Thoughts on “The Marching Morons” by C. M. Kornbluth: The Selfish Meme

If you have any positive feelings about what you read here on Behind the Hedge, you might be interested in some of the more serious things I’ve written, which can be found by clicking on these three words.

Here in these “pages” almost ten years ago I wrote about eugenics while reviewing a revival of the play Jennie’s Story by Betty Lambert. Ten years ago I wrote:

In these days of fairly routine genetic testing, of early diagnosis of susceptibility to genetically based diseases, in these times of new reproductive technologies, in these years so removed from the eugenics movements of the last century which culminated most darkly in the Final Solution, today, when a generation or two has grown up with no memory of the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act. . . .

These days a little touch of eugenics, a little improvement of the breed, might seem attractive. Maybe people with heritable genetic disorders should be encouraged to remain childless. Maybe, to improve the gene pool . . . .

But any attractiveness which may rise up today, if it is based on science at all, is based, like the earlier eugenics movements, on the science of stock breeding, which has created a gene pool so limited in many species that extinction could come from a minor illness. True genetic strength in a population comes from variety, from the mess that is natural selecion. A four person panel sterilizing a scatter of people based on brief interviews will do far less for the strength of the breed than will education, diet, public health, and the genetic roll of the dice that is human courtship behaviour.

We know all this – or should – by this point in our scientific investigation of the universe. And yet, we remain faced with new challenges because we can know so much about our children before they are born or even before they are conceived. It is indeed a Brave New World in the dark Huxlean sense of Miranda’s phrase. . . .

Back in 1951, when memories of Hitler’s eugenics and “Final Solution” must have been in memory yet green, and more than twenty years (!) before Alberta’s 1928 Sexual Sterilization act was repealed (in 1972), American author Cyril M. Kornbluth published his classic science fiction story “The Marching Morons.” Kornbluth’s story is a satire on the advertising industry and, perhaps, a shot at the eugenics movement. In brief, “The Marching Morons” is framed in the Rip Van Winkle tradition, with a fairly clear nod to Edward Bellamy’s wonderful 1888 novel Looking Backward in the mechanism of the man of the past awaking in the far future. Advertising man John Barlow, put into suspended animation in 1988 by a chance dentistry accident, finds himself awakened unspecified centuries later in a world defined by the simple demographic fact that, in somewhat offensive terms appropriate to the story, stupid people have more children than smart people. It is, of course, statistically true that family size across societies has dropped as educational level, most particularly the educational level of women, has risen. But, as we all must admit, educational level does not equal intelligence, and smart people don’t necessarily spawn smart children, and dunces may beget geniuses. . .

Yes, the genetic underpinnings of Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons are simplistic and inaccurate, and the whole thing is grounded in distasteful and largely racist eugenics (which Kornbluth may well have been pillorying). But I would argue that there is in the story an undiscussed memetic thread which should cause us to worry that the morons are in fact marching in our day. The term “meme” was, of course, coined by Richard Dawkins back in the 1970s in his book The Selfish Gene. A term encapsulating a useful concept which had been articulated for a century or more before Dawkins described it concisely as “a unit of cultural transmission”, it has now been reduced to Grumpy Cat pictures, Star Trek Jokes, and finally, AI generated nightmares.

It would seem that when left to roam and replicate in the wild, governed only by the “algorithms” (which examine what we show an interest in) decide what will appear in our “feed”, stupid memes multiply more easily than challenging, intellectually difficult, or emotionally painful memes: it’s easier to accept the idea that some dark group is conspiring to keep your life boring than it is to accept that you are responsible for your own lamentable situation; it is easier to believe that the earth is flat than it is to believe that you aren’t smart enough to know everything; it is easier to believe that Kubrick faked the moon landings than to believe that American technocracy can do such things; it’s easier to believe that a hundreds of thousands of white men conspired to demolish the Twin Towers or that Space Aliens built the Pyramids than it is to believe that brown people could ever have done such things. The stupid (and racist, which is the same thing) multiplies through the minds of the masses and very rapidly stupidity comes to dominate the world.

There is no need for Kornbluth’s idea of stupid people begetting stupid children: stupid people are begotten by the easy transmission of ideas, most of which (ideas) are stupid.  Every innovation of communication technology has increased the ease of transmission of ideas and was expected to revolutionize education, yet all those innovations  have done is increase the obtuseness of the masses, and dangerously increase the masses’ conviction that they, not the educated,  are enlightened!

In Kornbluth’s story, in a vignette, Mrs. Garvey is presented as one of the Morons. Mrs. Garvey is an ordinary woman. She is not stupid. She is not a moron, however intelligent or unintelligent her parents might have been. It is in Mrs. Garvey that Kornbluth slides a stileto into the very idea of eugenics. Mrs. Garvey has an historical sensibility, critical faculties, and a still, small spark of intellect desperately wanting to grow. But society sees Mrs. Garvey as a Moron.  Society feeds Mrs. Garvey an algorithmic pap.  And society sees Mrs. Garvey as a Moron with a neurosis. Her “neurosis” is that she remembers the moon rocket — she has an understanding of history, if only the history she remembers herself; and she questions the whole Venus marketing campaign that Barlow — the ancient advertising man — has devised to eliminate the Moronic “burden” on society. But, crucially, and tragically, she gives in to Barlow’s marketing, to the algorithm, to the memes, and buries her memories and her intelligence and her critical faculties with them.

As part of Barlow’s final solution, Mrs. Garvey “goes to Venus”.

Mrs. Garvey and Jennie, the protagonist of the play I reviewed some ten years ago, are two peas in a pod. Jennie was sterilized by order of the Alberta Government. Mrs. Garvey was murdered by her government. Both because they were “different”, and different was understood not only as a genetic thing, but as a genetic failing.

Eugenics is frightening, and I hope that the memory of Hitler’s Final Solution and of Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act (and similar laws, past and present) will forever make Eugenics a non-starter for humanity . . .

But then . . .

I look around at the dumbing down of it all. I look at the doom-scrolling, the Instaface videos about ancient aliens and ghosts and flat earth and . . .

And . . . .

I look at the amazing Alexandrian Libraries of knowledge and wisdom available on the internet, at the miraculous etymological resource that Wiktionary is, at the educational revolution that the internet must inevitably spark . . .

But then . . .

memes on a spectrum from cute kittens to praise for genocide, with nothing much that actually might improve the human condition doing anything like trending . . .

It isn’t the genes that have started the Morons Marching.

It’s all in the memes.

I don’t expect this post will go viral.

The Buddha in an English Garden

I pray you all give your audience,
And hear this matter with reverence,
By figure a moral play:
The Summoning of Everyman called it is,
That of our lives and ending shows
How transitory we be all day.
This matter is wondrous precious,
But the intent of it is more gracious,
And sweet to bear away.
The story saith: Man, in the beginning,
Look well, and take good heed to the ending,
Be you never so gay!
Ye think sin in the beginning full sweet,
Which in the end causeth thy soul to weep,
When the body lieth in clay.
Here shall you see how fellowship and jollity,
Both strength, pleasure, and beauty,
Will fade from thee as flower in May;
For ye shall hear, how our heaven king
Calleth Everyman to a general reckoning:
Give audience, and hear what he doth say!
– The Summoning of Everyman, in Everyman and Mankind, Douglas Bruster and Eric Rasmussen, ed. (London: Methuen, 2009) 181-183.

The Buddha in a Bright Russian Glade

I picture Count Leo Tolstoy sitting at a portable writing desk in the garden of his ancestral home at Yasnaya Polyana on a summer afternoon in the 1870s. A few rustic men sit about him, emancipated serfs and their sons, also residents of the estate at Yasnaya Polyana, until quite recently in the scheme of things, slaves of the Count. There is a visitor or two among the group, wandering monks of the sort so common in Imperial Russia. The sun glints off Tolstoy’s greying beard (he has survived a half century now) and off the shiny black beards of the young men around him. The Count listens to the young itinerant starets as he speaks, in his way, about the existential questions with which Tolstoy has himself been struggling.

