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Sunday Inspiration: Meaning and Purpose
The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
—Pablo Picasso
A Map of Middle Earth with Tolkien’s Annotations
You never know what you’ll find tucked into an old book.
In the 1960s, the British illustrator Pauline Baynes was working on a color map of Middle-earth, the land of wizards, elves and, of course, hobbits. While she was drafting the map, she worked closely with J.R.R. Tolkien, who sent her a copy of a map from a previous edition of Lord of the Rings, covered in notes revealing details of Middle-earth.
Baynes tucked that map into her copy of Tolkien’s trilogy, where it stayed for decades, until, just recently, it was found at Blackwell’s Rare Books, reports the Guardian.
Sunday Inspiration: The Majority
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
—Mark Twain
Trows
The Faery Folklorist has posted a wonderful introduction to the trows of the Orkney and Shetland Islands. In case you’re not quite up to speed on your trow-lore, the article begins,
According to Saxby and Edmondston’s ‘Home of a Naturalist’ (1888), “This interesting race of supernatural beings is closely allied to the Scandinavian Trolls, but has some very distinctive characteristics of its own. The Trow is not such a mischief-making sprite as the Troll, is more human-like in some respects, and his nature seems cast in a morbid, melancholy mould.”
From there, the article discusses what trows look like, where they live, and the sorts of things they do. There is even a brief but delightful list of trow names culled from Orkney and Shetland folklore.
Jersey Devil Sighting
Yeah, it looks pretty fake. But what photo of a cryptid doesn’t? Though at least the Jersey Devil doesn’t emit the same kind of photo-blurring effect one associates with Bigfoot, for example.
Sunday Inspiration: Goodbye
How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.
—A. A. Milne
Ancient Roman Ghosts: The Least You Need to Know
With Halloween coming up, I thought I’d do a few posts this months on ghosts. Let’s kick things off with the ghosts you’d have been likely to meet in ancient Rome. All of these are the same type of being, namely, the spirits of departed humans. They can be differentiated from one another based on how a person relates to them or possibly the mood they’re in.
Manes
Let’s start with the manes, whose name literally means “the good ones.” This is a pretty generic term for the dead when thought of collectively: those who have gone on to the afterlife. They are always spoken of in the plural.
As the Romans understood it, everyone who dies becomes one of the manes. With respect to their surviving family, however, they might be classed as one of the lares or as di parentes.
Lares and Di Parentes
The lares are almost always mentioned in the plural. They were the ancestral spirits or household gods of the ancient Romans, who borrowed the idea from the Etruscans before them. The Etruscans called these spirits the lassi.
Lares were conceived as the souls of mortals that were somehow attached to their former abodes. They functioned somewhat as “guardian angels” for the surviving members of their families: averting dangers and bestowing blessings. They received acts of worship at a special shrine within the home, where they were especially honored on special days for the family such as a birthday, wedding, anniversary, or departure or return from a journey.
The principal guardian spirit of a household was the lar familiaris, who might perhaps be the first in the line of ancestors (divine or human) or else a spirit that at some point became attached to a particular family to watch over it.
Related to the lares were the di parentes, spirits of one’s immediate ancestors, one’s father or mother, who had passed on. This group might also include the spirit or “genius” of a family member still living on earth.
Lemures or Larvae
The lemures were wandering and vengeful spirits of the dead, also sometimes called larvae, “masks.” They are always described in the plural, but a reconstructed singular Latin form would be *lemur. The primates we know as lemurs were saddled with this name because of their nocturnal habits.
Lemures were associated with fear and darkness. A few days every May were set aside to placate them with a ritual held at midnight, in which the head of each family would toss black beans over his shoulder for the lemures to feast on.
Lares could become lemures if the family didn’t make offerings and prayers in a satisfactory way. So be sure to always leave flowers at the graves of your ancestors, and always have some black bean salsa on hand, just in case!
Sunday Inspiration: Seeing Rightly
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Hero’s Journey in About a Minute and a Half
If you’ve ever wondered why the protagonists of so many books and movies have similar stories, here’s why:
(H/T: mental_floss)
Folletti: Italian Wind Sprites
![Alan Murray-Rust [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://pursiful.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/c8b93-weeping_willow_and_storm_sky.jpg)
Alan Murray-Rust [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Folletti are of ancient origin. They have probably been in the Italian consciousness since Roman times, although there is a bit of controversy over their precise lineage. They seem, in fact, to merge two distinct “portfolios” of activity.
According to some, folletti are a late variation on the Roman di penates, the gods of the pantry thought to guard a household’s food, wine, oil, and other supplies. It is said that folletti may remain on their chosen farm for centuries, protecting it from the worst kind of dangers. They are easily offended, however, so be sure to leave them a bowl of porridge on the front stoop every night if you want to keep the peace.
The other leading theory for the origins of folletti di vento links them to the mythology of the Celts who lived in northern Italy in ancient times. Indeed, folletti are similar in some ways to the spriggans of Cornwall—albeit with a somewhat nicer disposition. Like spriggans, folletti have impressive power over wind and weather. As stated above, they can fly by traveling in whirlwinds. They have also been known to cause rain, snow-storms, and floods, destroying both crops and homes. At other times, they might engage in less harmful activities like curdling milk or tangling horses’ tails.
Folletti sometimes take the form of snakes, hedgehogs, or other creatures with strong connections to the earth. They might use foxes as messengers and spies.
Darrell J. Pursiful 