Quiet

Very struck by this W G Sebald remark (from an interview he gave to amazon.co.uk, of all places):

I received a letter from a librarian after the publication of The Rings of Saturn, claiming that he had seen archival material that said that the Battle of Sole Bay—off Lowestoft—had been heard in London. Newton heard it from Cambridge. This sort of thing is inconceivable today. We can barely even imagine how it was then. It just shows how much we are losing possession of our senses, and how much noisier our world is now that it ever has been before. It has got much worse in the last ten years.

It's a beguiling notion. We think of modernity as shrinking space, leaping-over distance and so on; but in this auditory sense modernity has made England much bigger. Lowestoft might as well be in Siberia for all the chance I have, sitting here, for hearing anything from it.

Choking on the ashes of our enemies

If water sticks in your throat, what will you take to wash it down?

On the global success of Tolkien

One reason Tolkien’s imaginary realm has proved so successful is precisely its structural non-specificity. What I mean is: Tolkien treats material that has deep roots in, and deep appeal to, various cultural traditions; but he does so in a way—as fictionalised worldbuilding rather than denominated myth—that drains away much of the poisonous nationalist, racist and belligerent associations those traditions have accumulated over the centuries. A thumbnail history would go like this: in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries, Wagner’s Ring melodramas spoke to a great many people about a particular northern-European cultural identity; about a group of linked, potent emotional attachments to history, landscape, to the numinous and the divine, to matters of heroism and everyday life. I am trying not to sound sneery as I say this (I mean melodrama in the strict sense of the word), because these things did, and do, matter intensely and genuinely to many people. But there is a reason, a room-filling elephant of a reason, why Der Ring des Nibelungen no longer has this general resonance. It is because the cultural reservoir from which it draws much of its power also supplied cultural capital to the worst regime ever to take charge in Germany, and therefore lubricated the most catastrophically destructive war ever to be waged in the world. In saying this I am not, of course, blaming Wagner for the Nazis. Indeed, the endless debates about Wagner’s own ideological ‘purity’ (‘was Wagner an anti-semite?’ Short answer: yes. Long answer: yes, like just about every other gentile in 19th-century Europe) seem to me to miss the point. The restless churning through this question happens because we're desperate to acquit Wagner so that we can enjoy his music with a clean conscience. We ask the question, get the uncomfortable answer, and ask it again.  In our guts resides the queasy comprehension that Wagner can’t be acquitted. Politics can’t be neatly separated out from the Ring cycle, leaving only a washed-and-scrubbed sequence of pretty orchestral tone poems behind. I love the Ring cycle, and listen to it regularly; but I would never try to deny that it is political all the way through, down to its very marrow. It is, to be precise, about the notion that history and myth are in some sense the same thing—a very dangerous notion indeed.

Tolkien’s story is not the same as the Ring cycle; his ‘ring’ (as he crossly reminded correspondents) not the same as Alberich’s ring. But a considerable amount of the heft and force of Lord of the Rings derives from the way Tolkien draws on the same broader cultural, mythic, northern-European heritage. What saves Lord of the Rings is that it is not about Germany, or about England; or to be more precise, that it is about England and Germany only secondarily, in an eloquently oblique (a cynic might say: in a plausibly deniable) manner. Tolkien found a way of articulating the same deep-rooted cultural concerns in a way that avoids being poisoned by the cultural specificity of European Fascism. This doesn’t let Tolkien off the hook, as far as racial and ideological content goes, of course. Indeed, I offer my thoughts here not as a value judgement of his fiction, so much as an explanation for why Lord of the Rings has done so extraordinarily well—resonated so powerfully with so many people—in the postwar period. It rushed in to fill the gap that more culturally-specific art had supplied before that kind of art was discredited by the 1940s.

I wonder if this is a broader cultural phenomenon. We prefer stories of Marvel superheroes to actual stories of 'crime fighters' (policemen, soldiers and so on) because we have lost faith in the latter, or more precisely lost faith that the latter can ever exhibit the kind of perfect heroism we want our stories to articulate. Hogwarts, being fictional, can apprehend something very important -- school -- without being tangled in the messy specificity of actual real-world schooling.  A sequence of novels set in Eton would be noisome; although that is, in effect, what Rowling has written. The twentieth-century has cured us of our attachment to a certain kind of ideology-text; and the cure we have chosen is -- worldbuilt fiction. (I could add lots of other examples, from West Wing to Westeros. But I've probably said enough.)

Anglo-Saxon Dental Treatments

These are great.

They're from T Anderson, 'Dental treatment in Anglo-Saxon England', [British Dental Journal 197 (2004), 273-274]. It is through this article that I learned the name and contents of the most excellently titled 'Leechbooks of Bald'. See, I'm going to tell you that's an actual book; and you're going to carry on believing I made the name up. I can't help that.

