Friday, March 08, 2024

More flowers of the Torrevieja coast



I've been in Torrevieja, near Alicante, for a week at the beginning of March, and of course I've taken a few snaps of the common early flowers. 

I don't promise to identify them all. My guide over here is Wild Flowers of the Mediterranean by Marjorie Blamey and Christopher Grey-Wilson (1988), a book I don't often have much joy with.

The yellow plant above is a case in point. It must be the commonest wild flower round here, but I still don't know what it is. Here's some more pics of it.



It's a scrambly sort of plant. The leaves are pinnate with narrow, backward-pointing lobes. Some have clasping leaf-bases, flamboyantly pointed. The stems are fairly slender, solid and the ones I examined were basically hairless.



Hairless, that is, except for this distinctive white felty stuff at the base of the involucre and at stem-nodes.



The backs of the ray-florets are sometimes reddish, sometimes just a bit dingy.

Anyway, with the help of online image searches I've nailed it. It's Slender Sow-thistle (Sonchus tenerrimus). I think I was put off by Grey-Wilson describing the species as "often local". I'm sure that's true, from a pan-Mediterranean perspective. But round here it grows just about everywhere.




A smallish broom-like plant, flowers just starting on 2 March. Maybe Dyer's Greenweed (Genista tinctoria), a plant I last saw in a Sussex meadow 35 years ago.






A Stork's-bill. I'll have a guess at Erodium chium. (Other leaves I've seen are more distinctly lobed than the ones in this pic.)



Well this one's easy at least. It's the ridiculously pretty blue form of Scarlet Pimpernel (Anagallis arvensis), with hairy margins to petals.



Blue-leaved Wattle (Acacia cyanophylla), native to W. Australia. A major part of the coastal scenery at this time of year.




Pretty confident this is Euphorbia segetalis, though I wish Grey-Wilson had been more specific about the height than "short". Anyway, it's a common spurge round here.

[I should say, I was pretty confident. These plants must be about 50cm, taller than most heights quoted online for E. segetalis (though they're a mixed bag). Also these plants don't look like annuals to me.]






The vicious fruits of Small Caltrops aka Maltese Cross (Tribulus terrestris). I picked them out of my hand after steadying myself to photograph the spurge.

More about caltrops:






Unopened male flowers of the local pine (Aleppo Pine, Pinus halepensis).

More about it here:





Bermuda Buttercup (Oxalis pes-caprae). Introduced from South Africa to Malta in c. 1806, and soon a common sight around most of the Med, spreading vegetatively to form dense patches.




Yellow Sea Aster (Asteriscus maritimus), growing on a cliff wall.

It has other names. More about it here:





Don't know. It's very common, though. Every time I flick through Marjorie Blamey's pictures I hover over Urospermum dalechampii but that's supposed to be sulphur yellow and have backward-pointing leaf lobes, so no.


(Oh, I'd forgotten, I went through all this before. It's Reichardia tingitana.)




Purple Viper's Bugloss (Echium plantagineum)... I think. One of the commonest plants round here. You can find it at almost all times of year, but March is when it looks prettiest.

(It's also in the pic at the top of the post.)




Growing on the close-mown promenade at Mar Azul. A medick, maybe Medicago littoralis.
 




I was on my own this time, so there was a relative flood of reading.  I dived into a Spanish book that I'd bought the last time I was over, the Penguin Clásicos edition of El sí de las niñas by Leandro Fernández de Moratín, a comedy from 1806. I wrote about it in a separate post: 


When I'd mopped up all possible entertainment value from Moratín's play I switched over to Swedish, a genre novel I picked up in a charity shop, Klar Himmel by Kristin Fägerskjöld. This was her first novel (2020); I think she's up to her fourth now. It's a saga, multiple times and narrators, revolving around three women during WW2 and a dark secret, set partly in Sweden and partly in England, just the thing for expanding my vocabulary. My Swedish is now at about the same level as my French: I relish an easy novel, but literary novels remain forbidding. I read more slowly and hence with more interest than if I was reading the same kind of book in English. (Consequently, I'm learning quite a bit about what life was like in Sweden and England in 1941.)

Meanwhile, I finally managed to finish off a post that's taken me forever, about Scott's inexhaustible novel The Heart of Midlothian


Torrevieja is a multi-lingual sort of place, and you hear a lot of Nordic languages being spoken. The first euros I made, I was singing Den första gång jag såg dig ... I was delighted to finally add a new currency to my income history, to go with sterling and kronor. I've been trying for a couple of years, but never in the right place and time. Superficially, conditions didn't seem ideal here either, down on the seafront, which was windy all week (I don't use any amplification, so wind, crashing waves and traffic are major considerations). Nevertheless, something unlocked in the cosmos and people started coming over, the coins came and even one note. 

I cycled and ran but never felt like getting into the chilly sea. I made a batch of vegetable soup and mostly ate dinner in. But who could come here and resist tostada-tomate for breakfast, the occasional napolitana, the occasional krakauer...? My diary summarizes: Went to Bar El Botijo a few times, Elite a couple of times, Marco Polo (the one on C/ Scorpiones, handy for after shopping at Consum), El Carmen once, LaZia upstairs twice while using the launderette, Zenia Boulevard Bombon Boss twice, Miño (Av/ Desiderio Rodriguez) three times when heading Torrev direction. Andrea's bratwurst stall and our favoured restaurant whose name I think is Gelateria Italiana, though it's somewhat vague. (It's really a food place, with a German flavour to the menu; they stopped selling ice cream altogether when the electricity prices went mad, though I think it's back on now.)

Some other posts from visits to Torrevieja,  including some of the same plants...


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Wednesday, March 06, 2024

El sí de las niñas (Leandro Fernández de Moratín)


Don Diego (Pablo Sanz)

[Images clipped from this 1970 Radiotelevisión Española presentation of El sí de las niñas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCaebQoFFpc . ]


La escena es en una posada de Alcalá de Henares.

The scene is a guest-house in Alcalá de Henares.

El teatro representa una sala de paso con cuatro puertas de habitaciones para huéspedes, numeradas todas. Una más grande en el foro, con escalera que conduce al piso bajo de la casa. Ventana de antepecho a un lado. Una mesa en medio, con banco, sillas, etc. 

The stage represents a public room with four doors to guest bedrooms, all numbered. A larger doorway leads to the hallway, with a staircase descending to the ground floor. A chest-high window to one side. A table in the middle, with a bench, chairs, etc.

La acción empieza a las siete de la tarde y acaba a las cinco de la mañana siguiente.

The action starts at seven in the evening and ends at five the following morning. 

Acto I, Escena I

Sale DON DIEGO de su cuarto, SIMÓN, que está sentado en una silla, se levanta.

