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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| Ishmael wrote: | | If you don't read what Fomenko has to say, you aren't serious (though I agree that an independent investigation unsullied by Fomenko's research would be worthwhile -- this is in fact why I am reading him slowly so I can do my own thinking first in some areas, then see later where it matches up). |
I started to read Fomenko some time ago, but decided very quickly (part way into volume 1) that it was far too dangerous for somebody so new to Applied Epistemology... and locked it away (to be read at some future date when I'm better prepared to handle its consequences).
Had I not done so, I believe it would have removed too large a chunk of the subject matter on which I was hoping to hone my fledgling AE skills.
What bit I have read, has instilled in me a healthy scepticism for anything other than the most recent (and verifiable) historical accounts.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I endorse Chad's general position. Just as our neophytre brains get filled with all sorts when we are at school and university so there is a danger that our newly awakened brains can get overwhelmed by this or that New (and very Sweeping) Broom. When I first came across Fomenko I decided that I would leave it to others to do the sieving and I would myself concentrate on those bits of revisionist history that I was already involved in, or externsions thereof.
Of course it is incumbent on us to give Ishmael all the help we can while remaining firmly on the sidelines. Unless of course he can convince us to come on down. But speaking personally I have thus far been interested but not tempted.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Chad wrote: | | I believe [Fomenko] would have removed too large a chunk of the subject matter on which I was hoping to hone my fledgling AE skills. |
I have something of the same attitude really.
For instance, I've no idea what Fomenko has to say regarding Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. I'm hoping, very little.
However, even if Fomenko has much of this material already, I'm certain some of what I have will constitute a unique contribution. It will certainly have been arrived at (almost) independently.
Nevertheless, I continue to urge everyone to base no theory on the conventional understanding of the historical record. If you do, your work will not stand the test of time.
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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Over on "Matters Arising" I cast suspicion on the authenticity of the 1156 version of the Lord's Prayer.
Apart from being too similar to later versions, it was the fact that is was attributed to Pope Adrian IV.
The first written version of the Prayer in English would have been a prestigious and valuable document and more so being attributed to the one and only English Pope.
So what do we know about Adrian?
He is famous for two things: being English and (supposedly) giving the English Monarchy dominion over Ireland.
Little is known about his early years... and what little we do have, comes to us from two accounts written decades after his death. He was born Nicolas Breakspear, near St. Albans in about 1100. He was from poor but educated stock. His father became a monk and Nicolas then moved to France to continue his education.
There is some speculation as to whether he was Saxon or Norman... but it sounds like an English name to me.
One nice coincidence is that he was born in St. Albans and became Cardinal Bishop of Albano.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| He is famous for .... giving the English Monarchy dominion over Ireland. |
This is the bit that stinks even though it might be thought reasonable that an English pope would advance English interests. Two possibilities arise (assuming bogosity):
1. The maximalist (Ishmaelian) position would be that Adrian IV was dreamt up in order to legitimise English rule over Ireland.
2. The minimalist (Harperian) position might be that Adrian IV was genuine, but was used much later to legitimise English rule over Ireland by forging a document to that effect purportedly from him and inserted nefariously into the Vatican archive.
If the latter is true, other details about Adrian -- for instance that he was English -- might have been added to lend versimilitude. If so, details like "born in St. Albans and became Cardinal Bishop of Albano" become worth inspecting on grounds other than charming coincidence. For instance, if his real name was Adriano d'Albano then how better to account for this than by claiming it refers to St Albans.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Here is an interesting page which I haven't entirely read but seems to suggest that a whole country has been forged: Portugal.
http://www.reformation.org/portuguese-columbus.html
Actually the place, the time and the activity chimes in with the 'forging' (pun intended) of quite another country (and by the same crew, the Templars, or Megalithics as we here know them): Switzerland
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Came across this intriguing story. It concerns the Ballad of Eric. Wiki can give us the barebones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballad_of_Eric
| The "Ballad of Eric" (Swedish: "Eriksvisan") is a ballad found in Latin and Swedish about the legendary Gothic king Erik. It was once seen as a valuable source for Migration Period history, but is now regarded as inauthentic fakelore created during the 16th century. |
My first acquaintance with the term 'fakelore'. Wish I'd invented it.
| The ballad was published for the first time in Latin by Johannes Magnus in his Historia de omnibus gothorum sueonumque regibus (1554). |
That is pretty well contemporaneously with our view of when Beowulf first swam into sight.
| He states that the original was a song widely sung in Sweden at the time, but Johannes Magnus is not entirely reliable. The Latin text is composed of ten Sapphic stanzas. It tells the story of King Eric, whose career bears some similarities to a later king Berig whom Magnus claimed united the Swedes and Goths 400 years after Erik. Berig is also found in the Jordanes' 6th-century work Getica. |
So we know where Johannes Magnus was getting his material.
