As ever, welcome, dear readers.

The Italian phrase which forms the title of this posting can have an ironic ring:  “Lucky old you!”  but beato in itself, can have a more positive meaning:  “extremely happy”—and it has another meaning yet, “blessed”.

As is the case with the majority of Italian words, this is based upon a Latin original, from the verb beo, which, like the modern Italian adjective derived from it, has several meanings:  “to make happy, to bless,” even “to enrich” (which means that the adjective can mean not only “blessed/happy”, but can also mean “well-off”).  The form from which the Italian adjective comes is the PPP—the perfect passive participle—meaning that the adjective really means something like “having been blessed/having been made happy/having been made rich”, suggesting an outside agent.

This idea of blessing/being blessed has been in my mind recently for two reasons.

First, we know that The Lord of the Rings appears empty of virtually all signs of religion:  no priests, worshippers, temples, shrines—all of the things which, for Tolkien the medievalist, would have been everywhere in the medieval English world upon which Middle-earth is loosely based.  Chaucer’s (c.1342-1400) Canterbury Tales

(from the beautiful early 15^th century Ellesmere Manuscript—you can page through it here:  https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll7/id/2838 )

alone has 10 figures connected with the Church (the Prioress, the Second Nun, the Nun’s Priest, the Monk, the Friar, the Parson, the Summoner, the Pardoner, and the Canon—along with the Canon’s Yeoman).

And yet, at least twice, we find this:

“But you shall go now with my blessing upon you, and upon all your people…He embraced the hobbits then, after the manner of his people, stooping, and placing his hands upon their shoulders, and kissing their foreheads.”  (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapters 6 and 7, “The Forbidden Pool”, “Journey to the Cross-roads”)

and:

“ ‘Gladly will I take it,’ said the king; and laying his long old hands upon the brown hair of the hobbit, he blessed him.”  (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 2, “The Passing of the Grey Company”)

In the first of these, Faramir is speaking to Frodo and Sam before they set off on their journey into Mordor, and, in the second, Theoden is speaking to Merry, who has just offered him his service.

I imagine that JRRT got the idea of such behavior from his religious upbringing and adult faith, as well as from the medieval religious tradition he spent time in the midst of in his scholarly pursuits.

It’s interesting however, that, in a Middle-earth ostensibly without religion (except for the calling upon the Valar in The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”, and the custom of looking to the west at mealtimes, which Faramir and his men practice—The Two Towers, Book 4, Chapter 5, “The Window on the West”, and that moment in dealing with Shelob, when Sam calls upon Elbereth, The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 10, “The Choices of Master Samwise” ), this act, which still appears in most contemporary world religions, has survived.  In general, the idea is that, if a believer uses a gesture or words to convey a blessing,

he/she is conveying a wish that the person blessed will actually receive the fruits of that blessing from a divine figure.  I don’t see any evidence in the text that this is true for Faramir or Theoden, but Tolkien says of the people of Middle-earth:

“For help they may call on a Vala (as Elbereth), as a Catholic might call upon a Saint…But this is a ‘primitive age’:  and these folk may be said to view the Valar as children view their parents or immediate adult superiors, and though they know they are subjects of the King he does not live in their country nor have there any dwelling.”(draft of a letter to Peter Hastings, September, 1954, Letters, 193)

Is it possible, then, that, although they don’t mention such a figure, by the very act of blessing, Faramir and Theoden are implying that such a figure stands behind the words and gesture?

Something similar seems to be going on in Section IV of W.B. Yeats’ (1865-1939)

complex late poem, “Vacillation”, first published in 1932–

“IV

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessèd and could bless.”

Yeats mentions no divine figure behind his feelings, but we see him here in the roles both of Faramir and Theoden, those blessing, and of the various hobbits, those blessed.  

