#that are written in languages that English pillages from

[writingoddess1125]

hello!! ⭐, I saw that your order section was open and yesterday I read your story of buggy with the Roger effect and Jessica Rabit and I loved it, and I would like to know if you could do a one shot or something shorter if you prefer showing how they met and they decided to get married I love your stories and I think that, like your buggy, he is my favorite character. If you don't like this request or you think it's not good to do it, you can just ignore it, it won't be a bad thing 😸 thank you and have a good day!! 💗✨ (pd. English is not my first language so sorry if something is not written well😔)

Deal! I love this little idea

Buggy x FemReader

Small angst + Fluff

Heart on my Sleeve

Prequel Of Roger and Jessica Rabbit Effect

Wanna Buy me a Ko-Fi ☕️

• Your village was one of the poorest villages in the East Blue, the taxes from the World Goverment crippling your home to be a starving wasteland.

• Mainly to the wealthy Governor who lived above your town.

• You owned a fabric shop but the fabrics you owned were old and starting to rot from the lack of buissness. The moths having more use put of your fabrics then you did-

• The newest pirate on the scene Buggy the Clown shows up to your village ready to pillage it, in his early 20s with a fresh faced crew. However they did not expect the village to look worse then before they arrived.

• "I thought you said this place had money?" Buggy asked as he looked at the place. Lowering his blades as it looked like this place- it was in shambles. Like it had been pillaged to time then a pirate

• You had walked out of your shop, seeing if maybe the baker had just enough flour so you could feed yourself. Turning to see the group of pirates that seemed better off then you and your people.

• Buggy stared hard at you and matched forward, seeing that you were quite pretty in his eyes as he stood before you.

• "You! Tell me what the hell is wrong with this place! We heard it was rich here!" He said angrily, clearly upset at not getting to a small village that at least had a few Berries.

• You looked up at the pirate, noting the far too big of clothes for his frame and his painted face- Not liking he was putting such an unflattering green around his watercolor eyes. His face twisting up in anger as he caught you staring at his face.

• "What are you staring at!? You looking at my nose!" He yelled angrily, his fingers going to the inner part of your coat where you assumed some weapon would be.

• "No your shirts too big for your frame and that shade of green doesn't compliment your eyes well" You said truthfully, At this point a knife or bullet being a kinder death then starving anyway-

•"U-Uh- What?" He said confused, Unsure how to answer. You reaching forward and putting your arms around his frame to pull back the shirt. Taking a pin from your pocket and pinning the shirt back so it fit properly.

• "See- Your shirt is too big. It looks better fitted like that" You pointed out, His faze looking down at the pinned back shirt. His face red at how close you got to him, or that you'd touched him at all.

• "As for money we have non. The governor has the taxes so hide no one here can even feed themselves" You said truthfully, The young clown blinking at you in surprise.

• "Er- Y-Youre making fun of me somehow right? Like my Nose" He tried to yell again grabbing the front of your dirty shirt- clearly not used to someone trying to give him kind useful advice without some sort of motive.

• "I would never make fun of your nose, it looks fine to me anyways" You snap back and slap his hand away calmly. He blinked at you surprised and released your hand- His eyes going up the hill of the village and seeing the grand governors house hidden in some trees.

• He huffed and shoved you hard, you falling into the mud as him and his crew marched past up to the Governors home.

• However what did surprise you was the next Morning the Captian and his Crew stood in the village square and announced he now owned the village. Saying he was Buggy the Clown- and that he was now in charge.

• Before starting to hand out some stolen treasure??? Giving some supplies he had 'liberated' from the Governors house.

• You also noticed how his eyes lingered on you as he did this.

• It had been a few months like this, he would stop by randomly pay for the village. He wasn't taking taxes but instead paying things- it was improving greatly, the cracks of the pavements on the streets getting repaired, new paint on the building and new businesses flourishing-

• But you noticed how he would pay extra attention to your shop- Getting all his things from you. How you got extra rolls of fabric delivered to your door or how he would pay for all these extra accessories to his costumes.

• "You seamstress I want another coat!" He yelled as he invaded your shop.

• Buggy was there again, asking for another ridiculous costume. You couldn't help but notice how often he was coming by- claiming he wanted new costumes by you and wanting to be measured everytime he came in.

• How he would blush when you measured around his chest. "You know, I noticed you always come through here and stop specifically at my shop for new outfits when you wear the same coat" You tease, watching him blush at you pointing this out.

• "So what!" He yelled out, his face as red as a cherry. You look at him and raise a brow at him, Not even having to say a word as Buggy deflated.

• "...I uh wanted to take you on a date" He grumbled, finally admitting what his plans were. You smiled at this, Setting the tape aside.

• "Now please do tell me, Why should I accept your offer for someone who not only yelled in my face but pushed me in mud-" You point out, even though you knew he most likely made up for it by him saving your village.

• "..I am sorry about that.." He forced out, you could tell he wasn't used to apologizing and was trying his hardest.

• "I forgive you, But that doesn't mean I'll forget" You say calmly. Smiling softly as you saw him looking ready to flip put at the rejection but you held a hand to him-

• "I know- So why don't we make a deal. Since I can tell you're really sorry why don't we agree to dinner and go from there? Its not a date per say but its a start" You said with a smile, his eyes lit up at hearing this at the prospect of getting to win you over.

• "Really!?" He says excitedly, Jumping up and down like a school boy as he blushed and giggled into his gloved hands like a kid. You couldn't help but find it adorable-

• For the next year Buggy would send gifts, love letters, help rebuild the village. Do everything to get in your good graces and ask for a official date every time he visited.

• Buggy would essentially own the Village at the point, 30% of his money went to the village to get it on its feet and keep it a small strip of paradise the very limited taxes he implimented later affer the village was florishing acted as a small form of secondary income. Mainly making sure people knew the place was protected by him as his reputation grew through time.

• Him even showing his unique Devil fruit abilties- Which you often abused for him to float up and grab the more expensive rolls of fabric or hang up finished cloths.

• The village also being a popular tourist destination for the friendly locals and nice scenery. So for Buggy it was worth the investment since originally put in.

• After that 'probation' year you would finally agree to officially date him and he was over the damn moon.

• While he would be secretive about you, his love language was strong. He is both physically and verbally affectionate- While he still throws his fits you know how to handle him well. Loving him both for his strengths and flaws.

• It would be 1 years of dating before Buggy would start planning how to pop the question.

- You were closing up shop for the day, humming along to a made up tune when you heard the back door of your shop being unlocked. You didn't have to look to know who it was, only one other person had the key to it.

"Hey Buggy Boo" You call out, smiling as you heard Buggy grumble and peel off his boots to leave them by the front door.

"That is still such a bad nickname" He grumbled before walking behind you and kissing your cheek and wrapping his arms around you. He smelled like the sea, clearly having just gotten off his shop to visit you. He had been taking more time out to see, wanting to get his bounty higher. Currently proud of his 5,000,000 berry bounty which for a early 20s pirate was fairly good he claimed.

"Ah you love it" You giggle which earned a adorable chuckle from the man.

"You know (Y/N)- I uh really like you and Want to spend my.."

"So I wanted us to have dinner tonight- I know you like that place down the street and want us to go there" He said, his voice very soft- Much softer then normal.

Smiling you turn around and kiss him on the lips.

"I'd love to" You say cheerfully, earning a crooked smile from him as he held you close.

As promised, that night Buggy took you to your favorite restaurant. Having gotten a private table in the back, you two spending hours just talking and sharing a meal together.

Buggy even pulling out a box of your favorite candies he had gotten out from his last adventure.

After dinner he lead you away to the more scenic parts of your Village a small meadow pass that had the most beautiful blue and white flowers, under the moonlight it looked so magical. You saw Buggy reach in his pockets and turn to face you, nervousness painted on his face as he shuffled his feet. Clearly prepared to get on one knee-

"You stole my Thunder!!" He cried in faux anger, you laughing hard as he ranted about how you knew so quickly, happy tears running down your cheeks as you smiled and his face turned deep red.

"Yes I will!" You said with a wide smile, your excitement getting the best of you as you slapped your hands over your own mouth. His jaw dropping in shock.

"I've been planning this for 4 months!!" He whined, face so red his nose was glowing as he stared at you.

"Im so sorry Baby, You just- You talk in your sleep my Love." You reveal with a smile, His face twisting up as he realized you'd known the whole time and let him try to have his moment anyway. You had just got too excited and answering too quickly-

As this sunk in he smiled widely and started to laugh, he couldn't help it! You were just too perfect for him! Despite everything you still let him have the spotlight. He kissed your lips eagerly and held you close, rocking the two of you side to side in pure joy.

"I.. I love you (Y/N)..So much- I cant wait for you to be my wife.." He said as he pressed his face into your neck- You could feel the warmth of tears hitting your skin exposed. Your arms wrapped tightly around him as you hug him close and cried against him in joy.

Pulling the both of you to the ground with a loud laugh as you two laid in the flowers- Laughs leaving you both as tears stilled from both of your eyes.

"I love you too Buggy Boo"

[evedaser]

sometimes when i work on my poetry and research for my (final year high school) extension ii english, i feel like such a fraud and a failure. i write naturally and i write for fun, and especially recently getting extremely addicted to fanfiction the stuff im reading and influencing myself with is easy and simple, maybe not in plot but in its use of language. its not dense and fanciful like the classics, its not teeming with extended metaphors and symbolism to shatter your mind and link with postmodernism and contextual concerns

it’s just writing.

i write poorly and worry it’s not good enough for my teacher, for the markers who will put a number on my page. they who have been studying literature and language for years, decades, judging the work of i who have not yet reached one score in age.

i feel like i’m being asked to reinvent the wheel, when all i really want to do is ride in the cart

and maybe it’s all right to say fuck it and just hop on. writing is FUN. if it makes people feel things i’ve already won. my work doesn’t need to be dissected and broken down and analysed as perfection. it’s not fair.

fanfiction has helped me realise that I think. i never used to read it, some sort of dignity thing. even now i have to fight the shame when i tell people im reading fanfic, but at the end of the day this writing has so much heart. it makes me excited to write, it makes me so excited to READ. it traps me in its joyful escapism like any book could. I read the whole lotr in less than three weeks, i read a fanfic 100,000 words longer in three *days*. this kind of reading is FUN. sharing stories should be FUN!!

anyways, here’s my most favourite poem of all those i’ve ever written. it has no deliberate techniques, it does not follow a particular form, its rhythm is wobbly as best, its concepts are not earthshakingly deep. it’s about wanting to run away and be a pirate, just because it’s fun.

and fuck if it’s not better than those i wrote to be scrutinised. it has more of my soul than i fear those ever will. does that make me a bad writer? i hope not, but maybe id be ok with being bad if it meant i never had to give up the fun of it.

Dear Pirates,

Way out on the wide blue sea

Deep and dark beyond belief

You are all the things I long to be

O pirates on the great blue sea

From shore to town to shore once more

You pillage and plunder and break down the doors

You run and you sail away from the moors

O pirates with ships filled with treasure galore

Your tables are stained with blood and with beer

And though you are hunted there’s no time to fear!

You’ve places to be, not too far or near

O pirates, I dream that your ships will dock here

Great waves part around you, except when they don’t

And people surround you! Except when they won’t

All creatures, they run from your tattered black cloaks

O pirates, you run right on back to your boats

You sail straight off from all that is right

You look out for towns that gleam in the night

Where’s mischief, there’s money, and money you like

O pirates, for money you’ll put up a fight

And glory you love! And name-making too,

And name-taking just spells out more fun for you

So tell me you’re looking for somebody new

O pirates, let me be your newest recruit

And in spite of all the wet clothes that you’re wringing

You leap down! Your ropes fly, your cutlasses swinging!

Both quiet and loud, your sea-shanty singing,

And back to your ships your men keep on bringing

Great piles and rucksacks and chests filled with gold

And stories of danger, of recklessness bold

Your name piles with legends, with glory untold!

O pirates, does glory keep you from the cold?

If I were a pirate, I’d be ever so brave

And with crewmates and treasure there’s something to save

So even when pirates seem ever so grave

There’s safety and welcome, a home on the waves

anyway the actual point of fandom is to inspire each other. reading each other's fics and admiring each other's art and saying wow i love this and i feel something and i want to invoke this in other people, i want to write a sentence that feels like a meteor shower, i want to paint a kiss with such tenderness it makes you ache, i want to create something that someone else somewhere will see it and think oh, i need to do that too, right now. i am embracing being a corny cunt on main to say inspiring each other is one of the things humanity is best at and one of the things fandom is built for and i think that's beautiful

[thebuzztrack]

A Review of Cormac McCarthy’s 'The Road'

In the winter of 2009, I watched a dramatic film set in a post-apocalyptic era where a father and son travel on a long road. They anticipate a haven to live out their remaining days on Earth. The film stars Viggo Mortensen as the father and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the son. Although the story moves at a slower pace than other films of recent years, a definable mood is overwhelmingly present within the film’s storytelling. After reading the book on which the movie is based, I have discovered the origin of the dark mood that surrounds the story of survival and last hope. The Road is a dramatization written by Cormac McCarthy.

His other written work has also been adapted into films such as No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses. The prose written on the page within his books is intentionally simple and, on several occasions, defies the basic grammatical rules of the English language. Why would “cant” be written without an apostrophe when “he’s” has been written into the same paragraph and included one? This quirky behavior is a rare treat for successfully published writers. The only other author with a sense of writing style would be Hubert Selby, Jr., who has the notorious style of placing the forward-slash symbol (/) as the permanent replacement for an apostrophe, alongside ignoring the rules for other punctuation symbols. However, there is more to The Road than the nuance of the author’s punctuation style.

The book's structure does not comply with the traditional narrative of fiction storytelling. It strays from the usual methods by describing brief moments in time that appear as fragmented memories. The primary characters, a father and a son, exist in the present tense. Their daily travel down the road is written as a daily log of what they do and what they discover. The father recalls memories of their former life with his wife, but it is told in brief flashes of memory. Nothing is ever referenced with an explanation for what happened to the world that would leave so many people wandering the Earth as vagrants.

