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Gildas (British History)
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admin
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I have to report the tragic and untimely death of....
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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I did once send a DVD of SCUM (a space theory) to Horizon and got a very nice rejection.

WE did? I never heard.

There wasn't much to report. I sent out about thirty copies and didn't receive a single reply except the one from Horizon.

OGRE, SLOT & SCUM
Those acronyms have got to feature on the covers
.

I have been thinking about this for some time. Originally, the AE principle was that all new theories from us should be given unprepossessing titles on the ground that orthodoxy always uses super-sexy titles to make new theories both memorable and sound more technical than they really are.

However, I don't see why the devil should necessarily have the best tunes and have reluctantly come to the conclusion that we have to go down the memorable-but-for-the-right-reason road. OGRE, SLOT & SCUM do not really fit this bill.

Accordingly, the first task is to come up with a new name for the Hydrological Theory being unfurled on the Rainfall thread. The current name OGRE is actually OWGA standing for Overall Weighted Greenery Average (I think) so something better should be constantly nagging at the back of all readers' minds as they plod through the extracts.

Remember, the winner will be able to tell their grandchildren the equivalent of "I thought up the phrase Big Bang". Which knowing some people on this site will eventually become, "I thought up Big Bang."

You may however debate the merits of the overall policy. Ishmael will be shrill for the old ways as usual.
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nemesis8


In: byrhfunt
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Hatty wrote:
We take the view that fire breathing dragons are foundries.


The more I look at this the more I reckon Dragon Hill is a beacon.

Early written record (Tenth Century) Dragon Hill is Eccles Beorh, that is..... 'Church Barrow'.

This is going to satisfy your folks who like a quick dictionary search.

The theory being that a Christian religious building might once have stood on the summit, or it might be an ancient barrow.

BTW...Discovering barrows is like discovering forts. A tad more exciting than discovering animal enclosures.....

In fact beoth is just high mound, (as opposed to hlaew ...low mound) but hey ho discovering a barrow is a tad more exciting than a mound....

Lets get back to Eccles forget the Church bit.... thats a bit like dicovering a fort.....(I am labouring this now)

Eccles is a meeting place, or a place you are summoned to.

The top of Dragon (Fire breathing) Hill is flattened.

Its a signal/summoning beacon next to an enclosure..

Great.... I now disagree with you all.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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No-one is disagreeing with you. There are loads of so-called beacon hills around, some of which are actually named Beacon Hill or the equivalent. I don't see why anyone would ignore the fact that Segsbury, Uffington, Liddington, Barbury are intervisible and all on the Ridgeway.

Smoke is probably as good a signal as any, and whatever the function was of Dragon Hill it makes a good landmark, especially if it had an Eccles on top.
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N R Scott


In: Middlesbrough
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I'm currently reading William of Malmesbury's Chronicle of the Kings of England. I'm up to the bit about the Germanic nations (the Angles, Saxons and Jutes) getting overpopulated and sending out their sons into foreign lands. This bit stood out;

For almost all the country lying to the north of the British ocean, though divided into many provinces, is justly denominated Germany, from its germinating so many men. [my italics].

Is this derivation correct? If the word Germany did derive from germinate or its Latin equivalent it would mean that the name couldn't pre-date the Angle/Saxon exodus (unless there was some earlier exodus to inspire the name). This in turn would mean that any earlier mention of Germani or Germanic tribes in Caesar or Tacitus would be plain wrong - and therefore later forgeries.
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Jorn



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N R Scott wrote:
I'm currently reading William of Malmesbury's Chronicle of the Kings of England. I'm up to the bit about the Germanic nations (the Angles, Saxons and Jutes) getting overpopulated and sending out their sons into foreign lands. This bit stood out;

For almost all the country lying to the north of the British ocean, though divided into many provinces, is justly denominated Germany, from its germinating so many men. [my italics].


Are you sure it says North and not septentrional?

I am starting to become more and more suspicious that there is something strange going on in the earliest sources concerning the cardinal directions, like if they turned the compass 90 de'grad when the Latins were translating Greek sources.

The war of the Roses might have been a war over compass-roses.

I also don't think it is accidental that Carl Linne who systematized plants and animals was Swedish, as a rose garden (Rosen) in Swedish is a fruit and flower garden.