DON DIEGO comes out of his room and SIMÓN, who is sitting in a chair, gets up.

DON DIEGO.-   ¿No han venido todavía?

So they still aren't back?

SIMÓN.-   No, señor.

No, sir.

DON DIEGO.-   Despacio lo han tomado, por cierto.

They're taking a damned long time.

SIMÓN.-   Como su tía la quiere tanto, según parece, y no la ha visto desde que la llevaron a Guadalajara...

Since her aunt loves her so much, it seems, and hasn't seen her since they took her to Guadalajara ...

DON DIEGO.-   Sí. Yo no digo que no la viese; pero con media hora de visita y cuatro lágrimas estaba concluido.

Yes. I'm not saying she shouldn't see her, but a visit of half an hour, four tears and it's over.

SIMÓN.-   Ello también ha sido extraña determinación la de estarse usted dos días enteros sin salir de la posada. Cansa el leer, cansa el dormir... Y, sobre todo, cansa la mugre del cuarto, las sillas desvencijadas, las estampas del hijo pródigo, el ruido de campanillas y cascabeles, y la conversación ronca de carromateros y patanes, que no permiten un instante de quietud.

Strange decision of yours, to go two whole days without setting foot outside the guest-house. Reading gets boring, sleeping gets boring... and what's most boring of all is the dirty room, the rickety chairs, the prints of the Prodigal Son, the sound of church bells and service bells, the shouted conversations of wagoners and peasants so you never get a minute's peace.

DON DIEGO.-   Ha sido conveniente el hacerlo así. Aquí me conocen todos: el Corregidor, el señor Abad, el Visitador, el Rector de Málaga... ¡Qué sé yo! Todos. Y ha sido preciso estarme quieto y no exponerme a que me hallasen por ahí.

It suited me to do it this way. Everyone knows me round here: the judge, the abbot, the auditor, the rector of Málaga, and God knows who else... Everyone. And that's just why I chose to stay quietly here and not to reveal myself to whoever might run into me.

SIMÓN.-   Yo no alcanzo la causa de tanto retiro. Pues ¿hay más en esto que haber acompañado usted a Doña Irene hasta Guadalajara para sacar del convento a la niña y volvernos con ellas a Madrid?

I don't get why you're keeping such a low profile. Is there something more to this than you escorting Doña Irene to Guadalajara to pick up her little girl from the convent, then going back with them to Madrid?

DON DIEGO.-   Sí, hombre; algo más hay de lo que has visto.

Yes, my lad; something more than what you have seen.

SIMÓN.-   Adelante.

Go on.

DON DIEGO.-   Algo, algo... Ello tú al cabo lo has de saber, y no puede tardarse mucho... Mira, Simón, por Dios te encargo que no lo digas... Tú eres hombre de bien, y me has servido muchos años con fidelidad... Ya ves que hemos sacado a esa niña del convento y nos la llevamos a Madrid.

Something, something... You'll have to know about it eventually, and it can't be delayed much longer... Look here, Simón, for God's sake don't go spreading this around... You're a good man, and you've served me faithfully for many years ... so you see we've collected this child from the convent and we are taking her to Madrid.

SIMÓN.-   Sí, señor.

Yes, sir.

DON DIEGO.-   Pues bien... Pero te vuelvo a encargar que a nadie lo descubras.

Well, then ... But I repeat, you absolutely must not tell this to anyone. 

SIMÓN.-   Bien está, señor. Jamás he gustado de chismes.

It's all right, sir. I've never been fond of gossip.

DON DIEGO.-   Ya lo sé. Por eso quiero fiarme de ti. Yo, la verdad, nunca había visto a la tal Doña Paquita. Pero, mediante la amistad con su madre, he tenido frecuentes noticias de ella; he leído muchas de las cartas que escribía; he visto algunas de su tía la monja, con quien ha vivido en Guadalajara; en suma, he tenido cuantos informes pudiera desear acerca de sus inclinaciones y su conducta. Ya he logrado verla; he procurado observarla en estos pocos días y, a decir verdad, cuantos elogios hicieron de ella me parecen escasos.

I know that. That's why I want to trust you. I, this is the truth, have never seen Doña Paquita before. But, through my friendship with her mother, I've often heard about her; I've read many of the letters she wrote; I've seen some more from her aunt the nun, who she's been living with in Guadalajara; in short, I've had all the information I could ask for, concerning her inclinations and her conduct. I've managed to see her, I've taken the opportunity to observe her these past few days, and to be frank, all the eulogies they make about her seem to me to fall far short.

SIMÓN.-   Sí, por cierto... Es muy linda y...

Yes indeed... She's very pretty and....

DON DIEGO.-   Es muy linda, muy graciosa, muy humilde... Y, sobre todo, ¡aquel candor, aquella inocencia! Vamos, es de lo que no se encuentra por ahí... Y talento... Sí señor, mucho talento... Conque, para acabar de informarte, lo que yo he pensado es...

She's very pretty, very gracious, very modest ... And above all, what candour, what innocence! Come on, that's something you just don't find these days... And talented ... Yessir, very talented... And so, to come to the point, what I have been thinking is...

SIMÓN.-   No hay que decírmelo.

You don't need to tell me.

DON DIEGO.-   ¿No? ¿Por qué?

No? Why not?

SIMÓN.-   Porque ya lo adivino. Y me parece excelente idea.

Because I've already worked it out. And it seems to me an excellent idea.

DON DIEGO.-   ¿Qué dices?

What are you saying?

SIMÓN.-   Excelente.

Excellent. 

DON DIEGO.-   ¿Conque al instante has conocido?...

And so you knew instantly? ...

SIMÓN.-   ¿Pues no es claro?... ¡Vaya!... Dígole a usted que me parece muy buena boda. Buena, buena.

Well, isn't it obvious?... Wow! ... I'm telling you it seems to me a great match. Great, great.

Simón, Don Diego's servant (Alfonso Gallardo)


*

I've been reading Leandro Fernández de Moratín's* most admired comedy El sí de las niñas, published in 1806 (written a few years earlier).

Complete text of El sí de las niñas in Spanish:

https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/el-si-de-las-ninas--0/html/ff188e30-82b1-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_2.html

(This is the original version of the text. The book I've been reading is based on Moratín's final revision: which cuts, e.g., the bit about the Corregidor, the Rector de Málaga, etc.)

*

As they go on talking, it becomes apparent that they're at cross purposes. Simón assumes that Don Diego intends the sixteen-year-old Doña Paquita for his nephew (a much more suitable match in terms of age). Don Diego, who is 59, has to spell out that he is actually intending to marry the girl himself.  Embarassment all round. 

