There were two reasons why I set out to read the book. The first was a sense of obligation. The book was signalled for our October meeting. The second reason was much older. Heart of Darkness was a classic. It had survived for more than a century of earthtime. Such survivors are there to be studied and admired. Joseph Conrad’s reputation relies on his Polish origin and his outstanding command of the English language. That is what made him a classic. For me, his words printed on the page rose up. An impenetrable thicket redolent of cigar smoke and leather-covered easy chairs for the comfort of gentlemen in their clubs along Pall Mall.
I went in search of a first edition. The library had a handsome run of Blackwood’s Magazine. Here was a doorway to revelation.
1826 came forward in two leather-bound volumes. Two discoveries : William Blackwood published his monthly magazine in Edinburgh; it was a veritable miscellany designed to provide permanent reading material from the wider world for the benefit of Scottish gentlemen of leisure. It was avowedly political. A Whig counterblast to Tory intransigence. Huskisson and Grattan took me back to history lessons in the VIth Form. ‘First Love’ began : “I shall never forget the first time I ever drank rum-punch after having been smoking cigars.”
The two fat bindings of 1899 were tributes to increasing prosperity. William Blackwood & Sons were now of Edinburgh and 37 Paternoster Row, London. Here was John Buchan in January. Here the Heart of Darkness divided, like Gaul, in partes tres : February March April. And, on page 818, the grandiloquent exuberance of Lord Jim : “I was hindered by the oriental voice within the court-room expostulating with impassioned volubility.” Elsewhere : the Carlist cause in Spain; The Preservation of African Elephants; Californian gold discoveries; Game-fishing in the Thames; Mr Lecky on Mr Gladstone; Sir George Trevelyan as a historian; a biography of George Borrow; The Sins of Education; Christian Science ‘Quackery’; and much else besides. There was a military feel about it. Lt Gen Sir Henry Brackenbury, K.C.B., K.C.S.I., wrote at length from Salamanca; there were Lessons of Russian Aggression still to be learned; the necessity of the Boer War to be questioned; inappropriate equipment of British troops in Afghanistan to be lamented. Plus ça change .. ..
I have at last an explanation for Conrad’s thicket. The writing of fiction requires its own subset, its own particular register of the English language. It is like unto the conjuring of a magical spell designed to create that state of έκστασις [ékstasis] where the reader ‘steps aside’ from the everyday consciousness of physical reality into the metaphysical reality of the author’s original creation. I find myself unable to tune in to Conrad’s idiosyncratic wavelength. The yellow mellowness of London’s gas lighting and the swirling opacities of pea-souper fogs are but faded memories of Harcourt Street before I moved away. Coal-fired steamships and the blood red maps of Empire are no longer current currency. I wander all too easily among the unending landscapes of lo real maravilloso. Time’s wingèd chariot is standing at platform nine.
© francis cameron
oxford, 27 september 2008
Saturday, 27 September 2008
BOOKS ON THE BROAD
books on the broad
On the first Monday night of the month, I go to Books on the Broad. It’s a ‘reading group’ hosted by Blackwell’s in their bookshop on Broad Street in Oxford. Numbers present have varied between 12 and 20. Last night the age range began, I guess, in the mid-twenties and went upwards from there. Again I guess: probably the majority present are aged 50 or more. Men are in a minority. Just 3 or 4 of us.
The general idea is that during one month we read our ‘set book’ – it’s always a novel – and then we meet on the first Monday of the next month to talk about it. Put like that it looks a strange thing to do. I joined partly to meet a new group of people but more particularly to be led to books I otherwise might not have read. Somehow I suspect it just provides an evening’s entertainment in congenial company for some of those who attend. We meet at 6:30 with an 8 o’clock exit. I find I’m home in time to watch whatever BBC1 has on offer at 9 pm.
I ‘discovered’ the group in June, read the chosen book, and wrote a brief review which I took with me for the first Monday in July. The book was Annie Proulx : The Shipping News which I remembered from the short list for one of the literary Prizes and for a film version I’d seen on the telly a long time back. I didn’t particularly enjoy the book. It seemed to me like the work of someone who’d been to a Creative Writing course to learn how to do it and then diligently applied the lessons she’d learned when she wrote her novel. I was not surprised to find I was in a minority of one so far as Books on the Broad was concerned.
On August 4th, we talked about Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, a science fiction novel originally in Polish and the book of two films. Another text which didn’t particularly beguile me. Without a self-imposed obligation to read the whole thing, I would never have reached the end. I found it a monotone monologue without a beginning or an ending. It was first published in 1961 (in Poland). I found a sense of an undefined but continual threat lurking in the background and speculated that this was the very real possibility of imminent nuclear war which many people felt in the early 1960s.
And so to last night when we were assumed to be familiar with Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing, her first novel (published in 1950). It’s set in southern Africa (where she lived from age 5 until 1949) and is about a youngish single women who was influenced by gossip to get married. It was a disaster which ended only when she was killed. I found the book very well written and have since read two more of hers. The Sweetest Dream (2001) and The Golden Notebook (1962). I found Golden Notebook especially good and quite unlike any novel I’d ever read before. Maybe it can go on our ‘reading list’ sometime in the second half of next year.
