At the conclusion of the last thrilling episode of our exploration of Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Nibelung’s Ring, we watched bards and minstrels across the European world from Iceland to Austria keeping themselves fed and their patrons entertained by retelling traditional stories about the magic hoard of gold that Siegfried won by slaying the dread serpent Fafner, with guest appearances by the warrior maiden Brunnhilde, the doomed king Gunther, and his cold, bold, sinister brother Hagen. It was a grand cycle of stories, and it suited the taste of medieval audiences very well. Then—well, as the third-grader famously wrote on the history test, then some other stuff happened.
The most important component of the stuff in question was a little event called the Renaissance. All through the Middle Ages, people in Europe had been dimly aware that there had been a civilization before theirs, but nobody really grasped how different that civilization had been. Go digging in medieval literature and you can find lively retellings of the Trojan War in which Achilles, Hector, and the rest of them are portrayed as knights jousting outside the walls of a medieval French city that just happens to be called Troy.
The cultures of Europe in the Middle Ages was heavily influenced by ancient Greek and Roman cultures, to be sure. It wasn’t just that every educated person read and spoke Latin, and that the surviving scraps of Latin literature were the basis for literate culture; as C.S. Lewis has pointed out trenchantly in The Discarded Image, the entire worldview of medieval Europe was taken from Roman sources. Yet nobody at the time let themselves notice just how many changes had been smuggled into that framework over the centuries, or just how much more technologically and politically proficient than medieval Europe the ancient world had been. That began to change in Italy in the fourteenth century, when intellectuals began paying more attention to ancient literature than to Christian theology.
It was a shattering experience. Imagine, dear reader, that news broke tomorrow that archeologists at a series of digs in Africa have discovered conclusive evidence that ten thousand years ago, there was a global civilization that accomplished things we never have. Imagine that dig after dig turned up more evidence along these lines, conclusively demonstrating that modern industrial civilization was really pretty primitive compared to the mighty civilization that existed during the last millennia of the Ice Age. Think about the gut punch that this would deal to our vanity and our sense of ourselves as the cutting edge of humanity. That’s pretty much what Europe went through when the achievements of Greece and Rome finally registered on the collective imagination of the Western world.
Nowhere did that gut punch land hardest than in the patchwork of little countries that extended from the valley of the Rhine to that of the Danube, where various dialects of German were the most widely spoken languages. Germany wasn’t a nation in those days. It spent most of the Middle Ages as a loose federation of kingdoms, principalities, grand duchies, and free cities under the vague authority of the Holy Roman Emperors. Then, not long after the Renaissance succeeded in sinking deep roots there, came the apocalyptic horror of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), an era of unbelievably brutal religious warfare in which most of the powers of Europe used the German lands as a convenient location for mutual slaughter and wiped out a third of the population of those lands in the process.
The German lands emerged from that age of trauma as an asteroid belt of independent statelets more or less orbiting two rival centers: Vienna, the capital of elegant, cynical, Catholic Austria, and Berlin, the capital of dour, earnest, Lutheran Prussia. Austria had a border with Italy and had been in on the revival of Greek and Roman culture since quite early on; Prussia didn’t and hadn’t, but made up for it with typical Prussian doggedness. As a result, the German lands ended up plunging into classical studies to an extent that boggled the other European nations. “The tyranny of Greece over Germany,” as English historian of ideas E.M. Butler usefully called it, was a massive cultural reality all through the countries where German was spoken through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “The Germans have imitated the Greeks more slavishly; they have been obsessed by them more utterly, and they have assimilated them less than any other race,” she wrote, and she was entirely correct.
That meant, among other things, that for much of two centuries most German intellectuals took it for granted that the first thing they had to do, in order to become properly educated, was to forget as much as possible about their own cultural heritage and embrace a stuffed and mounted imitation of the cultures of Greece and Rome instead. That opened up a chasm through the middle of German society, between those who aspired to the status of cultured people and those who didn’t. Think of the way that middle class Americans these days are taught to hate, fear, and despise the working classes of their own country; the same thing was painfully common all through the German lands back in the day.
Of course the inevitable happened after a century or so, and a significant number of dissident intellectuals started breaking ranks, turning against the inevitable mediocrity and hypocrisy of the establishment of their day, and looking for other options, focusing on those that offended as much of the conventional wisdom of their day as they thought they could get away with. (Those of my readers who have been watching the contemporary American scene will readily think of equivalents.) That was when the words Classical and Romantic found their way once and for all into the vocabulary of Western culture.
The division between these two was a product of the post-Renaissance era. Most of the great artistic and creative ventures of the Renaissance had attempted to fuse the classical inheritance and the cultural forms of late medieval Europe. When those attempts at fusion broke down, as eventually they did, the result was an ongoing conflict between those who wanted to imitate the classical inheritance as exactly as possible and those who wanted to maintain the vitality of European cultural forms. The first of those was the Classical movement, the second the Romantic movement, and every artist, writer, poet, composer, and intellectual in Europe from that point on existed somewhere on the spectrum thus traced out.
That polarity had another dimension that unfolded from the ways that ancient and medieval cultures were received in the early modern world. It so happened that quite a bit of the literature that got to the modern world from ancient Greece was philosophical, and much of the philosophy was very good. That led to an overvaluing of the philosophical side of ancient Greek culture. Back in ancient Greece, philosophers were just one little intellectual subculture among many, but in the eyes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans, that detail got lost and Greece was turned into an imaginary utopia of perfect reason. Thus the Classical movement tended to be obsessed by logic, reason, and the suppression of strong emotions.
The Romantics, in turn, swung to the opposite extreme and chose the Middle Ages as their counterexample. It so happens that medieval culture was at least as deeply into logic and reason as the ancient Greeks were; modern historians of logic, in fact, talk of the high Middle Ages as one of the great ages of logic, because an enormous amount of thoughtful and fruitful work got put into building on the foundations of Greek logic by medieval philosophers. The Romantics missed that completely. To them the Middle Ages were all about religious devotion, courtly love, Gothic cathedrals, and folk tradition unburdened by the thick crust of Classical reasoning.
So all over Europe you had people of Classical tastes hearkening back to an ancient Greece that didn’t exist, and people of Romantic tastes hearkening back to a medieval Europe that didn’t exist. You had the Classically minded glorifying reason and the suppression of the passions, and the Romantically minded glorifying tradition and wallowing in the passions. It was a great illustration of the fact that the opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea, and it produced vast amounts of bad art as well as a significant outpouring of very, very good art. That is to say, it was like most other cultural phenomena.
The Classical-Romantic struggle had another impact on European cultures, though, and this is where we start circling back to Siegfried, Brunnhilde, and the gold at the bottom of the Rhine. The Classicists had a huge advantage early on, because they had a lot of first-rate stories. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are grand epic tales, brilliantly written; Vergil’s Aeneid is nearly as good; then you’ve got all the great Greek plays, reams of fine Greek and Latin poetry, and plenty more, all the way on down to Aesop’s fables, which were given to children early on to give them a taste of what the ancients had to offer.
The Romantics had to come up with something comparable. Fortunately for them, the Middle Ages were ready, waiting, and eager to fill the gap, and in Germany—due to the carnage and cultural disruption of the Thirty Years War—the Middle Ages weren’t that far in the past in 1800 or so. Enter Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, two brothers who had a taste for folk tales. They were both capable scholars with excellent linguistic skills, they had a large circle of friends, and they were powerfully moved by Romantic ideas. So they and their friends started collecting as many old German folk tales as they could find. They’re the reason you’ve heard of Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, and a whale of a lot of other characters who’ve stocked the imagination of children ever since. Yes, those were obscure figures in stories told only in isolated corners of rural Germany before the Grimms got to work.
There’s been a certain amount of fussing in recent years about the fact that the Grimms and their friends quite often rewrote the stories that they collected. Yes, that happened, but that was normal in those days; the current habit of blaming the past for not abiding by the fashions of the present is one of many marks of our pervasive modern chronocentric bigotries. What’s impressive about the Brothers Grimm stories, in fact, is that they did as little revision as they did, even when the stories center on themes such as cannibalism, rape, incest, and murder. These are not nice clean gutless stories of the sort spewed out of corporate orifices into the bored imaginations of today’s children. They are raucous, gritty, savage, and primal, which is why they’ve been so wildly popular with children ever since. They reach back through the ages to cultural strata so primitive that the fierce little animals we call “children” can instantly relate to them.
But the Märchen—“fairy tales” is an inaccurate label, since not that many of them have to do with fairies—collected by the Grimm brothers were only part of the medieval heritage that German Romantic scholars managed to find. There was the Nibelungenlied, one of the great works of medieval German literature. There was a flurry of Arthurian tales in old German dialects—the stories of King Arthur were wildly popular all over medieval Europe—of which the best was arguably Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, a vivid and enticing version of the Grail legend. There were medieval legends rooted in history, like the great contest of minstrels at the Wartburg or the remarkable story of Hans Sachs, the poet-shoemaker of medieval Nuremberg. It was a rich brew, as rich as anything that England and France had to offer.
One of the other things that turned up in all this fine medieval prose was a character named Alberich. His name means “elf-king” in very archaic German—albe is “elf,” and rich is cognate to Latin rex, Sanskrit raja, and words for “king” in other Indo-European languages. In the German legends he’s a dwarf who has magic treasures and occasionally hands them out to heroes. In the Nibelungenlied he’s conquered by Siegfried and thereafter serves him.
Yet there’s another character in old German legends with a very similar name, the Erlkönig (literally “alder king,” but probably derived from Danish Ellerkonge, “elf king”). He is a terrifying rider who chases down travelers in the woods and kills them with a single touch. There’s another name for that same terrifying rider in German legend: Wuotan or Wotan. That echo of the pagan god remained in German folklore well into modern times: another reminder of just how long the Middle Ages lasted in the more isolated regions of central Europe. Keep these two in mind; we’ll be hearing much more about them later on.
All of this had been picked up by German Romantics by the middle of the nineteenth century—and then the Norse epics of the Elder and Younger Eddas came blazing down from the distant north like Thor’s own hammer and left a mark that has not yet been erased.
It was late in the seventeenth century that European scholars started catching on to the extraordinary literary treasures to be found in Icelandic sources. For the next century and a half, those stayed the preserve of scholars. Karl Simrock changed that. He was another Romantic intellectual along the lines of the Grimms, and his thing was old epics; he’s the guy who made the first translation of the Nibelungenlied into modern German (and did the same service for many other medieval German texts). He published the first German version of the Elder Edda, the most influential of the Icelandic texts, in 1850.
Typically, Richard Wagner was ahead of the curve here, though only by a little. His first essays on the story of the Nibelungs, Der Nibelungen-Mythus als Entwurf zu einen Drama (“The Nibelung Mythos as Sketch for a Drama”) and Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Saga (“The Wibelungs: World History told in Saga”), both saw print in 1848. (These are long out of copyright but absurdly hard to find online in English translation; here and here are the copies I was able to locate.) The first of these is in fact a plot synopsis for the four Ring operas, not that different from the final verion. The second is a very strange essay about history, symbolism, and myth; we’ll be discussing it in quite some detail in a later post here, as it offers a crucial skeleton key to what Wagner was up to in The Ring, and also in Parsifal.
The point that matters for our present purposes is that Wagner was up to his eyeballs in the Nibelung legend by the time Simrock’s translation made Norse myth an inescapable presence in German culture. Wagner was, in point of fact, an arch-Romantic, one of the greatest of the Romantic composers (and there were a lot of very good Romantic composers), and also deep into the broader realms of Romantic literature, poetry, culture—and politics.
Yes, there is such a thing as Romantic politics. Two weeks from now, in fact, we’ll be talking about that in great detail, because that’s where pre-Marxist socialism came from, and it’s also where quite a few other cultural and social phenomena came from. Nor are any of these things a dead letter today. Quite the contrary, as we’ll see, the same Romantic politics and culture that shaped the thought and art of Richard Wagner (among many others) remain enduring presences all over the modern Western world, and come boiling up to the surface at regular intervals. The mere fact that the results are always the same does nothing to slow down the inevitable turn to Romantic politics whenever the conditions for it emerge.
Equally, the Classical movement remains firmly entrenched in modern culture—but with a twist. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, for a cascade of complicated reasons rooted partly in cultural changes and partly in the great technological transformations of the age, the Classical movement dropped its fixation on Greek and Roman culture and anchored its ideas of a society of logic and reason on science and technology. In place of Athens and Rome, an imaginary future of technological omnipotence became the golden age toward which those of Classicizing attitudes turned their adoring gaze.
That was when high school students across the United States, for example, stopped learning Latin and started taking classes in science instead. It’s when public buildings stopped being festooned with fluted columns and marble pediments in the Roman style, and became the dumping ground for architects’ notions of what “futuristic” buildings were supposed to look like. Togas were out, space suits were in, but very little changed in the underlying attitudes, not to mention the insufferable smugness with which the new Classicism of progress regarded its ideas and the imaginary world it had constructed out of them.
Meanwhile, as already noted, the Romantic movement hasn’t changed at all. This is why, dear reader, imaginative fiction in the Western world remains divided by a schism between the highly Classical genre of science fiction, obsessed with logic, reason, and the glorious onward march of science and technology, and the incurably Romantic genre of fantasy, still permanently fixed in the same pseudo-medieval setting that Wagner’s Romantic friends and rivals so deeply admired. That is to say, it’s no accident that the most commercially successful of all works of Romantic imaginative fiction, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, draws on exactly the same body of archaic Germanic legends and lore that gave Wagner the raw material for his opera cycle.
There’s a profound irony at work here. The European cultures that emerged a thousand years ago out of the wreck of the Roman empire, and exploded out of their bleak and wintry subcontinent five hundred years ago to conquer the world, were born from the collision between the fading Mediterranean cultures of Greece and Rome, on the one hand, and the rising tide of the Germanic barbarians who overwhelmed them. During the Middle Ages, those two flowed together to make a unique hybrid culture; during the Renaissance, the first irreconcilable strains began to show between them; in the centuries that followed, the schism between Classical and Romantic became more and more marked, changing in form but not in essential character.
And now? We’ll get to that, not least because Wagner himself had a prediction to offer.
Dear JMG , Namaskaram to you.
When you say Romanticism in Politics, I am reminded of Henry David Thoreau and that essay you once wrote on Johnny Appleseed.
Were they the heirs of the Romantic movement in America?
Cheers
So if we translate Raja into Albe, instead of getting Raja Yoga, we’ll get Elf Yoga, which is practiced by dwarves. Sign me up for Elf Yoga please : )
Mohsin, they were among the many American Romantics, yes. We have a very rich tradition of Romanticism here.
Justin, um, I don’t recommend quitting your day job for a new position in etymology. 😉
Hello John,
I apologize up-front for the off-topic post. I am dying of third-time cancer and it is unclear if I can make it to the end of the month for your open posts.
Based upon your description of screening students for past mental health issues, I take you to be sensitive to potential overlap of concerns. Also, you have mentioned [esoteric traditions?] having understanding which goes far beyond contemporary psychology. In the latter terms, perhaps the analysis I disclose here is not new.
I experienced paranoid delusions for seven years and snapped out of that about seven years ago. The entire time — during and since — I have analyzed the experience epistemologically.
One thing paranoid delusions tend toward is some kind of maximality of scope, so a model should help explain that. Actual development is probably multi-way, but the following just-so story helps with understanding in linear terms:
1. You carry your attention and proximity to yourself everywhere.
2. If you learn to convert your attention and/or effects of proximity into “evidence” (perhaps by accepting low signal-to-noise ratio), then you can find “etically-absurd evidence” *everywhere*, potentially in distracting/compulsive quantity.
3. If you find “etically-absurd evidence” in distracting/compulsive quantity, you will need to create “etically-absurd hypotheses” to explain finding “etically-absurd evidence” anywhere and everywhere; as a corollary, “etically-absurd hypotheses” need to embody expansive scale.
4. Identifiable standard categories of “etically-absurd hypotheses” appear to include: a) the super-natural; b) the super-technological; and c) the super-social.
5. There are also identifiable categories of common “etically-absurd evidence”; these categories include: a) seeing time-coincidences; b) completing chains-of-association; c) both (a) and (b) in some divination; and d) taking pre-defined associations personally when in proximity.
6. Together, listed categories of etically-absurd evidence vs. listed categories of etically-absurd hypotheses suggest a grid; in a sense, the “headspace” of delusional paranoia might thus be navigated with reference to said grid; this could be of use to those experiencing such paranoia.
7. In terms of delusional paranoia as a philosophical disease, the *constitutive criteria* for the implied grid appear to be:
– Categories of etically-absurd evidence must rationally explain a person’s ability to find etically-absurd evidence anytime, anywhere, almost at will.
– Categories of etically-absurd hypotheses must *disease-like “explain”* finding evidence essentially everywhere.
8. The preceding epistemic view implies one-way development from “etically-absurd evidence” to “etically-absurd hypotheses”; an actual *etiology*/*prodrome* — i.e., path to a maximal endpoint — is likely to involve mutually-amplifying multi-way interactions.
—
I have books at lulu.com (search “Jerry Van Polen”). I also have free pdfs of same at http://main.jvp.mm.st ; the one related to modeling paranoid delusions is *Finding a Grid*. A direct link to the html version of that is http://main.jvp.mm.st/delusions-model.html . I believe this to be useful work; for any visibility, I need to rely to some extent on faith in word-of-mouth and in providence.
—
You have also mentioned “virtue ethics” with favor. Here is a small poem of mine with that title:
In the thousand roles
Ex-cel-lence to match
If shaping metal
If laying thatch
One word to use is virtue:
High-skill looks so right
Thus (and so) this good world
Falls not apart at night
Jerry Van Polen
Hi John. How does the still massive influence of the Romantic movement square the circle with the short blast of the influence from Ceres? Do you think the influence of Pluto will linger as long in the culture as as the influence of Ceres has, with the continued relevance of the Romantics?
I’m greatly looking forward to the political essay. I take it that William Morris could be considered of the Romantic strain.
Of course we see the tug of war between the Classical and Romantic reframed as the tug of war between Apollo and Dionysius as injected into literary criticism by good ole Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy. It seems love of Dionysius might be waning based on comments here last week about the Olympics and in general around the net, while the love of Apollo is seeing a resurge, of course, guised as Christ. It seems Christians love their Classical education, still true in the homeschooling movement. I see lots of books on homeschooling + classical education being bought up via patron requests here at the library in Ohio. They aren’t teaching the kids the cannon I loved of Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats.
Speaking of them, I suppose Science Fiction could be a bastard child between Ceres and Uranus. In your twilight of Pluto you assigned SF to Uranus, but the Romantic influence from Mary Shelley and her cohort remains tinged there with the monstrous creations.
I listened to Scenes 1 & 2 of Das Rheingold yesterday, Metropolitan Opera, from Deutsche Grammophone with James Levine yesterday, on to scene 3 & 4 today.
I might say something about the difference between Apollonian ages and Dionysian ages. And how things seem to cycle back and forth between the two. I’ll let you tell me which of those two ages we’re currently in.
Hint: One of the reasons I’m deeply bearish on Artemis.
And you still haven’t told us exactly where the rings of Wagner and Tolkien came from. Although I’m guessing it has something to do with that mythical gold in the Rhine.
Don’t worry, I won’t. Much as I like words, I have no illusions I am qualified in linguistics, etymology, of philology. I like poetry though and Elf Yoga strikes me as something I could do while hanging out with Legolas while listening to the Tale of Beren and Luthien.
Jerry, under the circumstances that’s a reasonable excuse! (Please accept my condolences, and I hope you’re getting yourself ready for the far journey ahead.) I’ve bookmarked your sites for future reference.
Justin, given the odd mutations of Romanticism over the years, I’ve wondered if Ceres passed the torch to the imaginary planet Vulcan, which was “discovered” in 1859, right when Ceres was fading out, and that Vulcan (whose existence was disproved in 1915) then passed the torch to Pluto. What will happen now that Pluto’s dropping out of planetary status is an interesting question!
Other Owen, we’ll get to the ring(s). It has some fascinating precursors.
Justin, no doubt, but the etymology Albe-rich, “elf-king,” doesn’t justify making albe- rather than -rich cognate to raja! (Nor, alas, can you make the leap to “alder yoga”…)
Hello JMG and kommentariat…
A very fascinaring post, John. I’ve been thinking since I was a child if I’m a Classic or a Romantic person deep into my soul. I haven’t answered this dilemma yet to myself…
Your mention of the Erlkonig brings up another great piece of music Erlkonig, a really spectacular solo violin piece with multiple versions for other instruments. The poem was by Goethe, the music by Schubert. It’s creepy, intense, and extremely virtuosic.
I have to gently take issue with your idea of science fiction as “obsessed with logic, reason, and the glorious onward march of science and technology,” Triumphalist utopian SF has always existed, but I would suggest it’s not very influential today. More generally, it’s important to distinguish between “classicist” SF which does certainly nod to logic and reason in its form and the construction of its plots, and other types of SF which use science simply as a prop. As early as Verne (writing at the height of the romantic era) the mathematical trappings of “From the Earth to the Moon,” for example, are only the background to a romantic story of space exploration. A modern author like Alastair Reynolds scrupulously observes known physical principles, but his early novels are Gothic fiction set in outer space. As we’ve discussed before, there’s a long history of dystopian SF from the earliest times, and the whole of the Cyberpunk movement is really one long warning about the dangers of technology, yet its tone is not romantic, but one of gritty realism. Science Fiction as social satire goes back a long way too, to Zamyatin, to Pohl and Kornbluth, to Sheckley (and arguably to Orwell.)
So-called “hard” SF, which is largely about scientists and scientific problems does often feature triumphs over these problems, but here the pleasure of reading comes from the rigid constraints the authors subject themselves to: an extreme classicism of form, like the traditional detective story, or the novels of Georges Perec. By contrast, even writers with a strong scientific background often make use of the possibilities of SF to explore mythical, religious and ethical issues (James Blish, for example, who knew a bit about magic.) Authors like Roger Zelazny recast traditional myths in SF settings. And when you get to Philip K Dick and his fascination with Gnosticism …
I’ve always argued, in fact, that SF is the mythology of the technological era, and that the resemblances are quite precise and quite striking. By contrast, much fantasy seems to me drearily unimaginative and formulaic. Sorry to go on at such length, but I’ve been a reader (and occasional author) of SF for some sixty-odd years now…..
I recall Spengler himself mentioning two different strains within German Classicists. One, Mommsen and his imitators who see the value in studies of coins, and pots, and the economy of ancient times; the other represented by Nietzsche who delved into the myths and literature and ignored the boring coins and pots. So we have the Classicists of the Classicists and the Romantics of the Classicists too, quite likely we see the same thing even in the Romantics.
Spengler’s solution, as I see it, is to point out that all these are just parts of the elephant of the Classical culture-organism, and moreover different tendencies within Faustian civilization itself feel drawn to the different parts.
Thanks for indirectly exploring the schism between sci-fi and fantasy and the evolution of the underlying worldviews. I’ve always wondered why fantasy novels must always have swords. Not spears, not projectiles, and even the highest-class wizards who can obliterate everyone within a half mile must be skilled with hand-to-hand combat and must use it when facing their arch-enemies.
And then we have Star Wars and Dune, where a sci-fi techno universe is under the guidance or a control of a medieval priestly cast that still must fight with swords (made of light!) or knives. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on that phenomenon some day!
Chuaquin, oh, all of us who belong to European or European-diaspora cultures are both. It’s purely a question of which (or what blend of which parts) we affirm and which we unsuccessfully try to repress.
Pygmycory, I don’t think I’ve heard that one yet — I’ll make a point of looking for a CD.