At this stage you might anticipate a story where a lecherous old fool gets his deserved comeuppance, like January in the Merchant's Tale. But it doesn't work like that here. Don Diego isn't much of a lecher and he isn't even, except in this opening scene, much of a fool. As the play proceeds he becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the bland assurances of the loquacious mother and the almost equally maddening compliance of a daughter who seems to be just going through the motions. 

(The title means literally "The Yes of the girls" and is usually translated as something like "The Maiden's Consent".)


Doña Irene, the mother (Carmen Bernardos)


He begins to see that there's something radically amiss with an educational system that trains girls to comply absolutely with their elders' wishes and hence to conceal all their real feelings. When he discovers that the supposedly closeted Doña Paquita is in fact in love with the aforementioned nephew, he generously stands aside, to the happiness of everyone (even Doña Irene, once she's got over wanting to scratch her daughter's eyes out).


Doña Paquita [= Francisca], the daughter (Isabel María Pérez)


*

Antonio Calvo Maturano's lively 2012 essay introduces El sí de las niñas to readers of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, usefully bringing out the differences between the literature of absolutist Spain and democratic England, the different questions being asked; the progressivism isn't all on one side, both works treading a path between conservatism and reformism. 

https://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol32no2/calvo.html

An interesting point he makes is that Moratín's attack on unequal marriages was in line with the thinking of the absolutist regime, alarmed by an upper-class culture in which marital infidelity was becoming the norm. They thought it led to social instability (as well as a lot of young, unmaintained widows).


Rita, the ladies' maid (María Silva)


*

A chat with Doña Paquita (in Spanish), along with some fabulous pictures, by María Ángeles Merino:

https://aranitacampena.blogspot.com/2014/05/el-si-de-las-ninas-y-enamorado-mas-que.html


Don Carlos, the nephew (Carlos Larrañaga)


El sí de las niñas has been translated into English a few times over the years. I couldn't find any of the older translations online, but what I did find was a 2007 version by Christopher O. Kidder (for his Masters degree) that's a whole lot of fun:


It's part way between a translation and an adaptation (the sort of halfway house that was the norm in most earlier eras of drama, until copyright started to get in the way): overall, it gives a pretty faithful idea of the original play, but it slims down some of the more historical detail, turns Doña Irene's thrush into a parrot, and sprinkles the play with a bunch of new wisecracks and gags. (The idea of attaching Don Carlos' love-letter to a brick is absolutely inspired.)



Calamocha, Don Carlos' servant (Tomás Zorí)



Moratín was a firm believer in the dramatic unities, the gospel promulgated in Spain by Luzán. El sí de las niñas is set in a single location over a period of less than twelve hours, and it has just seven roles, all of them good opportunities for the actors to show their chops. (After all, it's not enough for a play to just please the public. If it pleases the actors too, it will get performed.)

You can see the good and not so good in this. In drama things happen and characters change as a result, but there's something artificial about character changes that occur within such a constrained timescale. It highlights the performance aspect of drama rather than the mimetic aspect; it unfolds like an intricate dance. But when we see Hamlet change, or Horatio, we believe it; we recognise the characteristic flow of a personality through time. Because in Shakespeare's double-time dramas, it isn't possible to say exactly how much time passes between Act I and Act V.

And lot gets excluded from such unity. Only afterwards do we wonder about the past and the future; for instance, how such an eligible gent as Don Diego happened to be still single at 59, or how a professional soldier like Don Carlos is going to square career with marriage. 

But at the same time, there's a pleasure to such a well-engineered mechanism. It feels like it can never go stale, like every time we set the play going we'll want to see it through to the end, the dramatic impetus never flagging, each new scene accompanied by fresh anticipation, and our applause at the final curtain just as assured as all the rest.


*

* That is his short name. His full name was Don Leandro Antonio Eulogio Melitón Fernández de Moratín y Cabo. He was born in Madrid in 1760 and died in Paris in 1828.

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Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Sir Walter Scott: The Heart of Midlothian (1818)

 

The Interview between Effie Deans and her Sister in Prison, 1873 engraving by James Faed from a painting by Robert Herdman.

[Image source: Wikimedia .]


A strangely powerful title, The Heart of Midlothian. (Or Mid-Lothian, as the first edition had it.)

In the introductory chapter, the two young Edinburgh lawyers explain to Peter Pattieson that it means the Old Tolbooth prison, still in use but now scheduled for demolition. (In fact it was demolished in 1817, just a year before Scott's novel was published. ) In those days the historic county of Midlothian included Edinburgh, and the Tolbooth indeed stood at its heart, right next to St Giles' Cathedral. This was because it was originally the burgh's main municipal building (that's what "tolbooth" means in Scotland); it included the town hall and customs offices as well as the jail. It was only after 1639 that the other functions were moved elsewhere, leaving the Old Tolbooth as purely a prison.

There's something remarkable about the idea (however jocular) of the heart of a place being its prison, as Peter immediately comments:

“I think,” said I, with the bashful diffidence with which a man lets slip a pun in presence of his superiors, “the metropolitan county may, in that case, be said to have a sad heart.”

“Right as my glove, Mr. Pattieson,” added Mr. Hardie; “and a close heart, and a hard heart—Keep it up, Jack.”

“And a wicked heart, and a poor heart,” answered Halkit, doing his best.

“And yet it may be called in some sort a strong heart, and a high heart,” rejoined the advocate. “You see I can put you both out of heart.”

(The Heart of Midlothian, Introductory chapter)

This discussion of "the heart of Midlothian" (expression) somehow resonates with our own  debate about The Heart of Midlothian (novel). What, many of us have asked ourselves as the story winds on, is the heart of The Heart of Midlothian? Because it isn't the Tolbooth, important as that is. Nor is it the law, important as that is. To readers with expectations of a thematic organisation like those of Little Dorrit (prisons) or Bleak House (the law), Scott's novel, while no less intricate than Dickens' masterpieces, may seem elusive. It is one of his novels with a shifting sort of structure, moving steadily (or sometimes unsteadily) away from the place where it begins. In this respect it most nearly resembles Guy Mannering (1815) among its predecessors. Both books have, ultimately, a sad heart, a tragicomic one anyway, and one of the things they say to us (as it were from the margin, but none the less powerfully), is that in life we (and Guy, and Jeanie, and Effie) can't ever go back. 

But as novel-readers, happily, we can: and be stirred and enchanted and troubled and puzzled all over again.

*

So to clear our heads it's good to recall that The Heart of Midlothian (like Guy Mannering) was a huge popular success. For the enchanted public, and for the artists whose work is shown in this post, there was no doubt about the heart of The Heart of Midlothian. It was the story of Jeanie and her sister, this simple, profound and deeply affecting tale in which one sister will not lie to save the other but instead sets out on an extraordinary rescue mission. It was a story about a family, that perennial staple of the popular bestseller. 