On the first Monday night of the month, I go to Books on the Broad. It’s a ‘reading group’ hosted by Blackwell’s in their bookshop on Broad Street in Oxford. Numbers present have varied between 12 and 20. Last night the age range began, I guess, in the mid-twenties and went upwards from there. Again I guess: probably the majority present are aged 50 or more. Men are in a minority. Just 3 or 4 of us.
The general idea is that during one month we read our ‘set book’ – it’s always a novel – and then we meet on the first Monday of the next month to talk about it. Put like that it looks a strange thing to do. I joined partly to meet a new group of people but more particularly to be led to books I otherwise might not have read. Somehow I suspect it just provides an evening’s entertainment in congenial company for some of those who attend. We meet at 6:30 with an 8 o’clock exit. I find I’m home in time to watch whatever BBC1 has on offer at 9 pm.
I ‘discovered’ the group in June, read the chosen book, and wrote a brief review which I took with me for the first Monday in July. The book was Annie Proulx : The Shipping News which I remembered from the short list for one of the literary Prizes and for a film version I’d seen on the telly a long time back. I didn’t particularly enjoy the book. It seemed to me like the work of someone who’d been to a Creative Writing course to learn how to do it and then diligently applied the lessons she’d learned when she wrote her novel. I was not surprised to find I was in a minority of one so far as Books on the Broad was concerned.
On August 4th, we talked about Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, a science fiction novel originally in Polish and the book of two films. Another text which didn’t particularly beguile me. Without a self-imposed obligation to read the whole thing, I would never have reached the end. I found it a monotone monologue without a beginning or an ending. It was first published in 1961 (in Poland). I found a sense of an undefined but continual threat lurking in the background and speculated that this was the very real possibility of imminent nuclear war which many people felt in the early 1960s.
And so to last night when we were assumed to be familiar with Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing, her first novel (published in 1950). It’s set in southern Africa (where she lived from age 5 until 1949) and is about a youngish single women who was influenced by gossip to get married. It was a disaster which ended only when she was killed. I found the book very well written and have since read two more of hers. The Sweetest Dream (2001) and The Golden Notebook (1962). I found Golden Notebook especially good and quite unlike any novel I’d ever read before. Maybe it can go on our ‘reading list’ sometime in the second half of next year.
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
daily daily
ic swince þearle
my day begins with texts in old english
today I am absorbed in the colloquia of aelfric
he that was abbot of eynsham round about the year 1000
he set out to familiarise his trainees with the latin language
to that end he wrote a series of imaginary conversations
with local craftsmen and traders
others have transformed his latin into old english
this is the only text I know which throws light
on the ways and means of ordinary people
in reply to the question
hwaet dest þu
the inevitable reply is along the lines of
ic swince þearle
swincan is full of meanings
ic swince þearle comes across as I really do work very hard
but ic swince can also mean I struggle
and I think of myself
and my struggles with some old english writings
this week’s task has been to focus on the description of beowulf’s funeral
ic swince
I really do
I really do struggle
I diligently parse every single word
but to convey connected thought into modern speech I cannot
still less am I able to respond with lines
half lines
of rhythmical verse
even imitative alliteration eludes me
I struggle
ic swince þearle
I really do
giese leof
my day begins with texts in old english
today I am absorbed in the colloquia of aelfric
he that was abbot of eynsham round about the year 1000
he set out to familiarise his trainees with the latin language
to that end he wrote a series of imaginary conversations
with local craftsmen and traders
others have transformed his latin into old english
this is the only text I know which throws light
on the ways and means of ordinary people
in reply to the question
hwaet dest þu
the inevitable reply is along the lines of
ic swince þearle
swincan is full of meanings
ic swince þearle comes across as I really do work very hard
but ic swince can also mean I struggle
and I think of myself
and my struggles with some old english writings
this week’s task has been to focus on the description of beowulf’s funeral
ic swince
I really do
I really do struggle
I diligently parse every single word
but to convey connected thought into modern speech I cannot
still less am I able to respond with lines
half lines
of rhythmical verse
even imitative alliteration eludes me
I struggle
ic swince þearle
I really do
giese leof
Tuesday, 12 February 2008
to þam wife cwæð god
þu bist under weres onwealde
and he gewielt þe
I am at my morning exercise. I’ve made a cup of coffee and am sitting up in bed with an extract of Aelfric’s Old English translation of part of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden which I am rendering (!) into current dialogue.
Mitchell & Robinson have kindly provided alongside for comparison King James’s Authorised Version and a Latin text which I take to be Jerome’s dubious vulgar rendition. The Old English makes its point with greater fervour.
god said to the woman
you are under your man’s command
and he uses you
None of the mollycoddling flimflam from KJ’s boys ‘he shall rule over thee’.