Aurelien, I didn’t know you were a SF author! (Would it be too personal to ask under what name you’ve published? I enjoy your blog enough that I’m quite sure I would like your fiction.) As for the complexity, of course — as with everything along the Classical-to-Romantic axis, the labels are binary but the reality is far more nuanced. Mind you, I grew up reading Analog magazine — my father had a subscription — which was the hardest of hard SF, so that doubtless biased me; also, I’m not sure British or European SF went as hard for the angry atheist/pseudoskeptic cause as the American SF scene did, and watching US science fiction conventions go hardcore Amazing Randy-ite also doubtless shaped my views. (That was when I gafiated from organized fandom, for whatever that’s worth.) That said, the interesting reception that’s been given to my SF and fantasy from within fandom circles suggests to me that the old distinction isn’t quite as arbitrary as it looks to you.
Alvin, as I noted to Chuaquin, everybody in Western civilization is both Classical and Romantic; it’s just a matter of which one we pretend to suppress.
Mark, that’s an intriguing point, and one I’ll want to reflect on. You’re right that non-sword weapons get embarrassingly short shrift. Why not maces, halberds, staffs, spears, or magic brass knuckles, for heaven’s sake? Hmm.
Here’s Kerson Leong’s performance of the Erlkonig.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7YBvRaxLi0
Youtube, but one doesn’t need to look. Though I must say, the empty darkened church with this one violinist playing furiously alone in a circle of light is very atmospheric!
Well worth a listen.
@Aurelien: Well said about SF. I have enjoyed a good chunk of cyberpunk. Sterling, Rucker, Gibson. Rucker is my favorite because of his humor. I like the way Sterling and Gibson have both grappled with climate change, and all the math and reality romps in Rucker. Even if I don’t think we will get to full immersion VR, I can also appreciate cyberpunk as an SF take on Noir crime novels in many senses.
And I like the satire of Pohl. Your comment about Reynolds early work being Gothic novels in space might actually get me to read him.
Hello Mr. Greer,
Thank you for your response to my question a few weeks ago. I appreciate the time you took to parse out my confused reaction to decline. I also appreciate your encouragement to keep writing. The links you sent (of your own work, both fiction and nonfiction) put me at ease. Us humans are a resilient group.
I have picked up your book, Decline and Fall. Halfway through and I am deeply fascinated with the text. Your summary of American history is clear and concise, and does a much better job of mapping truth than any AP U.S. History course could ever accomplish. You have a great prose style that engages readers in a practical and clear manner.
I am deeply fascinated with Wagner’s opera. I read the entire wikipedia summary of the operas after the second post. It is so exciting to read what you have to say about the operas.
Thank you again! Your writing and presence has certainly changed how I perceive writing, history, magic, and the world. Thank you!
Pygmycory #10 and JMG: “Der Erlkönig ” was originally a lieder and it’s terrifying:
Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind
Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm
Er fasst ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm
Mein Sohn
Was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?
Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?
Den Erlenkönig mit Kron’ und Schweif?
Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif
Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir
Gar schöne Spiele spiel’ ich mit dir
Manch’ bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand
Meine Mutter hat manch’ gülden Gewand
Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht
Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?
Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind
In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind
Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehen?
Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön
Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihen
Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein
Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein
Mein Vater, mein Vater
Und siehst du nicht dort
Erlkönigs Töchter am düsteren Ort?
Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh’ es genau
Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau
Ich liebe dich
Mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt
Und bist du nicht willig
So brauch’ ich Gewalt
Mein Vater, mein Vater
Jetzt fasst er mich an
Erlkönig hat mir ein Leid getan
Dem Vater grauset’s
Er reitet geschwind
Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind
Erreicht den Hof mit Müh’ und Not
In seinen Armen das Kind
War tot
JMG,
What does it say about our particular place in the arc of empire that few children today read, listen to, or watch any unadulterated versions the Grimm Brothers Tales? I read to my boys from a 1930’s edition passed down to me by my grandmother. But the full collection is not widely available ( to the ordinary suburban parent), only usually only a few of the popular stories are published. These are often adapted, disneyfied, or edited to suit the ” tastes” of modern children , though I think kids would like the original versions best if they got to choose.
Even worse the characters ( and beasts) from the tales are lifted out and used in Marvel Superhero movies as nothing but an excuse for boring CGI fighting. The most extreme example was the NBC TV series” Grimm” which reimagined characters from the tales as shapeshifting supernatural beings of all sorts being chased by monster hunters called ” Grimms.” This series was set and completely filmed in Portland OR because the producers found the atmosphere to be the most similar place in America to Medieval Germany ( forests, mist, dim light etc.), but maybe it was just the first place in America to be returning to medieval times.
So we have the classicists and the romantics, and in literature this is reflected in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. Could we find the middle ground between the two and create a new kind of fiction?
Mark #13 – “I’ve always wondered why fantasy novels must always have swords.”
Not to get all Freudian, but there is the obvious phallic aspect of swords and knives to consider. Frank Herbert went to extreme lengths to include knife/sword fighting in his Dune universe; the contortions involved always seemed excessive and unnecessary to me. A space-faring feudal society that fights with knives… it does seem preposterous and yet Dune is undoubtedly one of the great works of SF. I was blown away by Dune when it was published and have not lost my respect for Herbert in the decades and multiple re-readings since, but the fixation on pointy sticks for sticking people does seem excessively Romantic. But then again, it’s a Romantic tale, right?
Love this discussion! Thanks!
Among America’s Romanticists – Walt Whitman. Woody Guthrie. The entire hippie movement (And I’ll bet the year your music store clerk dismissed mountain dulcimer music with contempt was 1984. ) The entire re-enactor and RenFaire scene. “Where have all the flowers gone.”
I think swords were glamourized because of them being status symbol and needing more skill to be used. They always were a status symbol, ever since they were invented in bronze age because they needed to be made with metal(well there were those flint-knapped ones from scandinavia, but they were based on metal ones and were useless as a swords) and were the first weapon meant only for killing humans(we can argue about maces but they could be made from other, cheaper stuff and the metal ones were used and still are used as a symbol of office, for example in Poland). Also sword fencing are only survivng european martial art, aside from various local forms of boxing and wrestling.
Given how the Brothers Grim and Wagner deeply affected the growth of German nationalism in the 19th Century, I look forward to your exposition on how The Ring changed Western Civ. at political, emotional, and spiritual levels.
JMG, had two, “ah-ha!” moment reading that!
Another reason I think the middle ages is used as the setting for fantasy is to give the world a sense of stability and deep time, which is associated with the middle ages since from our cultures perspective, “nothing” happened, as in there was no progress of technology.
opposed to that is science fiction which is technology focused and to some quick definitive end, either utopia or dystopia.
the reason i think these are SEPERATE genres is because we can not accept the closing of histories cycle, because to maintain our “myth of progress”, the genre fantasy has to have a stable world because if there was ever technology they would assuredly start their inevitable road to progress, and sci fi must have an extravagant ending, since we must maintain that we are going to mars and becoming robots.
As you say, in reality technology is not so directional or stable and is less significant then we would like to think.
Speaking of people in the middle ages finding out about an advanced ancient civilization….. i would argue that is happening now as we see the carving techniques, large stones used for the pyramids, and highly symmetrical potteries and sculptures. I wonder who they think built the pyramids!
I hope you turn this series of essays into a book.
I re-read the paragraph about the name Alberich and I now see the error of my ways.
—
“Wagner’s influence as a shaper of the naotion of art … is totally pervasive. Indeed, one reason it is sometimes so hard to evaluate Wagner’s influence is because we are always within it. We can never get outside it, never see it as an organized stage picture. There is no vantage from which we can slip into the audience and look at it objectively. We try to contain it by saiying that Wagner’s legacy (along with Baudelaire’s and Flaubert’s) is that which we call modernism in art. But, for better or worse, it would be more accurate to say that Wagner’s legacy is that which any modern or post-modern -at the gut level- recognizes as art itself. whether our response is to go nodding off in boredom at the whole scattered operation, whether we wander about, gazing appreciatively up at this grandly engineered effect, or whether, now and again some aesthetic thunderclap galvanizes us for moments, hours, or years, shaking us to our footsoles.” –Samuel R. Delany, Wagner/Artaud
As far as weapons…swords are a nobility weapon and spears are a peasant weapon. Maces were specialized anti-armor weapons while halbers were useful against mounted armor. So, of course are you’re modern day heroes are of the nobility;)
@Mark L
I have a friend who is an amateur blacksmith and I have had the pleasure of working on a historical replica sword or two with him.
Swords have historically been prestige weapons, almost all throughout history, though I am sure there are some exceptions.. It takes more metal to make a sword than other polearm/wooden hafted weapons (especially a longsword or greatsword). It is cheaper, and easier, to make an axe, a spear, a halberd, etc.
The metal in a sword can also be folded and become an art piece in itself such as the case with Damascus patterning. In some medieval sword making manuals there are diagrams for sword making with complex geometric theory. Not to mention the spiritual and magical dimensions of sword making present in Japanese culture.
On top of all that, it takes practice and skill to use a sword. Again this indicates its use as a weapon of prestige. You need the free time to learn how to wield it properly. From what I understand, without training it can be ineffective against someone armed with a spear for example.
I guess all this is still in the collective psychie, it is considered a noble weapon.
That said, there are cultures, ancient and more recent, that revered the axe I think. The tomahawk comes to mind, as well as the stone boat shaped axes from the archaeological record in northern Europe.
I have always been curious as to why historically accurate hero epic films that go deep into obscure ancient hero types, real or imagined, have not been produced (outside of Roman and Greek). I assume the adventures of Widukind etc would feature a noble axe or two. Unfortunately it is cast as more of a brutal helmet smasher, such as depicted in more modern versions of Gawain and the Green Knight.
This is good stuff!! I You do a great historic comparative literature analysis and I appreciate your interpretation and presentation of the difference between Classicism and Romanticism, which until 20 minutes ago I knew nothing about. I wish you had a history podcast, it would be so enriching. I don’t have enough time to sit and read between being a housewife and nurse, so podcasts are a wonderful treat. I used to live in Germany and know what you are saying about their history. My education took the Classic route, I studied physiology/chemistry and the medical trade. Last week I took my teen son and hubby (who both prefer river rafting, camping or hiking to city vacations) to Rome. This essay is so apropos to our experience of seeing the timeline of Western culture layered in one city. A few things always stay constant – a taxed based kleptocracy usually runs things and Rome has been a tourist hot-spot (literally in the summer) and is expert in fleecing tourists for millennia. Because I am an ex-atheist/newly minted orthodox Christian, I also enjoy reading about your presentations of the spirituality of “magic” because it’s a different way of looking at the “unseen” world. Just wanted to say nice job and thanks!
Re the overuse of swords in fantasy, we can thank the pulp publishers and their cover artists here. Swords are a shorthand used to denote a medieval / barbarian era and were used to tell the prospective buyer they were getting a fantasy story, to the point where it went from shorthand to practically mandatory. It’s the same way a smoking handgun on a cover meant hard crime, a ray gun was used for scifi, or a knife for a murder mystery. It was enough of a trope by 1961 that Fritz Leiber coined the term “sword and sorcery” to describe high fantasy as a genre.
And, after all, no one ever won a kingdom by pulling brass knuckles out of a lake.
@JMG. You are very kind!
My current nom de plume for writing fiction is Daniel Crawford, and I’ve published a few stories in “New Maps” on de-industrial themes (though one had quite a bit of magic smuggled in.) I also appear in an anthology edited by one John Michael Greer that came out a couple of years ago.
Unfortunately I don’t have the time I would like to have to devote to writing fiction, and I have a number of other unfinished projects which I work on when I can. But there are only twenty-four hours in a day and I seem to be using at least twenty-five of them.
In addition to Classic and Romantic, it seems to me that Western civilization has a large element of the Magian/Abrahamic— i.e. the Near Eastern religious traditions that predate Classicism and Romanticism, imported to Europe in the form of Christianity. And this element is only getting stronger now with the arrival of large numbers of Muslims. Then there is the deconstruction of all of those cultural influences, which is another element we could call the Postmodern. It seems to me that Wagner is an artist for a different century and a different West that barely exists any more.
@katylina,
archery is still pretty popular, so fencing is not the only survivor.
“…all of us who belong to European or European-diaspora cultures are both [Classical and Romantic]. It’s purely a question of which (or what blend of which parts) we affirm and which we unsuccessfully try to repress.”
In the Cosmic Doctrine, if I recall correctly, the polarity between Ring-Cosmos and Ring-Chaos is expressed as their flowing at right angles to one another…
For the past wee while I have located a slightly different metaphor for a polarity in which the two poles are positioned at right angles to one another, and which ALSO has the merit of demonstrating the ongoing reliance each of those poles has upon the pulls and tugs of the other.
The reason I have searched for this metaphor, is, I think fairly obvious. Our social polarities are pulling us apart and driving us away from each other, and yet, we have no option but to continue sharing this common earth and common ground that we inhabit together, will we or nil we.
Lately, when faced with issues phrased in terms of (say) left and right, or red and blue, I have begun to play with expressing that opposition to myself as “warp” and “weft”… and it is producing interesting insights!
And so, I shall now muse upon the image of Classicism and Romanticism as the warp and the weft that weaves Western Civilisation together… but are in danger of cleaving it, should the threads fray…
Thank you for this post.
Pygmycory, thanks for this. I’ll see if I can get Youtube to let me listen to it instead of putting me on endless-loop ads.
MR, you’re most welcome and thank you.
Roldy, wow. Thank you for this — though I’m not sure I’ll feel the same way on the next windy night.
Clay, that’s utterly unsurprising; the plastic corporate pseudoculture that dominates modern America is fanatically hostile to anything that authentic. Fortunately this is a place where the Internet can help. For anyone who lacks one, here’s a very solid collection of 210 of their stories:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5314
And here’s an audio version, if you want someone to read them aloud in the grand old style:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20027
Spread these around, so that everyone who wants to give their children a good solid dose of old-fashioned stories can get them.
Enjoyer, it’s a grand idea, but it’s not new. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, before the pseudoskeptics muscled into the genre, it was often called “science fantasy” — an awkward term for a good genre. Andre Norton, a fine author too little appreciated these days, contributed a lot to that genre; her Witch World stories are a good place to start. Another fave of mine, if you can find it, is The Pastel City by M. John Harrison — that’s the novel, for whatever this is worth, that first got me thinking about the place of modern industrial society in human history as seen from the far future. If you’re inspired to write in that middle ground, though, give it a shot — now that the pseudoskeptics are in retreat, it might be possible to explore some new territory with it.
Ken, granted, but spears are just as phallic! Dune is a glorious piece of writing, no question, but yeah, I admired the handwaving Herbert used to smuggle knife fighting into his galactic Imperium but I never really believed it.
Patricia M, bingo. We’ll be talking down the road a bit about the astonishing parallels between 1848 and 1968.
Katylina, there are still some schools of staff and stick fighting in various parts of Europe, but they don’t get the good press that fencing does — and you’re almost certainly right that it’s a class issue.
Raymond, thank you and stay tuned.
Alex, two good points. The fascinating thing is that SF used to be able to explore alternative futures that didn’t go zooming off to the stars — does anyone remember Edgar Pangborn any more, or the aforementioned M. John Harrison? It hasn’t escaped my attention that right about the time the US shut down most of its manned space program, science fiction became almost hysterically obsessive about the whole “The Stars Are Ours!” schtick.
Thomas, thank you. We’ll see (a) whether it ends up at book length, and (b) whether I can find a publisher interested in anything so crashingly unfashionable.
Justin, I’m not a Delany fan but he certainly nailed that.
Candy, you’re welcome and thank you!
M Carole, that settles it. Magic brass knuckles have got to feature in some future novel of mine!
Aurelien aka Daniel Crawford, then I’ve read your fiction and enjoyed it — good to know. I know the feeling about the awkward shortage of spare hours per day…
Treebeard, of course the Classical-Romantic dynamic functions in a complex context in which various other cultural forces are also at work. I’m far from sure that Wagner is as outdated as all that, though — as I intend to show in future posts.
Scotlyn, hmm. And hmm again. Thank you for this; I’ll put some time into mulling it over — and yes, it may even become a theme for meditation. 😉
There’s a lot of fiction that blurs the boundaries of fantasy and science fiction, or that has technological progress.
For example, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels. Those set in the Ages of Chaos come across as high fantasy, while others set after recontact by terra are often more science fiction than fantasy, though how much depends on the type of story she’s telling and in which society it takes place.
Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series is solidly fantasy, but has technological progress. An ancient civilization heavily based on magic falling in The Black Gryphon, medieval in Vanyel’s time, and by the time of modern Valdemar there’s an exploding steam boiler as a plot point.
Edward Rice Burroughs novels may have been set on mars, but don’t seem very science based.
And then there’s Star Wars, which reads like high fantasy set in outer space.
Even Terry Brooks set sword of Shannara in the future. At one point in that novel they go running through the ruins of a modern city overgrown with greenery. And he’s now extended the series back into the near-present, with novels that read much more like science fiction.
There’s also warhammer, both fantasy and 40,000 versions. Fantasy had technological progress in terms of the development of firearms and recognisably changing social structures in the Empire that look a lot like they were borrowed wholesale from renaissance Europe. 40,000 is in space, but features far more in the way of lost technology, technological decline and rampaging demons than technological progress. The tau seem to be the only species actually managing to pull the latter off at the moment.
@Roldy(#18):
Thank you so much for “Der Erlkönig”! I first read about 60 years ago, once my German got good enough. It still resonates with me as strongly as it did all those decades ago.
And more generally, the Grimms’ Märchen are always a wonderful read in their original, undisneyfied and unbowdlerized, form. I have a good edition like that (published in 1912) in my bookcase of favorite reads, which I bought used in the early 1960s.. [It’s available through the Hathi Trust: babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924026138002&seq=9] You’ve prompted me to reread some of their tales tonight, starting (I think) with “Von dem Machandelboom” (#47), every bit as creepy as “Der Erlkönig.”
@JMG (#36): Right on about Ande Norton! She has always been one of my favorites. I’m particularly fond of her Witchworld books.
Thank you ! I learn so much from this rich corner of the internet
@pygmycory I can assure you the traditions run even deeper, I have been in a class with a UK police trainer who schooled us on the proper use of a shield wall in a phalanx, and this tactic can be seen in use today by riot police all over the world on any news channel you care to watch. Physics and biomechanics have not changed in the last 3000 years.
Thank you JMG for another fascinating post. Of course LOTR (the Peter Jackson version) is our modern Romanticism, and Star Wars the classical counterpart – both leaning heavily on later chivalric traditions and all of them devoted to the idea of individual heroic effort rather than the dirty, muddled real world of collective endeavour, a poisonous narrative that had given us billionaires and presidents.
@ Clay Dennis #19, @JMG
A retranslated version claiming to contain “The Complete Stories” was published in 1983 as “Grimm’s Tales for Young and Old”. I was interested to note that the “disneyfication” carried out when the stories were first translated to suit the taste of the English middle classes included leaving out the explicitly Christian stories.
These are not nice clean gutless stories of the sort spewed out of corporate orifices into the bored imaginations of today’s children. They are raucous, gritty, savage, and primal, which is why they’ve been so wildly popular with children ever since. They reach back through the ages to cultural strata so primitive that the fierce little animals we call “children” can instantly relate to them.
My favorite example of this is the difference between the Walt Disney version of “Snow White” and the Brothers Grimm version. In the Disney version, the evil queen in her guise as the peasant hag was chased off the edge of a cliff by the enraged dwarves when they saw what she had done to their beloved “Snow White”. Not a nice way to go, but it wasn’t entirely the fault of the dwarves that the evil queen was in too much of a panic to watch where she was going in her flight from them. In the Brothers Grimm version, the evil queen had a pair of red hot iron shoes forced on her feet and she was made to dance in them until she died as retribution for her misdeeds. And the tales in the Brothers Grimm collection are chock full of utterly nasty, old-fashioned German *schadenfreude* such as that!
The Grimm brothers were also the first editors of the biggest of all dictionaries of the German language. I saw the >20 huge tomes once in the university library and took a look at the introduction. You may think that collecting words dictionaries is just about the driest possible occupation, but that would mean you don’t know what a Romantic scholar is like! Jacob Grimm sings the praises of the “force and chasteness” of primeval German word composites (by which he probably means they avoided Romance suffixes). The whole dictionary is written in lower case.
I grew up not far from Kassel (where they collected their stories) and Göttingen (where they were liberal university professors, who were fired for defending the constitution). I found the trailer for the Hollywood movie referred to above very comical…
Like Shakespeare you don’t want to overthink it. They had melees and swordfights where everyone dies because people like it and think it’s exciting. Same with swords: Imagine a world where we use modern weaponry and long-range snipers as your “Single hero” genre, maybe with over-the horizon missiles and robot-operated drones. No? There’s no face-to-face showdown, no peak drama, no witty reparte’, no feats of physical prowess. Just standing there, talking to a Colonel, then boom, dead. Like hidden chess.
How about besides hidden ambush with bows, Kentucky sniper rifles, we use a face-to-face rush on the hero, one whack with a hatchet and counting coup or death? Nope, same thing. No standoff, no witty reparte’, seems unbearable berserker, bloodthirsty, thoughtless, although incredibly brave and effective. It’s just over too fast. Now compare to Kurosawa, the Samurai don’t need to hack away at each other like Rob Roy, but nevertheless, you have a nice, orderly, rules-based buildup, where everyone is aware and proceeding. Then a discussion, a standoff, a measure. Then one pass and one stroke to win or lose.
Again: so face-to-face. Known, mentally, with courage. With discussion and conflict.
This is why guns work but only in Westerns, or only in Chandler: the protagonists DISCUSS, talk a lot, face off, slowly and with rules.
As I say constantly, __The Gun Is Not a Communication Device__ for the love of God, or you’ll get everyone killed. It only is IN THE MOVIES. Real people pull them perhaps in America, unthinking, but the reality is if ANYONE pulls a gun, the other guy thinks “He’s not going to talk, this is not a time to talk, he is going to kill me.” The only answer to a drawn gun is shooting back instantly. …So to speak. South Park had a whole episode on this, where the whole family have revelational family therapy by pointing guns at each other. ….This is for books and movies only, sci fi and otherwise. Iraq is too out of range, 500meters and not talking much to each other at all. Yeah, if you’re writing a book, use a sword.
Speaking of British policing, have any of you been keeping an eye on the UK riots that have swept large parts of the country over the last week? In spite of PM Keir Starmer’s harsh crackdown and threats of retribution, they seem to be escalating, fueled in part by Starmer’s angry rhetoric aimed at protestors and his refusal to address conditions that have produced widespread discontent amongst the British working class to begin with.
For science fiction with a realistic strong fantasy element, I suggest S.M.Stirling’s Emberverse series. Full disclosure: it’s a post toastie sudden-catastrophe. But his world-building is wonderful on bringing out all the subcultures that spring up in the changed, post-industrial world into which magic is slowly creeping back. The magic is realistic as well. The people feel real. And I love the off-hand comment by one character somewhere in there “…except for Corvallis, which still thinks The Change was a broken carriage wheel on the road to progress.” Corvallis being “a University with a city-state attached.”
Caveat: Stirling is a major foodie; one can get easily bored by lengthy descriptions thereof. And the battles are as detailed as as you’d expect; again, a bit boring is you’re not into that. But on the good side, he does not indulge in prolonged sex scenes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emberverse_series
P.S. Plenty of weapons other than swords, again, described in loving detail. One used heavily in the series is basically a giant can-opener on a pole. And much attention is paid to the common people.
“Why not maces, halberds, staffs, spears, or magic brass knuckles”
I would certainly like to see a magical mace, hammer, or axe now and again. IIRC, Hindu mythology is chock full of completely wild divine weaponry.
