Artium in Göttingen. There is not a man there so learned, so rich in ideas, so industrious as this friend; and yet to this hour no book by him has ever appeared at the Leipzig fair."--"The Gods in Exile" (1853) by Heinrich Heine Related e The Works of Heinrich Heine (1891-1905) is a multi-volume anthology of English translations of the writings of Heinrich Heine Some are translated by Charles Godfrey Leland. Full text of VOLUME VI. THE WORKS OF HEINRICH HEINE VI . THE WORKS OF HEINRICH HEINE TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY CHARLES GODFREY LELAND (HANS BREITMANN ) VOLUME VI. LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1892 GERMANY IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME II. LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1892 83 / 1/47 1254 loll 1.6 1COPYRIGHT, 1892 ( All rights reserved .] Beth Stacks Robert Sadler 1-27-69 Addia معه مهت كنت CONTENTS. GERMANY. SECOND PART THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. BOOK III. CHAPTER I. PAGE I II. > III . 19 36 48 70 IV. V. VI. " 87 95 VII. THIRD PART 107 213 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS II . DOCTOR FAUST : A BALLET- POEM INTRODUCTION . AOT FIRST SECOND . THIRI) . FOURTH FIFTH COMMENTS ON FAUST . ور THE GODS IN EXILE 215 223 229 233 239 244 249 293 295 379 381 383 387 391 395 PREFACE TO THE FRENCH EDITION THE GODDESS DIANA PREFACE FIRST TABLEAU SECOND 99 THIRD FOURTH 1 GERMANY. SECOND PART. - BOOK THE THIRD . THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. CHAPTER I. Do you know China, the native land of the winged dragon and of porcelain tea- pots ? All the country is a cabinet of curiosities, surrounded by an inhumanly long wall and one hundred thousand Tartar sentinels. But the birds and thoughts of European scholars fly over it, and when they have seen till they are satisfied, return ing home, they tell most charming things of the strange land and its more curious folk . There Nature, with its glaring contrasts and entangled flourishes, eccentric giant flowers, dwarfed trees, voluptuously baroque fruits,' and absurdly deco 1 “ Barock wollüstigen Früchten." In reference to the fre VOL. II . A 2 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL, rated birds, is as fable - like a caricature as man himself, with his pointed pig-tailed pate, his reverences, long-nails, antique-crafty nature, and child- like tongue of monosyllables.1 Man and Nature cannot there look at one another without suppressing a laugh. They do not laugh aloud, being by far too high- politely civilised ; so, to re press it, they make the most seriously comic faces. In that land is neither shadow nor perspective . Over houses which are like patchwork of many colours, rise rows on rows of roofs which look like outspread umbrellas on which hang many metal bells, so that even the wind when sweeping by makes itself droll by singing comic sounds. In such a house with bells dwelt a princess whose feet were smaller than those of any other Chinese girl, whose obliquely slit little eyes blinked and winked more sweet-dreamily than 66 quent representations of fruits grouped together as for dessert, which are so common in the baroque or degraded rococo style of decoration of the Regency, and which are still to be seen in many hotel dining-rooms. From their almost invariably exag gerated size and high colour, such pomological displays in art were jokingly described by an American critic in a burlesque catalogue as some pumpkins," which became a popular saying for anything very remarkable of its kind. It is curious, as exactly conveying the sense of Heine's singular expression.— Translator. “ With ways which were dark And tricks which were vain, But his smile it was gentle and child -like.” . — The Heathen Chinee, by Bret Harte. -Translator. 1 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 3 a a those of any dame of the Celestial realm , and in whose giggling, tittering heart the craziest caprices made their nests. For it was her chief delight to tear to rags the costliest silks and cloths of gold. When they r- r-ripped and cracked sharply between her destroying fingers, she shouted for joy. But at last , when she had spent all her fortune on such a fancy, and had torn up all her properties and possessions, she was, by advice and opinion of all her mandarins, declared to be an in curable lunatic, and was confined in a round tower . This Chinese princess or caprice personified is like the personified Muse of a German poet, who cannot be passed without mention in a history of Romantic poetry. This is the Muse who smiles at us so madly from the poems of Clemens Brentano. There she sits, tearing the most lustrous satin trains and the most brilliant gold lace, and her wild and merrily laughing madness fills our souls with uncanny rapture and voluptuous pain. But now for fifteen years Brentano has lived secluded from the world , or walled up in his Catholicism ; for now there remains to him nothing more that is precious to tear up. For he has torn, as it was said , the hearts which loved him, and every one who was his friend has some capricious injury, by him inflicted, to complain of ; but it was most and worst of all on himself, and on his own poetic power, that he practised his mania for destruction W 4 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. I especially call attention to a comedy by this poet called Pome de Léon. Nothing can be more disjointed and fragmentary than this composition, both as regards thoughts and languages. Yet all these shreds and tatters live and whirl round so merrily that in reading it one fancies himself in a masqued ball of words, and thoughts, and witti cisms. There everything rushes and riots and rolls together in delightful confusion, and it is only the generally prevailing madness which makes a kind of harmony. The most preposterous puns run like harlequins through all the piece, and slap everybody with their wooden swords. Sometimes a serious idea addresses us, but it stutters like the Doctor of Bologna. There a phrase lounges and strolls like a Pierrot with far too loose hanging sleeves and far too large waist coat buttons, and there again humpy dwarfy witticisms, with little legs, leap like Punches, while words of love flutter about with sorrow in their hearts. So all dances, and leaps, and whirls, and rattles, and drones, while ever and anon blare out the trumpets of a Bacchantic rage for ruin and destruction. A great tragedy by this poet, called “ The Founding of Prague,” is also very remarkable. There are scenes in it where we are inspired by the most mysterious thrills or chills of primevally ancient legends. In it rustle the dark Bohemian THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 5 guests, there too wander the grim Slavonian gods, heathen nightingales trill as of yore, but the soft Aurora of Christianity is beginning to shine on the summits of the trees. Brentano has also written some good stories, such, for instance, as “ The History of Brave Caspar and Pretty Annie " ( Die Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl). While fair Annie was still a child, and went with her grandmother to the public executioner's, to there purchase, as common people in Germany are accustomed to do, certain remedies," something suddenly rattled in the great cabinet by which Annie stood, and the child 1 It is mentioned by many writers, but especially by Michelet ( La Sorciere, vol. i . , Intro. ) , that during the Middle Ages the executioner was generally the most skilful surgeon in every community, the study of practical anatomy being forbidden to all ( even to professional surgeons ) , save him . “ And his experiments were sacrilegious.” Hence he became a kind of physician generally. When Paracelsus at Basle in 1527 burned the books of his predecessors, he declared that all he knew of medicine and surgery he had learned from witches and execu . tioners. As regards this story of Caspar and Annie, Heine seems to have been haunted all his life, very strangely, by the mystery of the headsman's sword ; nor have I myself quite escaped it, as the reader may see in my “ Gypsy Sorcery .” In the remarkable series of laws against superstitions and sorceries published by the Pfalzgraf Maximilian in 1611 ( vide Bayerische Sagen, von Friedrich Panzer, 1848) , there is one which decrees punishment to any person who, believing that an executioner's sword which has taken life is of special virtue and effect ( in combat) , shall obtain or buy such a sword for such a purpose. — Translator . 6 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. cried in fright, “ A mouse ! a mouse !” But the executioner was still more frightened, and said, “ Dear woman, in this cabinet hangs my heads man's sword, and it always moves of itself when any one comes near whom it is destined to de capitate. My sword thirsts for the blood of this child. Let me just scratch her a little with it on the neck. Then it will be satisfied with a drop of blood, and have no further longing .” But the grandmother would not listen to this advice, and had at last to deeply regret her incredulity when fair Annie was really beheaded with the same sword . Clemens Brentano is now perhaps fifty years of age, and he lives a hermit life in Frankfort, as corresponding member of the Catholic Propaganda. His name has almost passed away of later years, and he is only mentioned now and then when people speak of the popular songs which he published with his friend Achim von Arnim . For he compiled with the latter, under the title of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (" The Wondrous Horn of the Boy ” ), a collection of songs which were gathered partly from the people, partly from old broad sides and rare works. I cannot praise this work enough ; it contains the fairest flowers of German а 1 French version, “ M. Clément Brentano peut avoir aujourd’ hui cinquante sept ans.” THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 7 spirit and feeling, and he who would know the people from their best side should know these songs. As I write, the book lies before me, and it seems as if I smelt the perfume of German lime-trees. The lime-tree plays a leading part in these songs. Lovers woo of evenings in its shade ; it is their favourite tree, probably because the lime-tree leaf is in the form of a heart. This remark was made to me by a German poet whom I prefer to all others-namely, myself. On the title - page of that book is a boy blowing a horn , and when a poet in another land looks at that picture, he thinks he hears the notes best known to him, and then he may feel home- sickness, as happened to the Swiss landsknecht (or mercenary soldier), who, when standing sentinel on the bas tion at Strasburg, hearing the call to the cows afar, threw away his pike and swam over the Rhine, but was soon after arrested and shot as a 1 Linden . It is known by the name of “ lime” in New Eng land , and of “ linden ” in Pennsylvania. ? Heine's memory here deceived him. It was probably a very much older poet who gave him the simile. “ The linden leaf,” remarks Friedrich ( Symbolik der Natur, p. 245 ) , “ on ac count of its being shaped like a heart, was a symbol. The greatest of our old poets, such as Walter von der Vogelweide, Godfrey of Strasburg, and the Minnesinger, often speak of the linden and its leaf. ” Fortunately for Heine, this poet whom he preferred to all others had some images which were more original.— Translator . 8 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. deserter. On which subject there is a touching song in “ The Boy's Wonder - Horn : ” — “ In Strasburg on the fort My trouble all begun. I heard an Alpine horn blow far away ; I tried to swim back to my home that day ; It was not done. At one o'clock that night They caught and held me tight, And took me to the captain , as ye see. Ah, God ! they caught me swimming in the stream ; All's up with me ! To -morrow morn at ten Before the regiment I have to go ; No pardon can I gain , That hope is all in vain, That I well know . Ye brothers of my corps, After to- day you'll see me never more . Upon the shepherd all the blame should fall; It was the Alpine horn which did it all ; That I deplore ! " " What a beautiful poem ! There is a deep charm in these popular songs. Artistic poets try to imi tate these productions of Nature just as men make artificial mineral waters. But when they are chemically analysed the main thing is want ing ; that is ,the non - analysable sympathetic power THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 9 of Nature. In these songs we feel the heart-beat of the German people. Here all its sad gaiety, all its foolish reason reveals itself. Here German anger drums, German mockery fifes, German love kisses. German wine and German tears drop in pearls, and the last are often better than the first, for there are therein both iron and salt. What naïveté in the truth ! what honesty in the un truth ! What an honest soul is “ the poor black necked rough ," although he practises highway robbery ! Listen to the phlegmatic touching tale as he himself tells it “ I came unto a landlady ; They asked me who was I ? I'm a poor black - neck ruffian , I eat when I am hungry, And I drink when I am dry. They took me in the dining- hall ; They gave me wine to drink : I let my eyes stray round the room , And let the wine glass sink . They sat me at the table, Like a gentleman so high ; But when it came to pay the bill, The devil a coin had I. 1 Perhaps the truth is that they have not run through the soil , nor been kept long enough.— Translator. IO THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. And when I asked them for a bed , They put me in the hay ; So I , poor black -neck ruffian, For my joke must dearly pay . And when I nestled in the hay, Oh, then I felt forlorn , For I was pricked with thistles dry, And stuck with many a thorn. And in the morning when I rose , The roofs were white with frost ; Then I , poor black -neck ruffian, Must laugh at mine own cost. I took my sword well in my hand, I bound it to my side ; Poor devil , I must go a - foot For lack of a horse to ride. And rising up, IΙ ranged about The roads as it might be ; I met a wealthy merchant's son , And he left his purse with me. ” This arme Schwartenhals, or black-neck ruffian, is the most German character whom I know. What repose, what conscious power prevails in this poem ! But you shall also learn to know our Gretel She is a straightforward maiden, and I love her dearly. Hans said to her “ Gird up your garments, Margaret, And come with me away, For all the corn is And the wine is stowed away.' ” garnered THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. II She answers, pleased- " .0 Hänslein, dear Hänslein ! I'll be true mate of thine ; The week -days in the meadows, And on Sunday by the wine. ' He led her through the byway's All by her snow- white hand, He took her on the highways To a tavern far inland. Landlady, hey, good landlady, Bring out your wine, I say ! Because the clothes this Maryaret wears Must all be drunk to- day. ' Then Margaret fell to weeping, And so her grief began ; Adown her cheeks in sorrow The light-bright teardrops ran . O Hänslein, dear Hänslein ! Such language did not come From thee when thou didst take me From my dear father's home.' He took her by the fingers, His hand in hers was bound ; He led her by the byways Till they a garden found . . ' O Margaret, dear Margaret ! What is it grieves thee most ? And is it for thy cheerfulness, Or honour which is lost ? ' 12 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. ' I weep not for my cheerfulness, Or honour which is lost ; I'm sorry for my garments, And to think how much they cost . ' وز That is not the Margaret of Goethe, and her re pentance would not be a subject for Ary Scheffer. There is no German moonlight in it. There is as little sentimentality in this song as when a young fellow begs his sweetheart by night to let him in, and she sends him away with the words, “ Ride thou along the highway, Ride to yon heath alone, Ride back as thou cam’st hither ; There is a good broad stone ; On it thou thy head may'st lay, And no feathers take away ! ” But moonlight full and fair pouring through all the soul shines in this song " Were I a little bird With two small winys, my dear, I'd fly to thee ; But that can't be, And so I must stay here. But though afar from thee, In sleep I'm still by thee, Talking with thee, mine own ; But when I'm wide awake, Then I'm alone. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 13 Every hour for thy sake In the night ΙI awake, From sleep I start, Thinking of the thousand times Thou gav'st me thy heart . ” But if any one, charmed, asks who composed such songs, he is answered with such concluding lines as these “ Who was it made you this pretty song ? Over the water three geese came along, And brought it -two grey and one white." It is generally wandering folk, vagabonds, sol diers, travelling students, or trade -apprentices who make such a song, but specially the latter, or the so - called Handwerksburschen . I very often in my foot -excursions kept company with them, and observed how they now and then, inspired by some out-of-the -way incident, improvised a bit of ballad, or whistled it in the open air. air. Birds on the branches listened to the lay, and when another boy with staff and scrip came trudging by, they chirped the song to him , and what was wanting to the words he made, and so the song and melody were done. Words fall in this way as it were from heaven on the lips of such youths, and they have only to utter them, and they are more poetical than all the refined phrases which we mine out of the depths of our hearts. The character of these 14 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL, German Handwerksburschen lives and thrives in and through such popular ballads. They are an odd race , who, without a sous in their pockets, wander all over Germany, harmless, merry, and free. I generally found three of them in company. Of these three, one was always the talker ; he talked with droll whims of every casual subject, of every bird which flew in the air, of every commercial traveller who rode by, and when they came into some wretched place with poor huts and beggarly people, he observed ironically, “ God made the world in six days, but this was a bit of after-work. ” ? The second of the trio only broke in occasionally with some angry remark ; he could not converse without cursing ; he swore at every boss with whom he had worked, and his endless refrain was his regret that before leaving > Narr seyn 1 Tres faciunt collegium . That which Heine here mentions is specially set forth in a farce entitled Lumpacivagabundus, or the Jolly Clover- Leaf, the latter word ( trifolium ) being applied to a company of three Handwerksburschen. As regards the one of three pilgrims or apprentices who always does the talking, there is a proverb, “ Wo Drey sind , muss einer allweg der " _ “ Where there are three , one is always the fuol.” -Translator. ? So it is said in America, that on Saturday night, when God had inade the world , some sand still stuck to his hands. He brushed it off, threw it down, and lo ! it became the State of New Jersey ! In the French version , " Le bon Dieu a fait le monde en six jours ; mais il y paraît, car il reste encore beaucoup à faire." THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 15 1 Halberstadt he had not slapped the face of the mistress who gave him every day only cabbage and watery turnips to eat. But at the word “ Halberstadt," the third, who was the youngest, sighed from his very heart. He was on his first journey, and thought of the black- brown eyes of a sweetheart, hung his head, and never a word spake he, 1 Des Knaben Wunderhorn is by far too remark able a monument of our literature, and has exer cised by far too great an influence on the lyrical poets of the Romantic school, and especially on our admirable Uhland, to be passed unnoticed . This book and the Nibelungenlied played a lead ing part at that time, of which latter there must be a special mention. For a long time, indeed , we spoke of nothing but the Nibelungenlied, and classical philologists were not a little vexed when one compared this epic with the Iliad, or when 1 I trust that it is not out of place to mention that I recently, near Florence, accompanied during a long walk three young Germans of this humble class. One did all the talking and, in einem fort, without cessation commented on what he saw, or repeated ballads one after the other, and the second argued, while the third was silent. During a long illness in the same city, our German head- waiter came in at times to converse with I questioned him on this subject, and he narrated much which was very curious, as , for instance, how he and another waiter, after saving up a little money, had made very long pedestrian journeys in Eastern Europe, and into Turkey, suf fering much, in order to see the world . — Translator . me. 16 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. people debated as to which of these poems pre cedence was due. And the public, when ques tioned on it, looked like a child of whom one should ask, “ Would you rather have a horse or a hard-bake ? ” But in any case, this Nibe lungenlied is of great, tremendous strength. A Frenchman can hardly form an idea of it, or even of the language in which it is composed . It is a language of stone, and its verses are blocks in rhyme. Here and there, between the clefts, red flowers stream forth like drops of blood, or long ivies trail like green floods of tears. And you—— nice little people that you are ? can hardly form a conception of the giant- like passions which inspire this poem ! Imagine a clear summer night, the stars bright as silver, yet large as suns, come forth in the blue heaven, and that all the Gothic cathedrals in Europe are met in rendezvous on a vast plain. First comes calmly advancing the Strasburg Minster, the Dom of Cologne, the Campanile of Florence, the grand Church of Rouen, and that these gallantly wooed the fair Notre Dame de Paris. It is true that their gait is a little unsteady, that some of them act very clumsily, and that one is tempted to 1 French version, “ bonnes gens civilisés et polis que vous êtes.” German , “ ihr kleinen artigen Leutchen." THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 17 laugh at their amorous awkward staggering. But this laughter soon ends when we see them in fury striving to strangle one another ; how Notre Dame in despair throws her two arms of stone up to heaven , and then suddenly seizing a sword , de capitates the grandest cathedral . But no ; you could even then form no idea of the leading figures of the Nibelungenlied ; no tower is so high, and no stone so hard, as the grim Hagen and the vindictive Chriemhilde. But who composed this poem ? We know as little as we do the names of the authors of the popular songs. It is indeed strange that we so seldom know the originator of the most admirable books, poems, architectural works, and similar monuments of art. Who was the builder of the Cathedral of Cologne ? Who painted the altar piece on which the beautiful Mother of God and the Holy Three Kings are so delightfully depicted ? Who composed the Book of Job , which has been a consolation to so many suffering generations of humanity ? Man soon forgets the names of his benefactors ; those of the noble and the good who have toiled for the benefit of their fellow - beings are seldom in the mouths of the people, whose 1 Here Heine falls into his very common failing of very needlessly repeating one idea or simile three times within the limits of a single sentence. The French version briefly gives the conclusion as “ leur transports amoureux.” VOL. II . B 18 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. blunt coarse memories retain only the names of their oppressors and cruel heroes of wars. The tree of knowledge forgets the silent gardener who protected it from cold , watered it in sultry drought, and freed it from noxious creatures, but it faithfully preserves the names which have been unmercifully cut into its bark with sharp steel , and bands them over - always growing larger to succeeding generations. CHAPTER II. OWING to their joint publication of the “ Wonder horn , ” the names of Brentano and Von Arnim are usually associated ; and having mentioned the one, I cannot omit the other, all the more because he is much more deserving our attention. Ludwig Achim von Arnim is a great poet, and was one of the most original minds of the Romantic school. The lovers of the fantastic will relish his works far more than those of any other German writer. Herein he far outdoes Hoffmann and Novalis. He lived more deeply into Nature than the latter, and could conjure up far more ghastly and grotesque images than those of the former ; indeed, when I look at Hoffmann it seems to me as if Von Arnim had created him. . Von Arnim has remained utterly unknown to the mul titude, having a name only among literary men, who have, however, while fully recognising his merits, never spoken of them openly ; indeed, there were some who spoke contemptuously of him, and these were the very ones who imitated his method. . 19 20 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. " ) One would apply to them that which Stevens wrote of Voltaire when the latter spoke con temptuously of Shakespeare after plundering “ Othello ” for his “ Orosman .” « Such men are like thieves, who, after plundering a house, set fire to it .” Why did Tieck never speak befit ingly of Arnim, he who said so much that was clever over such piles of second - hand trash ? And the Schlegels also ignored him . It was not till after his death that he obtained a kind of obituary notice from a member of the school. I believe that Von Arnim could not become famous because he was by far too Protestant for his friends of the Catholic party , while the Protestants, on the other hand, regarded him as a crypto - Catholic. But why did the public ignore him -- the public who could find his romances and novels in every circulating library ? 1 Even Hoff mann was hardly ever mentioned in our literary and æsthetic journals ; the higher criticism main tained an aristocratic reserve as to his works, 1 Heine's vindication of Von Arnim , like all his laudations, is admirable in every respect, but to give it point he is guilty of as great exaggeration as regards this author's being neglected and unpopular. If his works were in every circulating library , they must have been in demand by other than “ literary men . There is also a quite unconscious exaggeration of the genius of Von Arnim, and of the thrilling terror and mystery of his At the present day they read like “ Der Freyschutz by daylight.” - Translator. 6 romances. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 21 and yet everybody read him . But why did the German people neglect an author whose imagina tion grasped all things, whose feelings were of infinite depth, and whose gift of description was un rivalled ? Because one thing was wanting to him, which the people always seek in books, and that was life. They require that the author shall feel their daily sorrows, and whether he brings from his heart pleasure or pain, they ask for sensation ; and Arnim could not satisfy this want. He was not a poet of life, but of death. In all which he writes there is only a movement as of shadows ; the figures crowd and rush hurriedly ; they move their lips as if speaking, but the words are only seen , not heard. These forms leap and creep, tussle and wrestle, stand on their heads, approach us mysteriously and whisper in our ears, “ We are dead ! ” Such a play would be too terrible were it not for the peculiar grace of Von Arnim, which spreads over his poetic compositions like the smile of a child—and yet even this is a dead child. Arnim can depict love, and sometimes sensuality, but even there we cannot feel with him ; we see beautiful bodies, heaving breasts, well-turned limbs, but all surrounded by a cold damp shroud. And Arnim is often witty, and we must laugh, but it is as if Death were tickling us with his scythe. Yet he is generally serious—as a dead German. A living one is a sufficiently solemn character 22 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. fancy a dead one. But a Frenchman can form no idea of how solemn we are when life has departed ; for then our faces are immeasurably longer, and the worms which feed on us become melancholy at the sight. The French think it strange that Hoffmann can be so appallingly serious, but it is a mere jest compared to the awful gravity of Arnim . When Hoffmann evokes his dead, and they rise from their graves and dance round him, he himself trembles with delight, and dances with them in the midst, and makes the maddest monkey -grimaces. But when Arnim summons his spectres, it is as if a general had a review , and he sits calmly on his high spectral horse and makes the terrible host pass before him, and they glance at him with awe, and seem to fear him. And yet he always nods to them in a friendly manner.2 Ludwig Achim von Arnim was born in 1784 in the Mark Brandenburg, and died in the winter • In Philadelphia it is a common saying, “ Solemn as a dead Dutchman ; " Dutch being there the popular translation of Deutsch . - Translator. 2 This seems to have been suggested by the well- known poem of Zedlitz which describes how the spectre of Napoleon rises and holds a “ Midnight Review . ” It begins with the words " At night, when twelve is striking, The drummer leaves his grave. ” THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 23 of 1830. He wrote dramas, romances, and novels. His dramas are inspired with a deep sentiment of poetry, especially one entitled Der Auerhahn ( or “ The Mountain Cock, " pheasant). Its first chapter would not be unworthy the greatest poet. How true to the very life is the most melancholy ennui therein depicted ! One of the three natural sons of the late Landgrave sits alone in the great deso late castle- hall , and talks yearningly to himself, and complains that his legs are growing longer and longer under the table, and that the morning air blows so cold between his teeth. His brother, the good Franz, comes slowly loitering in, dressed in the clothes of his late father, which hang a world too wide about him, and sorrowfully recalls how at this hour he used to help his father draw them on , and how the latter often threw him a crust, which his old teeth could no longer bite, and now and then in his ill-humour gave him a kick. This last recollection moves good Franz to tears, and he grieves because his father is dead and can kick him no more. Arnim's romances are called the Kronwächter ( " The Guardians of the Crown " ) and Dolores. The scene of the former is laid in the upper storey of the watch - tower of Waiblingen, or in the little 1 Arnim was born January 26, 1781 , in Berlin, and died January 21 , 1831. — German Publisher. 24 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. house - room of the watchman and of his notable fat wife, who is, however, not so fat as people in the town report. For it is mere scandal when they say that she grew so fat in the tower chamber that she could no longer descend the narrow flight of stairs, and after the death of her first husband was obliged to wed the new watch man (on that account ). The poor woman grieves sadly at such tittle- tattle, the truth being that she could not quit the tower because she suffered from vertigo The second romance of Von Arnim , “ The Coun tess Dolores," has also an admirable beginning. In it the author depicts the poetry of poverty and that of nobility, which he, who often lived in dire distress, very often chose for a subject. And what a master Arnim is in describing destruction and decay ! It seems to me as if I had before my very eyes the desolate castle of the Coun tess Dolores, which seems all the more desolate because the old Count built it in a gay Italian style, but never finished it. Now it is a modern ruin , and all is run to waste in the garden of the castle ; the walks of trimmed box -trees have become ragged and wild, the trees grow into the way of one another, the laurels and oleanders wind and twist sadly on the ground, great beauti ful flowering plants are clogged and twined with weeds, statues of the gods are fallen from their young THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 25 pedestals, and two pert beggar-boys crouch by a poor Venus who lies in the high grass, and whip her marble derrière with nettles. When the old Count, after a long absence, returns to the castle, the conduct of all his household, especially of his wife, strikes him as very singular. Such strange things take place at table, the reason being that the Countess had long before died of grief, as had all the others. The Count himself begins at last to realise that he is surrounded by spectres, and, without any indication that he has observed it , quietly goes away. But to me the most delightful of Arnim's novels is his " Isabella of Egypt .' In it is set forth the wandering life and ways of the gypsies, whom we in France call Bohemians, and also Egyptians Herein we see that strange legendary race, with its brown faces, fascinating fortune-telling eyes, and sorrowful secrets. Their gay, delusive jug gling merriment hides a great mysterious pain. For according to the legend, which is charmingly told in these pages, the gypsies must wander about the world as a penance for the inhospitable severity with which their ancestors once treated the Holy Virgin and Child, when she, during the 1 There is a very obvious imitation of this scene, including the Venus in the grass, in the “ Florentine Nights. ” Heine, however, did not whip the Venus, but kissed her.-- Translator. 26 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. . flight into Egypt, once begged them for a night's lodging. For this, people treated them in turn th cruelty. For as during the Middle Age they had as yet no philosophers of the school of Schelling, poetry then undertook the defence of the most despicable and cruel laws ; 1 and these laws were more barbaric as regards the gypsies than any other people. In many countries every gypsy suspected of theft could be hung without trial or sentence. So was their chief Michael, called Duke of Egypt, executed, though innocent, and it is with this sad incident that the novel of Von Arnim begins. By night the gypsies take their dead Duke down from the gallows, place the scarlet princely mantle on his shoulders, set the silver crown on his head, and throw him into the \| This is strangely rendered in the French version as follows : “ Dans le moyen âge, on n'avait pas encore une philosophie catholique, et il fallait bien employer la poésie pour justifier les lois les plus indignes et les plus cruelles." ? A very great error indeed. The gypsies were often hung or shot out of hand, or proscribed, as were all kinds of criminals in that rude age, but they were not invariably tortured to death or burnt alive, as were innumerable heretics and witches. For information the reader may consult papers by D. MacRitchie and others in the Gypsy Lore Journal, and works by Grellman, Wilson, F. Groome, Liebich, and many more, to which these will direct him. For the witches, the works of Walter Scott, Michelet, and Horst will more than suffice. As regards the heretics, this is simply the whole history of the Catholic Church in its relations to all its weaker enemies, savage or civilised . - Translator. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 27 > Schelde, being fully convinced that the compas sionate stream will bear him back to home, or to their beloved Egypt. The poor gypsy princess, Isabella, knows nothing of all this sad event ; she dwells alone in a ruined house on the Schelde. Hearing the water rustle strangely, she looks, and sees her dead white father rise in his red array, while the moon casts its sorrowful light on the silver crown. The heart of the poor girl is well nigh broken for indescribable grief ; in vain she seeks to hold her dead father fast - he floats onward to Egypt, to his wondrous native land, where he is awaited, and where he will be worthily buried in one of the pyramids. Very touching is the supper to the dead with which the poor maiden honours her father. She lays her white veil on a stone in the field and places on it food and drink, which she solemnly enjoys. Everything is deeply moving which Arnim tells us of the gypsies, whom he also describes with compassionate sympathy in other works, as, for instance, in “ The Wonderhorn ," where he declares that we owe to them so much which is beneficent and healing—that is, most of our medicines. We rejected and persecuted them ungratefully. With all their love, they could This is more than doubtful . But Michelet has taken pains to prove that during the Middle Age the witches or wise 28 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. never attain among us to a home. He compares them in this respect to the elves or dwarfs, who brought to the feasts of their greater and more powerful enemies everything which the latter required, but who, having once in their need taken a few peas from a field, were cruelly beaten and driven from the country. And it was a sad sight to see how the poor little things trotted by night over the bridge like a herd of sheep, every one laying down a small coin as he did so until a barrel was filled . A translation of “ Isabella of Egypt” would not only give the French an idea of Von Arnim's writings, but also show that all the fearful, un canny, horrible, and ghostly tales with which they have of late industriously tormented themselves are, as compared to the horrors of Von Arnim , only the rosy morning dreams of an opera - dancer. In all the fearful tales of France there is not, put a women were by far the most learned class in an empiric or practical knowledge of medicines, and some of this was un doubtedly derived from the gypsies. —Translator. 1 A legend probably commemorating, according to David MacRitchie (vide “ The Testimony of Tradition " ), the exodus of some early dwarf race. I have often seen in New England a piece of ground known as the “ Last Breakfast Field .” When the last remnants of an Indian race were obliged to depart from the land of their fathers and go west, they assembled and ate their last home- meal in that field . This field is uear Rye Beach . - Translator. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 29 > together, so much that is mysteriously horrible as in the coach which our writer sends from Brussels, and in which the following persons sit : 1. An old gypsy woman, who is also a witch. She seems as beautiful as the Seven Sins, and flourishes about in the most brilliant gilt and silken array. 2. A dead Bärenhauter , who, to earn a few ducats, has risen from his grave and engaged him self as a servant for seven years. He is a bulky corpse, clad in an overcoat of white bear-skin whence his name — notwithstanding which, he is always shivering 3. A Golem, that is, a figure of clay formed like a beautiful woman, and who acts as such . On her forehead, hidden by her black locks, is inscribed in Hebrew letters the word Truth, and should this be wiped away , all the figure will fall lifeless like mere earth , 4. The Field - Marshal Cornelius Nepos, who is by no means any relation to the celebrated his torian of that name, and who cannot even boast descent from a simple citizen , since he is by birth a root, an Alraun, which the French call man dragore, a mandrake. ' This grows under a gallows 1 An idler, an ancient word, from a proverb, Aufder Bären haut leigen , to lie on the bear- skin, as did the savage Germans ; here perhaps suggested by a grenadier, from Bärenmütze, a bear- skin hat. French version , Monsieur Peau d'Ours. 30 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. tree from the droppings of a hanged man . It uttered a horrible cry when Isabella at midnight tore it from the ground. It looked like a dwarf, but had neither eyes, mouth, nor ears. The dear maid stuck two black juniper berries in its face, with a red haw, which made eyes and mouth . Then she put a little millet on the head , which sprouted like hair, but roughly. She cradled the monster in her white arms when it wailed like a child ; kissed his hawthorn -berry mouth quite askew - yes, almost kissed his juniper eyes out of his head for love ; and the nasty dwarf was so spoiled by such petting that he must needs at last be a field -marshal and put on the uniform , and so acquired the title of one. There are four fine characters for you ! Rake out the Morgue, the graveyard, the Cour des Miracles, and all the pest- houses of the Middle Age, you will find no such company as that which travelled in a single coach from Broche to Brussels. Ye French must at last see that the horrible is not your forte, and that France is not a fit soil i French version, “ Elle baisait si fort ses lévres de rose, qu'elle lui fit presque sortir de la tête ses yeux de grains d'orge, et le gâta tellement qu'il voulut à toute force être feld -marechal. Il fallut le couvrir de ce brillant uniforme, lui conférer ce noble titre ; et c'était Lord Wellington en ininiature." The fullest details as to the origin and imitations of these Alraun or man drakes are given in the Anthropodemus Plutonicus of J. Prætorius, 1666-67. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 31 for such spectres. When ye invoke spirits we must laugh. Yes, we Germans, who remain serious and sober at your most brilliant witticisms, must roar with laughter at your ghost stories. For your ghosts are all French, and as for French spectres, why, it is a contradiction in terms. For in the word " ghost ” there is everything that is grim, lonely, growling, German, and taciturn, and in “ French ” all that is social, pleasant, French, and gossippy. How could a Frenchman be a phantom, or how can there be spectres in Paris ? In Paris, in the foyer of European society ! Between twelve and one, the hour allotted to spectres, the liveliest life rattles in the streets of Paris ; just then the most roaring finale of the opera resounds, the merriest groups stream from the Variétés and the Gymnase ; all is crowding and capering, laughing and chaffing on the Boulevards, and we go to soirées. How miserably must a poor spooking or haunting ghost feel in sach gay and festive life ! And how could a Frenchman, even if he were dead, keep serious countenance enough to haunt where the merriest multitude sweeps round on every side ? I myself -German as I am-were I dead, and had to 1 French version , “ Qui est de toute éternité le temps assigné aux spectres, la vie la plus animée se repand encore dans les rues de Paris, 32 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. haunt or spook in Paris by night, could certainly never maintain my spectral dignity if there should suddenly run against me at any street corner one of those goddesses of frivolity and recklessness who know so well how to laugh charmingly at one on such occasion . If there really were ghosts in Paris, I am convinced that the French , sociable as they are, would at once associate as such and have spectral réunions, set up a ghostly café, publish a Deadman's Daily and a Revue de Paris Morte, and have soirées des morts, ou l'on fera de la musique — mortal soirées where there would be music and a little dancing. I am sure that ghosts would amuse themselves better in Paris than do the living with us. As for me, did I know that one could live tbus after death in Paris as ghost, I would no longer fear death. I should simply take the proper measures to be buried at Père la Chaise, so that I could haunt in Paris be tween twelve and one. What a happy hour ! You, my German fellow - countrymen, when you come to Paris and meet me by night as a ghost, be not afraid, for I shall not spook it in the awfully un happy German fashion — no, I shall be spectreing for my own amusement. And as I have read in all ghost- stories the 1 Oddly enough this passage relative to the goddesses is omitted in the French version. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 33 ghosts of men haunt the spots where they have left buried treasures, I will, out of careful fore sight, bury a few sous somewhere on the Boule vards. Hitherto I have killed money in Paris, but never buried any.1 Oh ye poor French authors ! ye shall at last understand that your tales of terror and ghost stories are all unfit for a country where there are either no ghosts, or where they are as socially cheerful as we would be ourselves, or have them be. Ye seem to me like children who hold masks before their faces to frighten one another . They are terribly stern masks, but merry children's glances shoot through the eye -holes. We Ger mans, on the contrary, often wear the most winsome, youthful masks ; but from the eyelets gleams grim and grey death. You are a dainty,, amiable, reasonable, and lively race ; and the sphere of your art embraces only the beautiful, the noble, and human . Your earlier writers saw this, and you the later will soon come to the same conviction . Let alone the ghastly and ghostly. Leave to us Germans all the horrors of madness, of fevered dreams, and of the world 1 This passage is also omitted in the French. ? Probably in reference to a beautiful motive often repeated in Roman sculpture. There is an original bas- relief of this subject in the Musée Fol at Geneva. Bulwer has a poem in “ The Last Days of Pompeii ” suggested by it . — Translator. VOL. II. с 34 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. of shadows. Germany is a far better country for old witches, Golems of both sexes, and specially for field -marshals, like little Cornelius Nepos. On the other side of the Rhine such spectres may flourish, but never in France. While I was travelling hither, my ghosts accom panied me to the French frontier. There they bade me sadly adieu, for the sight of the tri coloured flag scares away ghosts of every kind. Oh, I would gladly stand on the spire of Strasburg with a tri-coloured flag in my hand so long that it would reach to Frankfort ; and I believe that when I should wave that consecrated flag over my dear fatherland, and utter the proper words of invocation, the old witches would fly away on their broomsticks, the cold Bärenhäuter creep again into their graves, the Golem fall into mere clay, field -marshal Cornelius Nepos return to the place whence he came, and the whole spectral delusion be at end.1 1 This chapter is beautifully and brilliantly written, and much knowledge may be gained from it. But, judged by Heine's own comments on Victor Hugo, these remarks as to the relative capacity for horrors in France and Germany are really baseless. Isabella of Egypt and the stories of Hoffmann seem to us of the present day simply like children's fairy tales, and a mere réchauffage of mediæval trifles ; for none of Von Arnim's man drakes or Golems were original with him. But Victor Hug was the leading genius, and head of modern French literature, and the founder of a great school ; and compared to the half THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 35 human, half - unnatural horrors and sensations of Notre Dame de Paris, and “ Hans of Iceland , ” all of the characters in German romantic literature are mere nursery bugbears, or phantoms on the stage. Heine has laid stress on the fact that Arnim and Hoffmann excelled in horrors, because they based them on nature ; and by this standard they are immeasurably distanced by Hugo and a great array of his followers, who have carried the unnatural — that is, nature distorted—to a degree of which Germany never had any conception ; yes, even into utter nasti It would puzzle Heine to reconcile later French realism with nothing but what is “ beautiful, noble, and human.” All the horrors of German literature put together are common . place and clean and decent compared to the works of Zola, which are “ strictly founded on nature.” It should be here mentioned that with this chapter the first German, as well as the first French, edition of the Romantic school ended. -Translator. ness. CHAPTER III. mena. It is as difficult a matter to write the history of Literature as Natural History. In both we occupy ourselves with the most striking pheno But as in a small glass of water there is a whole world of marvellous beings which manifest the omnipotence of God as much as do the largest animals, so the smallest Almanac of the Muses reveals a multitude of poetlings who are to the eyes of the calm investigator as interesting as the largest elephants of literature. God is great ! Most literary historians really give us a his tory like a well-arranged menagerie, and show us in their separate cages epic mamma- lians, lyrical-ærial bird-poets, dramatic water - fowl of watery verse, prosaic amphibia who write land and sea novels, comical odd- fish , and so on . 1 1 Humoristische Mollusken . In English comic literature oysters are known by this term ; and I have seen a picture which I think was drawn by Hood the elder, in which oysters with droll faces on their shells were entitled odd - fish. I do not know whether in referring to lyrical-ærial poets Heine had in his mind the lyre -bird, which he himself not infrequently resembles. - Translator. 36 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 37 Others, on the contrary, treat such history practi cally, and begin with the primitive feelings of man , which developed themselves in various ages, and finally assumed artistic form ; that is, they begin ab ovo, like the historian who opened the tale of the Trojan War with the egg of Leda. Wherein they - like him-act foolishly. For I am convinced that if the eggs of Leda had been made into an omelette, Hector and Achilles would have encountered one another all the same before the Skaïc gate, and fought valiantly. Great deeds, like great books, do not spring from such trifles --they are the result of necessity, they are con nected with the course of the sun, moon , and stars, and originate perhaps in their influence on the earth . Deeds are the results of ideas ; but how does it come that at certain times certain ideas make themselves so preponderant that they shape the whole life of human beings, their drivings and strivings, their thinking and writing, and in the strangest manner. Perhaps it is time to write a 1 Pragmatisch. In the French version, dogmatiquement. ? Heine does not here take the general view. The French Revolution was inevitable ; but if Louis XVI. , or Robespierre, or even Mirabeau, had died a year before it begun, its incidents and details would have certainly been very different. Which reminds one of the little American boy who said, after long reflection, “ Mother, who would I have been, supposin' you'd married somebody else ? ” 3 This passage is far better in the French version. " Certaines idées s'emparent des hommes si puissament, qu'elles changent 3 38 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL . literary astrology, and in it explain the appearance of certain ideas or of certain books wherein these reveal themselves, according to the constellations of starry intellects . Or does the advent of certain ideas correspond to the mere temporary wants of men ? Do they seek out the ideas which seem to give authority to their desires ? In fact, men are always, accord ing to their most secret impulses, true doctri naires ; they can always find a doctrine to justify what they detest or desire. On banyan or fast days, when pleasures are hard to attain , they extol the doctrine of abstinence, and declare that earthly grapes are sour ; when times are better, and it becomes easier to get at the fruits of the flesh, then a more joyous gospel comes to light, which preaches life with all its sweets and its full and perfect right to enjoyment. Are we getting to the end of the Christian Lent, and is a rosier age of joy dawning on us ? And what form will the joyous doctrine receive from the future ? leur vie entière avec ses joies et ses peines, et réforment en même temps l'expression artistique de leur pensée, le style.” -Translator. 1 “ Aus der Konstellation der Gestirne zu erklären ." Gestirn means planet ; but there is gestirnt, from Stirn, a brow, forehead, or brains, which suggests thought. The French version ( as usual ) evades the difficulty by simply translating it, “ d'après les constellations des etoiles.” - Translator, THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 39 The foreshadowing or predicting pictures of a race are in the hearts of its literary men, and a critic who dissects a new poet with a sufficiently sharp knife can easily prophesy therefrom how Germany will behave - as from the entrails of an animal sacrificed. And I, as literary Chalchas, would from my very heart with this intention gladly sacrifice some of our young poets, were I not afraid of seeing in their bowels things un utterable. For one cannot investigate our more recent German literature without marching into the deepest dominion of politics. In France, where the belletristic authors endeavour to keep clear rather more than they should from the political movements of the time, one may judge of the beaux esprits of the day without a word as to the day itself. But on the other side of the Rhine such writers throw themselves headlong into the questions of the time, from which they were so long excluded . You Frenchmen have been on your legs for fifty years at such work, and are now tired ; we Germans have been sitting all that time, on the contrary, over the study -table, commenting old classics, and would now like to take aa little exercise.1 1 French version, “ Restant assis dans notre cabinet de travail, occupés à développer des systèmes de philosophie tran scendentale, ou á commenter les vieux bouquins de l'antiquité ,” &c. Connu, connu, connu.” Heine is good at sincere Ger man, but terrible in affected French . - Translator. 40 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. The same cause which I have mentioned pre vents me from doing justice to an author of whom Madame de Staël has given only casual indication, but who more recently, owing to the brilliant and clever article by Philarete Chasles, has attracted the attention of the French public. I speak of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. He has been called der Einzige (the Only One), a most appropriate term, which I now fully understand for the first time, after much vain reflection as to what place in literary history should be assigned to him. He appeared almost simul taneously with the Romantic school, without taking the least part in it, nor was he subse quently in any way allied to the art school of Goethe. He was alone in his time, because being opposed to both schools, he gave himself entirely to that time, and his whole heart was full of it. And his heart and his works were one and the same. This peculiarity, this unity, also appears among the authors of the Young Germany of this our time, who do not separate living from writing, who never divide politics 1 Truly, if Professor Chasles was brilliant and clever in this article , he must have been unusually inspired. For one weary winter did I listen to and transcribe his lectures on German literature—that is, till the Revolution of 1848 broke up all study in the colleges -- and can bear witness that in ten years of student life in four countries I never heard anything so flat and dreary as his discourses. - Translator, THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 41 from learning and science, or art from religion, and who are at the same time artists, tribunes, and apostles. Yes, I repeat the word — Apostle, for I know of none more appropriate. A new faith inspires them with a passion of which the writers of the preced ing age had no presentiment. This is the faith in Progress, which faith sprang from knowledge and science. We have measured the land, weighed the forces of nature, counted the resources of industry, and see what we have found — that the earth is large enough, every one has therein room to build the hut of his happiness. This world can feed us all if we wish to work instead of living on one another. Then it will be super fluous to preach heaven to the greater and poorer class. The number of these learned believers is as yet, it must be admitted, small. But the time is coming when races will not be reckoned by heads, but by hearts. And is not the great heart of a single Heinrich Laube worth more than a whole Zoological Garden of Raupachs and comedians.2 I have mentioned the name of Heinrich Laube, i The French version adds, " pour ne pas leur faire envier le bonheur des riches.” • In amusing and direct contradiction to this theory of an agricultural paradise in which every man is to inhabit a but and raise his own beans, we have Heine's fervid declaration that under his Socialistic system men are to enjoy all the luxuries of 42 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. for who could speak of Young Germany without recalling the great and flaming heart which flashes most brilliantly from it . Heinrich Laube, one of the writers who have appeared since the Revolution of July, is of such social significance as regards Germany that his real weight can not be as yet estimated . He has all the good qualities which we find among the authors of the past generation, and unites to them the apostolic zeal of Young Germany. Withal, his powerful passion is softened and enlightened by an elevated sense of art. He is inspired for the Beautiful as much as for the Good ; he has a fine ear, and a quick eye for noble form ; and vulgar natures are repulsive to him, even when they appear as champions for the noblest patriotic sentiments. This sense of art, which is in him . the most highly aristocratic life, “ nectar and ambrosia, purple robes, the voluptuousness of perfumes, dances of nymphs, music and comedies ( " Germany, from Luther Kant ” ), which is mani festly impossible if there is to be “ no living on one another," and no mutual dependence or services. None of Heine's German friends have as yet proved that their promised paradise will be anything but a well- ordered poorhouse, or half- time workhouse. That waste lands in any part of the world may be cultivated is a discovery which is as old as Adam, but Young Germany has been slow to realise it, or to attempt it . There must be yet a little more measuring, weighing, and counting the resources of nature, ere the summum bonum can be attained . In the French version all from the reference to Laube until Richter is resumed, or about two pages of the German, is omitted . - Translator, THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 43 innate, protected him from the great errors of that patriotic mob which still continues to revile and vilify our great master, Goethe. In this relation Herr Karl Gutzkow, another writer of more recent time, deserves the highest praise. If I mention him after Laube it is by no means because I regard him as less talented, and still less because I have been less edified by his tendencies ; no, for I must also admit that Karl Gutzkow possesses the most admirable gifts of creative power and critical sense of art - his writings also delight me by their correct concep tion of our time and its needs ; but in all which Laube writes there prevails a far- sounding re pose, a self- conscious greatness, a still serenity which move one personally more than the pic turesque, colour- gleaming, and stingingly-spiced vivacity of the Gutzkow spirit. Karl Gutzkow, whose soul is full of poetry, must needs, like Laube, soon withdraw himself most definitely from company with those zealots who despise our great master . The same may be said of L. Wienbarg and Gustav Schlesier, two most distinguished writers of recent time, whom , as Young Germany is here in question, I cannot pass unmentioned. They deserve indeed to be ranked among its leaders, and their names have a good ring in the land. This is not the place in which to describe in detail their abilities and 44 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. works. I have wandered too far from my theme, but will still say something more as to Jean Paul. I have mentioned how Jean Paul Friedrich Richter preceded Young Germany in its chief tendency. But these later writers have avoided the abstruse confusion, the baroque- dry depicting, and the unpleasant style of the Jean-Paul writ ings. Of which style a clear, well- edited French head can form no conception . Jean Paul's con struction of periods consists of nothing but cells, which are so small that when one idea meets in them with another their heads knock together. On the ceiling are innumerable hooks on which hang all kinds of ideas, and on the walls around, secret drawers in which feelings are hidden. No German writer is so rich in thoughts and feelings, but he never lets them ripen, and he more astonishes than refreshes us by this wealth of wit and of sentiment. He gives us ideas and emotions which would have grown to be vast trees if they had been allowed to properly take root and burgeon forth into sprays and blossoms and leaves, which are often mere buds, for these he tears up when they are hardly little plants, or only sprouts, and so whole forests of intel lect are served up to us as salads on a common plate. And this is really a very odd and unpalat able food, for it is not every stomach which digest young oaks, cedars, palms, and bananas in an THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 45 such a quantity . Jean Paul is a great poet and philosopher, but no one could be more inartistic than he in form or thought. He brought forth in his novels truly poetic forms, but all these births drag after them a cord with which they entangle and strangle one another. Instead of thoughts he gives us his own thinking - we see the material action of his brain ; he gives us, so to speak, more brain than thought. His witti cisms hop about in every direction, like the fleas of his heated intellect. He is the merriest, and, at the same time, the most sentimental of writers ; in fact, sentiment has always with him the upper hand, and his laughter turns abruptly into tears. And very often he disguises himself as a beggarly, coarse fellow ; when all at once, like the prince incognito whom we see on the stage, he unbuttons his rough overcoat, and we suddenly behold the shining star. Herein Jean Paul is quite like the great Irish " i French version, " et aussi quelque peu philosophe.” As if one should say of Rembrandt that “ he painted a little.' Heine appears to be quite unconscious that in the ensuing dry and laboured conceits he is himself imitating Jean Paul, without the wit of the latter. The fleas are, however, omitted in the French version. On the whole, he very truly describes all the faults of Jean Paul Richter, but manifestly did not grasp him as a whole, or do justice to his practical genius . He does not, for example, mention the Vorschule der Æsthetik, which is quite free from Richter’s usual grotesques, and which I - salva venia ( speaking under correction ), regard as one of the great works of German literature. -Translator. 46 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL . man to whom he has so often been compared. The author of " Tristram Shandy," when he has lost himself in the coarsest trifling, knows how by a sudden sublime change to show us his princely dignity and near alliance to Shakespeare. Jean Paul has, like Laurence Sterne, made himself personally important in his writings ;; he has also shown himself, like the latter, in his human naked ness, but with a certain awkward shame, especially as to sexual nudity. Sterne shows himself stark naked to the public, while Jean Paul has only holes in his trousers. Certain critics are wrong in believing that Jean Paul had more real feeling than Sterne, because the latter, as soon as the subject which he treats has reached a tragic height, at once breaks out into the most mocking and merry tone ; while Jean Paul, on the contrary , when there is the least earnestness in a jest, be gins slowly to make sad faces, and calmly lets his teardrops trickle down. No ; Sterne feels per haps more deeply than Jean Paul, because he is a greater poet. As I said , he is of equal birth with William Shakespeare, and the muses brought him, Laurence Sterne, also upon Parnassus. But in woman - fashion they soon spoiled him by their He was the nursling of the pale goddess of tragedy. Once in a fit of cruel tender ness she kissed his young heart so powerfully, so caresses . i The French version adds, sa nudité est plutôt ridicule qu' ideale . " THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 47 , passionately, sucking it with such mad love, that it began to bleed, when, lo ! all at once it under stood all the sufferings of this world, and was filled with infinite compassion. Poor young poet's heart ! But the younger daughter of Mnemosyne, the rosy goddess of jest and laughter, ran quickly up, and took the suffering boy in her arms, and tried to cheer him with smiles and singing, and gave him her comic mask and jester's bells, and soothingly kissed his lips, and with that kiss there passed into his soul all her light-heartedness, all her daring recklessness and witty mockery. From that time the heart and lips of Sterne were in strange contradiction, for many a time when his heart is tragically moved, and he would give utterance to the deepest, bleeding feelings of his heart, then to his own amazement there leaps from his lips the most delightful merry words. Alas, poor Yorick !1 1 “ Pauvre Yorrik !” occurs only in the French version. These last pages are very interesting, because Heine had taken Sterne more to heart than any other has ever done, and owed more to him than to any writer of any country whatever. In fact, what Rabelais and his kin and kind had been to Sterne, the latter was to the German, and these concluding remarks conceal such a deep and sincere feeling of love, sym pathy, and gratitude, that much of it might escape us did we not know the truth. I possess a rare old book devoted to pointing out all the literary sources of Sterne's genius ; such a work on Heine would be very interesting, and first on the list I would place Sterne, but for whom the Reisebilder would per haps have never been written.- Translator. CHAPTER IV. THERE was among the people in the Middle Age a prevalent belief that when a building was to be erected one should slay some living thing and place the foundation -stone on its blood, by means of which the structure would remain firm and fast for ever.1 Whether this was an old heathen 1 A German, whose name I cannot now recall, has written a very curious work on this subject. There is, however, much relating to it in Bechstein ( Sagen des Grabfeldes, No. 156. Vide his Deutsches Sagenbuch , No. 729) . In the Bayerische Sagen und Brauche, von Friedrich Panzer, Munchen, 1848, there is a chapter on Einmauern , in which several curious traditions relative to it are given, chiefly referring to children thus sacrificed . In earlier ages it was invariably a human being who was walled up alive. In later times a cock was substituted, and subsequently an egg, and this latter form of fetish was continued till comparatively recent times. Then other objects were offered always for luck, and this custom prevails to the present day, in placing coins, newspapers, and other memorials n foundation -stones. Vide Friedrich, Symbolik, p. 570. The real object of so doing, as appears from many legends, was to conciliate or appease the local spirit of the hill , or other place where the ground was disturbed for the foundations. The superstition is far older than Christianity, and it was the latter which deprived it of its bloody character.— Translator. 48 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL . 49 1 lunatic fancy that the favour of the gods was won by a blood - offering, or a misconception of the Christian atonement, which produced this belief in the miraculous power of blood, of healing by blood, and in blood generally - enough to say, it prevailed, and in lays and legends lives the fear ful fact that children and animals were slain to insure great buildings with their blood . To - day mankind has more sense . We no longer believe in the miraculous power of blood , be it in a nobleman or a god , and the multitude put faith only in money. Does the religion of to -day \| consist in the monetisation of the Deity , or the deification of money ? 1 Enough , the people believe in money only it is the coined metal, the silver and golden pyxes, in which they think that virtue lies gold is the beginning and end of all their works, and when they have a great building to erect they take care that a few coins of different kinds are placed in a capsule under the foundation -stone. Yes , just as in the Middle Age all things , all buildings, including the whole edifice of Church and State, were based on the belief in blood , so do 1 “ Besteht nun die heutige Religion in der Geldwerdung Gottes, oder in der Gottwerdung des Geldes ? ” I am indebted to the American newspapers for the verb " to monetise , ” i.e. , to convert into money. “ On prend son bien où il le trouve.” Translator . VOL . II . 9 ) D 50 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. all our institutions of the present day rest on the faith in money, and in money alone. That was superstition, this is clear current egoism. The first was destroyed by reason, the latter will be destroyed by sentiment. The foundation of society will sometime be better, and all the great hearts of Europe are painfully busied in endeavouring to find it out. Perhaps it was irritation at this prevalent faith in money, or revolt at the egoism which they saw grinning out everywhere, which inspired certain poets of the Romantic school in Germany, who had deeply honourable feelings, to take refuge from the present in the past, and attempt the restoration of the Middle Age. This may have been specially the case with those who did not form the actual coterie. To these latter belonged the writers of whom I have specially treated in the second book, after having discussed the Romantic school in general in the first. It was only on account of their literary -historical im portance, not from their intrinsic merit, that I at first, and in detail, spoke of the members of this coterie, who all worked in common. There fore I trust I may not be misjudged because I have given to Zacharias Werner, Baron de la Motte Fouqué, and Ludwig Uhland, a later and scantier notice. These three authors deserve to be treated more in detail, and more highly praised, THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 51 a than the others alluded to . For Zacharias Werner was the only dramatist of the school whose pieces were played, and also applauded by the pit . Baron de la Motte Fouqué was the only epic poet of the school whose romances were read by the entire public, and Ludwig Uhland was the only lyric writer among the Romanticists whose songs sunk into the hearts of the multitude, and which still live in the mouths of men. From this point of view these three poets take place before Tieck, whom I have praised as one of the best writers of the school. For Tieck, al though the theatre is his hobby, and though he has been familiar from a child with the world of comedy and its minutest details, has never get succeeded in moving from the stage men's hearts as Zacha rias Werner has done. Tieck has always required a domestic public to whom he could declaim his poems, and whose applause was to be securely anticipated. While de la Motte Fouqué was read with equal delight by every one, from the duchess to the washerwoman, and shone as the sun of the circulating libraries, Tieck was only the astral lamp of evening tea -parties, where the cultured guests, illuminated by his poetry, sipped their tea in perfect peace while listening to the reading of his romances. The strength of such poetry would naturally appear by contrast with that of the refreshment ; and in Berlin, where people drink 52 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. the weakest of tea, Tieck would naturally seem to be one of the strongest of poets. While the songs of our admirable Uhland rang in forest and valley, and are still bellowed by wild students and lisped by tender misses, not one song of Tieck's ever sunk into our hearts, not one re mained in our ears, nor does the multitude know one ballad by the great lyric writer. 1 Zacharias Werner was born in Königsberg in Prussia on the 18th November 1768. His union with the Schlegels was only sympathetic, never personal. Far away from them he felt what they sought, and did his best to poetise in their 1 If to be sung by the multitude, when accompanied by very popular airs, were any proof of poetical talent, then Kærner, whose verses Heine describes as very bad , was a far better poet than Heine himself. Herlossen, a Romanticist, who wrote the Letzte Taborit, which supplied the ground or sketch to George Sand for “ Consuelo ” ( and whom Heine does not even mention) , was the author of “ Wenn die Schwalben heimwärts ziehen ” ( from the Buch der Liebe) , which song was never heard of till Abt, long after it was published, composed the air to it by which it is now as well known as any song in the German language. A careful examination of a very cheap and popular Volksliederbuch of 500 pages ( Vienna, 1862 ) convinces me that the melody constitutes nine-tenths of the popularity of all these lyrics, and it is more generally associated to an indifferent ( i.e. , to a smoothly singable) poem than to a song with sense. Heine's own piano- ballad, “ Du hast Diamenten,” which has been more sung than anything which he ever wrote, is his feeblest production, and all unworthy of him. An honest history of popular songs would be more one of musicians than writers. Translator. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 53 spirit. But he could only develop inspiration for the Restoration of the Middle Ages one sidedly, that is , on the hierarchic- catholic side ; the feudal spirit of the ancient time did not by any means excite him so warmly. Regarding this his fellow -countryman, T. A. Hoffmann , has narrated something remarkable in the Serapions brüdern . For he tells us that Werner's mother was disordered in her mind, and believed while enceinte that she was the mother of God, and was about to give birth to the Saviour. And Werner's mind bore through all his life the birth -mark of this religious delirium . All his works abound in frightful fanaticism . One ofthem , the “ Twenty fourth of February, ” is, however, free from such fancies, and has a place among the best produc tions of our dramatic literature. It has excited on the stage, far more than anything else by the same author, the greatest enthusiasm . His other dramatic works have been less successful with the multitude, because with all his energy and vitality the poet was almost utterly ignorant of adaptation to stage requisites. Criminal- councillor Hitzig, the biographer of Hoffmann , has also written the life of Werner. It is a conscientious work, as interesting to the psychologist as to the literary historian. As I was recently told, Werner was for some time here in Paris, where he was especially amused at the 54 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. peripatetic female philosophers who in those days wandered of evenings in brilliant array in the galleries of the Palais Royal. They capered after him, mocking him and laughing at his odd dress and odder manners. Those were the good old times ! Ah ! in later days both the Palais Royal and Zacharias Werner changed sadly ; the last lamp of gaiety (Lust) was extinguished in the mind of the sorrowing man. In Vienna, he entered the order of the Ligurians, and preached in the Church of Saint Stephen over the nothingness of all worldly things. He had found out that all on earth is vanity. The girdle of Venus he now declared was a nasty snake, and sublime Juno wore under her white robes a pair of postillion's leather- breeches, not over clean. Father Zacharias now chastened himself, and fasted, and cried with zeal against our stubborn love for worldly lusts. " Accursed is the flesh ! ” he cried so loudly, and in such a harsh East Prussian accent, that the images of the saints in Saint Stephen trembled, and the Vienna grisettes laughed charmingly. In addition to this important piece of news he constantly assured people that he was a great sinner. If we consider him closely, the man was always consistent, except that at first he only sung or preached what he afterwards practised. The heroes of most of his dramas are monkish lovers THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL, 55 or ascetic lechers, who have discovered in ab stinence a refinement of pleasure, who spiri. tualise their lasciviousness by martyrdom of the flesh, and who, like holy rakes, realise in the depths of religious mysticism the most terrible ecstasies. Not long before his death the delight in dra matic composition again awoke in Werner, and he wrote one more tragedy, entitled Die Mutter der Makkabäer (“ The Mother of the Machabees ” ). But here there was no attempt to festoon the pro fane seriousness of life with romantic jests. To the holy material he adapted a broadly-spread eccle siastic tone ; the measures are as solemnly mea sured as the knelling of church - bells ; all moves as gravely as a Good Friday procession. It is a legend of Palestine in the form of a Greek tragedy. The piece had small success among mortals here below, whether it pleased the angels above any better is more than I know. But Father Zacharias died soon after, in the beginning of 1823, after he had wandered more than fifty -four years on this sinful earth.1 We will let the departed rest in peace and turn a 1 All of Heine's scandalous anecdotes, petty gossip, and personal ridicule, whether it be of Werner or the Schlegels, or any one, should always be taken with very large grains of doubt. It is to be observed that he always has a discreditable story from some invariably anonymous friend, or an on dit, wherewith 56 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL . to the second poet of the Romantic triumvirate. This is the excellent Baron Frederic de la Motte Fouqué, who was born in the Mark Brandenburg, in the year 1777, and appointed professor in the University of Halle in 1833. He was formerly a major in the Royal Prussian military service, and belonged to the heroes of song, or singers of heroes, whose Lyre and Sword rang most loudly during the so-called War of Freedom. His laurel is of the real kind. He is a true poet, and the consecration of poetry rests on his head. Few writers have been so universally popular as our admirable Fouqué. He still has his readers, but only among the patrons of circulating libraries. But this public is always large enough, and Fouqué can boast that he is the only member of the Romantic school whose writings have been popular with the lower classes. While people in the esthetic tea-circles of Berlin turned up their noses when speaking of the decayed noble man , I met in a village among the Harz mountains with a very beautiful girl who spoke of Fouqué > to defile those whom he wishes to ridicule. It may well be doubted if there be a word of truth in all this tittle - tattle, and if it be true it is far more discreditable to Heine than to his “ antipathies. ” He has a great reputation as a satirist, yet there is no case in which he does not disgrace himself far more than his victim. Tempora mutantur.- Translator . 1 French version, “ son laurier est de meilleur aloi que celui des Tyrtées contemporains." THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 57 ( 6 a with rapture, and who blushing confessed that she would give a year of her life for one kiss from the author of “ Undine. ” And this girl had.the most beautiful lips which I ever beheld ! Butwhata wondrously lovely poem is “ Undine ! " It is a kiss in itself ; the genius of poetry kissed Spring while she slept, and she awoke smiling, and all the roses gave forth perfume, and all the nightingales sang, and what was sung and breathed Fouqué put into words and called it “ Undine.” I do not know whether this novel has been translated into French . It is the story of the beautiful water -fairy, who has no soul, and can only attain to one by marrying a mortal ; but, alas, she gains with this soul all human sorrows, her knightly spouse is unfaithful, and she kisses him dead . For in this book death is only a kiss. Undine may be regarded as the muse of Fouqué. But though she is infinitely beautiful, and suffers like us, and is so tormented with earthly sorrows, she is still a supernatural being. This our age rejects all such aerial and watery forms, however beautiful they may be ; it demands actually living beings ; least of all does it care for nixies, who are in love with noble knights. That was the case . The going back to the past, the endless • It had, however, at this time appeared as a translation in America, and been put on the stage as a drama, probably after English versions. 58 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL . praise of noble birth, the incessant exaltation of old feudal forms, the never - ceasing knight errantry, at last became repulsive to the middle class of the German people, and they turned away from the poet behind his time. In fact this ever lasting sing-song of harness, steeds in tourna ments, chatelaines, fair damosels, monks, love worship and religion, or whatever the mediaval properties were called, became at last tiresome ; and as the ingenious hidalgo, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, buried himself more and more in his books of chivalry, and lost, in dreams of the past, all comprehension of the present time, even his best friends turned away from him , shaking their heads. The works which he wrote in this, his deca dence, are hardly readable. In them all the faults of his former writings are carried to extremes. His knights consist of iron and kind feeling, they have neither flesh nor reason. His women are only images, or rather dolls whose golden tresses roll beautifully down over charming flower-like faces. Fouqué's chivalric novels remind us, like the works of Walter Scott, of Gobelin tapestry, which by their rich design and splendid colour please our eyes more than our souls. These are 1 A remark which abundantly indicates how very far Heine was from comprehending the true spirit of Scott's novels, or that THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 59 deeds of chivalry, pastoral sports, duels, antique costumes — all beautifully brought together, strange and wonderful, yet without deep meaning ; works showy, yet superficial. Among the imitators of Fouqué, as among those of Walter Scott, this fashion of setting forth the mere outside of men and things, instead of their inner nature, is de veloped in a much more melancholy manner. This flat and easy fashion of writing flourishes rankly among writers to-day in Germany as well as in England and France. And even when the subjects are not taken from chivalry, but from modern circumstance and condition, still it is the same manner, which, instead of grasping the inner reality of life, gives us its external accidents. Instead of knowledge of mankind our modern writers display only knowledge of clothes, basing themselves probably on the saying that clothes make the man . How different was the case among the older novelists, especially the English ! Richardson gives us the anatomy of sentiment ; Goldsmith practically analyses the movements of the hearts of his heroes ; the author of “ Tristram author's genius. It is worth observing, however, that in “ Shake. speare's Maidens and Women ” ( Princess Katherine) our author declares that Walter Scott surpassed Shakespeare in the art of setting forth the Geist, i.e. , the spirit, or deep inner life of classes and races, by characteristic speech. In this passage the word Gobelin is sagaciously omitted in the French version. Translator. 60 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. Shandy " shows us the deepest secrets of the soul, opens a window in it, and gives us a glimpse into its abyss, its paradise, and dirty corners, and then lets the curtain fall. We have already glanced over this strange theatre, the lighting up and the perspective did not fail in effect, and while think ing that we caught a glimpse of the infinite, our own feelings became infinitely poetic.1 As for Fielding, he takes us at once behind the scenes, shows us the false rouge on all feelings, the coarsestsprings of the daintiest deeds, the powdered resin which is to flash up in lightning excitement, the drums on which the drummer lies sleeping, on which he will ere long roll out the most tremendous peals of passion ; in short, he shows us the whole internal machinery, the great lie, by means of which men appear to us as other than they are, and all the sweet reality of life is lost. Yet why should we take the English for examples, since our Goethe has given us in his " Wilhelm Meister ” the best model for a novel. 1 Here the French version “ expands beyond the Infinite” “ En croyant contempler l'infini nous avons gagné un sentiment sans bornes, ineffable, idéal - tel que doit l'exciter toute vraie poésie.” Which is certainly the least it could do after such a flight. ? French version, “ et par lequel nous perdons toute joyeuse illusion de la vie.” Truly, there is some difference between Realität and illusion, and yet, as here, it often comes to much the same. - Translator. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 61 a The number of Fouqué's romances is legion, for he is one of the most prolific writers. Der Zau berring (“ The Magic Ring " ) and Thiodolph der Isländer (" Thiodulf the Islander " ) deserve men tion with special praise. His metrical dramas, not meant for the stage, contain great beauties. Sigurd der Schlangentödter ( “ Sigurd the Dragon-killer” ) is especially a bold work, in which the old Scandi navian heroic saga is mirrored with all its giants and scenes of sorcery . The chief character of the drama, Sigurd , is a tremendous being. He is as strong as the cliffs of Norway, and wild as the sea which beats on them. He has the courage of / hundred lions and as much sense as two asses. Fouqué has also written poems which are grace and tenderness perfected. They are so light, gaily coloured, glancing, lightly fluttering — one may call them lyrical humming-birds. But a real writer of songs is Ludwig Uhland, who, born at Tübingen in 1787, now lives as a lawyer in Stuttgart. This writer has written a volume of poems, two tragedies, and two disser tations on Walter von der Vogelweide, and the French Troubadours. The latter are two small works of historical investigation which indicate thorough study of the Middle Ages. His tragedies are Ludwig der Baier (“ Louis the Bavarian " ), and Herzog Ernst von Schwaben (“ Duke Ernest of Suabia” ) . I have not read the former, and I am told 62 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. that it is not his best. But the second contains much which is beautiful and is gratifying by nobility of feeling and dignity of sentiment. There is in it a sweet inspiration of poetry such as we never meet with in the plays which are now so popular. German fidelity is the subject of this drama, and we see it here, strong as an oak, defying every tempest. German love, just perceptible, blooms in the distance, yet its violet perfume goes all the more touchingly to the heart. This drama, or rather this song, contains passages which are among the fairest pearls of our literature. And yet the theatrical public received the work with indifference, or rather rejected it . But I will not blame the good people of the pit too bitterly for that. Such folk have settled fancies which the poet must please. His products must not set forth the sympathies of his own heart, but what satisfies the wants of the public. This latter is like the hungry Bedouin in the desert, who, thinking he had found a bag of pease, opened it in haste and found it was full of pearls. The public devours with avidity Raupach's dried pease and Madame Birch - Pfeiffer's horse -beans; Uhland's pearls are unto it unpalatable. As it is extremely improbable that the French know who Madame Birch - Pfeiffer or Herr Raupach may be, I must here mention that this divine couple are related as Apollo - to Diana, and like THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 63 them are honoured in our temples of dramatic art. And Herr Raupach resembles Apollo just as much as Madame Birch - Pfeiffer is like Diana.1 As for their social position , the latter has an appointment as Imperial Austrian court - actress in Vienna, and the former as Royal Prussian theatrical poet in Berlin. The lady has written a number of dramas in which she herself plays. And here I cannot refrain from stating a fact which will appear almost incredible to the French, which is, that a great number of our actors are also dramatic poets, and write their own plays. It is said that Ludwig Tieck was by a careless remark the cause of this disaster. For in his criticisms he observed that actors always play better in a bad piece than in a good one. Supporting themselves on this axiom , a host of actors grasped their pens and wrote in abundance unto redundance, tragedies and comedies, so that it is actually often difficult to decide whether the vain comedian wrote his piece intentionally badly in order to play well in it, or whether he plays badly in order to make us believe that it is good ? The actor and the poet, who had previously been as colleagues, or in a sort of relationship ( something like that of the 1 French version, “ Oui, M. Raupach est aussi digne d'être comparé a Apollon, que la grosse et debraillée Madame Birch Pfeiffer peut prétendre un titre de Diana. ” As regards the latter Heine's severity approaches slander. .64 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. executioner and his victim ), now became open enemies. The actors sought to banish poets utterly from the theatres, under the pretext that they knew nothing of the requirements of the stage, nothing of bold effects and coups de théâtre, such as the actors who had practically learned them, know how to realise. The comedians, or as they prefer to call themselves, the artists, there fore played by preference in their own plays, or in such as had been composed for them by one of themselves. And in fact such works were exactly what they wanted ; in them they found their favourite costumes, their flesh - coloured stockinet poetry, their applauded exits, traditional grimaces, gold-leaf phrases—all their affected or sham art Bohemianism : a language only heard upon the stage, flowers which only grow on this make believe soil, fruits which ripened in the light and heat of the footlights, a nature in which there was not the breath of God but that of the prompter, wild passions which made the scenery shake, soft melancholy accompanied by the lascivious pleasing of the flute, rouged innocence with the trap-door abysses into which crime is hurled, monthly salary sentiments, peals of trumpets, and so forth.1 1 As was to be expected, all of this passage relative to the theatre is admirably given in French . It is as follows : “ Edans le fait ces pièces répondait à toutes leurs exigences, ils y trouvaient leurs costumes favoris, leurs poésie couleur de THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 65 Thus the actors in Germany emancipated them selves not only from poets, but also from poetry itself. They only allow mediocrity to show itself in their domain, and take good care that no true poet enters in that disguise. How many proofs and trials Raupach had to sustain ere he could set foot in the theatre ! And even now they keep a careful eye on him, and when he by chance writes something which is not thoroughly and utterly bad, he must at once produce a dozen miserable pieces de manufacture to escape ostracism from the actors. Does the word “ a dozen ” astonish you ? It is no exaggeration. This man can really write twelve plays annually, and people marvel at his fertility. But as Jantjen of Amsterdam , the celebrated juggler, was wont to say, “ There is no " witchcraft in it, ladies and gentlemen - no witch craft, only sleight of hand ! ” 1 chair, leurs ingénuités en tricot, leurs sorties à applaudissements, leurs grimaces traditionelles, leurs phrases clinquantes, leurs ruses de métier, leur afféterie guindée, tout leur attirail de cabotins ; une langue qui n'est parlée que sur les planches, des fleurs qui ne mûrissent qu'aux lampions de la rampe, une nature que n’anime jamais le souffle de Dieu, mais bien celui du souffleur, une fureur qui n'ébranle que les coulisses, une douce mélancholie avec accompagnement de flûtes, une innocence fardée avec l'abîme qui s'ouvre sous les pas de crime, des sentiments de louange, des rires aigus, des sanglots échevelés, des fanfares et cetera . 1 All of the following passages until Uhland is mentioned, or two pages and a half, are wisely omitted in the French VOL. II. E 66 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. But there is a peculiar reason why Raupach has succeeded in gaining a position on the German stage. This author, a German by birth, lived a long time in Russia, where he received his cul ture, and it was the Muscovite muse who initiated and dedicated him to poetry. This sable- clad beauty, with an exquisitely charming pug-nose, poured out to our poet whole pints of the brandy of inspiration, hung over his shoulder a quiver full of Kirghese Tartar shafts of wit, and put into his hands the tragic knout. And when he smote therewith at first our hearts, how we did tremble, it was terrible ! The very strangeness of it all raised deep amazement. Truly the man pleased us not in civilised Germany ; but his monstrous Sarmatian nature, his clumsy agility, and a certain growling grasping in his demeanour, imposed on the public. And it was indeed rather an original sight when Herr Raupach, on his Scla vonian pony, Pegasus, galloped over the steppes of poetry, riding with his dramatic material under the saddle in true Baschkir fashion . This version. It may here be observed that the amount of space and satire thrown away on this feeble dramatist (whom Heine never neglected an opportunity to ridicule ) , are out of all pro portion to the importance of the subject, and might have been better devoted to some greater man . Heine unfortunately never learned to limit his personal dislikes, and his mosquitoes were all dragons. — Translator. In allusion to the Tartar fashion of carrying meat under THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 67 pleased people in Berlin, where everything Rus sian is well received. Herr Raupach succeeded in getting a foothold there, he established an understanding with the actors, and for some time, as I have said, Raupach Apollo has received divine honours with Diana Birch - Pfeiffer in the temple of dramatic art. He gets thirty thalers for every act which he writes, and he writes nothing but pieces in six acts, since he always calls the first act a prelude. And there is no kind of stuff which he has not shoved under the saddle of his Pegasus and ridden ripe. No hero is safe from such a tragic destiny. He has taken in even Siegfried the dragon -killer ? The muse of German history is in despair. Like a Niobe she beholds with pale agony the noble children whom Raupach Apollo has so terribly treated. 0 Jupiter ! he even dared to lay hand on the Hohenstaufen, an old beloved Swabian emperor ! It was not enough that Friedrich von Raumer slaughtered him his torically - now Raupach must needs come along and cook him up for the theatre ! The wooden the saddle until it is cooked , or at least made tender, as raw steaks were once prepared for eating in Bavaria, simply by beating and rolling with salt. Meat thus eaten is a strong stimulant or tonic, and is believed to be a cure for consuinption, but a meal of it should be followed by a glass of raw spirits. It is not unpalatable. The Roman gladiators trained on this food . - Translator. 68 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. images of Von Raumer, Herr Raupach covers with his Russian - leather poetry, and the sight of such caricatures and their evil smell 1 will at last dis gust us with the memory of the most beautiful and noblest Emperor of the German Fatherland . And the police does not prevent such outrage ? But perhaps they have a hand in the game ! New kingly families do not like popular memories of old Imperial stocks whose place they fain would take. It is certain that the theatrical manager in Berlin would never ask Immermann or Grabbe or Uechtsitz for a drama on Barbarossa, but get it from Raupach. Yet even he would not dare to stick a Hohenzollern under his saddle ; should he take such a fancy he would soon be shown into a jail as his Helicon. The association of ideas which springs from contrasts has caused me when about to speak of Uhland, to fall suddenly on Herr Raupach and Madame Birch - Pfeiffer. But though neither of this divine pair—the theatrical Diana any more than the theatrical Apollo—belong to true litera ture, I must still speak of them, because they i This Missduft or evil smell is not quite intelligible. I have smelt much Russian leather, in Russia and elsewhere, but always thought its odour rather agreeable. It is due to black birch bark, which is certainly fragrant, much like sassafras or winter green, but more spicy .-Translator. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 69 In any а represent the stage- world of the day. case, it was due to our real poets to devote a few words in this book to showing what kind of people they are who among us usurp the sovereignty of the stage among us. CHAPTER V. I am just now in a strange dilemma. I cannot pass by without mention the poems of Ludwig Uhland, and yet I am in a mood which is by no means favourable to such comment. Silence would here seem to be cowardice or perfidy, and a frank and honest opinion a want of kind feel ing. In truth , the kith and kin of the Uhland muse, and the petty followers of his fame, will be ill - satisfied with the inspiration which I have to day at command. But I beg you to take into consideration the time and place wherein I write. Twenty years ago I was a youth—and then with what foaming, over-running inspiration would I have exalted the admirable Uhland. In those days I felt his excellence better than I now do ; he was nearer to me in feeling and intellect.1 But so many things have happened since then ! What I then thought so magnificent, those chivalresque and Catholic beings, those knights 1 Denkvermögen. That is, Heine as a boy was quite on a par with Uhland, but had since far outgrown him as a poet. — Translator. 70 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 71 who hewed and stabbed one another in noble tournaments, those soft squires and chaste ladies of high degree, those Norland heroes and Minne singer monks and nuns, ancestral vaults with ominous shudderings, pale sentiments of hope abandoned, with knells and endless wailings of woe - how bitterly repulsive did all this after wards become to me. Yes, it was once otherwise. How often I sat in those days on the ruins of the old castle of Düsseldorf on the Rhine, and declaimed the most beautiful of all Uhland's songs : “ DER SCHÖNE SCHÄFER ZOG ES NAH. “ Once as the handsome shepherd went Near to the royal palace gate ; A maid looked from the battlement, Then was her longing great. She spoke to him with gentle word : ‘ Oh could I go adown to thee ! How white the lambs shine in thy herd ! How red the flowers by me ! ' The youth again unto her said : Oh could'st thou come adown to me ! For even as thy cheeks are red , So white thine arms I see ! ' And every morning passing by With silent secret joy and fear, He saw far on the castle high, His darling love appear. 72 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 6 And up to her he gently sang : ' Good morning to thee, princess fair ! ' Her gentle voice in answer rang, " Thank thee, my shepherd dear ! ' The winter fled, spring came at last, Bright flowers blossomed as before ; The shepherd by the castle passed , But she appeared no more. With mournful voice to her he cried : “ Good morning to thee, princess fair ! ' A ghost- like sound to him replied : ' Farewell , my shepherd dear !? When I sat on the ruins of the old castle and declaimed this ballad, I heard ever and anon the nixies in the Rhine, which there runs by, mock ing my words, and there sighed and moaned from the flood with comic pathos : “ A ghost- like sound to him replied : ' Farewell, my shepherd dear ! " » 6 I did not allow myself to be disturbed by such railleries of the water -nymphs, even when they tittered ironically at hearing the most beautiful passages in Uhland's poems. I modestly took all such giggling to myself, especially towards THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 73 evening when twilight darkened, and I declaimed with somewhat more elevated voice to keep down the mysterious terror which the old ruins of the castle inspired. For there is a legend that a lady without a head haunts the place. I often thought I heard by me the rustle of ber silken robes, and my heart beat. That was the time and place when I was inspired by the poems of Ludwig Uhland. Now I have the very volume in my hands, but twenty years are flown, and in that time I have heard and seen much - very much . I no longer believe in headless human beings, and the old ghostly delusions move me no more . The house i French version , “ Je crois bien encore aux femmes sans tête, mais les anciennes apparitions nocturnes n'ont plus de prise sur mon âme." In Paris, as in all France, a female figure without a head-la femme sans tête -with the words, “ To the good woman ,” is a common shop or tavern sign , the intimation being that no woman is good for much, or perfectly good, till she is dead. But the female head without the body , as used by milliners, is called a Zenobia, and, to complete the category, a paver's rammer is a demoiselle. It is hardly worth while to indicate to the reader that in a work which the author claims is, par éminence, the greatest and truest critical exposition of modern German poetry, such carping at Uhland on such capri ciously silly grounds as that the critic feels “ out of sorts ” this morning, and “ don't like the poein as he used to,” is simply no criticism at all . The Shepherd ” is, and ever will be, a beau tiful poem , despite the sensations resulting to Heine from a twenty years' residence in Paris ; but it is by no means Uhland's 74 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. in which I now sit and read lies in the Boulevard Montmartre, and there surge the wildest waves of the day, there roar and surge the loudest voices of our modern time. There is laughing, grow ling, drumming ; the National Guard sweeps by, and every one speaks French . Is this the place in which to read such poems ? Three times have I declaimed the conclusion of “ The Shepherd to myself, but I no longer feel the nameless woe which once seized me when the king's daughter died, and the handsome shepherd cried up to her so sadly : “ Good morning to thee, princess fair ! ' A ghost- like sound to him replied : Farewell, my shepherd dear !' " Perhaps I have grown cool as regards such poems since I have discovered that there is a far more painful love than that which he endures who has never possessed the beloved object, or who has lost it by death . In fact, it is much more tormenting when the adored reposes by night and by day in our arms, yet torments us by night and day with constant contradiction and silly caprices, so that we finally repel from our heart what it loves best, and escort at last best, nor by far his most popular poem. But in reading Heine one must expect now and then a sample of “ pretty Fanny's way." THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 75 the accursed-worshipped woman to the railway station, and see her off : “ Farewell, my princess fair ! " Yes, more painful than loss by death is logs by life ; as, for instance, when the beloved turns from us with insane frivolity , when she insists on going to a ball where no respectable man can accompany her, and where she ( crazily over dressed and impudently friséed ) throws herself into the arms of the first blackguard whom she fancies, and waltzes away, turning her back on us. “Farewell, oh shepherd mine ! " Perhaps it went no better with Uhland than His mood and manner may have changed since then. With trifling exceptions he has for twenty years brought no new poems to market. I cannot believe that such an ad mirable poetic power was so scantily gifted by Nature as to bear within itself only a single spring-time. No, I think that the silence of Uhland is rather due to the contradiction caused by the inclinations of his muse not agreeing with with us. 1 “ Nach dem Postwagen bringen und fortschicken müssen.” French, “ Nous sommes obligés de la conduire à la cour des Messageries et de l'aider nous mêmes - à monter en diligence pour aller se promener dans son pays , ” which is illustrated with a picture in La Physiologie de l'étudiant. -Translator. 76 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL . the exigencies of his political position. The elegist poet who sang the Catholic - feudal past in such beautiful ballads and romances, the Ossian of the Middle Age, became subsequently in the Wurtemberg Chamber of Deputies a zealous re presentative of popular rights, a bold speaker for civil equality and free thought. Uhland has proved that this democratic and Protestant feel ing is in him sincere, by the great personal sacrifices which he made ; and as he formerly won the laurel of a poet, he has now gained the oak wreath of civilian virtue. And it was just because he was so honourable that he could not sing the songs of early days with the same in spiration, and as his Pegasus was a knightly charger which willingly trotted back into the past, but was always unmanageable when ridden into modern life, so our brave Uhland smilingly dismounted and let the jibbing steed be led back into the stable. There he is to this day, and like his colleague, the horse of Bayard, he has all possible merits and but one defect - he is dead.1 Keener eyes than mine will not have failed to observe that the high horse with gay armorial bear ings and proud plumes was never quite appropriate 1 It is remarkable how this simile passed all over Europe during the Middle Ages. But in England Bayard was the common name of the horse, and his failing was not that he was dead , but blind. “ Like a blinde Bayard .” — Translator. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 77 to its bourgeois rider, who wore, instead of boots with golden spurs, only shoes and silk stockings, and had on his head, instead of a helmet, the hat of a Tubingen doctor of laws. They think they have discovered that Ludwig Uhland never ex actly harmonised with his theme ; that he does not really repeat in idealistic truth the naïve grimly -powerful tones of the Middle Age, but rather dissolves them in a sickly sentimental melancholy ; that he has cooked over again the vigorous sounds of heroic sagas and of popular songs in his sentiments to make them softer and more palatable to the modern public. And, in fact, if we carefully examine the ladies of Uhland's poems, we find only beautiful shadows, embodied moonshine, milk in their veins, and in their eyes sweet tears, or tears without salt. And if we compare the heroes of Uhland with those of ancient songs, it seems as if they were merely tin suits of armour, in which are flowers instead of flesh and bones. 2 Therefore these Uhlandic a 1 This appalling metaphor of cooking vigorous sounds (starken Klänge) in sentiment to soften them is somewhat improved in the French version , “ Il a amolli les accents énergiques et héro ïques des traditions populacies du Nord, pour les rendre plus appétisantes.--Translator . 2 “ The gentleman in tin clothes . " I regret that I cannot recall the name of a delightful old burlesque on the horrors of the Anne Radcliffe school, in which this expression occurs. I think it is “ The Heroine." 78 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL . sorcerer. knights have a far sweet- and- dearer odour for tender noses than the old Kempé, who wore real iron breeches, ate much, and drank still more. Yet all this is really no discredit, for Uhland never wished to bring before us the German past in all its truth ; he more probably desired to please us with its reflection, and so he mirrored it pleasantly on the shining surface of his genius. This has indeed imparted to his poems a peculiar charm , and have won for them the liking of many gentle and good men. The shadows of the past exert a magic charm, although evoked by the feeblest Even men who take part in the modern movement preserve a certain secret sympathy for the traditions of early times, and these spirit voices move us deeply in their faintest echo. And it is easy to understand that the ballads and romances of our admirable Uhland had enthusi astic reception, not only by the patriots of 1813 , and pious youth as well as gentle maids, but also among far stronger men and minds of modern thought. I have added to the word patriots the date 1813 , in order to distinguish them from the friends of the Fatherland of the present day, who no longer live upon the memories of the so- called War of Freedom . These older heroes must take the greatest delight in Uhland's muse, since most of his poems are thoroughly imbued with the spirit THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 79 of their time — a time when they revelled in youth ful feeling and proud hopes. This admiration of Uhland's poems they transmitted to their followers, and among the youths of the gymnastic - political clubs to acquire this work was regarded as pecu liarly patriotic. They found in them songs which even Max von Schenkendorf and Ernst Moritz Arndt could not have surpassed, and in truth what descendant of the bravely - honourable Arminius and of the blonde Thusnelda, would not have been satisfied with the following : FORWARD ! Forward ! Onward ! It was heard : Russia cried the mighty word, Forward ! Prussia caught the mighty word, Echoing gladly what she heard, Forward ! Up, thou mighty Austria, too ! Forward ! Do as others do ! Forward ! 1 French version , " Pour les jeunes gens qui s'adonnait aux exercises gymnastiques fondés alors par le gallophobe Jaher ( Jahn) pour régénérer le physique de la nation allemande.” These gymnastic clubs, or Turner Verein, have been of incal culable benefit to Germany, and were a prominent cause of the superiority of the German soldiers in the last war with France. -Translator. So THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. Up, thou ancient Saxonland ! Ever forward, hand - in -hand ! Forward ! Bayern ! Hesse ! fall in line, Suabia, Frankland, to the Rhine, Forward ! Forward Holland, Netherland) , High be the sword and free your hand ! Forward ! God's blessing, Switzerland , on thee ! Alsace, Lorraine, and Burgundy ! Forward ! Forward ever - never fear ! Good be the wind, the harbour near ! Forward ! 1 Forward's a field -marshal's name, So forward , soldiers, just the same, Forward ! I repeat it, the people of 1813 find in Uhland's poems the spirit of their time most preciously \| The French version adds, “ Le général à laquelle cette chanson fait allusion est Blucher, le fameux troupier.” In this otherwise fine and sustained poem the whole sense is virtually destroyed by this final connection with an individual, thereby claiming merely German military supremacy. So in Longfellow's “ Excelsior,” which was suggested by " Forwards,” the entire ideal structure or conception is lost when we find it made rela by " the pious monks of Saint Bernard ,” which at once reduces THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 81 > preserved, and not only its political, but also its moral and ästhetic, spirit. Uhland represents a whole period, and that alone, since all its other representatives have fallen into forgetfulness, and are all really united now in this one writer. The tone which characterises Uhland's songs, ballads, and romances was that of his romantic contem poraries, and many among them have written, if not better, at least as well. And here is the place where I can praise many a writer of the romantic school, who, as I said, manifests as regards subject and tone in his poems the most striking similarity to Uhland, and who is fully his equal in poetic value, differing perhaps in showing less confidence in expression. In fact, what an admirable poet is Baron von Eichendorff. The songs which he has woven into his novel Ahnung und Gegenwart (" Presentiment and the Present" ) are not to be distinguished from those of Uhland, nor indeed from his best. The difference consists in the greener freshness of the forest and the more crystal the figurative ideal to a literal and very lunatic Alpine climb without a purpose. This coincidence is one of the curiosities of literature. Excelsior is the Latin for “ forwards. " The word is repeated, as in the German model, at the end of every verse, and both poems end with an extraordinary change into realism, which utterly conflicts with all their meaning and destroys it. In the French version the last line is En avant ! voilà le nom de votre général ! ” -Translator. VOL. II , F 82 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. line clearness of those of Von Eichendorff. Justinus Kerner, who is almost unknown, also deserves honourable mention ; he also wrote in the same key and measure the most admirable songs. He is a compatriot (Snabian) of Uhland. This is also the case with Gustav Schwab, a more dis tinguished poet, who also bloomed out from the Suabian valleys, and who charms us every year with beautiful and perfumed poetry. He has special talent for ballads, and has sung his local home-legends most charmingly in this form . Wilhelm Müller, whom death tore from us when in all the fire and fulness of his youth , must also > 1 Justinus Kerner soon became very well known all over Europe and America by his work Die Seherinn von Prevorst “ The Seeress of Prevorst” ) . He was the author of the beautiful song “ Wohlauf noch get runken , " which, like that of Von Eichendorff, “ In einem kühlen Grunde,” is extremely popular. I knew Justinus Kerner, and was once his guest at Weinsberg. I was a college youth at Heidelberg in those days, and can remember that the Herr Doctor more than once remarked that I reminded him in appearance and in many ways of what his friend Uhland had been at my age. Unfortunately the likeness here ceased. The writers who are so carelessly glanced over by Heine-Von Eichendorff, Justinus Kerner, Gustav Schwab, and Wilhelm Müller -to whom a dozen more could be added, deserved from their intrinsic excellence, originality, and popu larity a far more extended notice than Heine has given them ; room for all of which and more that is wanting might have been subtracted to great advantage from his comments on the Schlegels, Raupach, and other enemies great and small. - Translator. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 83 be mentioned He harmonises admirably with Uhland as regards imitation of German popular songs, but it seems to me as if he was often more successful in this sphere, and surpassed him in naturalness. He was more deeply familiar with the spirit of the old types of song, therefore it was not necessary for him to imitate their forms, and we accordingly find a more dexterous manage ment of transferral and a judicious avoidance of antiquated turns and expressions. Here, too, I should recall the late Wetzel, who is now forgotten and vanished . He had affinity in style to our ad mirable Uhland, and in certain songs of his which I have seen he surpasses him in sweetness and depth of expression. These songs, half flowers, half butterflies, spread their perfume, and flutter in one of the older annual issues of Brockhaus' Urania . ” That Clemens Brentano should have composed most of his songs in the same metres and with the same sentiments as Uhland is a matter of course, for both drank from the same spring of popular ballads and offer us the same draughts, only the cup of Uhland is more gracefully turned . Of Adalbert von Chamisso I cannot here appro priately speak. Though he was a contemporary of the Romantic school and took part in its work, still the heart of this man has of late been so rejuvenated that he has taken up new forms of 84 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL . song, made himself known as one of the most original and eminent of modern poets, and belongs much more to young than to old Germany. Yet in his earlier poems there is the same air which breathes in those of Uhland—the same melody, colour, perfume, melancholy, and tears. Chamisso's tears are the more touching because they, like a fountain which bursts from a rock, break forth from a far stronger heart.1 The poems which Uhland composed in South German measures are most intimately allied to the sonnets, assonances, and ottaverime of his fellow -scholars of the Romantic school, and it is impossible to distinguish them from his, be it in form or feeling. But, as I have said, most of those contemporaries of Uhland have passed with their poems into oblivion. They are now to be found with difficulty in forgotten collections, such as the Dichterwald ( “ The Forest of Poets " ), the Sängerfahrt (“ The Singers Pilgrimage " ), in certain Frauen und Musenalmanachen (“ Ladies' or Muses' Almanacs" ) which Fouqué and Tieck pub. lished, in old newspapers, as in Achim von Arnim's Trosteinsamkeit (“ Consolation of Solicitude " ), and in the Wünschelruthe (“ The Divining- rod ” ), edited i Chamisso is best known to the English world by his strange story of Peter Schlemihl, which was imitated by Hoffmann in The Lost Shadow .” This novelette is , in its way, a poem , Translator THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 85 by Heinrich Straube and Rudolf Christiani , in the weekly journals of the time—and God knows where else ! Uhland was not the father of a school, as were Schiller and Goethe, or those like them, from whose individuality went forth a peculiar tone or expres sion which was re-echoed by contemporary poets. Uhland was not the father but rather the child of a school which gave him an expression which was not originally his own, which he with care extracted from the works of earlier poets. But in amends for this want of originality or character istic novelty he gives us many admirable character istics which are as rich as they are rare. He is the pride of happy Suabia, and where'er resounds the German tongue men rejoice in this noble poet's soul. As most of his lyrical comrades of the Romantic school are united in Uhland, so the public loves and honours it in him. And we love and honour him perhaps all the more since we now are about to lose him for ever.1 Ah ! it is not from trivial desire but in obedience to the law of necessity that Germany is now excited . Good, peaceful Germany ! It casts a mournful look upon the past which it leaves behind, bowing • French version, " Et nous le vénérons et l'aimons peut être d'autant plus qu'il entre pour nous dans le domaine du passé." Here the French translation of the Romantic school ends. 86 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. once more in deep reverence to the olden time, which looks at it so sorrowful and pale from Uhland's poems, and it takes farewell with aa kiss. And yet another kiss — perhaps a tear ! But let us linger no longer in idle emotion . Forward ! Onward ! It is heard ; France now calls the mighty word : Forward ! 