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The Icelandic Sagas on In Our Time and "Memories of Old Awake"

You can get an overview about the Icelandic sagas from a recent program (episode) of In Our Time on BBC Radio 4, hosted by Melvyn Bragg. (More on IOT from this blog.) Below is a short documentary produced by one of the Lord Bragg's interviewees, Emily Lethbridge. It uses music, landscape videography, and interviews of Icelanders to evoke the spirit of the sagas. 

Follow the God of Wednesday blog for more insights about the sagas and medieval literature. (More on God of Wednesday, and Song of the Vikings, from this blog.)

Memories Of Old Awake from Cambridge University on Vimeo.

Pope Francis prays for ‘full unity’ with Coptic Church

Here is an interesting moment in modern ecumenism. Pope Francis was recently visited in Rome by the 118th Coptic Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of St. Mark, Tawadros II. There's about 15,000,000 Coptic Christians, approximately 12,000,000 of them in Egypt, their traditional home.

Pope Francis...prayed for “full unity” with the Coptic Orthodox Church as he received Patriarch of Alexandria Tawadros II for an historic visit in the latest sign of closer ties between the Catholic and Orthodox (sic) worlds.

“We long for the day when, in fulfilment of the Lord’s desire, we will be able to communicate from the one chalice,” he said, acknowledging that there had been “centuries of mutual distrust” between their two Christian churches.

This was the first such meeting in 40 years.

via www.gulf-times.com

To understand the division between the Coptic Church and Roman Catholicism, one has to look to the split between the Oriental Orthodox churches--of which the Coptic Church is one--and the dominant churches of the West and East, which occured as a result of the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451, the Fourth Ecumenical Council, due to what the modern mind almost certainly sees as a technicality.

Chalcedon confirmed that Jesus Christ's humanity and divinity are exemplified as two natures in one hypostasis. More specifically, that Christ is one prosopon (πρόσωπον, often translated into English as "person" though perhaps "identity" could be used) with two natures, fully God and fully man, that are not mixed but in a single and perfect hypóstasis (ὑπόστασις, also often translated into English as "person" though "substance" or "subsistence" could be used).

However, some at the council refused to accept the majority ruling. These non-Chalcedonian Christians insisted on a different Christology: that Christ's natures were not two per se but one, albeit a hybrid, a divine-human nature. Among them were many of the leaders of Egyptian Christians.

Of course, politics was involved in the council's decisions, too, as was the case to varying extents with all of the Ecumenical Councils of the ancient Church.

The majority termed the dissenters Monophysites (monophysite meaning "one nature") and deemed their views dangerously close to Apollanarianism, a heretical Christology that Christ's body was human but His mind was divine, or Eutychianism, that Christ's human nature was dominated by His divine nature--His humanity being "dissolved like a drop of honey into the sea" of His divinity.

However, the non-Chalcedonian Christians term their Christology as miaphysite (meaning "one unified nature") and insist that what the council approved is too close to Nestorianism, which was deemed a hersey twenty years before Chalcedon at the First Council of Ephesus, the Third Ecumenical Council. Nestorianism insists that the human and the divine natures of Jesus are completely separate. It also insists that due to that separation the Virgin Mary cannot be deemed the Theotokos ("Bringer forth of God") but rather the Christotokos ("Bringer forth of Christ").

Non-Chalcedonians are better referred to as the Oriental Orthodox or Miaphysite churches; they are sometimes called the "Old Oriental" churches and their Christology "Alexandrian." They include the Coptic Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, Eritrean Orthodox, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Syriac (or "Jacobite") Orthodox, and various churches of Oriental Orthodoxy in Indian, such as the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church.

In the linked-to article instead of "Orthodox" used alone as a name, "Coptic" or "Oriental Orthodox" would have been better in my opinion, to avoid confusion with the Eastern Orthodox Church, the dominant church in Easter Europe and the Middle East. 

Images: Francis and Tawadros II; a Coptic cross.

God of Wednesday & Song of the Vikings

Hooray! I won a copy of Nancy Marie Brown's latest book, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths! It's about Snorri Sturluson who in many respects is the principle source of our knowledge of Norse mythology and therefore the ultimate influence behind some of the great imaginative works of J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) and Richard Wagner (The Ring Cycle of operas).