Despite the lack of a traditional arc that would build an emotional and character development as the reader is accustomed to witnessing, there is an ongoing tension of survival for the two main characters. They must avoid the cannibals, find shelter from the rain to comfortably sleep every night, pillage for edible food and clean water as often as possible, and grasp every ounce of hope that could be mustered up.

Only speaking of my personal experience with reading the book, it is more entertaining to watch the film adaptation than it was for me to read the book. Comparing the book and movie, a couple of changes were made to the story I would contemplate an improvement. The flashback scenes include more information about the mother. Why was she willing to abandon her family? The movie attempts to explain her reasoning behind the decision.

In addition, a few scenes from the book have been intentionally misplaced in the film’s timeline. The decision was clear to me that the movie wanted to build upon a growing tension within the character development and emotional story. In my opinion, the changes to the timeline are minor, as the story draws a more satisfying development arc.

[mctreeleth]

Does anyone know if there is a version of the phrase persona non grata that refers to objects instead of people? I need a way to describe the Modern Quilt Guild’s attitude towards quilts which it considers “derivative” and won’t let be entered in their competitions.

“Obiectus” is object in Latin; would it just be obiectus non gratis?

[salvadorbonaparte]

How did English get so many Latin words ? It’s a Germanic language right?

Hello! Thank you so much for that question and providing enrichment to the tiny linguist in my brain.

English is indeed a Germanic language. It doesn't behave very much like one these days but it's actually kind of Double Germanic because it has it's roots in the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who settled Britain and influence from the Vikings, who tried pillaging the British Isles and then settled there.

Before these groups arrived, the British Isles were a Roman colony (and Celtic before that), which left some influences. The Roman baths in Bath are a physical example. But Latin entered into English in other ways too, especially since Latin wasn't really anyone's first language anymore by the time the Old English started to exist.

Firstly, the ancestor of Old English already had some contact with Latin.

Secondly, Latin was a high prestige language. It's much easier for prestigious languages to influence others (this is why English didn't borrow many words from Celtic languages). Latin was the language of religion and scholarship - the Bible and all church services were in Latin at the time and any educated person would have written and read Latin texts.

Thirdly, some of those words entered English through French. You see, French is a Romance language related to Latin so sometimes it's difficult to know when a word was borrowed at a first glance. But when the Normans took over Britain a lot of Norman French entered the vocabulary (again because as the ruling class they had prestige) and now you have a Double Germanic language with Double Romance influences.

And last but not least some Latin words are more modern. Because Latin and Greek were already high prestige language connected with scholarship they kind of just stayed that way and the West decided that if you're naming something (scientifically) it should be derived from Latin and/or Greek. (shout out to my favourite phenomenon where some plant or animal gets a name and it's a Latin/Greek word followed by the name of a scientist with a Latin suffix attached eg Lophophora Williamsii).

I hope this explanation made sense!

If you want to learn more about Old English you can also check out A History of Early English by Keith Johnson which I have uploaded in my MEGA folder of language resources.

[the-phantom-ender]

An Exploration Into Minecraft and Language.

I’m breaking this into sections and doing this literally just because I did a bunch of early human language stuff as review and I need a way to. Make my brain stop thinking about history. But I’ll start with canon knowledge first and slowly break into less official stuff from there!

Everything’s under the cut, because this got very long.

Early Language:

Pictograms are written languages where an image represents a thing and specifically just that thing, an expansion on pictogram languages are ideogram languages, in which an image represents multiple things. Likely the most well known pictogram/ideogram language (as it evolved as the need to say more did) was Hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphs were modeled after specific things but eventually grew to have many different meanings.

What’s the reason for the history lesson, I hear you asking? There’s evidence of a pictogram/ideogram language in Minecraft, of course! Chiseled sandstone (both normal and red) have images on them that highly seem to imply that there’s language and meaning behind them! Sandstone has a creeper face (which as well as being obviously a nod to creepers, could also mean explosions, as these blocks are found in Desert Temples), and red sandstone has a depiction of the wither (it wasn’t uncommon to have drawings of god-figures in pictograms so there’s a chance that withers were a deity of sorts).

There’s also chiseled stone bricks, but that’s a much more abstract shape. Perhaps it’s meant to symbolize an eye, though, and therefore the end, as stone bricks are often found in Strongholds, but that’s much more speculative. Chiseled stone bricks themselves also naturally generate in Jungle Temples. Chiseled polished blackstone seems to have a face on it of sorts (resembling the nose of a Piglin, most notably), and chiseled nether brick resembles that of a skeleton skull.

The only two major minecraft structures that don’t seem to have chiseled variants with symbols on them are the End City (purpur) and the Ocean Monument (prismarine). Ocean Monuments aren’t easily livable spaces, so it makes sense that language wouldn’t be a major factor, though. For the End, however, perhaps the lack of a symbol block is because there was already written language.

(above is a chart with all blocks mentioned in this section, listing their names, the symbols that appear on them, where they generate, and what they may represent)

Development of Language:

Here we get into full written alphabets. There are several types of alphabet, but “true” alphabets are those with distinct characters for both consonants and vowels. The most widely used modern day true alphabet is the Latin/Roman alphabet. Minecraft items in general adhere to the language the player is playing, so for the sake of things, the language you speak doesn’t play a factor here.

As many people know, there’s actually a true alphabet present in the game! That is, of course, Standard Galactic! There’s no official words tied to it, but it is the script used in the enchanting table and various other smaller details in the game! Now one thing to note about the Galactic in the enchantment table is that if you actually take the time to sit down and translate the words present, they don’t translate exactly. Most of the time, they will be a word similar to the enchantment, but not the same. Sometimes it’s just entirely gibberish.

(above is a chart of the Standard Galactic Alphabet, with the scripts corresponding Latin letters)

What this means is that, talking about translation wise, Galactic and English (or whatever language you play in) don’t translate directly into each other. So it isn’t simply just English words but different letters. At least not exactly. Perhaps this is the language Villagers speak, as they can and do trade enchanted books and items.

What people may not know, however, is that there’s actually another script present in Minecraft! Or… at least kind of. There’s six letters of a different script present in the game. And unlike Standard Galactic, it doesn’t appear in any other sources, so we will likely never know how it works in its entirety. What we do know, though, is that there are symbols on the End Crystals! And, digging into those textures, we can translate a word out from them by messing with them a bit! That word is… Mojang. It’s probably meant to just be an easter egg used to fill space, that one.

(above is a visualization of how the symbols present on End Crystals can translate into the word Mojang)

That being said, though, lore-wise, it can have a bigger impact! Remember how I said that End Cities are lacking in a pictogram? This can serve as an explanation! Perhaps the Enderman developed with language, even as far as having wide-spread Galactic (as there are enchanted books and armor in End City structures), but upon entering the end, after many years, they broke away from the standard script. Development of a new written alphabet and even more different languages is certainly possible, it’s happened plenty in the real world. Isolation creates new advancements. So the Enderman create the language present on the crystals at some point, eventually.

Additional Concepts and Less Canon Tidbits:

Here we get into wild speculation and fun ideas that don’t really hold any weight! If you don’t want that, that’s entirely fair!

Obviously, Villagers have what is technically the most advanced society economically. They trade for goods, have various jobs and artisans, and have an item that they value costs at (emeralds). They also have the most concrete communities, having villages, obviously. Villagers also have domesticated animals! Both in the sense of farm animals and also cats.

There’s also Pillagers- which I haven’t mentioned much here. They have giant mansions which seem a lot like manors. They don’t do trade, but they’re skilled fighters and have trained war animals, as well as people who have specific combat styles. They’re plenty advanced, especially because they have potions and therefore understand medicine at least to some degree, but much more war-oriented.

Piglins are essentially wandering tribes. They don’t trade, they barter, most of their structures are in ruins and the structures they do have are very heavily guarded because they contain riches. The Piglins seem to follow animals that they use (hoglins), but are also seemingly in the process of domesticating them. They also don’t seem to have much more in the way of language than pictograms (though there is Galactic present and they do seem to understand enchanting and brewing to an extent). Piglins seem to be midway in advancement, really.

Enderman are… complicated. Because yes, they do have written language and they do have cities and communities and means of transportation, they don’t exactly… interact. They don’t trade. They’re technologically advanced beyond any other groups in the game, but they are mostly isolated. So they’ve advanced entirely alone, building off only themselves.

There are also Nether Fortresses but that’s… complicated. Those tied exclusively to these structures are Wither Skeletons and Blazes. These are very different creatures, however. There’s also the fact that Blazes spawn almost exclusively from spawners. It’s hard to tell if Wither Skeletons or Blazes are the proper inhabitants of the area, but it could be both. Wither Skeletons likely originated from traditional Skeletons adapting to the environment of the nether. They’re undead and therefore it isn’t impossible that they may have, at least in the past, known how to build structures. Eventually losing that ability as the Nether degraded them.

Nether Fortresses provide no trade but there are chests that can contain loot! And some of that loot suggests a knowledge of places outside of the Nether (horse armor, most notably). Wither Skeletons/Skeletons generally may have also descended from people fearing a god figure called the “Wither” and therefore, the blackened skeletons were made out to be part of what would summon the creature. So they were kept in the Nether to avoid something like that reaching the Overworld.

There’s also… Ocean Monuments. I have no idea with those. Elder Guardians are likely a figure that’s revered. Giant structures were built for them to appease them or something of the sort. They might be told to keep the seas at peace or something of the sort. Not an active civilization, however. A structure built to pay respect to something powerful.

There’s probably plenty of things I blanked on mentioning, but yeah! This has been fun! I don’t know why this is my definition of fun.

[nordleuchten]

La Fayette in Les Misérables

Les Misérables is one of my absolute favourite books. I never get tired of it – funny coincidence, La Fayette is also in there. I have read the book in three different languages now and noticed that the amount of La Fayette varies in the different versions. The French original sets the precedent of course. The English translation (or, as there are of course several different translations, the English translation I read) featured La Fayette ten times (just as often as the French original). My two German translations feature La Fayette less often than the French and my English one. With that being said, I present to you the La Fayette-szenes in Les Misérables (Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, translated by Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee, based on the translation by C. E. Wilbour, published by Signet Classics, 1987)

Courfeyrac had a father whose name was M. de Courfeyrac. One of the false ideas of the Restoration in point of aristocracy and nobility was its faith in the particle. The particle, we know, has no significance. But the bourgeois of the time of La Minerve considered this poor de so highly that men thought themselves obliged to renounce it. M. de Chauvelin became M. Chauvelin,.M. de Caumartin was M. Caumartin, M. de Constant de Rebecque simply Benjamin Constant, M. de Lafayette just M. Lafayette. Courfeyrac did not wish to be backward, and called himself simply Courfeyrac. (Marius, book four, The Friends of the ABC, p. 653)

So the bourgeoisie, as well as the statesmen, felt the need for a man who would say "Halt!" An Although-Because. A composite individuality signifying both revolution and stability; in other words, assuring the present through the evident compatibility of the past with the future. -This man was found ready-made. His name was Louis-Philippe d'Orleans. The 221 made Louis-Philippe king. Lafayette undertook the coronation. He called it "the best of republics." (Saint-Denis, book one, A few Pages of History, p. 829)

I can not give you a direct written example where La Fayette said “the best of republics” but the statement mirrors his early impressions on Louis-Phillipe’s reign perfectly.

These memories associated with a king fired the bourgeoisie's enthusiasm. With his own hands he had demolished the last iron cage of Mont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI and used by Louis XV. He was the companion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette; he had belonged to the Jacobin Club; Mirabeau had slapped him on the shoulder; Danton had said to him, "Young man!" (Saint-Denis, book one, A few Pages of History, p. 834)

These doctrines, these theories, these resistances, the unforeseen necessity for the statesman to consult with the philosopher, confused evidences half seen, a new politics to create, in accord with the old world, and yet not too discordant with the ideal of the revolution; a state of affairs in which Lafayette had to be used to oppose Polignac, the intuition of progress glimpsed through the riots, the chambers, and the street, rivalries to balance around him, his faith in the Revolution, perhaps some uncertain eventual resignation arising from the vague acceptance of a definitive superior right, his desire to remain in his lineage, his family pride, his sincere respect for the people, his own honesty-all of this preoccupied Louis-Philippe almost painfully, and at times strong and as courageous as he was, overwhelmed him under the difficulties of being king. (Saint-Denis, book one, A few Pages of History, p. 841)

The distress of the people; laborers without bread; the last Prince de Conde lost in the darkness; Brussels driving away the Nassaus as Paris had driven away the Bourbons; Belgium offering herself to a French prince, and given to an English prince; the Russian hatred of Nicholas; at our back two demons of the south, Ferdinand in Spain, Miguel in Portugal; the earth quaking in Italy; Mettemich extending his hand over Bologna; France bluntly opposing Austria at Ancona; in the north some ill-omened sound of a hammer once more nailing Poland into its coffin; throughout Europe angry looks peering at France; England a suspicious ally, ready to push over anyone leaning and throw herself on anyone fallen; the peerage sheltering itself behind Beccaria to deny four heads to the law; the fteur-de-lis erased from the king's carriage; the cross tom down from Notre-Dame; Lafayette weakened; Lafitte ruined; Benjamin Constant dead in poverty; Casimir Perier dead from loss of power; the political disease and the social disease breaking out in the two capitals of the realm, one the city of thought, the other the city of labor; in Paris civil war, in Lyons servile war; in the two cities the same furnace glare; the flush of the crater on the forehead of the people; the South fanaticized, the West uneasy; the Duchesse de Berry in La Vendee; plots, conspiracies, uprising, cholera, added to the · dismal mutter of ideas, the dismal uproar of events. (Saint-Denis, book one, A few Pages of History, p. 843)