*

The sisters

A novel that hinges on two sisters; it might make us think for a moment about Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811. 

Scott had read it, of course; he read everything. In his review of Emma (published in March 1816), he has this to say of Sense and Sensibility

The interest and merit of the piece depend altogether upon the behaviour of the elder sister, while obliged at once to sustain her own disappointment with fortitude, and to support her sister, who abandons herself, with unsuppressed feelings, to the indulgence of grief.

[Source: https://pastnow.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/march-31-1816-jane-austens-achievement/ .]

Scott's remark, the particular aspect that struck him in Sense and Sensibility, vaguely foreshadows the sisterly dynamic in his own novel of two years later. Elinor Dashwood having to be the grown-up both for her younger sister and for her silly parent: yes, you could see a hint of Jeanie Deans in that. But of course the main point of mentioning Austen's novel is to highlight the differences.

Elinor and Marianne are gentlefolk, albeit somewhat impoverished since their father's death. Jeanie and Effie are uneducated peasant girls (though their father has done rather well for himself, if not quite as well as is reputed).

Nevertheless, both Elinor Dashwood and Jeanie Deans become romantically attached to churchmen in search of a living. But there the contrast is almost comical. Jeanie's beau, the sickly Reuben Butler, without prospects or family, has spent ten years looking for a living, with no success. But when it comes to the personable Edward Ferrars, from a wealthy family, the surprise is rather that he's in search of a living, even for a moment. 

Elinor and Marianne are close in age (19 and 16 when the novel gets underway), and live with their mother. 

Jeanie is ten years older than Effie, and their important relationship is with their fond, fiery, opinionated father. They are only half-sisters; both mothers died when they were young children. (Jeanie must have known Effie's mother, when she was alive, much better than she knew her own. What she really thought of Rebecca McNaught, is one of the novel's many pregnant silences.)

Elinor and Marianne are both, we may assume, good-looking girls (Austen disdains describing the appearance of her heroines). Scott, on the other hand, underlines that Jeanie is wholesomely plain but Effie is a beauty; though they do resemble each other in low stature and full figure.

The word "religion" appears in Sense and Sensibility -- once (and it's Marianne, at the pitch of distress, who uses it). It is a subject one simply doesn't discuss. But on the other hand, it's central to the sisters' story in The Heart of Midlothian. Theirs is a household that stands for an intense, vehement and exclusive religion, though their father asserts it much more in talk than in practice (the portrayal of Davie Deans isn't quite merciless, but it's deeply exposing). The girls react in different ways to this upbringing, yet both, you might say, are driven by a sense of election. Religion is why Jeanie cannot lie (though under extreme temptation), but also why she has the faith and strength to achieve the impossible and win her sister's pardon; it's easy for us to overlook how Jeanie's position on telling a saving lie, which we feel so inclined to indignantly reject, is grounded on a living faith in God. And when Effie goes astray, it's with a commitment to her personal destiny that she understands in religious terms, prefigured by the fearful text from Job, and finally issuing in Catholicism.

Elinor and Marianne spend all their days together. In the unrecounted past, Jeanie and Effie shared a bed and they too must have been together a lot, Jeanie watching over her little sister in loco maternis.  But during the course of the novel, they are nearly always apart. Effie's in service in Edinburgh, and then confined to prison, and then exiled; but those are outward manifestations of something more fundamental, that the sisters' lives have gone in different directions. Jeanie is content in the ambit of her father, but for Effie to realize herself she needs to get away: from her father, certainly, and perhaps from Jeanie too. 

[We'll say farewell to Sense and Sensibility now, but not without regret. I wrote more about it here.]

Altogether, the central relationship in The Heart of Midlothian yearns towards a true sisterliness, but never attains it for more than a few heartbreaking moments. 

The reported exchanges between Jeanie and Effie are brief, compared to the scale of the novel, and for just that reason they have a magnified importance. We don't doubt that the sisters themselves remember every word. 

Exchange #1 slides in during a retrospect (introduced, with Scott's customary misleading understatement, as if it's merely a sample of their talk).

“Whisht, Effie,” said her sister; “our father’s coming out o’ the byre.” — The damsel stinted in her song. —“Whare hae ye been sae late at e’en?”  

“It’s no late, lass,” answered Effie. 

“It’s chappit eight on every clock o’ the town, and the sun’s gaun down ahint the Corstorphine hills — Whare can ye hae been sae late?” 

“Nae gate,” answered Effie.

“And wha was that parted wi’ you at the stile?”

“Naebody,” replied Effie once more. 

“Nae gate? — Naebody? — I wish it may be a right gate, and a right body, that keeps folk out sae late at e’en, Effie.”

(Ch 9)

Then Effie, throwing off the confinement of this sisterly anxiety, launches her unkind counter-attack, followed by instant remorse. Their conversation settles down, and (the narrator remarks)

It is very possible, that, in the communicative mood into which the Lily of St. Leonard’s was now surprised, she might have given her sister her unreserved confidence, and saved me the pain of telling a melancholy tale . . .

(But it doesn't happen, because their father blunders in and ruins it.)

This is two years before the action of the novel begins, formally speaking; Effie is only fifteen, and it's in that context that we must understand her extraordinary thought, that were she to say more to Jeanie, "she’ll maybe hing it ower my head that she’ll tell my father, and then she wad be mistress and mair". Jeanie as domestic tyrant... Really? (But then her obvious capability, her incredible strength of will... she certainly is the long-established mistress of the household... It might alarm, as well as impress, a younger sister.) Anyway, there's a great difference between fifteen and twenty-five. Effie, we suddenly perceive, feels alone; Jeanie and her admirers seem to belong to an older generation. 

The other communications between the sisters are:

2. Visits by Jeanie to Mrs Saddletree's, mentioned in Ch 9 but not described. One of them forms the crucial topic of Fairbrother's questions in court (Ch 22). 

It was necessary, he admitted, that he should produce more positive testimony of her innocence than what arose out of general character, and this he undertook to do by the mouth of the person to whom she had communicated her situation — by the mouth of her natural counsellor and guardian — her sister. 

(Ch 22)

Under examination Jeanie says she had noticed Effie looked ill and asked what ailed her. But Effie said nothing in reply.  (Jeanie has already told George Staunton the same thing.)

3. Another failed communication, when Effie shows up at St Leonards, after giving birth but without a baby. She's in a terrible state and gives no coherent answers when Jeanie plies her with questions. (Ch 9)

4. The meeting in prison the day before the trial, with Ratcliffe in attendance (Ch 19: probably this is the scene portrayed in the pictures by Herdman and Scheffer, though it could also be the post-trial one in Ch 24.) It begins and ends in tears and embraces; in between, this great and painful scene, constantly switching direction, shows the love between the sisters but also their imperfect sympathy, each unable to act differently. Those tears and embraces are not just warmth of affection but also frustration, a lament for a relationship that cannot get beyond its limitations. (As the novel draws on, these tears and embraces almost take on a performative aspect.)

