What a day, what a day, when the apple fell for Tell and Switzerland

[austin_dern]

My new book for today, Curious Myths Of The Middle Ages by S Baring-Gould, was one of those fortuitous ones which I ran across while going from one shelf to another in the university library. The title leapt out at me just for the title seeming rather endearing. I was thinking that I had already enough books checked out and it's so hard finding time to read them all and yet, after all, I can renew them and what are the odds I'd run across this one again? So I went with the greedy algorithm and added it to the pile. The more I read it the more I appreciate it: the book dates to 1867, though I can't find when this edition was printed and it's surely not that old. Several of the pages are perforated-stamped with a college name that's been obsolete since 1955, so I have a lower bound on its age at least. It's a surprisingly easy, brisk read for something composed before Andrew Johnson's impeachment, though.

It contains some really fascinating stuff including --- following the debunking of the William Tell legend by noting how many stories just like it (and with a punch line I'd never heard before) were spread across northern Europe and across the centuries --- the work of an ingenious contemporary monk who mock-proved that Napoleon Bonaparte was ``just'' a localized retelling of the myth of Apollo. He makes a fair case, too. That Analog story which tried to ridicule Higher Criticism by proving how World War II was a fable was beaten to the punchline by at minimum a century.

Also it features an appendix talking about coincidences mentions one novel to me: that all the British monarchs from William III through George IV happened to die on Saturdays. I don't know if I'm really learning much from talk about the Wandering Jew or the legend of Presterjohn that I didn't know before --- other than how medieval views of them were understood 150 years ago, which is itself a kind of meta-historical knowledge you don't see much anywhere --- but I'm glad I'm reading it. (I am picking up all sorts of new ways to spell Genghis Khan's first name too, most of them emphasizing a soft-G start.)

Trivia: American Airlines sold out five 21-seat special plane flights to the 1941 Kentucky Derby. Source: 1941: The Greatest Year In Sports, Mike Vaccaro.

Currently Reading: Curious Myths Of The Middle Ages, S Baring-Gould.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Curious Myths Of The Middle Ages, S Baring-Gould

Ooooo! I love that book! And yes, it's been reprinted many, many times.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I quite liked it, particularly in the pleasant tone it takes while tearing apart a myth or showing that what looks like a local bit of folklore is actually only slightly less universal than tales of a great flood in the distant past. It's easy for that sort of thing to turn a little spiteful.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

It's from a different age, when scholars were primarily men of independent means, or clerics. People didn't have to contend in a zero sum game with their fellows for grants. It functioned, I think, a lot like certain aspects of the internet do now, in that everyone put forward his best work, and hoped to be recognized on its merits, while learning from others' thoughts and discoveries. It's better in such an environment to encourage others to keep trying, even when they're wrong.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, perhaps, although on going to actually learn something about Baring-Gould I'm inclined to say he was a rather exceptional person, with among other things a real deep love for folklore and folk song and an inability not to write about it. And apparently he wrote Onward Christian Soldiers, tossing it off in about ten minutes so the school children would have something to process to. Curious fellow.

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

::: medieval views of [legends] were understood 150 years ago, which is itself a kind of meta-historical knowledge you don't see much anywhere

Indeed. Better books have endnotes and bibliographies, but teasing out the chain of "who knew what when?" is torturous. The tendency is to establish an existence proof -- "X was demonstrated by Y" -- rather than a survey of all the confirmations and refutations (except when you're specifically symthesizing a large sample by means of meta-analysis). The whole "he wrote in an obscure language in an obscure journal" phenomenon is another hindrance.

I image a sort of edifice of human knowledge, of connected nodes; where you can re-examine something in the foundation, adjust a parameter, and see which contingent results collapse. This would be easier in math-heavy fields like physics, of course. ("Oops, Cepheid variables don't constitute standard candles after all, and all our trans-parallactic yardsticks have evaporated in a puff of chalk dust.")

I'm reading How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamity (John Cassidy, 2009), which explains how certain economic theories have become "common knowledge" through a process of distillation -- their simplifying assumptions have become dogmatic axioms; nobody looks at the caveats and dissenting models.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I've had a couple of bits of meta-historical knowledge which struck me as really enlightening, the one I think most interesting --- but which I've only seen in one reference --- being that during the reign of Charles I, historians were discovering that King, Lords, and Commons had not coexisted since time immemorial, but rather that Kings had called the first Parliaments and therefore, logically, would be justified in not calling Parliaments if they so chose. You can see how this would heighten tensions.

Another book (The Last Voyage Of Columbus) claims that there was a long stretch of time where Europeans thought Amerigo Vespucci had lead the first expeditions that landed in the New World, rather than Columbus, but other readings suggest to me that this is a slightly garbled version of what was actually believed. I'd like to be clearer on the subject, though.

I'd read How Markets Fail just recently and quite liked it, but I have got this side interest in reading about economics that's a bit peculiar considering I haven't got any money anyway.