#i do actually need to read the huntford still.. there's good stuff in there and i have immunized myself against most of the bullshit atp

[areyougonnabe]

It's polycule powerpoint anon. How've you been? Also if it is not breaking any rules to ask: who is Roland and why is he not Allowed Here?

lol hi nonny, roland is Roland Huntford who wrote The Last Place on Earth, the book that permawrecked scott's reputation in the late 70s. he is... an interesting character..... his amundsen standom was very powerful and so was its flipside of scott haterism, and both allowed him to do a lot of research that nobody had bothered to do up to that point. but in the interest of promoting amundsen's (legitimate and impressive!) achievements he promoted the "scott was an incompetent bumbler" trope which soon became dominant in the 80s during a broader trend of re-examination of imperial attitudes.

hilariously the guy was like... a conservative thatcherite..... he was also more importantly a big scandiboo who just wanted everyone to know that norwegians rock. BUT his book was adapted into the Last Place On Earth minseries by Trevor Griffiths, a radical socialist playwright who turned the incompetence huntford saw in scott into political commentary, emphasizing scott's sentimentality, anxiety, and (i daresay) femininity as representing imperial hubris, during a the time when the falklands war was at the top of the headlines.

despite a ton of work being done since huntford's book to rehabilitate scott, new pro-scott biographies up the wazoo in the 90s and 2000s, the damage was pretty much done, especially as shackleton's star began to rise. huntford also wrote a big shackleton biography that is just as detailed as LPOE, but i don't think shackleton's ascension had quite as much to do with huntford as scott's downall—it was probably the self-help industrial complex kicked off by "shackleton's way" which was more to blame... anyway what's insane is that huntford and griffiths are both still alive and i think someone should make them fight to the death.