escutcheon

Weather Station Kurt

Weather Station “Kurt”, officially WFL-26 (Wetter-Funkgerät Land-26) was an automated weather station installed in Northern Laborador on October 22, 1943, by a team from the German submarine U-537. It was the only German armed military operation on mainland North American during World War II.

Northern tip of Labrador. Location of WFL-26

At the outset of World War II, Germany could no longer receive important weather information from the Arctic from international weather services, and so began a program of installing manned and automatic stations across the region. These were important for planning air missions over the Soviet Union and northern Europe.

U-537 anchored in Martin Bay, Hutton Peninsula, Northern Labrador

In order to disguise the purpose of the station should it ever have been come across, the crew scattered packs of American cigarettes and labeled the equipment for the (non-existent) “Canadian Weather Service.” They apparently needn’t have worried as the station was completely forgotten about. Its existence was not rediscovered until a historian for Siemens Corporation, who had built the equipment, found it in the company archives. An expedition to the site was then undertaken in 1981.

Location of WFL-26

For a full description of the mission to install this station, see “U-Boats Against Canada: German Submarines in Canadian Waters”, by Michael L. Hadley, pp. 163-167.

» Posted: Sunday, March 24, 2013 | Comments (1) | Permanent Link
fleuron

The Phallus Tree of fr. 25526

The Bibliothèque nationale de France houses a particularly strange manuscript of Guillaume de Lorris’ and Juen de Meun’s Roman de la Rose: BNF fr. 25526. It is famous for its extensive bas-de-page images, several of which are of an explicitly erotic nature. One image in particular often serves as an exemplar of strange medieval marginalia - that found on page 106v, of a nun gathering the fruit of a phallus tree:

Nun at Phallus Tree. BNF fr. 25526, 106r

This single image is part of a series on pages 106r and 106v showing a nun and a friar engaged in erotic play. These same figures appear again on pages 111r and 111v.

Interestingly in her book, “Roman de la Rose and its Medieval Readers”, Dr. Sylvia Huot of Pembroke College, Cambridge points out that all of these images are part of a single bifolium; that is, a single double page that is folded in half and sewn into a quire. From the perspective of the illustrator working on the bifolium, all eight individual images form one extended series:

111v : 106r

106v : 111r

Because the bifolium if folded in half, the images on the top right (i.e., 111v, Copulation; Mule with phalluses) becomes the final scene in the series:

  • 106r: Nun leads monk, Monk scales tower
  • 106v: Nun at phallus tree; Nun and monk embrace
  • 111r: Monk kneels; Couple undresses
  • 111v: Copulation; Mule with phalluses

This manuscript was produced by the professional husband and wife team of Richard and Jean de Montbaston working out of their shop on the Rue Neuve Notre Dame in Paris.

Highlight of 14th century Paris. Rue Nueve Notre Dame, center left

In their book, “Manuscripts and their makers: commercial book producers in medieval Paris, 1200-1500”, Richard and Mary Rouse, show that the wife, Jean de Montbaston, was responsible for virtually all the illustrations in fr. 25526 and that interestingly, she was most likely illiterate(!). Book makers such as the Montbastons worked as speedily as possible and devoted little if any time for literary interpretations. Often in fact, their cursory view could result in illustrations that completely misrepresent the text.

Advertisement for Richard de Montbaston. BNF fr. 241

As specific and unambiguous as the tale appears to be, unfortunately, there is no known story which explicitly describes a friar and a nun as depicted in the bas-de-page images. The Rouse’s remark that the best that could be said is that they reflect some “bawdy tale” that Jean had perhaps heard during the course of her work.

That actual layout of the story is even in question. Many of the illustrations in the book are temporally out of order. For example, in the interleaving stories of the Passions of Christ and St. Margaret, Montbaston seems to be aware that the left side of the bifolium will come after the right side when folded and so puts the left side image:

  • Descent from the Cross : Crucifixion
  • Burial : Resurrection

Here the illustrator understands that the Descent from the Cross occurs after the Crucifixion, and so puts that image to the right, thus when folded, Descent (53v) comes after Crucifixion (52r) . But then, oddly, she puts the Burial and Resurrection on the other side of that bifolium. This results in a confusing series of illustrations:

  • 52r: Crucifixion
  • 52v: Burial
  • 53r: Resurrection
  • 53v: Descent from the Cross

Passion of Christ bas-de-page images from 52r, 52v, 53r and 53v

All of the aspects of the Passion stories follow this same disjointed pattern.

