Note: This was first published in the Signum University newsletter

Hello, my name is Dave and I am a language dilettante. Phew, that felt good to confess. Over the past five years I’ve dabbled in Classical Greek, Latin, Esperanto, Italian, Irish, Spanish and Welsh—spending an average of an hour a day on language study over that time. (Yes, I keep a spreadsheet…)

I travel internationally a lot for work—and pleasure—and I can’t help collecting a few linguistic souvenirs, and not-a-few books, on the way. For me, learning a bit of the local language is as necessary as hitting all the tourist spots. And there is no better place for the budding language tourist than at Signum University. What follows is a brief travelogue of this summer’s jaunt through Europe with my family as viewed through a Mythgard lens.

Iceland

Our first stop was Reykjavik, Iceland. The stunningly beautiful scenery re-invigorated my memory of the Norse stories we read in The Great Tales: Tolkien and the Epic and in Philology Through Tolkien. What I learned in the latter class about historical sound changes from Old Norse to Modern English helped me to understand some of the Icelandic around me. (Although the hotel clerks thought my pronunciation was hilarious.) We visited Geysir, the hot spring which gave us the English word geyser, and Þingvellir where the Althing met and the law was recited in medieval times. I could envision the scene just as Prof. Shippey had described it in class. Had Tolkien ever visited Iceland he would have mourned the dearth of trees, most of them cut down long ago.

Luggage space was tight, but I came away with three Icelandic books: Hobbitinn, the Icelandic translation of The Hobbit; Njal’s Saga in modern Icelandic; and Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) by 1955 Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness.

Spain

After a brief pause in England, we flew to southern Spain. Thanks to the two-semester Latin course with Profs. Walsh and Leibiger, I had a great foundation on which to build my Spanish, not to mention the pleasure of being able to read countless Latin inscriptions and the like found in almost every museum. After a few months of Spanish study I can carry on conversations, order my caña y tapas, and share a joke with the bartender about whether 200 serrano hams suspended from his ceiling qualifies as bastante jamón, all in Spanish.

On our first day in the village I had a pleasant but very confusing conversation with an elderly neighbor. “My Spanish comprehension is terrible,” I thought until another neighbor explained that the poor woman had dementia! My favorite tapas _was fresh rabbit—that’s _conejo in Spanish. So good! I feel like Sam Gamgee pining over some coneys just thinking about it. I can’t wait to continue my studies in Prof. Isaac Juan Tomás’ course.

Lessons learned in “Philology” also helped me appreciate the fascinating linguistic history in Granada. This area of the country was controlled by Islamic Moors for hundreds of years. The resulting mix of language, culture, and myth is not unlike that of England after the Norman Conquest. Ironically, the book of Moorish legends sold in every shop in Granada is written by an American author: Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. Sometimes you travel the world to discover your own country.

Spanish novels are easy to find in US bookstores, but non-fiction, especially popular science, is not. I bought some Asimov, several history books, and a collection of poetry by Federico García Lorca.

Wales

The final leg of our vacation took us through Wales. In my ignorance, I expected Wales to be largely indistinguishable from England. Not so! When you cross Offa’s Dyke into North Wales, Welsh comes alive all around you from the bilingual road signs to overheard conversations. I experienced the same attraction to it that Tolkien describes in his essay “English and Welsh”—with its bewildering spelling and breathy lateral l’s, which sound similar to one of the consonants in Icelandic. How pleased I was with myself for realizing the building labeled pysgod was a fish & chips shop because pysgod was cognate with the Latin word piscis!

It seems every village has ruins of a castle somewhere. You feel that you are standing within the physical remains of the Arthurian myth the Inklings found so compelling. Nothing tops off a long day of castle investigation like some delicious Cwrw Blasus (tasty beer, the name of an actual local brewery). Alas, I just missed an exhibition of the Hengwrt Chaucer, the earliest surviving manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, on display at the National Library in Aberystwyth.