But I wrote that I had two reasons for thinking about blessing.  The one was my interest in The Lord of the Rings.  My second is more personal.  My beloved Bernese Mountain Dog, Bellerophon, died recently at 9 (old age for many Berners),

and, while I feel blessed at having had him as a companion for all of those years, I also feel that I should somehow bless him as a kind of thank-you for being the quiet and pleased with the world and everything in it friend he always was.  May the Valar be kind to him.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Love and bless whatever pet you may have, from goldfish to elephant,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

“It’s an ill wind that bears nobody any good” sounds like it belongs right up there with “A third time pays for all” and other proverbs Bilbo quotes his father as saying in The Hobbit and, in my case, this one was true.  Covid-19 finally did away with my trypanophobia (fear of needles, based upon two Greek words, the obvious phobia, “fear” and the very graphic verb, tripao/tripo, “to puncture”!).

(how my vivid and terrified childhood imagination saw such things)

I begin my class on monsters asking my students about their fears and I get the usual, everything from heights (acrophobia)

to fear of enclosed places (claustrophobia)

to a fear of clowns (coulrophobia—but a debated term—perhaps bozophobia would be better?)

and I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone suffered from this one, as I find clowns disturbing, too.  Perhaps it’s the often sad makeup but the attempt to be comic? Or the suggested distortion of facial features, like exaggerated mouths?

Also among the items on the list was arachnophobia:  the fear of spiders.

(by herrerabrandon60)

I never think of this particular phobia without remembering a song by Michael Flanders (1922-1975) and Donald Swann (1923-1994) on the subject:

“I have fought a Grizzly Bear,
Tracked a Cobra to its lair,
Killed a Crocodile who dared to cross my path,
But the thing I really dread
When I’ve just got out of bed
Is to find that there’s a Spider in the bath.

I’ve no fear of Wasps or Bees,
Mosquitoes only tease,
I rather like a Cricket on the hearth,
But my blood runs cold to meet
In pyjamas and bare feet,
With a great big hairy spider in the bath.

I have faced a charging Bull in Barcelona,
I have dragged a mountain Lioness from her cub,
I’ve restored a mad Gorilla to its owner,
But I don’t dare face that tub …

What a frightful looking beast –
Half an inch across at least –
It would frighten even Superman or Garth!
There’s contempt it can’t disguise,
In the little beady eyes,
Of the Spider sitting glowering in the bath.

It ignores my every lunge
With the backbrush and the sponge;
I have bombed it with ‘A present from Penarth’.
It just rolls into a ball,
Doesn’t seem to mind at all,
And simply goes on squatting in the bath.

For hours we have been locked in endless struggle,
I have lured it to the deep end by the drain.
At last I think I’ve washed it down the plughole,
But here it comes a-crawling up the chain!

Now it’s time for me to shave,
Though my nerves will not behave,
And there’s bound to be a fearful aftermath.
So before I cut my throat,
I shall leave this final note;
Driven to it – by the Spider in the bath!”

(Two glosses:

1. “Garth” a British superhero character, first appearing in The Daily Mirror in 1943—see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garth_(comic_strip)

2. “a present from Penarth” a Victorian seaside resort in southern Wales, so this would suggest a souvenir with an inscription—there is a very detailed account of the town here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penarth

You can hear Flanders and Swann singing it here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z3D5Jutw1Q )

Arachnophobia gets its name from Arachne, a character from classical mythology, whose history is wonderfully described in Ovid’s (43BC-17/18AD) Metamorphoses, Book 6, Lines 1-145, where we see the human weaver who makes the huge mistake of claiming that her brilliant work is all her own and challenging the goddess Minerva, who clearly inspired her, being the patron of weaving, to do any better.  Minerva first appears as an elderly woman to warn her to remember who her patron is, but, upon receiving a boastful reply, appears as herself and the two settle down to a contest, Minerva depicting scenes of impious humans, Arachne scenes of male gods seducing human females.  At the end, Minerva can only admire the work(wo)manship, but is also so angry that she tears Arachne’s weaving apart and smacks her three times on the head with her shuttle.

Arachne is so humiliated that she attempts to hang herself, but Minerva saves her by turning her into a spider, with legs and abdomen

…de quo tamen illa remittit

Stamen et antiquas aranea telas.