“Andre Norton, a fine author too little appreciated these days”
I lucked into a massive trove of SF&F paperbacks a few years ago. Since then, I’ve been sporadically reading MZB’s Darkover books alongside Andre Norton’s old scifi and Witch World books. It makes for an interesting contrast: MZB writes like she despises science fiction, fantasy, and all points between, and her plots (in the early books at least, I haven’t tried the later ones) seem muddled and conflicted. Over all, the Darkover books are a chore for me.
On the other hand, Norton’s stuff is clear, vivid and gripping. It’s always a treat to read one of hers.
“There’s been a certain amount of fussing in recent years about the fact that the Grimms and their friends quite often rewrote the stories that they collected. Yes, that happened, but that was normal in those days; the current habit of blaming the past for not abiding by the fashions of the present is one of many marks of our pervasive modern chronocentric bigotries.”
Me thinks they doth protest too much! This happens all the time today: it’s just that the rewriting happens so the thing being rewritten can be made to support the Current Thing, whatever it happens to be. These rewritings can be a lot more thorough than anything the Brothers Grimm did! I’d thought this was just a case of the cult of authenticity, but now that I think about it, this also makes a lot of sense as a case of projection. Hmm…
On a very different note, your speculation on Romanticism moving from planet to planet made think of the possibility that it’s counterpart, Classicism, did the same; and I think the case can be made for it having shifted from Saturn (the natural ruler of the past; thus the emphasis on logic, reason, philosophers, and the distrust of strong emotions), then onto Neptune (thus the odd way that the Classicists became so strongly idealistic and detached from the realities of the Classical World they thought they were imitating), and then onto Pluto when it morphed into the odd cult of Science and Progress. This last one would almost certainly mean Romanticism shifted to Pluto as well, since one of the hallmark of the Plutonian is contending forces, the ongoing feud between the Mutant Classicism and Romanticism is among the defining features of the 20th century.
Hi John Michael,
So Wagner learned the hard way that eventually the old, nah, I won’t ruin the surprise. 🙂 It was all just a blip for the Europeans.
In other news, I’ve been scratching my head at comments the Federal Treasurer made recently about government spending and it’s effect on inflation. The RBA expects to keep interest rates on hold. It’s bad news for mortgage holders and a reality check for the government.
Here’s a quote from the article: Nor would the Treasurer accept his budget spending is going to keep inflation higher for longer. “I don’t accept that. I don’t agree with that. I don’t think that’s what the statement says in essence,” Chalmers said.
Federal government deficit spending, especially when the Reserve Bank is doing the funding, will mostly always expand the money supply thus fuelling inflation. That is not a complicated story. So I can’t really work out whether the dude is stupid, lying or merely ignorant. There’s probably some other reason too that hadn’t popped into my head.
What’s even worse is that the article went on to note: The RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia) was careful not to draw a direct link to its decision on rates, but it has made clear government spending is now a driver of growth in the economy. Its forecast for growth in public demand has nearly doubled from 2.1 per cent to 4.1 per cent this financial year.
All I can hear are your words echoing in the background like a solid reality check. They were something along the line of: When most economic activities becomes a losing game And here we are today.
Have you got any clear (or even vague) idea as to where things are headed? Cans cannot be kicked down the road indefinitely. Might be time for a re-read of John Kenneth Galbraith’s classic book on 1929 and the events thereafter.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Almost forgot to mention. When I was a young bloke, sci-fi was a bit more loose and wove both Classicism and Romanticism together. One of the reasons I so enjoy my Jack Vance collection is that he took from both and made fictional worlds where the characters were human.
I stopped reading new release sci-fi many years ago because the stories became repetitively boring. AI + Enhanced Humans + Vast amounts of energy. Dull.
Cheers
Chris
Hey JMG
Out of curiosity, is this “Classicism Vs Romanticism” thing purely a Western Phenomenon, or are there equivalents elsewhere? I personally think that it reminds me of the conflict between Confucianism and Taoism in China and its Neighbours.
How odd that Classicism and Romanticism are thought polar opposites, when you consider that the word “romantic” comes from a French phrase (Rome antique) meaning “ancient Rome.” So an historical touchstone of the Classical world is the very definition of all that is Romantic.
Also it seems to me that even Greek mythology has within it figures that are anticlassical, in the sense that they are antithetical to the logic-chopping emotion-suppressing philosophy you have mentioned. Dionysos comes mind, and so do some of the Titans.
My favorite author of science fantasy is Ray Bradbury, who incidentally had great advice for writers and other creative people.
I personally prefer to use the term SciFi for science fiction. Because of where I am from, to me SF means San Francisco, a once thriving and interesting place that now alas has succumbed to the Attilas of our time, like in that mural by Delacroix.
@Ariel,
I’ve been watching that a bit. One noticeable thing was the complaints by the zerohedge crowd that there are actually two sets of angry protestors, one nativist and the other islamic immigrant. And they’re being policed very differently and reported on very differently in the mainstream press. In particular, the islamic ones are being very much downplayed when they’re mentioned at all, while the nativist ones are getting threats of giant government crackdowns, major police presences at protests, and pilloried in the press.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/british-pm-standing-army-riot-police-hand-deal-far-right-thuggery
What’s your take on matters?
@Joan #42: Maybe because quite a number of the Christian stories are Catholic or at least involve Our Lady?
Pygmycory, Darkover is classic science fantasy, so thanks for the reminder. I can’t speak to Lackey’s work, as the two of her novels I read left enough of a bad taste in my mouth that I wrote a brief and rather nasty parody, titled “Flaming Koolaid,” and left it at that. (It gets really dreary to have an endless parade of Good Witches and Bad Ceremonial Magicians written by someone who doesn’t seem to know much about either, just for starters.) But yes, as I noted, there’s plenty of middle ground between the two.
Robert M, she’s been a fave of mine since I was ten or so, and first read Uncharted Stars.
She deserves much more attention than she gets these days.
KenV, you’re welcome. I try to keep things good and weird here.
MJP, you’re welcome. I’m not sure I’d call Star Wars classical, though — it’s a chambara (Japanese samurai flick) that somehow wandered into the wrong part of the studio filming lot. 😉
Joan, I’m glad to hear that a more complete edition is out in print.
Mister N, yep. When you were a kid, didn’t you enjoy ghoulish things like that? I certainly did.
Aldarion, the Grimms don’t seem to have slept much!
dZanni, notice that you’ve just explained how to do it gracefully: have rules. The Western novel was a wildly successful genre, and other genres can do the same thing with guns. BTW, I take if you haven’t read much Chandler; his gunfights rarely involve much conversation. The gunfight between Marlowe and Canino in The Big Sleep is a good example: very few words, plenty of flying lead, and an ugly and sudden end. Chandler and Hammett both went for realism, and it worked well. The better Western writers did the same thing: talk happens, but once somebody goes for his gun, it’s bangety-bang and somebody topples over. It makes for great scenes.
Ariel, it interests me that so many people think that the Starmer regime is overreacting. Quite the contrary, they have a matter of weeks to put a lid on this or Starmer may well end up having to flee the country like the recently deposed Bangladeshi head of state. This is the kind of situation that can bring down governments — by which I don’t mean Starmer’s administration goes away and is replaced by another. I mean that the British political system might just end up being replaced entirely by a revolutionary government…and I’m sure we can all name some countries who would likely be very eager to help that happen.
Cliff, Indian epic literature is full of glorious magical weapons of all kinds, so that’s a good call. Glad to hear that you’re finding Norton to your taste!
Taylor, a fascinating possibility. I hope that fantasy, at least, succeeds in making the leap to Neptune, where it will find a congenial home. 😉
Chris, is your country’s Federal Treasurer an economist? If so, that would explain it. I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith who suggested that economics exists to make astrology look respectable. 😉 I expect the current frantic juggling act to come crashing down at some point, though predicting when is an exercise for fools — but, yeah, a reread of The Great Crash 1929 is already on my agenda. As for Jack Vance, oh, my, yes — there’s a writer who could dance from high fantasy to science fiction and back again without missing a beat.
J.L.Mc12, it’s strictly a Western thing, but there are parallel phenomena in other cultures.
Kevin, yes, that’s just one of many ironies at work in that business.
Government spending could drive growth if they were building infrastructure, but somehow I doubt it.
As for the more usual boondoggles,
“For weeks, NASA has downplayed problems experienced by Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft that took two astronauts to the International Space Station in June. But on Wednesday, NASA officials admitted that the problems with the spacecraft were more serious than first thought and that the astronauts may not travel home on the Boeing vehicle, after all. The agency is exploring a backup option for the astronauts, Suni Wiliams and Butch Wilmore, to hitch a ride back to Earth on a vehicle built by Boeing’s competitor SpaceX instead. Their stay in orbit, which was to be as short as eight days, may extend into next year. ”
As an engineer who has done a fair bit of failure analysis I hope Boeing can bring the vehicle back unmanned so they can see first hand what went wrong.
It’s also worth noting the whole scheme rhymes with that ditty containing the words “for a three hour tour.”
In good news the landslide formed dam in BC washed out without too much fuss.
Well, there’s nothing new under the sun after all. I’ll get my hands on the Witch World books and on The Pastel City. I want to write at least one decent book in my life. As long as I try a bit each day I’ll end up with something. If I did write something it would take place in the very deep future, centered around beings that are descended from humans and but would look very alien to people from 2024.
Also- in a previous comment on the Open Post you asked for Dr. Nick Literski’s paper on the Smith Family Lamen. I reached out to him and asked for a copy, he said he will publish it in paper form as part of a larger work soon. For now he has a recording of a powerpoint presentation on it. I know you prefer not to watch videos, so I will make sure to get you a copy of the paper as soon as it becomes available. Just in case if you want to watch the presentation, here’s a link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhPsyJwxjqM&t)
Also, here’s a link to some of Literski’s papers on Mormonism and other subjects, such as cave paintings which I have grabbed in PDF form. (https://www.mediafire.com/folder/cqme8f2h1zuw0/Dr._Nick_Literski_Papers)
PS, thebirdnerd has several good YouTube videos on the Chilcotin river landslide and dam washout. No blathering newscasters either.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nlw2sv_SqAM
@Scotlyn,
In regards to your meditations on the warp and weft of the fabric of civilization, you might be interested in this essay: https://www.greekmyths-interpretation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/The-Cycles-of-the-Mind.pdf The author considers history in cycles of separating and fusional periods (separating being focused on individuation, fusional being focused on unification, which I think might correlate with aspects of Classical and Romantic). And though he doesn’t blatantly mention The Cosmic Doctrine or The Kybalian, he makes some statements that make me thinks he’s studied them.
I very much like your metaphor of weaving. I can see it at different levels, and it will be fun to dissect some of my understandings as cloth. Thank you!
(@JMG,
You might enjoy the essay, too. He riffs off Spengler and comes up with a cycle/rhythm that relates to astrology.)
I love learning history from you!
I think the main reason I did not like history in school was that the teachers were not really allowed to teach anything but a politically sanitized version of history, punctuated by accounts of shocking brutality to keep the kids awake.
Re: the thirty years war and how awful it was, Sabaton wrote a really good song about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plEiIPmTRUo
For my money, it’s one of the most powerful antiwar songs I’ve ever heard.
At first, I was quizzical about the detail of European and especially German history you were getting into for your mainly American public. Then, when I got to “…the first thing they had to do, in order to become properly educated, was to forget as much as possible about their own cultural heritage and embrace a stuffed and mounted imitation of…”, it struck me why you were doing this. And a few lines later you made the comparison to Europhile Americans explicit!
@Jerry Van Polen #4,
Thank you for your post. Very valuable information, and I can certainly relate to your experience. Everywhere I go, I am electrosensitive.
In another two weeks, I can offer up prayers for you, if you would like. (I am still in mourning currently, which makes it inadvisable for me to approach the Divine according to the traditions of my religion (Shinto).
It occurs to me I should probably provide the lyrics for ‘A lifetime at War’ these are the english lyrics. The swedish version is substantially different.
Two ways to view the world
So similar at times
Two ways to rule the world
To justify their crimes
By kings and queens young men
Are sent to die in war
Their propaganda speaks
Those words been heard before
Two ways to view the world
Brought Europe down in flames
Two ways to rule…
Has man gone insane?
A few will remain
Who’ll find a way
To live one more day
Through decades of war?
It spreads like disease
There’s no sign of peace
Religion and greed
Cause millions to bleed
Three decades of war…
From dawn to dawn they’re fighting
Die where they stand
The fog of war lies thick
When armies scorch the land
When all of Europe is burning
What can be done?
They’ve been to war a decade
Two more to come!
Long way from home
(Döpas och dö i strid)
Lifetime at war…
Has man gone insane?
A few will remain
Who’ll find a way
To live one more day
Through decades of war?
It spreads like disease
There’s no sign of peace
Religion and greed
Cause millions to bleed
Three decades of war…
When they face death they’re all alike:
No right or wrong
Rich or poor…
No matter who they served before
Good or bad…
They’re all the same
Rest side by side now…
Has man gone insane?
A few will remain
Who’ll find a way
To live one more day
Through decades of war?
It spreads like disease
There’s no sign of peace
Religion and greed
Cause millions to bleed
Three decades of war…
Has man gone insane?
A few will remain
Who’ll find a way
To live one more day
Through decades of war?
It spreads like disease
There’s no sign of peace
Religion and greed
Cause millions to bleed
Three decades of war…
I’ll wager Goetterdammerung for Einhundert, Trebek!
Keeping with our discussion last week, this all links up with the Reformation, and it makes sense that specifically in Germany folklore would explode back into the picture like this due to its role in the Reformation.
Those who are pointing out the Romantic version of these tales got rid of the Christian origin have it the wrong way around; Catholicism had picked them up and repackaged them in a Christian form, and the Reformation in its austere cleansing had booted them back out into folk land.
Apropos swords as a class symbol: many, if not most, armies still have them for officers for dress occasions. Very few have them for enlisted men. The British army horse guards come to mind; I’m sure there are others, though not many. US marines had, probably still have, swords for officers, cutlases for NCOs.
Stephen
Siliconguy, I grew up in Seattle back when Boeing could still make things that flew well. That was a long time ago. The investigative reporter who writes up the story of the Lazy B’s decline and fall will have a bestseller.
Enjoyer, got ’em and thank you! Let me know when the larger work is published and I’ll pick up a copy. In the meantime, please do write that science fantasy — it’s a worthwhile genre.
Patricia O, I have a personal grudge against every schoolteacher who makes history dull. Real history is anything but dull; it’s got more twists and turns than any thriller ever written, and it manages to be comic, tragic, heroic, and absurd all at the same time.
Pygmycory, thanks for this. Brecht’s play Mother Courage, which is set in the Thirty Years War, has a similar theme.
Aldarion, oh, it’s partly that, but it’s also partly that Americans are so stupid about other countries precisely because they never learn any history that isn’t Americacentric — even when our teachers talk about Egypt or China they’ve always got one eye on this country. It’s by getting a sense of what history looks like elsewhere that Americans can learn that the US is one nation among many, and if it makes the same idiotic mistakes as other nations it’ll suffer the same miserable consequences.
Willow, that was certainly a factor.
One of my favorite authors who combines SciFi and fantasy is Ursula K. Leguin, though her SciFi is more a device to set up the stage for human, or other sentient being, interaction.
Another, who also does this, is Mary Doria Russell, who I like very much.
Again apropos swords: The union cavalry in the American civil war stopped carrying them, as the cavalry functioned as dragoons and recon and the swords got in their way.
stephen
I read a long time ago that the ancient Chinese called their Roman contemporaries a ‘kingdom of many kingdoms’. Maybe that was a good way to think about it, a Roman ruling clique and regional governors alternately bribing-placating-flattering and then brutally cracking down on local kings and chiefs if they didn’t stay bought.
Maybe that relatively decentralized model of governance was the secret to its long duration. And then, after it was gone, it looked like people spent a lot of time trying to reconstitute it, even today with the EU or in the old days with the Holy Roman Empire.
But I wonder what the world would have looked like if the Roman Empire had never taken shape, for example, if Carthage had won the Punic wars. The Romans were, to my mind at least, farmers, builders, engineers, soldiers, legislators. But they knew their limitations, which is why they looked up to the Greeks and their achievements, or so I’ve heard.
But if Rome had just stayed one of a gang of squabbling city states, would we be better off now? Imagine what could have developed without the smothering effect of Greco-Roman culture. Would Christianity have spread without Roman roads and Roman soldiery adopting the faith? What could have developed in its place?
If you go to DC, you start thinking that a Roman senator would look at the architecture and feel at home. I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Maybe too much looking back. You bog down. You fossilize. You obsessively study the classics, the same set of writers decade after decade and century after century. What about new writers? When do they get their place in the pantheon? We study history. Has anyone ever learned from history?
Does this imply that the Prussian totalising military state only existed because they were all Romaboos?
Pygmy Cory et al,
I think this is one of the most powerful anti war poems I know:
The wind is level now,
the earth is wet with dew,
The storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth,
We who never let each other sleep above it.
Maria Tsvetayeva
1892-1941
So if Classical and Romance are basically just adult fanfic then maybe I should cut today’s pop culture some more slack.
I always wondered where the togas in Classic Science Fiction came from. Now I have an answer!
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrystalSpiresAndTogas
But what about the crystals? Another relic of Classical influence on Sci-fi?
Another excellent article, this series is turning into my second-favorite right after the Disenchantment series.
I am always a bit puzzled by the amount of alchemy in the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Snow White has black hair, white skin, red lips. So does the Sleeping Beauty. So, in fact, do quite a few princesses. These colors do not look accidental to me.
Perhaps I am stretching myself a bit too far when I focus the part where Snow White has to go hide in a Green Forest. Like the sun being devoured by Green Lions (Lyons?) in the Alchemic lore. Also, the Seven Dwarfs appear too frequently, and Seven is also the number of Planets, so there is that.
Again, there is Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods, wooed by the witch who tries to devour them. I wonder if the two of them are allegorically the Soul and Spirit. Likewise for Snow White and Rose Red in their eponymous story.
“That was when high school students across the United States, for example, stopped learning Latin and started taking classes in science instead. ” – There is also a notion that instead of foreign languages, kids should be allowed / forced to learn a programming language.
Interestingly, the programming language of C seems to take the same role as Latin – It’s a harder language than the more fashionable Python and gets a lot less use in practice, but contains nuance that requires you to think of stuff Python lets you ignore.
And much like how even today translating Latin is still needed, some critical pieces of code are still written in archaic languages like Fortran, giving scholars of those programming languages ample employment.
@RandomActsofKarma – Thank you!
Surely part of the reason you picked The Nibelung’s Ring for this series of posts is because it is centred on Germany, the European heartland. As far as mainland Europe is concerned, like it or not, it’s Germany which dictates what goes on in the continent.
I spent 34 years working for a multinational organisation in the EU and many of my colleagues were Germans, several of whom became good friends of mine. During that time, these colleagues would frequently beat their chests about the Deutsche Wirtschaftswunder, how the German economy was the strongest in Europe and how (until the introduction of the euro) the Deutsche Mark was the strongest currency. One of these friends once accusingly asked me how the British economy could possibly work since it didn’t produce anything. I told him banking and insurance mainly even though I thought he had a point.
Now, the Germans have taken over the EU Commission with serial grifter and devouring mother Jungian archetype, Ursula von der Leyen, just as Germany’s collective brain has gone out to lunch for the foreseeable future. It’s like the country has chosen a nice green hill to commit hara-kiri on using the ceremonial sword of Baerbock. Waving away any possible help from a nearby potentially friendly bear and happily exposing its entrails to ravenous bald eagles and packs of jackals and hyenas. The trouble is, this suicide will leave a hole so big that it seems certain to suck the rest of the continent down into it.
Perhaps the only good to come out of this, at least from a European perspective, is the doubtless fertile land between the Rhine and Elbe from which in due course will sprout fabulous new tales of great treasures, terrible monsters, heroic deeds and incredible derring do.
I only wish I could say “I can’t wait.”
@JMG,
I would not wrap the Latin and Greek languages together. They played very different roles in Europe, often in opposition to each other.
I do not think that Latin and Greek together were the languages of the “Classical” elite, while fairy tales were at the root of the “Romantic” lower classes. Instead, Greek and German culture were together used as tools to build a new German identity, in opposition to “Latin” France and to the Church.
The Church had kept the Latin language and much of Latin culture very much alive for centuries already, but Greek only reappeared in the West around 1500, and never achieved the same cultural prominence as Latin, at least not in Southern Europe.
The French appropriated Latin culture as their own, as a symbolic continuity of ancient Roman greatness and French greatness in the Grand siecle, the XVII century. They did it to wean themselves off an inferiority complex towards Italian culture and as a propaganda tool: for example, when Louis XIV crossed the Rhine to conquer the Netherlands in 1682, French intellectuals made all sorts of noises about the king outdoing Julius Caesar and conquering the unruly Germanic Dutch (he failed, by the way).
In the 1700s, if you wanted to be an intellectual, you had to master Latin. If your mother tongue was romance, or even English, then Latin came relatively natural to you, and you could claim ancestry of the noble Romans etc. This excluded the Germans almost by definition, and many members of the lower German elites were not happy about it. Greek was a very distant second language of culture, and was viewed with suspicion as a language of Protestants (Catholics used Latin translations) and heathens.
The German higher echelons were very much ready to disown their own culture and assimilate into the French way of life: Frederick I (Frederick the Great’s grandfather) desperately tried to conform to French standards of style and lavishness, and wanted to make Berlin into a “second Versailles”, even at the cost of bankrupting the small and poor Prussian state.
Frederick the Great himself tried his whole life to become a proficient French writer, putting up with all sorts of abuse from Voltaire, who despised him at some level. When asked, Frederick dismissed all claims of potential German cultural greatness: he spoke a German dialect and French, his Hochdeutsch was poor at best, and could not stand the Germans as such, whom he regarded as provincial, vulgar and small-minded (and in the case of his own father Friedrich-Wilhelm, he was probably correct).
Note that many Germans, especially west of the Elb river, still think about themselves that way.
But of course Germany *was* becoming great, with the likes of Hoelderlin, Goethe, Mozart, and the development of the great German universities. The shifting of power from the Mediterranean to the Mitteleuropa could not be ignored after the Seven Years War. The Germans were getting over their centuries-old inferiority complex towards the Mediterranean peoples and needed a cultural ancestry to match the French.
They also needed to escape the cultural supremacy of the Roman Church, which meant that their cultural canon had to shift away from everything Latin. So by the end of the 1700s, they turned to studying Greek in opposition to Latin. They “colonized” Greek culture with the usual German Masslosigkeit (lack of measure), and turned Greek into their own high language of culture.
The interest for Greek culture opened the door to the discovery of other non-Christian cultural ancestry, like German folklore tales, but also Persian and Egyptian culture.
Bu It was not so much “a chasm through the middle of German society, between those who aspired to the status of cultured people and those who didn’t”: it was a strife between those who looked at France and Italy, and those who wanted to be intellectuals with a German identity.
‘…they don’t get the good press that fencing does…’
Quarterstaff fighting requires a much greater range of skills than fencing, and it’s also a lot of fun. So it’s hard to fathom why it’s so obscure and unpopular.
>Federal government deficit spending, especially when the Reserve Bank is doing the funding, will mostly always expand the money supply thus fuelling inflation. That is not a complicated story. So I can’t really work out whether the dude is stupid, lying or merely ignorant.
He may not feel he has a choice. Or he is choosing the least painful short term choice, amongst a set of choices that are all painful.
“I’ll see if I can get Youtube to let me listen to it instead of putting me on endless-loop ads.”
