Category: mythgard academy Page 2 of 4

Snottor

On April 1, 2019

In Academy and Society, mythgard academy

Now that I’ve read “The Wanderer”, I’ve learned the Anglo-Saxon word “snottor”. That got me thinking. I realized there’s a confluence of events in the world that need to be dealt with.

Signum U is about to get the authority to grant degrees. Master of Arts is the current thinking, which shows a lack of ambition.
More than a few Signum students already have master’s degrees and even doctorates. Why take a course for credit, if it gives you a distinction you’ve already got?
The title “doctor”, alas, carries a lot of social rank with it. This being the USA, for-profit STEM education has sprung up to meet the market. Trade schools around the country are cranking out doctorates in the servile arts that require relatively little effort. So there are lots of “doctors” out there. It’s not very distinctive any more.

We’re going to need a new academic title to differentiate real scholars from people who got their boss to pay their tuition to get an extra degree so they look more impressive on a contract proposal. It seems wrong to have a Latin-named degree at Signum, anyway.

I hereby propose the creation of a new academic degree of “Snottor” for continuing students who already have a Ph.D. in another field. It ranks higher than “Doctor”, so all the world may know our magnificent erudition. Let’s just see some unscrupulous college try to sell Snottorates for massaging the amour-propre of middle management!

And “diploma” should be replaced with “twifeald”.

Jousting and Fencing

By Joe

On December 24, 2018

In mythgard academy

Just listened to Session 18 of the Mythgard Academy class on Le Morte d’Arthur. One unexpected thing I am really enjoying about this class is Prof. Olsen’s explications of knightly combat in “SportsCenter” style. Despite the five centuries since jousting was a thing, I recognize almost everything from my old days in competition, just one century ago.

This session had a long treatment of sir La Cote Male Tayle beginnning ab0ut 2:21:16. Sir La Cote Male Tayle is a strong knight, but not in the top ranks, so sometimes he wins and sometimes he loses. I can relate to that much better than to hot-shots like Tristram. When sir Mordred is spilling the beans on how top-ranked knights keep an eye on the competition, it reminded me of a bout I fenced long ago. January, 1998, the North American Cup in South Bend, Indiana. The luck of the draw put me in Pool #1. My first bout was against a short, left-handed, tough-looking guy whom I didn’t recognize.

What I did recognize was most of the US National Team, a few top-ranked coaches, and a couple of off-duty referees watching me fence. That’s weird. No, wait — they’re not watching me fence, they’re watching my opponent. I was doing all right, mostly because people tended not to believe how long my lunge could be. (I may occasionally have deceived opponents on that topic. 😇) We were tied 2-2 when he decided he’d seen everything I could do, and he won 5-2. As the spectators dispersed, I heard one of the coaches say, “Now we know who’s going to win the tournament.” Yeah, who?, I wondered. Oh: This guy. The one with an Olympic gold medal in his pocket.

Sir Mordred’s perspicacity hasn’t diminished a bit. But Ibragimov only beat me because the temperature was 20° F and I’m strongest in warm weather. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Kay the Sénéchal

By Joe

On August 12, 2018

In mythgard academy

There was quite a bit of discussion in Class 3 of Le Morte d’Arthur (starting at 50:19) about how Sir Ector asked Arthur to make Sir Kay his seneschal when he became King. What is a seneschal, anyway? The dictionary defines the seneschal as the senior officer in charge of administering the King’s household. That’s kind of skeletal. Let’s flesh it out a bit, by a combination of imagination and the medieval adage sequi pecuniam.

Any reader of medieval romances who pictures life at court is probably imagining a feast. All great events seem to happen at feasts. In reality, this isn’t far off. Whenever some important affair of state was going to happen, the King would summon his knights and lords, and these people needed to be fed. In an echo of the most ancient origins of kingship, the King could bolster his power by making sure they were extravagantly well fed.[1] The Seneschal (via a huge staff of commoners, naturally) furnished the table. He was in charge of acquiring the meat, fish, bread, wine, beer, and maybe even an occasional vegetable. As Corey Olsen said, it’s not a great office of state.[2] It’s the maximum that a middling fief-holder like Sir Ector could ask, but it’s big enough that it’s what he most needed.

So much of the king’s “soft power” depended on the seneschal that a wise king gave him a free hand and a generous budget for acquiring stuff for the court. So if we imagine Sir Kay’s first day on the job, what’s he going to do? The butchers and bakers and brewers he knows best are peasants on Sir Ector’s estates. He’s going to buy from them first, he’s going to be a reliable repeat customer, and he’s going to pay top prices to get their best product. Ector’s estates are guaranteed prosperity for as long as Kay is seneschal and King Arthur wants to hold power. With a generation of guaranteed prosperity, those estates can become very comfortable indeed, and Ector’s family will be able to use the resulting wealth to raise its position in society.