Still less of Jerome’s ‘sub viri potestate eris et ipse dominabitur tui’, though I must admit dominabitur associated with sub viri potestate does evoke a certain kind of folksy imagery, sitting up in bed as I am illuminated by rosy-fingered Dawn’s early light.
Aelfric was a monk, Abbot of Eynsham, no less, and he really didnt want to make the Book of Genesis open to men of the common herd lest they imagine they were free to copulate, as did the patriarchs, with their sisters and daughters for the better increase of the better part of the population; nor indulge themselves with assorted concubines as well as a plethora of wives and a side order of nubile serving wenches. Nonetheless he does make a point.
Was there something about knowing which side his bread was buttered?
þu bist under weres onwealde
and he gewielt þe
I am at my morning exercise. I’ve made a cup of coffee and am sitting up in bed with an extract of Aelfric’s Old English translation of part of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden which I am rendering (!) into current dialogue.
Mitchell & Robinson have kindly provided alongside for comparison King James’s Authorised Version and a Latin text which I take to be Jerome’s dubious vulgar rendition. The Old English makes its point with greater fervour.
god said to the woman
you are under your man’s command
and he uses you
None of the mollycoddling flimflam from KJ’s boys ‘he shall rule over thee’.
Still less of Jerome’s ‘sub viri potestate eris et ipse dominabitur tui’, though I must admit dominabitur associated with sub viri potestate does evoke a certain kind of folksy imagery, sitting up in bed as I am illuminated by rosy-fingered Dawn’s early light.
Aelfric was a monk, Abbot of Eynsham, no less, and he really didnt want to make the Book of Genesis open to men of the common herd lest they imagine they were free to copulate, as did the patriarchs, with their sisters and daughters for the better increase of the better part of the population; nor indulge themselves with assorted concubines as well as a plethora of wives and a side order of nubile serving wenches. Nonetheless he does make a point.
Was there something about knowing which side his bread was buttered?
Tuesday, 1 January 2008
round and round they go
round and round it goes
Is it the influence of my autoimmersion in AngloSaxon studies? Last night it happened. This afternoon it happened again. I’m taken back to october 1949. Unexpectedly. Very tangibly. It almost hurts.
last night
BBC4 TV has a couple of excellent programmes about Vienna, that old capital of the AustroHungarian Empire. We tour the grand style architecture when the Ringstrasse was built. I glimpse the little statue of Johann Strauss and relive the moment in the late summer of 1977 when my mother and I heard the orchestra strike up The Blue Danube. And we danced. There and then in the Ring we danced The Blue Danube Waltz while a Viennese orchestra played on the other side of the greenery. (Been there! Done that! They didnt sell T-shirts in those days!) BBC4 took us on a tour of the Wien of Freud and then to the Klimt of the Secession Pavilion. (I’d seen and luxuriated in the decadence of The Kiss when it was on display at the New York Guggenheim in january 1965.) Last night (New Year’s Eve) I turned on for Schiele’s Death and the Maiden.
and stayed on for The Third Man
Oxford, october 1949. My first evening in Univ. I still hadnt had my study grant confirmed. The National Service bureaucrats seemed reluctant to let me have my due. But I went up just the same and had a handsome room on the first floor, overlooking The High. I had a small quantity of small change in my pocket. I spent a substantial part of it in a visit to a cinema in the Cowley Road. Yes, you’ve guessed it. The film was The Third Man. In black and white. Dark shadowy atmospheric black and white. Ending as it began. In a cemetery. ( .. .. and my grant was delivered in the nest morning’s post.)
this afternoon
I’ve been a fan of Michael Wood since the early 1980s when he went on TV In Search of the Dark Ages. In my mind’s eye there’s still a picture of him, young as he then was, striding along a narrow footway between two hedgerows – an ancient and still existing AngloSaxon boundary – and as he strode he declaimed the AngloSaxon words of the original land charter. Very impressive.
In 1999 his In Search of England was published. I bought it to compare with H V Morton’s 1927 work of the same title (my copy was bought in Wells on 7 september 1957). Just a few minutes ago I was reading Michael’s considerations of Asser’s Life of Alfred the Great. A name leapt out of the page and caught my eye. Humfrey Wanley. Once more I am transported back to October 1949 when I sat in Duke Humphrey’s Library with the incomplete set of partbooks which contain the earliest surviving handwritings of church choir music in English. The Wanley Manuscript.
is there a message for me?