In an instant the little fellow was lifted, pushed, dragged, pulled, stuffed, crammed into the hole with no time to realize what was going on. And Gavroche, coming in after him, pushing back the ladder with a kick so it fell onto the grass, began to clap his hands, and cried, "Here we are! Hurrah for General Lafayette! Brats, my home!” Gavroche was in fact home. (Saint-Denis, book six, Little Gavroche, p. 956-957)

Hence, if insurrection in given cases may be, as Lafayette said, the most sacred of duties, émeute may be the most deadly of crimes. (Saint-Denis, book ten, June 5, 1832, p. 1052)

A circle was drawn up around the hearse. The vast assemblage fell silent. Lafayette spoke and bade farewell to Lamarque. It was a touching and noble moment, all heads uncovered, all hearts throbbed. Suddenly a man on horseback, dressed in black, appeared in the midst of the throng with a red flag, others say with a pike surmounted by a red cap. Lafayette looked away. Exelmans left the cortege. This red flag raised a storm and disappeared in it. From the Boulevard Bourdon to the Pont d'Austerlitz a roar like a surging billow stirred the multitude. Two prodigious shouts arose: "Lamarque to the Pantheon! Lafayette to the Hotel de Ville!" Some young men, amid the cheers of the throng, took up the harness and began to pull Lamarque in the hearse over the Pont d'Austerlitz, and Lafayette in a fiacre along the Quai Morland. In the cheering crowd that surrounded Lafayette, a German was noticed and pointed out, named Ludwig Snyder, who later died a centenarian, who had also been in the war of 1776, and who had fought at Trenton under Washington and under Lafayette at Brandywine. Meanwhile, on the left bank, the municipal cavalry was in motion and had just barred the bridge; on the right bank the dragoons left the Celestins and deployed along the Quai Morland. The men who were pulling Lafayette suddenly saw them at the bend of the Quai, and cried, "The dragoons!" The dragoons were advancing at a walk, in silence, their pistols in their holsters, their sabers in their sheaths, their muskets at rest, with an air of gloomy expectation. At two hundred paces from the little bridge, they halted. The fiacre bearing Lafayette made its way up to them, they opened their ranks, let it pass, and closed again behind it. At that moment the dragoons and the multitude came together. The women fled in terror. (Saint-Denis, book ten, June 5, 1832, p. 1059-1060)

Ludwig Snyder was a historical person who indeed existed and not a person that Hugo made up.

Alarming stories went the rounds, ominous rumors were spread. "That they had taken the Bank" ; "that, merely at thencloisters of Saint-Merry, there were six hundred, entrenched and fortified in the church"; "that the line was doubtful"; "that Armand Carrel had been to see Marshal Clausel and that the marshal had said, 'Have one regiment in place first,' " ; "that Lafayette was sick, but that he had said to them, 'I am with you. I will follow you anywhere that there is room for a chair' "; "that it was necessary to keep on their guard; that at night people would pillage the isolated houses in the deserted neighborhoods of Paris (the imagination of the police was recognized here, that Anne Radcliffe element in government)" ; "that a battery had been set up in the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher" ; "that Lobau and Bugeaud were conferring; and that at midnight, or daybreak at the latest, four columns would march at once on the center of the emeute, the first coming from the Bastille, the second from the Porte Saint-Martin, the third from La Greve, the fourth from Les Hailes"; "that perhaps the troops would evacuate Paris and fall back on the Champ de Mars"; "that nobody knew what might happen, but that certainly, this time, it was serious." (Saint-Denis, book ten, June 5, 1832, p. 1067-1068)

I could not find any historical reference about the chair-quote and I am pretty sure that Hugo made that up - however, it sounds very much like something that La Fayette would say - and Hugo and La Fayette probably knew each other, although superficially. Toward the end of La Fayette’s life, when Hugo was still a young men, there were different salons in Paris that both attended and it is quite likely that they both ran into each other during one of these meetings.

At this moment the bantam rooster voice of little Gavroche resounded through the barricade. The child had climbed up on a table to load his musket and was gaily singing the song then so popular:

En voyant Lafayette

Le gendarme repete

Sauvons-nous! Sauvons-nous! Sauvons-nous ! (Saint-Denis, book fourteen, The Grandeur of Despair, p. 1143)

This scene is not featured in my German version. It is mentioned that Gavroche sang a song but the text is not given in that translation.

They take you, they hold on to you, they never let go of you. The truth is, there was never any amour like that child. Now, what do you say of your Lafayette, your Benjamin Constant, and of your Tirecuir de Corcelles, who kill him for me ! It can't go on like this." (Jean Valjean, book three, Mire, but Soul, p. 1317)

La Fayette did not made it into the musical version of Les Misérables (neither in the French Original nor in the more popular English version) although he would have fit perfectly in there. I also have never seen him featured in any of the countless movie or TV adaptations - officially at least. Some adaptations that feature the funeral of General Lamarque have some extras running around that I sometimes turn into La Fayette - that was not the intended casting but it worked out for me nonetheless :-)

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Treat Your S(h)elf: The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise Of The East India Company (2019)

It was not the British government that began seizing great chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator – Clive.

William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise Of The East India Company

“One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late eighteenth century, when it became a common term across Britain.”

With these words, populist historian William Dalrymple, introduces his latest book The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. It is a perfect companion piece to his previous book ‘The Last Mughal’ which I have also read avidly. I’m a big fan of William Dalrymple’s writings as I’ve followed his literary output closely.

And this review is harder to be objective when you actually know the author and like him and his family personally. Born a Scot he was schooled at Ampleforth and Cambridge before he wrote his first much lauded travel book (In Xanadu 1989) just after graduation about his trek through Iran and South Asia. Other highly regarded books followed on such subjects as Byzantium and Afghanistan but mostly about his central love, Delhi. He has won many literary awards for his writings and other honours.  He slowly turned to writing histories and co-founding the Jaipur Literary Festival (one of the best I’ve ever been to). He has been living on and off outside Delhi on a farmhouse rasing his children and goats with his artist wife, Olivia. It’s delightfully charming.

Whatever he writes he never disappoints. This latest tome I enjoyed immensely even if I disagreed with some of his conclusions.

Dalrymple recounts the remarkable rise of the East India Company from its founding in 1599 to 1803 when it commanded an army twice the size of the British Army and ruled over the Indian subcontinent. Dalrymple targets the British East India Company for its questionable activities over two centuries in India. In the process, he unmasks a passel of crude, extravagant, feckless, greedy, reprobate rascals - the so-called indigenous rulers over whom the Company trampled to conquer India.

None of this is news to me as I’m already familiar with British imperial history but also speaking more personally. Like many other British families we had strong links to the British Empire, especially India, the jewel in its crown. Those links went all the way back to the East India Company. Typically the second or third sons of the landed gentry or others from the rising bourgeois classes with little financial prospects or advancement would seek their fortune overseas and the East India Company was the ticket to their success - or so they thought.  

The East India Company tends to get swept under the carpet and instead everyone focuses on the British Empire. But the birth of British colonialism wasn’t engineered in the halls of Whitehall or the Foreign Office but by what Dalrymple calls, “handful of businessmen from a boardroom in the City of London”. There wasn’t any grand design to speak of, just the pursuit of profit. And it was this that opened a Pandora’s Box that defined the following two centuries of British imperialism of India and the rise of its colonial empire.

The 18th-century triumph and then fall of the Company, and its role in founding what became Queen Victoria’s Indian empire is an astonishing story, which has been recounted in books including The Honourable Company by John Keay (1991) and The Corporation that Changed the World by Nick Robins (2006). It is well-trodden territory but Dalrymple, a historian and author who lives in India and has written widely about the Mughal empire, brings to it erudition, deep insight and an entertaining style.

He also takes a different and topical twist on the question how did a joint stock company founded in Elizabethan England come to replace the glorious Mughal Empire of India, ruling that great land for a hundred years? The answer lies mainly in the title of the book. The Anarchy refers not to the period of British rule but to the period before that time. Dalrymple mentions his title is drawn from a remark attributed to Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, whose Book of Admonition provided the author with the source material and who said of the 18th century “the once peaceful realm of India became the abode of Anarchy.” But Dalrymple goes further and tells the story as a warning from history on the perils of corporate power. The American edition sports the provocative subtitle, “The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire” (compared with the neutral British subtitle, “The Relentless Rise of the East India Company”). However I think the story Dalrymple really tells is also of how government power corrupts commercial enterprise.

It’s an amazing story and Dalrymple tells it with verve and style drawing, as in his previous books, on underused Indian, Persian and French sources. Dalrymple has a wonderful eye for detail e.g. After the Company’s charter is approved in 1600 the merchant adventures scout for ships to undertake the India voyage: “They have been to Deptford to ‘view severall shippes,’ one of which, the May Flowre, was later famous for a voyage heading in the opposite direction”.

What a Game of Thrones styled tv series it would make, and what a tragedy it unfolded in reality. A preface begins with the foundation of the Company by “Customer Smythe” in 1599, who already had experience trading with the Levant. Certain merchants were little better than pirates and the British lagged behind the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French and even the Spanish in their global aspirations. It was with envious eyes that they saw how Spain had so effectively despoiled Central America. The book fast-forwards to 1756, with successive chapters, and a degree of flexibility in chronology, taking the reader up to 1799. What was supposed to be a few trading posts in India and an import/export agreement became, within a century, a geopolitical force in its own right with its own standing army larger than the British Army.

It is a story of Machiavels from both Britain and India, of pitched battles, vying factions, the use of technology in warfare, strange moments of mutual respect, parliamentary impeachment featuring two of the greatest orators of the day (Edmund Burke and Richard Sheridan), blindings, rapes, psychopaths on both sides, unimaginable wealth, avarice, plunder, famine and worse. It is, in particular – because of the feuding groups loyal to the Mughals, the Marathas, the Rohilla Afghans, the so-called “bankers of the world” the Jagat Seths, and local tribal warlords – a kind of Game Of Thrones with pepper, silk and saltpetre. And that is even before we get to the British, characters such as Robert Clive “of India”, victor at the Battle of Plassey and subsequent suicide; the problematic figure of the cultured Warren Hastings, the whistle-blower who became an unfair scapegoat for Company atrocities; and Richard Wellesley, older brother to the more famous Arthur who became the Duke of Wellington. Co-ordinating such a vast canvas requires a deft hand, and Dalrymple manages this (although the list of dramatis personae is useful). There is even a French mercenary who is described as a “pastry cook, pyrotechnic and poltroon”.

When the Red Dragon slipped anchor at Woolwich early in 1601 to exploit the new royal charter granted to the East India Company, the venture started inauspiciously. The ship lay becalmed off Dover for two months before reaching the Indonesian sultanate of Aceh and seizing pepper, cinnamon and cloves from a passing Portuguese vessel. The Company was a strange beast from the start  “a joint stock company founded by a motley bunch of explorers and adventurers to trade the world’s riches. This was partly driven by Protestant England’s break with largely Catholic continental Europe. Isolated from their baffled neighbours, the English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield. This they did with piratical enthusiasm” William Dalrymple writes. From these Brexit-like roots, it grew into an enterprise that has never been replicated “a business with its own army that conquered swaths of India, seizing minerals, jewels and the wealth of Mughal emperors. This was mercenary globalisation, practised by what the philosopher Edmund Burke called “a state in the guise of a merchant””.

The East India Company’s charter began with an original sin - Elizabeth I granted the company a perpetual monopoly on trade with the East Indies. With its monopoly giving it enhanced access to credit and vast wealth from Indian trade, it’s no surprise that the company grew to control an eighth of all Britain’s imports by the 1750s. Yet it was still primarily a trading company, with some military capacity to defend its factories. That changed thanks to a well-known problem in institutional economics - opportunism by a company agent, in this case Robert Clive of India, who in time became the richest self-made man in the world in time.

Like many start-ups, it had to pivot in its early days, giving up on competing with the entrenched Dutch East India Company in the Spice Islands, and instead specialising in cotton and calico from India. It was an accidental strategy, but it introduced early officials including Sir Thomas Roe to “a world of almost unimaginable splendour” in India, run by the cultured Mughals.

The Nawab of Bengal called the English “a company of base, quarrelling people and foul dealers”, and one local had it that “they live like Englishmen and die like rotten sheep”. But the Company had on its side the adaptiveness and energy of capitalism. It also had a force of 260,000, which was decisive when it stopped negotiating with the Mughals and went to war. After the Battle of Buxar in 1764, “the English gentlemen took off their hats to clap the defeated Shuja ud-Daula, before reinstalling him as a tame ruler, backed by the Company’s Indian troops, and paying it a huge subsidy. “We have at last arrived at that critical Conjuncture, which I have long foreseen” wrote Robert Clive, the “curt, withdrawn and socially awkward young accountant” whose risk-taking and aggression secured crucial military victories for the Company. It was a high point for “the most opulent company in the world,” as Robert Clive described it.

So how was a humble group of British merchants able to take over one of the great empires of history? Under Aurangzeb, the fanatic and ruthless Mughal emperor (1658-1707), the empire grew to its largest geographic extent but only because of decades of continuous warfare and attendant taxing, pillaging, famine, misery and mass death. It was a classic case of the eventual fall of a great power through military over-extension.

At Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, a power struggle ensued but none could command. “Mughal succession disputes and a string of weak and powerless emperors exacerbated the sense of imperial crisis: three emperors were murdered (one was, in addition, first blinded with a hot needle); the mother of one ruler was strangled and the father of another forced off a precipice on his elephant. In the worst year of all, 1719, four different Emperors occupied the Peacock Throne in rapid succession. According to the Mughal historian Khair ud-Din Illahabadi … ‘Disorder and corruption no longer sought to hide themselves and the once peaceful realm of India became a lair of Anarchy’”.

Seeing the chaos at the top, local rulers stopped paying tribute and tried to establish their own power bases. The result was more warfare and a decline in trade as banditry made it unsafe to travel. The Empire appeared ripe to fall. “Delhi in 1737 had around 2 million inhabitants. Larger than London and Paris combined, it was still the most prosperous and magnificent city between Ottoman Istanbul and Imperial Edo (Tokyo). As the Empire fell apart around it, it hung like an overripe mango, huge and inviting, yet clearly in decay, ready to fall and disintegrate”.

