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100 Years Ago, Middle Earth Was Born
A century ago today [24 Sep 2014], Russian forces were beginning the 133-day siege of Przemyśl and the German army took Péronne. Meanwhile, in a Nottinghamshire farmhouse, a young man wrote a poem about a mariner who sails off the earth into the sky. The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star deserves its day in the spotlight alongside war commemorations. It was the founding moment of Middle-earth.
Neither elves nor hobbits were yet in JRR Tolkien’s mind. But the star mariner is remembered in The Lord of the Rings, as Eärendil, forefather of kings, whose light in a phial wards off Mordor’s darkness. In the vast backstory of The Silmarillion, he carries the last Silmaril, a jewel preserving unsullied Edenic light, seeking aid against the primal Dark Lord.
Magnus Chase
Rick Riordan has announced the title of his Norse mythology series: Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard. Book titles will be forthcoming, but…
And yes, I know what you’re wondering. Chase . . . hmm, where have I heard that name before? Isn’t that Annabeth’s last name? Yes, it is. And no, that’s not simply a coincidence. Beyond that, I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you guessing.
I know an eighth-grader who dressed as Annabeth for “spirit week” on Monday who may soon be jumping up and down.
The Nepalese Unicorn
Nepal’s Chitwan National Park is a royal hunting ground turned wildlife sanctuary. In this pristine forest landscape, filmmakers go out in search of the almost mythical greater one-horned rhino. This semi-aquatic beast, also known as the ‘unicorn’ rhino, is one of the rarest rhino species in the world.
No word on whether they’ve ever tried luring it out with young maidens.
(H/T: io9)
Sixteen Cryptids from Around the World
A mythological creature is one that people told stories about long ago. A cryptid is a creature that some people have claimed to have seen (or seen evidence of) in more recent times. A cryptozoologist is someone who studies (or tries to prove the existence of) cryptids.
Mental Floss has compiled a list of sixteen cryptids for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!
New Book Claims Merlin was from Glasgow, Scotland
Another Famous Glaswegian
Via Celtic Myth Podshow:
Tradition has it that King Arthur’s magician was either English or Welsh.
But in the book Finding Merlin: The Truth Behind the Legend, author Adam Ardrey claimed he actually hailed from Scotland. [Amazon]
Mr Ardrey, who spent six years researching the subject, told a newspaper he believed the wizard had lived in Partick “where the River Kelvin meets the Clyde”.
He told the paper:
I am thrilled that Glasgow has recognised Merlin as a Glaswegian and that almost 1,400 years after his death he can take an official place in Glasgow’s glorious history.
The Lowdown on the Minotaur
Alice Leiper has written a nice introduction to the Greek myth of the Minotaur over at Mythic Scribes:
The story of the Minotaur was never forgotten, but it wasn’t just in modern stories that it has been reused. Dante’s Inferno contains mention of the Minotaur, where Dante and Virgil encounter it guarding the entrance to the Seventh Circle of hell, the circle of violence. The Minotaur is here seen as representing all three rings of the circle: violence against others, for he ate people; violence against oneself, whereby in Dante’s version the Minotaur is seen as biting itself; and violence against nature, for what could be more unnatural than the product of a human mating with an animal?
More recently, CS Lewis used the Minotaur not as a single individual but a whole species, aligned with the White Witch and thereby retaining the evilness of their origins, albeit without the myth behind it. And from there, minotaurs became a fantasy race, used as monsters to battle in Dungeons & Dragons and various games stemming from it. In World of Warcraft the Minotaur’s appearance has inspired the Tauren race, but their temperament is quite a contrast to the angry, flesh-eating Minotaur of the Greek myth.
The Minotaur has been reimagined in other ways too. In the slightly bizarre fantasy webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell, there is a minotaur called Basil, who lives peacefully in a labyrinth hidden behind a secret door in the library of the Court. Basil gives his version of events in which Theseus is a drunk, party-crashing jerk.
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe: Fast Facts
Mental Floss has posted 16 facts about C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I’m pretty sure I knew most of them, but do check out the recipe for Turkish delight (warning: may contain evil).
Blunt Metaphors Trauma
This is your brain on metaphors.
[I]n their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By,the linguist George Lakoff (at the University of California at Berkeley) and the philosopher Mark Johnson (now at the University of Oregon) revolutionized linguistics by showing that metaphor is actually a fundamental constituent of language. For example, they showed that in the seemingly literal statement “He’s out of sight,” the visual field is metaphorized as a container that holds things. The visual field isn’t really a container, of course; one simply sees objects or not. But the container metaphor is so ubiquitous that it wasn’t even recognized as a metaphor until Lakoff and Johnson pointed it out.
From such examples they argued that ordinary language is saturated with metaphors. Our eyes point to where we’re going, so we tend to speak of future time as being “ahead” of us. When things increase, they tend to go up relative to us, so we tend to speak of stocks “rising” instead of getting more expensive. “Our ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature,” they wrote.
Female Viking Warriors?
It’s beginning to look like Viking shield-maidens may have existed in numbers greater than previously thought, if the excavations at sites in eastern England are any indication:
[Archeologist Shane] McLeod notes that recently, burials of female Norse immigrants have started to turn up in Eastern England. “An increase in the number of finds of Norse-style jewellery in the last two decades has led some scholars to suggest a larger number of female settlers. Indeed, it has been noted that there are more Norse female dress items than those worn by men,” says the study.
So, the study looked at 14 Viking burials from the era, definable by the Norse grave goods found with them and isotopes found in their bones that reveal their birthplace. The bones were sorted for telltale osteological signs of which gender they belonged to, rather than assuming that burial with a sword or knife denoted a male burial.
Overall, McLeod reports that six of the 14 burials were of women, seven were men, and one was indeterminable. Warlike grave goods may have misled earlier researchers about the gender of Viking invaders, the study suggests. At a mass burial site called Repton Woods, “(d)espite the remains of three swords being recovered from the site, all three burials that could be sexed osteologically were thought to be female, including one with a sword and shield,” says the study.
Personally, I’d like to see a better sampling than fourteen interments before asserting that Viking warriors had something approaching gender parity. Still, this is an interesting discovery. I look forward to seeing where it leads.
What to Name Your Amazon
Adrienne Mayor a number of names of Amazons from the classical world in a post at Wonders and Marvels, and points to many more available in an appendix to her new book, The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World.
Darrell J. Pursiful 