Does the erotic nun and friar tale follow this same pattern? If so, the story would flow in a way that makes even less sense:

  • 106r: Nun leads monk, Monk scales tower
  • 111v: Copulation; Mule with phalluses
  • 106v: Nun at phallus tree; Nun and monk embrace
  • 111r: Monk kneels; Couple undresses

Given what is known about Jean de Montbaston’s literacy and the speed with which she worked, the best I think can be said is that she managed to get the ordering “correct” this time. Still, what ultimately is the source of these strange images? Unfortunately, the answer is probably unknowable.

Images have phallus trees have appeared in other contexts, e.g., The Massa Marittima Mural, but any attempt to find meaning of them seems to result in series of circular references to the few examples that are known.

» Posted: Sunday, March 17, 2013 | Comments (1) | Permanent Link
fleuron

Massachusetts, 1810

A map showing the population distribution of Massachusetts based on the 1810 Federal census. It shows how remarkably and evenly distributed people were across the entire breadth of the state prior to industrialization.

Mass Population 1810

Massachusetts Population Distribution, 1810

The US Census of 1810 counted 421,040 inhabitants, with 79% of them dispersed in rural areas or in villages of under 2,500 people. Counties with the largest populations were Essex (71,888), Worcester (64,910), and Middlesex (52,789). The four western counties had a quarter of the population of the state (112,182), the greatest proportion that region ever achieved. The largest citIes were Boston—33,250 (4th in US), Salem—12,613 (7th in US), Newburyport—7,634 (12th in US), and Nantucket—6,807 (14th in US). In 1810, one in 15 Americans lived in Massachusetts.

Wilkie, Richard W. and Tager, Jack. “Historical Atlas of Massachusetts”. University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

» Posted: Saturday, February 2, 2013 | Comments (1) | Permanent Link
fleuron

More on “Twitter”

Notker Labeo (c950 - 1022) used the Old High German cognate of “twitter” for the Latin “susurrare” in exactly the same place as Chaucer in this own translation of Boethius in the early 11th century.

This is from page 118 of the manuscript. The Latin appears first followed by the translated OHG. Where Chaucer translated “susurrat” as “twitreþ”, Notker used its cognate “zwizeron”.

Notker's Boethius p. 118

Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 825: Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae

The original and translated sentences are then,

Boethius: “Sylvas dulci voce susurrat.”

Notker: “in uuálde uuíle er zuízerôn.”

Chaucer: “Twitriþ desiryinge þe wood wiþ her swete voys.”

“zwizeron”, pronounced “tswitseron” shares the same West Germanic antecedent as “twitter”. In fact, before the 2nd phase of the Germanic Consonant Shift (t→ts), it would have been pronounced “twiteron”. Old English did not participate in the Shift and so kept the hard “t”.

Chaucer undoubtedly did not coin the word “twitter” as it must have existed in Old English; it is pure happenstance that it was not attested in any other surviving document. The English “twitter” is in fact closer to the original West Germanic version of the word.

» Posted: Monday, November 5, 2012 | Comments (0) | Permanent Link
fleuron

Chaucer and “Twitter”

The Atlantic Magazine recently mentioned a tweet from the Oxford English Dictionary noting that Geoffrey Chaucer has the earliest attested use of the word “twitter”. It comes from his translation of Boethius’s “De Consolatione Philosophiæ”, which he called “Boece” (1380).

The usage in question is (in Middle English)

Chaucer's use of 'twitter'

Boece; Book III, Metrum II

Or:

Yet nevertheless, if such a bird springs out of her tight cage, sees the agreeable shadows of the woods, she befouls with her feet her scattered food, and seeks mourning only the wood and twitters desiring the wood with her sweet voice.

Chaucer was translating Boethius’s original Latin. I was interested to see what word he attempted to capture. The original sentence was:

Boethius original

De Consolatione Philosophiæ, Liber III, Metrum II, 21-25

The last line is “whispers to the woods with her sweet voice”, so the word in question here is “susurrare”, “to whisper or murmur”

Chaucer was also consulting Jean de Meun’s 13th-century translation written in Old French to guide his own. Meun’s translation was:

Meun's Old French

Other than “douce voiz”, i.e., “sweet voice” there is nothing there alluding to the timbre of this voice. It seems to be an affectation that Meun ignores and Chaucer retains.