In 1739 the mango was plucked by the Persian warlord Nader Shah. Using the latest military technology, horse-mounted cannon, Shah devastated a much larger force of Mughal troops and “managed to capture the Emperor himself by the simple ruse of inviting him to dinner, then refusing to let him leave.” In Delhi, Nader Shah massacred a hundred thousand people and then, after 57 days of pillaging and plundering, left with two hundred years’ worth of Mughal treasure carried on “700 elephants, 4,000 camels and 12,000 horses carrying wagons all laden with gold, silver and precious stones”.

At this time, the East India Company would have probably preferred a stable India but through a series of unforeseen events it gained in relative power as the rest of India crumbled. With the decline of the Mughals, the biggest military power in India was the Marathas and they attacked Bengal, the richest Indian province, looting, plundering, raping and killing as many as 400,000 civilians. Fearing the Maratha hordes, Bengalis fled to the only safe area in the region, the company stronghold in Calcutta. “What was a nightmare for Bengal turned out to be a major opportunity for the Company. Against artillery and cities defended by the trained musketeers of the European powers, the Maratha cavalry was ineffective. Calcutta in particular was protected by a deep defensive ditch especially dug by the Company to keep the Maratha cavalry at bay, and displaced Bengalis now poured over it into the town that they believed offered better protection than any other in the region, more than tripling the size of Calcutta in a decade. … But it was not just the protection of a fortification that was the attraction. Already Calcutta had become a haven of private enterprise, drawing in not just Bengali textile merchants and moneylenders, but also Parsis, Gujaratis and Marwari entrepreneurs and business houses who found it a safe and sheltered environment in which to make their fortunes”. In an early example of what might be called a “charter city,”

English commercial law also attracted entrepreneurs to Calcutta. The “city’s legal system and the availability of a framework of English commercial law and formal commercial contracts, enforceable by the state, all contributed to making it increasingly the destination of choice for merchants and bankers from across Asia”.

The Company benefited by another unforeseen circumstance, Siraj ud-Daula, the Nawab (ruler) of Bengal, was a psychotic rapist who got his kicks from sinking ferry boats in the Ganges and watching the travelers drown. Siraj was uniformly hated by everyone who knew him. “Not one of the many sources for the period — Persian, Bengali, Mughal, French, Dutch or English — has a good word to say about Siraj”. Despite his flaws, Siraj might have stayed in power had he not made the fatal mistake of striking his banker. The Jagat Seth bankers took their revenge when Siraj ud-Daula came into conflict with the Company under Robert Clive. Conspiring with Clive, the Seths arranged for the Nawab’s general to abandon him and thus the Battle of Plassey was won and the stage set for the East India Company.

In typical fashion, Dalrymple devotes half a dozen pages to the Company’s defeat at Pollidur in 1780 by Haider Ali and his son, Tipu, but a few paragraphs to its significance (Haider could have expelled the Company from much of southern India but failed to pursue his advantage). The reader is not spared the gory details.

“Such as were saved from immediate death,” reads a quote from a British survivor about his fellow troops, “were so crowded together…several were in a state of suffocation, while others from the weight of the dead bodies that had fallen upon them were fixed to the spot and therefore at the mercy of the enemy…Some were trampled under the feet of elephants, camels, and horses. Those who were stripped of their clothing lay exposed to the scorching sun, without water and died a lingering and miserable death, becoming prey to ravenous wild animals.”

Many further battles and adventures would ensue before the British were firmly ensconced by 1803 but the general outline of the story remained the same. The EIC prospered due to a combination of luck, disarray among the Company’s rivals and good financing.

The Mughal emperor Shah Alam, for example, had been forced to flee Delhi leaving it to be ruled by a succession of Persian, Afghani and Maratha warlords. But after wandering across eastern India for many years, he regathered his army, retook Delhi and almost restored Mughal power. At a key moment, however, he invited into the Red Fort with open arms his “adopted” son, Ghulam Qadir. Ghulam was the actual son of Zabita Khan who had been defeated by Shah Alam sixteen years earlier. Ghulam, at that time a young boy, had been taken hostage by Shah Alam and raised like a son, albeit a son whom Alam probably used as a catamite. Expecting gratitude, Shah Alam instead found Ghulam driven mad.  Ghulam Qadir, a psychopath, ordered a minion to blind Shah Alam: “With his Afghan knife….Qandahari Khan first cut one of Shah Alam’s eyes out of its socket; then, the other eye was wrenched out…Shah Alam flopped on the ground like a chicken with its neck cut.” Ghulam took over the Red Fort and after cutting out the eyes of the Mughal emperor, immediately calling for a painter to immortalise the event.

A few pages on, Ghulam Qadir gets his just dessert. Captured by an ally of the emperor, he is hung in a cage, his ears, nose, tongue, and upper lip cut off, his eyes scooped out, then his hands cut off, followed by his genitals and head. Dalrymple out-grosses himself with the description of Ahmad Shah Durrani, the Afghan invader of India, dying of leprosy with “maggots….dropping from the upper part of his putrefying nose into his mouth and food as he ate.”

By 1803, the Company’s army had defeated the Maratha gunners and their French officers, installed Shah Alam as a puppet back on his imitation Peacock Throne in Delhi, and the Company ruled all of India virtually.

Indeed as late as 1803, the Marathas too might have defeated the British but rivalry between Tukoji Holkar and Daulat Rao Scindia prevented an alliance. “Here Wellesley’s masterstroke was to send Holkar a captured letter from Scindia in which the latter plotted with Peshwa Baji Rao to overthrow Holkar … ‘After the war is over, we shall both wreak our full vengeance upon him.’ … After receiving this, Holkar, who had just made the first two days march towards Scindia, turned back and firmly declined to join the coalition”.

For Dalrymple the crucial point was the unsanctioned actions of Robert Clive and the bullying of Shah Alam in the rise of the East India Company.

The Jagat Seths then bribed the company men to attack Siraj. Clive, with an eye for personal gain, was happy attack Siraj at the behest of the Jagat Seths even if the company directors had no part in this. They “consistently abhorred ambitious plans of conquest,” he notes. Clive’s defeat of Siraj at Plassey and the subsequent chain of events that led to Shah Alam giving tax-raising powers to the company in 1765 may be history’s most egregious example of the principal-agent problem.

Thus, the East India Company acquired by accident the ultimate economic rent — a secure, unearned income stream. Company cronies initially thwarted attempts at oversight in London, but a government bailout in 1772 following the Bengal Famine and the collapse of Ayr Bank confirmed the crown’s interest in the company, which had now become Too Big to Fail. Adam Smith called the company’s twin roles of trader and sovereign a “strange absurdity” in Book IV of The Wealth of Nations (unfortunately, Smith’s long condemnatory discussion of the company receives only a cursory reference from Dalrymple).

As part of the bailout, Parliament passed the Tea Act to help the company dump its unsold products on the American colonies by giving it the monopoly on legal tea there (Americans drank mostly smuggled Dutch tea). This, of course, led to the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution.

By 1784, Parliament had set up an oversight board that increasingly dictated the company’s political affairs. The attempted impeachment of Governor-General Warren Hastings by the House of Lords in 1788 confirmed that the company was no longer its own master. By that stage, the company was an arm of the state. Dalrymple’s coverage of the subsequent racist policies of Lord Cornwallis and the military adventures of Richard Wellesley make for compelling reading, but they are not examples of unfettered corporate power.

Overlaid on top of luck and disorder, was the simple fact that the Company paid its bills. Indeed, the Company paid its sepoys (Indian troops) considerably more than did any of its rivals and it paid them on time. It was able to do so because Indian bankers and moneylenders trusted the Company. “In the end it was this access to unlimited reserves of credit, partly through stable flows of land revenues, and partly through collaboration of Indian moneylenders and financiers, that in this period finally gave the Company its edge over their Indian rivals. It was no longer superior European military technology, nor powers of administration that made the difference. It was the ability to mobilise and transfer massive financial resources that enabled the Company to put the largest and best-trained army in the eastern world into the field”.

Dalrymple pretty much loses interest once the Company gains full control. “This book does not aim to provide a complete history of the East India Company,” he writes. He skips past one mention of Hong Kong, which the East India Company seized after the opium wars in China. A few sentences record the 1857 uprising of Indian soldiers that led to the British government taking India from the Company and establishing the Raj that lasted until Indian independence in 1947.

The author makes passing reference to the fact that the struggle for American independence was underway for much of the period about which he writes. He notes that It was British East India Company tea that patriots dumped into Boston harbor in 1773. American colonists were so grateful that the Mysore sultans tied up British forces that might have been deployed in America, they named a warship the Hyder Ali. Lord Cornwallis provides a connection, having surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown in 1781, an event confirming American independence, and turning up in 1786 in India as governor-general, taking Tipu Sultan’s surrender in 1792.

That reference raises an interesting side question that may someday deserve closer examination - Why were American colonists successful in driving off their British overlords. At the same time, Indian aristocracy and the masses over whom they ruled were unable to rid themselves of the British East India Company and the British Raj for another century?

No heroes emerge from Dalrymple’s expansive account that is rich, even overwhelming in detail. He covers two centuries but focuses on the period between 1765 and 1803 when the Company was transformed from a commercial operation to military and totalitarian — to use an appropriate term derived from Sanskrit - juggernaut. Among the multitude of characters involved in this sordid story are a few British names familiar in general history, Robert Clive of India, Warren Hastings, Lord Cornwallis, and Colonel Arthur Wellesley, who was better known long after he departed India as the Duke of Wellington. None - with the exception of Hastings - escape the scathing indictment of Dalrymple’s pen.

At the core of the story we meet Robert Clive, an emblematic character who from being a juvenile delinquent and suicidal lunatic rose to rule India, eventually killing himself in the aftermath of a corruption scandal. In particular Robert Clive comes in for much criticism by Dalrymple. After putting down one rebellion, Clive managed to send back £232 million, of which he personally received £22m. There was a rumour that, on his return to England, his wife’s pet ferret wore a necklace of jewels worth £2,500. Contrast that with the horrors of the 1769 famine: farmers selling their tools, rivers so full of corpses that the fish were inedible, one administrator seeing 40 dead bodies within 20 yards of his home, even cannibalism, all while the Company was stockpiling rice. Some Indian weavers even chopped off their own thumbs to avoid being forced to work and pay the exorbitant taxes that would be imposed on them. The Great Bengal famine of 1770 had already led to unease in London at its methods. “We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped,” wrote the Whig politician Horace Walpole. “I stand astonished by my own moderation,” Clive protested, after outrage intensified when the Company had to be bailed out by the British government in 1772. Clive took his own life in disgrace. 

Warren Hastings, whom Dalrymple portrays as the more sensitive and sympathetic Company man, was first made governor general of India for 12 years and later endured seven years of impeachment for corruption before acquittal. Hastings showed “deep respect” for India and Indians, writes, Dalrymple, as opposed to most other Europeans in India to suck out as much as possible of the subcontinent’s resources and wealth. “In truth, I love India a little more than my own country,” wrote Hastings, who spoke good Bengali and Urdu, as well as fluent Persian. “(Edmund) Burke had defended Robert Clive (first Governor General of Bengal) against parliamentary enquiry, and so helped exonerate someone who genuinely was a ruthlessly unprincipled plunderer. Now he directed his skills of oratory against Warren Hastings (who was finally impeached), a man who, by virtue of his position, was certainly the symbol of an entire system of mercantile oppression in India, but who had personally done much to begin the process of regulating and reforming the Company, and who had probably done more than any other Company official to rein in the worst excesses of its rule,” Dalrymple writes. At his public impeachment hearing in 1788, Burke thundered: “We have brought before you…..one in whom all the frauds, all the peculation, all the violence, all the tyranny in India are embodied.’ They got the wrong man but, by the time he was cleared in 1795, the British state was steadily absorbing the Company, denouncing its methods but retaining many of its assets.

Dalrymple has a soft spot for a couple of Indian locals. “The British consistently portrayed Tipu as a savage and fanatical barbarian,” Dalrymple writes, “but he was in truth a connoisseur and an intellectual…” Of course, Tipu, Dalrymple confesses a bit later, had rebels’ “arms, legs, ears, and noses cut off before being hanged” as well as forcibly circumcising captives and converting them to Islam.

Emperor Shah Alam (1728-1806) is contemporary for much of the time Dalrymple covers. “His was…a life marked by kindness, decency, integrity and learning at a time when such qualities were in short supply…he…managed to keep the Mughul flame alive through the worst of the Great Anarchy….” Dalrymple portrays a most intriguing figure in Emperor Shah Alam, a man attracted to mysticism and yet as prepared as his contemporaries to double-deal; someone who endures exile and torture and who outlives, albeit in a melancholy fashion, his enemies. Despite his lack of wealth, troops or political power, the very nature of his being emperor still, it seems, inspired affection.

Part of Dalrymple’s excellence is in the use of Indian sources – he takes numerous quotes from Ghulam Hussain Khan, acclaimed by Dalrymple as “brilliant,” who threads the story as an 18th-century historian on his untranslated works, Seir Mutaqherin (Review of Modern Times). Dalrymple has used a trove of company documents in Britain and India as well as Persian-language histories, much of which he shares in English translation with the reader. However he does this a bit too often and portions of his account can seem more assembled than written.

These pages are also brimming with anecdotes retold with Dalrymple’s distinctive delight in the piquant, equivoque and gory: we have historical moments when “it seemed as if it were raining blood, for the drains were streaming with it” (quoted from a report c1740 regarding events that preceded Nadir Shah’s infamous looting of the peacock throne) as well as duels between Company officials so busy with their in-fighting that it’s a miracle they could perform their work at all; there’s also homosexuality, homophobia, sexual torture, castrations, cannibalism, brothels and gonorrhoea.