From Nancy's blog, God of Wednesday.

In my March 1 post I offered to raffle off an autographed copy of my book Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths. To enter, you had to answer the question, Who is the god of Wednesday and what does he have to do with this blog? Explain me to myself, I pleaded. I promised to print the best answers.

Yesterday the names went into a hat and … Congratulations to Scott Isebrand! Scott is a most deserving winner, as you'll see when you read his answer below.

via nancymariebrown.blogspot.com

Wagner and Love: Leon Botstein and The American Symphony Orchestra's Look at Wagner's Preludes

"Bombastic and overblow." "Sensual." What is Richard Wagner's music? It is different things to different people. Hear Leon Botstein, Music Director of the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO)--and who when only 23 yearsof age became the youngest college president in US history (Bard College)--briefly discuss some of the famous Preludes from Wagner's great operas, Wagner's career, and the ASO's Wagner performances in this the 200th anniversary year of Wagner's birth...and the 50th anniversary season of the ASO.

Here are two interesting recent articles on Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

"Is Wagner Bad For Us?" by Nicolas Spice, London Review of Books (11 April 2013); from the article:

Theft; the breaking of vows, promises and contracts; seduction, adultery, incest, disobedience, defiance of the gods, daring to ask the one forbidden question, the renunciation of love for power, genital self-mutilation as the price of magic: Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded.
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Difficulties and disasters dogged [Wagner's opera] Tristan und Isolde from the start and in the Wagner circle it came to be thought of as in some way cursed. The attempt at a first production in Vienna in 1862 foundered: the demands the opera made on players and singers were too much for them and the production was abandoned after 77 rehearsals. The planned public premiere in Munich in 1865 had to be postponed for a month, when Malvina Schnorr, who was singing Isolde, lost her voice on the morning of the first performance after taking a ‘vapour bath’. Relations between the orchestra and the conductor, Hans von Bülow, grew strained: Franz Strauss, father of Richard and the brilliant first horn of the Munich orchestra, had a blazing row with von Bülow, stomped out of the pit and had to be coaxed back. Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who sang Tristan to his wife’s Isolde, caught a chill on stage and subsequently died; on his deathbed he is said to have called out Wagner’s name. His wife abandoned her career after his death. ‘I drove you to the abyss,’ Wagner wrote in his diary; ‘I pushed him over.’ Four years later, during rehearsals for a revival of the first production, one of von Bülow’s young assistants had a mental breakdown, apparently brought on by the opera, and was institutionalised. In 1911, Felix Mottl collapsed and died while conducting Tristan and Joseph Keilberth met the same end in 1968.

"Wagner's Dark Shadow: Can We Separate the Man from His Works?" by Dirk Kurbjuweit, Spiegel Online (April 12, 2013); from the article:

Markus Käbisch, 45, is adept at describing what it's like to listen to this music. He studied music and is now an entrepreneur in the solar industry. He lives in Leipzig, Wagner's birthplace....

Käbisch loves Wagner's music but says he "couldn't handle it every day." He describes it as being, "extremely captivating; when you listen to it the ego and the individual disappear, and you become intoxicated, entering a state of ecstasy." Käbisch calls it "overpowering music." "That's what is so dangerous about it, and it's why this music was so well-suited to politics in the Third Reich." When the conversation turns to Wagner, politics is never far away. Wagner himself conceived his music as political. He didn't want to be merely an artist, but to build a new society, a society of the emotionally transported, of people who seek love instead of striving for money and power. His music was also a propaganda tool for this idea.

Photos: (Click each image for an enlarged version); top: Richard Wagner, 1861 when in exile in Paris; bottom: a 2010 staging of Lohengrin at the Bayreuth Festival.