In his Исповѣдь (Confession), Tolstoy begins to describe just such a conversation as I imagine, but he abruptly turns from the living people around him to the books he has been reading. Then he casually remarks on something that may seem odd to a modern reader and certainly was surprising to a younger version of myself:

Слушал я разговор безграмотного мужика странника о боге, о вере, о жизни, о спасении, и знание веры открылось мне. Сближался я с народом, слушая его суждения о жизни, о вере, и я всё больше и больше понимал истину. То же было со мной при чтении Четьи-Минеи и Прологов; это стало любимым моим чтением. Исключая чудеса, смотря на них как на фабулу, выражающую мысль, чтение это открывало мне смысл жизни. Там были жития Макария Великого, Иоасафа царевича (история Будды), там были слова Иоанна Златоуста, слова о путнике в колодце, о монахе, нашедшем золото, о Петре мытаре; там история мучеников, всех заявлявших одно, что смерть не исключает жизни; там истории о спасшихся безграмотных, глупых и не знающих ничего об учениях церкви.
– Исповѣдь автор Лев Николаевич Толстой (мой акцент)

I was listening to an illiterate peasant, a pilgrim, talking about God, faith, life, and salvation, and a knowledge of faith was opened up to me. I grew closer to the people as I listened to their reflections on life and faith, and I began to understand the truth more and more. The same thing happened to me when I read the Martyrology and the Prologues; they became my favorite reading. Taking exception to the miracles and viewing them as fables that expressed an idea, these readings revealed to me the meaning of life. Among them were the lives of Macarius the Great and Prince Ioasaph (the story of the Buddha), the writings of John Chrysostom, the story of the traveller in the well, of the monk who discovered gold and of Peter the Publican; they included the / histories of the martyrs, all of whom proclaimed that life does not end with death. These were tales of illiterate, stupid men who found salvation though they knew nothing of the teachings of the Church.
– translated by David Patterson, (Norton: New York, 1983) p. 83-4. (Emphasis mine)

Ignoring for the moment Tolstoy’s slighting of the “illiterate, stupid men” in the learned literary histories who had found salvation despite their stupidity and illiteracy –

What is this?: “Prince Ioasaph (the story of the Buddha)”?; The Buddha in a European Martyrology, a Book of Saints Lives rooted in the most widespread genre of Medieval Literature? Nobody mentioned this to me in grad school when I was studying – what was it again? – oh yeah: Medieval Literature!

Well, it turns out all those non-mentioners might be excused by the fact that the Middle English life of the Buddha in the Cambridge Peterhouse manuscript was not published until 1986, two years after I retreated from formal Academia. And I suspect my interlocutors were, as was I, largely ignorant of Count Leo’s Confession. Certainly the connection of the Christian saints Barlam and Josaphat to the Buddha has been known to a small set of philologists since the early nineteenth century. But, since 1986, it has become more widely known that the narrative wisdom of Buddhism has been a huge influence on literature and thinking of the Arab and European world since long, long before the New-Age-California-Buddhism that seemed a fellow-traveller of the Beatles-Hindu-British-Invasion I remember from my early years.   As an aside – in what is rapidly becoming more of a free-form collage of reference than what might be termed an essay – I also remember feeling like that other Medieval piece of wisdom, The Cloud of Unknowing, had a kind of mystical, Eastern vibe – and the Middle English Barlam and Josaphat hints at that cloud:

þauʒ he woulde nat as at þat tyme perfitly receyue þe ful knowynge of Criste for þe derke clowde þeat was aboute his soule.
– Barlam and Iosaphat: A Middle English Life of the Buddha, (London: Early English Text Society, 1986), p. 132.

That is perhaps a discussion for another day.

The Buddha on the Road to Xanadu

Unknown to many then and now, the Life of the Buddha was a very popular narrative throughout the Middle Ages in Europe and the Arab world. It was passed along and rolled around the Muslim world and through an Armenian telling and finally a Georgian version before bursting into Western Europe as the story of Saints Barlam (or Barlaam) and Josaphat (or Ioasaph). It came to Count Tolstoy through Byzantium and the Eastern Orthodoxies, quite probably from Georgia.   The life of the Buddha came to Medieval and Renaissance theatre through retellings in the widely and wildly popular and ever mutable collections titled the Gesta Romanorum and the Golden Legend, perhaps the Star Trek and Star Wars of an earlier, more sophisticated age. And, more clearly, the Life of the Buddha was told and retold in every European language, in churches and abbeys, in monasteries and nunneries, in the various lives of Barlam and Josaphat until it was so much a part of the European understanding of world history that according to one of the two Venetian (Vb) versions of his Travels, Marco Polo (or his prison amanuensis, Rustichello da Pisa) seemed surprised to hear on his travels the story of the Buddha’s life because it was so much like the familiar one of Old Saint Josaphat:

Questo asomeia alla vita de san Iosafat lo qual fo fiolo del re Avenir de quelle parte de India, e fo convertido alla fé cristiana per lo remito Barlam, segondo chome se legie nella vita e llegende di santi padri . . . .  –  Pamela Gennari, «Milione», Redazione Vb: Edizione Critica Commentata, (Venice: Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, 2009) p. 214.

“This is similar to the life of Saint Josaphat who was the son of King Avenir of that part of India, and who was converted to the Christian faith by Barlam the Hermit, according to what may be read in the lives and legends of the Holy Fathers . . . .” (my translation)

Times have changed: nowadays we can google “Barlaam and Josaphat” and find all sorts of “information”. One of my favourite bits of “knowledge” comes from the wonderfully detailed but flawed Wikipedia entry in which (at the moment – someone will edit it soon enough) we can learn that Shakespeare lifted the three box test in The Merchant of Venice from Caxton’s translation of The Golden Legend and also that he lifted the three box test in The Merchant of Venice from the Gesta Romanorum and that, in the end, he lifted it from Barlaam and Josaphat and, I suppose, from the Life of the Buddha. The actually convincing argument, based on surviving texts and printed records, is that Shakespeare lifted the test from the Gesta Romanorum, not from Caxton, and that, when all is said and done, Portia lands herself, by whatever route, in a Buddhist apologue as well as in a Venetian courtroom.

The Buddha in a Venetian Courtroom

The story of Barlaam the Hermit is told in volume 7 of Caxton’s Golden Legend and it does contain a scene involving four chests. But the story of the three caskets which was used by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice more obviously comes from the Gesta Romanorum (which is not a Caxton piece) and, probably, from Wynkyn de Worde’s translation published in the second decade of the sixteenth century and published again in London in a revised version in 1577 by Richard Robinson. It is unclear where the Gesta Romanorum three casket version originated, but an origin in a version Barlam and Josaphat, seems likely.  The Middle English version, which clearly derives from the four-casket Greek version traditionally attributed to John of Damascus (do I need to quote the Greek?), has four caskets:

Afterwarde þe kynge comaunded four chestis to be made of tree, and tweyn were kouered al aboute with gold, and put þerin ful of deed mennys bonys, and shett hem fast with lokkis of gold. That oþer tweyne were al dawbyd aoute with pych and terre, and fylde hem ful of precious stonys and noble oynementis and swete bawmes, and bonde hem aboute with cordis. Than he bade to come before hym all þo lordis and gentiles þat made his broþer to reproue hym for his humylite, and sette tofore hem þes four chesis, and bade hem deme whych of þo chestis weren most ryce and precious. Anon þei demyd þe two chestis of gold to be richer þan þe oþer tweyne, for þei supposed þat in hem was grete tresoure of diademys and of oþer precious iewellys. And þe oþer chestis þat were dawbyd without with pich and terre, þei seide þat þei were foule and abhomynable, and no good þynge worthy to put þerin . . . .
– Barlam and Iosaphat: A Middle English Life of the Buddha, (London: Early English Text Society, 1986), pp.23-24.

There follows the opening of the boxes and both the sickly and the sweet smells and the moralizing which Caxton repeats:

. . . And after this he did do make four chests, and did do cover two of them with gold withoutforth, and did do fill them with bones of dead men and of filth. And the other two he did do pitch and did do fill them with precious stones and rich gems. And after this the king did do call his great barons, because he knew well that they complained of him to his brother, and did do set these four chests tofore them, and demanded of them which were most precious, and they said that the two that were gilt were most of value. Then the king commanded that they should be opened, and anon a great stench issued out of them. And the king said: They be like them that be clothed with precious vestments and be full withinforth of ordure and of sin. And after, he made open the other and there issued a marvellous sweet odour. And after, the king said: These be semblable to the poor men that I met and honoured, for though they be clad of foul vestments, yet shine they withinforth with good odour of good virtues, and ye take none heed but to that withoutforth, and consider not what is within. And thou hast done to me like as that king did, for thou hast well received me.
– The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, Compiled by Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, 1275 First Edition Published 1470, Englished by William Caxton, First Edition 1483 Volume Seven. From the Temple Classics Edited by F.S. ELLIS First issue of this Edition, 1900 Reprinted 1922, 1931.