5. Not really a conversation,  but, in court, when Jeanie is called as witness, Effie cries "Oh Jeanie, Jeanie, save me, save me!" and  

Jeanie in the meantime had advanced to the bottom of the table, when, unable to resist the impulse of affections she suddenly extended her hand to her sister. Effie was just within the distance that she could seize it with both hers, press it to her mouth, cover it with kisses, and bathe it in tears, with the fond devotion that a Catholic would pay to a guardian saint descended for his safety; while Jeanie, hiding her own face with her other hand, wept bitterly.

(Ch 22; the scene shown at the foot of this post)

6. Straight after the trial: another meeting in prison, once more with Radcliffe in attendance. 

“What signifies coming to greet ower me,” said poor Effie, “when you have killed me? — killed me, when a word of your mouth would have saved me — ....."

.... “My sister shall come out in the face of the sun,” said Jeanie; “I will go to London, and beg her pardon from the king and queen. If they pardoned Porteous, they may pardon her; if a sister asks a sister’s life on her bended knees, they will pardon her — they shall pardon her — and they will win a thousand hearts by it.”

(Ch 24).

Now follows Jeanie's heroic journey, during which she's of course out of contact with her sister. 

7. In Ch 38, after obtaining a pardon for Effie, Jeanie writes to George Staunton, her father, and Reuben Butler, but not to Effie herself. There are many good reasons why this probably isn't significant, but it seems worth mentioning. 

8. In Ch 43, Butler tells Jeanie about the letter he received from Effie after leaving her father's house and going aboard with Staunton. Effie knows, of course, that its substance will be passed on to her father and sister.

“... That she could not endure that her father and her sister should go into banishment, or be partakers of her shame ... her father meant weel by her, and all men, but he did not know the dreadful pain he gave her in casting up her sins. If Jeanie had been at hame, it might hae dune better — Jeanie was ane, like the angels in heaven, that rather weep for sinners, than reckon their transgressions. But she should never see Jeanie ony mair, and that was the thought that gave her the sairest heart of a’ that had come and gane yet.  ...  she would, in some warldly respects, be far better off than she deserved. But she desired her family to remain satisfied with this assurance, and give themselves no trouble in making farther inquiries after her.”

9. Ch 45: the unexpected appearance of Effie on the shore of Jeanie's new home. Before they speak, it's a moment of sheer magic. Then the painful realities break in.

“There is nae danger — there shall be nae danger,” said Jeanie eagerly. “O Effie, dinna be wilfu’— be guided for ance — we will be sae happy a’ thegither!”

“I have a’ the happiness I deserve on this side of the grave, now that I hae seen you,” answered Effie; “and whether there were danger to mysell or no, naebody shall ever say that I come with my cheat-the-gallows face to shame my sister among her grand friends.”

 “I hae nae grand friends,” said Jeanie; “nae friends but what are friends of yours — Reuben Butler and my father. — O unhappy lassie, dinna be dour, and turn your back on your happiness again! We wunna see another acquaintance — Come hame to us, your ain dearest friends — it’s better sheltering under an auld hedge than under a new-planted wood.”

 “It’s in vain speaking, Jeanie — I maun drink as I hae brewed — I am married, and I maun follow my husband for better for worse.”

(Effie, I suspect, would rather see anyone else than her father and Butler.)

10. Five years later, in Ch 47, Effie's letter (prompted by fear of the Duke of Argyle finding out who she is), to which Jeanie reacts by  resentfully detecting "a smothered degree of egotism" before putting herself into "a better frame of mind". Jeanie sends a letter in reply.

In entering into her own little details of news, chiefly respecting domestic affairs, she experienced a singular vacillation of ideas; for sometimes she apologised for mentioning things unworthy the notice of a lady of rank, and then recollected that everything which concerned her should be interesting to Effie.

Further letters pass between them over the next ten years (Ch 48); Effie laments the lack of a child.

“Had he but a child,” said the unfortunate wife, “or had that luckless infant survived, it would be some motive for living and for exertion. But Heaven has denied us a blessing which we have not deserved.”

11. Ten years later (Ch 49), Jeanie sends the account of Meg's confession to Effie, and Effie visits her, staying with Jeanie until the novel's final page. (Effie's term of exile from Scotland has now expired; but perhaps, too, this visit feels more possible because their father is dead.) The sisters' affectionate meeting:

Jeanie was so much overcome by wonder, and even by awe, that her feelings were deep, stunning, and almost overpowering. Effie, on the other hand, wept, laughed, sobbed, screamed, and clapped her hands for joy, all in the space of five minutes, giving way at once, and without reserve, to a natural excessive vivacity of temper, which no one, however, knew better how to restrain under the rules of artificial breeding.

Effie now speaks completely differently; she calls Jeanie "my dear", not "lass". (But actually Mrs Butler, too, speaks in a more refined way as the novel draws to a close.)

When they were alone, her sister could not help expressing her wonder at the self-possession with which Lady Staunton sustained her part. “I daresay you are surprised at it,” said Lady Staunton composedly; “for you, my dear Jeanie, have been truth itself from your cradle upwards; but you must remember that I am a liar of fifteen years’ standing, and therefore must by this time be used to my character.”

This is the last time we'll hear the sisters speak directly to each other, though a lot happens thereafter. On George Staunton's death

In the vivacity of her grief she gave way to all the natural irritability of her temper; shriek followed shriek, and swoon succeeded to swoon. It required all Jeanie’s watchful affection to prevent her from making known, in these paroxysms of affliction, much which it was of the highest importance that she should keep secret.

(Ch 51)

(I suppose this must mean, the secret that Lady Staunton is the sentenced criminal Effie Deans. It's now only of social importance, not legal. Jeanie in these later years has become habitually secretive. She is willingly complicit in maintaining Effie's new, false position, perhaps at root terrified of raking up the past. A pardon doesn't take away the family shame.)

Effie stays with her sister for more than a year after that. Butler and Jeanie conceal from Effie what they learn of her son (now or later isn't entirely clear). Effie is grieving. 

In the latter months, [her grief] assumed the appearance of listlessness and low spirits, which the monotony of her sister’s quiet establishment afforded no means of dissipating. Effie, from her earliest youth, was never formed for a quiet low content. Far different from her sister, she required the dissipation of society to divert her sorrow, or enhance her joy.

(Ch 51)

When she goes "the departure was a relief to both sisters". 


Effie and Jeanie (and Ratcliffe) again. Painting by Ary Scheffer (1795 - 1858).


