text-abuse in the 21st century

one of the reasons that old texts are being mistranslated is that most of the work done on them was done before and during the nineteenth century when the academic mind was building on assumptions which are now easily seen to be invalid. in the nineteenth century, it was firmly believed that the precise time of the creation of the universe right down to the time of day had been accurately calculated, and what with the churches and the universities going at it hammer and tongs over everyone’s head, charles darwin was having a hard time getting his work read. that was the intellectual climate, the academic position.

 

if the nineteenth century scholars were romantics, swept up in the heady newness of it all after long centuries of repression and anathema; and if their work smacks strongly of their impassioned fantasies of the magical lands of their ancestors, the renaissance collectors and translators of old texts were worse. they brought forth many of their texts from undisclosed hiding places and published them if they dared to publish them at all under false pretences, passing them off as fictional works they’d written themselves. this applies to dante’s inferno equally with the faerie queene, many of shakespeare’s plays, tirant lo blanc, and most of the arthurian texts.

 

the reason why this was so is still lost in the mists, but it’s easy to see that these texts, if historical at all, clash wildly and howlingly with the history of the world as produced for us out of the texts from which the bible’s old and new testaments were concocted, and the church was very intolerant of alternative beliefs about anything.

 

the amount of work these several centuries of scholars have done is vast, the structures of ‘knowledge’ and belief arising from it are extensive, unwieldy and precarious, and they are straining present day credence to the limit. we must believe, for example, that if an entry in the famed dictionary of the irish language, taken from a old glossary made under unknown (or even falsely portrayed) conditions by a person whose knowledge of irish was clearly inadequate, gives bizarre translations of all passages in which it occurs except a very few, it is not because the suspect glossary, dil and centuries of scholarship are wrong, it is because the irish were bizarre, and since this is what the ancient romans always maintained, it must be right.

 

similarly, we must not disturb the slumber of that miracle baby born of god and an intact-hymen virgin, by dating mss according to the most persuasive evidence; we must date all mss mentioning evidence of christianity, a church, a priesthood, a worldwide network of monasteries and abbeys, as later than this event.

 

similarly we must not see the eons old succession of ruler-priests called jesus and josephus (jose’uses) and joses and jo cephas, and caiaphas and cheop’s. we have to believe this even though it means that the whole of the arthurian history has to fit into the time after the roman occupation and before the anglo-saxon period, and scholars have looked for it in vain and have started to proclaim that anyway, it doesn’t really matter if it was real or not, the myth is what inspires us most.

 

only a few fanatics, ferocious in their defence of their falsehoods, as enraged against heretics as any old-time cleric ever was, archaic in their methodology, lacking any epistemology and abysmal at dialectic, and their fans, dupes, and equally error-driven scholars working in dependent related disciplines such as numismatics, history and comparative philology (called historical linguistics by some) still believe that the ancient texts from homer to snorri and even shakespeare and spenser, have all been accurately translated, their lexicography pretty close to perfect, their meanings well-understood and their contexts satisfactorily worked out, or else emerging as scholars steeped in the established hermeneutical traditions continue their work.

 

one can appreciate their predicament. the body of opinion that determines how old texts will be translated and what sense will be made of the translations will be profoundly shocked by the paradigm shift that would occur within it as a result of anyone of its fundamental assumptions being recognised as false. and each discovery of the falsity of an assumption would lead inevitably to the examination of all assumptions, and many others would be seen to be false and there’d be a total collapse of all the screen memories currently in the way of progress towards the achievement of a more realistic approach to cultural memory retrieval and maintenance from the evidence of texts.

 

this is rendered more painful by the fact that currently one cannot progress in the academic arena unless one is dedicated in a peculiarly archaic fashion. i have discovered in the most painful way possible that i cannot offer a word of critique upon an instance of current dogma without deeply wounding or offending the scholar i’m addressing, as if the fabric of their body of opinion is the flesh of their bones. this serves as a kind of emotional blackmail: only a nasty person would persist in presenting academics studying old irish texts with evidence that their translations are wrong. they can’t defend themselves, so they resort to personal attack, insults and defamation, trying to discredit me by proving that i have not exhibited the same commitment to their methodologies as they do. their friends rally round.

 

this leads me to the conclusion that independent, free-thinking intellectuals with an instinct for critique and a conscientious love of truth get weeded out of these disciplines early in their career, and those that make it through to post-graduate levels are acutely aware (if they’re not repressing it) that there is ‘only one opinion’ as an oxford scholar assert to me a short while ago (on the subject of historical linguistics) and their career depends on their not wavering from it, making their tiny little edges of progress only within existing paradigms as driven by prevailing opinion.

 

when it gets that seriously stultifyingly up itself, you suspect the church. but you have to dare to say: the bible is a fraud, and that immediately drops you head first into the slush-category. no truly intelligent person could say that, or even if, well okay, everybody kno-o-o-ows that, but nobody really cares, what does it matter if it’s wrong or right, what does it matter if all history derivable from old texts is twisted insanely around their petty fibs and outside frauds, such that truths are no longer accessible through them, what does it matter if all chronologies are way off the mark, and all ancestral lineages horribly distorted and all cultures of the past hopelessly misrepresented, most to their detriment. after all it’s the myth that drives our dreams, shapes our culture’s evolution, makes us what we are.

 

so okay, cu chullain when ever he lost his temper had a stream of blood shooting out of the top of his head like a fountain and his knees went on backwards.