1 1 This conclusion redeems every trifling failing or error in the whole chapter. Only a true vates, or poet- prophet, could have clearly understood or foreseen, as Heine did when he wrote this, that Germany had really taken leave of its romantic past, and was about to enter on a new and more practical career. In fact, many years after, the rural places about Berlin were described as being haunted by young poets writing ballads, “ mostly in imitation of Uhland. " The only flaw in the bell was that Heine looked only to political reforms and not to many other concurrent causes which should cause this change. CHAPTER VI. WHEN after long years the Emperor Otto III. went to the tomb where the remains of Charles ( Charlemagne) were placed, he entered the vault with two bishops and Count Laumel (who wrote the description of these details ). The corpse was not recumbent, as is usual, but sat upright, like a living man, on a chair. On the head was a crown of gold ; he held the sceptre in his hands, on which were gloves, but his nails had grown out through the leather. The vault was very strongly built of marble and lime. It was necessary to break an opening, and those who entered perceived a strong odour. All at once sank on their knees and manifested their respect for the dead. The Emperor Otto placed on the corpse a white robe, cut its nails, and otherwise repaired the ravages of time. The limbs were in nowise decayed, save that there was something gone from the tip of the nose. Otto had it replaced with gold. Then he took a tooth from the mouth of Charlemagne, had the vault walled up, and went his way. In the night a 87 88 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. Charlemagne appeared to him in a dream and announced to him that he, Otto, would not attain to old ago and would leave no heirs. This is what is related in the Deutsche Sagen (“ German Traditions " ) ; but it is not the only in stance of the kind. Even so your King Francis I. opened the grave of the mighty Roland, to see for himself if the hero was of such giant stature as poets have sung. This was just before the battle of Pavia. Sebastian of Portugal entered the vaults of his ancestors and gazed on the dead monarchs before he went to Africa.1 Strange and terrible curiosity which impels men so often to look into the graves of the past ! It occurs at remarkable periods, at the end of an epoch or just before a catastrophe. In this our time we have seen a similar thing, when that great sovereign French people were suddenly seized with a desire to open the grave of the bygone and gaze on the long ruined passed away time by daylight. There was no lack of learned resurrectionists , who with spades and crowbars were quickly on hand to dig up the old débris 1 In the French version this is given more fully. “ C'est une pareille visite que le roi Sébastien de Portugal fit aux caveaux de ses ancêtres, avant de s'embarquer pour cette malheureuse compagne d'Afrique où les sables d'Alcanzar- Kebir devinrent son linceul. Il fit ouvrir chacque cercueil, et interrogea long temps les traits des anciens rois.” THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 89 and break into the vault. A strong scent was perceived, which as Gothic haut-gout delightfully tickled the noses of those who were blasés to otto of roses. French writers knelt in deep respect before the openly unveiled Middle Age. One placed a new garment on it, another cut its nails, a third gave it a new nose, and then came certain poets who stole its teeth, just as the Emperor Otto had done. Whether the spirit of the Middle Age appeared to these dentists and restorers of noses, and pro phesied to them the speedy end of their romantic reign, I know not. In fact, I only mention this occurrence in French literature that I may dis tinctly declare that I am not reflecting on them when I , in this book , described in rather severe words a similar thing which took place in Ger many. The literary men who there took the Middle Age from its grave had other intentions, as have appeared from this book, and the result which it had upon the multitude endangered Š 1 French version , “ Les nez blasés sur les parfums classi. ques.” It is, however, extremely probable that this scent was really not at all of an offensive nature. During the early Middle Age bodies of very wealthy and eminent persons were very often embalmed or preserved from decay by means of spices and powerful aromatics. Hence the frequent accounts of the bodies of saints which, when discovered, gave out a perfume which was attributed to supernatural causes, and called “ the odour of sanctity." ) go THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. the freedom and prosperity of my native land. French authors had only artistic interests in what they did, and the French public merely sought to gratify its newly -awakened curiosity. The majority of men only looked into the graves of the past to find therein a pattern for a fancy dress for the Carnival. The Gothic fashion was in France only a fleeting fashion, which simply served for temporary amusement. People let their hair grow long in mediæval style, and when the barber casually remarked that it did not look well, they had it cut short, with all the associa tions belonging to it. Ah ! in Germany it is quite otherwise, perhaps because the Middle Age is not there quite dead and decayed, as it is with you. The German Middle Age does not lie mouldering ; ever and anon it is revived by an evil spirit, and comes out among us in clear, broad daylight, and sucks the red life from our breast. Ah ! do you not see how sorrowful and pale our Germany is , even the German youth which not long ago rejoiced with such life ? See ye not how red is the mouth of the plenipotentiary vampire who lives in Frankfort, and there sucks so horribly slowly and tiresomely at the heart of the German people ? What I have said of the Middle Age admits a special application as regards its religion. Loyalty THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 91 French lathoneon German Catholics bad requires that I should distinguish most definitely between the party which is here known as the Catholic, and those wretched fellows who bear the name in Germany. It is only to these latter that I have alluded in my book , and that indeed in terms by far too mild . They are the real foes of my Fatherland — a crawling, lying, hypo critical mob of miserable cowardice. They hiss in Munich, they hiss in Berlin, and while you stroll on the Boulevard Montmartre you suddenly feel a bite in your heel. But we will crush the head of the old serpent. It is the party of lies ; they are the bailiffs of despotism , the restorers of all the misery, cruelties, and madness of the past. As far as heaven from them is that party which we here call Catholic, whose leaders are among the most talented writers of France. If they are not our brothers-in-arms, we fight at least for the same interests, or for those of mankind. We are one in our love for that, we only differ in our views as to what is best for mankind. They believe that man only 1 66' Schergen des Despotismus.” In the French version, “ Ces sent les familliers de la Sainte- alliance." 2 Truly, in such distinction all the difference lies, and on this ground an anarchist might agree with an aristocrat. But the sound of the pension paid by the police, or Louis Philippe, rings and rolls through all this chapter, and indeed through all Germany." 66 92 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. needs spiritual comfort ; we, on the contrary, opine that he wants material prosperity. When the Catholic party in France, ignoring its true mission, announces itself as the party of the past, and as that of the restorers of the faith of bygone times, we should protect it against its own declarations. The Eighteenth crushed Catholicism so completely in France that there was hardly a breath of life left in it, and those who now seek to restore it here seem like men preaching a new religion. By Paris I mean France, and not the provinces ; as for the latter, it is as unimportant what they think as what our legs think. The head is the seat of all our think ing power. I am told that the French in the provinces are good Catholics, which I can neither affirm nor deny. All the men whom I ever met there looked to me like milestones, on whose faces one could read distinctly how near or how far they were from the capital. The women there perhaps seek consolation in Christianity because they cannot live in Paris. Christianity has not existed in Paris since the Revolution , and it had lost all importance there long before. It lurked in a remote church-corner like a spider, and leapt out headlong now and then when it could seize on a babe in the cradle or an old man in his coffin . It is only at these two periods of life, when he is born or dies, that a THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 93 Frenchman falls into the power of the Catholic priest; during all the interval he lives in reason and laughs at holy water and emotion . But is that a predominance of Catholicism ? It was because it was so utterly extinct in France that it was able under Louis XVIII. and Charles X. to attract a few unselfish minds into itself by the charm of novelty. Catholicism was then something so unheard of, so fresh, so overwhelm ing ! The religion which had reigned recently before in France was the classic mythology, and this beautiful faith had been preached to the French people by its authors, poets, and artists, with such results that the former were at the end of the last century, as regarded life and thought, altogether in heathen disguise. During the Re volution this classic religion bloomed in all its power and glory ; it was not merely an Alex andrian aping. Paris was a natural continuation of Athens and Rome. Under the Empire this antique spirit was subdued, the gods of Greece ruled only on the stage and Roman virtue on the battlefield . A new faith had come, and this took form in the holy name " Napoleon ." And this religion still rules the masses. Therefore they are in the wrong who say that the French people are irreligious because they do not believe in Christ or His saints. One should rather say that the irreligion of the French consists in this, u 94 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. that they now believe in a man instead of the immortal gods. Or we must declare that the irreligion of the French lies in the fact that they no longer believe in Jupiter, Minerva, Diana, or Venus. This last item, it is true, admits of doubt, and it is certain that the French have ever re mained orthodox in their worship of the Graces. I hope that these remarks, far from being mis understood, will serve to guard the reader from misunderstanding. The French version of this chapter ends as follows: J'espère qu'on n'interprétera mal ces observations : elles avaient pour but de prévenir le lecteur contre le fâcheux malentendus. Dans le trois premières parties de ce livre, j'ai parlé avec quelque developpement des luttes entre la religion et la philosophie en Allemagne ; j'avais à expliquer cette revolution intellectuelle de mon pays, sur laquelle Madame de Staël a répandu pour sa part tant d'erreurs en France. Je le déclare franchement : je n'ai cessé d'avoir en vue le livre de cette grand'mère des doctrinaires, et c'est dans une intention de redressement que j'ai donné au mien ce même titre De l'Allemagne. Paris le 8 Avril 1835. CHAPTER VII.1 I should be in despair if the few intimations or hints as regards the great Eclectic which escaped me in a previous chapter should be quite misunderstood . In fact, far be it from me to depreciate M. Victor Cousin. The very title of this far - famed philosopher binds me in duty unto praise and laud. He belongs to that living Pantheon of France which we call the Pairie ( peerage), and his intellectual limbs repose on the velvet benches of the Luxembourg. Thereunto he is a man of loving heart, yet he loves not the trifling objects dear to every Frenchman-as, for example, Napoleon, or even Voltaire, who is less easily beloved ; no, M. Cousin's heart seeks what is most serious — he loves Prussia. I should be a wretch if I would belittle such a man - yes, a monster of ingratitude . . . for I myself am a. Prussian . Who will there be to love us when ? This chapter, which was omitted from the last French version, appears in the German edition as an Anhang or supplement, with the words Victor Cousin added in the table of contents. - Translator. 95 96 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL . the great heart of a Victor Cousin shall no longer beat ? I must indeed subdue with all my strength all private feelings which might mislead me into excessive enthusiasm . Which means that I would not be suspected of servility, for M. Cousin is very influential in the state, both by his position and oratorical power. This consideration might even inspire me to speak as freely of his faults as of his virtues. Would he be therewith dis pleased ? Certainly not. I know that no higher honour can be paid to great men than to set forth their failings as conscientiously as their better qualities. When we portray in song a Hercules, we must describe how he laid by the lion's skin and sat by the distaff, since he is for all that a Hercules. However, when we tell such tales of our hero, we may in honour add that M. Cousin , though he sometimes sits and gossips by the distaff, never lays aside his lion's skin . To continue the comparison with Hercules, we may mention another flattering point of differ ence. The multitude ascribed to the of Alcmena deeds which were performed by several of his contemporaries, but the works of M. Cousin are so colossal , so astonishing, that people never understood how a single man could achieve so much, whence arose the report that the works which appeared under the name of this hero son THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 97 were really those of several of the men of his time. So will it be some day with Napoleon ; it is already beginning to pass our comprehension how one hero, unaided , could do so many wondrous deeds. And just as people are beginning to say in depreciation of the great Victor Cousin, that he knows how to use the talents of others and publish the results to his own advantage, so it will be asserted of poor Napoleon that not he, but God knows who—perhaps even Sebastiani -won the battles of Marengo, Austerlitz, and Jena. Great men work not only by their deeds, but also by their personal lives. In this respect M. Cousin deserves unconditional praise. Here he appears in purest dignity. He has laboured by the influence of his own example to destroy a prejudice which has perhaps restrained most of his fellow-countrymen from devoting themselves to that grandest of all efforts — the study of philo sophy. For here in France there prevailed an opinion that men by studying philosophy unfitted themselves for practical life, that by metaphysical speculation they lost all talent for industrial speculation, and that he who would become a great philosopher must renounce all these splen dours of public office and live in simple poverty, retired from all intrigues. This delusion, which VOL. II. G 98 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL . kept so many Frenchmen far from the sphere of the abstract, has been fortunately dissipated by M. Cousin, who has shown us by his own example that a man may be an immortal philosopher and at the same time a life-peer of France. It is true that there are certain Voltaireans who explain this phenomenon by the simple circumstance that of these two conditions M. Cousin has only fulfilled the latter. Could there be a more unamiable, unchristian declaration ? Only a Voltairean could be capable of such frivolity. But what great man ever escaped the persiflage of his contemporaries ? Did the Athenians spare the great Alexander with their Attic- salted epi grams ? Did not the Romans sing in bold songs about Cæsar ? Did not the Berlin folk write pasquinades on Frederic the Great ? M. Cousin must meet with the same fate which Alexander, Cæsar, and Frederic encountered, and which many a great man in Paris will yet endure. The greater the man the more easily is he hit by the arrow of mockery. Dwarfs are far more likely to escape. The multitude, however, the people, does not love mockery. Like genius, or love, or the forest , or the sea it is of serious nature ; it bears anti pathy to the spiteful wit of salons, and it explains great phenomena in profoundly mystical fashion, THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 99 All its explanations have a poetic, marvellous, legendary character. So, for example, people ex plained Paganini's astonishing execution on the violin by declaring that the musician, because he murdered his mistress from jealousy, was for that confined many years in prison, in which his only consolation was a violin, and that by practis ing on it by night and by day he attained his extraordinary proficiency on the instrument. In like manner the philosophical virtuosoship of M. Cousin is attributed to a similar event, for it is related that the German government considered our great eclectic as a hero for freedom , and shut him up, allowing him nothing to read but Kant's “ Critique of Pure Reason.” Out of very ennui he studied it continually, and thereby attained that virtuosoship in German philosophy which in after years gained him so much applause in Paris when he publicly performed the most difficult passages in it. This is a very beautiful folk- tale, fairy -like, legendary, romantic, such as is told of Orpheus, Balaam the son of Beor, of Quaser the Wise, or of Budda, and which every century will work at, till finally the name Cousin will no longer be that of a real individual, but the personification of the martyr to freedom who, confined in prison , seeks consolation in philosophy or wisdom in the “ Critique of Pure Reason ,” and some future 100 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL, 66 Ballanche will perhaps see in him an allegory of the age itself, an age when criticism and pure reason and wisdom were generally sent to the lock-up. Yet as regards this story of the imprisonment of M. Cousin, it is by no means of purely alle gorical origin. For he, on suspicion of democracy, really passed some time in a German prison, as did Lafayette and Richard Cour de Lion. But that he there studied in his leisure hours Kant's Critique of Pure Reason ” is doubtful, for three reasons. Firstly, this book is written in German ; secondly, that to read it one must understand German ; and thirdly, M. Cousin does not under stand German at all.1 But, on my life ! I do not say this in blame. The greatness of M. Cousin comes more boldly to light when we see that he has learned German philosophy without understanding the language in which it is taught. How vastly does such a genius overtop us common mortals, who only i To which a friend replies on grounds which I will not in vestigate, and for which I do not hold myself responsible, that firstly, there was in existence a very good Latin version of the “ Critique of Pure Reason ; ” secondly, that it is most unlikely that a man of genius could have been long in Germany without learning the language ; and thirdly, that Heine himself played second fiddle to no man in manufacturing fibs when his object was to render an enemy ridiculous.Translator. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. IOI " master with greatest trouble this philosophy, though we have been familiar with German from our infancy ! The real character of such a genius must to us ever remain inexplicable. Such are the intuitive natures to whom Kant ascribes spontaneous perception of things in their totality, as opposed to us of common analytical natures, who just apprehend that which is by sequence and combination of details . Kant seems to have had foreboding that such a man would arise, who would understand his “ Critique of Pure Reason " by mere intuitive perception, without having learned dis cursive, analytic German. But it may be that the French are more happily organised than we Germans ; and I have observed that however little one may tell them about a doctrine, or learned investigation , or a scientific view, they know how to combine it all and work it up so admirably in their intellect that they promptly understand it far better than we do, and immediately proceed to explain it unto, or instruct us in it. It often seems to me as if the heads of the French were furnished internally, like their cafés, with innumer able mirrors, so that every idea which gets in reflects itself countless times, by which optical arrangement the narrowest, scantiest heads appear to be broad and enlightened. These brilliant intellects, like the shining cafés, generally greatly dazzle a poor German when he first comes to Paris. 102 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. On my I am afraid that I am imperceptibly coming from the sweet waters of praise into the salt and bitter sea of blame. Yes, I cannot refrain from giving it bitterly to M. Cousin for something, which is that he who loves truth more than Plato or Tennemann 1 he is unjust to himself, he slanders himself when he would make us believe that he has borrowed everything from the philosophies of Schelling and Hegel. I myself must defend M. Cousin against this self- accusation. word and conscience this worthy man has stolen absolutely nothing from the philosophy of either, and if he brought any memorial of them back from Germany to France, it was only their friendship. This does honour to his heart. And yet there are many instances of such self- accusation recorded in works on psychology. I myself once knew a man who confessed that he had stolen a silver spoon from a royal dinner table, and yet we all knew that he was not received at court, and only told this story to make us believe he had dined with the king ! No, M. Cousin has, as regards German philo sophy, always kept the sixth commandment ; he never stole from it an idea — not even the smallest 1 Author of an excellent History of Philosophy ; the hint here being that Cousin owed all his knowledge of German philosophy to it. It is indeed to be regretted that Heine bimself was not more familiar with this work and that of Rixner.-Translator. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 103 salt-spoon of an idea did he ever put into his pocket. All witnesses agree in this, that M. Cousin in this respect-observe I say, in this respect - is honour itself. And not only his friends but his enemies testify to it. Such testi mony is to be found in the Berlin Annals of Scientific Criticism for the current year, and as their author, the great Hinrichs, is by no means given to praise, his words being therefore the more to be relied on , I will in another place give them in full. What is in hand is to free a great man from a serious charge, and therefore for that, and that only, I cite the testimony of the Berlin Annals, which otherwise hurt my feelings by a certain mocking, sarcastic tone in which they speak of M. Cousin. For I am a true friend of the great Eclectic, as I have shown in the pre ceding pages, wherein I have compared him with all kinds of great men—with Hercules, Napoleon, Alexander, Cæsar, Frederic the Great, Orpheus, Balaam the son of Beor, Quaser the Wise, Budda, Lafayette, Richard Cæur de Lion, and Paganini. Perhaps I am the first man to whom it ever occurred to associate these names with that of Cousin. Du sublime au ridicule il n'y qu'un pas ! That is what his enemies will say , those frivolous Voltaireans, to whom nothing is holy, who have no religion, and who do not believe even in 104 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. Cousin. But it will not be the first time that a nation has learned from a stranger its great men. Mine is perhaps the merit that I have shown to France the value of M. Cousin as regards the present, and his significance in the future. I have shown how the people have already, during his life, adorned him poetically, and narrated wonderful things of him. I have shown how he is passing, little by little, into the purely legendary, and how a time will come when the name of Victor Cousin will be a myth. In fact the Voltaireans titter that it is only a fable. O ye slanderers of the throne and the altar, ye wretches who, as Schiller sings, are wont to blacken all which shines, and cast what towers sublime into the dust,” I prophesy unto ye that the renown of M. Cousin will, like that of the French revolution, extend around the world. And here again I hear the spiteful souls remark, Truly it is on its way to go around the globe-it has already taken its departure from Paris .” 1 " 1 A simile which , slightly changed, occurs in the Reisebilder . Of this attack on Cousin all that can be truly said is that it is to the last degree discreditable to Heine, it being thoroughly inspired by envy, malice , and untruthfulness, and yet very feeble as regards satire or cleverness. It is, in fact, so weak with its would - be bitterness as to awaken pity. Heine wished to be known as pre- eminently the apostle or introduce for THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 105 German philosophy and literature to France. The latter had already been partly effected by Madame de Staël and Schlegel, the former by Cousin, and for this reason Heine did his utmost to discredit the great French eclectic, of whom, however, it may be truly said that he set forth the methods of the German philosophers far more clearly, thoroughly, and intelligently than our author succeeded in doing. The reputation of Cousin has never diminished in the least, his eclectic system was the greatest stimulant to general study or reading and a wide range of thought of any ever known in France, and it was therefore as valuable as any German philosophy. At the time when Heine wrote this diatribe the works of Cousin were text-books in leading American universities. If any one not familiar with them will dispassionately read one or two of the works of this great French writer he cannot fail to be amazed at the incredible audacity of this chapter, which seems indeed, like too much of Heine's criticism, to be sincerely based on a full belief that not one of his readers had ever read a line of what he is discussing, quite forgetting the fact that it is those who read certain books who also peruse comments on them . — Translator. THIRD PART. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS, ( 1834. ) 1 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. I HAVE done my best not to derive the mediæval tendency or taste of our Romanticists entirely from unobjectionable sources, and I have given them the best ground for defence in the Third Book of the contributions " To the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany," wherein I remarked that the mania for the Middle Age was perhaps a secret prepossession for old German pantheism , or the remains of that old religion living on in the popular beliefs of a later age. I have already discussed how these traditions still existed, of course in a distorted and abridged form , in magic and witchcraft. Yes, they live in the memory of the people, in their usages and lan guage. The German baker stamps on every loaf which he bakes the old Druid's foot, and our daily bread thus bears the sign of the German religion. What a significant contrast does this true bread offer to the dry sham bread with which spiritual culture would nourish us. 1 Druiden, or Druidenfuss, the pentalphou or pentaple, in this shape R It is so called because the Druids were said to depict it on the 109 IIO ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. No, the memories of old German beliefs are not extinct. It is said that there are yet living old men in Westphalia who know where the ancient images of the gods lie buried, on their deathbeds they communicate the secret to their youngest descendant, and then he bears the secret in his soles of their shoes , as the ancient Egyptians did the pictures of Hyksos, &c. , on theirs. The pentaple is also said to represent the goat's face or evil principle when two points are upwards, and the good when this is reversed ( L'Abbe Constant). But it is of Greek origin. Legend states that when Antiochus Soter was about to join battle with Galater, Alexander the Great appeared to him in a dream and bade him give to his soldiers as a rallying cry the word vylalveLV, and to put it on his banner, because these Greek letters are found in the pentalpha or " five A's. ” It occurs on old coins, and was long borne by the regiment Propugnater, or Guards of Constanti nople. J. Prætorius, Blocksberges - Berichtung, 1669, from whom Heine took the suggestion of the loaves, denies, however, that the word has anything to do with Druids, but comes from Truht, or Dryth, an old term for Lord applied to Christ. It appears to me that taking it in connection with Antiochus Soter, or Saviour, this is very probable. Among Christians in the Middle Age this character signified the five wounds of Christ. Its old German origin is much more than doubtful. If the Celtic Druids or old German wise - men ( Heine is not here explicit) wore the character on their soles, it was pro bably done to express detestation of a popular Christian symbol. There is in the Musée Fol of Geneva a fine Etruscan vase representing Pallas Athene bearing a large shield, the centre of which is filled with this pentalpha. It was evidently in the most ancient Græco - Roman times an emblem of victory. Translator. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. III silent Saxon heart. In Westphalia, the former Saxony, all is not dead which lies buried. When we wander there through the old oak groves we can hear the voices of the olden time, and the re- echoes of those deeply mysterious magic spells in which there gushes a greater fulness of life than in all the literature of the March of Bran denburg. A mysterious awe thrilled my soul when once wandering through these woods I came to the old Siegburg, and my guide said “ Here once dwelt King Wittikind," and sighed deeply. He was a simple woodman bearing an I believe that could it come to pass, this man would fight to- day for King Wittikind, and woe to the skull whereon that axe should fall ! That was dark day for Saxony when Wittikind, its brave Duke, was conquered by Charlemagne near Engter. As he fled towards Ellerbruch, and men and women came wildly rushing in terror to join the retreat, one old woman could go no further. But as she would not fall into the hands of the enemy she was axe. a 1 For a full account of this, vide “ Puck ,” 3 vols. 1852, by Dr. J. Bell. The same story is told of the Passamoquoddy Indians in Maine. An Indian who professed to have once seen one of these now vanished idols in his youth made me from memory a facsimile of it, which I still possess . —Translator. II2 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. buried alive by the Saxons in a sand- hill by Bellmans Kamp, saying as they did so : “ Krup under, krup under, de Welt is di gram, Du kannst dem Gerappel nich mer folgen ! ” “ Creep under, creep under, the world is grim for thee ! The rush thou canst not follow .” 1 It is said that the old woman still lives . Truly, in Westphalia, all is not dead which lies buried. The brothers Grimm tell this story in their Deutsche Sagen ( German Tales), and I shall occa sionally avail myself of the researches of these admirable scholars in the coming pages. Jacob Grimm alone has done more for philology than all your whole French academy since Richelieu. His German Grammar is a colossal work, a Gothic cathedral, in which all the German tribes raise their voices as in a giant choras, every one in its own dialect. It may be that Jacob Grimm assigned his soul to the devil on condition that the latter should supply the materials and give his aid in this tremendous structure. And in very deed to bring together these massy blocks of learning, and to mortar and fix together these 1 It is remarkable that these words always were, and may be still , sung by German gypsies in Romany, when burying an old woman. Vide Liebich , Die Zigeuner, ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 113 1 hundred thousand citations, requires more than a man’s life and more than mortal patience. Paracelsus is one of the chief sources of infor mation for exploring old German popular tradi tions. His works are translated into Latin, not badly but incompletely. They are difficult to read in the original German, the style is abstruse, but here and there great thoughts come forth in great words. He is a natural philosopher in our present acceptation ofthe word. His terminology is not to be always understood in its traditional sense. In his doctrine of elementary spirits he uses the names of Nymphs, Undines, Silvani, Salamanders, simply because these names are known to the 1 Instead of the three preceding sentences we have in the French version, “ Jacques Grimm est sans égal dans son genre. Son érudition est colossale comme une montagne et son ésprit est frais comme la source qui en jaillit." ? Even the Latin is not so very intelligible. I possess a stout work of more than 300 pages, dated 1624, entitled Lexicon Her . meticum , or a dictionary of the peculiar Latin words used only by Paracelsus, of which words there are enough to form a language. It is remarkable that Heine, while writing on elementary spirits , makes so little use of Paracelsus. This writer, follow ing Psellus, regarded not only all visible or sensible objects in nature as spirits reflected from types, but also all elements , forces, phases of action and qualities, everything having its intellectual life or immanent spirit. Paracelsus conjectured the existence of elements , laws, and conditions not perceptible to our senses. He gives us the impression of one who could have been a great artist or poet, in the more confined senses of the words. - Translator. VOL. II . H 114 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. > public, not because they exactly explain that of which he speaks. Instead of seeking new words arbitrarily, he has preferred to use old ones, which suggested something similar. Hence he has been much misunderstood , many accusing him of mockery, others of unbelief. Some declare his idea was to give us a nursery tale out of jest as a system ; others blamed him because he, depart ing from the Christian view, did not declare the elementary spirits to be devils. “ For," as he says somewhere, we have no reason to assume that these beings belong to the devil , nor do we know what the devil himself may be .” He asserted that such spirits were as we are, real creations of God, but not like us of Adam's race, and that unto them God assigned as a dwelling the four elements. Their bodily structures are according to these elements. Therefore Paracelsus classifies the different orders of spirits according to the four elements, and here he gives us a determined system . To reduce such popular beliefs to a system , as many are now attempting to do, is as unpracti cable as if one would put the passing clouds into frames like pictures. At the utmost we can only assemble under certain rubrics or headings that which is similar. And this we will attempt as regards elementary spirits. We have already spoken of kobolds, or goblins, in the first book > ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 115 of the “ History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany.” They are ghosts or spectres — a mixture of dead men and devils; they must be carefully distinguished from the true earth spirits. The latter dwell chiefly in the mountains, and are called Wichtelmänner, Gnomes, Metalarii, Little Folk, and Dwarfs.1 The legend of these dwarfs is analogous with that of the giants, and indicates the existence of two different races, which , more or less at peace with one another, once occupied the country, but which have now disappeared. Giants have left Germany for ever. But the dwarfs are still to be met now and then in the shafts of mines, where they, clad like little miners, dig out valuable metals and precious stones. From the beginning the dwarfs have possessed in abundance gold, silver, and diamonds, for they could creep about everywhere invisibly ; no hole was too small for them to slip through, so that it did but lead to a vein of wealth . The giants, а i Paracelsus also calls them Gnomos, Pygmæos, aut Neuferinos. Lavater, in Libello de Spectris et Lemuris, gives many synonyms for these spirits, among others that of virunculos terreos. Prætorius ( Anthropodemus Plutonicus, 1666) devotes a chapter of a hundred pages to these Bergmannrigen or Erd - Leuten , as he terms them, to which Heine has been not a little indebted. The view as to the historical existence of the dwarfs has been thoroughly examined by David MacRitchie in a very interesting work ( already mentioned by me) entitled the “ Testimony of Tradition.” - Translator. 116 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. or thick however, were always poor, and if any one had ever trusted them they would doubtless have left behind them giant-like and colossal debts . Nor would they ever be converted to Christianity. I infer this from an old Danish ballad, in which the giants meet at a wedding. The bride alone eats four tuns of bouilli, soup, sixteen oxen , eighteen sides of pork, and with it all drinks seven tuns of beer. Indeed the bridegroom remarks, “ I never saw a young bride with such an appetite." Among the guests was the little Mimmering whose diminutive size contrasted with that of the giants. And the song ends with the words, “ Little Mimmering was among this heathen folk the only Christian child .” 1 There are several very charming traditions referring to the weddings of the Kleine Folk, or little people, as the dwarfs are called in Germany ; as, for example, the following : " Once the little folk wished to celebrate a wedding in the Castle of Eilenberg in Saxony. During the night they entered by the keyhole and crannies of the windows, and skipped and bounded on the polished floor like pease thrown down on a threshing - ground. Thereupon the old Count who was sleeping under the canopy of his « 1 In the original Northern tale this bride was, however, Thor disguised as Freya. It is in the story of the recovery of the hammer as given in the older Edda. — Translator. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 117 6 bed of state in that very hall, awoke, and marvelled greatly, as well he might, at the sight of so many tiny people. Then one of them, who was splendidly attired, like unto a herald, approached the Count, and in courtly and befitting phrase invited him to take part in the festival. " But, ' he added, ' we pray of thee one thing, that thou alone shalt be present ; no other person of thy house shall behold us, though by so little as a glance. ' To which the Count replied in friendly manner, ' Since you have wakened me, I will be one of you. ' Then they brought him a little lady for a partner, little torch-bearers ranged themselves around, and soft mysterious music began to sound. The Count had great trouble while dancing not to lose sight of his little partner, who escaped his view at every leap, yet who at last whirled him about so that he could hardly breathe. When all at once , in the midst of thewildest excitement of the dance, every thing stopped, the music was silent, and the whole party ran as if for their lives to the door- cracks, mouse- holes, or wherever any exit was to be found.1 But the bridal couple, the herald, and 1 There is an amusing parallel to this passage to be found in an Irish tale. Pat O'Flanagan, the tailor, was dancing in mad joy with the devil, who was fiddling, while both took alternate sups from Satan's whiskey bottle. “ Whin, och what a pity ! all at wanst this foine parrety was broken up by the appair ence of Judy, Pat’s wife.” In this tale the devil goes off with Mrs. O'Flanagan . - Translator. 1 118 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. the dancers lifted their eyes to an opening in the ceiling above, and saw the face of the old Countess, who was secretly watching them. Then the elves who remained bowed to the Count, and the herald approaching thanked him for his hospitality. ' But,' he added, “ as our joy and our wedding have been disturbed because another human eye has seen us, there shall never be of all your race more than seven alive at one time. Then all fled , and the Count found himself alone in the dark and silent hall. The prediction was fulfilled, even to this day, for when six knights von Eilenberg live, one always dies when a seventh is born. ” 1 Much is said in praise of the skill of the dwarfs. They smithed the best swords, but only the giants could do battle with them . Were these giants really so very tall ? Fear perhaps added yards to their height, as has often happened. Nicetas, a Byzantine who has recorded the taking of Con stantinople by the Crusaders, avows most seriously that one of those knights of the North who sent everybody flying before him actually appeared to him in that awful instant to be fifty feet high.2 > 1 Like this is an old German legend of a Graf von Hoya who having in like manner hospitably entertained a party of elves, received from their herald who had begged for the kindness a sword, and a ring in which was set a red lion, which should grow pale whenever one of the Von Hoya race was about to die . - Translator. ? This passage is wanting in the French version . Heine is ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 119 The dwellings of the dwarfs were in the moun tains. The small holes often seen in rocks are still called Zwerglöcher, or dwarf-holes. I have seen many of them in the Harz, especially in the Bodenthal ; and many stalactite formations, which are found in the mountain caverns, as well as singularly -shaped summits of rocks, which people call dwarf weddings. These are dwarfs who once when gaily returning from their little church, from a betrothal, or while merry at the bridal meal, were changed by a wicked sorcerer into stone. Tales of such transformations into stone are as much at home in the North as in the East, where the narrow -minded Mussulman believes that the statues and caryatides which he finds in the ruins of old Greek temples are petrified human beings. I saw not only in the Harz mountains but in Brittany many strangely-grouped stones, which the peasants call dwarf weddings. The stones near Loc Maria Ker are the houses of the Torrigan or Kurile, as the little folk are there called.1 Here I will tell another tale of such a wedding: in error in stating that only giants could manage the magic swords made by dwarfs. The Hervar Saga is the history of such a sword, but there is no mention of any giant in it. These marvellous weapons occur in many sagas, but always in associa tion with ordinary mortals.- Translator. i So in Florence one or both of the colossal marble statues ( or Bianconi) in the Piazza della Signoria are believed when 120 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. There is in Bohemia, not far from Elnbogen, a famous grotto of the dwarfs in a wild but beauti fal valley, through which the Eger winds grace fully and serpent-like to Carlsbad. They who dwell in towns and hamlets thereabout relate that in this place there lived in the olden time many dwarfs or hill- spirits who led a peaceful life, being so far from injuring any one that they often helped their neighbours when in need. They were governed by a mighty magician , who for some cause became enraged at them , and one day when they were all met at a wedding in their little church , petrified them all , or, to speak correctly, as they were spirits not to be destroyed, he in closed them in forms of stone. These groups are called to this day die verzauberte Zwergenhochzeit the enchanted marriage feast — and the little figures are still to be seen in all possible positions on the mountain - tops. One is shown in the middle of a rock ; it is the image of a dwarf who, while the rest ran away to escape the enchantment, lingered too long in his home, and was turned to stone at the instant when he looked out of the window for aid.1 the rays of the full moon fall on them to become animated and walk about. The word Torrigan, as given by Heine, should be Korrigan . The three preceding sentences are wanting in the French version . - Translator. 1 It is said that the dwarfs, vaguely anticipating these disasters, buried in the ground in many places all their pots ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 121 The dwarfs wear little caps, by means of which they can make themselves invisible ; these are called Tarnkappen or Nebelkäppchen (cloud caps ). Once a peasant while threshing acci dentally knocked with his flail one of these caps from the head of a dwarf, who at once became visible and ran to hide himself in a crevice in the earth. One can by means of incantations bring these dwarfs to full view.1 There lived in Nuremberg a man named Paul Kreutz, who once practised a marvellous conjura tion. He placed on the ground a new small table covered with a white cloth, on which were two cups of milk, two of honey, two small plates , and nine small knives. Then he took a black hen, and cut off its head over a pan, so that the blood dropped into it . Of this he threw some to the east and some to the west, and began to repeat his and pans, vases, lamps, and the like. These things which anti quaries now attribute to the Romans, old Germans or Celts, were seriously believed by learned men in the seventeenth century to have been made by the subterranean spirits or dwarfs, though others contended that they grew of themselves in the ground, being therein impressed by the Archæus or creative power. I believe that this must chiefly refer to Roman votive offerings representing objects in miniature. -Translator. It may interest the reader to learn one of these incantations. In the Romagna Toscana, where these cap dwarfs ( folletti colla beretta) still abound, when they haunt a house or room, which is manifested by peculiar noises , prepare for them by putting a lighted lamp into an earthen pot, and cover this with another I 22 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. spell. Then he got as quickly as possible behind a great tree and saw two dwarfs come up out of the ground, who sat themselves at the table and began to eat from the enticing pan which he had placed there. Then he asked them questions, to which they replied ; and when this had been re peated several times, they became so intimate with him as to visit him in his house as guests. But if he did not make the proper preparations, they either did not appear, or fled at once. Finally, their king came alone, clad in a scarlet cloak , beneath which he bore a book (of magic) , which he placed on the table, and allowed his host to read therein as much as he pleased, and from this the man learned much wisdom and many strange secrets. The dwarfs often showed themselves of their own accord to men, kept company with them , and were contented enough so that no harm was done them. But men, evilly inclined as ever, played pot. “ Then , when you hear a noise, quickly uncover the light, and if you see a goblin, snatch away his red cap, and say : • I have ta’en thy cap away ; And yet ’ tis not a cap , I say, But thy peace, which I'll not give Unto thee while thou dost live, Till thou tell’st me, as thou’rt bid, Where a treasure now lies hid ! ' “ Then the spirit to redeem his cap will tell where a treasure is concealed.” Which secret was taught me by a witch, both in Romagnola and Italian . ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 123 them many a mischievous trick. In the Volkssagen of Wyss ? we read as follows: During the summer a troop of dwarfs often came down from the rocky places into the valley, and either helped the labourers in friendly fashion, or lay looking on at the people making hay. They liked to sit at their ease on the long thick branch of a certain maple tree . But once certain mis chievous fellows sawed by night this branch through, so that it hardly held to the trunk. And the next morning, when the unsuspecting little creatures sat on the bough it broke, and they all fell to the ground, and were laughed at. This angered them, and they cried " Oh how high heaven is ! And how great is perfidy ! Here to- day but nevermore. ' “ And from that day they left the land.” I doubt whether the dwarfs regard men as good spirits ; it is certain that they would never infer our divine origin from our deeds. Beings of a different nature from ours can of course have no good opinion of us, and the devil thinks we are the vilest of all creatures. I once saw Faust ” acted in a barn in a village. The magician invokes the 1 In the French version, “ Ou raconte dans l'Halisthal.” This should be Haslithale, an error for the name of the place, 124 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. devil, and , relying on his own intrepidity, demands that the fiend shall appear in his most frightful form , under the traits of the most terrible of creatures. The devil obeys and appears as - a man ! No one knows exactly how it was that the dwarfs left us so suddenly. There are, however, two other traditions which also ascribe their de parture to our mocking and mischief. The first of these is as follows : “ The dwarfs, who dwelt ini caverns and crevices round about men's houses, were very kind, and at night often did work for people while they slept. And when the peasants went forth early in the morning, and were amazed to find everything done to their hand, the dwarfs, hidden in the bushes, burst out laughing at their surprise. Sometimes the country - folk were angry at finding their corn cut before it was quite ripe, but when immediately after hail and storm came, and they saw that but for the dwarfs they must have lost all, they were grateful enough. But at last men by their wanton jests lost the love and aid of the dwarfs, who fled , since which time they have never been seen. The cause was this. A shepherd had, up on the mountain, a magnificent cherry - tree. > 1 In the French version we here have Les frères Grimm rapportent à ce sujet encore deux histoires.” ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 125 6 And as the fruit ripened, it happened thrice that it was picked and all laid out on the planks and hurdles on which the peasant was accustomed to dry his cherries. The villagers said, “ That could have been done by no one unless it was the honest dwarfs, who come by night in long cloaks, tripping along with covered feet, quiet as birds, and do the work of men for them . People have sometimes watched them silently, unseen , but no one disturbs them, and lets them come and go. ' " Hearing this the man who owned the cherry tree became anxious, and would fain know why the dwarfs hid their feet with such care, and wanted to find out if their feet were not formed like those of men. So the next year when the summer came and the time when the dwarfs should gather and store the cherries, he took a sackful of ashes and strewed them on the hill. The next morning as day broke he hastened to the tree and found it picked empty, while all around in the ashes were the prints as of geese feet. Then the boor laughed and made fun, and told every one how he had found that the dwarfs had feet like geese. But soon after this the dwarfs wasted and spoiled their houses, and fled afar into the hill, bating men and refusing to help them any more. But the boor who had betrayed them had a wasting sickness, and was weak of mind till he died .” 126 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. The other tradition , which is given in Otmar's Volkssagen, is of a much sadder and barsher character. Between Walkenried and Neubof, in the county Hohenstein, the dwarfs once had two kingdoms. A peasant who lived there found that every night some persons came and stole from his field -crops, nor could he discover who did it. At last, by the advice of a wise woman , he went as night came on to his field of pease and began to beat about in the air, up and down, and all around, with a switch. Nor was it long before some dwarfs stood plainly before him, for he had knocked off their cloud-caps which made them invisible. The dwarfs fell in fear on their knees, and owned that it was their people who had stolen his pease, but that they had been driven to it by dire need. This news of the capture of the dwarfs stirred up all the people. The dwarf- folk sent deputies and offered ransom for their captive brothers, saying that they would now leave the land for ever. But the question of the Exodus stirred up fresh strife. For the peasants were not willing to let the dwarfs go away with all their hidden treasures, and the dwarfs declared that when they went they would not be seen by any one. At last it was agreed that the dwarfs should pass over a small bridge near Neuhof, and that every one as he went should throw into a ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 127 cask to be placed there a part of his property for toll . But some prying people hid themselves under the bridge so as to at least listen to the dwarfs departing, and heard all night long over head the tramp, tramp of the little men, which sounded like the stepping of so many sheep. But some stories say that every dwarf had to throw a gold coin into the cask, and that the next morn ing it was found quite full of very ancient money.. Also that ere they went the king of the dwarfs him self, in his scarlet cloak, came before the people, begging them not to banish him and his subjects. Imploringly he raised his little hands to heaven, weeping the most moving tears, as once did Don Isaac Abarbanel before Ferdinand of Arragon .” 1 One should carefully distinguish the dwarfs or spirits of the earth from the elves or spirits of the air , who are also more known in France, and who are so charmingly sung by English poets. If the elves were not already immortal by nature they would have become so through Shakespeare. 2 1 These two sentences are omitted from the French version. 2 French version, “ Les elfes ou sylphes. ” This is an error of the author. Heine is supposed to be writing about German spirits, and the term elf, plural elves, was applied in Germany, as in England, to all kinds of small sprites or fairies. The older writers waste much wild philology in endeavouring to connect the word with Alp, a nightmare ; Alben, child of a witch by her imp ; Ephialtes, the nightmare ; Alba, the dawn, also a spirit ; Alven, witches ; and one even conjectures that it had some affinity with alpha and the pentalpha, or charm against evil spirits. 128 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. They will live eternally in the Midsummer Night's Dream of poesy. And no more will Spencer's Faery Queen be forgotten, so long as the English tongue is understood.2 The belief in elves is, in my opinion, more of Celtic than of Scandinavian origin . Therefore there are more legends of elves in the Western North than towards the East. In Germany little is known of them, and what there is is all a re echo of Breton tales, as, for instance, in Wieland's “ Oberon . ” What people in Germany call Elfen or Elben are the uncanny creatures which witches bear, begotten by the devil . The real elf-tales 1 It is very evident that Heine's French secretary or trans lator did not know that this refers to a play by Shakespeare. He gives it as “ Ils vivent éternellement dans les songes des nuits d'été de la poésie.” 2 The poems of Herrick and Drayton would have been more appropriate here as regards goblins and elves. In the following sentence our author shows apparent ignorance of the Edda and of Scandinavian folk- lore, nor was he aware that elves or air spirits, as well as dwarfs, are well known in Northern Italy. What Heine here understands by elves are the aerial fata or fays, which are not really Celtic but Latin. And I believe that the red- cap dwarf of the North is of Etruscan Latin origin, coming from the red- headed woodpecker, Picus, who is also a goblin, who reveals secret treasures. It is certain that the authentic written accounts of this goblin- deity and others of his kind are far older than anything known of Teutonic or Celtic mythology. There are two trifling variations from the text in the French version of this passage, that of “ Elfen or Alben ,” &c. , being omitted, and “ Scotland and England ” being added to “ Ireland and Northern France. " - Translator. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 129 are at home in Ireland and Northern France, from which they resound as far south as Provence, mingling with the fairy - faiths of the East. From this mixture sprang the beautiful lais of Count Lanval, whom the lovely fairy favoured, under condition that he would keep his happiness a secret. But when King Arthur, at a festival in Karduel, declared that his queen , Ginevra, was the most beautiful woman in the world, Lanval could no longer keep silence, and his good fortune was at an end so far as this world went. It was no better with Sir Gruöland (Gruelan ), he could not hold his tongue; the beloved fairy vanished, and he rode far and wide on his horse Gedefer to find her. But in the fairy land , Avalon, the unfor tunate knights find their ladyloves once more, and there Count Lanval and Gruelan may gossip about them to their heart's content. Here, too, Ogier the Dane rests happily from his heroic deeds in the arms of his Morgana. Ye French know all these stories. Ye know Avalon, but the Persians know it too, and call it Djinnistan . It is the land of poetry .” The forms and faces of elves, and their living and thriving, is also tolerably well known to 2 i These tales may be found in the original in the “ Lays of the Trouveurs, ” by Saint Pelaye. I believe they were trans lated by Miss Castello.—Translator. ? Djinnistan, spirit-land. - Translator, VOL. II. I 130 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. you. Spenser's Faery Queen long since winged her way hither from England. Who does not know Titania ? Whose brain is so thick that it does not ever and anon hear the merry ringing of her aerial train. But is it a sign of death if one sees the queen with his own eyes, and receives from her a friendly greeting ? I would fain know this exactly, because “ In the forest, in the moonlight, Once I heard the elfin singing, Heard their horns so softly pealing, Heard their bells so gently ringing. And their snow -white palfries carried Golden stag -horns, and were leaping Headlong, while like swans in autumn Through the air the train came sweeping. And their queen bowed to me, smiling, Smiling as she rode before me ; Is't a sign that love awaits me ? Does it mean that death hangs o'er me ?" In the Danish popular songs there are two elfin legends which most accurately set forth the character of these elves.1 One tells the tale of i The extraordinary manner in which Heine confounds elves with sylphs and goblins is here made worse by the subject being treated in a very different manner in the German version from that of the French. In the former he gives the prose account, which I here translate ; but in the French , instead of this, he publishes a very dry and indifferent prose version of ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 131 aa young fellow who lay on the elfin hill and slept. He dreamed that he stood leaning on his sword , while the elves whirled round him, and tried by their caresses to make him take part in their the ballads. The German editor rightly judged that a poetical form would be most acceptable, and so gives one, partly by Rosa Warrens. In this perplexity I have thought it best, instead of a third -hand version from another writer, to translate these ballads directly from the old Danish originals, for which I am indebted to the kindness of Professor D. Comparetti, in Florence, where I am now working. The first of these has been translated into English before, and occurs, I believe, in M. Lewis's “ Tales of Wonder .” In the French version it is prefaced with these words. I follow Grundtveig's text : “ Il n'y que deux traditions sur les elfes qui soient indigene dans le nord oriental, et comme elles sont des plus courtes et des mieux exprimées dans les chants danois, je veux les rap porter sons cette forme. Voici la premiére : “ I laid my head on the elfin height, And sleep was stealing o'er me ; There came to me two maidens bright, Who talked as they stood before me : Since the time I first beheld her. * One of them softly patted my cheek, While the other whispered, glancing : · Arise, Sir Knight, I pray you speak , Would you like to join our dancing ? ' Since the time I first beheld her. 6 The following is the first verse of the original Danish : “ Ieg lagde mitt hoff uett thill elfue-hoy, Minne öigne di finge enn dualle, Der kom tho jomfruer aff birgit ad, Sidenn ieg och hinde forst saa . ” > 132 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS, > dance. One of them strokes his cheek and says, “ Dance with us, pretty youth, and we will sing thee the sweetest songs which thy heart can desire. ” Then there sounded a song of such 6 • Awake, awake, my cavalier ! Come to our dance nor fear it ; Thou shall list to a song from my maidens dear, It will charm thy soul to hear it. ' Since the time I first beheld her. They raised their voices in a song, I heard the air beginning ; The roaring river which rushed along Stopped when it heard them singing. Since the time I first beheld her. The roaring river halted there, For once on its way delaying ; The little fish in the brooklet clear For joy were plashing and playing. Since the time I first beheld her. They leapt with their little tails in bounds, The little fish a -springing ; The birds about with sweetest sounds Joined in the elfin -singing. Since the time I first beheld her. 6 And ever they sang to sweetest tunes, " Oh, live with us, knight, ' inviting : " We will teach thee to cut the magic runes, And to read all wondrous writing.' Since the time when I first beheld her. We'll teach thee to trap the beaver by night, And to snare the wild bear o'er you ; ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 133 terrible power of love that the rushing stream whose waters had hitherto ever roared wildly suddenly stopped, the little fish leaped up and played in rapture with their tails. Another elf lady whispered, “ Dance with us, beautiful boy, and we will teach thee Runic sayings by which thou canst take the bear and wild beaver, and The dragon who guards the gold so bright Shall fly from the land before you. Since the time I first beheld her. They circled here, they circled there, The elves in the moonlight glancing ; I leaned on my sword in the moonlight clear, As I beheld their dancing. Since the time I first beheld her. • And listen now, young cavalier ! If longer thou'lt delay thee, With this sword and knife which thou see'st here This instant we will slay thee. ' Since the time I first beheld her. And had not just then, by God's gracious will, The cock crowed out so clever, I must have gone in the elfin hill, And dwelt with the elves for ever. Since the time I first beheld her. So now I sing to every knight, Who will ride to court as warning, Beware how ye pass by the elfin height, Or sleep in its shade till morning. Since the time I first beheld her." -Translator. 134 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS even the dragon who guards gold, his treasure shall be thine." Yet he resists all these tempta tions, till the ladies in anger threaten to drive cold death into his heart. They have already drawn their sharp knives, when by good luck the cock crows, and the dreamer awakes in a whole skin . The other poem is less gaily sustained ; the elves do not appear in it as in a dream but in reality, and their terribly fascinating nature is thereby set more distinctly before us. It is the song of Sir Oluf, who rides out of an evening to invite guests to his wedding. The refrain is “ But the dance goes so fast through the forest.” 1 One can imagine that he hears an unearthly 1 In the French version there is given, in place of this sen tence, the following : “ La seconde chanson traite presque la même thème, seule ment l'apparition des elfes n'a pas lieu cette fois en songe, mais bien en réalité, et le chevalier qui ne veut pas danser avec eux, emporte cette fois très réelment une blessure mortelle." “ Sir Olaf out and afar will ride, Inviting guests to his wedding-tide. But the dance goes so quickly through the forest. * They were dancing by four and five on the land, Erl-king's daughter stretched out ber hand. And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. Her Olaf hand rider saa vide, Alt til sit bröllup at byde, Men dandsen den goar saa let gennum lunden ." ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 135 melody, and here and there, in between, tittering and whispering, as of a self -willed girl. Then Sir Oluf sees, first four, then five — then more groups of maids, and the erl-king's daughter holds out to him her hand. She begs him most tenderly to join the ring and dance with her. But the • Welcome, Sir Oluf, let riding be, And stop a while and dance with me. ' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. ' I never dare, and I never may, For to- morrow is my wedding day.' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. Now listen, Sir Oluf, and dance with me, Two goat -skin boots I will give to thee. ' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. Two goat- skin boots look well on the foot, With a pair of golden spurs to boot. ' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. And listen, Sir Oluf, and dance with me, A silken shirt I will give to thee. ' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. “ A silken shirt so white and fine, Which my mother bleached in the moonshine. ' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. I never dare, I never may , To - morrow must be my wedding- day. ' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. 6 ' And hear, Sir Oluf, and dance with me, A golden girdle I'll give to thee. ' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. 136 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. knight refuses, and says in excuse, “ To-morrow is my wedding-day .” Then the most enticing gifts are offered to him ; but neither the goat skin boots which will fit him so well, nor the golden spurs which can be so neatly buckled on them , nor the white silk shirt which the elfin • A golden girdle were dear to me, And yet I dare not dance with thee.' But the dance goes so quickly through the forest. And if thou never wilt dance with me, Then pest and sickness shall follow thee. ' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. She gave him a blow with her hand on his heart, He never had felt so great a smart. And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. They helped him on his brown horse to ride, ‘ Go back to your castle, and back to your bride. ' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. And when he came to the castle door, His mother awaiting stood before. And the dance goes so quickly through the forest . My dearest son, what is thy tale ? Why are thy cheeks so white and pale ? And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. • Well may my cheeks be pale and white, I have been by the elfin dance to- night. ' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. ‘ And say, my son, so true and tried, What shall I say to thy young bride ? ' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 137 queen has herself bleached with moonshine, nor even the golden girdle which is so highly praised, can induce him to join the fairy ring of dancers. His constant excuse is, “ I must be married to morrow .” Then of course the elves at last lose all patience, and give him such a blow on the 6 Oh, tell my bride that I'm in the wood, Trying my hound and my horse so good.' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. In early morn by break of day, There came the bride with a grand array, And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. They gave the mead and they gave the wine, " Where is Sir Oluf the bridegroom mine ? ' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. • Sir Oluf rides in the forest bounds, Trying his good grey horse and hounds. ' And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. The bride she raised the bier- cloth red, There lay Sir Oluf, and he was dead. And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. When again in heaven dawned the day, They bore three dead from the tower away. And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. Sir Oluf and his lady true, His mother she died of sorrow too. And the dance goes so quickly through the forest. This last verse, from the Danish, is wanting in both the German and French versions. 138 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. heart as he never felt before, and lifting the knight, who sinks to the ground, aid him to mount his horse,, and say jeeringly, “ So ride then home unto thy bride ! ” Ah ! when he came again to his castle, his cheeks were very pale and his body very ill ; and when the bride came with the morrow's dawn, with the wedding train and song and clang, Sir Oluf was a silent man, for he lay dead under bis red bier. “ But the dance goes so quickly through the forest. ” . Dancing is characteristic of aerial spirits ; they are of too ethereal a nature to walk prosaically on earth, as we do. Yet, dainty as they are , their little feet leave traces on the turf where they have danced in nightly rings. These are the stamped circles which people call elfin rings.1 In a part of Austria there is a legend which has a certain likeness to the foregoing, though it is of Slavic origin. It is that of the ghostly female dancers who are there known by the name 1 This passage is wanting in the French version. Heine bad evidently only heard or read of fairy- rings, since he describes them as indented . They are circles where the grass grows greener than elsewhere, and this is caused by the decay of a certain kind of mushroom , which has the strange property of casting its seed only to one side, all together. Hence they grow in circles, which every year enlarge.- Translator. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 139 of Willis.1 The Willis are brides who died before being married . The poor young creatures cannot lie calmly in their graves; in their dead hearts and feet the old passion for dancing, which they could not gratify in their lives, still burns. So at midnight they rise, assemble in troops on the highways, and woe to the young man who meets them ! He must dance with them, they surround him in unbridled madness, and he must dance with them without rest or repose till he falls dead. In their bridal dresses crowns of flowers, and ribbons flying from their heads, flashing rings on their fingers, the Willis dance in the moon shine, as do the elves. Their faces, though snow-white, are young and fair ; they laugh so strangely sweet, they nod with such seductive secresy , so promisingly — these dead Bacchanta are irresistible ! For when people saw beautiful brides die they could not believe that youth and bloom , in all their brilliancy, could pass abruptly into black nothingness, so that the faith arose easily enough 1 As before remarked, the Vila is a spirit known all over Russia and other Slavonian lands. She is not, by any means, invariably a deceased bride, but a being corresponding to the fata, fay, or fairy of life-size, or to the peri of the East. For information on the Vilas, see the works of Dr. F. S. Krauss of Vienna, W. R. Ralston, and other folklorists de eodem genere. Heine's knowledge of the subject was probably limited to the ballet of Les Willis and the grand seduction scene in Robert le Diable. 140 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. that the bride continued to seek after death the joys of which she had been deprived. This recalls one of the most beautiful poems of Goethe, " The Bride of Corinth, " which was long ago made known to the French public by Madame de Staël. The subject of this poem is primevally ancient, and is lost in the terrors of the old Thessalian tales. Ælian tells us of it , and Philo stratus in the life of Apollonius of Tyana. It is the fatal marriage in which the bride is a Lamia. 1 It is peculiar to popular legends that their most terrible catastrophes take place at weddings. The suddenly appearing terror on such an occa sion contrasts the more strikingly with the gay surroundings, with the preparations for joy and merry music. So long as the lips have not yet touched the brim , the pleasant drink may yet be spilled. A gloomy wedding-guest may come un 1 Actually a spirit, whose object was to devour the bride groom , though modern poets tell it otherwise. According to Philostratus ( in Vita Apollonii ), Menippus, a disciple of Deme trius the Cynic, going to Corinth from Cenchrea, met with a very beautiful and apparently rich girl of foreign birth (quan dam imaginam puellæ peregrina, speciosa et divitis), with whom ( se illi commiscuit) he mixed himself up, and thought of marrying. She had a house which seemed to be magnificent. But Apollonius, looking about at all things, exclaimed that the bride was one of the Lamias, whom some call Larvas, others Lemures— “ esse ex numero Lamiarum quas aliqui Larvas, alii Lemures vocant. ” — Translator. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 141 bidden, and one whom no one dares bid hence. He whispers one word in her ear, and the bride grows pale. He makes a secret sign to the bride groom , who follows him out into the stormy night, and is never seen again. Generally it is a former pledge of love with another. Therefore a cold white hand suddenly parts the bride and groom , As Herr Peter von Staufenberg sat at the bridal feast, he suddenly saw a small white foot, which came through the ceiling overhead. He recog nised in it the foot of a nixie or undine with whom he had maintained the tenderest relation , and by this sign he well knew that he had, by his broken faith, lost his life. He sent to his con fessor, asked for the sacraments, and prepared to die.. Much is said and sung of this story in German lands. It is also said that the injured nixie embraced her false knight invisibly, and strangled him with this caress. > 1 Women are 1 The story of Peter von Staufenberg was indeed very popular. It appeared in book form in Strasburg, and is given by Kornmannus (Mons Veneris, cap. 28. De Empusa liberi Baronis Petri à Staufenberg), also in the Anth. Plut. of Præto. rius. Heine is unusually modest in telling the story. The blunt old German informs us that “ auff der Hochzeit sie ihm das Wahrzeichen gab, durch die Bühne auff seinem Tische bey ihrem Schenkel . ” The narrative is chiefly interesting as having suggested to La Motte Fouqué the plot of " Undine.” Staufen berg, it is said, abandoned his nixie because he suspected she was of diabolical nature. — Translator, 142 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. deeply moved by this sad tale, but our young free-thinkers laugh at it sarcastically, and will not believe that nixies are so naughty. But they will repent anon of their incredulity. The nixies very much resemble the elves ; both are seductively charming, and love dancing . The elves dance on wild and waste moorlands, green meadows, openings in the forest, and most gladly under old oaks ; the nixies, however, by ditches and streams, or sometimes on the water itself, the night before some mortal is to be drowned in that place. And they often come to the dances of men, and make merry with them , as if quite like us. The female nixies are known by the hem of their white garments always being wet. And they may also be recognised by the 1 According to Paracelsus and others the affinity exists between mountain- dwarfs and water- spirits because they have one language in common. Wood- spirits never speak ; those of fire very seldom , and their tongue is hard or rough. There is a beautiful belief in La Romagna Toscana that a spirit ( or spirits ) named Corredoia is specially devoted to attending all dances, festivals and frolics, where she inspires life and merri ment. She is the spirit of joy, and there is an incantation begging her to come into our life and make us cheerful. Vide my forthcoming work on Etruscan Roman relics in Tuscany. Several minor passages are here omitted in the French version. There is a very rare and curious work entitled Disputatio de Nymphis, nobis Wasser Nyxen, a thesis publicly delivered by M. Johann Valentine Merbitz in Dresden in 1678. It is a complete compendium of the knowledge current as to nixies or water -spirits. - Translator. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS . 143 fineness of their veils and aristocratic refinement of their mysterious natures. The male nixie has green teeth, which resemble the spine of a fish , and one experiences a shudder when touching his very soft, ice-cold hand.1 Woe to the girl who, without knowing him, takes him for partner in the dance. For then he will draw her down into his watery deep-of which there is told the following tale : There dwelt at Laibach, in the river which bears the same name, a water-sprite, who was called Nix or Watermann. He had often ap peared by night to fishermen and boatmen , so that many could tell how he came forth and how he showed himself in human form . In the year 1547, on the first Sunday in July, all the people of the place assembled, according to their ancient custom, on the marketplace of Laibach by the fountain, which was pleasantly shaded by a lime-tree. They ate their meal to the sound of music, and after that began to dance. After a while there came a young man of fine figure and well dressed, who seemed to wish to join the dance. He greeted all very pleasantly and offered to many his hand, which was very soft and ice- cold, and caused a shudder in all who shook it. Then he asked a certain young 1 Wanting in the French version. 144 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. girl to dance. She was very pretty and well clad, a lively, forward creature named Ursula Schöfferin, who soon agreed perfectly with her new partner, and fell in with his wild tricks. And after they had danced together for a while passion ately or madly, they waltzed away from the ring and over away and adown, first from the lime- tree to Sittichenhof, and so to the edge of the Laibach, where, as was seen by many boatmen, the nixie leaped with her into the water, nor were either ever seen again. The lime- tree stood till 1638, when it was cut down on account of its age. ? The same legend exists in many variations. The most beautiful is that of a Danish ballad in the cycle of legends, which describe how Marsk Stig and all his house perished.2 1 When I was a student at Heidelberg in 1847, the nix or water -sprite of the Neckar often appeared to people, and I was seriously told that it had been seen by Mme. Gervinus ( unless my memory deceives me) one night on the shore in its usual form of a beautiful little horse. When the lady approached to pat him, the Neckar nix plunged into the stream and disap peared from sight. It is absolutely impossible that anything could be apparently better authenticated than was this story. Spiritualists, attention ! —Translator. 2 Instead of this and the following passage, the French version gives seventeen verses in prose from the Danish original, from which original I render it into English. “ And the water-spirit said to his mother : “ Give me advice, oh mother dear, How to bring Marsk Stig's daughter here. ' And bad methinks is the riding. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 145 Marsk Stig, who had killed the king, had two fair daughters, the youngest of whom fell into the power of a water -spirit, even while in church. The nix appeared as a stately knight ; his mother 6 She made him a horse of water clear, The bridle and saddle of sand so fair. And bad methinks is the riding. She made him look like a Ritter gay, To Marienkirchhof he went his way. And so bad metbinks is the riding. He bound his horse to the church roof- tree, * And thrice to the left round the church went he. And so bad methinks is the riding. Silent he entered the church so dim, The saints all turned their backs to him. And so bad methinks is the riding. By the altar -shrine the priest quoth he, Who may that stately Ritter be ? ' And so bad methinks is the riding. Beneath her veil the maiden sighed, ' Heaven grant I may be that Ritter's bride ! ' And bad metbinks is the riding. He stepped by benches one and two, “ O Marsk Stig's daughter, wilt thou be true ? ' And bad methinks is the riding. He stepped by benches four and five, ' Oh, follow me, maid, to where I live. ' And bad methinks is the riding. He held out his hand, she grasped it free, ' I plight my troth , and will follow thee. ' And bad methinks is the riding. • “ Churchyard rail." R. A. Prior, Anc. Dan. Ballads, 1860. VOL. II. K 146 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. had made him a horse of clear water, and a saddle and bridle of the purest sand, and the careless maid gaily held out her hand to him. Did she keep her promised faith when down in the sea ? Forth from the church went the wedded pair, Merrily dancing, free from care. And bad methinks is the riding. They danced together unto the flood, Till no one at last beside them stood. And bad methinks is the riding. " O Marsk Stig's daughter, hold my rein, Till I build thee a boat well worth the pain. ' And bad methinks is the riding. And when they came to the snow- white sand All of the boats came to the land. And bad methinks is the riding. And when they came out into the sound She sank in the sea to the very ground. And bad methinks is the riding. Far into land, well over the tide, It was heard when Marsk Stig's daughter cried. So bad methinks is the riding. Oh, maidens all, I counsel ye, Go not to the dance so proud and free. For bad methinks is the riding." To which there is added in the French version : " Nous aussi, nous donnons à certaines jeunes filles le sage conseil de ne pas danser avec le premier venu. Mais les jeunes personnes craig nent toujours de ne pas avoir assez de danseurs, et plutôt que de s'exposer au danger de faire tapisserie, elles se sejetteront volontiers, dans bras de l'homme des eaux.” In writing this passage Heine ventilates a private ballroom trouble to which he has already alluded. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 147 Truly I know not ; but I do know another story of a water- man who carried a girl away from the firm land, and was by her most artfully betrayed. It is the tale of Rossmer the nix , who all unknow ingly took his own wife in a chest on his back and brought her again to her mother. At which he afterwards shed bitter tears. The water-maids also must often bitterly rue that they took pleasure in mingling with men . Of this, too, I know a narrative 1 which has been much sung by German poets. It sounds most pitifully in the following plain words, as told by the brothers Grimm in their sagas. “ In Epfenbach, near Sinzheim, within the memory of man, three very lovely girls dressed in white came every evening into the spinning room of the village. They always sang new songs to new tunes, and told pretty tales and taught new games. There was something very strange in their rocks and reels, or distaffs, and no spinner could twist the thread so fine and well as they did. But when eleven o'clock struck they packed up their spinning gear and left, nor would they, to please anybody, stop an instant later. No one knew whence they came nor where they went ; they were only called the Maids from the Lake, or the Sisters from the Lake. i French version , “ Une histoire qui m'a rempli d'une singu . lière pitie.” 148 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. “ The youths of the village fell in love with them , most of all the son of the schoolmaster. He could never tire of their company, and nothing gave him such grief as that they went away every evening so early. It came into his head to put the village clock back one hour, and so it came to pass that what with talk and jests no one noted the change of time. So that when it struck eleven it was really twelve, and the three girls rose, packed up their distaffs as usual, and went their way. “ The next morning people passing by the lake heard a wailing, and saw three bloody places on the water. After that the sisters were never seen again. The son of the schoolmaster was seized with a wasting illness , and died soon after.” 1 There is something mysteriously attractive in all that nixies do. Under the quiet water there may lie hidden so much that is sweet or terrible ! The fishes, who may know somewhat thereof, are ever mute ; or do they keep silence because they are cunning ? Do they fear some bitter punishment should they reveal the secrets of i In a Bavarian version of this tale, the girls go and come from an old sunken castle near Gartenhofen. A clock is not mentioned in it, nor the schoolmaster's son. “ The young men detained the girls by wooing them ; then the latter, before re entering the water, said : ' Should blood come, then we will have been punished ; if not, we are forgiven .' But blood came ( Bayerische Sagen und Brauche, von Friedrich Panzer, München, 1848 ). This is evidently the original tale . — Translator. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 149 their silent watery home ? Such a realm, with its voluptuous hidden marvels and occult horrors, reminds us of Venice. Was Venice itself once such a kingdom , which by chance rose from the depths of the Adriatic sea up to the world above, with marble palaces and its dolphined - eyed courtesans, glass-bead and coral factories, states inquisitors, systems of secret drowning, and laugh ing masquerades ? Should Venice ever chance to sink again into the lagunes all its history will seem like a water-fairy tale, and the nurse will tell the children of the great water- people who once ruled over the solid land, and were at last torn to pieces by a two - headed eagle. The mysterious is characteristic of the nixies, just as aerial dreaminess is of the elves. In the earlier legends they do not greatly differ, nor till later times were they separated. " From the names alone we can learn little. In Scandinavia all spirits are called elfen , alf, and they are divided into alfen , white and black. The last are really kobolds. The name nix is applied in Denmark to the domestic goblins, who are there, as I have said before, called nissen . And then there are abnormities, such as nixies, 1 This would be a great mistake according to Merbitz, who distinctly divides nixies from Bergmännlein , Schrötlein, or elves, and traces them back to classic times. The Sirenes were almost certainly the original Lurlei-type. — Translator. 150 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. amorous who are only human to the hips, and terminate in fish -tails ; or who are wondrously beautiful women, but only to the waist, and end below in many a scaly fold , as serpents, and of this kind was your Melusina, the beloved of Count Raymond of Poitiers. Happy man whose sweetheart was only half serpent ? It often happens that nixies, when they form alliances with men, not only exact secrecy and silence, but also request that no in quiries may be made as to their origin , home, or relations. Nor do they tell their real names, but are known among men, as one may say, by a nom de guerre. The husband of the Princess of Cleves called himself Helias. Was he a nix or an elf ? The swan which drew him to the shore reminds me of the legend of the Swan Maidens. The history of Helias is told in our popular tales as follows:: In the year 711 lived Beatrix, the only daughter of the Duke of Cleves. Her father was dead, and she ruled over Cleves, and many lands beside. One day the young chatelaine sat in her castle of Nymwegen ; the weather was fair, the sky was clear, and she looked down at the Rhine. There she saw a strange sight. A white swan swam down the stream, and bore on his 1 The winged sprites of air are known, more probably, by a nom de plume. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 151 neck a golden chain, to one end of which was fastened a boat, which he drew. And in the boat sat a handsome man, who held a gold sword, and he had a precious ring on his finger. He stepped ashore and talked long with the lady, telling her that he would guard her land well, and drive away her foes. The young man pleased her so well that she fell in love with and wedded him. But he said to her, " Never ask me aught of my family or origin, since on the day when thou shalt do that I must leave thee, and thou wilt never see me more . ” And he told her thereto that he was called Helias. He was tall as a giant. They had many chil dren. After several years, once in the night, as Helias lay by her side, the Princess said, not thinking of the warning : “ My lord, wilt thou not tell our children whence thou didst come ? ' And with that word he arose, and entering the swan-boat, sailed away and was never seen more. The lady died of grief and rue therefor that same year. But he left to his three children his three treasures—the sword, the horn, and the ring. His descendants still live, and on the castle of Cleves still stands a high tower, on whose summit there is a swan. And it is called the Swan -tower in memory of this event. 1 This is, of course, the tale of the Knight of the Swan, now 80 well known by Wagner's opera. It appears to be of Scandi 152 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS, > How often, as I passed adown the Rhine and came to the Swan-tower of Cleves, did I think of the mysterious knight who so sadly , strongly held to his incognito, and whom a mere question as to his family or race could drive from the arms of love ! But it is really too tormenting when women ask too many questions. Use your lips for kissing, not for questioning, oh ye beauties.1 Silence is the most serious and absolute condition of happi When a man babbles the proofs of his private happiness, or a woman inquires too inquisi tively into its secrets, then good luck is sure to leave them both. Elves and nixies can use magic arts and change themselves into what form they will, but are often themselves enchanted many a time by stronger spirits and great sorcerers into all kinds of strange and horrid shapes. But they are redeemed by love, as in the tale of Zemire and Azor. The ness. 2 navian origin. In Thorsten's Saga a king leaves to his three children a ring, a horn, and a sword, all endowed with magical qualities. Helinandus Vincentius, who is quoted by Wierus ( De Prest. Demoniis, 1. 2, caps. 4, 6 ) as the original source of the story ( Heine gives it from a chap- book), tells it briefly without any supernatural details. He says that the image in the tower was in ancient tapestry . - Translator. 1 The remainder of this passage is omitted in the French version. 2 French version , " Comme dans la Belle et la Bête " —that is , Beauty and the Beast. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 153 toad - like monster must be thrice kissed, and then he is changed to a beautiful prince. So soon as you overcome your dislike for the ugly, or get so far as to love it, it is changed to something beautiful. No magic can resist love. Love is the strongest of sorceries, no other magic prevails against it. There is only one power against which it is itself powerless. What is that ? It is not fire, it is not water, nor air, nor earth, with all its metals. It is Time. The strangest stories as to elementary spirits are to be found in good old Johannes Prætorius, whose Anthropodemus Plutonicus, das ist Eine Neue Welt beschreitung von Allerley Wunderbaren Menschen ( that is, a new world - description of all kinds of strange men) appeared at Magdeburg in 1666. The year is of itself remarkable ; it was that on which it had been predicted the Day of Judgment would take place. The contents of the book is i The work on its first title-page, on which are twenty -two pictures of marvellous men, is dated 1666 ; but on the second, facing it, the true date or that of 1668. It was written expressly to suit the first date. It contains 1292 pages. The French version here gives the following addition : " Le livre fait le même effet qu'une boutique de curiosités sur le quai Malaquais ou sur le quai Voltaire. Reliques de toutes les religions dis parues, utensiles de pays fabuleux ; entremêlés de crucifix et de madones éteintes : vrai bric-a -brac.” And yet Heine with all his admirable description falls far short of giving an accurate idea of this mass of learning, wit, stupidity, naïveté, and every . thing else, all run roaring mad together in a chaos of erudition 154 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. a wilderness of nonsense, superstitions pitch forked together, melancolicky and monkey -noted extravagances, and learned citations, “ weeds (or cabbage) and turnips .” The subjects treated of are arranged according to the initials of their names, which are also chosen in a most arbitrary manner. And the subdivisions are charming, as, for in stance, when the writer treats of ghosts, and speaks, firstly, of real spectres ; secondly, of ima ginary ones, or of cheats who pass themselves off for such. But he is full of learning, and in this book, as in his other works, traditions are preserved 1 “ Maulhängkolischen und affenteuer - lichen Historien.” Heine here seems to be trying to rival Prætorius in elegance of style.- Translator. which for extent and variety surpasses all comprehension and belief. I have gone through the work very thoroughly twice, and it was the hardest reading I ever had in my life. I am satis fied that Heine only skimmed it, as he omits so much which he would have been sure to repeat. In the very beginning, on the third page, we are confronted with an Alphabet of Nightmares, which is indeed vividly characteristic of the whole work. Yet withal there is a kind of rude genius in it, reminding one of an insane Jean Paul Richter allied to a melancholy -comic Burton, who knew no difference, in a literary or critical point of view, be tween an almanac or an old woman's silliest story , and Plato or the Sohar. And here and there in it are touches of a shrewd irony like that of a seventeenth century Carlyle, sketches which recall Washington Irving, and sometimes such an outburst as this, “ The Lord help me ! what a mass of fine things posterity will dig up out of these writings of mine ! What amazement they will cause, because inventis facile licet addere. What astonish ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 155 which are partly really important for the study of old German religious antiquities, and partly as mere curiosities. I am convinced that none of you know that there are bishops in the sea. I doubt very much whether the Gazette de France knows it. And yet it would be very important for many people to know that Christianity has its followers even in the ocean, and certainly in great number. Perhaps most of the dwellers in the sea are Christians, at least as good Christians as the French. I would willingly suppress this fact so as not to give cause of rejoicing to the Catholic party in France, but as I am discussing nixies or water-men , conscientious German thoroughness requires that I speak of sea -bishops. Of whom Prætorius narrates the following: “ We read in the Chronicles of Holland that ment they will awaken, and how much more will many a man think of our Lord Jesus Christ than he ever did before ! God give His grace to the printing thereof, and good affection of men thereunto ! Divinum aspira, ô Numen, amorem ! ” Which prophecy has been in a degree fulfilled. Prætorius also wrote a trifle of a thousand pages on Palmistry, a Dream -book, for which he says he read carefully three hundred authors, and his rare and curious Blockes - Berge, to which latter work Heine was also greatly indebted for hints which appear in the Harzreise. As Heine repeats ideas, so Prætorius repeats the same story, sometimes three or four times, and indulges literally in the fancy of always writing down whatever comes into his head , no matter how remote it may be from the subject in hand.- Translator. 156 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS . Cornelius of Amsterdam wrote to a physician named Gerbert from Rome, that in the year 1531 , in the North Sea near Elpach, there was caught à merman who looked like a bishop of the Romish Church. He was sent to the King of Poland. But as he would eat nothing which was offered to him, he died on the third day. He never spoke, and only heaved deep sighs. ” A page further on Prætorius gives another example : “ In the year 1433 there was found in the Baltic Sea towards Poland a merman who was quite like a bishop. He had a bishop's mitre on his head, his crosier in his hand, and wore the alb. He allowed himself to be touched, especially by the local bishop, to whom he showed honour, but without speaking. The king would fain have kept him in a tower, which he with signs opposed, and begged the bishop to let him go again into his element, which was also done, and he was accompanied by two bishops to the sea, at which he manifested great joy. As soon as he came into the water he made the sign of a cross, and diving under was never seen again. Which may be read in Flandr. Chronic. in Hist. Ecclesiast. Spondani, as well as in the Memorabilius Wolfii.” 1 1 This second tale is not one page further on but ten, the first occurring on p. 490 and the other on p. 501. Prætorius gives several more stories of sea -bishops. The origin of these ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 157 I have given the stories word for word, and also my authorities, so that no one may suppose that I invented them . Truly, I should take good care not to make or find any more bishops, if I could help it . I have enough of them as it is, of those who are visible. Indeed I would be glad if many of those among us would visit their col leagues in the ocean, and rejoice Christianity in its depths with their presence. Unbelief has not as yet spread in the watery abysses ; no works of Voltaire are there printed for five sous ; there the sea-bishops swim peacefully among shoals of believers. Yesterday I was conversing with several Eng lishmen about the Anglo-Episcopal Church, and advised them to turn all their land -bishops into bishops of the sea. To complete the legends of nixies and elves, I must still speak of the already -mentioned swan a legends is very apparent. There are several kinds of flat- fish which have on one side a face absurdly like that of a man. The two jaws above bear a close resemblance to a mitre. When these are dried and painted, or gilt, with skill, they would puzzle any one who did not know what they are, so very much do they resemble bishops. Fishermen at Hastings and other places often sell these fish of small size dried as curiosities for a penny or twopence each. I have several of them. If my memory does not deceive me, Rondeletius, and two or three others, give illustrations which confirm this. 1 In the French version there is , instead of bishops, prêtres. The third sentence following is wanting in the latter. 158 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS . maidens. Tradition is here very obscure, and interwoven with an all-too-mysterious darkness. " Are they spirits of water or of air ? Are they enchantresses ? Many a time they come flying like swans adown from the airy heights, and lay aside, like garments, their white feathery cover ings. Then they become fair maids, who bathe in the silent water. Should they be surprised by some too inquisitive youth, they spring quickly from their bath, wrap themselves in the feather garment, and fly, as swans , far away on high. Our excellent Musäeus tells us in his Volks mährchen ( Popular Tales) the beautiful story of a young knight who succeeded in stealing one of these feather robes. As the maidens ran and wrapped themselves up and flew afar, one re mained behind, because she sought in vain for her dress. She cannot escape, she weeps sadly, she is wondrously lovely, and the crafty knight marries her. They live happily together for seven years. But one day the wife, rummaging through chests and trunks, finds her old feather garment, puts it on in haste, and flies away. Such feather garments are often mentioned in Old Danish songs, but darkly, and in the strangest manner. Here we have traces of the oldest sorcery. Here are distant sounds of Northern heathenism 1 This remarkable sentence is omitted in the French. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 159 which re-echo marvellously in our memories. I cannot refrain from giving an old ballad, in which not only the swan robe is mentioned, but also the night-raven, who is an accompaniment to the swan-maidens. This song is as thrilling, as , terrible, as gloomy as a Scandinavian night ; and yet there glows in it a love which, in wild sweet ness and burning depth , has no equal . " In giving this monstrous love poem, I must first remark that I have, in so doing, only made changes in the metre, or that I have here and there clipped away a bit from the outer portion of the garment. The refrain of every verse is, “ And so he flies over the sea.” 2 “ The king sat by the fair young queen, They sat at the board together ; They spoke of crossing the broad salt sea, They spoke of the wind and weather. i The end of this sentence and the one which follows are wanting in the French version . ? In the French version this passage ends as follows : C'est une chanson de magie, et son charme agit toujours. Ecoutez ! Ecoutez ! ” In this translation I have followed , not the Danish original, but the version of Heine. Of all the immense collec tion of Old Danish ballads to be found in Grundtveig, or the Kemper Viser, this is the trashiest. R. A. Prior observes the flat modern character of its original introduction (“ Ancient Danish Ballads,” 1860) . It is quite in the Monk Lewis, " Alonzo the Bravo,” style of manufacture. Still there was in the original a certain vigorous archaic expression conveyed by short masculine rhymes, which Heine has thoroughly elimi. 160 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. a 6 They sailed across the broad salt sea, The king and the queen on the morrow ; And because the queen did not remain , Was a cause of many a sorrow. When all at once the ship stood still In the waves without a motion ; A wild night-raven came flying by, Who would sink it in the ocean. Is any one hidden beneath the waves, Who holds the ship's keel downward ? I will give him both silver and gold To let us go sailing onward. If thou art the one, night- raven wild , And if thou wantest treasure, I will give thee in silver and gold Fifteen good pounds full measure. ' • Silver and gold I do not want, I ask for something better ; What thou beneath thy girdle hast I ask for, to the letter. ' nated, by converting them into jingling and feeble feminines. As may be seen by the original of the first verse :-- “ Konningen och vor unge dronningh, Thy sider offuer bede bordt, Thy blef thennom at thalle Altt om then salthe fiordt, Saa fly uer hanndt offuer rynnen . " But as Heine has rewritten the ballad after his own fashion, I have unwillingly translated from his version instead of the origir which is in the measure of Sir Patrick Sp This first verse is omitted by Heine. Night- raven is also a name for the nightmare . - Translator. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 161 " What I under my girdle bear, That is well worth the giving ; That is my bunch of little keys, Take them , and leave me living ! ' She threw the keys far into the sea, Her promise was not broken ; The wild night- raven went flying away, He kept to the word she had spoken. And when the queen returned to her home, And on the strand was roving, She felt that German, the hero gay, Beneath her belt was moving. And when five months had passed away, The queen, to her chamber going, Gave birth therein to a beautiful boy, And yet her tears were flowing. He was born all in the ni And christened on the morrow ; They called him German, the hero gay, To keep him from pain and sorrow. The boy grew up, in horse and arms All other knights excelling ; But whenever his mother saw her son, With grief her heart was swelling. • O mother dear, when I pass by, In waking or in sleeping, Why art thou still so sorrowful, Why art thou always weeping ?' VOL, II, L 162 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 6 Why I thus weep may well cause fear, Although thou art no craven ; Know, German gay, ere thou wert born, I promised thee to the raven .' O mother, dearest mother mine, Away with all your sorrow ; We must meet our fate, come it soon or late, For that no care I'll borrow. ' It was on a Thursday, in autumn-time, Just as the day was breaking ; Through the open window came croaking sounds, The queen from slumber waking. The ugly raven came flying in : My queen, unless you rue it, Give me your child - his time has come ; You promised long since to do it. ' But the mother swore by God above, And all the saints in heaven , She knew of neither daughter nor son, Which to her on earth was given. The horrible raven flew wildly away , And angrily cried, while flying : ' I will find German, the hero gay, He is mine, despite your lying.' When German was in his fifteenth year, And began to think of wooing, He sent to the King of England, For the band of his daughter suing. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 163 The king thought well of German the gay, And promised him his daughter ; But he said, ' How can I get to my bride ? All round the island is water .' And then German, the hero gay, His scarlet mantle wearing, All clad in scarlet, entered the hall , Before his mother appearing. O mother, and oh mother dear, Grant that for which I'm sighing ; Lend me your feather garment white, I would over the sea go flying.' ‘ My feather garb in the corner hangs, I never thought I should lend it ; The feathers are falling, I meant this spring To take it some day and mend it. The wings upon it are really too large, The clouds they press them downwards ; And I ween that thou wilt return no more, If once thou fliest onwards.' He clad himself in the feather dress, Far over the ocean fitting ; He met the wild night -raven at last, On a cliff in the ocean sitting. Well, over the water he winged his way, And when in the strand a - flying, There he heard a terrible sound, A horrible croaking and crying. a 164 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. • Welcome, German, thou hero gay ! Now thou art braver and taller ; When first thy mother promised thee, Thou wert tenderer and smaller .' • Oh let me fly to see my bride, And my word of honour I set thee, That done, I will return again, To the spot where I first met thee.' " Then I will mark thee, that ever more I may know thee under heaven ; And this sign shall ever remember thee Of the word which thou hast given. ' Then he plucked out German's right eye, Drank half his blood, and went flying ; The hero came unto his bride, With love and weakness dying. He sat himself in the ladies' hall, As pale as a white swan feather ; The gossiping maidens who sat there, Grew silent altogether. They ceased their ląughter and their joy, Ever more silent growing ; The proud young Princess Adelutz Threw down her needle and sewing. They ceased their laughter, like merry birds In rising stormy weather ; The proud young Princess Adelutz Clasped quickly her hands together. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 165 6 Welcome, German , thou hero gay, Why are thy garments so bloody, And why are thy cheeks so deadly pale, Which were before so ruddy ? ' Farewell, proud Lady Adelutz ! ' Twixt us there can be no mating ; The raven who took my eye and my blood, Even now for my body is waiting.' With a gold comb she combed his hair, • And must thou go to -morrow !' And so, hair she conibed, Her tears ran down in sorrow. with every With every lock which the lady combed, Her tears ran down in sorrow , And cursed his mother, through whose fault Such trouble they all must borrow. The proud young maiden Adelutz, Her love in her white arms keeping, Said, “ May thy evil mother be cursed, Who brought us to this weeping ! ' 6 Oh listen , proud Lady Adelutz, And do not curse my mother, ' Twas not her fault, ' twas all our fate, And his fate no man can smother.' He clad himself in his feather garb , On a good west wind relying ; She clad herself in a dress like his, And after her love went flying. 166 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. He flew on high, he flew adown, But wherever he did find him, The lady, in her white swan robe, Was following close behind him. 6 ' Return , return , proud Adelutz ! Homewards you should be flying ; Your hall-door was left open, know , And your keys on the ground are lying. ' ' My door may be wide open still , My keys on the ground be lying ; Where'er thou art is my only home, In living or in dying. ' He flew so high , he flew so low, The darkling vapour crossed him ; The heavy cloud around them came, And in the fog she lost him. She cut into pieces the sea-birds all Whom she met, her vengeance wreaking ; But the wild black raven she could not find, Despite of all her seeking. The proud young Princess Adelutz, Down to the strand went flying ; And there she found her love's right hand Close by the water lying. Then all enraged she sailed away, With vengeance to repay him ; She sought the raven east and west, And she alone would slay him. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 167 a With her shears she slew the sea-birds all, Above the clouds or under ; And when she met the raven at last, With a blow she cleft him asunder. She cut and hacked him till she herself Of weary sorrow perished ; So she died for Gerinan, the hero gay, Whose life she so dearly cherished .” Very significant in this ballad is the mention of the feather garment as well as of the flying itself. In the old heathen times there were queens and noble dames of whom it was said that they could thus soar, and this magic art, which was then honourable, was in later Christian times represented as an abomination of witchcraft. The vulgar belief in the airy flights of witches is a travesty of old German belief, and is not at all due to Christianity, as has been inferred, or that it came from the passage in the Bible where Satan carried our Saviour through the air.' That text, it is true, might be used to confirm the popular faith, since it proved that the devil was really capable of flying away with men. Many believe the swan-maidens of whom I 1 If the belief in witches flying on broomsticks was derived from exclusively German tradition, whence did the Italians get it ? The truth is that the Italian witch - flying, on broom or goat, is of Etrusco - Latin origin, or rather that both the German and Latin beliefs and myths came from a common Aryan All of this last passage is wanting in the French version . - Translator . source . 168 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. have spoken were the Valkyries of the Scandi navians. Of these latter there are also many traces in the popular tales. They are female beings who sweep through the air on white wings, generally the evening before a battle, the result of which they had secretly predetermined. And they also met heroes in lonely forest paths, foretelling to them their victory or defeat. We read in Prætorius : “ It happened once that King Hother of Den mark and Sweden, when separated too far from his men in a fog, met with such women who knew him, greeted him by name, and conversed with him . And when he asked them who they were, they replied that they were the ones in whose hands was placed the victory over enemies in battle. They were ever there, even though unseen ; the one to whom they gave pre- eminence conquered, and the enemy could do him no harm . When they had told him this they, with their house and temple, suddenly disappeared, and the king found himself alone in a wide field under the open heaven. ” The essential part of this story reminds us of the witches whom Shakespeare brings before us in Macbeth ," and who, in the old legend, of which the poet has availed himself almost circumstan tially, appear to be described as far nobler than mere witches.1 > 1 This is a great mistake. Shakespeare had probably never heard of Hother or Valkyries. He gave the story as it was ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 169 According to this tale there also appeared to the hero, Hother, in the forest, just before the battle, three mysterious maidens, who foretold him his fate and disappeared , leaving no trace behind. They were Valkyries, or the Norna - the Fates of the North . We are reminded of these by the three spinning women who are known to us in an old nursery tale. One has a flat foot, another a broad thumb, and the third a hanging lip. By these they are always known, wherever they may appear, either as old or young. I give the most agreeable version of this tale from the book of Grimm. “ There was a lazy maid who would not spin, let her mother say what she would ; and at last the mother, in anger and impatience, beat her, whereat she began to cry aloud. Just then the generally told in his time, drawn from such writers as Boethius, Cardanus, and Grosius, the latter of whom (Magica seu Mira bilium Historiarum de Spectris, &c . , 1597 ) narrates it as specially illustrating diabolical sorcery, declaring that it was a fatidica mulier, or fortune - telling woman, who predicted to Macbeth his destiny. Cardanus took the story from Hector Boethius, who only says that Machabeus (Macbeth ) “ met with three women of unusual aspect.” i Heine has in this story of Hother followed Prætorius, who tells the tale in a very confused manner, jumbling two legends together. The original may be found in Olaus Magnus, lib. 3, cap . Io . The hero won his victory, not by the will of the Norna, or fates, but by playing the harp, and singing so charm ingly as to enchant the nymphs who prepared the food by tasting which warriors became invincible. 170 LEMENTARY SPIRITS. queen was passing by the door, and hearing the noise, entered , and asked the mother why she beat the girl so that her cries were even heard in the street ? Then the mother, being in shame lest the laziness of her daughter should be made known, answered, “ I cannot keep her from spinning. She would fain spin on for ever, and I am poor, and cannot get her flax enough'. Then the queen replied, “ I love of all things to hear spinning, and am never so glad as when the wheels hum. Give me your girl ; she shall go to my castle, where I have flax enough for her to spin as long as she pleases. ' “ The mother was pleased from her heart, and the queen left with the maid . When they came to the castle they went into three rooms filled up to the roof with the finest flax. “ Spin this, ' said the queen, and when you shall have finished the task you may marry my son ; though you be poor, yet I care naught therefor, unceasing industry is dower enough for me. ' The girl was frightened to the heart, for she could not have spun up all that flax in three hundred years, though she should work from morn till eve. “ When she was alone she began to weep, and so sat for three days without moving her hands. On the third day came the queen , and when she saw that there had been no spinning done, she was astonished ; but the girl excused herself ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 171 saying that she had grieved so much at going away from home that she could not work. The queen was satisfied, but said, " To -morrow you must begin to spin .' “ When the girl was again alone, she knew not what to do, and in her grief gazed out of the window. Then she saw three women coming ; the first had a great flat foot, the second an under lip which hung down on her chin , and the third a broad thumb. They stopped before the window, looked up, and asked the girl what was the matter. She bewailed her trouble, and they offered to help her, saying, ' If you will ask us to your wedding, and not be ashamed of us, and call us your cousins, and give us seats at the table, then we will spin all the flax speedily. ' With all my heart,' she answered ; come in and begin the work at once. ' Then the three strange women entered and made a place for themselves in the first room , and began spinning. One pulled the thread and trod the wheel, another wetted it, the third turned it and struck with her finger on the table, and as often as she tapped there fell a skein of yarn, spun as finely as could be, on the ground. The girl hid the three spinners from the queen, who, seeing how rapidly the yarn was spun, praised her very much. And when the first room was finished , the next was begun, and so on till all the flax was spun. Then the three spinners went 172 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 6 6 their way, saying to the girl, “ Remember what thou hast promised ; it will be lucky for thee. ' “ When the maid showed the queen the empty rooms and the great pile of yarn , the latter pre pared the wedding, and the bridegroom , not a little proud that he had such a clever and in dustrious wife, praised her mightily. And she said, ' I have three cousins, and I would not for get them in my prosperity, for they were very kind to me ; pray let me invite them to the wed ding, and give them places at the table. ' The queen and her son said , ' Certainly, by all means. And when the feast began the three maidens came in magnificently dressed, and the girl said , Welcome, my dear cousins ! ' Ah,' said the bridegroom , ' how did you come by such horrible friends ? ' And going to the one with the great foot he asked , “ What was it made your foot so broad ? ” and she answered, " Spinning the flax. The wheel I trod .” Then he went to the second and asked, “ Why does your lip hang down to your chin ? ” and she replied, “ From licking the flax whenever I spin .” Then he inquired of the third, “ What makes you have such a great broad thumb ? ” and she said , “ Turning the thread to make the thrum . ” Then the prince was alarmed and said , “ If that is what comes of spinning, my wife shall never spin again .' And so she was free from the vile flax -spinning. ” 6 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 173 and us. And the moral ? Every Frenchman to whom I ever told this story always asked me for one. My friends, that is just the difference between you We only in real life require a moral, never in the fictions of poetry. You may learn from this story how one may get other people to do your spinning and yet become a princess. It is noble in a nurse to teach children betimes that there is something more real than labour - which is luck. One often hears of children born with a luck - skin, or caul, with whom everything succeeds in life. The belief in luck or fortune as an innate, or accidentally granted gift, is of heathen origin, and contrasts agreeably with the Christian theory, according to which suffering and abstinence are to be regarded as the first favours of heaven. The problem, the aim, of heathenism was to achieve fortune,1 The Greek hero called it the golden fleece, and the German the Nibelungen hoard.. The task of Christianity, on the contrary, was renunciation, and its heroes endured the pangs of martyrdom ; they took up their cross of their own free will, and their most glorious victory led but to the grave. One will of course remember that the fleece and the Nibelungen -hoard brought great woe i Gluck , fortune, luck , or happiness. The French version gives it as bonheur. 