And now compare this, from Wynkyn de Worde’s translation of the Gesta Romanorum (emphasis mine):

And whan he hadde thus sayd he lette brynge forth thre vesselles. The fyrste was made of pure golde couched well with precyous stones without and within full of deed mennes bones and there vpon was this poyse wryten who soo chieseth me shall fynde that he deserueth. The seconde vesselle was made of fyne syluer fylled with erthe and wormes and thus was the superscrypcyon who soo cheseth me shall fynde that his nature desyreth. The thyrde vessell was made of lede full within of precyous stones and therupon was wryten this poyse who soo cheseth me shall fynde that god hathe dysposed for hym. These thre vessels the Emperour shewed to the mayden and sayd. Loo here doughter these ben noble vessels yf thou chese one these wherin is profyte to the and to other than shalte thou haue my sone. And yf thou chese that wherin is no profyte to the nor to none other sothely thou shalte not wedde hym whan the mayden sawe this she lefte vp her handes to almyghty god & sayd. Thou lorde whiche knoweste all thynges graūte me grace this houre so to chose that I may receyue the Emperours sone. And with that she behelde the fyrste vessell of golde that was lorged and graued royally and redde the scrypture. Who cheseth me. &c. saynge thus. Thoughe this vessell be full precyous and made of pure golde. Neuerthelesse I woote neuer what is within. Therfore my lorde this vessell wyll not I chese. And thenne byhelde she the seconde vessell that was of clere syluer and redd. the superscrypcyon who so che¦seth me shal fynde that whiche his nature desyreth. Thynkynge thus within her selfe yf I chese this vessell what is within knowe I not but well I wote there shall I fynde that nature desyreth and my nature desyreth the luste of yflesshe and therfore this vesselle wyll I not chese whan she had seen those two vesselles and gyuen an answere as touchynge to theym she behelde the thyrde vessell of lede and rede the superscrypcyon who soo cheseth he shall fynde that god hathe dysposed. Thynkynge within her selfe. This vessell is not passynge ryche ne precious without for∣the. Neuerthelesse the superscrypcyon sayth who choseth me shall fynde that god hath dysposed and withouten doubte almyghty god neuer dysposed ony harme. Therfore as as nowe I wyll chese this vessell whan the Emperour sawe this he sayd. O good mayden open thy vessell for it is full of precyous stones and see yf thou haste welle chosen or none whan this yonge ladye had opened it atte the Emperours commaūdement she founde it full of golde and precyous stones lyke as the Emperour had tolde her before and than sayd the Emperour O my dere doughter bycause thou haste wysely chosen therfore thou shalte wedde my sone. And whan he had soo sayd he ordeyned a maryage and wedded theym to gyder worthely with moche Ioye & honoure. And so they contynned to theyr lyues ende bothe in Ioye and solace.

Which is more like The Merchant of Venice? The caskets, or chests, and the inscriptions, are so woven through Shakespeare’s version that it were almost pointless to make quotation. Go see the play. But . . .

in Act II, scene ix the Prince of Aragon gives us the inscriptions (emphasis mine):

And so have I address’d me. Fortune now
To my heart’s hope! Gold; silver; and base lead.
‘Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.’
You shall look fairer, ere I give or hazard.
What says the golden chest? ha! let me see:
‘Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.’
What many men desire! that ‘many’ may be meant
By the fool multitude, that choose by show,
Not learning more than the fond eye doth teach;
Which pries not to the interior, but, like the martlet,
Builds in the weather on the outward wall,
Even in the force and road of casualty.
I will not choose what many men desire,
Because I will not jump with common spirits
And rank me with the barbarous multitudes.
Why, then to thee, thou silver treasure-house;
Tell me once more what title thou dost bear:
‘Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves:’
And well said too; for who shall go about
To cozen fortune and be honourable
Without the stamp of merit? Let none presume
To wear an undeserved dignity.
O, that estates, degrees and offices
Were not derived corruptly, and that clear honour
Were purchased by the merit of the wearer!
How many then should cover that stand bare!
How many be commanded that command!
How much low peasantry would then be glean’d
From the true seed of honour! and how much honour
Pick’d from the chaff and ruin of the times
To be new-varnish’d! Well, but to my choice:
‘Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.’
I will assume desert. Give me a key for this,
And instantly unlock my fortunes here.

Clearly Shakespeare drank from the font of the Gesta Romanorum, likely ladled out by (the marvelously named) Wynkyn de Worde, with its three inscribed chests and their inscriptions (and then Shakespeare made it all his own), not from Caxton’s Golden Legend and it’s redundantly paired four caskets that have nothing to do with matrimony.

And all of this is variations and elaborations on a theme from Barlaam and Josaphat.

And, just for fun, the Greek:

Ἐκέλευσε δὲ γενέσθαι ἐκ ξύλων βαλάντια τέσσαρα. καὶ τὰ μὲν δύο περικαλύψας πάντοθεν χρυσίῳ, καὶ ὀστᾶ νεκρῶν ὀδωδότα βαλὼν ἐν αὐτοῖς, χρυσαῖς περόναις κατησφαλίσατο: τὰ δὲ ἄλλα πίσσῃ καταχρίσας καὶ ἀσφαλτώσας, ἐπλήρωσε λίθων τιμίων καὶ μαργαρίτων πολυτίμων καὶ πάσης μυρεψικῆς εὐωδίας. . . .   – St. John Damascene, Barlaam and Ioasaph, Chapter VI, section 42

The Buddha in a Cloistered Garden

And there is another English play, earlier than Shakespeare, in which the Buddha speaks. Everyman, sometimes called, as it is self-described, The Summoning of Everyman is, in large measure, a variation of the “Man with Three Friends” parable in Barlaam and Josaphat. (pp. 57-59 in Hirsh’s Early English Text Society Edition). In a nutshell, a man is summoned by authority to account for himself. The man calls upon two kinsmen two vouch for him and they both turn away. In desperation, the man calls upon an acquaintance he has neglected, and that true friend stands by his side. While the narrative details are disparate, the moral is the same: the deeds we do, the friends we cultivate, without investment or expectation of profit, will be the ones who give us the greatest return.

It is strange that Bruster and Rasmussen in their recent edition of Everyman in the Arden Early Modern Drama series (referenced above) include in their “Appendix 4” (pp. 260-262) two analogues, one from the Gesta Romanorum and the other from “the Buddhist tradition in a text from before the Christian era” ( p. 260), but they do not mention by name Barlaam and Josaphat, the conduit connecting Buddhist tradition and the Gesta Romanorum. They do, however, offer that “This story of the ‘faithful friend’ draws on a parable found in Buddhist literature as early as the third century BCE, and which appears in the literature of many Eastern and Western nations” and, furthermore, was available “in various European versions” (p. 260) the most obvious of which, Barlaam and Josaphat, they leave unmentioned.

Curious.

The Buddha in my Winter Garden

John C. Hirsh, the first modern editor of the Middle English Barlam and Iosaphat, who’s tremendous work underlies everything I am mumbling here, writes in his preface (Early English Text Society, 1986, p. viii):

. . . I have been struck too by how arbitrary the line is we draw between East and West. I do not mean to minimize cultural differences – the text itself stands against any such simplification – but merely to record my sense that the final pattern here does not associate the work with one culture, or with one tradition. The changes, many of them substantive, which it has undergone, may fix one version – but the narrative itself seems always to invite another. If there is a final cause for the extraordinary distribution of the text, that cause seems to me at once deeply religious and profoundly human – very like the text itself.

As I have casually jumped and slithered and tumbled down this source-critical rabbit-hole over a number of years and more concertedly over the last few weeks, I have come to realize quite clearly that the narrative of human understanding is unparsable, indivisible, uncategorizeable. There are no genres. No human story or history is an island. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, tragedy, comedy, history, and advertising all share and depend upon the vast anthology of human tales. Jains and Sikhs, Druze and Daoists, Maya and Catholic, DC and Marvel, depend on our common stories. Our shared foundational moral narratives unite us in historical fact and should unite us in sentiment. But somehow we are desperate to find division and to seek stories that let us feel justified in killing each other or in cheering on others as they kill in the name of that story or another.

All falls to tragedy or terribly black comedy, and sadly, tragically the centre cannot hold.

I’m not certain of the answer to this dilemma of shared fact and divided sentiment, or that there even is an answer, but I’m willing to bet that if there is a solution, it is to seek honestly and with heart-bursting humility to acknowledge and so begin to disperse the vast cloud of unknowing, and to tell to every person you meet, and to yourself, the right story, the true human narrative, the resoundingly resonant tale:

We are one.

