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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I've opened a new chapter in the Enlightening World of fakes'n'forgery down in the Reading Room. Anyone who can't access this but thinks they ought to be able to -- and would like to -- should let me know.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Cant see anything....So presumably have not been granted access.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You have graciously been granted access.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Yet another extraordinary tweet has come from Prof Oosthuizen via the British Museum about the runes on an Anglo-Saxon ring, which according to the BM means 'I am called ring'
| Old English runes inscribed on this 8thC #AngloSaxon silver-gilt ring say simply (& unimaginatively) ‘ic hatt ring’ (‘I am called ring’).They’re partially covered by 3 (poss. later) bosses, 1 still w/ a red stone, so maybe the spell - & the ring - failed |
The inscription is of the 'Alfred ordered me to be made' school. It must be obvious to historians there's no way of dating an old ring except "stylistically". Even Prof Oosthuizen finds it unimaginative.
The ring is decorated with coloured glass, not precious stones, reminiscent of other 'early medieval' artefacts that are supposed to have been kept intact in a family home or some out-of-the-way church but restored at a later date. This ring has been gilded, the gilding overlaying the first and last letters of the runes
| Silver-gilt finger-ring: the hoop is an oval band of broad strip with row of 3 bosses riveted to the front, each with a beaded collet; the larger, central boss and one of the 2 lateral ones are empty, but the third still contains a red glass disc; a runic inscription is inscribed round the back of the hoop, where most of the gilding is worn off. |
Provenance?
| Found by vendor while digging the foundation trenches for his house in 1993. | |
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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As usual I asked about the provenance, the who, when and where, and Evert van Kuijk obliged
| 'Wheatley Hill, Durham, found 1993, now in the British Museum'. |
No mention of the BM's householder digging his foundation trenches. This is a perfect example of finagling. Apologies to van Kuijk but there's no other way of describing it.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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If you wander through this Twitter thread you will be bemused as to why we are treated with such hostility. We have clearly been insufficiently radical. https://twitter.com/hashtag/ForgeryMAM?src=hash
On the other hand the wallies seem not to appreciate that trying to pick and choose when combing through dung heaps is a mugs' game. They don't understand the precautionary principle: you are looking for diamonds in the rough not rotten apples lurking at the bottom of the barrel. Hashtag mixed metaphors.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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It is pretty amazing that between the Romans leaving and the 12th Century there are no documented finds at all (!) in Wheatley Hill and Thornley except for this one solitary find which has been dated to the Middle Saxon.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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I found this interesting: a forged charter from 'Aethelred' with the wrong date on it (only 300 years out) Tweet Might it be possible that the "forgery" is the real document. 300 years matches the 300 years of Fomenko's false history thesis.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You, like me, are probably familiar with the word bibliography but, beyond seeing it at the end of respectable books, to mean something like "Book list", are probably unaware of what exactly it is. It is, in Maureen Lipman's memorable phrase, 'an -ology'
| Bibliography, as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology. Carter and Barker (2010) describe bibliography as a twofold scholarly discipline—the organised listing of books (enumerative bibliography) and the systematic description of books as objects (descriptive bibliography). |
It is also the key to systematic literary forgery. Why forge whole books when you can forge a bibliography?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You're all getting a bit lax so here's an exercise for you. It's from an Oxford don writing an official bio of a very influential figure
| X was genuinely interested in art and enjoyed the company of artists. Jacob Epstein was a friend – the story goes that he oversaw the delivery of a consignment of sculptures to New York, for which he received a bronze bust in lieu of payment. |
Comment.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Oh well, since nobody has, I'll tell you how I came by my own Epstein bronze which I use as a door stop
Jacob Epstein: Yes?
Mick Harper: It's Mick. Wondering whether you wanted to come for a jar.
JE: Love to, Mick, but I'm in the middle of organising this consignment for New York.
MH: Anything I can do to help?
JE: I don't know really. As a professional sculptor I'm well used to sending my stuff abroad and since this represents probably a year's work, I'm really concerned to get this right.
MH: And?
JE: Well, obviously I use the best shipping agent in London but my agent deals with all the bumf.
MH: Well, I could pop round with some old newspaper if you like. You know stuff into the crates, that sort of thing.
JE: That's a great idea, Mick, that way we can finish early and have time for a swift half before closing time.
MH: Half? You mean sod.
JE: Yeah, sorry. Tell you what, you can have a bust if you like. I've got one hanging around the place somewhere.