“…from which that one, a spider, still sends out and back

Thread and [her] traditional weavings/webs.” (Book 6, Lines 144-145—if you’d like to read the whole story, or even the whole of the Metamorphoses, start here:  https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0028%3Abook%3D6%3Acard%3D1 )

For all of Minerva’s anger and Arachne’s fate, this conclusion seems so gently domestic that it might be hard to see such as threatening—unless you have very large ones,

(By johntylerchristopher)

who wait in the trees to drop down and seize passing dwarves,

(a particularly disturbing illustration by Ted Nasmith)

or are even larger ones who attack hobbits.

(by the Hildebrandts)

So, with such creatures in two of his major works, did their creator suffer from arachnophobia?  Let him tell us:

“…and I knew that the way was guarded by a Spider.  And if that has anything to do with my being stung by a tarantula when a small child, people are welcome to the notion (supposing the improbable, that any one is interested).  I can only say that I remember nothing about it, should not know if I had not been told; and I do not dislike spiders particularly, and have no urge to kill them.  I usually rescue those whom I find in the bath!”  (to W.H. Auden, 7 June, 1955, Letters, 217)

But, as Dante (1265-1321)

mentions Arachne twice in the Commedia, once in L’Inferno XVII(16-18) and then in Purgatorio XII (43-45), I wonder how he felt about spiders?

As ever, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Be kind to things which fall into your tub,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

It seems that the earliest recorded version of the proverb with which I began dates to John Heywood’s (1497—died post 1578) A Dialogue of the Effectual Proverbs in the English Tongue Concerning Marriage (1546)—you can find it on page 93 of this edition:  https://archive.org/details/dialogueofeffect00heywuoft  and this is a fun book just to browse through, with proverbs of all sorts done in a long coupleted form.  Bilbo’s father would have been pleased.

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

Last Saturday morning, I was up very early to view pageantry.

If I had written that c.1400AD, you would have understood it to mean one of the plays in a cycle of medieval mystery plays,

like the “Towneley Cycle”, of which this is a manuscript page, c.1500.

(This is from the collections of the Huntingdon Library, one of the many great treasures of the LA area. To see more, go to:  https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll7/id/52959/  )

And certainly what I was up to see had elements both of drama and religion, besides being some centuries older than that collection of ancient plays.

The main part of the ceremonies took place in a religious building, Westminster Abbey,

along with a certain amount of parading back and forth

and some final waving from Buckingham Palace at the end.

I have to say at the outset that I am neither monarchist nor anti-monarchist.  As I come from a country with a somewhat different governmental system (although directly descended from the British one), I can only be an interested—a very interested—spectator, taking pleasure in seeing such a grand spectacle:  this is a bright bit of ancient history reconstituted in a modern context and it can only help those of us interested in the drama of the past to better recreate in our own minds what that past might have been like, even if only in a small way. 

It therefore also reminded me of an earlier ceremony, not quite so religious as this, but definitely ancient—

“…A hush fell upon all as out from the host stepped the Dunedain in silver and grey; and before them came walking slow the Lord Aragorn.  He was clad in black mail girt with silver, and he wore a long mantle of pure white clasped at the throat with a great jewel of green that shone from afar; but his head was bare save for a star upon his forehead bound by a slender fillet of silver.  With him were Eomer of Rohan, and the Prince Imrahil, and Gandalf robed all in white, and four small figures that many men marvelled to see…

Then Frodo came forward and took the crown from Faramir and bore it to Gandalf; and Aragorn knelt, and Gandalf set the White Crown upon his head, and said:

‘Now come the days of the King, and may they be blessed while the thrones of the Valar endure!’

But when Aragorn arose all that beheld him gazed in silence, for it seemed to them that he was revealed to them now for the first time.  Tall as the sea-kings of old, he stood above all that were near; ancient of days he seemed and yet in the flower of manhood; and wisdom sat upon his brow, and strength and healing were in his hands, and a light was about him.  And then Faramir cried:

‘Behold the King!’ “  (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 5, “The Steward and the King”)

Tolkien was born in the late years of Queen Victoria (1819-1901)

and therefore could only have heard or read about her coronation in 1838.