Horses in the Americas

     It seems like so much longer a span than just since March of this year that I’ve had a pile of particular books and article offprints concerning horses stacked up on a side of my desk.  Perhaps it is because I’ve just finished reading Walter Edmonds’ tremendous story “Courtship of My Cousin Doone” that that I am spurred to complete my thoughts on Horses in America this evening.  Or, perhaps it is the sound of thunder rolling onto the Alberta parkland from the foothills and the Rockies beyond that has suggested it is time for a storm.

     In March I downloaded and read an article: “Early dispersal of domestic horses into the Great Plains and northern Rockies”.  This article seemed to follow hard upon a bit of a nonplussing news story which came to my attention about a PhD. absurdly granted by the University of Alaska:  The relationship between the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the horse: deconstructing a Eurocentric myth.  Carl Feagans has already debunked this doctoral thesis pretty thoroughly in “Pseudoarchaeological Claims of Horses in the Americas”  but I can’t help but add a few notes I’ve made over the last few months. . . .

     Some may suggest that the “standard history” is that horses were only dispersed into the North American West after the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, almost a century after the Spanish began importing horses to the Americas and breeding them intensively.   This “standard history” is a myth, not history, as, while it has never been doubted that the Pueblo Revolt had an explosive impact on the breeding stock of indigenous held and bred horses, there has never been a doubt, that I am aware of, that indigenous peoples held stock of horses before the Pueblo Revolt but not before the Spanish brought horses to the Americas.

     There has never been any serious doubt that the horses experienced by indigenous people since 1492 have been horses derived from the Columbian Exchange.  Even the much celebrated article (mentioned above) from March of this year unequivocally agrees:  “Admixture graph modeling did not show evidence of gene flow from Late Pleistocene into historic or modern North American horses (“Early dispersal of domestic horses into the Great Plains and northern Rockies” Science, 379 . p. 1317. )  In a nutshell, horses in the Americas, including the commonly named “Indian Horse” of North America, are descendants of horses brought from the Old World since 1492.

      A big part of the modern myth of horses in the Americas seems to be the idea that indigenous people at contact were somehow in awe of European horses.  At the same time, a popular idea is that indigenous people were totally down with horses because, like, they’ve always had horses from forever.  While my childhood somehow contained the erroneous idea that the Aztecs were dumbfounded by Spanish horses, my youthful reading of the History of the Conquest of Mexico by Prescott immediately cleansed me of that lie.  Horses were almost always just another domestic animal to the people of the Americas, albeit a threatening one when European hands were on the reins.

     It’s been several months since the Science article appeared and who knows how long since the absurd and embarassing (to the) University of Alaska PhD. thesis appeared  and the kerfuffle has perhaps died down a little bit.  Maybe it is safe to present the notes I made over the last few months about horses coming to the Americas.

      First, some notes on William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843)  (I use the Random House Modern Library one volume Edition of the History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru, n.d.), which has been described as “often cited (though seldom read)” by one Mark A. Peterson at Encyclopedia.com.   For what it’s worth, I have read every word of Prescott’s magnificent Mexican and Peruvian Histories and poured over a great many passages for some four decades since first looking into those epic histories..

p. 144, note:  Bernal Diaz minutely describes all the horses Cortez brought on the expedition.

p. 157:  It is in describing an early encounter in Tabasco that Prescott mentions the Tabascans being panicked by the advent of the Cavalry, quoting the words of Paolo Giovo, an Italian who never once left Italy, and who was therefore not actually a witness, in his Elogia Virorum Illustrium [(sic) likely actually Elogia virorum vellica virute illustrium rather than his vitae virorum illustrium].   The chroniclers who were actually present do not seem to take much note of any panic at the sight of horses – as opposed to normal panic at the arrival of heavy cavalry as reinforcements to the foundering infantry.  One might suspect that the first tank groaning across WWI trenches would have instilled a similar initial reaction, followed by a brainstorming of tactics to defeat this new feature of battle.  This is exactly the reaction of every army Cortes’ horses encountered during the march to Tenochtitlan and in Tenochtitlan itself.  If there were some sort of superstitious awe, it was short lived in every case.

p. 277:  The Tlaxcalans kill two horses and drag riders from their mounts.  Neither the Spanish Chroniclers nor the 19th century historian pretend that the peoples of the Mexica’s Empire or their neighbours were in awe of horses beyond the first moments of encounter.

p. 230:  The Spaniards are explicitly disappointed that the horses are not held in awe, but rather are killed and mutilated by the Tlaxcalans as readily as they kill and mutilate Spanish soldiers.

p. 239:  long before reaching Tenochtitlan all the horses have been wounded or killed.

p. 418:  whatever the untold wonder might have been toward the horses, the Mexica very quickly are grappling the horses’ legs and pulling the riders from the saddles.

pp. 651-652:  The Maya of the Isle of Peten are left an injured horse to care for.  Not knowing what to feed it, they inadvertently let the horse die.  They erect a statue of the horse on their Teocalli and give it reverence.  In 1618, almost a century later, Franciscan friars come to preach the gospel in the area and find the horse statue still being revered.  This is a rare case where a particular horse is revered by the Indigenous People of the Americas, and it demonstrates that the adoption of the horse into the centre of local culture could be very rapid.  It should be no surprise wherever it is observed.

Contemporary European witnesses:

Bernal Diaz, in his discussion of the Tlaxcallan Campaign in his The Conquest of New Spain gives no indication that the enemy was in awe of horses.

Bartolomé de las Casas in his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies talks a great deal of horses and cavalry, but there is no mention of any sort of superstitious awe.

David Ingram, in his account of his journey across the south-east of North America in late 1568 and early 1569, a half century after the arrival of the Spanish in continental America, mentions in passing that “there is also great plenty of  . . . horses” in the areas he traversed. (p. 560 of the 1589 edition of Richard Haklyut’s The Principal Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English nation, etc. (London: George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, Deputised to Christopher Barker, Printer to the Queenes most excellent Maiestie, 1519).

     It should be noted that Narváez, Coronado, and De Soto all travelled in the early 16th century into what is now the south and southwest United States with significant numbers of horses (and other livestock) which were fully capable of escaping, going feral, and being recaptured/re-domesticated.

     It should also be noted the alacrity with which Old World cultures adopted and made their own such New World products as tomatoes, potatoes, chili peppers, and maize.  What did Italians eat before they got their hands on tomatoes?  Where would Pad Thai be without chilies?  Where would the Irish be without potatoes? –  well, probably exactly where a lack of potatoes put them today – but you understand my point.  The process of cultural appropriation of useful products and technologies is almost universally extremely rapid.  Turkeys came to England from the Americas, by way of Turkey – a country with absolutely no colonial ambitions in the Americas but quite healthy trade links apparently –  in an historical blink of an eye.  Remember how quickly tobacco and chocolate, fairly useless products by any estimation, were made integral to European culture!   It should be very much a surprise if such a mobile and vitally useful technology as the horse had not preceded European humans in penetrating the American Plains Cultures with or without the Pueblo Revolt.

     A postulated American equine survival from the Pleistocene is an absolutely unnecessary multiplication of entities which flies in the face of concrete genetic evidence and clearly established historical evidence.  The notion should be set aside until new concrete genetic evidence – not simply more anecdotes – is forthcoming.  That may well happen.  I can remember a time not so long ago when it seemed that genetic tests of the Neandertal bones in the Shanidar Cave in Iraq “proved” that Modern Humans and Neandertals did not interbreed.  Science – and scientists – moved on and forward when new evidence arrived.  If ever concrete evidence of pre-Columbian domestic horses in the Americas arrives, I’m sure we’ll all move on and move forward – to investigate why buffalo jumps or buffalo pounds or fortuitous muddy bog traps were clearly used in any discovered remains of pre-Columbian Bison hunts but never, ever any horses.  Yes, an absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, but it does seem strange that if horses had been a part of Indigenous cultures “forever” that they only began to be used in Bison hunts on the great plains a century or two after the Spanish and other European powers brought their horses to the Americas.

     Science is not “a Euro-centric myth”.  It is Science.  Science can be and is constantly tested and refined and brought closer to something which, for all intents and purposes, can be proven right.

     Myth, by its nature, for its believer, cannot be tested, and so, it cannot ever be proven wrong – and it can never be proven right.