The principal protagonists of the “Black Hole of Calcutta” incident are both, naturally, certified pervs: Siraj ud-Daula is a “serial bisexual rapist” while his opponent Governor Drake is having an “affair with his sister”. And one particular Mughal governor liked to throw tax defaulters in pits of rotting shit (“the stench was so offensive, that it almost suffocated anyone who came near it”). All this gives one a rough idea of what historically important people were up to according to Dalrymple. But all things considered, Dalrymple’s research is solid and heavily annotated.

However entertaining and widely researched using unused Urdu and Persian sources, Dalrymple’s overall approach doesn’t tell us very much about the general tendency in eighteenth-century imperial activity, and particularly that of the British, that we didn’t already know. And other things he downplays or neglects. Thus, the East India Company was one of a series of ‘national’ East India companies, including those of France, the Netherlands and Sweden. Moreover, for Britain, there was the Hudson Bay Company, the Royal African Company, and the chartered companies involved in North America, as well, for example, as the Bank of England.  Delegated authority in this form or shared state/private activities were a major part of governance. To assume from the modern perspective of state authority that this was necessarily inadequate is misleading as well as teleological. Indeed, Dalrymple offers no real evidence for his view. Was Portuguese India, where the state had a larger role, ‘better’?

Secondly, let us look at India as a whole. There is an established scholarly debate to which Dalrymple makes no ground breaking contribution. This debate focuses on the question of whether, after the death in 1707 of the mighty Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707), the focus should be on decline and chaos or, instead, on the development of a tier of powers within the sub-continent, for example Hyderabad. In the latter perspective, the East India Company (EIC) emerges as one and, eventually, the most successful of the successor powers. That raises questions of comparative efficiency and how the EIC succeeded in the Indian military labour market, this helping in defeating the Marathas in the 1800s.

An Indian power, the EIC was also a ‘foreign’ one; although foreignness should not be understood in modern terms. As a ‘foreign’ one, the EIC was not alone among the successful players, and was not even particularly successful, other than against marginal players, until the 1760s.  Compared to Nadir Shah of Persia in the late 1730s (on whom Michael Axworthy is well worth reading), or the Afghans from the late 1750s (on whom Jos Gommans is best), the EIC was limited on land. This was part of a longstanding pattern, encompassing indeed, to a degree, the Mughals. Dalrymple fails to address this comparative context adequately.

Dalrymple seems particularly incensed at “corporate violence” and in a (mercifully short) final chapter alludes to Exxon and the United Fruit Company. Indeed Dalrymple has a pitch ” that globalisation is rooted here, albeit that “the world’s largest corporations…..are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company.”

It is an interesting question to ask: How might the actions of these corporate raiders have differed from those of a state? It’s not clear, for example, that the EIC was any worse than the average Indian ruler and surely these stationary bandits were better than roving bandits like Nader Shah. The EIC may have looted India but economic historian Tirthankar Roy explains that: “Much of the money that Clive and his henchmen looted from India came from the treasury of the nawab. The Indian princes, ‘walking jeweler’s shops’ as an American merchant called them, spent more money on pearls and diamonds than on infrastructural developments or welfare measures for the poor. If the Company transferred taxpayers’ money from the pockets of an Indian nobleman to its own pockets, the transfer might have bankrupted pearl merchants and reduced the number of people in the harem, but would make little difference to the ordinary Indian.”

Moreover, although it began as a private-firm, the EIC became so regulated by Parliament that Hejeebu (2016) concludes, “After 1773, little of the Company’s commercial ethos survived in India.” Certainly, by the time the brothers Wellesley were making their final push for territorial acquisition, the company directors back in London were pulling out their hair and begging for fewer expensive wars and more trading profits.

So also for eighteenth-century Asia as a whole. Dalrymple has it in for the form of capitalism the EIC represents; but it was less destructive than the Manchu conquest of Xinjiang in the 1750s, or, indeed, the Afghan destruction of Safavid rule in Persia in the early 1720s. Such comparative points would have been offered Dalrymple the opportunity to deploy scholarship and judgment, and, indeed, raise interesting questions about the conceptualisation and methodologies of cross-cultural and diachronic comparison.

Focusing anew on India, the extent to which the Mughal achievement in subjugating the Deccan was itself transient might be underlined, and, alongside consideration, of the Maratha-Mughal struggle in the late seventeenth century, that provides another perspective on subsequent developments. The extent to which Bengal, for example, did not know much peace prior to the EIC is worthy of consideration. It also helps explain why so many local interests found it appropriate, as well as convenient, to ally with the EIC. It brought a degree of protection for the regional economy and offered defence against Maratha, Afghan, and other, attacks and/or exactions. The terms of entry into a British-led global economy were less unwelcome than later nationalist writers might suggest. Dalrymple himself cites Trotsky, who was no guide to the period. To turn to other specifics is only to underline these points.

After Warren Hastings’ impeachment which in effect brought to an end the era when “almost all of India south of [Delhi] was…..effectively ruled by a handful of businessmen from a boardroom in the City of London.” It is hard to find a simple lesson, beyond Dalrymple’s point that talk of Britain having conquered India ‘disguises a much more sinister reality’.

One of the great advantages non-fiction has over fiction is that you cannot make it up, and in the case of the East India Company, you cannot make it up to an extent that beggars belief. William Dalrymple has been for some years one of the most eloquent and assiduous chroniclers of Indian history. With this new work, he sounds a minatory note. The East India Company may be history, but it has warnings for the future. It was “the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok”. Wryly, he writes that at least Walmart doesn’t own a fleet of nuclear submarines and Facebook doesn’t have regiments of infantry.

Yet Facebook and Uber does indeed have the potential power to usurp national authority - Facebook can sway elections through its monopoly on how people consume their news for instance. But they do not seize physical territory as Dalrymple states. Even an oil company with private guards in a war-torn country does not compare these days. This doesn’t exonerate corporations though. I know from personal experience of working in the corporate world that it attracts its fair share of psychopaths and cold blooded operators obsessed with the bottom lines of their balance sheets and the worship of the fortunes of their share prices and the lengths they go to would indeed come close to or cross over moral and legal lines. Perhaps the moral is to keep a stern eye on ‘corporate influence, with its fatal blend of power, money and unaccountability’. Clive reflected after Buxar, ‘We must indeed become Nabobs ourselves in Fact if not in Name…..We must go forward, for to retract is impossible.’ That was the nature of the beast. 

Speaking of being beastly, some readers may disagree with the more radical views presented in taking apart the imperialist project and showed it for what it was - not about civilising savages, but about brutally exploiting civilised humans by treating them as savages. I think that’s partly true but not the whole story as Dalrymple will freely concede himself. Imperial history is a charged subject and they defy lazy Manichean conclusions of good guys and bad guys.

Dalrymple’s book is an excellent example of popular history - engaging, entertaining, readable, and informative. However, I honestly think he should have stuck to the history and not tried to draw out a trustbusting parallel with today’s big companies. Where the parallels exist, they are to do with cronyism, rent-seeking, and bailouts, all of which are primarily sins of government. 

The Anarchy remains though a page-turning history of the rise of the East India Company with plenty of raw material to enjoy and to think about. To my mind the title ‘The Anarchy’ is brilliantly and appositely chosen. There are in fact two anarchies here; the anarchy of the competing regimes in India, and the anarchy – literally, without leaders or rules – of the East India Company itself, a corporation that put itself above law. The dangers of power without governance are depicted in an exemplary fashion. Dalrymple has done a great service in not just writing an eminently readable history of 18th century India, but in reflecting on how so much of it serves as a warning for our own time when chaos runs amok from those seeking to be above the law.

[n3rdybird]

The Serpent Ch 1

Written for @tilltheendwilliwrite​‘s 7.7k Celebration/Covid Sucks Challenge.  My prompt was this image.

Not gonna lie, this got away from me a bit, and looks like it might flesh out into several chapters.  Hope you enjoy!

Vikings

OFCxIvar

Rating:Teen

Warnings: Blood/Battle/Curse words

The singing of swords echoed through the trees. Ivar and his men mowed down English soldiers with relish, screaming their victory. Ivar, atop his chariot, pounded his axe against the woodside, eager for more. The wood bridge was no-man’s land as both sides rushed each other, dying over the water. Ivar urged his horse forward, his blood pounding with every Englishman slain. Out of nowhere, a sword caught his arm, causing his grip on his horse's reins to falter. The horse panicked, causing the cart to careen sideways on the rickety bridge. The chariot slammed into the side of the bridge, sending Ivar over the edge. He had but a moment to see the clouded sky overhead, before falling into the churning river.

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The calm quiet of the glade was an illusion. The plush green moss underfoot, the soft rushing of the river, the clear blue sky. By all accounts, it was a peaceful day. But the muddied red river and corpses along the banks betrayed that notion.

 A lone figure picked through the woods, a piebald horse trailing after her a few paces behind. She laughed as the horse would pause to chomp at the occasional green leaf. The horse would toss his head, annoyed, when she would urge him forward with a click of her tongue. He would take his revenge by nibbling at her chestnut brown hair in defiance. Legs encased in sturdy leather leggings, her torso covered by a thick band topped with animal fur. Her boots were soft and pliant; she didn't make a sound as she scanned the grounds for various plants.

 She paused when coming upon the bloody scene. She hitched her herb basket higher up on her back before squatting to inspect the closest body. The chain mail and metalwork of his armor pointed to a soldier of Lord Aldrich. She curled her lip in distaste; she had run-ins with his men before. Her family was not welcome to the ‘civilized’ English. She scavenged his corpse, searching for anything of use. When she found nothing, she moved on to the next. The leather armor was similar to what her people wore but thicker and heavy with metal studs. These men were not her kin, nor Alrich’s. They were someone new.

 While towns did not appeal to her, they were a great source of news. She heard the whispers of the elders, as they discussed the possible allies or enemies. Northmen, they were called. The heathen monsters from across the sea; known for pillaging, killing, wearing their enemies blood like warpaint. Something most parents would tell children to frighten them to stay close to home. Much like the tales that surrounded her kin. But this scene proved they were human and bled, like all men.

 She made her way to each of the bodies, picking over each one. She found very little, refusing to take any of the adornments of the unknown warriors. If they were fighting with her clan’s enemies, they deserved the courtesy of not being picked over like carrion. She found a dagger tucked into a waterlogged belt. It was well made and would be easy for her to wield. She stood and brushed off her knees, not wanting to linger when a groan caught her attention. Brandishing the purloined knife, her eyes darted around to find the source.

 As the groan reverberated again, she pinpointed its source to a fallen log. The enormous oak was half-submerged under the river. The tree's limbs acted like a sieve to catch anything in the river’s current. Wedged in the branches was a body. Curiosity winning out against sense, the woman wadded into the water, following the sound. She tossed the debris aside, revealing a young man, pale but breathing. He had blood clotting at his temple and a nasty gash on his shoulder. He wasn’t one of Aldrich’s men that was certain. His braided hair was decorated with beadwork and his armor matching that of the Northmen. She kneeled, the cold water lapping at her thighs, and reached out to trace his brow. He was young, no wrinkles but a few silvery white scars spaced apart on his skin, most likely from battle. He was a handsome sort, and no doubt a person of importance, if his stylized armor was to go by. She was so focused on her appraisal that she didn’t see him move until it was too late.

 Pain shot up her arm, her wrist held in a bruising grip.

 “Hvem er du?” his voice growled out. 

 Although his language was unfamiliar, his gravel-toned voice made her shudder. His forceful tone and his grip were intimidating, but the bright blue eyes staring drew her in. Steeling herself, she wrenched her wrist away and reached for the dagger at her waist. The warrior was quicker and had her dagger against her throat in a flash.

 “Hvem er du!” he yelled, the blade demanding against her skin. He trembled and blinked, his eyes unfocusing. He was weak and close to falling unconscious again.

 She leaned into the blade, the metal cutting her flesh. He stared at the blood trickling down her next, before bringing his piercing blue eyes back to hers.

 “Elda,” she introduced, taking the knife from his weakening grip and putting his hand on her chest.

 “Ivar,” he mumbled before his head lolled forward. Elda stood up, tucking the knife back into her waistband. He was strong, that was certain. And if half of his men were as strong as he, perhaps her family’s future would not be so bleak. Decision made, she whistled, and her horse plodded closer, whinnying at his owner.

 “Come closer Paega, you coward. I’m not carrying this man back to the hut alone.” He tossed his mane and snorted.

 “Fine,” she huffed, hefting Ivar as well as she was able. He was heavier than she expected, his upper body strong under his leathers. She clicked her tongue at her horse, and he kneeled, allowing Elda to drape the man over his back. Paega straightened up, dancing a bit in place to get used to the weight on his back.

 “Come on now boy, let’s get back home.”

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 The trek back to her camp took Elda longer than anticipated. While Paega had a smooth gait, picking through the woods caused the rouncey to stumble at times. She tried to take it slow so as to not aggravate the Northman’s injuries. She would be disappointed if he died after the trouble of getting him out of the river.

 Elda crested a hill and breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of her camp. The wood and thatched roof were modest, but it was hers. The small hut was nestled in a glade surrounded by rocky outcroppings. It had some supplies and a lean-to barn for Paega. The hut itself was sparse, a single room with only one wall. But it was enough for her when she was away from home and needed a safe refuge.

 The young woman was able to get Ivar inside with some effort, with Paega all but dumping the Northman onto the wood. After his victorious delivery, the chestnut horse busied himself with a bucket of hay.

 The brunette stretched, her back sore from hauling the unconscious man across her threshold. For now, Ivar lay on a bedroll fashioned from furs. Elda collected supplies, herbs, and clean linen dressings and a bowl of water. She arranged them next to the bedroll. The next step would be to undress him. Elda knelt next to his prone form, her fingers attempting to undo all the buckles and straps. She eyed the strange metal skeleton encasing his legs but passed on trying to figure it out. His shoulder was the priority. Each layer she set aside until skin slick with blood revealed itself.