Viking sunstones

If you've watched any of the History Channel's Vikings drama, co-produced with MGM, you'll know much has been made of the vikings' use of sunstones as a navigation aide. Not so fast, says Tristan Gooley in a letter to the editor of The Economist:

SIR – The Vikings’ use of sunstones has captured the imagination of scientists more frequently than these stones may have been used practically at sea (“Crystal gazing”, March 9th). There are good reasons why sunstones are unlikely navigation aids, and equally good ones why they may still have been carried on ships.
.....
My belief, formed in the North Atlantic and not the laboratory, is that the Vikings relied on the many clues in nature, including the sun and birds, to navigate effectively (see my recent paper, “Nature’s radar”, for the Royal Institute of Navigation). They may have relied on the sunstone and other legendary routines and rituals to get people to follow them confidently in difficult conditions.

Read the letter in full here.

What may be a sunstone of post-viking use was found recently off the island of Alderney in the English Channel.

Photo: sail-world.com

Happy Birthday to the Royal Air Force (RAF)

Happy Birthday to The Royal Air Force. Founded 1st April 1918 by the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service, the RAF is the world's oldest independent air force; the first air force in the world to become independent of army or navy control. The RAF's motto is Per Ardua ad Astra - "Through Struggle to the Stars."

Oh, and while we're at it, kudos to the Air Dogs of the RAF Police (RAFP), the training school for which was founded in 1945.

Of Monks, Medieval Scribes, and Middlemen

Exceprt from "Of Monks, Medieval Scribes, and Middlemen," Peter K. Yu. Michigan State Law Review, Vol.1 (2006 )

The Rule of St. Benedict...“contained a specific instruction that a certain number of hours in each day were to be devoted to labour in the scriptorium. The monks who were not yet competent to work as scribes were to be instructed by the others.” 

Notwithstanding the Church’s active participation, the production of knowledge remained parochial. The copying of books was also slow, tedious, and very time-consuming; it took years for a scribe to complete “a particularly fine manuscript with colored initials and miniature art work.” When Bishop Leofric took over the Exeter Cathedral in 1050, he found only five books in its library. Despite immediately establishing a scriptorium of skilled workers, his crew managed to produce only sixty-six books in the twenty-two years before the bishop’s death in 1072. Likewise, although the Library of Cambridge University had a remarkable collection of 122 books in 1424, it “labored for a half-century to increase the number to 330.”

To make the copying task even more difficult, the working conditions in monasteries were “far-from-productive.” For instance, “[t]he weather might be uncomfortable, the light poor..., and the text difficult to read or tedious to contemplate.” In addition, monks had to “concentrate on material they [might] not have been interested in—or even understood,” and they often feared that they would make an error or would not be able to complete a given work within the specified time. Under these conditions, it is, therefore, no surprise that monks sometimes jotted remarks about their frustration and relief in the margins, or the colophons, of their manuscripts. Examples of these remarks included “Thin ink, bad vellum, difficult text,” “Thank God, it will soon be dark,” and “Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.”
.....
Because the monks focused on the process, rather than the contents, it was not uncommon to find them writing over materials on the same parchment or copying “useless texts in illegible scripts.”  After all, the goal of such writing assignments was not to produce or preserve knowledge, but rather to keep their hands and minds busy and away from sins or idle thoughts. By the twelfth century, towns emerged, and communities grew in size and wealth. As a result of the spread of literacy, the demand for books increased dramatically, and a large number of new texts appeared. “[M]onastic libraries [soon] found it more and more difficult to keep their collections up  to date, and they began employing secular scribes and illuminators to collaborate in book production.” Meanwhile, schools became independent from cathedrals, to which they were originally attached, and guilds of lecturers and students gathered to form universities. With the changing lifestyle and the emergence of new educational institutions,

[i]t became more and more common for people to want to own books themselves, whether students seeking textbooks or noble women desiring to own beautifully illuminated Psalters. By 1200 there is quite good evidence of secular workshops writing and decorating manuscripts for sale to the laity.  By 1250 there were certainly bookshops in the big university and commercial towns, arranging the writing out of new manuscripts and trading in second-hand copies. By 1300 it must have been exceptional for a monastery to make its own manuscripts: usually, monks bought their books from shops like anyone else, although this is not quite true of the Carthusians or of some religious communities in the Netherlands.

As universities began to rely on scribes to produce and reproduce texts, supervision by the university faculty became necessary. Ordinances, therefore, were developed “to regulate the work of the copyists, to lay down the minimum requirements of formal presentation and substantial correctness, and  to prescribe the selling price of  duly certified copies.”....