     When I’m in a thinking mood, or a feeling mood, a poetic mood, or a mood of just plain wonder, I’ll go with Science.

The Doctrine of the Method of Proceeding Against Heretics, or, “No One Expects the Southern French Inquisition!”

A long time ago, before Wikipedia or Facebook or Twitter or even MySpace were much if anything, there was an online community called H2G2, the brainchild of a British fellow named Douglas Adams. H2G2 (an odd acronym for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) was a little bit of all of the above mentioned products but created with a completely non-commercial purpose: it was meant to be a completely open, user-generated encyclopedia. This, of course, sounds a bit like Wikipedia, but H2G2 (“Hootoo” to most users) began as, and, I suspect, remains a much more creative place than is Wikipedia. Original research and work has been at the heart of H2G2 from its beginning and many of the entries are downright loopy. But even deeper into the heart of H2G2, in my opinion, was the incomprehensibly huge and varied (and often technically unmanageable — hence the migration to management by the BBC and the site’s later migration away from the BBC) conversation threads. These threads ranged from simple two person conversation which might last for years (digital penpals), through careful peer-review discussions of entries submitted for the Edited Guide, to global, sometimes heated, but almost always respectful discussions/arguments about whatever subject you could possibly imagine.

Hootoo kept me going through a challenging period which happened to almost perfectly coincide with the site’s residence at the BBC, so, often, when talking to real-world people about my time as an active contributor to H2G2, I refer to it as “the BBC thing”. The conversations I had there late at night (my time) with people all over the world are invaluable to me. And some of the Edited Entries I wrote for the Guide later helped get me my first paid writing gigs.

But that’s all background to the story I’m telling this evening.

One day or night — I don’t remember when exactly it was — while scrolling through the recent conversation threads I came across one that was titled something like “help with a bit of Medieval Latin” and I thought “what the hell: I’ll give it a try.” So, “Montana Redhead” (everybody on H2G2 was pretty much required to use a pseudonym) needed some help with translating a little bit of Medieval Latin as a part of her research for her PhD thesis. “Send me a copy” I typed.

I was expecting a few lines of an inscription or something.

I got a pdf of a handbook written by inquisitors for new inquisitors being posted in the area of Toulouse and Carcassonne in the south of France in the last half of the 13th Century (and three Papal Letters of Instruction for inquisitors). The text “Montana Redhead” sent me was from a 1717 edition of various Latin texts which I will likely never see.

I spent the next six months translating the thing. I would take my daughter to school in the morning, work on the “Doctrina” until about noon, and then carry on with life. For six months pretty much every weekday morning was spent translating this thing. When one is trained only in Classical Latin, Medieval Latin is quite a jump. I often found my years of public school French and my smattering of Italian to be of more use than anything I had learned at Virgil’s knee. I would dutifully send off installments to “Montana Redhead” and, when she achieved success with her PhD, I was honoured with an acknowledgment in the front pages of her thesis. I truly, truly feel honoured to have been given that opportunity. Thank you for the honour Melissa (Montana Redhead).

Some years later my neighbour suggested “You’re writing all this stuff anyway: why don’t you put it up on Amazon? You might as well see if you can get something for it!” At first it seemed to me a silly idea. But then I got thinking about those six months of mornings spent slaving over one of the most obscure languages there can possible be. So I got down to brass tacks and very, very carefully retranslated the whole thing and the three Papal Letters. Then I retyped all of the Latin text from the terribly fine italic print of that original pdf file. When I’d done all that and had a bit of a text actually assembled, I jumped on the learning curve of Kindle Direct Publishing (which turned out to be pretty user friendly) and put together my first book since my own thesis back in 1984. I gave it a title similar in length to the titles of many of my little paintings: The Doctrine of the Method of Proceeding Against Heretics: A Handbook for Inquisitors of Heretical Depravities such as those of the Albigensians and Waldensians.

It’s always a wonderful pleasure when someone, somewhere, buys a copy of this little 102 page handbook, not just because I get a few dollars deposited in my bank account, but because this handbook was composed and compiled by individuals who were clearly very different from our usual view of the Inquisition. These men (they were surely men) had come to search for heretics in a land cleansed of heretics half a century before they arrived and they were writing a handbook for men who would come after them. They knew that the only people left to prosecute were the poverty stricken, the ignorant, and — will this ever change? — the few Jews who continued to quietly practice their religion while publicly acting as Christians. Despite its title (my title is a translation of the Latin title in the 1717 edition), the handbook strikes me as more of a guidebook for defense counselors than a handbook for persecuting inquisitors. This sort of text from the Middle Ages is a text that needs to be available to scholars and historians and, frankly, to the general public, to counter the all-too-easy condemnation of everything about the Church in the Middle Ages. For all of the horrors — and they are overwhelming — the Middle Ages, and the Church, produced uncountable beautiful, moving, uplifting expressions of fundamental humanity. While there is little beauty in it, and while it is necessarily bound and confined in the shackles of the inquisitorial system, I came away from the Doctrina with a powerful impression that these men were trying desperately to be fair, to be compassionate, to care in a world that was incomprehensibly more harsh than most of us can imagine today.

When I look around at the world today, particularly the online world, I can’t help but feel it’s all become so much more harsh than it was in those early days of Hootoo. Back then the real world was harsh and Hootoo was a place where people could, for the most part, feel safe to express themselves and maybe find a receptive ear. Sometimes there were moments of bullying and really uncalled for nastiness, but it seemed like Real Life leaking in. Today it seems too often like the online world is the wellspring of harshness that has gushed out to drown Real Life with its bile.

I wonder if Toulouse in the late 13th Century might not have felt in some ways the same: so much terrible, lethal harshness, in real life — the only life at that time — and so much of it from the Church. I wonder whether maybe the writers and compliers of the Doctrina might have said somewhere inside themselves “Let’s cut them a little slack, for Christ’s sake! Sure, we’ve got to follow the law, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe we could try to presume them innocent until proven guilty or something like that.” Throughout my work on the Doctrina I felt like I was reading a foundational document of the Rule of Law. And how startling to the modern mind is the suggestion that an inquisitorial document from the Medieval Catholic Church is a foundational document of the Rule of Law?

Well, I was startled, and I’m grateful that I was. I was startled to realize that this handbook — of which I had only learned because another human being had asked strangers for help — was the creation of human beings long ago and far away who couldn’t help wanting to help strangers themselves.

But none of that should really be startling: human beings generally do want to help strangers, thank goodness. That fact is the not-harsh-reality of Real Life . . .

. . . if we are willing to see that reality through the horrible fog we are all too willing these online days to throw up around us to block out everyone who doesn’t think just like us . . . .

If you’re a Medievalist, a Legal or other sort of Historian, a Monty Python fan, or just a Human Being, you might be interested in The Doctrine of the Method of Proceeding Against Heretics.

On Treasures Tucked into Old Books

Since I was an undergraduate I have frequented used bookstores whenever possible.  My regular pilgrimage site in those early days was Bjarne’s Books, a little place upstairs on the corner of Whyte Avenue and 100th Street in Edmonton.  Many of my early treasures were purchased from Bjarne before he packed up and moved to Vancouver, where he still, a scarce-to-be-imagined forty years later he continues to run a tremendous antiquarian book business under his full name, Bjarne Tokerud Bookseller, Inc.  I don’t expect Bjarne would remember me:  I was just a non-descript young university student with an affinity for old copies of Milton, Dante, and, particularly, for early editions of Old English poetry.

While it is always a joy to come across the unexpected in a second-hand bookstore — like that time I found a copy of Klaeber’s edition of Beowulf in the Wee Book Inn priced at $1.00!  It must have been the mid 80s.  I was going to see a film at the Princess and had already bought my ticket, I think, and, having arrived early, I was killing some time across the street from the theatre when my eyes fell on the volume in question.  $1.00!  I knew that at the time a brand new copy of this standard edition of the Old English poem would cost at least $60.00, a pretty major sum of money for those days.  I grabbed the book with one hand and dug in my pocket with the other, fumbling out change to the amount of $1.00 (no GST in those days) and shuffled out of the store amazed at my good fortune.

It was a different time.

Sometime earlier, probably at Bjarne’s, in 1983, I purchased a copy of Wyatt’s edition of Beowulf, the new edition by R. W. Chambers, published by Cambridge in 1925.  At some point the volume had belonged, according to the inscription on the fly leaf, to one Henry Hughes, in 1929.  I don’t know who Henry Hughes was, but he (I presume it was him) made copious crib notes through the first 1650 lines of the poem — past the half way point!  Well done, and far better than most who crack the cover of Beowulf, even in translation!