 Ivar wasn’t the first man or boy she’d seen shirtless. Her skills as a healer had her seeing many people at stages of undress. Ivar was no boy. His upper body was all sinewy muscles and scattered scars. Elda allowed herself a moment to gaze at the ink adorning his shoulders, wondering what deeds he had completed to earn them or if he had more. Shaking her head, she turned her attention to the gash on his arm. It spanned his bicep to his shoulder, deep, but not fatal. The blood loss combined with the cold water of the river led to his current state. She cleaned the wound, first with water to wash away any dirt, and then again with an herbal rinse. If it was painful, only the slightest twitch from her charge betrayed that. Needle and thread in hand, she closed the angry wound with even, small stitches. It would scar, but what was another in his already impressive collection. Ivar grunted in his delirium and opened his eyes.

 He panicked sluggishly, attempting to push Elda away.

 “Stop Ivar,” she chided, pushing his arm back down with a firm hand. Even in his state, he was almost strong enough to toss her aside. Elda braced his head and brought an earthenware bowl to his lips, water for his parched mouth. He slurped at the bowl, causing him to cough when he took too much. She pulled the bowl from his mouth, even though he groaned in disappointment.

 A poultice was next, fresh cloth steeped in warm water and herbs. Goldenrod to stop the bleeding. Garlic to prevent infection. Feverfew to keep him from falling to fever. With the remedy placed on his arm, and then wrapped tight, Elda turned her trained eyes on the rest of him. The gash on his temple was superficial but she cleaned and treated it nonetheless. Ivar watched her through half-lidded eyes, not trusting Elda. She didn’t see any more wounds aside from a few scrapes and bruises on his top half, so she reached for his legs.

 “No!” he half roared/half slurred, sitting up to push her hands away. Elda jerked at his outburst, knocking over her bowl. The bloody water splashed across the wood, soaking into the furs. She cursed and stood up.

 “Ungrateful ass!” Elda couldn’t help the irritation coloring her tone. She gathered her supplies as Ivar groaned, clutching his shoulder.

 “Lay still, else you will undo all of my hard work. And I refuse to stitch you up again,” she said, pushing the stubborn warrior back down. He grunted but allowed Elda to arrange the bedding.

 Within moments, Ivar seemed to either fall asleep or unconscious. To be fair, she normally wouldn’t care, he wasn't one of her people. But the elders had a vested interest in the Northmen. After all, the enemy of their enemy is their friend. Or at least their potential ally. She stood and walked to Paega who had finished his meal and nibbled at her pants looking for more.

 She laughed, feeling some of the tension leave her shoulders. Paega was a gift from her father when he realized he couldn't stop her wandering. A sure-footed horse to help her escape should she run into trouble. Over the years, Paega had become her constant companion, seeming to know what she was feeling.

 “Is this a foolish idea sweet boy?” she asked the horse, who nickered in response. Elda stroked his nose, the velvety skin of his nose soft against her hands.

 Now all she had to do was get her charge to Valkwind without running into Lord Alrich’s men. Or any Northmen who might take offense to her holding one of their own. She could only hope that he would be less combative once the fog of battle waned.

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Ivar awoke with a start and immediately reached for his weapon, which was not at his side. He was without a shirt and winced when his shoulder pulled. He touched the bandages wrapped around his arm, sniffing the herbal scent wafted from it. The wound was stiff, but not burning with infection. The hovel he was in was little more than a lean-to with a single wall and a raised wooden floor of rough-hewn wood. There were few supplies stashed in boxes or hanging from the roof.

 His legs seemed a bit sore, but that was common. However, his leg braces showed damage. He didn’t remember much after catching the blow to his arm, but he remembered falling into the water. The metal was bent in a few places, snapped in others. Ivar cursed under his breath. He wasn't sure if they would hold if he stood, or if they'd crumble under his weight.

 A movement to his left drew his attention, and he saw a brown and white horse nosing at some of the hanging herbs.

 “Paega!” a feminine voice scolded the horse. A young woman with a pheasant in one hand and a bow around her chest. The horse seemed immune to the chastisement and took a leaf in defiance. The woman grumbled something in a language Ivar didn’t understand but patted the horse's neck. Ivar followed her every move, watching for any sign of aggression. His hands flexed, wishing he had a weapon in his grasp.

 “This north man believes me to be an enemy. Surely he’s noticed I have bandaged his wounds,” she said to the horse, turning her gaze to Ivar. While she was speaking English, her accent betrayed the fact it wasn't her first language.

 “Who are you?” he asked. The woman tilted her head at his use of English and smiled.

 “I am sure that I answered that yesterday, Ivar,” she said, with mirth in her eyes. He frowned at her flippant attitude. Did she know who she was addressing?

 “To remind you, my name is Elda,” she introduced with a little bow. Ivar bristled.  Was she mocking him?

 “Where are my men? Where am I?”

 “The alive ones, I do not know. The dead ones, several leagues to the south. It is where I found you, after all. Half-dead. Gratitude would be appropriate,” Elda said with a nod to his shoulder. She took a seat at the edge of the hut and began plucking the feathers with efficient movements. Instead of thanking her, Ivar huffed and reached for his shirt. He twisted his body to reach it and did not see her eyes widen at the design inked on his back.

 “You will take me back to my camp,” he ordered, pulling the shirt over his head with a wince.

 “I will not,” she retorted, continuing her plucking. “I do not know where your camp is located, nor do I wish to run into Aldrich’s men.”

 At the mention of his enemy, Ivar studied the woman. She didn’t seem like the typical English woman. No long swishing skirts, her hair wasn't coiffed but pulled into a loose braid. He admired the way her leather leggings clung to her hips. Elda reminded him of a shield maiden of his people, but less refined. She wore no gold adornments, her few pieces of jewelry made of polished stones or carved bone.

 “Aldrich is lord of these lands, yet you speak his name with contempt,” he said, zeroing in on the knife at her hip. If he could get it away from her, he could make his way back to his men. He did not relish losing his command to his brothers.

 “Lord of these lands, pah,” she said with disgust. “My people have been here for generations, long before Lord Aldrich deemed it his.” She pulled the last stubborn feathers out with a vicious yank and set the bird down.

 “And who are your people?” he asked with veiled interest.

 She looked amused at the question.

 “My people? If you were to ask our enemies, we are the uncivilized heathens who spurn their ‘God’, commune with nature spirits, and snatch their children to drink their blood.”

 At this Ivar grinned. Such stories were familiar, after all his reputation was similar.

 “Is there truth to the stories?”

 Elda smiled and pulled her knife out of its sheath. She tapped the knife against the pheasant.

 “We don’t drink children’s blood. Why waste the whole child?”

 Ivar laughed at her jape.

 Elda methodically slid the knife through the bird's flesh, pulling the meat from the bones. Ivar had to admit, her knife skills were impressive. He could only imagine what she could do against her enemies, slicing through skin with deft precision.

 She finished butchering the bird and set the knife aside. She stood up and made her way to the small cookfire outside the hut. While Elda focused on skewering the meat to cook, Ivar palmed the knife, tucking it under his sleeve. He couldn’t believe the foolishness of the woman. She had no idea who she was dealing with and her ignorance would be her downfall.

 While she tended to the cookfire, Ivar formulated a plan. He would catch her off guard, and demand she take him back to the battlefield under threat of death. From there, he would be able to find his way back to his camp. He’d take her as a thrall. She had skills as a healer, and she was striking to look at. His brothers would be jealous of his captive.

 Elda’s voice cut into his thoughts.

 “Are you planning to use that knife before or after I finish cooking? I would ask that you wait until after I've eaten.”

 Ivar looked up to see Elda watching him with a knowing grin. He bristled, angry at himself for being caught and for the smug look on her face.

 “You could have killed me the moment my back was turned, yet you did not move from the bedroll. So you are waiting. For what I wonder?”

 She stood up, brushing dirt off her knees.

 “For me to come closer? You would not let me check your legs for injuries. Perhaps you are injured.” Elda watched Ivar for any reaction to her questions. His strange leg armor wasn’t anything she’d seen before.

 “Well, Northman? Are you going to kill me? Steal my horse? Somehow find your way back to your men? Without running into Aldrich’s?” she asked, before holding a skewer just out of Ivar’s reach.

 “Or you can eat, ride with me to my family, and have an ally in these lands?” She approached him and straddled his legs, kneeling on either side of his hips. Her thighs brushed his, as she kept her weight off him. She was so close, that he could drive the knife into her neck with ease. Fearless, he had to give it to her. This woman had more balls than most of his men.

 Ivar clamped down on the irritation that was bubbling up at the gall of the woman. While he did not take orders from anyone, she had a point. This land was unknown to him and he was without the support of his men. It riled him to be exposed like this, armed only with the pilfered knife. And that self-satisfied smile. She knew she was his best option. Even if he did kill her, he wasn’t sure if he could even get on her horse, let alone ride it to find his camp. For now, it would be in his best interest to at least follow the strange woman’s lead. He could always kill her later if he so chose.

 He spun the knife in his hand before tucking it into her belt. He ran his hand along her waist to her arm. His hand circled her wrist and he could feel her heartbeat through her pale skin. It was quick and that fact excited him. Yet as calm she seemed on the surface, she was still nervous. Ivar brought her hand up to his face and took a bite out of the skewered meat. The meat tore easily and juices ran down his chin.

 “How far is it to your family’s land?”

[greatworldwar2]

• Nazi Book Burnings

The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union (the "DSt") to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism.

On April 8th, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union proclaimed a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit", which was to climax in a literary purge or "cleansing" by fire. Local chapters were to supply the press with releases and commissioned articles, sponsor well-known Nazi figures to speak at public gatherings, and negotiate for radio broadcast time. On the same day the Student Union published the "Twelve Theses", a title chosen to be evocative of two events in German history, Martin Luther's burning of a papal bull when he posted his ninety-five theses in 1520, and the burning of a handful of items including 11 books at the 1817 Wartburg Festival on the 300th anniversary of Luther's burning of the bull. This was, however, a false comparison, as the "book burnings" at those historic events were not acts of censorship, nor destructive of other people's property, but purely symbolic protests, destroying only one individual document of each title, for a grand total of 12 individual documents, without any attempt to suppress their content, whereas the Student Union burned tens of thousands of volumes, all they could find from a list comprising around 4000 titles. The "Twelve Theses" called for a "pure" national language and culture. Placards publicized the theses, which attacked "Jewish intellectualism", asserted the need to "purify" German language and literature, and demanded that universities be centres of German nationalism. The students described the action as a “response to a worldwide Jewish smear campaign against Germany and an affirmation of traditional German values.”

On May 6th, 1933, the German Student Union made an organised attack on Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research. Its library and archives of around 20,000 books and journals were publicly hauled out. On May 10th, 1933, the students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books in the square at the State Opera, Berlin, thereby presaging an era of uncompromising state censorship. In many other university towns, nationalist students marched in torch lit parades against the "un-German" spirit. The scripted rituals of this night called for high Nazi officials, professors, rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. At the meeting places, students threw the pillaged, banned books into the bonfires with a great joyous ceremony that included live music, singing, "fire oaths," and incantations. In Berlin, some 40,000 people heard Joseph Goebbels deliver a fiery address: "No to decadence and moral corruption!" Goebbels enjoined the crowd. "Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser, Erich Kästner." Not all book burnings took place on 10 May as the German Student Union had planned. Some were postponed a few days because of rain. Others, based on local chapter preference, took place in June, during the summer solstice, a traditional date of celebration. Nonetheless, in 34 university towns across Germany the "Action against the Un-German Spirit" was a success, enlisting widespread newspaper coverage. And in some places, notably Berlin, radio broadcasts brought the speeches, songs, and ceremonial incantations "live" to countless German listeners.

All of the following types of literature, as described by the Nazis, were to be banned; The works of traitors, emigrants and authors from foreign countries who believe they can attack and denigrate the new Germany (H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland); The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism; Pacifist literature; Literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes, and writings supporting the Weimar Republic (Walther Rathenau, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann); All historical writings whose purpose is to denigrate the origin, the spirit and the culture of the German Volk, or to dissolve the racial and structural order of the Volk, or that denies the force and importance of leading historical figures in favor of egalitarianism and the masses, and which seeks to drag them through the mud (Emil Ludwig); Books that advocate "art" which is decadent, bloodless, or purely constructivist (George Grosz, Otto Dix, Bauhaus, Felix Mendelssohn); Writings on sexuality and sexual education which serve the egocentric pleasure of the individual and thus, completely destroy the principles of race and Volk (Magnus Hirschfeld); The decadent, destructive and Volk-damaging writings of "Asphalt and Civilization" literati: (Oskar Maria Graf, Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Jakob Wassermann, Franz Blei); Literature by Jewish authors, regardless of the field; Popular entertainment literature that depicts life and life's goals in a superficial, unrealistic and sickly sweet manner, based on a bourgeois or upper class view of life; All books degrading German purity.

Many German students were complicit in the Nazi book burning campaign. They were known as Deutsche Studentenschaft, and when they ran out of books in their own libraries they turned to independent bookstores. Libraries were also asked to stock their shelves with material that stood up to Hitler's standards, and destroy anything that did not. The Nazis also seized many books from Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. They did intend to keep and display a few rare and ancient books in a museum on Judaism after the Final Solution was successfully completed. The blind writer Helen Keller published an Open Letter to German Students: 'You may burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas those books contain have passed through millions of channels and will go on." On May 10th, 1934, one year after the book burnings, the Germany Library of Burnt Books founded by Alfred Kantorowicz was opened to assemble copies of the books that had been destroyed. Because of the shift in political power and the blatant control and censorship demonstrated by the Nazi party, 1933 saw a “mass exodus of German writers, artists, and intellectuals…”.

