That's no cave!

A spot of regional geography. The Express & Echo carried a story yesterday (Man rescued after being taken ill in remote cave while looking for bats, E&E 28th February 2011) concerning a mishap at "Hooken Cave" at the Hooken Undercliff, near Beer.

I've never seen the place called Hooken Cave before; this particular hole in the ground, nicely illustrated here at Wikimedia, is called the Beer Stone Adit or Hooken Adit or Connett's Hole (I've no idea who Connett is/was). It's not technically a cave but a mine entrance formerly used to extract Beer Stone, the local variety of hard chalk. Contrary to some descriptions, as far as I can tell there's no evidence of it connecting to the well-known Beer Quarry Caves a mile inland. A number of accounts, such as Alfred John Jukes-Browne's 1903 The Cretaceous rocks of Britain, mentions that its specific purpose was to extract rock for transport by sea; at least when Jukes-Browne was writing, dressed blocks of stone were still recognisable "lying on the slope below, alongside the pathway leading down to the shore".

There are further geological details at the Beer and Seaton page for Ian West's excellent series of south coast field guides. It notes that the adit entrance is not to be messed with by non-climbers.

Addendum: I've just found a majorly nice image in an Internet Archive copy of Arthur William Clayden's 1906 The History of Devonshire Scenery; an essay in geographical evolution: see the plate (which is zoomable) opposite page 137 of Hooken Cliff and Under Hooken. Connett's Hole is clearly visible, but what's chiefly interesting is the lack of undergrowth - Clayden calls the terrain of Under Hooken a "greensward".  The difference is probably down to the same factors that have made the Lyme Regis Undercliff heavily overgrown: change in land use, with the area no longer grazed by sheep and rabbits.

See Hooken and Beer for our visit in September 2012 revisit.

- Ray

"It was a dark and stormy night"

As explained at Wikipedia - It was a dark and stormy night - the opening paragraph of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford is generally considered the nadir of purple prose.

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

However, having just read part of Maxwell Gray's 1899 story collection The World's Mercy, I have to conclude Bulwer-Lytton to be an amateur at the genre. Here are the intros to a couple of the stories:

The night was stormy ; a wan moon rode through masses of black and gold, swift-sailing cloud, through lakes of clear blue space and threads of opal and silver film, thus producing a wildly beautiful and impressive series of sky pictures. Now and again the dim wet streets were swept empty and dark by a scud of rain, then as suddenly flooded by clear, pale moonlight, when the wet flags and streaming runnels became a dazzling silver brilliance, making the light from houses appear duller and dimmer than before.
- An Old Song, from The World's Mercy

A bitter wind swept the dim-lighted street, along which a few stragglers passed with bent heads and swift steps, and through which wheels rattled drily at intervals. It shook windows in sudden gusts; it rose from time to time to howl savagely round the house, and died down in groans and mutterings of impotent rage. Stars glittered with fiery brilliance in a steel-blue sky that seemed to shudder in the fierce blast; trees shivered and moaned in the bear [sic] garden.
- The World's Mercy, from The World's Mercy

The World's Mercy comprises some rather odd stories; the title story in particular reads like a pious temperance-themed melodrama of a format that went out of fashion decades before. It opens on the above-described chilly night in a small town, and introduces us to Isabel Arnott, a wife who is caring for her sick baby (the only survivor of several children) and waiting with trepidation for the arrival of her husband George, who is a doctor and drunkard. He turns up in the small hours and - a regular habit - locks her and baby Harry out on the street. With no-one else to to turn to, she is rescued by Arthur Hedley, a student lodging opposite, who takes her and the child in.

Arnott wakes with a hangover the next day to find Isobel missing and Harry laid out dead in his cot. The maid, Charlotte, explains that Harry had been left dead on the doorstep. Arnott is guilt-stricken and swears that he will never drink again. He persuades Charlotte to keep quiet about the night's events, on grounds that his imprisonment would leave Isobel destitute.