| According to the text Eric, the first king of the Goths, sent troops southwards to a country named Vetala, where no one had yet cultivated the land. In their company there was a wise man, a lawspeaker, who was to uphold the law. Finally, the Gothic king Humli set his son Dan to rule the settlers, and after Dan, Vetala was named Denmark. |
In other words Sweden had a historical claim to suzerainty over Denmark rather than vice versa. Which by an amazing coincidence was the chief bone of contention between the two countries in the sixteenth century!
| In 1825 Erik Gustaf Geijer of the Geatish Society reproduced parts of the song.[3] He believed that this was an ancient traditional text, and Geijer was a person of immense authority in Swedish academia |
OK, so the whole thing rests on authority, pure and simple.
| In an analysis of this song's weirdly archaic language in his 1848 PhD thesis, Carl Säve believed that the use of i and u instead of e and o indicated that it was first written down with the runic script. In 1853, Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius and George Stephens followed Säve. They had missed or just ignored that in 1850 P. A. Munch had argued that the ballad was dependent on the Prosaic Chronicle and suggested that it was composed ca 1449 or 1450. |
All this highly revealing bickering is presumably possible because, unlike Beowulf, the Ballard of Eric is not the National Epic.
| Henrik Schück initially accepted Munch's reasoning. However, he changed his mind, and argued in 1891 that everybody involved in presenting it lied about its wide currency and that it was composed by Johannes Magnus himself. After that, only Einar Nylén (1924) has tried to argue that a Swedish version existed before Johannes Magnus, but his opinion was rejected or ignored in subsequent scholarship |
Oh look, everybody, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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If this "Thomas Middleton" was involved with the scripts then it makes it all the more possible that "Shakespeare" has been projected backward from a later date -- another outcome I would prefer.
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N R Scott
In: Middlesbrough
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The Shakespeare Apocrypha is a good place to look. It's worth asking why so many plays attributed to Shakespeare in the 17th century have since been removed from the Shakespeare canon by later 'experts'.
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| Ishmael wrote: | | If this "Thomas Middleton" was involved with the scripts then it makes it all the more possible that "Shakespeare" has been projected backward from a later date -- another outcome I would prefer. |
I didn't realize you thought that Shakespeare was projected back in time as well.
I was reading this book by Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom. It contains a series of essays, one for each Shakespeare play. There are numerous points in the book where he mentions that the accepted chronology of the plays is puzzling.
Coriolanus, for example, is a weaker play than Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. But it was written after all of those plays. The scholars answer to this is that Shakespeare was experimenting with an unknowable protagonist in Coriolanus. Of course, the counter to this is that if Shakespeare was so brilliant, he would have known that unknowable protagonists don't make for good drama.
This single point means nothing in itself, clearly. Shakespeare may very well have been experimenting with unknowable protagonists. But when there are many points made about the puzzling chronology of the plays, it makes one wonder.
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| N R Scott wrote: | | The Shakespeare Apocrypha is a good place to look. It's worth asking why so many plays attributed to Shakespeare in the 17th century have since been removed from the Shakespeare canon by later 'experts'. |
It does make one wonder what was dismissed long ago in the name of business and will never see the light of day.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Rocky wrote: | | I was reading this book by Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom. It contains a series of essays, one for each Shakespeare play. There are numerous points in the book where he mentions that the accepted chronology of the plays is puzzling. |
In keeping with the AE axiom, nothing ever gets worse, I submit that the "real" Shakespearean plays are the apocryphal plays, along with all the other ones that suck.
That is, the lowest quality plays are those that have the fewest authors.
The more popular was the play, the more it was altered over time. With each performance, the best plays were made better: Refined and influenced by a lineage of directors, actors and audiences (the latter, by their reactions). Thus it ought to be possible to graph the quality of the plays upon a curve that is exponential -- as quality begets improvement. The original plays of "Shakespeare" will be embarrassingly bad by comparison with the celebrated, canonized library.
Furthermore, if I am correct, the least prestigious and most "suspect" plays will utilize the narrowest and most similar vocabulary, reflecting the narrowness of their "original" authorship.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Drama comes from ritual.
Attic drama splits from ritual into tragedy, comedy and the so called satyr plays.(the players had a massive phallus...spear?) Note the correspondence to death, life and sex rituals.
'The Bard's' content included tragedy, comedy and historical/satire...satyr (sic).
Orthodoxy seems to believe that the Bard was influenced by earlier foreign, classical works, but maybe the primary influences were English hunting rituals/folklore that developed into early forms of plays (contained within an English oral tradition).
Ritual......
Sha...man
Shake...man
Shake... spear
Shake Speare, a not uncommon name, maybe its origin was the shaman/ shake man (leader of the hunting ritual)....
Will I am Shake Speare.
If so it was a nick name for playwrights (sic) (Playwright not playwrite must be understood like shipwright)....that developed into a first and surname...
Who knows?
RIP N8.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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The shaman is the 'trickster'. Those Puritans knew what they were about when they closed the playhouses down.
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