Something even more exciting to me than the serendipitous discovery of a book in a second-hand shop is the serendipitous discovery of some slip of paper, a note, a treasure tucked into the pages of a second-hand book.  I think I have written about this in the case of a volume of the Paston Letters.  Well, in Henry Hughes’ copy of Beowulf there is a slip of paper, about 4.5 inches by 6.5 inches, covered on both sides by very legible but apparently quickly written prose in blue ink from a fountain pen.  Here is a transcription of the note:

Hannibal leaving the senate house ordered Decius Magius to be arrested and tried He since (superscript: when) he said (superscript: was saying) this to be impossible by the law of treaty then fetters were thrown upon him and he was ordered to be led into camp before the lector As long as he was lead with uncovered head he marched(?) along as if addressing a meeting crying aloud to the assembled hostile(?) crowds on all sides, ” You have the liberty Campaneans which you sought. I am seyed in the midst of the forum in your sight inferior to none of the Campanians and carried away to death if Capua were seized what more violent deeds may (over crossed out “had”) been done. Go to meet Hannibal, adorn the city and make sacred the day of his approach / so that you may see his triumph over your fellow citizen. When the mob seemed (crossed out “by”)to be aroused by the man shouting these things his head was muffled and he was ordered to be borne outside the gate more swiftly So he is borne into camp and immediately placed in a ship and sent to Carthage A storm delayed the ship at Cyrene. There Magius being carried by a guard to Ptolemaeus When he had shown him that he had been captured by Hannibal contrary to the oath of treaty he was freed from prison.

Obviously this text has nothing to do with Beowulf.  What it actual appears to be is a student translation of an assigned Latin text.  The text translated is quite clearly an adaptation of Livy’s History of Rome, Book 23, perhaps Livy: The Hannibalian War: selections from books XXIII and XXIV, edited by E P Coleridge, in the Macmillan Elementary Classics series from the early part of the last century, a copy of which I have been unable to compare to the translation in question.

While having nothing really to do with Beowulf, this almost-century-old student translation of an adapted edition of a Latin Historian found tucked into an old edition of Beowulf has to do with me is that I was once an undergraduate learning Old English at the same time I was learning Latin, reading Beowulf for the first time in the same moment that I was reading Virgil for the first time.  This translation of Livy tucked into a crib-noted copy of Beowulf is exactly the sort of thing I might have tucked into the remnants of my own undergraduate library, and someday, some quirky collector of old books may find just such a trace of my learning, the spoor of my bookish questing, tucked into a volume formerly my own, into an object which once formed a part of my being,  in a second-hand book store.

Henry Hughes and I have each stood in the same place, between Latin and Old English,  and yet we’ve never met.  But still, I feel we actually have met somehow . . .  in this forgotten leaf of paper covered with Livy’s words, tucked into a copy of Beowulf, a poem and an historian virtually no one could read today even if they wanted to.

And someone in 2053, or 2073 will bring one of my old books home from a second-hand bookshop and find a slip of paper in it, and be curious, and take some time with it, and that person and Henry Hughes and I will for a moment transcend the time between and stand together with the treasures tucked into old books.

Oral-Formulaic Theme Survival: The Hero on the Beach in Margaritaville

It’s my own damn fault.

– Jimmy Buffett, “Margaritaville”, 1977.

Many, many years ago a scholar named D. K. Crowne published an article titled “The Hero on the Beach: An Example of Composition by Theme in Anglo-Saxon Poetry”. The years was 1960. I was still at least a year away from the day of my birth. Twenty-seven years later I published an article titled “The Critic on the Beach”. In the almost three decades (the almost three decades of my life to that point) between Crowne’s article and mine, a surprising number of papers were published relating to this “theme” or “type-scene” of “The Hero on the Beach”. It became something of an academic cottage industry to write articles about “The Hero on the Beach” in everything from the poems of Homer, throughout Anglo-Saxon poetry, and on into every Medieval Germanic literature from Norse Sagas, to the Nibelungenlied, to the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I made my own little contribution in “The Hero at the Wall in The Wanderer”, accepted for publication before, but published after “The Critic on the Beach”, perhaps fittingly, in the same journal as D. K. Crowne’s piece that started this whole little industry. After “The Critic on the Beach” appeared, the industry ended, a victim of its own success, one might say.

Here’s the thing: “The Hero on the Beach” is what they called a “theme” or a “type scene”; it’s kind of like Joseph Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces”, but this is a hero on a beach with his companions in the presence of a bright or flashing light at the beginning or the end of a journey. What became clear over the course of the theme’s development in scholarly literature is that the beach could be any “liminal” position, that the light and even the companions could be implied – at times quite vaguely, and that the journey is something everyone, everywhere, every moment is beginning or ending. So, in “The Critic on the Beach” I pointed out examples in Hamlet, in Dante’s Inferno, in Virgil’s Aeneid, and in a Canadian pop song. Shortly before my article appeared, some associates published a brief note suggesting the “theme” to be present in Virgil’s first Eclogue with a beech tree, by an ingenious and somewhat prophetic bilingual pun, filling in for the Hero’s beach.

I concluded “The Critic on the Beach” with what I still think to be a quite nice universalizing paragraph (even if it did bring an end to what had been a quite productive field for those who feel the need to publish or perish):

The fundamental problem is that no longer is the theme “a stereotyped way of describing (l) a hero on the beach (2) with his retainers (3) in the presence of a flashing light (4) as a journey is completed (or begun).”[as Crowne first described the theme] The so-called “Hero on the Beach” has become simply a description of a threshold situation; the free substitutions suggested by scholars have removed the “theme” from the stereotype, allowing a range of variation beyond the limits of a single tradition. A danger in this development is that the history of the transmission of traditions is clouded for scholars. One must ultimately ask why an occurrence of certain details in Gawain is “theme survival” but a similar occurrence in Hamlet is merely coincidence. The proper response to the hero on the beach is likely not a recognition of familiar literary convention, but the recognition of a situation intimately known to every individual – for every [one] is at some point in [their] life “on the beach.”

I feel fortunate to have brushed up against Academia and escaped relatively unscathed. I feel blessed that I am able to follow my research interests without any quasi-lethal pressure to publish the things that come across my fancy. It has been a wonderful experience to be published in peer reviewed journals, particularly in two which published so many of the “Hero on the Beach” studies: Neuphilologische Mitteilungen wherein were published Crown’s “The Hero on the Beach” and my “The Wanderer at the Wall”; and Neophilologus, where “The Critic on the Beach” drew the curtain down on a tremendously stimulating, if terribly narrow, period of scholarship. It has been a wonderful privilege to live in a bit of an ivory tower above the Ivory Tower: I got to do the scholarship; I got to publish when I felt like it; but I got to be outside in the fresh air of the rest of the world. I can read what I want, I can write what I want, more so as time goes by! For example, I can read Spanish Drama or schlocky Science Fiction or the greatest obscurities you can imagine; and I can write:

Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” is a textbook example of “The Hero on the Beach”! Listen: “Watching the sun bake all of the tourists covered with oil” – what light is brighter than the sun?; “On my front porch swing” – liminal position, a metaphoric beach; “She’s a real cutie, a Mexican cutie, and how she got here I haven’t a clue” – the companions or retainers (the oil-covered tourists baking in the sun fulfill this requirement as well); and

I blew out my flip flop
Stepped on a pop top
Cut my heel, had to cruise on back home

– he’s walking on the beach, a journey, beginning and ending, going out and then back home because of the injury caused by his damaged bit of beach footwear. But the more important journey in Margaritaville is the journey of self-reflection and self-discovery, from childlike irresponsibility to adult responsibility, from the stagnation of “it’s nobody’s fault” to the life-changing growth of “It’s my own damn fault.”

The deepest response to Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” is certainly not the recognition of some made-up “Oral-Formulaic Theme”. The deepest response is likely not the recognition of a fun pop song, or the yelling of “salt, salt, salt” during the chorus, or calling for another round – the deepest response may be the recognition of a situation intimately known to every individual – for every one is at some point in their life, in Margaritaville.

My article, “The Critic on the Beach” has been gathered together with my other scholarly publications in a little volume called Old Papers About Old English which is available from Amazon and some other online booksellers.