“The English book trade...developed not around the universities, as on the Continent, but in London, where the stationers formed a guild as early as 1403.” This guild was known famously as the Stationers’ Company.... Despite the professional growth, medieval scribes continued to be treated as mere laborers.... “The average scribe in the later Middle Ages...had to work three to seven days for the sum earned in one day by a common foot-soldier slogging through Scotland in King Edward’s army.”

Nevertheless, the commercial book trade continued to flourish in major European cities, and  the number of scribes and  illuminators increased substantially as a result. “By the late thirteenth century in Paris (a century later in England)...[t]he names of scribes, illuminators, parchment-makers and binders...[can be found] in tax records, though few names can be linked with surviving books.”

Hat-tip to Medievalists.net.

Image: The Monk Eadwine;  c. 1150 Illumination on parchment, 457 x 330 mm; Trinity College, Cambridge. 

The monk Eadwine, the prince of scribes (as the inscription calls him) is shown in this mid-twelfth-century portrait in a luxury glossed Psalter written at the cathedral priory of Christ Church, Canterbury. Eadwine is working with a pen and a knife together.

Doolittle Raiders to meet for final reunion 'to close this mission'

FORT WALTON BEACH — The Doolittle Tokyo Raiders will end their longstanding tradition of reunions this year at the place where it all started.

The group of 80 men made famous by their April 18, 1942, bombing on Tokyo that lifted American morale during World War II is down to five living members.

“It was a very emotional decision to make,” said Tom Casey, business manager for the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders. “I think this was one of the toughest things I‘ve ever done.”

The Raiders trained at then Eglin Field with Lt. Col. James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle, who led the 16 Army B-25 bombers off the deck of the Navy aircraft carrier to bomb five major Japanese cities.

The four active Raiders decided last October that this year would be their final reunion. The decision was announced Friday.

via www.stripes.com

Image description:

 

Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. James H. "Jimmy" Doolittle, center, clasps hands in a gesture of friendship with two former enemies, retired Japanese Rear Admirals Heijiro Abe, left, and Sadao Chigusa, at a luncheon held in Doolittle's honor at the American Club in Tokyo in March, 1974. Doolittle led the famous April 18, 1942 bombing raid on Tokyo that provided Americans with a much-needed morale boost after a string of early Japanese successes. Abe flew a fighter-bomber in the attacks on both Pearl Harbor and Midway Island, while Chigusa served as executive officer of a destroyer accompanying the Japanese carriers whose planes hit Pearl Harbor. HIDEYUKI MIHASHI/STARSAND STRIPES

 

Inglorious bastards of Collis Palatium

The Rome of Romulus' day was anything but glorious. It was deliberate and rapacious in its habits, an emerging society jostling for space on the Italic stage.... The predatory and opportunistic behavior of these early Romans is ideally illustrated by the flurry of raids and counter-raids conducted against...local highlanders [of the Apennines].... This was an ugly war of ambuscades, with surprise attacks followed by equally rapid retreats, artful deceits followed by face-saving compromises--a hide-and-seek game.... Pillage was not simply the inevitable and distasteful consequence of war, but the very substance of it.

Fields, Nic. Early Roman Warrior 753-321 BC. Osprey Publishing, 2011.

(Image: Italian warrior of the late 8th, early 7th century BC, Museo della Civilta, Rome. Photographer unknown.)

Tolkien's mythic borrowings

It is well known that J.R.R. Tolkien in creating his mythopoeic books like The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit extensively borrowed and adapted from the mythologies of Northern Europe, in particular the tales of the Poetic Edda, also known as the Elder Edda, a collection of poems written in the 1270s in Old Norse. It includes the legend of Sigurd and the fall of the Nibelung (Niflung or Niflungr in Old Norse), the tale that also served as Richard Wagner's principle source for his grand operatic cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen in German), completed about 50 years before The Hobbit.