The next day, his colleague Dr Marston visits and is also informed of the true story; shocked, he nevertheless, pledges to help Arnott turn his life around. In this, Arnott succeeds over the next few months, materially at least. Isobel, however, remains missing, and Arnott still suffers badly from guilt. Charlotte seeks the aid of a visiting missionary, Philip Sternroyd of the Upton Fathers. Sternroyd comes to the house, and Arnott is surprised to find that he knows him: he was Sternroyd's fag at public school. The charismatic Sternroyd gives him absolution, and Arnott lives a sober and religious life from that point.

Five years later, we are introduced to a lady called Belle Harris, who lives in an idyllic country cottage with her daughter Pansy. Her husband Arthur, generally away on business, is due to arrive. On his return, it's revealed that "Mr and Mrs Harris" are Arthur Hedley and Isobel Arnott. She was pregnant at the time of her rescue, and Pansy is her daughter by George. Her relationship with Arthur is already distinctly chilly, but Arthur has further bad news; he has to end it, as he too is suffering from guilt, and his strict Puritan parents want him to marry someone else. He gives her six months' lease on the cottage, and leaves.

A further five years have passed, and George Arnott is living an exemplary life. His medical practice has recovered and, still friends with Sternroyd, he is physician for Hill House, a hostel for alcoholics. In the autumn, Sternroyd suggests he and Arnott take a holiday at St Egbert's, a mission house in Portsmouth run by their friend Father Anstey ("a sort of slum menagerie, a combination of socialism and monkery"). During their stay, there's an altercation in the street, and Arnott is called to attend on a flower-seller who, in a drunken fight, has hit her head on a curbstone. It turns out to be the long-missing Isabel. Gravely injured, she recovers consciousness enough to tell her story - how she turned to crime and drink after Hedley abandoned her - and to evidently forgive George, before dying. Sternroyd then introduces George to his daughter Pansy.

Then, with a sob of unspeakable thankfulness, he took the lonely little thing in his arms and kissed and blessed her. And in the deep peace that fell upon him he knew that his penitence was accepted and her pardon sure. So he tasted the sweetness of God's mercy, which is not as the world's mercy.

I can't disagree with the general thrust of reviews: that the book was mostly a turkey. The sarcastic Pall Mall Gazette review is worth quoting in full:

VERY FINE WRITING
When at page 4 we found a boy of a year old called a "noble babe," we instinctively tightened our grasp of "The World's Mercy" and applied ourselves with new diligence to the assiduous and conscientious study of every page that followed, in the active hope that "Maxwell Gray" would afford us more entertainment than is her wont. For a while our search was unrewarded, although it was with a pleasurable thrill that we found an old gatekeeper described as "castellan;" but in the fullness of time, and after some wearisome plodding, we came, in a waking interval, on this lofty and soaring passage: "Oh! rosemary ... your fragrance is the scent of unforgotten youth, which was sweet, and is bitter in retrospect ... which was gloomy with despair, and is now, seen in the arid meridian of life, glorious with auroral hues of hope." Even the doubt whether the reference is to youth or a visible perfume cannot conceal from us the sublimity of this description. To those who enjoy this style of thing, since there is more of it, we can recommend the book, but as for the tales themselves, we can but give praise to the last of them, "The Widow’s Clock," which is simple, unaffected, and pretty. The rest are generally without plan or purpose, the incidents are not worth the chronicling, the dialogue is still, awkward, and frequently impossible, and the characterization indistinct and colourless. Moreover, although we expect no graces of style from "Maxwell Gray," we note with surprise how much the construction of her involved sentences leaves to be desired, even in the matter, even in the matter of gramma. It must, however, be admitted that she is powerful and convincing in the account of Isabel Arnott's horror of her drunken husband, and of that husband’s remorse on finding that he is responsible for the death of his baby boy, "the noble babe" aforesaid. But the strongest impression the book leaves on the reader’s mind is that "Maxwell Gray" had better keep to the writing of the religious novel, and leave the writing of short stories to others.
- The Pall Mall Gazette, March 28, 1900

- Ray

Pasties and other yarns

Not being from around here originally, I admit I get a trifle bored with Devon/Cornwall regional rivalries, of which one focus is traditional foods.

