Merry Christmas and Happy Yule!

Wæs þu hal! This week we have a very special Christmas episode of The Endless Knot all about the word Yule:

The etymological key to everything I talk about in this video is the two possible sources for Germanic word (and festival) Yule. Yule might come from a Proto-Indo-European word that meant 'to turn', in which case it's referring to the turn of the year that is the winter solstice, or from  a Proto-Indo-European word that meant 'to speak' and by extension 'to joke' or 'to play', by way of the sense of festivities and celebration. Together these sources highlight Yule as a time associated with fertility festivals and celebration, which are exactly the elements of the Germanic Yule that are now commonly associated with Christmas. These elements work well symbolically with the Christian story of the birth of Christ, of course, which also has the theme of the renewal of life. And indeed it was a very intentional decision to borrow from various pagan traditions and incorporate these elements into a Christian holiday. For instance, Pope Gregory the Great advised Augustine the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his mission to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons, to adapt and adopt the Germanic customs and places of worship into the Christian tradition, rather than to try to simply suppress them. I also point out the possible etymological connection between Yule and jolly, as in the "Jolly old elf" of Clement Clark Moore's Twas the Night before Christmas (more properly A Visit from St Nicholas), and the fact that "elf" too is a Germanic word and pagan connection. You can learn more about the elf etymology in my earlier video on the word "Album":

I was reminded of another medieval literary connection here (in addition to Beowulf and the Norse stuff), in a Twitter conversation with my friend and colleague Damian (@IPFWMedieval), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is also set around Christmas and New Year's, and also draws on the imagery of the evergreen holly. In fact there are a number of parallels between Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with the Green Knight lining up well with Grendel (and the Grinch). And similarly to Beowulf, the Old Norse sagas, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight features a strange supernatural being visiting the hall at Christmas and causing trouble. And evidently Ted Geisel (aka Dr Seuss) was a student at Oxford University while JRR Tolkien, a notable scholar and translator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf (as well as Lord of the Rings author), held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Thanks for the extra connection, Damian! If you want to read more about the Grinch/Grendel link, there is at least one article published on the topic (to my knowledge), Robert L. Schichler's "Understanding the Outsider: Grendel, Geisel, and the Grinch". You can find the full bibliographic info for this article, along with other useful sources on the various topics in this video, on the show notes page. Though I couldn't work Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into this "Yule" video, I have covered the poem in some detail in an earlier video called "A Detective Story":

One last programming note: I'll be taking a bit of time off over the holidays, and regular video releases will resume on January 13th, 2015. So in the meantime, Happy Yule! And as a final Christmas present, here are a number of other fun and interesting videos about Christmas with an etymological or historical angle!

From Naval Gazing to Navel Gazing: Thinking about and with Metaphor

With this week's video we're back to the "ways of knowing" miniseries, and a look at metaphor, and how it connects the development of sailing technology and "the journey of life":

This one has quite a long history. It was originally a series of three posts on my very first blog (1 2 3), which I later updated and combined into one long post on my second blog, and you can now also access that version here on my current website. Basically the backstory is that I was teaching a course in narrative, and one of the thematic groupings of texts I put together was travel narrative. As I was preparing this, I noticed that there was an interesting parallel between the way the "journey of life" metaphor was used in many texts and the development in sailing technology from the ancient world into the 20th century. I've always been interested in the relationship between science and technology on the one hand, and literature and culture on the other, and I've sometimes worked this into my lectures a bit; that's the genesis for this idea.

There weren't many stipulations for this narrative course other than that we were to consider narrative from fairly broad terms. I decided to divide the course into two parts. First we would survey some of the major narrative genres of western literature — myth, folktale, legend, etc.; epic and saga; romance; the novel; the short story — and then we'd spend the rest of our time on thematic units. I wanted to consider narrative broadly speaking as a way human beings tend to organise information and make sense of their world. Starting off with myth was a particularly good way of introducing this idea. We compared parallel stories such as creation myths, destruction myths (like flood myths), and so forth from the Bible, Greek myth, and Norse myth. This also gave us the opportunity to do a bit of comparative mythology and consider the differences in religious beliefs and some of the different world views these reflect, for instance the very personal relationship between humans and God in the Judeo-Christian world and the relationship based on fear in the Greco-Roman world.

I also wanted to spend some time on some of the fundamental narratives of western culture, and the first thematic unit that I settled on was travel and exploration. As I was prepping my lectures on this topic it occurred to me that there was an interesting parallel pattern between the travel and exploration literature and the world views reflected by this imagery on the one hand, and the development of sailing technology on the other. I suggested to the class that the travel and exploration metaphor could be seen as reflective of cultural change from the ancient world to the modern. This narrative metaphor often describes humans' relation to the world in which they live — the narrative is symbolic of people's place in the universe. And the use of this narrative metaphor changes over time to reflect different beliefs about people's place in the world.

I've held on to this idea over the years, and when I started to work on this web series, it was one of the first things I wanted to come back to and adapt for video, since it would be nicely visual. Indeed the concept map is figured here as an actual map, and the chronological journey of the development of this metaphor is figured as a journey.

