December 2010
62 posts
The Viking "man of the forest."
More Viking fun (or at least interestingness):
Gragas [Icelandic laws - Jess] distinguished btween three degrees of severity for such a sentence [of outlawry - Jess]. For the most serious crimes a man might be declared a skógarmaðr, literally a “man of the forest,” compelled to live apart in forests and other deserted places. His property was confiscated, none was allowed to shelter...
Brrr.
More from Ferguson’s The Vikings, of the Rus (Swedish) Vikings’ difficulties during their trips to Constantinople:
He [Constantine Porphyrogenitos - Jess] names seven of the rapids that must be forced on the journey down the Dneiper in both Rus and Slavonic, and linguists have identified Scandinavian original forms for all the Rus names given: Essupi, Ulvorsi, Galandri, Aifur,...
Something I didn't know about Viking religion.
From Robert Ferguson’s The Vikings:
From the Saga of the Jomsvikings we know that people cultivated supernatural personal helpers whose powers they placed above those of any of the Aesir. In a desperate attempt to change the course of the crucial sea-battle at Hjorungavag in about 986, Hakon the Bad, a Norwegian Earl of Lade, sacrificed his nine-year-old son Erling to a personal goddess,...
Just because some of you might not have read... →
“Recently an additional and unexpected fragment of the poem Beowulf was...”
– http://archiveofourown.org/works/143758
I think I just died of lulz, zomg. Beowulf + Old Spice = more win than the internet can contain.
so great
(via therotund)
:DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
(via wildunicornherd)
Torture: as American as erroneous apple pie...
“The major, wanting a prisoner or two, planned a raid. When observation failed, we took that means of getting information about our interesting enemy.
“Did you say, ‘Would they talk?’
“Listen, bud, when a couple of our tough guys started working on a prisoner, he was damn glad to talk.”
—from Elton Macklin’s Suddenly We Didn’t Want To...
Mark Kurlansky's Salt.
I’m taking four things away from Mark Kurlansky’s Salt.
Salt is everywhere and everything. Which is flippant, but the degree to which salt is an integral part of human history was underappreciated by me.
The salt cathedral is pretty cool.
Syracuse, New York, should never have gotten rid of its canals.
My god, the British were assholes in India. Which, yeah, I know, hardly news,...
This amused me inordinately.
Cat Sparks wrote, of a certain group of authors, that “they boast a CV filled with publications I collectively refer to as ‘Cthulu’s arsehole’ zines.”
Editorial approach to the slushpile.
Donald Wollheim, to a new employee, on her first day of slushpile duty:
You can do anything you want with these. Read, reject, write letters of revision, write letters of comment, have a little bonfire off the premises…just make sure that I never see any of them for any reason, ever.
Two bits from Chop Suey.
Andrew Coe’s Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States is informative and entertaining. Coe’s a professional food critic and knows his subject, and he spends a decent amount of time on the history of Chinese and American interaction, the evolution of Chinese cuisine, how Chinese writers have viewed Chinese food, and so on.
But I found it disappointing in at...
Parsley, sacred to the dead.
Parsley’s association with the dead is attested by the general European belief that the effects of the Wild Hunt on one who has seen it (such as blinding, swelling of the head, injury from a knife in the hand at the time, even death) can be averted by asking the huntsmen for parsley.
And now you know.
Someone please write a novel about this woman.
I’m reading Robert Ferguson’s The Vikings: A History, which I’m enjoying, with reservations—a little too much emphasis on individual battles, and a regrettable tendency to describe non-Christian practices as “Heathen.” But while describing the Oseberg ship and sorcery (seid), Ferguson has this passage:
The great power attached to being a sorcerer is one...
This is the kind of dialogue I want to see in...
Odin was the master of seid, the art of divination and sorcery, but its practice was felt (among the Norse) to be not quite manly; as Robert Ferguson puts it, “Despite the powers seid conferred on its user, Snorri tells us that in time it was felt to compromise masculinity so profoundly that it present became the province of women, and possibly of homosexual men.” In the Eddic poem...
Michael Oakeshott, on the role of the historian.
From The Activity of Being an Historian:
The activity of being a historian is not that of contributing to the elucidation of a single ideal coherence of events which may be called ‘true’ to the exclusion of all others; it is an activity in which a wirter, concerned with the past for its own sake and working to a chosen scale, elicits a coherence in a group of contingencies of similar...
Pulp Market Share, 1930.
Title data: 187 total pulps.
Adventure: 14 titles, 7.5%.
Aviation: 20 titles, 10.7%.
Boxing: 1 title, 0.5%.
Detective: 21 titles, 11.2%.
Fantastica: 2 titles, 1.1%.
F.B.I. 3 titles, 1.6%.
General: 10 titles, 5.3%.
Humor: 5 titles, 2.7%.
Miscellaneous: 6 titles, 3.2%.
Mountie: 1 title, 0.5%.
Romance: 21 titles, 11.2%.
Saucy: 44 titles, 23.5%.
Science Fiction: 8 titles, 4.3%....
Using science fiction to communicate technology in... →
Paper by Indian academics on the use of science fiction and mythology in communicating science and technology to (their words) “illiterate Indian masses.” From the Science Fiction in India blog.
The Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists. →
I can’t believe I never knew about this site until this morning. Splendid stuff.
Pulp Market Share, 1929.
Title data: 166 total pulps published.
Adventure: 19 titles, 11.45%.
Aviation: 19 titles, 11.45%.
Boxing: 1 title, 0.6%.
Detective: 15 titles, 9%.