Firstly, there's the cream tea. Did it originate in Cornwall or Devon? This is pretty academic, since the named entity "cream tea" is a modern marketing construct (see Google Books Ngram Viewer here) though the combination of jam, scone and cream (in the past more likely to be junket than clotted cream) clearly goes further back, as Charles Dickens wrote in Household Words in 1882:

You spread the jam on the scone, and eat it with the junket. It is only when the tea is fairly advanced— we mean the meal, and in Cornwall tea is a solemn and serious affair — that the junket is reverently tapped by the mistress of the feast, and each guest is invited to partake ...

But the account that seems to trump the lot was that mentioned in a Western Morning News piece: "Cream tea on menu for over 1000 years" (January 20, 2004):

Historians in Devon have found evidence which they say could shed light on the original birthplace of that popular Westcountry dish the cream tea ... Historians in Tavistock claim to have unearthed manuscripts that reveal the cream tea tradition actually began in the town some 1,000 years ago. While carrying out research into the history of the 900-year-old Tavistock Market Charter, they discovered that the monks of the town's Benedictine Abbey could have created the famous dish to reward workers who helped to restore the building. The monks would serve the clotted cream with bread and strawberry preserves. This evidence was brought to the attention of the Tavistock Food and Drink Festival committee, which is now organising a two-day event which will feature the Devon cream tea.

The BBC has repeated the story at least twice - for instance, Ancient roots of cream tea discovered. I'm really not sure what to make of this; the Tavistock & District Local History Society have no idea who the historians involved were. The lack of specifics rings alarm bells with me, and having seen how origin myths can start up (see "A Bishop storm-tossed on the ocean") I'd like to see a scholarly publication confirming this discovery that surfaced just in time for the Tavistock Food and Drink Festival. I've emailed them to ask about this.

And then there's the pasty. The BBC news magazine, reporting on the food's newly-granted EU protected status - Who, What, Why: What exactly is a Cornish pasty? - reported this:

Les Merton, author of The Official Encyclopaedia of the Cornish Pasty, points to cave paintings on the Lizard peninsula showing a woman eating a pasty-like foodstuff, suggesting the tradition stretches back to prehistoric times.

A very early pasty, he believes, would have been encased in leaves rather than pastry, but he says the evidence nonetheless suggests that even such primitive versions would have had their edges crimped in some way.

The BBC has failed to spot a joke: The Official Encyclopaedia of the Cornish Pasty is a humorous publication tracking the pasty back to the Garden of Eden.  Debunking is hardly necessary, but as the art historian Dr Geri Parlby said to the Western Morning News - Doubts cast on pasties in cave painting claim (WMN, Feb 26th 2011):

"I am always fascinated to hear of new discoveries in prehistoric art especially when they appear to show something as detailed as Mr Merton claims to have seen.

"As there is only very limited evidence for any form of prehistoric cave art across the whole of Britain, I find it hard to believe these Cornish examples could have been such a well kept secret, even Cornwall Council's Archaeology Department seems unaware of them."

I'm not sure which I find more tiresome: the rivalry that gives rise to these yarns, or the readiness of the BBC to treat unverified soundbites as sacrosanct.

- Ray

Kenneth Grahame's lesser-known works: part 2

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Headswoman

The Headswoman (1898, Internet Archive ID headswoman01grahgoog

The Headswoman is a short story about a female executioner, that first appeared in the literary magazine The Yellow Book in 1894. It concerns Jeanne, a young woman in an early 16th century French town, who inherits the post of headswoman. The town council are doubtful about it, but she argues persuasively her right to the job.