The next most recent attestation to “twitter” according to the OED is from John Trevisa’s translations of Ranulf Higden’s Prolicionycion (1387)

Travisa's use of 'twitter'

Or:

In town as it longes (lounges)
The osel (blackbird) twitters in merry songs
At night for dread
Truly no song does he grede (cry out)

The original Latin here reads:

Hidgen's original

Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis, p. 236

So, “pulchris zinzitat”; or “chirps beautifully”. So Trevisa was translating the rarer word “zinzitare”.

It’s interesting that “susarrare” and “zinizitare” both have a dual constant sound “s-s”, “z-z” similar to “twitter”, “t-t”. In all cases they are onomatopoetic. Also, recent scholar ship has Chaucer writing ‘Boece’ in ~1380, not 1374 as the OED lists, and Trevisa started writing is translation in 1385 bring the dates of their usage closer together. It’s impossible to say if Chaucer actually coined the word and Trevisa made use of it, or if it was in usage during that time.

The OED gives the etymology of “twitter” simply as: “Of imitative origin: compare Old High German zwizirôn , -erôn”. There’s no indication of any Latin derivation, but I can help but noticing the similarity between “zwizerôn” and “zinzitare”. Ultimately it may be that Chaucer simply was groping for a more poetic word with avian connotations given the context and chose one with both a direct influence from the low countries and had a close analogue in Latin.

» Posted: Monday, October 29, 2012 | Comments (0) | Permanent Link
fleuron

S0-102

Scientists at the University of California recently announced the discovery of a star with the shortest known period orbiting around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way (Sagittarius A*) at only 11.5 years. The new star has been designated “S0-102”.

A diagram accompanying the announcement shows the orbit of both S0-102 and S0-2, the star with the previous shortest known period (as well as the orbit of various other stars buzzing around the black hole.)

Diagram showing orbits of stars around Sagittarius A*

To provide a sense of scale, I added a small sub-diagram showing the relative size of the orbits of Sedna and Pluto. Sedna has the largest known aphelion of any body orbiting the sun other than some long-period comets; still, this shows that the neighborhood of Sagittarius A* is comparable in scale to that of the Sun, though of course with far greater gravitational intensity.

Some basic trigonometry indicates that the .2 arc seconds shown on the diagram represents about 8.8 light days. Which is amazingly compact given the usual distances associated with stars. (Or course, that is over 140 billion miles, so it is only relatively compact.) Computing the relative sizes of Senda’s and Pluto’s orbits are equally straightforward, coming out to .1277 arc seconds and .0103 arc seconds respectively.

To get a sense of the enormity of the Milky Way’s black hole, consider that Sedna orbits the Sun in about 11,700 years. Sagittarius A* pulls S0-102 through its orbit in only 11.5 years. S0-102 reaches over 1% the speed of light at perihelion.

» Posted: Saturday, October 20, 2012 | Permanent Link
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David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon and the Brockengespenst

Faust Pale Fire The Berkshire Hills Gravity's Rainbow Infinite Jest

There is an incident in David Foster Wallace’s “Infinity Jest” (1991) that is a direct reference to Thomas Pychon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973). I believe though that this is actually part of a chain of references going back to Goethe.

In this scene from Infinite Jest, two characters on a mountain top are making shadows in the rising sun:

Marathe watched a column of shadow spread again out east over the desert’s floor as Steeply got a hand under himself and rose, a huge and well-fed figure tottering on heels. The two men sent together a strange Brokengespenst-shadow out toward the city Tuscon, a shadow round and radial at the base and jagged at the top, from Steeply’s wig becoming uncombed in his descent.

Infinite Jest, p. 89

brockengespenst

The allusion is to this scene from Gravity’s Rainbow 1:

… Here are Slothrop and the apprentice witch Geli Tripping, standing on top of the Broken, the very plexus of German evil, twenty miles north by northwest of Mittelwerke, waiting for the sun to rise. …

As the sunlight strikes their backs, coming in nearly flat on, it begins developing on the peal cloudbank; two gigantic shaows, thrown miles overland, past Clausthal-Zelterfeld, past Seesen and Goslar, across where the river Leine would be, and reaching toward Weser. … “By golly,” Slothrop a little bit neros, “it’s the Specter.” You got it up around Greylock in the Berkshires too. Around these parts its is known as the Brockengespenst.

… They are enormous, dancing the floor of the whole visible sky. He reaches underneath her dress. She twines a leg around one of his. The spectra was red to indigo, tidal, immense, at all their edges. Under the clouds out there it’s as still, and lost, as Atlantis.

Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 335

A few pages earlier there is this bit of conversation between Geli and Slothrop:

“Have you been up to the Brocken yet?”
“Just hit town, actually.”
“I’ve been up there every Walpurgisnacht since I had my first period. I’ll take you, if you like.”

Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 326

In the introduction to his book of short stories, “Slow Learner” (1984), Pynchon mentions the book, “The Berkshire Hills” (1939), which was produced as part of Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for Massachusetts. That book contains a mention of the Brockengespenst:

Thirty years ago, at the end of the summer season, a Berkshire man was bringing down the piano from the little recreation house atop the mountain. Suddenly he saw himself, his horse and wagon and the piano standing upright, outlined in monstrous design against the sky. Unable to decide whether he had quaffed too much from the “cup that cheers,” he is said to have fled in haste from the mountainside to the minister, and taken the pledge at once.

The phenomenon of a gigantic shadow of an object reflected in a cloud is so well known as to have a German name, the Brockengespenst (Specter of the Brocken) from Brocken, the highest peak of the Hartz Mountains. As Greylockgespenst would be a bit unwieldy for Berkshire, here it is simply called the Specter. C. H. Towne tells more about it in his Autumn Loitering. 2

The Berkshire Hills, p. 42

It’s clear that Pynchon initially found the reference to Brokengespenst from his fascination with Berkshire book, but note the occult aspects he introduces: Geli being a witch; satyric entwinings; Walpurgisnacht, etc. These elements are not part of the Berkshire Hills background story.

Pynchon is known for his wide-ranging references, so it’s impossible to say exactly where he was introduced to the German mythology surrounding the mountain. I believe there is a connection to Nabokov however.

There is a oblique reference to The Brocken in Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” (1961):

During the fortnight that I had my demons fill my goetic mirror to overflow with those pink and mauve cliffs and black junipers and winding roads and sage brush changing to grass and lush blue flowers, and death-pale aspens, and an endless sequence of green-shorted Kinbotes meeting an anthology of poets and a brocken of their wives, I must have made some awful mistake in my incantations, for the mountain slope is dry and drear, and the Hurleys’ tumble-down ranch, lifeless.

Pale Fire, p. 141

Here the protagonist, Kinbote, is in essence comparing Shade’s wife - a rival for his affections - to a witch.

As a student at Cornell, Pynchon attended Nabokov’s lectures while he was teaching Russian and European literature. There is speculation that his character Blodgett Waxwing from Gravity’s Rainbow is a reference to the famous opening line of Pale Fire’s poem 3. Could Nabokov’s reference to The Broken have induced Pynchon to dig deeper into its inherent paganism?

Nabokov was obviously aware enough of The Broken to produce such an arcane neologism with its biting implication of witchcraft. It is understood that this is a direct reference to Goethe’s “Faust”. Even the use of the word “goetic” (~Goethe) in the same paragraph referenced above hints at this.

Goethe described the Brocken in his “Faust” (1808), as the center of revelry for witches on Walpurgisnacht.

Now to the Brocken the witches ride;
The stubble is gold and the corn is green;
There is the carnival crew to be seen,
And Squire Urianus will come to preside.
So over the valleys our company floats,
With witches a-farting on stinking old goats.

brockengespenst

Note: I was tempted to try and find a link to Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” (1924), and its references to Walpurgisnacht, through there was nothing obvious, it is easy to imagine that it influenced Pynchon or even Nabokov, despite his noted criticism of him.

1 Wallace himself confirms this in an interview from 1997:

“That thing in Infinite Jest where two representatives (Steeply and Marathe) of two countries are on a cliff-side and are making enormous shadows and playing with it — and there’s even the use of the word Brockengespenst, which comes out of Slothrop and Geli Tripping (from Gravity’s Rainbow) fucking on the Brockengespenst— that’s an outright allusion.”

2 I could find no reference to this book anywhere.

3 Pale Fire, Canto 1:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky,

» Posted: Sunday, July 29, 2012 | Comments (1) | Permanent Link
fleuron

Asgard

Even though I probably know better, I can’t help but view the Arctic romantically. So, while some of the hooting, “extreme sport” carrying-on in this clip from The Asgard Project is a bit annoying, the visuals look great:

The film has won several awards, so I really want to see it eventually.

The views of Asgard shown in the clip don’t really do justice to just how dramatic the mountain can appear. It looks like something you imagine could only be located in Mordor.

Mt. Asgard

Mt. Asgard, Baffin Island, 1994

I set up my camp in a snow storm and didn’t have any real idea where Asgard was when I settled in. In the morning the skies had mostly cleared and this is the sight before me when I opened my tent. Awesome.

» Posted: Thursday, November 17, 2011 | Comments (2) | Permanent Link