In his own lifetime, however, he could have witnessed (or at least read about—and even seen images of) the coronations of Edward VII (1902)

George V (1911)

Edward VIII (1937—which never happened, as he abdicated before the crowning)

George VI (1937)

and Elizabeth II (1953)

In the case of Elizabeth II, he could even have watched her crowned on television and seen color photographs of everything in magazines of the period.

So, as I followed the elaborate ceremony which finally confirmed that Prince Charles was now King Charles III, I kept wondering, when Tolkien heard the Archbishop of Canterbury declare, “God save the King/Queen!”, was he also hearing Faramir shout out, “Behold the King!”?

As ever, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Imagine what Minas Tirith looked like, even after the brutal attack by Sauron, when Aragorn was crowned and the King returned,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Songs always stick in my mind and sometimes pop up to ambush me.  Recently, I had this appear from nowhere:

“The name game. Shirley!

Shirley, Shirley

Bo-ber-ley, bo-na-na fanna,

Fo-fer-ley, fee fi mo-mer-ley, Shirley!

Lincoln!

Lincoln, Lincoln

bo-bin-coln, bo-na-na fanna,

fo-fin-coln, fee fi mo-min-coln, Lincoln!”

It has a tune—really a chant—and you can hear the original here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez8fEJ86hGI

This is by Shirley Ellis (1929-2005),

with her collaborator, Lincoln Chase (1926-1980),

and became a hit when recorded by Ellis.  It was said to be based, at least in part, on a game which Ellis had played as a child and it sounds to me like it might have been for a game which uses rhythm and rhyme, as in skipping rope–

“Teddy bear, teddy bear: turn around.              (* Jumper mimes actions *)

Teddy bear, teddy bear: touch the ground.

Teddy bear, teddy bear: tie your shoes.    (* Sometimes 'Ladybug, ladybug' *)

Teddy bear, teddy bear: read the news.

Teddy bear, teddy bear: go upstairs.

Teddy bear, teddy bear: say your prayers.

Teddy bear, teddy bear: turn out the lights.

Teddy bear, teddy bear: say good night.

G-O-O-D-N-I-G-H-T.                                 (* Spell on each jump *)”

(This illustration is from Der kleine Kinderfreund—“The Little Children’s Friend”—an children’s book from 1860.   There are many illustrations to see and—a gentle warning—the text appears to be just jampacked with morals—for instance, how little Ernestine, in a moment of anger, broke her dolls and lived to regret it, so, if you don’t want to be taught behavior lessons, stick to the pictures!  You can see the whole book with its very interesting illustrations here:    https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Der_kleine_Kinderfreund  The skip-rope/jump-rope rhyme is from  the wonderful Mudcat Café, a site for the preservation of traditional music:  https://mudcat.org/ )

As the song was all about playing with names, it brought the names of characters in the stories I taught this semester back, with the differences to be seen in the different texts

 The most recent book, in relative time as well as in the span of the semester, has been Dracula, set in England in 1897, where the protagonists have names like “Arthur Holmwood” and “John Seward”, indicating that, not only does everyone have a personal name, but that everyone has a family name, as well.  These can be derived from a number of different sources-- -for example, upon a place—“Holmwood” looks to combine “holm”, a raised piece of land in marshy ground/an island, and “wood”, a grove of trees—and Seward (there’s discussion about this) which may be from an occupation, like all of those people named “Smith”, only Seward may be from Old English su, “pig” and hierde, “herder”.  

 The only character without a family name is the title character, Dracula, supposed to be modeled upon an actual historical person, Prince Vlad III of Wallachia (now part of Romania).  If he is, then we might see that “Dracula” as a family inheritance, as his father was Vlad II Dracula, where I would guess that that second name was originally a grim diminutive, from the root drag-, “serpent/dragon” and the diminutive ending –ula, “little”, so “Little Dragon/Little Serpent”, more like a nickname than a family name. 