 

wouldn’t have been that he had a red plume on his helmet and they were wrong about the knees, would it? all those scholars wouldn’t be wrong?

and irish kings just did fuck horses, didn’t they? wouldn’t be that some translator mistook the word for a woman for a word for a mare, in a linguistic situation in which confusion about that word was eminently possible, with emer, mari(e) mare, myrgh, margh, mary, marry, maere etc, all meaning either horse, mare, wife or girl, depending where and who says it and which dialect, would it? and even if it were, it’s the myth we’re all enamoured of, isn’t it???

 

and there wouldn’t have been circle ceremony, with quarters and a centre and peace throughout the whole world, would there, just brehon law, which is really rather good, in keeping with bizarre magician kings who fucked their horses and rolled themselves up in bloody bullskins to find out whatever they needed to know (wouldn’t have books, would they?)

 

oh, breath-blast them all! let their eyes be skinnyfat and a terrible soft slipperiness to their gibberish!! i’m going to translate them sanely. and just admit it when i don’t know what a word means. sometimes the meaning’s just lost forever… until we learn to time travel, anyway.

 

 

on the non-antiquity of the inflected languages

( naturally as a wyverne spirit person, i find this a sensitive area. people who think dragons are for beheading, riding about on or running through with lances just aren’t my type, y’know. even more so as an independent etymologist who disagrees with the textbooks on fundamentals so essential i can scarcely find common ground. )

 

this is a response to mainstream proto-indo-europeanists. they are imo up to their necks in fundamental error. their scholarship is hidebound. most of its fundamental principles were already laid down by the nineteenth century, and have never been questioned from any academic position that i could call valid, and okay, i’m finicky, but i’m not that finnicky.

 

the earliest inventors of the art of ‘comparative philology’ (now called ‘comparative historical linguistics’ or some similar thing) were free-thinkers ahead of their time, but they had gone under the spell of the keepers of the mostly Sanskrit traditional literature of India. their work won great acclaim and came under the scrutiny of mainstream universities which were heavily committed to church dogma. though the bravest intellectuals involved in the early development of ‘comparative philology’ as a scholarly pursuit were not committed to defending these dogmas, as the universities took it up, perforce they warped the study around ‘established’ biblical dogmas as if they were beyond question, god’s own words, ‘gospel’.

 

now, this was before darwin’s work was accepted. church scholarship had established the exact date of god’s creation of earth by working it out from the bible. adam spoke the first words in the garden of eden when he named the animals, less than six thousand years ago, if i remember rightly. that wasn’t considered to be a myth – in fact it wasn’t all right to call that a myth – until the middle of last century. it was blasphemy to hint that it ‘ain’t necessarily so’. i remember the bold, rash feeling there was to it too. like you looked around after to see if you were going to be struck down by a thunderbolt for blaspheming. the birth of jesus, calculated from biblical evidence and the dogma concerning them, was and still is slap bang in the centre of the one and only time scale for all earth for all time, neutral, zero, the end of an ugly era and the commencement of another, better one.

 

into this atmosphere came this wonderful idea of tracing the origins of words by comparing them and working out how they came to be different and from what common ancestor they diverged, and the belief that you’d soon find that original, perfect language that god and adam spoke in the newly created garden, not so very long ago.

 

don’t get me wrong – i’m not saying they haven’t progressed. they’re no longer expecting to find adam’s own language. they know about laetoli and the ice-ages etc. they’ve got quite articulate about analysing the result of this process. so what harm does insisting on the infallibility of sacred texts and the sacred traditions concerning them do? pull up a chair. J

the scene is set in william jones’s famous statement that

“the Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than the greek, more copious than the latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident…” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jones_(philologist)

 

let’s unpack it. ‘more perfect than the greek. . . more exquisitely refined than either’ (and he might have added hebrew) refers us at once to the conviction then held that extinct, tightly conjugated languages were the original, superior languages from which the uninflected languages had deteriorated into their present forms. both were taught in schools as models of excellence to attune the mind to all that is holy and good. kid’s greek text-books used to promise their pupils that they were about to learn the very language that god chose to tell us all about his son. practically angel-speak. note he doesn’t regard latin as ‘perfect’, just ‘copious’, reflecting the idea that latin was less holy – ‘god’ had preferred the greek version to the latin vulgate since luther’s and king james’ versions hit the stands. his hyperbole ‘more exquisitely refined’ indicates that he expected to find people ready to agree with him – slightly disenchanted with the ‘classics’, but still seeking the elusive ideal, and expecting to find it further a-field.

 

this idea of the superiority of ancient languages goes back to the celtic idea of the twenty noble languages which are recorded as having been taught in the Scythian schools. while scholars have declared roman writings all but infallible, they have dealt more contemptuously with the everyone else’s, so while livy’s account of road-making with vinegar and fire (eg) is considered fact even though impossible, the Scythian schools are still often considered to be entirely mythical, even though supported by truckloads of evidence. in fact they were extremely influential. but when did they exist and what were they?

 

the oldest datable examples of writing we have are not earlier than the renaissance, and while we can date parchment and ink, we can’t date the actual text. no spoken examples date from before the invention of the phonograph. carvings on stone are notoriously difficult to date. carbon dating is sometimes farcically inaccurate, as are all other methods of dating carved inscriptions.

 

(read don quixote for a contemporary account of salvaging old texts from the burnings. it gives a wonderful account of publishing, translating, getting away with appearing learned to people who aren’t and then making it up as you go along and being pain for it, and the hermeneutics of the age are all exquisitely there.)