Among the German-speaking authors whose books student leaders burned that night were such figures as; Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Ludwig Renn, and Karl Marx. Not only German-speaking authors were burned, but also French authors like Henri Barbusse, André Gide, Victor Hugo and Romain Rolland; American writers such as John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Jack London and Upton Sinclair; as well as English authors Joseph Conrad, Radclyffe Hall, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence and H. G. Wells; Irish writers James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; and Russian authors including Isaac Babel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Maxim Gorki, Vladimir Lenin, Vladimir Nabokov, Leo Tolstoy, and Leon Trotsky. The burning of the books represents a culmination of the persecution of those authors whose oral or written opinions were opposed to Nazi ideology. Many artists, writers and scientists were banned from working and publication. Their works could no longer be found in libraries or in the curricula of schools or universities.

In 1946, the Allied occupation authorities drew up a list of over 30,000 titles, ranging from school books to poetry and including works by such authors as von Clausewitz. Millions of copies of these books were confiscated and destroyed. The representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order in principle was no different from the Nazi book burnings. Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings is a traveling exhibition produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Through historical photographs, documents, and films, it explores how the book burnings became a potent symbol in America's battle against Nazism and why they continue to resonate with the public in film, literature, and political discourse to this day.

[marvelousecology]

Archaic Genomics

Every hair on my arms stands to attention whenever I hear the haunting downward hum. Hrrmmmmm. The bagpipes drone until portions of the fleet transition to bleating as the battle song, Scotland the Brave, surges through the open field. The resonance of its echoing sound leaves me awestruck with a powerful sense of connection to my ancestors. My mother always said, “We’re German, Irish, English, Scottish, French, and Dutch, in that order,” but her knowledge wore thin the further back she went, while I longed to visit the old country and experience the cultural roots my family has long forgotten since coming to America.

An unfortunate byproduct of being a late generation American is that my inheritance of these ethnic backgrounds, which links me to my ancestors, is practically nonexistent in my life; yet, an integral part of myself is knowing where my family came from because it affects my identity. I’m German, Irish, English, Scottish, French, and Dutch, in that order.

Nonetheless, there is no family heraldry hanging on our walls or a cherished crest passed down from generation to generation. No symbolic colors, animals, or objects showcasing the values or convictions our family once embodied. What’s our tartan colors? Is there a schnitzel recipe? Whatever Pagan, Celtic, or Germanic customs and traditions would have been celebrated were either Anglicized or Americanized. So, attending events or festivals that celebrate our national heritages is as close to experiencing the motherland as we will get and by venerating cultural practices like music, dance, sports, feasts, wearing the attire, and sharing the vernacular tales, imbues us with a sense of pride, belonging, and appreciation for our ancient kinfolk. Otherwise, the closest familial ties to my cultural heritage have been deduced to the commodified four-leaf clover, death by green, Saint Patrick’s Day or Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.

One afternoon, my mother’s oldest sister, Ruth Putrus, calls to tell us we’re one fifth Viking. The chronicle of her genetic story unfolded after submitting her saliva sample to 23&Me, which revealed a shared mutation that occurred 6,500 years ago from an offshoot of the previous gene that’s mostly found in Iceland. Enthralled by the news, I proudly add Viking to the mix.

Daydreams of Norsemen traveling from Scandinavia, dominating the Baltic coast and the Dnieper and Volga trading routes sail across my imagination. Hurling myself into Viking history as they colonized, pillaged, and traded during the Viking Age (800-1000 AD), spreading throughout various regions of Europe and settling in Iceland and Newfoundland. Imagining the dark black clouds of smoke from burning monasteries ransacked of its gold and goods as brutal bearded raiders took what they wanted, painting a medieval tale of Vikings sailing up and down rivers, always attacking England and Scotland, then seizing the women for wives.

These results wildly intrigued me, but it isn’t until much later when I take a DNA test of my own that I realize how complicated genomics can be. According to Ancestry, I’m 50 percent English, 37 percent Scottish, 5 percent Welsh, 4 percent Irish, 2 percent Swedish, and 2 percent German. The results conflicted with the phrase I’ve known my entire life; I’m German, Irish, English, Scottish, French, and Dutch, in that order. Not an inkling of Dutch or French and just a smidge of Irish and German? Sweden is home to Scandinavians who are descendants of Vikings, but only 2 percent? What happened to the one fifth?

Online, Ancestry’s website states that they test individual autosomal DNA because it reveals more information compared to Y-chromosomal DNA and mitochondrial DNA tests, but their ambiguous explanation is devoid of digestible information relating to how exactly it was determined or the science behind the reasoning.

A plant genomics laboratory researcher at Oregon State University, Amanda Roelant, comments on Ancestry’s statement. “Vaguely talking about a complicated process is necessary otherwise everyone would need to be a geneticist,” she says.

Geneticists specialize in the interdisciplinary field of biology called genomics, which studies different living organism’s genome. The genome is the entirety of genetic code stored within that organism and the genetic code is comprised of DNA—the blueprint of our lives—and it’s found within our cells and within our cells it’s found in the nuclei. Try to envision DNA as the sacred written text on the pages of archaic scriptures occupying the many shelves of a library hidden deep within the city. A geneticist reads this intricately coded text, a language foreign to most, and transcribes it for us to see; mostly revealing ancestry or underlying medical diseases.

Genetic information is inherited from our parents at the time of conception when the sperm and the embryo meet. Simply, half of mom’s DNA and half of dad’s DNA. Humans have a total of 46 chromosomes that breakdown into 23 pairs and 22 of those pairs are autosomes 22, while remaining are the sex chromosomes, XX or XY. Inheriting the Y-chromosomal DNA directly links men to a paternal lineage of ancestors descending from all fathers to sons. Meanwhile, the maternal line is found within the mitochondria; an organelle of the cell, like the nucleus, that stores DNA, which is directly passed from mother to child. Since, the mitochondria is the site for energy production and the mother creates a child inside her body, with her body, the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed onto them by her.

23&Me provided Ruth with more resourceful information on her test results and the science behind the answers. Providing citations from archaeological studies laying down the foundation for genetic comparison using archaic DNA extracted from ancient skeletal remains, Ruth is positive we share a female Celtic-Viking ancestor.

One of the founding women of Iceland was most likely taken from Scotland by the Vikings. Was she a wife, slave, or servant? We may never know but there’s speculation because the first mtDNA references, to a maternal haplogroup called I2, has the highest concentration in Iceland. Vaguely speaking, haplogroups refer to a sustained change or mutation in the DNA that sticks with a certain population through a period of time. Detecting these changes or mutations can help group different organisms to different lineation’s.

“Grandma is the one with the I2 haplogroup and that would’ve went to all her female descendants, so your mom and I had it from her and we passed it onto our descendants, which means you have this haplogroup too,” she says.

Icelandic scientist from the University of Oxford, Agnar Helgason, specializing in genetic anthropology, and analyzing new mtDNA control-region sequences, published, “mtDNA and the Islands of the North Atlantic: Estimating the Proportions of Norse and Gaelic Ancestry,” that’s evaluating the matrilineal ancestry in Iceland. Roughly 37.5 percent is Scandinavian. “More recent analyses of mtDNA and Y-chromosome variation in the Icelanders suggests that a majority of the female settlers may have originated from the British Isles, whereas 80 percent of male settlers were Scandinavian.”

This haplogroup doesn’t necessarily represent Viking DNA since it’s very rare in Denmark and other parts of Scandinavia. “Some of our ladies got up there but not to a dominant extent unlike Iceland where there was an early presence,” says Ruth. The theory is that haplogroup I may have been carried to Iceland by the Vikings when they took British, Scottish, and Irish women from their homes in the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries, which changed to I2 and continued descending.

Ancestry provides me an ethnicity estimate without verifying its origins, whereas 23&Me correlates their findings with scholarly reviews and related studies. Although, I’m 2 percent Viking, arguably the 37 percent Scot is interrelated to the Celtic woman taken by the Vikings centuries ago. Culture is not inherent to genetics.

Geneticists are trying to crack a code and what that means for us. Everything we know about genetics is based on something a modern-day human theorized. “It doesn’t mean it’s the only truth,” Amanda says, “And as a scientist, I believe in a lot of it, but on a human level, there’s such limitations on what we know. So, it’s something to keep in mind when you’re taking it seriously.”

[amer-ainu]

Do The Shamo See Us Now?

From the 1300s to 1899 (that’s more than 500 years for those who are bad at math) we were hairy barbarians, which meant the Wajin were morally free to kill us, enslave us, rape us, and take our stuff. 

In 1899 we were “former aborigines,” after the Wajin had succeeded in all their raping and pillaging. We were “given” automatic Japanese “citizenship,” replacing our Indigenous status in the eyes of the Japanese law (if not the hearts and minds). This is when the physical genocide was more or less replaced with a cultural genocide, following the Meiji restoration period. 

That went on from 1899 to 1997 (98 years), when the 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act was replaced with the 1997 Ainu Cultural Promotion Law. This is when they got wise to those sweet, sweet tourist dollars. You know what the 1997 act was coming up on the heels of? The 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. Ainu activism had been active for decades, the world was becoming a smaller place, and there had been increasing scrutiny on Japan about how they treated minorities and Indigenous people. The 1997 act was written to save face and promote a culture that could be repackaged and sold to tourists. We were still not legally considered Indigenous.

In 2008 the Japanese Diet passed a non-binding resolution to recognize us as Indigenous to Japan, wagging a non-binding moral finger at discrimination against us, and recognized our culture as distinct from Wajin culture. 

2019, more than ten years later, our status as Indigenous became legalized within Japanese law. Oh, also the 2020 Summer Olympics are coming to Tokyo, Japan. Deja vu, huh?

OK, But What Does That Mean?

I have no idea. Having read through some of the English-language articles,

Aljazeera, NHK, Japan Today, Japan Times, Asahi Shimbun, the word “tourism” comes up a lot, and not many more specifics.

From Asahi Shimbun:

While banning discrimination against the Ainu people, the bill also has provisions to establish new subsidies to promote tourism to the northernmost main island of Hokkaido where Ainu are from.

A subsidy of 1 billion yen ($9 million) will be proposed in the fiscal 2019 budget to promote the development of Ainu culture as a tourism resource as well as provide support for bus operations to help support Ainu communities. 

It also is intended to help the government achieve its target of foreign tourist numbers to 40 million by 2020 when Tokyo will host the Summer Olympics and Paralympics. 

When Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga visited Hokkaido in August 2018, he told reporters, "Having the world understand the splendid aspects of Ainu culture will contribute to international goodwill and lead to promotion of tourism." 

I mean, they just straight up say it, don’t they? 

So what’s in it for Hokkaido Ainu?

The draft bill states its objective as realizing a society that will respect the pride of the Ainu as an ethnic group. Legal restrictions will be relaxed to allow the Ainu to engage in traditional fishing practices.

The new bill will be an effort to implement a more comprehensive package of measures to promote local communities and industries with a view to also expanding international exchanges. 

Huh? 

From Aljazeera:

"It is the first step for ensuring equality under the law," Mikiko Maruko, who represents a group of Ainu people in eastern Japan near Tokyo, told AFP news agency, commenting on the government's move.

"There are lots of things to be done, for example, creating a scholarship for families who struggle to send their children to high schools," she added, referring to Ainu living outside Hokkaido who cannot access existing Ainu scholarship programmes on the island.

Meaning none of those things are being done currently, and don’t appear to be on the table in the 2019 bill. 

Under the new plan, the government will also allow the Ainu to cut down trees in nationally-owned forests for use in traditional rituals. 

From NHK:

The bill also calls for deregulation to make it easier for the Ainu people to gather wood in state-owned forests and catch salmon in local rivers, as part of efforts to help them conserve their cultural traditions.  

TELL ME MORE ABOUT FISHING RIGHTS. 

The short of it is, I’d like to hear more specifics before I start celebrating the Japanese seeing us for the first time. I apologize if this post is not the most concise thing I’ve ever written, but I wanted to write something as this story gains some momentum. I don’t speak for all the Ainu in all the tribes, I only speak for one, and I’m still trying to sort out the events for myself. And the Sakhalin recognition is a huge deal as well, I wish I had more information on that. 

[crviis-a]

tell us some of your branwen tribe headcanons!

          i could fuckin kiss u right now dude what the fuck 

          - taking inspiration from the fact that qrow and raven’s last name ‘branwen’ is welsh and essentially means ‘blessed/beautiful raven/crow’, the branwen tribe’s main cultural links are welsh and japanese          - they’re nomadic! pretty self explanatory but when qrow was with the tribe they moved camp pretty much every few weeks, never settling long enough for anyone to really pin down their whereabouts or get too close for comfort. when raven took over the lead of the tribe, they moved even more often          - the branwen tribe has their own language, though it’s now almost completely been drowned out by the english speaking members joining the ranks for whatever reason, the original language of these people was essentially a combination of what we call japanese and welsh (cymraeg) for members of the tribe some years ago, their first language was always what the tribe refers to as llywthtafod (literally translating to ‘tribe tongue’)          - since they’re nomadic in nature, it makes sense that it’s a hard driven habit to not leave anything behind when they move camp, as such. this tiny civilisation outside of most settlements never developed a written alphabet. none of their legends or stories or superstitions have ever been written down          - the people of the tribe thrive on stories. on myth and legend, every story they have has been passed down mouth to mouth from the elder generations to the younger, people add their own flair to these tales to keep the other generations interested but the plot lines are always the same. even the members of the tribe who don’t speak the language or are younger/haven’t been members for long still know these stories          - their diets are largely plant based, they lived off of pillaging small villages and ambushing supply shipments to the larger towns and cities - and they never settled down long enough to warrant keeping livestock or farming any land they stopped on - so anything like meat or breads or even sweeter foods were hard to come by. they always know what plants are edible and hunt sparsely - never wanting to leave behind too much damage          - raven’s ‘the strong survive’ bullshit? yea that’s from the tribe. while they’re a poetic people with a love for communication and sharing their stories, they’re ruthless. they very quickly found that the ‘weaker’ people in their number held the others back - especially with such a hard lifestyle and a routine that insists everyone capable pull their own weight. the only exception to this rule while in tribe life was babies and those who have lived long enough in such a harsh environment to reach older age. those few were treated with the utmost respect possible in a band of thieves          - combat and hunting techniques are taught from a young age. as soon as a child is old enough and strong enough to carry a weapon then they do and they’re taught how to use it in the tribe’s usual ruthless style and then they’re put to work. organising ambushes or participating in raids on small villages.           - in places that the tribe isn’t well known, their reputation precedes them. they’re known as ‘the flock’ to the places that they’ve hit but haven’t settled in for long enough for people to learn of their name

[sayruq]

Hello Sayruq question do you think George failed with Dany's essos followers? I mean yes the story is about her being their white savoir but the fandom does not see them as her not slaves to follow her every whim, they want them dead. No thoughts as them as anything more than fodder for wars not even as tools. The narrative 'given' the famine their meant to act as her army die as their are too many mouths for westeroes. Basically he attracted the wrong type of racists for his story.