 (For an extremely informative article about diminutives in many languages, see:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diminutives_by_language   We might also notice here that Vlad has another grim nickname, tepes (pronounced “TSAY-paysh”), “impaler” from his well-known propensity for treating captives and Ottoman ambassadors in a less than hospitable way.) 

 (Angus Mcbride)

Our earlier works included Beowulf, c.500-1000AD, in which characters had personal names but, for further identification, would be linked to their fathers, as Beowulf is the son of Ecgtheow (EDGE-thay-oh), giving us patronymics (literally “about/concerning the father’s name”). This would change with the generations, of course, and had Beowulf had sons, they would have been identified as “Beowulfson”, although, in formal situations, one might stretch back another generation, so that we might see “Aelfric the son of Beowulf the son of Ecgtheow”.

 Even in the smallest communities, it’s easy to see how the addition of last names begins:  have two or more people in a village with the same first name, like William, and, when referring to one of them in conversation, the speaker might add after “William”, “Richard’s son” just to keep the listener clear.  As villages grew, we may imagine that occupations could be employed to distinguish this William from other Williams, as he might be the owner of the local grain-processor, and could then be “William (the) Miller” vs, say “William the Smith”.  (You can see how this becomes complicated, when you come across a name like “Smithson”, which includes an occupation become part of a name which is then used in a patronymic!)

 As characters in Dracula have last names based upon things like places and occupations, we can see the same for patronymics, in which the use has hardened in modern western Germanic names, producing permanent last names like Madsen (Matthewson) in Danish, and Johnson, in English, just as, we have Mac- and Mc- in Scots and Irish names and Ap- in Welsh (which can lose that A- in names like P-rice or P-richard, once Ap-Rhys and Ap-Richard), where those initial syllable indicates “son of”). 

 Going back one step further in our reading, we’d find that patronymics are also the rule for the Odyssey (difficult to date—our text probably dates from the 3rd to 2nd BC, but story elements are clearly much older), where Odysseus is identified as “son of Laertes”, just as Agamemnon is the “son of Atreus”, while Telemachos, the offspring of Odysseus, would be known as “son of Odysseus”.  There is another significance to this, as well, and it’s all about kleos, a word which, appropriately enough, comes from a verb meaning “to call by name”.   Kleos means “reputation”, sort of, but it’s broader than that, as it’s almost a kind of physical possession, and definitely something which can be passed down in families.  In a warrior culture, it includes all of the warrior’s achievements:   plunder, enemy towns captured, monsters slain, famous ancestors, and certainly famous or at least formidable opponents beaten.  This last almost ruins Odysseus’ trip home as kleos makes him shout to the blinded Cyclops his name and address, which gives the monster a target at which to aim,

as well the identity of the person who harmed him, which he then uses in a prayer to his father, Poseidon, who thereafter causes no end of sea-going troubles for Odysseus.

 (?)

And finally we come to The Hobbit (date not available on our time-line—but “medieval-ish” in general).  The dwarves use patronymics—Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror (along with a nickname, “Oakenshield”),

(the Hildebrandts)

 but some characters, like the goblins and the spiders, have no names in the story at all.

(Alan Lee)

(?)

 Others, like the trolls—or the dragon--have only first names, like “Bill” or “Smaug”

(both by Tolkien)

 and then there’s “Gollum”.

(Inger Edelfeldt)

 Gollum, as we know, is a nickname, but, as we learn from The Lord of the Rings, Gollum has another name, “Smeagol”—and this is interesting because Smeagol is, in fact, a Stoor, a kind of proto-hobbit, but the hobbits of the Shire, as we learn from the few names we see in The Hobbit, and the many more in The Lord of the Rings, all have family names, as well as personal names—just think of the brief list given by Bilbo at his birthday party—

 “My dear Bagginses and Boffins…and my dear Tooks and Brandybucks, and Grubbs, and Chubbs, and Burrowses, and Hornblowers, and Bolgers, Bracegirdles, Goodbodies, Brockhouses and Proudfoots.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party”)