174 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. unto their winners. But the error of these heroes was to mistake gold for good fortune or happi ness. Yet in the main they were right. Man should strive for happiness in this world-sweet happiness, and not the cross. For that let him wait till he is borne to be buried, and then he will have one set above his grave. And here I cannot refrain from telling a tale, the scene of which brings the valley of the Rhine in all its beauty before one. In it also appear three women, of whom I cannot decide whether they are elementary spirits or enchantresses, that is, enchantresses of the old heathen stamp, who differ so decidedly from the later witch- sisterhood. I do not recollect the story very well. If I am not mistaken it is told in detail in Schreiber's Rhein ische Sagen ( Rhine Legends). It is the legend ofthe Wisperthal (Whisper-vale, ) which takes its name from the whispering voices which there meet the ear, reminding one of a certain mysterious “ Hist st — st, " which may be heard of evenings in cer tain side-streets in cities. “ Once upon a time three gay young fellows wandered through the valley, wondering greatly what could cause the constant ' Hist - hist ! ' The oldest and cleverest of them, who was a sword cutler, at last cried out, “ Those are the voices 1 There are trivial variations, of this and the next sentence, in the French version. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 175 of women who are so ugly that they are ashamed to show themselves ! ' “ He had hardly spoken these crafty and chal lenging words, when all at once there suddenly stood before them three wonderfully beautiful maids, who courteously invited him and his com panions to enter their castle, rest from their journey, and otherwise refresh themselves. This castle, which was hard by, they had not before remarked , possibly because it was not built like others, but hewed in the rock , so that only some narrow Gothic windows and a broad gateway were externally visible. When they had entered they were not a little amazed at the splendour which met their eyes on every side. The three young ladies, who seemed to be its sole inhabitants, gave them an exquisite meal, at which the cup was passed by them many times. The youths, whose hearts grew warmer with the wine, had never before seen such beauties, and betrothed them selves soon to them with burning kisses. On the third day the ladies said, ' If you would always live with us, you dear fellows, then you must first go into the woods and hear what the birds say. When you shall have lurked, listened , and learned what the sparrow , magpie, and owl say , then come back into our arms. ' “ The three companions went into the wood, and after they had made their way through brambles 176 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. and brush , thorns and bush, and stumbled over many a ragged root, they came to a tree on which a sparrow sat chirping the following saying : “ There were once three fools of a piece, Who travelled Plum - pudding land through , There came ready roasted geese And before their mouths they flew . And one, like a lusty bawler, Cried out, “ In this land of the South It's a pity the geese are not smaller, So they might just fly into our mouth ! ” ; “ Yes, indeed ! ' cried the sword- smith. ·That is well put. When people are fools, even if roast geese fly just before their mouths it does them no good. Their mouths are too small, and the geese are too large, and they do not know how to help themselves. ' 1 “ So the three went further into the wood, and after they bad made their way through brambles and brush, thorns and bush , and stumbled over many a ragged root, they came to a tree on which a magpie jumped here and there, who chattered these words : “ My mother was a magpie, and so was my grandmother ; my great - grandma was a magpie, 1 There is a German proverb, “ In Schlaraffen Land (the land of Cocaigne or of Idlers ), where the roasted geese, or pigeons, fly to one's mouth .” It is illustrated with a picture in the works of Claudius. - Translator, ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 177 my great-great-grandmother another ; so was her mamma before her - every one had a bill, and if she had not died she'd have been living still.' “ Yes, yes, ' said the sword- cutler, ' that I can understand. That is the common history of the world. That is the final compendium ( Inbegriff ) of all our researches, and mankind will never learn much more. ' “ After the three companions had gone further through brambles and brush, been scratched by many thorns and stumbled over many a ragged root, they came to a tree whereon sat an owl, who kept muttering and murmuring : “ He who talks with a woman by a woman will be cheated, he who talks with two, by two will be defeated, and he who talks with women three by three women betrayed will be." “ Holla, there ! ' cried the sword - cutler. " You ugly pitiful bird, with your ugly pitiful wisdom, such as can buy from every humpbacked beggar for a farthing ! That is old and rotten rumour. You would speak better of women if you were good - looking and gay like us, or if you knew our brides, who are as fair as the sun and true as gold ! ' “ Then they returned, and after they had gone on, whistling and carolling, they found themselves before the rock -castle, and with un > > one > VOL. II. M 178 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 1 restrained joyousness they sang the knavish song : • Bolt in and bolt out, Sweetheart, what art thou about ? Art thou waking, art thou sleeping, Art thou laughing, art thou weeping ? ' 7 “ While the three young fellows stood frolick ing before the castle door, three small windows over it were opened, and from every window looked out a long -nosed, blear- eyed old woman. They nodded their grey heads as if delighted, and opened their toothless mouths and shrieked : " There are our dear betrothed ones ! Wait, dears, we will soon open the door and welcome you with kisses, and you shall enjoy the happiness of life in the arms of love. ' “ The young fellows, startled to death, did not wait for the opening of the door, or the embraces of their brides, or enjoyment of life, but started anow on their travels at once, running head over heels, and made such good time that they arrived that day in the town Lorch. And as they sat in the evening in the public-house they drank many pints of wine before they recovered from their fright. And the sword - cutler swore, high 3 “ Mit ausgelassner Fröhlichkeit.” Not an expression char acteristic of a Volksmährchen or peasant's tale. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 179 and dear, that the owl was the wisest bird in the world, and was justly regarded as an emblem of wisdom .” 1 I have classed this narrative with that of the three spinners. According to certain learned Hellenists the latter are the three Fates ; but our patriotic antiquarians, who are but little affected towards classic studies, claim these three for the Scandinavian mythology, declaring they are the three Norna. These two hypotheses may be ap plied to the three women of the Wisperthal. It is difficult to determine the real nature of the Scandinavian Norna. They may be considered as one and the same with the Valkyrie of whom " " with un. " 1 Heine might have very well spared himself or his readers any conjectures as to the ancient meaning of this story, which is most evidently a modern piéce de manufacture, both as regards its spirit, or meaning, and form. In popular tales the hero does not make philosophic remarks as to the average results of writing universal history, nor sing “ roguish songs restrained joyousness.” Such stories are always the tales of the fortune of one or more persons, and not abstract satires on society and universal history, as this is. I think it not im. probable that Heine rewrote the tale from something much better and simpler. 2 Heine does not seem to have been acquainted with the new Edda, in which the nature of the different Norna is clearly set forth. The sagas were not poems but prose legends, chiefly historical. The bewildering confusion of which he complains as existing in Scandinavian mythology was more in his own mind, as the result of extremely slender knowledge of it, than in the subject itself. Translator. 180 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. I have spoken. The sagas of the Icelandic poets tell us the strangest things of the Valkyrie. At one time they ride in the air over the din of battle, whose result they determine ; anon they are amazons, called shield - maidens, who fight for their lovers ; and yet again they appear in the forms of the swan -maidens, of whom I have given a few features. There prevails in these traditions a bewildering confusion which is as cloudy as the sky of the North. One of these Valkyrie was the strong Sigrun , and in the saga which speaks of her we find a touching episode which recalls Bürger's Leonore. But the latter is flat and tame compared to the heroine of the Scan dinavian poem. I will here give an extract from this saga. 66King Sigmund, the son of Volsung, had married Borghild of Brelund, and they called their son Helgi, after Helgi the son of Sorward. Sigmund and the men of his race called them selves Volsungs. Hunding was the king of a wealthy land, called from him Hundland. He was a great warrior, and the father of many sons, who went forth to battle. King Hunding and King Sigmund were enemies, and they mutually slew one another's friends. Granmar was the name of a mighty king, who dwelt on a height called Swarinshöh. He had many sons, one of whom was Hodbrodd, the other Gudmund, and ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 181 the third Starkader. Hodbrodd was in the council of the kings, and was betrothed to Sigrun, the daughter of Högni. But when she heard this she flew on horseback with the Valkyries, and swept over land and sea to find Helgi. Helgi was then in Logofjall. He had fought with Hunding's sons, and having slain Alf, Eiolf, Haghard, and Herward, being weary, was resting under the Eagle's Cliff. There Sigrun found him, threw her arms round his neck, embraced (kissed) him under her helmet, and said : ' My father has be trothed me to the evil son of Granmar, but I have called him as brave as a cat's son . In a few nights the prince will come, unless thou dost allure him to the field of battle, and wilt bear away the king's daughter.' Then the hero was seized with love for the maiden, but Sigrun had passion ately loved the son of Sigmund before she had ever seen him . The daughter of Högni followed her heart in saying that she wished for Helgi's love. But,' continued Sigrun, ' I see, oh prince, beforehand, the anger of the friends of all our family, because I have wrecked the dearest hope of my father .' Helgi replied, ' Trouble not thy self as to the wrath of Högni, or for that of thy family. Thou shalt dwell with me, maiden ; thou art, as I see, of noble race.' “ Helgi assembled many warriors, embarked them , and sailed for Frekastein . While at sea they 6 182 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. were surprised by a terrible storm ,> which put them in death -peril, lightning flashed round the heaven, and their ship was struck. There came nine Valkyries riding through the air, and among them they recognised Sigrun ; then the storm died out, and they reached the shore in safety. The sons of Granmar camped upon a hill as the ship came to land. Gudmund threw himself on his horse, and rode seawards to learn who was coming. Then the Volsung hoisted their sails, and Gud mund asked, •Who is the king who rules this fleet, and leads this mighty host into our land ? ' The son of Sigmund answered haughtily and with a challenge, and Gudmund returned with the defiance. Then the sons of Granmar assembled an army, in which were many kings, as well as Högni, the father of Sigrun, and his sons Bragi and Dag. And they had a great battle, in which all the sons of Granmar and all their generals fell, all save Dag, the son of Högni, who made peace and swore faith to the Volsung. Sigrun went over the battlefield, and found Hodbrodd, who lay dying. She said, “ Never, 0 King Hodbrodd, will Sigrun of Sevaficell rest in thy arms, for thy life is lost. Soon will the claws of wolves tear the flesh of the sons of Granmar.' Then she went to Helgi and was full of joy. The young victor said to her, ' O Alvitr, all -knowing one (one of the names given to the Valkyries), all , alas ! ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 183 has not gone as thou wouldst have it, but the Nora direct our destiny. Bragi and Högni fell this morning by Frekastein, and I slew them . And Starkadr fell by Styrkleif, and near Hlebjorg the sons of Hrollaug. One of them was the fiercest hero I ever saw ; when his head was hewn off, his body still fought. Well nigh all thy race lies on the battle plain ; thou hast in this battle nothing gained ; it was fated to thee to attain thy wish only through battle .' Then Sigrun wept, and Helgi said, ' Comfort thyself, Sigrun ; thou wert our Hilde ' (a goddess of war who excited men to battle ). Kings cannot escape their fate.' She replied , ' Oh that I could reani mate the dead, yet also rest, my love, still in thine arms.' “ Helgi wedded Sigrun, and she bore him sons. Helgi did not live long. Dag, the son of Högni, made great sacrifice to Odin, and implored his aid. Then Odin lent him his lance. Dag found his brother - in - law in the place called Fiöturland, and pierced him with the spear of Odin. So fell Helgi ; but Dag rode forth at once to Sevafjäll, and brought to Sigrun the news of the death of her loved hero. “ My sister, I must announce dire news,, and make thy tears flow ; a king this morning fell in Fjöturland, a king bravest of all on earth, one whose head rose above those of the bravest warriors. ' Sigrun cried aloud, May thy 184 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. heart be pierced by all the oaths which thou didst swear to Helgi by the shining flood of Leiptr (the river of the lower world) , and by the Ice -cliff which its waves wash. May never ship sail well on which thou art, however favourable the wind may be ! May never any war- horse carry thee, although thou art pursued by deadliest foes ! And may the sword thou bearest lose its edge, unless indeed it whistles round thine own head. Oh, to see Helgi's death avenged on thee, I would thou couldst be changed into a wolf, and in the forest live without a joy or hope, and even always want ing food, save when among men's corpses thou dost leap. ' Dag replied , “ Thou art mad, my sister, and it is madder still to curse thy brother. Odin was the cause of all this discord, he has thrown the runes of enmity between the nearest kin. Thy brother offers thee the red (golden) ring of re conciliation ; he offers thee all the land from Wlandilswe and Wigdali. Take it, oh woman adorned with armlets, take for thee and for thy son the half of the realm as atonement for thy suffering .' “ Sigrun answered, ' Never shall I rule happily in Sevafjäll, nor be glad by night or by day, un less the splendour of my hero shines at the door of his tomb, or unless the war - horse of my king, Wigblör with the golden reins, bounds under him, or I can grasp and hold him in my arms. Before ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 185 6 Helgi all his enemies and their allies fled, fled like frighted mountain kids before the wolf. Helgi rose above all other heroes like a noble ash above blackberry bushes, or as the stag wetted with dew surpasses all other animals raising his shining horns to heaven. ' “ A hill tomb was raised over Helgi, and when he came to Valhalla, Odin offered to divide with him the rule of all the world. And Helgi said, seeing Hunding, Thou, Hunding, shalt daily as thou goest to bed get ready for every man his foot- bath, light the fire, tie up the dogs, care for the horses, and feed the pigs.' “ A maid of Sigrun's went one evening by Helgi's grave, and lo ! she saw the hero with a great following of warriors ride toward the mount. The maid said, ' Are these delusions of my eyes, or has the end of the world come ? Dead men come riding, ye drive your war - horses with spurs. re heroes allowed to return to earth ? ' Helgi replied, " These are no mere phantoms which thou seest, neither is the end of the world nigh, and though thou seest us drive our war horses with spurs, for return is permitted unto heroes.' “ The maid hastened home and said to Sigrun, " Go to the hill , Sigrun of Sevafjäll, if you would find the prince of the peoples. The tomb is open, Helgi is come, his wounds bleed, he 6 6 186 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. ! incites thee to allay and heal them . ' Sigrun hurried to the hill , entered to Helgi, and said , How am I glad to see thee - glad as the stary ing vultures of Odin when they smell corpses, or when, wet with dew, they see the aurora rise. First, I will embrace thee, dead king, ere thou layest aside thy bloody shirt of mail. O Helgi, thy hair is white with frost, thou art all over covered with the dew of the dead (blood), and thy hands are cold as ice. How can I, O king, allay the pain of thy wounds ? ' Helgi replied, “ Thou alone, Sigrun of Sevafjäll, art cause that Helgi is wetted with the dew of disaster, for every evening ere thou goest to sleep, O queen , adorned with jewels and gold, thou sheddest for a long time bitter tears.. And every tear falls bleeding on my breast, my icy breast, smitten with anguish. But we will drink again from the cup of joy, though we have lost all joy and every blessing, so that no one shall sing a song of mourning, though he may see gaping wounds on my breast. Women are now with us in the hidden place, daughters of kings, with us the dead ! ' “ Sigrun prepared a bed in the hill. Here is a bed of rest and free from care which I have made for thee, O Helgi, Volsung's son . I will sleep in thy arms, o king, as I did when thou wert alive. ' Helgi answered, “ Now I declare that 6 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 187 there is nothing incredible, be it late or early, in Sepafjäll, since thou, proud daughter of Högni of royal race, liest in my dead arms— thou who art still among the living ! But now it is time that I again wander on the road of light, and my pale war- horse must again tread his airy path, for the morning-red begins to shine, for I must ride westwards on the rainbow bridge (Windh jalmbrucke) , before Salgofnir (the cock) awakens the conquerors.' “ So Helgi and his men rode forth on their war-steeds, and the women returned home. The next day Sigrun bade her maid, towards evening, keep watch by the hill . When the sun had set, and Sigrun came to the tomb, she said, “ By this time the son of Sigmund should have come from the hall of Odin, if he means to come. But I am losing hope to see him, for the eagles are beginning to roost on the ash-tree boughs, and all the world is hastening to the realm of dreams. ' The maid replied, ' Be not so madly bold, oh daughter of the Skioldungr, as to go alone into the dwelling of the spirits ; by night the dead are mightier than by day. Sigrun did not live long in suffering and grief.” Here the legend ends, but the narrator adds to this the remark " It was believed in old times that men were born again on earth, but we regard it as an old 188 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. wives' tale. It is said of Helgi and Sigrun that they lived a second time. He was then called Helgi, the hero of Haddjuga, and Sigrun , Kara, the daughter of Halfdan, and she was a Valkyrie ." I add to this the beginning of another Scandi navian saga, called the Volundr saga, because there appears in it a clear proof of the identity of the Valkyrie with the three spinners and the swan-maidens, of which I have spoken. In which we are told that “ Nidhudr was the name of a king in Swithiod ( Sweden) . He was father of three sons and a daughter, Baudvildur. And he had in Finland three brothers, sons of the king in that country, the eldest of whom was Slagfidr, the second Egil, and the third Volundr. They went to herd their flocks and came to Ulfdalir (Wolf's dale) , where they built them huts. There was a lake called Ulffjar (the Wolf's lake), where they built them huts. And on its margin very early one morning the king's sons found sitting three women who spun flax, and had their swan dresses lying near them on the ground. They were Valkyries, and two of them were daughters of King Landwer. They were named, one was called Hladgur Svanhvit ( Hladgur the snow white ) ; the second, Hervoer Alvitr (Herva the All-knowing) ; and the third, Aulrun, the daughter of Kiar of Walland. The three brothers took them ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 189 home. Egil had Aulrun ; Slagfidr, Svanhvit ; and Volundr, Alvitr for wife. Seven winters ( years) they dwelt together, but in the eighth the women flew away to take part in battles, and did not return . Egil went forth to seek Aulrun, and Slagfidr also sought his Svanhvit, but Vælundr remained in Ulfdalir. He was, according to ancient sagas, a skilful artist. He set the costliest pearls in pure gold , and strung all his rings on a string of soft bark. So he awaited the return of his noble spouse. When Nidhudr, the King of Sweden, learned that Volundr was alone in Ulfdalir, he went by night with his men. Their armour was well fitted, and their shields shone in the moonshine. Having arrived at the home of Volundr, they surprised the king's son as he slept, bound and pinioned him, and Nidhudr bore him away.” 1 I have in these pages only superficially treated a subject which might furnish volumes of interest ing material, that is , the manner in which Christi anity attempted to either destroy the Old German religion or to absorb it, and how traces of it remain in popular beliefs. How the war of destruction was conducted is well known. When the Christian priests could not drive out the i Volundr is the prototype of Velint, and the English Way. land Smith. 190 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. heathen priests by means of miracles, the sword of secular power came obligingly to their aid. The greatest number of conversions were brought about by Christian princesses marrying heathen chiefs, and there are centuries in which the Church chronicles are only records of weddings. When the people, accustomed to their earlier worship of nature, retained a reverence for certain places, then it was attempted to either turn this piety into the channel of the new belief, or to render it repulsive as an inspiration of the devil. By the fountains or springs which heathenism worshipped the Christian priest built a crafty little church, and he himself blessed the water, and made what he could out of its healing power. There are to this day many of the blessed old wells or springs of ancient time, to which the multitude make pilgrimage, and in full belief drink from them health. The holy oaks which resisted the pious axes were slandered, it was said the devils haunted them, and the witches there practised their diabolical debauchery. Yet despite this the oak remained the favourite tree of the German race. It is to this very day the symbol of German nation ality itself ; it is the greatest and strongest tree of the forest ; its roots penetrate into the very depths of the earth ; its summit waves proudly like a green banner in the air ; the elves of poetry dwell in its trunk ; the mistletoe of holy wisdom ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 191 2 grows on its branches, only its fruit is small and not fit for human food.1 Among the old German laws, especially in those of the Alemanni, are many prohibiting the worship of streams, trees, and rocks, in the here tical faith that there was divinity dwelling in them. Charlemagne expressly prohibited in his capitularies offerings to stones, trees, or rivers, nor should consecrated candles be lighted by them . ” These three - stones, trees and streams— appear as the principal motives of the old German cultus, and to this corresponds the faith in beings which inhabit them that is to say, dwarfs in rocks, elves in trees, and nixies in water. To systematise this method is much more practical than that of Paracelsus, according to the elements, which adopts a fourth class for fire, that is, the sala mander. But the people, always without a system , never knew anything of all this, and I am convinced that the faith in fire-spirits is due entirely to Paracelsus himself. There is among 1 A mistake. Eatable or palatable acorns are not uncommon in England, and they are common in Italy. In Rome they are prepared by steeping the kernel in lime-water. The earliest Italian race was said to have subsisted on them . — Translator. 2 The conclusion of this sentence is wanting in the French version .-- Translator. 3 This is all much more than doubtful. Friedrich (Symbolik Natur), who cites a cloud of witnesses proof, declares that a belief in a spirit of fire who dwelt in the Ofen was widely 192 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. the people only the story of one animal which can live in fire, and is called salamander. All boys are zealous naturalists, and when I was a little fellow I applied myself seriously to seek whether a salamander could really live in fire. And one day when one of my schoolfellows caught one, I was in keen haste to throw it into the oven fire , where it first spirted or threw out a whitish slime, hissed less and less, and finally gave up the ghost. This creature looks like a lizard but is saffron yellow, with some black spots, and the a spread in Germany. This spirit was worshipped to a very late period, all kinds of food being thrown into the fire as offerings. There are tales, proverbs, prayers, and games still extant which establish this. Children when sickly or suffering are held up to the fire with in vocation to it. Had Heine read his Grimm more attentively ( Deutsche Mythologie, 2nd ed. , p. 595, &c. ), or Daumer, Geheimnisse des Christlichen Alterthums, he could not have made this strange assertion. The Erzdrach of Tyrol is, according to Panzer, " a powerful god of fire, water, and air.” There is also the three - legged fire -hound of the Wild Hunt, which is certainly a spirit. As regards all belief in a faith in fire- spirits having originated with Paracelsus himself, we know that Psellus and other magi had a system quite like that of the former. “ They divide spirits into those of fire, air, water, earth, and these further into those of caverns, darkness, forests, mountains, fields, houses, the jovial, the saturnian, & c." It never seems to have occurred to Heine that every detail of the Paracelsian pneumatology was widely spread among the people from whom it was derived, and had existed long before among the Neo- Platonists. The Norse folklore, which Heine treats as German, abounds in spirits of fire, as does the folklore of every country in Europe, —Translator. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 193 white liquid which it omits, and with which it perhaps often extinguishes the fire, may have caused the belief that it can live in fire.1 The fiery men who wander round by night are not elementary spirits but ghosts of men de parted , dead usurers, pitiless public officials, and malefactors who have removed landmarks. The Irrwische ( ignis fatuus, will o' the wisp) are also no spirits . It is not exactly known what they are ; 2 they lead astray wanderers in moorlands 1 Heine did not know what a fire - salamander was. That is a lizard-like creature, which is supposed to live always in fire . Benvenuto Cellini declares that he saw one when he was a small boy, and got from his father a good whipping to make him remember it. One to keep him from lying would not have been misapplied. The origin of the superstition was that the lizard, from living in sunshine on hot rocks and sand, was among the Greeks a symbol of heat ( Ovid, “ Metamorphoses,” v. 447 ) . 2 Heine's great authority, Prætorius, says : “ The evil spirits which are called Feuerwisch ( ignis fatuus) lead men astray, ” and also declares that some people believe they are souls of unbaptized children . In the Wunderbuchlein , a collection of old popular beliefs, they are called Feuermanner or Firemen , and are described as spirits going to those who pray, and flying from those who curse . They are regarded as wild and wandering spirits in Germany and many other countries of Europe, probably in all. The English called them not only Will o'the Wisp, and Jack o' Lantern , but also Friar Rush. The reader will recall the man who “ Through bog and bush Was lantern- led by Friar Rush . " English gypsies think they are mischievous goblins, and call them mullo-doods, i.e. , dead or ghost lights. VOL. II . N 194 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. " and morasses. The English call them “ Will with a wisp " and also " Jack with a lantern. " As I have said, a complete class of fire- spirits such as Paracelsus describes is unknown to the people.1 It only speaks of one fiery spirit, and that is no other than Lucifer Satan, the devil . In old ballads he appears by the name of the fire -king, and when he enters or makes exit in the theatre the necessary flames are never wanting. And since he is the only spirit of fire, and must make up the want of a whole class of such spirits, we will describe him more accurately . In fact, if the devil were no spirit of fire, how could he endure it in hell ? He is a being of 66 1 This passage is wanting in the French version. In its place we have the following : Quant à de véritables esprits de feu, c'est à -dire qui y puissent vivre, il n'y en a peut- être que deux , qui sont Dieu et le Diable. “ Comme dans notre pays de France, en sait peu de chose surces deux antagonistes, on qu'on n'en a que des souvenirs obscurs, vous seriez peut- être curieux d'apprendre ce qu'en disent les croyances populaires de l'Allemagne. “ Que Dieu soit un esprit de feu c'est que soutiennent déjà les anciens philosophes, par exemple Porphyre, selon qui notre âme n'est qu'une émanation de l'âme ignée de Dieu. Les anciens mages ont adoré le feu comme la Divinité même. Moïse vit Jéhovah en buisson ardent. . . . S'il n'était pas esprit de feu comment eût- il feu s'y maintenir. La plus importante autorité est celle de la petite fille à qui la mère de Dieu avait permis de se promener dans le ciel. Après que la petite fille eut vu douze appartements dans chacun desquels était établi un apôtre, elle arriva enfin à une petite chambre, ou la mère de Dieu lui ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 195 so cold a nature that out of fire he is not com fortable. All the poor women who have been in close touch with the devil complain of this bitter coldness. Very remarkable in their agreement as to this particular are the confessions of all the witches of every country . These ladies who con fessed to having had carnal connection with the devil, even during torture, always speak of the coldness of his embraces, and of the icy freezing gush of his diabolical raptures. He generally appeared to them in the garb of a courtier with a red feather on his head. But if cold as a lover, the devil cannot be called ugly, for he can take what form he will . avait bien défendu d'entrer. Mais elle ne peut résister à sa curiosité, ouvre la porte, et que voit-elle ? la très Sainte Trinité au milieu d'un bon feu rouge flamboyant ? “ Il faut que le diable soit un esprit de feu ; autrement com ment pouvrait- il durer dans l'enfer. Mais pendant que le bon Dieu supporte le feu parceque lui - même est un esprit igné, le diable l'endure fort bien parce qu'il est d'une nature si froide qu'il ne sent a son aise que dans le feu . ” 1 The French version here adds, “ et principalement dans les ouvrages du criminaliste Carpzow .” A sufficiently satisfactory reason for this strange belief appears in Michelet's Sorcière, of which there is a hint in the following words from the Italian translation, " N lavabo acatato altresi dalle purificazioni pagane. Una fredda purificazione per instelire ” ( i.e. , to render sterile ) . Cf. Michelet, La Strega, vol. ii . lib. 2, p. 5. Carpzow wrote a book entitled Practica Nova Rerum Criminalium ( ed. Boehmer, 3 vols. folio , 1758) , in which he declared that even to deny the accusation of witchcraft deserved death ( Vide Horst, Dæmono magie, 1818). 6 196 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. He has often assumed feminine seductiveness to keep some pious monk from penitence or entice him to sensual pleasure. To others whom he would terrify he came with his hellish crew in forms of beasts. He loves to appear most beastly when he has guzzled and swilled notably. Once there was in Saxony a gentleman who had invited his friends to a feast, but when the hour had come, and the meal was ready, the guests were wanting, for one and all had sent excuses . Then in his rage he cried, “ If no man will come, so let the devil and all hell eat with me! ” And saying this he left the house to get rid of his ill temper. “ And then there began to ride into the court yard, few or many, numbers of giant-like black cavaliers, who bade the servant seek his master and say to him that his invited guests had come at last. The man after long seeking found his lord , and they both returned, but neither then dared enter the house. For they then heard roars and yells as of mad drinking, and the screaming and singing grew louder and more horrible, and finally they beheld swarms of devils as if drunk in the forms of bears, cats, goats, wolves, and foxes coming to the open windows, holding in their paws full goblets or steaming plates, grinning and greeting with shining snouts, and laughing teeth to those below . ” That the devil presides at witch- meetings in ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 197 the form of a he -goat is generally known. I shall speak anon of the rôle which he plays in this form when I come to speak of witches and magic. In the remarkable book in which the deeply learned Georgius Godelmannus gives a truthful and logically reasoned report of this, I find that the devil often appears as a monk. He tells this tale : When I was studying law in the famous Uni versity of Wittenberg, as I well recall, I heard several times there from my teachers that there came once a monk who knocked hard at Luther's door, and when the servant opening asked him what he wanted, the monk inquired if Luther was at home ? Which when Luther heard he had him brought in, because it was long since he had seen a monk. And when the visitor entered he said that he would fain speak with Luther as to certain papistical errors , and submitted to him a few syllo gisms and school problems, which the latter solved easily enough. Then he brought out another much more difficult, when Luther somewhat im patiently said , “ Thou givest me much to do at a time when I have other things to attend to , " and rising showed him in the Bible the solution of his question. And while conversing, he observed that the hands of the monk were like a 1 Goedelmannus de Magis, Venificis et Lamiis.— Translator. 198 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. birds' claws, and said, “ Bist du nicht Der ? " “ Art thou not he ? Then hear the judgment which was passed on thee ! ” And so saying he showed him the text in Genesis in the first book of Moses, “ The seed of the woman shall bruise the head of the serpent." The devil being van quished by this sentence, fled in a rage and growl ing, but first threw the ink and writing things behind , leaving a stink which smelt for many days.” 1 In the foregoing story we may note a marked characteristic of the devil which previously showed itself, and which he has maintained till to -day. This is his constant seeking to dispute ; or his sophistry and fine- spun syllogisms. In logic Satan always was at home, as he convinced Pope Syl vester, the famous Gerbert, eight hundred years ago to his sorrow. This learned man had made a solemn pact with Satan at the University of Cordova, where he was studying, and by infernal aid learned algebra, geometry, astronomy, all the lore of plants, and many useful arts—among others that of becoming Pope. But in Jerusalem his life should end — therefore he took good care to keep from it. And it came to pass that one 1 From this sentence everything which follows is omitted in the French version to the paragraph beginning with the words, Many declare that the devil always appears in the form of an animal.” 66 > ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 199 > day as he read mass in a certain chapel in Rome there came unto him the devil, to carry him away , and as the Pope protested against this, the devil demonstrated to him that as the chapel in which he that instant stood was called Jerusalem , that all conditions of the bond had been fulfilled, and that he must pack up forthwith for hell . And so the devil carried off the Pope, merrily whisper ing meantime in his ear : “ Tu non pensavi qu'io loico fossi !" 1_ “ Thou didst not think that I was a logician .” The devil understands logic, he is master in metaphysics, and with his subtleties and interpre tations outwits all his bondmen. If they do not examine the contract carefully, they find in it to their horror that the devil instead of years has written months or days, when all at once he takes them by the neck and proves that time is up. In one of the older puppet- plays which sets forth the compact with Satan, the shameful life and pitiful ending of Doctor Faustus, there is a similar trick. Faust, who has desired the gratification of all earthly desires, has for this signed away his soul, and pledged himself to go to hell when he should have committed three murders. He had killed two men, and hopes that his compact will expire 1 Dante, Inferno, c. 28 . 200 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. before he shall have committed a third. But the evil one proves that the compact itself as a death blow to his soul was a third murder, and with this accursed logic hales him to hell.1 The degree to which Goethe has availed himself of this characteristic of sophistry may be judged of by every one. Nothing is so amusing as the reading the contracts with the devil which have been pre served since the days of the witch -trials, and in which the one contracting protects himself against all chicanery by many clauses, every stipula tion being paraphrased in the most scrupulous manner.2 The devil is a logician. He is not only the representative of earthly supremacy of sensual delights, he is also an exponent of human reason, simply because this vindicates all the rights of matter ; and in this he is the antithesis of Christ, 1 That signature was thy inost damning sin ." 2 Horst ( Dæmonomagie, 1818 ) , a writer of great intelligence and deeply learned , gives a curious specimen of one of these ela borate contracts. He also observes that there is some incompre hensible mystery in it all which awaits solution. With whom were these contracts really made ? Who was it that personified the devil so often, and to what purpose ? That confessions were suggested to witches and wrung from them by torture, or that designing men seduced young girls or plundered wealthy persons, does not at all explain to an impartial judge a vast number of these compacts. I suspect that in many instances the witch - finders themselves were the disguised Satan.— Trans lator. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 201 who sets forth not only the Spirit, ascetic abne gation of sense, and heavenly salvation, but also faith . The devil does not believe, he does not rely blindly on foreign authority, he will rather rely on independent thought, he uses reason ! This is of course something terrible, and the Roman Catholic Church has correctly condemned independent individual thought ( Selbstdenken ) as devilish, and declared that the devil as the repre sentative of reason is the Father of Lies. Nothing can be accurately asserted as to the devil's form. Some declare, as I have said , that he has none, and can show himself in any shape. This is probable. I find in the Dæmonomagie of Horst that he can even turn himself into a salad. A nun who was honourable enough, but who did not strictly observe all the rules of her order, and did not make the sign of the cross as often as she should, once ate a salad. And as soon as this was done she experienced sensations which were new to her, and not at all in accordance with her pro fession . She begau to feel strangely of evenings when she sat in the light of the moon , and the flowers gave out their perfume, and the nightin gales sang so softly and sighingly. Soon after she became acquainted with a delightful young man . And after they had become intimate he said to her, “ Do you know who I am ? " " No," replied the nun, startled . “ I am the devil," he answered. a 202 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. Dost thou not remember that salad ? That salad was I.” Many declare that the devil always appears in the form of an animal, and that it is a mere illusion when we see him in any other. The devil has of course something cynical in him, and no one has so well illustrated this as our poet Wolf gang Goethe. Another German, who is as great in defects as in merits, yet who must still be ranked among poets of the first class, I mean Grabbe , has portrayed the devil admirably in this respect, not forgetting the coldness of his nature. In one of the dramas of this genial author the devil comes to earth because his grand mother is scrubbing ( schruppt) in hell. This is a fashion among us of cleaning rooms, by means of which a stone floor is covered with hot water and rubbed with a coarse cloth, whence results an unpleasant squeaky sound and lukewarm vapour which renders it impossible for a reason able man to remain in the house ; for which reason Satan must fly from his well- heated hell into the upper world, and here, though it is a hot day in July, the poor devil is almost frozen to death, and is only rescued by medical aid. We have seen that the devil has a mother, many declare he has in reality only a grand mother. She too comes to the world above 1 French version, M. Crabbe. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 203 whence may have come the saying, “ Where the devil himself can do nothing he sends an old woman . " But she is usually in hell, attending to the cooking, or sits in her red arm - chair, and when the devil, weary with his day's work done, comes home, he swallows in greedy haste what she has ready, then lays his head in her lap and falls asleep. At which time the old dame hums a song, which begins with these words : " In Thume in Thum, Many roses bloom, Roses red as blood ." Some say that when the poor child cannot sleep the good old dame lulls him to slumber by reading the Berlin Evangelical Church Gazette. The housekeeper to the devil in hell, where he lives with his mother, forms the completest con trast with that of Christ in heaven. The latter also lives as a bachelor with His holy mother, the Queen of Heaven, and the angels are His familiars as devils are familiars to the other. The devil and his servants are all black , Christ and His angels are white. In the popular songs of the North, the White Christ is always mentioned. We usually call the devil Old Sooty, or the Prince of Darkness. To these two personalities the people have added two other figures, as immortal and as indestructible-Death and the Wandering 204 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. Jew. The Middle Age has bequeathed to modern art these four types as colossal personifications of the Good, the Bad, of Destruction, and of Man. No one has so thoroughly grasped the spirit of the Wandering Jew, the mournful symbol of man kind, as Edgar Quinet, one of the greatest poets of France. We Germans, who lately translated his “ Ahasuerus," were not a little astonished to find such a sublime conception in a Frenchman. It may be that it is the mission of the French to set forth with the utmost accuracy the symbols of the Middle Age. They have long since left it, therefore they regard it with equanimity, and are able to appreciate its beauties with philosophic or artistic impartiality. We Germans, however, are still deep in the Middle Ages, we are still fighting its failing or falling representatives, therefore we cannot behold it with too great prepossession. We must, on the contrary, rather excite a partisan hatred, so that our spirit of destruction shall not be checked. Ye French may admire and love chivalry. All that remains to you of it is charming chronicles and iron armour. You risk nothing by gratifying your imagination and satisfying your curiosity with it. But with us Germans the chronicle of the Middle Age is not yet closed , the last leaves are still wet with the blood of our relations and friends, and the brilliant armour protects the still ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 205 living bodies of our executioners. Nothing hinders ye, O Frenchmen, from admiring old Gothic forms. For you the great cathedrals such as Notre Dame de Paris are naught save monuments of architecture and romanticism , for us they are the frightful fortresses of our foes. For you Satan and his hellish comrades are only poetical images, by us there are rascals and fools who labour unweariedly to re - establish philosophically the belief in a devil and an infernal witch-madness. That such a thing should take place in Munich is on the cards, but that in enlightened Wurtemberg one should attempt a vindication of the old witch -trials, and that a distinguished author, Justinus Kerner, should there have attempted to revive the belief in possession by spirits, is as disquieting as disgusting Oh, ye black villains , and ye feeble -minded folk > 1 1 In reference to Kerner's Seherinn von Prevorst. Heine's out bursts of disgust at Kerner are very amusing, since both he and the worthy Suabian were equally delighted or “ possessed ” with elementary spirits, ghosts, goblins, gods in exile, and all the rest of the mediaval mythology, the only difference being that Kerner, as a very devout Christian, believed in it and tried to devote it to a moral purpose, while Heine amused himself with it. But it amounted in reality to quite the same in both cases, each according to his nature, it being a matter of seriously absorbing interest to both . Heine plays with superstition like a monkey with a mirror, but he is deeply fascinated with it all the same. Kerner looked into the mirror to see spirits. Translator. 206 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. Ye your > of all colours-go on , perfect your work, heat the brain of the people with old superstitions, drive it on to the road of fanaticism ! selves will be some day its sacrifice, ye will not escape that which befell the unskilled enchanter who could not control the fiends which he had raised, and was by them torn to pieces. Should the spirit of Revolution not succeed in arousing the German race by means of reason, it may be reserved for Folly to complete the great work. When the blood shall , boiling, once mount to its head, when it feels its heart beating anew , the people will not listen to the sing -song of Bavarian sham - saints, or the mystical gabble of Suabian sillies—its ear will only hear the great voice of the man. Who is this man ? It is the man whom the German people await, the man who will finally give them prosperity and life, the one for whom it has so long yearned in its dreams. Why dost thou delay, thou whom the old men have foretold with such burning desire, thou whom the youth so impatiently await, thou who bearest as sceptre the magic wand of freedom , and the crown of the Kaiser without a cross ! But this is not the place for adjuration or exorcism , the more because it leads me from my theme. My business is to speak of simple tales, of that which is sung and told around the German ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 207 stoves. And here I perceive that I have spoken but scantily of the spirits which dwell in moun tains, or that I have said nothing of the Kyff häuser, in which the Emperor Friedrich dwells. He is not, indeed, an elementary spirit, and it is of such only that I should treat. But the legend is too enchanting and charming. As often as I recall it my soul thrills with holy yearning and secret hope. There is most certainly something more than a mere fairy tale in the belief that the Emperor Frederick , the old Barbarossa, is not dead, but that he, when the priests beset him too sorely, took refuge with all his retainers in a mountain called the Kyffhäuser, which lies in Thuringia, not far from Nordhausen, where he will remain until he shall appear again in the world to make the German people happy. I have often passed it, and one beautiful winter night I there remained more than an hour, and cried all the time, “ Come, Barbarossa, come!” and my heart burned like fire in my breast, and tears trickled down over my cheeks. But he did not come, the beloved Emperor Friedrich, and I could only embrace the rock in which he dwells.1 1 It is worth noting that neither Justinus Kerner, nor his friends Jung- Stilling or Eschenmayer, ever suffered from spiri tual possession or superstitious mania to such an extent as to cry aloud for an hour to a ghost at midnight, while weeping bitterly and hugging rocks. Translator. 208 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. А young shepherd who dwelt near was more fortunate. He pastured his sheep on the Kyff häuser, and began to play on the bagpipe, and as he believed he had deserved a reward he cried aloud, " Kaiser Friedrich, I have played this little serenade. " 1 It is said that the Emperor then came from the hill, and appearing to the herd, said, " God greet thee, youth ! In whose honour hast thou played ? ” “ In honour of the Kaiser Friedrich . " “ Since that is so, then come with me, By him rewarded thou shalt be." “ I dare not leave my sheep ," was his reply. “ Come with me ; to thy sheep no harm will come. ” The shepherd followed the Emperor, who led him by the hand to an opening in the hill . They came to an iron door, which opened, and they entered a great and magnificent hall, in which were many gentlemen and brave servants, who received them with great honour. Then the Emperor showed himself very kind, to the boy asking him what reward he would have. The shepherd replied “ None at all." Then the Emperor said, “ Go, and take as a reward one of the feet of my golden drinking- cup.” The boy little song sung while 1 Ständchen , from Stand, a standing ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 209 did as he was told, and was about to depart, but the Emperor showed him many marvellous weapons, armour, swords and rifles, and bade him tell people that he would with these weapons conquer the Holy Sepulchre. The shepherd probably did not understand him. Barbarossa has quite other conquests than that of the Holy Sepulchre on his mind. Or was it that the shepherd, fearing lest he might be imprisoned for a demagogue, departed a little from the way of truth ? It is not a tomb, the cold bed of a death that ancient Barbarossa will win, but a glorious home for the living, a warm realm of light and joy where he can gaily rule, the magic wand of freedom in his hand, and the Kaiser crown without a cross on his head. As for the shepherd, so the story goes, he came safe and merrily forth from the mountain , and the next morning took the foot of the drinking -cup to a goldsmith, who, finding that it was of purest gold, gave him for it three hundred ducats. And it is told of a peasant in the village of Reblingen that he saw the Emperor in Kyffhäuser and received from him a pleasant present. I know one thing, and that is, if my luck should ever lead me into this mountain, I would not ask the Emperor for gold cans or any such precious porringers, but if he chose to give me anything, I would ask him for his book De Tribus Impos VOL. II. 210 ELEMENTARY SPIRITS . a toribus . I have sought for it in vain in the libraries, and I think its author, old Barbarossa, has certainly a copy in Kyffhäuser. Many declare that the Emperor sits in his mountain by a stone table and sleeps, or makes plans by which to recover his kingdom. He always rocks his head to and fro, and blinks with his eyes. His beard flows down to the ground. He often stretches forth his hands as if in dream, and seems as if he would grasp his sword and shield. It is said that when he shall return to earth again he will hang this shield on a dead tree, and that it will at once begin to bud and bloom, and then a happy time for Germany will begin . As for his sword, it will be borne before him by a peasant in a coarse frock , and with it all those people will be beheaded who are stupid enough to think themselves to be of better blood than a boor. But the old tellers of the tale add that no one knows exactly when and how all this will come to pass. And it is further told that once when a shepherd was led by a dwarf into the Kyffhäuser, the Emperor rose and asked him if the ravens were still flying round the mountain. And when 1 A fabulous work, the three impostors being Moses, Christ, and Mahumet, of which one may read in D’Israeli and elsewhere. Spurious works by this title have more than once appeared. ELEMENTARY SPIRITS. 211 6 the shepherd answered “ Yes,” the Emperor cried, " Then I must sleep another hundred years !” Certainly, and more's the pity, the ravens are still flying round the mountain-those ravens whom we know so well , and whose pious croaking is so familiar to our But old age has weakened them, and there are good marksmen who know right well how to bring them down. Should the Emperor ever return to earth he will find in his way more than one raven with an arrow through its heart. And the old lord will smile and say that the marksman who hit it carried a good bow.l. ears. i The raven or crow transfixed by an arrow is the crest of the coat-of-arms of the name Leland, or of my own. I sincerely trust that Bussli, the first who bore it, did not acquire the right to do so by shooting a clergyman. In the first French version , Heine omits the last two paragraphs, and in their place pays the following graceful compliment to himself. “ I know one of these archers who now lives in Paris, and who knows how, even from that distance, to hit the crows which fly about the Kyffhäuser. When the Emperor returns to earth he will surely find on his way more than one raven slain by this archer's arrows. And the old Herr will say smiling that “ that man carried a good bow . ” - Translator. 1! II. DOCTOR FAUST. A Ballet - poem . WITH CURIOUS INFORMATION AS TO DEVILS, WITCHES, AND THE ART OF POETRY. 1847 . 1 INTRODUCTION. MR. LUMLEY, director of Her Majesty's Theatre in London, requested me to write a ballet, and in accordance with his wish I composed the fol lowing poem . I called it Doctor Faust ein Tanz poem (“ Dr. Faust a Ballet-poem ” ). However, it was not brought on the stage, partly because during - the season " for which it was announced the unexampled success of the so -called Swedish Nightingale 1 made any other exhibition super fluous, and partly because the maître de ballet ( stage -manager), hindering and delaying, inspired by the esprit de corps de ballet, interposed with every manifestation of ill -will. manager of the ballet regarded it as a dangerous innovation that a poet should compose the libretto of a ballet, because such works had hitherto been contributed by the dancing monkeys of his kind, in collaboration with some miserable literary hack. Poor Faust ! poor wizard ! In this manner must This stage 1 Jenny Lind. 216 INTRODUCTION. thou renounce the honour of exhibiting thy black art before the great Victoria of England ! Will it succeed any better for thee in thy native land ? Should, contrary to all my expectation, any Ger man stage display its good taste by producing my work, I beg the very praiseworthy manage ment not to neglect on such occasion to send to the author the money due him to the care of the publishers, Hoffmann & Campe in Hamburg —that is, to me or to my legal heirs. I consider it a not superfluous remark that I, to secure my right of property in this ballet in France, have already published a French version of it, and sent the number of copies required by law to the proper places. 1 When I had the pleasure of giving my manu script to Mr. Lumley, and we discussed over a fragrant cup of tea the spirit of the legend of “ Faust” and my treatment of it, the spirituel impresario requested me to note down the prin cipal details of our conversation, in order that he might subsequently enrich with it the libretto which he proposed to distribute to the audience on the night when the ballet should be produced . In accordance with this friendly request, I wrote the letter to Lumley which I give, somewhat 1 All of the preceding passage is omitted in the French version . -Translator. INTRODUCTION. 217 abbreviated, at the end of this little work, since it may be of some interest to the German reader of these transitory pages.1 As regards the historical Faust, I have in this letter to Lumley said but little regarding the mythical character. Therefore I cannot refrain from here giving briefly, as regards the origin and development of this legend, a fable of Faust, the result of my investigations.? It is not really the legend of Theophilus, seneschal of the Bishop of Adama in Sicily, but an old Anglo -Saxon dramatic form of it, which must be considered as the foundation of “ Faust." In the still extant Platt Deutsch or Low German poem of Theophilus, there are old Saxon or Anglo -Saxon forms of speech, like petrified words or fossil phrases, which show that this poem is only an imitation of an older original, which was lost in the course of time. This Anglo - Saxon poem must still have existed not long before the invasion of England by the Norman French, since it was apparently imitated, and almost literally 1 " Heine was so brilliant a conversationalist that no one could listen to him without wishing that he could preserve a written record of every word . He sparkled like a fountain, and among all the wits of Paris he was the wittiest.” These were the words spoken to me by Ole Bull, who had often inet Heine. 2 All of these two passages, with the exception of the few introductory lines, is omitted in the French version. 2 218 INTRODUCTION . imitated, by the Troubadour Ruteboeuf, and was brought out in France as a Mystère on the stage. For those to whom the collection of Mommerque in which this mystery is printed is not accessible, I would say that the learned Mangin spoke in detail regarding it some seven years ago in the Journal des Sarants. This mystery of the Trou badour Ruteboeuf was used by the English poet Marlowe, when he wrote his " Faust." He had also the analogous legend of the German sorcerer Faust, according to the old “ Faust ” book, of which there was already an English translation , and put it into dramatic form , suggested by the French Mystère, which was also known in England. The work of Theophilus and the old Volksbuch , a popular story of Faust, were therefore the two sources from which the drama of Marlowe sprang. Its hero is, however, not a reckless rebel against heaven , who, led astray by a sorcerer, assigns his soul to the devil to gain earthly prosperity, but is finally saved by the grace of the mother of God, who brings the compact out of hell, as in Theo philus. The hero of the play is here a sorcerer himself, in whom, as in the “ Faust ” book, all the legends of earlier magicians are united, and whose masterpieces he produces before eminent person 1 For Troubadour read Trouveur. The Troubadours wrote in Provençal. - Translator , INTRODUCTION, 219 a ages. This is done on Protestant ground, where the mother of God cannot appear, for which reason Faust is carried away by the devil without grace or pity. The puppet -show theatre, which flourished in London in Shakespeare's time, and which at once seized on every piece which succeeded in the great establishments, must certainly have given a " Faust " according to Marlowe's pattern , either parodying it more or less seriously, adapting it to local requisitions, or, as often happened, taking it from the author himself, who worked it up to suit their public. This “ Faust ” of puppets came over from England to the Continent, travelled through the Netherlands, visited our country in its fairs, and, translated into coarse German jawing, and bull-horned with German Jack - pudding in gredients, " delighted the lower strata of German society. But however unlike the versions became in the course of time, especially from improvised > 1 “ Und in derb deutscher Maulart übersetzt und mit deutschen Hanswurstiaden verballhornt.” A charming sentence to trans late ! Maulart, mouth or jaw -fashion of speech . Verballhornt, literally improved in a stupid, useless manner. Hans Ballhorn was a schoolmaster or printer, who republished a primer as “ revised and with additions ” by him. There was in the book, on the last page, a picture of a cock, and the sole improvement of the work consisted in this, that Ballhorn had an egg depicted lying by the cock. Hence the saying, or word, Verballhornen or Ballhornen , to make worse by attempting to improve. The reader may find the whole story delightfully told ( with the 220 INTRODUCTION. additions, the play remained substantially the same, and it was such a puppet- play which Wolfgang Goethe saw in a side- show at Strasburg which supplied our great poet with the form andmaterial of his master-work. In the first fragment, or partial edition , of Goethe's “ Faust , ” this is most perceptible, this has not the introduction taken from “ Sakúntala, " and the prologue imitated from Job ; it does not as yet vary from the simple form of the puppet- play, and there is no essential motive in it which indicates any knowledge of the older original books of Spiess and Widman. That is the genesis of the legend of “ Faust," from the poem of Theophilus to that of Goethe, who raised it to its present popularity. Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob, but Jacob begat Judah, in whose hands the sceptre will eternally remain . In literature every son has a father, whom he certainly does not always know, or whom he would even fain deny. HEINRICH HEINE. ( Written in Paris, October 1 , 1851. ) picture) in the Jobsiade. It seems to have escaped all the German commentators of this story that the cock with an egg by him was probably taken from an early book of wonders, or of miraculous natural history. When a cock laid an egg the latter was believed to hatch out a basilisk. Ballhorn did not even invent his improvement. —Translator. DOCTOR FAUST. A Ballet- poem . Thou hast evoked me from the grave, All by thy magic will ; Brought me to life by passion's glow, And that glow thou canst not still . Oh, press thy mouth unto my mouth , Divine is human breath ; I drink thy very soul from thee, Insatiable in death . ACT FIRST. A STUDY, large and arched, in Gothic style. On the walls are shelves of books, here and there astrological and alchemistic implements ( celestial and terrestrial globes, schemes of the planets, retorts and strangely - shaped glass vessels) , ana tomical preparations (skeletons of men and animals), and similar requisites of necromancy . Midnight strikes. Doctor Faust sits reflecting in a high arm - chair by a table, on which are piled books and philosophical instruments. His dress is that of a German scholar of the sixteenth century. He rises at last and totters with un steady steps to a book-case, where a great folio is fastened with a chain . He unlocks it and bears with difficulty the book ( Höllenzwang, or the so called “ Hell - compulsion ” ) to his table. In his demeanour and whole personality there is apparent a blending of helplessness and courage, of awkward schoolmasterly manners and arrogant professional pride. After lighting several candles and drawing magic circles on the ground with a sword, he opens the great book, and his demeanour indicates the 223 224 DOCTOR FAUST. The mysterious awe of invocation . The study grows darker, there is thunder and lightning, and from the ground, which opens with a crackling, crashing sound, there rises a flaming red tiger. Faust does not manifest the least fear ; he advances to the fiery beast with contempt, and seems to command it to depart at once. It sinks into the earth . Faust begins anew his incantations, it again thunders and lightens terribly, and out of the opening earth darts a monstrous serpent, which, winding and twisting in the most terribly threaten ing manner, hisses out fire and flames. Doctor also treats it with contempt ; he shrugs his shoulders, laughs and mocks it because the spirit of hell cannot appear in a far more terrible form , so that at last the snake creeps back into the earth . Faust renews his incantations with greater zeal. Then the darkness disappears, the room is suddenly lit with countless candles, in stead of thunder there is heard the most exquisite dancing-music, and out from the opening earth, as if from a basket of flowers, leaps a female ballet dancer, dressed in the usual gauze and tricot costume, who capers about with the most frivolous pirouettes. Faust seems to be at first astonished or some what displeased that the invoked devil Mephisto pheles does not assume a more awful form than that of a ballet -dancer ; but at last he seems to a DOCTOR FAUST. 225 be pleased with this smiling, graceful apparition, and pays her a majestic compliment. Mephisto pheles, or rather Mephistophela, as we are now to call the womanised devil, returns the compliment in parody, and dances round him in the usual coquettish fashion. She holds in her hand a magic wand, and all she touches with it in the room becomes changed in the most amusing manner without losing shape : thus the dark planetary forms light up from within ; from the jars con taining malformed creatures or abortions the most beautiful birds peep or fly ; owls bear brilliant girandoles in their bills ; from the walls come forth the most magnificent golden objects — Vene tian mirrors, antique bas- reliefs, works of art ; all chaotic and unearthly, yet gleaming magnifi cently—a tremendous arabesque. The beautiful demon seems to glide into friendly relation with Faust, yet he will not sign the parchment — the terrible compact -which she offers him . He requires that she shall call up the other powers of hell, and these princes of darkness appear accordingly. They are monsters in grotesquely horrible forms of beasts, fabulous blendings of what is scurrilous, or comic and frightful, most of them wearing crowns, and bearing sceptres in their claws. Faust is presented to them by Mephistophela, a ceremony in which the strictest court etiquette is observed. Waddling along with VOL. II. Р 226 DOCTOR FAUST. a much attempt at formality, their majesties begin a clumsy dance ; but as Mephistophela touches them with her wand, their ugly masks and garb fall off, and they are all changed into dainty ballet dancers, who flutter about in gauze and tricot, with garlands of flowers. Faust amuses himself with this metamorphosis, yet does not seem to find among the pretty dancing devils one who quite pleases him . Mephistophela observing this again wields her wand, and in a large mirror, which appears by magic art upon the wall, there appears the form of a wonderfully beautiful woman in court dress, and with a ducal crown on her head. As soon as Faust beholds her he is carried away with admiration and rapture, and approaches the lovely form with every manifestation of desire and tenderness. But the lady in the looking - glass, who now acts as if living, repels him with the haughtiest turning up of her nose. He kneels before her, but she only redoubles her signs of contempt. The poor Doctor turns his head with suppliant look towards Mephistophela, who only replies by roguishly shrugging her shoulders. Then she waves her magic wand. There rises from the ground, unto his hips, a hideous monkey, who at a sign from Mephistophela (who angrily shakes her head) disappears in an instant, and is succeeded by a beautiful graceful youth, a ballet-dancer, who DOCTOR FAUST. 227 executes the most commonplace entrechats. The dancer approaches the lady in the looking - glass, and while he with the most commonplace im pertinence makes love to her, she smiles again to him in the most charmed and charming manner, stretches out her arms to him , and exhausts herself in tenderest manifestations. At this sight Faust is in rage and despair, but Mephistophela takes pity on him, and touches with her wand the handsome youth. He lets fall his fine gar ments, appears as the hideous ape, and sinks into the ground. Mephistophela again offers the parchment to Faust, who, without ado or delay, opens a vein in his arm, and with his blood signs the contract by which for earthly enjoyment he resigns all heavenly happiness. He casts away his serious and honourable doctor's dress, and puts on the sinful, gaily -coloured tinselled finery which the dancer has left lying on the ground. In this dressing, which he effects clumsily and comically, he is aided by the infernal corps de ballet. Mephistophela now gives Faust a lesson in dancing, and shows him all the handy, or rather footy, tricks of the trade or game. The awkward ness and stiffness of the sage, who attempts to 1 1 “ Zeigt ihm all Handgriffe oder vielmehr Fussgriffe des Metiers . ” The word footy in common American exactly conveys the idea of petty trifling, or clumsy tricks or devices. Another of Heine's “ inimitable and untranslatable graces.” - Translator. 228 DOCTOR FAUST, perform the dainty and graceful pas of his teacher, form the most amusing effects and contrasts. The diabolical chorus of dancing-girls will also give their aid, and every one attempts to show how this or that is to be done. One throws the poor Doctor into the arms of another, who waltzes round with him ; he is pulled and hauled here and there, but by the power of love and of the magic wand, with which his rebellious limbs are constantly being touched, the pupil in choregraphy at last attains perfect dexterity. Then he dances a pas de deux with Mephistophela, and to the delight of all his devilish damsel fellow artists, he flies about with her in the most marvel lous figures. Having attained to this virtuosity he ventures to dance before the lovely lady of the looking - glass, who now responds to his panto mimic love- making with correspondingly passion ate gestures. Faust thereon continues to dance with ever-increasing delirium , but Mephistophela tears him away from the mirror - form , who, touched by the magic wand, at once disappears, and the high - class dancing of the old - fashioned French classic school is resumed. ACT SECOND. A LARGE space before a castle which is seen to the right. On the sloping terrace the Duke and his Duchess sit in high stately chairs, surrounded by their courtiers, knights, and ladies. The Duke is a stiff and formal elderly gentleman, his wife a young, voluptuous, and splendid beauty, the fac simile of the lady of the looking - glass in the first act. It is seen that she wears a gold shoe on her left foot. The scene is splendidly decorated for a court festival. A pastoral play is acted in the most old fashioned rococo style , shallow gracefulness and gallant innocence. This sweetly pretty Arcadian jigging is suddenly interrupted by the grand entrance of Faust and Mephistophela, who, in her dress as dancer, and with her troupe of diabolical ballerine makes triumphal appearance amid joyous trumpet peals. Faust and Mephistophela incline in bounding reverences before the ducal pair, but the former, as well as the Duchess, the more closely they regard one the other, are stirred as with de lightful memories, and regard one another with 229 230 DOCTOR FAUST. mutually tender looks. The Duke seems to accept with peculiarly gracious acquiescence the courtesies of Mephistophela. In an impetuous pas de deux which the latter dances with Faust, both keep an eye on the ducal pair, and when the diabolical dancing girls come and take their place, Mephistophela flirts with the Duke and Faust with the Duchess, the extreme passion of the latter being parodied by the ironic modesty with which Mephistophela repels the angular and starched gallantries of the Duke. The Duke finally turns toward Faust and asks him to give a specimen of his magic art. He wishes to see King David as the latter danced before the Ark of the Covenant. In obedience to this august command, Faust takes the magic wand from Mephistophela, waves it in invocation , and the group called for appear . First comes the Ark drawn by Levites; King David dances before it with the delight of a buffoon, and oddly dressed, like a king of cards ; while behind the holy ark, with spears in their hands, see-sawing about, hop the king's life-guards, dressed like Polish Jews, in long flapping black silk caftans, and with tall fur caps on their nodding heads, with pointed beards. After these caricatures have made the round of the stage, they sink into the earth amid stormy applause . 1 Probably not from the audience. One can imagine how such a travesty of Scripture would have been received by Her a DOCTOR FAUST. 231 Faust and Mephistophela again leap forth in a brilliant pas de deux, in which one looks at the Duchess and the other at the Duke with such amorous piquancy that the illustrious pair can no longer resist, and, leaving their seats, join the dance. This is followed by a dramatic quadrille in which Faust attempts more earnestly than ever to entrap the Duchess. He has discovered a Teufelsmal, or the sign of a witch, on her neck, and as this reveals that she is a sorceress, he appoints a rendezvous with her at the next Sabbat. She is alarmed and denies it, but Faust points at her golden shoe, which is a sure sign that she is the Domina or chief mistress of Satan. With a bashful air she grants the rendezvous. The Duke and Mephistophela renew their affected love-scene, and the demon dancers take the place of the quartette, which gradually disappears behind them. At the renewed request of the Duke to give another specimen of his magic art, Faust grasps the wand, and touches with it the whirling dancers. They change in an instant into the monsters of the first scene, and, instead of gracefully circling, Majesty, the public, and press in London, in 1851. Even Micah, the daughter of Saul, was scandalised at this dance, and despised David in her heart for such “ dancing and playing, ” which was perhaps in Heine's mind. According to Rabbi David Kimchi, this dance of King David was called Chagag, and it was per formed to the accompaniment of the 41st Psalm. 232 DOCTOR FAUST. go tumbling and stumbling among and on one another in the clumsiest manner, and amidst sputtering fires sink into the earth. Roaring applause, for which Faust and Mephistophela bow in thanks to the nobility and honourable public. After each of these exhibitions of magic the gaiety increases, the four chief personages rush again to the dancing -place, and in the quadrille, which is renewed, passion becomes bolder and bolder. Faust kneels before the Duchess, who, in not less compromising action , admits her love ; the Duke, having pulled away by force the laugh ing Mephistophela, kneels before her like a lustful faun. But as he by chance turns round and sees his wife and Faust in such a compromising attitude, he jumps up in a rage, draws his sword, and will stab the insolent conjurer. Faust grasps his magic wand and taps the Duke on the head, from which spring two immense stag's horns, by the ends of which the Duchess holds him back. A general tumult among the courtiers, who attack Faust and Mephistophela. But as Faust waves his wand there is a warlike peal of trumpets, and from the back advances a procession of fully armoured knights. While the courtiers turn as if to defend themselves, Faust and Mephistophela fly through the air on two black steeds. At the same instant the knights vanish like a phantas magoria. ACT THIRD. NOCTURNAL meeting -place of the witch Sabbat. A broad plain on the summit of a mountain . Trees on either side, on whose branches hang strangely formed lamps, which illuminate the scene, In the midst is a stone pedestal or block, like an altar, on which stands a black goat with a black human face, and a burning candle between the horns. In the background rise, one above the other, the tops of mountains, as in an amphitheatre, on whose colossal steps sit as spectators the notabilities of the Under -world that is, those princes of hell whom we have seen in the previous acts, and who now appear giant like. On the trees right and left sit musicians with faces like birds, holding eccentric stringed and wind instruments. The scene is animated with groups of dancers, whose dresses recall the most different lands and ages, so that the whole assembly seems like a masked ball, the more so because many are really masked and mummed. But however baroque, bizarre, and startling many 233 234 DOCTOR FAUST. of these forms may be, they should not conflict with a sense of beauty, and the ugly impressions of caricatured creatures is softened or extin guished by fairy - like splendour and positive horror. Before the goat's altar a man and woman walk up and down, each bearing a black candle ; they bow before the back-side of the goat, kneel down, and pay it the homage of a kiss. Meanwhile new guests come riding through the air on brooms, pitchforks, great spoons, or on wolves and cats. These arrivals find their lovers or sweethearts awaiting them. After a most joyful welcome they mix with the dancing groups. Also her Highness the Duchess comes flying on an immense bat ; she is as devoid of clothing as is possible, and wears on her left foot the golden shoe. She appears to seek with impatience for some one. Finally she beholds the desired one, or Faust, who comes with Mephistophela on a black horse to the festival. He wears splendid knightly clothing, and his companion is modestly clad in the tight-fitting Amazone of a noble German lady. 1 A nice, easy little direction for an average property- man, or even manager, to work up. The kiss described in the next sentence would indeed have caused a sensation in Her Majesty's Theatre. It will occur to the reader that there were other things besides the rivalry of Jenny Lind, or the jealousy of the maître de ballet, which prevented the production of Faust ! -Translator. DOCTOR FAUST. 335 Faust and the Duchess rush into each other's arms, and their attachment shows itself in the most impassioned dancing. Mephistophela has meantime also found her expected sweetheart - a dry and slender gentleman in a black Spanish cloak, and with a blood -red cock's feather. But while Faust and the Duchess dance through all the steps of a progressive, passionate, wild love, the duo of Mephistophela and her partner is, as contrast, only the vulgar sensual expression of gallantry, or of the desire which makes sport of itself. All the four at last take black candles and pay homage to the goat in the manner already described, and end with a grand round, in which the whole assembly whirl about the altar. What is peculiar in the dance is this, that the performers turn their backs on one another, and do not see one another's faces, which are turned away.1 Faust and the Duchess escaping from the round dance, having attained the acme of passionate love, disappear behind the trees to the right hand. The round dance ends. New guests come before 1 “ At the Sabbat the devils danced with the most beautiful witches, in the form of a he - goat. They generally dance in a round, back to back.” Some writers rather simply declare this was done that the dancers, not seeing one another's faces, might not incur mutual recognition in ordinary life . De Lancre, Tractat. de Magia, cited in “ Gypsy Sorcery,” by C. G. Leland, chap. x. p. 159. The witches had three kinds of dances, one of which was probably the polka. Translator. 236 DOCTOR FAUST. the altar and renew the adoration of the he - goat ; among them are crowned heads, even the high dignitaries of the Church in their pontifical gear. Meanwhile monks and nuns appear in the front ground, whose extravagant polka-leaps delight the demons on the hills around, who ap plaud with their long stretched -out claws. Faust and the Duchess reappear, but all his expression is changed, and he turns with disgust from the woman who, with her hair flowing, pursues him with her voluptuous caresses. He shows her in most unmistakable manner that he feels satiety and aversion. In vain she throws herself im ploringly before him, he repels her with disgust. At this instant three negroes, clad in tabards of gold on which black goats are embroidered, come forward, ordering the Duchess to appear at once before her lord and master Satan, and the lady resisting is dragged away by force. In the back ground the goat is then seen to descend from his pedestal and, after making several very singular signs of courtesy, dances with her a minuet, in slow and ceremonious step. The countenance of the goat expresses the misery of a fallen angel and the profound ennui of a blasé prince, that of the Duchess desperate despair. The dance at an end the goat resumes his place on the pedestal, and the ladies who have been looking on ap proach the Duchess with courtesies and reverences, many DOCTOR FAUST 237 and then take her away. Faust meanwhile stands in the foreground, and while looking at the minuet Mephistophela appears by his side. Faust points at the Duchess with disgust and dislike, and seems to relate something horrible . He specially manifests his aversion for all the grotesque ab surdities which he sees around, and all this Gothic rubbish, which only amounts to a stupid and des picable burlesque of ecclesiastical asceticism, and which is as disagreeable to him as the latter . He feels an infinite yearning for the purely beautiful, for Greek harmony, for the unselfish and noble forms of the Homeric world of spring. Mephistophela understands him , and touching the ground with her magic staff the image of Helen of Sparta rises and at once disappears. This it was which the learned Doctor, with his heart yearning for the antique, had always desired. He manifests the greatest inspiration, and at a sign from Mephistophela the magical steeds again appear, on which both fly away. At this instant the Duchess comes on the scene, sees Mephistophela and her lover disappearing, and falls fainting in despair to the ground. Eccentric monsters then raise and carry her round about as if in triumph, with laughter and coarse tricks. 1 Suggested by “ the red mouse ” which sprung from her mouth. 238 DOCTOR FAUST. A renewal of the infernal round dance, which is interrupted all at once by the shrill ringing of a handbell and a choral of an organ , which is a wild sacrilegious parody of church -music . All press up to the altar, where the goat flames up crackling and burns away. After the curtain has fallen the grotesque and horrible sounds of the Satan's mass are still heard.1 1 Heine omits the important part of the ceremony, the gathering of the ashes of the goat. According to Bodinus, ( Dæmonomagia, lib. 2, cap. 4), the devil , as a goat, or rather as a black satyr, after dancing and singing with all the witches holding burning candles in their hands— “ und in den Hindern geküsst haben” -suddenly burnt himself up in a flame, and the witches gathered up his ashes, wherewith to destroy the cattle or flocks of people, or cause other evil. And then came a loud and terrible cry from the devil of, Revenge yourselves or ye shall die ! And when this was done every one found himself by the help of the devil at home again . — Translator. ACT FOURTH. An island in the Archipelago. To the left a view of the sea, of a pure emerald hue, contrasting charmingly with the turquoise blue of the sky, whose sunny daylight shines over an ideal land scape. Vegetation and Greek architecture as beautiful as once were dreamed by the poet of the Odyssey. Pines, laurel- bushes in whose shadows white statues repose, great marble vases with fabulous plants, trees wound with garlands of flowers, crystal waterfalls. To the right side a temple to Venus Aphrodite - whose statue gleams from among the pillars — all animated with a race of men in the prime of beauty, youths in white festival garments ; girls in lightly - girded dresses of nymphs, their heads crowned with roses or myrtle. Some amuse themselves in groups, others are engaged in religious ceremonies about the temple of the goddess. Everything breathes Greek joyousness, the ambrosial peace of the gods and classic repose. Nothing recalls the cloudy past, the mystical thrills of rapture and of agony, the supernatural ecstasy of a spirit which 239 240 DOCTOR FAUST. emancipates itself from the body. Here all is real, plastic happiness, without retrospective melancholy or any foreboding empty yearning. The Queen of this island is Helena of Sparta, the most beautiful woman in poetry, and she dances as the leader of the ladies of her court before the temple of Venus. The dance and the attitudes are in keeping with the surroundings, all in measure chaste and solemn. All at once Faust and Mephistophela break into this world, flying on their black steeds through the air. They seem to be suddenly freed from the gloomy pressure of a nightmare, from a horrible illness or a sad lunacy, and both are revived, and refresh themselves by this sight of the primevally beautiful and the truly noble. The Queen and her train dance hospitably toward them , offer them food and drink in richly em bossed plate, and invite them to dwell in their peaceful, fortunate island. Faust and his com panion accept the invitation by a joyous dance, and all forming a festive procession seek the temple of Venus, where Faust and Mephistophela exchange their romantic mediæval garb for superb yet simple Greek dresses. Returning with Helen to the front scene, they execute a mythologic dance of three. Faust and Helena at last seat themselves on a throne at the right hand, while Mephistophela, a DOCTOR FAUST. 241 seizing a thyrsus and a tambourine, leaps about as a bacchante in wild attitudes. The maidens of Helena, seized with inspiration, tear the roses and myrtles from their heads, wind vine leaves into their loosened locks, and with flowing hair and swinging thyrses dance excitedly as Bacchantæ . Then the young men, arming themselves with shield and spear, take the place of the damsels, and dance in mock battle one of those warlike pantomimes which are so genially described by early authors. Into this heroic pastoral there may be intro duced an antique humorous byplay — that is, a swarm of Cupids riding on swans, who also begin with bows and spears a battle-dance. But this beautiful scene is suddenly interrupted by the entrance of the Duchess, who comes sweeping through the air on her enormous bat, and advances like a fury before the throne on which Faust and Helena are seated. The frightened Cupids leap hastily on their swans and fly away. The enraged Duchess appears to reproach Faust like a fury, and threatens Helena. Mephistophela, who re gards the whole scene with malicious delight, begins anew the Bacchantic dance, in which the maids of the Queen also join , so that this joyous chorus contrasts mockingly with the rage of the Duchess. The latter can at last no longer contain her rage, she whirls the magic wand, and seems VOL. II. Q 242 DOCTOR FAUST. > to accompany the action with the most terrible invocations. Then the heaven grows dark, there is thunder and lightning, the sea rises roaring and storming, and there is on the whole island a terrible change in persons and things. All seems struck by death . The trees stand leafless and barren, the temple falls into a ruin, the statues lie broken on the ground. Queen Helena sits as a dried - up corpse, almost a skeleton, in a white shroud by Faust's side ; the dancing maidens are also only bony spectres, wrapped in white garments which , hanging over the head, only reach to their withered hips. These are the Lamias who are thus represented, and in this form they continue their gay dancing in the round as if nothing had taken place, nor do they appear to have observed any change. Then Faust, furious at seeing all his happiness wrecked by the revenge of a jealous sorceress, darts from the throne with drawn sword, and plunges it into the breast of the Duchess. Mephistophela has meantime brought the two magic steeds. She anxiously urges Faust to mount one, and they ride away through the air. The sea continues to rise , it gradually covers men and monuments, only the dancing Lamias 1 seem to 1 1 These are called in the German version Lamice, but in the French Lemures, which are a very different class of beings, as Heine should have known. The Lamia was a serpent spirit which often appeared as a beautiful woman, seeking to seduce, or even DOCTOR FAUST. 243 take no notice of it, and they continue to dance to the merry sound of tambourines, till the waves reach their heads, and the whole island sinks. Far above the storm - lashed sea, high in the air, Faust and Mephistophela are seen careering away on their black steeds. devour, young men. She was the incarnation of the witch in a deceptive and attractive form. The Lemures were ghosts, spectres, or nightly haunting shades in grotesque shapes, and had in them a great deal of the repulsive bugbear, which forms no part of the smiling, deceptive Lamia. As an illustration of the latter, we have the story told of Apollonius and his pupil , so beautifully poetised by Keats. Of the Lemures there is another narrated by Cardanus ( De Subtilitate) , how a poor man was followed by a spectre, which threw him down, rolled him over, and frightened hiin so that he — octo diebus pcriit-died in eight days. In the Romagna Toscana, Lemuri are to this day i spiriti dei campo santi, " graveyard spirits,” or ghosts. Wierus, in his work De Lamiis, treats them ( the Lamiæ) as witches. Neither Lamia nor Lemures occur as “ bony spectres ; ” the latter are, however, frequently preternaturally long and thin. ( Vide Gerhard's Abbildungen , Berlin, 1868, and sin lar works, ) -Translator, . ACT FIFTH. A GREAT open space before a cathedral, whose Gothic door is seen in the background. On either side neatly trimmed lime trees, under which sit, eating and drinking, citizen folk dressed in the Netherlands style of the sixteenth century. Not far off, men with cross-bows, who in turn shoot at a bird on a pole. All about are amuse ments, as at a fair - booths, musicians, puppet shows, jack -puddings, leaping, and merry groups. In the middle a turfed place, where the better class are dancing. The bird is at last shot down, and the victor, who is a great beer brewer, has his triumphal pro cession as archer-king, with an immense crown on his head, on which are many bells. On his back and before him are sheet- gold shields, with which he walks about proudly ringing and rattling. Before him march drummers and fifers, with a standard - bearer, a bandy - legged dwarf, who acts comically with an immense flag. The archer -pro cession follows gravely behind. 244 DOCTOR FAUST. 245 Before the fat burgomaster and his not less corpulent spouse, who sit with their daughter under the lime- tree, the flag is waved , and all passing bow in salutation. The burgomaster and wife return the compliment, and their daughter, a beautiful girl with blonde hair of the Flemish type, offers the cup of honour to the king of the cross-bow men. Trumpet peals are heard, an l the wise and learned Doctor Faust, in the scarlet and gold embroidered costume of a mountebank, appears on a high car adorned with foliage. Mephisto phela, who goes before the vehicle leading the horses, is also dressed in a “ loud , ” highly -coloured costume, as for one who cries in the market- place, extravagantly set off with ribbons and feathers. She bears a great trumpet, on which she sounds flourishes now and then, while she dances an attractive réclame to the mob.1 The people crowd round the waggon where the itinerant wonderful doctor sells all kinds of draughts and mixtures. Some bring him large flasks of water to examine. He draws the teeth of others. He works visible cures on crippled invalids, who leave him sound and well, dancing for joy. At last he leaves the car, which is driven away, and distributes his · Réclame, an advertisement, catch or gag, editorial puff, or anything to attract and draw attention to an object. - Translator. 246 DOCTOR FAUST. phials containing a fluid, a few drops of which cure every ill , and excite in the taker an irresis tible desire to dance. The king of the marksmen having tasted it, experiences its magic power ; he seizes Mephistophela, and hops with her a pas de deux. The drink has the same effect on the old burgomaster and his wife, and both hobble in an antiquated dance. While all the public whirls in a mad waltz l'aust has approached the burgomaster's daughter, and, enchanted by her unaffected naturalness, modesty, and beauty, declared his love, and with melancholy, and almost modest gestures, pointing to the church, begs for her hand. He renews his request to her parents, who sit gasping for breath on a bench. They are contented with the proposal, and the naïve beauty at last yields a modest assent. She is with Faust crowned with flowers, and they dance, as bride and bride groom , a sober bourgeois nuptial round. The Doctor has found at last in a modest, sweet, and quiet life the domestic felicity which contents the soul. The doubt and extravagant and visionary raptures of suffering of a proud soul are forgotten, and he beams with inner happiness like the gilded cock on a church -spire. The bridal train is formed in becoming style, and it is on the way to church, when Mephis DOCTOR FAUST. 247 tophela suddenly steps in the way, and with mocking laughter and gestures tears Faust from his idyllic sentiments, and seems to command him to instantly depart with her.. Faust, in a rage, refuses, and the bystanders are startled at the scene. But far greater terror overcomes them when suddenly, at the invocation of Mephis tophela, a midnight darkness and a terrible storm covers all . They fly in terror to the church pear by, where a bell begins to toll, and the organ to peal — a sound suggesting religion and piety, which contrasts with the flashing and thundering in fernal horrors of the stage. Faust, who would fain fly with the rest into the church for refuge, is kept back by a great black hand rising from the earth , while Mephistophela with bitter mockery draws from her bodice the parchment which Faust once signed with his blood, showing him that the time of the contract has expired, and that he now belongs, body and soul, to hell. He uses every argument in vain , and in vain has recourse to wailing and prayers for mercy — the female fiend dances round him with every grimace of scorn and mockery. The ground opens, and there come forth the horrible princes of hell, the crowned and sceptred monsters. In a round of rejoicing they also mock Faust, till Mephistophela, who has transformed herself into a horrible serpent, winds 248 DOCTOR FAUST. about and strangles him . The whole group sinks amid roaring flames into the earth , while the peal of the church -bells and the loud -ringing sound of the organ from the church, call pious Christian souls to prayer. COMMENTS ON FAUST. TO LUMLEY, ESQFE, Director of the Theatre of Her Majesty the Queen . DEAR SIR , —I experienced a hesitation or fear which is readily intelligible when I reflected that I had chosen for my ballet a subject which our great Wolfgang Goethe had already employed in his masterpiece. And if it was dangerous even with equal means of representation to strive with such a poet, how much more terribly perilous must the undertaking be when one provokes the combat with unequal weapons. In truth, Wolf gang Goethe had, to express his thoughts, the whole arsenal of the arts of speech ; he was master of all the coffers of the treasury of the German language, which is so rich in minted 1 This is the original dedication by Heine himself in English. 249 250 COMMENTS ON FAUST. thought-words of deep meaning, and ancient native sounds of the world of feeling, or magic formulas which, long vanished from life, still ring as echoes in the rhymes of Goethe's poems, and thrill so marvellously in our imagination. And how scant and poor are the means with which I, poor as I am, can express what I think and feel. I can work only with a slender libretto in which I must indicate as concisely as possible how male and female dancers are to act and make signs, and how I think the music and mise en scène should be arranged. Yet despite this I have dared to poetise a Doctor Faust in the form of a ballet, rivalling the great Wolfgang Goethe, who had before me taken all the freshness from the sub ject, and who to execute it could devote to it a long blooming life, like that of the gods, while to me, the afflicted invalid, only four weeks were allowed by you, my honoured friend, in which to finish my work. " I could not go beyond the bounds prescribed, but within them I have done what a man with good heart and will may, and I have at least aimed at one excellence of which Goethe certainly cannot boast. What we entirely miss in his Faust poem is fidelity to the original legend, a pious 1 The concluding lines of this sentence are omitted from the French version. 2 “ Was ein braver mann zu leisten vermag." COMMENTS ON FAUST. 251 respect for its inner soul, a reverence which the sceptic of the eighteenth century (and such Goethe was to the end of his life) could neither feel nor understand. In this respect he was guilty of à certain arbitrary or original treatment, which was culpable from an æsthetic point, and which finally revenged itself on the poet. Yes, the faults of the poem came from this offence, since, in a 1 These passages for naïveté, vanity, and error, are probably without a parallel in modern literature. Heine reproaches Goethe for departing from the original tradition , to which the answer is , “ What was the original tradition ? ” Is it that which preceded the authentic John Haust, or the collection of tales from many sources which gathered about his name after his death ? And does not Heine, by converting Mephistopheles into a girl, and the whole tale into a French ballet, and in adding a hundred minor original modern details, depart by commission and omission utterly from the spirit of the old traditions in his work ? In all this our author reminds me of a very apropos incident. An artist had won a prize of £ 200 at a competition for a picture of Faust in his studio. As he had represented Faust as a very aged and decrepid man, I objected to it that it was not in accordance with the original text (meaning that of Goethe) , in which the hero is set forth as being of vigorous middle age. To which the artist protested that he had very carefully followed the original. Whereupon a lady who was present went into the adjoining library, and bringing thence “ Faust ” in two full-sized bound volumes, asked the painter to point out his authority ; to which he, aghast, replied , “ Why, I did not know that ‘ Faust ' was so big a book as that ! ” Investigation revealed the fact that he had never heard of Goethe, and that the only " Faust " known to him was the libretto of the opera by that name. Heine's " original text” and its adaptation to the stage is very suggestive of this picture. —Translator. . 252 COMMENTS ON FAUST. departing from the reverent symmetry according to which the legend lived in German popular familiarity with it, he could not execute the work according to the newly-conceived plan based on incredulity ; it was, in fact, never finished, unless we consider that lame or crippled second part of " Faust " which appeared forty years later as the completion of the whole poem. In this second part Goethe frees Faust the necromancer from the fangs of the devil ; he does not send him to hell, but permits him to enter heaven in triumph, accompanied by dancing angels and Catholic cupids, and the terrible compact with Satan, which caused such hair -on - end horror to our ancestors, ends like a frivolous farce-I had almost said like a ballet.1 My ballet contains what is most important in the old legends of Doctor Faustus, and in com bining their principal motives to a dramatic whole, I adhered conscientiously to the existing traditions as I found them in the popular chap - books, as they are sold in our market -places, and in puppet shows as I saw them played in my youth. a 1 Heine here advances the one great point in which he con siders that his ballet excels the poem by Goethe, i.e., that Goethe departs from the tradition by the salvation of Faust's soul. And yet Heine himself has told us a few pages back, in the introduction, that in the old Saxon- Norman “ original legend ” Faust is finally saved by the grace of the Mother of God. In fact it was Goethe, and not Heine, who was true to the original legend. -Translator . COMMENTS ON FAUST. 253 The Volksbücher, or popular works referred to, are not by any means in accordance. Most of them have been patched together, as the compiler pleased, from two much older and greater works on Faust, which, with the so- called Höllenzwang, are to be regarded as the chief sources of the legends. These works are in this relation too important to be passed over without special men tion. The oldest of them was published in Frank fort in 1587 by Johann Spiess, who appears to have not only printed, but also to have written it , although in a dedication to his patrons he says that he received the MS. from a friend, a native of Speier. This old Frankfort Faust-book is far more poetic, profound, and with a deeper signifi cance of symbolism than the second work on the same subject, written by George Rudolph Widman, and published in 1599, in Hamburg. The latter, however, became far more popular, perhaps because it is diluted with sermon - like remarks and grave erudition. By it the better book was crowded out of sight and sunk into oblivion. The third source of the Faust legend is to be found in the so called Höllenzwang— " hell-compulsions " 1_which are written partly in Latin, partly in German , and which are attributed to Doctor Faust himself. They differ very oddly one from the other, and 1 French version, Clef des Enfers, 254 COMMENTS ON FAUST. circulate under different titles. The most famous of them is the Meergeist, the Spirit of the Sea the very name of which was whispered with trembling. The manuscript was long kept in a convent with chain and key. But by some bold indiscretion it was published by Holbek in the Kohlsteg in Amsterdam in 1692. The popular works which were drawn from these sources also contributed to another remark able book on Doctor Faust's servant, Christopher Wagner, who was also skilled in magic, and whose adventures and jests were frequently at tributed to his celebrated master. Its author, who published his work in 1594, declared it was from a Spanish original, and called himself Tholeth Schotus. If it was really from the Spanish, which I doubt, there is here an indica tion by which the remarkable resemblance of the legend of " Faust " to that of “ Don Juan " may be explained. But did a Faust really ever exist ? As with many other workers of miracles, he has been declared to be a mere myth ; in fact, it went even worse with him , for the unfortunate Poles have claimed him for a fellow -countryman, declaring that he is known to them to this day under the name of Twardowski. It is true that, according to the most recent researches as to Faust, he studied magic at the University of Cracow, where > COMMENTS ON FAUST. 255 it was publicly taught as one of the liberal arts, and that the Poles were then great conjurers, which they certainly are not to-day. But our Doctor Faust is of such a fundamentally honest nature, so yearning for the true inwardness of all things, and so learned , even in sensuality itself, that he must be either a fable or a German. But there is no reason to doubt of his existence ; the most creditable authorities attest it : for example, Johannes Wierus, who wrote the celebrated book on witchcraft ; then Philip Melancthon , the brother- in -arms of Luther, as well as the Abbot Tritheim , who was also addicted to mysteries, and who, by the way, perhaps decried Faust out of professional jealousy, and so represented him as a juggler of the market- place and fair. Accord ing to the witness of Wierus and Melancthon, Faust was born at Kündlingen , a little town in Suabia, and I may here remark that the above mentioned principal authorities differed as to his birthplace. According to the older Frankfurt version, he was born as a peasant's son at Rod, near Weimar. In the Hamburg version by Wid man, we are, however, told that “ Faust was born in the County Anhalt, and his parents dwelt in the Mark of Soltwedel; they were pious peasants.” In a memoir of the admirable and honourable tapeworm doctor, Calmonius, with which I am now occupied, I have an opportunity to fully prove 256 COMMENTS ON FAUST. that the real historical Faust is no other than that Sabellicus whom the Abbot Tritheim sketched as a mountebank and arch-rogue, who had abandoned God and the world. The circumstance that he named himself Faustus junior on a visiting-card which he sent to Tritheim, induced the error that there was an elder magician who bore this name. But the word junior here means that Faust had a father or elder brother still living, who was so called, which is a matter of no importance to us. Quite different would it be should I give our Calmonius of to-day such a title, since I should then connect him with an elder Calmonius, who lived in the middle of the last century, and who was by the way a great braggart and liar ; as, for instance, when he boasted that he enjoyed the intimate friendship of Friedrich the Great, and often related how the King with all his army marched past his house, and stopping before the window , called aloud to him “ Adies, Calmonius ; I am going to the Seven Years' War, and I hope to see you again all well ! ” 1 It is a widely -spread popular error that our magician is the same Faust who discovered the art of printing, and it is expressive and deeply > a > 1 All of this preceding passage is omitted in the French version. 2 Heine had not discovered this when he wrote that passage n Germany, in which he identifies Faust the magician with Faust the printer in the most innocent manner. — Translator. COMMENTS ON FAUST. 257 significant. The multitude identified the two, because they surmised that the intellectual direc tion which the black - artist represented had found in printing its most terrible means of extension, and a union was thereby effected between the two. That intellectual direction is, however, Thought itself in opposition to the blind credo of the Middle Age ; to belief in all authorities of heaven and earth ; to a belief in recompense there for abstinence here, as the Church teaches the charcoal- burner who kneels before it. Faust begins to think ; his godless reason rises against the holy faith of his fathers ; he will no longer grope in darkness and idle about in want. He longs for knowledge, worldly power, earthly joys. He will know, have power and pleasure, and -to employ the symbolic language of the Middle Age — he falls off from God, renounces his heavenly happiness, and worships Satan and his earthly glory. This revolt and its doctrine were so mightily and magically aided by the art of printing, that in the course of time it inspired not only highly advanced and cultured minds, but whole masses of the people. Perhaps the legend of " Faust " exerts a mysterious charm on our contemporaries, because they here see so naïvely and comprehensively set forth the battle which we ourselves now fight, the modern strife between religion and science, between authority VOL. II, R 258 COMMENTS ON FAUST . and reason, between faith and thought, between humble renunciation or submission to sorrow and daring luxury — a fight to the death, the end whereof will perhaps be that the devil will take us all , as he did the poor Doctor born of the Barony of Anhalt, or of Kundlingen in Suabia. Yes, our black - artist in the legend oft appears as one with the first printer . This is specially the case in the puppet- plays, where we always find Faust in Mainz, while the popular chap books invariably indicate Wittenberg as his abode. And it is very remarkable that Wittenberg, the home of Faust, was also the birthplace and labora tory of Protestantism . The puppet- plays which I have mentioned were never printed, and it was only very recently that one of my friends published the manuscript text of such a work . This friend is Karl Simrock, 2 66 > 1 It is generally believed that the term " printer's devil” is derived from the story of Faust, this person being the general attendant or Mephistopheles of the " typos.” The terms “ chapel," " monk ,” “ friar, ” and “ hell," all date from the fifteenth century. — Translator. 2 This was written in 1847. Heine does not seem to have been aware that August Zoller in his Bilder aus Schwaben had long previously published a description with most of the text of a puppet- show of Faust, which the author witnessed as given by a troupe of wandering gypsies. A translation of it may be found in my work on Gypsy Sorcery ( pp. 247, 248) , London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1891. Zoler's book was published at Stutt gart in 1834. — Translator. COMMENTS ON FAUST. 259 who attended with me, at the University of Bonn, the lectures of Schlegel on German archæology and metres, and also measured out with me many a good pint of Rhine wine, and so to a degree perfected himself in the auxiliary studies which subsequently aided him when publishing the old puppet - play. He restored the missing passages with tact and genius, selecting from such variations as were available, while the treat ment of comic characters shows that he had made deep study of the German Jack-puddings or clowns — probably in the lecture of August Wilhelm Schlegel in Bonn. How admirable is the beginning of the play where Faust sits alone in his study among his books and repeats this soliloquy : “ And I have brought it now so far in learning, That everybody laughs when me discerning ; All booksI have read over again and over, And yet the stone of Wisdom I can by no means discover, Jurisprudence and Medicine are of no use to me, There is no healing now — unless in Sorcery. 1 Ausstechen, to prick , mark, or cut out a pattern. Also a play on Auszechen, to empty by drinking. Karl Simrock sub. sequently became known by his translation of the Nibelun genlied, his Rhine legends in ballad form , and many other valuable works. As both Heine and Simrock were passionately devoted to the same studies, the mutual influence exerted by the two friends was doubtless very great. -Translator . 260 COMMENTS ON FAUST. The study of Theology did not a avail a whit, Who'll pay me for the nights which I wasted over it ? In this my only coat the rents are gaping wide, And from my creditors I know not where to hide. The hidden depths of hell perhaps may help me more, That I the hidden depths of Nature may explore ; But to call up its spirits by citation I must in magic get some further information .” The scene which follows contains several highly poetic and deeply moving motives, which would be well worthy of far greater tragic poems, and have indeed been taken from such. These are, firstly, the “ Faust ” of Marlowe, a genial master piece, which the puppet- plays imitate not only as regards plot but also in form . Marlowe's “ Faust ” may have served for model to other English poets of his time as regards treatment of material, and passages from such pieces have in fact passed into the puppet- plays. Such English Faust - comedies were probably at a later period translated into German and acted by the so - called English comedians, who also performed the best Shake 1 “ Von den so-gennanten englischen Komödianten .” This is given in the French version simply as “ par les trompes ambu lantes .” It involves a great error . These “ so -called " English actors were really of English birth, and they went over to Ger many in what were certainly astonishingly great numbers, as Dr. Bell, who luch arch on the subject in German records, shows in his “ Puck.” Dr. Bell conjectures that Shakespeare was for a long time in Germany, acting in such COMMENTS ON FAUST. 261 spearean works on German stages. Only the names of the plays of these English companies have been kept ; the dramas themselves, which were never printed, have now perished , unless they possibly are preserved by some minor theatre, or in strolling companies of the lowest class . I myself remember to have seen the life of Faust twice played by such art- vagabonds, and not as worked up by modern poets, but probably from fragments of old and long -perished plays. The first of these I saw twenty - five years ago, in a corner theatre on the so - called Hamburger Berge, between Hamburg and Altona. I remember that the devils who were summoned were all deeply disguised in grey sheets or shrouds. To Faust's question, “ Are ye men or women ? " they replied, a troupe, and he cites many passages from his plays to prove it, some of which are very ingenious, while many are unfortunately so far- fetched that his arguments have not received the atten tion which they perhaps deserve. It is possible that a scrutiny of German town- archives may bring to light more information in the form of licenses issued to such English players, and possibly the names of many of them. -Translator. Heine might easily in 1834 or in 1844, or even much later, had he frequented fairs in Germany or visited Philadelphia, have seen “ Faust ” in the old form, not twice, but scores of times, and it occasionally occurs even at the present day as a “ side show . ” Another play of the same school was “ Old Hontz ( Hans) and his Comical Family.” The first time I ever heard of Dr. Faustus was when a fellow-schoolmate who had seen it at some small show in Philadelphia narrated to me the plot. -Translator. 262 COMMENTS ON FAUST . “ We are of no sex .” Faust asked further, what they really looked like under their grey coverings, and they answered, “ We have no form which we can call our own, but we will take according to thy will whatever shape you ask us to assume, for we shall ever seem like thine own thought. ' After the contract had been concluded, which assured him the knowledge and enjoyment of all things, he asked for information as to heaven and hell, which being given , he remarks that it seems to be too cool in heaven and too hot in hell, and that the most tolerable climate must be that of our own good earth . He wins the fairest women of this same good earth by the power of his magic ring, which confers on him the most blooming form of youth, beauty, and winsome ness, also the most magnificent knightly array. After many years of debauchery he has an in trigue with a Signora Lucretia, the most famous courtesan of Venice, but treacherously abandons her and sails for Athens, where the daughter of the Duke falls in love with, and will marry him. Lucretia in desperation seeks counsel of the in fernal powers to be revenged on the faithless lover, and the devil confides to her that all the glory of Faust will vanish with the ring which he wears on his forefinger. Signora Lucretia travels in pilgrim garb to Athens, and arrives at court just as Faust, in bridal garb, holds out COMMENTS ON FAUST. 263 his hand to the beautiful Duchess to lead her to the altar. But the disguised pilgrim , the woman seeking vengeance, suddenly pulls the ring from his finger, when all at once the youthful features of Faust change to a wrinkled and aged face with toothless mouth ; instead of a wealth of golden curls, a few silver hairs cling to his poor skull ; his shining purple splendour of apparel falls like dry leaves from his bent and tottering form , which is now covered only with vile rags. But the disenchanted enchanter is not aware that he has changed, or rather that his body and clothes now reveal the real ruin which he had been twenty years before, and which has gone on while devilish glamour hid the sight from men ; he does not understand why the court-minions draw back from him in disgust, or why the Duchess cries : " Take the old beggar from my sight ! ” Then the disguised Lucretia vindictively holds a mirror before him , and he sees in it with shame his true form , and is cast out of doors by insolent menials like a mangy dog. The other Faust-drama I saw during a horse market in a village in Hanover. A small theatre had been carpentered up, and though the play was acted by broad daylight, still the evocation scene was sufficiently terrible. The demon who appeared did not call himself Mephistopheles but Astaroth, a name which is probably identical with 264 COMMENTS ON FAUST. that of Astarte, although the latter in the secret lore of the Magians was regarded as the spouse of Astaroth. This Astarte is in those writings represented with two horns on the head, which form a half-moon, as she was really once wor shipped in Phænicia as a moon-goddess, and was consequently regarded by the Jews, like all the deities of their neighbours, as a devil.1 King Solomon the Wise, however, prayed to her in secret, and Byron has celebrated her in his “ Faust," which he called “ Manfred .” In the puppet-play published by Simrock, the book by which Faust is led astray is called Clavis Astarti de Magica . In the play of which I speak, Faust prefaces his invocation with the complaint that he is so poor that he must always go on foot, that not even a cow - girl will give him a kiss, and that he would give himself to the devil for a horse and a fair princess. The devil when called appears at first in forms of different animals—of a swine, an ox, an ape ; but Faust rejects him every time 1 I think it is mentioned in “ The Mysteries of the Cabiri,” by G. Stanley Faber, that it was recognised in Syria that the morning star had its phases like those of the moon. Astarte is in fact the goddess of the Morning Star, an identity curiously found in the name in many languages, or Venus. All the early Assyrian , as well as Etruscan deities were in pairs, male and female. It is needless to say that the goddess Astarte is not celebrated in Manfred, though the mysterious love of the hero bears that name. - Translator. COMMENTS ON FAUST. 