 

analysis and a modern (not post- which obscures it a bit) education shows how they must have come into being. both modern and ancient languages were taught in neat paradigms. then, immersion and/or wider experience of the language fills this out. you can imaging this potted approach narrowing down to the pure condensed form of paradigms: the conjugations of verbs and declensions of nouns and adjectives.

 

so the idea that the inflected languages are older than the non-inflectedies s still fondly and firmly held today (although i might refer you here to a discussion on the celtic l list in which Raymond karl concede me this point early this year or late last). there is no evidence to support claims re the antiquity of the inflected languages. none at all.

 

irish old texts describe a Scythian school which taught the twenty noble languages to trainee officials who would then be sent to the places in which these languages were spoken to live and work there, in positions of high authority – like an english speaking student taking german before going to teach geology at a german university. the date is now not knowable, but evidence i’m seeing places it in the middle ages, not too long before the Norman invasion in England.

 

i’ve been making a sort of study of anc gk textbooks of the 19^th and early 20^th with the help of nigel molesworth (google him if you don’t know him – but beware, he’s a steeeeeep learning curve). they keep turning up in op-shops and they’re much easier to learn anc gk from than the latest, which is inclined to be over-reacting to the octopus – it’s not everybody’s medicine. the little first form grammar is naïve and pure, with the only spin on it being the probiblical one, before it was obscured by all the modernistic (and post-) spins of the 20^th century, and the honest attempts to eliminate spin from language teaching; so the politics in them is glaringly intelligible.

 

(probibly should slap copyright on probiblically as a coining) (or bung in a hyphen)

 

these languages were taught as second languages from chantable paradigms into which the original had been potted up by the scholars responsible, and chantable vocabulary lists. a student who learnt a language in this way never heard the natural language until sent out into the field. but language change was then as now faster than textbooks could keep up with. so teachers educated in this way, the learned celts who educated young romans for example, were having to teach natives whose language had continued to evolve through bride-exchanging, conquest and immigration et al, the text book, chantable paradigm version, which had only ever been a very imperfect misrepresentation of a snapshot in time of a rapidly evolving language. a thoroughly artificial language, yet it carried so much prestige that the natural speakers of the original were regarded in some instances (notably welsh and greek) as inferior languages and were replaced by the chantables in schools for the elite, which over the generations provided a leg-up into civilisation for the locals by teaching it to them until the original language at last died out.

 

this system disappeared when the celtic empire went down (we can’t assume we know when that was, as i’ll explain later) and attempts at reconstruction were made during the renaissance. the most recent instance of this we have is the ancient greek, which was reconstructed from the old texts that surfaced after the fall of Constantinople. these texts were translated inexpertly around the fantasies of impassioned reconstructionists, whose work has never been checked except tautologically, according to the lexicography and grammar they themselves invented, all debate being knock-out competition instead of respectful consideration of all viewpoints.

there’s more coming, but it’s a good beginning if you can loosen up on believing the textbooks on the antiquity of the inflected languages.

 

        

darn! the panting syllable

the great adventure began one day when bluestocking the bard was looking something up in the local library. discerning that the book she needed wasn’t there, she muttered under her breath, ‘darn!’, and it’s a good thing it wasn’t something stronger, for it echoed rather loudly, as stage whispers do, in the still, stiff silence of that stern and sullen place. at once the woman behind her, who had been poking about in some of the dustier, cobwebbier shelves, abandoning all decorum, screamed ‘yoicks!’ spun on her stubby high heel and stared bluestocking full in the face. ‘tally ho!’ she added, remembering almost to whisper. she beamed and nodded. ‘darn,’ she said. ‘just the one i’m after.’

    ’one what?’ asked bluestocking.

    ’panting syllable. that’s what ‘darn’ is to me. and i’m after that little one. i’ve been on is track a long while and i know im well. you can catch scent of im from donegal to china and all the way up the danube and down the dnieper changing from tin to tan and from tan to can and every which way and now ere e is ere: darn.’ she was short and muscular with big bowling-ball breasts, powerful thighs and thick, white fingers. ‘etty moloji,’ she concluded proffering that hand. bluestocking shook it and smiled her widest, and would have said, ‘oh, how interesting,’ but the librarian caught her eye with a sombre glare and she only nodded. but as she left the library, she found etty beside her, tugging her sleeve. ‘you see i need to know why you said “darn” instead of “blast” or “shit” or something. where and when did you first hear it, used how, and by whom, and when and where and why did you first start using it yourself. and much more. may we walk together a space.’

    ’certainly. why, i’d be helping scholarship. i first heard darn from my mother and father when i was little, and i asked them what it meant and they said it had no meaning: it was just something you say. i suppose it must have been some old reference to the goddess dana. she’s well-documented anyway. where would you like to walk?’

    ’cornwall? there’s such lots of lovely runnable syllables there. and you often catch glimpses of our darn.’

    ’well, that’s fine with me,’ said bluestocking the bard. ‘my great grandfather was a Cornishman.’

    ’well, you mean a den, then?’

‘a dane? no, a cornishman.’

‘the cornish word for man is den.’

‘oh, i see, it only sounds like dane.’

    ’well, i wouldn’t say only. it’s going beyond the evidence to say they’re the same word, but we should not rule out the possibility, which is rather strong in this instance, although whether dane came from den or vice versa, or whether both came from a common source extinct or extant can’t be guessed at yet. added to which there are other possibilities, some of them equally strong. greeks intermarried with britons long ago, though the history documenting it has not been understood.’