From wikipedia.
Roses can be herbs, shrubs or trees. Most species are deciduous, but some are evergreen.[2] They have a worldwide range, but are most diverse in the northern hemisphere.

Several economically important products come from Rosaceae, including many edible fruits (such as apples, apricots, plums, cherries, peaches, pears, raspberries, and strawberries), almonds, and ornamental trees and shrubs (such as roses, meadowsweets, photinias, firethorns, rowans, and hawthorns)


Edit. It seems that Linne classified Woad as a rose as well.

Here is an old folk tune where they sing about blue clothes, Roland, Rosen, Ships etc, but modern Swedes seems to have forgot that "Uti Rosen" meant "out in the rose(garden)", and translate it to "in youth" Press "show more" to find the English translation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufnnr_q1yfE

Are there such strange lyrics in English, Scottish or "Gelike"?
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Jorn



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nemesis8 wrote:
Hatty wrote:
We take the view that fire breathing dragons are foundries.


The more I look at this the more I reckon Dragon Hill is a beacon.

Early written record (Tenth Century) Dragon Hill is Eccles Beorh, that is..... 'Church Barrow'.


In Norwegian a "Böker" is a sign for a "Böe", that is an underwater skerry. A "böl" is a bonfire, a "böt" is a boat. There are more of these related words, and you find the same pattern in OE, but not in Old French IIRC.

A "drakkar" is a warship with sails and oars that could be dragged over land, and g and k is the same rune. If your language did not contain a word for sail, would it not be natural to call them wings?

It would not surprise me one bit if the myth about dragons came from priests in Central Europe, that experienced attack by Drakkars.

As for the Chalk horse, objects like that are still called a daymark for sailors in Norwegian and in English.

A daymark or a day marker is a structure, such as a tower constructed on land, that serves as an aid to navigation by sailors. Similar in concept to a lighthouse, a daymark though does not have a light and so is usually only visible during daylight hours. Some disused lighthouses remain useful by serving as daymarks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daymark

Nightmark does however not exist, but a lighthouse is called a "fyr" (fire), and could perhaps just have been called a light in OE. You do find the word "fyrd" in OE, but they seems to have been lit to call out troops and warn enemies.

In case of war all day-marks were removed, and the "fyr"s were put out. Instead you lit something called a "vete" in Norwegian, a ready-made bonfire where you could control the air supply to produce massive amounts of smoke in daytime, or a huge fire at nighttime.

I am pretty certain English also has this difference of concepts, if one just looks for them.
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nemesis8


In: byrhfunt
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Jorn wrote:


As for the Chalk horse, objects like that is still called a daymark for sailors in Norwegian and in English.



The most famous white steed is at Uffington.

Uff=Up which fits in with your daymark theory.....

Now I just need to go there, and check it out.
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Jorn



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nemesis8 wrote:

The most famous white steed is at Uffington.

Uff=Up which fits in with your daymark theory.....

Now I just need to go there, and check it out.


I looked it up, and Uffington is pretty far from the sea. It is thus a landmark, rather than a daymark.

Originally, a 'landmark' literally meant a geographic feature used by explorers and others to find their way back or through an area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmark


The Dragon Hill could still be a "vete" though.

You need google translate for this, as I can't find a link to it in English.


http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vete
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N R Scott


In: Middlesbrough
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Jorn wrote:
Are you sure it says North and not septentrional?

I checked, in the original Latin it does say septentrional.

Omnis enim fere terra quae trans oceanum Britannicum sub septentrionali axe jacet

...whatever that means.
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Ishmael


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Jorn wrote:
A "drakkar" is a warship with sails and oars that could be dragged over land, and g and k is the same rune. If your language did not contain a word for sail, would it not be natural to call them wings?


Unfortunately, both "drakkar" and "dragon" are forms for "Tzar-khan", one of the oldest word forms in human language (meaning zone-kin, or "a group of similar things"). This is according to me -- but I now take it as given.

If I am correct (and I am), none can say whether drakkar derives from dragon or vice versa, or indeed whether either word has any meaningful relationship with the other.

However, Fomenko argues that "dragons"---the fire-breathing kind of mythology---are cannons. I find this (for the time being) persuasive.

Note that the English word "thing" is itself a form of Tzar-khan (which is to say, it is a form of the word "dragon"). The word "thing" expresses in English the base concept of "tzar-khan" better than any other English word.