*

Escape

But this list of meetings and non-meetings gives a slightly unbalanced impression of the novel. The feeling of sadness is there, all right; there's a bitter wisdom in The Heart of Midlothian, as in Scott's other novels of c. 1816-1819.

But what's unbalanced is that it doesn't fairly represent Jeanie's passionate efforts to save her sister's life. She finds it easier to express her love for Effie when Effie isn't there (something many of us will uncomfortably recognize). An early instance is keeping her tryst with a frightening stranger at Muschat's Cairn (Chs 13-14), an adventure that no-one knows of until Butler hears of it, and Butler doesn't approve. In this, a premonition of her later and greater mission, we see the same pattern: when Jeanie cuts herself loose from family and friends something is released in her, she becomes herself, someone very different from the quiet and strait-laced woman of her domestic life. If the something is terror it's also joy, the joy that strangely animates her on the very day her sister is sentenced to death (Ch 24); the joy of finally knowing what you're going to do and acting with spontaneity and decision.

At this moment of despair it's as if a light has been switched on (and Scott reveals, what he has carefully withheld up to now, that it's suddenly springtime). 

And Jeanie, again carefully leaving her father in ignorance, leaving behind Effie threatening to starve herself to death, leaving behind a sickly and not very supportive Reuben Butler, sets off to walk to London to see the king.

The suggestion of a quest in a fairy tale is entirely deliberate. Indeed Jeanie's first encounter (Ch 25), with the vicious tongue of Mrs Balchristie, Dumbiedikes' housekeeper, is like a comic version of encountering a dragon (while also a pitiless sample of what the disgraced Deans family can expect from now on). Jeanie negotiates this first obstacle with grace and decision, obtaining the money she needs from Dumbiedikes without the slightest compromise, and as she walks south barefooted, she seems like a woman who can do anything.

And this simple fairy-tale image is retained thereafter, occasionally to reinvoke it, more often to play reality off against it. For Volume III is a paradox, both settled and unsettled. On the one hand, all you have to do is keep walking and trust... ; on the other hand, the dizzying and chaotic switches of mode and genre that lie in wait, for both Jeanie and the reader.

When Jeanie, now in England, sees people starting to look at her curiously (Ch 27),  it's the first clouding of that image; she is not journeying into fairyland, she is bringing fairyland with her. What, more specifically, she's bringing with her is a religious conviction, "borne in upon my mind" (as she writes to her father from York); but in her letters she deliberately exaggerates her confidence: "I hae nae doubt to do that for which I am come — I canna doubt it — I winna think to doubt it —" (as she writes to Butler) -- for, be it said, Jeanie is by no means pernickety about being totally honest in private life. (It's the momentousness and gravity of the question in court that, she considers, would make it a grievous sin to reply untruthfully in this instance. Readers, moral philosophers or not, have debated her decision ever since; but most of us, I imagine, would feel exactly the same.)

And then, as so often in this novel, Scott starts to tweak on the rudder, shifting us into other narrative modes. The kindly Mrs Bickerton, with her "prejudice" for a neighbour Scot and her negus, gives excellent advice but is also a yardstick of the distance from Jeanie's home and heart that she will experience from now on. But her course is more violently disturbed on Gunnerby Hill; falsely signalled, once more, by recognition in this land of strangers ("A braw good-night to ye, Jeanie Deans..."). The novel goes a bit mad, dropping us into a robber's den along gothic lines, then into the stifling folklore of Madge Wildfire and her lost baby (the darkest element in the whole book, and never wholly explained), then into the unlikely interviews with a posh George Staunton and his father. What is this quest turning into, we wonder?

And yet, somehow, Jeanie carries on, until the remarkable chapter when, through sheer conviction and force of character, she does indeed get to plead her case before royalty, and she triumphs. But for all the transporting magic of that scene in Richmond Park, and for all the stronger magic that Jeanie carries within her, this brilliant scene (Ch 36) is remarkably unlike a fairy tale. It's a display of power, certainly, but within a real political context of futureproofing alliances, controlling the narrative, concession without prejudice.... Entering such a world you may sometimes get what you came for, and yet it never turns out quite the way you thought.

*


Jeanie Deans, painting by William Drummond Young (1855 - 1924).

[Image source: https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/PORTRAIT-OF-JEANIE-DEANS/27D94E9AEB896C63E07BE0109FB2DAC8 .]


Disappointments

When Volume IV begins (Ch 37), Jeanie doesn't even know she has triumphed. That's the first of her disappointments, in a way: that instead of a definite statement that her sister's life will be spared, she's asked to pin her faith on a house-wife case and the Duke of Argyle's confidence in what it will boil down to. In the mean time, the mundanities of real life don't stop; the nosy Mrs Glass has to be negotiated, letters must be written, her return journey must be thought of. The Duke offers transport to Scotland, an offer not to be refused, and a safer journey too; and yet we sense already how Jeanie's freedom, the fierce joy of committing to her own decision and to all its risks ... that era in her life is definitively over. And getting sucked into the Duke's travel arrangements will indeed have consequences.

Jeanie writes her letters (Ch 38). To George Staunton she writes: "Alwaies, sir, I pray you will never come again to see my sister, whereof there has been too much." To her father she writes: "And oh, my dear father, since it hath pleased God to be merciful to her, let her not want your free pardon, whilk will make her meet to be ane vessel of grace, and also a comfort to your ain graie hairs." To Butler she writes: "And mind this is no meant to haud ye to onything whilk ye wad rather forget, if ye suld get a charge of a kirk or a scule, as above said. Only I hope it will be a scule, and not a kirk, because of these difficulties anent aiths and patronages, whilk might gang ill down wi’ my honest father." As it turns out, not one of these hopes will be realized. Of course Butler's school doesn't matter so much, but the point is the same; through extraordinary heroism Jeanie has achieved what she wanted, she has saved Effie from the scaffold. It's huge, but it's not everything. She has no control over how it all plays out, no control over others' wills and dispositions and destinies. 

Meanwhile another disappointment comes -- and it's somewhat jarring that the Duke announces it, after all, to nosy Mrs Glass and not to Jeanie -- the condition that Effie is to be exiled from Scotland for fourteen years. It "greatly grieved her affectionate disposition", but Jeanie's somewhat mollified by an unwontedly sweet-tempered letter from her father, which has her dreaming of them all together at "a wild farm in Northumberland". Jeanie's idea is of a return to their lives as they were before Effie's trouble: an Effie free of Staunton, presumably repentant, and happily reunited with her father and sister (and Butler nearby). Alas, Jeanie! It's never going to happen.

He thrust upon her a large piece of cake, nor would he permit her to break off a fragment, and lay the rest on a salver. “Put it in your pouch, Jeanie,” said he; “you will be glad of it before you see St. Giles’s steeple. I wish to Heaven I were to see it as soon as you! and so my best service to all my friends at and about Auld Reekie, and a blithe journey to you.”