    ’oh, are you going to refer now to the danaans? because weren’t greeks once called danaans?’

    ’well, it’s not as simple as that. i was thinkin of tirant lo blanc. but it goes back further, you see: it’s about tin. now, ere in cornwall’ (which is where they now were) ‘they ad a tin-trade, and people came from everywhere, all of them talking their eads orf an in all sorts of languages and foreign accents, ship-board creoles, pidgins and things. among them they’d've pronounced tin in every possibly way: tin, tan, ton, tyn, tun, twn, tn, and then some said chin and gave us china (there was also a pottery industry, making fine china, too; some said can, cen or even sin, and there’s the cin of incinerator. there’s shine, sheen and then other metals, zinc, tungsten and other industries that use tin, or other metals, such as dying, paint-making and leather-making give us tint, tan, tone and so on. and then all kinds of containers are made of metals, some of them named for the metal: tins, cans, tanks, and here’s a verb: contain and, depending what you put in em and how long it pullulates, stench, and stink. even the noise it makes is a din. and that’s only the english words. Cornish has tan, meaning fire, and tinn or dinn, meaning hard, stern, and uncompromising, and related to the english stern. . . ‘

    ’what’s fire got to do with it?’ bluestocking couldn’t help asking.

    ’they made their fires in tins.’

    ’who did?’

    ’the people who used the word tin to mean fire. they heated their spaces by lighting a fire inside a tin. that would get hot and warn the room. light the fire would mean the same as light the tin. some people would still say that today. the irish word for fire is tine, sometimes pronounced like chin-é or chin-ye. maybe even chimney means fires. -ne or -ney is a plural ending in some old dialects. it’s like the irish –anna. means the same as the english any in some instances.’

    ’and stern too? where does the s come from?’

    ’that’s a long story,’ said etty. ‘let’s call in at the diwotti and talk about it over pastiow ha pott te.’

    ’good idea,’ said bluestocking, and into the diwotti they went.

 

don’t miss the next exciting instalment: where the s came from

 

     ‘

    

there’s a new book on the market, a hermeneutical work, and everybody’s talking about it, so i’ll be having a peruse of it as soon as i can get hold of a copy. for those of you clambering for my wise help and guidance, i’ll let you know whether it’s worth a gecko or not. shlomo zand or sand is the author, and The Invention of the Jewish People is the book. i’ve ordered the paperback -paupers must live like paupers – so watch this space.

without knowing what zand has said, i have to applaud his title. i’ve always been a great believer in the invention of, not the jewish people, but of the popular notion of the jews, as a fantasy to sustain the bible account of creation. but the real, original jewish people are elusive enough.

on the subject here’s an interview i did with etty moloji, while researching the exodus of cornish people from exeter, which our history bod, Hiss, Dorian tells me is dated to the 10th century, but dates that far back can’t be considered reliable because every household kept different records and even if they had any calendar at all, they weren’t synchronised. so the chronologies are a bit of a giggle. lights! action!

herman newt: good day to you, etty, i’m seeking insight into the reality of the character behind the name tewdar. he became the leader of the cornish when, in driving them out of exeter, aethelstan’s soldiers killed his father. can you help us with the etymology, etty?

etty moloji: ooh heaven’s yes, there’s such a lot of it there, herman. panting syllables as far as the eye can see. now the first thing to do, ooh thank you, is that elderflower? how refreshing, all sparkly. now the first thing to do is to hold the word down with one foot, and divide it carefully into its written and spoken components. the written bit is hard and firm, so we hold it by that, and now squint about for the phonetic possibilities. say it. how would you say that, herman? t*e*w*d*a*r?

herman newt: well, i’d say tew rhimes with dew, or it’s stew without the s, so i’d go for chew for the first syllable, and d@ for the second, and i’d put the emphasis on the first. chewdah. oh i get it. in cornish that’s mutate to jewdah. like judah.

etty moloji: only if they spelt it chewdar, but they didn’t. that doesn’t mean they never did, only that we haven’t recorded it. but you could bet your last mudworm at least some of them would have and yes, that does support the hypothesis of a link between the two. but can you think of any other ways? for example, your assumption that tew rhymes with dew or stew is pretty packed for an etymological foray. it assumes that the t is, like that in stew or like the d in dew, slender. perhaps it was at least sometimes, but let’s feel about for all the possibilities and see what sort of contexts they guide us to. you see the spelling must have the power to represent the sounds it represented in some way to the writer, bearing in mind that, for example in modern english, spelling gets almighty surreal sometimes, so we can assume a range of pronunciations loosely referred to at least by the letters.

herman: oh, i see. yes, well tew, as in ‘’e didn’t tew me why’.

etty: that’s it. and of course the vowel will vary from speaker to speaker e, o, i, a, @, u, etc. you see spelling was well, idiosyncratic, and writing was getting a tad cryptic. butcher’s hooks, you know. rows and rows of them, and when you get ms and ns and and vs and us and ws and double ls and double is and things like that all in a row its anybody’s guess, especially when you’re learning the school language out of text books, like they did latin, and gaulish and oh, all the inflected ones, for chrissakes they’re not old, they’re jerrybuilt from potted grammars, and you could so easily get taught the wrong word and there’s your tell turned into a tew before you know it.

herman: is this what happened?

etty: oh no! woah, hold your horses, herman! this is only one possibility. but we’ll come back to it. let’s now glance at http://wapedia.mobi/kw/Tewdar where we see this:

Furv Latin y hanow a via nepprys Teutharius, nepprys Theodoricus. An Frankyon a’s galwa Thierry, ha’n KembroyonTewdr

lynn gwyst translates that for us as ‘the latin form of his name would be sometimes teutharius, sometimes theodoricus. the franks called him thierry, and the welsh, tewdr.’ this gives us a glimpse of the sort of range of phonetic possibilities.

herman: um, this isn’t exploring the relationship between the names tewdar and judah, etty.

etty: well, not yet, but there’s a lot of work to do and a lot less if you do it right the first time. and it’s probably just as relevant and to the point to pick up the word jew and consider its relationship to the french word dieu, the irish día, the jo of joseph(us) and diel, devil, deva, devon and all. we’ll look at other aspects next time.

herman: well, all right, class. Etty has given you your homework: making copious reference to at least a good beginner’s knowledge of at least six languages including hebrew, cornish, ancient greek, old irish and english, french, spanish, morroccan, dutch, gothic, persian and german, explain the relationships between these several words: the word jew, the french word dieu, the irish día, the jo of joseph(us) and diel, devil, deva, devon tracing their origins and noting every appearance in the literature. note any overlap in distribution with the words tewdar, judah, and tudor. try not to leave england yet. for next week, have read about athelstan and the expulsion of the cornish under tewdar from exeter. more wine, etty?

etty: no thank you herman. i am not a lush. (fading out)

erm, herman isn’t here right now, so it’ll have to be history, instead. we’re looking at byzantium by john julius norwich.
it’s in three volumes:
the early histories.
the apogee.
the decline and fall.

it was first published by viking in 1988, reprinted by penguin in 1990, and in its fourth printing by 2007, dorian’s is the folio edition, all covered over with little bits of gold and lots of glossy pictures of antiquities tucked in here and there between carefully designed pages of text.

here glanced into by the renowned historian dorian hiss, or, as he is more likely to be referred to in citations, bibliographies and indexes, hiss, dorian, known affectionately to his friends as hissy. a graduate of st custards, as was the celebrated nigel molesworth, dorian obtained his phd SUMMA CUM LOUDER from the iona gwersity (you don’t pronounce the g and the w is a labio-dental) of wyeuro in 2008, and has been serving on committees and writing blogs ever since. (whether there is any truth in the rumour that hissy is really aka the ‘truly appalling vyvyan ogma wyverne’ as oxford scholar mark williams aka megli of the message boards once called her on the celtic-l list, is a matter for further research. dorian himself knows nothing of such rumours and anyway prefers to keep to the facts. what’s of more interest to us here are hiss, dorian’s thoughts about norwich, john julius’s three volume book. i’ll hand you over to hiss.

hem hem, as for byzantium - it’s a proud book, with some of the most conceited modesty i’ve ever encountered. don’t even think to compare him to gibbons, he implores in his intro, but since gibbons has declined and fallen in most historian’s esteem these days, at least, so we hope, it would do but little harm if we did. like gibbons, he truly believes that most of what has happened so far in history is a blessed relief because if anything had happened differently it would not now be like it now is, and then where would we be – christ alone knows, maybe it would be different or something, saints preserve us. he starts his chapter one with “in the beginning was the word”, without attribution – ’nuff said. anyway, he got good marks in history to the tune of a phd in it i daresay, though there’s no mention of it in this edition, pry as i might between the pages and even down the back of the spine, but he was a good friend of somebody influential to do with the new yorker and had visited istanbul in 1954, and he has (or anyway expresses) strictly orthodox views – that’s why his book got published at all – so he’s representative, if not definitive, and that makes him a fair target for the likes of me.

i’m going to take a fairly detailed look at some of the things he says in chapter one, just as they come up. even before the plagiarism of his first sentence, he quotes for us a slab of a quote from constantine himself which he found in eusebius’s de vita constantine. it includes the simple direct assertion that ‘beginning at the remote ocean of britain. . . with god’s help i banished and eliminated every form of evil then prevailing. . .’ without mentioning where it all ended. i warn you that this is a quote from a quote from a quote, and while we can be sure that i have copied it pretty accurately from norwich, john julius, and that he has copied it pretty nearly verbatim, or even to the letter, from a translation by williamson, g a of eusebius’s history of the church from christ to constantine, there’s no knowing how accurately williamson translated it from the latin, and even less knowing how accurately it was translated into the latin from its original source. then, how reliable were his sources as a truthful account of the exact words of constantine the great? eusebius swears blind that the author of that history knew the ‘victorious emperor’ personally. but was the ‘glorious emperor’ referred to constantine? and was eusebius the author of that particular history?

i refer you to my colleague, the distinguished moloji, etty, for a brief etymology of the chap’s monicker. over to you, etty.

moloji, etty: no. no, really dorian. no.

hiss, dorian: what? what do you mean, know?

moloji, etty: just that. i mean nobody ever believes anything i say. they all get it off the web and the web just gets it off the universities and the universities all get it off each other and . . . and . . .

hiss, dorian: please don’t snivel, etty.

moloji, etty: . . . and they never stop to think.

hiss, dorian: well, you do, etty, i know you do.

moloji, etty: well, you see, they all think eu is greek and means sweet, good and nice and all that. they think the hellenes were naïve, but they weren’t, they were half-educated braggards. worse still, they think the hellenes were greeks.

hiss, dorian: yes, but don’t tear your hanky dear. tell us what eu really was.

moloji, etty: well, i could if i could only get you to believe just one little thing – no, two.

hiss, dorian: try us, etty.