The original users of Old English lived in a continuous present. Their language provided for this and for recalling events of the past. Unlike the Latinists of the ekklesia they had no future tense. I sense though that at least some of them were aware that their continuous present was a continuous weaving of the Web of Wyrd. Each individual continuously created their own future – in conjunction with the Webs of all those with whom they were inexorably linked. What am I weaving now?
swa cwæð snottor on mode
francis atte oxenford
incipit 2008
Is it the influence of my autoimmersion in AngloSaxon studies? Last night it happened. This afternoon it happened again. I’m taken back to october 1949. Unexpectedly. Very tangibly. It almost hurts.
last night
BBC4 TV has a couple of excellent programmes about Vienna, that old capital of the AustroHungarian Empire. We tour the grand style architecture when the Ringstrasse was built. I glimpse the little statue of Johann Strauss and relive the moment in the late summer of 1977 when my mother and I heard the orchestra strike up The Blue Danube. And we danced. There and then in the Ring we danced The Blue Danube Waltz while a Viennese orchestra played on the other side of the greenery. (Been there! Done that! They didnt sell T-shirts in those days!) BBC4 took us on a tour of the Wien of Freud and then to the Klimt of the Secession Pavilion. (I’d seen and luxuriated in the decadence of The Kiss when it was on display at the New York Guggenheim in january 1965.) Last night (New Year’s Eve) I turned on for Schiele’s Death and the Maiden.
and stayed on for The Third Man
Oxford, october 1949. My first evening in Univ. I still hadnt had my study grant confirmed. The National Service bureaucrats seemed reluctant to let me have my due. But I went up just the same and had a handsome room on the first floor, overlooking The High. I had a small quantity of small change in my pocket. I spent a substantial part of it in a visit to a cinema in the Cowley Road. Yes, you’ve guessed it. The film was The Third Man. In black and white. Dark shadowy atmospheric black and white. Ending as it began. In a cemetery. ( .. .. and my grant was delivered in the nest morning’s post.)
this afternoon
I’ve been a fan of Michael Wood since the early 1980s when he went on TV In Search of the Dark Ages. In my mind’s eye there’s still a picture of him, young as he then was, striding along a narrow footway between two hedgerows – an ancient and still existing AngloSaxon boundary – and as he strode he declaimed the AngloSaxon words of the original land charter. Very impressive.
In 1999 his In Search of England was published. I bought it to compare with H V Morton’s 1927 work of the same title (my copy was bought in Wells on 7 september 1957). Just a few minutes ago I was reading Michael’s considerations of Asser’s Life of Alfred the Great. A name leapt out of the page and caught my eye. Humfrey Wanley. Once more I am transported back to October 1949 when I sat in Duke Humphrey’s Library with the incomplete set of partbooks which contain the earliest surviving handwritings of church choir music in English. The Wanley Manuscript.
is there a message for me?
The original users of Old English lived in a continuous present. Their language provided for this and for recalling events of the past. Unlike the Latinists of the ekklesia they had no future tense. I sense though that at least some of them were aware that their continuous present was a continuous weaving of the Web of Wyrd. Each individual continuously created their own future – in conjunction with the Webs of all those with whom they were inexorably linked. What am I weaving now?
swa cwæð snottor on mode
francis atte oxenford
incipit 2008
sæternes dæg 29/1207
I’ve had one of those once-a-year letters tucked into a Christmas card from distant cousins half a world away. Theirs is neatly printed out headed by a colorful (sic) interior scene of fir tree presents and pink lounge. My reply, when it is composed, shall travel via email as did last year’s response but I hardly know what to say.
I look back at my own past twelve months and see little to report. Barren wilderness unsullied by incident. The highlight of each week a locking of intellectual stimulus with Katy (who surprised me last time by actually agreeing with me). Apart from that. What?
I’d gone into the medical practice to get a prescription renewed. Nothing serious. Just routine to keep the platelets happy. In an unscripted moment I enquired how busy everyone was. A few fingerings of the computer later I was booked in to see a locum. The locum had time to spare. We talked. Was there anything physically wrong with me? If not, then I knew what to do. More talk. Questions and answers. Blood samples taken and sent for analysis. Go back for the results. Nothing to report but do have another cholesterol test in twelve months’ time. OK. So it’s psychosomatic and I know what to do about that.
Shan reappeared in my landscape. I’d known Shan in the mid-80s by reputation. She was a force to be reckoned with. One of those who act, who build, who do something whether or not others approve. House of the Goddess. In London. She was still a force to be reckoned with more than ten years later when I met her at one of Michael de Ward’s In the Presence ChristoPagan seminar weekends on a commercial campsite at Calne in Wiltshire. I remember she spoke about reciting the Charge of the Goddess and then finding out she was in the presence of Doreen Valiente. After that I’d heard nothing more of Shan until her name popped up on the screen in front of me sometime in this year 2007. Now she was in Newport, Mon., transforming a disused working man’s club into premises which included a temple. I went along and helped with the redecorating. Now I have a proprietorial interest in two of the kitchen’s walls and some other bits and pieces here and there. More visits to look forward to. Stimulus. Momentum. Time shall come again when once more I take the A40 westward and over the border to that place of magic.
I used to assist with the computer teaching programmes at the university’s Department of Continuing Education. My name remains on their mailing list. In the early summer an advance copy of their autumn schedule arrived on my desk. I tend to read anything in print that comes under my eye. Dutifully I worked through from the front cover and towards the back. My eye spied a course of Old English language literature and culture. I knew this was for me. And so it was. And so it is. For two reasons. One : in my time of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Sydney, I could happily decode the Latin texts handwritten in Carolingian minuscule. But the AngloSaxon material defeated me. I was quite ignorant of the language. More urgent matters took its place. Now was a time to remedy a deficiency. Fill a gap. Two : when I first came in contact with Marian Green she encouraged us to explore our local landscapes for traces of the old gods among the places belonging with their names on the map. I did visit Great Tew but perhaps I wasnt on the right wavelength that day. Or the signal was deep buried in more mundane static. Village prettiness. Too too too arty. Consciously.