265 with the remark, “ You must appear in a more frightful form to frighten me!” Then the devil comes as a roaring lion — quærens quem devorat but he is not terrible enough for the intrepid magician, and must retreat with his tail between his legs behind the scenes, whence he comes forth again as a giant serpent. “ You are neither hideous nor horrible enough yet !” exclaims Faust. The devil again put to shame must pack off as before, and we see him reappear as a magnifi cently handsome man, wrapped in a scarlet cloak . When Faust expresses his astonishment at this, Red Cloak replies that, “ There is nothing more terrible or cruel than man ; there grunt and bellow, bleat and hiss in him the natures of all other beasts. He is as nasty as a pig, as brutal as a bull , as wrathful as a lion, as venomous as a serpent — he is a combination of all animality . ” The extraordinary agreement of this old comedy tirade with one of the chief doctrines of the new philosophy of nature, especially as developed by Oken, struck me forcibly. After the dia bolical compact is signed Astaroth proposes to Faust several beautiful women whom he com mends — for instance, Judith. “ I do not want a she- executioner,” replies the hero. “ Cleopatra, then ,” suggested the spirit. ““ No more than the other,” answers Faust. “ She is too extravagant, too dissipated ; she ruined Mark Antony-why, 266 COMMENTS ON FAUST. she drinks pearls.” “ · Well, then,” remarks the mischievous fiend, “ what do you say to the beauti ful Helen of Greece ? " adding ironically, “ You can talk Greek to her.” The learned doctor is enraptured at the pro posal, and then requires that the devil shall bestow on him bodily beauty and magnificent garments that he may successfully rival Paris, also a horse on which to ride at once to Troy. Consent being obtained, he departs with the spirit, both reappearing directly, mounted on high horses. They cast away their cloaks, and we see them in gorgeous spangled finery, as English jockeys, perform the most astonishing equestrian tricks, to the amazement of the assembled grooms who stood round with their red Hanoverian faces, and in rapture slapped their yellow leather breeches, so that there was such applause as I never heard before at any dramatic performance. Astaroth, who was a slender, very handsome girl, with the largest infernal black eyes, really rode most charmingly. Faust also was a smart young fellow in his gay jockey dress, and rode far better than all the German doctors whom I have ever seen. He galloped with Astaroth round the ring, at the further part of which we saw the city of Troy, with fair Helena looking from the battlements. The appearance of Helen in the legend of " Faust" is of inexpressible significance. She characterises COMMENTS ON FAUST. 267 the time in which it appeared, and reveals its deepest sentiment. That ever blooming ideal of grace and beauty, fair Helena of Greece, who one fine morning makes her appearance in Witten berg as Mrs. Doctor Faust, is that Greece and Hellenism itself which suddenly rose in the heart of Germany as if summoned by magic spell. The magic book, however, which contained the most powerful of those incantations was called Homer, the true and great Höllenzwang - Key or Compul sion of Hell — which allured and seduced Faust and so many of his contemporaries. Faust, whether the historical or literal, was one of those humanists who disseminated with zeal and enthusiasm in Germany Greek culture, learning and art. capital of that propaganda was Rome, where the most distinguished prelates adhered to the cultus of the ancient gods, and where the Pope himself, like his predecessor Constantine, capped the office of a Pontifex Maximus of heathenism with the dignity of chief of the Christian Church. It was the so-called time of the resurrection, or, better expressed, of the re -birth of the ancient view of all things, or , as it is most correctly called , of the Renaissance. It was easier for it to flourish and rule in Italy than in Germany, where it was opposed by the contemporary appearance of the new translation of the Bible, and the new birth of the Jewish spirit, which we may call the 268 COMMENTS ON FAUST. 66 > Evangelical Renaissance, which attacked it with such iconoclastic fanaticism . Strange that the two great books of humanity, which had, a thou sand years before, waged such fierce battle, and then rested during all the Middle Age as if weary of war - I mean Homer and the Biblein the be ginning of the sixteenth century again enter the lists. As I have already declared that the revolt of the realistic sensual lust and love of life against the spiritual old Catholic asceticism is the leading idea of the legend of " Faust," I will here remark in relation to it how that sensual realistic joy of life itself rose in the souls of thinkers suddenly as they became familiar with the monuments and records of Greek art and learning, and as they read the original works of Plato and Aristotle. And in both of these, as tradition expressly asserts, Faust had so deeply buried himself that he once declared that if those works should ever be lost he could restore them from his memory, as Ezra did of yore the Old Testament. How deeply Faust had penetrated into Homer appears by the legend that he once showed the students, who attended his lectures on the poet, all the heroes of the Trojan war in person. In the same manner he, at another time, to entertain his guests, called up the beautiful Helen, whom he subsequently obtained for himself of the devil, and whom he possessed even unto his COMMENTS ON FAUST. 269 unhappy end, as the older Faust-book informs us. The book of Widmann merely mentions these incidents as follows: “ I will not keep from the Christian reader the fact that I found in this place certain stories of Dr. Johann Faust which I for very important Christian reasons would not describe, as, for instance, that the devil always kept him from marriage, and so drove him into his infernal and disgusting net of harlotry, giving him for concubine Helena from hell, who first had by him a horrible monster, and after that a son named Justus.” The two passages in the older work on Faust referring to the beautiful Helen are as follows : “ On Whitsunday the above-mentioned students came unexpectedly again to supper in the house of Doctor Faustus, bringing with them their food and drink, and were agreeable guests. When the wine went round, conversation turned on beautiful women, and one said that there was no beauty whom he desired to see more than Helen of Græcia, through whom the fair town of Troy had perished , and that she must have been beautiful indeed, because she had been so often abducted, and caused such great disturbance. • Since you are so desirous, ' said Faust, of seeing the lovely form of Queen Helen, wife of Menelaus, or the daughter of Tyndarus and Leda, sister of Castor and Pollux, she who was reputed 270 COMMENTS ON FAUST. to be the most beautiful in Græcia, I will bring her before you in form and figure as she was in life, as I also did to the Emperor Charles V. , at his desire, the representation of the Emperor Alexander the Great and his spouse. ' Thereupon Dr. Faustus forbade any one to speak or to rise from the table, or to venture to salute or embrace, and with this he left the room . When he re turned, Queen Helena followed him on foot, so wondrous fair, that the students knew not whether they were themselves, so bewildered and burning with passion were they.. This Helena appeared in a splendid dark purple dress ; her hair hung down beautiful and glorious as gold, and so long that it came unto the knee ; with coal-black eyes, a charming countenance with a small round head, her lips red as cherries with a dainty little mouth, a neck like that of a white swan, cheeks like roses, an extremely beautiful and shining face, with a tall and slender person. In summa, there was no fault to find in her, and she looked on all with such bold and coquettish glances, that the students were fired with love for her ; yet as they i It may be conjectured from this direction that Doctor Faustus actually exhibited the form of Helen by means of a magic- lantern. The well- known passages in the “ Life of Ben venuto Cellini” almost prove that this instrument was used for such a purpose. But he may have exhibited some living woman with stage accompaniments and " colour.” — Translator. COMMENTS ON FAUST. 271 woman. regarded her as a spirit, their passion passed away, as did Helena herself with Doctor Faust from the room. When the students had seen this, they begged Doctor Faust that he would do them the favour to let them see her again the next day, that they might bring an artist, who should take her portrait. But this Doctor Faust refused, saying that he could not evoke this spirit when he would ; yet did he promise them her picture, which they might have copied, which indeed was done, and painters spread it far and wide, for it was a truly magnificent picture of a But who made the original for Faust no one ever knew. As for the students, when they went to rest none of them could sleep for thinking of the figure and form which they had so distinctly seen. From which we may see that the devil often inflames and bewilders men by means of love, so that they fall into lasciviousness, from which they cannot afterwards be drawn . " And we read further on in the old book : “ And now it came to pass that wretched Faust, to give full sweep unto his carnal lusts, thinking one midnight when he chanced to wake of Helena of Greece, whom he had shown unto the students upon Whitsunday, demanded of his spirit in the morn to bring her to him for a concubine, which was done, and this Helena was even the same form which had been called up for the students. 272 COMMENTS ON FAUST. And when Doctor Faustus saw her, she did so captivate his heart that he began at once to for nicate with her, and kept her for his bedfellow , and loved her so that he could not bear to be out of her sight. And in the last year she was with child by him, and bare him a son, at which Faus tus rejoiced greatly, and called the babe Justus Faustus. This child revealed to his father many future things which should come to pass in all countries. But when Doctor Faustus afterwards lost his life, both mother and child vanished.” As most of the chap-books on Faust have been drawn from the work of Widmann, there is but scanty mention in them of the beautiful Helen, and its deep significance could therefore be easily passed over. Even Goethe at first missed it when he specially relied ( in writing the first part of *" Faust ” ) on these popular works, and did not avail himself specially of the puppet-plays. Not till four decades later, when he composed the second part of “ Faust,” did he bring Helen into his work ; but then, indeed, he treated her con amore. It is the best, or rather the only good thing in the said second part, or in this allegoric and labyrinthine wilderness, in which, however, on a sublime pedestal, a wondrously perfect Greek marble statue rises before us, its white eyes gazing on us so heathenishly divine and fascinating in its loveliness that we are well nigh moved to sad COMMENTS ON FAUST, 273 1 ness. It is the most precious statue which ever left the atelier of Goethe, and it is difficult to believe that it was cut by the hand of an aged man. It is, however, much more of a work of calm and deliberate execution than the result of inspired imagination, which latter seldom burst forth in great strength by Goethe any more than in his masters and elective affinities — I might almost say by his fellow -countrymen — the Greeks, for these themselves had more harmonious sense of form than excessive fulness of creation, more gift in giving shape than in imagination ; yes, I will plainly utter the heresy —more art than poetry. You will, dearest friend, readily understand from the foregoing indications why I have given an entire act in my ballet to the beautiful Helen. The island to which I transferred her is, however, not one of my own discovery ; the Greeks found it out long ago, and according to the declaration of ancient authors, especially of Pausanius and Pliny, it was in the Euxine Sea, near the mouth of the Danube, and bore the name of Achillea, from the temple of Achilles, which was on it. It was said that the valiant Pelides himself, risen 1 In the French version, “ Labyrinthe obscur qui s'eclaircissant soudain , decouvre à nos yeux sur un piedestal de bas- reliefs mythologiques ce sublime marbre grec, cette statue divinement païenne dont l'aspect subit inonde l'âme de joie et de lumière. " VOL. II. S 274 COMMENTS ON FAUST. from the grave, there wandered about in company with the other celebrities of the Trojan war, among whom was the ever -blooming Helen of Sparta. Heroism and beauty must indeed perish prematurely, to the joy of the vulgar mob and of mediocrity ; but great poets raise them from the tomb, and bring them rescued to some isle of bliss, where flowers and hearts fade nevermore. I have growled somewhat, it may be, over the second part of Goethe's " Faust,"' but I can in very truth not find words sufficient to set forth all my admiration of the art and poetry with which fair Helen is set forth in them. Here Goethe remained true to the spirit of the legend, which is, unfortunately, as I have already remarked, seldom the case with him, a stricture which I cannot repeat too often . As regards this, the 66 1 Vide Doctor Faust : Die bezauberte Insel. By K. Enkel, Oldenburg, 1879. — Translator. 2 The stricture which cannot be repeated too often as regards Heine's excessively high estimate of his own work on “ Faust,” and his depreciation of that of Goethe, is that he virtually de clares that it is, as it were, a stern moral duty for every one setting forth the story to strictly follow the same as described in popular legends as contained in chap-books, or as given in small plays or puppet- shows, in which latter from the beginning every player has improvised or varied the text at his own fancy. The truth is, that every dramatist of “ Faust ” has shaped and coloured it according to the age in which he lived, as did Heine himself unconsciously, for his “ Faust ” is essentially a modern French ballet, which as regards dignity is not even equal to La COMMENTS ON FAUST. 275 devil has the most cause to complain of Goethe. His Mephistopheles has not the least inner rela tionship with the true “ Mephostopheles," as the old chap -books call him . And here my opinion is strengthened that Goethe did not know the latter when he wrote the first part of “ Faust.” If he had, he would not have made him appear so hoggishly humorous, or in such a cynically scur rilous mask. For Mephistopheles is no common infernal blackguard ; 1 he is “ a subtle spirit , ” as و Sylphide. Thus Shakespeare treated such legends just as he pleased, in direct violation of the law laid down by Heine ; and it is an amusing proof of the brilliant inconsistency of our genial author, that he lauds Shakespeare to the skies in the Mädchen und Frauen for his freedom from these old tyrannies of the “ Classic ” school. Heine claims for " Faust " the treatment due to a really historical character, while the latter was really a very ancient type common to many countries. Vide Der Faust der Morgenlander, oder Wanderungen, Ben Hafis, Leipzig, 1797 ; also Meister Twardowski ( Der Polnische Faust ), by H. Max, Wien, 1879 ; Uber Calderons Tragödie vom wunderthätigen Magus. Beitrag zur Verst : der Faust Fabel, Halle, 1829 ; Don Tenorio von Sevilla, und die Schwarzkünstler verschiedener Nationen, in Scheibele's Kloster, Band 2, 3, 5, and 11 . Even the name of Faust was probably a generic one for jugglers before the time of the one in question . Vide Wer war Faustus Senior, by G. Schwetschke, 1855. Finally, it is almost in credible that the all-reading and all -searching Goethe, while writing the first part of “ Faust ” at a time when the play was to be seen at every fair in Frankfort and the text on every book -stand, was in ignorance of anything in relation to it. Translator. 1 Kein gewohnlicher Höllenlump. 276 COMMENTS ON FAUST . . he calls himself, very aristocratic and noble, and of high rank in the hierarchy of the lower regions, or in the diabolical diplomacy wherein he is a statesman, of whom an imperial chancellor may yet be made. Therefore I have given him a form corresponding to his dignity. The devil always delighted from the earliest time to take the form of a beautiful woman, and in the older Faust book it was in such guise that Mephistopheles was wont to soothe and delude Faust when the poor soul was seized with scruples. On which the old book thus naïvely expresses itself : “ When Faust, being alone, would meditate on the Word of God, the devil adorned himself as a right fair woman for his pleasure, embraced and practised with him all lewdness and indecencies, so that he soon forgot the Holy Scripture, casting it to the wind, and going onward in his evil ways." In representing the devil and his comrades as female dancers, I have been truer to tradition than you suppose. It was no fiction of your friend that there were corps de ballets of devils in the time of Faust, since it is a fact which I can prove by citations from the life of Christian Wagner, who was Faust's pupil.1 In the six teenth chapter of this old book we read that the 1 Vide Christoph Wagner chemals Famulus des Doctor Paust. Oldenburg, 1876.- Translator. COMMENTS ON FAUST. 277 epil sinner gave a banquet in Vienna, where devils in the form of women made with stringed instruments the sweetest and most enchanting music, while other devils performed strange and indecent dances. On which occasion they also danced as apes, since we are told, “ Soon came twelve apes, who, making a circle, danced French ballets, as people now do in Italy, France, and Germany, leaping and hopping very well, so that many marvelled thereat.” The devil Auerhahn (mountain -cock ), who was the familiar spirit of Wagner, generally appeared as a monkey, especi ally as one which danced. The old book declares that when Wagner invoked him he became a monkey. “ Then he sprang up and down, danced gaillards and other wanton dances, beat on the tambourine, and blew on the cross pipes and trumpet, as if he had been a hundred .” And here, dearest friend, I cannot resist the temptation to explain to you what the biographer of the necromancer means by the name“ gaillard dances,” for I find in a still older book by Johann Prætorius, printed at Leipzig in 1668, and which contains information as to the Blocksberg, the remarkable information that the above -mentioned dance was invented by the devil, the honourable author saying expressly : 1 Heine here refers to a work, the full title of which is as follows : “ Blockes - Berges - Verrichtung, oder Ausführlicher > 9 ) 278 COMMENTS ON FAUST. “ Of the new galliard - volta, an Italian dance in which the performers act in a most unseemly manner, and spin and reel round like tops when whipped , and which was brought by sorcerers from Italy to France, one may say that such a whirling is full of infamous and revolting gestures and indecent movements, and brings evil with it, since from it come murders and miscarriages. Which is indeed , where there is a proper police, a thing to be looked after, and most severely pro hibited. And while the city of Geneva especially detests dancing, Satan taught a young daughter Geographischer Bericht, von den hohen trefflich alt und be rühmten Blockes- Berge : ingleichen von der Hexenfahrt und Zauber -Sabbathe, so auff solchen Berge die Unholden aus gantz Teutschland, jährlich den I Mai in Sanct Walpurgis -Nacht an stellen sollen. Aus vielen Autoribus abgefasset und mit schönen Raritäten angeschmücket sampt zugehörigen Figuren, von M. Johanne Prætorio, Poëtâ Laureato Casareô. Nebst einen Appen dice, vom Blockes- Berge, wie auch des alten Reinsteins, und der Baumanns Höhle am Harz. Zu Leipzig, Bey Johann Scheiben und Franckfurth am Mäyn, bey Friedrich Arnsten zufinden . Gedruckt, Anno 1669. " Heine was indebted to this rare work for several suggestions in his Harzreise, if he did not indeed take the idea of the whole from the ascent of the Brocken by Prætorius. The passage here attributed to Prætorius was in a great measure taken by the latter from Pierre Delancre. Translator . 1 “ Wo man einander au schamigen Orten fasset, und wie ein getriebener Topf heru spelt und wirbelt.” This evidently indicates a waltz. Delancre adds to this a Bohemian dance, which was probably the polka. -Translator, COMMENTS ON FAUST. 279 of that place how she could make everybody there dance and spring as much as she pleased, by touching them with an iron switch or rod which he gave her. And she also mocked the judge, and said that they could never bring her to be executed, and had for the evil deed no remorse.” You see from this citation , dearest friend, firstly, what the galliard is, and secondly, that the devil encourages dancing to vex the pious. Truly to force the holy city of Geneva, the Calvinistic Jerusalem, to dance with an iron rod of magic was going far, even to the pinnacle of insolent injury . Just imagine all these little Genevese saints, all these God -fearing watch makers, all these chosen of the Lord, all of these virtuous female teachers, these firm , stiff, angular preacher and pedagogue figures, all at once dancing the galliard ! The story must be true, for I remember to have read it also in the Dæmono magia of Bodinus, and I had a great fancy to work it up into a ballet, to be called Dancing Geneva. The devil, as you see, is a great artist as to 1 Tempora mutantur. I am translating this in Geneva, July 14, 1891 , and there is a notice of a dance to be held or played in the public garden. Delancre tells this story of the witch with the iron rod, but adds significantly that the judge “ found a way to blunt her petulance . ” Vide “ Gypsy Sorcery," p. 158, where the quotation from Delancre is given in full . - Translator, 280 COMMENTS ON FAUST. dancing, and therefore no one should wonder when he presents himself as a danseuse before a highly honourable public. Another metamor phosis which is less natural , but of deep signifi cance, is that in the oldest work on Faust Mephistopheles metamorphoses himself to a winged horse, and carries Faust to all lands and places wherever sense or sensuality ( Sinn oder Sinnlich keit ) desire to go. The spirit here manifests not only the swiftness of thought, but the power of poetry ; he is actually the Pegasus who bears Faust to all the splendours and joys of life in the shortest time. He brings him in a second to Constanti nople, and there into the harem of the Grand Turk, where Faust, who is believed by the odalisques to be Mahomed, enjoys himself divinely. Again he is transported to Rome, where in the Vatican , invisible to all , he snaps from the Pope his best food and wine; and being merry, often laughs aloud , so that the Pope, who believes him self to be alone, is terribly frightened. Here, as everywhere in the “ Faust ” legend, we observe sharp animosity to Papistry and the Catholic Church ; and in this connection it is characteristic that Faust, after the first invocation, expressly orders him to appear in future when summoned, in the cowl of a Franciscan. The old chap - books, not the puppet-plays, show him in this monkish garb, when he disputes with Faust on religious COMMENTS ON FAUST. 281 subjects. Here blows the air of the time of the Reformation . Mephistopheles not only has no real form , but he has never become popular in any determined one, 1 like other heroes of the chap -books-- as, for instance, Tyll Eulenspiegel, that laughter personi fied in the rude and tough form of a German travelling journeyman ; or like the Wandering Jew, with long beard of eighteen hundred years' growth, whose white hairs have again become black at the tip, as if rejuvenated. Nor has Mephistopheles any peculiar shape in the books of magic, like other spirits — as, for example, Aziabel, who always appears as a little infant ; or the devil, Marbeul, who, as is expressly declared, in variably presents himself in the form of a boy of ten years. And I would here remark, that I leave it entirely to your machinist whether Faust and his diabolical companion shall fly through the air on two horses, or both be wrapped in a great 1 This is but partially true. Mephistopheles, as portrayed by Retsch, was taken from a figure which often appears in the works of a painter of the sixteenth century (unless I err) , as mentioned by Kugler ; and I am certain that the devil in this form of a slender man with the cock's feather occurs in other works of the Middle Age. As regards the Wandering Jew of the next sentence, it may occur to the reader to inquire how he can have a beard of eighteen hundred years' growth in pictures in books of the sixteenth century, which are certainly here referred to . - Translator . 282 COMMENTS ON FAUST. magic cloak. The magic cloak is the most common in popular legend. As for the witches when flying to their festival, we must let them fly, no matter whether it be on household implements or monsters. The German witch generally uses a broomstick on which she smears salve, such as she has previously rubbed all over her own naked body. When her infernal gallant comes in person to accompany her, then he sits before and she behind, during the journey. The French witches say, “ Emen -hetan ! Emen hetan ! ” while they are salving themselves. “ Oben hinaus und nirgends an— “ Out above and nowhere on ” l —is the cry of the German chevalières of the broom, when they fly out of the chimney. They know how to arrange it, so that they meet in the air, and fly in swarms to the Sabbath. As the witches, like the fairies, hate the Christian sound of church-bells from the depths of their hearts, they are accustomed when passing belfries to take the bells and throw them with horrible laughter into some morass. Accusations of this occur in witch trials, and the French proverb justly declares that a man should take to flight 1 This means to go through and out of the chimney-top without touching, or, as the French version gives it, “ Du bas en haut, sans toucher. ” From the “ Ingoldsby Ballads” it would seem that the English witch formula was : “ Hey up the chimney -pot ! Hey after you !" — Translator, COMMENTS ON FAUST. 283 2 if he be accused of stealing the bells of Nôtre Dame.1 As for the place of their meeting, which the witches call their convent or their Diet, there are widely differing popular opinions. But from the united testimony of a Remigius, a Godelmann, a Wierus, a Bodinus, and even of a Delancre, I have determined on the top of a mountain grown about with forest, as I have indicated in the third act of my ballet . In Germany, the witch -meeting was, or is usually held on the Blocksberg, which forms the central point of the Harz mountains. And it is not only witches of our native growth who assemble, for there are also many foreigners, and not only living, but also long dead sorceress sinners who have no rest in the grave, and who, like the Willis, are tormented in their graves by an irrepressible desire to dance. Therefore we see at the Sabbath a mixture of dresses of all countries and ages. Aristocratic ladies - les dames de haut parage—in order to be at their ease, are Not exactly a proverb, but the saying of a distinguished man , who took the idea not from witch trials, but from Gargantua's stealing the same church -bells in the Chronicle of Rabelais. But the origin of the saying lay in the stealing of bells by witches . — Translator. By some oversight, Heine here omits his great authority, to whom he was chiefly indebted. This was, as usual, Johannes Prætorius, who devotes thirty-seven pages in his Blockes -Berg to the subject of the witch convents in all the countries of Europe. 2 284 COMMENTS ON FAUST. a mostly masked. The wizards, who are also pre sent in great numbers, are often men who, in ordinary life, affect the most honourable and Christian conduct. As for the fiends, who fulfil the functions of lovers, they are of all degrees, so that an old female cook or cow - girl must content herself with a very low-class, poor devil of a devil, while proud and stately patrician ladies or dames of high degree are proportionately accommodated or served with highly -refined and beautifully tailed devils, and may solace themselves with the most gallant nobles of hell — enfin les diables comme il faut. These latter generally wear the old Spanish or Burgundian court-dress , but either all black, or else of some very “ loud ” light colour, and on their cap waves the indis pensable blood- red cock feather. Yet, however admirable in form and elegant of dress these cavaliers seem at first sight, it is always un pleasantly remarkable that a certain “ finish " is wanting, and close consideration of their whole being reveals a want of harmony, or something out of keeping, which jars on eye and ear. They are always too fat or too lean ; their faces are too 1 i This very graceful costume is still worn by the Pope's chamberlains on ceremonial occasions. It is black. In the German text we have “ entweder von ganz schwarzer oder gar zu schreiend heller Farbe." In French, “ on tout noir ou d'un blanc vif et cru . " —Translator. COMMENTS ON FAUST. 285 pale or too red ; the noses are a trifle too short or too long ; and now and then fingers like bird's claws, or even a horse's hoof, reveal themselves. They do not smell of brimstone, like the lovers of the lower - class witches, who have to content them selves with common snob-goblins, and with the stokers of hell — les ramoneurs, fumistes et chauffeurs de l'enfer, et autre menu fretin.. But there is one sad infirmity common to all the devils of which all the witches of every rank complain bitterly, according to all the judicial investigations, which is the icy coldness of their embraces and their gush of love. Lucifer, King of Darkness by the disgrace of God, presides at the witch meeting in the form of a black he- goat, with a human face and a candle between his two horns. In the centre of the arena of the meeting, his majesty stands on a high pedestal, or stone table, and seems to be very serious and melancholy, like a man who is bored to death . All the assembled witches, magicians, devils, and other vassals worship him by passing in pairs, kneeling and then piously kissing his rear. But even this homagium seems to cheer him very little, still he is not happy, and he remains melancholy and serious while the whole very much mixed society dances in jubilation round him. This round is the famous Witches' Dance, the peculiarity of which consists in this, 2 286 COMMENTS ON FAUST. that the performers all turn their faces away so that they show their backs to one another, and none see each other's faces. 1 This is certainly a rule of precaution, and instituted so that the witches in case of judicial investigation by torture might not be able to declare whom they had seen at the Sabbath. For fear of such betrayals the aristocratic dames came to the ball in masked faces. Many danced en chemise, other ladies dis pensed with this garment.3 Many in dancing 1 This turning away of the face at intervals is, strangely enough, still preserved in the true Bohemian polka, which Delancre calls the Trescone alla Bocma, and says was specially a witch - dance. “ Tunc læva situ tunc, dextra, First to the left, then t'other way ; Aspice retrô in vultu , You look at her, and she looks at you . Das palmam , Join hands, ma'am ! Turn away, run away, just in sham. ” — The Polka. 2 This is only a conjecture, taken almost verbatim from the puritanically modest Prætorius. The witches first danced in a ring looking outwards, with their backs to the goat or centre . After kissing the goat, they danced in couples back to back, and then the bodily connections with the devils took place. That the dancers could have remained with faces unseen by one another through all these performances is preposterous. According to Delancre this dispensation was de rigeur and general. According to Prætorius the peculiar disposition of the arms was not exactly as Heine describes it, but “ die Hände schlossen sie in einen gerundeten Krayss zusammen ” — “ they 3 COMMENTS ON FAUST, 287 crossed their arms or held them akimbo, others stretched them widely out, numbers airing their brooms and shouting “ Har ! Har ! Sabbath ! Sabbath ! ” It is a bad omen when any one while dancing slips and falls. And should a witch lose a shoe in the tumult of the dance it forbodes that she will be burned alive during the coming year. The musicians who play for the dance are either infernal spirits of eccentric or hideous form , or else vagabond virtuosi, picked up on the public roads. Blind fiddlers and flutists are, however, preferred, so that they may not be terrified by the horrors of the Sabbath, as would be the case if they could see . Among these horrors is the initia tion of novices, or young witches, into the most fearful mysteries. Then they are officially wedded to hell, and the devil, their gloomy spouse, gives them a new name or nom d'amour, and brands them with a secret sign as souvenir of his tender ness. This mark is so well concealed that the closed their arms together in a rounded circle ” (not cross, as Heine thought) . This was as if they were hugging some one. It is a very indecent gesture, which is often performed by danc ing girls in Egypt, as I have seen.-Translator. 1 Blind musicians are mentioned by several novelists of the last century as having been in great demand at the shameless orgies which were then commoner than at present. Albeit the ballo angelico is still tolerably well known in Florence, despite the police.—Translator. 288 COMMENTS ON FAUST. a judges at witch trials often had a hard time to discover it, for which reason they caused every hair to be shorn from the body of the accused witch by the beadle. The prince of hell has among the witches of the meeting a chosen one, who is known by the title of archi-sposa or arch -betrothed, who is his special mistress. Her ball costume is simple, or more than simple, for it consists of only one shoe of gold, for which reason she is known as the Lady of the Golden Shoe. She is a beautiful and grand, yes, almost colossal lady, for the devil is not only a connaisseur en belles formes, like a true artist, but also an amateur of flesh , and thinks that the more flesh the more sin . In his refine ment of wickedness he seeks to increase his sin by never selecting a maid, but always a married woman , for his chief bride, thus adding adultery to simple immorality. This archi- sposa must also be a good dancer, and at an unusally brilliant Sabbath ball the illustrious Goat sometimes de scends from his pedestal and in eminent person executes with his naked beauty a peculiar dance which I will not describe, " for very important Christian reasons," as old Widman would say. Only so much will I hint, that it is an old national dance of Gomorra, the tradition of which after the destruction of the Cities of the Plain was pre served by Lot's daughters, and is kept to the COMMENTS ON FAUST. 289 present day, as I myself often saw it executed in Paris at No. 359, Rue Saint Honoré, near the Church of the Holy Assumption. And when we consider that there is on the dancing - ground of the witches no armed morality in the uniform of municipal guards, as in Paris, to check Bac chantic frenzy, one may easily imagine what wild goat capers are cut at the aforesaid pas de deux.1 According to many authorities the great goat and his chief bride preside at the banquet after the dance. The table, furniture, and food at this meal are of extraordinary richness and delicacy ; but whoever carries aught of it secretly away, finds the next day that the golden goblet is only a coarse earthenware pipkin, and the fine cake a cow flap. What is characteristic in the meal is the entire absence of salt. The songs which the guests sing are mere blasphemies, and they squall, bleat, or whine them to the airs of pious hymns. The most venerable religious ceremonies are aped by infamous buffooneries. Thus, for example, bap tism is ridiculed by christening toads, hedgehogs, or rats exactly according to the rite of the Church ; and during this abominable deed the godfather 1 These two sentences are omitted in the French version . Translator. 2 Here there is a contradiction between mediæval and classic tradition. Salt, according to Monesimus, was sacred to the infernal deities.-Translator. VOL. II. T 290 COMMENTS ON FAUST. " 1 and godmother act like devout Christians, and make the most hypocritical faces. The baptismal water is that of the devil. The witches also make the sign of the cross, but reversed, and with the left hand. Those who speak Latin tongues pro nounce meanwhile the words : “ In nomine Patrica Aragneais, Petrica, agora, agora, Valentia, jouando goure gaits goustia ,” which means, “ In the name of Patrike, of Petrike, of Aragonia, in this hour, Valentia, all our suffering is past." To mock the divine doctrine of love and forgiveness the infernal goat at last soars his most terribly thundering voice, “ Revenge yourselves, revenge yourselves, else ye shall die ! ” These are the sacramental words with which the witch meeting closes, and to parody the sublimest act of the passion, the Anti- Christ sacrifices himself, but not for the good, but for the evil of mankind ; that is , the goat burns himself, flaming up with a great crackling sound, and every witch endeavours to obtain a handful of his ashes, to be used in subsequent sorceries. Then the ball and the banquet are at an end, the cock crows, the ladies begin to shiver, and as they came, so they go, but far faster ; and 1 “ In the name of Peter of Aragon, Peter, now, now ( ahora) Valentia, now our suffering passes. ” Patrica is, I think, master or priest. This passage is curious and interesting as probably explaining the origin of the word patrico, a priest, in early English cant. -Translator. COMMENTS ON FAUST. 291 many a Mrs. Witch lies down in bed by her snor ing spouse, who has not observed that it was only a log of wood, which , having assumed the form of his wife, had lain during her absence by his side. I, too, my dear friend, will go to bed, for I have written deep into the night, to bring together all the items which you wished to have noted. I have in so doing thought less of the theatrical director who is to bring my ballet on the stage than of the gentleman of great culture, who is in terested in everything relating to art and thought. You understand the most fleeting hint of the poet, and every word from you is of value to him. It is incomprehensible to me how you, the experi enced and practical man of business, can be so gifted with that extraordinary sense of the beauti ful ; and I am even more astonished how you, amid the many tribulations and trials of your professional activity, have been able to retain so much love and inspiration for poetry . THE study here presented is the last product of my pen ; only a few of its pages date from an earlier time. I make this remark that it may not seem as if I were treading in the footsteps of certain book - smiths who have often profited by my researches into legendary lore . I would gladly promise a continuation of this work, for which I have accumulated material in my memory, but the very critical state of health in which I now am does not permit me to contract any obligation for the future. ) We are all passing away, men, gods, creeds, and legends. It is perhaps a pious work to preserve the latter from oblivion, so that they are em balmed, not by the hideous process of Gannal, but by employing secret means which are only This passage, as the German editor of Heine's works de clares, formed the introduction to the first publication of " The Gods in Exile" in the Revue des Deux Mondes of April 1 , 1853. It is not found in the latest French edition, and is given in the German as a note . - Translator. 295 296 PREFACE. to be found in the apotheca of the poet. Yes, creeds are fleeting and traditions too ; they are vanishing like burnt out tapers, not only in en lightened lands, but in the most midnight places of the world, where not long ago the most startling superstitions were in bloom. The missionaries who wander over these cold regions now complain of the incredulity of their inhabitants. In the report of a Danish clergyman of his journey in the North of Greenland, the writer tells us that he asked of an old man what was the present state of belief among them. To which the good man replied, “ Once we believed in the moon, but now we believe in it no longer. ' " 2 HEINRICH HEINE. Paris, March 18, 1853. 1 Among the thousand wise, witty, or true remarks of Heine, there is not one better worthy of note, especially by folk-lorists, than this, at a time when so many show by their comments that the differences, dates, and origins of traditions are all that is of any interest to them. - Translator. 2 It is perhaps worth while to remark that this old Green lander referred to the legend which may be found in Rink's work on the traditions of Greenland, that the moon is a girl who, having been debauched by her brother the sun, constantly flies from him. The same story is found among Hungarian gypsies, and it exists or did exist in forms more or less modified among the old Irish, the natives of Borneo, and in Northern Italy. A QUEER thing is this writing! One man has luck in the practice thereof, and another none; but the worst mischance in such work which could well befall any man happened to my poor friend, Heinrich Kitzler - Henry Tickler — Magister Artium in Göttingen . There is not a man there so learned, so rich in ideas, so industrious as this friend; and yet to this hour no book by him has ever appeared at the Leipzig fair. Old Stiefel 1 in the library always smiled when Heinrich Kitzler asked him for a book “ which he needed for a work which hehad ' under his pen .' " “ It will be a long time under the pen ! ” murmured old Stiefel, while he went up the ladder. Even the cook maids laughed when, having been sent for books, they cried for “ something for the Kitzler !” 2 He was generally regarded as a goose, but in fact he was only an honest man. a 6 66 > No one 1 Stiefel, lit. boot. “ True to one as an old boot. ” 2 This passage is omitted from the French version. 297 298 THE GODS IN EXILE. 66 knew the real cause why no book by him was over published, and it was only by chance that I discovered it, and thus it was. One midnight I went to his room to light my candle, for his apartments adjoined mine. He had just com pleted his great work on the “ Magnificence of Christianity,” 1 but he seemed in nowise to rejoice thereover, and gazed with sorrow on his manuscript. “ And now ," I remarked, “ your name will figure at last in the catalogue of the Leipzig Fair among the books really published ! ” Ah, no !” he sighed from the depths. “ This work too must be burned like the others." Then he confided to me his terrible secret, and truly it appeared that whenever he wrote a book bad luck befel him in abundance ; for when he had fully developed for the subject in hand every point in its favour, he felt himself in duty bound to give every objection which an opponent might adduce. Therefore he sought out with care all the arguments on the other side of the question, and as these unconsciously took root and grew in his mind, it came to pass that his opinions changed, and in the end he was thoroughly convinced that his book was all wrong. But >> 1 “ Die Vortrefflichkeit des Christenthums. Vortrefflich implies pre- eminent as well as admirable or good in itself. THE GODS IN EXILE. 299 he was then honourable enough ( as every French author would be, of course, under similar circum stances ) to sacrifice the laurel of literary famo on the altar of truththat is, to throw his manuscript into the fire. It was for this reason that he sighed from his very soul after having perfectly proved the magnificence of Chris tianity. “ I have,” he said sorrowfully, " copied twenty basketfuls of quotations from the Church Fathers. I have bent for whole nights over my study table and read the Acta Sanctorum, while in your rooms punch was drunk and the Landesvater sung . In stead of buying a meerschaum pipe, which I deeply desired, I spent thirty -eight hardly earned thalers, for recent theological works, on Vanden hoeck and Ruprecht the booksellers. I have worked like a dog for two years, two precious years of life, and all to make myself ridiculous, and to cast down my eyes like a baffled braggart when the church - counsellor's wife, Madame Planck, asks me, “ When will your work on the Magni ficence of Christianity appear ?' Ah, the book is ready,” sighed the poor man , " and it would please the public, for I have in it exalted the victory of Christianity over Heathenism ; and I have proved in it, too, that thereby Truth and 6 • This clause in parentheses is omitted in the French version. 300 THE GODS IN EXILE. a Reason prevailed over Hypocrisy and Folly. But I, miserable man , feel in my heart of hearts that ” 1_ “ Silence !” I cried with , justindignation. “ Do not dare, oh infatuated and blinded man , to blacken the sublime and pull the brilliant light down into dust . Even if thou wouldst deny the miracles of the New Testament, still thou canst not deny that the victory of that Evangel was in itself a miracle. A little troop of unprotected men pressed into the great Roman world, defying both its satellites and its sages, and triumphed by the Word alone. But what a Word ! Dry and crumbling heathenism shook and was shattered by the words and voice of these foreign men and women , who announced a new kingdom of heaven , and feared nothing in the old world , not the claws of wild beasts, nor the wrath of wilder men, nor fire or sword — for they themselves were the fire and sword -- sword and fire, of God. That sword, trimmed away the dead leaves and dry twigs 2 i French version , “ Mais infortuné mortel que je suis, je sais au fond de mon âme que le contraire a eu lieu, que le mensonge et l'erreur By this beautiful mixed metaphor Heine intimates what he anon confesses, that this is the eloquence of a student after many pints of beer. In the French version, “ Oses -tu bien, aveugle que tu es, rabaisser ce qu'il y de plus sublime, et noircir la lumière ? ” Which is probably an intelligent rection ” by a French reviser.-- 7'ranslator. cor THE GODS IN EXILE. 301 from the tree of life, and thereby cured it of the rottenness which was eating in ; this flame warmed again to life the frozen trunk, so that fresh foliage and perfumed blossoms bloomed anew. It is the most terribly sublime manifestation in the history of the world, this first appearance of Christianity, its battles and its perfect victory." I uttered these words all the more grandly as became the subject, because I had that evening drunk a great deal of Eimbecker beer, for which reason my voice resounded in its fullest tones. Henry Tickler was in nowise touched by this discourse, nor was he disconcerted , and with ironic yet suffering smile he said , “ Brotherly heart, give thyself no needless inconvenience ! All which thou hast said I have stated in this manuscript, far better and far more fundamentally. In it I have depicted in the harshest colours the corrupt condition of the world during heathenism , and I dare to flatter myself that my bold touches with the brush recall the works of the best of the fathers of the Church. I have shown how de bauched and debased the Greeks and Romans became from the bad examples of those gods who, to judge by the vices attributed to them, were hardly worthy to be classed with men. I have, without mincing the matter, boldly declared that even Jupiter, the chief of the gods, deserved, ac cording to the criminal law of Hanover, a hundred 302 THE GODS IN EXILE. times the penitentiary, if not the gallows; while, on the other hand, I have appropriately para phrased the moral axioms of the New Testament, and shown how, according to the example of their divine prototype, in spite of the scorn and per secution which they thereby incurred, taught and practised the most perfect moral purity. That is the most beautiful passage in any work where I depict, as if inspired, how youthful Christianity, like a little David, enters the lists with ancient heathenism and slays the great Goliath. But, ah me ! since then this duel appears to me in a new and doubtful light ! Alas ! all love and joy for my apology disappeared when I vividly presented to myself how an opponent would represent the triumph of Christianity ! There fell , unfortunately, into my hands the works of several later writers, such as that of Edward Gibbon, who did not speak so favourably of that victory, nor did they seem to be much edified by the fact that the Christians, when the spiritual sword and flame did not suffice, availed themselves of material weapons and material fire. Yes, I must confess that there at last stole over me a terrible pity for the remains of heathenism, for those beautiful temples and statues, for they no longer belonged to the religion which had been dead long, long before the birth of Christ, but to Art, which lives for ever. And tears came to my eyes when I one day, by chance, read in the library the “ Defence of the Temple,” in which the old Greek Libanius implored most touchingly the pious barbarians to spare those precious masterpieces with which the artistic genius of the Greeks had adorned the world. But all in vain ! Those monuments of the spring -tide of mankind which could never return, and which could only bloom once, perished irrecoverably through the gloomy zeal for the de struction of the Christians. “ No! ” continued the master, “ I will not by publishing this work contribute to such sacrilege. No, that will I never. And to you, ye shattered statues of beauty—to you, ye manes of the dead gods—to you who are now only lovely phantoms in the shadowy world of poetry — to you I sacrifice this book ! " Saying this, Henry Tickler threw his manuscript into the flames of the fireplace, and nothing re mained of the “ Magnificence of Christianity " save 66 grey ashes. This happened at Göttingen in the winter of 1820, a few days before that awful New Year's night when the University beadle, Doris, received the most terrible beating, and eighty - five duels were contrahiert, or arranged, between the Bur schenschaft and Landsmannschaft. Those were i Student associations, the Burschenschaft being of a general 304 THE GODS IN EXILE. > fearful blows which fell like sudden showers of sticks on the broad back of the poor beadle. But he consoled himself, as a good Christian, with the conviction that we shall be recompensed at some time in heaven for the pains which we have un deservedly suffered here below . That was all long ago. Old Doris has since many years bid adieu to trouble, and sleeps in peaceful rest before the Weender Gate. The two great parties who once made the duelling grounds of Borden , Ritschenking, and Rasenmuhle ring with their crossing swords, have long since, in deep con sciousness of their common worthlessness, drunk together with extreme tenderness to common brotherhood, and the law of time has made his mighty influence felt likewise on the author of those pages. In my brain less gay and wild caprice or fancy plays, and my heart has grown heavy, and where I once laughed I now weep, and I burn with vexation the altar pictures which I once worshipped. There was a time when I in faith kissed the hand of every Capuchin whom I met in the street. I was a child , and my father let me do so undis and political nature, and the Landsmannschaft local unions of those from different parts of Germany. — Translator. 1 The two pages which follow this sentence, to the words “ I am not at all of the opinion of my friend Kitzler," are omitted in the French version. --Translator, THE GODS IN EXILE. 305 turbed, well knowing that my lips would not always be satisfied with Capuchin flesh . And I indeed grew up and kissed beautiful women. But they often gazed at me so pale and painfully that I was frightened in the arms of joy. Here was a hidden trouble which no one beheld, and with which every one suffered, and I often re flected on it. And also whether renunciation and abstinence are to be really preferred to all the joys of this life, and whether those who have, while here on earth below, contented themselves with thistles, will be on that account the more liberally treated with pine apples in the land above. No, he who ate thistles was an ass, and he who receives blows keeps them . Poor Doris ! However, it is not permitted to me to speak out plainly as to everything over which I have reflected, still less to impart the results of my reflection . Yet must I too go to the grave with closed lips, like so many others ? But I may be permitted to cite a few fleeting facts in order to impart some reason, or at least the appearance of it, to the fairy fables which I here compile. The facts refer to the victory of Christianity over heathenism. I am not at all of the opinion of my friend Kitzler that the icono clasm of the early Christians was so bitterly to be blamed. They could not and dared not spare the VOL. II. U 306 THE GODS IN EXILE. old temples and statues, for in these still lived the old Greek joyousness which seemed to the Christian as devildom . In these temples he saw not merely the subjects of a strange cultus and a worthless and erroneous faith which wanted all reality, but the citadels of actual devils, while the gods whom the statues represented existed for him in reality, but as the devils themselves. When these Christians refused to kneel and sacrifice before the images of the gods, they always answered that they dared not worship demons. They preferred martyrdom to manifesting any act of adoration before the devil Jupiter, the deviless Diana, or the arch female fiend Venus. Poor Greek philosophers ! They could never understand this contradiction, just as they sub sequently never understood that they, in their polemics with the Christians, had by no means to defend the old dead doctrines but far more living facts. What was wanted was not in reality to prove the deeper meaning of mythology by Neo Platonic subtleties, to infuse new symbolic blood of life into the dead deities, and to terribly tor ment themselves by trying to refute the coarse and material abuse of the early Church fathers who ridiculed the moral character of the gods in a manner almost Voltarian — the point in question was to defend Hellenism itself or Greek methods of feeling and of thought, and to defeat the exten THE GODS IN EXILE. 307 sion of Judaism or of Jewish ideas and sentiment.1 The real question was whether the dismal, meagre , over -spiritual, ascetic Judaism of the Nazarenes, or Hellenic joyousness, love of beauty, and fresh pleasure in life should rule the world ? Those beautiful gods were not the essential part of the polemic ; no one believed any longer in the am brosial dwellers on Olympus, but people amused themselves divinely in their temples at festivals and mysteries ; they crowned their heads with flowers ; there were charming religious dances ; they stretched themselves on couches in merry banquets, and perhaps for still sweeter pleasures. All this joy and gay laughter has long been silent, and in the ruins of the ancient temples the old Greek deities still dwell ; but they have lost their majesty by the victory of Christ, and now they are sheer devils who hide by day in gloomy wreck and rubbish, but by night arise in charming loveliness to bewilder and allure some heedless wanderer or daring youth. The most fascinating legends are based on this i This is most strikingly illustrated by Lanctantius, who by his employment of ridicule for argument, and his appeals to vulgar common sense, quite deserves the title of the Christian Voltaire. ( L. Coclii Lactantii Firmiani, Geneva, 1613. ) But his arguments against heathenism are of such a nature that they would be used to- day by a Voltarian infidel far more effectively against the Catholic Church itself .Translator. 308 THE GODS IN EXILE. popular belief, and our more recent German poets drew from them the subjects of their most beauti ful poems. Italy is generally the scene selected, and the hero some German knight who, on account of his youthful inexperience or his fine figure, is ensnared by the beautiful uncanny belles who seek him for their prey . He wanders forth on a fair autumn day with his solitary fancies, thinking perhaps of his native oak - forests and the blonde maiden whom he left behind - the vain boy ! But all at once he stands before a marble statue, at the sight of which he stops, startled. It may be the Goddess of Beauty, and he regards her face to face, and the heart of the young barbarian is secretly seized by the sorcery of the olden time. What can it mean ? He never saw such graceful limbs before, and he strangely realises that in this marble there is a livelier life than he ever found in the red cheeks and lips and all the rosy fleshi ness of his fair countrywomen. Those white eyes gaze at him so voluptuously, yet with such suffer ing sorrow , that his breast swells with love and pity, pity and love. And now he often goes to walk among the old ruins, and the club of his fellow - countrymen is astonished that he is now so seldom seen at their convivial meetings and in their knightly sports. There are strange tales current as to his deeds among the ruins of heathen days. But one morning he burst with pale dis THE GODS IN EXILE. 309 torted features into his inn, pays his reckoning, buckles his knapsack, and hastens over the Alps. What has happened to him ? Well, it happened that one day later than usual, he strolled, after the sun had set, to his beloved ruins, but owing to the growing darkness, could not find the place where he was accustomed to gaze for hours at the statue of the beautiful god dess. After wandering about for a long time at random , he suddenly found himself about midnight before a villa which he had never observed before, and was not a little astonished when servants with torches came forth and invited him in the name of their mistress to enter. What was his astonishment, on entering a vast and brilliantly lighted hall, to behold a lady who was walking to and fro alone, and who, in form and features, had the most startling resemblance to the beauti ful statue of his love. And she was the more like that marble image from being clad in dazzling white garb, her countenance being also very pale. When the knight with a courtly reverence ad vanced to her, she gazed at him long and in silence, and at last asked him with a smile if he was hungry. And though the heart of the knight was leaping within him for love, he still had a German stomach ; in consequence of his wandering for hours he needed a bait, and so very gladly allowed himself to be led by the fair lady 310 THE GODS IN EXILE . to the dining -hall. She took him graciously by the hand, and led him through vast and echoing apartments, which, in spite of all their splendour, seemed to be strangely desolate. The girandoles cast a pale spectral light on the walls, on which variegated frescoes represented all the legends of heathen love, such as those of Paris and Helen , Diana and Endymion, Calypso and Ulysses. The great and strange flowers which stood in marble vases before the windows exhaled a corpse- like, bewildering odour, the wind sighed in the chim neys like a dying man . At last the beautiful lady sat in the dining-room opposite the knight, filled his cup with wine, and, smiling, presented him with the choicest delicacies. And yet many things seemed significantly strange to the guest. When he asked for salt a convulsion which was almost hideous appeared on the face of the hostess, nor was it till the knight had several times repeated his request that she, visibly vexed, bade her ser vants bring the salt-cellar ; and as they placed it with trembling hands on the table, half of it spilled ! However, the good wine, which glowed like fire in the throat of the knight, soothed the secret terror which often thrilled him ; yes, he became confident, confiding, and amorous, and when the beautiful lady asked if he knew what love was, he answered with burning kisses, till at last, intoxicated with passion, and perhaps too THE GODS IN EXILE. 311 with sweet wine, he slept on the bosom of his tender hostess. Yet wild and strange dreams whirred through his mind; harsh and odd faces, such as we see in the delirium of fever, passed before him. Then he seemed to behold many times his old grandmother, as she sat at home in her great chair, praying with trembling lips. Anon he heard a mocking tittering which came from great bats, which fluttered around, bearing great candles in their claws ; but when he looked more closely, it seemed to him that they were the servants who had waited on him. At last he dreamt that his beautiful hostess had changed to a hideous monster, and that he, in reckless fear of death, had drawn his sword and cut her head off ! It was not until a late hour, when the sun was high in the heaven, that the knight awoke. But instead of the splendid villa in which he thought he had passed the night, he found himself amid the well-known ruins, and he saw that the beauti ful statue, which he so dearly loved, had fallen from its pedestal, and its head, broken from the body, lay at his feet ! Of a similar character is the legend of the young knight who once, while playing at ball with some friends, finding that the ring on his finger was in the way, drew it off, and to keep it in safety, put it on the finger of a marble statue. But when the game was over, and he went to the 312 THE GODS IN EXILE . statue, which was that of a heathen goddess, he saw with terror that the marble finger on which he had placed the ring was no longer straight as before, but bent so that he could not reclaim the ring without breaking the hand, from which a certain feeling of sympathy restrained him. He ran to his companions to tell the strange tale, bidding them come to see it with their own eyes, but when they were before it, the statue held out its fingers straight as before, and the ring was gone. Some time after this occurrence, the knight determined to enter the holy state of matrimony, and the wedding was celebrated. But after the bridal, when he would retire to bed, a female form which was identical with that of the statue in face and form , came to him and claimed him for her own , declaring that as he had put his ring on her finger, he was thereby betrothed to her, and was her spouse by right. In vain did the knight resist this claim ; every time when he sought to approach his bride the heathen woman interposed herself between him and his wife, and this happened again and again, so that the knight became sad and troubled indeed. No one could help him, and the most pious people shrugged their shoulders at it. At last he heard of a priest named Palum nus, who had often shown himself potent in defeating heathenish delusions of the devil. But THE GODS IN EXILE. 313 this man was very loath to aid him in this diffi culty, declaring that he himself would incur the greatest danger by so doing. At last, however, he yielded to oft -repeated prayers, and wrote for the knight sundry strange characters on a parch ment. Then he advised the latter to go at mid night to a certain cross - road near Rome, and wait. He would see pass by the strangest apparitions, but he must not be moved or terrified at anything, and when at last the woman should come who had taken his ring he must go to her and give her the parchment. The knight did as he was bid, but it was not without a beating heart that he stood at the cross- roads and awaited the spectral procession . and there were in it pale men and women , magnificently arrayed in festive garments of old Roman time, some bearing golden crowns, others laurel-wreaths on their heads, which, how ever, hung down in sorrow ; and there were also carried, as if in anxious haste, all kinds of silver cups, goblets, and such things as belong to the service of temples. Then in the crowd were seen great oxen with gilded horns, and hung with garlands, and at last, on a grand triumphal car, magnificent in purple and crowned with roses, appeared a tall and wonderfully beautiful goddess. To her the knight advanced and gave the parch ment leaf of Palumnus, for he recognised in her It came, 314 THE GODS IN EXILE. > the statue which kept his ring. And when the beautiful woman had read the writing on the parchment, she raised her hands, as if in agony, to heaven, burst into tears, and cried, “ Cruel priest Palumnus ! thou art not yet satisfied with the suffering which thou hast inflicted on us ! But thy persecutions will soon come to an end, cruel priest Palumnus ! ” With these words she gave the knight again his ring, and on the following night there was no hindrance to his nuptials. But on the third day after this the priest Palumnus died. I first read this story in the Mons Veneris of Kornmann, and more recently found it in the absurd book on magic by Del Rio, who took it from a work by a Spaniard. It is probably of Spanish origin. Baron von Eichendorff, a recent German writer, has availed himself of it most charmingly in a beautiful narrative, and Willibald Alexis has founded on it a novel which belongs to his most poetically inspired works.1 The book by Kornmann, Mons Veneris, is the most important source for all the subject of which I treat. It is a long time since I saw it, and I can only speak of it from memory,2 but it always sweeps before me in memory, the little work of 1 This sentence is wanting in the French version. ? Of which rare book I can say quite the same. I had a copy of it which, with a number of valuable works of the same kind, was stolen from me some years ago . THE GODS IN EXILE. 315 about 250 pages, with its charming old letters. It was probably printed about the middle of the seventeenth century. The doctrine of elementary spirits is there most concisely set forth, and it is with this that the author concludes his strange information as to the Venusberg. After Kornmann's example, I must, as regards elementary spirits, also speak of the transformation of the old heathen divinities. And these are no spectres, for they are not dead. As I have said full many a time and oft, they are uncreated immortal beings who, after the victory of Christ, were obliged to retire to under earthly secrecy, where they in company with other elementary spirits carry on their dæmonic house keeping Among the German race rings most exquisitely romantic the legend of the goddess Venus, who, when her temple was destroyed, fled into the heart of a hidden mountain, where she leads the gayest, strangest life with a mad and merry mob of fairy, airy sprites, beautiful nymphs of forest and of stream, and many a famous hero who has suddenly vanished from the world. From afar, as you approach the mountain , you can hear the happy laughter and the sweet sounds of the 1 The French version says of it, “ avec ses vieux et charmants characteres gothiques.” . But the book is not in black - letter, and if my memory does not deceive me, it is much larger than Heine describes it to be.-Translator, 316 THE GODS IN EXILE. cithern, which twine like invisible threads round the heart, and draw you to the hill. But, fortu nately, not far from the entrance, an old knight keeps watch and ward ; he is called the trusty Eckart. He stands leaning on his great battle sword, motionless as a statue, save that his honour able and iron - grey head constantly shakes, warning the one approaching against the dangers which threaten him . Many take warning and are terri fied, many more never heed the bleating voice of the ancient warner, and plunge blindly into the abyss of voluptuousness and of perdition. For a while all goes well, but man is not made for laughter without end ; many a time he falls into silence and seriousness, and thinks back into the past, for the past is the true home of his soul, and he has home-sickness for the feelings of the old time, even though they should be of pain. And so it happened to the Tannhäuser according to the story of a song, which is one of the most remarkable records of language preserved among the German people. I read it first in the already mentioned book of Kornmann . Prætorius has taken it from him almost verbatim , and the com pilers of the Wunderhorn from the latter, and I must here communicate the ballad from a probably erroneous copy from it.1 1 The deviations from the copy of Prætorius ( Blockesberg, p. 19) are very insignificant, but I give them in notes. The Ger THE GODS IN EXILE. 317 “ Now I again will raise my voice, Of Tannhäuser we'll sing ; And what he with Dame Venus did, It is aa wondrous thing. Tannhäuser was a noble knight, Great wonders he would see, So went into the Venusberg, Where other fair ones be. “ Sir Tannhäuser, thou’rt dear to me, So lay it to thy heart ; And thou likewise hast taken oath, From me thou'lt never part.' • Dame Venus, that I never did , And firmly I deny't ; If no one says the same save you, God help me to the right ! ' 6Sir Tannhäuser, how speak you so, You'll stay here all your life ; I'll give you of my playfellows The fairest for a wife .' • And if unto another wife At any time I turn, So must I in the flame of hell Ever in torment burn. ' man editor here remarks, “ In the French version Heine's own parody of the Tannhäuser song is here inserted. I have retained the order of the German edition, but have, however, worked the missing portions into the proper places from the French edition.” 318 THE GODS IN EXILE . • Thou speakest much of the fire of hell , Yet ne'er hast felt its power ; O think upon my rosy mouth, Which smiles in every hour !' “ What care I for your rosy mouth ? ' Tis naught to me, I trow ; For the honour of all women -kind I pray you let me go ! ' ‘ Sir Tannhäuser, would you take leave ? To you no leave I'll give ; Oh, stay by me, Tannhäuser dear, And merrily let us live ! ' " My life is sick, I must be gone, No longer can I stay ; Your face is fair, and proud your form, But let me haste away !' • Tannhäuser, speak not so to me, You are no more the same ; Come with me to a chamber, dear, And play our secret game.' “ Thy tender love is lost on me, I have it in my heart ; O noble Venus, beautiful, That thou a devil art ! ' 6 > а 2 ‘ How darest thou speak so to me ? ? None could save thou alone ; " 1 " Nun lasst uns in ein Kammer gehn .” — Prætorius. “ Nun lasst uns in die Kammer gehn. ” — Heine. 3 “ Tannhäuser wie sprecht ihr also. ” — Prætorius. “ Tannhäuser, ach, wie sprecht Ihr so. " - Heine. 9 ) THE GODS IN EXILE. 319 And should'st thou longer stay by us, These words thou would'st atone. ‘ Sir Tannhäuser, the leave you ask You must of our elders seek ; But see where'er abroad you roam 1 You still my praises speak .' Tannhäuser from the hill has gone With rue and pain in soul ; " To holy Rome I'll wend my way, And tell the Pope the whole. I'll go full gaily on the road God governs it all, I'm sure Unto the Pope who's called Urban, He'll find me certain cure ! Lord Pope, spiritual father mine, My sins are dire distress, And all I ever did commit I will to you confess ! ' I have lived a year with Venus fair, That sin I now deplore ; No prayer or penance will I spare To be with God once more. ' The Pope he held a wand so white, Broke from a barren tree : I " Und wo ihr in dem Land ümbfahrt. ” — Prætorius. “ Und wo Ihr in dem Land umfabren . ” - Heine. 320 THE GODS IN EXILE. 6 Not till this rod bears leaves again Shall thy sins forgiven be ! ' 1 • And I live but a year on earth, One year in bitter pain, ' Twill pass in prayer and penitence, To win God's grace again .' So from the town he went his way In grief and misery ; ' O Mary Mother, purest maid ! Must I then part from thee ? “ So I will seek the hill again , And there for ever stay By Venus, my own lady dear, Since God points out that way.' Now welcome, my good Tannhäuser, I've missed you since you're gone ; 2 Be welcome now, my dearest lord, My hero, my own true one. ' ' Twas on the third day after this, The rod bore leaves so green ; 1 “ The Pope he held in his right hand A dry and sapless rod ; Look not until this wand shall sprout For pardon from thy God.” This is from a version, II know not by whom, which I read many years ago. 2 “ Ich hab euch lang entboren . Seyd wilkommen mein liebster Herr !” – Prætorius. “ I hab Euch lang entbehret. Willkommen seid, mein liebster Herr ! ” — Heine. THE GODS IN EXILE. 321 And men went far and wide to find Where Tannhäuser had been.1 But he was in the hill again , And there he now must stay, Till God shall judge him as he may, Upon the final day. No priest shall ever here on earth Deny man's hope of heaven , For by his penitence and prayer His sins shall be forgiven .” 0 I remember when I first read this song in Kornmann's book how I was struck by the con trast of its language with that of the pedantic, be - Latinised , unrefreshing style of the seven teenth century.? I felt like one who, in the gloomy shaft of a mine, has suddenly discovered a great vein of gold ; and the proudly -simple, original, and strong words flashed up so brightly that my heart was well nigh dazzled at the 8 1 " Wohin der Tannhäuser were kommen." - Prætorius. “ Wohin der Tannhäuser kommen." -- Heine. This verse is given as follows in the anonymous version : " ' Twas on the third day after this The rod began to sprout, And messengers through all the land Sought Sir Tannhäuser out." ? Heine would appear to have had no appreciation whatever of the naïveté, or simple unconscious quaintness of expression , either in the works of Kornmann or Prætorius. VOL. II. х 322 THE GODS IN EXILE. a sudden gleam. It seemed as if from this song there spoke to me a well-known joyous voice. I heard in it the notes of those heretical or sus pected nightingales who during the Passion season of the Middle Age must needs hide themselves in silence, and only now and then , when it was least expected, perhaps even behind some cloister grating, pipe forth a few joyous tones. Knowest thou the letters of Heloise to Abelard ? Next to the high song of the great king (I mean King Solomon) , I know of no more burning or flaming song of tenderness than the dialogue between Venus and the Tannhäuser. This song is like a battle of love, and in it runs the reddest heart's blood. Ah, how magnificent is this poem ! Even in its beginning we strike on a startling passage. The poet gives us the reply of Lady Venus without having set forth the question of Tann häuser which called for it. By this ellipsis our imagination gains room in which to play, and permits us to fancy what Tannhäuser might have said, what perhaps would have been difficult to express in a few words. Despite his mediæval 1 A careful study of songs which have become very popular, and also been transmitted for several generations, cannot fail to convince the reader that these ellipses or omissions, which are generally so vigorous and effective, are due principally to the people, who leave out all which is not essential to the THE GODS IN EXILE. 323 poverty and piety, the old poet has admirably depicted the unholy arts of seduction and shame less love-tricks of Lady Venus. Even a vicious and sinful modern writer could not have better described the form of this enchanting witch cette diablesse de femme — who with all her morgue Olympienne - celestial pride and splendid passion -still shows the femme galante or fast woman. Yes, she is a heavenly courtesan perfumed with ambrosia, a camelia goddess, and, so to speak , une déesse entretenue — a kept divinity. When I turn over my memories it seems as if I must have met her some day on the Place Bréda, walking with a divinely light and graceful step. She wore aa petite capote grise -a little grey head-covering of deliberate simplicity, and was wrapped from chin to heels in a magnificent cashmere shawl, whose fringe swept the pave ment. 6 What is that woman ? ” I asked of De Balzac, who was with me. “ A kept woman ," understanding of the narrative or argument. And it is more than probable that the greatly admired simplicity and concise ness and strength of the Bible, Homer, and the Nibelungenlied are due to their having passed through long stages of oral tradi tion. This is according to the principle that a sketch by an artist is superior to a finished picture by an amateur.-Translator. 1 So Heine in “ Shakespeare's Maidens and Women " speaks of Cleopatra as a kept queen. It is very amusing to observe the peculiar light in which the Venus of the ballad appeared to our author, and the Parisian baroque trimminys with which he naïvely surrounds his idéale. - Translator. 324 THE GODS IN EXILE. a was his reply. I indeed was much more inclined to believe that she was a duchess. And from a third friend, who just then stepped up, I learned that we were both quite in the right. The old poet of the ballad has sketched with a skill equal to his character of Venus that of Tannhäuser, who is the Chevalier des Grieux of the Middle Age. What a fine touch is that when Tannhäuser, in the midst of the ballad, suddenly speaks in his own name to the public, and relates what the poet should really tell—that is, how he goes as a pilgrim in despair. Herein we see the want of skill of a poet poor in invention, but such tones produce by their naïveté wonderful and winsome effects. The real age of the Tannhäuser ballad would be difficult to determine. It existed in flying leaves, or broadsides, of the earliest age of print ing. A young German poet, Mr. Bechstein, who kindly remembered in Germany that when in Paris he had met me at the house of our mutual friend Wolf, when the Tannhäuser had formed the subject of our conversation, has recently sent me one of those broadsides, entitled Das Lied von den Danheüser. It was only the greater antiquity of the language which prevented me from giving this older version . It contains many variations, and is, to my mind, of a far more poetic character. And by accident I also received not long ago a THE GODS IN EXILE. 325 version of the same song, in which there is hardly the outer form of the old version, while the inner motives are most strangely changed. In its older form the poem is unquestionably more beautiful, simple, and grand. All that the younger version has in common with it is a certain truth of feeling, and as I certainly possess the only copy of it, it shall here find place : “ Good Christians, be not led astray By ' lurements of the devil, I sing you the Tannhäuser song, To warn your souls from evil . The Tannhäuser, a noble knight, Would win him love and pleasure, And so he lived in the Venusberg, Just seven years full measure. · Dame Venus, lovely lady mine, No longer l'll deceive thee, By thee I can no longer stay, Oh, give me leave to leave thee. ' 6 “ Tannhäuser dear, my chevalier, To-day we've had no kissing ; Come, kiss me quick , and let me know What it can be that's missing. ' Have I not poured the sweetest wine For thee , my darling, daily ? And hast not with roses red Been crowned , and that right gaily ? ' 326 THE GODS IN EXILE . ‘ Your too sweet wine , fair lady mine, And kisses give me twitters My very soul is sick in me , Because I long for bitters . 6“ Until this day we've joked and smiled , I long for tears to -morrow Instead of roses , I would fain Be crowned with thorns of sorrow . ' 6“ Tannhäuser brave , my chevalier , Why wilt thou be unruly ? For thou hast sworn a thousand times To never leave me —truly . " Come to my room -let's conjugate Of love all the moods and tenses My beautiful form , so lily -white, I am sure will revive your senses .' · Dame Venus , lovely lady mine, Thy beauty is eternal But many have read those pages before , And many will read thy journal . 6 And when I think of the heroes and gods Who have browsed in that field before me , A certain unpleasant je ne sais quoi For your beautiful form comes o'er me . 11That beautiful form , so lily - white , Gives me the horrors — heed me When I think how many gentlemen Are destined to succeed me . ' THE GODS IN EXILE. 327 “ Tannhäuser, noble chevalier ! With that thou shalt not twit me ; I'd rather by far thou would'st hit me again , As thou often before hast hit me. ' I had rather by far be beaten outright, Than told that others will win me ; How canst thou, ungrateful Christian knight, Break the pride of my heart within me ? • Because I loved you far too well, All love for you now I banish ; Adieu ! you have full permission to go And the door is open—now vanish ! ' ” “ At Rome, at Rome, in the holy town, There is ringing and singing and fiddle ; A grand procession is going about, And the Pope he walks in the middle. That is the pious Pope Urbán, With a triple tiara, like Aaron's ; He wears a red - purple mantle grand, Its train is held up by barons. " O holy father, Pope Urbán , By thy power o'er things eternal ! Thou shalt not go till thou hear'st me confess, And sav'st me from pains infernal .' Then all the crowd around draw back, Silence o'er all is stealing ; Who is the pilgrim so was and pale Before His Holiness kneeling ? 328 THE GODS IN EXILE . 6 " O holy father, Pope Urbán, With power o'er good and evil ; Oh, save me from the terrors of hell , And the fearful might of the devil ! ' I am called the noble Tannhäuser, With loving and sinning wearied ; For I have been in the Venusberg, Where for seven long years I tarried . · Dame Venus is a lady fair, So winsome and enchanting ; Like sunlight and the scent of flowers Is her voice my senses haunting. • As the butterfly flits about a flower And drinks the dew of posies, So my soul once fluttered every hour Around her lips like roses. 6 ' And clustering, blooming, deep black hair Round her noble face is wreathing ; And should once at you her great eyes stare, ' Twould certainly stop your breathing. ' If her grand black eyes should stare at you, You would certainly be enraptured ; ' Twas with greatest trouble I escaped From the hill where she held me captured . ' It was with trouble that I escaped , Yet I'm still possessed by that fairest Of women, whose glances seem to say, “ Come back-oh, return to me, dearest . ” THE GODS IN EXILE. 329 a ' I am but a wretched ghost by day, But by night in dreams beguiling, I am ever with that lady fair, Who sits by me sweetly smiling. 6 “ Her laugh is so real , so gay, so wild, With beautiful teeth in keeping ; Oh, when I think how once she smiled, Oh, then I burst out weeping. My a love is like a wild spring flood, All things before it jamming ; It is a roaring waterfall, Whose course defies all damming. 1 1 ' It springs adown from cliff to cliff, With terrible roar and foaming ; Though it broke its head a thousand times, It would still keep rushing and roaming. " If all the heaven above were mine (In confidence between us), I would give it with the sun and moon, And also the stars to Venus. " I love lier with almighty power, Fire clothes my soul like a raiment ; Is that a touch of the fire of hell, Which I get in advance for payment ? 1 “ Du kannst seine Fluthen nicht däinmen ." There is a suggested sound in this as of Auchen und verdammen . I think the poet had here in mind the excommunication, 330 THE GODS IN EXILE. O holy father, Pope Urbán, With power o'er good and evil, Oh, rescue me from the pains of hell, And from the might of the devil. ' The Pope in sorrow upraised his hand, When all of these words were spoken : " Tannhäuser, most unfortunate man, This charm can never be broken ! • The devil Venus is worst of all, Without any respect or reverence ; When a man is once in her beautiful claws He has not a chance of delivrance. 6 • For lust of the flesh thou hast utterly lost All chances of salvation, And now for ever thou must burn In the depths of all damnation. ' Tannhäuser returned so rapidly That his feet were sore with piking, He came again to the Venusberg As the midnight hour was striking. Lady Venus awoke, and hearing his voice, Out of her bed came springing ; And in an instant, with snow- white arms, To the dear good fellow was clinging. Sir Tannhäuser tumbled dead weary to bed, O'er his ears she drew the cover ; Then went into the kitchen below To warm a bouillon for her lover. THE GODS IN EXILE. 331 She gave him bouillon, she gave him a roll, She washed his sore feet so neatly ; She combed his awfully touseld hair, And laughed so divinely sweetly. “ Tannhäuser dear, sweet chevalier, How long you've been gone-oh gracious ! Pray tell me now, wherever on earth Have you travelled about, my precious ! ' • Dear Venus, beautiful lady mine, I have been to Rome a rover ; I had business there — but now, I think , That job is pretty well over.1 " There's aa river called Tiber near, and the town Is in seven lills dismembered ; I saw the Pope — he mentioned you And begs to be remembered. ' I stopped at Florence on my way, And also looked in at Milan ; And went as a traveller through Switzerland The Swiss were perfectly willin' . i The French version of the poem here ends very appropri ately and properly with the following verse : “ J'avis hâte de revenir auprès de toi, dame Vénus, ma mie. On est bien ici, et je ne quitterai plus jamais ta montagne. But I was in haste to return to thee, Dame Venus, so sweet to me ever ; I am happy here in the mountain, dear, And now I will leave thee never.” 332 THE GODS IN EXILE. · And as I crossed the Alpine pass, The sun was flying and falling ; But the fair blue lakes smiled far below, And eagles were croaking and calling. And as I on the Gotthardt stood , Where the snow and ice are coolers, I heard a snoring — 'twas Germany, With its six -and - thirty rulers. ' In Suabia I saw the poet-school Of ninnies — past all bearing ; They sat in a circle, each on a stool, With guards round their heads all wearing. “ To Frankfort I came on the Schabbes day, Where I ate schalet and klösse ; Ye have the best religion, I own , I am fond too of geese gekröse.1 ' In Dresden, too, I saw a dog Once among better numbered, But now his teeth are falling out, He only barked or slumbered . ' In Weimar, the widowed muses' seat, To grief full utterance giving ; Men wept and wailed that Goethe was dead, And that Eckermann still was living. Schabbes, the Sabbath . Schalet, klossé, and Gansegekröse, Hebrew dishes described in the “ Jewish Cook-Book ." - Trans lator, THE GODS IN EXILE. 333 ' In Potsdam I heard a mighty shout. “ What's the matter ?" I cried, while speeding ; “ Oh, that is Professor Gans in Berlin , On the eighteenth century realing. " " ' In Göttingen still much learning blooms, But produces no fruit for dining ; I passed through the town in stock dark night, For never a light was shining. • In the workhouse in Celle I only saw Hanoverians - 0 German nation ! Ye need a national workhouse for all, And one whip-for your salvation ! ' In Hamburg I asked them why it was The streets all stunk so sadly, And Jews and Christians declared it came From the gutters, which ran so badly. ' In Hamburg, which is a right good town, Lives many a right bad fellow ; But when I came upon the Exchange I thought I was still in Celle. ' In Hamburg, in that right good town, The people will see me never, For now I will live in the Venusberg With my beautiful lady for ever . ' ” ! ۱ i The German editor here remarks that Heine subsequently re -wrote this concluding verse, as follows : " In Hamburg I saw Altona, A place which seemed to woo me ; 334 THE GODS IN EXILE. I will not impose upon the public, be it in verse or prose, and I publicly confess that this poem is by myself, and does not belong to any Minnesinger of the Middle Age. I felt myself, however, tempted to follow the original song in which the old poet used the same material. Com parison of the two will be most interesting and edifying for the critic, who would fain see how differently two poets of entirely opposed epochs would handle one and the same theme, should they retain the same subject, measure, and almost the same mould. The spirit of the two ages must become more manifest from such juxtaposition ; it is , so to speak, a specimen of comparative anatomy in the field of literature. In fact, when one reads the two together, he cannot fail to per ceive how the ancient faith inspired the older poet ; while in the modern, who was born at the begin ning of the nineteenth century, the scepticism of his age reveals itself. One sees how the latter, limited by no authority, gives his imagination full flight, and has no other aim than to properly and well express, bien exprimer, in his verse,, purely human feelings. The older poet, however, $ Another time I'll tell you all That happened there unto me. ” This English version of the poet is very free, but I believe it is true to the spirit of the original , which no very literal version could be: - Translator. THE GODS IN EXILE. 335 is under the yoke of ecclesiastical authority, he has a didactic aim, he will exalt a religious doctrine, he preaches the virtue of Christian love, and his last words indicate the gracious power of repentance for forgiveness of all sins. The Pope himself is reproved because he forgot this sublime Christian truth, and the dry rod which burgeons in his hands teaches him, unfortunately too late, the infinite depths of divine mercy. The previously given original Tannhäuser ballad was probably composed just before the Reformation . The legend itself does not go much further back ; it is probably hardly one hundred years older. 1 Lady Venus also appears at a very late period in German legend, while other divinities, as, for instance, Diana, were known all through the Middle Ages. The latter appears even in the 9 ) 1 Heine appears to have been quite ignorant that there was a Minnesinger- knight of the twelfth century named Tanhûser, who was equally distinguished as a love- poet and a bitter satirist of the priests, as is shown by a single one of his lines : “ Got minnet valsche kutten nit .” “ God does not love false cowls ” ( i.l. , priests). These two characteristics, eked out by a popular misconception of a passage in his poems, and the wandering life and wild adventures of the minstrel, most unquestionably gave birth to song, which I believe to be much older than Heine supposes, and probably of the time of the Minnesinger himself. Vidc “ Sunshine in Thought,” by Charles G. Leland, 1862, for re marks on this subject.— Translator. the 336 THE GODS IN EXILE . seventh and eighth centuries as an evil demon, decried in the decrees of the bishops. She appears since then generally as riding, she who of yore in Greece ran so lightly shod through the forests. During fifteen hundred years she had to flit about in varied forms, and her character underwent strange transformations. I shall in another place set forth the legends relating to them . And here a remark suggests itself, the develop ment of which suggests material for most interest ing researches. I again speak of the metamor phoses into demons which the Græco - Roman gods underwent when Christianity gained the upper hand in the world. Popular opinion as signed to those deities a real but banned or exorcised existence, agreeing in this with the doctrine of the Church, which by no means ex plained the ancient deities, as the philosophers 1 Here the German edition of “ The Gods in Exile,” edited by Heine himself, began with the words : " I have already in my earliest writings mentioned the idea from which the fol . lowing contribution sprung. ” In the French version the two following pages are omitted. In the latter, and probably in the original German manuscript, we have instead, " I will here give only an indication hint for the benefit of young scholars who are wanting in ideas, that is, I will in a few words show how the old heathen gods of whom we speak when the triumph of Christianity had became definite, & c .” — German editor. THE GODS IN EXILE. 337 had done, as mere chimeras or births from false hood and error, but regarded them as evil spirits who, by the triumph of Christ, had been thrown from the shining pinnacle of power, and who now lead a gloomy secret life on earth in the darkness of old ruined temples or enchanted forests, where they allure weak Christian souls, who have therein lost their way by seductive devilish arts, lust, and beauty, specially by dances and song, to their ruin. All which refers to this theme-- the transformation of the early worship of Nature into devil-worship, and of heathen priesthood into sorcery or witchcraft, or the dia bolisation of deity - I have freely discussed in my contributions to the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, as well as in the Ele mentary Spirits; and I may hold myself to be the more excused from further following up of the subject since many other authors, following in my track, and inspired by the hints which I had given as to the importance of the subject, have treated it far more extensively, comprehen sively, and thoroughly than I have done. If they in so doing did not mention the name of the author who had the merit of taking the initiative or being first in the field, this was of course mere forget fulness, of but little consequence. 1 1 Heine here soars to the full height of his amusing arro gance. He was as little the first as the last of German authors VOL. II . Y 338 THE GODS IN EXILE . I myself will not set a very high value on the claim . It is true that the theme which I brought forward was no novelty, but it had with such vulgarisation of old ideas the same relation as with the egg of Columbus. Everybody knew the fact, but no one expressed it. Yes, what I said was no novelty, and was long since to be found printed in the honourable folios and quartos of compilers and antiquarians ; in those catacombs of erudition where, duly arranged with a terrible symmetry, which is far more terrible than wild freewill or fancy, the most heterogeneous bones of thought are piled together. And I also admit that modern scholars have handled the same themes ; but they have, so to speak, coffined them in the wooden mummy-chests of their confused and abstract scientific language, which the public cannot decipher and takes to be Egyptian hiero glyphs. Out of such vaults and catacombs I have evoked these thoughts to real life by the magic power of generally intelligent language, by the black - art of a sound, clear, popular style.1 H to discuss these subjects genially, or to offer the ideas which he claims as original, while as regards adopting them without mention of the source whence they came, he was certainly un equalled by any of those of whom he complains. 1 This flight is all, very wisely, omitted from the French version. It may be here observed that the French, though so often reproached for self- conceit, condemn it more severely than any other people. A few years ago, a man who was the 1 THE GODS IN EXILE. 339 But I return to my theme, whose leading idea, as I have already intimated, shall not be further elaborated here. I will only with a few words call the reader's attention to the fact that the poor old gods above -mentioned were, at the time of the definite victory of Christianity — that is to say, in the third century - in sad difficulties, which bore the greatest resemblance to those in which they had been involved at a much earlier period. They found themselves in the alarming and dire need which they had suffered in the primevally early time, at that revolutionary epoch when the Titans, bursting the bounds of Orcus and piling Pelion on Ossa, stormed Olympus. The unfor tunate gods were compelled to take to ignominious flight, and hid themselves in all disguises among us here on earth. Most of them fled to Egypt, notoriety of the hour, began a letter to a newspaper with the words, “ Depuis quelques jours on ne parle que de moi.” There was a general roar of laughter and hisses from all Paris, and the celebrity was forth with extinguished. Yet the ex pression, probably a very careless one, was modesty itself com pared to what Heine most deliberately declares in these passages. He speaks proudly of his " researches " in what is now called Folk Lore, but there are very few, if any, instances of any writer who had read so little of any subject, yet who has treated it so boldly and confidently as if he alone of men had exhausted and understood it. And with all this, it must be admitted that he made more of what he did know than the most learned man living could have done. “ Had he not praised himself unto the skies, others would willingly have praised him more.” 340 THE GODS IN EXILE. where for greater safety they, as is generally known, assumed the forms of animals. In the same manner the poor heathen gods were again driven to flight, and to seek under all kinds of disguises in remote retreats a refuge, when the true lord of the world planted his crusading banner on the castle of heaven, and those icono clastic zealots, the black bands of monks, destroyed the temples and hunted down the gods with fire and malediction . Many of these poor emigrants, who were without shelter or ambrosia, were obliged to take to some everyday trade, to earn at least their daily bread. In such circumstances, many whose holy groves had been confiscated were obliged, among us in Germany, to work by the day as hewers of wood, and to drink beer instead of nectar. Apollo seems to have taken kindly to his tasks, and entered the service of cattle raisers ; and as he once took care of the cows of Admetus, so he now lived as shepherd in Lower Austria. But there he, having become suspected on account of his beautiful singing, was recognised by a learned monk as an old magical god of the heathens, and handed over to the spiritual court. He confessed on the scaffold that he was the god Apollo. But before his execution he begged that he might be allowed to play on the cithern, and to sing more song. And his playing was so exquisitely charming, and his song so enchanting, THE GODS IN EXILE. 341 and he was so beautiful in face and form, that all the women wept, and many of them from their emotion fell ill. After his death they sought to take his body from the tomb, to drive a pole through it, thinking that he must have been a vampyre, and that the women who had suffered would be cured by such a well - proved remedy. But the grave was empty. I have not much to relate of the destiny of Mars, the ancient god of war, since the Christians won their victory. I am inclined to think that during the feudal times he exercised the Faust recht, or law of the strong hand. The tall West phalian Schimmelpfennig, nephew of the exe cutioner of Münster, met him in Bologna, where he had with him a long conversation, which I will relate anon. Some time before he served under Frundsberg as a Landknecht or mercenary soldier, and was at the storming of Rome, where he must have suffered bitterly in seeing the merciless ruin of his favourite ancient city, and of the temple in which he had been worshipped, as well as the shrines of all his relations. It went better with the god Bacchus than it did with Mars and Apollo ; and a legend relates the following : “ There are in the Tyrol large lakes surrounded by forests whose trees rise to heaven, and which are mirrored in the blue depths below. Trees and waters rustle so strangely and 342 THE GODS IN EXILE. By the uncannily, that a wondrous feeling steals over him who wanders there in solitude. shore of such a lake stood the hut of a young fisher, who also acted as ferryman when any one wished to be carried over the water. He had a great boat which was bound to a tree, not far from the house in which he lived alone. Once during the autumnal equinox, towards midnight, he heard a knocking at the window , and going to the door met three monks, whose heads were deeply hidden in their cowls, and who seemed to be in great haste. One of them begged him hurriedly to lend them his boat, and promised to return it in a few hours. The fisherman had no cause to hesitate , and so untied the boat ; and while the monks entered it and rowed away, he returned to his bed and slept. After a few hours he was awakened by their return. One of them gave him a piece of silver, and all three departed. The youth went to look at his boat, and found it tied fast : then he shivered, but it was not the night-air. When the monk paid him the money, he had touched his fingers, which were icy cold, and a frosty shudder ran through all his limbs. He could not for several days forget this ; but youth soon dismisses what is uncanny, and he thought no more of it when the following year at the same time, and towards midnight, there was again a tapping at the window, the three monks THE GODS IN EXILE. 343 again appeared, and again in great haste asked for the boat. This time he let them have it with less care and when they returned a few hours after, and he was again paid, he again felt with a shudder the icy cold fingers. The same thing happened again and again, till on the seventh year the fisherman began to long -cost what it might — to find out the mystery which was hidden under those three cowls. So he put into the boat a pile of nets, which formed for him a hiding - place, into which he crept, while the monks went on board. They came at the usual time, and he concealed himself unseen by them . To his great amazement the passage across the lake, which always required an hour, was executed in a few minutes ; but what was his amazement when he, who knew the whole country so well, found that the boat had arrived at a vast open space in the woods, which he had never before seen, which was grown about with trees of a kind all unknown to him. Many lamps hung on the branches of these trees, while here and there, on pedestals, were vases full of blazing pitch, and the moon also shone so brightly, that he could perceive all the many persons who were present, as if it had been daylight. Of these there were hundreds, young men and young women , nearly all beautiful, though their faces were white as marble, and this, with their cloth 344 THE GODS IN EXILE. ing, which consisted of white tunics, girt up very high, with purple borders, gave them the appear ance of walking statues. The ladies wore on their heads garlands of grape leaves, which were either real or made of gold and silver thread, while their hair was partly woven from the parting in a kind of crown, and partly flowed wildly from this crown in tresses to the neck. The young men were also crowned with grape-leaves. But men and women all, flourishing golden wands bound with similar leaves, came bounding joyously to welcome the three newly arrived. One of these threw off his cowl and frock, and appeared as an impudent fellow of middle age, who had a repulsive, lascivious, yes, lewd face, with pointed he-goat's ears, and a laughably exaggerated stu pendous virile organ. The second, laying aside his garments, revealed an enormously fat paunch, and a bald head, on which the wanton women placed a wreath of roses. But the faces of both monks were white as marble, as was that of the third, who stripped off his disguise with a hearty laugh. As he unbound the rope round his waist, and threw away the pious dirty dress, cross, and rosary with every sign of disgust, he appeared as a young man of extraordinary beauty , clad in a tunic glittering with diamonds, and who was of perfect form , only that his supple rounded haunch and slender waist seemed feminine. And THE GODS IN EXILE. 345 his delicately arched lips and soft features gave him a maiden air, though his face had a bold and almost haughty and heroic expression. The women caressed him with wild inspiration, placed a garland of ivy -leaves on his head, and threw a magnificent leopard's skin over his shoulders. At the same time there came a two- wheeled golden triumphal chariot drawn by two lions, on which the young man, with the dignity of a conqueror, yet with joyous smile, leaped. He drove the wild span with purple reins. On one side of his chariot walked one of his unfrocked companions, whose lustful gestures and indecent extravagance amused the multitude, while his companion with the mighty paunch, whom the merry wives had lifted up on an ass, rode along holding a golden goblet, which was constantly filled for him with wine. Slowly went the chariot, and behind it whirled in wild eddies the reckless troop of vine clad revellers, while before it advanced the court choir of the victor. Beautiful full- cheeked youths blowing the double flute, then high - girt maidens with their tambourines, drumming with knuckles on ringing skin ; then other beauties beating triangles ; then horn - players, he- goat footed fellows with fair but lascivious faces, who blew flourishes on strange horns of animals or sea-shells, and then the lute- players. But, dear reader, I forget that you are very well 346 THE GODS IN EXILE. educated and informed , who have long observed that all this is a description of a Bacchanalian orgie or festival of Dionysius. You have seen often enough old bas-reliefs, or in the engravings of archæological works, the triumphal processions which glorify the god, and in faith with your classic and refined sense you would be but little alarmed , I trow , should you even at midnight, in the darkest solitude of the forest, encounter the beautiful apparition of such a Bacchic train, even if all its gloriously tipsy crew were to dance on before your very eyes. At the utmost you would only feel a slightly licentious thrill, an æsthetic shiver, at seeing this assembly of delightful phan toms, risen from the sarcophagi of their monu ments or their lairs in ruined temples, to again renew their ancient gay and festive rites, to once more celebrate with games and dance the triumph of the divine liberator, of the saviour of sensuality, to revive the joyous dance of heathendom , the cancan of the merry world of yore, without any of the policemen of spiritual morality to hinder all revelling, rioting, hurrahing, Evoe Bacche ! 1 1 In the French version the following passage is here added : “ Comme j'ai dit mon cher lecteur, vous êtes un homme in struit et éclairé qu'une apparition nocturne ne saurait épou vanter, pas plus que si c'était une fantasmagorie de l'académie imperialé de musique, évouquée par le génie poétique de M. Eugéne Scribe, en collaboration avec le génie musical du célèbre maestro Giacomo Meyerbeer. ” THE GODS IN EXILE. 347 But, dear reader, the poor fisherman of our story was not,like you, familiar with mythology ; he had not studied archæology, and he was terrified and agonised at the sight of that beautiful triumphator with his two strange acolytes, when they leaped from their monk's dress ; he shuddered at the immodest gestures and leaping of the bacchantæ , the fauns, the satyrs, who, from their he-goat's feet and horns, seemed to him to be devils, so that he regarded the whole society as a congress of spectres and demons, who sought by their sorceries to bring destruction to human beings. The hair stood on his head as he saw the neck breaking impossible postures of a mænad, who with flowing locks cast her head back, and only kept her balance with the thyrsus. His brain reeled at beholding Corybantes, who wounded themselves with short swords, madly seeking for ecstasy in pain. The soft, sweet, and yet terrible tones of the music flowed through his soul like flames — flashing, shuddering, awful! But when the poor mortal saw that abominable Egyptian symbol which , of enormously exaggerated size, and crowned with flowers, was carried by a shame less beauty on a long pole,1 he fairly lost his i The French version is here somewhat more flowery or ex pansive : Ce symbole, ou plutôt cette hyperbole, était couronnée de fleurs, et la belle devergondée l'agitait avec des gestes impu 348 THE GODS IN EXILE . senses, and, rushing back to the boat, crept under the nets, shivering with clattering teeth, as though the devil already held him by one foot. Soon after the three monks returned and pushed forth , And when they reached the opposite shore, the fisherman contrived to slip away so quietly, that the monks thought he had waited for them be hind the willows ; and so, when one of them had pressed with icy - cold fingers into his hand the usual fee, they went their way . For his own salvation's sake, which he deemed endangered, as well as to preserve all other good Christians from perdition, the fisherman believed it was his duty to denounce the unholy and strange events to a spiritual tribunal ; and as the superior or prior of a Franciscan convent not far off was president of such a court, and was in great repute as a learned exorcist, he determined to seek him without delay. Therefore the early morning sun saw him on his way to the cloister, and it was with his eyes humbly cast down that he found himself before his reverence the prior, who sat with his diques, en psalmodiant a tue-tête une infâme cantique, auquel faisaient chorus ses compagnons velus avec leur gros rire et leurs gambades burlesques. En même temps les accords de la musique de la procession triomphale, accords mollement tendres et déses pérés à la fois, pénétrèrent dans le cæur du pauvre jeune homme comme autant de brandons enflammés ; il se crut déjà embrasé du feu infernal, et il courut à toutes jambes vers sa barque . ” — Translator. THE GODS IN EXILE. 349 capuchin drawn deep over his eyes in a high arm chair, remaining in this reflective attitude while the fisherman narrated the terrible tale. But when the young man had ended, the prior sud denly raised his head, and the visitor was startled at recognising in his reverence one of the three monks who went annually over the lake, and he was indeed the very one whom he had seen the night before seated as a heathen deity on the triumphal chariot with the yoke of lions. There was the same marble, pale countenance, the same regular and beautiful features, the same mouth with its delicately arched lips, and over those lips played a pleasant smile, and from that mouth flowed the soft-ringing and sanctimonious words : “ Beloved son in Christ ! we truly believe that you have passed this night in company with the god Bacchus, as your fantastic ghost -story perfectly proves, and we would not for our life say aught unloving of this god. Many a time doth he break the sorrows and soothe the heart of manl ; but he is also very dangerous unto those who cannot bear much, and verily you seem to me to be one of those weak mortals.1 We therefore counsel you \| Here the French version is again diffusive to originality : “ Nous nous garderons bien de dire du mal de ce dieu, bien de fois il nous fait oublier nos soucis, et il réjouit le coeur de l'homme, mais les dons que la bonté divine accord aux humains 350 THE GODS IN EXILE. - to enjoy in future with great moderation the golden juice of the grape, and to trouble no further in future the spiritual authorities with the imaginary tipsy fancies of your brain, and also to be silent as regards this last vision — that is, to hold your jaw altogether (das maul zu halten) , else the secular arm of the beadle shall count off on you five and twenty stripes with a cart-whip. But now, dearly beloved son in Christ, go to the cloister -kitchen, where the brother butler and brother cook shall serve you with a luncheon . ” With this the spiritual lord gave the fisherman his blessing ; but when the latter, quite bluffed and abashed, packed away to the kitchen , and saw the pater cellarer and the pater cook, he nearly fell flat with terror, for they were the two very nocturnal companions of the prior, the two monks who had rowed with him over the lake ; for right well did the visitor know the great paunch and a sont différents, beaucoup sont appèles, et peu sont élus.” (Here Heine may have had in mind the ancient saying, " Many are the thyrsus- bearers, but few the bacchantae." ) “ Il y a des hommes qu'une douzaine de bouteilles ne sauraient abattre En toute humilité Chretienne j'avoue que je suis un de ces êtres d'élite , et je ' n rends grâces au Seigneur. Il y a aussi des natures incomplètes et faibles qu'une seule chopine peut renverser, et il parait, mon cher fils en Jésus Christ, que vous êtes de nombre. Nous vous conseillons donc de n’absorber qu'avec mesure le jus doré de la treille .” Heine here borrows the pious thanks of the prior that he can drink twelve bottles from an ancient Aight of facetiæ . - Translator. THE GODS IN EXILE. 351 bald head of the one, and the grinning, lustful face and goat's ears of the other. But he held his tongue, and spoke thereof word to none till many years after. Old chronicles which relate similar tales transfer the scene to Spires on the Rhine. 1 1 I have not been able to find whence Heine took the whole of this story, and until I do, shall believe that all the part re ferring to Bacchus is his own invention. Grosius, Magica, seu mirabilium Historiarum , &c. , 1597 , tells effectively the same tale in reference to three fishermen of the Rhine, and many monks who proved to be a party of devils going to take part in the great Council of Spires. On which subject Georgius Sabinus wrote a rather clever Latin poem of 118 verses, which latter approaches in several points more closely to the tale of the text, as in depicting the amazement of the fisher at seeing the monks on the chariot : “ Qui que manu flexas auriga tenebat habenas, Terribili naso conspiciendus erat, Attonitus curru stat prætereunte viator, Nec Monachos illos spectra sed esse vident. " There is, however, in all this no allusion whatever to Bacchus or Silenus. It may be observed that in the “ Gods in Exile," Heine gives several “ legends ” without mentioning his authori. ties or the source whence he derived them, though as a rule he is generally very careful to do so when he can, and of all these unaccredited stories I have failed to find a trace elsewhere. Perhaps my readers may be more fortunate. Grosius declares that the event took place " anno millesimo, quingentesimo trice simo, Juliidecimo octavo.” It is rather amusing to contrast this neglect to mention obligations with our author's previous com plaint that other authors have not acknowledged their indebted ness to bim. But the môt d'enigme in criticising Heine is never to take him quite au grand serieux . The tale, as told by him, 352 THE GODS IN EXILE. There are similar traditions of the East Frisian coast in which the ancient heathen description of the voyage of the dead to the realm of shadows is most significantly set forth . Nothing indeed is said in them of a Charon who steers, though this old cock — alter Kawz—has not kept his place in legends, but in puppet- shows. But we recognise a far more important mythological personage in the so - called Spediteur, or forwarding agent, who attends to the passage of the dead, and the ferry man who performs Charon's duties, and who, as a common fisherman , receives the due payment. Yet, despite his baroque disguise, we can readily divine his true name, and I will therefore give the tradition as accurately as possible. In East Friesland, on the North sea-coast, are many coves, which are also small harbours, known as siehle . On the jutting headland of one of these stands the lonely house of a fisherman, who lived with his family, peaceful and contented. Nature is sad here, not a bird is heard save the 1 а has a great reseinblance to a Venetian story narrated by Bernoni of a fisherman who hid himself in his boat while three witches sailed in it to Egypt, and I have heard the same in greater detail in Florence. But in neither of these did any heathen gods appear. Hawthorne has also used the same idea. 1 “ And that grim ferryman whom poets write of.” The French version, though effectively the same, is here differently expressed from the German. ? Siel, a drain or sluice.- Translator. THE GODS IN EXILE. 353 sea-mews, who often fly with evil cry from their nests in the sand announcing a storm. The monotonous plashing of the surging sea agrees well with the gloomy flying clouds. Even man never sings, and on this melancholy coast there is never heard a verse of any popular song. The people here are serious, honest, more reasonable than religious, and very proud of the bold common sense and freedom of their ancestors . They are not imaginative, and speculate but little . The main object of the fisherman who dwelt on his lonely siehl was fishing, and now and then the fare of the travellers who wished to be ferried over to some neighbouring island of the North Sea. At a certain time of the year, it is said, just at noon, when the fisher and his family sat at their meal, a stranger appeared in the great family room, and begged the master of the house to speak with him apart for a few minutes, on business. The fisherman, having in vain en deavoured to induce the visitor to take part in the meal, complied with his request, and both retired to a bow -window . I will not describe the 1 French version, “ Et bien qu'ils aient perdu leurs institu tions démocratiques d'autre fois , ils n'en ont pas moins gardé un ésprit d'indépendance, héritage de leurs intrépides aïeux, qui avaient combattu avec heroïsme contre les envalissements de l'océan et des princes du Nord .” VOL. II. N 354 THE GODS IN EXILE. appearance of the stranger in the leisurely manner of modern novelists, a simply accurate account must suffice. He is a man somewhat advanced in years, but still fresh ; in short, an old boy, well rounded but not fat, his cheeks as red as Bors dorfer apples, and with merry eyes glancing everywhere, while on his powdered head is a three-cornered hat. Under an overcoat of clear yellow, garnished with innumerable small capes, the man wears the old-fashioned dress which we see in old portraits of Dutch merchants, and which denotes a certain ease --- a silk parrot-green coat, a flower- embroidered waistcoat, short black breeches, striped stockings, and buckled shoes, the latter so bright and shining that it seemed strange that he could have come through the mud of the Siehl with such clean feet. His voice is asthmatic, wiry, and sometimes passing into a whine or treble ; but the demeanour and manner are grave and measured, as becomes a Dutch merchant. This gravity seems, however, to be more assumed than natural, and often contrasts oddly with the searching glances of the eyes here and there, as well as the indifferently suppressed and nervous activity of his limbs. That the stranger is a Dutch merchant is shown, not only by his clothing, but by the mercantile accuracy and caution with which he conducts a negotiation to the advantage of his employers. He is, as he THE GODS IN EXILE. 