That’s why I use addons to block ads and various other sites to watch Youtube, which Youtube constantly tries to block, so there is sometimes a process of finding which site works at that moment. Invidious is a bunch of instances, front-ends, etc. for showing youtube:
https://docs.invidious.io/instances/#list-of-public-invidious-instances-sorted-from-oldest-to-newest
I think I mentioned Robert Pattison’s Triumph of Vulgarity. Pattison says Romanticism is alive and will in the form of Rock and Roll, but in a vulgar form.
@JMG:
“Americans are so stupid about other countries precisely because they never learn any history that isn’t Americacentric”
Thanks for this comment, I was just reflecting on this recently.
I’ve been on the internet for many a long year, been witness to many a discussion, and I’ve concluded that with very rare exception, I’m not much interested in discussing Canada or Canadian affairs with Americans, ever again. Present company may be excepted.
(This is partly because, as displayed by recent events in the UK, things are Getting Real out there, and the era of bookish, abstract internet discussion is perhaps drawing to a close. But it’s not just that.)
I have developed a personal guideline, in the vein of Godwin’s Law, that goes something like: if an American on the internet says something about Canada, it’s gonna be dumb.
It doesn’t matter how intelligent or educated the writer is, their misconceptions always disappoint.
For a long time I asked myself, “Why is this? Why are they like this?”
And at some point it dawned on me: it’s because to Americans, Canada isn’t a real place. Canada is an IDEA that slots within the American worldview, to serve as a foil for American ideas.
This may be easier to explain by way of an example, so I’ll use the easiest one that comes to mind, which is guns. My stars, if I had a loonie for every time I saw an American online write something like:
“If only you Canadians had guns.”
“That’s what happens when your society becomes disarmed.”
Etc, etc.
Meanwhile every time I read this – and I’ve seen variations of it dozens upon dozens of times – I’m sitting thinking, they don’t know how many people in this country have basements full of guns. Why o why do they continue to think this??
Well, it’s because to them, Canada is an IDEA that exists to contrast and highlight concepts about the USA that they consider important. In the American mythology, Canada is the “anti-USA”. They think: the USA is the freest, gun-friendliest country in the world (true as far as it goes), and so by contrast, then, other countries like Canada “must” not have any guns. “Because we’re the ones who have them.”
To Americans on the right of the political spectrum, Canada becomes a mythical dystopia characterized by all of the ideas that the writer wishes not to be, which is why I’ve seen any number of forums or videos of people saying stuff like, “screw that commie country, I’d never go there.”
To Americans on the left of the political spectrum, Canada becomes a promised land characterized by all of the ideas that the writer DOES wish to be. Which is why I’ve seen no shortage of pilgrims, usually with New York State license plates and cars plastered with Bernie/Hillary/COEXIST stickers, coming here to visit because they think that’s what we’re like and that’s what we want.
And they’re both invariably wrong, because they both only have an IDEA of what Canada is, an IDEA that only makes sense when contrasted with the USA.
Anyway. This is all with apologies to our actual thoughtful friends on this forum – I’m not trying to be inflammatory, it’s just that it’s a phenomenon I’ve seen over and over and over: there’s little effort to actually understand other countries, there’s only a desire to use common perceptions about other countries in order to bolster the mythology about the USA.
dZanni #45
Stage fencing is very different from historical swordfighting. It has to always face the camera or the audience in a two dimensional way and all the movements have to be highly exaggerated. In historical swordfighting if you make a single mistake your opponent will capitalize on it instantly. So there is really very little for any bystanders to see, and there is certainly no backwards and forwards of attacks and parries. There are a lot of conventions in stage fencing like the compulsory close quarters stalemate where the swordsmen manfully push against each other. Fight choreographers also have to exclude anything that might confuse or upset the viewers, like an attack to the feet or a headbutt. 🙂
Stephen, so noted; I haven’t read Russell.
Smith, sounds like a good theme for an alternative-history novel. As for learning from history, yes, it does happen — one of the reasons why the Chinese Empire lasted for more than three thousand years is that every aspirant to the Imperial mandarinate had to study history.
Synthase, it was certainly one of the reasons. “Romaboos” is a keeper, by the way — not least for all those men who think every day about the Roman Empire. 😉
KVD, that’s funny, but it’s not entirely wrong.
StarNinja, I’m not sure about the crystals. Anyone else?
Rajarshi, alchemy was hugely popular in medieval and Renaissance Germany, perhaps more popular than in any other part of Europe. So it’s not impossible…
Four Sided, ha! Yeah, that makes plenty of sense.
Hereward, no, I picked it partly because I’m a nearly lifelong fan, and partly because it’s arguably the most influential single artistic creation in the history of post-Roman Europe. The fact that it’s German in origin, and thus ties in very well with the rise and fall of European civilization, was lagniappe.
Disc_Writes, interesting. Can you recommend some sources on this?
Tengu, because it’s a peasant weapon. Class snobbery runs very deep.
Lunchbox, thank you for this!
Bradley, he’s not wrong.
Bofur, most Americans don’t even know much about their own country. I certainly didn’t — despite having what passes for a good US education, I reached adulthood with only the vaguest and most wildly inaccurate notions of every part of the country I hadn’t visited. I’ve come to think that to Americans, there are no real places. “America” isn’t a real place; it’s an idea, or more precisely a fantasy, as imaginary as Oz and rather less realistic. Britain, in American eyes, is another fantasy kingdom, even less realistic. Canada? It’s not even an afterthought. It’s a vague sense that since the United States doesn’t actually extend all the way to the North Pole, there must be some country or other in the way — and you’re right, of course, that so blank a screen makes a good place to put various clueless projections. I sometimes wonder if someday us USians will blink awake and realize that the country and the world we thought we lived in were all a dream…
“I’ve come to think that to Americans, there are no real places. “America” isn’t a real place; it’s an idea, or more precisely a fantasy”
That’s very interesting, I hadn’t thought about it that way – that to USians, maybe other places are “just ideas” because the USA itself is just an idea. Thanks for this.
In the eastern end of India, there is a marshy land known as Bengal. I was actually born there, so I happen to have grown up on a steady diet of the local folklore. The local “fairy tales” here were traditionally passed down by grandmothers to grandchildren, and my grandmother told me those stories when I was a really young boy of five years or less. One of the things I find surprising is how much those tales have in common with the tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Some of the motifs of our folklore can be traced back to very popular dramas and plays from the Gupta Era (mid-third to mid-sixth centuries AD), some of them accredited to the famous poet and dramatist Kalidasa. For instance, there is the recurring theme of the fisherman finding a treasure or something magical inside the belly of a fish he catches, which dates back to Kalidasa’s epic drama named Shakuntala.
Another curious recurring theme is the “golden stick and silver stick” – a princess is cursed to lie in eternal slumber, and can only be awakened if a magical stick of gold and another of silver are brought from a distant and magical land and placed on her forehead. These sticks are usually guarded by an evil giant, and a gallant prince travels there to fight him. Also common is the theme of the Life Bird – a monstrous being (such as the aforementioned giant) has hidden his life inside a talking bird, and cannot be killed until that bird has been slain first. And of course, there is the classic motif of “Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers”, the distance which has to be covered by the gallant princes to get the faraway magical lands where their destinies await them.
But what I find common with the Germanic tales is the repetition. In the German tales, a character tries something and makes a mistake. Then they try again, and either succeed or make a mistake again. This continues for a few times until they heed proper counsel and then get it right. Or not, and they make a mistake and must heed counsel again. I find that there is a lot in common between this and the fairy tales in India. This bungling, failing, and somehow qualifying protagonist appears to be a common theme in fairly tales.
In the early twentieth century, an intellectual went around the rural parts of Bengal and collected the local fairy tales, and published them in a book titled “Grandmother’s Bag” (as in, granny’s bag o’ tales). A translated version is available here, but as is the case with fairy-tales everywhere, the sweetness has not entirely been preserved in translation:
https://www.ezcc-india.org/pdf/book/bag.pdf
@smith #72: The Roman republic and the earlier Roman empire (until the crisis of the 3rd century AD) had very little civilian administration, though the frontier provinces of course supported an army presence. It was just the city administration of Rome, and later a couple of hundred freedmen in the Caesar’s household who managed to coordinate all the tax collection, public works, petitions etc.
This only worked because the local elites in each provincial town were so eager to imitate Rome, all on their own. They were the ones who payed for constructing the local forum, amphitheatre, aqueduct, roads etc.
Once the admiration for Rome had cooled down (in part because of Rome’s problems, in part because the provinces had caught up), the empire nearly broke up in pieces. Diocletian and Constantine put it back together but at the cost of a huge, bloated public administration using a lot of force.
After a century, that broke down, too (in Northern Gaul, Britain and Germany around 380 AD), and since then, the North Sea / channel-facing parts of Europe have never again been stably united with the Mediterranean parts in a single state (though of course the cultural influence was still immense).
@Bofur (#86)
Notice what color the Canada flag is…..
I love the Viriconium tales by M. John Harrison as well. I liked his later SF novel titled Light pretty well too.
@ Bofur– A little while ago I started noticing certain patterns that occur whenever Americans and Canadians talk with one another. I see this specifically on podcasts, which I listen to often. The American very often slips in some awkward joke about you guys “up there in Canadia-land” or something to that effect. I was trying to figure out why this is, and so I examined my feelings about Canada.
It seems to me that there is something about Canada that Americans find very confusing and very hard to process. Canada is in North America, so it is in America. But it isn’t America. But it’s not a totally different culture, like Mexico. Canadians look like Americans, they talk like Americans, and, when you step out a bit, they’re governed rather like Americans. But they aren’t Americans. What is even stranger, they don’t even seem to WANT to be Americans! One looks at history, and the puzzle only deepens. Canadians COULD have been Americans. They had the chance. They declined. They were given a second chance. Again, they refused. How could this be? The mind recoils.
And so the American is left with an awkward joke to cover his longstanding national confusion.
Now, to be fair to my countrymen, I’ve seen certain patterns from Canadians online as well. In particular, a certain type of Canadian seems to be incapable of talking about their country without talking about America, Americans, and how they’re not America or Americans. At times it seems like many Canadians have an entirely negative identity, like the apophatic theology of Dionysius applied to nationality. “We cannot say what Canada is, but only what it is not.” I remember an old Kids in the Hall skit from the 90s in which a traveler is approached in a foreign country by a local who thinks he is an American. The traveler replies, “No, I’m Canadian. It’s like an American but without the hand gun.”
I was in Canada for the first time recently. I can usually get a good feel for the spirit of a place, and so I tried to get a sense of it. The experience of crossing the border is both like and unlike crossing into another US state. I was near Toronto, and the culture seemed closer to upstate New York than either of those are to California or South Carolina. And yet, I want to be completely honest with you: A part– a small part, but a real part– of me was sincerely confused at the sight of a thriving, normal, and English-speaking society, not radically different from any functioning American city (to the extent that any such remain), and yet somehow not America. I’m American myself, at the end of the day, and the reality of Canadia-land is, in a certain final sense, something my mind is not quite able to bear.
Fascinating essay. In another life you could be the greatest high school history teacher ever. (I had a good one for which I am eternally grateful, but it would never have occurred to him to integrate the Nibelungenlied into his lectures on the Renaissance and the Thirty Years War, nor did he illuminate with such clarity as you have done the Classical/Romantic divide.)
Remarkable — and rarely noted — that for two consecutive centuries the most influential works of art were essentially retellings/recastings of the same body of Old German, Norse, and Icelandic myth: Wagner’s Ring cycle and Tolkien”s Lord of the Rings. What does that tell you about the comparative blindness of our cultural elites? (Well, to its credit, the most perceptive poets, writers, philosophers and artists of the 19th century did immediately grasp the significance of the Ring Cycle — see Alex Ross’s Wagnerism — but a few scattered references here and there excepted, nothing comparable greeted the appearance of the Lord of the Rings.)
As is commonly known, Tolkien was outwardly dismissive of the Ring cycle, saying that any similarity to the Lord of the Rings was limited to the roundness of their respective rings. Complete balderdash, of course. I’ve often wondered about that. Tolkien was the far greater philologist, had read more widely in the source material than anyone before or since, and boasted a working knowledge of a dozen languages; Wagner could barely manage a bit of French in addition to his native German. Did Tolkien bristle at an amateur’s intrusion into his area of professional expertise? (He was also dismissive of Shakespeare.) I suspect more was at play. — most particularly in the obvious lifting from Wagner of the notion of a Ring of Power that gives one technical mastery at the price of one’s soul — i.e., the ability to love. ( My understanding is that there is no such Ring in any of the vast body of myth from which both men drew — Wagner invented it as the perfect metaphor for the stakes at issue. ) Did Tolkien envy Wagner’s incomparable musical mastery used to illuminate what these myths tell us about the essence of the human condition? Did ardently Catholic Tolkien resent the non-Christian Wagner’s use of this body of myth which Tolkien would go on to build a fundamentally Christian parable?
I trust that later essays in this series — which I ardently await — might explore some of these questions.
Regarding Romantic Politics and their tendency to fail, is it because of something baked into the DNA of Romanticism? Something fatalistic and tragic? The Gotterdammerung of it all? Or is it because Classical and Romantic politics are a binary and the answer lies somewhere between the two extremes?
Re: swords & ‘Dune’: we need to give Frank Herbert a break here. He researched his books assiduously, and it’s well-established that the society of his Dune books is based on that of the 19th-century Caucasus as described in Lesly Blanch’s ‘The Sabres of Paradise’, ie the long war of the Muslim mountain tribes led by the Imam Shamil against Tsarist Russia, invading from the north. Shamil’s warriors were universally armed with the shashka (sabre) and kindjal (long knife, not dissimilar to the Roman gladius); the latter is frequently referred to in ‘Dune’. Other terms such as ‘Padishah emperor’ are drawn from Persia, and some perhaps from the Ottomans, both to the south.
As regards swords vs other weapons, I think the most intriguing example is ‘The Lord of the Rings’. The witch-king of Endor is specifically described as riding through the broken gates of Gondor armed with a mace; in the film of ‘Return of the King’, he has a Celtic-style fiery sword (and, granted, a morning-star later on). Pity: I think the menace of a mace would have been more interesting. I can’t help noting that the mace was the symbol of authority for the elected ‘Hetman’ (Ukrainian) or ‘Ataman’ (Russian) of independent Cossack sietches (another term adopted by Herbert).
John M. Harrison’s ‘The Pastel City’ is still widely available as part of a collection published as ‘Viriconium’.
More generally to the theme of the post, I wonder: do you think, JMG, that there’s a divide here between the clerics & monastic community who taught the ‘rational’ liberal arts from the post-Roman period through to the Enlightenment vs the nobility descended from war-bands and authentic knights (before the term became a rank bestowed by the sovereign), who generally were all about charging about on horses & waving bits of pointy metal at each other? Indeed, the mace was regarded in part as a priestly weapon (there being plenty of bishops who enthusiastically took part in the horse-charging and metal-waving business) since it didn’t technically cut the flesh to spill blood….
I do think about the Roman Empire most days… but only the eastern part.
One intriguing theory on “why are decisive weapons so frequently swords” that a friend of mine came up with: much more than the other common weapons, metal quality matters a LOT for swords – and steel metallurgy is poorly understood until very recently. So a really excellent sword – say, a vanadium-steel Toledo sword – would have been an almost-magical weapon for a millennium, and reproducing it would have been very nearly a magical feat since the trace elements would depend on things like the particular mine from which the ore came.
Off topic… but on the overarching topic. I made some comments on Ted Gioia’s blog yesterday about the Rust Belt renaissance and people emigrating to Ohio from California etc in the context of a discussion of avant-garde art and music. It seemed to resonate with a lot of people. My comments were quickly turned into an essay between two sessions last night and today. Because it was mercury retrograde I thought now would be a good time to revisit our hosts essay from the Archdruid Report days, “Betting on the Rust Belt.”
Interested parties can find my article The Rust Belt Renaissance Revisited here, including my personal observations on people moving back to or coming to Ohio and surrounding area for the first time:
http://www.sothismedias.com/home/the-rust-belt-renaissance-revisited
JMG,
No need to post this if you don’t want but I noticed in one of your posts you are annoyed by Youtube’s endless ads before the content. A quick and easy way around that is to take whatever Youtube URL you’re given, and replace the “you” with “613”, so http://www.youtube.com would be http://www.613tube.com.
Streams the exact same video, but minus all the ads and annoying stuff that youtube does. Discovered it via my daughter’s teacher, who uses 613tube to safely stream videos in school.
Best,
Tim Pw
Rajarshi, fascinating. The similarity doesn’t surprise me, because good stories are good stories, and back in the pre-electronic media days somebody who had a good stock of stories and knew how to tell them could count on a hearty dinner and a comfortable place to sleep wherever he went. With all the travel back and forth along the Silk Route north of India and the maritime spice routes all around India, it would be amazing if plenty of good Indian stories didn’t get carried all over the place, and plenty of good stories from elsewhere must have found their way to India too.
Justin, oh, I like the later stories too, but The Pastel City is welded into my imagination. I read it while spending a weekend at my dad’s place a couple of months after my mother dumped like a bag of old clothes; it was a quiet, pleasant weekend, the two of us got along as well as I think we ever have, and the story clobbered me like a baan through the vitals. I adored it.
Tag, thank you. I’m probably going to have to devote an entire post to Tolkien vis-a-vis Wagner. Tolkien’s dislike for Wagner had very straightforward roots. Tolkien was politically arch-conservative and religiously a devout and very traditional Catholic; Wagner was well over on the left politically and — well, we’ll get to the religious side of his thought, but it was almost exactly the sort of thing that was most guaranteed to set Tolkien off. Are you familiar with the fantasy novels of William Morris, another socialist who used themes from Germanic mythology? Just for starters, the main villain of The Well at the World’s End (which was published when Tolkien was four years old) is named Gandolf…
StarNinja, we’ll get to that in an upcoming post.
Bogatyr, fascinating. I wasn’t aware of that, though I caught Herbert’s borrowings from Bedouin culture and Islam generally. As for clerical and aristocratic cultures, the interplay was extremely complex, not least because the upper end of the religious hierarchy was normally recruited from the nobility — but there were two very different cultures of education, one classically based and religious, the other aristocratic and (once literacy became tolerably widespread) focused on secular literature as well as war, hunting, and the like.
SamChevre, that’s a valid point.
Justin, thanks for this.
Tim, and thanks for this!
“Canadians COULD have been Americans. They had the chance. They declined. They were given a second chance. Again, they refused. How could this be? The mind recoils.”
One part of history that is almost never discussed is the Patriot War.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_War
The goal to foment American sympathy regarding the tryanny of British rule over Canadians towards starting a rebellion had some appeal. Created common ground for a spell. To overthrow British rule in Canada Basically. It fizzled very quickly.
A few books have been written on it; more recently; Shaun J. Mclaughlin The Patriot War Along the Michigan-Canada Border.
The practise of initiating rebels into the movement through the hunters lodges network is interesting. not impactful enough to weave into North American myth making i guess.
I know of one fantasy novel that did not involve any swords: the Many-Armed God of the Dalain by Svyatoslav Loginov. Unfortunately, as far as I know it was only ever translated to Bulgarian from Russian. It’s quite an original if bleak work with surprising ecological themes; set in a small world that consists of stone squares surrounding a sea inhabited by a giant betentacled monster, the titular God who, together with lesser monsters, is simultaneously a menace to litoral communities and the source of all wealth. Anyway, practically all the arms and armour there are made from parts of those lesser monsters, and none are conveniently sword-shaped. Instead there are bone knives and harpoons and battle whips made from antennae.
Greatly enjoying the series, by the way! On a linguistic note, I’ve never thought of this before, but it is funny that the Romantic tendency is the one usually at odds with the Roman side of Europe’s heritage.
As for Greek influence in Germany, I do remember the craze for Greek names in early modern HRE. As in Philip Melanchthon, born Schwartzerdt, among many, many others…
http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2024/08/1914-again.html
Kaiser compares Israel’s position with 1914’s Austria-Hungary, with the added factor of Israel being our client nation
I also hope fantasy can make the leap to Neptune, and survive long term. I rather hope that when it does, it manages to yank science fiction into it’s orbit, because a lot of classic science fiction would make amazing fantasy. The old dying ruins of Mars, the jungles of Venus, the tiny sliver of Mercury which is inhabitable, between the dayside boiling under a permanent day and the frozen night side… I for one think of that as the greatest shared universe in the history of fantasy, and would love to see what could be done with it if it survives.
“Bofur, most Americans don’t even know much about their own country. I certainly didn’t — despite having what passes for a good US education, I reached adulthood with only the vaguest and most wildly inaccurate notions of every part of the country I hadn’t visited. I’ve come to think that to Americans, there are no real places. “America” isn’t a real place; it’s an idea, or more precisely a fantasy, as imaginary as Oz and rather less realistic. Britain, in American eyes, is another fantasy kingdom, even less realistic. Canada? It’s not even an afterthought. It’s a vague sense that since the United States doesn’t actually extend all the way to the North Pole, there must be some country or other in the way — and you’re right, of course, that so blank a screen makes a good place to put various clueless projections. I sometimes wonder if someday us USians will blink awake and realize that the country and the world we thought we lived in were all a dream…”
I’m not sure it’s even a dream. I think it makes more sense to view the American worldview as being unable to separate reality from television. It even makes sense of oddities such as the Storm Trooper Fallacy, and now that I think about it, even the odd way that so many people act as if their prior statements, actions, and beliefs are irrelevant: that was a previous season, and since then there has been a reboot.
I too am for magic brass knuckles. They’ll fit well into the superhero genre; those guys punch each other a lot.
As for swords, Indiana Jones made short work of them in the original Indy movie. Some guy showed up and did fancy scimitar play; Indy pulled out a gun and shot him dead. Case closed. Star Wars has space wizards bounce away blaster bolts with light saber play; I’d like to see a movie where that silly tactic is soundly defeated.
As for classical rationality vs romantic passion; Plato compared the human mind to a chariot drawn by two horses: the white horse of Reason and the black horse of Emotion. The charioteer’s job is to keep the two horses pulling in the same direction. Plato did not mention what the charioteer is a metaphor for.
You say:
<>
You needn’t bother to say what that same result always is. It’s common knowledge. Eric Hoffer once said, of the utopian novels of the 18th century, that “now we know how the story ends”.
The website blipped out this quote of you:
“The mere fact that the results are always the same does nothing to slow down the inevitable turn to Romantic politics whenever the conditions for it emerge.”
With regards to Romanticism and astrology, it looks like all of the attention is focused on Chiron. I’m confused by all the attention Chiron gets. I don’t think assigning astrological qualities to a body based on a name given it to from astronomers is a good idea. The same applies to Eris and the major asteroids.
The main reason of its popularity, I think, is that the mythological figure of Chiron is highly emotional. Calling him the wounded healer attracts those who are interested in emotional healing and romantic thoughts.
>This only worked because the local elites in each provincial town were so eager to imitate Rome, all on their own
It wasn’t an empire, it was a multi-level marketing scheme. It was a brand. No wonder every time anyone tries to put it back together it blows apart almost immediately.
>Tolkien was politically arch-conservative and religiously a devout and very traditional Catholic; Wagner was well over on the left politically
I wondered why Tolkien ripped off Wagner to begin with. He liked the story but not the flavor. I suppose if the woke crowd made something of quality (ha), someone would come along and de-wokeify it. LOTR was basically a de-wokeified Ring Cycle.
To think 2000 years from now, someone will be making books, operas and video games based on some forgotten Mexican cartel, all while adding elves and orcs and magic rings and PvP and raiding and guilds.