However, I did find an amazing second-hand bookshop where I bought two volumes in Middle Welsh including Owein, a Welsh version of the tale better known from Chrétien de Troyes’ Ywain. The scholarly introduction makes a convincing argument about the independence of the Welsh version from the Old French that I never would have followed before my philological classes at Mythgard.

As a Mythgard student I’ve learned that Tolkien believed language is inextricably entwined with its mythology. As a language tourist I’ve come to realize that both are also shaped by the places and communities in which they developed. Visiting these places has deepened my appreciation for their language and myth and the literature and language classes I’ve taken at Signum have equipped me to make the most of every travel opportunities.

When I was growing up, to me Gramp was not so much a regular person as he was a virile, indomitable presence. He was the man with a thousand guns and a woodworking shop; a man who hunted and fished and did other masculine outdoorsy stuff. (Now that I think about it, I never actually saw him do most of these things but nevertheless I was convinced he was a master of them.) He was a man who would hand his young grandson an ax and expect him capable of splitting firewood; a man who needed said firewood moved from one pile to another pile for no discernible reason. In other words, to my childish mind Gramp was a man who could do things, manly things. The sort of things that demonstrate Man’s control over Nature.

I find this Romantic conception of the “outdoorsman” very appealing, at least in theory (I’ve always preferred theory to actual practice), and Gramp was the embodiment of this idea for me. What’s more, he’d carved up his own little piece of nature for himself: Parker Country. This too was important to me as a kid because I moved around a lot, but this place was a fixed, physical point. The unchanging, unmoving root where all the diverse branches of family met. Just as Gram provided a sense of family connectedness in Time with her limitless knowledge of the goings-on of the extended family, Gramp provided a sense of connectedness in Place. Not only a place to connect with family and friends, but a place where you could connect with nature and with yourself. Even if you couldn’t visit, the knowledge that the place existed meant a lot. For much of my life it didn’t occur to me that Gramp appreciated this aspect of Parker Country or that he had intentionally tried to provide this for his family, but of course he did.

I first realized this 15 years ago, when I brought Charlene up to Camp with the intention to propose to her at the top of Buck Mountain. It was hunting season and Gramp insisted that we wear bright orange jackets which looked ridiculous. He was so happy for us. I think it meant a lot to him that I wanted to propose here and that he got to be part of it. That weekend we got to chatting about the hunting season. At that time he would still ride out on the trails with the 4-wheeler and I asked him if he ever hunted anymore. I can still remember the look on his face when he said, “No, I just like to watch the deer now.”

It was the first time I looked at Gramp as a regular person and not a stereotype. He was a man who had a profound appreciation for the beauty of nature. It was a side of him I never stopped to consider before, a side that was easily overlooked. He had a bit of the poet in him, however hidden by the gruff demeanor. So I don’t think it out of place that he reminds me of the concluding lines from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. I like to imagine that if that poetic side of my grandfather could write a message to us all, it would sound like this:

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

If there is one place we can search and always find Grampa, it is here in this place.

Note: This was written in response to this article in The Atlantic.

I’m wary of people eager to opine about “privilege.” (But of course I would be, wouldn’t I?, being a white male…) By her logic, she should learn to write in a different language because English writers are extremely privileged.

Yet granting the premise, I’m skeptical that the solution is for white dudes to “use [their] privilege to humanize and valorize everyone, instead of just [themselves].” This might work occasionally (eg. Joss Whedon), but more likely it would be seen as abusing their privilege and misappropriating the oppressed (or simply getting it wrong). There’s an odious paternalism behind this notion.

Consider blues music. Not a day goes by where The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, et al aren’t criticized for stealing from the musical tradition of an oppressed people. It is unclear what, if any, this did to advance the future of African-American music embodied in R&B, hip-hop, and rap. With Jimi Hendrix a notable early exception, African-American artists and audiences have largely ignored the rock genre. Certainly, the intent of the appropriation was to cater to a privileged audience not a marginalized one. Yet, this is precisely the sort of misappropriation that this author would condemn! Whether white appropriation advanced the development of black music is unclear (IMO, not much), but if it did it was incidental. The tradition had to develop on its own terms, speaking to its own audience, and the privileged have no difficulty finding value in it in droves.