moloji, etty: well, the hellenes were british, or anyway, celts from britain; that’s the first.
and the second is that just as now in the britain of today, half of ‘em couldn’t say ‘l’ except before a vowel and half of ‘em could. the ones who couldn’t pronounced it w, which was spelt variously w, u, oo, or o. eu.

hiss, dorian: are you sure of this, etty?

moloji, etty: blood oath.

hiss, dorian: so what does eu mean?

moloji, etty: hell. they also dropped their ‘h’s half the time, some of ’em.

hiss, dorian: hell?

moloji, etty: yes, for feic’s sake, as in hellenes.

hiss, dorian: but eusebius was a roman.

moloji, etty: nngggghhhnghhhhnghhhhh. i’ll say that again. nngggghhhnghhhhnghhhhh. nngggghhhnghhhhnghhhhh. nngggghhhnghhhhnghhhhh.

hiss, dorian: well, what then?

moloji, etty: eu means el, which means hell, as in hellene. You see it was originally pol, as when everyone used to put up the central pole of a proposed building to proclaim a new polis. polis was a plural form of a word ancestral to and very similar in meaning and pronunciation to the modern english word pole – a wooden post. perhaps the original polis was a wooden structure, like the iron-age hill forts which had wooden ‘palisades’ (polis is palace in england, palais in france, baile in ireland, but the meaning varies a bit) and pales and poles and palings are all to do with wooden posts. polis means poles. but the meaning got transferred to any polis or palace whatever it was made of, and because stone ones lasted better and were harder to burn than wooden ones, and the forests were diminishing anyway, the wealthier ones stopped using wood, even when wood was available and they had to import the stone from far away. but then when the far north was colonised, they sent brides for the norse men from the warm south to the snowy northern extremes and they all got terrible frostbite and lost their lips. read about the medusa for example. here’s a link to that brilliant scholar, the truly appalling vyvyan ogma wyverne’s brief, easy to read, ground-breaking essay on the subject. needs revision but it makes its point:

http://www.esnips.com/doc/e391f897-b5f4-477b-afb3-92d14c426535/p–k–split-or-how-the-gorgon-lost-her-liks—i-mean-lips…

the fathers took little interest in their children’s education and may have been absent, fishing or hunting, or working outdoors while the children were small, so the brides taught them to speak. how do you teach a child to say ‘polis’ when the nearest you yourself can get is chailleach, or kali, or coll, and sometimes even the l was reduced to a y or j, when it wasn’t just a w or a u or a oo anyway. and these kids taught their kids the language their mothers taught them. so they became the original q- celts though i prefer to refer to their language as a-labiate as distinct from the labiate forms that the p-celts with their full lips were having no trouble at all with. so when they came south and found their mothertongue strangely be-p’d they rejected the notion that their q-forms were wrong, and so the battle was on. depending on who your companions were it was either poll or coll, and where fists were knuckly and tempers uncertain it wasn’t worth your while to be wrong. homer probably knew that apollo was achilles, (the vowels went every which way under the influence of different accents) but today’s historians and mythologists, your good self excepted, and others who have had the simple sanity to read and agree utterly with the article at still haven’t penetrated to that juicy little piece and sucks to them for their stupidity, i say.

hiss, dorian: now, now, etty, i say, that’s a bit strong.

moloji, etty: well it’s so very provoking. one hesitates to say ‘they are all dickheads’, but . . .

hiss, dorian: look, we’ll have to stop here, etty. we’re already five hundred words over the limit and. . .

moloji, etty: wait on. i haven’t got to the main point yet. you see, frost-bite wasn’t all. there was sunburn, too, affecting the p-celts, and making them say f and v for p and b. and by the time they all got together, they had a full array of syllables all meaning the same or nearly the same, either a polis or some feature of it, or a person from a polis. they had kells and kils and cells and sells and sols and suls and syls and sals and thells and theos and dells and dals and dails and thales and zells and zeals and challs and hells all over the map. they had pells and polises and palaces and piles and bells and bailes and old baileys and bols and bills and fells and filidh and villas and phillys and files and fools, and mills and mulls and maels and and mhaols, pronounced like wheels, and williamses and oh, mobs more, and to stop fights, or because lip damage and its consequences had been so extreme, some of them reduced all cs and ps to hs or just dispensed with them altogether.

you see the polis was the main identifier of any person, so polglas, for example identified a person as a glass polis person – the glass trade was very rich, but the word comes from older words related to class and classic, and were educational as much as commercial, though often enough both. achilles just distinguished any polis person from someone who wasn’t a polis person, and the labiate form was apollo. but names like golgotha, helvetia, ballinderry, kildare etc specify which polis, using the local variant of the original pole word. so if you dropped the first letter, whichever it was, you tended to get a neutralish vowel which was so often prefixed to a noun of some sort that in some speeches (in spanish and arabic for example) it became a definite article, while in greece it became a prefix denoting general niceness or superiority. so euserbius’s first syllable meant either pole, pleasant or the. if anyone tells you they know better send ’em to me. tell ’em i’ve got a black belt in karate and . . .

hiss, dorian: thanks etty. shall we leave the rest till. . .

moloji, etty: and the second syllable means serb, aka sab, serf, seraph, sherrif, and any number of rellies, and the third one, ius, started out as a frost-damaged poles reduced to hells, with the vowel changed to i, as in hills, and the h dropped, and the ll reduced to u, as in ius, used as a suffix with its origin forgotten by the committee that put together euserbius’s name. so it means the serb. but serb hadn’t yet come to mean a citizen of serbia yet. there were serbs/serfs/seraphs/siabhras etc all over southern europe, and their extent has not yet been mapped. it’s a scandal, it really is.

hiss, dorian: well, thanks, etty. bBut I really must stop you here, though you’re obviously busting with more to say on the subj. sorry, you lot, we didn’t really get very far down page one, did we. oh well, more next time.

for homework, read homer on apollo and achilles and compare and contrast the two. then read the myth of the medusa and google the old ventriloquists’ song ‘can you say bread and butter without moving your lips’ and try it. try also ‘my mum made me mumble’.