Fantastica: 2 titles, 1.2%.
General: 15 titles, 9%.
Humor: 4 titles, 2.4%.
Miscellaneous: 11 titles, 6.6%.
Mountie: 1 title, 0.6%.
Romance: 24 titles, 14.5%.
Saucy: 27 titles, 16.3%.
Science Fiction: 6 titles, 3.6%.
Sports: 1...
Pulp Market Share, 1928
Title data: 119 total pulps.
Adventure: 11 titles, 9.2%.
Aviation: 9 titles, 7.6%.
Boxing: 1 title, 0.8%.
Detective: 8 titles, 6.7%.
Fantastica: 3 titles, 2.5%.
General: 17 titles, 14.3%.
Humor: 6 titles, 5%.
Miscellaneous: 6 titles, 5%.
Mountie: 1 title, 0.8%.
Romance: 14 titles, 11.8%.
Saucy: 23 titles, 19.3%.
Science Fiction: 3 titles, 2.5%.
Sports: 1 title, 0.8%.
True...
Pulp Market Share, 1927
Title data: 93 titles.
Adventure: 8 titles, 8.6%.
Aviation: 1 title, 1.1%.
Detective: 9 titles, 9.7%.
Fantastica: 4 titles, 4.3%.
General: 16 titles, 17.2%.
Humor: 5 titles, 5.4%.
Miscellaneous: 5 titles, 5.4%.
Mountie: 1 title, 1.1%.
Romance: 13 titles, 14%.
Saucy: 22 titles, 23.7%.
Science Fiction: 2 titles, 2.15%.
Sports: 1 title, 1.1%.
True Crime: 1 title, 1.1%.
...
Pulp Market Share, 1926.
Title Data: 82 titles.
Adventure: 6 titles, 7.3%.
Detective: 7 titles, 8.5%.
Fantastica: 2 titles, 2.4%.
General: 16 titles, 19.5%.
Humor: 6 titles, 7.3%.
Miscellaneous: 3 titles, 3.7%.
Mountie: 1 title, 1.2%.
Romance: 11 titles, 13.4%.
Saucy: 25 titles, 30.5%.
Science Fiction: 1 title, 1.2%.
Sports: 1 title, 1.2%.
True Crime: 1 title, 1.2%.
War: 1 title, 1.2%.
Western: 11...
Pulp Market Share, 1925.
Title data: 82 titles.
Adventure: 9 titles, 11%.
Detective: 4 titles, 4.9%.
Fantastica: 1 title, 1.2%.
General: 21 titles, 25.6%.
Humor: 6 titles, 7.3%.
Miscellaneous: 3 titles, 3.7%.
Romance: 11 titles, 13.4%.
Saucy: 26 titles, 31.7%.
Sports: 1 title, 1.2%.
True Crime: 2 titles, 2.4%.
Western: 6 titles, 7.3%.
Issues data: 1011 total issues.
Adventure: 100 issues, 9.9%.
...
Pulp Market Share, 1924
Title data: 57 titles.
Adventure: 8 titles, 14%.
Detective: 5 titles, 8.8%.
Fantastica: 1 title, 1.75%.
General: 11 titles, 19.3%.
Humor: 3 titles, 5.3%.
Miscellaneous: 2 titles, 3.5%.
Romance: 9 titles, 15.8%.
Saucy: 19 titles, 33.3%.
Sports: 1 title, 1.75%.
True Crime: 1 title, 1.75%.
Western: 3 titles, 5.3%.
Issues data: 844 total issues.
Adventure: 100 issues, 11.85%.
...
Pulp Market Share, 1923
Title data: 40 titles.
Adventure: 5 titles, 12.5%.
Detective: 3 titles, 7.5%.
Fantastica: 1 title, 2.5%.
General: 12 titles, 30%.
Humor: 1 title, 2.5%.
Miscellaneous: 2 titles, 5%.
Romance: 6 titles, 15%.
Saucy: 11 titles, 27.5%.
Sports: 1 title, 2.5%.
Western: 1 title, 2.5%.
Issues data: 764 total issues.
Adventure: 99 issues, 13%.
Detective: 85 issues, 11.1%.
...
Jiefu Jipin.
From Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers: Violence and Clandestine Trade in the Greater China Seas:
One of the most interesting cases of piracy occurred in 1726. During the late summer and early autumn, two fleets that appeared to have worked in conjunction with one another threatened the waters of Zhejiang and Fujian. The first group consisted of a small squadron of four ships that attacked a...
Firsts in animal exhibitions in the U.S.
The first exotic animal to be imported into the North American colonies and exhibited was a lion, in 1720. The second was the camel of 1721.
On Oct. 23, 1721, both the lion and the camel could be seen in Boston. The first elephant came in 1796.
Pulp Market Share, 1922.
Title Data: 35 pulps published.
Adventure: 4 titles, 11.4%.
Detective: 3 titles, 8.6%.
General: 12 titles, 34.3%.
Humor: 1 title, 2.9%.
Romance: 4 titles, 11.4%.
Saucy: 10 titles, 28.6%.
Western: 2 titles, 5.7%.
Issues Data: 597 total issues.
Adventure: 79 issues, 13.2%.
Detective: 79 issues, 13.2%.
General: 212 issues, 35.5%.
Humor: 12 issues, 2%.
Romance: 72 issues, 12.1%.
...
First anthology of all women writers?
Venetian printer Gabriel Giolito’s all-female-authors anthology (including Veronica Gambara, Laura Terracina, and Vittoria Colonna), in 1560.