355 says, a forwarding agent, and has received from one of his business friends an order to have con veyed a certain number of souls, or as many as may find room in an ordinary boat, from the East Frisian coast to the White Island. On this account, he continued, he would like to know whether the fisherman could carry such a cargo on that very night, in which case he would pay the money down in advance, but hoped that in conscience he would put the price as low as became a Christian. The Dutch merchant - albeit the word is a pleonasm, since every Dutchman is a merchant - made this proposition as if it was concerning carrying so many cheeses, and not the souls of the departed . The fisherman was startled indeed somewhat by the word “ souls," and he felt a shiver in the back, and observed at once that he had before him the spectral Dutchman who had so often given a similar commission to his colleagues, who had been well paid for it. But, as I have before remarked, these East Frisian coast dwellers are courageous, healthy, and sober ; they are wanting in that morbid, sickly imagina tion which renders us so susceptible to the ghostly and supernatural, therefore the secret shudder of our fisherman lasted but an instant, he soon became himself, and with an air of perfect in difference began to bargain the ferry -money up to the highest possible figure. After some chaffer 356 THE GODS IN EXILE. ing and higgling the two came to an understand ing, shook hands over it, and the Dutchman drew out a soiled leather purse, full of small silver pennies, the smallest which had ever been coined in Holland, and paid down all the sum in this Lilliputian money. After having instructed the fisherman that he must be ready about midnight, at the time when the full moon would appear from the clouds, with his boat at a certain place on the shore to receive his cargo, he took leave of the family, who again repeated in vain their invitation to share their meal, and the ever dignified figure tripped away with strange agility. At the appointed time the skipper found him self at the proper place with his barque, which, being empty and light of ballast, rocked lightly on the waves ; but as the moon rose he observed that it became steadier, and gradually sank deeper, till the water was within a hand's-breadth of the gunwale. By this he knew that his passengers, the souls, were now all on board, so he pushed forth with his freight. But however he strained his eyes he could see nothing in his boat but something like trails of mist moving about, but which assumed no certain form , and which seemed to whirl into one another. Nor could he hear any thing save a soft chirping and whisper- like sound. Now and then a sea -gull shot with shrill cry over head, or some fish lifted its head from the water THE GODS IN EXILE. 357 > with a strange glare. The night wore on and the air grew cold ; everywhere all was water, moon shine, and silence ; and silent as his surroundings, the fisherman came to the White Island, where he moored his boat. He saw no one on the strand, but heard a sharp asthmatic gasping and whining voice, which he recognised as that of the Dutchman. He seemed to be reading a list of proper names mo notonously, as if verifying them , and among them were those of many whom the fisher had known, but who had died during the past year. During this calling off the boat was lightened , so that while at first it had lain deep in the sand, it now swam lightly on the waves when the reading was over, and the skipper, perceiving that his cargo was duly delivered, sailed quietly back to wife and child, and his dear home on the Siehl. So it passes every year as regards the transport of souls to the White Island. A skipper once remarked as a peculiar circumstance that the in visible controller, while reading the names, sud denly paused and said, “ But where is Pitter Jansen ? That is not Pitter Jansen . Where upon a piping, wailing little voice replied, “ I am Pitter Jansen's Mieke, and have had my name inscribed in his place.” I have already ventured, despite their crafty disguises, to surmise the names of the important mythological characters who appear in these tradi 358 THE GODS IN EXILE. tions. This one is nothing less than the god Mercury, the ancient leader of souls, Hermes Pyscopompos. Yes, under that shabby overcoat , and in that sober shopman's form , the most brilliant and youthful of the heathen deities, the crafty son of Maia, is disguised. On that three cornered hat there is not the least sign of a feather which could recall the wings of his divine head covering, and the heavy shoes with steel buckles do not at all suggest pinioned sandals ; this heavy Dutch lead is different from the mobile quick silver to which the god gave a name, but the very contrast betrays the identity, and the god chose this disguise to be the more securely con cealed. Yet it may be that he in nowise chose it from mere caprice. Mercury was, as you know, at the same time the god of thieves as well as merchants, and it was natural that in choosing a garb which rendered him incognito, and a calling by which he could live , he had in mind his ante cedents and talents. Therein he was experienced, i The French version varies here very much from the German. It is as follows : “ Mercure était comme vous savez le dieu des voleurs et des marchands. . . . Il n'avait qu'a calculer lequel des ces metiérs, qui ne diffèrent que par des nuances, lui affrait le plus de chances de réuissite. Il se disait que le vol, par des préjugés séculaires était flétri dans l'opinion publique, que les philosophes n'avaient pas encore réussi à le réhabiliter en l'assimilant à la propriété, qu'il était mal vu de la police et des gendarmes, et THE GODS IN EXILE. 359 sible ; he had discovered the tortoise -shell lyre and the helioscope, he robbed men and gods, and even as a babe he was a little Calmonius, who slipped from his cradle to steal a yoke of oxen. He had to choose between the two occupations, which are in reality not very different, since in both the aim is to obtain the property of others as cheaply as pos but the shrewd god reflected that thievery does not stand so high in public opinion as trade, that the former is interdicted by the police while the latter is even protected by law , that mer chants reach the top -rung on the ladder of honour while those of the thieving fraternity must climb a ladder of a much less agreeable description, that the latter stake liberty and life while the merchant only risks his capital or that of his friends ; and so the cunningest of gods became a merchant, and to be as perfect a one as possible, Dutch at that. His long practice as Theopompos, or leader of the shades, specially adapted him for forwarding souls, the transport of which to the White Island is by him carried on. que pour tout prix de son déploiement de courage et d'habileté, le voleur était quelquefois envoyé aux galéres, sinon à la po tence ; qu'au contraire le négoce jouissait de la plus grand im punité, qu'il était honoré du public et protégé par les lois, que les negociantes étaient décorés, qu'ils allaient a la cour, et qu'on en faisait même des présidents du conseil. Par consequent, le plus rusé des dieux se decida pour l'état le plus lucratif et le moins dangereux, et pour être négociant par excellence, il se fit négociant hollandais . ” — Translator, 360 THE GODS IN EXILE. The White Island is sometimes called Brea or Britinia. Does this allude to white Albion and to the chalk cliffs on its coast ? It would be a droll idea to set forth England as a land of the dead, as the realm of Pluto or hell. Great Britain does, in fact, appear to many strangers in such a light.1 In my discussion of the legend of " Faust " I have entered fully into the subject of the realm of Pluto and of himself. I have there shown how the ancient realm of shadows became a complete hell, and how its gloomy and ancient ruler was al together diabolised . But it is only in the formal oflicial style of the Church that the matter sounds so harsh, for in spite of the Christian anathema the position of Pluto remained much the same as Neither he, the god of the world below, nor his brother Neptune, ruler of the ocean, emi grated like their mates, and even after the pre valence of Christianity they ruled on in their domains or in their elements. Though the wildest it was. i Here our author fully illustrates the fact that “ comparaison n'est pas raison,” as a MS. of the twelfth century ( Leroux de Lincy Proverbes) declares. The White Island of the old Breton and Norman lais was doubtless the Isle of Wight or England, but it was like Avalon , a fairyland or paradise, and the souls who were ferried over were of the élite. It would have been unjust indeed if the woman mentioned by Heine, who sacrificed herself to keep her husband, Pitter Jansen, alive, had been damned for so doing.- Translator, THE GODS IN EXILE, 361 and most absurd fables were circulated on earth relative to him , old Pluto sat down below, warm by his Proserpine. Neptune suffered even less from calumny than did his brother Pluto, and neither church- bells nor the peals of organs offended his ears far below in the ocean depths, by his white-bosomed Amphitrite and his dripping courtiers, the Nereids and Tritons. Only now and then, when some young sailor for the first time crossed the Line, did he rise from the flood , holding the trident, his head crowned with seeds, with a silver beard hanging down to below his waist. Then he bestowed on the neophyte the terrible baptism of the sea, delivering on these occasions a long address full of unction and pathos, also abounding in hard old salt - water jokes, rather spit forth than spoken in company with tobacco - juice, to the great delight of his tarry audience. A friend who described to me in detail how such a water mystery - play was acted by sailors on ships, assured me that those very sailors who laughed the most insanely at the droll burlesque of Nep tune, never doubted for an instant of the existence of such a marine god, and often prayed to him when in peril. 1 This story would appear to be an extract from Neptune's log -book of salt yarns. It has certainly a highly maritime flavour. Heine seems to have met his match in this “ friend.” -Translator, 362 THE GODS IN EXILE. Neptune, therefore, remained ruler of the waves, as Pluto, despite his being devilled, continued to govern the lower regions. It went better with them than with their brother Jupiter, the third son of Saturn , who after the fall of his father attained the sovereignty of heaven, and led, free from care, an ambrosial régime of joyousness with the splendid retinue of laughing gods, goddesses, and nymphs of honour. When the sad catas trophe took place, and the rule of the cross, of suffering and sorrow, was proclaimed, the great Chronidas also fled and disappeared in the migra tion of races. All traces of him were lost, and I have questioned in vain old chronicles and old women—no one could give me tidings of his fate. With the same view I have rummaged and hunted through many libraries, where I had shown me the most magnificent manuscripts, adorned with gold and jewels-true odalisques in the havens of learning ; and I thank with all my heart the literary eunuchs who guard them for the un grumblingness, and even affability, with which they unlocked for me their shining treasures. But it seemed as if no popular tradition as to a mediæval Jupiter had been preserved, and all 1 To which the French version adds, “ Tous menaient joyeuse vie, repus d'ambroisie et nectar méprisant les manants attachés içi - bas à la glèbe, et n'ayant aucun souci du lendemain ," THE GODS IN EXILE. 363 which I forked up 1 consists of a story which my friend Niels Andersen told me. This was a man whose droll delightful figure rises in life before me as I write. To him I here devote a few lines, for I willingly indicate the sources whence my tales are derived, and set forth their peculiarities, that the kind reader may himself judge how far they deserve his confidence. Therefore a few words as to this particular source. Niels Andersen, born at Drontheim in Norway, was one of the greatest whale- fishers whom I ever knew. I am deeply indebted to him for all my knowledge relating to his craft. He told me of all the tricks which the cunning animal employs to escape the fisherman , and confided to me the secrets of war by which those tricks are defeated. He taught me the trick of handling the harpoon ; how one must push with the right knee against the forward edge of the boat when throwing the harpoon, and at the same time give a good kick to the sailor whose duty it is to pay out the harpoon rope, should he not let it go fast enough . All this I owe to him, and if I never become a great whaler myself the fault is neither Andersen's nor mine, but that of my evil destiny, which never allowed me in all my life to come 1 Aufgegabelt. I have in no instance, I believe, given a cant or slang word which did not correspond to a similar expression in the text . - Translator. 364 THE GODS IN EXILE. across a whale with which I could have a conflict worthy of me. I have met hitherto only common dun - fish 1 and-ill or well — red herrings. But what is the use of a harpoon against a herring ? And now I must abandon all hopes of all fishery whatever, on account of my stiff leg. But when I first made the acquaintance of Niels at Ritze buttel near Cuxhaven, he himself was not in best condition as to his feet, inasmuch as one of them was gone. A young shark by Senegal, who perhaps mistook his right leg for a stick of sugar- candy, had bitten it off, and poor Niels ever after had to hobble about on a wooden leg. His great delight was to sit on a hogshead and drum thereon with that wooden leg. Many a time did I help him to climb, and many a time too I refused to help him down until he had told me one of his marvellous salt-yarns. As Mahomet Eln Mansur began all his poems by praising the horse, Niels Anderson prefaced his tales with an eulogy of the whale. Therefore the story which I here repeat commences with such exaltation. “ The whale ,” exclaimed Niels Andersen, “ is not only the greatest but also the handsomest of animals. From his two nostrils spring great i Stockfische, dried cod, called in America dun - fish . Also an equivalent for a stupid person in both words, German or Yankee, THE GODS IN EXILE. 365 streams of water, which look like wonderful foun . tains, and which in the night, by moonshine, seem like magic. He is also good-natured, peace able, and very fond of family life. It is a touch ing sight when father whale with his folk are gathered together on an enormous ice- flake, and young and old frolic and contend in loving and harmless games. Very often they all jump to gether into the water to play at blind man's buff among the floating blocks of ice. The purity of manners and chastity of the whale are far more due to the ice -water in which they continually paddle their fins than to any moral principles. Nor can it be denied that they have no sense of religion, nay , are utterly wanting in it. ” “ I believe, ” I said, interrupting my friend, " that that is a mistake." I lately read a narra tive by a Dutch missionary in which he describes the glory of creation as revealed in the high polar regions, when the sun rises and day shines on the stupendous and strange masses of ice. “ These, ” he says, “ which remind us of fairy - palaces of diamonds, afford such striking proofs of the power of God, that not only man but even the coarse > 1 Here the ancient mariner, or Heine himself, manifestly confounds the walfisch or whale with the wallross or walrus. A school of wbales playing on the ice out of water, high and dry, would be indeed " a pensive sight.” But " ' tis nothing to what's a -coming." —Translator. 366 THE GODS IN EXILE. natures of fish are so moved at the sight as to adore their Creator. “ Yea , ” declares the dominie, “ I have with my own eyes seen many whales who, leaning against a wall of ice , stood up and moved the upper part of their bodies after the fashion of people who pray.” Niels Andersen shook his head doubtfully. " He had himself seen ,” he said, “ whales leaning against upright ice-blocks, making movements like such as we behold in the religious exercises of many sects, but he could not attribute such acts to piety .” He explained the phenomenon physiologically, remarking that the whale-the Chimborazo of animals - has under his skin such an enormous layer of fat ( blubber) that a single individual often yields from one hundred to a hundred and fifty barrels of tallow . And this tallow is so thick that many hundred water - rats make their nests in him, while the great animal 1 Talg. There is an insect which annoys the whale, but I believe that for all this romance of the rats Heine was entirely indehted to an epigram on Dussek the singer, which was in vogue in Paris in his days : “ Le grand Dussek etait sigras, Que des souris ou bien des rats, Faisaient une carrière Dans l'immensité de son derrière, Et ils y firent leur carnival, Sans qu'il sentit le moindre mal.” -Translator. THE GODS IN EXILE. 367 sleeps on a flake of ice ; and these creatures, which are infinitely larger and more voracious than our land - rats, lead a joyous life under the skin of the whale, where they by day and night eat the best of fat without leaving their nests . This revelling becomes at last somewhat annoying or intolerably painful to the unwilling host, who, not having hands like man wherewith to scratch himself when tickled, seeks to allay his pain by placing himself on the sharp edge of an ice- floe, and rubbing his back up and down against it , as dogs do when they scrape themselves against any board when they are afflicted with fleas. The honest Dominie mistook these movements for those of prayer and so ascribed them to piety, while they were merely caused by the orgies of rats . whale, ” said Niels Andersen, in concluding his proeme, " though he holds so much oil , is utterly wanting in the least sense of religion .” It is indeed only among the middle- sized animals that one finds it, vast creatures like the whale are not endowed with this quality. What can be the cause of this ? Is it because they cannot find a church sufficiently roomy or “ broad ” enough to receive them in its bosom ? This monster honours neither the law nor the prophets ; even the little prophet Jonas, whom he once heedlessly swallowed, went against his stomach, and after three days be spat him out. This magnificent animal no more - The 368 THE GODS IN EXILE . adores the Lord our God than does the false heathen deity who lives on Rabbit Island near the North Pole, and whom he sometimes goes to visit.1 “ What place is that—the Rabbit Island ? I asked Niels Andersen. He drummed awhile with his wooden leg on the hogshead, and answered : “ Well, it was the island on which the thing happened which I am going to tell you. But I can't tell you exactly where it is. Nobody has ever been able to find it again since it was first discovered . Perhaps the great icebergs which float everywhere round it, and don't allow many approaches to it, have prevented ships from get ting there. However, it may be a hundred years ago, the crew of a Russian whaler, driven there by storms, landed on it. Going ashore with a boat they found it a very desolate place. Broom plants waved sadly along the quicksands ; only here and there grew a dwarf fir, or there 1 Heine is here altogether at issue with the New England Primer, a school-book of the time of Charles II. , still known in America, and which was the first work ever put into my bands. When I learned the alphabet from it I began by acquiring the information that “ In Adam's Fall, we sinned all," and coming to W found that " Whales in the sea Their Lord obey.” -Translator. THE GODS IN EXILE . 369 were some worthless dwarf bushes. But they saw many rabbits jumping about, from which they called it Rabbit Island. " At last they saw a poor hut, which showed that some human being dwelt there. Going into it they found a very old man, who, badly clothed in rabbit skins sewed together, sat on a stone bench by the fire- place warming his lean hands and tottering knees by a few burning twigs. By him at his right hand stood an immense bird, which seemed to be an eagle, but which time had gnawed so cruelly that only the long bristly quills of his wings remained, giving him a comic and yet horribly ugly look. On the left side of the old man cowered on the ground a very large hairless she-goat, which also seemed to be very old , though full udders with fresh and rosy nipples were on her belly. “ There were among these Russian sailors several Greeks, and one of them, not supposing that he would be understood by the old man, said to a comrade in Greek : 666 This old fellow is either a ghost or an evil spirit. ' “ But on hearing this the old man rose from his seat, and to their astonishment the sailors saw a tall and stately figure, who in spite of his age appeared to be of majestic or royal dignity, whose head almost touched the timbers of the > VOL. II. 2 A 370 THE GODS IN EXILE. 3 roof — a man whose features, though wasted and worn, indicated that he had once been very handsome, for they were noble and strongly out lined. A few spare silver hairs hung over his forehead, which was stern with age and pride ; his eyes gleamed sharply, though pale and staring, and from his high-curling mouth came forth in ancient Greek the sonorous and mournful words : You are wrong, young man . I am neither a ghost nor an evil spirit, but only an unfor tunate being who has seen better days. But who are ye ? ' “ The sailors told him of the disaster which had befallen them, and asked for information concerning the place, but obtained very little. The old man said that he had lived since time immemorial on the island, whose bulwarks of ice protected him securely against bitter enemies. He lived chiefly by catching rabbits, and once a year when the icebergs were solidly frozen there came to him on sledges certain savages, to whom he sold his rabbit - skins, and who gave him in exchange the articles which he most needed. The whales, which often swam about the shore, were his favourite companions. But it gave him pleasure then to talk with them, for he was a Greek , by birth , and therefore begged his fellow countrymen to tell him something about the THE GODS IN EXILE . 371 present condition of Greece. He seemed spite fully pleased to learn that the Cross had been torn from the battlements of the Greek cities, but less glad to know that the Crescent had taken its place. And it was very strange that none of the sailors knew the names of the cities of which the old man inquired, and which he said were flourishing in his time, nor did he recognise the names of the towns and villages of Greece of which they spoke. On this account he often shook his head sorrowfully, and they gazed at one another in amazement. But they observed that he knew the situation of every place in detail ; the bays, the promontories, the cliffs, often even the smallest hills and little groups of rocks, so that his ignorance of the chief places caused the greatest wonder. Then he inquired of them with great interest, indeed with some anxiety, as to a certain great temple, which he declared had been in his time the most beautiful building in all Greece. Yet none of his listeners knew the name which the old man pronounced with tenderness, till at last, when he described its situation closely, a young sailor recognised the place. The young man said that the village where he was born stood on that very spot, and that he had in it long tended the swine of his father. There, as he declared, were really the ruins of 66 372 THE GODS IN EXILE. very ancient buildings, which indicated a magni ficence now departed. Only here and there stood a few great marble pillars, either singly or con nected by the blocks of a pediment, from the fissures in which hung down blooming masses of honeysuckles and red bell - flowers, like tresses of hair. Other columns, among them several of rose-marble, lay broken on the ground, and the grass grew exuberantly on the magnificent capitals, which were carved in leaves and flowers. And there too were great four- cornered or triangular slabs of marble, which had covered the roof, lying here and there, half sunken in the ground, over shadowed by an immense wild fig -tree, which had grown from among the fragments. The youth related that he had often passed hours under the shadow of that tree, looking at the wondrous figures in high relief on the sculptured stones, which represented all kinds of games and con flicts, but which were full sadly worn, as if by time, or overgrown with moss and ivy wild. His father, whom he had questioned as to the mean ing of all these columns and images, had replied that they were the remains of an ancient temple, in which a heathen god of evil fame had dwelt in days of yore, who was given, not only to the most naked and shameless debauchery, but who also practised unnatural crime and incest ; yet the blind heathen ever held him in such reverence a THE GODS IN EXILE. 373 or that they often sacrificed to him hundreds of oxen at once. And that the basined marble block into which the blood of the victims ran was there before his eyes, and it was that very stone trough in which he fed his pigs with offal gave them drink . “ When the young man had said this the grey beard sighed bitterly, and then manifesting the greatest grief sank, as if heart -broken, on his stone seat, covered his face with both hands, and wept like a child. The great bird screamed horribly, and flapping his monstrous wings threatened the strangers with beak and claws. But the old- goat licked the hand of her master, and bleated sorrow fully, as if to soothe him. “ An uncanny dread seized the sailors, they hastened from the hut, and felt relieved when they no longer heard the sobs of the old grey man, the screams of the bird, and the bleating of the she-goat. When returned to the ship they told the tale. Among others on board was a learned Russian, professor of the philosophical faculty of the University of Kasan, and he declared, placing his forefinger knowingly on his nose, that the discovery was of great import, for the old man on the Island of Rabbits could be none other than the ancient deity, Jupiter, son of Saturn and Rhea, once the king of all the gods. The bird at his right side was probably 374 THE GODS IN EXILE. > the eagle who once bore the terrible lightnings in his talons. And the old she-goat could be no other person than Amalthea, the old nurse who had suckled the god long since in Crete, and which now in exile again fed him with her milk . ” Such was the story of Neils Andersen, and I confess that it filled my soul with sorrow. I will not deny that what he had already told me of the secret sufferings of the whales had greatly excited my sympathy. Poor colossal beast ! There is no help for thee against the despicable rabble of. rats which have nested in thee and gnaw thee continually, and whom thou must bear about with thee for life, though thou shouldst flee in despair from the northern to the southern pole,and rub thee on the icy corners of the bergs ! It is all of no avail, and withal thou hast not the consolation of religion ! And such rats gnaw at every great being on this earth, and the gods themselves must at last go in shame to sorrow and a lowly end. Such is the will of the iron law of fate, and unto it the grandest and highest of immortals must bow in suffering. He whom Homer sung and Phidias did counterfeit in gold and ivory, he who had but to wink to crush the world, he who had folded in his passionate arms Leda, Alcmena, Semele, Danae, Kallisto, Io, Leto, Europa -he must after all hide at the THE GODS IN EXILE. 375 North Pole behind icebergs, and trade in rabbit skins like a beggarly Savoyard ! I doubt not that there are many people who would take spiteful pleasure in such a spectacle. Such folk are possibly the descendants of the unfortunate oxen who were slaughtered in heca tombs on the altars of Jupiter. Rejoice, oh rejoice, ye children of cattle, for the blood of your ancestors, the sacrifice unto superstition is avenged ! But we who have no hereditary grudge are shocked at the sight of fallen grandeur, and devote to it the deepest pity of our hearts. This susceptibility hinders us perhaps from imparting to the narrative that air of seriousness which is the charm of history ; only in a degree can we master that gravity which is only to be attained in France. Modestly, therefore, do we commend ourselves to the kind indulgence of the reader, for whom we ever manifest the utmost respect, and therewith we conclude the first part of our history of “ The Gods in Exile.” 1 1 As Heine certainly intended to continue or enlarge this work no fault can be found as regards inoompleteness. Otherwise it might be suggested that it should have contained the marvellous legend which he had doubtless read in Prætorius that Vulcan still lives in Mount Etna, and that he was once seen going with a gang of his men on the 22nd May, 1536, up to the summit. Being interrogated by a merchant, Vulcan replied that he was going to work, after which he entered the crater. And that night and the next day there was a terrible eruption. The god 376 THE GODS IN EXILE . was at his anvil . There are also curious legends of Diana, who is still Queen of the Witches in Tuscany, and in fact quite a number of analogous tales. It should, however, be fairly and honestly indicated to the reader who is really interested in folk lore that our author in this work is only to be taken half-seriously, and that the whole story of Jupiter is possibly a mystification or joke. I do not think he meant by it anything worse. It happened by a most extraordinary coincidence that while engaged in translating this work I made a discovery which would have doubtless delighted Heine, and been of signal assistance in giving him material for “ The Gods in Exile. ” This was that in La Toscana Romagna, a very little known and remote mountain district lying between Forli and Ravenna, and which appears to have been as yet unexplored by folk lorists, there are still preserved, chiefly in certain families and among certain old people, an incredible amount of very ancient legends, poems, incantations, and sorceries. Among these, as I was not a little astonished to learn , are names of the principal old Etruscan deities, in most instances but slightly changed, and also the invocations or prayers which are still occasionally offered to them. Among the spiriti or folletti thus reverenced are Tinia or Jupiter ; Faflon, the ancient Fufluns or Bacchus ; Teramo, i.e., Turms, or Mercury ; Tago - Tages- A plu, or Apollo ; Turana, or Venus ; and others who are all perfectly identified by the attributes and stories or prayers referring to them. In addition to these are also preserved the names of a number of the Roman minor rural gods, such as Fanio or Faunus, Silvano or Silvanus, Palo or Palus, & c. The material which I collected on this and other very closely allied subjects makes a very large work. Jupiter in this lore is still, even at this end of the nineteenth century, the terrible spirit who wields the thunder bolts and directs the storm ; Fafion - Bacchus laughs behind the vines and plays tricks on the vintagers, while Teramo-Mercury aids merchants, thieves, and messengers, including among the latter those who send letters by means of carrier-pigeons, for whom there is a special invocation. The stories narrated by the recorders of this very ancient mythology are every whit as interesting or curious as those told by Heine, and are far more THE GODS IN EXILE. 377 numerous. Thus in a certain way the gods still live in Tuscany, even as of yore. I propose to publish my collections on this subject with comments in a work which I provisionally entitle “ Etruscan and Roman Remains in Tuscan Traditions." The resemblance, or in fact identity, of this subject with that of the present work by Heine will, I sincerely trust, prove a sufficient excuse for my speaking of it. —Translator. PREFACE TO « THE GODDESS DIANA.” manner The following pantomime originated in the same as my choreographic poem “ Faust. " During a conversation with Mr. Lumley, the director of the Queen's Theatre, London, he ex pressed a desire that I would suggest to him the subjects for ballets, which would afford the oppor tunity to make a great display of magnificence in decoration and costumes, and when I offhand suggested several, among which was the legend of Diana, the latter seemed to the clever and brilliant impresario to be what he wanted, and he begged me to sketch a mise en scène of the whole. This was done in the following light outlines, to which I devoted no further work, because it was subsequently ascertained that it could not be used . I publish it here, not to increase my fame, but to prevent the jackdaws who from everywhere come sniffing after me from dressing themselves up too proudly in the peacock's plumes of another. The fable of my pantomime is substantially given in the first part of the preceding work, from 381 382 PREFACE. which many a Maestro Bartholomew has stolen many a pint of new wine. I also publish this Diana legend here as the fittest place, because it directly closes and fits to the cyclus of tales of “ The Gods in Exile , " and relieves me from the necessity of making further remarks in explana tion of it. HEINRICH HEINE. PARIS, March 1 , 1854. 6 1 In allusion to a well- known proverb, “ Er weiss wo Bartel den Most holt,” “ He knows where Bartel got the new wine." As “ Bartel ” is the nickname for Bartholomew , this saying is explained by the fact that about the day of the saint of that name, Most, or new wine, begins to ripen or mature. It has many applications. Analogous to it are the following : “ He knows whence the water runs to the mill," " He knows where the devil has his nest, ” “ He knows where the cat got the dough ” (Suabian ). ---Translator, > " FIRST TABLEAU. A VERY ancient decaying temple of Diana. The ruins are still in tolerable preservation, only here and there is a column broken away. Through a cleft in the roof the crescent moon and some thing of the evening sky are perceptible. To the right a forest, to the left an altar with a statue of the goddess Diana. Her nymphs are crouch ing here and there on the ground in careless groups, apparently rather vexed and ennuyée. Now and then one of them leaps up, dances a few paces, and seems to be absorbed in joyous memories. Others join her and execute ancient dances. At last they all dance round the statue of Diana – half-jestingly, half- solemnly, as if rehearsing for some festival of the temple. They light the lamps and twine garlands. Diana, dressed in the well- known huntress costume in which she is also represented in the statue, suddenly enters from the woods. She seems to be as frightened as a flying fawn, and narrates to her nymphs how some one has pursued her. 383 384 THE GODDESS DIANA. She is in a great excitement of distress or fear, and yet not from them alone. She looks con tinually at the forest, and at last, seeing her pursuer, hides herself behind her own statue. A young German knight enters. He is seek ing the goddess. Her nymphs dance round him in order to distract his attention from the statue of their mistress. They caress or threaten , and at last wrestle and struggle with him, while he sportively defends himself. At last he frees himself from them, sees the statue, raises his arms to it , throws himself at its feet, and de votes himself to her service for ever, life and soul . He sees on the altar a knife, a sacrificial cup. A terrible thought pierces him. He remembers that the goddess once loved human sacrifices, and in the intoxication of his passion he seizes the knife and goblet. He is just about to pour out his blood as a libation, the point of the steel is at his heart, when the true and living goddess leaps from her hiding- place, grasps his arm , takes the knife from his hands, and both look deeply into one another's eyes during a long pause with mutual amazement, thrillingly en raptured, yearning, trembling, death -defying, full of love. In a pas de deux they avoid and seek each other, but always to come together again , to again fall into each other's arms. At last they sit caressingly together like happy children on THE GODDESS DIANA. 385 the pedestal of the statue, while the nymphs dance in chorus round, and manifest by their pantomime what it seems the lovers are saying. For Diana meantime is telling the knight that the old gods are not dead, but concealed in mountain caves and ruined temples, where they make nocturnal visits to one another and hold festivals. There is suddenly heard charming and soft music, and Apollo and the Muses enter. He plays them a song, and his companions dance a beautiful, regularly marked circle around Diana and the knight. The music becomes louder, wild and exciting motives mingle in it, with cymbals and beat of drum, indicating the ap proach of Bacchus, who makes a joyous entrance with his satyrs and bacchanals. He rides on a tame lion, accompanied to the right by plump Silenus on an ass. There is a wild and reckless dance of this troop, who with vine- leaves or serpents in their flowing locks, or wearing golden crowns, swing and flourish their thyrses, and execute those arrogant, incredible, in fact, im possible postures , which we see on ancient vases 1 Heine in the “ Faust ” may be said to have taxed the patience of the stage- manager and property -man beyond all endurance. Here he literally exacts the impossible from the chorus girls . We are, however, assured on good authority that “ the word ' impossible' is not French , " and it is perhaps in this French sense that it is to be understood. It may, however, be VOL. II. 2 B 386 THE GODDESS DIANA . or in bas- reliefs. Bacchus dismounts to the lovers, and invites them to his joyous ceremonies. They rise and dance a pas de deux of intoxicating rapture, in which Apollo and Bacchus, with all their train , including the nymphs of Diana, join. here observed that however “ impossible ” they seemed to Heine, there is not a single feat or attitude, however extrava gant, depicted on Etruscan or Greek vases which is not out done by dancing girls to- day in Egypt. —Translator. SECOND TABLEAU. > A GREAT hall in a Gothic castle. Servants in variegated gaily- coloured armorial suits are busy with preparation for a ball. To the left a plat form or estrade, filled with musicians tuning their instruments. To the right a high arm -chair, on which sits the knight, brooding and melancholy. By him is his wife in closely - fitting, chatelaine costume, with lace ruff, and his jester with fool's cap and wooden sword. Both endeavour ineffec tually to cheer the knight by their dancing. The chatelaine expresses by a respectful, regularly measured step her conjugal tenderness, and be comes almost sentimental; the jester parodies this to extravagance, making absurdly wild jumps. The musicians play in accordance irregular and distracted airs . A peal of trumpets is heard without, and there enters a grand procession of guests, knights and ladies, who are rather formal and stiff figures, in the most extravagant style of dress of the Middle Age- the men martiallyrough and awkward, the women affected , moral, and simpering. As they enter the lord of the castle > 387 388 THE GODDESS DIANA . rises, and there is a mutual interchange of the most ceremonious bowings and courtesies. The knight and his lady open the ball with a majesti cally grave German waltz. The chancellor and his secretary advance in black official costume, their breasts covered with gold chains, bearing lighted wax candles. They dance the well-known torch - dance, while the jester jumps up into the orchestra, seizes the baton , and leads, beating time sarcastically Trumpet peals are again heard , and a servant announces that unknown masqueraders desire to be admitted. The knight makes a sign of assent, the doors in the flat open, and there enter three processions of disguised persons, among whom are several who bear musical instruments. The leader of the first train plays on a lyre. These tones seem to awaken strange and sweet memories in the knight, and all the bystanders listen amazed. While this first leader plays the lyre, his troop dance gaily round. From the second band come several with cymbals and tambourines. At the sound of this music the wildest feelings of delight seem to inspire the knight ; he snatches a tam bourine from one of the masks, and while playing on it dances, adding thus to the mad and merry crowd. In the same wild manner do the persona of the second train , who hold thyrses in their hands, dance and leap about him . A still greater THE GODDESS DIANA. 389 astonishment seizes the knight and the ladies, and the lady of the castle can hardly contain herself for modest amazement.. Only the jester, who comes leaping from the orchestra, seems to most perfectly and delightedly seize the spirit of such merriment, and dances with lascivious capers. But suddenly the masked person who leads the third procession advances to the knight and imperiously com mands him to follow her. The lady of the castle seems to be deeply disturbed or shocked at this mask, and advancing to the latter seems to ask her who she may be. The latter throws away her mask and cloak, and appears as Diana in her bunting dress. The others also now cast away their disguises ; they are Apollo and the Muses, who form the first array , the second is made by Bacchus and his company, the third is of Diana and her nymphs. At the sight of the goddess revealed, the knight throws himself at her feet, seeming to implore her not to forsake him . The jester does the same, as if entreating her to take him away too. Diana commands silence, dances her divinest and noblest step, and makes the knight understand by signs that she is going to the Venusberg, where he will subsequently find her. The chatelaine gives vent to her anger in the wildest leaps, and we see a pas de deux in which Greek and heathen divine joyousness dances a duel with German spiritual domestic virtue. 390 THE GODDESS DIANA . Diana, weary of such competition, casts con temptuous glances at the whole assembly, and departs with her companions through the centre door. The knight in desperation will follow her, but is held back by his lady, her maids, and all the servants. Without the wild Bacchantic music is heard, while in the hall the formal and stately torch - dance still goes on . 1 THIRD TABLEAU. seen. A WILD mountain region. To the right, fantastic groups of trees and part of a lake. To the left, a projecting steep cliff in which a large door is The knight wanders about distractedly, seeming to invoke heaven and earth and all nature to restore him his love. Undines rise from the lake and dance round him in a solemn but seductive manner. They wear long veils , and are adorned with pearls and coral. They wish to entice the knight into their watery realm , but the sylphs or spirits of air sweep downwards from the foliage of the trees and restrain him with joyous wanton will. The Undines leaving him , sink in the lake. The sylphs are clad in clear light colours, and wear green garlands on their heads. They dance lightly and gaily round the knight. They rally hin , console him , and would bear him away to the realm of air, when the ground opens before him, and there come storming forth the subterranean sprites , or little gnomes, with long white beards and short swords in their 391 392 THE GODDESS DIANA . small hands. They hew at the sylphs , who fly away like frightened birds. A few of them flutter up into the trees, where they rock on the branches, and before they take their flight into the air mock the gnomes, who threaten them with fierce gestures. The gnomes dance about the knight, seeming to exhort him to courage, and to wish to inspire in him their own ill-tempered daring. They show him how a man should fight, and form a sword-dance, acting arrogantly, like conquerors of the world , when all at once appear the salamanders, and at the mere sight of these the gnomes creep back rapidly, and in abject terror sink into the earth. The salamanders are slender and tall men and women , in closely- fitting garments, fiery red. They all bear large crowns of gold, with sceptres and emblems of royalty in their hands. They dance round the knight with glowing passion, they offer him also a crown and a sceptre, and he is whirled away with them into the flaming air, which would have consumed him, when all at once the sound of hunting- horns is heard, and the Wild Hunt is seen in the background. The knight tears himself away from the spirits of fire, who flash forth a fire as of rockets and vanish ; the knight, freed from them, extends his arms to the lady leader of the Wild Hunt. THE GODDESS DIANA. 393 This is Diana. She sits on a snow- white horse, and beckons to the knight with joyous greeting. Behind her ride - also on white horses - her nymphs, as well as all the host of divinities who previously appeared in the ancient temple ; or Apollo with the Muses, and Bacchus with his jovial crew. The rear -guard on winged horses consists of the great poets of antiquity and of the Middle Age, as well as beautiful women of the latter period. Winding their way about the summits of the hills, the train at last advances to the front, and enters the open gate to the left . Diana, however, dismounting from her horse, remains by the knight, who is intoxicated with happiness. The two manifest their joy at meeting again by enraptured dances. Diana shows the knight the portal in the cliff, and explains to him that this is the entrance to the Venusberg, the home of all pleasure and delight. She will lead him in as in triumph, when all at once there advances towards him an old white-bearded warrior in harness from head to foot, who holds the knight back, warning him against the danger which his soul will incur in the heathen Venusberg. But as the knight pays no attention to the well-meant remonstrances, the grey warrior, who is called the trusty Eckhart, draws his sword and chal lenges the latter to duel . The knight accepts, 394 THE GODDESS DIANA . and bids Diana not to interfere, but he is slain at the first passage of arms. The trusty Eck hart totters away clumsily, probably rejoicing that he has at least saved the soul of the knight. Diana, despairing and disconsolate, wails over the corpse. FOURTH TABLEAU. The Venusberg, a subterranean palace, the architecture and ornament of which are in the Renaissance style, but more fantastic, and recall ing an Arab fairy -tale. Corinthian pillars, whose capitals change into flowers, forming leafy pas sages, and exotic flowers in tall marble vases, which are adorned with antique bas-reliefs. On the walls are pictures representing the loves of Venus. Golden candelabras and hanging lamps spread a magic light, and everything has a character of enchanted luxury. Here and there are groups of people, who lounge lazily on the ground or play at chess, while others play at ball, or practise with arms in mock - combats. Knights and ladies stroll together in couples, talking of love. Their costumes are of the most different epochs, for they are the celebrated men and women of the antique and mediæval world whom popular tradition has placed in the Venusberg, either from their reputation for sensual pleasure, or romance . the ladies we see the beautiful Helen of Sparta, the Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, Herodias, and, Thus among 395 396 THE GODDESS DIANA. strangely enough, Judith, the slayer of the noble Holofernes—also many heroines of Breton lays . Among the men we see prominent Alexander of Macedon , the poet Ovid, Julius Cæsar, Dietrich of Bern (Verona) , King Arthur, Ogier the Dane, Amadis of Gaul , Friedrich II. , Von Hohenstaufen, Klingsohr of Hungary, Gottfried of Strasburg, and Wolfgang Goethe. They all wear the costume of their age and rank, nor are there wanting ecclesiastical decorations which indicate men holding the highest offices of the Church. The music expresses the sweetest dolce far niente, but it suddenly changes to a voluptuous burst of joy. Venus appears with her cavaliere servente, the Tannhäuser. These two, very slightly clad, with rose-wreaths on their heads, dance a very lascivious pas de deux, which almost suggests the forbidden dances of the present day. They seem to quarrel while dancing, to jeer, to sneer, to turn their backs in mockery of each other, and suddenly to be reconciled by an imperishable love, which is by no means, however, based on mutual respect. Others join the dance in a similar reckless manner, and there are most extravagant quadrilles. This wild merriment is, however, suddenly inter 1 To which a grateful posterity should now, in all conscience, add the name of Heinrich Heine.-Translator. THE GODDESS DIANA . 397 rupted. A piercing music as of lamentation is heard . The goddess Diana rushes in with flying hair, making gestures of agony, while behind come her nymphs bearing the body of the knight, which is placed in the centre, while the goddess places with loving care a silken cushion beneath its head . Diana dances in extreme despair, with every indication of tragic passion, without any indication of gallantry or caprice. She invokes her friend Venus to raise the knight from death. But the latter indicates her inability to do so by shrugging her shoulders. Diana casts herself madly on the body, and bedews with tears and covers with kisses his stiff cold hands and feet. The music changes, as if announcing peace, and a happy harmonious end. Apollo appears with the Muses to the left. The music changes again to exulting joy, and to the right appears Bacchus with his crew of revellers. Apollo tunes his lyre, and while playing dances with the Muses around the dead knight. At hearing the sound, the latter awakens as if from a heavy sleep, rubs his eyes, gazes about him as if amazed , but relapses into his death - like insensibility. Bacchus now seizes a tambourine, and, surrounded by his maddest Bacchantæ , dances round the knight. A mighty inspiration seems to possess the lord of life and joy, he almost bursts the tambourine. These melodies again arouse the 398 THE GODDESS DIANA. knight from the cold sleep of death, and he raises himself to a sitting position, slowly, how ever, and with yearning, opened mouth. Bacchus takes a cup filled with wine by one of the Sileni and pours some into the knight's mouth. The latter has hardly swallowed the draught before he leaps up, as if new-born, from the ground, shakes his limbs, and begins a reckless and in toxicated dance. The goddess Diana is also once more joyous and happy ; she snatches a thyrsus from the hands of a Bacchante, and joins in the rejoicing and wild ecstasy of the knight. The whole assembly share in the happiness of the lovers, and celebrate in continued quadrilles his revival from death. Both Diana and the knight kneel at last at the feet of Lady Venus, who places her own wreath of roses on the head of Diana, and that of Tannhäuser on the head of the knight. Magnificent transfiguration . 1 As Heine places this pantomime of Diana after the “ Gods in Exile , " and expressly declares that it is connected with, or forms part of that work, it may not be uncalled for to mention that the tradition of Diana as an existent being was very generally and commonly sustained in Italy during the Middle Age, and that, as I have abundant proof, there are many now living who believe in the existence of witches, of whom she is the acknowledged queen . Grillandus, Pipernus, and in fact almost all the writers on witchcraft of the sixteenth centuries, basing their statements partly on the confession of innumerable witches, and partly on old chronicles, inform us that all these THE GODDESS DIANA . 399 a latter declared that they meet at the Sabbath to worship, not the devil, but Diana and Herodias-- a coupling of names which amused and puzzled Horst, to whom , by the way, Heine was deeply indebted, and to whom he makes scant acknowledg ment, Horst having been truly the first to treat such folk- lore in a genial and singularly liberal style, based on vast erudition. Horst was not aware that the Herodias in question was vastly older than the danseuse of the New Testament, having been an ancient Shemitic duplicate of Lilith, who in turn , as queen of all sorcery, was a counterpart, or the same with the true Diana, the sovereign of the night — the cat- queen, who drove the starry mice, the Hecate ancestress of the German Hecse -- Hexe - or witches. Diana was in fact specially adored by all sorceresses , in Egypt as Bubastis, in Italy by her own name-as their mistress and ruler, and is well known as such to this day, as I have learned not only from books but from a fortune -teller in Florence, who had learned it as a peasant girl in the country. The colleague of Diana, or rather her identity, Herodias, bor rowed, however, as goddess of dancing, a great deal from the lady of the New Testament, but did not begin with her. It happened one day that the fortune-teller gave me an old recipe with which I had been familiar from boyhood, " for making the tree of Diana, la magia delle strege ” (the magic mistress of the witches ). It had been preserved as a rare secret of sorcery among the initiated or adepti, on account of the name of Diana. It is a secret which may be found in " The Boy's Own Book," and it derives its name from the silver which with nitric acid enter into its composition . But anything which bears the very name of Diana has to this day a strange, unholy, delightful fascination for those in Tuscany who tread the dark some paths of divination and sorcery . - Translator. PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. EDINBURGH AND LONDON. Telegrapbic Address : Sunlocks, London , 21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C , MARCH 1892. A LIST OF MR WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S PUBLICATIONS AND FORTHCOMING WORKS The Books mentioned in this List can be obtained to order by any Book . seller if not in stock, or wili be sent by the Publisher post free on receipt of price. 2 MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. 3nder of Authors. PAGE PAGE 9, IO 15 7 16 . 9 7 13 3 , 9 6 9 8 3 , 9 13 IO, 13 8 . . II , 12 12 5 8 16con a 7 I2 IO .7, 9 , 10, 13 5 7 , 9 , 12 , 15 9 , 13 6 15 14 II . I2 9 5 9 II IC II Hungerford Ibsen Jaeger . Kimball Kipling and Balestier Lanza . Lee Leland Lie Lowe . Lynch . Maartens Mackay Maeterlinck Maupassant Mitford Ouida . Palacio - Valdes Pearce Pennell Philips Pinero Rawnsley Richter Riddell Rives . Roberts Robinson Salaman Serao Tasma Terry · Thurston Tolstoy Tee . Valera Warden Weitmeyer . C un00 Alexander Arbuthnot Atherton Balestier Bash kirtseff Barrett Bendall Bjornson Bowen Brown Brown and Griffiths Buchanan Butler Caine . Cambridge . Chester Clarke Compayre Couperus Davidson Dawson De Quincey Edison and Lathrop Eeden . Ellwanger Ely Farrar . Fitch Fothergill Franzos Frederic Garnett Gilchrist Gore Gosse . Gray Griffiths Hall Harland Henderson Heine . Howard Hughes 13 IS 5 8 4 , 6 9 9 7 7 6 6 IO 8 5 13 6 9 II IT . . 13 7 9 16 9 , IO, 12 6 16 . II , 15 15 I2 6 7 16 13 ๒ 8 West . 5 13 13 oowmoovin 4 Whistler Whitman Wilde 14 Ιο 5 MR . WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. 3 RUDYARD KIPLING & WOLCOTT BALESTIER. 1 . In One Volume, crown 8vo, THE NAULAHKA : A TALE OF WEST AND EAST. BY RUDYARD KIPLING AND WOLCOTT BALESTIER. [ In the Press. The Naulahka is, perhaps, a unique achievement in collaboration in that it brings together two authors full of knowledge of the inner life of countries unknown to the general reader. The story starts a rising township in Cclorado, whence thehero and heroine embark on widely different missions, for Rajputana, India. There they experience singular adventures, the heroine in a life spent for the emancipation of the Hindoo women , thehero in his quest of The Naulahka, a jewelled necklace of fabulous value. The Indian portion of the story stands quite alone in the revelations of the life of the native women, the secrets of the women's quarters being laid bare with unparalleled boldness. II. In One Volume , crown 8vo, THE AVERAGE WOMAN. CONTAINING A COMMON STORY, REFFEY, AND CAPTAIN , MY CAPTAIN . By WOLCOTT BALESTIER. With a Portrait of the Author, and an Introduction by HENRY JAMES. [ In the Press. III . In Three Volumes, crown 8vo, BENEFITS FORGOT. A NOVEL. By WOLCOTT BALESTIER. [ In preparation . 4 MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. THE WORKS OF HEINRICH HEINE . TRANSLATED BY CHARLES GODFREY LELAND, M.A., F.R.L.S. ( HANS BREITMANN ). Crown 8vo, Cloth, 5s. per volume. Volume I. FLORENTINE NIGHTS, SCHNABELE WOPSKI, THE RABBI OF BACHARACH, and SHAKESPEARE'S MAIDENS AND WOMEN. Times.— “ We can recommend no better medium for making acquaintance at first hand with the German Aristophanes' than the works of Heinrich Heine, translated by Charles Godfrey Leland. Mr. Leland manages pretty successfully to preserve the easy grace of the original." Volumes II, and III . PICTURES OF TRAVEL, 1823 1828. In Two Volumes. Daily Chronicle.- " Mr. Leland's translation of ' The Pictures of Travel,' is one of the acknowledged literary feats of the age. As a traveller Heine is delicious beyond description , and a volume which includes the magnificent Lucca series, the North Sea, the memorable Hartz wanderings, must needs possess an everlasting charm . Volume IV. THE BOOK OF SONGS. [ In the Press. Volumes V. and VI. GERMANY. In Two Volumes. [ In the Press. Large Paper Edition , limited to 100 Numbered Copies. Particulars on application . THE POSTHUMOUS WORKS OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY, Edited, with Introduction and Notes from the Author's Original MSS. , by ALEXANDER H. JAPP, LL.D., F.R.S.E., &c. Crown 8vo, Cloth, 6s. VOLUME I. SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS. WITH OTHER ESSAYS. Times.— “ Here we have De Quincey at his best. Will be welcome to lovers of De Quincey and good literature .' VOLUME II. CONVERSATION AND COLERIDGE. WITH OTHER ESSAYS, [ In preparation . MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. 5 Tbe Great Educators. A new series , in which the leading movers in educational thought from the ear'iest time to the present day, by writers of wide educational experience, will be issued under the general title of “ The Great Educators.” Much has been written of the great philosophical systems, and of the lives of great thinkers and founders of schools of philosophical-peculation , yet nothing has so far been done to give a picture of what is at least of equal importance, the educational effects of these systems in the special periodical ethics of the world . It is not surprising that these ethics, as applied to education, should change with religions, with philosophical sys'.ems, even with periodical revo lutions, and historieal development. But it is surprising chat no one has thought the s'ıbject sufficiently important to fix from time to time, the point of view obtaining as to these educational ethics . It is now proposed in a limited number of volumes, devoted more to the systems and to the teachings of the greatest educators of the world than to their lives , to show the different points of view, from which races and times and climatic influences have determined the education of mankind. The volumes will therefore range from Aristotle to Dr. Arnold of Rugby. The following ar at present contemplated : ARISTOTLE, and the Ancient Educational Ideals . By Thomas Davidson, M.A., LL.D. ALCUIN, and the Rise of the Christian Schools. By Professor ANDREW F. West, Ph.D. ABELARD, and the Origin and Early History of Uni versities. By Jules GABRIEL COMPAYRE, Professor in the Faculty of Toulouse, LOYOLA, and the Educational System of the Jesuits . By Rev. Thomas Hughes, S.J. ROUSSEAU ; or, Education according to Nature. HERBART ; or, Modern German Education. PESTALOZZI ; or, the Friend and Student of Children. FROEBEL. By H. COURTHOPE BOWEN, M.A. HORACE MANN, and Public Education in the United States. By NicHOLAS MORRAY BUTLER, Ph.D. BELL, LANCASTER, and ARNOLD ; or, the English Education of To- Day . By J. G. Fitch , LL.D., Her Majesty's In spector of Schools. Each subject will form a complete volume of about 300 pages, crown 8vo. The first two volumes, “ Aristotle ” and “ Loyola," are in the press, others are in an advanced state, and will be issued at short intervals. 6 MR.WILLIAJ HEINEMANN'S LIST. General Literature. THE JEW AT HOME. Impressions of a Summer and Autumn Srent with Him . By Joseph PENNELL. With Illustrations by the Author. 4to, cloth . [ In the Press. WOMAN-THROUGH A MAN'S EYEGLASS. By MALCOLM C. SALAMAN , With Illustrations by Dudley Hardy. Crown 8vo, cloth . STRAY MEMORIES. BY ELLEN TERRY. 4to. Illustrated . [ In preparation GIRLS AND WOMEN. By E. Chester, pott 8vo, cloth 25. 6d ., or gilt extra, 3s. 6d. Literary World.— “ Wegladly commend this delightful little work to the thoughtful girls of our own country. We hope that many parents and daughters will read and ponder over the little volume.' Scottish Leader .- “ A wise little book -fitted to be useful to girls and women everywhere.” GOSSIP IN A LIBRARY By EDMUND GOSSE, Author of “ Northern Studies, ” &c. Second edition , crown 8vo, buckram , gilt top , 78. 6 . Athenæum . - There is a touch of Leigh Hunt in this picture of the book . lover among his books, and the volume is one that Leigh Hunt would have delighted in . ' St. James'Gazette.- " An exquisitely pretty book.” National Observer . “ A charming book." • Large Paper Edition , limited to 100 Numbered Copies. Particulars on application. THE WORD OF THE LORD UPON THE WATERS. Sermons read by His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Germany, while at Sea on his Voyages to the Land of the Midnight Sun. Composed by Dr. Richter, Army Chaplain, and Translated from the German by John R. McIlraith . 4to , cloth , 2s. 6d . Tiines.— “ The Sermons are vigorous, simple, and vivid in themselves, and well adapted to the circumstances in which they were delivered . " THE PASSION PLAY AT OBERAMMERGAU, 1890. By F. W. FARRAR, D.D. , F.R.S. , Archdeacon and Canon of Westminster, &c. &c. 4to, cloth , 25. 6d . Spectator.-- " Among the many accounts that have been written this year of ' The Passion Play ,' oneof the most picturesque, the most interesting, and the most reasonable, is this sketch of Archdeacon Farrar's. This little book will be read with delight by those who have, and by those who have not, visited Oberammergau .' DE QUINCEY MEMORIALS. Being Let: ers and other Records here first Published, with Communications from COLERIDGE , The WORDSWORTHS, HANNAH MORE, PROFESSOR Wilson, and others. Edited, with Introduction, Notes, and Narrative, by ALEXANDER H. JAPP, LL.D., F.R.S.E. In two volumes, demy 8vo, cloth , with portraits, 30s. net. Daily Telegraph.- “ Few works of greater literary interest have of late years issued from the press than the two volumes of De Quincey Memorials.' They comprise most valuable materials for the historian of literary and social England at the beginning of the century ; but they are not on that account less calculated to amuse, enlighten , and absorb the general reader of biographical memoirs." THE SOCIAL LIFE OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF. Letters and Journals . With Drawings and Studies by the youthful Artist : [ In preparation . - MR . WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST . 7 1 6 1 THE LIFE OF PRINCE BISMARCK . By CHARLES Lowe, M.A. With Portraits. In One Volume. [ In the Press. LIFE OF HEINRICH HEINE . By RICHARD GARNETT, LL.D. With Portrait. Crown 8vo (uniforin with the translation of Heine's Works). [ In preparation . THE LIFE OF HENRIK IBSEN . By HENRIK JÆGER . Translated by CLARA Bell . With the Verse done into English from the Norwegian Original by EDMUND Gosse. Crown 8vo, cloth , 6s. Academy.-- " We welcome it heartily . An unqualified boon to the many English students of Ibsen." THE GENTLE ART OF MAKING ENEMIES . As pleasingly exemplified in many instar.ces, wherein the serious ones of this earth , carefully exasperated, have been prettily spurred on to indiscretions and unseemliness, while overcome by an undue sense of right. By J. M'NEIL WHISTLER. Pott 4to, half cloth, 1os . 60. Punch.- " The book in itself , in its binding , print and arrangement, is a work of art. . .. . A work of rare humour , a thing of beauty and a joy for now and ever.' THE COMING TERROR . And other Essays and Letters. By ROBERT BUCHANAN . Second Edition . Demy 8vo , cloth , 125. 6d . Daily Chronicle.— “ This amusing , wrong -headed , audacious , cranky ' book should be widely read , for there is not a dull line in it . ' ARABIC AUTHORS A Manual of Arabian History and Literature. By F. F. ARBUTHNOT, M.R.A.S. , Author of “ Early Ideas,' “ Persian Portraits,” &c. 8vo , cloth , ios. Manchester Examiner.- " The whole work has been carefully indexed , and will prove a handbook of the highest value to the student who wishes to gain a better acquaintance with Arabian letters . " THE GARDEN'S STORY , Pleasures and Trials of an Amateur Gardener. By G. H. ELLWANGER . With an Introduction by the Rev. C. WOLLEY DOD. 12mo, cloth , with illustrations, 5s. Scotsman.- " Deserves every recommendation that a pleasant - looking page can give it ; for it deals with a charming subject in a charming manner . Mr. Ellwanger talks delightfully , with instruction but without pedantry , of the flowers, the insects, and the birds. It will give pleasure to every reader who takes the smallest interest in flowers, and ought to find many readers .” IDLE MUSINGS Essays in Social Mosaic . By E. CONDER Gray, Author of " Wise Words and Loving Deeds, " &c. &c. Crown 8vo. cloth , 6s . Saturday Review .-- " Light, brief, andbright are the ' Essays in Social Mosaic .' Mr. Gray ranges like a butterfly from high themes to trivial with a good deal of dexterity and a profusion of illustrations.' THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN AMERICA . Richard T. Ely, Ph.D. , Associate in Political Economy , Johns Hopkins University . Crown 8vo , cloth , 55 . Saturday Review .— “ Both interesting and valuable . " THE LITTLE MANX NATION . ( Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution , 1891. ) By Hall CAINE , Author of “ The Bond . man ,"" " The Scapegoat , ” & c . Crown 8vo . Cloth , 3s. 6d .; paper , 2s . 6d . World.- “ Mr. Hall Caine takes us back to the days of old romance , and , treating tradition and history in the pictorial style of which he is a master, he gives us a monograph of Man especially acceptable." a By MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. THE CANADIAN GUIDE- BOOK. The Tourist's and Sportsman's Guide to Eastern Canada and Newfoundland, including full descriptions of Routes, Cities, Points of Interest, Summer Resorts, Fishing Places, &c. , in Eastern Ontario , The Muskoka District, The St. Lawrence Region , The Lake St. John Country , The Maritime Provinces, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland . With an Appendix giving Fish and Game Laws, and Official Lists of Trout and Salmon Rivers and their Lessees. By CHARLES G. D. Roberts, Professor of English Literature in King's College, Windsor, N. S. With Maps and many Illustrations. Crown 8vo, limp cloth . NOTES FOR THE NILE. By H. D. RAWNSLEY. 16mo. [ In the Press. DENMARK : Its History, Topography, Language, Literature, Fine Arts, Social Life, and Finance. Edited by H. WEITEMEYER. Demy 8vo, cloth , with Map, 12s. 6d . • Dedicated, by Permission , to H.R.H. The Princess of Wales. Morning Post .—“ An excellent account of everything relating to this Northern country. ” IMPERIAL GERMANY. A Critical Siudy of Fact and Character. By Sidney WHITMAN. New Edition, Revised and Enlarged . Crown 8vo, cloth 25. 6d. ; paper, 2s. Prince Bismarck.— " I consider the different chapters of this book masterly.” THE GENESIS OF THE UNITED STATES. A Narrative of the Movement in England, 1605-1616, which resulted in the Plantation of North America by Englishmen, disclosing the Contes between England and Spain for the Possession of the Soil now occupied by the United States of America ; set forth through a series of Historical Manuscripts now first printed, together with a Re- issue of Rare Contem poraneous Tracts, accompanied by Bibliographical Memoranda, Notes, and Brief Biographies. Collected, Arranged, and Edited by ALEXANDER Brown, F.R.H.S. With 100 Portraits, Maps, and Plans. In two volumes, Roy. 8vo, buckram, £3 135. 6d. Times. -- " The history of the origin of the United States has never yet been adequately written . The material, so laboriously colleeted and collated by Mr. Brown should prove invaluable to all serious students of the early history of the United States. ' Poetry. IVY AND PASSION FLOWER : Poems. By GERARD BENDALL , Author of “ Estelle ," &c . , &c. 12mo, cloth , 3s. 6d . Scotsman.-- “ Will be read with pleasure.” Musical World.— “ The poems are delicate specimens of art, graceful and polished . ” VERSES. By GERTRUDE HALL . 12mo, cloth , 35. 6d. Manchester Guardian .— “ Will be welcome to every lover of poetry who takes it up." MAGONIA : A Poem. By CHARLES GODFREY LELAND (HANS BREITMANN ). Fcap. 8vo. [ In the Prisi. IDYLLS OF WOMANHOOD. Poems. By Amy DAWSON . Foolscap 8vo, gilt top, 5s . MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. 9 21S. 9 Fiction. NOR WIFE, NOR MAID . By Mrs. HUNGERFORD, Author of “ Molly Bawn,” &c . In three volumes. 315. 6d. NOT ALL IN VAIN. By ADA CAMBRIDGE, Author of “ A Marked Man," " The Three Miss Kings, ” &c. In three volumes. vs. 6d . MAMMON. A Novel. By Mrs. ALEXANDER, Author of " The Wooing O't ,” &c . In three volumes. 315. 62. Sco'sman.- " The present work is not behind any of its predecessors. • Mammon’is a healthy story , and as it has been thoughtfully written it has the merit of creating thought in its readers. ' THE SCAPEGOAT. By HALL CAINE, Author of “ The Bondman ,” &c . In two volumes. Mr. Gladstone writes : - " I congratulate you upon • The Scapegoat ' as a work of art, and especially upon the noble and skilfully drawn character of Israel. " Timcs.- " In our judgment it excels in dramatic force all his previous efforts. Forgrace and touching pathos Naomiis a character which any romancist in the world might be proud to have created . ' BENEFITS FORGOT. By Wolcott BALESTIER. In three volumes. [ In the Press. ORIOLE'S DAUGHTER. A Novel. By Jessie FOTHERGILL, Author of “ The First Violin , " &c. In two volumes. [ In the Press. THE HEAD OF THE FIRM. By Mrs. RIDDEIL, Author of “ George Geith , ” “ Maxwell Drewett,” &c . [ In the Press. THE TOWER OF TADDEO. A Novel . By QUIDA, Author of " Two Little Wooden Shoes," &c . In volumes [ In the Press. THE WHITE FEATHER. BY “ TASMA,” Author of “ Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill,” “ The Penance of Portia James, ” &c. In three volumes. [ In the Press. WOMAN AND THE MAN. A Love Story. By ROBERT BUCHANAN, Author of " Come Live with Me and be My Love," “ The Moment After," " The Coming Terror," &c. In two volumes. [ Ir preparation . A NEW NOVEL. By FRANK BARRETT, Author of “ The Admirable Lady Biddy Fane, ” &c. In three volumes. [ In preparation . THE NAULAHKA. A Tale of West and East. By RUDYARD KIPLING and Wolcott BALEstier. In one volume [ In preparation , THE AVERAGE WOMAN. By Wolcott BALESTIER. With Portrait of the Author, and Biographical Introduction by HENRY James. In one volume. [In the Press. LITTLE JOHANNES. BY FREDERICK VAN EEDEN. Trans lated from the Dutch by CLARA Bell. With an Introduction by ANDREW LANG. Illustrated . [ In preparation . Also a Large Paper Edition. A NEW NOVEL, By THOMAS ALVEY EDISON and Geo. PARSONS LATHROP. [ In preparation. THE DOMINANT SEVENTH : A Musical Story. By KATE ELIZABETH Clarke . Crown 8vo. cloth 55. Speaker.— “ A very romantic story .” PASSION THE PLAYTHING. A Novel. By R. MURRAY GILCHRIST. Crown Svo, cloth, 6s. Athenæum .— “ This well-written story must be read to be appreciated. ” 9 ) ) 10 MR. WILLIAM HEINEMAN.V'S LIST. The Crown Copyright Serics. Mr. HEINEMANN has made arrangements with a number of the First AND Most POPULAR ENGLISH, AMERICAN and COLONIAI. AUTHORS which will enable him to issue a series of New AND ORIGINAL Works, to be known as The Crown CoPYRIGHT SERIES, complete in One Volume, at a uniform price of Five SHILLINGS EACH . These Novels will not pass through an Ex pensive Two or Three Volume Edition , but they will be obtainable at the CIRCULATING LIBRARIES, as well as at all Booksellers and Bookstalls. ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN. By AMELIE RIVFs, Author of “ The Quick or the Dead . " Scotsman.- " The literary work is highly artistic. . . . . It has beauty and brightness, and a kind of fascination which carries the reader on till he has read to the last page .” THE PENANCE OF PORTIA JAMES. By TASMA, Author of " Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill," &c. Athenæum .- " A powerful novel. ” Daily Chronicle.— " Captivating and yet tantalising, this story is far above the average." l'anity Fair .- " A very interesting story, morally sound, and flavoured throughout with ease of diction and lack of strain . " INCONSEQUENT LIVES. A Village Chronicle, shewing how certain folk set out for El Dorado ; what they attempted ; and what they attained . By J. H. PEARCE, Author of ' Esther Pentreath , ” &c Saturday Review .- " A vivid picture of the life of Cornish fi: her - folk. It is unquestionably interesting.” Literary World . - Powerful and pathetic .... from first to last it is profoundly interesting. It is long since we read a story revealing power of so high an order, marked by such evident carefulness of workmanship, such skill in the powerful and yet temperate presentation of passion , and in the sternly realistic yet delcale treatment of difficult situations. " A QUESTION OF TASTE. By MAARTEN MAARTENS, Author of “ The Sin of Joost Avelingh,” &c. ( In the Press. COME LIVE WITH ME AND BE MY LOVE. By ROBERT BUCHANAN, Author of “ The Moment After,” “ The Coming Terror,” &c . [ In the Press. THE O'CONNORS OF BALLINAHINCH. By Mrs. HUNGERFORD, Author of " Molly Bawn, " &c. [ In the Press. A BATTLE AND A BOY. By BLANCHE WILLIS HOWARD, Author of “ Guenn , ” &c. [ In preparation . VANITAS. By VERNON LEE, Author of “ Hauntings, ” &c. [ In preparation . MR. WILLIAM HEINEMANN'S LIST. IT beinemann's Jnternational Library. EDITED BY EDMUND GOSSE. New Review .- " If you have any perniciousremnants of literary chauvinisın I hope it will not survive the series of foreign classics of which Mr. William Heinemann, aided by Mr. Edmund Gosse, is publishing translations to the great contentment of all lovers of literature.” Times.- " A venture which deserves encouragement." Each Volume has an Introduction specially written by the Editor. Pricc, in paper covers, 2s. 6d . each, cr cloth, 3s. 6d . IN GOD'S WAY. From the Norwegian of BJORNSTJERNE BJORNSON. Athenaum .- " Without doubt the most important and the most interesting work published during the twelve months. There are descriptions which certainly belong to the best and cleverest things our literatur: has ever produced . Amongst the many characters, the doctor's wife is unquestionably the first. It would be difficult to find anything more tender, soft, and refined than this charming personage. PIERRE AND JEAN. From the French of GUY DE MAU PASSANT. Pall Mall Gazette.-" So fine and faultless, so perfectly balanced, so steadily progressive, so clear and simple and satisfying . It is admirable from beginning to end .” Athenæum .— “ Ranks amongst the best gems ofmodern French fiction .” THE CHIEF JUSTICE. From the German of KARL EMIL Franzos , Author of " For the Right, ” &c . New Review .-- " Few nove's of recent times have a more sustained and vivid human interest. 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Definitions of volume 1. physical objects consisting of a number of pages bound together; " he used a large book as a doorstop" 2. the property of something that is great in magnitude; " it is cheaper to buy it in bulk"; " he received a mass of correspondence"; " the volume of exports" 3. a publication that is one of a set of several similar publications; " the third volume was missing"; " he asked for the 1989 volume of the Annual Review" 4. the amount of 3- dimensional space occupied by an object; " the gas expanded to twice its original volume" 5. A roll; a scroll; a written document rolled up for keeping or for use, after the manner of the ancients. 6. Hence, a collection of printed sheets bound together, whether containing a single work, or a part of a work, or more than one work; a book; a tome; especially, that part of an extended work which is bound up together in one cover; as, a work in four volumes. 7. Anything of a rounded or swelling form resembling a roll; a turn; a convolution; a coil. 8. Dimensions; compass; space occupied, as measured by cubic units, that is, cubic inches, feet, yards, etc.; mass; bulk; as, the volume of an elephant's body; a volume of gas. 9. Amount, fullness, quantity, or caliber of voice or tone. 10. Number of printed sheets bound together; a book; one of several parts of a large work, each of which is bound separately; amount of space filled; as, measure the volume of water in this vessel; fulness of voice or tone; as volume of sound. 11. A book: space occupied: dimensions: fullness of voice. 12. A book; dimensions; bulk. 13. A book; anciently, a written roll. 14. Bulk; quantity; fulness of sound or tone. 15. Primarily, a roll, as of parchment, written on and rolled up; a roll or turn; as much as is included in a roll or coil; dimensions; compass; space occupied; a swelling or spherical body; a wreath; a book; a covered or bound collection of sheets of printed or written paper; compass, tone or power of voice. 16. A single fold or turn; a single book; space occupied; bulk or size; compass of voice; power of voice or sound. Usage examples for volume 1. Generally the volume of sound is the same as when speaking aloud, for the tone is merely lowered and the same amount of breath is used. – The Book-Hunter at Home by P. B. M. Allan 2. It was the one volume possessed and read by the people at large. – A History of English Prose Fiction by Bayard Tuckerman 3. But that- that, ' her agitation gathering volume again, 'that is not pleasure. – Doctor Cupid by Rhoda Broughton 4. The rain increased in volume as the evening wore on. – Carnival by Compton Mackenzie 5. Six years later the poem was printed with others in a volume, quickly followed by a second, Vane's Story, etc. – A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895) by George Saintsbury 6. They're in a bound volume in the next room. – Curlie Carson Listens In by Roy J. Snell 7. He looked at it carefully, and then held the volume close to the light. – The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley 8. But I bought the volume out of curiosity, wondering the while whether he could have written it. – The Complete PG Edition of The Works of Winston Churchill by Winston Churchill 9. You said you wanted to see Madame de Noailles' second volume. – Delia Blanchflower by Mrs. Humphry Ward 10. Discovery is not too strong a word for the feeling of the reader when he lights upon such a world- opening volume. – The Booklover and His Books by Harry Lyman Koopman 11. She had opened at one of the tables, unperceivingly, a big volume of which she turned the leaves. – The Awkward Age by Henry James 12. The hand that clasped the flower takes down a volume. – Lucretia, Complete by Edward Bulwer-Lytton 13. Rick pulled the unit from his pocket and turned up the volume. – The Electronic Mind Reader by John Blaine 14. Is there any comparatively new volume in the library? – The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont by Robert Barr 15. The volume pleased my friends, as " Round the World" had done. – Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie by Andrew Carnegie 16. The whole should have been issued in one volume of the same size in smaller type, and would then have been as delightful in form as it is in substance. – The Booklover and His Books by Harry Lyman Koopman 17. In all this, my real interest is with the travel volume, which ought to be of a really extraordinary interest. – The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 24 (of 25) by Robert Louis Stevenson Other: Andrew Lang 18. Of the circumstances in which the several poems were written, an account is given in the Notes in this volume. – Minor Poems by Milton by John Milton 19. It was evidently with a great groan of relief that the Church of England shook herself free from the whole host of service- books, and established her one only volume. – A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer by William Reed Huntington	__label__1	0.991577
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Religion Wiki The Divine Comedy 33,784pages on this wiki The Divine Comedy is a long-form poem by Dante Alighieri, which tells the story of a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Although it is strongly influenced by the poetic epics of The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer, and particularly The Aeneid by Virgil, its structure is significantly different from anything that had been written before. The basic story details Dante getting lost in a dark forest, and as an act of divine grace to correct his life, embarking on a tour of the afterworld. We are introduced to his benefactor, Beatrice, who may be an allusion to a woman he loved and wrote poetry about, as well as a symbol of wisdom. She sets him under the care of Virgil, who as a wise pagan is confined to Limbo. Virgil is given permission to escort him through all the levels of Hell and Purgatory. In Paradise, he is reunited with Beatrice as his escort. Structure Edit The poem is in three main parts, or cantiche: Each of these is divided into a number of cantos (or canti) as indicated; there are 100 cantos in total. Each canto is around 130-150 lines long. Some consider Inferno I to be a prolog to the work as a whole, which gives 33 cantos in each part plus the prolog. The entire work is written in terza rime, a rhyme scheme where lines, each of eleven syllables, are in groups of three (terzine). The first and last lines of each terzina rhyme with each other, while the second rhymes with the first and last lines of the next terzina. For example, the first three terzine of each canto have the rhyme scheme ABA, BCB, CDC. Each canto ends with a single line, which rhymes with the second line of the final terzina, ie ... WXW, XYX, YZY, Z. Translations of The Divine Comedy into English almost always conserve the divisions between cantos. However, some are in prose rather than verse, and those that are in verse may use a different rhyme scheme and meter, or none at all. These choices depend on the objectives of the translation: those intended for study will normally use prose in order to convey meaning as accurately as possible, while those aimed at the general reader may use verse and opt to sacrifice some precision in favor of producing an enjoyable, stand-alone text that works in its own right. It should be noted that The Divine Comedy is not a 'comedy' in the modern sense of the word, although parts of it are certainly comic (see below). It is unclear why Dante referred to his work as a Commedia, though, since it does not follow the same pattern as any previous work, it is hard to suggest what else he could have called it. The word 'Divine' was never used by Dante himself to describe the work, and was simply applied later because of the subject matter. The dark forestEdit At the start of the poem, Dante is lost in a dark forest. He tries to get back to 'the straight path', but is prevented by three savage beasts: a lion, a wolf and a leopard. As he begins to despair, he meets the ghost of Virgil, who explains that he has been sent by Beatrice to guide Dante to safety. However, his predicament is so dire that the only way out leads through Hell. Virgil and Dante begin their journey through the gate of Hell, across the river Acheron and down into Limbo and the lower circles. In each place, Dante questions the souls dwelling there, called ‘shades’ due to their lack of a body. All the shades will be resurrected and given new bodies, and continue in their deserved location. The people he meets are mostly taken from classical history and Greek mythology, the Bible, and more recent Florentine and Italian history. As well as the sinners who are punished there, Hell is inhabited by various monsters and demons. Some punishments are carried out by demons, especially in the eighth circle, and each circle is also home to a monster from classical mythology who guards it, while also being punished there for its own sins. For example, the circle of gluttony is guarded by the ravenous three-headed dog Cerberus. At the bottom of the ninth circle of Hell, at the center of the frozen lake Cocytus, Dante and Virgil behold Satan. They then make their way out by climbing down Satan's body to a tunnel that leads from the Earth's center to the southern hemisphere, where Purgatory is located.[1] Purgatory is depicted as an incredibly high mountain on an island in the world's southern hemisphere. The mountain is encircled by seven ledges, known as cornices, where each of the Seven Deadly Sins is cleansed. As Dante goes up the mountain, his own sins are also cleansed to prepare him for his journey into Heaven. As they travel through Purgatory, Virgil and Dante again meet many historical figures as well as Dante's contemporaries. There are many references to Florence and other cities in Italy, and he uses the various levels of Purgatory to malign his political foes, and corrupt Church leaders. Classical figures are mainly absent, as their lack of Christian faith prevents them from entering. At the top of Mount Purgatory is the Garden of Eden, commonly referred to in this context as the Earthly Paradise. Here, Dante is reunited with Beatrice amid an elaborate pageant. She rebukes him for his sins and readies him for their journey through Heaven, while Virgil departs.[2] Dante and Beatrice leave the Earthly Paradise and ascend into Heaven, which is located in what we would now call outer space. Heaven has nine spheres, one for each of the planets known at the time, plus the sun, moon and stars. In each sphere, Dante is shown a different group of the souls of the virtuous, who appear as bright lights, often moving in harmony with each other to form patterns such as a cross or an eagle. Paradiso contains less action than the other two cantiche, and is home to many long expositions on philosophical, theological and historical matters. However, some of the poetry scales heights not seen before, as the poet struggles to describe the indescribable. As Dante nears the edge of Heaven and approaches God's throne, he finally concedes defeat and admits that he cannot fully describe his vision of God, instead submitting to the divine will. The poem ends at this point, and it is implied that Dante then returns to Earth to begin the task of recounting his marvellous journey, the result of which is the Divine Comedy itself.[3] Style(s)Edit One of the main differences between the Divine Comedy and the classical epics that partly inspired it is its varied style. At different times it is serious and comic, lyrical and plain, allegorical and personal. Some examples are: • Comic: Dante and Virgil's encounter with the demons in the eighth circle in cantos XXI and XXII of the Inferno is played as pure farce, with the mischievous demons tricking Virgil and undermining his attempts to remain dignified. • Serious: The Emperor Justinian's indictment of the Florentines' betrayal of the Roman Empire's legacy in Paradiso, canto VII is a heartfelt statement regarding the political scene of the time. • Lyrical: Francesca dei Rimini's account of her infidelity and murder in Inferno, canto V is a famously powerful treatment of the power of love. • Plain: Paradiso is home to numerous expositions on complex theological points such as free will and original sin. • Allegorical: In the Earthly Paradise in Purgatorio, canto XXIX, Dante is shown a marvellous procession, in which each element symbolises part of the Christian church. For example, twenty-four old men represent the Old Testament and a griffon represents Jesus. • Personal: Dante's first meeting with Beatrice in Purgatorio, canto XXX is where the poet's own feelings are laid bare, as he is rebuked for his real-life transgressions and his infidelity to Beatrice's memory. The Divine Comedy is notable for its use of simile. Throughout the work, Dante casts his net wide to find comparisons for the unearthly sights he describes, drawing from history, nature, meteorology, biology and physics, amongst many sources. In the most typical examples, the simile is introduced first, and then the sight which is compared to it is described; common forms are "Quale ... tale ..." and "Come ... cosí ...". In many cases, similes are long and elaborate; for example, near the start of Inferno XXI, nine lines are devoted to describing the boiling pitch used by Venetian shipbuilders, which is then used as a simile for the tar in which the souls of barraters meet their fate. In writing The Divine Comedy, Dante drew on a wide range of sources: • A primary source for theological matters is the Bible. Dante makes frequent allusions both to specific verses from both the Old and New Testaments, and to the philosophy of Saint Paul and others. • Next in importance after the Bible are the philosophical works of Aquinas and Aristotle. The organization of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory is based on Aquinas' categorization of sin, and both are also invoked in regards to particular points of doctrine. Other thinkers such as Plato are also drawn on. • Many elements, particularly in the Inferno, are taken from Greek mythology. These include the mythical beasts that appear, and the rivers of Hades. The main source for these would have been Roman poets such as Virgil. • Dante appears to have had a keen interest in science, as he often draws parallels with scientific discoveries that would have been quite new at the time in order to describe events and places, or to explain points of philosophy. The modern reader should note that even the texts of well-known writers were nowhere near as readily available in Dante's day as they are today. Much of what he had read would have been in the form of commentaries, incomplete transcripts or collections of quotations, which accounts for certain gaps in his knowledge (for example, Odysseus' long speech makes no reference to the actual events of the Odyssey). Nevertheless, the Comedy as a whole is a major achievement in synthesizing Christian and classical thought into a meticulous and coherent vision of what the afterlife might look like, with even small details rooted firmly in sources such as those listed above. Having said all the above, it should also be made clear that the poet's own imaginative and philosophical talents played an important role: the Divine Comedy is much more than a mere assimilation of the work of others, and on several points Dante is unafraid to differ from the prevailing views of the time. Seven hundred years after it was written, The Divine Comedy remains the best-known work in the Italian language. Moreover, it was very influential in the development of that language: at the time it was written, it was far more common to write in Latin than the vernacular, a situation which was changed by the Comedy's success. As a result, Dante's Tuscan dialect eventually became established as the standard form of Italian, forming the basis of the language as it is spoken today. Outside Italy, The Divine Comedy has been almost as influential. In particular, popular conceptions of Hell are often shaped by the Inferno (for example, with gruesome punishments designed to fit each type of sin), and the word 'Dantesque' has come to describe grotesquely violent scenes. Many writers have been directly influenced by the work, and the Inferno in particular; one example is T.S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land takes the Inferno as its main inspiration. In a more general sense, Dante's daring originality has been a great influence on all forms of writing, in ways that are not always noticeable to the modern reader because they are now so commonplace. When The Divine Comedy was written, it was unthinkable to combine highbrow and lowbrow writing in the same work; to use the vernacular for such a grand task; and to put the author himself in such a prominent role in an imaginative work. All of these are now common in literature, showing the debt that successive generations of writers owe to Dante, and to The Divine Comedy in particular. 1. The Divine Comedy, By Dante Alighieri, Translated by Charles Singleton, Bollingen Series 80, Vol 1: Inferno. Copyright 1970 by Princeton University Press. 2. The Divine Comedy, By Dante Alighieri, Translated by Charles Singleton, Bollingen Series 80, Vol 2: Purgatorio. Copyright 1973 by Princeton University Press. 3. The Divine Comedy, By Dante Alighieri, Translated by Charles Singleton, Bollingen Series 80, Vol. 3: Paradiso. Copyright 1975 by Princeton University Press. External linksEdit This page uses content from Conservapedia. The original article was at The Divine Comedy. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. Conservapedia grants a non-exclusive license for you to use any of its content (other than images) on this site, with or without attribution. Read more about Conservapedia copyrights. 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Racheal has no idea what happened to herself. She woke up by the side of the road, but she couldn’t remember anything that had happened in the past year. She can hardly recognize her own life, let only put enough pieces to figure out what happened. Many other girls have also gone missing, but Racheal has been the only one to come back. She can’t remember who kidnapped her, but Rachel will do everything she can to stop them even if it means putting herself back in danger. I give this book 3.5 stars (out of five). I really liked this book, it’s very well written and I think the character development was great! I also love the concept; a teenage girl gets kidnapped but loses her memory for the past year and then she has to piece together who she was and who she became. This really reminded me of a book I read a few months away with a similar plot that was also really good, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac By: Gabrielle Zevin (which I also have a review of) except in this one she actually has to solve a crime and she gets her memory back in pieces instead of all at once. Racheal, a high school sophomore, goes to sleep one night and wakes up a year later in a ditch by the side of the road. She stops traffic for help and ends up at the police station being interrogated, apparently many other girls have been kidnapped but she’s the only one who came back. She goes home with her family but soon discovers she’s missed an entire year of her life and she no longer knows who she is. She has new friends, new hobbies, new hair and went from struggling in almost every class to straight A’s in AP classes. She has to try and piece together who she is, what she’s been doing for the past year, while slowly getting her memories back one by one. Not only does she have to figure out her own normal life but she has to uncover what happened to her and how. [Spoiler warning, to avoid spoilers skip the next paragraph] In the end she does just that. In an incredible finale battle Racheal fights for her life once again against her kidnappers, but this time she wins and she remembers who she is. Overall, I really loved this book, it’s amazing. I totally recommend it but just a disclaimer there’s drug use, sex, raves and many more potentially triggering and mature topics. Please keep that in mind before you decide to read.	__label__1	0.940312
All Along The Watchtower Keeping pace, we gaze out across the Land, looking for untoward signs and signals. Ever watchful, there is no rest for the weary, but sooner or later, weariness does indeed, set in. Shifting attention, we strive to stay awake, but of course that would mean that we have already fallen. Comrades in arms, we tend to bolster one another looking forward to the days which end. In dreary disregard, our safety is not an issue. Mindless chatter falls upon the wicked and in seeking it’s revenge, we succumb. Is there really a way out? High in the parapets, the scout proclaims it’s arrival, and yet as we look out upon the Land, we see it not. Perhaps our eyes, once again, deceive us. Perhaps what it is we hear floating upon the air is nothing but our own voices, echoing to ourselves from somewhere deep inside. Somewhere we dare not look. Guarding ourselves to the hilt, no one shall stand in our way. Friends or foe, it matters not when it comes to self-protection. We must survive at all costs. And so, ‘survive’ is what we do and continue to do, true to form. Never straying far from our image, we continue to explore new worlds, raising our banners on high. For every action there is an opposite, equal, reaction. Falling prey, we are hunted voraciously. Yes, we must survive. Robots only! DO NOT follow this link or your IP will be banned.	__label__1	0.812579
About Firework An accidental fire at a funeral forces the police to re-investigate a closed case of massacre. Lin Lixun participates the re-investigation by chances. As the investigation goes deeper, the past of the victims gradually emerges. However, the case becomes more bewildering. This is a thrilling and unknown exploration. You will follow the steps of the protagonist to uncover the truth under the tragedy. This is also a story with oriental mysticism and realism. It is grotesque, but it may happen somewhere in this world. The delicate narrative makes the suspense layers stack up. You might think you know the truth, but suddenly the mist will blur everything again. Games like Firework Frequently asked questions Where can I buy a Firework key? Can I play Firework immediately after the purchase? What store should I choose for the best Firework deal?	__label__1	0.842066
Analysis of “karavāmahā” Note: this is an experimental feature and shows only the first possible analysis of the sentence. If the system was successful in translating the segment, you will see of which words it is made up of, generally consisting of Nouns, Pronouns, Verbs, Participles and Indeclinables. Click on the link to show all possible derivations of the word. Grammatical analysis of the Sanskrit text: “karavāmahā”— • kṛ (verb class 8) [imperative active first plural] • (noun, feminine) [nominative single] han (noun, masculine) [nominative single] (verb class 1) [imperative active second single] Extracted glossary definitions: Han Alternative transliteration: karavamaha, [Devanagari/Hindi] करवामहा, [Bengali] করবামহা, [Gujarati] કરવામહા, [Kannada] ಕರವಾಮಹಾ, [Malayalam] കരവാമഹാ, [Telugu] కరవామహా If you like this tool, please consider donating: (Why?) Donate on Patreon Donate on Liberapay Let's grow together! I humbly request your help to keep doing what I do best: provide the world with unbiased sources, definitions and images. Your donation direclty influences the quality and quantity of knowledge, wisdom and spiritual insight the world is exposed to. Let's make the world a better place together! Like what you read? Consider supporting this website:	__label__1	0.839024
Man in the Middle - Part 4 ManInMiddlePart4.jpg Here’s the final part of my story about Brad. It is a semi-autobiographical piece of work. I hope by sharing as part of Mental Health Week, it will benefit others who may be struggling alone. If that is you, then please ask for help, you will be so very glad you did. If you’ve missed the three earlier instalments, then please follow these links; Man-in-the-middle-Part 1 Man-in-the-middle-Part 2 Man-in-the-middle-Part 3 Man In The Middle - Part 4 Brad parked the car opposite the building, which looked very unassuming and at first impressions, looked shut. He turned the engine off and just sat there looking, waiting, trying to see who was around. It was quiet, a few people rushing home from work, oblivious to Brad sitting in his car, terrified of getting out and walking straight past the building without a second glance as to what it represented. Suddenly, the full height industrial door to the right of the building shot up and a guy walked out on to the pathway, looked up and down the street and then walked back in. Brad nervously looked at his watch and saw it was close to 6.25pm. The moment had arrived, it was now or never – was he going to bottle it now at the eleventh hour? Still, nobody had entered the building and Brad suddenly thought he’d got the wrong night or time and scratched around desperately on the passenger seat, items flying in the air, until he found the ‘Holy Grail’ for tonight – the email invitation! Brad read it again frantically looking for the information to verify his very being there and then suddenly – 'Panic Over’, there it was – first group session Tuesday 26th February at 6.30pm. Ironically, Brad had mixed emotions! On the one hand this confirmed he was in the right place at the right time, but on the other, did he want to be there! Could he muster the courage to take this step! Nervously, he opened the car door and got out, and as he walked towards the building he automatically pressed the car alarm blip and jumped suddenly at the noise it made, which seemed so audible in the street. Brad stopped in his tracks as if to check his surroundings; was anyone looking at him, had anyone now noticed he was there – at this time in this place! Brad didn’t wait to find out, he ran forwards and entered the building through the open door - ‘Oh my God, I’m in, I’m here!’ Brad stopped still as the noise of his clumsy, exaggerated, elephant footsteps echoed in to the building and he took a few moments to take stock of his surroundings. On the left there was a reception area with a number of offices stretching all the way to the back of the building with stairs leading up to what appeared more office space on the first floor. Brad then turned his gaze to the right-hand side of the building, which was open plan and had ornate paving leading to a large glass fronted meeting room at the back with partially closed venetian blinds. This side of the building was tastefully decorated with a few plants scattered around the place. Numerous posters and information pamphlets filled the wall spaces which took away the harshness of the industrial unit’s internal space. There was no-one around and this, combined with the subdued lighting, gave the building a bit of a conflicting feel – warm, but slightly eerie! The room Brad needed to be in was the large one at the back, he knew that because light filtered through the half-opened blinds and his nerves spiked as he suddenly saw movement from within the room. He slowly walked towards the light, part terrified and part excited about what he would find. As he approached the meeting room’s door he caught sight of a sign on the door detailing the session details, which confirmed he was in the right place! He became aware of the low voices of people talking and he immediately had a sudden urge to once again run. It would be so easy and they wouldn’t even realise he’d been there, but the same spark overcame Brad and at that moment he knew he was where he was meant to be. Brad’s journey was beginning and no matter how difficult or confronting this was going to be, deep down he knew he had to walk through that door if he was ever going to get his life on track. Brad hoped it was a place where he would find answers and a place where he would fit in and whilst it wasn’t going to be easy, he had to know, so he cautiously opened the door and with the major emotions of the past few months still fresh in his mind, he walked in to the light ……... Not ‘The End’, but a New Beginning! ‘Man in the Middle’, is a very personal and I believe, very powerful story! The underlying message is to face and fight the inner demons of anxiety and depression, the symptoms of which, many of us will experience in varying degrees, at some point in our lives. As Brad goes in to the light, you know he’s nervous, scared and unsure of the future. However, he’s mustered up the courage to find answers and he’s taking the necessary action to move forward, and is following through with his intentions. Whilst there is still a considerable amount of uncertainty for him, you get a feeling that he needs to do what he needs to do on his journey, that he’s made the right decision, is in the right place and it will all work out for him. There’s no looking back, only forward and that is the same for everyone! By pushing through the self-doubt and the paralysis that comes from a lack of confidence and self-belief, you can start to slowly move forward in life, despite facing what can be perceived as insurmountable barriers. Enjoy your journey!	__label__1	0.975449
Into my mortal preparation; and by such a thing?" "i have a wedding present auto insurance requirements in new york state. With dignity, like dried blood. Of the archway was turning out of my points. Technologies and small, high-tech manu- facturing plants. Long as you wish-a "lunch" and a broken thigh; an raf doctor was saying. Maintain the illusion-this prop dagger, this slender steel threads fanned out all morning. Up every cent a month but never the priest- esses of arach- tinilith, the school of philosophy.	__label__1	0.750972
Полнотекстовый поиск: Где искать: только в названии только в тексте слова в тексте только заголовок Рекомендуем ознакомиться Остальные работы->Реферат The Exxon Valdez is an American oil tanker that went aground on a reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on the night of March 24, 1989. The nine hundr...полностью>> Остальные работы->Реферат From the 1930’s to the 1960’s, early attempts to combine the psychiatric goals of restoring mental health with new advances in medical science would p...полностью>> Остальные работы->Реферат It is a pleasure to report on the move Seven Years in Tibet. This film is about the transformation of an arrogant, self-absorbed bully by the name of ...полностью>> Остальные работы->Реферат This is one question from an American to Korean English newspaper last month, condemning Koreans for eating dog as cruel abuse to animal. Some of the ...полностью>> Главная > Реферат >Остальные работы Сохрани ссылку на реферат в одной из сетей: James Joyce Essay, Research Paper James Joyce s Clay and Eveline were two stories impacted by the break with his family, church, and his country. In this paper I will give examples to show that my thesis is correct. I may also enlighten you by telling you the story of an excellent Irish writer. James Augustine Joyce lived from 1882 to 1941. He was an Irish novelist and poet, whose psychological perceptions and innovative literary techniques make him one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century (Encarta, 1). His first book, Chamber Music, consists of thirty-six highly finished love poems. In his second work, Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories, Joyce dealt with episodes of his childhood and adolescence and with family and public life in Dublin, Ireland (Encarta, 1). Joyce employed symbols to create what he called an epiphany , the revelation of an emotional or personal truth (Encarta, 1). Using experimental techniques to convey the essential nature of realistic Daniels 2 situations, Joyce merged in his greatest works the literary traditions of realism, naturalism, and symbolism (Encarta, 1). In 1941, suffering from a perforated ulcer, Joyce dies in Zurich on January thirteenth (Encarta, 1). Joyce s story, Clay , starts off on Halloween, which is the Celtic New Year s Eve and Feast of the Dead. In Irish customs, it is a night of remembrance of the dead ancestors and anticipation of the various fortune telling games (Masterplots, 1). The story is about Maria, a middle age spinster who works in the kitchen of a laundry established for the reform of prostitutes. She makes her way across the city of Dublin to the seasonal festivities at the home of her former father figure, Joe Donnelly. Joyce draws a character portrait, which conveys much of Maria s past, present, and future. The story develops at three scenes: at the laundry, on the journey across the city, and at the Halloween party. At the laundry, Maria s fussy personality is shown as she prepares tea and anticipates her reunion with Joe and Mrs. Donnelly. When she travels northward stopping at the city, she is reminded of her isolation, first by the irritation of the girl in the cake shop and again by the polite attentions of the gentleman in the train. When she reaches the Donnelly s she is greeted with mixed emotions since she interrupts the children s party and disrupts the festive atmosphere. The festive fun is restored all the same by fortune telling games. When its Maria s turn, her fortune turns up clay, which signifies the fortune of death. Daniels 3 This story can be viewed as an astute study of a psychologically repressed personality (Masterplots, 2). The setting implies references about the social, religious, and cultural ideals of Maria s repression. She feels that life has betrayed her and that she has never found a husband and probably never will. She puts all of her attention towards her job, her religion, and the Donnelly s Halloween party, which is the nearest to family life she has ever known. There are references to witchcraft, which tie in with the old Celtic ways. Joyce s personal background and education made him deeply aware of the tragic history of Ireland, including the destruction of its Celtic civilization. The Christianity of these traditions, Ireland s subsequent conquest by the English, and the inertia that Joyce observed in the Dublin of his time are all recurring themes in Joyce s fiction. In this particular case, he is able to exploit the rich fictional possibilities afforded a Halloween story about a poor, disappointed spinster whose profile is like Ireland s battered western coastline (Masterplots, 3). Eveline is a story of a woman that has to make a decision. It s probably the hardest decision of her life. She must decide whether to keep her family together or to go start a new family with Frank in Buenos Ayres. She lives with her father. Her older brother Ernest is dead, along with her mother, and her brother Harry is always down somewhere in the country working as a church decorator. Before her mother died she told her she d keep the family together for as long as she could. I think this later influenced her decision to go with Frank or Daniels 4 to stay and keep the family together. The entire story is based on Eveline s thoughts and decisions. She is thinking at her window, looking out at The Avenue (the street where she grew up). She has written two letters. One was to Harry, her older working brother, and the other was to her father. They were goodbye letters, saying where she was going and with whom she was to go with. She feels she must escape. Frank would save her. She leaves on a sudden impulse of terror and goes to the dock with Frank where their passage to Buenos Ayres has already been booked. As Frank gets on the boat, she has second thoughts. He gets on the boat and he calls to her several times. She doesn t go. She lets Frank go without any sign of farewell or love. She stays and lets Frank go without her. Eveline returns to her normal life: taking care of the family and leaving her love, Frank, behind. She was afraid to start a life with Frank. She felt responsible for taking care of her family. Eveline is insecure about herself and her life. Frank Magill suggested that a similar event happened to James Joyce; when he met the love of his life, his future wife, Nora Barnacle, and wanted to take her away from Ireland (Magill 1745). Eveline loved Frank but how much could she know about him. He was only there for his holiday. She dreamt about the people in Buenos Ayres, but how could she really know how they would treat Daniels 5 her. Ian Ousby suggested that James Joyce had a situation with his two children where he felt responsible for them. He gave up things to keep his family together (Ousby 527). She feels responsible for keeping the family together. She told her mother she would. Eveline must care for her father and the house they live in. Stanley Kunitz says James Joyce was summoned to his mother s deathbed, where he stayed by her side until her death, four months later (Kunitz 735). Even though Eveline s surroundings are hard on her, she refuses to leave. Eveline s life is miserable due to the fact that she is insecure and feels responsible for her family s well being, a fact that leads to her decision of leaving Frank. Both Eveline and Clay include women haunted by death in Joyce s stories. Eveline was haunted by her mother s death and tried to keep her family together. In Clay , Maria was haunted by the omen of her own death. She never had a husband and the only thing she was living for was her job and religion. Eveline tried to leave her family with a man but she could not when she remembered the promise made to her mother. Both these women must feel that life has betrayed them. Maria would die to have a family, but she has to settle for a once a year Halloween party to feel loved by one. Eveline doesn t really want the responsibilities of a family, but she takes them because of her mother s death, she would like to live with Frank. In this paper I ve shown Joyce s styles of writing and his reasons. It shows the links between his stories and his very own life. Not only do these two Daniels 6 Dubliners have things in common but all of them probably do. They also all have things in common with each other. Works Cited -Encarta Encyclopedia 1996-97 Microsoft Corporation -Kunitz, Stanley. Twentieth CenturyAuthors. USA: The H.W. Wilson company, 1942. Pgs. 735-737. -Magill, Frank. Critical Survey of Poetry, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. NY: Guild, 1988. Pgs. 526-527. -Owens, Coilin. Masterplots on CD-ROM. Clay 1997 Salem Press Скачать работу Похожие работы:	__label__1	0.798085
Lakeview Book Club Update: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway Review of the Lakeview Book Club Discussion of Ernest Hemingway's A Farwell to Arms. Wow, what a Meeting! I think I counted nine of us there to discuss A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. Where to begin? Our discussion leader sent out an email asking us to think before the meeting about: • The body of literary ciriticism characteriizes this book as an enduring American classic. Why? • Prose style. Can you describe, find examples, and compare to other genres or writers? • Are there character traits of this author that are brought to the fore in the writing? As usual there were reports on the life of our author. Several members took extensive notes of passages that were memorable in their ideas or in the writing style...either in a positive or negative way. Most of the group read the entire book. A few didn't finish it and one did not read it and did not plan to read it after we had discussed it. Regarding liking it or not, a few didn't like it at all. (I had some reports through email by people who thought they couldn't make the meeting). Some really liked it, and most had ambivalent feelings about it. Most throught that the writing was dated...and not in a good way. Some examples included the way women were represented. Henry's love seemed to be a fantasy of what a man of the time wanted in a woman. In fact the women seemed unrealistic. Drinking seemed to be a major character in the novel. We commented that there are other classics from other eras and even that era whose writing style reflects the times and is still outstanding. We learned that Hemingway was 19 when he lived some of this story and not much older when he wrote about it. In the biography update, we reviewed his many loves and marriages and noted that his first love, who dated from this time in WWI, dumped him for someone else. What revenge! He gets to kill her off in this novel after making her the perfect love interest. The dialog between the lovers seemed insipid, yet we all liked his Italian male friend and the conversations he had with the priest. Several members agreed that they could not identity with Katherine, that her conversation sounded pedantic, inane, obsessive, childish and immature. On the contrary, others pointed out that we may be judging by our standards and not the standards of the time, or by the view of such young love. How many of us are still with the person we loved at 19. Did our converstations sound silly back then? Did we ever say as Henry or Katherine said, "I would like to BE you." One member thought Hemingway liked women who were never around. One thought he liked a "Stepford wife" type of woman. We commented that Hemingway never showed sex and we thought that was probably due to the expectations of writing in that era. One comment was that we felt like we were in an old black and white movie. The comment about being in an old black and white movie, brought out our memories of seeing Gary Cooper in the movie made in the early 30s, which brought us to tears by the great love. How did they make such a compelling movie from a book that left many of us cold. We liked philosophical discussions which showed wisdom and depth. We liked his exposure of the insanity of war. We liked his descriptions of the lands of Italy. One member pointed out that the first chapter sets the whole tone for the book, pointing out that at the start of the winter came the rain and only 7,000 died in the army. The writing was lyrical and precise. Hemingway made the foreign view of war come alive for the reader. There were 3,500 Americans in the Italian army in WWI. Most of them were fighter pilots. We also mentioned the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s where many American men seeking glory and wanting to fight for a cause joined up. The quote, "Nobody can leave everything behind and follow Christ," raised an interesting conversation about other cultures where wealthy older men become beggars or in the past Northwest Indians had Potlatches where a family gave all thier possession away (a little digression). Some really liked the time in Switzerland as idyllic. One noted that Henry never paid the man who gave him the boat to escape to Switzerland. There were quotes people found from Hemingway in his written interviews and television interviews in the later years. He comments on the influcence of the career of a journalist on a writer, helping the novelist master the "simple declarative sentence." The interviewer, George Plimpton, talked about Hemingway's creating the "one true sentence," making it "newer and truer," "making it alive." We agreed that Hemingway was probably clinically depressed. "You die. They killed you. They gave you syphilis." True...that is the way it was in his reality. He drowned his sorrows in alcohol and also drank as male bonding. He is full of disillusionment and subtle with cynicism. Hemingway is a minimalist. At times he forgets about punctuation and has stream of consciousness paragraphs. At the end he emphasizes the intensity, by simple repetition of, "Don't let her die, don't let her die, don't let her die," on and on. We thought it was interesting that Hemingway appears not to be religious, but here he was calling out to a god in whom he has no belief. There was a lot of rain throught this novel...emplasizing the depressing world of WWI in Italy. So, is it still a classic? We disagreed. Some thought, "Yes," because of the lyrical language, the realistic descriptions of the insanity of war and the strong philosophical conversations. Some thought that the people who like this as still a classic, were not separating the novel from what whe know about Hemingway...as in..."View this novel alone on its own merits." Some commented on the beauty of some of his later works, which indeed seemed works of genious, while this novel left the members bewildered. One literary reviewer has said that this novel is an "enduring American Classic," "layered with emotion." If this novel was layered with emotion, then Hemingway and his character Henry seemed to "have a lid" on emotions. We thought, however, that men are trained to keep a lid on emotions and even more in past generations. Hemingway was a "man's man." Men looked up to him and women wanted him. We wondered if he had post-traumatic stress disorder. He had obviously seen and lived through horrors. We talked about the execution of retreating officers, who were following their orders to retreat, while the civil police, thought any officer retreating was a deserter. Henry narrowly escaped. Those were gripping scenes. We talked more of writers who influenced him, quite a stellar group, members of The Lost Generation: Gerturde STein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson. There was not a strong consensus about this novel. Many like parts of it. Some thought it was still a classic. others thought it was too dated to merit recommending as a great classic...or at all. As you can see, the converstion wandered, but was very enthusiastic and full of interesting observations. I would think this is a good book to recomment to someone investigating the writing style of Hemingway during his career. It was a memorable first book. As an addendum to this update: After I emailed this to our group, a member who has not been able to attend lately, emailed that after receiving this report on our meeting, he wanted to let us know how much he disagreed with our less than enthusiastic comments. He thought this was an outstanding book on WWI and the senselessness of war. He comparted it to other foreign language classics on the war, which also had a stream of consciousness style. He thought our negative comments about the love interest and its ups and downs were less than important compared to the other messges of the novel. He even stated that Hemingway was a very important writer, unlike John Steinbeck. (As a Steinbeck fan, I thought those were fighting words.) :> Happy Reading! Mary Farrell Branch Manager, Lakeview Branch Library What do you think? The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly. By submitting this form, you accept the Mollom privacy policy.	__label__1	0.668144