A Small Appreciation of “Three Men in a Boat”

I have come to the conclusion that, be the explanation what it may, I can take credit to myself for having written this book. That is, if I did write it. For really I hardly remember doing so. I remember only feeling very young and absurdly pleased with myself for reasons that concern only myself. It was summer time, and London is so beautiful in summer. It lay beneath my window a fairy city veiled in golden mist, for I worked in a room high up above the chimney-pots; and at night the lights shone far beneath me, so that I looked down as into an Aladdin’s cave of jewels. It was during those summer months I wrote this book; it seemed the only thing to do.        – from Jerome’s “Author’s Advertisement”

Upon first looking into Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog, one might be forgiven for thinking Jerome’s writing to be a bit of – if not a poor man’s – something less than a billionaire’s Wodehouse. Jerome’s writing is at times as clever and as outrageously funny as Wodehouse’s, and the characters in both men’s writings – although Jerome’s young men are firmly based on himself and two of his friends – are cut from similar cloth and to a similar pattern. But Three Men in a Boat has an unevenness of tone and moments of darkness which set the book down into a different world from the fundamentally sunny and silly world of Jeeves and Wooster and the rest of Wodehouse’s ingeniously amusing characters in their amusingly ingenious troubles.

What we at first expect to be a sparkling comedy of silly young men of privilege boating on the Thames for a fortnight turns out to have much more of the tragicomical about it. We and the young men are sharply confronted close to the end of their journey with the fact that this sparkling summertime river, in Joseph Conrad’s words, “. . . also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth.” Jerome’s young men seem to quickly forget what they have seen, but the reader can’t help but be shaken. Jerome, in his “Author’s Advertisment”, compares London at night to Aladdin’s cave. The tale of Aladdin, for all its oriental splendour, is full of darkness. So too was the sparkling London night full of darkness in the autumn of 1888 when Three Men in a Boat began being serialized in Home Chimes magazine and Whitechapel was being terrorized by a man known as Jack.

As Jerome’s boaters gently row and tow their boat up the Thames toward Cambridge, we are treated to a bit of an historical and natural history tour of the river: as they pass Runnymede we are told about the signing of the Magna Carta; we get lost in the hedge maze at Hampton Court; we learn the history of a number of riverside pubs. As D. C. Browning writes in his introduction to the 1957 Everyman edition “ . . . it was not planned as a humorous book at all, but was meant to be an historical and topographical account of the river, entitled ‘The Story of the Thames’.” The first editor, however, found the silly bits to be of greatest interest and cut out most of the historical and topographical bits. Personally, I found the back and forth between the travelogue of the real Thames and the slapstick of the young men to be quite enthralling. Perhaps it is that often abrupt back and forth which prepares us for the moment toward the end of the book at which the darkness of the real world quite literally rises up from the water of the Thames.

In chapter XVI our three men and their dog reach Reading and they meet some friends who have a steam launch and are willing to tow the little boat for a distance up the river. The three young men are happy to have a rest from rowing and towing by hand. About ten miles above Reading they part ways with the steam launch and have a bit of a humorous debate about who should take a turn with rowing. As they get underway, the darkness appears mid-sentence:

   I had not been pulling for more than a minute or so, when George noticed something black floating on the water, and we drew up to it. George leant over, as we neared it, and laid hold of it. And then he drew back with a cry, and a blanched face.

It was the dead body of a woman. It lay very lightly on the water, and the face was sweet and calm. It was not a beautiful face; it was too prematurely aged-looking, too thin and drawn, to be that; but it was a gentle, lovable face, in spite of its stamp of pinch and poverty, and upon it was that look of restful peace that comes to the faces of the sick sometimes when at last the pain has left them.

Fortunately for us—we having no desire to be kept hanging about coroners’ courts—some men on the bank had seen the body too, and now took charge of it from us.

The next few paragraphs are, like so much of Three Men in a Boat, a very gentle piece of writing, and perhaps the most poetic and most tragic in the book. I feel I must include the whole passage not only because it is a beautiful piece of tragic poetry pushing up against but not stepping into melodrama, but also to emphasize Jerome’s sudden transitions – juxtapositions really, like sudden cuts in a motion picture:

   We found out the woman’s story afterwards. Of course it was the old, old vulgar tragedy. She had loved and been deceived—or had deceived herself. Anyhow, she had sinned—some of us do now and then—and her family and friends, naturally shocked and indignant, had closed their doors against her.

Left to fight the world alone, with the millstone of her shame around her neck, she had sunk ever lower and lower. For a while she had kept both herself and the child on the twelve shillings a week that twelve hours’ drudgery a day procured her, paying six shillings out of it for the child, and keeping her own body and soul together on the remainder.

Six shillings a week does not keep body and soul together very unitedly. They want to get away from each other when there is only such a very slight bond as that between them; and one day, I suppose, the pain and the dull monotony of it all had stood before her eyes plainer than usual, and the mocking spectre had frightened her. She had made one last appeal to friends, but, against the chill wall of their respectability, the voice of the erring outcast fell unheeded; and then she had gone to see her child—had held it in her arms and kissed it, in a weary, dull sort of way, and without betraying any particular emotion of any kind, and had left it, after putting into its hand a penny box of chocolate she had bought it, and afterwards, with her last few shillings, had taken a ticket and come down to Goring.

It seemed that the bitterest thoughts of her life must have centred about the wooded reaches and the bright green meadows around Goring; but women strangely hug the knife that stabs them, and, perhaps, amidst the gall, there may have mingled also sunny memories of sweetest hours, spent upon those shadowed deeps over which the great trees bend their branches down so low.

She had wandered about the woods by the river’s brink all day, and then, when evening fell and the grey twilight spread its dusky robe upon the waters, she stretched her arms out to the silent river that had known her sorrow and her joy. And the old river had taken her into its gentle arms, and had laid her weary head upon its bosom, and had hushed away the pain.

Thus had she sinned in all things—sinned in living and in dying. God help her! and all other sinners, if any more there be.

And then, without a pause:

   Goring on the left bank and Streatley on the right are both or either charming places to stay at for a few days. The reaches down to Pangbourne woo one for a sunny sail or for a moonlight row, and the country round about is full of beauty. We had intended to push on to Wallingford that day, but the sweet smiling face of the river here lured us to linger for a while; and so we left our boat at the bridge, and went up into Streatley, and lunched at the “Bull,” much to Montmorency’s satisfaction.

So abrupt! They’ve just pulled a poor woman’s body out of that “sweet smiling face of the river”! These young men no more want to face the darkness than they want “to be kept hanging about coroners’ courts.”   “God help her! and all other sinners, if any more there be.”  An ideal world, with no more sinners, is so very much desired, but so very much unreal!  They are young and they are privileged and they want the gentle river back.  And they are, in the end, characters in a book, ideal and unreal. They can’t help but move on from the darkness. “It seemed the only thing to do.” We, on the other hand, cannot help but be haunted by the reality of the darkness that has pushed through the young men’s gentle ideal unreality.  In his “Author’s Preface” Jerome quips of Three Men in a Boat: “for hopeless and incurable veracity, nothing yet discovered can surpass it.” Like that of his book, his quip’s humour is seasoned with truth.

Three Men in a Boat is a youthful summertime romp, a vivid account of an imagined journey through a very real geography, and at all times a very serious piece of writing. But above all else, Three Men in a Boat is a very gentle book, and that is a refreshing thing.

The Hoary Stone in Old English and “The Hobbit”

The hoary (or grey) stone is a symbol repeated in Beowulf four times, once in an Old English homily, once in the Old English poem Andreas, and a few times in chapter 11 of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. In Beowulf it is noted as being near Sigemund when he kills the worm, near Grendel’s Mere, and later, it is referred to twice near the dragon’s hoard. In Blickling Homily xvii, St. Paul looks over a lake in Hell and sees the hoary stone. And in Andreas the hoary stone towers over the city of the cannibal Myrmidonians. In Old English the grey stone is always associated with things monstrous and/or Hellish, be they dragon, strange creature of the moors, a cannibal city on the coast of Crimea, or simply demons in Hell.

In chapter 11 of The Hobbit, Bilbo and the Dwarves finally find the closed “back door” of the Lonely Mountain in which the dragon, Smaug, rests on his hoard of treasure. The door is in “a little steep-walled bay, grassy floored” and “A large grey stone lay in the centre of the grass . . .” It is on this grey stone that the thrush knocks and signals the opening of the keyhole, and it is on this grey stone that Bilbo stands as he explains to the Dwarves the way forward to the dragon hoard. The grey stone in The Hobbit is an “Easter egg” for those who know how to find it, and it is a call-back to the Old English poetry that Tolkien knew and loved so well.