The first person to assume the title Rex Anglorum (King of the English) was Offa of Mercia.

ahem, morning everyone. emerging from my silurian slime is getting easier since the drought broke, and i’ve been noticing that more and more, the historians and interpreters of old texts both long and short, (texts and interpreters come in all lengths and widths), both in the past and the present, and yes the future too, all seem to be needing a bit of help with it and that’s what i’m here for.

so you can all heave a great sigh of relief that the really murky problems of history have been taken out of the sticky fingers of the homo sapiens and handed to us newts, who are bound to do less mischief with them. this we amphibious axolotlene neotenites undertake for the good of all earthlings out of the pure goodness of our hearts. so take your pencil out of your ear, michael, and don’t chew your nails in class please susan.

today we’re going to look at the above quote which comes from wikipedia’s beautifully crafted web-page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_monarchs where it appears about four lines down from the top after the bit that warns you about not counting ethelreds, egberts and things. good advice it is too and i’d strongly advise you all not to take any of it too seriously until i’ve written things in the margins as a guide.

for now we’re going to look appalled, gaze aghast, if you like, upon the horrific mess the experts are making of english history because of a simple oversight which we shall find revealed in all its gaspworthy shockingness when i part the murky waters for you with my spatulate fingers to show you the true meaning of the quote above and to trace for you some of the implications of it.

offa was a king back in the eighth century ad, or so they say, though i wouldn’t trust ‘em. before the renaissance, during the renaissance and right up until after the renaissance, there were more calendars than you can shake a stick at, and they had to be reconstructed anyway from entries in tomes, and you couldn’t always tell entry numbers from year numbers nor could you tell page one of a given book from year one of the founding of the city, monastery, tower or school that kept it, nor could you be sure you had the first book of a series or the fifth, seventeenth or zillionth. then even when the calendars were sorted out, historians and recorders of events were undisciplined in their attempts at chronology, and were often ambiguous or made errors. in other words, all english dates before round about the first of the georges are suspect.

furthermore, even when you know the date of a book, you don’t know when the entries carefully copied into it were first written. many a beautifully bound book of gloriously prepared parchment was made at the capture of a castle or monastery, country house or church, and all the papers and parchments in it gathered into a neat pile, translated and often quite freely edited, often ineptly by people who did not know the language well and were too proud to admit it, (see keating’s account of this in the history of ireland and the coming of the cruel false st patrick who replaced the earlier beloved one) and sometimes even sarcastically (see cervantes accounts of this in don quixote). i mean, o ye earnest questers after truth, trust not the chronologies. however, for now they’re not relevent to today’s discussion.

nor the spellings neither. they hadn’t learnt the rules yet, and they also hadn’t learnt that bbc english as we find it in the oed is the (only correct) way to go and all the rest is bad english, or unlearned or rough english, or very very ignorant english, so spellings were everywhere and any which way, with even the sloppiest speakers thinking their way of saying fings was right and finking it was all right to spell it like it sounded and as you can expect, even respectable monks were making the most godawful mess of it and look, if you will – jane and anthony i’ll talk to you after class and if you don’t mind i’ll confiscate that astrolabe right now you can have it back at the end of term – look if you will, i say, at the consequences and no, james, they aren’t funny, it’s just a pity that a few have to spoil it for the rest of us.

all right, now, take out your exercise books and we’ll do a little experiment. i’ll adopt a really really cute english accent of the sort where a simple ah for artichoke is pronounced just like an o for otter, quite posh really, and then i’ll add in the little quirk we often see among poms in their own land who seem unable to pronounce a th and so say f instead. ve very fought of it might bovva some, but uvvas will be fomiliar wiv ve occent i mean. i fink it’s extont somewhere in london. now i’ll give you all a spelling test. i want you to write down the words i say in your best bbc english.

movva

what have you written felicity? mother? good girl.

next, fovva

paul? father? good boy.

next. offa.

geoffrey? stocks what stocks? who would put you in the stocks?

charles? don’t be ridiculous, there is no rack any more.

no, maureen, they don’t burn heretics at the stake anymore – this is a perectly safe exercise. you would not be burned for a truthful try.

ouch, that hurt, nigel! those are very heavy objects you are hurling! ouch! i say, sit down everyone please. please, get back to your desks. hey, drop that gun! stop, i say! all right, you asked for it: hand me the capsicum spray, etty. thank you. there! and there! and there! gaynor, run and get nurse to look at phillip’s head, it looks nasty – who did it now? gloria, is this your ipod? i’ll see you after.

now sit quietly and answer my question. did anyone even try? amanda? yes, correct arthur!!!!!!!

now for homework write a fifteen hundred word essay on ‘how trustworthy are the chronologies relating to king offa of mercia aka king offa of england, and why would anyone even care?’ have on hand a large box of tissues for crying into, and remember there’s a helpline available for if you get dizzyings and swoonings or a fit of the vapours from staring into the turgidity of it at all. i recommend a sprig of parsley behind the ear for those with weak constitutions.

valete

Hallo, me darling ones. Here at last is a photo of me, Herman Newt, with Axol O’tl, who spoke to us last time so memorably. I am here alone today to talk of fairies and elves, and despite the slander and defamation of character, I’m adopting a fairly newt-ral stance on it, tiny amphibious fingers clinging to the bark of a partially submerged branch, body flat, tail dragging in the ooze.