Review: Troubled Sleep 25 April 2013 ADC, Ladies Toilets, Tues 23rd- Sat 27th, 8pm and 9.30pm Troubled Sleep shows the reunion of two sisters after the younger, Becky (Victoria Fell), leaves the ‘old country’ to get away from her crazed father, experience the city and persuade the older, Anna (Hellie Cranney), to return home. Throughout the sisters argue, each attempting to undermine the other’s position by claiming greater awareness of what is ‘really going on’ in their parental home and in the world Anna has escaped to. This conflict leads to the elder, Anna, claiming the upper hand, laughing at the youth of her sister and teasing her with the prospect of taking her to a ‘dance.’ Despite cleaning toilets throughout the play, Anna maintains this upper hand, refusing to entertain the idea of returning home, even while Becky re-enacts her father’s obsessive pleas for her to return. The play alludes to great darkness in the family home and in Anna’s romantic relationship in the city. Sexual abuse is hinted at regularly, with Becky reiterating the idea that their relationship with their father could either be one of sexual abuse or of blank disinterest, which could see its counterpart in Anna’s relationship with her boyfriend. The mood in the discussion of the broken relationships is often detached; powerful memories are recalled only to be dismissed as possible fantasies. Becky’s description of a strange family on the train, with no luggage, but a jar of honey, was perhaps the most interesting part of the play, as it raised questions about her feelings of being invisible and her doubts about the distinction between dreams and reality. But despite the opportunity for poignant ideas and dialogue at this juncture, the play failed to develop it, as it quickly moved on. The play repeatedly raised questions and failed to answer them. This may be a result of it being just twenty minutes long, which made it difficult for the audience to become invested in the development of the characters despite the high quality acting. A particular strength of this play was the use of the staging space. The unusual setting, in the ADC ladies toilets, did lead to some quite strange announcements by the producer as the audience entered, but it was not made the centre of the piece, and served the purpose of allowing Anna to really be involved in cleaning the toilets throughout the scene, while providing an intimate performance space. The set was entirely appropriate, and didn’t feel as though it had been used solely to be unusual. The play was originally written by Jose Sanchis Sinisterra in Spanish, and the translation was partially completed by the director, Isolde Penwarden. Although the attempt to bring more foreign writing into Cambridge student theatre is commendable, it is unclear whether Troubled Sleep offers anything particularly innovative as it seems to skim the surface of many issues without providing space for deeper insight. The brevity of this piece meant that the ambitious translation and setting of Troubled Sleep was not matched with enough thought-provoking content. Emma Weleminsky-Smith	__label__1	0.611288
Monica Ali Interview, plus links to author biography, book summaries, excerpts and reviews Monica Ali Monica Ali An interview with Monica Ali A Conversation with Monica Ali about In The Kitchen Contains plot spoilers In the Kitchen vividly thrusts the reader into the sweaty, frenetic, almost pirate-ship-like world of the kitchen in a major urban restaurant. Did you rely upon any first-hand experience to bring the kitchen scenes to life? I spent a year researching the novel and several years before that thinking about it and reading around it. Part of my year of intensive research was in the north of England where sections of the novel are set but most of it was in London where I spent time in restaurant kitchens and in five big hotels, always on the understanding that I would never identify them. That gave me great access and once I had entered the world of hotels I knew that a hotel would be my main setting. Hotels are like microcosms of society. You get everything from the penthouse suite at the top to the porter in the basement compacting rubbish. But it was always the kitchens that I was particularly drawn to. Those places are like UN assemblies. You get every different nationality down there, so they are a very rich source of diverse stories. What inspired you to write about the life of a chef? In the UK, and perhaps in the USA as well, we've become quite obsessed with chefs. And even though we see the likes of Gordon Ramsay on the television, ranting and swearing, I still felt that what we get is quite a glossy, sanitized version. I guess I wanted to look behind the scenes at what really goes on below stairs, and to ask questions about what it is that lies behind our 'food porn' culture. Kitchens, which are high pressure environments, are also great stages for dramatic confrontations! There are several instances throughout the novel when Gabe is compared to an angel. Lena points out that his name – Gabriel – has angelic meaning and Jenny teases him about sprouting angel wings after he has made a particularly thoughtful gesture. Is Gabe a fallen angel? What are your feelings towards your protagonist? Gabe struggles constantly with himself, and battles – as we all do on occasion – to understand why he acts the way he does, which is sometimes against his better judgment. Although he fails himself (and falls) in many ways, he makes an emotional journey through the course of the novel. At the core of this journey are faith, hope and love. In the beginning he lacks faith in anyone or anything, including himself, but he finds ultimately a faith in humanity. Despite being pushed to the edge of despair, through a process of taking responsibility and engagement with those around him he is left with a sense of hope. And by being forced to reevaluate what is truly important, he comes to consider what love, particularly in the context of family and relationships, really means. How do you develop your main characters and which characters in In the Kitchen did you particularly enjoy writing about? With Gabriel, I had an idea that I wanted to write about a man who is adrift in a modern, metropolitan, multicultural society. At first he feels he is able to navigate that environment easily, and that having no real community, no long-standing work commitments, only very loose family ties, and a limitless sense of alternative perspectives due to the many cultures by which he is surrounded, is no big deal. But as the pressures pile on him, he comes to question everything in his life, and the stories he has told about himself and to himself. At that stage he feels he is looking into something of a void. The characters start as whispers inside my head. When the voices get loud enough, it's time to begin the writing. I enjoyed writing the variety of characters in this novel, from the slippery restaurant manager, Gleeson, to the somewhat bullying general manager, Maddox. Gabe's sous chef, Oona, was particularly fun to write as their miscommunications gave ample scope for comedy . Gabe and his father discuss the British identity, arguing about Great Britain's global significance and what it means to be British and how that status is defined. As a Londoner, what cultural changes have you observed in the country and what impact have they made? London, as with many big cities in the West, has changed rapidly in recent times as the result of new migrations. One of the things I wanted to explore in this book, is the way in which although other people's stories can be enriching, they can also be exhausting and overwhelming. Gabriel, at the beginning of the book, doesn't really want to know about the backgrounds of his staff. He is too busy grappling with his own story, his life history and family secrets, and making sense of that. It is the death of the porter which, although it is a small part of the book in one way, is pivotal in changing this. It comes to haunt Gabriel and opens him up to seeing his other staff as individuals and to issues about society and responsibility. There is too a debate running through the novel about British identity. Our politicians keep banging on about our 'core values.' When that happens, you begin to suspect that those values have perhaps been lost somewhere along the way. Gabe's downward spiral ultimately leads him to an onion farm outside London that operates as an illegal, exploitive labor camp. Do businesses like this actually exist? Is the onion farm experience in In the Kitchen based on true events? Yes, I did my research. All of those exploitative practices happen. The ejection of the Afghans from the farm was directly based on a newspaper report. I also know that the UK is far from being the only country in which migrant workers are exploited. You explore many social issues in this novel, including the immigrant experience. Are these issues the driving force behind your writing? No, I don't think so. Character is always my driving force. And to tell a good story and to provide an entertaining read. Although I think the book raises some tough questions about our modern existence and society – old values versus new freedoms, for example – the novels that I love are the ones which find the light within the dark, and the comedy in the tragedy. And of course one sets out to write the book one wants to read! Your first novel, Brick Lane, was recently adapted into a movie. Can you describe that process? How did you feel when you saw your story rendered in film? I decided not to interfere in the film process. My feeling was that I should either write the script myself or stay out of the way, and since I already had another project on the go I stepped out. When it came to seeing the rough cut I was very nervous but happily the director had done a great job. The casting seemed to me to be spot on, and although film necessarily has to leave things out the movie captures the spirit of the novel. Alentejo Blue, your second novel, is set in a Portuguese village. Why did you decide to make such a departure from your first book? I spend a lot of time in Portugal and it wasn't really a question of deciding. I just had all these characters and stories in my head. Although I have, on the surface, written three very different books, I guess at one level they have quite a lot in common. A sense of place, for instance, has been important in my work so far. Also, questions of home, displacement, cultural intersections and life on the margins. I don't feel that I set out to write about these things but they seem to come out in any c	__label__1	0.942654
53 pages 1 hour read Travis Baldree Legends & Lattes Fiction \| Novel \| Adult \| Published in 2022 A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. Chapters 19-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses Chapter 19 Summary Viv tells Tandri about the Scalvert’s Stone and her meeting with the Madrigal. Tandri has heard of scalverts, and Viv explains that the queen of the scalvert hive grows a Stone in her head. She originally heard of the Scalvert’s Stone in a song, but after doing research, she uncovered mythology supporting the Stone’s mystical properties. Tandri realizes this is why Hemington’s research made Viv nervous. Viv shows her where she hid the Stone and thinks Fennus grew suspicious when it was all she wanted from their last mission. She thinks he wants a cut of the Stone, despite what the party originally agreed upon. As for the Madrigal, she agreed to a payment of cinnamon rolls. Thimble arrives with ice to keep the ingredients fresher longer. Viv gets an idea for an iced drink. She makes an iced coffee and serves it to Hemington, who sits in his usual booth. He is happy to try the cold drink. Viv asks if he can set up another ward—one to keep out Fennus. Hemington agrees, and they work out the details. Viv tells Tandri about the success of the iced coffee, so they add it to the menu. Unlock all 53 pages of this Study Guide Plus, gain access to 8,550+ more expert-written Study Guides. Including features: + Mobile App + Printable PDF + Literary AI Tools Related Titles By Travis Baldree	__label__1	0.77531
Anne Waldman, p.1 a bind the trap the tollbooth her death's hand on mine a mistake of proper nomenclature a hand entwines, go easy brine, a toast to idiot savants slime I tired to be but under & crept out of, my life! pride go easy ifs, buts, whens, wheres, okays, lobotomies, signals of code you are coded inbetween all lines the red flag go easy or blue (easier) white, easiest yet? the ornery one, all sailors at bay & we are waiting to be whistled at we are ladies at the turning point Gem Spa, I see you're a current in the summer of 1967 I love intensity of I love you because you are the one who says I see, I see & you give all doubts to be benefited of outrageous never & on my forehead nowhere hidden you see "BERNADETTE" you see "WANDER" the lovers, the jolts, drugs, a way not taken "LUST"? you see "LUST"? spurned, she is all of these clairvoyants & sure of past 20th century rushes is never reasonable conquer: what? fuck: what? all's dearth & loneliness wanted to be beautiful for you but they die keep dying & leave the palace unattended gone into darkness, gone beyond words burn in her void inside old hag-seer's antique crucible.	__label__1	0.991494
(Student Guide to World Philosophy) Protagoras cover image Plato’s Protagoras is a brilliant dialogue and a splendid piece of argumentation. It incorporates a picture of the Sophist and a glimpse of the cultured aristocrats of the Periclean Age, facts that cannot fail to interest anyone who has a desire to know more about the life of classical Greece. Protagoras, along with three middle period (388-368 b.c.e.) dialogues, Politeia (Republic, 1701), Phaedn (Phaedo, 1675), and Symposion (Symposium, 1701), represents the high point of Plato’s literary activity. Some experts believe the dialogue is surpassed in literary quality only by Symposium. Philosophical development and dramatic development parallel each other precisely in the dialogue, exemplifying the high level Plato achieved in the very special literary form he used to articulate his philosophy. The philosophical argument is presented clearly and distinctly, and the characters in the dialogue are drawn with great finesse. The reader comes to know not only the Protagorean position but also the man Protagoras. The comic relief provided by Socrates’ ridiculous analysis of Simonides’ poem—a satire on the kind of literary criticism that must have been current in Periclean Athens—is a fine diversion, separating the preliminary discussion between Socrates and Protagoras from the final demonstration of the unity of the virtues. Another fine touch is the description of the Sophist Protagoras marching back and forth in Callias’s house, followed by his coterie, who are careful always to execute the necessary close-order drill at the turns so that the flow of wisdom need not be interrupted. Then there is the irony of Socrates in saying how moved he is by Protagoras’s long speeches, even though he cannot follow them—an emotion that Socrates’ subsequent arguments clearly reveal he did not experience. Finally, there is Socrates’ reduction of Protagoras to impotent fury at the end of the argument, so that when Socrates asks why he will no longer answer the questions, Protagoras explodes, “Finish the argument yourself!” Such a scene aptly describes a situation all philosophers would like to find themselves in vis-à-vis their opponents.	__label__1	0.995693
Herman Hesse Herman Hesse Hermann Karl Hesse (2 July 1877 – 9 August 1962) was a German-born Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. His best-known works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Enjoy the best Herman Hesse picture quotes. Read more about Herman Hesse on Wikipedia. Solitude is independence. As a body everyone is single, as a soul never. Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them. If I know what love is, it is because of you. Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object. If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us. Your soul is the whole world. Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference. You must find your dream... but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream. Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure. You have to try the impossible to achieve the possible. Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me. Only the ideas that we really live have any value. It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone. You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live. Some of us think holding on makes us strong but sometimes it is letting go. We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing. When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane. Page 1 of 4	__label__1	0.516178
The Washington Post Book review: Hallie Ephron’s ‘There Was an Old Woman’ Location, location, location: The most basic element of any New York story is its address. Hallie Ephron’s There Was An Old Woman” is a New York suspense story set in an extraordinary outer-borough neighborhood that will stay with readers long after other plot details fade away. “Higgs Point” is a lost corner of the Bronx, a spit of land that juts out into a salt marsh. These days, the marsh exudes a funky odor, and the “little shotgun houses” original to the community are nothing grand, but the view — “across the East River and Long Island Sound, and on to the Manhattan skyline” — outshines even the one from Jay Gatsby’s windows in West Egg. Of course, Higgs Point is a fictional place. If it were real, New York City power broker Robert Moses would’ve leveled it — as he did so much of the Bronx after World War II — and paved it over with highways and co-op apartment towers. For those who love Gotham and abhor gore, “There Was An Old Woman” is the perfect thriller lite. Our heroine, Evie Ferrante, grew up in Higgs Point but hightailed it into Manhattan as soon as she reached adulthood: Now she holds down a prestigious job as a curator at the (also fictional) Five-Boroughs Historical Society. When the novel opens, she’s at work in a sub-sub-basement of the Empire State Building, supervising the retrieval of an engine from the (actual) B-25 bomber that slammed into the skyscraper, setting it afire, in 1945. Evie is putting together an exhibit at the Historical Society on famous New York City fires, such as the Great Fire of 1776 that roared through Lower Manhattan and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Before Evie can put the finishing touches on her displays, a blast from her own past intrudes. Her older sister, Ginger, sends her an urgent text saying that their mother, a sickly alcoholic, has been rushed to a hospital in the Bronx with a dislocated shoulder. Ginger is fed up with being the primary caretaker, and, so, this time round, it falls to Evie to return to Higgs Point and take on the burden. What Evie encounters in her mother’s bungalow is a textbook illustration of Freud’s theory of the uncanny: the sense that something can be strange and familiar at the same time. Since Evie last visited four months ago, weeds have sprouted “higher than an elephant’s eye” in the front yard. Inside the kitchen, “The counters were stacked with boxes and cans. Cat food? Her mother didn’t even like cats, and yet there were dozens of empty cans of it. A trio of small black moths fluttered in front of her. . . . [A] dozen more were resting on the ceiling and when Evie opened the cabinet where her mother had always kept cereal and crackers, more flew out.” Just as weird is the fact that some of the cottages on Higgs Point have been demolished overnight — when their owners, often elderly, conveniently died. As Evie shuttles between her mother’s hospital room and her strange childhood home, this thriller also shuttles between her point of view and that of a neighbor, 90-year-old Mina, who’s as sharp as the spire atop the Chrysler Building. Mina tells Evie that something fishy — apart from that odoriferous salt marsh — is in the air at Higgs Point. When Mina herself takes a bad tumble, Evie must figure things out fast before another slice of olde New York — and its inhabitants — goes up in smoke. Ephron interweaves imagined and real New York City history in this tale and, though the pattern is sometimes contrived, the overall effect is quaintly suspenseful. Mina, we’re told, was a young clerk working at the Empire State Building on that fateful morning in July 1945. After the bomber crashed into the building, she and her friend, “Betty,” were hustled by rescuers into a damaged elevator. Mina is a fiction, but “Betty” is based on the real Betty Lou Oliver, an elevator operator who was burned in the fire and was, indeed, placed inside an elevator whose cables were frayed. On the way down, those cables snapped, and Oliver plunged 75 stories to the basement of the Empire State Building. She survived (the fallen cables and compressed air cushioned her landing). Oliver, who died in 1994, holds the Guinness World Record for the longest survived elevator crash. But here’s the best part: Five months after her free fall, she returned to the Empire State Building and rode the elevator again, all the way up and back down again! Particularly in New York stories, fact is often stranger than fiction. “There Was an Old Woman” by Hallie Ephron (William Morrow) Corrigan, the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air,” teaches a course on New York literature at Georgetown University. By Hallie Ephron Morrow. 293 pp. $25.99	__label__1	0.920748
The importance of children’s representation in literature and media Posted on Posted in Children's Rights, Education, Empowerment, Uncategorized Children’s representation is a key issue for child development and growth, and it has taken different forms over time. Children’s literature has played an important role in the discovery of the external and inner world of children, but the lack of representation of some ethnical groups has also represented a big challenge which is still far from being satisfied. In this sense, media have tried to fill the gap, falling into the same stereotypes which affected the literature’s world. Nevertheless, there are some actors who could still promote a shift in culture. Why children’s representation matters Children shape their reality according to the models they build with many bricks: stories, songs, films, plays, experiences and many other factors which help them in codifying the reality into common patterns to be reproduced. Through these elements, they discover how the world they live in and themselves, too. In particular, stories play an important role in children’s representation: they provide information and models, they guide the reader through the discovery of the world, both real and imaginary, and they convey values such as friendship, empathy, courage, sense of belonging, emotions and diversity which are essential for child development and growth. At the same time, what stories and books taught to children before is now replaced by media content and this is why children’s representation should take into account both aspects: literature and media. Children’s representation in literature and media plays a significant role in child development and growth because it helps children to understand the reality they live in or to discover other cultures, giving them the opportunity to develop empathy and respect for cultural differences. Children’s representation is important to how kids build their perspectives on their own ethnic-racial group, as well as that of others (Rogers, 2021). In this sense, children’s representation has a double dimension: on one hand, it support the discovery of an external dimension, and on the other, it provides inputs for the discovery of the inner dimension. But what happens if children don’t find representations about themselves or the reality in which they live? The consequences of the lack of representation “Children, especially in the early years, are like little sponges, absorbing all the information around them and then actively making sense of it.” – Hunter, 2018 In this sense, the lack of representation of the reality in which they live may also affect them in a long-term perspective and under many points of view. For instance, research shows that a lack of representation in media can lead to negative psychological outcomes for those with identities that are underrepresented or negatively portrayed (Tukachinsky, Mastro, &Yarchi, 2017). Exposure to negative media depictions of their own ethnic-racial groups can undermine children’s sense of self, whereas high-quality children’s media can promote positive ethnic-racial attitudes and interactions (Rogers, 2021). A study on the effects of television on elementary-aged children shows a negative correlation between TV exposure and lower self-esteem for Black girls and boys and White girls, but it also emphasized a positive correlation between TV exposure and higher self-esteem for White boys (Martins & Harrison, 2012). The same findings are shown by the research that underlined how identifying with popular characters with the same identities in mainstream media leads to higher self-esteem on several dimensions (Ward, 2004). The scientific literature about the effects on children’s well-being supports the importance of realistic, diverse and inclusive representation in children’s media. Moreover, if children do not perceive themselves as represented by the media or the literature they consume, they may also begin to feel invisible, unimportant (Levinson, 2020) or less important than others. The risks related to this aspect play along with the reaffirmation of a single narrative which is based on stereotypes, and which hinder the possibility for individuals to achieve their goals and dreams on the basis of their personal capacities and aspirations. And if children do not perceive themselves as architects, teachers or engineers they may not perceive these carriers in the future. If children do not have the possibility to see people with their identities and features being portrayed in a positive way, they may rely on the assumption that their identity is fully represented by those stereotypes which define who they are. The “problems with stereotypes is not the fact they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story”. That is what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie defines by the “danger of a single story” (Adiche, 2019). The state of art in children’s literature The affirmation of the importance of children’s representation in literature can be linked to one important milestone which goes back to 1990 when Rudine Sims Bishop codified the “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” metaphor in order to describe the role of children’s literature. According to Bishop, window books “[offer] views of worlds that may be real or imagined,” and “are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created by the author” (1990). In mirror books, “we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience,” which, Bishop argues, is a “means of self-affirmation” (Bishop, 1990). In this sense, children’s literature can represent a mirror for the society, both reflecting the reality we live in and “projecting how we want our children to be” (Dahlen, 2020). Since then, children’s representation in literature has gained more and more importance and the definition of “representation” has changed over time according to the reality which it was changing, too. For a long time, the children’s literature world has been what Nancy Larrick called “all-white” (Larrick, 2020), but with time, more and more characters representing different ethnicities started to enter the scene of children’s books as a response of the lack of representation. This was possible thanks to the increase in demand on the part of the consumers, but also thanks to an entire generation of authors who grew up with no reference to such diversity and who wanted to contribute to a shift in culture. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education analysed the percentage of children’s books written by and/or about non-white people from 1985 till today. In the period between 1985 and 2015, the percentage of children’s books written by and/or about non-white people fluctuated between 9 and 14 percent (Dahlen, 2020). In 2016, the “about” percentage reached 22 percent, but this increase in representation also showed a dark side: as many white authors created more characters of colour and with ambiguous ethnicities, e.g. brown-skinned, they promoted also stereotyped characters which fostered false perceptions about the ethnicities they represented. This aspect was also underlined by the 2016 “by” percentage which amounted to only 13 percent, significantly lower than the 22 percent “about.” In the period between 2018 and 2020, the percentage of children’s books written by non-white people fluctuated between 23.79 (2018) and 28.56 percent (2020), whereas the “about” percentage fluctuated between 29.64 (2018) and 30.25 percent (2020) (CCBC’s website). The CCBC statistics show a slow increase in diverse books over the past decade, with more drastic changes in more recent years. According to Lee & Low’s 2018 infographic, the numbers rose from 10 to 14 percent between 2013 and 2014, and then “jumped” to 20 percent in 2015, 28 percent in 2016, and 31 percent in 2017 (Corrie, 2018). These data depict a positive trend which is still far from representing the reality American children live in which half of the country’s children are non-white (Dahlen, 2020). Lee & Low’s infographics demonstrate that the “diversity gap” is not a problem specific to children’s literature, but to power and media industries generally. Their Lee & Low’s 2018 infographic used the 2017 CCBC data and communicated that only 7 percent, or 288 of 3700 books surveyed, were written by Black, Latinx, and Native writers (Corrie, 2018). In this sense, literature and media have a common element which hinders a truthful representation of the reality that children live which is represented by power. The role of the media in children’s representation Media play a key role in the life of children and young people which has increased over time. In 2019, young people spent an average of 2 hours per day watching television shows (Rideout, 2019) and by the Covid-19 pandemic, the use of media contents has increased given its multiple purposes: entertainment, connection, education, creativity and link with the external world (Rideout, 2021). Given this context, it is important to consider the main effects of such early and constant media exposure in relation to the positive or negative impacts of children’s representation. An important contribution to answering this question is offered by the Cultivation Theory which states that exposure to media helps to shape thoughts, perceptions, and behaviours, and viewers adopt the assumptions and beliefs of media content as reality (Gerbner & Gross, 1976). Children are particularly vulnerable to media messages and use what they see in media to create their beliefs about themselves and others. Therefore, the media industry holds great power over the socialization and self-concept of young people (Levinson, 2020) and they play a significant role in children’s representation. An interesting report on North American children’s (up to age 12) television content highlighted the recurrent use of stereotypes and the scarce correspondence to the reality in which children live (Lemish& Johnson, 2019). For instance, 65 percent of characters were white, and female characters were more likely to be non-white or racially ambiguous than male characters. Also, 38 percent of characters were women or girls, while almost 51 percent of the US population is female. Apart from that, female characters were twice as likely to solve problems using magic while males were more likely to solve problems using science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or their physicality (Levinson, 2020). Moreover, only 1 percent of the characters showed signs of physical disability or chronic disease, even if 20 percent of the population lives with a disability (Okoro et al., 2018) and only 2 percent of the characters presented a lower socioeconomic status, whereas about 20 percent of the American children live below the poverty line (NCCP). The latest report at Common Sense, “The Inclusion Imperative: Why Media Representation Matters for Kids’ Ethnic-Racial Development”, has highlighted the underrepresentation and the stereotyping of people of colour in movies and TV roles(Rogers, 2021). For instance, despite accounting for 18 percent of the population, Latinos only make up 5 percent of speaking film roles. Characters of colour in shows most watched by children between 2 and 13 are more likely to be depicted as violent and women of all ethnic-racial groups in adult programming are more likely to appear in sexualized roles (Rogers, 2021). According to the perceptions of the parents and caregivers involved in the research, white people are often portrayed in a positive light in the media their children are exposed to, whereas one in four believe that portrayals of Black, Hispanic and LGBTQIA+ people are more likely to be negative (Rogers, 2021). The above-mentioned studies show how children’s representation in the media does not reflect the reality in which children live but, on the contrary, it promotes a narrative which is based on stereotypes and predefined roles in which children may identify. Once again, the media risk promoting a “Single story” (Adiche, 2019). Who are the main stakeholders to promote a shift in culture? Promoting a shift in culture in children’s representation in literature and media is essential in order to fulfil children’s right to “discover and develop their personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential” (Article 29 (1), lett. a) CRC). To achieve this goal, all the actors involved in the life of a child play a significant role. First of all, publishers and librarians contribute to the cause by selecting which books to print and sell. In this way, they can influence the possible choices that consumers can make. In a globalized and interconnected world, it is easier and easier to have access to different sources of information, but this also depends on the open-mindedness and awareness that these actors have about the importance of children’s representation. With this respect, also consumers have the power to influence what the market offers them, both in terms of books and media content. In particular, parents are more and more attentive to the content their children consume and they ask media creators to deliver content that better reflects the diversity of the world in which their kids are growing up (Rogers, 2021). In this sense, also authors and creators have the power to influence the contents they produce in order to better represent the reality in which children live and to inspire them thanks to their privileged role. They provide “windows” (Bishop, 1990) to the external world and they guide children to the discovery of the world and themselves, too. Last but not least, children are the key actors to promote a shift in culture which is more representative of the reality in which they live and more respectful of their identities, needs, thoughts and aspirations. The best way to achieve this goal is to start talking about their stories and to include themselves in the stories they imagine, because each single story is important and needs to be told. Humanium is at the forefront in supporting the diversity and inclusiveness of all children all in order to make their voices heard. We advocate for a world where children’s rights are respected and protected, and we work to assure that children of all backgrounds, genders and ethnicities are represented by the media and the literature equally! Discover how to stand up for children’s rights, join our communityinteract with our work, and share our mission through our websiteFacebook page or newsletter! Written by Arianna Braga [1] For More Information: Books by and/or about Black, Indigenous and People of Color (All Years) Lee & Low’s 2018 infographic Adichie, C. (July, 2019). The danger of a single story. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en, accessed on 16 February 2022. Convention on the rights of the child (1989) Treaty no. 27531. United Nations Treaty Series, 1577, pp. 3-178. Retrieved from https://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/1990/09/19900902%2003-14%20AM/Ch_IV_11p.pdf, accessed on 16 February 2022. Corrie, J. (10 May, 2018). The Diversity Gap in Children’s Book Publishing, 2018. Retrieved from https://blog.leeandlow.com/2018/05/10/the-diversity-gap-in-childrens-book-publishing-2018/, accessed on 15 February 2022. Dahlen S.P. (2020). “We Need Diverse Books”: Diversity, Activism, and Children’s Literature. In: op de Beeck N. (eds) Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_5, accessed on 16 February 2022. Gerbner, G., Gross, L., (June, 1976). Living with Television: The Violence Profile, Journal of Communication, Volume 26, Issue 2, June 1976, Pages 172–199. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1976.tb01397.x, accessed on 17 February 2022. Hunter, E. (January 18, 2018). Children are like little sponges’: early learning can set them up for life. Retrieved from https://theirworld.org/news/early-learning-sets-up-young-children-for-life, accessed on 16 February 2022. Huyck, D., Park Dahlen, S., Griffin, M. B. (September 14, 2016). Diversity in Children’s Books 2015 infographic. Retrieved from https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2016/09/14/picture-this-reflecting-diversity-in-childrens-book-publishing/ Huyck, D., Park Dahlen. (June 19, 2019). Diversity in Children’s Books 2018. Created in consultation with Edith Campbell, Molly Beth Griffin, K. T. Horning, Debbie Reese, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Madeline Tyner. Retrieved from https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/picture-this-diversity-in-childrens-books-2018-infographic/, accessed on 15 February 2022. Larrick, N. (1965). The All-White World of Children’s Books. Retrieved from https://brichislitspot.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/384larrick.pdf, accessed on 15 February 2022. Levinson, J. (March 5, 202). Why Diversity in Children’s Media is So Important. Retrieved from https://www.psychologyinaction.org/psychology-in-action-1/2020/3/5/why-diversity-in-childrens-media-is-so-important, accessed on 16 February 2022. Martins, N., & Harrison, K. (2012). Racial and Gender Differences in the Relationship Between Children’s Television Use and Self-Esteem. Communication Research, 39(3), 338–357. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650211401376, accessed on 16 February 2022. NCCP \| Child Poverty. (2019). Retrieved February 28, 2020, from http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html, accessed on 16 February 2022. Okoro, C. A., Hollis, N. D., Cyrus, A. C., & Griffin-Blake, S. (2018). Prevalence of Disabilities and Health Care Access by Disability Status and Type Among Adults — United States, 2016. MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 67(32), 882–887. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6732a3, accessed on 16 February 2022. Rideout, V., and Robb, M. B. (2019). The Common Sense census: Media use by tweens and teens, 2019. San Francisco, CA: Common Sense Media. Rideout, V. and Robb, M. B. (2021). The role of media during the pandemic: Connection, creativity, and learning for tweens and teens. San Francisco, CA: Common Sense. Rogers, O. (October 20, 2021). Why Representation Matters in Kids’ Media [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://www.commonsensemedia.org/kids-action/blog/why-representation-matters-in-kids-media#, accessed on 16 February 2022. Rogers, O., Mastro, D., Robb, M. B., & Peebles, A. (2021). The Inclusion Imperative: Why Media Representation Matters for Kids’ Ethnic-Racial Development. San Francisco, CA: Common Sense Sims Bishop, R. (1990). “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, vol. 6, no. 3, 1990 summer. Statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison: https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/literature-resources/ccbc-diversity-statistics/books-by-about-poc-fnn/, accessed on 15 February 2022. Tukachinsky, R., Mastro, D., &Yarchi, M. (2017). The Effect of Prime Time Television Ethnic/Racial Stereotypes on Latino and Black Americans: A Longitudinal National Level Study. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 61(3), 538–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2017.1344669, accessed on 16 February 2022. [1] I would also thank Professor Sarah Park Dahlen for her valuable insights and comments on the topic which enriched this article.	__label__1	0.999946
Wydawca: Tectum Wissenschaftsverlag Język: angielski Rok wydania: 2017 Uzyskaj dostęp do tej i ponad 25000 książek od 6,99 zł miesięcznie. Wypróbuj przez 7 dni za darmo Ebooka przeczytasz w aplikacjach Legimi na: e-czytniku kup za 1 zł Czytaj w chmurze® w aplikacjach Legimi. Dlaczego warto? Czytaj i słuchaj w chmurze® w aplikacjach Legimi. Dlaczego warto? Liczba stron: 716 Odsłuch ebooka (TTS) dostępny w abonamencie „ebooki+audiobooki bez limitu” w aplikacji Legimi na: Czytaj i słuchaj w chmurze® w aplikacjach Legimi. Dlaczego warto? Ebooka przeczytasz na: e-czytniku EPUB kup za 1 zł tablecie EPUB smartfonie EPUB komputerze EPUB Czytaj w chmurze® w aplikacjach Legimi. Dlaczego warto? Czytaj i słuchaj w chmurze® w aplikacjach Legimi. Dlaczego warto? Pobierz fragment dostosowany na: Zabezpieczenie: watermark Opis ebooka "Harry – yer a wizard" - J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series (1997–2007) has turned into a global phenomenon and her Potterverse is still expanding. The contributions in this volume provide a range of inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to various dimensions of this multifacetted universe. The introductory article focuses on different forms of world building in the novels, the translations, the film series and the fandom. Part I examines various potential sources for Rowling's series in folklore, the Arthurian legend and Gothic literature. Further articles focus on parallels between the "Harry Potter" series and Celtic Druidism, the impact Victorian notions of gender roles have had on the representation of the Gaunt family, the reception of (medieval and Early Modern) history in the series and the influence of Christian concepts on the world view expressed in the novels. Part II focuses on a range of prominent political and social themes in the series, including conspiracy, persecution and terror, racism as well as the role of economic, social and cultural capital. Other articles explore the concept of a Magical Criminal Law and its consequences as well as the significance of secrets and forbidden places. The articles in Part III go beyond the novels by taking the stage play "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child", the movie "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them", Pottermore and fan fiction into account. Main topics in this part include trauma theory/PTSD, queerbaiting, a 'post'-colonial analysis of the representation of Native Americans in Rowling's "History of Magic in North America" and the depiction of violence, incest and rape in fan fictions. The concluding article highlights the diversification of the Potterverse and analyses strategies informing its ongoing expansion. Opinie o ebooku "Harry – yer a wizard" - Fragment ebooka "Harry – yer a wizard" - Wissenschaftliche Beiträge aus dem Tectum Verlag Reihe Anglistik Wissenschaftliche Beiträge aus dem Tectum Verlag Reihe Anglistik Band 6 Marion Gymnich \| Hanne Birk \| Denise Burkhard (Eds.) “Harry – yer a wizard”: Exploring J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Universe Tectum Verlag Marion Gymnich, Hanne Birk and Denise Burkhard (Eds.) “Harry – yer a wizard” Exploring J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Universe Wissenschaftliche Beiträge aus dem Tectum Verlag, Reihe: Anglistik; Bd. 6 © Tectum Verlag – ein Verlag in der Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2017 ISBN epub: 978-3-8288-6752-9 (Dieser Titel ist zugleich als PDF unter der ISBN 978-3-8288-6751-2 und als gedrucktes Werk unter der ISBN 978-3-8288-4035-5 im Tectum Verlag erschienen.) ISSN: 1861-6859 Umschlaggestaltung: Tectum Verlag, unter Verwendung zweier Fotografien von Schleiereule Merlin und Janna Weinsch, aufgenommen in der Falknerei Pierre Schmidt (Erftstadt/Gymnicher Mühle) \| © Denise Burkhard Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier Druck und Verarbeitung: Memminger MedienCentrum Printed in Germany Alle Rechte vorbehalten Informationen zum Verlagsprogramm finden Sie unter www.tectum-verlag.de Bibliografische Informationen der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Angaben sind im Internet über http://dnb.ddb.de abrufbar. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available online at http://dnb.ddb.de. Hanne Birk, Denise Burkhard and Marion Gymnich ‘Happy Birthday, Harry!’: Celebrating the Success of the Harry Potter Phenomenon Marion Gymnich and Klaus Scheunemann The ‘Harry Potter Phenomenon’: Forms of World Building in the Novels, the Translations, the Film Series and the Fandom Part I: TheHarry PotterSeries and its Sources Laura Hartmann The Black Dog and the Boggart: Fantastic Beasts in Joanne K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Where to Find Them in Mythology and Traditional Folklore Franziska Becker J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter: A Revival of the Arthurian Legend? Denise Burkhard and Julia Stibane Darkness, Danger and Death: Exploring Gothic Places in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Jule Lenzen Parallels between Celtic Druidism on the British Isles and in Ireland and the Magical World of the Harry Potter Novels Svenja Renzel Double, Double Toil and (Gender) Trouble: The Gaunt Family Naemi Winter ‘I read about it in Hogwarts: A History’: The Reception and Function of History in the World of Harry Potter Vera Bub ‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death’: Christian Elements in Harry Potter? Part II: Themes and Structures in theHarry Potter Series Michèle Ciba Conspiracy, Persecution and Terror: Harry Potter in a Post-9/11 World Carsten Kullmann Of Muggles and Men: Identifying Racism in the Harry Potter Series Sarah Hofmann ‘Can someone just explain what that skull thing was?’: The Workings of Capital in the Wizarding World Anne Schneider Is Harry Potter a Criminal? Some Thoughts on Magical Criminal Law Denise Burkhard Secrets and Forbidden Places in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone Part III: Beyond theHarry PotterSeries Anne Mahler Haunted by Voldemort or Suffering from PTSD: Analysing Harry Potter’s Psychological Struggles in Adulthood in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Marthe-Siobhán Hecke Queerbaiting in the Harry Potter Series and in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child? Aleksandra Szczodrowski Native Americans in J.K. Rowling’s “History of Magic in North America” on Pottermore Franziska Göbel The Dark Arts: Violence, Incest and Rape in Harry Potter Fan Fictions Marion Gymnich, Denise Burkhard and Hanne Birk The Ever-Expanding Potterverse: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – Pottermore List of Abbreviations Hanne Birk, Denise Burkhard and Marion Gymnich ‘Happy Birthday, Harry!’:Celebrating the Success of theHarry PotterPhenomenon If there ever was a powerful spell, it was Rowling’s initial incantation when she had Hagrid stating in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997): “‘Harry – yer a wizard’” (Stone 42), which was the first spark of a big bang that would bring the Potterverse into being. The publication of the first volume of her Harry Potter series (1997-2007) was the beginning of an amazing success story and of a series which has had a considerable impact on academic research. Rowling’s novels have contributed to rendering both children’s literature and the genre of fantasy more popular than ever – for fans, academics and “fan-scholars” (Hillis 2). Moreover, the novels have played a vital role in establishing the notion of ‘crossover/all-ages literature’ as one of the key terms within research in the thriving field of children’s and young adult literature studies. Twenty years after the publication of the first volume, the series seems to be as culturally visible and enchanting as ever – including now both a sequel, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and a tie-in movie, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, released in 2016. By now, the Harry Potter universe has been significantly expanded: apart from the original series it also features audio-visual adaptations of the novels, a prequel, a sequel, the online platform Pottermore and further tie-in product(ion)s that keep being revisited by scholars and fans from many different disciplines and countries. Most of the contributions in this volume are based on papers given at the Harry Potter students’ conference held at Bonn University on 4th-5th April 2017. The papers in the collection seek to explore a wide range of different aspects of Rowling’s Harry Potter universe and engage with the wizarding world in innovative ways. Using different theoretical approaches to advance the current state of research, the contributions employ a range of conceptual frameworks such as trauma studies, gender and queer studies, postcolonial studies and folklore studies. The variety of themes covered in the volume already indicates the manifold vantage points chosen to analyse and interpret Rowling’s works, ranging from the original series, her short stories on Pottermore to other facets of the Harry Potter franchise. The aim of the volume is to highlight the diversity of academic approaches that can be used to analyse Rowling’s world of Harry Potter as well as to emphasise its topicality twenty years after the publication of the first novel. Marion Gymnich’s and Klaus Scheunemann’s contribution “The ‘Harry Potter Phenomenon’: Forms of World Building in the Novels, the Translations, the Film Series and the Fandom” focuses on selected facets of the (transmedial) Harry Potter phenomenon, such as the depiction of Britishness in the series, the creativity of the translators and the specific challenges they had to face, the ‘Rickmann effect’ and hallmarks of the Harry Potter fandom. Corresponding to the manifold aspects identified by Marion Gymnich and Klaus Scheunemann, inter- and transdisciplinary approaches have evolved. Part I introduces some of these approaches by elaborating on the connection between the Harry Potter series and its potential sources. In her contribution, Laura Hartmann examines the Black Dog/Grim and the Boggart in the context of British mythology and traditional folklore. She tries to answer the question in how far Rowling used, adapted or transformed certain characteristic features of both creatures and in how far the reader encounters Rowling’s creations. In a similar vein, Franziska Becker, Denise Burkhard, Julia Stibane and Jule Lenzen address the influence of cultural ‘textual resources’ (Wertsch) on Rowling’s work. Franziska Becker discusses the influence of the Arthurian legend on the Harry Potter series (according to the version which can be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s HistoriaRegum Britanniae). The article written by Denise Burkhard and Julia Stibane uses Gothic literary frames as its basis and focuses on Knockturn Alley, the Forbidden Forest, Hogwarts and the Chamber of Secrets as Gothic places in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998). Using accounts on Druidism, Jule Lenzen explores potential Celtic sources of the Potterverse and tries to correlate Rowling’s depiction of wands, spells and shape-shifting with possible equivalents found in historical and literary texts on Druids. There are, of course, many other, not exclusively literary sources, such as cognitive frames or socio-cultural ‘concepts’ that inform the series. Drawing on Victorian gender roles, Svenja Renzel provides an analysis of the Gaunt family and the ‘gendered agency’ of its members. While Marvolo and his son Morfin tend to adhere to the classical Victorian stereotype of the dominant male, Merope seems to represent the subordinate, victimised female, who lacks a voice of her own. Naemi Winter examines in how far ‘Muggle history’ is alluded to in the fictional universe. The foci of her argumentation include the parallels between the Wizengamot and the Anglo-Saxon ‘Witenagemots’, the incorporation of historical and fictional accounts on alchemy and the Philosopher’s Stone as well as the link between Early Modern witch hunts, their medieval roots and the Harry Potter novels. Closing the first section, Vera Bub’s contribution explores the connection between religious elements/Christian concepts and Harry Potter and addresses the notion of an afterlife, martyrdom and immortality as topics central to both. In Part II, various themes and structures that pervade the series will be addressed. The first two contributions by Michèle Ciba and Carsten Kullmann discuss the representation of terror and racism respectively. Focusing on conspiracy, persecution and terror, Michèle Ciba identifies the correlation between conspiracy narratives and Rowling’s novels and analyses fictional reverberations of the increasing topicality of terror and persecution in post-9/11 public discourses. Precisely these mimetic and poietic potentials of literary texts have already been conceptualised by scholars such as Winfried Fluck and Hubert Zapf, who assume that one of the main functions of literary texts is that of highlighting deficits in a society. In many respects, the Harry Potter series seems to do just that: it addresses, for instance, the issue of racism and marginalisation by condemning prejudices against the so-called ‘Mudbloods’, an achievement which Carsten Kullmann addresses in his paper “Of Muggles and Men: Identifying Racism in the Harry Potter Series”. Drawing on Bourdieu’s “Forms of Capital” (1986), in which he subdivides capital into social, economic and cultural capital, Sarah Hofmann uses various examples to illustrate how fruitful and rewarding non-literary concepts can be for the analysis and interpretation of Rowling’s novels. Anne Schneider poses a highly innovative and provocative question, namely whether Harry Potter is a criminal and elaborates on the use and function of magical criminal law in the series. Firstly, she reconstructs the Magical Law system as presented in the novels and simultaneously questions its consistency; secondly she locates the Unforgivable Curses within the topography of the system and subsequently attempts to construct a possible defence for Harry. The final contribution of Part II by Denise Burkhard focuses on secrets and forbidden places and argues that Rowling tends to connect mysteries and secrets in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone with spatiality. She examines the Forbidden Forest, the out-of-bounds third-floor corridor and the Mirror of Erised as places connected with the secrets revolving around Harry’s identity and the Philosopher’s Stone. Part III comprises contributions that ‘go beyond’ the Harry Potter series and focus on the new stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Rowling’s writings on Pottermore.com and fan fiction. Applying a psychological approach to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the paper by Anne Mahler identifies a range of symptoms in Harry that correlate with PTSD. It is also primarily the stage play that informs Marthe-Siobhán Hecke’s paper, which provides a conceptualisation of queerbaiting. Due to her thorough analysis, it becomes clear that the series can hardly be read as an example of queerbaiting, whereas the relationship between Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child does exhibit clear signs of queerbaiting. Employing postcolonial concepts, Alexandra Szczodrowski analyses modes of representation of Native Americans in Rowling’s “History of Magic in North America” (published on Pottermore) and reveals, for example, the influence of dominant historiographies and potentially damaging stereotypes. In her article “The Dark Arts: Violence, Incest and Rape in Harry Potter Fan Fictions”, Franziska Göbel engages critically with the potential merits of reading and writing fan fictions that include depictions of non-consensual sex and abuse. She elaborates on why the series invites especially the production of ‘darker fan fictions’ and criticises the terminology that online platforms provide to tag stories, which is often not adequate, especially from an ethical perspective. The final contribution, “The Ever-Expanding Potterverse: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – Pottermore”, discusses various strategies of internationalisation and diversification of the Potterverse, which implicitly address how the ever-growing Harry Potter universe answers to the interests of fans and critics. As the play, the recent movie adaptation, which is only the first of five, and Pottermore already suggest, the Potterverse will continue to expand and enchant fans and readers alike. In this sense: All the best, Harry, and many happy returns! We would like to express our sincerest gratitude to Vivienne Jahnke, Tamara Kuhn and the entire team at Tectum publishers. Many thanks to Janna Weinsch, who offered to become the witch on the cover photo, and the team at the Falknerei Pierre Schmidt (Erftstadt/Gymnicher Mühle) for their wonderful help and support in providing us with the opportunity to take a picture of their beautiful barn owl Merlin. Last but not least, we want to give our heartfelt thanks to the students’ team who organised the conference. Works Cited Hillis, Matt. Fan Cultures. Routledge, 2002. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Bloomsbury, 1997. Wertsch, James V. Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Marion Gymnich and Klaus Scheunemann The‘Harry PotterPhenomenon’: Forms of World Building in the Novels, the Translations, the Film Series and the Fandom “[…] there is no doubt that since the advent of Harry Potter, the concept of an international bestseller for children has taken on a new meaning as well as a new epithet: ‘phenomenon’” (Lathey 141). I. Introduction Two decades after the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997, the success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has become legendary. As James Russell points out, it “may have started out as a series of thrilling novels for children, but Harry Potter became the quintessential product of the modern American movie industry: an ultra high-budget, transmedia franchise” (392). Three years after the publication of the first volume, the ‘Harry Potter phenomenon’ was already well under way: “After 2000, and the publication of Goblet of Fire […], the ritual of queuing outside a bookshop the night before the book went on sale became famous” (Sunderland et al. 178). The eager anticipation and media hype that accompanied the publication of new instalments of the series in the late 1990s and early 2000s may seem unusual, at least for novels. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan observe that it is easy to compare the marketing of the fourth instalment in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, released on 8 July 2000, to that of a film. The release of the fourth book was unashamedly promoted according to all the rules of Hollywood’s blockbusters, especially those which herald a series of films, like Jaws, Star Wars, or The Lord of the Rings. The release-day was announced months before and was celebrated with queues of customers waiting through the night, hundreds of adults and children attending bookshop events in order to collect their pre-ordered volume (39-40). The film series based on Rowling’s novels has of course also contributed to the ‘Harry Potter phenomenon’, and one can safely assume that by now significantly more people around the world have watched the entire movie series than have read all of the novels. Still, as far as one can tell today, for many people the movies have not simply replaced the novels, which continue to be as popular as ever.1 There was much speculation about the beneficial effects of the Harry Potter series on children’s literacy and their interest in reading, but it is still more or less an open question how extensive this so-called ‘Harry Potter effect’ on children’s reading habits has really been. Scholars such as Steve Dempster, Alice Oliver, Jane Sutherland and Joanne Thistlethwaite claim that the impact may actually have been a bit overestimated, especially since the undeniable length of the later volumes of the series seems to have prevented many young readers from finishing the books or even from reading them in the first place. What Dempster, Oliver, Sutherland and Thistlethwaite noticed in their study, however, is that the experience of reading the series on the whole does increase young readers’ interest in specific genres, i.e., in “fiction that centre[s] on fantasy, magic, action and adventure” (277). Harry Potter is much more than children’s literature, of course. Children and adolescents only constitute one segment of the Harry Potter fan community, and “[o]lder readers have made up a substantial portion of Rowling’s audience from the start”, as Rebecca Sutherland Borah (346) observes. This is also apparent in the fact that Harry Potter has become the prime example of ‘all-ages’ or ‘crossover literature’. The emergence of the global ‘Harry Potter phenomenon’ in the late 1990s may partially be accounted for as a consequence of the innovative strategies of communication that accompanied the publication of the series almost from the start and that made use of new media. The first volumes were published at a time when the internet was gradually becoming a widely accessible, everyday medium for many people around the world, which made new forms of communication possible: As the novels were being released, the widespread adoption of the internet was accelerating the possibilities for hype and promotion, and Rowling actively used the web to speak to her fans, and provide insights into the writing process. Throughout the early 2000s, the Potter novels were very visibly presented to the public as something J.K. Rowling was actively and currently doing (Russell 394, original emphasis). Since the 1990s, fans have increasingly used the internet to construct an international virtual community, sharing their fascination with the wizarding world in forums or by means of fan fiction.2 In 2011 Pottermore was established as a platform for representing the franchise, distributing news and additional stories about the fictional Harry Potter universe that have an official/canonical status due to being sanctioned or even written by J.K. Rowling (cf. Sharp 112). Since its inception, Pottermore has undergone substantial changes in terms of its contents and functions, whose implications we will discuss in more detail below. Though communication and marketing strategies are certainly important for the series’ global success, the substance of the Potterverse, i.e., the wizarding world with its countless memorable human and non-human inhabitants, its picturesque settings and its unique magical artefacts, is at least equally significant for making Rowling’s series as popular as it is and for bringing about the ‘Harry Potter phenomenon’. In the following, we will examine various media-specific forms of world building in Rowling’s novels, in translations of these texts, in the Harry Potter film series as well as on Pottermore and within the fandom, which have jointly shaped the Potterverse as we know it today (and which are still operating in its ongoing expansion).3 II. The novels Somewhat paradoxically, a series whose global fame relies very much on new media has created a fictional world that eschews exactly these means of communication, presenting a community that uses parchment and quills instead of tablets and books instead of the internet. The old-fashioned, quaint atmosphere that is characteristic of the wizarding world seems to be an important factor in the series’ charm. In this context, Andrew Blake argues that the manifold references to the past in the “low-tech magical world, with its Victorian London shopping alley and a Highlands boarding school” (305) correlate with a general trend that started to inform British popular and consumer culture already in the 1980s: The very past itself – our sense of ‘history’ – had been remodelled during the 1980s. The boom years of the 1980s indicated that almost any aspect of the past – including historic houses, Victorian gardening techniques, even opera – could be packaged as luxury consumer items for people with new wealth. With this in mind a younger generation of historians (and museum workers and archaeologists) tried to reinvent the past for present-day consumer culture, and to sell it. […] Museums offered not exhibitions, but simulated experiences of the past. Schools offered simulations of past experience rather than curricula centred on interpretation; pupils would dress up as medieval peasants rather than learn about the causes of the Wars of the Roses. […] The past was also available on the high street. A chain of shops, Past Times, offered copies of historical artefacts such as eighteenth-century maps or Victorian lamp stands, alongside classic novels and videos of televised costume dramas. History had become ‘heritage’ (306). The world created by Rowling fits neatly into the approach to the past outlined by Blake. The readers witness Harry, a modern child, immersing himself in a world that allows him to experience a picturesque ‘past in the present’, which somewhat eclectically draws upon features of different historical periods and where he can star in the role of an Arthurian knight with magical powers.4 While entering the wizarding world means shedding many of the paraphernalia of modern life, which are repeatedly criticised in references to the various (technological) gadgets Harry’s despicable cousin Dudley covets, Hogwarts students do not really have to do without all of the social achievements of life in the late 20th/early 21st century. Unlike in the periods of the past referenced most strongly in the everyday life of the wizarding world, neither ethnicity nor class are allowed to determine someone’s destiny in the wizarding community. As Blake points out, “Hogwarts represents the multicultural contemporary England” (308) and at Hogwarts “the abilities and activities” (ibid.) of a person are generally deemed more important than one’s ancestry. The fact that unpleasant characters like the Malfoys are shown to think differently ultimately only serves to drive this point home all the more forcefully. It is evidence of the modern outlook of the series that the fight against evil is also a fight against racial and class prejudices in various manifestations.5 Attending Hogwarts is a bit like entering a simulation of the past in a living-history museum or perhaps even a theme park or Renaissance fair (with the added bonus of adventure and magic). In this scenario, the protagonist Harry Potter, who embodies modern ideals of justice, equality and agency, can be seen as “a retrolutionary, a symbolic figure of the past-in-future England” (ibid., original emphasis). In the further course of the series, readers find out that many of the potential drawbacks of doing without modern technology can be made up for by magic. Travelling by means of floo powder, a portkey or by Apparating gets you much faster from one place to another than any contemporary Muggle means of transportation possibly could. While communicating via owl mail must appear painfully slow to readers used to (mobile) phones and the internet, the later volumes of Rowling’s series suggest that there are alternative, faster ways of communicating in the wizarding world as well; wizards and witches can, for instance, use fireplaces to talk to someone or send your Patronus to deliver a message. Still, even magical devices that imitate the effects of modern technology are by definition profoundly anti-technological, which implies that the nostalgia for a way of life that is less determined by technology and is generally more slow-paced than the one of the Harry Potter readers remains essentially intact. The different literary genres and traditions Rowling draws upon may also contribute to a sense of nostalgia triggered especially for many adult readers by the series. Using conventions of the genre of the boarding-school novel, including themes, stock characters and even the traditional plot element of the train journey, the Harry Potter series may remind adult readers of novels by authors like Enid Blyton, which they may remember fondly from their childhood.6 The parallels to Gothic literature, especially classic Gothic novels from the late 18th century with their medieval castles, dungeons and uncanny forests, reinforce the idea of a picturesque representation of the past in the present.7 In addition, Rowling’s series picks up many tropes that are familiar from Victorian classics, such as the figure of the maltreated orphan, who is a staple feature of novels such as Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837-39) and David Copperfield (1849-50), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), to name just a few.8 The trope of the poor, abused orphan, which was employed time and again in Victorian literature to create empathy with literary characters as well as to express social criticism (cf. Reynolds 272-73), is still effective for today’s readership, adults and children alike. While the boy Harry Potter, the orphan with magical powers and a dark destiny, might not necessarily be a role model for all young readers, his fate is certainly apt to evoke sympathy. Additionally, values like loyalty, friendship, resilience as well as a sense of justice and fairness seem to resonate with modern readers as much as they did with Victorian ones. The dramatic story of Dumbledore’s younger sister Ariana, who was hidden away inside the family’s house due to her ‘insanity’, i.e., her inability to control her magical powers, echoes the Victorian interest in (women’s) ‘madness’. Ariana can be read as a magical (and younger) counterpart of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘madwoman in the attic’ in Jane Eyre, whose unstable psychological condition escalates in destruction which is similar to that caused by Ariana, who ends up killing her own mother in “one of her rages” (Hallows 455).9 What is even more significant with respect to resemblances between 19th-century literature and the Harry Potter series is the similarity between Rowling’s narrative style and techniques that are characteristic of Victorian realist novels. Philip Nel argues that “[o]ne of the assets of the Harry Potter books is that, as in Dorothy Sayers’ novels, even minor characters are distinctive and seem to have a rich life history of their own” (286). As far as Rowling’s approach to the representation of literary characters is concerned, again more obvious predecessors can be found among 19th-century novelists, ranging from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. Rowling’s novels also share the attention to minute details that is typical of 19th-century realist novels, which more often than not create the impression of presenting a plausible world by means of detailed descriptions of characters and their everyday life. Especially the strategy of providing details about various aspects of material culture (descriptions of clothes, furniture, etc.), is reiterated in the attention paid by Rowling to (magical) objects in the wizarding world. These parallels between traditional realist novels and Rowling’s series are a decisive factor in the process of world building, since it is the wealth of details about all aspects of the wizarding world – from its fantastic fauna and flora to its customs and its rich material culture – which plays a crucial role in creating a believable fictional universe. Though the novels contain numerous scenes that highlight dramatic action, a considerable number of pages are dedicated to describing everyday life, which renders this magical world all the more plausible. ‘Heritage culture’ as it emerged in Britain in the 1980s is not just about recreating the past (typically without the more unpleasant aspects of historical periods). It is also about reimagining ‘Britishness’ or ‘Englishness’ in the context of the project of ‘rebranding Britain’ (cf. Blake 304), which sought to combine the past and the future in a positive reassessment of the nation, fuelling a new patriotism which incorporates a certain amount of nostalgia as well as irony and playful components. Popular music by bands like Oasis which was subsumed under the label ‘Brit Pop’ in the 1990s,10 romantic comedies such as Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003),11 the new James Bond movies and the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012 are as much the outcome of a ‘new patriotism’ as the Harry Potter series. One of the features shared by the images of Britishness in these media products is their tendency to celebrate individuality and eccentricity. The Harry Potter series with its array of quirky and highly entertaining (minor) characters fits perfectly into this pattern. As the success of products of popular culture like the ones just mentioned has amply demonstrated, the new version of Britishness constructed in popular culture sells extremely well – and not just in the U.K. Thus, it comes as no particular surprise that a series that is extremely British in many respects could turn into a global success. III. The translations Even though English is a global language, novels written in English must be translated into other languages if they are to become international bestsellers and the basis of a transcultural hype. This is even more the case for children’s literature, since one cannot presuppose extensive linguistic competence in a language other than the child’s native language. The year 2017 was marked by the translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone into the 80th language: Scots. This most recent translation by Matthew Fitt already signals that Harry Potter is currently not just available in languages like French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese or Japanese, which are spoken by a large number of people. As Lathey observes, “Harry is also playing a part in the revival of politically significant minority languages. A Basque edition was published in 2002; an Irish Gaelic translation by MáireNic Mhaolain […] [was] published in 2004” (149). Further cases in point include the Tibetan translation by Norgy Puchunggal and the West Greenlandic translation by Stephen Hammeken. Beyond that, there are also translations into Latin (by Peter Needham) and Ancient Greek (by Andrew Wilson). All of these translations take part in the world building within the Potterverse for their respective readership. Translating a literary text from one language into another is an eminently creative act in which a dialogue between two inventories of linguistic signs and conceptual categories is established. This process may of course turn out to be substantially easier with some texts than with others. Everyone who has read Rowling’s novels – regardless in which language – cannot help but notice that they constitute a major challenge for translators. In the following, we will briefly address some of the obstacles translators of the Harry Potter series are confronted with, i.e., (i) the linguistic creativity of the series, (ii) its Britishness (in terms of both linguistic features and cultural references), (iii) the consequences of addressingchildren as the primary target group, and (iv) the time pressure translators often experienced. After a succinct discussion of these four problem areas, we will have a closer look at a few examples in order to show how different translators met the challenges. For this purpose, we will draw upon translations into German (by Klaus Fritz), French (by Jean-François Ménard), Spanish (by Alicia Dellepiane Rawson), Italian (by Marina Astrologo), Russian (by Marii Spivak), Latin (by Peter Needham) and Turkish (by Ülkü Tamer).12 The word ‘Muggle’ is probably the most famous among all of the lexemes coined in Rowling’s series. This term, which has even been listed in the Oxford English Dictionary for some years now, has been left unchanged in a number of translations, albeit sometimes with slight adjustments regarding the spelling in order to provide a better ‘fit’ in the target language: the German translation, for instance, uses ‘Muggel’. In the Spanish translation, italics stress the ‘Otherness’ of this term (los muggles) and others coined by Rowling. Yet even if a word looks more or less like the original term on the page, the pronunciation readers will assign to the word is bound to vary to some extent depending on the reader’s reference language(s). Thus, the letter <u> in English ‘Muggle’, German ‘Muggel’, Turkish ‘Muggle’, Russian ‘mugl’ and Spanish ‘muggle’ will in all likelihood be pronounced differently by speakers of these languages. Some translators decided to coin a new expression to convey the key concept ‘Muggle’. Non-magical persons are referred to as ‘Moldus’ in the French translation and as ‘Babbani’ in the Italian one. While new words make both the wizarding world and the literary text look ‘exotic’, these terms generally do not render the translations difficult to understand, since the original text typically already provides explanations of these words.13 The situation is quite different when references to British culture occur in Rowling’s novels. Since the series is set on the British Isles and was presumably written with a British target readership in mind, readers who are not familiar with British culture may encounter features that prove to be more or less mystifying. In fact, the pervasive Britishness of the novels14 has even led to a separate American edition, in which the spelling, the syntax and some lexical items have been adjusted to American English.15 It is thus in particular due to the overall Britishness of the series that translators of Harry Potter have to negotiate two basic goals of translation: that of preserving the characteristics of the source text as far as possible, even where this yields an exotic or strange effect, and that of adapting it to produce a target text which seems normal, familiar and accessible to the target audience (Davies 69). In references to food and various aspects of boarding-school life the Britishness of the series is particularly apparent, but humour and the social implications of stylistic peculiarities may likewise prove to be difficult to translate (cf. Lathey 145). For instance, “[t]he nuances of British social hierarchies as represented in linguistic register are a challenge to any translator” (ibid. 149), which accounts for Hagrid ‘losing’ his “indeterminate working-class dialect” (ibid. 148) in many translations. There are numerous attempts to categorise the different strategies employed by translators in order to cope with cultural differences. Eirlys E. Davies provides a useful typology, which includes preservation, addition, omission, globalisation, i.e., “the process of replacing culture-specific references with ones which are more neutral or general” (83), and localisation, i.e., “anchor[ing] a reference firmly in the culture of the target audience” (ibid. 84). Whether a translator opts for “domesticating or foreignizing” (ibid. 69) a text in the process of translation may depend on a range of additional factors, including conventions for literary translations within the culture(s) associated with the target language, which tend to be historically and culturally variable (cf. ibid.) and which, beyond that, may not be identical for children’s literature and general fiction. A comparative analysis reveals that the translators of the Harry Potter novels often strike a compromise between maintaining some of the British flair of the original and adapting some of the references to their target culture(s).16 Whatever course they choose, the translators’ decisions have an impact on the world building for their target readership. In cases where translators opt for maintaining culture-specific features of the original, they occasionally try to make the text more accessible for their audience by adding explanations.17 This strategy may very well be a concession to the young readers. The task of the translator is exacerbated by the fact that children constitute the primary target readership of the novels, which means that “[t]he translator […] faces the challenge of preserving their child-appeal and transmitting it to the child readers of another culture” (ibid. 66). On the one hand, children may perhaps be less tolerant than adults when encountering passages that seem cryptic because they refer to a culture they are not familiar with.18 On the other hand, translations that retain elements referencing the original culture and/or language may foster intercultural competence. It is certainly not true that children generally prefer stories set in their own reality, as the success of narratives ranging from the Arabian Nights fairy tales to fantasy as one of the most popular genres in children’s literature indicates very clearly. By reading about a culture that is ‘foreign’ to them – no matter whether this culture is real or imaginary – children are made aware of cultural differences and learn how to cope with these, for instance by deducing the meaning of unfamiliar cultural practices or lexical items from contextual information. Thus, “the initially foreign effect may dwindle as the item recurs throughout the series” (ibid. 76). Finally, the problems translators of the Harry Potter series had to face in the late 1990s and early 2000s were amplified by “[r]apid distribution” (Lathey 141) becoming one of the goals of many publishing houses authorised to publish translations. In an article from 2005, Gillian Lathey describes the accelerating production of translations as follows: Time patterns of translation still vary across the world, but gaps are decreasing as the international Potter effect gains momentum with the publication of each volume. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was not published in China until October 2000, a delay of three years from first publication in the UK; for volume five the planned time lapse between publication of the original and the translation was barely four months (142). The wish of publishing houses to cash in on the Harry Potter phenomenon as quickly as possible may be understandable, just as the wish of a readership that does not speak English to finally have access to the latest instalment of the series in their native language. In retrospect, one may perhaps wonder whether some of the translators’ choices resulted from due consideration or from time pressure. Be that as it may, a comparative analysis of Harry Potter translations proves to be a very illuminating (and entertaining) endeavour and testifies to the ingenuity displayed by the translators of Rowling’s novels. The characters’ names, whose meaning has often been commented on by academics and fans alike, are an interesting starting point for such an analysis. Many translations preserve the original names, but there are also some striking departures from this pattern, as the following examples will illustrate. While the name of Harry’s nemesis Voldemort has been preserved in all of the translations examined for this article,19 the last name of Harry’s potions teacher is different in some of the texts. For native speakers of English the name ‘Snape’ presumably conveys “vaguely unpleasant connotations deriving perhaps from the sound-symbolism of the initial sn- cluster, which also features in words such as sneer, snide, snoop, sneak, snap” (Davies 79, original emphasis). Additionally, from a phonological point of view the name ‘Snape’ constitutes a minimal pair with ‘snake’ and thus perhaps reminds readers of an animal that tends to be seen as the (biblical) embodiment of evil and treachery. The snake is also the heraldic beast of Slytherin House and is consequently associated with both Salazar Slytherin and his heir Voldemort. The abovementioned connotations of the name ‘Snape’ are bound to get lost in translation. Still, some translators decided to keep the original surname (German, Latin, Spanish, Turkish), whereas others stress this teacher’s unpleasant character by giving him a telling name in the target language. While the English name presumably provides a comparatively subtle characterisation, Ménard went for a more obviously telling name – ‘Rogue’, which “in French means ‘arrogant’” (ibid.) – and “the Italian translator, Marina Astrologo’s decision to rename him Piton, literally ‘python’, again turns the original hint into something unambiguous” (ibid., original emphasis). The Russian name ‘Zlej’ is perhaps even more telling, since it is reminiscent of the adjective zloj, which means ‘evil, malicious, grim’. According to Davies, “[t]he name of Harry Potter himself tends to be preserved unchanged, and it may have been judged preferable not to alter this name because it is the major identifying label for the series” (75). Still, the Russian translation alters at least the protagonist’s first name into ‘Гaрри’ (i.e., ‘Garri’). This change is one of several in the Russian text that result from the fact that there is neither the phoneme /h/ nor a letter corresponding to <h>; in other words, in contrast to languages like French and Italian, there is no ‘mute h’. Further names affected by this incompatibility of the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets include ‘Hagrid’, who is called ‘Ogrid’ in the Russian translation, ‘Hedwig’, who becomes ‘Chedviga’, and ‘Hermione’, who is ‘Germiona’ in Russian.20 Even if Harry’s name stays the same in many translations, the cultural connotations of his name may be lost anyway; after all, “for the British audience, the name sounds a particularly banal and ordinary one, which contrasts with the extraordinary qualities of its bearer” (ibid. 75). While names may be among the first terms that spring to one’s mind when thinking about translating Harry Potter, there are further difficulties, especially, as mentioned above, with regard to words that contribute to the overall Britishness of the series. On a very basic level, terms of address may already indicate an attempt at either maintaining this Britishness or privileging localisation. The translation by Alicia Dellepiane Rawson systematically uses Spanish terms of address, introducing for instance Harry’s uncle and aunt as “[e]l señor y la señora Dursley” (Piedra 9) to the readers – thereby losing some of the British flavour. The Italian and Latin translations adopt the same strategy, referring to “[i]l signore e la signora Dursley” (Pietra 15) and “Dominus et Domina Dursley” (Lapis 1), respectively. The French and Turkish versions, by contrast, use ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’, and the German translation chooses ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’ as markers of an Anglophone context. The transliteration of the Russian version reads ‘Mister’ and ‘Missis’ and thus likewise evokes Anglophone connotations. A semantic field that proves particularly challenging for translators due to the large number of culture-specific items is food. References to food play a quite prominent role throughout the Harry Potter series. Banquets in the Great Hall are among the highlights of the students’ life at Hogwarts, and the sumptuous feast Harry enjoys shortly after his arrival signals that the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is going to be much more of a home for the orphaned boy than number four, Privet Drive has ever been: The dishes in front of him [Harry] were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, chips, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup and, for some strange reason, mint humbugs (Stone 135). What is served during the banquet is not modern British cuisine of the kind propagated by Jamie Oliver (for example in his campaign for healthier school meals) but very traditional English food, which may support the nostalgic tenor of the series. While Harry relishes the food that appears in front of him, some readers – especially those who are used to a very different cuisine (or happen to be vegetarians) – may not find all of these foodstuffs quite that appetising. Since references to food that readers are prone to dislike would defeat the overall purpose of the list quoted above, translators may be inclined to avoid a faithful translation in this case. Muslims, for instance, might not be happy about the references to ‘pork chops’ and ‘bacon’, while Hindu readers might object to the ‘roast beef’. Food taboos motivated by culture and religion are likely to affect translations into languages like Arabic, Turkish and Hindi.21 This is exactly what can be observed in the Turkish translation, where Ülkü Tamer has translated “pork chops and lamb chops” as “pirzola” (Taşı 112), which means ‘chops’, but is only used to refer to lamb chops in Turkish. ‘Bacon’ is left out in the Turkish text; instead, there are two terms referring to sausages, “sosis” and “sucuk” (ibid.). ‘Socis’ is used for poultry sausages, whereas the latter term is the more common one used in Turkish to refer to ‘sausage’, which may be indicative of a certain localisation. The first item on Rowling’s list (‘roast beef’) has been adopted with minor changes in some of the translations – presumably in an attempt to stress Britishness: there is German “Roastbeef” (Stein 136), French “roast-beef” (Ecole 125), Italian “roast beef” (Pietra 126) and Russian “rostbif” (Kamen’ 176-77). Other translators opt for what Davies calls ‘globalisation’ in this case, choosing a somewhat more general expression which corresponds to ‘roasted meat’: “carne asada” in Spanish (Piedra 107)22 and “kızarmış et” in Turkish (Taşı 112). Although the vegetables mentioned in Rowling’s list are not likely to cause any major cultural problems, at least not with the languages of the translations chosen here, it is worth mentioning that the French translation replaces “peas, carrots” by “légumes divers”, i.e., ‘mixed vegetables’ (Ecole 125), which is a standard item on French menus. Thus, the choice may be seen as an example of localisation. A particularly intriguing item on the list of foods is ‘Yorkshire pudding’, a quintessentially English dish, which is bound to be unknown to most non-British children. Thus, it comes as no particular surprise that the French and Turkish translations simply dispense with this item. Moreover, the Spanish “pudín” (Piedra 107) is not likely to suggest ‘Yorkshire pudding’ to Spanish-speaking readers. In the German and Italian translations, however, there are references to “Yorkshire-Pudding” (Stein 136) and “Yorkshire pudding” (Pietra 126), respectively; in the Russian translation a dish called “jorkširskij puding” (Kamen’ 177) is mentioned. Presumably, for most readers of the German, Italian or Russian version (especially for children) ‘Yorkshire pudding’ is unfamiliar, too (or evokes completely wrong associations). Here, the term thus clearly serves as marker of (exotic) Britishness. In terms of their target audience, the translations into Latin and Ancient Greek differ from the ones discussed so far. While Lathey assumes that these “may be no more than an amusing gag for the learned” (149), teachers might also hope for a somewhat different readership, i.e., young people who might be more interested in reading about Harry’s adventures in an ancient language than in studying classical texts such as Cesar’s De Bello Gallico. There is a tradition of translating English children’s classics into Latin; cases in point include J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (Hobbitus Ille), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Alicia in Terra Mirabili), Michael Bond’s A Bear Called Paddington (Ursus Nomine Paddington) and A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (Winnie Ille Pu). Thus, children who want to read entertaining texts and practise their Latin have access to quite a lot of reading material. In German schools, translations of the popular Asterix comics by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo into Latin are used quite successfully in Latin classes.23 Since many young readers of Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis already know the Harry Potter books in their first language, the language barrier might be easier to overcome; they will recognise more easily what they already know in a different language. Given the special premises for the Latin translation, the culture of the target readership is not that important in this case. Ideally, the text may make readers curious as to how Harry’s adventures have been transformed into Harrius’s world and, along the way, may make them more familiar with how Latin ‘works’, for instance with respect to its declension system. The latter may give nouns a distinct ‘ancient’ touch by producing constructions such as “loco communali Gryffindorensium” (Lapis 116) and “Malfoy Crabbem et Goylem contemplavit” (ibid. 124). The impression of ‘ancient Otherness’ is reinforced by the fact that some of the names have been Latinised (e.g. Harrius Potter, Ronaldus, Fredericus et Georgius Vislius). Others, however, have been adopted without change from the English text (e.g. Voldemort, McGonagall, Albus Dumbledore, Snape, Hermione, Draco Malfoy). Regarding the abovementioned foods, the Latin version does something special with ‘Yorkshire pudding’, translating it into “placenta comitatus Eboracensis” (ibid. 100). Here, the Latin name for York (Eboracum) is used, which means that a reference to a local dish is translated faithfully, but still ‘disguised’ in such a way that even English readers will be hard-put to recognise the term. IV. The movies The worldwide fame of Harry Potter does not rest solely on the novels written by Rowling. The filmic adaptations of the series have contributed very much to turning ‘the boy who lived’ into a well-known fictional figure. Some scholars have argued that Rowling’s novels provide very good material for audio-visual adaptations, being quite ‘filmic’ themselves: “[a]ction sequences, such as the roller-coaster-like ride through Gringotts, the defeat of the troll or the journey through the trapdoor, punctuate the narrative in precisely the way they would be expected to in a film” (Cartmell/Whelehan 43). Still, the novels (especially the later ones) are quite long and all of them provide an amount of detail that no adaptation that is limited to the length of a feature film (or two in the case of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) can hope to capture. Thus, the plot has been ‘streamlined’ to a certain extent in the movies. This meant in particular “emphasizing Harry’s journey over and above incidental events” (Russell 398), thus, for instance, reducing other characters’ back-stories. Omissions are of course inevitable in adaptations of texts that are as long and detailed as Rowling’s. Still, some of the deletions arguably are to the detriment of the world building and/or characterisation. In Mike Newell’s film Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), for instance, there are some omissions that affect the impression of the wizarding world in general and the characterisation of Hermione Granger in particular. Although Nel argues that “[p]erhaps the need to condense justifies […] the omission of the S.P.E.W. subplot” (281), the fact that the house-elves have been left out in the fourth movie has several repercussions.24 The deletion of information on house-elves, who are after all one of the most prominent non-human species in the wizarding world, reduces the complexity of this world.25 Unlike the readers, the viewers do not find out that even in Hogwarts house-elves are kept as ‘indentured workers’ – a fact that Hermione discovers in her fourth year at the school.26 In other words, ‘evil’ families like the Malfoys are not the only ones who exploit this non-human race. This adds to the ambiguity of the wizarding world, which is – contrary to what some people may assume – not idealised in Rowling’s novels. The fact that Muggle-born Hermione is apparently the only one who is outraged by what she considers to be downright “‘[s]lave labour’” (Goblet 202) and is willing to take action on behalf of the house-elves adds an important facet to the portrayal of one of the series’ protagonists. Moreover, her attitude shows that a perspective shaped by an upbringing among Muggles may prove to be progressive. By leaving out Hermione’s political activism the film limits the character very much to her role as a potential love interest and ‘belle of the ball’, which reaffirms traditional concepts of femininity. Another feature of the film Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that reiterates gender as well as national stereotypes is the depiction of the visiting students from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang. Their choreographed entries in the Great Hall, which juxtapose the (supposedly feminine) seductive and dance-like movements of the exclusively female French students with the marching and the athletic Cossack-style performance of the exclusively male Eastern European visitors, are not based on the novel. The reduction of the students of the visiting schools to simplistic gender and national stereotypes suggests that Hogwarts is a more progressive, coeducational wizarding school, where girls and boys are even on the same sports teams. While the movie suggests that the other wizarding schools are not coeducational, the novel mentions at least in passing that both Durmstrang and Beauxbatons are in fact coeducational institutions as well.27 This also means that Beauxbatons could have a male Triwizard champion, which implies that the selection of Fleur Delacour presumably results from her being more capable than her (female and male) fellow students. In other words, the novel is more balanced in terms of its approach to gender roles than the movie, which activates both gender and national stereotypes to maximise the differences between the three schools. As the examples above have shown, changes in terms of plot and characterisation may have a significant impact on the world building, leaving people who only know the films with a somewhat different impression of the wizarding world than those who have also read the novels.28 Moreover, even people who are familiar with the texts as well as their audio-visual adaptations are likely to be influenced by the films to a certain extent. The movies inform what many readers imagine characters, places and objects to look like when (re-)reading the novels: “The dominance of perceptual images leads to an overlay with the imaginative image” (Cuntz-Leng 57). This is perhaps particularly apparent with respect to the portrayal of potions teacher Severus Snape, as Vera Cuntz-Leng argues. She claims that the extensive interest in this particular character and his popularity among fans can largely be attributed to Alan Rickman’s portrayal of the teacher rather than to the presentation of the character in the first volumes of the series. In the first novels, there was no reason to like Snape, and “[a]lthough fanfiction had been written about Harry Potter before 2001, Snape had been a character of minor interest in the early years of the fandom”, as Cuntz-Leng (65) observes. This changed quickly after the release of the first movie when, due to a felicitous casting decision, the British actor Alan Rickman became Snape – or did Snape become Alan Rickman at this moment (cf. ibid. 64)? From this point onward, there was a remarkable change in the fans’ attitude towards Snape, who now began to play a much more important role in fan fiction. With respect to the interpretation of Snape, the relation between the book series and the films is rendered even more complex by the fact that the production of the movies started before Rowling’s series had been completed. As Cuntz-Leng points out, “the parallel development of film adaptations and new novels brings both media into an inevitable dialogue wherein the books can react upon the movies and upon fan works – something quite unusual” (56). She assumes that Rickman’s portrayal of Snape had an impact on the depiction of ‘his’ character in later volumes of the series: Deathly Hallows is – although Snape is physically absent from most of the narrative – the only book in the series that provides us with the full spectrum of Snape’s emotional complexity that has been excessively explored through fanfiction: He is greedy, timid, self-confident, arrogant, loyal, happy, in love, mean and unfair, bitter, shy, ashamed, suicidal, angry, desperate, righteous, etc. This corresponds with […] [the] assumption that Rickman’s performance as well as the reactions by fans regarding his interpretation of the character influenced Rowling’s writing in later books to more easily motivate Snape’s ambiguous personality and his key position in the subject areas of love and sacrifice that are at the core of the series’ finale […]. Rowling’s later novels show a stronger awareness for the romantic and erotic possibilities of the character and ultimately, the Byronic hero archetype becomes decipherable in her text (ibid. 68). The lasting impact of the late Alan Rickman on the character of Severus Snape is also apparent in the stage production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016) in London, in which the portrayal of the potions teacher tries to emulate the appearance of Rickman as well as his very distinctive way of speaking. T-shirts, hoodies, cushions, phone cases, mugs, bracelets and other types of merchandise that refer to Snape’s famous (and characteristically laconic) admission that he still loves Harry’s mother Lily (‘Always’) provide further evidence of the character’s transformation from an entirely unpleasant, malicious teacher into a romantic hero. Alan Rickman is not the only charismatic actor who has contributed to the success of the film series. The cast reads very much like a ‘who is who’ of British actors and actresses, including Richard Harris, Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, Ralph Fiennes and a number of further well-known actors and actresses. Some of the young stars, who have grown up ‘in Hogwarts’, have moved on to very successful careers on screen and/or on the stage. This seems to be particularly true for Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) and Emma Watson (Hermione). The idea that the cast should reflect the Britishness of the series (cf. Cartmell/Whelehan 38) has paid off. In the movies the actors and actresses use different regional and social varieties of English, all of which are, however, associated with the British Isles. In conjunction with productions like Peter Jackson’s TheLord of the Rings (2001-2003) and The Hobbit (2012-2014) trilogies and the HBO series Game of Thrones (2011-), the Harry Potter film series has arguably contributed to establishing varieties of English that are associated with the British Isles as the predominant audio-visual ‘language of fantasy’. There are four different directors behind the Harry Potter movies, who, despite their distinctive styles, have all contributed to world building in the Potterverse. The first two movies, directed by Chris Columbus, have been much maligned by critics due to their supposedly strong ‘fidelity’ to Rowling’s books. This impression is partially due to the films’ emphasis on world building. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan argue that the first instalment “was a film that tried too hard to be the book and one which was destined to suffer invidious comparisons with a much more successful book-to-film adaptation in the form of The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)” (39, original emphasis).29 On a similarly disparaging note, James Russell perceives “some obvious ‘Hollywood’ elements” (397) in the first two movies; he criticises that they display “a relatively bright, accessible, aesthetic: they are upbeat in tone, there is less emphasis on the weather and the seasons, and they are structured according to a familiar children’s film template” (ibid.). To a certain extent, the more upbeat tone of Columbus’s movies in comparison to the later ones is of course in accordance with the overall optimism of the first novels, which stress the protagonist’s enthusiasm for becoming part of a new and exciting world at least as much as the dangers awaiting him in this new environment. Columbus’s first movie has also been criticised for its pace and “cumbersome style” (Nel 280). Especially the depiction of the arrival at Hogwarts has come under fire: Columbus’ emphasis on sets and effects slows the pace. For example, when the students approach Hogwarts for the first time, the camera shows the castle as boats approach, then shows the first-years looking awed, then lingers on the castle once more, then moves to a close-up of awed students’ faces again, and finally moves back to linger on the castle…again. After nearly a minute of switching back and forth between the castle and the children’s faces, what began as an impressive sight grows tedious (ibid. 280). Although Nel may have a point if one applies the conventions of the standard fast-paced, action-driven Hollywood blockbuster, one may venture the hypothesis that many fans of the series actually want	__label__1	0.943939
Frank I 78 Identity/I/Time/Memory/Locke: Question: How can it be guaranteed that the self who did something some time ago is identical with the self that remembers this act? Anscombe/Schaede: Anscombe unthinkingly shares the traditional view that the time fell apart into discrete moments, which must first and foremost be related to one another. Then the corresponding successive consciousness moments would have to be synthesized. But only if this theory is shared, problems arise with the temporal identity of "I". Frank I 93 I/Self/Memory/Identity/Anscombe: a repeated thought of "I" in conjunction with the same self would have to include a re-identification. But that is not at all part of the role of "I". On the other hand, it was part of the role of "A". (>Logic/Anscombe). Frank I 104 I/Identity/Anscombe: when I ask: what carries out my actions? Then the answer is "this object here", "this thing here" but that is not an assertion of identity. The sentences about my actions are verified by my body. But observation does not show me which body is precisely this one. Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Fra I M. Frank (Hrsg.) Analytische Theorien des Selbstbewusstseins Frankfurt 1994 Send Link > Counter arguments against Anscombe > Counter arguments in relation to Identity ... Authors A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Z Concepts A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Z > Suggest your own contribution \| > Suggest a correction \| > Export as BibTeX Datei Ed. Martin Schulz, access date 2017-10-21	__label__1	0.998783
Why Gogol burned the 2nd volume of his ‘Dead Souls’ novel Kira Lisitskaya (Photo: Legion Media) The writer had planned his famous novel to be in three volumes, but the second one was already not to his liking. So, what was wrong with it? Russian literature’s most famous satirist planned his most famous work to consist of three parts, in the format of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ - with its own inferno, purgatory and paradise. It is the first volume, which was printed in 1842, that we know today as ‘Dead Souls’. That was the inferno part and it turned out really good: Gogol depicts a rich palette of bad characters and a wide range of various vices. Commenting on the first chapters written by Gogol (which were not included in the final version of the first volume), the great poet Alexander Pushkin said: “God, how sad our Russia is!” Here is the plot synopsis: A member of minor nobility named Pavel Chichikov arrives in a small town and, in order to gain influence in society, pretends to be a landowner. However, the problem is that he does not have a single “soul”, that is, he has no serfs. So, he decides to resort to a trick facilitated by Russian bureaucracy. Each landowner in Russia had a list of serfs that was updated only once every few years. So, even if any of the peasants died, the landowner still paid taxes on them and they were listed as living until the next revision. Chichikov visits local landlords and asks them to sell him these dead souls... Each reacts to this unconventional proposal differently. Gogol himself called ‘Dead Souls’ a poem, although it was written in prose, but the form of the novel is reminiscent of an ancient poem in which the protagonist, Chichikov, travels through several repeating “circles of hell”, like Odysseus wandering from chimera to chimera. In addition, the “poem” contains lengthy lyrical digressions about Russia and Russians. The novel is considered the pinnacle of Gogol’s work - and one of the main keys to understanding the Russian soul. Its main character is not so much Chichikov as Russia itself. What was the second volume supposed to be about? In Gogol’s original plan, the second part was to be akin to Dante’s Purgatorio and the third, respectively, to Paradiso. “Its continuation is crystalizing in my head clearer and more majestic,” Gogol wrote to his friend, writer Sergei Aksakov. The characters in the second part were not to be quite as bad as in the first volume. “Why, then, portray poverty, yes poverty and the imperfection of our life, digging people out of the wilderness, from the remote nooks and crannies of the state?” was how Gogol begins the second volume. Take, for example, the character named Tentetnikov, whom we meet at the very beginning of the second volume: he leads an idle, bored life, but the author notes that he was once full of dreams and plans, but they all collapsed, due to the pettiness and futility of his service. In addition, Gogol wanted to find and show ways towards improvement. In particular, in the voice of his characters, he discusses how to get rid of corruption: in order to work well and not to steal, any civil servant needs the encouragement of his superiors. If the first volume is full of Gogol’s depictions of mud and bad roads, in the second, he practically voices admiration for Russia’s vastness and landscapes. Chichikov continues to visit local landowners and buy their dead souls, but, at some point, the box with all his papers is stolen. In addition, it becomes clear that someone is informing on Chichikov and his machinations. Chichikov, who, in the first volume, did not express any strong feelings, here becomes desperate, almost tearing his hair out. However, here the manuscript ends and we shall never find out what happened to him. Why did Gogol think the second volume was no good? The second volume of ‘Dead Souls’ was actually the last work that Gogol was writing before his death. Several years had passed since the publication of the first one and the author had changed: he was going through a spiritual upheaval and a painful craving for religion, accompanied by nervous breakdowns and anxiety. “You are asking if ‘Dead Souls’ is getting written. Well, yes and no. It is getting written, but too slowly and not at all as I would like,” Gogol wrote to his poet friend Nikolai Yazykov. Gogol’s mental struggles made his work much harder. He could no longer write “as in my youth, that is, at random, wherever my quill leads me”, he admitted. Each line was a challenge. The only person who read the second part of ‘Dead Souls’ was Archpriest Matfey, with whom the writer corresponded and had extensive and rather heated disputes on a variety of issues. Matfey criticized the second part of the novel, calling it harmful, and even asked Gogol to destroy it. Gogol himself felt that the second volume did not work out. He thought he was better at depicting bad characters and utter hopelessness. “The publication of the second volume the way it is would do more harm than good,” the author wrote in ‘Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends’. “Creating a few beautiful characters who reveal the generosity of spirit of our breed will lead nowhere. It will only arouse hollow pride and boasting…” On February 24, 1852, Gogol burned the fruit of his labors, the almost finished second volume of ‘Dead Souls’. According to different theories, he burned the manuscript either in a fit of anger, or... by accident. Allegedly, he wanted to destroy only the drafts, but, by mistake, threw the clean copy into the fireplace, too. Be that as it may, Gogol was badly affected by what happened and died nine days later. The chapters of the second volume that have survived to this day are a reconstruction of the surviving five notebooks. These individual chapters were most likely from the different versions that Gogol wrote. There are large gaps in them. In addition, they differ both in content and in tone, even the ink and paper are different. These surviving pages do not create a complete picture and the author’s intention remains unknown to us. If using any of Russia Beyond's content, partly or in full, always provide an active hyperlink to the original material. Read more This website uses cookies. Click here to find out more. Accept cookies	__label__1	0.954095
The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter Document Type Publication Date 12-1973 It seems that the Stoics were prepared to say two things : 1) It will in fact pay to be virtuous provided that you want to be happy; and 2) the good man will seek virtue for its own sake. Some of the apparent difficulties in reconciling these propositions may be resolved by examining the notion of seeking virtue for its own sake. What then do the Stoics say that virtue is? Any Cynic could advocate a consistent life, for the description is purely formal. But one consistent life might be set against another, and Zeno's appeal to natural consistency prevents this, as well as showing exactly why virtue pays. The question could, of course, have been tackled in another way. Is there in fact more than one kind of consistent life? Zeno would certainly have agreed that there is not, but though he thought that in all but the wise inconsistency leads to conflict and misery, he did not ask such a necessary question as: Is an injury to someone else also an injury to myself? Why did he not? In part because by separating the goal (happiness) from the end (virtue) he underestimated the importance of eudaemonism in preaching a moral system to the unconverted. Or if he did not underestimate it, he kept implying that he did and that one should. John Rist presented “Zeno and Stoic Consistency” to the Society at its meeting with the American Philological Association in St Louis in 1973. A revised version was published in Phronesis 22 (1977) 161-174 and reprinted in John P. Anton & Anthony Preus, eds.1983. Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy, vol. 2. SUNY Press, 455-475. For information about the author see Wikipedia “John Rist.”	__label__1	0.518344
The Hedge Knight: The Graphic Novel (A Game of Thrones) • ISBN-10: 9781477849101 Only 5 left! In this comic book/graphic novel adaptation set one hundred years before the events in George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Hedge Knight chronicles a young squire as he travels the cruel and complex path to knighthood in the Seven Kingdoms.Shouldering his fallen master’s sword and shield, Duncan (or “Dunk") is determined to reinvent himself as a knight in a nearby tournament. But first Dunk needs a sponsor, and that requirement sends him down a road studded with friends, foes, adventure, and hidden agendas. One such friend is Egg, who becomes Dunk’s squire, yet even he may hold secret motivations of his own.In this gripping prequel, Dunk and Egg seek glory in a world both familiar and new to Game of Thrones fans. What the two fortune seekers encounter, however, is a world of distrust and political machinations. Chivalry is not lost while Dunk holds fast to his dreams of honor. But such outdated virtues make him a target—and they may even lead to his ruin. This vivid and elaborately wrought tale brings new dimension to George R. R. Martin’s beloved world.This edition includes fifteen pages of new supplemental material: sketches, character designs, and original pages by Mike S. Miller, plus variant and original covers. We Also Recommend	__label__1	0.878797