Hi. This is why I think it’s 100% OK for people to dislike Dany because of the sheer amount of racism in her chapters. GRRM uses every racist, orientalist trope he can think of from hyper-misogynistic brown men to ‘swarms’ and ‘hordes’ of brown people. No brown or black character is written with nuance, no culture is written with nuance. The Dothraki only care about pillaging and raping, they have no art. They don’t have oral tradition, music, drawings, jewelry, etc. They’re written like the most racist writings on Genghis Khan and his Mongol army even though he abolished slavery among the Mongols, outlawed the kidnapping of Mongolian women and united the Mongols under one leader. He had military strategies rather than running wildly and dying uselessly (like Dothraki were described as in their battle against the Unsullied). Dany is written as a shining beacon of progressiveness amongst these ‘savages’. Only she is aware that mass rape is evil, that pillaging is wrong, that killing defenseless people is wrong, etc. Not even the most sympathetic Dothraki character agrees with her.

The same storyline is played up again in Slaver’s Bay. The Astapori have no empathy for anyone, their city is mystical in an Arabian Nights kind of way and the slave owning class wears something that resembles the saree. Again only Dany is the only disgusted by the treatment of slaves. I have maintained that Dany wasn’t interested in helping people unless she gained something but GRRM still manages to make her morally above the slave owners whenever she interacts with them. The Astapori are evil, their clothing is evil, they are incapable of sophistication (why the fuck would you insult a customer?) and are easily tricked. Seriously go read her battle plan against the Yunkai and you’d think she was dealing with children. The same lack of subtlety and sophistication is present when the Yunkai attack Astapor and later Meereen. They can’t be clever, just brutal. It gets even worse when she goes back to Vaes Dothrak. We know she’ll win the Dothraki over because she’s the Stallion that Mounts the World. This white woman who only lived with the Dothraki for one year is the subject of a major Dothraki prophecy. Imagine that.

The slaves are a whole other story. GRRM is a white American man, he can claim the Roman system of slavery all he wants but he was raised in a country that used chattel slavery and it shows. The slaves are childlike for the most part when they adore Dany, calling Dany ‘mother’ a fact that doesn’t seem to part of any of cultures he mentions. They are violent other times, behaving exactly like the masters. It’s not handled carefully, there’s no examination of institutionalised violence. It’s like he is saying that the only difference between the slaves and their owner is power and that’s very disturbing.

GRRM also has an annoying habit of writing the non white characters speaking in broken English even if they’re communicating with Dany in a language she also speaks. It makes her look smarter, more eloquent, as though she’s their superior in every way. He also loves to highlight the whiteness of her skin, having her be considered the most beautiful woman in the world without examining why the beauty standards favour her. The Valyrians colonised and enslaved large parts of Europe but GRRM isn’t interested in examining that, he prefers to lay it all on civilisations of brown people.

GRRM attracted white feminists (meaning feminists who uplift only white, upper class able bodied, etc women) and white supremacists. Most Dany stans love her because she’s a white saviour. I can’t tell you how many I’ve seen people who changed their minds on her the moment she started interacting with white characters. Her stans love that there are thousands of brown men who will act as cannon fodder on her behalf. They use her white saviour status to exalt her supposed strong moral fibre by ignoring all the times she has brutalised people, including slaves. They also only like (parts of) cultures when she’s trying to assimilate- look at them celebrating the Dothraki practice of never cutting one’s hair unless they’re defeated when they thought that’s what Dany’s hair represented but they don’t care for the Dothraki at all. They love it when she tortures and kills brown people, it’s empowerment to them. On the other hand people are excited for the Dothraki and Unsullied to die in the winter, I know it’s going to happen but there’s something about the glee that I don’t like. Some people don’t care about the racist writing that went into the Dothraki. I mean the way folks talk about them, you’d think you were watching Fox News. Lots of ‘savages coming to hurt our women’ rhetoric which GRRM and D&D also use. It’s a mess.

Sometimes a racist fandom is racist despite the creator(s)’s attempts to write a story that has as little racism as possible but in ASOIAF/GOT’s case the fandom’s racism is nurtured by the text and what they’re watching on TV.

[newstfionline]

The Scripps National Spelling Bee is a reminder of the English language’s amazing enormity

Jeva Lange, The Week, May 30, 2019

The word “ginkgo” is misspelled, even though you’ll find it written that way in every English dictionary. Other accepted spellings include “gingko,” with the ‘G’ before the ‘K,’ and “ginko,” which--though rarely used outside the 1700s--was the spelling given in the third round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee by 11-year-old Charles Fennell on Tuesday. He advanced.

You see, back in 1712, when preparing a text about Japanese plants, the German naturalist Engelbert Kaempfer accidentally mis-transliterated the Japanese gin kyo (which itself comes from the Chinese yin-hing) as “ginkgo.” But because Kaempfer was writing in Latin, his “ginkgo” error is identified by the Oxford English Dictionary as the word’s official Latin etymon, although really the variations of ginkgo in English today are derived from a Latin misspelling of a Japanese translation of a Chinese word. Got all that?

There’s no shame if you don’t--the dizzying journey undertaken by “ginkgo” before arriving on the Scripps stage in its three accepted modern variations is a testament to the turbulent, hodgepodge, sticky-fingered and roughly-cobbled-together state of the English language, which contains more than 171,000 words in current use. And if you’re like me, watching the spelling bee, which will air its final rounds on ESPN on Thursday and Friday, is humbling not just because of the kids who can spell “ginko”, but because of the renewed admiration it inspires for a language I use every day yet will never fully grasp, no matter how many decades I commit to trying.

It is impossible to put a number on exactly how many words there are in English, although people certainly try. We do know English is likely one of the richest languages in the world due to its tendency to pillage other languages, like scooping up the Mexican Spanish “chihuahua” (the winning spelling bee word in 1967) or the Yiddish-by-way-of-Middle-High-German “knaidel” (the winning word in 2013). When Scripps contestants ask the judges, as is their right, about the origin of a word prior to taking a stab at the spelling, many times the answer is Latin or Greek, the roots that make up 60 percent of the English language. There is almost no language on Earth, though, that hasn’t been somehow subsumed into English in some form or another.

Part of the appeal of watching the spelling bee is to be reminded of this sheer limitlessness, which even as a fluent speaker can be hard to fully appreciate. We only use a very small percentage of the words available in the dictionary in our day-to-day lives. The average speaker of English knows somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 “lemmas,” or brackets of related words (“spell,” “spells,” “spelled,” and “spelling” are all one lemma, for example, as are “cold,” “colder,” and “coldest”). You can be conversational with 800 lemmas, but you need the most common 3,000 or so under your belt to appreciate a movie, and around 9,000 or so to read a novel, the BBC reports. It would take knowing a whopping 50,000 lemmas to understand 95 percent of the Oxford English Corpus, and there’d still be another 5 percent left over to leave you scratching your head.

The Spelling Bee isn’t only about the words we rarely come across, though. Many of the winning words might surprise you with their relative popularity in everyday speech: The aforementioned “chihuahua” needs no definition here, while “romaine,” “whimsical,” “platypus,” and “guacamole”--all words given in the Bee’s third round--might on the surface seem deceptively simple. Only a look at each word’s origins exposes their oddity together under the umbrella of “English”: “romaine” being old French for “Roman”; “whimsical” traceable back to Scandinavian roots; “platypus” a smattering of letters taken from Modern Latin; and “guacamole” ending up in our vocabulary after originating in Aztecan. That any of us can spell these words, plucked as they were from across the globe and following no overlapping spelling rules, is impressive in and of itself.

And that’s to say nothing of English’s own ridiculous creations. In the third round of the Spelling Bee, one could also find “wafflestomper”--a sort of boot--and “Rooseveltian,” a word that describes anything that pertains to the 26th or 32nd presidents of the United States. Likewise, a middle schooler from Colorado was confronted with “labradoodle,” a word that specifies only dogs that are a cross between Labrador retrievers and poodles, while a boy from Illinois got “Michigander,” a word specifying a person from Michigan. Meanwhile, a girl from Florida failed to properly spell “Chaplinesque,” a word referring to anything that recalls the British actor and director Charlie Chaplin. Why we require the existence of words with such precise and specific definitions is a mystery left up to the arbiters of English dictionaries, which add new words every year. Case in point: Another third round word, locavore, describing “one who eats foods grown locally whenever possible,” only started appearing in use in 2005.

Beyond studying for the SATs or GREs, though, there are few opportunities in life to really stop and appreciate the indefinable volume of words that are at our disposal as English speakers (to say nothing of those afforded to anyone who is bilingual). Even the most enthusiastic logophiles ultimately rely on the same 100 or so common lemmas for the bulk of their writing or speech.

The Scripps National Spelling Bee, on the other hand, is an annual chance to set aside arguments about the usefulness of knowing how to define and spell “smaragdine,” and to marvel instead at the fact that if you need to describe something that is specifically emerald-like, then English has a word for you, too.

[sadiebutdigital-blog]

TROSKHEVYR: The Man Who Stood Between Mythology and Philosophy

This blog(?) of sorts opens with an old story. The tale of Vladimir Troskhevyr, a celebrated 19th century Russian philosopher with an insatiable appetite. This is just one article from a much larger project, which may or may not ever see the light of day. So enjoy this first post, I guess!

Here at STORIES, our history star power spotlight is shining on VLADIMIR TROSKHEVYR, who at just 65 years old spawned a rather short lived - yet notorious - branch of Russian philosophy. Although Troskhevyr’s messages channeled anarchist thought at the time and incorporated themes of Pagan literature, his ideas usually revolved around - sometimes even horrifically exceeding - the confines of what is considered taboo. 

Troskhevyr was born in 1844 and “died” in the year 1910, yet his work in the enlightenment of many pre-soviet thinkers is still impacting us today.

“Vladimir Troskhevyr was unique, as he gained a reputation at the intersection of ancient mythology and philosophic beliefs of the Russian Federation at his time,” said Mikhail Sarrah, 83, Russian bar owner and local surgeon of Poykogut, the Siberian village of which Troskhevyr hails from.

Throughout his life, Troskhevyr would obtain notoriety and a reputation as the “мужчина медведь,” which roughly translates to Man-Bear in english. “This is pretty neat, considering men and bears were always thought of as separate entities before this,” said Sarrah.

This reputation was earned after Troskhevyr’s 10th birthday, when he began to grow a set of secondary molars, and his front teeth elongated into the fangs of a bear – commonly honored in ancient religions and folklore of the area.

                     “Он скрежет зубы, и кричит ‘я Бог, я Бог.’”                               *He would gnash his teeth, and yell “I am God, I am God,” (Troskhevyr: пророк Гризли, 1943).

Troskhevyr’s unusual appearance, and tendency to pillage local farms for chickens led the villagers to riot against him. “The people of Poykogut rallied together for the first time in history,” said Nicolas Alupovich, 9, local cigarette manufacturer. Alupovich is the only living descendent of Troskhevyr. “They strapped [Troskhevyr] to the back of a horse, and as he rode through town they stabbed him with pitchforks.”

The anger of Poykogut would not break Troskhevyr, as he had already consumed the blood of all the livestock in town, and had been planning to migrate. By the time he made it to Moscow, the year was 1870.

“Онбыл допрошен российскими военными, которые называли его дьяволом, и стрелял в него много раз без видимой травмы.” - *[Troskhevyr] was questioned by the Russian military, who called him the devil, and shot him many times without apparent injury,” (учения мужчины несут, 1910).

Troskhevyr spent many years as a declared enemy of Russia, and he would later go on to often brag about how many prison cell doors he tore off the hinges, leading to many escapes. “His hands were bigger and stronger than a bear’s paws,” said Leo Murayvig, historian at the Museum of Demonology Moscow. Murayvig has been studying Troskhevyr for over ten years, after the case was handed over to the Vatican for private investigation. “Legend tells that mice would ride on his hands as he walked on four legs through the forest.”

Troskhevyr’s luck seemed to turn around though, when in 1909 he published his first book, titled “какой бог не может видеть,” which translates to “What God Cannot See.” In it, he details the declining state of the Russian Federation, and claims to be God, sent to educate the Russian people – and set them on a path of Nihilism.

What God Cannot See garnered record sales with readers across the country, who praised Troskhevyr as both a philosopher and prophet. The book was written in mud in it’s first edition, and much of the characters used were not found in any existing language. Yet that did not stop Troskhevyr’s reader’s from using their best judgement to guess what he was trying to say, and worshipping his word to their grave.

Troskhevyr “died” in the year 1910, just 7 months after the release of his debut book, and has been celebrated for the decades which followed. A statue is to be constructed in the town square of Poykogut, honoring the Man-Bear’s legacy. A source describes the plan for the statue as being “realistic,” and depicting Troskhevyr holding a book in one hand, with the other reaching upwards into heaven, and the flayed corpse of a goose in his mouth.

Over here at STORIES, we personally cannot wait to see the statue upon completion, and stand by the Russian Federation as they honor the man who stood at the crossroads of philosophy and mythology.