"My motive, gentlemen, in demanding what is my due, is a simple and (I trust) an honest one, and I desire that there should be no misunderstanding. It is my wish to be dependent on no one. I am both willing and able to work, and I only ask for what is the common right of humanity,—admission to the labour market. How many poor, toiling women would simply jump at a chance like this which fortune, by the accident of birth, lays open to me! And shall I, from any false deference to that conventional voice which proclaims this thing as ‘nice,’ and that thing as ‘not nice,’ reject a handicraft which promises me both artistic satisfaction and a competence? No, gentlemen; my claim is a small one,—only a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. But I can accept nothing less, nor consent to forgo my rights, even for any contingent remainder of possible cousinly favour!"

She gets the job, and performs the task competently and cheerfully, until a setback. She has an argument with her lawyer cousin Enguerrand (next in line for the post) about a woman's suitability for the job. The next day, suffering from a headache, she takes the day off, and the council takes this as evidence of the problems of hiring a woman. Things look up, however, when she flirts with a young gentleman on the town ramparts.

But the day after that, she is surprised to find the young man is her first client for execution.  The two continue their courtly flirting as he is brought to the block.

"And now, sir," said Jeanne, "if you will kindly come this way: and please to mind the step—so. Now, if you will have the goodness to kneel here—nay, the sawdust is perfectly clean; you are my first client this morning. On the other side of the block you will find a nick, more or less adapted to the human chin, though a perfect fit cannot, of course, be guaranteed in every case. So! Are you pretty comfortable?"

"A bed of roses," replied the prisoner. "And what a really admirable view one gets of the valley and the river, from just this particular point!"

"Charming, is it not?" replied Jeanne. "I’m so glad you do justice to it. Some of your predecessors have really quite vexed me by their inability to appreciate that view. It’s worth coming here to see it. And now, to return to business for one moment,—would you prefer to give the word yourself? Some people do; it’s a mere matter of taste. Or will you leave yourself entirely in my hands?"

"Oh, in your fair hands," replied her client, "which I beg you to consider respectfully kissed once more by your faithful servant to command."

In the nick of time, the mayor arrives and halts the execution: it's a case of mistaken identity. Jeanne is put out at the interruption to her work, and is all for carrying out the execution anyway. But she is persuaded by the arrival of Thibault, the seneschal of the local chateau: the young man is "the young Seigneur" who has just come home from his education in Paris. They make up the next day, falling in love, and she gives up the job.

Executions continued to occur in St. Radegonde; the Radegundians being conservative and very human. But much of the innocent enjoyment that formerly attended them departed after the fair Châtelaine had ceased to officiate. Enguerrand, on succeeding to the post, wedded Clairette, she being (he was heard to say) a more suitable match in mind and temper than others of whom he would name no names. Rumour had it, that he found his match and something over; while as for temper—and mind (which she gave him in bits). But the domestic trials of high-placed officials have a right to be held sacred. The profession, in spite of his best endeavours, languished nevertheless. Some said that the scaffold lacked its old attraction for criminals of spirit; others, more unkindly, that the headsman was the innocent cause, and that Enguerrand was less fatal in his new sphere than formerly, when practising in the criminal court as advocate for the defence.

The Headswoman is clearly intended as satire. Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Hilary Fraser, Judith Johnston, Stephanie Green, Cambridge University Press, 2003) has a detailed analysis of its targets, including bureaucracy and the "new woman" narrative (see pp 184-185), But Alison Prince, in Kenneth Grahame: an innocent in the Wild Wood (Allison & Busby, 1994) calls it "a somewhat maladroit offering" that "seems to have been received with baffled (or perhaps tactful silence)".  It's hard to say if it works: whether the strangely upbeat tone of the whole piece is part of the joke, or a symptom of Grahame being too squeamish to tackle the gritty scenario.  Peter Green, in his 1959 Kenneth Grahame, a biography, commented that:

Direct engagement stimulated his satirical sense, but put too great a strain on his delicate sensibilities. If today The Headswoman reminds us of anything, it is of a play by an author who in many ways resembles Grahame: Christopher Fry. In The Lady's not for Burning the treatment of the death motif and the ambivalent humour enshrouding it directly recall Grahame's story: there are further similarities of plot, setting, and character. It is fascinating to speculate just what would have become of Grahame's talent if he had continued to explore this field instead of abandoning it after a single experiment

As it was, The Headswoman was the nearest thing Grahame ever wrote to fiction for an adult readership.