(Ch 39)

Thus says the duke, with "the frankness of a soldier". The frankness needed underlining, because, actually, Jeanie will never see St. Giles’s steeple again, not in the novel anyway; and the main reason is the background machinations of this "benevolent enchanter" who is now wishing her godspeed. 

Perhaps we should admit that this disappointment (that Jeanie never returns to Edinburgh), and some of the others I've mentioned, are more the reader's than Jeanie's own -- though we shouldn't forget her protesting, in Ch 40, that "[N]ever hunted deer langed for its resting-place as I do to find myself at Saint Leonard’s".

In fact what the duke organizes for Jeanie at Roseneath is a very reasonable simulacrum of Jeanie's own pastoral dream, except for the absence of the one person that he gives no thought to. (Effie, we understand, is pardoned, not forgiven.)

But leaving aside that yawning absence (even Jeanie couldn't control Effie's destiny, and the duke certainly couldn't) it's still an imperfect simulacrum. Saddletree and Dumbiedikes are exchanged for Knockdunder and Mrs Dolly Dutton; well, perhaps that's not the worst of bargains, but it's no idyll either. Jeanie is quite aware, though her father apparently isn't, that all of this fortune comes by grace and favour, not desert. And Butler's appointment is far from the harmonious call of serious Presbyterians that Jeanie had, for fear of her father's reaction, hopefully envisaged; it's Davie Deans himself who (not for the first time, it seems) must bend those so unbending principles to match what's on offer. 

Jeanie doesn't complain. She and her husband attain their quiet happiness because they carry it within themselves, not because the world around them is perfect. She's the mother of three children (there are hints that they'll have their own complications). She isn't now the person she became in that strange freedom of catastrophe, though there's a flash of recurrence at the very end when she kind-of-rescues the Whistler from execution; it's just what she does. She can't give any of her own happiness to Effie (or the Whistler). It's a sobering end to what once seemed a fairy tale.


The Old Tolbooth, Edinburgh. Engraving based on a painting by Alexander Naysmith (1758 - 1840).

[Image source: Wikimedia .]


*

Placing all this emphasis on Jeanie and her sister, I'm aware that I've said very little, or even nothing, about large parts of The Heart of Midlothian. The Porteous riots, for instance. The comedy, of which there's plenty. Douce Davie, Sharpitlaw and Ratcliffe, Reuben Butler, Madge Wildfire and her mother, Bartoline Saddletree... it's a shame to neglect them.

In small compensation, here's a few discussion questions that you can have fun thinking about. 


If Jeanie had been able to consult Butler (conveniently under house arrest), what would he have advised her to say in court?

The real Geordie Robertson wasn't from the owning class. Does Scott's novel gain or lose by making him into George Staunton?

Who actually was the father of Madge's baby? Does Staunton rule himself out, and are we supposed to believe him? Are we perfectly certain the baby even existed?

"And then what is the poor lassie to do in a foreign land? — Why, wae’s me, it’s just sending her to play the same pranks ower again, out of sight or guidance of her friends." Mrs Glass has a point, doesn't she? (In Scott's own time infanticide was no longer punished by execution, but it was typically punished by exile.)

Jeanie keeps a lot of secrets, by the end of the book. Does no-one ever talk about Effie, are the rest all happy just to assume she's disappeared over the horizon and never been heard of again?



Jeanie refuses to give false testimony. From the 1914 movie The Heart of Midlothian, directed by Frank Wilson and starring Violet Hopson as Jeanie Deans. 

[Image source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0231704/ .]


*

The Heart of Midlothian, online text on Project Gutenberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6944/6944-h/6944-h.htm#link2HCH0019


Another post, a deep dive into narrative inconsistencies in Scott's complex narrative:

Time trouble in The Heart of Midlothian 



Sir Walter Scott's novels, a brief guide



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Friday, February 23, 2024

February cherry

 




A very early flush of cherry blossom... three small trees on the Mount estate in Frome. These photos are from 22 February 2024, the blossom already slightly past its best.

(It's been another absurdly mild winter. Cherry Plum was out at the start of Feb, Blackthorn by mid Feb.)

Council estates are usually the parts of a town that least attract a visitor, but they can be great places for seeing interesting trees on public land.

I'm tempted to call this Prunus 'Kursar'. The only thing holding me back, really, is that the petals don't seem as dark pink as in most online images. But maybe the endless rain might contribute to that.

At any rate, it has to be one of the earliest cherries to blossom (leaving aside the winter cherry Prunus subhirtella).

Collingwood Ingram named his new variety 'Kursar', combining the names of the species he thought he had crossed, Prunus kurilensis and Prunus sargentii (Sargent Cherry). But the deep pink puzzled him, and later he decided that there must have been a label mix-up and the second parent was actually Prunus campanulata (Formosan Cherry).

NB the first parent is now called Prunus nipponica var kurilensis. Prunus nipponica is also known as the Japanese Alpine Cherry. 









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Tuesday, February 20, 2024

En blanc et noir

 


A bit of Swedish grammar...

Forms of the relatively few neuter nouns ending in -o (I have just realized), follow the model of neuter nouns ending in -e.

äpple, meddelande : apple, message
konto, piano: (bank) account, piano

äpplet, meddelandet: the apple, the message
kontot, pianot: the account, the piano

äpplen, meddelanden: apples, messages
konton, pianon: accounts, pianos

äpplena, meddelandena: the apples, the messages
kontona, pianona: the accounts, the pianos


So now I'm as ready as I'll ever be to chat about Claude Debussy's En blanc et noir, for two pianos. "Pianona, så trevliga..." (The pianos, so nice).

Here it's performed by Martha Argerich and Iddo Bar-Shai:



[Everything in this post is derivative. Apart from the links below, I strongly recommend Arun Rao's "Claude de France: Debussy's Great War of 1915" (PDF) .]


When war broke out in August 1914 Debussy had already virtually ceased to compose. He was depressed about his marriage, his financial situation and his ill-health. When war came, bursts of violent nationalist emotion and anti-boches fury vied with his customary scorn for the French mainstream.

En blanc et noir was one of the first compositions after that hiatus. Maybe Debussy chose the two-piano format because it was hard to muster an orchestra in wartime. The music was mostly written in Paris in June 1915. It was completed in July at Pourville-sur-mer (just to the west of Dieppe). Debussy wasn't easily prised away from Paris but now he accepted the playwright Ferdinand Hérold's offer to make use of his villa "Mon Coin"; with Emma and nine-year-old Chouchou, Debussy stayed there for three productive months. (He and Emma had been here before, in summer 1904.) There was no piano at the villa; it helped Debussy to compose, far away from his Bechstein and the temptation to sit noodling at the keyboard. After completing En blanc et noir he immediately started work on the Études.