Anyhow, this is what Anderson says:

The Leechbooks of Bald. These books, possibly compiled in the ninth century, were copied down in Old English at Winchester in the middle of the tenth century. This makes it the oldest extant vernacular medical work. The MS (Royal 12.d, xvii) is housed at the British Library. The third section, with more magical remedies and charms, most accurately reflects English medical practice of the time, whereas volumes I and II contain more mediterranean influence. Book III contains several vernacular remedies for oral problems:

For toothache:

'...chew pepper often with the teeth, it will soon be better for him. Again boil henbane's root (Hyoscyamus niger) in strong vinegar or in wine, set it on the sore tooth, and let him chew it with the sore tooth sometimes; he will be hale'

A recipe 'For a mouth broken inside':

'take a plum (Prunus domestica) tree's leaf, boil it in wine, let him swill his mouth with it'

Apparently an attempt to combat advanced infection, probably associated with advanced periodontal disease. A remedy against 'hollow teeth' apparently refers to large carious cavities:

'...chew bothen's [? Rosmarinus officinalis] root with vinegar on that side'

A complicated remedy, including phlebotomy, is known for a 'crooked or deficient' mouth. This may refer to a cleft lip or palate:

'...take coriander (Coriandrum sativum), dry it out, make it into dust, mix the dust with the milk of a woman who is feeding a boy-child, wring it out through a blue cloth and smear the healthy cheek with it, and drip it into the ear carefully. Make a bathing, then: take bramble (Rubus fruticosus.) bark and elm (Ulmus campestris) bark, ash (Fraxinus excelsior) bark, blackthorn (Prunus spinosus) bark, apple tree (Pyrus malus) bark, ivy (Hedera helix) bark — the lower parts of all of these — and cucumber, smearwort (Aristolochia rotunda), boarfern (Polypodium vulgare), elecampane (Inula helenium), elfthon (Circaea lutetiana), betony (Stachys betonica), horehound (Marrubium vulgare), radish (Raphanus sativus), agrimony (Potentilla anserina), scrape the plant into a cauldron and boil them thoroughly. Once it is thoroughly boiled, take it off the fire and let it stand and make the man a seat over the cauldron and cover the man so that the vapour cannot get out anywhere except that he might breathe it in. Bathe him with this bathing for as long as he can bear it. Have another bathe ready for him then, take an entire anthill — of those that sometimes fly, it will be red — boil it in water, bathe him with it, with excessive heat. Then make him a salve: take some plants of each of those kinds, boil in butter, smear the sore parts with it, they will soon come back to life. Make him a lye from elder (Sambucus niger) ashes, wash his head with it cold, it will soon be better for him; and let the man's blood each month on a five-night-old moon, and on a fifteen, and on a twenty'

That last one is especially marvellous. The incredibly complicated herbal mixture I can just about see; but 'take an anthill, boil him, make the patient sit over the cauldron to breathe in the boiled-anthill-vapour ...' is beyond the comprehension of a simple fellow like me to fathom.

In other news, Boiled Anthill Vapour is the name of my next band.

Goðmog

From Maria Artamonova* I learn that Tolkien, not content with writing Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion in modern English, also composed Old English Annals or Chronicles-style texts concerning various events in his imagined history. Here’s an example:

MMCCCCXCIX Hér gefeaht Féanores fierd wiþ þam orcum / sige námon / þá orcas gefliemdon oþ Angband (þaet is Irenhelle); ac Goðmog, Morgoðes þegn, ofslóh Féanor, and Maegdros gewéold siþþan Féanores folc. Þis gefeoht hátte Tungolguð

Here Fëanor’s host fought with the Orcs and was victorious, and pursued them to Angband (that is Iron Hell); but Gothmog, servant of Morgoth, slew Fëanor, and Maedhros ruled Fëanor’s folk after that. This battle was called the Battle-under-the-Stars [quoted in Artamonova, 86]

From this I learn (a) that Tolkien was Method, when it came to his own writing; and (b) that he chanced upon the greatest name for a villain in the history of Fantasy—Gothmog. Beware the coming of The Gothmog! Black, black like the heart of a crow, his collar studded with silver skulls, his soundtrack of Sisters of Mercy abruptly drowned-out by his earth-shattering MIAOW.

---

[* ‘Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century: J.R.R.Tolkien’s Old English Chronicles’, in David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (eds), Anglo Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (Cambridge: D S Brewer, 2000), 71-88]

Resartus

I've been half-thinking about tracing the cultural history of an idea. It started with wondering about the trajectory of Sartor Resartus (which was Carlyle's own personal experience) -- namely, that you pass through the Everlasting Nay in order to be born again in the Everlasting Aye; that spiritual doubt is not an aberration from faith, but a vital component of it (because unless he died, Christ could not be born again; si le grain ne meurt and all that). Carlyle's book embodies this formally and thematically as well as discussing it on the level of content; but who else does it? Who did it earlier than Carlyle? Who says 'perfect faith that never doubts and never has doubted is a kind of monstrosity, almost a perversity of faith'? I'm not sure anybody does -- before Carlyle. Then I chanced upon this on Alan Jacobs tumblr:

“What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. – If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, – what I need is certainty – not wisdom, dreams or speculation – and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe in the Resurrection. Or: It is love that believes the Resurrection. We might say: Redeeming love believes even in the Resurrection; holds fast even to the Resurrection. What combats doubt is, as it were, redemption. Holding fast to this must be holding fast to that belief. So what that means is: first you must be redeemed and hold on to your redemption (keep hold of your redemption) – then you will see that you are holding fast to this belief. So this can come about only if you no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven. Then everything will be different and it will be ‘no wonder’ if you can do things that you cannot do now. [Ludwig Wittgenstein, note of 1937, in Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (1984)]

Perceiving the Universe as it Really Is

Well, this is a pretty stunning thought:

Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is." [Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), 19

I can't think it's true, though. The data perceived by a single-cellular-being may not be being processed in the ways that happen inside my brain, but it is surely being mediated.