I think we do need more diverse voices, but the solution is never going to be the privileged writing what they don’t know (or worse, their self-flagellation as penance for inherited sins). Marginalized people need to write what they know. If they do it well, either:

1. they will build an audience with other disenfranchised people or
2. just as the marginalized have found value in the literature of their oppressors, so will the privileged find value in theirs.

If her description of the situation is accurate, there should be a vast audience out there craving to read something not about a white male. Give it to them.

I’m told that medievals thought Boethius was the man. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis also apparently thought his argumentation was compelling. Then I started a class on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde which is steeped in Boethian thought. So, after years of hearing how great this guy was I finally decided that I had to read this book. How disappointing. It is little more than a case study in the perils of motivated reasoning.

The book addresses four related metaphysical problems: why bad things happen to good people, what happiness is, good vs. bad fortune, and the question of free will and God’s foreknowledge. The problems I had with the book are variations of the following fallacy: assume some complex idea is true a priori (eg. God exists, is good, etc.), redefine the problem in terms that you’ve already assumed true, then voila! the resulting conclusions just happen to make the guy awaiting death feel better about getting screwed over by life. The more you want to believe something because it makes you feel good the more you should doubt it.

While I’m not wholly antagonistic to philosophical realism per se, I am aggravated by the reticence Neoplatonists and other sympathizers have to revisit their premises and the ease with which their universal forms accrete bullshit. Yes, I do wear my Methodological Nominalist badge to cocktail parties.

Ultimately, I am glad I read this for the insight into medieval and Christian philosophy it brings. However, it was at the cost of losing some respect for the judgment of people who are convinced by Boethius’ arguments.

[The] history of science in general often has been the story of scientists vigorously fighting an onslaught of new ideas. This is because it is difficult to relinquish the sense of security that comes from a long and rewarding acquaintance with a particular world view. (p. 191)

…criticizes the guy promoting eastern mysticism which, by his own admission, hasn’t changed much since the 2nd c. AD (p. 312). Good thing he doesn’t have the character flaw of feeling safe in a particular world view, unlike those foolish scientists who are always grappling with new ideas… What a crock of shit.

At first I thought the whole “quantum weirdness is, like, totally Zen, man” attitude was just the eccentric conceit of an aged hippy physics enthusiast. Turns out, that it is his entire argument. He misses no opportunity to claim that quantum mechanics and Buddhism are talking about the same thing because occasionally they seem vaguely similar. The book is divided into twelve chapters–all numbered chapter one–across six parts–all numbered part one. This gives you an idea of what passes for profundity here. I should have guessed as much since the book was published under Bantam’s “New Age” label, but the positive quote from Martin Gardner on the back made me hope it transcended the label. In hindsight, I suspect this quote was taken out of context and/or Gardner regretted making it.

While large chunks of the book are pretty good explanations of various concepts in physics, it is fatally marred by horrible pseudo-scientific nonsense and faulty reasoning. To give you one example, he cites quantum entanglement as evidence for telepathy. Yet, even granting every point he makes this explanation utterly fails. First, it has been shown that such quantum effects cannot be controlled. He buries this fact in a footnote (p. 296) and yet implies throughout the book that quantum mechanics says we can control reality with our consciousness. Even ignoring this fatal flaw, entanglement is a link between specific particles. In order for two minds to communicate this way, linked particles would have to inhabit the two specific minds that wish to communicate in exactly the correct place of the brain, etc. This happenstance is so unlikely as to never occur and if it did it would be detectable by rigorous experiment. Certainly it doesn’t explain psychics who claim to be able to read many minds yet fail under rigorous experiment and suchlike supernatural claims.

I award two stars, which is frankly over-generous to the book as a unity, on the grounds that I did enjoy some of the pure physics exposition. I debated even putting this on my ‘science’ shelf in Goodreads because at its heart it is anti-science in the same way that CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy is un-science-fiction. By the way, the book was recommended to me by the Baha’i gentleman I mentioned in a prior review.