It occurs to me that a fire-breathing tzar-khan is how someone might express, "the thing we don't have a name for that breathes fire."
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Jorn



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N R Scott wrote:
Jorn wrote:
Are you sure it says North and not septentrional?

I checked, in the original Latin it does say septentrional.

Omnis enim fere terra quae trans oceanum Britannicum sub septentrionali axe jacet

...whatever that means.


I don't think it matters much anyway.

I have tried to read some British chroniclers since my last post, and I can only say that Latin is high level idiocy, and that I now hate the Catholic Church even more than before.

If you read OE, ON or OG you can date the text roughly by what kind of tools they use, how they are dressed, place names.

No such thing in Latin, as it is one correct way to write everything, and the scribes have seen it as their mission to correct mistakes, and before the text gets published, it was washed once again. Names change, name of landscapes change, loanwords change, etc, until the texts have no significant markers left.

Just one example: I am pretty sure that there has never been a Norwegian king named Loth, as the name doesn't exist in Norwegian, but it is impossible to say if it is an outright forgery, misunderstanding, or some scribe trying to improve on the text.

Add to this that the monks writing these chronicles were primarily interested in showing how insignificant the earthly life was compared to the eternal church.

From what I can see, no technological advancement happens from Bede until book-printing arrived. I don't think that all chronicles are forgeries, but I have concluded that there is no use in reading them, or translations from them, until those that publish them at least acknowledges the problem.

I know that some Germans have started to publish medieval Latin no matter how horrible the original, and from the reactions I have seen in the Anglo-sphere, it is a long way to go still.
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Jorn



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Ishmael wrote:

However, Fomenko argues that "dragons"---the fire-breathing kind of mythology---are cannons. I find this (for the time being) persuasive.

I kind of trust the Finnish language more than written sources, as nobody has cared what names the Finns used for stuff.

For the Finns it is the Swedes that are called Routsi, while the Russians are "Venäjä" = vends? The other nationalities are easy to spot though: englanti, hollanti, norja, saksa (german), tanska (danish)

As Fomenko doesn't care about stuff like this, I have a hard time taking him seriously when he recreates this huge Russian empire.
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Hatty
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I am pretty sure that there has never been a Norwegian king named Loth, as the name doesn't exist in Norwegian, but it is impossible to say if it is an outright forgery, misunderstanding, or some scribe trying to improve on the text.

In Arthurian legend King Lot or Loth was the father of Sir Gawain and is sometimes portrayed as the ruler of Orkney or Norway. Near Traprain Law, a huge mound reminiscent of Viking mounds that overlooks the Firth of Forth to the east of Edinburgh, there's an insignificant standing stone beside the footpath, which was apparently relocated to make way for ploughing even though "The Loth Stone is said to mark the grave of King Loth, a fictitious? Pictish monarch who gave his name to the Lothian region."

It has the usual folklore attached:

As the story goes, Loth lived in the area around 518 B.C. and had a daughter who fell in love with a local shepherd. Much displeased with this he had his daughter condemned to death by being thrown from the top of Traprain Law. However, being a hardy Scots lass, she survived the fall and while still unconscious was placed in a coracle and set adrift on the Firth of Forth. The princess landed at Culross and was saved by local shepherds. Some time later, she gave birth to a son, Kentigern who trained as a holy man and later took the name of Mungo. His travels took him to the west where he set up a monastery in the small village of Cathures, which was later to become Glasgow. Meanwhile, the shepherd who had originally fallen in love with the princess, took his revenge on King Loth and killed him with an arrow through the heart. Legend states that Loth's Stone marks the site of the burial.
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Jorn



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Hatty wrote:

In Arthurian legend King Lot or Loth was the father of Sir Gawain and is sometimes portrayed as the ruler of Orkney or Norway.


The Law was King, that is, they didn't have a King.

A territory of Sweden and Norway is often called a law (Roslagen, Trønderlagen, etc), as they used to have their own lawgiving Thing. Sometimes the thing elected a King, sometimes they elected a lawspeaker.(lagmann). Later lawspeakers were appointed by the King. Iceland got its first king in 1264.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawspeaker

Like all titles it has been devalued over the years. A Lagmann is now the professional judge in a jury in Norway.

I am for instance pretty sure King Lagman of Scotland wasn't baptized Lagman.

IIRC Man still has something like an elected lawspeaker.
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