In th’olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour,
of which the Britons speken greet honour,
al was this land fulfild of fairye
The elf-queene with her joly compaignye
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede,
This was the old opinion, as I rede…
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

That’s the start of the Wife of Bath. It tells us newts a lot about Chaucer’s times and his view of what was then to him, Britain’s past; and however distant or recent the past described, it might as well as well have been ancient, so strange the people and scenes described in the written and oral traditions of the time seemed to the Normanised English people of his day. As the Wife of Bath points out, elves were no longer to be seen in her day in England. These days, most people take this to mean that elves, along with fairies, never really existed, although some believers in parallel universes might believe that they were ‘supernatural’ beings viewed sometimes when the magic was right, and now in occultus. Yet although I have not checked every instance of elves in texts, so far nothing disturbs my sense that all references to elves in the pre-Renaissance texts and the oral traditions were to real solid flesh and blood human beings. Periodic reworking of texts as their language became old-fashioned, quaint and sometimes inaccessible, introduced hermeneutical errors which were woven into the fabric of the tales giving them a magical or miraculous atmosphere that they did not have for their original authors.

If in a song the ‘elf-king’s daughter did appear…’ an ambiguity arises for some listeners accustomed to eerie tales – ‘did appear’ can mean ‘appeared suddenly’ or ‘became briefly visible’ implying ‘out of thin air’. So a magical attribute is imputed to the elf, which then is said to have the magical power to appear and disappear at will. This makes it a supernatural being, and for those who don’t believe in such things, throws doubts on the possible value of the entire document dealing with elves, fairies and the like. I shudder to think how often such judgments have deprived us in the centuries following of truthful historical texts that could have told us so much discarded to be lost or burnt because a conqueror did not believe them…

Let’s imagine that the authors of these old texts that mention elves did not think of them as supernatural beings, but as real flesh and blood people with the ordinary powers of mortals. How does that song go? Steele-Eye Span used to sing it, and very nicely too, with eerie, supernatural wailing music in the back ground… I think it was on ‘All Around My Hat’.

A knight he rode his lonely way
Thinking about his wedding day
As he rode by a forest near
the Elf-king’s daughter did appear
Out she stepped from the Elfin band
smiling she held out her hand,
Welcome sir knight, why such speed
Come with me the dance to lead…

So far nothing magical at all, but the word ‘appear’ does become a little ambiguous when we hear that it’s an elf doing it. But watch what happens in the refrain:

Dance dance, follow me,
all around the greenwood tree
Dance dance, while you may,
tomorrow is your dying day
Dance with me, Dance with me…

Is this elf prophecying (a magical act but one that quite real prophets can do) or is she threatening (implying that she could bring about his death ) ? If it’s an elf, you can accuse it of anything, and any reconstruction of its song undertaken in the past when elves were feared would make the sinister worst of it. If it were not an elf, it might be easy to believe that his dying might be her intention from a quite unmagical murder, ‘dance with me and/or I’ll kill you’, but it’s also possible that it’s not a dying at all. There are I believe many instances of ritual and ceremony that are referred to in words that subsequent historians have mistaken for words for death and killing, because of semantic shifts that we now have no records of. We talk of ‘gilded’ youths, but no longer remember that gilding was the same as schooling. For some people the only instances of attention from the guilds they belonged to was at their birth and at their death, so for them any guild ceremony was likely to be a funeral. Think of Kells, Cille, and Kil-, all meaning ‘church’. Think of the Irish ‘bas’ death and compare with imbas, the Cornish abbas words to do with religion that changed meaning as they travelled. So it’s possible that this song records that in the two languages of the knight and the elf, the elfin word for a wedding was like the knight’s word for dying. (I see linguistic confusion like this in The Taming of the Shrew, where the bride is forced to learn to call the sun the moon just to please her husband.)

In the song this elf offers the knight spurs of gold, a shirt of moon-bleached silk, and a crown of gold, which may have been wedding gifts (in which case it’s a garbled wedding song, in which a fatal misunderstanding between bride and groom resulted in a murder, or a gift of recruitment – the elf trying to recruit a knight whose loyalties are elsewhere. She lives in the forest, she has all the trappings of high and courtly civilisation and she wishes to enlist a knight. I believe it might be an initiatory ceremony, in which the traditional three gifts are tokens: the spurs signifying a horse and a place in her cavalry, the shirt her livery or uniform, and the crown a series of intitations amounting to an education, with a crown to certify him a leaned knight. Our knight refuses to dance and refuses the first two gifts, but he wants the crown, and therefore she proclaims that ‘a plague of death shall follow’ him. Now that’s a fairly nasty accusation to make about someone who isn’t here to defend herself. Maybe it was a ‘series of ceremonies’. Here’s how it was carried out anyway:
‘Between his shoulders a blow she dealt,
such a blow he never felt’
Now if he couldn’t feel it, it didn’t hurt him, did it. So maybe she wasn’t dealing death, just ‘killing’ him softly (ie, initiating him) with a ritual stroke in preparation for his marriage.

There’ll be more on this subject soon.