(The above is adapted from a footnote in my forthcoming translation of The Vercelli Book, one of the four great manuscripts of Old English poetry which have survived to our day.)

On “Andreas”, line 874b: “Dream wæs on hyhte”

The Old English poem Andreas (which I’m currently translating as a part of my ongoing project of translating all of Old English poetry into Modern English verse) is perhaps too often dismissed as a cheap imitation of Beowulf  by a poet not at the height of his powers (if he may be imagined to ever have reached any particular heights) and having an unfortunately unconducive-to-poetry devotion to hagiography.  Having now spent some forty years studying Old English Poetry, and having translated well over half of the lines of the surviving corpus, I’ll plant my feet and say:  Yes, Andreas does have some connection to Beowulf,  and, Yes, Andreas has some not terribly felicitous passages suggestive of a poet still trying to get to his 10,000 hours, but, No, hagiography can be conducive to remarkable poetry, and, No:  there is nothing cheap about Andreas, and, indeed, there are some passages that are stunningly powerful, complex, masterfully artful, brilliant, and terribly difficult to translate because they are such good poetry in the slightly more than seventeen hundred lines of Andreas.  One of those passages is very near the middle of the poem, the second half of line 874, Dream wæs on hyhte.  St. Andrew’s followers are explaining how they have, in their sleep, by the power of the Lord, been transported from a ship at sea to the shores of eastern Crimea.  They describe divinely commanded joyful eagles who carry them up to heaven, where the angels are singing around God.  And, Dream wæs on hyhte.

[The following is adapted from a footnote to my forthcoming translation of The Vercelli Book, the fourth completed volume in my series The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records in Modern English Verse.]

The second half of line 874  – Dream wæs on hyhte. “Joy was in Highest Heaven.” – is a four word sentence remarkable for its density of connotations, which render it very difficult to adequately translate. Dream, the ancestor of the Modern English word “Dream” doesn’t mean “dream” but rather “joy, happiness” and also “song” and sometimes a general sense of revelry. Hyhte, at the other end of the sentence most usually connotes “hope” and “trust” as well as the “joy” for which, perhaps, one hopes or trusts. And so, one could reasonable translate these four words as “Joy was in the joy”, which may well have a certain homely and mildly Buddhist wisdom to it.

Furthermore, hyhte, especially in the present context of angels and divinely guided eagles, carries more than a little of the feeling of hiehðu, “height, the heavens”, a word used in the immediately preceding line (I translate it as “high heaven”). And so, one could say, and I do, that, among many other things, the half-line means, “Joy was in Highest Heaven.”

At least since Kenneth R. Brooks’ 1961 Clarendon Press edition of Andreas and The Fates of the Apostles, the generally accepted rendering is a dull something like “the song was joyful”, very similar to an early choice I made for the sentence. But there is so much more complexity and nuance of connotation in the four simple words Dream wæs on hyhte!

Between: an Etymological Reverie of Twos

. . . I had spent a morning of such joy as is difficult of communication to any other. This particular feeling has been with me for a few days now, a sort of twitching desire to share a discovery which seems impossible to share with anyone, even with family and friends who seem to have strangely drooping or rolling eyes as I speak. . . .

The other day (as opposed to this day, I suppose) I was making my way through the Old English poem Andreas and was struck by a phrase:

Saga, þances gleaw þegn, gif ðu cunne,
hu ðæt gewurde be werum tweonum . . .
— ll. 557-558

[“Tell me, thane wise of thought,
if you know how it came about
among the doubtful men . . .]

(Please ignore my translation until you finish reading the next paragraph.)

The phrase which sent me on this morning reverie, which makes up the second half of line 558, Be werum tweonum, which is in bold above, is usually construed literally as “be-men-tween”, or, “among men”. The splitting of the prefix, itself a preposition, from the second element of betweonum is interesting in itself, if not unheardof in Old English poetry: the word, at its root, a compound of the preposition be “by, among” and the numeral “two” (or adjectival forms thereof). In the present context we have a prepositional phrase consisting of the preposition, be, the object of the preposition, werum, and an adjective, tweonum, describing the object of the preposition. The phrase is accepted to mean “among all humans of the world” rather than simply “by men twain” or “between men”. The construction here (and in a number of other poems, for example in Exodus ll. 443 and 563, and in Beowulf ll. 858 and 1297) is a marvellous little syntactical jewel as it places the object of the prepositional phrase, both temporally and on the page, between the two halves of the preposition, which itself means “between”. The rhetorical possiblities of this construction, even more than those of the split infinitive, are tools to boldly embrace — if only they had not been allowed to quietly slip away, be fingers tween of English linguistic history.
With more specific reference to the passage from the Old English poem: there is an extra connotation of tweonum when it stands alone, a connotation of “doubtful, untrustworthy”, and, perhaps, by etymology, “ambivalent, of two minds”. This adjective is ultimately derived from the Indo-European root *dwóh₁, which is also the root of “two” and of the second element of “between”. “Doubtful” is doubtless descriptive of all of fallen humanity in the Medieval Christian world-view. And so, when I came to translate Andreas, this Old English poem, I explicitly included the “doubtful” meaning in the line without compromising the primary meaning of this interesting prepositional phrase.

None of the etymological details I point out here are new discoveries. What I am presenting here is not in any way particularly original research. This story is just a part of my ongoing rambling self-education. But if only I could give you a hint of the joy that comes with this rambling and learning!

The other day (not this one) I spent much of a morning rushing about the house consulting volumes I’ve collected and squirrelled away for a few decades now, from Kenneth Brooks’ still very useful 1961 edition of Andreas and The Fates of the Apostles, through Bruce Mitchell’s wonderful Old English Syntax, into a page or two of Bessinger and Smith’s A Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, flipping past various editions of Beowulf from Wyatt to Klaeber, and finally arriving at the still reliable Bosworth and Toller Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon, which very matter-of-factly confirmed the conclusions I’d just washed up on the shores of: “IV. sometimes the case is placed between be and tweonum . . .” (p. 96). But B & T didn’t tell me (because I didn’t look ’em up) about the other meaning of tweonum, and the strange parallel course the two “twains” had run over the last many thousands of years to come together in that moment of particularly good poetry in (the often unremarkable) Old English poem Andreas.
I had spent a morning of such joy as is difficult of communication to any other. This particular feeling has been with me for a few days now, a sort of twitching desire to share a discovery which seems impossible to share with anyone, even with family and friends who seem to have strangely drooping or rolling eyes as I speak.  But, just imagine: to have this vast, six-thousand-year sweep of human linguistic history opened up in what feels to be (and really has been) an emotional and physical revolution in one brief morning by means of a single, very common little English preposition! Between is a preposition that isn’t really a thing in a lot of European languages: most of them have something deriving from the Latin inter, which really just means “among” (like the first element of between). “Between”, in contrast, has a very concrete spatial implication: the object of the preposition is situated in the middle, equidistant from two, and only two, subjects. If someone is “inter” a Senate or a pair of horses, or a crowd of rowdies at a tavern, that someone may be in the back row or the Presidents seat of the Senate, riding one of the horses or attempting to climb the fence of the corral, tending bar or in the thick of a ferret legging competition. “Between” is the current stop on a linguistic journey for these sounds we make each day, between waking and slipping off again to dreams.

But, to hear, distantly, the voices of horsemen on the Central Eurasian steppes long before Genghis Khan, of hunters in the Caucasus long before the mythical Jason abused Medea, of priests in Brahman temples before Prince Gautama, of pig farmers in Lucania before Romulas, and of sailors on the North Sea before the Vikings sailed, and countless thousands of others using words something like “be” and something like “tween” and to know that these sounds have rolled around in my mouth, and in your mouth, and in their mouths for six thousand years and more, and that their meanings have rolled around in all our brains for all that time. And all of this for the single, wonderful purpose of moving thoughts between two doubtful but momentarily trusting human beings.

This is a rare pleasure, but one that happily seems to occur more frequently to me as I age and as I continue to read.

And none of this would or could have happened without the human knowledge trusted to be held between the covers of actual, physical books.

My translation of Andreas and the other poems of The Vercelli Book is in progress and will appear, with luck and a bit of good management, later in 2023. The Vercelli Book will be Volume 2 of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records in Modern English Verse. Three volumes of this six volume series, The Exeter Book, Beowulf and Judith, and The Old English Scatterlings are currently available at Amazon and a number of other online and real world booksellers.