Word of the week: the Anglo-Saxon adjective ælf-scīne, 'elf-bright,' or beautiful.
I spent an exhilarating evening listening to the recordings of Jean Doyen, an outrageously forgotten pianist of impeccable gift, especially in the music of the Impressionists. The first video I heard was of Miroirs, and it was probably the best thing to happen to me all week. The tone was dry, controlled, polished, ælf-scīne.
It was Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, read a few days before the fire of 2019, which imprinted in me a deep love of the fantastic in Gothic architecture. So when I took a closer look at Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame recently, I was shocked and delighted by how faithful the animators had been to the book in this regard, in both spirit and letter. For an avid fan of the novel, it was clear that they'd read, and thoughtfully incorporated even slight details from, the novel's architectural rambles. I decided that it warranted a video to flesh out the comparison, complete with Saint-Saëns's Aquarium to set the mood. The text (translated by me) is taken from a single paragraph of the novel.
Apart from the dislodging of the crows (SO thoughtful honestly), my favourite touch from Disney is the grotesque figures literally coming to life as Quasimodo's friends- a stroke of interpretative genius. Both book and movie intrigued me enough regarding these medieval oddities, that I dug up, and have been devouring, two fantastic works on the subject. Firstly, this very long book by Bob Trubshaw, and then a very niche book by the scholar Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame. I'm currently reading Camille's fascinating explanation of how fantastic figures like Le Stryge (shown below) on Notre-Dame's balustrade aren't actually from the medieval period, but products of the feverish Gothic Revival in the nineteenth century, which revamped the cathedral according to romanticised notions of the Gothic. In fact, Hugo's novel was a key instigator of the restoration of the cathedral at the time, giving popular imaginative life to its architecture, and inspired the addition of the aforementioned famous chimeras. Oscar Wilde would have been delighted.
(I don't believe Camille mentions this specifically, but I have my personal theory that Le Stryge was at least partly inspired by the line I quoted in the video: 'Now you ran, in some dark corner of the church, into a sort of living chimera, crouched, surly; it was Quasimodo deep in thought.')
It's interesting that scholars, Hugo and Disney have all highlighted how cathedrals are reimagined throughout the ages by vacillating social forces. Gervase Rosser did a nice lecture at Oxford which is worth checking out. The declared subject is actually the specific role of the architect of medieval cathedrals- covered by Camille as well- an equally intriguing topic.
Anyway- back to the grotesques, specifically. Camille is prone to slightly tedious rambles here and there, but the book, paired with Trubshaw's work, is overall well worth a read for anyone who, like me, was fascinated by the book or film. How do we break down the complex, multidimensional functions of of grotesques in medieval churches- both in the eye of the beholder and of the sculptors? What do grotesques tell us about the interplay of reason and the irrational, and subversion of the conventionally "beautiful," in the Gothic mindset? What were the power dynamics between the architects and masons who created these masterpieces? Never thought I'd become so invested in the Middle Ages, but here we are.
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There's a famous passage of the Iliad where the Trojan prince Lycaon, previously caught and spared by Achilles, begs the latter to once more spare his life. But mad with grief for Patroclus, Achilles is in no mood to relent. The Fagles translation I'm reading depicts him as swiftly caustic:
'And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am?
The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life
a deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you,
death and the strong force of fate are waiting.'
I love the thrumming energy of Fagles's verse- very apt for battle. But my favourite rendition of this part is a shortened version of EV Rieu's, created for his blurb. It was in this version that I first read Achilles's words, and I was blown away by the bare-bones bleakness, the gorgeous simplicity of the language. Look, also, how it pulls you in with a slowly expanding sentence length.
'Look at me. I am the son of a great man. A goddess was my mother. Yet death and inexorable destiny are waiting for me.'
This is an Achilles naked in bitter truth- the bitter truth which perhaps sums up the entire Iliad.
This puts me in mind of one of the greatest poems in Middle English. It hinges on the old idea that human life springs from the earth. Punning on the various, related meanings of earth as a shorthand for mortal man, soil and planet, it brutally summarises human life:
(lightly modernised spelling)
'Earth took of earth earth with woe;
Earth other earth to the earth drew;
Earth laid earth in earthen trough;
Then had earth of earth enough.'
In other Middle English news, I was reading Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida- an absolute eyesore for someone unaccustomed to the spelling. So I was glad to find that Chaucer thought the same:
'Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden pris now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so,'
('You know, too, that forms of speech change
over a thousand years, and words which
had currency then now seem ludicrous, and we think
them strange, and yet that was how they spoke.')
You don't say.
In another, lovely Middle English poem, Spring, I paused with delight on the editor's explanation that 'dayeseyes' meant 'daisies.' A quick Google confirmed my theorised etymology: 'daisy' comes from Old English 'dæges ēage ‘day's eye’ (because the flower opens in the morning and closes at night)' (Oxford Languages).
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Finally read Hardy's Under The Greenwood Tree (the title being a nice quote from a song in As You Like It). I first came across it in a Waterstone's around a year ago, where I was rather captivated by the opening paragraph:
'To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality.'
This idea is also referenced in a much longer, and equally beautiful, passage in The Woodlanders.
In any case, having finished the book, it is exactly what it proclaims itself to be: 'A RURAL PAINTING OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL..' There's not much plot going for it, just light and sometimes too drawn-out portraits of life in the rural West Country. It is evidently one of Hardy's earlier works, with none of the nimble pacing of his masterpieces. However, this is excused not just by the trademark rich descriptions of nature, but by a truly funny couple of chapters detailing a mini-war between the choir and the vicar, so vividly characterised, with the different registers used, that you can hear every individual voice in your head and see every colour in your mind's eye. It's futile to summarise it here; go read it yourself. It is refreshing to see such a light side of Hardy.
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