 To which we could immediately add “Gamgees, Cottons, and Maggots” without digging any deeper.  Does the fact that Gollum/Smeagol has no last name suggest something about just how old he is, coming from a time before hobbits had grown to such numbers that they require more complex identification and therefore acquired family names?  (If we compare when Gollum first got the Ring—TA2460s with when Marcho and Blanco crossed the Baranduin—TA1601—perhaps we should imagine that those left behind when the first settlers crossed the Misty Mountains were few and never developed the same levels of society which their cousins/descendants did in the Shire?) 

 If we had to construct a chronology from all of this, perhaps we might say that naming began with single (first) names, then, as communities expanded, a further identifying mark was added—maybe a nickname, like “Oakenshield”—or a patronymic, then the name of a place from which you came (think of all of those “de/di and “von/van” prepositions in the Romance languages and German/Dutch), or occupation—“Hornblower”--and we shouldn’t leave out a physical attribute, as in “Proudfoot” (which might have begun as a nickname—but stuck).  

 But I began with the “Name Game”, so I’ll give a try to a verse from the Shire to end this posting.  The “Name Game” song includes a verse which explains how to play--

 
“Come on ev'rybody, I say now  let's play a game

I betcha I can make a rhyme out of anybody’s name

The first letter of the name

I treat it like it wasn’t there

But a “B” or an “F”  or an “M” will appear

And then I say “Bo” add a “B” then I say the name

Then “Bo-na-na fanna” and “fo”

And then I say the name again with an “”f” very plain

Then  “fee fi” and a “mo”

And then I say the name again with an “M” this time

And there isn’t any name that I can’t rhyme.”

So—

Bilbo! 

Bilbo, Bilbo, bo-bil-bo,

Bo-nan-na fanna, fo-bil-bo,

Fee fi mo-bil-bo, Bilbo!

As ever, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Think about what the Name Game would do with your name,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

I apologize for the weird type face shift. Two possibilities why this happened:

1. it’s spring and my laptop has decided to go larking
2. something happened when I copied “Teddy Bear” into the posting

For myself, I imagine that it’s #1.

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

I had just finished lunch last week when I was stopped by a student worker who asked if I minded answering a question.  As I love student questions, I said, “Absolutely!” and he said, “What was that book you were reading?”

It was this book—

I had the sense that he was puzzled because, when we say “Goth” today, I imagine that most of us probably think this first—

But there’s a long, complicated history behind this, and the clothing may provide an immediate clue—

if we see this as a direct descendant not only of later Victorian clothing, but of a specific kind—mourning dress—

like the sort of thing Queen Victoria wore for the rest of her life,

after the death of Prince Albert, in 1861.

(There is another Victorian tradition, associated with Victorian ladies’ undergarments, here, as well, but we will allow others to pursue that.  If you’d like to know more on the subject of Goth culture, there’s a long, detailed article at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goth_subculture  )

This, in turn, is linked to what is often called “Gothic horror” fiction—familiar to us from stories like Dracula (1897),

with its vampire villain

(by Andrew Baker—one of the few illustrations of Dracula which actually follows the description in the novel)

and especially its opening, full of foreboding as its first protagonist, Jonathan Harker, comes to the brooding, semi-ruined castle of Dracula in the wilds of the Carpathian mountains.

(This is Bran castle in Romania, which has been suggested as a model for Dracula’s stronghold.)

But why “Gothic” horror?

And answer to this may lie in Horace Walpole’s (1717-1797)

(with a bit of his own “gothique” castle, Strawberry Hill, in the background.)

 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, the subtitle of the 1765 edition bearing the words “A Gothic Story”.