Project Gutenberg has an HTML version of the 1928 Bodley Head edition with nice woodcut illustrations by Marcia Lane Foster.

- Ray

The scent of plagiarism

I'm not sure how to categorise this: strange cultural/musical crossover, I suppose. I admit to liking a lot of Europop, and just ran into the above: "Я люблю тебя" ("Ya lyublyu tebya" = "I love you") by ГиллерА (GillerA, who I think is/are Ukrainian; the song is all over the Russian/Ukrainian videoclip circuit, but with no sign of creator details). It's a very nice track: upbeat and bright, yet rather wistful. It's accompanied, however, by a majorly incongruous SF video, about an evidently alien/superpowered woman (vital stats including ferrum, helium, uranium, hydrargyrum, cuprum and copernicium ain't normal) who gets loose in a laboratory and zaps the staff with mindcontrolling/aphrodisiac fluence from her hands.

Whatever its intrinsic merits, however, it's causing considerable annoyance to fans of the French singer Mylène Farmer. As reported in the online magazine .evous - Mylène Farmer: Le clip de ’Dégénération’ plagié par une chanteuse ukrainienne! - the video for "Я люблю тебя" is heavily derivative - shot for shot in places - of that for Farmer's "Dégénération" ("Degeneration") in which an evidently alien/superpowered woman gets loose in a laboratory and etc etc. Here's the video - it's NSFW, but far less explicit than it looks.

It's hard to take sides on this. While the video for "Я люблю тебя" is clearly based on that for "Dégénération", the song should be judged on its own merits: it's pleasant light listening, as good in its own way as "Dégénération", a far darker techno/electro piece that reached No. 1 in the French charts. I very much like both tracks. The "Dégénération" video, in addition, itself contains in one section a close visual similarity to a previous work: the scene in Luc Besson's film The Fifth Element in which Leeloo escapes after her regeneration, so its makers aren't entirely on the moral high ground about borrowing.

There is a possible book connection; at least one commentator - Erwan Chuberre, in the book Mylène Farmer: Des mots sur nos désirs - thought the "Dégénération" video also drew inspiration from Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume, in which the perfumier Grenouille escapes execution by releasing an aphrodisiac scent, sparking a whole-town orgy.

- Ray

Kenneth Grahame's lesser-known works: part 1

On Wednesday a customer was asking about the early works - prior to Wind in the Willows - of Kenneth Grahame. I was aware of these, but have never seen copies in book form. As it happens, they're all old enough to be out-of-copyright, and are on the Internet Archive. They are:

Pagan Papers (1893, Internet Archive ID paganpapers04grahgoog)
The Golden Age (1895, Internet Archive ID goldenage01grahgoog)
Dream Days (1898, Internet Archive ID dreamdays01grahgoog)
The Headswoman (1898, Internet Archive ID headswoman01grahgoog)

These were all written when Grahame was pursuing a very successful career as a banker, were what made his critical reputation. In contrast, the critics disliked The Wind in the Willows. In the long term, however, it came to largely eclipse the early works.