The DCE Old English course is absolutely first class. Our tutor is Russian. She’s on the staff of Duke Humphrey’s Library where the Bodleian keeps its manuscripts and incunabula. She really knows her stuff. And life is transformed for me. I made it clear at the start that I have a primary interest in the paganism the original English brought with them from their homelands adjacent to the North Sea. Not so easy since the finite amount of surviving documentary evidence depends upon the handwork of longdead Christian scriptoria. Which tends to leave an unbalanced view of reality. Nevertheless. Joy of joys. [Corn in Egypt!] I find I can hardly go two steps in my local landscape without tripping over ground which was once nurtured by my AngloSaxon brethren. The very house I live in is on ground that used to belong to one of them. Until Guillaume le Bâtard dispossessed the last of them in favour of the Earl of Abingdon, whose family name was Norris. Also spelt Norreys.
So there we have it. Something to look forward to. Something to exercise the mind for as long as .. .. ..
I weave my own input into the Web of Wyrd. I create my own future. As we all do.
Oh yes. And there was a significant birthday just days ago with three daughters and five grandchildren. Twelve of us altogether. I’ve managed to survive 80 years on this planet. More than I ever expected. And I’m aware of preparing for next time. And the time after. Still more yet to do. The Web of Wyrd weaves unceasing and it weaves exceeding fine. Toodle pip. As they say.
Swa cwæð snottor on mode
francis atte oxenford
29 december 2007
I’ve had one of those once-a-year letters tucked into a Christmas card from distant cousins half a world away. Theirs is neatly printed out headed by a colorful (sic) interior scene of fir tree presents and pink lounge. My reply, when it is composed, shall travel via email as did last year’s response but I hardly know what to say.
I look back at my own past twelve months and see little to report. Barren wilderness unsullied by incident. The highlight of each week a locking of intellectual stimulus with Katy (who surprised me last time by actually agreeing with me). Apart from that. What?
I’d gone into the medical practice to get a prescription renewed. Nothing serious. Just routine to keep the platelets happy. In an unscripted moment I enquired how busy everyone was. A few fingerings of the computer later I was booked in to see a locum. The locum had time to spare. We talked. Was there anything physically wrong with me? If not, then I knew what to do. More talk. Questions and answers. Blood samples taken and sent for analysis. Go back for the results. Nothing to report but do have another cholesterol test in twelve months’ time. OK. So it’s psychosomatic and I know what to do about that.
Shan reappeared in my landscape. I’d known Shan in the mid-80s by reputation. She was a force to be reckoned with. One of those who act, who build, who do something whether or not others approve. House of the Goddess. In London. She was still a force to be reckoned with more than ten years later when I met her at one of Michael de Ward’s In the Presence ChristoPagan seminar weekends on a commercial campsite at Calne in Wiltshire. I remember she spoke about reciting the Charge of the Goddess and then finding out she was in the presence of Doreen Valiente. After that I’d heard nothing more of Shan until her name popped up on the screen in front of me sometime in this year 2007. Now she was in Newport, Mon., transforming a disused working man’s club into premises which included a temple. I went along and helped with the redecorating. Now I have a proprietorial interest in two of the kitchen’s walls and some other bits and pieces here and there. More visits to look forward to. Stimulus. Momentum. Time shall come again when once more I take the A40 westward and over the border to that place of magic.
I used to assist with the computer teaching programmes at the university’s Department of Continuing Education. My name remains on their mailing list. In the early summer an advance copy of their autumn schedule arrived on my desk. I tend to read anything in print that comes under my eye. Dutifully I worked through from the front cover and towards the back. My eye spied a course of Old English language literature and culture. I knew this was for me. And so it was. And so it is. For two reasons. One : in my time of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Sydney, I could happily decode the Latin texts handwritten in Carolingian minuscule. But the AngloSaxon material defeated me. I was quite ignorant of the language. More urgent matters took its place. Now was a time to remedy a deficiency. Fill a gap. Two : when I first came in contact with Marian Green she encouraged us to explore our local landscapes for traces of the old gods among the places belonging with their names on the map. I did visit Great Tew but perhaps I wasnt on the right wavelength that day. Or the signal was deep buried in more mundane static. Village prettiness. Too too too arty. Consciously.