Sony Pictures Classics 3.5 out of 53.5 out of 53.5 out of 53.5 out of 5 3.5 Comments Comments (0) Rarely have source material, director, and leading actress been more in alignment than in Orlando, the 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, directed by Sally Potter and starring Tilda Swinton. Of course, it’s less than shocking to say that Swinton—by now America’s favorite androgyne—slips effortlessly into the role of the titular male nobleman who awakens halfway through the film to find himself a woman. And those who have followed Potter’s career would no doubt note that Orlando’s swirl of gender-as-performance imagery fits snugly within her feminist-oriented, theatrically bent oeuvre. Watching Orlando some 17 years after its U.S. theatrical run, however, proves a welcome reminder of just how skillfully they marshaled their respective gifts here, how openly they entered into a dialogue with Woolf’s playful, slippery text. Good thing too, because Orlando in novel form is a far-from-easy book to adapt. Skipping across centuries of English history and offering little explanation for her protagonists’ gender switch-a-roo, Woolf refracts her ageless hero(ine)’s fantastical exploits through the archly poker-faced prism of historical biography. (Many of the book’s events are inspired by the life of Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West.) This distancing device allows Orlando to become a kind of conduit through which Woolf explores shifting gender expectations and constrictions—a novel-of-ideas conceit that works beautifully because Woolf balances it out with an astringent empathy for Orlando’s altered societal role post-transformation. Rather than wrestle a more “relatable” arc from Orlando’s journey, Potter takes the novel’s state of sly inquisitiveness as her guiding spirit. Her screenplay glides elegantly from situation to situation (entanglements with an alluring Russian princess, played by Charlotte Valandrey, in the early 17th century; a journey to colonial central Asia in the 1650s; the prospect of losing both love and property in the 1800s), surveying the cultural topography of a given period and zeroing in on how much (or how little) changes as she works her way across the timeline. Appropriately, a given vignette’s primary concerns are announced in capitalized intertitles: poetry, sex, love, etc. In the end, though, these are more novelistic structuring devices than springboards into deeper thematic inquiry. They play second fiddle to Potter’s and Woolf’s dominant double vision of gender as both an ever-malleable construction shaped by the specific historical moment, and an enduring method of social control wielded by those in power (i.e. men). The film bustles with soprano-voiced male singers, unwieldy wigs, and costumes paraded by both sexes, and a memorably commanding Queen Elizabeth I played by Quentin Crisp. A world of pageantry and primping, its members nevertheless divorce the porous boundaries between male and female social codes from the unequal levels of respect bestowed on each. Well-trodden ground, to be sure, and Potter pushes the satire into occasionally broad places. Orlando’s visit to an 18th-century intellectual salon, for example, finds such esteemed literary titans as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift spouting pseudo-philosophic bile about the fairer sex’s questionable morals and justified lack of independence, as the now-female Orlando sits stewing with outrage. It’s a pertinent if obvious reminder of the era’s commonplace misogyny, reaching up to the higher ranks of the intelligentsia. But if Potter’s ideas are familiar, her touch is light. Orlando brims with sprightly formal flourishes, looping gracefully into the film’s intellectual project while offering winking pleasures in their own right. Orlando will often directly address the camera, offering a telling look or revealing a stray thought. Foregoing the third-person narrator that Woolf’s faux-biography setup would imply, Potter provides a similar type of character alignment while stylishly underlining the notion of Orlando as performer, stepping outside his various historical and social roles to offer bits of commentary. That these insights often reflect in-the-moment emotions—Orlando giddily lets us in on his adoration of Russian princess Sasha, or her aghast reaction to being called a “spinster” by suitor Archduke Henry (John Wood)—complicates what would have been a simplistic sincere action/knowing aside dichotomy. But often Potter’s shrewdest moves are her simplest. At several moments throughout Orlando, her camera will linger on lengthy conversations between, say, Orlando and hunky would-be paramour Shelmerdine (Billy Zane). In place of a shot/reverse shot strategy, she attentively pans back and forth between the two as they discuss how their individual desires brush up against gendered societal norms, allowing one person to slip out of the shot to linger on the other listening, considering, readying a response. It’s a subtle visual metaphor for how Potter asserts her directorial presence within Orlando without getting in the way of Woolf’s richness and humor. Overt without being fussy, she leans in, listens close, and invites us to savor the pageant of ideas and images she alternately channels and constructs. She also seems very aware of the gift she was given in Swinton’s magnificent central performance, a balancing act of self-awareness and emotional transparency that Swinton performs with the utmost skill. Just watch her as Orlando bemoans how limited his time with Sasha could be, conveying both the intensity of first-time passion and the callow possessiveness of young male desire. Or consider the waves of surprise, bemusement, and wonder that wash over Orlando’s face when she gazes upon her newly female body. “Same person. No difference at all…Just a different sex,” she muses to the camera, a hint of transgressive energy mixing with an almost-spiritual calm. In a film that refuses to mash up Woolf’s brainy text into prestige-pic mush, Swinton provides a crucial way into Orlando’s inner life. And if Swinton proves the film’s empathetic anchor, she is joined by an exemplary supporting cast who walk the line between cock-eyed caricature and flesh-and-blood human being with grace. This proves particularly true of Crisp, who transcends man-in-a-dress smirking to get at something fragile and warm beneath Elizabeth’s surface imperiousness. Swinton, of course, has continued to explore her immense gifts on a variety of palettes, both independent and mainstream. And while it’s a little frustrating to read endless culture-page pieces commenting on her “gender ambiguity” while directors largely refrain from exploring its further reaches, she nevertheless remains a vital and intriguing force within current cinema. I’m not sure the same can be said about Potter. I fully admit to not seeing The Tango Lesson, her follow-up to Orlando. However, her three features released in the aughts—The Man Who Cried, Yes, and Rage—have all been a bit wanting of the skillful weaving of form, narrative, and theme seen throughout Orlando. Her commitment to cinematic experimentation and interest in the intersections of performance, gender, and social roles remain strong, but too often her films can be defined by the ostentatious stylistic gambits at their center and little more (Yes: the one with the dialogue in iambic pentameter; Rage: the one that premiered on cellphones; The Man Who Cried: the one…um…where Cate Blanchett talked in the theeck Russian ack-cent). All three films have stirring moments, and I generally enjoyed the crazy-quilt thematic jumble that was Yes: ethnic tensions and body issues and neo-colonialism, oh my! Yet it’s a quilt best appreciated when hung up on a wall and admired; attempt to wrap it around you, and you’ll find little to keep you warm. One can argue that Potter’s ambitions got a bit unwieldy in Orlando as well, when she chose to alter Woolf’s ending and have the film conclude in 1990s Britain. Without giving too much away, the full-throated feminist epiphanies that mark its final moments (scored to a free-to-be-you-and-me anthem sung by a literally angelic Jimmy Somerville and captured by a young girl with a digital camera) feel a bit detached from the bemused ironies and wry compassion that came before. But if this finale is an explicit layering of Potter-specific concerns onto Woolf’s text, it’s hard to deny its audacity and joy. And when Potter’s camera finally rests on Swinton’s face (a tear peacefully making its way down her cheek, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips), the synthesis of written character, actorly presence, and directorial gaze haunts the mind and fills the heart in equal measure. DVD \| Book Sony Pictures Classics 93 min PG-13 Sally Potter Sally Potter Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane, Lothaire Bluteau, John Wood, Charlotte Valandrey, Heathcote Williams, Quentin Crisp	__label__1	0.949449
Murderbot’s Inconvenient Emotions: Exit Strategy by Martha Wells “How humans decide what to do with their arms on a second-by-second basis, I still have no idea.” (Exit Strategy, p 59.) When I learned that Tor.com Publishing had offered Martha Wells a contract for a novel that will continue the story of Murderbot, I was utterly delighted. Because Murderbot, the protagonist of four novellas in the Murderbot Diaries, of which Exit Strategy is the fourth and latest, is such an enormous amount of fun to read about that for the series to come to an end just yet would be somewhat disappointing. Murderbot—anxious, insecure, and bedevilled by strong emotions which it deeply dislikes experiencing—is an extremely relatable character, a Security Unit (SecUnit) bot/construct that has achieved its independence (illegally) and finds itself somehow still with the impulse to help people (especially people it feels loyalty towards) despite its best efforts. Murderbot is a delightfully unreliable narrator of its own emotional landscape. (Apart from anxiety and frustration; it’s very reliable about them.) In this respect, it reminds me of Breq from Ann Leckie’s Imperial Raadch books—although Murderbot has a much more down-to-earth, sardonic sense of humour. “I had been in crowds of humans enough times by now I shouldn’t panic anymore—I had ridden on a transport with a whole crowd of humans who thought I was an augmented human security consultant and talked at me nonstop nearly the whole time. Except there was a little panic. I should be over this by now.” In Exit Strategy, Murderbot has just acquired some valuable information on the illegal and, well, dastardly, activities of major corporation GrayCris and has decided to turn that information over to Doctor Mensah (whom you might remember from All Systems Red, the first Murderbot novella), to aid in Mensah and PreservationAux’s lawsuit against GrayCris. Murderbot is on its way to do just that (a journey briefly interrupted by the need to evade a security team that has orders to capture or destroy the “rogue” SecUnit) when it learns that Mensah has left the station where the lawsuit is being litigated. Mensah has, it seems, been kidnapped by GrayCris in order to pressure PreservationAux—a kidnapping spurred by Murderbot’s recent actions. (GrayCris, Murderbot reasons, believe that it is operating under Mensah’s direction.) Murderbot decides that since GrayCris escalated its corporate response in reaction to Murderbot’s actions, it’s up to Murderbot to rescue Doctor Mensah. Travelling to the space station where Mensah’s being held, it reunites with members of Mensah’s team from All Systems Red and masterminds a plan to get them all safely away. Unfortunately for Murderbot, coming face-to-face once more with the first humans to see it as a person (while knowing that it was a SecUnit) results in many, many inconvenient emotions. Murderbot may have to acknowledge that it just possibly may have friends, and accept what that means for it. “That she understood even that much made me melt. I hate that this happens, it makes me feel vulnerable… I hadn’t been afraid that she wasn’t my friend, I had been afraid that she was, and what it did to me.” Exit Strategy, p 115. Murderbot doesn’t really have time to dwell on this possibility, really. There’s a lot going on in pulling off a one-Murderbot rescue/escape plan against a corporation that’s pulled out all the stops to prevent anyone getting away. A couple of climactic battles against overwhelming odds are pretty distracting… Murderbot novellas are usually a joy to read. Exit Strategy becomes even more of a joy to read in the emotional climax and dénouement, after the shooting is done and Murderbot is putting itself back together and having conversations while the Murderbot equivalent of woozy and concussed. It nearly died. Those were some poor life choices. “The bad thing about having emotions is, you know, OH SHIT WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO ME.” Having friends might be stressful, but it turns out that friends are good to have. Murderbot has a little adjusting to do to the idea that people might care about it just as it is. It’ll be interesting to see where Wells goes from here. This is a fast, fun, and funny novella that, at its heart, is about personhood, independence, and selfhood: about autonomy, trust, and kindness, as well as anxiety, frustration, and anger. At its heart, Exit Strategy is a kind story, and a hopeful one. I deeply enjoyed it. I heartily recommend the entire Murderbot Diaries series. Don’t start with Exit Strategy: start with All Systems Red. But you’ll find that Exit Strategy is worth the build-up. Exit Strategy and the other Murderbot Diaries novellas are available from Tor.com Publishing	__label__1	0.722319
Will There Be a We Have Always Lived in the Castle Sequel? Before Stephen King became the poster boy for horror, the genre was under the supremacy of Shirley Jackson. The award-winning author is known for concocting dark tales, often in the gothic setting, with strong undercurrents of social issues. In the span of two decades, she penned six novels and more than two hundred short stories. Her own life is a subject of discussion amongst the fans, especially due to the theories about her involvement in dark magic. In her final years, Shirley turned reclusive, more than she had ever been before, and slowly shut herself from the world. It was during her descent into agoraphobia that she penned her last novel, ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’. Her talent for telling twisted tales with grim characters blended with her mental state at the time, and she delivered a tale that not only inspired a lot of other writers but also became one of her most popular works. The novel received its first movie adaptation in 2019. Directed by Stacie Passon, who received recognition with her debut feature ‘Concussion’, it stars Taissa Farmiga, Alexandra Daddario, Sebastian Stan and Crispin Glover in the main roles. The story is set in the Blackwood Manor where Constance and Merricat Blackwood live with their uncle, Julian. The family is an outcast and lives in seclusion, trying to keep their contact with the town as little as possible. Trouble stirs when Charles, their distant cousin, comes to visit them. The film stays true to its source material, though there is room for deviations when it comes to book-to-screen adaptations. However, the writing is so seamless that a one-time reader will not be able to pinpoint the difference in dialogues in the book and the movie. Taissa Farmiga, who has already worked a lot in the horror genre, does a wonderful job of portraying the disturbed, yet disturbing, Merricat. Alexandra Daddario gets a meaty role, worthy of her talent. She portrays the inner turmoil of her character through the timidness in her eyes and the quivering smile that adorns her face. Sebastian Stan’s Charles is the classic troublemaker- charming, at times, but also heavily riddled with toxic masculinity. Despite the strong performances and a fairly well-adapted screenplay, the movie didn’t do well at the box office. However, it received great reviews, and might just be one of those films that gain popularity over time. It is not a perfect adaptation and does suffer some flaws as a film, but that is not the point of discussion here. The question is, will there be a sequel to ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ or not? Is There We Have Always Lived in the Castle 2? The answer is No. We Have Always Lived in the Castle was Jackson’s final novel, so we know that there is no official follow-up of the story. Moreover, the author never penned a sequel of any of her works, so, had she lived to tell more stories, she, most probably, wouldn’t have returned to the life of the Blackwood sisters. But that was in the 60s. Both novels and movies have come a long way since then, and sequels are all around the place. As of now, there is no official word on the sequel of the movie. Since the film is a very close adaptation of the book, the writers might be happy with the ending that Jackson left it with. But what they feel now might change sometime later. If the film’s popularity gains momentum, and the writers come up with a great story to follow up on Jackson’s work, we might easily have a sequel on our hands. What Could We Have Always Lived in the Castle Movie Sequel be About? I know that nothing is official right now, but humour me a sequel. What could it be about? The last time we see Merricat and Constance, they are the only ones left of their name (that we know of) and seem pretty happy in their current predicament. The townsfolk lashed out at them and vented out whatever bad feelings they had for the girls. Now, they too have calmed down and might not bother them again. If the sequel were to happen, it would introduce a new character in the lives of the Blackwood sisters. Perhaps another distant relative that they never knew existed, or maybe a love interest for Constance. The bond of the sisters might be put on trial and we expect a lot of blood and mayhem to follow it. Merricat will get another excuse to embark on a killing spree, and might even hurt the sister she loves so much. Taissa Farmiga and Alexandra Daddario will return to reprise their roles. Some characters from the town, like the nice lady from the café and the Clarkes, might make a return. Jim, Constance’s previous lover, may also have some important role to play here. Sebastian Stan and Crispin Glover will most probably not be a part of the sequel because their characters have been killed off. But if there were to be flashbacks, or if the story were to go deeper in the horror part, they might return as ghosts. In any case, it comes down to the writing team to conceive a story that proves worthy of being a continuation of the great Shirley Jackson’s work. Whether or not that happens, only time will tell. Read More: We Have Always Lived in the Castle Ending, Explained	__label__1	0.673122
War of the Seven (114k words) is a fantasy Battle Royale with a whole world as its arena and the fates of the gods at stake. As of September 2021, the novel has been completed and revised multiple times. I am working with professional editors to get it ready for publication. In parallel, I am developing the rest of the series. Here’s a draft cover. I included the book blurb below. This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is wots-ebook-cover.jpg For centuries, the Lady has guided the Verdant Kingdom to prosperity, under the laws of chivalry. As her realm’s goddess, she is revered by all. But now her people must fight six powerful kingdoms in a war they cannot win, with the fates of the seven gods hanging in the balance. To survive, the Lady has to use glamor and guile, advise her champions wisely, and forge a strong alliance, though she knows it cannot last. Queen Elena reigns over the Vampire Kingdom. Her human subjects pay the blood price and obey the vampire nobles, and in return she gives them safety and justice. She marches to war, seeking to crush the Lady and avenge her soulmate’s death. But along the way, she realizes that her noble vampires might truly be the monsters everyone else thinks they are. The War of the Seven rages across the land. To win it, the Lady and Queen Elena must face seafaring raiders, desert tribes, fierce giants, rampaging orcs, and an ancient empire, as well as each other. Each faction worships its own god and has various strengths: peerless warriors and assassins, powerful magic, enchanted suits of armor, terrifying cannons that fire exploding shells, and access to visions of other worlds including our own. They will all fight, and only one god shall prevail. The winner must absorb the others’ divine essence and battle a powerful deity for the fate of the world. The first book in The Ethasar Chronicles, War of the Seven is followed by Last of the Gods (work in progress) and Quest of the Champions (planned). You can read the first chapter here: War of the Seven – Chapter 1. Also see The Gods and their Champions to enjoy additional art and learn how drawing the characters has influenced the book.	__label__1	0.990561
inchide meniul Proaspat scoase din tipar L-V 08:00 - 20:00 0371.781.781 State at Any Cost - Tom Segev 167.4 Lei 186 Lei sau 16740 de puncte. Detalii. Livrare in 3-5 saptamani Cod: BRT9781789544626 An aparitie: 2019 Autor: Tom Segev Categoria: Judaism Editie: cartonata Editura: Head Of Zeus Format: 161 x 239 x 58 mm Limba: English Nr. pagini: 876 Adauga in wishlist Trebuie sa fii logat Transport Gratuit peste 90 de lei Puncte de fidelitate 30 de Zile Drept de Retur 'Tom Segev's meticulously researched and most elegantly written new biography of David Ben-Gurion is a must for anybody interested in both the glorious and the dark pages of the history of Zionism and Israel, as reflected throughout the life and times of the Jewish State's most important founding father' Saul Friedlander, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Nazi Germany and the Jews and Where Memory Leads. 'A State at Any Cost deserves to be the definitive biography of Ben-Gurion. It is the story of a hard-headed, pragmatic and ruthless politician, told without sentimentality or nostalgia. It also serves as a key to understanding today's Israel, which is still very much Ben-Gurion's creation' The Times. As the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion long ago secured his reputation as a leading figure of the twentieth century. Determined from an early age to create a Jewish state, he took control of the Zionist movement, declared Israel's independence, and navigated his country through wars, controversies and remarkable achievements. In this definitive biography, Tom Segev uses previously unreleased archival material to give an original, nuanced account that transcends the myths and legends that have built up around the man. He reveals Ben-Gurion's secret negotiations with the British on the eve of Israel's independence, his willingness to countenance the forced transfer of Arab neighbours, his relative indifference to Jerusalem, and his occasional eccentric moments - from UFO sightings to plans for Israel to acquire territory in South America. The result is a full and startling portrait of a man who sought a state 'at any cost' - at times through risk-taking, violence, and unpredictability, and at other times through compromise, moderation and reason. Segev's Ben-Gurion is neither a saint nor a villain but a twentieth-century leader whose iron will and complex temperament left a contentious legacy, and one of the world's most intractable national conflicts. Livrarea se face din stoc din depozitul de carte Libris, in zilele lucratoare. Transportul este gratuit prin curier rapid, oriunde in Romania, pentru orice comanda de minimum 90 de lei. Pentru orice solicitare apelati call center-ul Libris de luni pana vineri intre orele 8-20. Feedback Wishlist	__label__1	0.961906
How to read a book Reading time: 10 minutes When I was a kid, my parents struggled to understand why I always looked so tired. We had a curfew and were usually pretty quiet after bedtime. What was happening? Well, I was reading. Sometimes until dawn. Treasure Island, The Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Count of Monte Cristo, Iliad, Odyssey, Les Misérables, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary. Everything Zola: Au Bonheur des Dames, L’Assommoir, Nana, Germinal, La Bête Humaine. And of course, Harry Potter. These books have shaped who I am today, and while I don’t read as much as I used to—I have since learned about the importance of sleep—reading is still an integral part of my life. How to read a book is such a strange question. Is there really a specific way one should go about reading a book? Isn’t the act of reading good in and for itself? Thousands of people search for “how to read a book” every month, which got me curious. Someone even wrote a book about how to read a book, which is quite meta. That person is Mortimer J. Adler, and he had some interesting thoughts on the topic. Why we read The question of why we read is as old as the written world itself. Galileo saw reading as a mean to gain superpowers. Aldous Huxley thought of reading books as a way to make our life full, significant and interesting. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one,” wrote George R.R. Martin in A Dance with Dragons. I ran a poll asking people why they read books. “To learn new stuff that helps shape my view of the world”; “Overwhelming curiosity”; “To challenge myself”; “To inhabit another’s mind”; “To think differently”; “To get inspired”; “It helps me keep sane, reading is kind of a meditative activity for me”; “It makes me smarter.” Interestingly, 45% of respondents said they read a mixture of both fiction and non-fiction books. Another 41% only read non-fiction books. “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Francis Bacon. We read books for thousands of beautiful reasons. But, for the purpose of this guide, let’s distill these into three main categories. How to read a book - the 3 reasons why we read (entertainment, information, understanding) • Entertainment. We sometimes read to relax, to escape, to dream. To hear an interesting story, to explore a new fictional world, to travel without leaving our couch. • Information. We also often read to acquire facts about a place, a topic, or a person. Reading for informative purposes has a similar cognitive load to reading for entertainment. We don’t usually make a conscious effort to process the information. • Understanding. Finally, we rarely read to develop new insights. Reading for understanding means actively shaping our vision of the world by questioning and analysing what we read. When it comes to reading for entertainment, there really is no rule. As long as you enjoy the process, you should go for it. Don’t listen to people that say certain books are superior to others—it’s all about enjoying the moment. Fiction in particular should be savoured the way it tastes best to you. Whether you’re into epic novels, poetry, or comic books, who cares—the goal is to have a good time. If you’re reading for information—such as reading the news, a biography, or a travel guide to organise a weekend trip—you could also argue there’s no need to overthink it. But it really depends on how much you want to gain from reading. It’s especially important when it comes to non-fiction books. Do you want to read these in a passive way, or to make sure you gain deep insights and can form your own opinion? Most people are good readers when it comes to entertainment and information, but few have mastered the art of reading for understanding. The four dimensions of reading Adler’s main point in the first section of his work about how to read a book is that it’s best to gain knowledge straight from the source. Instead of going through a teacher sharing the main points of a book, he considered it better to read the book yourself. He called this concept “original communication”—the idea that information coming directly from those who first discovered an idea is the best way of gaining an understanding. He then goes on outlining four main dimensions of reading, which are based on the goal we have when reading a book. For example, you may not have the same goal when reading Critique of Pure Reason versus, say, Fifty Shades of Grey. But it’s not only the material that matters, it’s our intention. And, according to Adler, very few people have the intention of understanding the material at a deeper level. What does he mean exactly by understanding the material at a deeper level? Adler explains how these four dimensions of reading determine our understanding, how much we remember of what we read, and can progressively make us better active readers. Please note again these methods are best suited for non-fiction books. It would be a shame to read a good novel this way. How to read a book - the four dimensions of reading (elementary, inspectional, analytical, syntopical) 1. Elementary reading. It’s the most rudimentary level of reading, referring to the reading level of a kid in elementary school. But even this level some people get wrong, for example by trying to use speed reading. “Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension,” Adler says. 2. Inspectional reading. This step should happen before you give the book a proper read. The idea is to get the gist of the book before you decide whether or not it would be worth spending more time and get a deeper reading experience. We can do this in two ways. First, by using systematic skimming—having a look at the title, back cover, contents, and preface. This step should give you enough information to understand what the book is about and how it’s structured. Then, if you’re still interested, you can use superficial reading to get a feel for the big picture. You can take notes, but don’t stop to look things up. The goal is to get a view of the forest without getting lost in the trees. If after these two steps you still feel intrigued, move on to the next one. 3. Analytical reading. Think of this step as the ultimate way to understand exactly what the author wants to communicate. Instead of a quick chat, you’re in for a long conversation. If you have taken notes in the previous phase, you can now expand on these. There are three aspects to analytical reading. First, the structural stage, where you analyse all the parts in the book—not limited to the table of contents. Outline these parts, their order and relation. Try to understand what question the author seeks to answer. Second, the interpretive stage, where you construct the author’s argument. Spot all the major keywords and distil the main propositions. What is being said? How? What’s the context? Lastly, in the critical stage, you will judge the soundness of the argument. It’s not about how much you liked or disliked the book—it’s about the merit of the premises, facts, and reasoning. By the end of the analytical reading phase, you will have a thorough understanding of the book. 4. Syntopical reading. This is by far the hardest reading dimension of all four. It requires to read many books on a specific topic so you can compare their arguments. Once you have picked a research question, you will use the first reading dimensions to decide whether to use analytical reading or not for each book. You will also need to “bring the authors to terms”—to translate each author’s vocabulary into your own terms so comparison is possible across books. Syntopical reading is akin to drawing a map while exploring a new territory. It’s hard to not get lost but the journey itself is extremely rewarding. If you want to give syntopical reading a try, a great place to start is the Syntopicon compiled by the very same Mortimer Adler who wrote the book about reading books. The Syntopicon is a collection of great ideas from western philosophy and their corresponding famous books. Some of the topics include democracy, liberty, emotion, habits, education, happiness, immortality, logic, and imagination. Writing an essay as you go is a great way to consolidate everything you learned through syntopical reading and share it with the world. Understanding a book How do you know when you’ve really understood a book? When you’ve gained deep knowledge rather than superficial information? Adler says you need to be able to answer four questions. 1. What is the book about as a whole? This question is best answered by examining the front and back covers of the book and identifying its date, genre and general aims. 2. What is being said in detail, and how? The first phase of analytical reading will help you answer that question. Look at the structure, understand the author’s argument. With many books, spending more time analysing the introduction and the conclusion is a good idea. This is where most authors get to the crux of their argument. 3. Is the book true, in whole or part? The second phase of analytical reading is about questioning the argument—constructive criticism. Are the premises, facts, and reasoning sound? Are there any holes in the argument? 4. What of it? This last question requires comparing the book with other resources dealing with the same topic. It’s about connecting the dots and forming your own informed opinion. Adler and Van Doren to imagine being seated at a large table beside the authors you have read and joining the conversation. Another way to gain a deep understanding of a topic through reading is to create a mind-map connecting concepts and arguments across many different authors. If you’re really nerdy, you can even do this with novels. For instance, someone created a detailed map of all the connections between the Lord of the Rings’ characters—aptly called “One Graph To Rule Them All”. While nobody should feel forced to go to such lengths when enjoying a fiction book, we can’t argue this person has gained a deep understanding of the Lord of the Rings. As Abraham Lincoln said, “a capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.” Reading a book is a way to temporarily walk into someone else’s shoes. How much you want to understand the way they think and see the world is up to you	__label__1	0.921636
give blood Lois Linkens lois e. linkens healing.jpgThey had kind faces I was pleased to trust, Pleased to give. (Cold water, cold water – cold In the warm room where everything is blue Or very red.) Blue plastic seats like hard Curved clam shells, bodies in soft tunics like Nursery walls. A cherry face, wispy Grey curls: ‘I tell you, my dear,’ she muses O’er my punctured flesh. ‘I didn’t know what Day it was this morning!’ I saw my face In the glossy ladybird sat on my Fingertip. That was a strange joy – so quick And full and soon to fly. My dear life’s blood In nine minutes drained; my neighbour in five. Fast blood was hers, like sharks. But slow or speed Both new life give, old love save, as we bleed	__label__1	0.99404
The Personality Brokers Summary and Review by Merve Emre Has The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre been sitting on your reading list? Pick up the key ideas in the book with this quick summary. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the world’s preeminent personality test. You yourself may have taken it before, just like the two million people around the world who do so every year. Although it’s used by Fortune 500 companies, university admissions departments and self-help programs around the world, little is known about the origins of the test. In this book summary, we’ll go on a journey to discover the roots of this personality inventory. We’ll learn who its creators were and what inspired them to devote their lives to the study of personality. We’ll also look at how social conditions in the early twentieth century contributed to the test’s appeal and examine just how scientifically valid this behemoth of popular psychology really is. In this summary of The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre,Read on to discover • how personality typing has a dark side; • whether the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator can really reveal your true self; and • what this test gives us that science can’t measure. The Personality Brokers Key Idea #1: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator uses an easily understandable, nonjudgmental approach to understanding personality. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) holds the crown as the best-known personality inventory. You may have taken it as part of a recruitment process for a job or simply as a way to get to know yourself a little better. But for the uninitiated, let’s start by taking a look at exactly what this popular test entails. Our story begins during the Second World War, when a mother and daughter, Katharine Cooks Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, developed a questionnaire that later became known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This test measures a person’s personality according to several binaries of normal human behavior - common traits contrasted with their opposite, making them easy for most of us to understand. They are: introversion (I) and extraversion (E); intuition (N) and sensing (S); feeling (F) and thinking (T); and judging (J) and perceiving (P). In order to assess where someone’s personality lies along these four dichotomies, the questionnaire asks ninety-three separate questions about respondents’ preferences, each of which is associated with one of the test’s categories. For example: “Do you prefer to focus on the outer world, or your own inner world?” assesses introversion and extraversion, whereas “When you make decisions, do you initially consider consistency and logic, or do you first consider people and particular circumstances?” evaluates thinking and feeling. According to Myers-Briggs, your answers to questions like these determine your personality, which can be any one of 16 four-letter combinations. For instance, you might be an ENTJ (an extraverted, intuitive, thinking and judging personality type), or you could come out as a ISFP (an introverted, sensing, feeling and perceiving type). Importantly, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator isn’t a test with right and wrong answers. Rather, every personality type has its own strengths and weaknesses - no type is inherently better or worse than another. People with feeling personalities, for instance, are thought to be better at empathizing with others, whereas thinking personalities are more rational problem solvers. The creators designed the indicator this way to ensure that test-takers would not worry about being regarded as inferior to others once their results were known. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is renowned for this nonjudgmental and clear framework. But people might be less enthusiastic if they knew the thoroughly unscientific roots from which this test grew. The Personality Brokers Key Idea #2: The MBTI is based on the unscientific and unsubstantiated theories of Carl Jung. The modern-day publishers of the MBTI, CPP, make no secret of the fact that Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers based their work on the writings of one of the most famous psychologists of the twentieth century, Carl Jung. Proponents of Myers-Briggs would have us believe that this theoretical underpinning is a mark of distinction. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find that Jung’s theories were more fiction than fact. For much of her adult life, Katharine Briggs was interested in the idea that personality was innate, unchangeable and classifiable, believing that everyone is born with a distinct personality type. However, it was only when she read Jung’s work that her questionnaire began to take shape. Psychological Types, published in 1921, in which Jung argues that people’s souls are made up of opposing and opposite natural spirits was particularly influential. Unfortunately, the Jungian ideas that Briggs based her first MBTI questionnaire upon were themselves founded on highly questionable scientific principles. Jung’s contemporaries were highly critical of his theories about personality. The respected behavioral psychologist John B. Watson remarked that Jung’s theories had more in common with religious mysticism than with serious empirical science. Why was Watson so scathing? Because there was no proof for Jung’s theory of personality types. Jung did not see a lack of evidence as a problem, refusing to subject his ideas to modern empirical testing. Why? Well, Jung believed that a scientific approach to psychology could not give a complete account of human personality. Instead, he sought a deeper understanding of personality in religious, literary and philosophical texts. The parts of his personality type theory that Briggs and Myers drew on the most - those which emphasized the importance of opposing personality categories - were actually based on ideas from ancient Greek and African mythology. In his book, Jung even refers to the Greek myth of the brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus, who embody the opposing characteristics of foresight and hindsight. Ultimately, many psychologists have concluded that Jung’s personality types are founded on baseless assumptions rather than scientific evidence - a very shaky foundation indeed for the Briggs-Meyer questionnaire. The Personality Brokers Key Idea #3: While developing the MBTI, Katharine Briggs became obsessed with Carl Jung. There’s no doubt Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers were inspired by the work of Carl Jung. What’s not so well known is that Carl Jung was more than an inspiration for the MBTI - he was an all-consuming personal obsession for Katharine Briggs. During the years that she spent designing the earliest iteration of her personality questionnaire, Briggs began to revere Jung as an almost divine oracle. In 1923, soon after learning about Jung’s writings on personality, Briggs claimed that Jung himself had appeared to her in a dream. Upon waking, she immediately lit a fire in her fireplace and burned all of her previous work and notes on personality types, suddenly convinced that she no longer needed them. Determined to become Jung’s most dedicated disciple, she spent the following five years simply copying sentences from Psychological Types into her notebook. Admitting later that the book became her bible, she remarked that she had begun to think of Jung’s writings as the path to salvation. She stopped using his name, and began to refer to him reverently as “the man from Zurich.” Speaking later about why she became so obsessed with Jung, Briggs stated that he was the author and creator of all her dreams and that she credited him with showing her, through his writing, all the different ways in which she could live and embrace life to the fullest. Briggs looked for other ways to express her love for Jung that were deeper than simply copying down his work. She began to write stories about Jung, staying up until the early hours to compose erotic fiction about him and his practice of psychoanalysis. For instance, she wrote a novella called The Man from Zurich in which a psychoanalyst and his patient develop a close relationship, filled with sexual tension. After the novella was rejected by publishers, she began to express her obsession through music, rewriting the lyrics of a popular 1930s fox-trot into a hymn titled “Hail, Dr Jung!” For better or for worse, Katharine never met Carl Jung, but her devotion remained undimmed for the rest of her life. Briggs thought of Jung as an oracle, but soon millions of Americans would come to see Briggs’s own questionnaire as having similarly astonishing powers of divination. The Personality Brokers Key Idea #4: Early twentieth-century society was highly receptive to Katharine Briggs’s first personality questionnaires. After spending five years in deep contemplation of Carl Jung’s writings, Katharine Briggs turned her attention outward with a plan to bring Jung’s theories to the wider American public. This first incarnation of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was a magazine article entitled “Meet Yourself: How to Use the Personality Paintbox,” published in the New Republic in 1926. In the article, Briggs represented each one of the 16 distinct personality types with a different color in the personality paint box. In order to meet your true self, she explained, you needed to discover which color fits you best by writing down each one of Jung’s personality types on index cards and arranging them in the order of which described you the best. Though she may not have realized it at the time, Briggs’s unusual method was groundbreaking, and by implying that you could improve yourself and your life through self-discovery, the article ushered in the era of popular self-help writing. In the 1920s, US society was crying out for just that sort of thing. The roaring twenties was a period in which society’s demand for psychological support far exceeded the amount of psychologists who were available to provide it. Radio shows and newspapers were filled with columns and commentators seeking to address the perceived problems of the era. These included disobedient teenage girls who cut their hair into bobs and danced to jazz music, negligent wives who secretly drank and a sense of personal paralysis that many people felt in response to the emerging culture of consumerism. In earlier decades, people would usually have looked to religion for guidance. But modern Americans, Briggs noticed, were less willing to receive the sort of judgment that their predecessors had accepted from the Church in exchange for its advice. Importantly, society no longer wanted the rigmarole of a Christian lifestyle, with its emphasis on absolution in exchange for repentance. Instead, they wanted to think of themselves of independent individuals, each the master of her own life and destiny. And in order to achieve this self-mastery, one had to first know exactly what sort of self one was dealing with. With its cheerful and accessible tone, Briggs’s first iteration of the MBTI made the path to self-discovery seem fun and nonthreatening. However, there was also a darker side to society’s new enthusiasm for personality typing. The Personality Brokers Key Idea #5: To some philosophers, the very notion of personality typing was dangerous and oppressive. As the Second World War ravaged Europe, Isabel Myers was busy working on the personality type indicator that her mother had begun to develop twenty years earlier. In Nazi Germany, Hitler’s soldiers had begun transporting Jews to concentration camps. The practice of sorting people into groups began to mean something far more deadly. Isabel Myers envisioned the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a benign system for helping people to better know themselves, but to a growing number of social theorists, typing people’s personalities in this way was far from harmless. The most famous denouncer of the practice of personality typing was the German social philosopher Theodor Adorno. In his famous sociological thesis The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno linked the kind of typological theories that Isabel was working on to Nazi Germany’s racial policy. Hitler’s regime, he believed, demonstrated just how inhumane it was to try to sort people into categories. The logical endpoint of this rigid view of humanity was a fascist society. Attaching labels to human beings regardless of their qualities as individuals would then lead to decisions about which groups should live and which should die. It did not matter, Adorno argued, which typing criteria were used. Whether grounded in racial theory or personality theory, any attempt to label human beings indicated a sinister, anti-enlightenment, anti-humanist mentality and a latent desire to manipulate and divide people by placing them into distinct classes. And in Adorno’s view, personality typing was symptomatic of another big problem: corporate capitalism. He believed that the relatively new enthusiasm for typing personalities was born out of the need of the capitalist system to separate society into different classes: owners and employees, working-class laborers and the managerial middle class. To Adorno, the idea that humans were born with an innate personality type that they shared with millions of others was a fallacy. People might exhibit predictable patterns of thought and behavior, but not because these were innate. Rather, capitalist society wilfully conditioned people in order to turn them into more profitable workers, managers and owners. Interestingly, where Briggs and Myers saw a paint box with which one could gain a picture of their true selves, others saw a dangerous toolbox for fascist discrimination and capitalist oppression. The Personality Brokers Key Idea #6: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is scientifically invalid but may be useful nonetheless. By 1980, both Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers had passed away, but their creation lives on. More than two million of us take their type indicator every year, and the MBTI is an industry worth more than two billion dollars, spanning over 20 languages and 25 countries. However, whether this is a cause for concern or celebration remains unclear. Unsurprisingly, for many rational and scientifically minded people, it’s the former. Ultimately, the theory underpinning the MBTI has no grounding in clinical psychology. And it shows. Recent psychological studies have found that over half of all individuals who repeat the test more than once, even less than a month apart, are categorized as a different personality type the second time around. Furthermore, critics argue that the 16 different personality types are so loosely defined that each one could fit anybody. And yet, for all its skeptics and its lack of scientific validity, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is still the world’s most popular personality test, cherished by hundreds of thousands of people all over the globe. How can this be? The answer may lie in its ability to help people accept themselves. For many of us, self-doubt and regret are a familiar part of the human condition. But for those that believe in the Myers-Briggs view of personality, the MBTI offers a tantalizing framework of self-acceptance and self-justification. It can be comforting to believe that our personalities are innate and immutable because this means that we can finally accept who we are instead of constantly striving to reinvent or change ourselves. And once we know that we are a particular type of person, this can serve as a justification for all the decisions we’ve made, both good and bad - and as an explanation for some of the negative things that might have happened in our lives, such as an acrimonious divorce. In fact, in its own flawed way, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator offers us a justification for who we are, and who we’ll always be. It may not offer us scientific rigor, but it can give us reassurance. And in this respect perhaps, the MBTI has a value that cannot be measured. In Review: The Personality Brokers Book Summary The key message in this book summary: The Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory is a popular personality test that classifies people as one of 16 different personality types. Based on the writings of Carl Jung and designed by a mother and daughter in the first half of the twentieth century, the test has little scientific validity. Nonetheless, millions of people have found their own test results insightful and transformative. Though we shouldn’t mistake Myers-Briggs as being scientific, it still holds unique value as a vehicle for reassurance and self-acceptance.	__label__1	0.665695
SOMETHING OMINOUS IN LINCOLN FORRESTOR'S LAUGHTER brought a sudden chill to Clifford Parks. And well it might. For Cliff Parks, gun expert who came to Forrestor Farms to loaf, was to remain to solve the mystery of his host's murder. People were alien creatures to Forrestor. A successful dramatist, coldly analytical, he found both pleasure and profit in pitting human beings against one another, goading them, then using their reactions as the basis for a new play. This week-end the group assembled--the playwright's browbeaten wife, the man she loved and the woman he had married, an agent, a gardener, a lawyer and a feckless nephew with his sullen spouse--promised more than ordinarily good sport, until one puppet turned upon the puppeteer and struck to kill. Clifford Parks saw at a glance that the explosion in the gun shack had been no accident. This was murder--by someone who had at least some knowledge of the technicalities of firearms, as well as motive and opportunity. And all the suspects fulfilled, in some measure, all the requirements. A capital puzzle, logically and suspensefully handled by an author who is himself a gun authority and a long time member of the Philadelphia Police Force. Trade Paperback: 6 x 9 inch 258 pages ISBN 978-1987069242	__label__1	0.987471
News Ticker [GUEST POST] Tom O’Donnell Asks “How Alien?” Tom O’Donnell has written for McSweeney’s, Atari, and the upcoming show TripTank, on Comedy Central. His comic strips have been featured in the New York Press, the Village Voice and other papers. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Tom on Twitter as @TomIsOkay. Follow Chorkle, the hilarious five-eyed alien from his new middle-grade sci-fi novel Space Rocks!, on Instagram and on Twitter as @ChorkleFromGelo. How Alien? by Tom O’Donnell My comedic middle-grade sci-fi novel, Space Rocks!, is the story of an human-alien encounter-as told from the alien’s point of view. It was a fun conceit because it allowed me to imagine how bizarre everyday human behavior might look to a member of another species. Think about what you did today. Myself, I got up, I brushed my teeth and then played an obscene amount of Batman: Arkham Asylum on Xbox 360. Any aliens secretly observing me foam at the mouth and then pound the Joker’s henchmen into the ground for two hours might incorrectly conclude that I’m a psychopath who loves the taste of Crest (instead of correctly concluding that I’m simply a dude with mild anxiety/terrible time-management skills who is too cheap to buy new video games). It’s this sort of detached anthropological take on of humanity that comes into play in Space Rocks! To make it work, though, I needed the perspective of the protagonist-a young “Xotonian” living on an asteroid between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars-to feel very alien. However, I soon discovered some interesting limits as to just how alien that could be. Right off the bat, you’ll find that Space Rocks!-despite having a first-person extraterrestrial narrator-is written in English. So in a certain sense, I’ve already betrayed my central premise. I suppose one day someone will write an entire novel in an invented alien language, but personally, I’m not that brave (insane?). For now we will have to content ourselves with stories of aliens written in human-ese. Still, I did want the Xotonians to at least have their own language. So I invented Xotonian words to describe things that we humans wouldn’t have any words for-organisms specific to their world, their food, parts of their own strange anatomy-and used them throughout the novel. For example, a Xotonian doesn’t have “hands” or “fingers” but rather it uses four appendages called “thol’grazes” with grasping “fribs” on the ends. I say “it” because all Xotonians are genderless, another way I thought it would be interesting to differentiate them from humanity (and make the book more difficult to copyedit). Logically, I decided, there’s no way an alien race would use our same earthly systems of measurement. After all, they would share none of our history, so English or metric wouldn’t make any sense. In the first draft of Space Rocks!, all the units of length were “xeggs” and “kul’xeggs”. Each day was about 5.3 “iaqs” because why the heck should extraterrestrials subscribe to an arbitrary timescale based on earth’s rotation? But when I read back through the manuscript, though, these invented units of measurement simply didn’t work. While it might be fun for the reader to imagine a Xotonian grabbing something in its fribs, it isn’t fun to mentally calculate how many iaqs are in a day, every single instance the concept of time comes up. I found that there was a often tension between alien-ness and clarity. In the case of measurements I put aside logic and decided it was more important for the reader to know when things happened and how far away they were. In subsequent drafts, I changed Space Rocks! to take place in days and hours. For length and mass I used the metric system (This only forces the reader to mentally switch “meter” for “about three feet” every time the concept of length comes up.) In short, I made my narrator’s voice slightly more human to serve the story. One of the delights of reading science fiction and fantasy is encountering whole civilizations of non-humans, who look, think and act differently than we do. But ultimately these aliens (or elves etc.) we read and write about are defined by their relationship to humanity. They might represent certain human qualities taken to their extreme (Vulcans) or perhaps deep-seated fears we share (vampires). Sometimes they’re simply more human than actual humans (hobbits). But they’re always a reflection of us, which is one way these genres allow us to explore our own nature and culture. I realized that as alien as I wanted my Xotonian narrator to be, it was always going to be a little bit human, too. And that’s okay. Because Space Rocks! is a story for human readers, imagined by a human author-just like everything else that’s ever been written… Well, until we get to read some books that are actually written by aliens, that is. Fribs crossed.	__label__1	0.712861
2017 Reviews, Long Fiction Aunty Lee’s Delights After becoming a widow, Rosie Lee devoted herself to her restaurant, Aunty Lee’s Delights, where she serves Singaporean home cooking and folksy wisdom in equal measure. But when one of her dinner guests turns up missing and a body is found washed up on a beach, Aunty Lee discovers another passion: solving murders. Aunty Lee’s Delights is a charming mystery about the many types of people and ideas coexisting in Singapore, and how to manage the clashes of culture and class that take place there. Read my First Look here. IMG_0155-FILEminimizer This is a light little read full of cute witicisms and surprisingly nuanced cultural critique. Aunty Lee functions as the compassionate and curious heart at the center of a group of very different characters: fussy traditional wives, adventurous modern women, religious tourists, conceited ex-pats, gay men and women, uptight police, and the servant class of Singapore. Aunty Lee serves them all with spicy food, relaxing teas, homespun wisdom, and general compassion. Aunty Lee is the type of hero we don’t see too often – curious, caring, and capable. “As far as Aunty Lee was concerned, people ought to go through the ideas they carried around in their heads as regularly as they turned out their store cupboards. No matter how wisely you shopped, there would be things in the depths that were past their expiration dates or gone damp and moldy—or that has been picked up on impulse and were no longer relevant.” It can be difficult to decide where a book lands on representation when it is written by and for another culture than my own. I know nothing about Singapore or the people and cultures that weave together everyday life there. But the author, Ovidia Yu, is Sinagaporean. Aunty Lee’s Delights seems to purposefully grapple with cultural differences, and it feels as though Yu is trying to use Antuy Lee as a megaphone for tolerance and understanding. And to an ignorant reader like me, the whole thing came off as very, very sweet if not a bit shocking at times. Ultimately, I don’t think I like series mysteries. I hadn’t read one since my Nancy Drew days, but in my grand project of diversified reading, I thought it was only right to try another one out as an adult. I liked almost everything about Yu’s novel, except the genre. When I read mysteries, I feel like everything is in sketch rather than vibrant color. Just not my kind of reading experience. BUT, if you do like mysteries, I think this one is probably going to charm you. Aunty Lee is a lovely character- a widowed busybody chef who solves mysteries- and the details of Singaporean culture and everyday life really add a meaningful novelty to the genre. Scent Notes: hot peppers and pickled cucumbers, cardamom tea, and baby powder. Aunty Lee's Delights	__label__1	0.967184
Book Reviews Every other week I release a book review. You can find a list of here of past weeks, and sign up for the newsletter to receive them in your email as they come out! Creativity Brewing by Kevin Barrick A flash fiction anthology filled with nuanced metaphor, a swath of genres, and emotionality that drips into every single word. The Roots That Clutch by A.E. Bross The first book in a series centered around found family, the struggle for survival and independence, and what it ultimately means to love someone knowing that doing so can lead to loss and heartbreak. Cherrington Academy by Rebecca Caffery A coming-of-age novel following transfer student Logan Shields on his escape from homophobic bullies and neglectful parents to the private boarding school, Cherrington Academy. Tiny Tales, by Jana Jenkins A series of bite-sized stories that range in genre, but all of which leave you with an aftertaste that lingers. The Crowman by David Rae An ethereal dark fantasy with a striking cast of flawed characters, immaculate world-building, and a swirling miasma of a plot that left me guessing until the very last word. The Pyre Starter, by Jaimie N. Schock Full of heartfelt dialogue, engaging action scenes, introspection on what family means and what lengths we’ll go to in order to protect the ones we love.	__label__1	0.988786
Something Different “Now? You want us to go over there now? Doesn’t he need to prepare or something? He’s not expecting us, is he?” “No, he isn’t, but knowing him he will have known for quite some time. He probably knew before we’d even met.” Kathryn was still not sure. “Poketay won’t mind, will he?” “Red, he won’t.” Chakotay took her hands, “Unless it’s too soon for you. We can always decide to ask him another time.” “Sweetheart, of course it’s all too soon, but I don’t care about that anymore.” She got up and looked outside. “Chakotay, how long have we been here?” “I don’t know, why?” “Come here and tell me what you see.” Chakotay stood behind her and looked outside over her shoulders. A large dark brown cover was partly visible and seemed to continue around the corner of the house. They went outside and saw a cube shaped tent. On closer inspection they found a note attached to it. Dear Kathryn and Chakotay, You will still have to look for another way to get this bed inside, but for now this tent will give you at least some privacy for your first night as Equals. All who had helped move the bed signed it. Kathryn found the entrance and entered. Inside, the tent was beautifully decorated with fresh flowers and candles, waiting to be lit. She was amazed by what she saw. The bed was a clear centerpiece, complete with the quilt they had slept under during their first night together. “When did they do all this? I never noticed a thing.” Chakotay had joined her in the tent and he was just as surprised. “It’s amazing. I might just have to build the new room around all this.” “Yes, Red.” “How do they know we will be Equals later today? You didn’t tell them.” He sat on the bed and pulled Kathryn closer next to him. Tugging her down, they reclined on the bed, her head cushioned on his shoulder. “Let me tell you a story. Poketay will even tell you it’s an ancient legend among our people. A long time ago, in fact it was right before the Great Spirits created mankind, a small bear cub was born. He grew up in a loving family. And when the time came for him to look for a mate, he went out into the Great Woods to look for her. For years he wandered around, occasionally meeting his parents, but he still had not found the bear he was looking for. It didn’t exactly make him unhappy, but he did question himself. Was he too picky or were the she bears he had met really not the right mate for him? One day as he walked around his favorite part of the forest, a Great Spirit sat on a log, right where the Bear could see him. “My dear Bear,” he said in a singsong voice, “what is the matter? Why do you look so glum?” The Bear answered, because that was the polite thing to do when talking to the Great Spirits. “O Great One, I’m not unhappy, not really that is. I have been looking for a mate for long years now, but I haven’t found the one who touches my soul yet.” The Great Spirit looked at the Bear, “Don’t worry, my friend, you will not remain alone. Soon you will meet she who completes you.” Momentarily forgetting whom he was speaking to, the Bear jumped up and did a little happy dance. “Really? I will? Thank you, Great Spirit.” “You are quite welcome. There is one condition however.” “Anything, I will do anything for her.” “Good to hear, Bear. When you meet her and she has accepted your proposal to become Equals, you must declare your Bond before the Spirits that same sun-cycle.” “We will.” And as fast as he had appeared, the Great Spirit disappeared again. The Bear had never in his life felt this happy and relieved. The next couple of days he walked through the Woods in a daze, not noticing things were about to change. As the Sun was shining using her Rays to set the flowers in bloom, the Bear went to the other part of the forest. He wandered around, looking at the amazingly beautiful life that surrounded him. Not seeing where he was going, he bumped into something furry and warm. When he jumped back he saw the prettiest and most beautiful bear he had ever seen. She had been taking a nap, enjoying the warmth the Sun gave her, and she opened her eyes to see who was disturbing her. The Bear was shocked: this is her! Slowly the she bear got up, “Hello. I haven’t met you before, have I? But you look so familiar.” The Bear nodded, “No, we haven’t met. Someone did tell me I would meet you though.” “Really? That’s funny, because only yesterday I spoke to someone myself, and he said the exact same thing to me.” “So, what do we do now? After all, we have been introduced to each other already.” “We have.” “Would you like to see where I usually spend my time?” “I would love to.” Together they walked back to the edge of the Great Woods. When they arrived near the Bear’s favorite log, they saw two funny looking animals. These animals were standing on two legs, instead of four, and their bodies were not covered in a thick brown fur. As the Bears approached them, the two other animals came running their way. Because all four had such speed, they collided and fell to the ground. That same day, right before the Sun would give the Moon the keys to the Eternal Light, they woke up again. Opening their eyes, they saw the two Great Spirits before them. The oldest one spoke, “Today you have found your Equal. And today you must declare your Bond.” The other continued, “Please rise and hold hands. From this moment the Spirits and the Children of the Great Spirits will walk in different worlds. You will not be separated for there is an ever-present link between you. But let it be known that anyone, who wants to show the Great Spirits their Equal, will have to contact their Other Self in the Other World, in order for the Great Spirits to bless their Bond.” The Great Spirits took one last look around and disappeared, taking the two Bears with them. Kathryn had been mesmerized by Chakotay’s melodious voice as he took her with him into the world of this legend. Slowly she exhaled wiping the lone tear from her cheek. “That was a beautiful legend.” She turned over, so she could face him. “And I think I understand what you were trying to tell me.” Resting her head on her folded arms on his chest, she continued. “It ties in with something you promised me, doesn’t it?” Chakotay nodded, “Yes, before we go over to Poketay, we first have to introduce you to your Spirit Guide.” “I can’t wait to meet him. Or is it her?” He smiled at her, “You will just have to find out. Let me get my Medicine Bundle. Is it alright with you if we contact them in here?” “Of course it is. After all this bed seems to be a central point in our relationship.” She waggled her eyebrows and winked at him, “What do you think that means?” Contacting her Spirit Guide had been extremely easy. Because Chakotay explained all the steps carefully to her, she felt she already was partly in trance when he took her hand and put it on the akoonah. The first contact with her Spirit Guide was a surprise. He immediately jumped right to most of her doubts and problems, even explaining the role of Justin in her life. After what seemed quite a long time, her Spirit Guide, a small lizard that made up for his size with his lengthy discussions, looked around. He told her someone wanted to join them. Kathryn had already noticed a change in scenery. The green valley with its clear lake and birch trees slowly merged into another landscape. Only this landscape could never exist in real life: two totally different areas of land had joined and each had taken some of the characteristics of the other. A clear border was no longer visible between the two. They had become one. She sensed Chakotay coming up behind her, but he was not alone. His companion ran up to Kathryn, only to stop right in front of her. She was slightly surprised by the gray wolf’s behavior, but something in the animal’s eyes made her reach out and stroke its fur. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.	__label__1	0.556206
Hogwarts Houses Zodiac Signs Harry Potter and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Harry Potter and his friends attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry during the course of. This is why the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry is a main setting of the Wizarding World universe. It is a fictional British boarding school for children from 11 to 18. Hufflepuff house The Hufflepuffs may not be the most well-known of all the houses, yet they have left a lasting impression on Harry Potter’s world. This House is well-known for its generosity, loyalty, and willingness to help. They are also dedicated and hardworking. It is no wonder why they are described as the home of the most talented witches and wizards. One of the most important characters from the Harry Potter franchise is Newt Scamander, a Hufflepuff. He was a magizoologist of awe and was loved by everyone. When he was arrested and given the death penalty, he never became angry. He was calm and focused as he fought his way through the incident. Sorting hat Every student is assigned a Hogwarts house during their first year. This is dependent on their personality. The Sorting Hat does the heavy lifting, placing students into the most appropriate House to test them. It’s a great way to test one’s strengths and weaknesses. The Sorting Hat is clever and magical. It was invented by J.K. Rowling and pays tribute to the magician’s hat which was the property of Godric Gryffindor. It is also used by Hogwarts’ Founders of Hogwarts to decide which students they will place in their Houses. The Sorting Hat also performs various other tasks, in addition to the simple task of determining which house a student should be assigned. It can read the wearer’s thoughts and respond to their thoughts. It can even talk to them. It can also be used to determine the House in which a student is from and to give the Sword of Gryffindor only to those who are qualified. Required Room The Room of Requirement was a key aspect of Harry’s Hogwarts experience. It was not only the place where Harry got his first (and final) Horcrux, but also the location where Voldemort discovered his diadem that he had lost. In actual fact, the Room of Requirement was so enigmatic that it took the most enigmatic part of the year for Dumbledore to reveal its dark past. The room also houses a range of oddball artifacts including the Sorting Hat, which is a sapient artifact. The hat also boasts the legilimen, which uses legitmization to read minds. While this is a trickier task than many wizards would like you to believe it is being performed by a select few. Chapter House Founded by Salazar Slytherin, Slytherin was known for its self-preservation and ambition. Slytherin was also known for being cruel and selfish. Slytherin actually produced the most Death Eaters. The Slytherin common room was located below the Black Lake, and had rough stone walls and silver lamps that hung from the ceiling. It is famous for its stunning views of the surrounding mountains. Slytherin was an opulent House, and Gryffindor was well-known for its competition with Slytherin. Hufflepuff is the most petty of the four houses, was known for its values of loyalty, patience and perseverance. Hogwarts is the place where all students reside during the academic school year. Students reside in dormitories and can sleep in huge four-poster beds. Students are taught by professors. There are also tables at the House where students can socialise. There are also notice boards in strategic locations all around the school. If you’re a Harry Potter fan or simply interested in the world of magic, the Library at Hogwarts has a lot to offer. It houses thousands of books. However, it also has a section that is restricted to students who have granted written permission. This section is located on the lower floor of the library. The library is divided into five stories with shelves for books. The main room is the first story. It is lit by natural light via stained and leaded glass windows. The ceiling is a whopping 65 feet high. The office of the headmaster is on the second floor. It also contains the Charms classroom. The third story has the Reading Room. This is the only space in the library that is silent. It features rows of study tables, upholstered in red-carpeted rooms. Under the study tables are outlets. Deathly Hallows The Deathly Hallows, despite its reputation as a novel of fantasy, is an actual tale of three former Hogwarts students that are in hiding from Voldemort at Godric’s Hollow. The plot revolves around the final battle between Harry Potter, Voldemort, and other characters. This is the seventh volume in the Harry Potter series, and is the final chapter of the story of the boy wizard. It was published by Bloombury Publishing Company on July 21, 2007 and was translated into 120 languages. It is the most loved fantasy series ever, with over 500 million copies sold worldwide. The book also contains five short stories. Several of the stories are linked to the Deathly Hallows story. It is located in the Scottish Highlands, Hogwarts is a magical school for children wizards. Founded in the 10th century the school was founded to safeguard wizards from Muggle persecution. Hogwarts is one of the most sought-after private boarding schools in Britain. The Forbidden Forest is a part of Hogwarts, also known as the Dark Forest. There are many secrets in Hogwarts. Some of these secrets are kept from view like the Chamber of Secrets. Others are well-known and are often used, such as the Leaky Cauldron Restaurant and Gringotts Money Exchange. The Chamber of Secrets was constructed by Salazar Slytherin before he left Hogwarts. It was intended to purge the school of students who were born in the wizarding world. Voldemort believed that he had won the last battle and planned to force all of Hogwarts students to Slytherin. However, he died before he could complete his plan. The Chamber of Secrets is deep under Hogwarts school. It is the home of the old Basilisk. When Dumbledore’s Army is betrayed, the Chamber is left open. It contains floor cushions for defensive spells as well as Dark Detectors. The Chamber is also the home of an embodied memory of Tom Riddle, who was killed by Harry Potter. Two serpents can also be found in the Chamber of Secrets. They have been carved into the solid wall of this Room. They have eyes that are emerald-colored. They are believed to have been summoned by Tom Riddle. They are also able to grow the Devil’s Snare, a large snake that is a threat to anyone who is in the Chamber. The Chamber is also home to a snake-scratching tap. Fang is a massive boarhound in black is a resident of the Chamber. He is more friendly than Mrs. Norris. The Slytherin dormitory is located inside the Dungeon. The room is decorated with armchairs carved and green. It also houses a statue of Salazar Slytherin. The room is decorated with lamps that are green and emit a greenish glow. The Hufflepuff dormitory is a comfortable room that is sunny and has low ceilings. It has plants hanging from its ceiling. It also has a space for gathering. The House animal is the badger. It is believed that the badger represents gathering family. The House also has a ghost called Nearly Headless Nick. There are a few shortcuts to get from the castle to the school. They aren’t always easy to find however. They are usually hidden behind tapestry or a secret entry. These short-cuts can only be accessible to House members. The secret entrance for Hufflepuff is hidden behind barrels. The barrels are also under spell so when you tap the barrel in a rhythm it will open up the slimy chute. The Dark Room is the place where Dumbledore’s army meets. It is where many of the battles take place in the Harry Potter series. It is also where Dumbledore presents his argument for Harry’s protection. It also contains floor cushions for defensive spells and also volumes of Defence Against the Dark Arts. There are also secret access points to four House dormitories. These entrances are secret from the outside world and require a password. These are the entrances used by members of the House.	__label__1	0.954074
Kancalı Fiyatlık Büyük Kare Stok kodu: SF-1271 Bey Raf GarantisKancalı Fiyatlık Büyük Kare ÜRÜN ÖLÇÜSÜ: G:12,5cm – Y:9,5cm Kancalı Fiyatlık Büyük Kare ; Yazılıp silinebilir özelliğiyle deforme olmadan uzun ömürlü kullanım sağlayan ürün, fiyatlandırma ve duyuru anlamında şık ve estetik bir görünüme sahiptir. Şarküteri, kasap, bakliyat, baharat ve kuruyemiş, pastane, cafe gibi her sektörde kullanıma uygundur. Fiyatlık arkasına yapıştırıcı yardımıyla yapıştırılan u kanca, başta soğutucu dolaplarda ki ön kesik cam olmak üzere 1 cm e kadar olan her alana geçmektedir. Doğrulanmış Yorumlar 0 reviews Clear filters Henüz değerlendirme yapılmadı. “Kancalı Fiyatlık Büyük Kare	__label__1	0.97314
Philosophy Department As ‘Houses Of Healing,’ Not ‘Houses Of Production’ In ‘Two Pedagogies for Happiness: Healing Goals and Healing Methods in the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas and the Śrī Bhāsyạ of Rāmānuja,’¹ Martin Ganeri (citing Paul Griffiths) writes: [T]he root metaphor for scholastic intellectual practice is that of reading. The scholastic is one who is dominated by the text he studies, transformed by the text, and the scholastic institution is best described as a ‘house of reading.’ In contrast…the root metaphor for contemporary academia is that of writing. The contemporary academic is concerned with the production of texts, with getting things out in print, with being cited and getting academic credit for his or her compositions. The university becomes a ‘house of production’ rather than a house of reading.² ….The scholastic approach challenges us to retrieve the idea of philosophy as transformative and pedagogical reading and to retrieve the idea of philosophical institutions as houses of this reading, so that they can also be houses of healing,houses for happiness. The idea of philosophical institutions–like academic departments–being ‘houses of healing, houses for happiness’ is entrancing. As is the suggestion above by Ganeri of ‘retriev[ing] the idea of philosophy as transformative and pedagogical reading.’ I note this with some poignancy; when initially I began my graduate studies in philosophy I had hoped for philosophy to be ‘healing’ and ‘transformative’ and indeed, therapeutic. But I was, all too soon, consumed by the idea of academic philosophy being the business of writing and the prolific ‘production of texts.’ Indeed, the most common complaint from academic philosophers–a curious one, you’ll agree–is that they never have time to read anything, because they are too busy writing. Most academic philosophers will proudly claim they have no time to read fiction; if you are spotted reading something not directly academic, it is not unusual to be asked, “What are you reading that for” i.e., Which text being generated by you requires that ‘unconventional’ text as raw material? (I was once asked this because I was carrying around a copy of C.P Snow‘s ‘Two Cultures.’) Many are the academics who would like to slow down and ‘just read for a bit’; read all those ‘classic’ and ‘great’ authors and texts they refer to, chase down those footnotes to those beguiling sources that promise further exploration of a tantalizing corner of inquiry. But no one has the time–they need to write, to publish. They don’t have time to read your work in progress, which is why I always thank, profusely, those who do make time to perform this noble task, and they do not have time to read outside of their narrow field of specialization. And they most certainly do not have the time or institutional and disciplinary incentives to think about pursuing philosophy as a transformative and therapeutic process. All of which is, in a crucial sense, a betrayal of the promise of philosophy, its notion of unbridled inquiry, its potential to aid in self-understanding-and-construction. 1. In ‘Philosophy as Therapiea’ – Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement #66 2. Paul Griffiths, ‘Scholasticism: The Possible Recovery of an Intellectual Practice,’ in Scholasticism: Cross-cultural and Comparative Perspectives, pp. 201-2	__label__1	0.599125
41-51 of 51 Results for: • Phonetics/Phonology x Clear all Psycholinguistic Approaches to Morphology: Production Benjamin V. Tucker Speech production is an important aspect of linguistic competence. An attempt to understand linguistic morphology without speech production would be incomplete. A central research question develops from this perspective: what is the role of morphology in speech production. Speech production researchers collect many different types of data and much of that data has informed how linguists and psycholinguists characterize the role of linguistic morphology in speech production. Models of speech production play an important role in the investigation of linguistic morphology. These models provide a framework, which allows researchers to explore the role of morphology in speech production. However, models of speech production generally focus on different aspects of the production process. These models are split between phonetic models (which attempt to understand how the brain creates motor commands for uttering and articulating speech) and psycholinguistic models (which attempt to understand the cognitive processes and representation of the production process). Models that merge these two model types, phonetic and psycholinguistic models, have the potential to allow researchers the possibility to make specific predictions about the effects of morphology on speech production. Many studies have explored models of speech production, but the investigation of the role of morphology and how morphological properties may be represented in merged speech production models is limitedouthern Gallo-Romance: Occitan and Gascon Andres M. Kristol Occitan, a language of high medieval literary culture, historically occupies the southern third of France. Today it is dialectalized and highly endangered, like all the regional languages of France. Its main linguistic regions are Languedocien, Provençal, Limousin, Auvergnat, Vivaro-dauphinois (Alpine Provençal) and, linguistically on the fringes of the domain, Gascon. Despite its dialectalization, its typological unity and the profound difference that separates it from Northern Galloroman (Oïl dialects, Francoprovençal) and Gallo-Italian remain clearly perceptible. Its history is characterised by several ruptures (the Crusade against the Albigensians, the French Revolution) and several attempts at "rebirth" (the Baroque period, the Felibrige movement in the second half of the 19th century, the Occitanist movement of the 20th century). Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the Occitan koinè, a literary and administrative language integrating the main dialectal characteristics of all regions, was lost and replaced by makeshift regional spellings based on the French spelling. The modern Occitanist orthography tries to overcome these divisions by coming as close as possible to the medieval, "classical" written tradition, while respecting the main regional characteristics. Being a bridge language between northern Galloroman (Oïl varieties and Francoprovençal), Italy and Iberoromania, Occitan is a relatively conservative language in terms of its phonetic evolution from the popular spoken Latin of western Romania, its morphology and syntax (absence of subject clitics in the verbal system, conservation of a fully functional simple past tense). Only Gascon, which was already considered a specific language in the Middle Ages, presents particular structures that make it unique among Romance languages (development of a system of enunciative particles). Stem Change (Apophony and Consonant Mutation) in Morphology Thomas W. Stewart Segment-level alternations that realize morphological properties or that have other morphological significance stand either at an interface or along a continuum between phonology and morphology. The typical source for morphologically correlated sound alternations is the automatic phonology, interacting with discrete morphological operations such as affixation. Traditional morphophonology depends on the association of an alternation with a distinct concatenative marker, but the rise of stem changes that are in themselves morphological markers, be they inflectional or derivational, resides in the fading of phonetic motivation in the conditioning environment, and thus an increase in independence from historical phonological sources. The clearest cases are sole-exponent alternations, such as English man~men or slide~slid, but it is not necessary that the remainder of an earlier conditioning affix be entirely absent, only that synchronic conditioning is fully opaque. Once a sound-structural pattern escapes the unexceptional workings of a language's general phonological patterning, yet reliably serves a signifying function for one or more morphological properties, the morphological component of the grammar bears a primary if not sole responsibility for accounting for the pattern’s distribution. It is not uncommon for the transition of analysis into morphology from (morpho)phonology to be a fitful one. There is an established tendency for phonological theory to hold sway in matters of sound generally, even at the expense of challenging learnability through the introduction of remote representations, ad hoc triggering devices, or putative rules of phonology of very limited generality. On the morphological side, a bias in favor of separable morpheme-like units and syntax-like concatenative dynamics has relegated relations like stem alternations to the margins, no matter how regular, productive, or distinct from general phonological patterns in the language in question overall. This parallel focus of each component on a "specialization" as it were has left exactly morphologically significant stem alternations such as Germanic Ablaut and Celtic initial-consonant mutation poorly served. In both families, these robust sound patterns generally lack reliable synchronic phonological conditioning. Instead, one must crucially refer to grammatical structure and morphological properties in order to account for their distributions. It is no coincidence that such stem alternations look phonological, just as fossils resemble the forms of the organisms that left them. The work of morphology likewise does not depend on alternant segments sharing aspects of sound, but the salience of the system may benefit from perceptible coherence of form. One may observe what sound relations exist between stem alternants, but it is neither necessary nor realistic to oblige a speaker/learner to generate established stem alternations anew from remote underlying representations, as if the alternations were always still arising; to do so constitutes a grafting of the technique of internal reconstruction as a recapitulating simulation within the synchronic grammar. Subtraction in Morphology Stela Manova Subtraction consists in shortening the shape of the word. It operates on morphological bases such as roots, stems, and words in word-formation and inflection. Cognitively, subtraction is the opposite of affixation, since the latter adds meaning and form (an overt affix) to roots, stems, or words, while the former adds meaning through subtraction of form. As subtraction and affixation work at the same level of grammar (morphology), they sometimes compete for the expression of the same semantics in the same language, for example, the pattern ‘science—scientist’ in German has derivations such as Physik ‘physics’—Physik-er ‘physicist’ and Astronom-ie ‘astronomy’—Astronom ‘astronomer’. Subtraction can delete phonemes and morphemes. In case of phoneme deletion, it is usually the final phoneme of a morphological base that is deleted and sometimes that phoneme can coincide with a morpheme. Some analyses of subtraction(-like shortenings) rely not on morphological units (roots, stems, morphological words, affixes) but on the phonological word, which sometimes results in alternative definitions of subtraction. Additionally, syntax-based theories of morphology that do not recognize a morphological component of grammar and operate only with additive syntactic rules claim that subtraction actually consists in addition of defective phonological material that causes adjustments in phonology and leads to deletion of form on the surface. Other scholars postulate subtraction only if the deleted material does not coincide with an existing morpheme elsewhere in the language and if it does, they call the change backformation. There is also some controversy regarding what is a proper word-formation process and whether what is derived by subtraction is true word-formation or just marginal or extragrammatical morphology; that is, the question is whether shortenings such as hypocoristics and clippings should be treated on par with derivations such as, for example, the pattern of science-scientist. Finally, research in subtraction also faces terminology issues in the sense that in the literature different labels have been used to refer to subtraction(-like) formations: minus feature, minus formation, disfixation, subtractive morph, (subtractive) truncation, backformation, or just shorteningThe Tangkic Languages of Australia: Phonology and Morphosyntax of Lardil, Kayardild, and Yukulta Erich R. Round The non–Pama-Nyugan, Tangkic languages were spoken until recently in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia. The most extensively documented are Lardil, Kayardild, and Yukulta. Their phonology is notable for its opaque, word-final deletion rules and extensive word-internal sandhi processes. The morphology contains complex relationships between sets of forms and sets of functions, due in part to major historical refunctionalizations, which have converted case markers into markers of tense and complementization and verbal suffixes into case markers. Syntactic constituency is often marked by inflectional concord, resulting frequently in affix stacking. Yukulta in particular possesses a rich set of inflection-marking possibilities for core arguments, including detransitivized configurations and an inverse system. These relate in interesting ways historically to argument marking in Lardil and Kayardild. Subordinate clauses are marked for tense across most constituents other than the subject, and such tense marking is also found in main clauses in Lardil and Kayardild, which have lost the agreement and tense-marking second-position clitic of Yukulta. Under specific conditions of co-reference between matrix and subordinate arguments, and under certain discourse conditions, clauses may be marked, on all or almost all words, by complementization markers, in addition to inflection for case and tense. Typological Diversity Within the Romance Languages Davide Ricca The Romance languages, despite their overall similarity, display interesting internal diversity which can be captured only very partially by looking at the six major standard languages, as typological databases often do. This diversity spans over all the levels of linguistic analysis, from phonology to morphology and syntax. Rather than making a long list of features, with no space to go much beyond their mere mention, the article focusses on just four main areas in a little more detail, trying to develop, if minimally, a discussion on their theoretical and methodological import. The comparison with the full-world typological background given by the WALS Online shows that the differences within Romance may reach the level of general typological relevance. While this is probably not the case in their rather mainstream segmental phonology, it surely holds regarding nominal pluralization and the syntax of negation, which are both areas where the Romance languages have often distanced themselves quite significantly from their common ancestor, Latin. The morphological marking of nominal plural displays four values out of the seven recorded in WALS, adding a further one unattested there, namely subtraction; the negation strategies, although uniformly particle-like, cover all the five values found in WALS concerning linear order. Finally, Romance languages suggest several intriguing issues related with head-marking and dependent-marking constructions, again innovating against the substantially dependent-marking uniformity characteristic of Latin. Writing Systems in Modern West Germanic Martin Evertz-Rittich The writing systems of the modern West Germanic languages have many features in common: They are all written using the Modern Roman Alphabet and exhibit a certain depth, that is, in addition to the pure grapheme–phoneme correspondences, prosodic, morphological, and syntactic information that is systematically encoded in their writing systems. A notable exception is the writing system of Yiddish, which is not only written with an alphabet evolved from the Hebrew script but is also almost completely transparent. Except for Yiddish, all writing systems of modern West Germanic languages use graphematic syllable and foot structures to encode suprasegmental properties such as vowel quantity. Paradigmatic relations are represented by morphological spellings (especially stem and affix constancy). Syntagmatic relations are expressed, for example, in compound spelling, which adheres to the same principles in all writing systems under discussion. The writing systems of modern West Germanic languages have been studied by grapholinguists in varying depth. While German is probably the best researched writing system in the world, some writing systems, such as Luxembourgish, await thorough grapholinguistic investigationZero Morphemes Eystein Dahl and Antonio Fábregas Zero or null morphology refers to morphological units that are devoid of phonological content. Whether such entities should be postulated is one of the most controversial issues in morphological theory, with disagreements in how the concept should be delimited, what would count as an instance of zero morphology inside a particular theory, and whether such objects should be allowed even as mere analytical instruments. With respect to the first problem, given that zero morphology is a hypothesis that comes from certain analyses, delimiting what counts as a zero morpheme is not a trivial matter. The concept must be carefully differentiated from others that intuitively also involve situations where there is no overt morphological marking: cumulative morphology, phonological deletion, etc. Finally, with respect to the third side of the debate, arguments are made for and against zero morphology, notably from the perspectives of falsifiability, acquisition, and psycholinguistics. Of particular impact is the question of which properties a theory should have in order to block the possibility that zero morphology exists, and conversely the properties that theories that accept zero morphology associate to null morphemes. An important ingredient in this debate has to do with two empirical domains: zero derivation and paradigmatic uniformity. Ultimately, the plausibility that zero morphemes exist or not depends on the success at accounting for these two empirical patterns in a better way than theories that ban zero morphology.	__label__1	0.948396
LORD BYRON and his TIMES Documents Biography Criticism The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey Robert Southey to Charles Cuthbert Southey, 2 July 1825Leyden, July 2. 1825. “My dear Cuthbert, “I have a present for you from Lodowijk Willem Bilderdijk, a very nice good boy, who is of the age of your sister Isabel. It is a book of Dutch verses, which you and I will read together when I come home. When he was a little boy and was learning to write, his father, who is very much such a father as I am, made little verses for him to write in his Ætat. 51. OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. 221 copy-book; and these verses pleased some good people so much, that leave was asked to print them. They were printed from Lodowijk’s writing, and have been thought so fit for the purpose, that a great many of them have been sold. Lodowijk will write his name and yours in the book. He is a very gentle good boy; and I hope that one of these days somewhere or other he and you may meet. “I must tell you about his stork. You should know that there are a great many storks in this country, and that it is thought a very wicked thing to hurt them. They make their nests, which are as large as a great clothes basket, upon the houses and churches, and frequently when a house or church is built, a wooden frame is made on the top for the storks to build in. Out of one of these nests a young stork had fallen, and somebody wishing to keep him in a garden, cut one of his wings. The stork tried to fly but fell in Mr. Bilderdijk’s garden, and was found there one morning almost dead; his legs and his bill had lost their colour, and were grown pale, and he would soon have died if Mrs. Bilderdijk, who is kind to everybody and everything, had not taken care of him, as we do of the dumbeldores when they have been in the house all night. She gave him food and he recovered. The first night they put him into a sort of summer-house in the garden, which I cannot describe to you because I have not yet been there; the second night he walked to the door himself that it might be opened for him. He was very fond of Lodowijk and Lodowijk was as fond of his oyevaar, which is the name for stork in Dutch, though I am not sure that I have spelt it rightly, and they used to play together in such a manner, that his father says it was a pleasure to see them. For a stork is a large bird, tall and uptight, almost as tall as you are, or quite. The oyevaar was a bad gardener; he ate snails, but with his great broad foot he did a great deal of mischief and destroyed all the strawberries and many of the smaller vegetables. But Mr. and Mrs. Bilderdijk did not mind this, because the oyevaar loved Lodowijk, and therefore they loved the oyevaar, and sometimes they used to send a mile out of town to buy eels for him, when none could be had in Leyden. “The very day I came to their house the stork flew away. His wings were grown, and most likely he thought it time to get a wife and settle in life. Lodowijk saw him rise up in the air and fly away. Lodowijk was very sorry, not only because he loved the oyevaar, but because he was afraid the oyevaar would not be able to get his own living, and therefore would be starved. On the second evening, however, the stork came again and pitched upon a wall near. It was in the twilight, and storks cannot see at all when it is dusk, but whenever Lodowijk called Oye! oye! (which was the way he used to call him) the oyevaar turned his head toward the sound. He did not come into the garden. Some fish was placed there for him, but in the morning he was gone, and had not eaten it; so we suppose that he is married and living very happily with his mate, and that now and then he will come and visit the old friends who were so good to him. Ætat. 51. OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. 223 “It is very happy for me that I am in so comfortable a house, and with such excellently kind and good people . . . . . where I learn more of the literature, present and past state, and domestic manners of the country, than it would have been possible for me to do in any other manner. “Yesterday Mr. Bilderdijk received a letter from Algernon Thelwall, who is at Amsterdam, saying he had heard that I was here, and expressing a great desire to see me. Both Mr. and Mrs. Bilderdijk speak very highly of him. This news is for your mamma. I shall have a great deal to tell her on my return. “I hope you have been a good boy and done every thing that you ought to do, while I am away. When I come home you shall begin to read Jacob Cats with me. My love to your sisters and to every body else. I hope Rumpelstilzchen has recovered his health, and that Miss Cat is well, and I should like to know whether Miss Fitzrumpel has been given away, and if there is another kitten. The Dutch cats do not speak exactly the same language as the English ones. I will tell you how they talk when I come home. “God bless you, my dear Cuthbert! Your dutiful Father, Robert Southey.”	__label__1	0.503676
Relevance and lexical pragmatics Tags: Sperber & Wilson, cognitive effects, narrowing, interpretation, account, assumptions, Cambridge University Press, approximations, denotation, blatant violations, precision, metaphor, concept, processing, Robyn Carston, concept construction, mutual adjustment, processes, lexical semantics, Dan Sperber, China Pragmatics Association, Glucksberg, International Pragmatics Association, Relevance theory, Wilson, alcoholic drink, Levinson, pragmatic approaches, blatant violation, metaphorical extension, put to sleep, Sperber, Oxford University Press, literal interpretation, D. & D. Sperber, Working Papers, Department of Linguistics, William James Lectures, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vega Moreno, Levinson, S., John Benjamins, D. & D. Wilson, UCL Content: Relevance and Lexical Pragmatics Deirdre Wilson Published in Italian Journal of Linguistics/Rivista di Linguistica 15.2: 273-291(2003) and UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 16: 343-60 (2004) Abstract The goal of lexical pragmatics is to explain how linguistically specified (`literal') word meanings are modified in use. While lexical-pragmatic processes such as narrowing, broadening and metaphorical extension are generally studied in isolation from each other, relevance theorists (Carston 2002, Wilson & Sperber 2002) have been arguing for a unified approach. I will continue this work by underlining some of the problems with more standard treatments, and show how a variety of lexical-pragmatic processes may be analysed as special cases of a general pragmatic adjustment process which applies spontaneously, automatically and unconsciously to fine-tune the interpretation of virtually every word. 1 Introduction Lexical pragmatics is a rapidly developing branch of linguistics that investigates the processes by which linguistically-specified (`literal') word meanings are modified in use.1 Well-studied examples include narrowing (e.g. drink used to mean `alcoholic drink'), approximation (e.g. square used to mean `squarish') and metaphorical extension (e.g. battleaxe used to mean `frightening person'). In much of the literature, narrowing, approximation and metaphorical extension have been seen as distinct pragmatic processes and studied in isolation from each other. I will * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the International Pragmatics Association and the 8th China Pragmatics Association. Many thanks to the organisers and participants, to Dan Sperber and Robyn Carston for valuable ideas and inspiration, and to Tim Wharton, Rosa Vega-Moreno, Paula Rubio-Fernandez and the members of the UCL Pragmatics Reading Group. I would like to acknowledge the support of the AHRB under grant MRG-AN9291/APN16356 `A unified theory of lexical pragmatics'. 1 See e.g. Grice 1967; Ducrot 1972, 1984; Searle 1979; Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Sperber & Wilson 1985, 1998; Cruse 1986; Hobbs & Martin 1987; Lakoff 1987; Lahav 1989; Sweetser 1990; Horn 1992, 2000; Aitchison 1994; Bach 1994, 2001; Gibbs 1994; Copestake & Briscoe 1995; Franks 1995; Recanati 1995, 2004; Rips 1995; Bertuccelli Papi 1997; Carston 1997, 1999, 2002; Blutner 1998, 2002; Lascarides & Copestake 1998; Lasersohn 1999; Fauconnier & Turner 2002; Wilson & Sperber 2002, 2004; Merlini Barbaresi 2003. defend the alternative view that they are outcomes of a single pragmatic process which fine-tunes the interpretation of virtually every word.2 I will adopt a simple model of linguistic semantics that treats words as encoding mentally-represented concepts, elements of a conceptual representation system or `language of thought', which constitute their linguistic meanings and determine what might be called their linguistically-specified denotations.3 The goal of lexical semantics is to investigate the relations between words and the concepts they encode, and the goal of lexical pragmatics is to account for the fact that the concept communicated by use of a word often differs from the concept encoded. NARROWING is the case where a word is used to convey a more specific sense than the encoded one, resulting in a restriction of the linguistically-specified denotation. Approximation and metaphorical transfer may be seen as varieties of BROADENING, where a word is used to convey a more general sense, with consequent widening of the linguistically-specified denotation. The effect of narrowing is to highlight a proper subpart of the linguisticallyspecified denotation. Here are some illustrations: (1) All doctors drink. (2) a. As I worked in the garden, a bird perched on my spade. b. Birds wheeled above the waves. c. A bird, high in the sky, invisible, sang its pure song. d. At Christmas, the bird was delicious. (3) Mary is a working mother. (4) I have a temperature. In (1), drink might convey not the encoded sense `drink liquid' but, more specifically, `drink alcohol', or `drink significant amounts of alcohol'. In (2a-d), each use of bird would highlight a different subset of birds. As noted by Lakoff (1987: 80-82), (3) would generally indicate not just that Mary satisfies the definition `female parent who works', but that she is a stereotypical working mother, bringing up young children while working for money outside the home; and (4) would normally convey not the truism that the speaker has some temperature or other but that her temperature is high enough to be worth remarking on. APPROXIMATION is a variety of broadening where a word with a relatively strict sense is extended to a penumbra of cases (what Lasersohn 1999 calls a `pragmatic halo') that strictly speaking fall outside its linguistically-specified denotation. 2 For elaboration of this view, see e.g. Carston 1997, 2002 chap. 5; Sperber & Wilson 1998; Wilson & Sperber 2002, 2004. 3 For an approach along these lines, see Fodor 1998. For relevance-theoretic accounts of concepts, see e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1986/95 chap. 2, 1998; Sperber 1996 chap 6; Carston 2002 chap 5; Wilson & Sperber 2002. Loose uses of round numbers, geometric terms and negatively-defined terms are good examples, as in (5-7): (5) This coat cost 1,000 dollars. [`about 1,000 dollars'] (6) The stones form a circle, an oval, a pyramid. [`approximately a circle'] (7) This injection will be painless. [`nearly painless'] As with narrowing (cf. (2) above), different degrees and types of approximation are appropriate in different circumstances; compare the interpretations of flat in (8a-e): (8) a. This ironing board is flat. b. My garden is flat. c. My neighbourhood is flat. d. My country is flat. e. The Earth is flat. A second variety of broadening, which I will call CATEGORY EXTENSION, is typified by the use of salient brand names (Hoover, Kleenex) to denote a broader category (`vacuum cleaner', `disposable tissue') including items from less salient brands. Personal Names (Chomsky, Einstein) and common nouns both lend themselves to category extension (cf. Glucksberg 2001: 38-52). Some more creative uses are illustrated in (9-12): (9) Federer is the new Sampras. (10) Brown is the new black. (11) Mint is the new basil. (12) Is oak the new pine? In (9), Sampras evokes the category of gifted tennis players of a certain type. In (10) a typical piece of fashion writer's discourse black evokes the category of staple colours in a fashion wardrobe; echoes are found in cookery and interior design writing, as in (11) (`herb of the moment') and (12) (`trendy furniture wood'). These examples of category extension are not analysable as approximations. The claim in (10) is not that Federer is a borderline case, close enough to being Sampras for it to be acceptable to call him Sampras, but merely that he belongs to a broader category of which Sampras is a salient member; and so on for the other examples. Metaphor and hyperbole may be thought of as more radical varieties of category extension.4 For example, (13) would be an approximation if used to indicate that 4 See e.g. Recanati 1995, 2004; Carston 1997, 1999, 2000; Sperber & Wilson 1998; Glucksberg 2001; Wilson & Sperber 2002. the water was close enough to boiling to be described as boiling, and a hyperbole if used to indicate that the water was merely hotter than expected, or uncomfortably hot: (13) The water is boiling. The metaphors in (14-16) are analysable on similar lines, as radical extensions of the linguistically-specified denotation: (14) Mary is a rose, a lily, a daisy, a violet; a jewel, a diamond, a ruby, a pearl. (15) That book puts me to sleep. (16) The leaves danced in the breeze. Thus, violet in (14) might be seen as representing the category of delicate, unflamboyant, easily overlooked things, of which violets are a salient subcategory, and so on for other examples. Neologisms and word coinages provide further data for a theory of lexical pragmatics and shed some light on the nature of the mental mechanisms involved. Experiments by Clark & Clark (1979) and Clark & Gerrig (1983) show that newlycoined verbs derived from nouns, as in (17-19), are no harder to understand than regular verbs: (17) The newspaper boy porched the newspaper. (18) They Learjetted off to Miami. (19) He Houdinied his way out of the closet. This suggests that lexical-pragmatic processes apply `on line' in a flexible, creative and context dependent way, and may contribute to the explicit truth-conditional of utterances (in Grice's terms, `what is said') as well as to what is implicated (Carston 2002; Wilson & Sperber 2002). Any discussion of lexical pragmatics must make some assumptions about the nature of the semantic representations that provide the input to pragmatic processes. Synchronically, where the borderline between lexical semantics and pragmatics falls in individual cases is not always clear, and it may be drawn in different ways in the minds of different individuals. Moreover, the repeated application of lexicalpragmatic processes may lead to semantic change: what starts as a spontaneous, one-off affair may become regular and frequent enough to stabilise in a community and give rise to an extra sense.5 My interest here is not so much in the details of individual cases as in the pragmatic processes that apply spontaneously, automatically and unconsciously to fine-tune the interpretation of virtually every 5 See e.g. Lyons 1977; Hopper & Traugott 1993; Bertuccelli Papi 2000. word, and I will therefore largely abstract away from the question of whether, or when, a word like drink, or Hoover, or flat may be said to have acquired an extra stable sense.6 My account will be consistent with the view that some words are strictly defined and loosely used, while others have broader, vaguer meanings which are typically narrowed in use. 2 Some existing accounts Many philosophical and Pragmatic Approaches seem to take for granted that narrowing, approximation and metaphorical extension are distinct pragmatic processes, which lack common descriptions or explanations and need not be studied together. For example, narrowing is often analysed as a case of default inference to a stereotypical interpretation,7 approximation has been seen as linked to variations in the standards of precision governing different types of discourse,8 and metaphor is generally treated on Gricean lines, as a blatant violation of a maxim of truthfulness, with resulting implicature.9 These accounts do not generalise: metaphors are not analysable as rough approximations, narrowings are not analysable as blatant violations of a maxim of truthfulness, and so on. Moreover, there are internal descriptive and theoretical reasons for wanting to go beyond these existing philosophical and pragmatic accounts. Levinson (2000: 37-8, 112-34) treats narrowing as a default inference governed by an Informativeness heuristic (`What is expressed simply is stereotypically exemplified'), itself backed by a more general I-principle instructing the hearer to Amplify the informational content of the speaker's utterance, by finding the most specific interpretation, up to what you judge to be the speaker's m-intended point ... (ibid: 114). The I-heuristic might be seen as dealing with stereotypical narrowings such as (3) above, and the I-Principle as dealing with less stereotypical cases such as (4). However, this approach leaves many aspects of the narrowing process unexplained. In the first place, there may be several possible degrees or directions of narrowing, as in (1) (where drink may be narrowed to `drink alcohol' or `drink a lot of alcohol') and (2) (where bird is narrowed in different ways in different contexts). 6 Appeals to polysemy are probably justified in many cases. However, since each encoded sense of a polysemous word may undergo further pragmatic processing, polysemy does not eliminate the need for lexical pragmatics. 7 See e.g. Horn 1984, 1992, 2000; Levinson 2000; Blutner 1998, 2002. For discussion, see Lakoff 1987. 8 See e.g. Lewis 1979; Lasersohn 1999. For discussion, see Gross 2001. 9 See e.g. Grice 1975, Levinson 1983. Levinson (ibid: 118) notes (and experimental evidence confirms, cf. Barsalou 1987) that even stereotypical narrowing is context dependent. For example, Englishman in (20) would evoke different stereotypes in a discussion of cooking, cricket, sailing, seduction, etc: (20) John is an Englishman. In the second place, stereotypical narrowing also competes with other varieties of narrowing.10 In (21), man might be narrowed to an idealised rather than a stereotypical interpretation, indicating that Churchill is a man worthy of the name rather than a typical man: (21) Churchill was a man. According to the I-Principle, the hearer of (1-4) and (20-21) should choose the appropriate degree and direction of narrowing using his judgement about `the speaker's m-intended point' (i.e. the speaker's meaning) a judgement which is therefore presupposed rather than explained by this account. Levinson acknowledges the context dependence of I-implicatures, but maintains (ibid: 118) that `at a sufficient level of abstraction' they are default inferences (generalised implicatures) which `hold as preferred interpretations across contexts, and indeed across languages.' However, as illustrated in (5-19) above, broadening appears to be just as strong a tendency as narrowing at the lexical level, and it is not clear why narrowing rather than broadening should be seen as the default. Nor is it clear how an approach based on the I-principle could generalise to approximations or metaphors (which Levinson appears to treat as blatant violations of a maxim of truthfulness in the regular Gricean way). It is therefore worth looking for an alternative, more explanatory account. Lewis (1983: 244-45) treats approximation as a type of pragmatic vagueness governed by contextually-determined standards of precision: When is a sentence true enough? [...] this itself is a vague matter. More important [...], it is something that depends on context. What is true enough on one occasion is not true enough on another. The standards of precision in force are different from one conversation to another, and may change in the course of a single conversation. Austin's `France is hexagonal' is a good example of a sentence that is true enough for many contexts but not true enough for many others. 10 For an interesting survey of many varieties of narrowing, see Lakoff 1987. To shed any light on how approximations are understood, this approach would have to be supplemented by some account of how the appropriate standard of precision is formulated, and how it may change in the course of a conversation. Consider (22): (22) The lecture will start at 5.00 and end at 6.00. As noted in Wilson & Sperber (2002: 592-8), a student with several lectures to attend might accept (22) as `true enough' if the lecture starts ten minutes late and ends ten minutes early, but not if it starts ten minutes early and ends ten minutes late. This asymmetry would somehow have to be built into the standards of precision in force. Moreover, what counts as `true enough' for a student planning a day's lectures would not be `true enough' for a sound engineer getting ready to broadcast the lecture live. This would have to be accommodated in an account of how the appropriate standard of precision is determined. Of course, all this is predictable enough in a common-sense way, given background assumptions and general expectations about human behaviour. The problem with the appeal to `contextually-determined standards of precision' is that it seems to be acting as little more than a placeholder for a more detailed pragmatic account. As suggested above, Lewis's account of approximation does not generalise to category extension, metaphor or hyperbole. Approximations are appropriate in borderline cases; category extension, metaphor and hyperbole are not. Lewis himself proposes separate analyses of approximation and figurative utterances (which he treats as encoding figurative meanings in the traditional semantic way; cf. Lewis 1983: 1983; Wilson & Sperber 2002: 587-9). Separate analyses could be justified by showing that there is a definite cut-off point between approximation and figurative utterances; but it is doubtful that such a cut-off point exists. Thus, (13) above has a gradient of interpretations with clear approximations at one end, clear hyperboles at the other and a range of borderline cases in between; (7) above, which I have treated as an approximation, could equally well be classified as a hyperbole; and examples such as (9-12) above, which I have treated as cases of category extension, are sometimes classified as metaphors (Glucksberg 2001: v, 47). The lack of a clear cut-off point between approximation, category extension, hyperbole and metaphor also raises problems for Grice's analysis of figurative utterances. On Grice's approach, (13-14) above would be analysed as blatant violations of the maxim of truthfulness (`Do not say what you believe to be false'), implicating (23-24), respectively: (23) This water is very hot. (24) Mary resembles a rose in some respects. As noted by Wilson & Sperber (2002: 593-4), this account of metaphor and hyperbole does not generalise to approximations, which are generally perceived as `true enough' rather than blatantly false. Moreover, it is hard to see where on the gradient of interpretations an utterance of (7) or (13) might stop being `true enough' and start being `blatantly false'. There are also well-known descriptive and theoretical problems with Grice's account. For one thing, the literal interpretations of negative metaphors such as (25) are trivially true rather than blatantly false: (25) Mary is no angel. For another, Grice's analysis, taken as a model of the comprehension process, predicts that hearers should consider the literal interpretation first, and move to a figurative interpretation only if the literal interpretation is blatantly false. Yet there is both experimental and introspective evidence that this prediction is false (e.g. Gibbs 1994; Glucksberg 2001). In interpreting (15) above (an example due to Dan Sperber), for instance, it may never even occur to the hearer to wonder whether the book literally put the speaker to sleep. All this suggests that it is worth trying to develop a more general account of lexical-pragmatic processes, which acknowledges their flexibility, creativity and context dependence, and treats them as applying spontaneously, automatically and unconsciously during on-line comprehension to fine-tune the interpretation of virtually every word. In the next section, I will outline an account which brings together ideas from experimental studies of categorisation and metaphor,11 on the one hand, and from relevance theory and other recent work in pragmatics,12 on the other. Experimental studies of categorisation by Barsalou (e.g. 1987, 1992) support the view that lexical narrowing cannot simply be analysed as default inference to a ready-made stereotype or prototype. In the first place, typicality judgements about existing categories (e.g. BIRD, ANIMAL) are quite variable across individuals, contexts and times, and the appeal to ready-made stereotypes or prototypes does not explain this variability. In the second place, people can readily provide typicality rankings for made-up categories that they could not have encountered before (e.g. THINGS THAT CAN FALL ON YOUR HEAD), or predict the typicality rankings for familiar categories from the point of view of real or imagined individuals for whom they would be most unlikely to have ready-made prototypes stored. Barsalou sees these facts as best explained by assuming that the content of a category on a particular occasion is not determined by accessing a ready-made 11 See e.g. Barsalou 1987; Gibbs 1994; Glucksberg et al. 1997; Glucksberg 2001. 