I remember a conversation shortly after the original Star Wars, before The Empire even Struck Back, about whether the movie was SF or fantasy. My position was that it would depend on whether anyone with the parts and blueprints could build a lightsaber, or if only a Jedi could. (The sequel brought in enough other fantasy tropes to settle the larger question, while later franchise writers would give inconsistent answers to the question of where lightsabers come from.)
That distinction runs parallel to what appears to be a strong association between Classical narratives and everyman protagonists. It seems odd given the Greek and Roman fondness for demigod heroes, but today it’s the hero of a Romantic epic who is more likely to be the displaced scion of the rightful ruling lineage, the Prophesied One, the product of a massive secret program of research or selective breeding, or a nascent or temporarily discomfited quasi-deity. (Or, if you’re Paul Atreides, all of the above.) If you’re just some sunna Gwen, better hope you’re in a Classical epic instead, and go enlist in something.
Political? More than a little.
re: Condoming Youtube
When posting a video, the really important part of the URL is the “watch?v=XXXXXXXXXXX” part. Take that part and prepend this to it – https://farside.link/invidious/
That will randomly route it to an invidious proxy. Sometimes the proxy will fail, because they’re run by volunteers but try again and eventually you’ll get one that works.
For instance, here’s a video about International Cat Day, which happens every 8/8 – https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=4f7vS5MDSZ0
@Old Steve:
I don’t know what your comment means. In any event, I don’t regard the current flag – the one you know- as the real Canadian flag. The real Canadian flag is this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Red_Ensign
@Steve T.
Thanks for that splendid comment, one of the finest I’ve seen! It makes my day, for a variety of reasons, but a proper reply will have to wait.
(The brief answer is, the trajectory of global events is effecting a resurgent nationalism in this country and your comment touches on a lot of this.)
This. Is. So. Good. Can’t wait for another two weeks.
Let me guess: in politics, Empire is Classical, while Nationalism is Romantic.
Other Owen 109: Is The Ring woke? I don’t see it. Siegmund’s sword gets shattered against Wotan’s spear. Wotan’s spear (with law and contracts engraved on the shaft) then gets shattered against — I forget what. It seems a little like a game of “rock paper scissors.” But once Wotan’s spear is shattered law and order break down, leading to Gotterdamerung, where chaos and disorder rule. Fast forwarding to today, I think maybe that’s how/where Wagner was prescient. Prescient, but not woke.
Hi JMG,
Your essay reminded me of an aesthetic I find very interesting but without a name as far as I know. In the late 19th century and very early 20th century science fiction as we know it began to bubble up, along with the truly modern notions of the glorious techno future that awaited us. But for a while there you would see that future described in quasi classical aesthetic terms. Think the Beaux-Arts 1893 Chicago world’s faire or those very early neoclassical sky scrapers in Manhattan or the allusions to a white marble, neoclassical super New York in the first story in The King in Yellow. The cities of tomorrow were supposed to be forests of white marble neoclassical sky scrapers. I suspect it was the First World War that caused the Progress movement to shed its last outward aesthetic connexions to classicism. For a while, even into the 30’s as I understand the togas remained but now they were transposed to constructivist or art deco settings and by the Atomic Age 50’s even the togas were gone. Science fiction as the last vestiges of Beaux Arts is a fascinating idea JMG so thanks for that!
Cheers,
JZ
Ah, swords. I practice Tai Chi sword and love it. The movements are very exacting (as is regular Tai Chi). I have fired rifles but not hand guns (and I’m Canadian, eh), but sword work is an art form as far as I’m concerned. I can see why authors would have their characters use swords. But I would love to read something with magical brass knuckles.
Andre Norton was one of my favourite authors decades ago. I loved the Witch World series as well at the Beast Master series.
JMG
As an add on to you reply regarding different parts of America not knowing each other, as a foreigner who has travelled through a large portion of your country, I was quite shocked with how people in many parts of the country are quite happy to lay the boot in to the South in an almost aggressive manner. My favourite part of our journey was the south and rural midwest, the people were great and welcoming and it was all very vibrant and fun, despite the obvious poverty compared to the rest of the country.
But when I would discuss our experience with west coasters or east coasters, or even western Mountain state people, many would recoil and launch into the most stereotyped assessment of flyover country and ask why we would ever visit that area (freakshow was a common term used). When asked if they had been there of course the answer would often be no.
To SteveT, Bofur, JMG and whoever else hasn’t yet fallen asleep discussing Canada, Canada is the most tedious class in accounting. Ever taken cost accounting? I have. It’s mind-blowing. You want to poke your eyes out. You wake up when your nose hits the desk. Ok, I jest, I’m kidding. Really, no, it’s not boring, not at all.
So, anyway, what is Canada? It’s an English speaking successor state to the British Empire. It was founded by Sir John A. Sir John was a drunk. He used to barf on stage. To my knowledge he never bit the head off a bat.
That’s it. That’s what it is. As if to state the plainly obvious, they called the founding doc The British North America Act. No, no, don’t thank me.
See? Not one word about what Canada isn’t. And not a peep about the US.
Anyway, it’s like Orwell said, seeing what’s right under your nose is the most difficult thing. And with Canadians, they’ve self-censored to the point where they can only say what the country isn’t.
See, Canada is the country that dares not speak its name. Why? For plain fear of offending Quebecers because you never know what sets those guys off. Oh yeah, and more recently or fear of accusations of patriarchy and white supremacy. What patriots, what heroes. So much for Vimy Ridge. Oh, you never heard of Vimy Ridge? That’s alright, never mind.
Now, this is like the rash that won’t go away, and likely the most dreary, mind-numbing issue extant, a close second being Belgium, but Quebecers want independence, and not only that but a subsidized independence. Oh yes, those death-defying firebrands want an arrangement kind of like what Canada has with the US. To the barricades!
As for cross border relations, you noticed that Canadians sound bitchy when discussing the US with Americans? It’s because Canadians sense the country exists only with the sufferance of the US. Mind you, times have changed, maybe the US can manage to screw up a northern invasion badly enough to defeat itself.
As is commonly known, Tolkien was outwardly dismissive of the Ring cycle, saying that any similarity to the Lord of the Rings was limited to the roundness of their respective rings. Complete balderdash, of course. I’ve often wondered about that. Tolkien was the far greater philologist, had read more widely in the source material than anyone before or since, and boasted a working knowledge of a dozen languages; Wagner could barely manage a bit of French in addition to his native German. Did Tolkien bristle at an amateur’s intrusion into his area of professional expertise? (He was also dismissive of Shakespeare.)
Tolkien was one of those people who delighted in making outrageous claims in his letters and interviews, and then when pressed, backtracked and qualified*. He got called up for saying that Dante “doesn’t attract me. He’s full of spite and malice. I don’t care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities” – whereupon he acknowledged he was being a troll.
In the case of Shakespeare, Tolkien was consciously engaging with Shakespeare’s work, and was happy enough to attend live performances of the plays, so one should take his bombast on the subject with a grain of salt. In the case of Wagner, we know that Tolkien wrote a (still-unpublished) essay on Wagner in his youth – and the older Tolkien who wrote “both Rings were round, and there the resemblance ended” in 1961 is not the same as the myth-loving youth from half a century earlier.
*Tolkien would have professed to hate Twitter, and then spent all his time on it.
Alsarion#91, thanks for this, I wish I’d spent more of my life reading history instead of slaving in corporate sweatholes. Anyway, it seemed to me that the Romans could never seem to figure out a way to transfer power from one emperor to the next without a bloodbath. It seemed that these frequent civil wars drained human and economic resources making the empire vulnerable. But I haven’t read enough. This is just an impression. I read that when Roman legions abandoned Britain, the local tribes went at it tooth and nail against one another. If only they’d paid more attention to what guys like Horsa and Hengist were up to…
Even so, it took 200 years, one county per year, for the Saxons and Jutes take over. And even then it wasn’t a complete job. I read that in Shakespeare’s day, the farmers around Stratford still spoke Welsh.
This post is the best summary of the Classical vs. the Romantic movements, and their respective origins, that I have ever read, JMG. Bravo!
When reading your description of how they have manifested in the 20th century, something came to mind: 1950s and early ‘60s US cinema had a brief ‘traditional Classical revival’ with so many big-budget films about the Romans and their world (and a bit of the Greeks – such as The 300 Spartans) and at the same time indulged in the Romantic-themed horror films such as Dracula and the Werewolf (both of which have central European roots). In recent decades the few remakes that have been made (Ben Hur and 300 / Meet The Spartans come to mind) were horrible, while the Romantic faux-medieval movies and long-running TV series abound. Meanwhile, few science fiction films have made a splash and those which have lack the ‘gee wiz’ factor of the future that was so prevalent in the mid-to-late 20th century. The Romantic spirit has certainly got a firm grip of the imagination these days – understandably so. “Winter is coming!”
@Bofur – thanks for the shout-out for Canada’s real national flag. I might add that while ‘O Canada’ officially became Canada’s national anthem in 1980, my parents did not sing it when they were in school. Instead, they sang ‘The Maple Leaf Forever’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feXTfHhnQE4) which my mother proudly sang well into her 90s and Canada’s military bands (including cadets) still play to this day. “The thistle, shamrock, rose entwined – the maple leaf forever!”
JMG,
Something about this series really touches me on a deeper, probably subconscious level. Recently I’d been thinking of the schism here in the USA politics, connecting the Conservatives with the Second Religiosity and how many of those on that side of the divide want things to return to how they were, or at least how they think they were. On the other hand the Liberals are shrieking how we need to be more inclusive and accepting in order for things to become better. It is perhaps no irony that recently, in our local politics, two people whom my wife and I are fairly well acquainted with are running against each other for the same side, each on the opposite sides of that schism, and each fitting the description I gave earlier pretty well. They are both great people, who fight passionately for what they believe in, and they treat others very well. Politically, they both believe they have the answers to what society needs in order to achieve a perfect society, or utopia. In that context, it’s fascinating that there is such a deep division between peoples. This essay today helps add a layer to give a bit more understanding, although it is a little difficult to determine whether the Classicists and Romantics are Conservatives and Liberals, since some details like technology and science seem to be more to the Liberal beat.
Scotlyn,
Thanks for sharing your meditation on the topic. It immediately made me think of the Norns weaving the threads of Wyrd, which doesn’t that have a linguistic connection with the word weird? I think there was a bit of a thread going on about weird in the Open Post comments recently. Lots to consider with the trains of thought connecting with this metaphor.
Greetings from Germany, what a wonderful insight in our cultural heritage you have 🙂
The schism between academia and the working class is as alive and well today as it was back then. It is deeply entrenched politically and culturally. While the left wing green party has the most academic voters, the right wing AfD has the most working class voters. The academic class distincts itself by using woke language and eating organic foods.
Another interesting thing are medieval markets and festivals. Almost every region/town/area in Germany has medival markets and festivals where they connect to their unique local past (to vikings in the norhtern most tip of Germany, to slavs in the north east, to the famous medival pirate Klaus Störtebeker in the baltic coast …). Additionally there are thousands of castles and medieval churches across germany, and many cities still have half timbered buildings in there center dating back many centuries. Thus the medieval area is not some abstract story you can read about in history books, but it is a thing you can feel and touch.
This connection to the medieval past is unique to the ethnical german population. Although many German cities today have the divers appearance of a mix of peoples and races you find in any larger city in todays world, those medieval markets are exclusivly organized and visited by ethnical germans. this is not because anyone is excluded, on the contrary, the people you meet on those medieval markets and festivals are nice and welcoming and open minded. It is because people from other cultures simply have no interest in it, because they did not inherit the cultural connection to medieval Germany.
Some other interesting Deatails are the fusion of the cultural connection t medieval times with modern cultural trends. Often you find musicians on medieval markets and festival, and the play modern music on medieval instruments. Also you often find street food based on medieval recipes and those markets, which merges nicely with some modern food movements like eating regional and seasonal foods.
Even the the distinction you draw between the classic/modern/industrial movement and the romantic movement can be seen there. On those medieval markets you an find craftsman, who produce traditionally made items, from wooden combs to drinking horns. Also a lot of the clothing and costumes people wear on those festivals is hand made and unique. So the romantic medieval markets also show a counterculture to modern consumerism.
As a last point I want to add that romanticism in todays world often has an escapist component. People find joy in medieval worlds and cultures because it offers a simpler and less complex world, that is less abstract and feels easier to navigate. This escapism always has been part of the romantic movement, but I think with the modern western civilizations slowly fall the appeal of fleeing to this other world is increasing. Who knows, maybe we will one day have a medieval renaissance, where people rediscover the middle ages.
@JMG #88,
Here some sources.
“Frederick the Great” by Giles MacDonogh, depicts vividly the relationship of the Prussian royal family with French and Italian culture, the spats with Voltaire, Frederick’s very low consideration of German intellectuals and culture, and the disappointment this caused to the pro-Germans in his entourage.
The praising of Louis XIV as a new Julius Caesar is evident in the Porte Saint Denis in Paris, built for the occasion. The eye-catcher is the relief “The passage of the Rhine”.
For anti-French, anti-Latin and anti-Catholic sentiment in Germany, Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation are a goldmine. Well worth a read. Among other things:
– Greek was of minor importance compared to Latin (2nd Rede),
– Latin influences corrupt the German language (4th Rede). The Teutonic language in its original form was purer and better and, we could say, more “down to earth”. Foreign words are “mostly new fashions of speech due to boredom and caprice” (there can be no doubt that he is talking about the French).
– To call yourself civilized, you have to speak Latin or French (5th Rede). And he hates it. He savagely pokes fun at the French throughout the texts.
– He has no sympathy for the Catholic Church. His idea of religion is as removed from the Roman Church as possible. A German state, and not the Church, will have to educate the youth (he was a Freemason and a suspected atheist).
Fichte got his ideas about education by German reformers like Pestalozzi (a Swiss German, despite the name) and von Humboldt, the founder of the German university model. In particular, von Humboldt advocated educational reform to reflect the ancient Greek gymnasium.
See for example Von Humboldt’s 1793 “Über das Studium des Alterthums und des Griechischen insbesondere” and his comparison of Roman and Greek antiquity “Latium und Hellas” , where of course he greatly favors Hellas. He does not spare the Church, either, which for him is the ideal of Romanticism and nothing good can come of it. Greek culture is the only possible antidote.
Fichte combined von Humboldt’s educational ideas and his anti-clericalism and anti-French sentiment, and created a blueprint for German nationalism and state-building that lasted until WWII.
James Howes is a British historian that labored on the concept of Ostelbien (the non-Romanized part of Germany, basically yesterday’s DDR and today’s AfD-voting Germany). I only read a few articles about him, but the go-to book would be “The Shortest History of Germany”.
The letters at the end of Primo Levi’s “The Drowned and the Saved” are representative of the self-hatred of Germans, but you can pick up that feeling during casual conversations with Germans, especially Western ones. Germans are known to be pessimistic and self-effacing. I am sure your other readers can weigh in on this.
The problem for their neighbors comes when the Germans try to overcompensate their feelings of inferiority. Sometimes I just wished they were more like the French.
I suspect the reason why swords are so popular in science fiction is even simpler yet: many, many science fiction writers have a fencing hobby, or they sword fight in the SCA or a similar group. Either one knows from the inside how to write a (limited) sword fight, or one can get one’s writing buddy to take one to watch her fight, and describe a sword fight based on that.
I took fencing in college-I’m a left handed fencer due to a prior injury. I don’t think for a moment that I know what a real sword fight is actually like based on that, but I can probably fake it enough to get away with it in a book. How even does one hold a quarterstaff or a mace?
There’s also the classic “projectile in a soda can” problem of firearms in spacecraft, that using held weapons gets around, so one can justify that really, swords don’t accidentally let the air out when you don’t want to and thus are a better choice than firearms.
Hey JMG
On the subject of Sci-fi that is also fantastic, or at least “soft”, I have a few recommendations.
The first is one I have mentioned before, the “Requiem for homo sapiens” Trilogy by David Zindell, which has been compared to “Dune” on account of its exploration of the “Big questions”, the fact that there is deliberate technological suppression in favour of “Appropriate tech”, and its space opera style, unsurprising as David is a Mathematician who was deep in the alternative spirituality scene. He has written both a Prequel and a sequel book, along with short stories connected with it. He also wrote a long fantasy series, but I have not read it at all.
Secondly, there is “Rynosseros” by the Australian author Terry Dowling, set in a future Australia in which a bizarre Hi tech yet still “Traditional” aboriginal civilisation controls the inland, keeping forcing “White civilisation” to stay along the coast. I know it sounds “Woke” but it was written way before that was a thing, around 1990, and is definitely far from it in terms of style.
@Bofur (#112)
It’s the same color as this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Soviet_Union#/media/File:Flag_of_the_Soviet_Union.svg
Senator McCarthy would have rolled over in his grave the day Canada’s new flag first flew in 1965.
Hi John Michael,
Agreed. It is unwise to predict when such things are to occur. And it is not as if such markets are free of manipulation. It is theoretically possible that at some point in the future, financial obligations are met, yet the payment is worthless.
I’m having some trouble following the whole Tolkien versus Wagner issues. Basically I don’t get what the fuss and arguing is all about. There are good aspects to Classicism, and there are equally good aspects to Romanticism, but either ideology taken to their extremes can produce some strange outcomes. As they say, I’ve got no dog in that fight. A lot of what I’ve read in the comments here about the two, sounds a lot like ego driven behaviour.
Cheers
Chris
@Roldy#18 – thanks for confirming my memory of “Der Erlkönig ” as a lieder. It is my all-time favourite piece of German vocal music. I heard it only once in my high school music history course – but it made such an impact on me that much of the lieder stayed with me to this day (I just listened to it for the second time in my life just now). Prior to playing the record, our teacher dramatically explained the context and translated much of the lyrics. Ah – I’m such a sucker for blood-curdling tales of supernatural horror!
All: I found a good version sung here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTxiaqvCThg
>For plain fear of offending Quebecers because you never know what sets those guys off
Didn’t Quebec try to join the EU at some point? And it was France of all people that were the most against Quebec joining, IIRC?
>I was quite shocked with how people in many parts of the country are quite happy to lay the boot in to the South in an almost aggressive manner
Welcome to the Fissure. It was once a hairline crack but the stresses, strains and sheer abuse of the country has made the U in USA somewhat of a joke now. You go back to the 60s, they were making fun of the same people back then, except it was much more good-natured. Go back to the 30s, and they were maybe not respectful, but there was a spirit of “We’re all in this together”.
Fast forward to today and the snobbery has given way to outright hatred and viciousness.
It’s part of the reason I periodically ask “What is it that unites this country in the 21st c?”. There for a while the hatred and derision of Joe Biden seemed to unite everyone but they’ve pillowfaced him now. Say what you will about Trump but he can draw crowds from Mobile to Boston. That counts for something these days.
@JMG I’m not familiar with Morris’s novels; I’ll have to remedy that. And Tolkien’s recoiling from Wagner’s left socialism makes total sense as a reason for his distaste for the latter.
@strda221 I didn’t know about that essay Tolkien wrote in his youth on Wagner. Would love to get ahold of that. C. S. Lewis was an ardent Wagnerian before Tolkien converted him to Christianity; one would love to have been the proverbial fly on the wall to hear them discuss Wagner — they had to have talked about him. Tolkien grew up in a world saturated with Wagner (see Alex Ross’s book that I mentioned in my OP); given his stubborn, traditionalist, cantankerous character, it makes total sense that he would rebel against the Wagnerolotry that surrounded him as he was growing up. LOL on what Tolkien would have done with Twitter!
@Pumpkinscone: some of the most beautiful parts of this country cant be seen on the flights between NYC and LA.
Kentucky is one of the most beautiful states in the union.
Yeah, that attitude you describe is very real, I’ve heard it myself. It doesnt help that it gets amplified by MSM based on either coast.
I have a lot of neighbors from California now in the hood, and I see a palpable relief in them when we chat, now that they are here.
Daniil, I’ve heard that there’s a vast amount of first-rate SF and fantasy in Russia that’s never been translated into English. Somebody could make a pretty penny by setting up a small publishing firm, arranging to get the English language translation rights, and turning out paperback and ebook editions in English…
Patricia M, ouch. Yeah, that’s about right.
Taylor, oh, granted! Zendexor over at https://www.solarsystemheritage.com/ has done a fine job of chronicling that shared universe, for what it’s worth.
Paradoctor, I’m definitely going to find some place for magic brass knuckles. As for how the story ends, granted, but we’re still going to talk about it in a future post for the sake of those who didn’t get the memo.
Jon, I have no idea. The historical Romantic movement, as I see it, was mostly linked to Ceres, which was thought to be a planet when it was first discovered, in much the same way as Pluto.
Other Owen, yep — and you won’t be able to tell that any of the names of the cartel leaders were once Spanish, as they were folded, spindled, and mutilated by linguistic drift after the West African settlement of eastern North America in the twenty-sixth century…
Walt, that’s an excellent point. Notice how it parallels the Classical emphasis on logic and reason, which can be taught, and the Romantic emphasis on emotional and personal qualities, which can’t.
Phil, oh, it’s much more complex than that, but you’re on the right track.
John, hmm! I hadn’t thought of that but of course you’re quite correct.
Annette, sure, but have you ever practiced with a staff? It’s just as subtle and exacting…
PumpkinScone, of course. The South is the eternal whipping boy of the bicoastal managerial elite. Mumble mumble Jungian projection of the shadow mumble mumble…
Smith, funny. Maybe if Justin Castreau dined on bats he’d be less embarrassing.
Ron, I hadn’t thought of sword and sandal movies as an expression of the last gasp of American Classicism, but you’re right, of course. Complete with Ray Harryhausen monsters!
Prizm, this obsession with utopia is one of the most destructive habits of modern times. I begin to sympathize with the characters in Somtow Sucharitkul’s science fiction novels who zoom across the galaxy destroying attempted utopias, recognizing them as the one great threat to galactic civilization…
Deedl, thank you for this — that’s high praise. I hope I have the chance to visit Germany one of these days, though I’m going to have to get much more fluent in German to make the most of it.
Disc_writes, many thanks for these.
BoysMom, when I was involved in the SCA — admittedly this was many years ago — there were plenty of people who used maces, axes, and staff weapons in combat, and most Asian martial arts include staff fighting:
As for where you hold a mace, why, here’s an example. I suspect you can figure it out! 😉
J.L.Mc12, thanks for these.
Chris, of course it is, but there’s more to it than that. We’ll get to some of the deeper differences as this sequence of posts continues.
Tag, you’re in for a treat. The Water of the Wondrous Isles is a good one to start with.
“There’s also the classic “projectile in a soda can” problem of firearms in spacecraft, that using held weapons gets around,”
In Babylon 5 this problem was referenced as the reason the station crew used pulsed plasma weapons. No holes in the metal hull.
There is a historical analog too. In WW1 the ship inspection crews on blockade duty used the Winchester 1992 rifle chambered in 44-40 specifically because it would limit the damage to ship, equipment, and cargo if things went badly.
Off topic but wanted to post this about the “Second Coming of Super Sonic Flight”
I was immediately reminded of your article about this a while back.
https://www.insidehook.com/travel/second-supersonic-travel-age
JMG, no I have never practiced with a staff, but I know a woman who does and I’ve watched her. If I were younger, I would be tempted to take it up. Maybe in my next lifetime.
To add a data point to the magic brass knuckles discussion: it reminded me of a relatively recent television series with an extremely mundane-sounding magical weapon: a green gardening glove of super strength.
This is in the 2017 David Lynch series, Twin Peaks: The Return. In it, a character named Freddy Sykes is told by a supernatural being to go and get a particular green gardening glove that will give him the strength of a enormous pile-driver when he puts it on. He can then crush walnuts in that hand, and send people to the ICU with a single punch—and he’s not at all big or bulky. He later uses that gloved hand to destroy a demon.