Pagan Papers is a compilation of Grahame's essays written from 1888 onward in publications including The Yellow Book, St James's Gazette and the National Observer.  A quick summary of the topics:

• The romance of the road: on the exhilharating experience of walking the Ridgeway of the north Berkshire downs.
• The romance of rail: on the imaginative delights of planning rail journeys.
• Non libri sed liberi: on the habit of buying books, even getting them custom-bound, and never reading them.
• Loafing: on the merits of aimless passive enjoyment of an upper Thames village.
• Cheap knowledge: on the pros and cons of free libraries.
• The rural Pan: in praise of countryfolk, personified as Pan, in contrast to the Apollo and Mercury city denizens.
• Marginalia: on the practice of annotating books.
• The eternal whither: in praise of people who know what they want from life, via the example of clerks who took criminal holidays.
• Deus Terminus: on the Roman god Terminus, god of boundary markers, and mourning the days when no such demarcations of land existed.
• Of smoking: in praise of pipe and cigar smoking.
• An Autumn encounter: an extended description of passing a scarecrow.
• The white poppy: on the benefits of forgetting.
• A Bohemian in exile: an account of "Fothergill", who opted out of society to roam the country roads with a donkey cart.
• Justifiable homicide: on dealing with annoying relatives.
• The fairy wicket: on moments that offer brief glimpses of the magical.
• Aboard the galley: an extended exploration of the metaphor of officer workers as galley slaves.
• The lost centaur: a lament at humanity's divide from animals, and failure to acknowledge kinship.
• Orion: the constellation is explored as a symbol of the hunter that remains in us all.

The general tone is wry and whimsical. While they're not at all bad reading, I found them variable in quality: some come across as throwing an excess of erudition and style at extremely slight topics. But others express the powerful emotion, a very deep and very English yearning, evoked by the countryside. The repeated themes - pastoral escape, urban encroachment on the countryside, the urge to transgress against the system either by idleness or crime or primitivity, the recognition of our animal nature, the appearance of Pan - are highly recognisable as similar to those of The Wind in the Willows. They could be read as the unsurprising fantasies of a man reacting to the confines of his highly formal job, but a number of biographies note that Grahame (like a number of late-Victorian writers) was actively interested in neopaganism ...

Neither his visions of escape from modern society nor the anti-authoritarian philosophy of his essays was particularly original to Grahame; they were shared by many of his contemporaries, as was a variety of neopaganism that the title of his first gathering of essays, Pagan Papers, reflects.
- Writers for children: critical studies of major authors since the seventeenth century, Jane Bingham, 1988

... and the essay "A Bohemian in exile" contains a fairly explicit statement of this.

When old Pan was dead and Apollo's bow broken, there were many faithful pagans who would worship at no new shrines, but went out to the hills and caves, truer to the old gods in their discrowned desolation than in their pomp and power. Even so were we left behind, a remnant of the faithful.

Contemporary reviews were mixed. A standard critical comment was to view them as derivative of Robert Louis Stevenson's essays such as the 1876 Virginibus Puerisque. Patrick Reginald Chalmers, in his 1933 Kenneth Grahame: life, letters and unpublished work, mentions one reviewer who said that Grahame was "only one in a whole generation who turns out a "Stevensonette" as easily and lightly as he rolls a cigarette", and another who evidently felt the writing to be precious, proving the author to be "one of Mr. Henley's very clever young men". However, plenty of other reviews took a less complicated view, and were unstinting in their praise of the book. For instance:

The sense of virility, of wholeness, which one gets from this book is not its least claim upon the regard of all who care for literature. In these essays Mr. Grahame shows himself a lover of boats, of the fresh free life of the . fields and the downs, of old books, of the poets; he gossips cheerily of them all, adding to the clearness of his observation and his extreme sanity a sense of the value of word and of phrase, which makes each short paper excellent reading.
- The Review of Reviews, Volume 9, 1894

- Ray

Modeste, strenue, sancte

Following the thread of school songs, here's another literary question. A while back I briefly mentioned correspondence with a Yahoo! Answers contact, Eric Schonblom, who is conducting biographical research on the prolific children's author Constance Winifred Savery (1897-1999 - see the Independent obituary). Last year he visited Great Torrington with the enviable opportunity to examine a large collection of materials, including unpublished works, and the partial results are now on his much-expanded biographical site, www.constancesavery.com.

