In summary: Clouds of Witness features Sayers and her aristocratic detective at or near their best—or most unbearable, depending on how it hits you. This is a literate (even pretentious) and witty mystery story which also shows Sayers’ burgeoning skill as a novelist. If you like this, you should read the rest of the Wimsey stories. If you don’t, switch to another series. (Spoilers inevitably follow below.)
I fell into the dictionary again today and learned that Old Norse fífl (“fool”) also meant “monster” (cf Old English fifal “monster”), hence the fíflmegir (“monster men”) who rowed the hellship from Muspellheim that Loki steered on the way to Ragnarǫk. I wondered if the same word meaning “fool” and “monster” had any implications for the Hamlet legend, where he plays the fool but is also a savage killer and possibly a magic-user.
I still don’t know, but in looking up the etymology of English fool I fell into another dictionary. It’s a loanword from Latin, by way of Old French, going back to follis “ball, bellows”. The PIE root *bhel– (“blow, swell”) makes fool cognate with bowl, bole (of a tree), bulk, boulder, ball, biltong, bull, bold, balloon, bold, bale, the pall in pall-mall, Baldr (the Norse god’s name), bollocks, bawd, phallus, and the boule– in boulevard (where they take it hard). That’s a schlong and winding road.
Alpha wolf, schmalpha wolf. Time to slay that zombie idea.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-myth-of-the-alpha-wolf
I was reading the Eddas today, which is what Tolkien would probably be doing on Re(re)ading Tolkien Day, and I was struck by a pair of birdy lines:
Ǫrn mun hlakka,
slítr nái niðfǫlr.
—Vǫluspá (quoted in Snorri, Gylfaginning 50)“An eagle will shriek;
niðfǫlr, he rips into corpses.”
hlakka is “to scream like an eagle”—a new favorite verb for me, right up there with Latin drindire “to cry like a weasel”. I was pretty sure that hlakka is cognate with English clang (borrowed from Latin clangere) and Beekes backed me up on that (see his entry on Greek κλαγγή).
The noun ǫrn is just “eagle”, cognate with Old English earn/ærn. I’ve known that for years, but I suddenly wondered how that OE form yields eagle in modern English. The answer, to my surprise, is that it doesn’t. Modern English eagle is a loan-word from Norman French, ultimately stemming back to Latin aquila. But this goes to show that Everything Is Better With Latin!™—especially modern English.
But there’s a bigger question with these lines, the question that’s on everyone’s lips these days, namely, “What the hell is niðfǫlr?” It looks like a compound word from nið “the dark of the moon” and fǫlr “pale”. Old Norse loves these kennings, which are like very dense, very compact riddles/metaphors that you can figure out if you’re clever enough and your skaldic knowledge is deep enough.
Mine may not be, but I don’t think I’m alone. Faulkes renders niðfǫlr as “darkly pale” which strikes me as an oxymoron—like saying “downly-up” or “leftly-right”. Terry and Bray render niðfǫlr as “bright-beak(ed)”; I’m guessing (wildly) that they’re interpreting nið as the sickle moon, which could be construed as beaklike for kenning purposes. But nið really seems to be the dark of the moon, at least as represented by Cleasby & Vigfusson, not the sickle moon.
Maybe niðfǫlr describes something that’s pale even in the lightless darkness that follows the death of the moon, stars, and sun. In modern English, which doesn’t really do kennings, it’s hard to render that much content in one or two words, which may be how Faulkes came up with “darkly pale”.
Another thing that occurred to me is: whatever the etymology of this word, maybe it’s not an adjective at all (which is how all the editions and translations I have available render it). Maybe it’s the name of the eagle: Niðfǫlr.
Back toward the beginning of Snorri’s account of Norse myth, Hár (if that is his real name) describes Yggdrasil and its denizens.
Ǫrn einn sitr í limum asksins, ok er hann margs vitandi, en í milli augna honum sitr haukr sá er heitir Veðrfǫlnir.
—Snorri, Gylfaginning 16
“An eagle sits on the limbs of the ash tree <Yggdrasil>, and he knows many a thing; in-between his eyes sits a hawk who is called Veðrfǫlnir.
Veðrfǫlnir either means “gale-pale” (“pale as a storm”?) or “wether-pale” (i.e. “as pale as an old sheep”), but either way, it’s a bird name meaning “Something-pale”. Maybe the eagle in Vǫluspá isn’t just any corpse-eating eagle but the eagle from Yggdrasil, Veðrfǫlnir’s wise pal, and his name is Niðfǫlr.
The line from Vǫluspá, describing the run-up to Ragnarǫk, also reminded me of another apocalyptic text:
ὅπου ἐὰν ᾖ τὸ πτῶμα, ἐκεῖ συναχθήσονται οἱ ἀετοί.
—Matthew 24: 28 (cf Luke 17:37)
“Where the corpse is, there will the eagles be gathered together.”