Some of the specific ideas from German and Norse myth that Tolkien used include a powerful magical ring, races of dwarves and elves, horses of supernatural speed, and men who transform into bears. Even some of the character and place names in Tolkien's works can be traced to the old myths. Here is a small sampling, some alongside images from the films The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Frodo, the protagonist of The Lord of the Rings, is the Latinized name of a character in Hrolf's Saga, which was written in Iceland in Old Norse prose in the 1300s, the original Old Norse being Fróði (Old English, Frōda, Latin Frotho, as in Saxo Grammaticus'sGesta Danorum--i.e., History of the Danes).

Bilbo, the protagonist of The Hobbit, is also an archaic English word meaning a well-tempered sword; bilbo was presumably derived from the Spanish town name, Bilbao. In The Hobbit, Bilbo's aquires a sword, Sting, which plays a crucial role in events, and in The Lord of the Rings, too. German and Norse myth has magical swords, too; one of the most well-known is Leg-Biter, a cursed blade, featured in Icelandic saga.

Beorn, the name of the man who can transform into a bear in The Hobbit, is the Old English word for bear, and such shape-changing occurs in old Norse myth. Its modern Anglicized equivalent, Bjorn, is common as a name even today in Scandinavian countries--as Björn in Swedish and Icelandic and as Bjørn in Norwegian and Danish.

Middle-earth is the English translation of both the Middle English word middel-erde and its Old English antecedent middangeard, (Miðgarðr in Old Norse) the world of men in German mythology, which featured nine worlds, though more literally it might be translated "middle-enclosure".*

orc, the singular noun in Tolkien's works meaning one of the race of orcs, a prevalent evil in Tolkien's Middle-earth about which Tolkien wrote in a letter, "the word is, as far as I am concerned, actually derived from Old English orc 'demon.'" Tolkien used the term goblin in The Hobbit to indicate an orc.

ent, the singular noun in Tolkien's works meaning one of the race of ents, which are large sentient trees, is the Old English word for giant, as in the Old English poetic line, orþanc enta geweorc ("work of cunning giants")

Orthanc, one of the two towers referred to in the title of Tolkien's work The Two Towers, from the Old English word orþanc, which I referenced in the poetic line cited above in the entry for ent. (In Old English, as well as Gothic, Old Norse, and Icelandic, the letter þ--known in Anglo-Saxon as the thorn--is pronounced as th in the modern English word that or in the word thief depending on its placement; the thorn is still used in modern Icelandic.) I like to pretend that it was the inspiration for The Shard.

troll, the singular noun in Tolkien's works meaning one of the race of trolls, is of course a word in use in English today, but its origin is as the Old Norse term meaning a fiendish giant or demon, but it carried supernatural connotations (in modern Swedish, trolla means to bewitch), while the trolls of Middle-earth are not magic users--in fact, they can be thunderously stupid.

Meduseld, the hall of the king of Rohan, Théoden, in The Lord of the Rings, is a combination of the Old English medu (mead) and seld (hall), "mead-hall" being a term in Old English lore; the most famous mead-hall in literature being Heorot, the mead-hall featured in Beowulf.

Grima, the duplicitous and false adviser to Théoden, king of Rohan, is also the word for mask in Old English and Old Norse, and it survives with the meaning intact in modern Icelandic as gríma.

warg, a type of large wolf and stead for orcs in Tolkien's works, is the anglicized word for of the Old Norse vargr, meaning wolf.

Eärendil, a character of Tolkien's Silmarillion, was inspired by the name and deeds of Éarendel of two of the Crist poems (that is, Christ poems)--Christ II and Elene--by the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf ("kin-wulf")* 

There are other clear, and some merely probable, sources in Norse and Germanic myth serving as inspiration for Tolkien during his creative work. The above is not an exhaustive list. But, if you go to see the recently-released film The Hobbit or enjoyed the film trilogy of The Lord of the Rings, I hope you'll appreciate not only that behind the films rest Tolkien's books, but behind the books are shades--or perhaps better described as the soft, even fading, light--of what one might call, curiously, "true myth," sagas and stories, sometimes of religious significance, told fireside among, and often about, Northern Europe's pre-modern people undertaking genuine quests for survival and a better life. We have more to thank them for than their tales, but I think it's good to treasure those, too.