Eric just contacted me with a puzzle. Among Constance Savery's unpublished verse is the following poem:

William Rutlish's Song

Ask little; greatly give, / Ye who would truly live / Modeste, strenue, sancte.
Fight cruelty and wrong; / Meet sorrow with a song / Modeste, strenue, sancte.
Shun all ungentle ways; / Love beauty all your days / Modeste, strenue, sancte.
Stand firm against the tide; / Fear sin and naught beside / Modeste, strenue, sancte.
In your appointed place / Serve God and seek His face / Modeste, strenue, sancte.

© - reproduced by permission of E.C.W. Hummerstone

As Eric says, Modeste strenue sancte ("Be modest, be thorough and pursue righteousness") is the motto, adopted in 1901, of Rutlish School. Wiliam Rutlish was the benefactor, embroiderer to Charles II, who left a bequest that had appreciated sufficiently by the late 1800s to fund the school's founding in 1895.

Constance Savery incorporated the poem in her novel The Quicksilver Chronicle, but is ambigious about where the verses came from. Her work diary for June 20, 1952 says 'Wrote verses ("William Rutlish's Song")' but in a tape recording in 1994 she said it was "translated from a Latin poem, except for the Modeste strenue sancte refrain that resisted translation". Eric is well aware that the 1994 statement (made when she was 97) could be a misrecollection, but he would nevertheless like to track the attribution if any exists. Rutlish School hasn't replied.

So, the question is: is William Rutlish's Song actually a translation of a Latin poem, or written in 1952 as a work retrofitted to the Rutlish school motto? Eric will pay a finder's fee of £20 if anyone can find a reliably-attributed Latin original.

- Ray

The Last Ringbearer

MetaFilter currently has an excellent thread worth visiting - The Last Ringbearer - which has a wealth of links concerning 'parallel novels': works that retell others from the viewpoint of a different character or perspective.

The particular focus of the thread, however, is Middle-earth according to Mordor ("A newly translated Russian novel retells Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings' from the perspective of the bad guys") - this Salon article by Laura Miller discusses Последний кольценосец (The Last Ringbearer) by Russian paleontologist Kirill Eskov. Working by the aphorism that "history is written by the victors", this is a counter-text to The Lord of the Rings that tells of the last days and aftermath of the War of the Ring from the viewpoint of the forces of Sauron. As Miller describes it:

... a well-written, energetic adventure yarn that offers an intriguing gloss on what some critics have described as the overly simplistic morality of Tolkien's masterpiece.

In Yeskov's retelling, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science "destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!"
...
The protagonist of "The Last Ringbearer" is a field medic from Umbar (a southern land), who is ably assisted by an Orocuen -- that is, orc -- scout, who is not a demonic creature like the orcs in "The Lord of the Rings," but an ordinary man.
...
In Yeskov's scenario, "The Lord of the Rings" is a highly romanticized and mythologized version of the fall of Mordor, perhaps even outright propaganda; "The Last Ringbearer" is supposed to be the more complicated and less sentimental true story.

The Last Ringbearer is in tune with a number of criticisms of Tolkien's mythos mentioned in the MetaFilter thread that, much as I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings films, I don't find hard to disagree with. There's Michael Moorcock's 1989 essay Epic Pooh. And David Brin's J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress (Salon again, Dec 17th 2002), that attacks its pro-aristocratic Romanticism. And Fantasy and revolution, an interview in International Socialism in which fantasy author China Miéville says: "Tolkien's worldview was resolutely rural, petty bourgeois, conservative, anti-modernist, misanthropically Christian and anti-intellectual".

