“Hamlet isn’t just Hamlet. Oh no, no, no–oh, no. Hamlet is me. Hamlet is Bosnia. Hamlet is this desk. Hamlet is the air. Hamlet is my grandmother. “
—A Midwinter’s Tale (1995)
This is really just a test to see if I can crosspost to Dreamwidth from my WordPress blog.
Here’s the decoration for my office-door schedule this semester. In some ways I’m one of the volentes, in most ways I’m one of the nolentes, but am feeling the motion either way.
Apple pushed a notification about so-called “Apple Intelligence” to my computer. Since they don’t have a “Hell, no!” button, and punching the screen is a too-expensive indulgence, this is my reaction.
A rack of personae from a Latin manuscript of Terence in the Vatican Library,
which always reminds me of this song by They Might Be Giants (who are, in fact, giants):
I was thinking about these Cold-War-era sf novels today, prompted by a Facebook post about vintage paperbacks, and it occurred to me that in both of them Simak is satirizing what we now call the Rot Economy. Simak’s work, quietly and intensely weird, was ahead of its time because it was resolutely against its time.
I’ve been reading the Gesta Herwardi (“The Deeds of Herward” a.k.a. “Hereward the Wake”), one of the original outlaw stories from England (although it’s written not in English, but in Latin—because, no doubt, Everything Is Better With Latin!™). The Robin Hood collection from T.E.A.M.S. that I got last week includes a translation of Gesta Herwardi, but (a.) it’s abridged, and (b.) it’s a translation. (There’s no translation like no translation.) I found the Latin in a couple places at the Internet Archive and have been plowing though it. (The text that the Robin Hoods translated is at the end of this edition of Gaimar’s English Chronicle. A bilingual edition with an English translation by Henry Sweeting appeared serially in Fenland Notes and Queries.)
It’s pretty good so far. Herward, like young Grettir Stark, seems to have been a jagoff in his youth: partying at his parents’ expense, defeating everybody at sports in the most insulting way, quarrelling and fighting with everybody, until he finally gets kicked out and his adventures proper begin. He kills a terrifying bear, who is himself the son of a famous bear that had human hands and feet, could talk, and was wily in the ways of war. This Norwegian were-bear abducted a young woman who later gave birth to Beorn (“bear”), King of Norway. The bear that Herward fights is apparently the were-bear’s son by a different consort, because he’s all-bear but very large and savage.
Later Herward runs up against a giant warrior called Ulcus Ferreus, kind of a weird name. The ferreus is pretty straightforward: it means “(made of) iron”. But ulcus just means “sore” in Latin (coming into English as ulcer). I couldn’t believe there was a guy running around with the name “the Iron Sore”, so I looked up Sweeting’s translation to see if he offered any alternatives, but he just translates it as “Iron Sore”.
To my mind Ulcus is more likely a non-Latin name that’s had a Latin ending tacked on (which is how the writer treats most of the non-Latin names in their text, starting with Herward himself). I just can’t figure out what that name would be.
The guy in question is Scottish, and ulk might be a Celtic root, but those languages are closed doors to me, so I haven’t had any luck finding one that might fit here. I wanted the name to be something like Hulk, which has a nice comic-booky feel for a giant warrior, and hulcus is an Old English word, deriving from Medieval Latin hulcus (“a bulky ship that needs to be towed”). But I can’t figure out a reason for the initial h to be dropped, unless there were some proto-Cockneys running around northern Britain in the early Middle Ages.
The same Proto-Indo-European root that produces ulcus in Latin yields words meaning “rotten, stinking” in some Germanic languages. (Or maybe those are loans from Latin ulcus; sores do sometimes rot and stink, especially if the medical care is on the ancient/medieval level.) And ulk is a dialect word for “skunk” in Dutch., according to Wiktionary and the Etymologiebank at the Meertens Institute.
So I’m calling this guy “Iron Skunk” until forced by lawsuits or superior philology to do otherwise. Maybe Iron Skunk will pal around with Ratlick in an upcoming Morlock story.
Speaking of skunks: I was looking for an image or two of Herward to brighten up the dusty, skunky tedium of this post and I found quite a few public domain images. A lot of them had been watermarked by copyleft-thieves like Getty and Alamy, who will charge you a few hundred dollars for images that they don’t own and should not control. That stuff should be illegal.
Typo of the day, possibly of the decade, is Ratlick, for an intended Tatlock (the author of an old myth textbook).
If a character named Ratlick doesn’t appear in an upcoming Morlock story, my name isn’t James Enge. (Um. So I guess that may or may not happen.)
Reading about cops and robbers today.
I’ve been watching through The Outer Limits (1963-1965), a show I have fond memories of from when I was a kid.
Uff da. They’re mostly terrible so far. The best episode of the first five was 1.4 “The Man with the Power”, with Donald Pleasance, a pretty good story–but a lot better when it was the plot of Forbidden Planet seven years earlier.
The next episode is another–homage, let’s say, to older sf: this one borrowing from Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” (1931). Edward Mulhare plays a scientist intent on exploring the secrets of humankind’s future evolution, something Man Was Not Meant to Know (Nor Woman Either, If That’s What You’re Thinking, Éowyn).
David McCallum plays the scientist’s test subject, an unemployed coal miner with ideas above his station. In the first part of the episode, he looks like David McCallum with dirt on his face. In the second part of the episode, after he’s stepped out of Mulhare’s magic box, imbued with all the inconceivable powers latent in a human being after !T*E*N! !T*H*O*U*S*A*N*D! !Y*E*A*R*S! of evolution, he looks like… Larry Fine from the Three Stooges.
This was too dark a vision of the future for me to handle at the moment, so I turned it off. I’ll finish it later when I feel more able to peer into the abyss.
I’ve been rereading Petronius’ Satyricon, to take my mind off the imminent death of democracy in America. It’s not working that well, because Trimalchio (the wealthy boor who is the anti-protagonist of his own episode in the novel) keeps reminding me of Trump. Which is really unfair to Trimalchio, a man who used to work for a living and apparently had some business sense, unlike the Orange Buffoon.
I just got to the part where Trimalchio has a giant boar brought in on a serving dish, accompanied by long-nosed hunting dogs and servants dressed as hunters. A big guy jumps forward with a hunting knife and slashes open the boar’s side, and a bunch of turds fly out. Sort of.
barbatus ingens, fasciis cruralibus alligatus et alicula subornatus polymita, strictoque venatorio cultro latus apri vehementer percussit, ex cuius plaga turdi evolaverunt.
—Petronius, Satyricon 40
“A huge bearded guy, with bands tied on his legs and wearing an embroidered shirt, drew a hunting knife and savagely struck the side of the boar. From that wound, thrushes flew out.”
Latin turdus means “thrush” (and is in fact cognate with the English word). But when I see the Latin word I always think first of English turd, and it renders a completely wrong image.
The AHD says that English turd goes back to *PIE *der– “tear” and is associated with words for skin and leather (e.g. the derm– in dermatologist, from Greek δέρμα “skin”). Apparently turd originally meant “discarded scraps” and was used as a euphemism for shit.
One good thing about this scatological homonym: if there were a Latin translation of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the crappy organization that the bad guys work for would be TURDUS.