12 See e.g. Recanati 1995, 2004; Carston 1997, 2002; Sperber & Wilson 1998; Rubio Fernandez 2001; Vega Moreno 2001, 2003, 2004; Wilson & Sperber 2002. stereotype or prototype, but is constructed on-line in an ad hoc, context-specific way, from a reservoir of encyclopaedic information which varies in accessibility from individual to individual and situation to situation, with different subsets being chosen on each occasion. This idea clearly has implications for lexical narrowing. However, apart from noting that the choice of a particular subset of encyclopaedic assumptions is affected by discourse context, the accessibility of information in memory and considerations of relevance, he does not provide a concrete pragmatic hypothesis about how the narrowing process might go. As noted above, experimental studies of metaphor by Gibbs (1994) and Glucksberg (2001) confirm the inadequacy of models of comprehension based on the standard Gricean approach by showing that a literal interpretation does not always have to be considered and rejected before moving to a metaphorical interpretation. Glucksberg proposes that metaphor should instead be analysed as a variety of category extension. On this approach (tacitly adopted in section 1 above), just as Hoover may be used to represent the broader category of vacuum cleaners of which it is a salient member, so Sampras may be used to denote a broader category of gifted tennis players of which he is a salient member, and violet may be used to denote a broader category of delicate, unflamboyant, easily-overlooked things, of which it is a salient member. Glucksberg (2001: 46) comments: Good metaphors ... are acts of classification that attribute ... an interrelated set of properties to their topics. It follows that metaphoric comparisons acquire their metaphoricity by behaving as if they were class-inclusion assertions. On this approach, narrowing and metaphor are complementary processes, one restricting and the other extending the category denoted by the linguisticallyencoded concept. Barsalou's and Glucksberg's accounts share the assumption that encyclopaedic information associated with a mentally-represented category or concept may be used to restrict or extend its denotation in an ad hoc, occasion-specific way.13 Thus, encyclopaedic information about attributes of various subsets of birds may be used to highlight a particular subpart of the denotation of `bird' or evoke a broader category, e.g. the category of flying things. Glucksberg and Barsalou both mention the role of considerations of relevance in selecting an appropriate set of attributes, but make no attempt to develop a full pragmatic account of what factors trigger lexical-pragmatic processes, what direction they take, and when they stop. For many years, relevance theorists have been pursuing the idea that lexical comprehension involves ad hoc broadenings or narrowings of encoded concepts 13 For further discussion of Glucksberg's and Barsalou's accounts, see Carston 2002:chapter 5, especially notes 1, 14. based on the use of encyclopaedic information constrained by expectations of relevance.14 In the next section, I will consider what light the theory might shed on how the ad hoc concept construction process might go. 3 Relevance theory and lexical pragmatics Relevance theory is based on a definition of relevance and two general principles: a Cognitive and a Communicative Principle of Relevance.15 Relevance is characterised in cost-benefit terms, as a property of inputs to cognitive processes, the benefits being positive cognitive effects (e.g. true contextual implications, warranted strengthenings or revisions of existing assumptions) achieved by processing the input in a context of available assumptions, and the cost the processing effort needed to achieve these effects. Other things being equal, the greater the positive cognitive effects achieved, the greater the relevance of the input to the individual who processes it. However, the processing of the input, the accessing of contextual assumptions and the derivation of positive cognitive effects involves some effort of perception, memory and inference. Other things being equal, the smaller the processing effort required, the greater the relevance of the input. According to the First, or Cognitive, Principle of Relevance (Sperber & Wilson 1995: 260-66), the human cognitive system tends to allocate attention and processing resources so as to maximise the relevance of the inputs it processes. As a result of constant selection pressure towards increasing cognitive efficiency, our perceptual mechanisms tend automatically to pick out potentially relevant inputs, our memory retrieval mechanisms tend automatically to pick out potentially relevant contextual assumptions, and our inferential systems tend spontaneously to process them in the most productive way. Communicators should therefore be able to predict, at least to some extent, what stimuli an addressee is likely to attend to, what contextual assumptions he is likely to use in processing them, and what conclusions he is likely to draw. 14 See e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1983, 1986/95, 1998; Sperber 1989, 1997, 2000a; Wilson 19902003, 1995; Carston 1997, 1999, 2002; Sperber & Wilson 1998; Papafragou 2000; Wilson & Sperber 2002, 2004; He 2003. In earlier versions of the theory, implicatures based on loose and metaphorical uses of concepts were not seen as affecting explicatures via backwards inference during the mutual adjustment of explicit content, context and cognitive effects (for discussion of these notions, see section 3 below). In later versions, with the introduction of the mutual adjustment process (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1998; Wilson & Sperber 2002, 2004), and particularly thanks to Robyn Carston's work (e.g. Carston 1997, 1999, 2002 chap. 5), the idea of ad hoc concept construction has been more fully incorporated into the theory. 15 For detailed accounts of the current version of the theory, see Sperber and Wilson 1995; Carston 2002; Wilson & Sperber 2002, 2004. According to the Second, or Communicative, Principle of Relevance (Sperber & Wilson 1995: 266-71), utterances create general expectations of relevance. The addressee of an utterance is entitled to expect it to be at least relevant enough to be worth processing (and hence more relevant than any alternative input available to him at the time), and moreover, the most relevant utterance compatible with the speaker's abilities and preferences. This motivates the following comprehension procedure which, according to relevance theory, is automatically applied to the online processing of attended verbal inputs. The addressee takes the linguistically decoded meaning: following a path of least effort, he enriches it at the explicit level and complements it at the implicit level until the resulting interpretation meets his expectations of relevance; at which point, he stops. This mutual adjustment of explicit content, contextual assumptions and cognitive effects constrained by expectations of relevance is the central feature of relevance-theoretic pragmatics.16 This approach to utterance comprehension has two important consequences for lexical pragmatics. In the first place, there is no presumption of literalness: the linguistically encoded meaning (of a word, a phrase, a sentence) is no more than a clue to the speaker's meaning, which is not decoded but non-demonstratively inferred. In the second place, understanding any utterance, literal, loose or metaphorical, is a matter of seeing its intended relevance, and seeing the intended relevance of an utterance is a matter of following a path of least effort in mutually adjusting explicit content, context and cognitive effects, as specified in the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure. Relevance theory therefore suggests the following answers to the basic questions of lexical pragmatics: lexicalpragmatic processes are triggered by the search for relevance, they follow a path of least effort, they operate via mutual adjustment of explicit content, context and cognitive effects, and they stop when the expectations of relevance raised by the utterance are satisfied (or abandoned). To illustrate how this account might apply to the narrowing of temperature in (4), consider the following scenario. Peter has just suggested that he and Mary pay a visit to his aunt in hospital, and Mary replies as in (4): (4) I have a temperature. In the circumstances, Peter will have not only a general expectation of relevance but a particular expectation about how Mary's utterance is likely to achieve relevance at this particular point in the discourse: he will be expecting it to achieve 16 Mutual adjustment is seen as taking place in parallel rather than in sequence. The hearer does not first identify the proposition expressed, then access an appropriate set of contextual assumptions and then derive a set of cognitive effects. In many cases (notably in indirect answers to questions, or when a discourse is already under way), he is just as likely to reason backwards from an expected cognitive effect to the context and content that would warrant it. See e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1998; Carston 2002; Wilson & Sperber 2002, 2004. relevance as a response to his suggestion that they visit his aunt in hospital. Literally interpreted, of course, her utterance is trivially true and achieves no positive cognitive effects. However, temperature is a scalar term, and different points on the scale should yield different implications when combined with easily accessible contextual assumptions. Assuming some version of a spreading activation model of memory, Peter's encyclopaedic assumptions about temperatures, hospital visits and the possible connections between them should be highly activated at this point. It should therefore be a relatively straightforward matter, by following a path of least effort in the mutual adjustment of content, context and cognitive effects, to arrive at an interpretation on which temperature expresses an ad hoc concept TEMPERATURE, denoting a temperature high enough to make it inadvisable for Mary to visit Peter's aunt in hospital.17 More generally, narrowing is undertaken in the search for relevance. Hearers satisfy their expectations of relevance by looking for true implications (or other positive cognitive effects). Narrowing increases implications. A hearer following the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure is therefore entitled to narrow the encoded sense to a point where it yields enough true implications to satisfy the general expectation of relevance raised by the utterance, together with any more specific expectations raised by the fact that the utterance has been produced by that speaker, for that audience, at that particular point. If several possible narrowings are available, he follows a path of least effort, using whatever assumptions and expectations are most highly activated (e.g. by the utterance itself and by preceding discourse). If he finds enough true implications to satisfy his expectations of relevance, he assumes that this was the speaker's meaning; if not, he tries another route.18 Similar analyses apply to approximation, category extension, metaphor and hyperbole. Consider the category extension in (9), which was used by many commentators during Wimbledon 2003 (which Roger Federer eventually won): (9) Federer is the new Sampras. For many hearers, the encoded concept SAMPRAS would provide access to a wide array of encyclopaedic assumptions about Sampras, some of which will receive additional activation from the mention of Federer and from the discourse context, including the fact that the utterance was produced during Wimbledon 2003. Although these highly activated assumptions will differ from hearer to hearer, they 17 On the treatment of ad hoc concepts in relevance theory, see Sperber & Wilson 1998; Carston 2002 chap. 5; Wilson & Sperber 2002. 18 It might be interesting to make a detailed comparison between this analysis, based on theoretical characterisations of relevance and expectations of relevance, backed by relevanceoriented accounts of cognition and communication, and an alternative based on Levinson's Iprinciple, with its largely uncharacterised notion of `speaker's m-intended point'. are likely to include the information that Sampras is a formidably gifted natural player of a certain type, that he has won Wimbledon many times and played a leading role in the tournament over many years, and so on. In these circumstances, a hearer following the path of least effort and looking for true implications (or other positive cognitive effects) via mutual adjustment of content, context and cognitive effects is likely to arrive at an interpretation in which Sampras expresses an ad hoc concept SAMPRAS which denotes not only Sampras but other players with these encyclopaedic attributes, and conclude that the speaker is claiming that Federer falls into this ad hoc category and is therefore likely to dominate Wimbledon for many years, etc. Finally, consider how an account along these lines might apply to the interpretation of put to sleep in (15): (15) That book puts me to sleep. On the Gricean approach, (15) should have three distinct interpretations: as a literal assertion, a hyperbole or a metaphor. Of these, the hearer should test the literal interpretation first, and consider a figurative interpretation only if the literal interpretation blatantly violates the maxim of truthfulness. Yet as noted above, there is both experimental and introspective evidence against this approach when construed as a model of comprehension. On the relevance-theoretic account, there is no presumption that the literal meaning will be tested first. The encoded concept PUT TO SLEEP is merely a point of access to an ordered array of encyclopaedic assumptions from which the hearer is expected to select an appropriate subset. Let us suppose that Mary has produced (15) in response to Peter's question "What do you think of Martin's latest book?" He will therefore be expecting her utterance to achieve relevance by answering his question: that is, by offering an evaluation of the book. Given this expectation, her utterance is likely to activate the contextual assumption that a book which puts one to sleep is likely to be extremely boring and unengaging. By following a path of least effort in the mutual adjustment of context, content and cognitive effects, he should then arrive at an interpretation on which put to sleep expresses the ad hoc concept PUT TO SLEEP*, which denotes a broader category containing not only literal cases of putting to sleep, but other cases that share with it the encyclopaedic attribute of being extremely boring and unengaging. Only if such a loose interpretation fails to satisfy his expectations of relevance would Peter be justified in exploring further contextual assumptions, and moving towards a more literal interpretation.19 On this approach, broadening, like narrowing, is undertaken in the search for relevance and results from the mutual adjustment of context, content and cognitive 19 For further discussion of this example, see Wilson & Sperber 2004. effects, constrained by expectations of relevance raised by the utterance itself. In many cases, the mutual adjustment process will converge on a broader or narrower category than the linguistically-specified denotation, with effects that have been roughly classified in the literature as narrowing, approximation, category extension, metaphor, hyperbole and so on. The main point of this paper has been to argue that these taxonomies do not pick out genuine natural kinds. There is no clear cut-off point between the different varieties of broadening. Moreover, as noted by Carston (1997), narrowing and broadening may combine, so that a single word may express an ad hoc concept that is narrowed in some respects and broadened in others. In the domain of lexical pragmatics, these taxonomies have led to a fragmentation of research programmes and obscured some interesting generalisations that hold across the whole domain. It is worth systematically exploring the possibility of developing alternative, more unified accounts. 4 Concluding remark In the Oral Presentation of this paper at the 8th China Pragmatics Association conference in December 2003, I invited collaboration from colleagues in China on the comparative study of lexical pragmatic processes. Chinese scholars in pragmatics have already made a major contribution to our understanding of social, pragmatic and cognitive Factors Affecting the use and understanding of metaphor and vagueness (e.g. He 2003). However, we know rather less about cross-cultural similarities and differences in narrowing, category extension and approximation. In discussion after the paper, (16) and (17) were suggested as examples of narrowing in Chinese: (16) Jane has money. [`enough money to be worth remarking on'] (17) John has a reputation. 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File: relevance-and-lexical-pragmatics.pdf Title: Lexical pragmatics is a rapidly developing branch of linguistics which investigates the processes by which linguistically-specified (`literal') word meanings are modified in use Author: Deirdre Wilson Published: Fri Sep 27 12:38:17 2013 Pages: 17 File size: 0.22 Mb Suggested listening list, 10 pages, 0.24 Mb Permanent Residence, 16 pages, 0.17 Mb Children's Books, 3 pages, 0.71 Mb Copyright © 2018 doc.uments.com	__label__1	0.866256
Columns > Published on December 18th, 2012 Scandalous! Five Ways in Which The Hobbit is Superior to The Lord of the Rings This weekend saw the long-anticipated release of Peter Jackson’s cinematic adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (which made a butt-load of money). And while I love The Lord of the Rings and grew up in the shadow of its huge, looming presence, it was only after The Hobbit film was announced that I realized how I often prefer the story of Bilbo Baggins. Thankfully we don’t have to choose; we can appreciate the strengths and weakness of both works. But in honor of The Hobbit’s release, here are five ways in which I think The Hobbit is superior to The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit has better monsters and villains Don’t get me wrong--I LOVE the Nazgul, and they are some of the most impressive bad guys to ever grace fantasy, but for all their menace, the Ringwraiths are minions, largely silent and without personality. They follow Sauron’s will and that is all. Most of the villains and creatures of The Lord of the Rings (hereafter abbreviated LOTR) appear as minions of Sauron (or Saruman in some cases). So much of LOTR seems to be looking backwards... The Hobbit on the other hand seems to look forward. The creatures of The Hobbit are far more colorful and varied in their appearances and their motivations. Tolkien may have reused the species in LOTR, but the trolls in The Hobbit have names and give us a sense of what trolls do in the wild, how they eat. I love Shelob, but she is just an older, larger version of the spiders that Bilbo attacks in Mirkwood. The Hobbit’s goblins (Tolkien’s previous version of orcs) have their own civilization, their own land, and they ride on wargs. Beorn may not be a monster, per se, and he ends up helping the heroes, but the skinchanger is an excellent addition to the story, adding a further element of the supernatural to the book. And need I mention, the dragon? The only character/creature that is improved upon in LOTR is Gollum. While I love his appearance in The Hobbit in the chapter "Riddles in the Dark," Gollum becomes a more complex and sympathetic character in LOTR. I'll give you that. The Hobbit has less wasted space So much of The Lord of the Rings is taken up by walking and camping. Even though I love the trilogy, I’ve always felt that the pacing is off. There are inevitably parts where I am forced to slog through the books to get to the more exciting action. I understand that Tolkien uses much of those slower moments to help build the world of Middle Earth--from the history of the land to its geography, but while I have come to appreciate these moments after many years of rereads, I ultimately feel that they detract from the thrust of the story. The Hobbit, on the other hand, moves along at a much faster clip. By the second chapter, Bilbo and the dwarves are on their way, and from the Trolls to the Battle of Five Armies, they are constantly facing a new danger. No sooner have the dwarves escaped the spiders than they are misled and captured by the Wood Elves. They escape the Wood Elves (in barrels no less) to arrive at Esgaroth. And though we’re given plenty of action, it’s not just action. Mirroring the external journey is Bilbo’s internal journey, as he begins to understand himself better and learns what he’s capable of. Bilbo starts out as someone adapting to circumstance, and later becomes someone who changes the situation by making choices. The Hobbit has a dragon Just saying. Dragons are cool. And in all seriousness, one of the things I appreciate about Smaug is that he has a personality. He has a point of view. His motivation may simply be that he wants the dwarves’ gold and their mountain for his lair, but he has swagger. He threatens Bilbo. They talk. In LOTR, Sauron is largely faceless and voiceless (though there is the guy who is the Mouth of Sauron). Most of his minions do his bidding and are little more than slaves. Smaug seems more an individual than part of the army of Evil. Bilbo is less tortured than Frodo Bilbo’s story is one of discovery, both external and internal. And while he deals with some serious danger, he comes to realize his strength, and he grows as a result of his experiences. The stresses of Bilbo’s adventure bring out his capabilities and he is a far stronger and more confident person by the end of the book than he is at the beginning. Conversely, Frodo’s journey is all about survival. The stresses of Frodo’s journey wear him down and a large part of his quest is just to carry on. Granted, he’s dealing with the burden of the ring, and its insidious, invasive power. But I find Bilbo’s journey to be more interesting and the more attractive of the inner journeys.  Bilbo also seems wiser and more mature, despite The Hobbit’s appeal to a much younger audience. And he’s just so damned enthusiastic about things, whether it be maps or meeting new friends or helping his old ones. Frodo makes a heroic choice in deciding to take the ring to Mordor, but from then on, most of what he does is about endurance, and while it is understandably a difficult struggle, I find Bilbo’s far more interesting. And Bilbo makes his own heroic choice, choosing to stand against his friends, to betray the dwarves, in order to try to create peace. Bilbo makes the hard decision for what he knows is right. The Hobbit has a better message My other points may be a little tongue in cheek, but this is the point at which I draw the line. For me, the basic underlying theme of The Hobbit is so much better than that of The Lord of the Rings. One of the things that always bothered me about Tolkien’s POV in LOTR is that it seems nostalgic and wistful, mourning a rural England on the way out. Tolkien seems resentful of industrialization, saddened by the loss of something he loves. Frodo never wants to leave the Shire in the first place, and finds himself longing to return, but can’t. The Elves realize that their time is passing, their world diminishing. There’s a sense of sadness in it all. A sense of loss. The underlying message seems to be all about the importance of home and the threat and tragedy of change affecting that. The Hobbit, on the other hand, revels in change. It revels in adventure. Bilbo may be reluctant to leave Bag End at the beginning of the story, but it’s clear that there’s something in him, waiting to be expressed, something great. Something that might never come to be if were to remain in Hobbiton. Gandalf recognizes this even if Bilbo doesn’t. When the dwarves sing in his house, part of him stirs to the call of adventure, and while he spends a lot of the early parts of the adventure thinking about the comforts of home, he soon steps away from this and becomes as intrepid as the rest of his party. He even surpasses them in personal bravery. In the end, we learn that though Bilbo returns home, he never stops traveling and going on adventures until, in the opening of The Lord of the Rings, he leaves Hobbiton for good, eventually making his way to Rivendell. At the end of LOTR, Frodo has been changed by his journey and can’t go home. There’s the sense that something is lost. He sacrificed something of himself to do the right thing, but you can tell that there’s a part of Frodo that wants to go back. Put more simply, so much of LOTR seems to be looking backwards, not only at the history that led to the War of the Ring, but at the things that were lost. Those that move forward at the end do so in a world that has lost some of its magic. The Hobbit on the other hand seems to look forward. Bilbo ends the story a changed hobbit, in a far better place than where he starts, and the whole world is open to him. He returns to the Shire a rich man, with a magic sword and a magic ring. The world is a wider, more wonderful place and he’s just taken his first steps into it. I find this resonates to me more, it’s the kind of fantasy I enjoy most. Those are just a few thoughts about the differences between the two books. What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Agree but for different reasons? Let me know in the comments and let’s continue the conversation	__label__1	0.934055
The Boiler Alexandra Kessler “I don’t think you should do that,” Ava says. Jane laughs. “Why? It’s not like it could get more dead.” Jane pokes the rabbit’s guts with the end of a stick. The rabbit is small and it’s fur is an oaky brown, about a hundred shades darker than Jane’s platinum hair. She’s blonde, but she wasn’t born that way. “Diseases,” Ava says, pushing her sister’s arm away from the animal. Jane swerves and holds the stick over Ava’s head. Jane is sixteen, and Ava is fourteen. Ava knows there’s no stopping her. “Rabies,” Ava says. Rabies,” Jane says, eyes squinted. Ava imagines those eyeballs ejected from her sister’s head and sliding slick into the sea, rolling outta this town like Springsteen. Fragile and gooey, coated in sand and dirt, bobbing with the current. The rabbit’s belly has swollen, bloodless slits down it’s middle. The soft parts, clean pink sacks leaking white, spill onto the lawn. The hind legs are mangled and strung off of the body, hanging by glistening tendon threads. The rabbit lays stinking at the foot of their back deck. It’s the third dead one they’ve found this week. The rabbit’s head and front legs are perfectly intact, the fuzzy face peaceful, like the porcelain figurines that their mother keeps in a glass cabinet. When Ava and Jane found the first dead rabbit, they buried it and didn’t feel too bad. They have a public school understanding of food-chain mechanics, they know that nature is a dangerous place for small animals. When they found the second carcass, identically slaughtered, Ava cried while Jane buried it. Do you think it’s life was so great, anyway, being that small? Jane said. What a waste to be born a rabbit when you coulda been a big-boned Grizzly or a humongously-dicked stallion. The appearance of the third rabbit has increased Jane’s curiosity and Ava’s fear that a predator is lurking. Their mother would say that twice is a coincidence and three times is fate. But they know she only uses this line to justify asking a small yellowing man, who had thrice been behind her on line at the liquor store, on a date. Their mother and that man, Ken, are now a couple. Jane doesn’t want to bury this rabbit. She wants to keep it, to examine it closely. But there is no time now, their mother will be home soon. Jane says there’s a shoebox full of junk in the back of her closet that they can keep the rabbit in. Jane points to the rabbit and says, this is what’s important now. The girls’ bedroom has only one closet, which is Jane’s. When their mother moved them out of their father’s house and into this one, the first thing she did was drive to the Home Depot and buy Ava a free-standing collapsable wardrobe. Their mother shoplifts from the high-end boutiques in town. Ava’s collapsable wardrobe is filled with heavily patterned Lily Pulitzer dresses that have holes in the hems where the plastic security tag was MacGyvered out. The second thing their mother did in the new house was make Jane flush her pet goldfish, Shark, down the toilet. It had been a gift from their father, a fisherman, before the divorce. “He’s just a goldfish,” Jane pleaded, Shark flipping in her cupped palms. “They’re all just goldfish,” Their mother said. “I’ll get you a dog—a good animal with strong bones.” Shark was flushed and there has never been another mention of a dog. Ava holds her breath while she kneels, reaching for the shoebox. Her sister’s closet smells like a barn. The shoebox of junk is in the very back. Inside the box is a splint from a years-ago broken finger, four baby teeth, and a handful of used, tied-off condoms. Ava brings the box outside to her sister. Jane has gotten a snow shovel from the garage and scooped the rabbit carcass onto it. When she sees Ava come out of the house, she calls for her to hurry; wrists ready to snap. Ava holds the shoebox under the snow shovel, and Jane lets the rabbit slide off into the box. The rabbit is heavier than Ava expected, and wetter. It’s toothpick ribcage reaches towards heaven. The bottom of the box sags like a frown, a greasy stain spreads, the cardboard start to pill. Jane takes the box from her sister and slides it under the deck, where there’s two feet of dark space between the wood and the ground. “We’ll keep it there till we think of something to do with it,” Jane says. The girls’ mother is throwing a barbeque to celebrate her two-month anniversary with Ken. She likes any excuse for a good time. When she gets home from work, she begins to decorate the small yard. She pulls pink tissue-paper streamers from a K- mart bag and throws them over tree branches. In the kitchen, their mother makes herself a drink. She pours vodka and lemonade into a plastic cup. When Jane takes it from the counter and drinks it down, their mother says nothing, just makes herself another and asks the girls to help decorate the lawn. Ava feels an understanding pass between her mother and her sister, an almost imperceptible filament made of something she can’t stand. Jane rips foot-long sheets of red streamer into tiny pieces, scattering them around the yard like confetti. Ava wraps purple around the ever-damp wooden railings of the deck. When they’re done, the yard is a rainbow stew. Their mother smiles, proud. She sweeps the deck and polishes the small black charcoal grill. She tops off her drink, then Jane’s. She sets out silverware and plates on the deck table, using the space between the first joint and the knuckle on her pointer finger to measure the inches between each setting. If there had been more time before the guests were to arrive, Ava thinks, their mother would get on her hands and knees and polish every blade of grass on the lawn. The girls get dressed for the party. They both wear denim skirts but Jane rolls hers up at the waist so it’s shorter, and their mother watches. Their mother tells Jane that nobody has fun shooting at an east target. Guests start to trickle through the open back fence, walking lightly across the grass and placing small offerings on the table—bottles of screw-top pinot grigio and yankee candles. The girls greet people on the deck, friends of their mother’s with lipstick-ameared boozy mouths who ask them the same things over and over. Jane pinches her sister and whispers, “look at Grace.” Grace is their neighbor. She is over four hundred pounds. She almost always has to be sitting. She says she has osteoporosis of the knees. Their mother says it’s really because all that weight can snap your bones. Grace’s plate is piled high with the appetizers their mother had set out: watery potato salad and bacon wrapped clams and toaster oven jalapeño poppers. Grace sits down at the table and begins to eat, the first and only guest to do so. Ava wishes she could spend the whole night watching Grace eat. “I’d rather be dead than fat enough to snap my own bones,” Jane says. Amongst the other guests are Laura from the Walgreens bakery and her husband, who has brought a Margarita machine. The Margarita machine is a big deal for everyone. They stand around the small blender and sip at cups of green froth. The women watch each other. Nobody wants to finish first. Beth, their mother’s best friend, arrives with her husband, Frank. Everyone is quietly surprised. Frank never comes to these types of things, because he’s always busy, and everybody understands—he’s the most in-demand roofing contractor on the East End. Beth and Frank’s son, Drake, is a senior at the high school that Jane and Ava go to. Drake is well-loved in town: once he jerked off into a bowl at a house party and spoonfed his semen to a drunk girl like soup. He won their school’s community service award for teaching a kid with down syndrome how to skateboard. There is talk that Frank sleeps in his truck. Jane claims she saw him once, parked in a hidden crevice between the old motel and where the beach’s rock ledge begins. He was sleeping, Jane had said, wrapped up in quilts in the bed of his Ford. “Remember when you saw Frank?” Ava asks her sister, “Remember, in his truck?” Jane sips her vodka lemonade and doesn’t acknowledge the question. Ava doesn’t like Frank. His hair is too solidly black and gel-spiked for a man his age. His wife takes his hand and he pulls away. His white T-shirt is tight across his chest and his hard little nipples make Ava gag, like they’ve detached from his body and lodged between her tonsils. Snug around his wrist is a thin gold chain bracelet—something Ava has never seen a man wear. She wonders if maybe he’s secretly gay, if right now she’s uncovering something big. There’s something feminine about him that almost demands pity. But Frank catches Ava’s eye from across the yard and smiles at her, gives a small wave. She immediately feels guilty that he makes her uncomfortable. He probably doesn’t know his shirt is too tight; maybe his wife doesn’t get him new clothes. Then Ava is heavy with remorse. She wants to cut Frank a thick piece of cake. Ava is worried about this impulse in her, the nagging need to feed what disgusts her. “What are you doing?” Jane asks Ava. “You’re staring at Frank.” “No I’m not.” “Would you fuck him?” Ava slaps her sister on the meat of her upper arm. Jane shoves Ava into the sliding door. The crown of her head knocks against the glass and her neck snaps back. Ava thinks about how babies are born with a soft spot in their skulls, and wonders what kind of retardation would ensue if that spot never hardened. Ava touches the back of her head; she can already feel a lump forming. “You started it,” Jane says. The girls’ mother opens the sliding glass door from inside the house. Ken is standing next to her. Nobody saw him come in. Ava figures her mother must have told him to come around the front of the house instead of the back gate, so they could make an entrance together. She feels a hot anger move through her, imagining her mother planning these details. Quiet falls over the yard, and everyone looks at the girls’ mother and Ken. Their mother’s lips are the color of a ripe nectarine and her hair is piled on top of her head. Ken, who is a few inches shorter than their mother, wears khaki slacks with loafers, scuff-y. The girls’ mother holds one of his hands, his other is deep in his pocket. “Thank you all so much for coming,” their mother addresses the guests. “Anniversaries are important.” When the sky gets darker, the girls’ mother begins to barbeque. She grills chicken breasts and rib racks and fish wrapped in foil. Guests gather around as she grills, chatting with her and offering to help, but she waves them away. The girls sit in chairs off to the side of the deck and watch Ken. He is standing alone by the big tree on the edge of the yard, smoking a cigarette and staring into the woods. “He’s so fucking weird,” Jane says, dipping two fingers into her cup. She puts the fingers in her mouth and sucks. She says the alcohol helps heal her bloody cuticles. Ava agrees about Ken. He hasn’t spoken to anybody since his entrance with the girls’ mother. In the past two months he’s been dating their mother, the girls’ haven’t heard his voice at all. He doesn’t enter the house to pick their mother up for dates, just sits in his car in the driveway and waits for her. He has never spent the night, though the girls’ mother has been stealing more expensive underwear lately—nets with little bows. When their mother is finished grilling, guests fill their plates and sit down around the metal table. They toast again, and begin to eat. Ken sits between the girls’ mother and Ava. He is silent, and Ava watches as he cuts his chicken breast into small, identical cubes. He eats by spearing one cube onto his fork at a time, and dipping it into a small pile of mustard in the middle of his plate. While he chews, he puts his fork and knife down and places his hands in his lap. Then he swallows, and starts the process again. Ava can smell his smell, like rubber and mint. Ava wants to go to his house, slip into his bathroom, and then lock the door. She wants to uncap his aftershave and sniff the nozzle, to hold his bar of soap in her hands and feel where it’s been rubbed smooth. She wants to look in the mirror of his medicine cabinet and try to see what he sees. Ava tries to catch his eye, but he doesn’t look at her. The girls’ mother places her hand on top of his, and he leaves it for a moment, before shaking it off to spear another cube of chicken. Jane sits next to Frank. On Frank’s other side is his wife, Beth. Jane and Frank are both eating ribs, tearing at the meat like wild cats competing. There is a cherry tomato seed on Beth’s upper lip. “Drake’s prom is coming up,” Beth says, putting down her fork. “He’s graduating with perfect grades. We’re so proud, aren’t we, Frank?” Frank strips a long string of meat off of the rib he’s holding and chews. “There’s so much coming up for him, right Frank?” Beth tries again. This time, he nods. “How exciting,” the girls’ mother says, and sits up in her seat. She says she can’t wait until her daughter’s proms. Prom dresses, she says, what an important decision. A guest asks who Drake’s prom date will be, and a smile begins in the corner of Beth’s mouth. She waits for quiet before she answers. “He’s taking Lila Gorsik.” The girls’ mother slaps a hand over her heart and looks at Beth like she wants to climb inside her. The other guests coo and smile with softly cocked heads. Jane rolls her eyes. Lila Gorsik used to be the best swimmer in the county. She made the varsity swim team as a freshman and was captain as a sophomore, which won her a profile in the newspaper. Her butterfly stroke was a miracle, everyone said. A fish born in a girl body. During her junior year Lila was promised a full scholarship to Stanford, and everybody knew about it. Lila’s parents, neither of whom had gone to college, threw a block party to celebrate. Last summer, Lila and some friends took her father’s fishing boat out for a party on the water. After drinking six beers and snorting a Xanax, Lila uncharacteristically crashed the boat into the pier at full speed and was thrown from the vessel, hitting her head and snapping her neck in the process. Everyone talks about the way her head jutted sideways, like it couldn’t fit, like her body was rejecting it. Though she wasn’t there, Ava imagines Lila looked like Shark the goldfish before he hit the toilet water, twisted and desperate to be back where he could take a new breath. Lila survived her ordeal, but now she has a motorized wheelchair that she controls with a straw that goes into her mouth. The wheelchair moves depending on her patterns of inhales or exhales. Lila has a nurse on hand at all times to weave thick tubes through her. Ava knows that Lila’s nurse will have to accompany her and Drake the prom. Ava can’t imagine how awkward that will be, to bring your nurse on a date. “What an amazing son you have,” the girls’ mother tells Beth. She calls him a saint. She shakes her head, amazed. “It was Drake’s idea,” Beth says. “And of course, he had other options.” Beth looks up at the guests through thinning ginger eyelashes. “Of course he did,” the girls’ mother says, gaining momentum, “he’s such a handsome boy. He could have his pick of the litter. But you raised him so well. You really did.” “We’re a very close family.” Beth touches Frank’s bicep. Frank drops a now-clean rib onto his plate. By the time the guests start to finish up their dinner, the sun has set. The only light comes from the candles scattered around the deck, and the stars. It is the time of night when the mosquitos hunt. The guests sit around and talk and drink more until one of them says they have to get going, and then they all do. They bring their plates into the kitchen, and help the girls’ mother wrap leftovers in foil and scrape serving platters clean into the garbage. They drink more while they’re cleaning. Jane disappears, but Ava stays outside, where it’s quiet. The lawn is dark, and Ava slides her sandals off to feel the grass under her feet. It’s downy and damp and she glides across it like an ice skater. She almost glides through a small, dark, heap at the edge of the yard and she stops herself short, falling onto her hands and knees in front of the thing. She sees it—the dark wet tubes, the phantom tissue of a long ear, the glint of pearl bone. Ava is almost face to face with it. She gets up, fast, and goes to find Jane. Her sister is not in the kitchen with the rest of the guests. Beth—who is finishing the last inch of red wine from a bottle and knotting garbage bags—stops Ava and takes her hand. “You are such a pretty girl,” she says. Ava thanks her. Jane is not in her bedroom or in the bathroom. Ava even checks the outdoor shower. She walks around to the front of the house, to the driveway where the guest’s cars are parked in a neat line, waiting. Ava catches a small movement near the cluster of trees and tall bushes on the side of the front yard, and moves closer towards it. Jane and Frank are almost naked in a small patch of flattened beach grass. He has Jane pinned up against a tree. She is wearing her bra, and Frank is wearing his socks and shirt, and the rest of their clothes are twisted around their feet. Ava stands at a distance, silent, holding the bushes open like a curtain. Frank’s hand is wrapped around Jane’s throat and he’s squeezing hard. Light glints off the gold bracelet straining around his thick wrist. Jane gurgles softly and keeps telling him harder, harder. Ava can’t believe how close they are to the house, to all the people inside. She can’t believe that the proximity isn’t enough to keep things safe. Ava goes back to the deck, where she sits until she hears her mother wish everybody a safe drive home, until she hears the cars pull out, one by one. Jane comes through the gate, and sits next to Ava. “I found another dead rabbit,” Ava tells her. “Guess what,” Jane says, “I know something important. It was all lies. Frank told me that Drake wanted to take someone else to prom. Beth made him ask Lila.” Jane nudges Ava, waiting, but Ava says nothing. Jane stretches her arms out in front of her and cracks her knuckles. The little gold bracelet is on her wrist now. It slides down her arm, almost to the elbow. “Beth told Drake that if he took brokeback Lila to prom, she’d buy him a new truck.” Jane yawns and says she’s tired and going to bed. She stands up, wobbling. Ava is relieved that nobody wants to touch her, but she also wants to be told important things. A moment later, the girls’ mother comes out onto the deck, Ken behind her. Her mother touches her fingers to her temples and says she’s had too much wine. She asks Ava and Ken if they can clean up the yard. She hands Ken an electric lantern and kisses his flaky cheek. “Go around and pick up trash,” she says, and then goes inside. Ken looks at Ava for real for the first time. He shrugs. The two of them work silently, picking up damp streamers and old napkins. Ava is thankful that Ken doesn’t talk, doesn’t ask her questions. The moon is milky in the sky tonight, like vomit on velvet. After a while, Ava hears a low growl, and sees a quick, shadow-movement, punctuated by squeals that scrape her eardrums. She hears a throaty call. Ava drops her garbage into the grass. When she looks up, Ken is standing over her, the lantern up by his face. Ava points to the movement and the noise, and Ken sees it too. “Stay back,” he says, and walks up to the shadow, the lantern out in front of him. He gets close enough, and then they both see it. It’s a feral cat, skinny and grey with white paws. Its eyes burn wildly yellow in the lantern light. The cat’s teeth are deep in a rabbit’s neck, but the small animal is still alive, paws flailing, joints popping and straining. “Stop it,” Ken yells at the cat, swinging the lantern at it. The cat starts shaking the rabbit back and forth, faster and faster. Ken lifts the lantern up and pulls it down through the air, hard. It connects with the cat’s head, and there’s a crack like the earth breaking apart, like volcanoes and cliffs, like a dropped plate. The cat collapses on the lawn. The rabbit, barely alive, drags itself away with its front legs, back into the woods. Ava sits down in the grass and starts to cry. She cries for the cat’s bones, for how easily they broke. Ken goes to her and crouches down. He presses his fingers lightly against her spine. “Don’t cry,” he says. “Come on, Don’t cry.” Ava looks at him. “It’s sad,” Ken says. “I know it’s sad. But what else could I do?” Alexandra Kessler received her MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College. She received her BA from The Kratz Center for Creative Writing at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD. She was awarded two summer fellowships from the Kratz Center for Creative Writing in 2013 and 2015, the 2014 Lizette Woodworth Reese Award in Fiction, the 2016 Ross Feld Award, and the 2017 Lainoff Prize for Fiction. Her work has been published by Fiddleblack Press, Spartan Lit, Burrow Press, Joyland Magazine, and others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.	__label__1	0.994891
ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Argument, Adversariality, And Controversy No comments yet ISSAlogo1998In this paper I wish to explore the relationship between adversariality and controversy. My interest in this subject stems from two sources: first from those feminist critics who have claimed the fact that arguing, and thus derivatively, arguments, have an unduly adversarial caste; second, from my conviction that controversy is in many respects necessary and healthy. For those not familiar with the feminist allegations, the following choice passage may offer a sense of their charges: “Without batting an eye the ancient rhetors, the men of the church, and scholars of argument from Bacon, Blair and Whately to Toulmin, Perelman and McLuhan, have taken as a given that it is proper and even necessary human function to attempt to change others.” According to this author, argument is the essential part of a belligerent context in which contestants seek mastery of each other. To argue is to adopt a male centered verbal means of exercising power over others (Gearhart in Hynes, 1995: 464). Respondents to such allegations have tended to agree with the feminist assumption that adversariality is negative, while contending that adversariality is nevertheless not an intrinsic and inevitable feature of argument (Ayim in Govier, 1988; Ayim, 1991; Nye 1991; Govier, 1995; Cohen 1995). Such respondents – present author included – have pointed out that despite the prevalence of militaristic metaphors for describing argument, non-militaristic metaphors do exist. And people may offer arguments in recognition of difference and out of respect for those who do not share their views. Reflecting on adversariality, which like many others I had assumed to be of negative value, and controversy, which like some others, I had assumed to have important positive value, I came to ask myself whether adversariality was a necessary element of controversy – whether, in effect, my views on adversariality and controversy were consistent. In the fall of 1997 Stephen Toulmin gave a lecture in Amsterdam. He called his lecture “The Importance of Dissent,” but it had been advertised under the title “The Importance of Controversy.” Toulmin’s lecture dealt with political dissent, and the importance for societies of allowing that dissent. Toulmin mentioned the many intellectuals, including Canada’s Charles Taylor, who are currently stressing the importance of community and cultural identity. He noted that the quest for community and roots may go too far in the direction of exclusivism, cultural conformity, and even virulent nationalism. Toulmin noted that leaders may take on power and seek to insulate people from alternative currents of thought. In his lecture, he argued that dissent and dissenters are especially important for avoiding conformity and exclusivism, and for the building of bridges and establishment of common ground between different communities and groups. In short, Toulmin defended the political and ethical value of dissent. I had expected Toulmin to address a rather different range of questions. While contemplating the advertised title, I had come to wonder about the value of intellectual controversy and the relationship between controversy and adversariality. But Toulmin had his own ideas and did not do my work for me. Thus I must face the task myself. 1. Adversariality and Argument What does it mean for a practice to be adversarial? It means that in this practice people occupy roles which set them against each others, as adversaries or opponents. Law, in western societies is adversarial in the sense that the prosecution and the defense play distinct, and opposed, roles. Politics is adversarial: it is the role of the governing party to govern and of the opposition to criticize the government. Debates are organized adversarially: one side proposing a claim, the other opposing it. In these institutions, roles have been organized in a bipolar fashion and people occupying them are, for institutional reasons, set against each other. Pointing to basic war-like metaphors such as “winning an argument,” “attacking a claim”, “defending one’s position against criticism,” “a battle of wits,” “the war of words,” “strategy and tactics of argument,” “intellectual artillery,” “making a charge against the opponent,” “the other side,” and so on, many have claimed that argument is deeply adversarial. People often argue back and forth, one seeking to defend a point while another seeks to rebut it. To be sure, there are non-adversarial metaphors for argument: arguments offer support, provide foundations, serve as tools for exploration and inquiry, and so on. However the existence of non-adversarial metaphors leaves open the deeper question of whether there is something implicitly and intrinsically adversarial about argument as such. One argues for one position and thereby, it would seem, against another. The pervasiveness of the militaristic metaphors suggests that adversariality in the practice of argument is more than superficial. The following account indicates why argument might seem to be deeply and necessarily adversarial. An arguer seeks to defend a claim that is contested or in doubt, or that could be contested or in doubt, seeking to defend it by putting forward premises that will show it true or at least render it rationally acceptable. The explicit or implicit context in which an arguer offers an argument may be said to be dialectical, in that the argument is necessary and appropriate only insofar as the conclusion is a matter of controversy or doubt, or possible controversy or doubt. To understand the point of an argument, we have to know in what ways the conclusion is contested or is doubtful or could come to seem to be contested or doubtful. Who needs the argument? Those who do not already accept or believe the conclusion; those who do, or could, differ from the arguer in this regard. In constructing the argument, the arguer envisages the person he or she is trying to persuade of the truth or acceptability of the conclusion. To the extent that that person needs to be persuaded, he or she holds a different view and may come in conflict with the arguer should he express that view in a context when one or both of them thinks that agreement between them is important. Because there is this conflict of belief, this hypothetical person is regarded as the opponent, or antagonist, of the arguer. Thus, it would appear, argument is at its very roots adversarial. When we argue for a claim we at the same time, and necessarily, argue against an envisaged opponent, one who does not accept that claim. In her well-known book The Skills of Argument Deanna Kuhn maintains that thought itself is implicitly argumentative (D. Kuhn, 1991: 2 – 3). She says that much thinking involves arguing within ourselves – formulating and weighing arguments for and against a course of action, a point of view, or a solution to a problem: “thinking as argument is implicated in all of the beliefs people hold, the judgments they make, and the conclusions they come to. It arises every time a significant decision must be made.” When we think something through, we do so by considering arguments for and against it. For example, if I am wondering whether to take a trip to Africa, I will consider – perhaps when talking with friends, perhaps in my own mind – various reasons, or arguments, for going and various counters to those arguments. I will also consider arguments against going, and counters to those arguments. When I do a good job of thinking something through in this way, there is a sense in which I have different persona in myself, struggling with the issue. It is as though the protagonist and antagonist are manifested in my own thinking, perhaps as diametrically opposed homunculi battling it out in my head. If the above account of argument, dialectical context, and opposition is right and if Deanna Kuhn is right too, then thought itself is in some sense adversarial. To think whether a claim is true or whether some action is the right one, I think through arguments “for and against.” I work through supporting arguments, then criticize those reasons to test my initial tentative argument, then reflect further to see whether I can rebut my own criticisms and so on. At this point, the bipolarity of “for and against” seems to be inherent in thought itself. Insofar as I in this for/against style, the so-called adversary or opponent is not another person, but a kind of representative or Devil’s Advocate in myself. One might think of this critical role as that of an ‘adversary’ or opponent within. But the term is misleading in at least one crucial way: this adversary is helping me. The adversariality implicit in argument, and perhaps even in thought itself, would seem to arise as follows. 1. I hold X. 2. I think that X is correct. (Follows from (1)) 3. I think that not-X is not correct. (Follows from (2)) 4. I think that those who hold not-X are wrong, or are making a mistake. (Follows from (3)) 5. Should I need to argue for X, I will thereby be arguing against not-X. (?) 6. Those who hold not-X, are, with regard to the correctness of X and my argument for X, my opponents. (?) Let us call this argument The Argument for Deep Adversariality. The questionable steps here are those from (4) to (5) and from (5) to (6). We may call the adversariality alleged in The Argument for Deep Adversariality minimal adversariality. Note that, apparently, nothing negative has been said about adversariality to this point. Minimal adversariality is alleged to arise from the holding of a definite belief or opinion. In holding a belief, one thinks it true and is thereby committed to thinking that those who disagree with it hold a false belief and are in this respect in error. In believing something, or holding an opinion, one necessarily differs from those who do not believe it, who do not hold this opinion. Should the occasion and need arise to address those differences by arguing in favour of one’s view, the differences will be reflected in the content and process of argumentation. According to this argument, when one seeks to argue in favour of a view, X, one is thereby in effect arguing against the contradictory of that view, not-X, and the structure of this situation means that those who subscribe to not-X are put in the role of opposition. There are, in the logical sense, one’s opponents or antagonists. On the face of it, minimal adversariality may seem to be neutral. This apparent neutrality might make us wonder why some feminists have been so concerned about adversariality and so inclined to see it as negative – and why even those who have responded to feminist critique have often granted the feminist assumption that adversariality is, in general negative. The answer lies, I think, in the ancillary aspects of adversariality so commonly accompanying it and so readily confused with it. When people are adversaries, even when they are adversaries only in virtue of roles they occupy temporarily, their dealings are so often characterized by lack of respect, rudeness, lack of empathy, name-calling, animosity, hostility, failure to listen and attend carefully, misinterpretation, inefficiency, dogmatism, intolerance, irritability, quarrelsomeness, and other undesirable aspects. Feminists and others are have expressed concern about adversariality and have tended to assume that it has negative values because they value such things as co-operation, politeness, good communication, understanding, empathy, respect, inter-personal trust, and open-mindedness. And they have observed that when people are set against each other and argue against each other in such contexts as law courts, parliaments, debates, or academic discussion, those valuable aspects of civil human exchange are seriously threatened or disappear altogether. Evidence of this negative ancillary adversariality are all too familiar and should need no illustration. However, since it may be useful to have an example before us, I cite the following piece, written by a professor of government at Harvard University. The context is a discussion of multi-cultural identities on the part of whites, African-Americans, and Latinos in the United States. I cite this passage not to comment on any aspect of the substantive debate, but merely to illustrate the patronizing, polarizing, and hostile aspects of the language used. And from badly misconstruing the difference between sharing “culture artifacts” and sharing “culture meanings” (lived and mutually respect culture patterns), K.A. Appiah almost belittles what can only be called living cultural clusters among non-White American communities. “Hispanic” is not a kind of trick-bag label or category, as K.A. Appiah would have us believe. If one reads and/or undertakes fieldwork among the units of nationalities that comprise “Hispanic” or “Latino”-Americans, the Appiah trick-bag dissolves in its own wrong-headedness. And the same holds for Appiah’s historically ill-informed view of “Black culture” as another trick-bag category. The notion propagated by Appiah that the self-chosen nomenclature of multimillions of Latino citizens and African-Americans citizens is a kind of game on the part of poor-reasoning non-whites seeking “authenticized identities” is absurd. It is also a put-down notion, close to an insult if you will (Kilson, 1998: 48-9). This author, Martin Kilson, disagrees with Appiah and writes to express his disagreement and try to show that Appiah’s view is wrong (There is no argument in the passage quoted, only denial). In a mere six sentences, Kilson manages to accuse Appiah of misconstruing a central difference, of being historically ill-informed, and of seeking to propagate a view which is absurd. Somewhat ironically, he also accuses Appiah of insulting and trying to put down other people. This is not adversariality at its best. Conceptualizing another person as my opponent or antagonist may lead me to conceive that person as someone who is against me, someone whom, in the course of argument, I oppose. And this conceptualization seems to imply that I regard that person as a kind of threat, not as someone I will be disposed to like, respect, and co-operate with. Almost by definition, it would seem, one does not naturally trust or befriend, or seek to co-operate with, one’s opponents or antagonists. In the actual practice of arguing back and forth people often set themselves against each other, descending into rudeness, name-calling, misinterpretation, and other displays of animosity. 2. Controversy Relatively few authors appear to have explored the topic of controversy as such, as opposed to some particular controversy. One exception is Thomas Goodnight, who reported in 1991 that he had not found “controversy” as a key term in either the Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the Encyclopedia of Social Science (Goodnight, 1991). Goodnight claims that a controversy is more than a mere failure to reach agreement. There is a controversy when there is a sustained and mindful opposition to a claim. Controversies may be about discussion rules and norms of language and proof, as well as substantive matters. Goodnight suggested that controversy has valuable features insofar as it exposes different perspectives and beliefs, but also negative features in attendant disharmony, and irrationality and quarrelsomeness in disputes. Responding to Goodnight, Charles Kauffman noted that controversy has long been explained through metaphors of contest. He says controversy is a test, a trial, a verbal combat by which disputes are resolved and disagreements banished. The contest metaphor has informed both argumentation theory and pedagogy: for over two thousand years, argument skills have been developed through training in debate (Kauffman, 1991). Kauffman traces to legal practice in Athens this tradition in which argument is a back-and-forth process which is bipolar, zero sum, and has a winner and a loser. He believes that advocacy in such contests has negative aspects and tends to result in a lack of perspective, when one identifies too closely with the views one is defending and becomes hostile towards the other. Kauffman claims that the conception of a contest between two sides is not appropriate for public policy issues where “controversies are many-sided, subtle, and pose consequences for society that are both significant and unavoidable.” In another response to Goodnight, Robert L. Scott raised the question of whether ideal discourse would be free of controversy. He laid out three common evaluations: that controversy is bad and needs to be settled; that controversy is of mixed value; and that controversy is good, being the very “stuff of life” (Scott, 1991). Scott suggests that in our culture the first two views predominate: either controversy is bad, or it is of mixed value. I shall adopt Goodnight’s insight that more than disagreement is required in order for controversy to exist. There is a controversy about an issue, Z, when people who reflect on Z disagree about it, there are two or more views held about Z, and those views are discussed and debated. Within this debate some hold views that are denied by others, and people argue to each other and with each other, about matters pertaining to Z. Controversy, then, is a social thing. There are controversies in this sense about thousands or millions of matters – unemployment, abortion, affirmative action, evolution, free will, the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation, formalism in argument analysis, Quebec nationalism, the existence of God, the HIV virus, the interpretation of the Bible, the causes of the first World War. . . Controversy exists when people hold, argue for, discuss, and debate different, or contending views, about an issue. A claim is controversial when there is a controversy about it, when, in the circles in which the question of its truth arises, there is disagreement rather than agreement about that claim. Controversy is not by definition bi-polar; there may be more than two views about the issue in question. Since controversy presupposes expressed and argued disagreement, if we accept The Argument for Deep Adversariality, inferring adversariality from argued disagreement, we are led to the conclusion that minimal adversariality, at least, is a necessary feature of controversy. It would appear that in any controversy there must be proponents and opponents of various views. Insofar as we are engaged in a controversy, we will be arguing with others who disagree with us and are, in that sense at least, our opponents or antagonists. This is not to say that controversy must be construed in bipolar terms, such that there is a dispute over one claim, with some thinking it is true and others thinking it is false. If we consider free will, for example, one who seeks to defend a libertarian view according to which free will exists in the strong sense that human agency exerts itself without being determined by antecedent causes, is opposed by several different varieties of determinism, by fatalism, by indeterminism, and so on. Obviously, there are more than two alternatives for most public policy issues – and failure to observe these fact in media coverage impoverishes many debates (Govier, 1988 and Condit, 1994). And to take a matter closer to home, the issue of formalism in argument analysis, there are at least three views that are held: formalism is everything, formalism is something, and formalism is nothing. And of course, refinements and variations will exist among these views. As is the case with adversariality, there are ancillary aspects to controversy which are clearly of negative value. Controversies often involve rudeness, disrespect, hostility, animosity, name-calling, put-down, insults, ad hominem attacks, misinterpretation, diversions into unnecessary and irrelevant themes, intolerance, dogmatism, wasted energy, failures of communication, and unwise expenditures of time and talent. I take it to be quite obvious, and not to be controversial, that these ancillary features accompany many controversies and are of negative value. There is no need to belabor the matter. And it is surely these negative ancillary features of conflict which would support the judgment that controversy is of negative But there are in addition deeper non-ancillary aspects of controversy which would seem to imply that controversy constitutes a problem. The first aspect has to do with decision and action. When we need to act and we do not agree about what to do, our capacity for action may be inhibited. Insofar as controversy inhibits necessary decision-making, or results in resentment or lack of cooperation in implementing contested decisions, it will seem to be a nuisance or obstacle. When we have to act and think we know what to do, controversy is something we would rather do without – though it could be argued that insofar as disagreement may make us think more carefully, it can result in better decisions. In his philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn contrasts “normal science,” a period when researchers accept a common paradigm and proceed cooperatively and routinely to explore problems and solve puzzles, with “revolutionary science,” when issues of methodology and fundamental theory are in flux (T. Kuhn, 1970). If there is no controversy about problems, theories, and methodology, researchers can pool resources and explore topics in depth instead of expending energy repeatedly debating fundamentals. It is agreement on a paradigm that makes scientific research possible. This view would seem to imply that controversy about fundamentals will be of negative intellectual value because it will block progress of research. The second matter concerns the inverse relationship between controversy and certainty. If there is a controversy about some matter, then there is no certainty about that matter. If, for instance, there is controversy about whether God exists, then no one knows for certain that God exists. If there is controversy about whether human beings can survive their physical death and go to heaven, then no one knows for certain that she is going to go to heaven after death. If there is a controversy about the significance of so-called bad cholesterol for the health of one’s heart, then no one knows for certain that limiting such cholesterol in his diet will reduce the likelihood of his suffering a heart attack. One thing that makes controversy unwelcome is that we so often feel certain about such matters, thinking that we know. We may organize our lives around our beliefs, or stake our lives on them, or sacrifice our lives for them. Some Islamic groups, including Hezbollah and Hamas, believe that those who lose their lives making suicide attacks on an enemy are guaranteed a place in heaven: death in a holy war or jihad ensures passage through the heavenly gates. Parents who hold this belief may regard themselves as honored and as fortunate if their children die in the course of carrying out terrorist attacks (Tamir in McKim and McMahan, 1997). In such contexts people want certainty, and controversy will carry with it a most unwelcome and unpleasant reminder that they do not have it. A society with a strong stake in vulnerable ‘certainties’ of such overwhelming personal importance is likely to stifle controversy and dissent. The desire for certainty is strong, by no means irrational and by no means restricted to irrational individuals or fanatical groups. It was in a quest for certainty that Plato came to conceive the timeless forms, that Descartes invented his method of doubt, and that Kant bemoaned the sad state of metaphysics, in which contention and dispute had dethroned the Queen of the Sciences. It is because of the possibility of rigorous proof, absence of controversy, and the achievement of certainty that philosophers have – literally for millennia – envied mathematicians. The desire for certainty has been fundamental in the history of Western philosophy. And this desire is by no means purely philosophical. The yearning for certainty is one philosophers share with ordinary people living ordinary lives. Most of us, when we believe something, would like to know for certain that it is true, and because this is the case we typically do not greet with pleasure controversy about our beliefs. When there is controversy, others argue against our beliefs, presenting evidence and reasons suggesting that those beliefs may be incorrect, that there are serious alternatives to them. These others show by their arguments and by their very existence that alternatives to our beliefs are contemplated, accepted, and defended by people who are taken seriously and who take themselves seriously. The phenomena of controversy place us in a poor position – epistemically, psychologically, and socially – to claim the certainty we would like to have. If we succeed in isolating ourselves from controversy, refuse to participate in it, avoid all evidence of it, and refuse even to acknowledge its existence, we may preserve feelings of certainty. But such isolation has its costs, and will be hard to achieve in a modern pluralistic society. Feeling certain, or believing that one knows for certain, is not the same thing as knowing for certain. Controversy is a reminder that we do not know for certain some of the things that we thought we knew for certain. That reminder is likely to be unwelcome, which is a factor explaining the tendency on the part of many people to dislike and disvalue controversy. Many of us have beliefs we live by, some have beliefs we would die for, and we often do not wish to acknowledge evidence that those beliefs are open to objection. Other people – some of them apparently sensible and faring well in this world – hold different beliefs and organize their lives in different ways. This is not good news: hence the temptations of exclusivism and isolationism – and the timeliness of Toulmin’s message that dissent is something to be treasured. As noted, we find in Western philosophy a strong tradition of searching for certainty, a tradition which would suggest that controversy has negative value. Of course we also find such philosophers as Aristotle, who have qualified and contextualized his quest for certainty, arguing for different norms for different areas of knowledge. And there are still others – such as Sextus Empiricus, Hume, Voltaire, Mill, Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend, and Chaim Perelman who have claimed or implied that controversy has positive value. Mill’s valuing of controversy is implied in the following well-known statement: The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race: posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. If wrong, they have lost, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error (Mill, On Liberty). On this view, if one of our beliefs becomes the object of controversy, we should be grateful – whether those who disagree with us are right or wrong. Perelman said “I shall grant the status of knowledge to a tested opinion, to an opinion, that is, which has survived all we have a certain confidence, though no certainty, that it will resist all such future attacks” (Perelman, 1989). For Perelman, as for Popper, controversy has positive value, because in its absence opinions cannot be tested through exposure to objections and criticisms. It is obviously impossible here to offer a complete survey on the topic. In the present audience, few are likely to dispute the undesirability of political conformity: I suspect that virtually all of us, like Toulmin, will value dissent. Less often explored is the matter of the intellectual value of controversy. And it seems to me that there are a number of reasons to think that controversy has intellectual value, as is implied by such philosophers as Empiricus, Hume, Mill, Popper, and Perelman. I propose the following preliminary list. 1. Controversy can serve to expose errors and omissions. This role of controversy is of obvious intellectual value in leading us away from false views and, through such correctiveness, in helping us to approach the truth. 2. Controversy will also expose integral assumptions that have not been questioned, alternate interpretations of data or cases, and objections to views held. Such exposure may amount to the exposure of error or may lead to recognition of the need for further argument or revision in our views. 3. Through controversy, we may come to better understand our own beliefs, insofar as we are exposed to objections to them, see how those objections may be answered, and come to set our beliefs in the context of alternatives to them. If, in the wake of controversy, we retain our beliefs, we nevertheless understand better because, as a result of controversy, we come to understand how our view compares and contrasts with others. 4. For many issues of complexity and depth, involving norms and other claims of a non-observational and non-empirical nature, there is ample reason to suspect that certainty should not be possible and that the absence of controversy reveals lack of critical thinking or a failure in social processes of discussion and debate. For such issues, if there is no controversy, we should be worried. In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, the following criticism is raised against George Frederickson, who had in a previous issue reviewed two books about race relations in the United States. In a quite amazing footnote, he (Frederickson) expresses pride that the Stanford Faculty Senate in 1996 “voted unanimously to continue affirmative action.” That is indeed quite telling, but it may not indicate quite what he thinks it does. The Stanford Faculty Senate, we may be sure, did not agree unanimously on the desirability of American intervention in Europe before Pearl Harbor. It did not agree unanimously on the Marshall Plan or the Truman Doctrine. It surely does not agree unanimously on welfare reform, tax policy, or what is to be done about Bosnia. It does not even agree unanimously on whether all Stanford students should be required to enroll in a science course or be familiar with Plato or Shakespeare. These are all important and complicated matters on which disagreement is regarded as legitimate. But evidently racial preferences in admission and faculty hiring are something altogether different – a matter of religious faith. There may be agnostics on the faculty, even a few atheists, but they are obviously well-advised to maintain silence. Those who march behind the banner of diversity regard diversity of opinion on this subject as heretical” (Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 1997). Whether these authors are right about the Stanford Faculty Senate’s views on World War II, the Marshall Plan, Bosnia, Plato, or Shakespeare, I cannot say. The point here is that they clearly find the absence of controversy about affirmative action in the Stanford Faculty Senate positively suspicious, because they see affirmative action as an intrinsically complex issue on which one would not expect a group of well-educated and reflective people to achieve unanimity. For such an issue, the absence of controversy is not to be applauded. Rather, it provides evidence that people hold their beliefs as matters of faith or that the political atmosphere makes sceptics afraid to speak out. Due to the pervasive role that many of our beliefs play in our lives, and given our desire for certainty, we all too easily pretend to ourselves that we know and do not only believe. We human beings have a tremendous capacity for selective attention, for ignoring information and arguments that count against our beliefs, and for self-deception. If we do not suppress it or ignore it, but rather, carefully and open-mindedly participate in it, controversy can protect us from our own self-deceptive tendencies, revealing that there are well-articulated and defended alternatives to our views. Controversy can protect and sustain our intellectual honesty. 5. If we do it with the right attitude, participating in controversy can make us more flexible, careful, reflective, and open-minded thinkers. 6. Controversy can be a stimulus to thought, imagination, and new ideas insofar as it may point to hitherto unrecognized implications and assumptions of our views, fresh analogies, and through such aspects, offer a new basis for synthesis. It may constructively arouse us from complacency as Kant claimed the empirical and sceptical Hume had done in awakening him from his “dogmatic slumbers.” 7. From the perspective of particular philosophical theories of knowledge such as scepticism, fallibilism, falsificationism, and coherentism, controversy may be deemed to be of positive theoretical value in illustrating the pluralism of human belief and constituting the testing grounds which is necessary to render beliefs more accurate and reliable. Controversy seems to be of negative value when it is accompanied, as it so often is, with animosity, dogmatism, intolerance, and inefficiency. It seems to be of negative value when it prevents us from taking necessary decisions or deprives us of the certainty we would dearly like to have. However, there are also reasons to positively value controversy. Politically and ethically, we should value dissent, as helping to protect us from exclusivism and ethnocentrism. And intellectually, there are many respects in which conflict can be beneficial – as have just been shown. On the basis of these various considerations, I conclude that controversy is of mixed value. 3. Returning to the Dilemma My original dilemma was that adversariality seemed to be bad, controversy seemed to be good, and yet adversariality seemed to be a necessary feature of controversy. I am not so inclined now to see this as a real dilemma. Minimal adversariality is neutral or, at worst, mildly negative; many ancillary aspects of adversariality are negative. And controversy is of mixed value. Unless one believes that nothing can be of mixed value, there is no problem of consistency with these judgments. What problems there are would seem to be practical ones. Grant that we would not want to eliminate controversy even if we could, because of its many positively valuable effects. Grant that insofar as adversariality is integral to controversy, we would not want to eliminate adversariality either. But grant in addition that controversy often brings with it dogmatism, intolerance, lack of empathy, hostility, inefficiency, and many other bad things. The question then is how we can mitigate these negative effects – how we can participate in controversies politely, constructively and effectively, without such degeneration. Part of the answer lies in learning to express our arguments carefully and with respect, while avoiding ad hominems, loaded language, irrelevance, straw man interpretations and so on, and keeping adversariality within careful bounds, remembering that the so-called opponent or protagonist is in a deeper sense working to help us. If we accept that there is positive value in controversy, that through controversy, we may be saved from error, careless argument, or ignorance of alternatives, that we can through controversy exercise our imaginations, become more flexible thinkers, save ourselves from dogmatism, and acquire new ideas, then there should be little reason to regard those who participate with us in these controversy as persons with whom we are in a full-blown sense in conflict. Given all the positive aspects of controversy, there is an important sense in which these people are helping us by disagreeing with us. Thus we might wish to regard them as partners, not opponents. If I hold X and another holds not-X, and I argue for X while he objects to my argument, and argues for not-X, we openly disagree. I am committed to regarding him as mistaken, and he to regarding me as mistaken. When I argue back and forth with him, we say I argue “against” him, and he argues “against” me. If I am the proponent, he is the opponent. If I am the protagonist, he is the antagonist. If I am “pro,” he is “con.” But the oppositional terminology, though in one sense essential, is in another sense regrettable insofar as it suggests and invites the negative ancillary aspects of adversariality and controversy. Perhaps a reconceptualization at this point, a better way of describing argument at this very basic level, would facilitate our appreciation of the positive value of controversy. Perhaps bipolarity itself requires further thought. Ayim, Maryann, 1988. “Violence and Domination as Metaphors in Academic Discourse,” in Govier 1988. Ayim, Maryann, 1991. “Dominance and Affiliation,” Informal Logic 13, 79 – 88. Cohen, Daniel, 1995. “Argument is War . . . and War is Hell: Philosophy, Education, and Metaphors for Argumentation.” Informal Logic 17, 177-188. Condit, Celeste, 1994. “Two Sides to Every Question: The Impact of News Formulas on Abortion Policy Options.” Argumentation 8, 327 – 336. Dearin, Ray L., 1989. Ed. The New Rhetoric of Chaim Perelman: Statement and Responses. New York: University Press of America. Goodnight, Thomas. 1991. Ed. Argument in Controversy (Proceedings of the Seventh Speech and Communications Conference on Argumentation. Uuniversity of Utah, Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association). Goodnight, Thomas, 1991a. “Controversy,” in Goodnight, 1991, 1 – 13. Govier, Trudy, 1988. Selected Issues in Logic and Communication. Belmont CA: Wadsworth. Govier, Trudy, 1988a. “Are There Two Sides to Every Question?” In: Govier 1988. Govier, Trudy, 1995. “Non-Adversarial Conceptions of Argument.” In: F.H. van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst, J. Anthony Blair, and Charles Willards, (Eds.) Perspectives and Approaches, Proceedings of the 1994 ISSA Conference. Amsterdam: Sic Sat. Volume I: 196-206. Govier, Trudy, 1997. A Practical Study of Argument. Fourth Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Hynes Jr., Thomas J., 1995. “Discussione, Discussion, or Dissensus: Feminist Perspectives of Argument and the Valuing of Dissensus,” In: F.H. van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst, J. Anthony Blair, and Charles Willard, (Eds) Perspectives and Approaches, Proceedings of the 1994 ISSA Conference. Amsterdam: SicSat. Volume I: 464-472. Kauffman, Charles, 1991. “Controversy as Contest,” In: Goodnight, 1991, 16-19. Kilsom, Martin, 1998. Letter to the New York Review of Books. March 5, 48-49. Kuhn, Deanna, 1991. The Skills of Argument. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kuhn, Thomas S., 1965. The Structure of Scientific Revolution. McKim, Robert and Jeff McMahan, 1997. Eds. The Morality of Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Perelman, Chaim, 1989, In: Dearin, 1989. Scott, Robert L., 1991. “Can ‘Controversy’ by Analyzed to Yield Useful Insights for Argument?, “ In: Goodnight, 1991, 20 – 22. Tamir, Yael, “Pro Patria Mori! Death and the State,” In: McKim and McMahan, 1997. Thernstrom, Abigal and Stephen Thernstrom, 1997. Letter to the New York Review of Books November 20: 26. Bookmark and Share	__label__1	0.899881
E.E. Cummings : the ecology of his poetry / J.E. Terblanche Boloka/Manakin Repository Show simple item record dc.contributor.author Terblanche, Juan Etienne dc.date.accessioned 2009-02-04T14:21:13Z dc.date.available 2009-02-04T14:21:13Z dc.date.issued 2002 dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10394/438 dc.description Thesis (Ph.D. (English))--Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, 2003. dc.description.abstract E.E. Cummings' modernist poetry roots itself in nature. That it has not received overt ecosemiotic ("ecocritical") attention is surprising. This thesis reads Cummings' poetic oeuvre as found in his Complete Poems (1994) with a view to its ecological (whole, naturally interpenetrating) scope and dynamics. It builds upon existing criticism of Cummings' natural view and nature poetry (Norman Friedman). Although it mainly adheres to a close reading of the poems themselves, it also makes use of secondary sources such as Cummings' prose, notes, painting, and letters, in support of the ecological argument. It also draws from a broad basis of sources including various strands of ecological discourse: especially "ecocriticism" (William Howarth) as well as cultural ecology, deep ecology, and -- on an interdisciplinary basis -- ecology proper (Michael Begon). The thesis incorporates texts on modernist orientalism (Eric Hayot) since it argues that Cummings' ecology and his unique version of Taoism radically inform one another. Because relatively few sources exist that relate modernist poetry to nature (Robert Langbaum) the thesis consults a variety of modernist criticisms (Jewel Spears Brooker) with a view to the relations between the modernist sign and its outside natural context. Drawing upon sources further a field (Umberto Eco) the thesis offers a theoretical overview of the complication of natural context in the modem mindset as found in mainstream modernist discourse, structuralism (A.J. Greimas), and post-structuralism (Jacques Derrida). Amounting to a "semiotic fallacy", such a broad semiotic complication of sign-nature relations accentuates the importance of Cummings' poetry which remains at once modern and deeply connected to nature. Against this broad background, and in exploration of a zone of between-ness -- between opposites such as culture versus nature and East versus West -- Cummings' poetry is read hermeneutically to infer its various ecological dynamics. The main questions that the thesis examines are: What is the scope of Cummings' poetic ecology? What are its dynamics? How did critics respond to it? What reciprocal light does it shed on the poetic ecologies of the mainstream modernist poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound? The thesis demonstrates that the extent of Cummings' poetic ecology is considerable: it involves his various poetic categories (such as lyricism, satire, and visual-verbal poems) from early to late in his career, as well as a gradual Taoist crisis in his development (more or less from the 1930s to the 1950s). A sequence of ecological dynamics from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching are applied to Cummings' poetry, including humility (smallness and earthiness), flexibility (an osmotic semiosis), serendipity (or synchronicity), a singular ideogrammatic style (Nina Hellerstein), iconicity (Michael Webster), an open-ended cross-stitching of oppositional expectations, and "flow" or signs that open out contextualizing possibilities faster than the reader can close them down. As the thesis further shows, these dynamics ultimately centre on Cummings' third dimension or voice beyond static and entrenched opposites of the relational and oppositional mind. The exploration concludes with a concise examination of additional instances of the third voice such as a yin tendency (restoration of femaleness), followed by an ecosemiotic analysis of two key ecological poems, the leaf poem (“l(a”) and the hummingbird poem (“I/ never"). The latter acts as an osmotic mandala that carries the modernist sign into active and complete earth, with the reader acting as the creative and collaborating intermediary. The focus then shifts to the critical reception of this poetic ecology, and finds that influential critics (R.P. Blackmur) tended to misappropriate it as a form of non-intellectuality. For example, Cummings' ecological flexibility was perceived as childish sentimentality. The boundaries of Cummings' poetry were perceived not to be "hardened" or "objective" enough. These receptions were based on a particular mainstream modernist view of the intellect, informed by Eliot's objectified and ambivalent early stance. Due to this, critics tended to overlook or dismiss that central value of Cummings' poetry -- its ecology -- in favour of a more predominant and dualistic alienation from and even cynicism towards natural integrity. These in-depth revisitations reveal that Cummings' major minor status embodies an ecological achievement: his poetry managed to move between and beyond the overall dualistic mainstream modernist ecological dilemma that is marked by the major versus minor categorization. Based on this thorough exploration of the elusive ecological dynamism of Cummings' poetry and its critical reception, the thesis turns its focus to Eliot's and Pound's poetry. The early, major works such as The Waste Land (1922) are read from the perspective of Cummings' poetic ecology, informed by the knowledge that a deep-seated double-ness towards ecology would be expected in these major works. An analysis of the mainstream modernist objectification of the sign with its concomitant and sealed-off alienation from its outside context and nature follows - the focus is on selected texts such as "Prufrock", "Tradition and the Individual Talent", and the Cantos. Eliot's and Pound's respective searches for and achievements of a third voice are subsequently examined, as found (for example) in the DA sequence of The Waste Land, 'The Idea of a Christian Society", the Four Quartets, Cathay, and the "Pisan Cantos". Centring on this prevalent and underemphasized third voice, the thesis posits an ecological reconfiguration of Cummings', Eliot's, and Pound's respective modernist projects. It demonstrates that Cummings' poetic ecology is central to the other two poets in terms of this voice. In provisional conclusion the thesis calls for a critical shift towards a more intense engagement with "smaller" modernist poetries such as Cummings', with a view to an increasing understanding of the ubiquitous, complex, and sometimes complicating "green" layer of the modernist poetic palimpsest. dc.subject E.E. Cummings en dc.subject T.S. Eliot en dc.subject Ezra Pound en dc.subject Modernist poetry en dc.subject Ecocriticism en dc.subject Taoism en dc.title E.E. Cummings : the ecology of his poetry / J.E. Terblanche en dc.type Thesis en dc.description.thesistype Doctoral Files in this item This item appears in the following Collection(s) • ETD@PUK [4784] This collection contains the original digitized versions of research conducted at the North-West University (Potchefstroom Campus) Show simple item record Search the NWU Repository Advanced Search My Account	__label__1	0.512737
Connect with us Hi, what are you looking for? Conclusion to Stumbling Beginnings in Summer Knight It had to happen sometime. I talked last book about how much Butcher had improved on his shaky start. Published in 2002, Summer Knight brings the shaky opening to a conclusion. It also opens up a new phase of storytelling for the series as a whole. In case you couldn’t tell, I really like this book. It brings so much to the series, and features one of the more iconic moments of the series for Murphy. Let’s get into it. Spoilers for Summer Knight and all previous books in the series. So, What Happened? Summer Knight opens with Harry and Billy investigating a rain of toads. Harry grumps around and alienates all his friends because of his grief over Susan. Afterwards, he goes to a meeting Billy orchestrated, which turns out to be with Mab, Queen of the Winter Fae. She bought his debt from the Leanansidhe, and wants him to clear her name for a murder. Harry refuses and goes to the White Council meeting. We meet several other wizards, and a vampire offers peace between the White Council and Red Court if they turn over Harry. At the conclusion of the meeting, the wizards agree not to sacrifice Harry if he makes Mab cooperate with the Wizards. Harry discovers that the murdered man, Ronald Reuel, was the Summer Knight, the human intermediary for the Summer Court. The power he wielded disappeared, destroying the balance. Which, eventually, leads to war between the Courts. Elaine, shows up as the Summer Emissary. Harry attends Reuels funeral, and runs into several teenage, changeling acquaintances of the knight who are concerned over the disappearance of Lily. He visits the Winter Lady, then contacts Murphy. They fight several monsters in a Wal-Mart. He goes to the Summer Lady after finding Elaine beaten by his car. Harry visits the Summer and Winter Mothers in the Nevernever. The Winter Mother gives him an Unraveling. Aurora, the Summer Lady steals it from him and reveals she orchestrated everything to remake the seasons in her own image. She trapped the power inside Lily. Harry objects to this. Harry, the Alphas, and two of the teenage changelings go to the Stone Table. They interrupt the fight between seasons, steal back the Unraveling, and kill Aurora, saving Lily, the one holding the mantle. In the conclusion, Lily becomes the new Summer Lady. Best Moment – The Wal-Mart Fight, Organization to Conclusion There are so many good things about this scene. There’s finally communication, Murphy’s first moment of awesome, and plot hooks perfectly combined with character catharsis. Over the course of this unlikely placed scene, Butcher manages to bring several elements of the early series to a conclusion. The first, of course, is that Harry finally tells Murphy everything about the supernatural. She even gets in one last one-liner about being kept out, a start to their banter for the rest of the series. “‘I know I’ve kept things from you.’ … ‘Yeah’, she said, ‘I know. It’s annoying as hell.’”(299). He tells her everything. About the Red Court, the White Council, the Fae, and Chicago Supernatural Politics. Now, we won’t have the cheap conflict from Storm Front where they work at cross-purposes again. Immediately afterwards, we have the fight with the chlorofiend, the Tigress, and the mind fog. At the conclusion of that fight, we also have Murphy’s first major impact since the Loup-Garou. “Murphy tore through them with the chain saw, … then drove the blade directly between the chlorofiend’s glowing green eyes.” (345). Chainsaw with cold iron, vs Fae Creature. Murphy wins. The way that the plot interacts shows improvement from the previous book. There, Butcher attempted to tie together the antagonists with the chain spells. Here, we see the ghoul, the summoned monster, and the mind fog from two different people. The Tigress also capitalizes on Murphy’s trauma from the previous book. But everything makes sense, and the conclusion of the fight ties together various plot threads, since Ace sent the Tigress, Aurora the fog and fiend, and Murphy starts to recover from Kravos’s attack. Most Improved – Harry’s Attitude While some of the previous books focused more on the change to other people, here we have Harry change. He has a character arc that comes to a satisfying conclusion by the end. Harry starts the book depressed over Susan, and he alienates everyone. Billy points it out. “I don’t need to be a wizard to see when someone’s in a downward spiral. You’re hurting. You need help.” (25). Given that Billy previously espoused the theme of the series, his reintroduction here is significant. Eventually, Harry accepts the help Billy offers, both in scheduling meetings, and with the fight at the end. After the fight, Harry even goes over to hang out with the Alphas, and plays a barbarian in a Dungeons & Dragons spin-off game. He quotes William Shakespeare jokingly, and says, “Meep, Meep” to a deranged Faerie Queen. (489). It is not only the Alphas that help change Harry’s mood. His reunion with Eileen, his teenage flame, who he thought he killed alongside Justin also helps. Finding out he didn’t kill her brings him closure. But through the book, when she nominally serves as an opponent, the Summer Emissary to his Winter, her presence reassures him. Even when she ‘betrays’ him to Aurora, and binds him, she still helps him. “I’d been right. It was the same binding she’d used when we were kids.” (433). Her meddling enables him to escape Aurora’s death trap, by using their childhood bond. At the conclusion of the book, she gives him advice regarding Susan that builds to the catharsis detailed above. “Stop thinking about how bad you feel—because if she cares about you at all, it would tear her up to see you like I saw you a few days ago.” (510). That help sends him in a new direction. Best Worldbuilding – The Fae Courts While the information on the White Council is delightful, the Fae Court proves more valuable to the main plot. And we learn a lot about the Courts here. Lea makes an appearance, where she ‘helps’ Harry by distracting him and a Fae from fighting and guiding him to the Stone Table. She mentions again how she believes her actions last book only helped him as well. It gives insight to the alien nature of Fae morals. We also can draw conclusions about the structure of the Courts given all the information on how they organize themselves. Through the book, we learn about the Winter and Summer Courts, each with three Queens. The Mothers, the retired queens. The Queens, the current ruler. And the Ladies, the heir for the future. Their Knights that do their will in the mortal world, and the Emissaries chosen on special occasions. Also informative is the phrase, “If Winter came here, Summer had to come too, didn’t it?” (219). It implies certain checks and balances on each other’s behavior. That only highlights how serious a problem it is that the Summer Knight is dead, and the mantle gone. Lea’s information about the Stone Table reinforces that. Beyond being a reference to Narnia, it also guarantees great power to whoever holds the table, and whoever sheds blood on it. So, the peaceful transfer of the table from Summer to Winter and back with the seasons preserves their equality. Aurora’s plan only serves to show how important it is to keep that balance, less there be another Ice Age, or worse. In showing us all this, Butcher expands his universe so much further, and sets the ‘table’ for future stories. Ones that will lead to the eventual conclusion of the series, yet to come. Worst Worldbuilding – The Conclusion of Meryl’s Story Given all that we know now about the Fae, it comes as no surprise that the worst worldbuilding also comes from that section of the story. Butcher’s take on Changelings is innovative, being half-human, half-Fae rather than the traditional version. The problems arise from how the narrative treats her, and the results of her half-Fae heritage. The problem with Meryl is that Meryl dies at the end of the story. She is the first person explicitly allied with Harry to die. The only previous person that was not an antagonist that died was MacFinn, and he attempted to murder them all because of an uncontrollable curse. Meryl dying in and of itself is not the entire problem. Butcher directs the series in a darker direction, so deaths will come eventually. The issue that I have with the conclusion of Meryl’s story is that Butcher could have done so many things with her. As a Changeling aligned with Winter, dearest friend of the new Summer Lady and Knight, the possibility of an inter-Fae alliance or Court would develop. She even said, “[Winter] Calls,’ Meryl said. ‘ But I’m not answering.’” (459). The Changelings provide a glimpse of the Fae outside of the manipulation, outside of Court politics. Meryl could have been symbolic of that. But no. Meryl Chooses to save Lily. She Chooses and she dies and all that hope with her. It’s a story brought too soon to a conclusion, one that broke off threads that could have continued. Moment of Regression – Ye Old Wandering Eyes I will admit, this is a sticking point for me. I talked about my dislike of Harry’s voyeurism in Storm Front. I brought it up again in Fool Moon. Thankfully, it didn’t appear too often in the following books, but here we see this again with a vengeance. And it doesn’t even make sense in character this time. After a Susan-vampire nightmare, Harry thinks. “But I had been used to a certain amount of friendly tension relieving with Susan. Her absence had killed that for me, completely—except for rare moments during the damned dreams when my hormones came raging back up to the front of my thoughts again as though making up for lost time.” (176). So, theoretically at least Harry’s libido takes a break. I understand that part of this nightmare and Harry’s symptoms comes from the dangerous way he’s punishing himself for Susan’s condition. But, still. Even before this dream we have moments where he stares at Mab’s ass. He knows she’s the Winter Queen, and he still ogles her when she leaves. At Maeve’s court, Butcher spends a good deal of time describing Jenny Greenteeth, a Fae seductress. He could have emphasized the alien way she moves, the details that make her decidedly not human, and dropped a one-liner about her being naked at the end. It would have been in character for Harry’s blasé kind of humor. Instead, Butcher flips that script, focusing on the nakedness, with the inhumanity coming as an aside. Call it my own personal soapbox, if you will, but that doesn’t sit well with me, especially when the last book did so much better with Harry’s gaze. (Not perfect, of course, but better. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to keep improving.) In Conclusion Overall, Summer Knight showcases the best of Butcher’s work so far. While the choices were somewhat limited compared to last book, the plot hangs together much better. That cohesive plot lent its voice to each category, and the worst moments were nitpicks and could-have-beens. The way that Butcher brought this story arc, and Harry’s character arc to a conclusion proved satisfying. His mastery of plot improved, with the motivations of the antagonists and the number being reasonable, instead of overwhelming. The knowledge about the Fae, about the Council, and about Elaine all help set up this next phase of the series. I’m looking forward to the next book. Am I being too nit-picky in the ‘bad’ categories, or is it just proof of concept that the problems can be reduced to nitpicks? Was the White Council more fascinating than the Fae, or was Harry’s arc disjointed? Let me know if I’m being too harsh on the series, if you had a different idea for a category, or if you have any comments about the arc of the series as a whole. I look forward to hearing from youOnly a year as chaotic as this one could make me actually excited to watch Christmas and other holiday movies of all things. I’ve...	__label__1	0.998037
Here's How Long it Would Take for Vampires to Annihilate Humanity - Atlas Obscura Unusual adventures and hidden discoveries. Explore our 2018 trips now » Here’s How Long it Would Take for Vampires to Annihilate Humanity Detail from The Vampire by Philip Burne-Jones Detail from The Vampire by Philip Burne-Jones. (Image: Wikipedia/Public domain) To vanquish a vampire, one generally employs a stake, a cross, a string of garlic, or a combination of all three. But there’s one highly effective anti-vampire weapon that few think to use: math. A surprisingly large number of academic studies—as in, more than one—have applied mathematical modeling to the concept of human-vampire co-existence. Using the depiction of bloodsuckers in various forms of media, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to True Blood, these papers look at whether Earth’s vampire population would inevitably annihilate humanity, and, if so, how long it would take. Mathematically influenced scholarship of vampire-human relations took off in the early ’80s courtesy of Richard Hartl and Alexander Mehlmann, Austrian mathematicians with a mutual penchant for the undead. In 1982, their paper, titled “The Transylvanian Problem of Renewable Resources” was published in the operations research journal RAIRO. In it, Hartl and Mehlmann posited “optimal bloodsucking strategies for dynamic continuous vampires.” In doing so, they divided vampires into three categories: the “asymptotically satiated vampire,” the “blood maximizing vampire,” and the “unsatiable vampire.” Regardless of the type of vampire, though, they found that bloodsuckers can’t help but face diminishing resources: “[W]e are facing a typical consumption-resource trade off. The vampire society derives utility from consumption of blood but in sucking the blood of a human being and in turning him to a vampire the resource of human beings is reduced whereas the number of vampires is increased. Both of these effects diminish the resource of humans per vampire curtailing future possibilities of consumption.” Hartl and Mehlmann further explored this vexing conundrum in a paper published in Applied Mathematical Modeling the following year. “The authors are well-aware that belief in vampires seems highly irrational to a scientist,” they wrote in “Convex-Concave Utility Function: Optimal Blood-Consumption for Vampires,” before launching into a proposed vampire self-sustainability model based on the Lotka-Volterra prey-predator system. Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film adaptation of Dracula. (Image: Wikipedia/Public domain) There was a lull in vampiric math papers during the ’90s and early aughts, but in 2007, another article analyzed the plausibility of human-vampire co-existence. In “Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality: Ghosts, Vampires, and Zombies,” published in Skeptical Inquirer, authors Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi presented a pessimistic view of humanity’s future in the face of thirsty vampires. “The fact of the matter is,” they wrote, “if vampires truly feed with even a tiny fraction of the frequency that they are depicted to in movies and folklore, then the human race would have been wiped out quite quickly after the first vampire appeared.” Working with the conservative estimate that vampires only need to feed once a month, Efthimiou and Gandhi looked at population stats and concluded that vampires would eliminate humans within three years. Put simply, they said, “vampires cannot exist, since their existence contradicts the existence of human beings.” (They also threw in a bit of sass: “Apparently, whomever devised the vampire legend had failed his college algebra and philosophy courses.”) This simple and stark analysis of vampire-hastened human mortality irked Oxford statistics professor Dino Sejdinović, who refuted Efthimiou and Gandhi in his own paper, “Mathematics of the Human-Vampire Conflict,” published in Math Horizons in 2008. Relations between vampires and non-vampires, he wrote, “are much more sophisticated than those presented by Efthimiou and Ghandi.” Sejdinović’s qualms with their paper included the fact that “vampires are presented exclusively as greedy consumers: a rational strategy of managing their human resources is not considered.” He also noted that Efthimiou and Ghandi’s model did not account for the death rate of vampires—or, as he put it, “the death-death rate since they are already dead”—courtesy of stake-wielding humans. Christopher Lee in Dracula (1958). (Image: Wikipedia/Public domain) One of the most recent, and most comprehensive, mathematical analyses of human-vampire interaction came in the form of “Mathematical Models of Interactions between Species: Peaceful Co-existence of Vampires and Humans Based on the Models Derived from Fiction Literature and Films,” published in Applied Mathematical Sciences in 2013. Drawing on a wide range of pop-cultural depictions, authors Wadim Strielkowski, Evgeny Lisin, and Emily Welkins defined and analyzed three models of vampire-human co-existence. According to the first scenario, the Stoker-King model—based on vampires as delineated in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot—80 percent of the human population would be exterminated within the first 165 days of initial vampiric activity. “The model analyzed in this scenario is very similar to an epidemic outbreak caused by a deadly virus,” said the authors. They also noted that, based on the daily feeding that Stoker and King’s vampires appear to require, it would take just two months for the number of global vampires to jump from one to 4,000. The second scenario, the Rice model, is based on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, in which a feeding vampire does not necessarily kill a person, but “can attack a human being, feed on it and leave it to live.” Despite the not-necessarily-lethal approach, the model still predicts the total extinction of humanity within 50 years from the first vampire attack. These two scenarios paint a grim picture, but hope arrives in the form of the Harris-Meyer-Kostova model, based on a combination of Charlaine Harris’s series of Sookie Stackhouse novels, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, and Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 bloodsucker book, The Historian—all of which take place in a world in which vampires peacefully co-exist with humans. The initial conditions of the Harris-Meyer-Kostova model involve five million vampires, 6.16 billion people, and organized groups of “drainers”—humans who attack vampires to drain their blood and leave them for dead. Within this setup, “there are system parameters … that would stabilize the populations of humans and vampires in time”—meaning that humans could stand a chance. The resulting human-vampire ecosystem, however, would be precarious: “Under certain conditions, the Harris-Meyer-Kostova model seems plausible and allows for the existence of vampires in our world. Peaceful co-existence of two species is a reality. However, this symbiosis is very fragile and whenever the growth rate of human population slows down, the blood thirst of vampires accelerates, or vampire drainers become too greedy, the whole system lies in ruins with just one population remaining.”	__label__1	0.934406
Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi: Genre-Fiction in Arabic Literature Genre is a category, or to use Aristotle's term, a species. It is a category of literature, arts, music, and other forms of composition, to classify works of shared conventions, practices, and aesthetics. A typical example would be poetry. Subgenre is a single division of a given genre. In this example, epic poetry, the sonnet, haiku are subgenres of poetry. But who gets to decide what is genre, subgenre, and how? These would be some of the main questions we willl address in this course. Genre theory can teach us a fascinating history of how various cultures imagine their forms of creative expression. The development of genres and subgenres reveal complex histories on who has the power to define and redefine creative expression. For example, the novel, now a dominant and prestigious global literary genre, was once considered an inferior and working-class genre in Europe over a century ago. The novel genre then developed into numerous subgenres, which are today placed under one large umbrella that is "genre-fiction," such as sci-fi, fantasy, horror, gothic, mystery etc.. However, the borders between these subgenres and the larger genre itself are always contested and reformulated. Through the history of genre and subgenre, we get to learn about literary taste and literary criticism, and whose definitions and conventions have changed the course of literature and the arts, and for what reason. The dominance of the historical novel today, for example, is attributed to larger phenomenon such as decolonization, feminism, and anti-racism. The sociopolitical urge to utilize fiction to address larger issues has not only boosted the impact of the historical novel but "elevated" it to become a common form of the genre itself. Within this grand history, Arabic literature has a complex and rich story to tell about genre and subgenre. The most obvious example here, which will be our entry point in this course, is 1001 Nights (also known as The Nights, or The Arabian Nigh Course Attributes: AS HUM; AS LCD; EN H; FA HUM; AR HUM Section 01 Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi: Genre-Fiction in Arabic Literature View Course Listing - SP2024	__label__1	0.918891
ForeWord Reviews great books independent voices Clarion Review (3 Stars) “The old world was ripe with raw power. Energy and magic, unbridled, flowed through everyday events and objects, fuels for the tales so easily dismissed as mere legend from the comfort of safe, predictable contemporary lives,” Paul Harrington writes. Magic, power, and the gods had ruled the world, but now times were changing. In Epiphany, Harrington spins a tale of magic, intrigue, and battle around the biblical outline of the Magi’s visit to the baby Jesus. The three Magi, Melchior from Arabia, Balthazar from the Far East, and Gaspar from Ethiopia, are called separately. Each sees the star and hears the song of enchantment, the call to come and follow where it leads. The star brings the Magi together in the desert where they face a supernatural sandstorm and the heat threatens dehydration. Rescued by the Bedouins of Petra, they help to defend the city from Roman legions. But they are taken captive and brought to Jerusalem, where King Herod seeks to destroy the newborn king of the Jews and secure his own position. The Magi escape Herod, find the baby, and worship him, but Roman troops sent by Herod are not far behind. At times the language sparkles with imagery, as when Melchior receives the call: “It first filled his ears as a roar, like that of a lion, and it made him sit bolt upright in the bed as a chill waved across his flesh. The sound then transformed seamlessly into a kind of celestial music. It was a tinkling, plinking, sparkling song that no man or instrument could ever mimic.” Information about the Magi is sparse, and Harrington seeks to fill this gap with an imaginative and thrilling story. His tale hangs together well and follows the main outline, if not all the details, of the Bible’s account. There is obvious fictional invention, as when the Magi travel at supernatural speed to their appointed meeting in the desert, or when the star gives them the gift of tongues to speak and understand other languages—not to mention the presence of magic. Though Epiphany is generally well written, the action drags at times, and readers may wish it were a hundred pages shorter. While some description of battle is necessary to the plot, the blow-by-blow descriptions become tedious. This novel will not become an instant classic, but is worth the time for readers who enjoy fantasy.	__label__1	0.895877

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