If you know Russian, an article by Kirill Eskov, How and why I wrote the apocryphal "Lord of the Rings", looks worth reading. Skimming via Google Translate: Eskov explains that he's not formally a writer, but a "graphomaniac" who writes for his own pleasure and that of friends. He mentions the long history of works that dissect and overturn fictional worlds, right back to Dio Chrysostom, whose rhetorical "Trojan speech" argued the Iliad to be pure PR, the siege of Troy a failure. He mentions the power to expose interesting facets of a work through the device of approaching a work from an ethical or aesthetic position radically different from that of its creator, citing examples including Andrzej Sapkowski (whose Złote popołudnie - Golden Afternoon - retells the story of Alice from the viewpoint of the Cheshire Cat), "Gloria Howard's take on Moby Dick from Ahab's wife's viewpoint" (I can find no reference to Gloria Howard - but the book has to be Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel), and Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

However, a further aspect of Eskov's motivation was to examine Tolkien's Middle Earth as a real world, and as a geologist he spotted problems. Plate tectonics requires that Middle Earth, as a supercontinent, would have central highlands, which Tolkien doesn't describe. Evidently there must be more to Middle Earth, so Eskov posits other continents and archipelagoes.  He asks about practicalities of Middle Earth that have to exist. What's the monetary system? How can Rohan sustain itself solely by breeding horses? What do the inhabitants of Mordor eat, and why is their capital city in the middle of a desert? And if Middle Earth is treated as a real world, then characters such as Aragorn and Faramir are historical personages whose actions, just as with historical figures in our world, are open to very differing interpretations Finally, he tackles the tropes of fantasy itself.  Fantasy has very strict canonical rules: no moral relativism, but a black-and-white morality. He accepted this groundrule, but attempted to arrange good and evil more realistically, by individual person rather than by race (his elves are "not evil and not good - they are simply alien").

For the moment anyway, The Last Ringbearer is available in the English translation by Yisroel Markov, authorised by the author, as a free download. To circumvent the undoubtedly grey copyright situation - see the Guardian's Lord of the Rings reworking a hit with fans, but not Tolkien estate - it's being released on a non-commercial basis. I won't link to it, but you'll find links via Eskov's Wikipedia entry and the Salon article.

Eskov has, by the way, written another novel called The Gospel of Aphranius, which attempts to construct a demythologised account of the events of the Gospels (rather like Frank Yerby's Judas, My Brother).

Update: see The Last Ringbearer, posted in December 2012 after I read the ePUB version of the 2nd Edition.

- Ray

Hæ tea

On the subject of plants, a slight puzzle via Yahoo! Answers. Do we have any Danish readers?

Great Dane dining (Lars Eriksen, The Observer, 3 February 2011) tells of a culinary visit to Dragsholm Castle. It mentions an unusual detail:

Henriksen strays off the tractor tracks we are following to pick a couple of twigs from a slender brownish tree called hæ. He breaks one and shoves it under my nose, and there is an instant aroma of liquorice and marzipan. He says he'll boil the twigs to make a tea for a bread he is baking. It seems that the purveyors of modern Nordic cuisine owe a debt of gratitude to their Viking forefathers.

Whatever is "hæ"? The Danish Wikipedia finds no sign of a tree or shrub with this name, nor is it in the Routledge Danish Dictionary. The licorice-marzipan aromatic twigs are probably diagnostic, but don't ring any bells with me. Googling, "hæ" just seems to be a Danish interjection (e.g. "hæ hæ hæ" = laughing in text "he he he"). Is this a garbling of some other word, a mistake, or a wind-up?

Addendum. credits go to "Voelven", who has suggested the likely answer: that the word intended is "hæg".

"Almindelig Hæg" (Common Hæg) is the Danish name for the Bird Cherry (Prunus padus), which does have various English names cognate with "Hæg", Hagberry (aka Hackberry, Heckberry, Hegberry, Egg-berry, etc - see A Dictionary of North East Dialect by Bill Griffiths).  Like all Prunus species, it has a chemical defence against pests in the form of cyanogenic glycosides, in the case of Prunus padus the one called prunasin: the marzipan smell when twigs are broken is hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid, as it used to be called).  I assume - hope - that in the recipe described it boils out during cooking.

- Ray

Fern-dom

A piece in the local paper about the Canonteign Fern Garden introduced me to a historical episode I'd never heard of: pteridomania (aka fern fever).