MH: Sotheby's? Valuation department, please. ... I've got this Epstein bust ... No, not documentation as such, I was a friend of his ... yeah, all right, two o'clock.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This is an interesting new genre which I am absolutely not confident has anything to do with forgery. But might have. It's 'the Soviet novel'. [All quotes from the Guardian Review by Marcel Theroux https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/07/stalingrad-vasily-grossman-review]
| Although it was first published in English in 1985, it’s only in the last 10 years or so that Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate has been widely acclaimed as a masterpiece |
It was this that caught my eye
| It was a brave and, as it turned out, reckless book. The manuscript was confiscated by the Soviet authorities and remained unpublished at the time of Grossman’s death in 1964. The first Russian edition appeared in the west in 1980 after a copy was smuggled out of the Soviet Union. |
Copy of what exactly? This is an 800-page book so the manuscript will have some heft. I don't know enough about Soviet life in the 1950's to say whether Grossman would have a carbon copy, a handwritten final draft or what, though I know enough about the Soviet secret police of the era to be surprised if they didn't confiscate the lot.
If so, this 1980 'copy' would seem to be the original, held by the authorities. Now this is by no means impossible. The Soviet state might have been pretty geriatric by this stage but it was relatively relaxed not just about political literature in general but about books from the Stalinist/Khrushchev period in particular. Also there was a good deal of jockeying between liberal and hardline factions so it was not unknown for these leaks to be made by either side to embarrass the other. So far, so genuine.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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We’ve talked a bit about how context can catapult a workaday book into a best seller. The Bible being a good example. It all began with Beowulf and having to contend with questions like, “If it’s a fake, how come it’s a masterpiece?†To which we used to say, “You only think it's a masterpiece because it is sui generis.†But we’ve tended to have to eat our words after coming to the conclusion that it was written by John Milton. Though only a minor Milton.
Thus, if you decide to write a historical epic a la War and Peace but set in the Soviet era, it would probably pay you to present it as written by an unknown genius struggling against the wrath of the state. You’d still have to write a good book but you wouldn’t have to write a great book.
I’d go a little further and say, if you were an ordinary Russian novelist with a good book on the stocks, you’d probably get it published in Russia but you wouldn’t have a prayer of making the big bucks available in the West. No disrespect but not only do we have a limited appetite for foreign books, the cost of translation alone being prohibitive, but even if it does see the light of our day, it'll only get traction with the sniffy set. You'll have to give it some gulag welly to see it really fly.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Well, okay, it's kinda this or maybe it's kinda that. But what about this?
| As much as I enjoyed Life and Fate, I didn’t close it wishing it was longer. And yet, now comes news of a prequel |
Blimey, it's been a bit of a miracle that a 1964 manuscript has survived the vicissitudes of Soviet antipathy, so what's this all about?
| It turns out that Grossman’s magnum opus is actually the follow-up to a novel called For a Just Cause. This was first published in the USSR in a number of different editions in the 1950s |
Yes, but the Stalinist fifties or the Ivan Denisovich fifties?
| The received wisdom about this book is that it was an orthodox Soviet account of the siege of Stalingrad and that it lacked the complexity and merit of Life and Fate. The very fact that it was publishable in the Soviet Union – in 1952, under Stalin, no less – is not encouraging |
I assume this is beyond reproach as provenance but these are unknown rather than murky waters for me.
| For this first publication in English, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler have revised the Russian editions of For a Just Cause with material from Grossman’s politically riskier manuscript versions and given the book his preferred title: Stalingrad |
Well, there's nothing like keeping to the author's intentions but it would be fascinating to hear how (or perhaps, how come) Grossman was keeping such perilous material around the place and where it has been all the time between c 1950 and c 2019.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Maybe the easiest way to decide is to ask "Was this the kind of thing that Russian writers would be writing in the middle of the twentieth century or the start of the twenty-first?"
| The book’s size is made less daunting by Grossman’s short chapters, his vivid writing and his engagement with such daring topics as the parallels between Hitler and Stalin, the Soviet penal system, Russian nationalism and official antisemitism |
Here's something we'll all find resonant
| Reading it is a very eerie experience. It’s like discovering the Bayeux tapestry has a prequel, albeit with marked differences in colours and texture |
And then there's the question of who is writing the backstory. Remember, there isn't supposed to be a backstory since the writer didn't know he was writing a backstory at the time.
| The first thing it explains is the extraordinary depth of the imagined lives in Life and Fate, since we’re now able to read almost 900 pages of carefully worked out backstory |
And nor, strictly speaking, should the author have a backstory since he is writing both books only a few years apart
| Perhaps the most intriguing element of all is the overstory: the way the Grossman of this novel somehow became the dissident author of Life and Fate |
What is our overstory? Dunno but someone should dive down Russia's rabbit holes before the halls of mirrors close in too tight.
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