The DCE Old English course is absolutely first class. Our tutor is Russian. She’s on the staff of Duke Humphrey’s Library where the Bodleian keeps its manuscripts and incunabula. She really knows her stuff. And life is transformed for me. I made it clear at the start that I have a primary interest in the paganism the original English brought with them from their homelands adjacent to the North Sea. Not so easy since the finite amount of surviving documentary evidence depends upon the handwork of longdead Christian scriptoria. Which tends to leave an unbalanced view of reality. Nevertheless. Joy of joys. [Corn in Egypt!] I find I can hardly go two steps in my local landscape without tripping over ground which was once nurtured by my AngloSaxon brethren. The very house I live in is on ground that used to belong to one of them. Until Guillaume le Bâtard dispossessed the last of them in favour of the Earl of Abingdon, whose family name was Norris. Also spelt Norreys.
So there we have it. Something to look forward to. Something to exercise the mind for as long as .. .. ..
I weave my own input into the Web of Wyrd. I create my own future. As we all do.
Oh yes. And there was a significant birthday just days ago with three daughters and five grandchildren. Twelve of us altogether. I’ve managed to survive 80 years on this planet. More than I ever expected. And I’m aware of preparing for next time. And the time after. Still more yet to do. The Web of Wyrd weaves unceasing and it weaves exceeding fine. Toodle pip. As they say.
Swa cwæð snottor on mode
francis atte oxenford
29 december 2007
Saturday, 16 June 2007
why do we speak english?
The Roman Empire achieved its greatest geographical extent in the reign of Trajanus, emperor from 98 to 117. His European boundaries, roughly speaking, were the rivers Rhine and Danube. Then there were territories in western Asia with seaports on the eastern Mediterranean; in Egypt and along the coastal strip of northern Africa. In the western part of the Empire the official language was Latin. In the eastern part the lingua franca was the Koiné Greek established there by Alexander the Great some four centuries before.
Trajanus was followed by Hadrianus, emperor from 117 to 138, who began to shorten his lines of communication. On the island called Britannia, for example, Hadrian’s Wall was built to delimit the far northern frontier. South of that barrier (as every schoolboy knows) most of the country was subject to Roman military occupation. The official language was Latin, spoken and written by the ruling élite and the Britons who were closest to them. The remainder of the population spoke – so far as we can ascertain – various Celtic dialects. Of their written language, remains are few and sparse.
In the year later to be denominated as Anno Domini 410, the Roman legions packed up their kit and marched away, leaving behind them a Britannia subjected to raids from the Picts on the northern side of The Wall as well as intermittent forays by seaborne intruders. It was all part of a catastrophic movement of tribes and nations. The Romans with their ‘us and them’ attitudes categorised them all as Barbarians, because their common speech was neither decent Latin nor Koiné Greek. Barbarians they may have been in Roman eyes. Uncultured rabble they were not. Gradually, inexorably, they spilled over the borders of the once impregnable Empire. They came. Some settled. Others walked on. And these incursions were not confined to Europe. Problems with powerful régimes in Asia forced the Empire to move its capital from Roma to Constantinopólis, and to divide the Empire with its Greek East having authority over a Latin West.
In that Western Empire – nominally still to the West and the South of the Rhine-Danube line – there was often turmoil leaving profound cultural changes in its wake. Historians have called these centuries ‘The Age of Invasions’. Another term is Völkerwanderung, typifying the mass migrations which took place as whole tribes and nations poured in while the defences crumbled. Collectively those ‘wanderers’ are labelled ‘Germanic’ in contradistinction to the earlier inhabitants who had formerly been governed from Roma. It is a fascinating time. ‘Dark Ages’ only to historians with too little documentary evidence to contradict the widely held view that civilisation came to and end with The Fall of the Roman Empire and was not regained until the Classical Renaissance associated, in some minds, with the Capture of Constantinopólis by the Turks in 1453, preceded by the exit and transhipment of Byzantine scholars with their precious manuscripts who ‘brought the Light of Learning’ to the Medici in Firenze from whence it flowed delightfully all over Europe to connoisseurs all too thankful to receive it.
It is a distorted view, of course. The ‘barbarian’ infiltrators carried their own cultures with them. They just did not go to the bother of learning to write things down. Only in the eyes of Men of The Book is this a serious flaw of character. When the new arrivals eventually settled in their final locations, they became the foundations of modern European Civilisation.
I have been fascinated by the ways in which some of the immigrant languages survived while others did not. My current paradigm, for what it is worth, has writing as the most significant factor. In the Italy of Theodoric the Ostrogoth (reigned 471 to 526), for example, the written language was the Latin of Boethius (c.475 to 524) and Cassiodorus (c.490 to c.580). The common spoken language eventually became the Italian branch of the Romance family. The Germanic Franks who crossed the Rhine became the Merovingian Kings chronicled in the Latin of the churchmen while the Franks who did not cross the Rhine continued with their own vernacular. By the time of the penning of the Treaty of Verdun in 843, the details were set down twice : one in the Romance tongue of the West; the other in the Germanic of the East.
And what of the country we now call England? Why do we speak English?
Let us mentally go back to the time when global warming and rising sea levels finally cut off our country from the continental mainland. We may consider the islanders who survived as the original inhabitants of Britain. Cheddar Man, or one of his maternal ancestors, may or may not have been among them. We know nothing of their language. It is just possible, though not at all likely, it was not even IndoEuropean.