Not quite similar enough to argue influence of the one text on the other. But because the death of persons corresponds with the death of the world in eschatological myth, the image of the eagle as a carrion-eater is useful for both storytellers who are spinning yarns about the end of days.
Happy Downfall-of-Sauron Day, but remember: “Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.”
Two things were interesting to me in that piece about Sandon Branderson that everyone is talking about (and that I don’t propose to link to because, eh, it’s not great and also Wired has gotten plenty of hits from it already).
First: Sanderson’s reported insensibility to pain. Is that mere stoicism, or a medical condition, or what? An actual journalist might have tried to find out. It’s too bad there wasn’t one on the job.
Second: the connection between worldmaking and religion. This is not a new idea (see Tolkien’s comments on “subcreation” in “On Fairy Stories”), but it’s a potentially useful one.
There are lots of things I think are best explained as religious phenomena these days, even if they are superficially something different. When I read an AI puff-piece/alarm-piece (two sides of the same hype coin) I usually see someone craves/loathes a god, which they call AI.
I’m not beating the drum for or against religion here. But I think understanding the religious impulse (whether it’s innate or conditioned–I have no opinion on that) is key to understanding lots of behavior, even in this ostensibly secular age.
Sixteen years ago, M. John Harrison fired off a blog post heard around the world.
I was annoyed by it at the time and, rereading it now, I am annoyed again.
There is a case to be made for worldbuilding. If you’re going to create a large narrative structure, you have to have some sense of the universe it’s going to happen in. The world affects the kind of action that can occur in it, and “Action is character” as John C. Hocking so brilliantly puts it. I’ve spent decades developing a few different worlds and I don’t like someone sneering at the work. The post doesn’t make its point through argument or persuasion; it’s just a bowlful of abuse that MJH is splashing on things and people that he doesn’t like.
On the other hand, after talking to a lot of people whose principal interest in fantasy is developing a world with hard-edged rules that make magic as mundane as a set of municipal regulations, I’ve developed a grudging acknowledgement for Harrison’s point. World-discovery is at least as important as world-building, and when the writer participates in that experience along with the reader, some interesting things can happen. It’s the outliner-vs.-improviser conundrum transferred from plot to setting.
A writer’s propensity to follow one path or the other can be viewed as a personality difference, but it’s also a religious difference. If you’re an Apollonian “God has a plan!” sort of person, you’ll go with worldbuilding. If you’re a Dionysian “God says get on the dancefloor!” sort of person, you’ll go with world discovery. If your Parnassus has two peaks, you may even have it both ways.
If you’re an atheist and all this god-talk makes you uncomfortable, that’s something that the inventor of the Apollonian/Dionysian distinction would sympathize with. But I’d also urge you not to be so squeamish that you fail to understand yourself—the kind of mistake about religion that prudes make about sex. The religious impulse is present even in irreligious people, leading to absurdities like the Rapture of the Nerds. If it is present in you (not something I get to have an opinion about; that’s between you and your shadow), you’ll want to wrestle with that angel, or at least buy it a cup of coffee and see what it has in mind.
Happy Equinox to my fellow Tellurians. All visitors: please make sure your waiver forms have been signed.
https://manuelsantosmusico.bandcamp.com/track/equinox
Reading Snorri’s account of Ragnarǫkr this noon over blunch, and I was struck by this poetic phrase in Snorri’s prose: Þórr berr banaorð af Miðgarðsormi “Thor bears the baneword from Midgard’s Serpent”.
Old Norse orð is cognate with English word, both of them derived from PIE *wer– “speak”, making them cognate with verb, verve, irony, and the rhe– in rhetoric. I also wanted it to be cognate with weird “doom” but Watkins and the AHD gave me no comfort there, saying it comes from a different PIE root *wer– meaning “turn, bend”. Since speech occurs serially, like road or a string or anything that might bend, it seems to me that the “speak” root may actually be an extension of the “bend” root. That’s just speculation, but it gave me a great title for this blogpost (and maybe someday a Morlock story).
In ON, orð can be “summons”, “verdict” or “message”. Probably it means the latter here: Thor brings away from his fight with Jormungandir the news that the mighty Worm is dead.
But he doesn’t bring it very far: ok stígr þaðan braut níu fet. Þá fellr hann dauðr til jarðar fyrir eitri því er ormrinn blæss á hann “and he walks nine steps away from there. Then he falls dead to the Earth because of the poison that the Worm breathed on him.”
Nine is a magic number (3×3) and the Earth is Thor’s mother, so in a sense he lies dead in her arms. There are a lot of layers in this mythic onion.
Typo of the day: amle (for an intended male).
Amle looks like a real word, but I’m not sure what it’d mean. In OI ama is “to vex, annoy” so maybe Amlé would be like Purgatory for Norse Gimlé (“High Heaven”).
Or maybe amle is just animal said really fast because one is after you.