This link is a decent wiki for reading further:
https://twinpeaks.fandom.com/wiki/Freddie_Sykes
The gardening glove of super-strength. I like it. I’ve also heard of magically enhanced or cursed frying pan. I think that one was from one of the Tortall novels by Tamora Pierce, but it’s second hand from a friend years ago so I may be mis-remembering.
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Mindwind’s dad Clem’s 8/12 surgery to remove blood clots from his recent severe head injury go completely smoothly, and may he be blessed and healed quickly and completely.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
May Heather’s brother in law, Patrick, who is dying of cancer and has dementia, go gentle into that good light. And may his wife Maggie, who is ill herself, find the strength and peace she needs for her situation. (Update on Patrick’s condition here)
May Falling Tree Woman’s son’s girlfriend’s mother Bridget in Devon UK, who has recently regained consciousness after a week of sedation following a life-threatening fall from a horse, be blessed and healed and returned to full health.
May Neptune’s Dolphins’ husband David, who lost one toe to a staph infection last year and now faces further toe amputations due to diabetic ulcers in his left foot, be blessed and healed, and may the infection leave his body for good.
May young Azalea Troung of California, who recently had a life threatening reaction to the initial antibiotic applied for a finger bone infection, resolve her reaction without lasting issue; may the infection be completely cleared from her body; and may her family, including those physically separated from her, be strengthened against fear and dread.
May Rebecca, who has just been laid off from her job and is the sole provider for her family, quickly discover a viable means to continue to support her family; may she and her family be blessed and sustained in their journey forward.
May Just Another Green Rage Monster, his mother, and his Kiddo be blessed and healed as they deal with the loss of Monster’s father.
May Kerry’s dad Michael, who is experiencing extreme delusional behavior and overwhelming anxiety, be healed mentally and emotionally.
May Ian, who has recently been diagnosed with Diastolic Heart Failure, be healed and restored to full health quickly and completely.
Regarding Princess Cutekitten’s recently renewed problems with mortgage servicers causing her difficulties, may the situation resolve in the best way possible.
May Jeff H’s cat Tuxy, who ran off from their new home in June, be safely returned home to Jeff’s family.
May Jennifer have a safe and healthy pregnancy, may the delivery go smoothly, and may her baby be born healthy and blessed.
May Ecosophian, whose cat Cheesecake (picture)ran away on Wednesday 6/12, be safely reunited with Cheesecake; and may Cheesecake be protected and guided on his journey home.
May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.
Tyler A’s wife Monika’s pregnancy is high risk, and has now successfully entered the third trimester; may Monika and baby Isabelle both be blessed with good health and a smooth delivery.
May Jennifer’s mother Nancy G. in SW Missouri is still recovering from various troubles including brain surgery for hydrocephaly; may she be healed, regain her mobility, and be encouraged with loving energy.
May Erika, who recently lost her partner James and has been dealing with major knee problems (and who senses a connection between the two), be healed in both broken heart and broken knee, and be able to dance in the sun once more.
May Ms. Krieger’s hometown of Norwalk, Connecticut recover quickly and fully from the gasoline tanker fire that destroyed an overpass and shut down interstate 95 on May 2. May the anger and fire that has made driving in the area so fraught cool down in a way that benefits all beings. May all people, animals, and other beings around the highway, the adjacent river and the harbor be protected and blessed, and may the natural environment improve to the benefit of all. (update)
May Christina, who passed away on 5/8, experience a peaceful repose; may the minor child she leaves behind be cared for, and the needs of all affected me met; and may her family be comforted in this difficult time.
Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
I read the Wibelungen essay linked to above (the German original seems to be quite difficult to find online, too). It ranks among the weirdest of the weird of alt-history, right there with the star-shaped forts and the mud floods! The northern hemisphere under water in the recent past; the Franks migrated as a people from the Himalayas by way of Troy…
Funny how that ties in with the Roman / non-(or anti-)Roman split. The whole classicist and modernist narrative of the Middle Ages as a low point, a valley between ancient and modern civilization, only really makes sense west of the Rhine and south of the Danube. In places like Wagner’s native Saxony or even in Bayreuth, there was no Roman peak to fall down from. Urbanization and literacy simply climbed (more or less) continuously.
So it makes a certain sense that Wagner ignores the Roman heritage of Charlemagne and makes of him a descendant, the perfect incorporation, of an ages-old Eurasian tradition.
In fact, it is nothing short of astounding that the modern divide between Catholic and Protestant parts of Europe follows the old Roman frontier as closely as it does. Astounding because for a while, southwestern France, Austria and Hungary contained large Protestant minorities – almost all German-speaking towns and cities had Protestant sympathies for a while. On the other hand, the whole of Germany might have been forcibly reconverted to Catholicism around 1625. But in the end, as if by stage magic, the old frontier reimposed itself, and again, Wagner was born on the non-Roman, non-Catholic side of it.
By synchronicity, I read Howes’ Shortest history of Germany (referenced by disc_writes) a few weeks ago, which makes a lot of these divides. It was amusing, a fast read, but I was not much convinced by the political conclusions he draws. No stable, mid-sized state in Germany has ever been located within the old Roman frontier (at most Baden?). On the other hand, the line of semi-Roman and Christian influence that stabilized for a while in the 6th to 8th century included Thüringen, where the AfD now has the best odds of coming to power. Niedersachsen, the old Saxony, was pagan and non-literate doing those centuries and votes solidly for Western parties, while “Ostelbien”, which Howes talks about all the time, is really only Mecklenburg, Brandenburg and the modern state of Saxony.
Eric, another fine piece of evidence that progress is over; all we’re doing now is rehashing various portions of the 20th century. Zoot suits, Gibson girls, surfer films, and tailfins on cars, here we come!
Annette, it’s as fun as swordplay — definitely something to put in your planner for a future incarnation.
Eirik, I like it! That’s clever.
Pygmycory, and so is that. I’m feeling better about the future of fantasy already.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Aldarion, oh, no question, it’s astonishingly weird. We’ll talk about that in an upcoming post.
Regarding staff fighting, historically the main weapon of the NZ Maori was a staff, the taiaha, until muskets arrived. Interestingly, thrown spears were not amongst the traditional weapons, possibly because of the largely forested terrain (lack of metal for spearheads is refuted by the example of the Australians).
KAN, it’s also refuted by simple common sense. Human beings made spearheads from stone a hundred thousand years before they first made anything from metal:
Other Owen, re #132, I hadn’t heard anything about Quebec trying to join the EU. Nor had I heard that France blackballed them. What mystifies me is Quebeckers attachment to the language of a country from whom they’ve hardly heard a peep in over 250 years (if I have my history right). Does the use of French even work to their advantage? And now, if you’re correct, getting it in the chops from from the old mother country.
Even if Quebec can’t join seeing as they’re not a sovereign country, and because they’re not even European, they might try to make commercial arrangements. But this is tricky stuff because there’s places in Europe bucking for independence, ie in Spain for instance, and the EU may not be too enthused about making deals with subnational units like provinces, in effect going over and around a national government. It may set inconvenient precedents. Just sayin’.
All that said, crazy stuff happens. Wasn’t Macron threatening to send troops to the Ukrainian front?
@Aldarion #142 – the same is true of Scandinavia. The new culture arose in those nations which had never been Romanized. And Iceland was the last one to become Christian, and that, peacefullly, by vote of the Thing. And when Scandinavia has the chance, they went Lutheran just like northern Germany.
Hey JMG
After mentioning Terry Dowling and his collection of short stories, I have not only decided to look him up again but re-read one of his short stories. It never occurred to me before, but his style and world-building is very similar to Cordwainer smith due to its very unusual settings that are never fully explained.
I have found out that much of his “Rynosseros” stories are quite hard to get, the only place that seems to still print them is “PS publishing’ in Britain. There are no Ebook versions that I can find. He is still alive, and now seems to focus on horror fantasy. I shall leave a link to his website,
http://terrydowling.com/
“I’ve heard that there’s a vast amount of first-rate SF and fantasy in Russia that’s never been translated into English.”
Well, there is certainly a vast amount of untranslated SF and fantasy here. Applying Sturgeon’s Law yields the same result as extrapolating from my own experience: there is indeed enough that would be worth translating.
Some more grist for your mill, by the way: “aboveground” Soviet sci-fi was, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly Classicist in attitude. It’s not that the authors stuck unfailingly to the utopian progressive Party line; they could often deviate from it in more or less subtle ways, but their own thinking was highly progressivist in its own right. One of its greatest exemplars, Ivan Yefremov, was an unabashed admirer of (what he saw as) Classical Greek culture and wrote novels about both Ancient Greece and Far Future Communist Earth, with similar ideals becoming apparent in both. Though obviously Greece was a less successful early attempt at realising true human potential.
Two others, the Strugatsky brothers, were not as overtly Hellenistic but represent another trend you might find familiar: the decline of progress. They went from largely utopian technocommunist stuff to increasingly dark themes in the same setting to extremely pessimistic works in generally more grounded settings that greatly disappointed a large faction of their fans. I think it’s probably because the brothers were smart and honest enough to notice that Progress, as they initially conceived it, wasn’t working out, at least on any reasonable timescale; but they (moreso one of them; the other was less fanatical and more critical, but died earlier) could not abandon their ideals, so they largely turned on Man (the Failure) instead. The Strugatskies had and still have a vast influence over the progress-minded share of our intelligentsia, providing them with fodder for both optimistic and pessimistic visions. On another sidenote, Yegor Gaidar, the 90s Arch-Liberal Reformer, was open about being strongly influenced by the Strugatskies’ books since childhood. He simply thought that unconstrained pro-market reforms would get the sadly stagnant and irrationally managed country back on the main track of Progress, leading eventually to Utopia. The surviving Strugatsky brother, Boris, was a strong supporter of Gaidar… though in addition to this ideological harmony, he was also Gaidar’s father-in-law.
As for Loginov, he is curious in that he started out as a Strugatskian sci-fi writer, but his own mindset seems to me much more Romantic: typical for him or at least his more mature work are more or less isolated heroes irreconcilably at odds with the world (rather than builders or loyal citizens of attainable or real Utopia), noticeable sympathy for peasants and their folkways (though not for religion or medieval social structure), individual passions counting for at least as much as reasoned ideology, and… noticeably greater interest in the European Middle Ages than in the Ancient Mediterranean. So from that perspective, his eventual drift into fantasy makes a lot of sense!
@ Ron M #130
Thanks for the link, that’s in incredible performance!
bk.
Sorry, dreamwidth did not let me post so I send it here and hope you’ll find it:
Despite all your troubles, all the more:
Happy birthday, erika!
@Smith:
“See? Not one word about what Canada isn’t. And not a peep about the US.”
Funny comment, but this is exactly right, part of my point. By contrast to the way that Trudeau Sr. et al tried to re-fashion the country, Canada always had an identity that was NOT “just an idea”. This is part of the reason for the “failure to communicate” between Canada and the US.
Anyway, I’ll save my other thoughts for another time.
Hi John Michael,
I live not too far from a very old Indigenous stone axe quarry at Mount William. In this instance the wiki page link is quite interesting because it provides very early European accounts of the activities going on at the quarry. The trade network was clearly vast given how far away the polished stone has been found.
In January this year I visited another lesser known Indigenous quarry about maybe an hours drive north of here. For a quarry, it was remarkably easy on the eye. Scroll down until you get to the photo of ‘The head of the flint quarry is on one side of the road’
I’d imagine that the Indigenous folks must have known about metals to some extent given that gold (just for one example) was laying around on the surface. And fire was part of the landscape. The interaction of the two (metal and fire) would have been observed for sure.
I’ve noticed that there was some talk about an aircraft company, who also makes spacecraft. I did a double-take today when the news had an article which included a subtitle: What’s wrong with the spacecraft? Not words you ever want to hear when stuck in space and considering using the machine. A bit like asking whether the submersible is rated to 3,500m or 3,800m when you want to dive down to see the Titanic wreck, and hearing the answer: Honestly, we’re not quite sure, yet. Exciting times.
Cheers
Chris
Bofur– For what it’s worth, I like the real Canadian flag much better. I had also never thought about the maple leaf before, but what does it say? “We’re harmless and a bit socialist.” Nothing to worry about!” It has a feel of having been designed by a committee. The red ensign looks to me like the flag of a nation.
1) Wait, I’m confused. I thought Wotan was Odin, the one-eyed All-Father, not a horse-riding elf?
2) Part of my confusion may be caused by what you mean by “elf”. I’m picturing a four-foot tall Santa Claus-type toy-making elf. Which is what I always thought elves looked like. That is, until Peter Jackson’s LOTR movies came out, and Legolas appears as a six-foot tall blond man. That confused me at the time, and I chalked it up to Peter Jackson’s artistic license. But maybe he was right, and elf doesn’t necessarily mean small?
Aldarion #142
“In fact, it is nothing short of astounding that the modern divide between Catholic and Protestant parts of Europe follows the old Roman frontier as closely as it does.”
Except this divide appears to go the other way in respect of Ireland and England, only the latter of which was ever part of the Roman Empire. Interestingly, the earliest English projection of power towards Ireland appears to have been authorised by a pope who considered Irish Christianity to be insufficiently “Roman” and relied on the more thoroughly Romanised English to get that job done….
I suppose many dynamics can change between the jigs and the reels…
@Smith says:
“Other Owen, re #132, I hadn’t heard anything about Quebec trying to join the EU. Nor had I heard that France blackballed them. What mystifies me is Quebeckers attachment to the language of a country from whom they’ve hardly heard a peep in over 250 years (if I have my history right). Does the use of French even work to their advantage? And now, if you’re correct, getting it in the chops from from the old mother country.”
I suspect that the old mother country doesn’t consider the utterances of the Quebecois to be French ‘-)
Dear JMG and Commentariat:
This has been a wild trip!
I think it would be interesting to see where Romanticism made its greatest impact and why or why not. Obviously “Germany”, but I think to a slightly lesser extent, “Italy” (neither of which was a nation yet), Great Britain (probably by way of the Hanoverian royal connection after 1714, and the overall German influence on English Post-Roman history, the Celtic heritage in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, as well as the historical connections between the Vikings and northern England, Scotland, and Ireland). France to a much lesser extent I think (Louis the XIV – the heir to Charlemagne, and thus the Caesars), Spain to a lesser extent again, I think (again 1492 the unification of Spain and the end of the Reconquista; then the quick rise of the Spanish Empire and it becoming the dominant European power). However, even where the impact of Romanticism was less, it was still important.
Another interesting thought is the Classical impact on Muscovy and Kiev by way of Constantinople (the Byzantine Empire considered themselves Romans, by the way). They also received a huge eastern Viking impact, bringing the Norse tales and myths there. The difference is the Mongol invasions. I hesitate to suggest another avenue for you to pursue, and I know you have discussed Russian/Eastern European thought in some detail.
Following the history and reasons for the change from Classical veneration of Greece and Rome toward Science and Progress would also be very interesting. Obviously, the logic and reason of Classicism would fit perfectly with Science and Progress, and the Romantics’ turn towards the Middle Ages gave Classicists something to push against. The Renaissance being an “Enlightenment”, the advance of Science versus religious dogma, the Protestant Reformation, all likely had a big part (i.e. you can discover truth through your own investigations, rather than some guy in Italy telling you what it is) all likely played a part.
As a final word (almost), I read somewhere that during the Greek War of Independence, the British volunteers were very disillusioned when they met the Greek revolutionaries. No Classical Greece, just a bunch of Balkan bandits, indistinguishable from the Balkan bandits who fought for the Ottoman Empire! Oh, the horror!
Yet another odd tidbit, as something approaching regular armies began to evolve from the late 15th Century through the 18th Century from, mercenary bands, the Classicists looked to Roman history as an example and source of how and what to do, and it is interesting that Europeans had no real idea how the Roman (or any regular army) actually worked, thought, functioned (or didn’t), etc. There are plenty of Roman historians and commentators (especially Vegetius) who were essential reading for 18th Century military theorists. And the arguments between the use of firepower (Prussia, the north German States, Great Britain) versus shock (France, Spain – of course the Hapsburgs kind of fell in the middle) somewhat map onto Classical (logic and reason – send a lot of lead at them) versus Romanticism: the Furia Francese – Charge with the cold steel (although Frederic the Great started on that road but decided it was a not so good idea; the Swedes under Charles XI and XII were also big proponents of give them a round, then charge them furiously). The Eastern European irregular contribution to warfare (and fashion; it was Croation mercenaries who brought us the cravat, which evolved into the necktie – to think that a mercenary’s sweat rag, napkin, bandage, and at last resort his shroud over his face at the end evolved into expensive neckties); I’m not sure how that fits in (other than that there were things the regulars couldn’t do or at least do very well – although regulars later learned how to do them and took over those roles).
Good heavens, I’ve gone all over the place! In closing:
Kill the Waaaaabbit; Kill the Waaaaabbit!
Cugel
@Patricia Mathews: Iceland was certainly not the last Scandinavian country to become Christian in 999 AD! Norway still went back and forth for some decades after that, and Sweden (including Finland) resisted the package of Christianization, urbanization and state formation for another two centuries.
You wrote “as soon as they had the chance, they became Lutheran”. That is indeed the impression one gets, but it is astounding. Kristin Lavransdottir is one of my all-time favourite books. The detailed descriptions of daily life in Norway around 1300 AD include the veneration of the saints and monastic life. Would any observer in 1300, 1400 or even 1500 AD have been capable of distinguishing between the parts of Europe that would stay Catholic, and those that would become Lutheran or Calvinist?
And of course the Lutheran reformation did not abolish the veneration of the saints, nor did it completely abolish monasteries (considerable parts of Niedersachsen even today belong to the Klosterkammer, the Chamber of Monasteries). It did (re-)introduce vernacular services and married clergy.
This is maybe getting a bit on a tangent. My main point is that the usual 21st century histories of Europe focus on the (West and East) Roman heritage and see few continuities between pre-Christian Germanic, Celtic or Slavic cultures and modern ones in the same area. Wagner goes full throttle in the other direction and focuses only on a supposed continuity from pre-Christian Germanic culture. I think it is easy to err in that direction. The one thing that gives me pause is exactly the religious split of Europe along the old Roman frontier.
J.L.Mc12, I wonder if they knew each other. Smith visited Australia and it shows in his writing — the proper name of the planet Norstrilia, of course, is Old North Australia, and it has its share of sheep stations, although strange, strange sheep they were…
Daniil, thanks for this. Of course there’s plenty of bad science fiction — Sturgeon’s law always applies — but I’d like to see some of the good stuff in English. As I recall, there are translations of some of the Strugatskys’ works.
Chris, good stone was traded very far. There’s a stone quarry in Ireland whose products have been found in prehistoric sites in Ukraine. As for Boeing, well, yes.
Blue Sun, mythic figures don’t remain fixed. Wotan started out as the Allfather and evolved over time into something not unlike Tolkien’s Black Riders — a point that Tolkien doubtless had in mind. As for the Erlking, here’s an image of him, the rider, and the boy from the turn of the last century:
As you see, he’s not small.
Cugel, all interesting stuff. The Byzantines considered themselves Romans, but their cultural impact was very different — thus (part of) the immense gulf between Russia and the West.
@Cugel #158 I don’t think Classicism really took off in Russia until the 18th century, though there was certainly some prior awareness of Rome (Ivan III claimed descent from Augustus, for example, and Scipio Africanus was mentioned as a conversation topic in a 16th century Russian glossary for English merchants). But until then the main external cultural influence was that of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, not pre-Christian civilisation (except insofar as that civilisation has been digested by Eastern Orthodox Christianity).
In the 18th century, Peter the Great kicked off a fashion for emulating some idea of Ancient Rome (he changed his title to Imperator, formed a Senate, had himself named Pater Patriae, conducted a Triumph…). Both Romalatry and the copying of Western European Classicism in all its forms persisted throughout the century. Conversely, the 19th century saw an exported Romanticism (as seen in the Byron craze that influenced Pushkin and Lermontov) that gradually and partly converged with an interest in native Russian traditions (which Pushkin also picked up). I’d say that overall both Classicism and Romanticism were both originally contemporary Western European influences here, some local peculiarities notwithstanding. Very fertile influences, though.
@Blue Sun #155
In Tolkien’s legendarium of Middle Earth, elves were human sized. Peter Jackson was being faithful to the LOTR books with the actors and actresses who played elf characters.
@scotlyn, yes, and the other big exception is Poland. As long as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was powerful, it was (for European standards) very tolerant of Protestants, Jews and even Unitarians. I suspect in the case of both conquered Ireland and divided Poland, Catholicism served (in part) as a focal point for national resistance.
England (with Wales) is the great Western European exception, where the Roman language and urban life completely disappeared at some point. The only parallels are on the Balkan peninsula.
“Blue Sun, mythic figures don’t remain fixed. Wotan started out as the Allfather and evolved over time into something not unlike Tolkien’s Black Riders”
Am I just imagining it, or is there a similarity between Wotan in his “wanderer” manifestation and the Crawling Chaos?
@Aldario, there is also another religious split of Europe that follows an old Roman frontier: the split between catholicism and orthodox Christianity is almost exactly the split between the West and East Roman empire. For example Croatia (West) is catholic while Serbia (East) is orthodox.
I was also wondering about the exemptions of the split between catholicism and protestantism. The British Isles follow the reverse pattern (except Scotland) and Poland and Lithuania are catholic despite not having been Roman provinces. Otherwise the split is amazingly exact. I notice that Ireland, Poland an Lithuania have had centuries of figting against a powerful, oppressive neighbour with a different denomination, so I speculate that drove them to (sticking to) catholicism. That still leaves the point open why the split is such a accurate reflection of the borders of Roman empire.
#158 Interesting about neckties, being originally an item of military attire for mercenary forces, transferring into an item of office attire at least until recently.
Whatever the reason for this transfer is, could this be also why you hear certain pseudo-military language in the workplace, such as you could be working in local government and get a job title as some kind of ‘officer’ like ‘building control officer’ or something, and get a ‘promotion’ to ‘senior building control officer’.
Oops Aldarion, I just missed your post #163 before I made my post above. You said the same as me about the exceptions. Apologies!
Thanks as usual for a great article, JMG! I haven’t read all the comments yet, but it seems to me that swords and knives are often named, as actual conscious entities. Swords and knives also seem to be the most elegantly shaped, aesthetically pleasant of weapons. They also visually appear as an extension of the human arm, whereas maces, spears and guns just don’t. And yes, the phallic symbolism is there, too. But rockets are much more phallic, I think. I try to imagine The Lady of the Lake giving Arthur a mace or AK47 or a spear, or magic brass knuckles…and..blech—a sword with a name & it’s own agency, capable of being a friend or ally rather than an inert tool…is just so cool. There were magic shields too, but they didn’t seem to have agency or soul the way swords and knives do. Maybe be it is as simple as weapons with moving parts, or weapons that are thrown away from the warrior just don’t seem capable of being a living creature entitled to a name?
Re: denominational boundaries, we can ask why the split is such a accurate reflection of the borders of Roman empire, but we could also ask if their is something preceding Rome at work in the land itself (or the peoples) which created that border to the Roman empire. There are other interesting boundaries around the world, like why the Polynesians never permanently settled Australia, despite it being well within their range.
Boccaccio makes a very important observation in his comment #167. The boundary between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity is very old in Europe, and very important. It was formalized twelve centuries ago, with the Great Schism of 1054, but it really goes as far back as the 800s. The boundary runs, roughly, between Croatia (with Slovenia) on the Catholic side and Serbia (with Nothern Macedonia and Bulgaria) on the Orthodox side. (Bosnia, for some centuries, was neither Catholic nor Orthodox, but “Bogomil,” a dualist offshoot of Christianity, regarded as heretical by both Catholics and Orthodox.)