(This info comes from an article by Sudip Bose: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26755628 .)


Debussy had been painfully suffering from colorectal cancer since late 1908.

On Debussy's cancer, by Georg Predota:

https://interlude.hk/on-this-day-25-march-claude-debussy-died/

It was only officially diagnosed in late 1915. In December 1915 he underwent a colostomy (one of the first ever performed) and had radium treatment, which was just as agonising as the disease. His health continued to decline and he died in March 1918.

En blanc et noir is not very obviously war music; the three pieces were originally called Caprices en blanc et noir and they certainly are capricious, as well as sarcastic, effusive, keening, raw, modernist. But despite Debussy's own denials the work certainly makes reference to the war, especially in the second movement episode where a Lutheran hymn tune is accompanied by bombastic artillery. The dedication of the second movement was ‘au Lieutenant Jacques Charlot tué à l'ennemi en 1915, le 3 mars’. (The 'Prélude' in Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin is also dedicated to him.) Its epigraph is the Envoi from Villon's Ballade contre les ennemis de la France:

Prince, porte soit des serfs Eolus 
En la forest ou domme Glaucus, 
Ou prive soit de paix et d’espérance 
Car digne n’est de posséder vertus 
Qui mal vouldroit au royaume de France.


Prince, may the bright‑winged brood of Æolus
To sea‑king Glaucus' wild wood cavernous
⁠Bear him bereft of peace and hope's least glance,
For worthless is he to get good of us,
⁠Who could wish evil to the state of France.

]

About En blanc et noir, by Meg Ryan:


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Wednesday, February 07, 2024

Three Celtic horses

 

Silver coin, E. Danubian Celts (Carpathian mountain region), 2nd century BCE.

In Britain in 55 BCE (Julius Caesar reported) the Celts used ring money. But on the European mainland they had long adopted coinage, initially from Greek models.

These three coins are all to some extent imitations of Macedonian silver tetradrachmas (Philip II). But the horses (with their riders scarcely visible) have quite a different spirit.


Coin made of billon (low grade silver). E. Danubian Celts, Carpathian mountain region, 2nd century BCE.

This stylized design is known as a Schnabelpferd ("beak-horse").


*


Etymological trivia that caught my eye while reading about the Celts:

The Boii were a major Celtic tribe of central Europe and their name is still embedded in "Bohemia" and "Bologna".

"Hus" is one of just three recorded words from the Galatian language. It means Kermes Oak (Quercus coccifera, the scrubby Mediterranean oak, host plant of the Kermes insects that were used to make the luxurious dye called crimson). However this oak bush occurs only round the edge of Asia Minor, not in the central area where Galatia was located. Unlike the other two Galatian survivals, "hus" is apparently not of Celtic origin, so perhaps it was borrowed from some neighbour language.

Lusitanian, an extinct language from central Portugal and Extremadura, contained numerous Celtic-looking words but its basic forms suggest it was actually a relic language from a more ancient stratum of Indo-European, subsequently borrowing or assimilating vocabulary from surrounding Celtic languages such as Gallaecian.

It's unclear if "Celt" was itself a Celtic term, or a label originally pinned on them by others (Greeks?). Anyway, some 500 years later Julius Caesar says that the Gauls used the term to describe themselves. But that was then. Later, the word disappeared for at least a thousand years; the modern speakers of Celtic languages were simply "Irish", "Breton", etc. It only began to be used again in the 18th century, by scholars such as Edward Lhuyd.

Caesar, of course, called them "Galli". Like "Galatia", it seems to derive from a Celtic term, perhaps meaning warrior band. 

On the other hand the English word "Gaul" comes via French and Frankish from a proto-Germanic word that originally meant "foreigner" e.g. a Roman or Celt. (It also gave rise to "Wales" and "Welsh"). 

"Galicia" (the Iberian one) has yet a different origin, from the Gallaecians, a name (more properly Callaeci) applied by the Romans to the peoples near Portus Calle (modern Porto). (The name Portugal has the same origin.)

 [The other Galicia -- a historic region of SE Poland/NW Ukraine -- takes its name from the medieval city of Halych, now a small town in W. Ukraine.]


Silver coin, E. Danubian Celts, c. 280-200 BCE.

Before the Gallic war, Julius Caesar and his veteran legions had already campaigned against the Lusitanians, he being governor of Hispania Ulterior.

Caesar said that the two classes with power in Celtic society were the druids and the equites (knights, literally horsemen) (Commentarii de Bello Gallico, VI.13). Everything about the druids is disputed, down to their very existence: some people point out that druids are never mentioned in Caesar's own transactions with the Celts, only in this socio-mythic excursus. All the same, what he says is intriguing, and ancient Celtic art certainly suggests a remarkably imaginative culture.


14.

The Druids do not go to war, nor pay tribute together with the rest; they have an exemption from military service and a dispensation in all matters. Induced by such great advantages, many embrace this profession of their own accord, and [many] are sent to it by their parents and relations. They are said there to learn by heart a great number of verses; accordingly some remain in the course of training twenty years. Nor do they regard it lawful to commit these to writing, though in almost all other matters, in their public and private transactions, they use Greek characters. That practice they seem to me to have adopted for two reasons; because they neither desire their doctrines to be divulged among the mass of the people, nor those who learn, to devote themselves the less to the efforts of memory, relying on writing; since it generally occurs to most men, that, in their dependence on writing, they relax their diligence in learning thoroughly, and their employment of the memory. They wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another, and they think that men by this tenet are in a great degree excited to valor, the fear of death being disregarded. They likewise discuss and impart to the youth many things respecting the stars and their motion, respecting the extent of the world and of our earth, respecting the nature of things, respecting the power and the majesty of the immortal gods.

[Source: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0001%3Abook%3D6%3Achapter%3D14 .]


Caesar portrayed the Celts as proud warriors but also barbarous and shifty, justifying his own pre-emptive aggression and the behaviour of his legions. Slaughter of "the enemy" was normal. Often women and children were not spared.

He also said that they were civilised in comparison with the Germanic people. They traded and farmed and understood civilised ideas. But civilisation had also rendered them effete, "accustomed to defeat" as he says at one point. The Celts, in other words, were conquerable and worth conquering, but the Germans were neither. 

Caesar's conquest didn't only affect Gaul. It apparently meant the collapse of Celtic economic systems across the continent. Major sites such as Manching in Bavaria had already declined and been abandoned before the Romans arrived there (in 15 BCE). One sign of that decline, at Manching, was metal recycling!


Silver tetradrachm (Philip II), 355-348 BCE

[Image source: Wikipedia . The obverse shows a laureate head of Zeus, the reverse a horseman advancing to the left.]

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