Before Julius Kaiser came on his exploratory raid, various Celtic dialects were in general use, including the Gallic spoken by those of the Belgae who had migrated from the mainland some decades before. Claudius engineered the landing of his taskforce (AD 43) and the general military annexation of Britannia. In some places they were welcomed. Some Britons assimilated. Others did not and sank into an underclass. Latin was the official spoken and written language. Where the Roman penetration was incomplete, Celtic dialects continued to be spoken and eventually achieved written status. But that was much later. In the year 410, as I have already mentioned, the legions sailed away. The mêlée on their continental frontiers demanded their prior attention. Britannia was expendable.
Enter the Saxons. A few of them had been here before, probing hither and yon, perhaps for trade, perhaps for loot, perhaps for Lebensraum. The story goes that postRoman Britannia was disturbed by the Picts from north of The Wall. Mercenaries were engaged to fight Britannia’s battles. They came in three keels to Ebbsfleet. They fought. They liked it here. They stayed. So the story goes.
More of them came. These were the tribesmen we may conveniently call Saxons. They were fighting men. As the situation resolved, the land now called England was occupied by a strongly stratified hierarchical society. At the top were the Saxon kings, commanding and supported by Saxon military aristocracy. Saxon landed gentry, with obligations of service to their overlords, completed the upper tier. The Saxon landed gentry were slave owners. We may assume that the Romano-British landed gentry assimilated into Saxon society, moved to the Celtic fringes of the islands, or crossed the Channel in sufficient numbers to colonise that part of the NorthWest now called Bretagne. In occupied Former Britannia, Saxon dialects were the official spoken tongues, solidly established and later committed to writing in a flourishing literature along with the scribal Latin of the churchmen.
When Guillaume le Bâtard headed his marauding battalions to victory at Hastings in 1066, they brought with them the Northman-tinted French of their adopted homeland. In their new territory Norman French remained the language of the military aristocracy. Latin the language of the Church. Old English, with its Saxon and Danish elements, survived because it already had, and continued to have, written form. In time English became the general lingua franca. French had its place in the law courts. Latin remained the language of international exchange even after Henry VIII (“Tudwr”) had taken the reins of the Church into his own hands and enacted an ordinance declaring English to the sole official language of his realm. (Some of the Welsh, rightly, have never forgiven him for this, nor have they ever given way to his will.)
Today the use of English is no longer confined to the Former Britannia. And even there its use is enhanced by a multitude of other tongues which arrived with yet more immigrants who also came and settled. The local delights of Regional Englishes are still with us despite, perhaps even because of, the ubiquitous telecasts.
Saxon military invaders brought their own regional variants with them. For six centuries or more their language coalesced, grew in strength and was committed to writing, firmly established and surviving. Spelling and orthography changed. Usage continues to change. Loan words proliferate. Neologisms attain prominence. Some fade away to become archaic or obsolete. Inflexions lose their force. Collective nouns modulate from singular to plural. Agendum is a thing needing to be done. Agendum pluralises as agenda. And like the neuter plurals of medieval Latin agenda in its turn is multiplied into agendas.
.. .. is now and ever shall be. So long as we continue to talk to each other.
© francis cameron
oxford, 15 june 2007
Trajanus was followed by Hadrianus, emperor from 117 to 138, who began to shorten his lines of communication. On the island called Britannia, for example, Hadrian’s Wall was built to delimit the far northern frontier. South of that barrier (as every schoolboy knows) most of the country was subject to Roman military occupation. The official language was Latin, spoken and written by the ruling élite and the Britons who were closest to them. The remainder of the population spoke – so far as we can ascertain – various Celtic dialects. Of their written language, remains are few and sparse.
In the year later to be denominated as Anno Domini 410, the Roman legions packed up their kit and marched away, leaving behind them a Britannia subjected to raids from the Picts on the northern side of The Wall as well as intermittent forays by seaborne intruders. It was all part of a catastrophic movement of tribes and nations. The Romans with their ‘us and them’ attitudes categorised them all as Barbarians, because their common speech was neither decent Latin nor Koiné Greek. Barbarians they may have been in Roman eyes. Uncultured rabble they were not. Gradually, inexorably, they spilled over the borders of the once impregnable Empire. They came. Some settled. Others walked on. And these incursions were not confined to Europe. Problems with powerful régimes in Asia forced the Empire to move its capital from Roma to Constantinopólis, and to divide the Empire with its Greek East having authority over a Latin West.