Moving northward, the boundary divides Hungary (on the Catholic side) from Romania (on the Orthodox side), and then heads northward right down the middle of the lands that are now Ukraine and Belarus, ending at the Baltic Sea. (The awkward geographical position of these lands, straddling the Catholic/Orthodox boundary, has shaped a lot of subsequent Ukrainian history, including the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia.)
Those northmost lands (i.e., Ukraine and Belarus) were formerly part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was the last sovereign state in Europe to become officially Christian; this happened as late as 1387 under Grand Duke Jogailo, who positioned his land on the Catholic side. (There was an earlier, superficial conversion in 1251 under Grand Duke Mindaugas, but after a few years he renounced Christianity and reverted to his former Paganism.)
sgage
Why should it mystify you that Quebecois are attached to their own language and culture.Does ones language and culture have to” serve one”? You might as well ask why someone in Appalachia still speaks English, if no one in England has paid attention to them for 250 years, or why they don’t try to speak with an Oxbridge or Ivy League accent. It’s just who they are, and they are quite happy with it.
If I recall correctly, the idea to join the EU ( it might still have been the EEC) was at the height of the independence movement, and was partially done to annoy Anglo Canada.
Stephen
My #179: Oops!
“It was formalized twelve centuries ago” should read “ten centuries ago.” Late night slip-up …
Aldarion #163,
“England (with Wales) is the great Western European exception, where the Roman language and urban life completely disappeared at some point.”
This makes another fascinating contrast… in that in Ireland scholarship and literacy were never particularly identified with urban life, per se.
On the one hand, Ireland is *still* notable for its “densely dispersed” habit of rural living, which is quite different from other European places where there is a gradual increase in density of dwellings from sparsely occupied woodlands to more densely occupied small villages, and so on up to big cities. Almost every town or city in Ireland formed around a nucleus of either 1) a monastery, or 2) a Viking trading post, neither of which altered the densely dispersed rural pattern in its surrounding areas, by much, until very recent times, when Dublin has become surrounded for many miles around with “bedroom communities”.
The Irish were famous for keeping alive in Western Europe the knowledge of Greek, Hebrew and Latin, throughout what are known as the “dark ages”. Their habits of literacy and scholarship which had developed in the bardic school tradition appear to have transferred almost seamlessly into habits of literacy and scholarship nurtured in the early Christian monasteries, all this throughout both the arrival to, and the withdrawal of the Romans from, Britain. At the same time, it can safely be said that the Irish never really got the hang of urban life at all, so had no urban tradition to “miss” as the Roman influence withdrew.
While the Irish learned classes of the early post-Christian centuries, taught and learned both Greek, Hebrew and Latin as clerical languages*, it is also remarkable that this class still preferred its own language to all of these, often bragging of its superiority for many purposes, especially poetry and satire, and eventually, producing much of its literary output in Gaelic, rather than in Greek or Latin. (Also, incidentally, producing fascinating re-readings of Biblical material such as the tower of Babel narrative, in which the natural superiority of the Gaelic language is emphasised).
So, here is a case where literacy and urban life are not joined at the hip, and also a case where the classical traditions were taken on board, but on strictly local terms, including the developing classical tradition of Roman Christianity.
Hey JMG
I don’t know about that, but Terry did write forewords for some of Jack Vance’s stories, apparently.
On the subject of legendary weapons that aren’t swords, one of Vietnam’s most famous fairy tales centres around a King who is given a magic Bow, or crossbow in some versions, that shoots a thousand arrows with each shot by the Golden turtle god Kim Quy.
@Stephen Pearson #171
I believe your comment was meant for Other Owen, to whom I was replying. I am not mystified at all 🙂
Doom has always been a top seller,
“Ancient Babylonian Tablets Are Finally Deciphered. They’re Full of Bad News”
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ancient-babylonian-tablets-lunar-eclipse-omens-deciphered-2522698
@Ron M., @Bofur, @Steve: Thanks for the lessons in Canadian history and symbols! I have no opinion about the Red Ensign flag, though I would point out to @Old Steve that it contains even more of that dangerous commie color red than does the maple leaf flag (and do you think the flags of Poland or Denmark or Austria betray communist tendencies, too?).
When I read the line of “Maple Leaf Forever” which you cited, I immediately thought of the arms of Montréal and thought, “where is the fleur-de-lys”? I read the whole lyrics and see that the lily was added by the original author, but you didn’t cite the version that includes it. In fact, these lyrics could only every be the anthem of British Canada, citing French Canadians only obliquely through their defeat by Wolfe. I am not saying “O Canada” is the perfect hymn either (the French version is quite a bit more specific than the English one and could be understood as excluding Protestants).
In Quebec City, one still sees the efforts made decades ago to transform the opponents Wolfe and Montcalm into equal symbolic ancestors of today’s Canadians: statues for each of them, celebrating their valour, and actually a monument that unites them in death, with a Latin inscription to avoid linguistic partisanship.
I think Canada in its present frontiers defies the nation state concept, just like Switzerland does. Many multilingual states kept peace and prosperity, in a measure, and were better than what came after – Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the Roman Empire (Latin and Greek) , the Achaemenid Empire (Persian, Babylonian and Aramaic). The older empires didn’t have to choose a flag and anthem, though!
Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid series has magic brass knuckles and a magic staff.
The protagonist has a magic sword (two of them) but his apprentice gets a magic fighting staff that grants here invisibility and his teacher gets a pair of magic brass knuckles that transform into brass claws when he transforms into an animal form.
“just how much more technologically and politically proficient than medieval Europe the ancient world had been.”
JMG, I take and don’t dispute your overall point, but I don’t believe the Middle Ages were so technologically deficient as is generally supposed. There were advances in agricultural technology, many developed by Cistercian monks, who tended to settle in wilderness areas and had to learn how to farm them. Northern Europeans, Germans and Scandinavians, I think, learned how to build ships that could survive the Atlantic Ocean, making possible the voyages of Cabot and other explorers. By the 15th C., fishermen from the Basque regions of Spain and from Bristol in England were sailing to the cod banks off the coast of Canada. Amateur historians have suggested that Bristol sailors had already seen the coast of North America before 1492 but wanted to keep the secret of the plentiful cod banks.
It appears to be fashionable today to claim that the great churches used borrowed architectural technology; I have seen photographs of pointed arches in the ruins of ancient Persian buildings, from about 1000 years prior to the coming of Islam, I might add. But the flying buttresses were a European invention. An architecture based on domes doesn’t need them. Technologies, just like ideas, do have antecedents. What is important is how they are used. I have seen glass from the ancient world in museum exhibits, always small, opaque objects, nothing like the enormous sheets of colored glass used in church windows. In fairness, one should remember that the Medieval Europeans had access to vast forests for the making of charcoal, and ships, and scaffolding, but part of technological advancement is using the resources at hand, just as the Phoenicians used plentiful sand for glass making and the Romans used a volcanic rock, tufa I think, in their concrete.
Phutatorius, heh heh heh.
Pat, a mace has no moving parts. Neither do brass knuckles or quarterstaffs. According to Welsh legend, by the way, Arthur’s spear was named Rhongomiant; the Sumerian god Ninurta had a magical mace named Sharur, which could talk to him; and everyone who’s ever read The Journey to the West, that classic Chinese novel, will remember Ruyi Jingu Bang 如意金箍棒, the gold-banded iron staff that Monkey got from the dragon king beneath the sea and used constantly to protect the monk Xuanzang on his quest to get Buddhist scriptures from India and bring them back to China. So I think it’s just a Western thing — and probably a matter of class snobbery.
J.L.Mc12, and there’s another for the list! Did the magic crossbow have a name?
Siliconguy, nice to know that I’m in a grand tradition. 😉
Team10tim, good to hear.
Mary, that’s not how things looked to Europeans in the 14th and 15th centuries, though — and of course that was what counted at the time.
@ Siliconguy # 176
I suppose cautioning the king and state of the possibility of disaster was one way to keep make the king listen to the people. The royalty had all the power, and it is not clear if they were competent rulers. After all, any late-stage monarchy will have kings who are more figurehead than exemplary.
So it must have become normal for the bureaucracy to call all the shots and to have the king yes-man their suggestions. This is technically insubordination on part of the bureaucrats, though, so the simplest prop to cover it would involve such “prophecies”.
I suppose this is how a normal day in court ran: a wizened “prophet” appeared and made a perfunctory pronouncement of incoming doom. The king listened patiently, then asked what could be done to avoid this doom. This question, of course, was a formality. It was also quite possibly an invitation to the ministers to start giving their opinion on what policy the state should adopt, and the king would proceed to nod to each of these suggestions. If anyone wondered why the king was listening so raptly and obediently to the ministers, there was a creative essay on flood and doom to explain his actions.
I think that’s how it is in late-stage democracy too. I mean, look at how policies are passed. Just before a policy comes to term, a rumor emerges from the ye olde rumor mill on the internet, and all of a sudden everyone is discussing a new candidate injustice. People begin to discuss on social media, then someone makes a controversial statement about it. And then news picks it up and blares it at the crowd. Then, a bill is produced which supposedly addresses this injustice. It seems to come just at the nick of time, but in truth the bill did not follow the zeitgeist, the zeitgeist heralded it.
Btw Siliconguy, have you read my response to your views on Vitalism in the previous blog here on Ecosophia? Its in comment # 289.
I’ve long noticed that science fiction and fantasy are closely related: where one uses magic, the other uses technology. However, I didn’t realize this dichotomy mapped onto a deeper fault-line in Western culture between Romanticism and Classicism, but that makes perfect sense.
I concur that Lord of the Rings is the modern romantic epic par excellence. As for Star Wars, I wouldn’t call it fully romantic or classical, but a mix of the two: a romantic epic with classical aesthetics. A truly classical modern work would actually be Star Trek — there you see the glittering ideal of Classicism on full display (not sure how I’d categorize its storytelling, but it’s not an epic nor a fairy-tale). As for a modern romantic fairy-tale, that of course is the Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis; I realize not everyone here is a fan, and even I’ll admit to its heavy-handed Christianity, but there’s no denying that it’s truly a fairy-tale; I can’t think of many competitors aside from Alice in Wonderland.
Anyway, as for Canada, that country is a product of French colonists, and Tories/British Loyalists who were expelled from America after we won the Revolutionary War, and their land/property confiscated and redistributed to Patriots. Naturally, they needed somewhere to go and rebuild, so they headed up north. Being a Crown colony worked for awhile, until the British monarchy devolved into a figurehead, which left Canada adrift. Nowadays, it’s an economic zone and an experimental ground for Globalist policy.
I know I mentioned this a few weeks back, but the Guns in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series are a magical weapon that are no longer swords : )
“The Sandalwood Guns are the guns of a true gunslinger. They have been passed down through the ages from Arthur Eld himself, down to Steven Deschain and ultimately Roland Deschain.
They were made using the melted down blue-grey steel of the sword, Excalibur, and have the rose, the sign of the Eld, engraved in the side. The sandalwood grips of the gun have never lost their fragrance and near the muzzle of each gun can be seen scroll work which translates to “White”, which was Arthur’s dinh mark.
However, there are many other legends regarding their origins, and some say the steel and sandalwood are not from Mid-World but brought from an alien world. Others believe the guns came from same Kashamin pyramid that Arthur and his sword Excalibur have been entombed in; others say they were a gift from the Dark Tower.
The guns are extraordinarily large by the standards of modern pistols. They are described multiple times as being “comically large”. The guns shoot .45 caliber bullets and our world’s equivalent of Roland’s original bullets are Long Colt .45’s.
A few times in the series, Roland has referred to the guns as “the widow makers”.
As Roland had to present a sign of Arthur Eld upon entering the Dark Tower, he presented one of the sandalwood guns, which allowed him access (the other having been taken by Susannah when she left to find her own world and her own destiny). He originally wanted to present the Horn of Eld, but he lost it after The Battle of Jericho Hill.
From the way they are usually depicted and described, they are likely twins of the Colt Single Action Army model, otherwise known as The Peacemaker or the SAA in .45 Long Colt. or maybe a .454 casull.”
https://darktower.fandom.com/wiki/Sandalwood_Guns
This list of mythological objects is pretty dang cool. Wikipedia, I know, but…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mythological_objects
A book on mythological objects would be a great (and a massive project).
This discussion also reminds me of the song “The Gun and the Bible” by Negativland, where it lists a bunch of weapons…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF8vgDfC8d4
Re: JMG #57:
“Quite the contrary, they have a matter of weeks to put a lid on this or Starmer may well end up having to flee the country like the recently deposed Bangladeshi head of state. This is the kind of situation that can bring down governments — by which I don’t mean Starmer’s administration goes away and is replaced by another. I mean that the British political system might just end up being replaced entirely by a revolutionary government”
I expect that Starmer will prevail for the time being. He has the minion classes firmly on his side. As long as that remains the case, no revolt can succeed.
As for a revolutionary government, put it out of your mind. Revolutions only happen when there is a counter-elite ready to take power. Think of the Communist Party in Russia, the Jacobins in France, or the Thule Society in Germany. I see no signs of any credible, non-co-opted, counter-elite anywhere in the Western world at this point. That may change down the road, but at this point, I think ex-Yugoslavia or post-USSR are more likely scenarios.
John Carter, in his Barsoom Substack, gives the following bleak assessment:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/through-the-chilled-years-ahead
“A generation of low-intensity warfare will leave Great Britain an impoverished ruin. No one builds or invests in a country beset by violent ethnic conflict, so you can say goodbye to London’s status as a centre of global finance … especially as the financiers themselves are very likely to be high-priority targets. Innocents will get caught in the crossfire – children, on both sides. Men will stain their souls with war crimes, and become beasts. These kinds of things invariably degenerate into terrorism and the terrorists always end up as criminal gangs; even if they win, they’re a curse on the land for a generation afterwards. …
“Barring a miracle, the darkness that has spread over the land will deepen. The Anglo-Saxons, the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish will face a protracted, desperate struggle in which the only options are annihilation on the one hand, and ruin on the other. Should they be defeated, fifteen hundred years of Anglo-Saxon history, and thousands of years in the case of the Cymry and the Irish, will be drawn to an ignominious close, all because a cabal of traitorous communists seized control of the state apparatus for a few decades.”
sgage
My apologies. It was late and I didn’t check that thoroughly. Thanks for the correction.
Stephen
Stephen Pearson, I’m the one mystified by this attachment to the French language. Much of what I learned about Quebec comes from family that settled there (Montreal) a long time ago. They were embedded like ticks, speaking joual just like the neighbors, and later going to McGill and Concordia.
So, does one’s language and culture have to serve one? Yes, it would be nice, and better still if one’s language and culture, which usually come intertwined, don’t keep people stupid, pregnant and on the farm. This was the Quebec ruling elite’s way of control, particularly the game plan of the Roman Catholic Church. It was also the Church’s game plan in my family’s European ancestral country where women would routinely be asked by the priest in the confessional how many times a week they boffed their husband. Oppressive and abusive, I would say, and well deserving of overthrow, or, barring that, at least a punch in the mouth. Maybe I’m being too judgmental.
My understanding is that France dumped Quebec as part of peace settlements in the 1700s between France and Britain and later, in multi-country negotiations in Paris, at the end of the US Revolutionary War. Some territories were ceded by the different powers, other acquired. IIRC, France got some Caribbean Islands in return for New France.
But having said all that, by the 1840s Britain had enough of Canada and wanted out. Not enough there to easily rip-off. Not like India. Maybe France made the right decision.
And, last but not least, look at the numbers which are self explanatory. More than 300M English speakers in N. America, 150M Spanish speakers, and maybe 8M French speakers, depending on who you ask. So, three questions, does the language you use serve your interests? Does the state you live under serve your interests? Or, is it the other way around?
IMO French Quebeckers shouldn’t have waited 200 years to tell their purported betters to stuff it. And, by the time they did, one object of their ire – the hated Westmount Rhodesians – were pretty much gone. Later, ‘101 or 401’ was the motto, and so, the 401 it was. Company HQs upped sticks and headed to detested TO. Montreal was once the financial capitol. Did it leave Montreal better off?
Hey JMG
As far as I am aware, the magic bow had no name beyond “the magic bow”. The entire story in a nutshell can be read here,
https://www.vietnam.com/en/culture/art/fairy-tales/the-magic-crossbow-an-old-vietnam-tale-of-trong-thuy-and-my-chau.html
Smith
thanks for your reply. I appreciate your insights.
As to the language serving them, perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. It defines to themselves and others who they are. They would never pass as French, and don’t think of themselves as such. Many of them are fluent in English, especially those in Montreal, and in business, government, education.,etc. Where I live in Mexico half the year there are a lot of Quebecois. They really enjoy their own company and tend to stick to themselves a lot. Some of them speak very little English or Spanish. A lot of Anglos,perhaps Anglo Canadians the most,tend to look down on them for that, though they themselves speak little or no French. I find that my limited French is always appreciated. I used to be reasonably fluent, but have lost a lot of it over the years. It is not a case where they are going to go” Oh, we would be better off speaking English” and switch. The logical reasons for switching only make them more stubborn not to. Things often work that way. I have seen it with other language and cultural groups. I will stick with my comparison to Appalachia for one. France comes to mind as does Israel, Basques and Portugese with Spanish. I remember in Quebec in the 60s copping some pretty major attitude for speaking with a French accent, which was all I knew.
I will not argue with your points about history or catholicism, which are true, just that to me cultural identity doesn’t work that way.
Stephen
It may be a bit later for this, but here are some stray bits.
With respect to Tolkien and his inspirations, there’s a fellow who’s been developing an interesting speculation about the geographical and geological location of Middle Earth, which he thinks maps onto a very precise part of the ice-age Eurasian world. The first article is here:
https://thesaxoncross.substack.com/p/tolkien-ice-age-europe-and-middle
As for neckties, after coffee-filter neckpieces went out of fashion, neckties and (cravats and ascots) do a pretty good job sealing the shirt against drafts and breezes. Useful in drafty offices and houses until central heating came along, and even afterward when one had to go outside.
Terry Gilliam’s Adventures of Baron von Munchhausen is a protracted cinematic essay on the tension between the Fantastic and the Reasonable. The Age of Reason does not come off very well….
In general, the romantic aligns with the exotic, whether historical, geographical, or cultural. The classical aligns with the reasonable, clever and civilized. In the US there’s the romanticism of the frontier. Chinese romanticism tended to dwell on the world of the rivers and lakes, the and the mysteries of the mountains — not the protocols of the mandarin’s office. It would be plausible for a science fiction novel to focus on accounting; it would take much more effort to make that work in a fantasy novel.
Swords are portable, and very often marvelous, and are a good compromise between a ranged weapon and a close-in weapon. They can be carried by a lone wanderer, and easily deployed. Staves (or is that staffs?) are useful, but not so marvelous: they don’t, for example, need to be made by mysteriously skilled smiths. Bows are useful, but arrows take more maintenance. So for story-telling purposes, swords of one sort or another are a pretty handy device. Now, a magical mountaineer’s axe might also work, but it would take some explaining….
Long time reader here who is from Québec, a historical Romance linguist by training who has spent decades teaching French in anglophone Canada and the Southern United States, and who thus might offer some answers to the perplexed.
1-Smith (#186): I regret to say this, but your claims about Québec are untrue. For instance, the claim that Anglo-Canadians massively left Montréal during the 1970’s because of the evil separatist boogeyman is a well established piece of Anglo-Canadian folklore, but it is doubly groundless:
A-First, many competent sociologists and demographers have cast serious doubt on whether emigration patterns relating to anglophones from Québec at the time exhibit ANY discontinuity from those of previous generations. And B-Those who claim that emigration DID increase at the time clearly agree that the evidence that the rise of nationalism in Québec played a decisive role thereupon is, AT BEST, quite ambiguous.
In answer to your question “Did it leave Montreal better off”: From the vantage point of its francophone inhabitants especially, Québec nationalism undeniably left the inhabitants of Montréal and Québec better off. In socio-economic terms francophones (in Québec and indeed throughout Canada) in the late nineteen sixties could quite accurately be compared to African-Americans vis-à-vis whites south of the border: dying younger, with less education, victims of socio-economic institutional discrimination.
Today? Québec has the highest life expectancy of the North American continent: if PISA test scores are to be believed Québec now has better-educated high schoolers than either anglophone Canada or the United States (A much higher percentage of whom then pursue post-secondary education, and end up with far less debt in the process, incidentally). The income gap with anglophones? Gone.
Inasmuch as this is ONLY true of francophones in Québec and not of those in any other Canadian province, it seems fair to conclude that these positive developments (and several others) are a consequence of Québec nationalism. This was done while scrupulously respecting the linguistic and civic rights of anglophones in Québec, a group which has quite properly been called the best-treated minority on the planet.
So, Smith, allow me to throw your question back at you: Why do you think adjacent American States persist in speaking English, when the language of an obviously better society (Its citizens live longer, are better educated…) is present just next door? You may also be familiar with the Hispanic paradox in American demographics: on the basis of this, why do (anglophone!) Americans persist in using a language which seemingly makes them die younger?
Now, suggest to any American that French and/or Spanish should be sole language(s) of the United States for the above reasons (or any reason, really…), and you will get a…rather negative reaction. To put it mildly. Analyze why this negative reaction exists and what its origins are, and the desire of the inhabitants of Québec to continue to speak French will make a LOT more sense to you (As a special bonus, you will also “get” places like Catalonia, Flanders or the Spanish Basque country much better!).
2-Non-Canadian ecosophians, and indeed JMG too, need to understand a very fundamental reality about anglophone Canada: approximately 95% of its diet of television and movies is American. NOT “American-influenced”: I mean strictly American. The same is true of books: 95% of all books read by anglophone Canadians are American. This is true of all regions and all generations.
Discussions on “Anglophone Canada” thus tend to miss what I have come to see as its core feature today: a society suffering from a powerful, vicious inferiority complex and self-loathing which are intense, ubiquitous, utterly crippling, and worst of all…never, ever, EVER acknowledged openly. And this is a direct result of the total disconnect between what (little) Canadian history and/geography its anglophone citizens learn in school and whatever other facts about the country they somehow acquire on the one hand and, on the other, Canada’s conspicuous non-existence in the American media landscape.
I have indeed sometimes wondered whether Anglo-Canadian hostility to Québec might not best be explained as a surface manifestation of this self-hatred: if it is axiomatic to your mind that Canada is utterly worthless garbage because it is not the United States , then…since Québec is both part of Canada and (on account of its ethnolinguistic composition) the least American-like part of Canada, it therefore follows that Québec must be the filthiest, most disgusting collection of human garbage north of the border.
3-On the Catholic + Protestant + Orthodox split in Europe: I would like to recommend a book on the topic to all (including JMG, who I suspect would find it intriguing if not indeed fascinating): Emmanuel Todd, “L’invention de l’Europe” (Éditions du Seuil, 1990).
Todd is a political scientist and anthropologist who has two claims to fame: in his first book (“La chute finale”, 1976) he predicted that the Soviet Union would fall in the late 80’s or early 90’s, and in a later one (“Le rendez-vous des civilisations”, co-written with Youssef Courbage in 2007) he predicted that within a decade most dictatorships of the Arab world would be overthrown or be in severe danger, with Tunisia probably representing ground zero of this wave. Both predictions proved true, of course.