It’s clear that, when Walpole chose to add those words as a subtitle to the second edition, he was aware that the idea of “gothic” stories already existed, as the reviewer in The Monthly Review for February, 1765, says of the book:

“Those who can digest the absurdities of Gothic fiction, and bear with the machinery of ghosts and goblins, may hope, at least, for considerable entertainment from the performance before us…”  (The Monthly Review, February, 1765, page 97—you can read it here:  https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hxjfgr&view=1up&seq=111&q1=otranto )

This tale, which includes murders, haunting, and kidnapping, among other events, all set around an ancient castle in a remote area of southeastern Italy, however, became such a sensation in its own time that it’s usually cited as the ancestor of many such stories to come. 

Although this may link “Gothic” with fiction, we are then left with the question:  why the link?

In his preface to the Second Edition, Walpole has this to say about his work:

“It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of Romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former, all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. But if in the latter species Nature has cramped imagination, she did but take her revenge, having been totally excluded from old Romances. The actions, sentiments, conversations, of the heroes and heroines of ancient days were as unnatural as the machines employed to put them in motion.

The author of the following pages thought it possible to reconcile the two kinds. Desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, and thence of creating more interesting situations, he wished to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability; in short, to make them think, speak and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions.”

That is to say, take a less-than-believable setting from “the ancient”—that is, medieval, world of story-telling, but place within it people from “the modern” with their current reactions.  In fact, the actual story is, to me, as unbelievable as any “ancient” romance, but Walpole’s intent can easily be seen in later novels, Dracula, in fact, being a perfect example, in which a character based upon a late 15^th-century border warlord,

infected with vampirism, plans to invade the very realistically-depicted late-Victorian England, using its very modern 20,000 miles of railroads to conquer the country and faced by protagonists who use everything from modern science and medicine to modern firearms to oppose him. 

Attaching “Gothic” to the past appears to have originated in a Renaissance architectural criticism, in the works of Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574),

famous for his The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550; 1568),

(the 1568 edition)

in which he suggests that earlier architects had created “buildings of a style which today have been called by us ‘Germanic’ (maniera di edifizi c’hoggi da noi son chiamati ‘Tedeschi’—my translation from the 1568 edition, which you can see here:  https://archive.org/details/levitedepiveccel01vasa/page/76/mode/2up).   He later calls this style barbaric and joins it with the Goths and this is where castles must come in, as, in fact, the “Gothic” style, as he understands it, doesn’t belong to the Goths, invaders and rulers of the later western Roman empire from the later 4^th AD century on,

(Angus McBride)

but to the later medieval period, when castles first appeared and in which Walpole wanted to set his story.

Those Goths, in fact, spoke an early Germanic language and that’s the subject of the book about which the student was curious.  I feel like I’m always working on my German and my latest approach has been to seek out the earliest member of the family for which we have significant evidence and to study it to see if it will help to make my modern German stronger, just as Latin has certainly helped with my Romance languages (and English for that matter, as about 50% of English is directly or indirectly derived from Latin).  As someone with a certain amount of German and a lot of experience with ancient Indo-European languages (mainly Latin and Greek), 4^th-6^th century Gothic feels quite comfortable, as it shares many features.  There is the added bonus that the main surviving text is a large chunk of the Christian New Testament, so that, having grown up in that world, many of the stories told are already familiar.

And, in all of this, I’m following in the footsteps of someone about whom I often write.

As Humphrey Carpenter tells us:

“One of his school-friends had bought a book at a missionary sale, but found that he had no use for it and sold it to Tolkien.  It was Joseph Wright’s A Primer of the Gothic Language.

Tolkien opened it and immediately experienced ‘a sensation at least of full of delight as first looking into Chapman’s Homer.’ “ (Carpenter, Tolkien, 41)

While I am certainly enjoying the study of it, I doubt that I’ll ever have anything more than a general reading knowledge—Tolkien wrote book dedications in it (see Letters, 356-8) and even poems, which were published, along with other colleagues’ work, in a 1936 booklet, Songs for the Philologists—

but becoming a scholar of Gothic was never my goal. 

Now as to blue hair, piercings, and funeral dress…

Thanks for reading, as ever.

Stay well,

Refrain, while invading, from damaging the previous owner’s art collection,

(another Angus McBride)

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O