In that Western Empire – nominally still to the West and the South of the Rhine-Danube line – there was often turmoil leaving profound cultural changes in its wake. Historians have called these centuries ‘The Age of Invasions’. Another term is Völkerwanderung, typifying the mass migrations which took place as whole tribes and nations poured in while the defences crumbled. Collectively those ‘wanderers’ are labelled ‘Germanic’ in contradistinction to the earlier inhabitants who had formerly been governed from Roma. It is a fascinating time. ‘Dark Ages’ only to historians with too little documentary evidence to contradict the widely held view that civilisation came to and end with The Fall of the Roman Empire and was not regained until the Classical Renaissance associated, in some minds, with the Capture of Constantinopólis by the Turks in 1453, preceded by the exit and transhipment of Byzantine scholars with their precious manuscripts who ‘brought the Light of Learning’ to the Medici in Firenze from whence it flowed delightfully all over Europe to connoisseurs all too thankful to receive it.
It is a distorted view, of course. The ‘barbarian’ infiltrators carried their own cultures with them. They just did not go to the bother of learning to write things down. Only in the eyes of Men of The Book is this a serious flaw of character. When the new arrivals eventually settled in their final locations, they became the foundations of modern European Civilisation.
I have been fascinated by the ways in which some of the immigrant languages survived while others did not. My current paradigm, for what it is worth, has writing as the most significant factor. In the Italy of Theodoric the Ostrogoth (reigned 471 to 526), for example, the written language was the Latin of Boethius (c.475 to 524) and Cassiodorus (c.490 to c.580). The common spoken language eventually became the Italian branch of the Romance family. The Germanic Franks who crossed the Rhine became the Merovingian Kings chronicled in the Latin of the churchmen while the Franks who did not cross the Rhine continued with their own vernacular. By the time of the penning of the Treaty of Verdun in 843, the details were set down twice : one in the Romance tongue of the West; the other in the Germanic of the East.
And what of the country we now call England? Why do we speak English?
Let us mentally go back to the time when global warming and rising sea levels finally cut off our country from the continental mainland. We may consider the islanders who survived as the original inhabitants of Britain. Cheddar Man, or one of his maternal ancestors, may or may not have been among them. We know nothing of their language. It is just possible, though not at all likely, it was not even IndoEuropean.
Before Julius Kaiser came on his exploratory raid, various Celtic dialects were in general use, including the Gallic spoken by those of the Belgae who had migrated from the mainland some decades before. Claudius engineered the landing of his taskforce (AD 43) and the general military annexation of Britannia. In some places they were welcomed. Some Britons assimilated. Others did not and sank into an underclass. Latin was the official spoken and written language. Where the Roman penetration was incomplete, Celtic dialects continued to be spoken and eventually achieved written status. But that was much later. In the year 410, as I have already mentioned, the legions sailed away. The mêlée on their continental frontiers demanded their prior attention. Britannia was expendable.
Enter the Saxons. A few of them had been here before, probing hither and yon, perhaps for trade, perhaps for loot, perhaps for Lebensraum. The story goes that postRoman Britannia was disturbed by the Picts from north of The Wall. Mercenaries were engaged to fight Britannia’s battles. They came in three keels to Ebbsfleet. They fought. They liked it here. They stayed. So the story goes.
More of them came. These were the tribesmen we may conveniently call Saxons. They were fighting men. As the situation resolved, the land now called England was occupied by a strongly stratified hierarchical society. At the top were the Saxon kings, commanding and supported by Saxon military aristocracy. Saxon landed gentry, with obligations of service to their overlords, completed the upper tier. The Saxon landed gentry were slave owners. We may assume that the Romano-British landed gentry assimilated into Saxon society, moved to the Celtic fringes of the islands, or crossed the Channel in sufficient numbers to colonise that part of the NorthWest now called Bretagne. In occupied Former Britannia, Saxon dialects were the official spoken tongues, solidly established and later committed to writing in a flourishing literature along with the scribal Latin of the churchmen.
When Guillaume le Bâtard headed his marauding battalions to victory at Hastings in 1066, they brought with them the Northman-tinted French of their adopted homeland. In their new territory Norman French remained the language of the military aristocracy. Latin the language of the Church. Old English, with its Saxon and Danish elements, survived because it already had, and continued to have, written form. In time English became the general lingua franca. French had its place in the law courts. Latin remained the language of international exchange even after Henry VIII (“Tudwr”) had taken the reins of the Church into his own hands and enacted an ordinance declaring English to the sole official language of his realm. (Some of the Welsh, rightly, have never forgiven him for this, nor have they ever given way to his will.)
Today the use of English is no longer confined to the Former Britannia. And even there its use is enhanced by a multitude of other tongues which arrived with yet more immigrants who also came and settled. The local delights of Regional Englishes are still with us despite, perhaps even because of, the ubiquitous telecasts.
Saxon military invaders brought their own regional variants with them. For six centuries or more their language coalesced, grew in strength and was committed to writing, firmly established and surviving. Spelling and orthography changed. Usage continues to change. Loan words proliferate. Neologisms attain prominence. Some fade away to become archaic or obsolete. Inflexions lose their force. Collective nouns modulate from singular to plural. Agendum is a thing needing to be done. Agendum pluralises as agenda. And like the neuter plurals of medieval Latin agenda in its turn is multiplied into agendas.
.. .. is now and ever shall be. So long as we continue to talk to each other.
© francis cameron
oxford, 15 june 2007
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