He has a complex model presented in his post-1976 books which correlates (mass) ideologies and traditional family structures, and in pre-modern times religions were THE mass ideologies which spread: he argues that the Catholic/Protestant/Orthodox border(s), and indeed the one separating the Christian from the Muslim world, correspond to older borders, relating to separate family types. Unlike all too many French intellectuals, Todd pays VERY close attention to data, and I am convinced his model is, at the core, sound.
(For the galloglottolically-challenged -why yes, I just made up that word, by all means feel free to use it -who might be interested in the above references I believe all are available in English translation).
4-Oh, and (somewhat off topic) thanks to JMG are in order: Your writings on history, especially on the nature of imperial expansion and decline, have immensely helped me in making (more) sense of the linguistic landscape of Western and Central Europe in the wake of the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire: Your name (and bibliographical references to your relevant writings) will of course appear in my (very unorthodox) book on the prehistory of the Romance languages, based on my dissertation, which I hope (because of a recent improvement in my job situation) to publish sometime in the foreseeable future.
5-(Monty Python quote): And now for something completely different. Have any ecosophians read Alison Stine’s 2021 novel “Trashlands”? It is a dystopian science-fiction novel that is so similar to JMG’s writings (Star’s Reach, especially) that part of me wonders whether Alison Stine in fact exists and might instead be a JMG “nom de plume”. If nobody has read it, I definitely recommend it.
Hi John Michael,
Recent economic events have sparked a note of internal introspection. I’ve known about peak oil since around 2004. Back then it was sort of mentioned in the news. It was hardly a big secret that conventional oil peaked around 2005. At the time I became alarmed at the implications and so read books about the subject, and they made a lot of sense. You and I have been discussing this subject on and off for almost sixteen years, and the implications of the story are not lost on me, and you’ve made your choices, and I’ve made mine, both with some awareness of the underlying reality. Free will being something that takes strength of character to stand up to the prevailing winds.
Every year or two, I re-read Michael Lewis’s most excellent book ‘The Big Short’. The narrative is a solid reminder that fools (or at the very best, the uninformed) can be captaining the ship of western civilisation as it sails the choppy seas of the realities of life on a planet with finite resources and energy. Every re-read I get slightly more out of the narrative. And this time around a sort of introspection has entered my consciousness. Hmm.
Grappling with a sudden sense of self awareness, I was wondering out of sheer curiosity whether the cursed Wagner ever came to struggle with the knowledge as to the implications of the spell he’d let loose upon the world? What do you reckon about that, or is it too early to discuss such matters?
Cheers
Chris
>A generation of low-intensity warfare will leave Great Britain an impoverished ruin. No one builds or invests in a country beset by violent ethnic conflict
Basically, the whole of UK is about to become N Ireland. If you are a youngun with marketable skills, and you’re not particularly attached to living there, I’d leave. Now. At this point, I don’t think it’s going to matter too much where you go either. Anywhere where they aren’t shooting each other will be better.
They’re not shooting each other in Hatusa, er, Turkey, for instance. They pet stray cats instead. That has to count for something.
>the game plan of the Roman Catholic Church
So that’s the thinking behind that Monty Python song. It always mystified me a bit.
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk
Thanks Scotlyn and Robert Mathiesen for your interesting contributions in the discussion about religious boundaries in Europe.
I hope this doesn’t veer too much away from the topic, but I think more or less the same boundaries will become very relevant to the future of Europe, albeit for a very different reason. JMG has argued many times that Europe will be in trouble when the protection of the US falls away. Without the global dominance of the US, Europe will quickly find out that it doesn’t have the resources to uphold aything close to the current standard of living. The military prowess of Europe exisits only in the mind of Macron, so force will not work either.
It seems likely that after the falling away of the protection of the US, Europe will quickly pivot and try to find another supplyer of cheap energy. That could be the Middle East, but the price will be the islamisation of the country. Another option would be to pivot to Russia. I don’t think Russia will be interested or able to come to the aid of all of Europe, but I think they will be interested in parts of it. The reason is that Russia could very well use some extra ‘body’ to avoid ending up as a contributary to China.
I’ve wondered many times what parts of Europe would be most of interest to Russia. Besides energy resources I think some industries are interesting where Europe is leading and that could help improve Russia’s geopolitical standing. Of course things will change when fossil fuels run out, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for the next decades. My current list is like this:
– oil: Norway and Scotland
– gas: Norway
– coal: Germany, Poland
– production technology: Germany, Switzerland, North Italy
– industrial metrology: Germany, UK
– medical devices: Germany, Netherlands (Siemens, Pilips)
– chip design: England (ARM)
– chip making: Netherlands (AMSL)
– high end steel: Netherlands (Tata steel)
– agriculture: Netherlands (glass, Wageningen university)
– aerospace: England (Rolls Royce)
– power generation: Germany (Siemens)
As you can see, nearly all of this is in protestant territory. It makes me wonder if in the future Europe will split again following the borders of the Roman empire, this time with the former Roman territories turning Islamic and the other territories turning Orthodox Christian.
Hi JMG and kommentariat.
This is a bit offtopic, but when I went to the local “fiesta” in a town near the place where I usually live, well, there was a big poster on the main street, written by the local youth. Its words were “Make the feast great again”. Maybe the feasts in Spain aren’t like they were some years ago. I don’t know…
I think the Trump slogan has nowadays its own life outside the USA…
Another non-sword legendary (cryptically magical) weapon is Cúchulainn‘s Gae Bulg which is not only not a sword, it’s not easy to name or describe what it is. A spear, but one apparently designed to be launched across the surface of water, using a foot. (One has to be fighting in more or less waist-deep water, which Cúchulainn just happens to do at critical times.) On penetration it divides into numerous branches or barbs that fatally pierce all the target’s organs at once. I wonder if it was inspired in part by distant recollection of some toxin or disease. In terms of narrative structure it functions as a Wave Motion Gun.
Wer here
JMG what you think about the possibility of WW3 in this autumn. The Ukrainians apparently figured up that they can’t win in the south and east so they decided that attacking border villges in Kursk region.
I don’t know why maybe because it is an atempt to drive forces away from the Donbass or maybe start some kind of troubles in Russia. They are not going very far despite a week has passed, if it gets bogged down what will be the result. People are screaming that attacking Russian teritory is Ukraine’s last chace of “forcing negotiations”,
poeple are seriously screaming right now that NATO member states must attack Russia’s borders in order to “help” Ukraine, mass conspription is now disscused by everyone. People are claiming that in order to stop Ukraine’s collapse in Donbass they must attack Russia’s West border, what if the NATO leaders are so afraid that Ukraine loses Eastern regions that starting WW3 over this is an acceptable”option”.
I am afraid this is something that I never excpected this are they really thatb crazy. Poland gave away it’s weapons systems to Ukraine and we don’t have much If a war starts it will be bad for us people are panicking and me myself I am uncertain about this.
What say tou archdruid ?
About Catholic marriage, as mentioned above: it is one way to organize a community. Marry fairly young, consensual on both sides, no arranged marriages, permission of elders not required but it is understood by all that the couple become a part of both families. Absolute fidelity is expected on both sides; the infamous “My wife is married, I’m not.” double standard was mostly a (lapsed) Protestant attitude. Lots of social interaction at church, family and sports events at which all family members are welcome, no shunning of “weirdos”, such as all too often characterizes Protestant communities. The benefit to men, besides the obvious, is belonging, a community to be part of, where your life and opinions matter. The benefit to women is support for themselves and their children and every married woman is mistress in her own household, no subordination to First Wife or Auntie or MIL. The institution worked well in the days when one wage or salary could support a household, and part of the responsibility of Catholic officials, elected or appointed, was making sure that every man in the neighborhood had some sort of job.
The nostalgia of traditional Catholics for their ethnic neighborhoods is understandable, but they are, IMHO, delusional in thinking that Mr. Trump and his following have any intention of bringing back the conditions in which such communities can flourish.
I misread ‘Richard Wagner’s opera’ as ‘Wagner’s soap opera’, and got a mental image of coronation street singing everything in full opera mode.
re: magical weapons
Nobody ever mentions the Predator.
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=Sz8QC2Ng3Vs
@smith #186: Your question “does the language you use serve your interests?” seems to me to cut exactly to JMG’s distinction between Classicist and Romantic world views. Etienne went into a lot of detail on whether the use of the French language actually serves Québecois’ interests, which I am in no conditions to judge since I have only lived here for some years.
I would rather point out that the question itself is anti-Romantic. By synchronicity, reading Doctor Zhivago, I came across suggestions from more than one character (and possibly shared by Pasternak himself, who was of Jewish ancestry) that the Jews were all fine and good, and we should thank them for their contributions, but why couldn’t they just stop insisting on being Jewish and become the same as their Russian neighbours? That would be in their own best interests!
I don’t think many Jews nowadays would take that suggestion (especially when coming from outsiders) very well. I also don’t think Estonians, Latvians, Slovakians and so many others would agree with the sentiment (I don’t know where your family came from).
At bottom, for many people, continuing to speak their ancestors’ language is not a rational choice, just as having children is not a rational choice. In fact, since the introduction of social security, there is hardly any rational argument for having children; the choice to have them is almost entirely emotional. And perpetuating one’s cultural lineage is often conflated with perpetuating the biological one when talking of one’s nation going extinct.
Hello JMG,
As Michael Martin #184 has weighed in on your comment #57, I thought I might add my own opinion at this late stage of the discussion. Whether because of Starmer’s actions or not, the riots here seem to be petering out for the time being. Of course another serious crime perceived to be linked to immigration or further economic pressure on the working class resulting from a financial crisis – and I think there is an even chance of one on the scale of 2007 within the next five years – is likely to cause another flare up. However, I just don’t see a critical mass of people getting angry enough to overthrow a UK government outside of an election in the foreseeable future. Certainly, Labour are signalling they will squeeze the middle class and businesses with higher taxes before hitting the working class too hard, partly because they fear Reform grabbing more of the traditional Labour vote. Nor do I foresee serious and widespread armed insurrections as Michael seems to hinting.
On the whole, I have a weary resignation that the future suggested in Aurelian’s blog posts is the one we will get in the UK, with over a few decades people of non-West European ethnicity taking most of the senior jobs in government, business and eventually the judiciary, with traditional British culture, customs and norms gradually being subsumed. I expect this to happen with a few nasty incidents here and there, but nothing that will much change or delay the process. Differential birth rates between various ethic groups will of course play a big role. Already in many inner city schools ethnic British children are already in a small minority.
Changes in laws will follow at some point but I would not like to predict which direction that would take and where it would stop. In the main, traditional Britain will end in a whimper rather than a bang.
Etienne, thanks for the link to Emmanuel Todd! I do note that he places the origin of the various family structures (for Europe, at least) in the Middle Ages or later. That is, his model has no explanatory power for the coincidence of the Roman frontier with the religious split.
On the necktie front: we owe their popularity to the extremely overweight Prince Regent, later George IV of Britain. He got fashion advice from one Beau Brummell, who emphasised dark clothing and a cravat to hide George’s excess weight and double-chin. And because the Prince Regent was wearing this, it became fashionable to wear this. And thence the style evolved into the modern business suit and tie.
>It makes me wonder if in the future Europe will split again following the borders of the Roman empire, this time with the former Roman territories turning Islamic and the other territories turning Orthodox Christian
I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do suggest a way of estimating it. Take a train ride and start counting mosques and churches you see. If you see more mosques than churches, that place is likely to flip muslim. If you see more churches than mosques, it’ll stay christian.
[Edited by JMG to remove ethnic slurs. Other Owen, please remember that courtesy is required here, even toward people you don’t like.]
The origin of the cravat struck me as being very like the traditional Western bandanna – a practical all-purpose neck rag. I wonder if it will evolve the same way.
BTW – headline from the AP – “US Colleges are cutting majors and slashing programs after years of putting it off.” And my grandsons and one grand-niece are being shoved down the college track into that environment. as if it were the only possible option for them. Am still overjoyed that the grandchildren were taught survival skills like cooking etc at home.
Xcalibur/djs, are you forgetting the Oz books by L. Frank Baum? They’re among the supreme fairy tales of modern Western culture, and have had an astonishingly broad influence. I’d also recommend reading, if you’re not familiar with them, the tales of George Macdonald (especially The Princess and the Goblin), which Lewis himself adored, and the stories of E. Nesbit. There are more, but those will do to start with!
Justin, a good point. I’ve thought more than once of doing something with guns as magic weapons.
Michael, at least at the moment, he seems to have put a lid on it via draconian legal abuses. We’ll see what happens in the longer run. Mind you, it’s an old story: Keir Starmer’s name the last time around was Vortigern, and he (or at least the class he represents) will doubtless end up facing the same fate, shoved unceremoniously from power by the immigrant forces he hoped to use to prop up his rule.
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this.
LeGrand, hmm! I’ve bookmarked the Ice Age essay to study closely in due time.
Chris, it’s rather early to discuss such matters, since first we have to talk in much more detail about the spell itself.
Other Owen, and it’s not exactly a comforting sign that Belfast has become a hotbed of anti-immigrant activity, with Catholic and Protestant militias finding common ground for the first time in centuries. A lot of people over there still know how to smuggle arms, build bombs, and carry out assassinations; the learning curve on the other side of the Irish Sea is likely to be rather steeper as a result.
Chuaquin, thanks for the data point!
Walt, funny. Yes, I dimly remember enough chatter about Be Forever Yamato to catch the reference.
Wer, it fascinates me that so few people seem to have noticed just how closely the Ukrainian command is following Hitler’s playbook. This is Ukraine’s Battle of the Bulge. That’s not to say it was a mistake; the Ukrainian side is in deep trouble, just as the German side was in December 1944, and a sudden thrust into a poorly defended region to try to take back the initiative was in both cases just about the only option that made any kind of military sense. The Russians were also pretty obviously preparing to open a new front in Sumy oblast, and so striking first was a smart move for the Ukrainians. Neither the Wehrmacht nor the Ukrainian army, though, had enough reserves left to achieve the breakthrough it needed. Now comes the blowback. I doubt it’ll be any easier for Zelensky than it was for Hitler.
Pygmycory, funny!
Robert M., well, we’ll see. As I noted above, this is an old story; if Hengist and Horsa’s current equivalents can moderate their demands for the time being and rein in the violent elements of their own community, your scenario might well happen. If not — well, we know what kind of backlash happened when Keir Vortigern’s armed immigrants showed no interest in following inconvenient laws. It’s not at all impossible that a couple of centuries from now, the western fastnesses — Wales, the Scots highlands, possibly the old kingdom of Rheged, possibly Cornwall — might once again be in the hands of the descendants of the old inhabitants, the eastern and central regions might be dominated by new immigrant communities, and centuries of war between the two will follow.
Patricia M, I bet. I expect the next wave of colleges and universities shutting down entirely to hit within a few years at most.
@Aldarion #201 “I don’t think many Jews nowadays would take that suggestion (especially when coming from outsiders) very well.”
It really depends (as it historically depended) on the Jew. Pasternak was an ethnic Jew (which, in the former USSR, counts for more than religion in determining Jewishness) who was indeed quite anxious to be assimilated. That was a reasonably common attitude among Jews throughout Europe in the early 20th century (including in Germany – for all the good that did them, as the victorious Hitlerites, unlike some of the Nazi heretics, weren’t for assimilation). Nowadays it is indeed less popular, but survives in, say, certain Jewish oligarchs ostentatiously declaring that they were now Russians after having converted to Orthodoxy (to be fair, converting to Orthodoxy did make you Russian under the Tsars and the Emperors, at least nominally; but that isn’t how it is seen now).
Of course there was also another option: abandon your language (at least outside your house), preferably pick an inoffensive surname, try to blend in with the goyim, but don’t claim to have somehow changed ethnicity; remain Jewish, in other words, but don’t bring too much attention to it in mixed company, where your enemies are likely to hear of it. That, I think, was the path chosen by the Jewish parts of my own ancestry throughout the Soviet period. Inglorious, perhaps, but adaptive enough. I certainly can’t begrudge people for trying to fully hold on to their ethnic culture – I think complete assimilation is a pipe dream anyway, for both majorities and minorities – but it’s not always what people choose even when they do have a reasonably free choice, and the choice is often seriously constrained by social realities.
Ice Age Tolkien? That’s an interesting thought. It fits surprisingly well if you grant some poetic license to expanding the Harz Mountains into the Misty Mountains. The general outlines of the European Ice Age coast have been known for a long time.
Piers Anthony’s Xanth looks remarkably like Florida, and Westeros is very reminiscent of Britain. Tweaking a map for a story is a common enough practice.
Switching topics, the mainstream media is silent about the similarities between the Battle of the Bulge and the Ukrainian offensive. Do they not know history, or do they remember who ultimately lost? Or is it political, as in “hey, the Ukrainians are trying the same last-ditch thing as the Nazis did” making an unpleasant implication.
Chauquin #195
“Make the feast great again”
Growing up as a “nothing,” I knew only snatches of what Christianity was. In my 60s (roughly between 2010 and 2016), I took it upon myself to study Christianity for the sole purpose of somehow feeling better seated in a country that calls itself ”Christian.” (All lies, by the way.)
So, studied. I bought a wall calendar which included all the “Feast Days.” Every single day had been assigned a feast day, I assume mostly centuries ago. I said, “In my town, where are the feast days?”
I joined a local “Christian” church in my town in Northern California, and attended most Sunday worship services for a couple years. On Sundays, elder women would bring relatively lame potluck dishes, like molded Jay-ello. Where was the pot roast? I was expecting at least one pot roast in those two years. Nothin’.
I silently looking for signs of even one feast day. Still nothin’. Not even a mention in two years. I was sorely disappointed. I felt the same let-down when I heard zilcho about feet washing around Easter. Huh? I was all set to wash someone’s feet, in the spirit I had learned around the ritual.
The “not a peep about feast days” disaffected me. WTF? These rituals, it seemed to me, had gotten dumped, at least in that place, in that time.
I finally faced the fact that these rituals were never gonna show up in my town🥺😢. May I should have gotten on the phone and called each local church asking, “Does anyone bring a pot roast on ANY day during the year?” ”Do you do feet washing around Easter?”
I left Christianity behind. In my town, Christianity was dead. No juice (like gravy) flowing, so to speak.
Now I am Buddhist. I continue to practice meditation as I have done since I was 20. I am in the process of donating the dozens of paper books on Christianity I had bought during those years, including the NIV Rainbow Study Bible (an event in itself) and Queer Bible Commentary by Deryn Guest. Books having to do with Christianity are useless to me. Christianity came and went.
No Christian I met had use for a 60-something woman. I like hearing about Christians’ experiences here. I wish people well for whom Christianity works for them. But Christianity is a group thing—a people thing. Each group is different since it is made up of a specific set of people. I was around the wrong kind of Christian, I guess. I now know the theology behind Christianity but, in those years, was never able to connect with even one Christian who I wanted to emulate. Christianity is not a meditation thing. One might say, “Not connecting wasn’t my fault.” I extended quite a lot of myself looking for something—anything—that meant something to me.
Back to feast days. I still am looking into the mist asking, “Where is the pot roast?”
💨Northwind Grandma💨⛪️🤦🏼♀️☸️
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Wer #197
“WW3 in this autumn”
KOMODO HARRIS
WOMB & HAIRDO
Dear Wer,
Thank you for your comment. I look forward to your comments, and listen carefully to what you write.
I can’t speak for every Murican, but at the least the international news that reaches me, (I will say specifically) “we Muricans” are NOT being told ANYTHING true about Okraine. I will venture and say that all we are receiving by way of news is propaganda.
The Bitten-Harris administration does what it damn well pleases (World War 3-like) (both are warmongers). NUTO does what it damn well pleases. Neither set is telling the Murican people what the f___ is going on. Being that the Murican people are the ones paying for all this sh__ going on in (and around Okraine), the Murican people deserve better. Why the f___ are Murican monies being spent on war in Ruussia’s backyard? (Murica needs to back out slowly, as one would logically do upon encountering a cobra). Ruussia is a cobra, ready to strike.
It feels like 1914 just prior to Archduke Franz Ferdinand getting assassinated.
I hope Putin is wise enough and astute enough to hang on until AFTER the Murican election on 5th November 2024 when, I hope, a different person gets elected besides warmonger KomodoDragon Harris. (She is Robert McNamara 1960s all over again.)
Komodo Harris never saw a war she didn’t like. She may have “a womb and a hairdo” but she is 110% “toxic-male.”
💨Northwind Grandma💨🇺🇸⚒️💀
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Mary Bennet #198
“The benefit to women is support for themselves and their children and every married woman is mistress in her own household, no subordination to First Wife or Auntie or MIL.”
Thank you for this. You made my day.
I love this. I saw “First Wife,” then “Auntie,” and was looking for mother-in-law, and there she was (MIL). Yeah‼️Yep, mothers-in-law must fast learn that in (and around) her son’s house, the son’s wife is THE BOSS (an authority not to be challenged). I have had experience this last year on this exact issue, where my 80-something mother-in-law thought she was “boss in all instances,”—not only that, but a devouring mother archetype, at that. Think Komodo-dragon-in-the-house-chasing.
My mother-in-law’s attitudes and stances were what first clued me in that there *IS* a “Komodo dragon archetype” in humans.
💨Northwind Grandma💨me👵🏼her🦎👵🏽
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Today I saw I car with two bumper stickers on it. The one on the left was one of those rainbow flag stickers with woke sayings on it like “ love is love”. on the right side was a sticker that said, “ Science, it’s like magic , except real”.
the tales of George Macdonald (especially The Princess and the Goblin), which Lewis himself adored,
The Princess and the Goblin/Princess and Curdie books also happen to be a big influence on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Orcs.
@Boccacccio (#194):
Not only are all the countries you list (except Poland) on the Protestant side of the Protestant/Catholic confessional divide in Europe, but they’re on the Germanic side of the Germanic/Romance linguistic divide, and also on the Beer side of the Beer/Wine beverage divide. Those three divides roughly coincide, and mark a boundary that is very old and runs very deep.
Hello John, slightly off topic but Robert Pirsig has some interesting things to say about the classic/romantic split in Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. His journey has thrown up an interesting way to view the world, in my eyes. As to posts about the UK riots, it may be the consequence of the rise of the meritocracy as Michael Young wrote about. The outcome may depend on how we allow a struggling underclass regain value and worth in society.
Dear JMG,
Although I hate opera (Dad, turn it down), I’m loving this.
Hey, while we’re opening up the raw underside of history, how about this… once the fat lady sings:
The Cathars in the Languedoc
and…
The Kazars…
I don’t want to get you into trouble, but then I’d always hoped to have a chance to speak with you while, probably, chained to a wall in some fools dungeon :- /
JMG #207: Yes, it seems I was forgetful! Of course, the Wizard of Oz has had profound influence, and I’ll have to delve into The Princess and the Goblin, which seems like a classic I’ve overlooked. So, there are modern gems here and there, but you have to dig for them.
As for Britain/Ireland, I don’t think that will end well. The ruling elites will keep doubling down, and the people are getting fed up with exploitation and abuse. For the Catholic Irish and Ulster Scots to come together is unprecedented, and could signify a new Troubles on the way.
As for Ukraine, I too have noticed the similarities between the current counter-offensive and the Battle of the Bulge. The main difference I think is that the Nazi German counter-offensive posed more of a threat, since if the Allies were not so competent on defense, they could’ve seized Antwerp, dividing their forces and cutting off their main supply port. That might’ve forced a stalemate, leaving them only the Eastern Front to deal with, which might’ve been stabilized somewhere around the Oder River. So even in late 1944, I believe Nazi Germany could’ve recovered and retained control of Central Europe. Others disagree, but I think it’s too easy to see conclusions as foregone after the fact, when it really wasn’t so. Compared to this, the AFU may cause more or less trouble in Russia, but I don’t see any plausible potential for this to alter the course of the war.