The centrality of metaphor to our language and our cognition is perhaps most importantly explored in the groundbreaking book Metaphors We Live By (1980), by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Though Lakoff's useful index of conceptual metaphors, the Conceptual Metaphor Homepage, no longer seems to be available at its old ulr, it's mirrored here (at least for now), so have a look. Here is the relevant section that includes the "life as a journey" metaphor. Interestingly, the idea of fundamental cultural metaphors was explored earlier by Ernst Robert Curtius in European Literature of the Latin Middle Ages (1948). I first encountered Curtius while writing my doctoral dissertation, and, after constructing the appropriate footnotes for that project, I filed him away as something I should come back to later. More recently, there's the very exciting The Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus project at the University of Glasgow, which is drawing on the Oxford English Dictionary's Historical Thesaurus to map out how metaphors in English have developed and changed over the history of the English language. I'm very excited to see the (ongoing) results of this excellent project. You can read more about the project and see some fascinating visualizations on their blog.

And one final link for those interested in reading a little further: if you want to know more about the development of sailing technology in the ancient world (and beyond) a good starting place is this useful overview.

Programming note: in two weeks we'll go back to looking at word origins with the first of a very special two-parter about an interesting etymology and the surrounding cultural connections. The final part of the "ways of knowing" miniseries, looking at narrative, will be coming later, so stay tuned...

The Story Behind "A Detective Story"

Here it is, the second episode of The Endless Knot YouTube series, and the second part of the "Ways of Knowing" miniseries that starts off my new channel:

This video has a long history for me. I first wrote this up as a blog post on my old blog -- you can now read it here on my new blog. The text of the video is pretty much the same with only some minor revisions and additions. But the idea started years before that in a course I was teaching aimed at first-year university students which focused on literature in the context of the arts and humanities. (It was intended for students who were not English majors.) I decided to take the approach of trying to demonstrate the cultural network that underlies all of western literature, that nothing existed in a vacuum, and that all of history, art, culture, philosophy, and science are inextricably linked. In order to understand the literary texts in the course, we have to examine the world that produced them in all its interconnected complexity. As it turns out, two of the works I decided to include in this course were the 14th century Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Sherlock Holmes short story “A Scandal in Bohemia”. In my final, half-improvised lecture to my students, I outlined this connection, which touched on several of the texts and historical contexts we had examined in the course. The point was (and is) that all these things are connected one way or another and to study any one of them inevitably leads to an unending trail of connections.

For those unfamiliar with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain is one of the knight's of King Arthur's Round Table, and also Arthur's nephew. While Gawain was one of the most important knight's and instrumental in the denouement of the Arthurian story, this particular poem was, as far as we know, obscure in its own day, existing in only one manuscript, and only came to wider attention in more recent times. It's now highly celebrated as one of the finest Arthurian poems of its kind.

In any case, it's from this Gawain connection that I get that I get the name the Endless Knot, and the image I use in the logo. I saw this endless knot image from Gawain as an idea expression of the interconnectedness of things, and it was also a nice parallel with heptagram which which shows the interconnected elements of cognitive science:

I liked this idea of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a detective story (not original to me), and wanted to push it to its limits, and furthermore try and connect it with Sherlock Holmes, who is also notable for his interconnected thinking. Here's the fuller passage from the story "A Scandal in Bohemia" which I quote at the beginning of the video:

"Wedlock suits you," he remarked. "I think, Watson, that you have put on seven and a half pounds since I saw you."

"Seven!" I answered.

"Indeed, I should have thought a little more. Just a trifle more, I fancy, Watson. And in practice again, I observe. You did not tell me that you intended to go into harness."

"Then, how do you know?"

"I see it, I deduce it. How do I know that you have been getting yourself very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and careless servant girl?"

"My dear Holmes," said I, "this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago. It is true that I had a country walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as I have changed my clothes I can't imagine how you deduce it. As to Mary Jane, she is incorrigible, and my wife has given her notice, but there, again, I fail to see how you work it out."

He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together.

"It is simplicity itself," said he; "my eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant bootslitting specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical profession."

I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction. "When I hear you give your reasons," I remarked, "the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours."

"Quite so," he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself down into an armchair. "You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room."

"Frequently."

"How often?"

"Well, some hundreds of times."

"Then how many are there?"

"How many? I don't know."

"Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed."

With only the start and end point it's hard to see the connections, which was the effect I was trying to create here. The other element of Sherlockian thinking that underlies all this is the mind palace technique, or as Holmes himself calls it the "brain-attic", a well-ordered mental storehouse. The recent BBC adaptation Sherlock makes much of this, with a visually compelling representation on screen.

This originally comes from an ancient Greek and Roman idea, also important during the middle ages, and is also known as the memory theatre or method of loci. Basically the idea is you associate the new things you want to remember with a place you already know well, such as your house. As you move through the familiar space in your mind's eye, you remember the associations more easily. You use your spatial cognition, which is a very fundamental human faculty, to help you think about more abstract and unfamiliar things. And that's also kind of what's going on here with this web of connections I've laid out in the video. For more on this sort of thing, have a look at Maria Konnikova's book Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, which explores various aspects of Holmes's though process and psychology, or my own brief comments on the "doorway effect" on memory.

Here are a last few links for further reading if you feel so inclined. You can read Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" here, or better yet you can listen to a wax cylinder recording of the poet himself reading it here. Amazing that we have a recording of Tennyson himself! You can read the Mary Seacole references from Punch magazine, including the poem "A Stir for Seacole" (to be sung to the tune of "Old King Cole"), here, and you can read Seacole's own autobiography here.

Comments and questions are most welcome and appreciated.