It comes at a price, though. John Steinbeck’s version of the conversation between Lancelot and Kay is heartbreaking. Kay might be the character who translates most easily into 20th-century American understanding.

Why does Kay get such a bad rap in other versions of the story? I think the seneschal is the bellator equivalent of the miller when you’re telling stories: a natural bad-guy. Every time he makes a big purchase, some other supplier loses out on the contract. Even if Kay was perfectly honest and fair in his dealings, somebody out there was bound to resent him. Maybe those somebodies had real-world counterparts who were wealthy and bought books. I doubt Chrétien de Troyes was any different from modern authors, when it comes to considering market share as they’re plotting out a story.

Coda

When I type a Malory-word on this iOS device, autocorrect decides I must have meant to type the French word and tweaks the spelling accordingly. I’m enjoying that, so I’m leaving the title as it stands.

[1] Which is where we get things like fire-breathing swans on the dinner table. Countless political squabbles in the Middle Ages were averted because the would-be recréant knight, doing his benefit-cost calculation, had to account for losing his seat at the table and decided it wasn’t worth it.

[2] In England. The cognate French office was a really powerful position.

The more things change

By Joe

On August 4, 2018

In mythgard academy

This is a funny line from the beginning of The Tale of King Arthur:

And the thyrd syster, Morgan le Fey, was put to scole in a nonnery, and ther she lerned so moche that she was a grete clerke of nygromancye. (p.5, lines 28-9.)

The Mythgard Academy class broke a number of staves of wit on the abbess of Morgan’s convent. (about 40:00)

It’s hard not to hear an echo of parents who send their children off to college, and then lament that they’ve come back with their heads full of funny ideas. To a modern-day capitalist father, Marxism might be an exact parallel to black magic in medieval times.

Hail, Caesura

By Joe

On June 24, 2017

In Failed Classical Education, fantasy, mythgard academy

In which the Idiosopher appreciates the poetic value of zeroes of the first time-derivative.

Tom Hillman has written a Mythgard Academy bank-shot post, in which he draws a line from the song-duel between Finrod and Sauron in The Silmarillion, to a poem in Boëthius’s Consolation of Philosophy, to the beach in Long Island. Tom points out an almost-caesura in J.R.R. Tolkien’s verse:

Softly in the gloom they heard the birds
Singing afar in Nargothrond,
The sighing of the Sea beyond,
Beyond the western world, on sand,
On sand of pearls in Elvenland.

Silmarillion, ch. 19

The alliteration on “s” in lines 3-5 is onomatopoetic to me. We’re hearing waves on the beach. The caesura effect comes from the repetition of “beyond” and “on sand”. The forward progress of the poem glides gently to a halt, then resumes, like a wave losing energy as it climbs the beach, before it returns to the sea. To a first approximation, the distance a wave travels up the slope of the sand is a parabola. We see only the nose of the parabola, because another wave comes along and uses it as a lubricant against friction with the land. What we see is Figure 1.

Fig. 1. Wave height as a function of time

This is a good time of year to think about that. We’ve just passed the solstice, so the same sort of thing is happening with the sun. The sun has been in the sky perceptibly longer each day; now that’s come to an end like waves running out of energy on the sand. The actual length of the day is a complicated function of the earth’s axial tilt, the latitude of the observer, the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, the nutation of the earth’s rotation, and even a little factor due to the Moon. The Naval Observatory keeps track of all this. We can use a much simpler approximation, and treat everything as circles. [geometric derivation with awesome ASCII art] That yields an equation you can actually read. The fraction of a day during which the sun is up is

2 acos[sin(λ) tan(τ sin(2πy))],
where λ is the latitude of the observer, τ is the earth’s axial tilt, and y is the number of days since December 21st divided by the length of the year in days. The approximation is about 10 minutes shorter than the true amount of sunshine at my latitude, as shown in Figure 2. Not bad, Copernicus!

Fig. 2. Daylight in Virginia

So here we are, just past the noontide of the year. The vegetable plants have stopped their manic growth phase. (Fortunately, so has the grass.) The botanical world is in a caesura of its own for a few days. The beanstalks made it to the tops of their poles just in time. The squash vines have found every inch of space they can reach. Now they’re hunkering down to making seeds and fruits. My job protecting them from skulking vegetarians will begin soon enough, but now is a time to take a breath.

Yes, the camera is at eye level. This year’s experiment is a 15-foot bean trellis.

My greatest wonder

By Joe

On June 21, 2017

In mythgard academy

The theme of Mythmoot IV was “Invoking Wonder”, and lots of people who attended have been posting about works that have inspired wonder in them. Here are noteworthy contributions from Kat and Tom.

I tried to think of works of art that inspired a similar wonder in me, but they kept getting drowned out by a work of science and engineering: The Hubble Space Telescope‘s Deep Field images.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field image

This is what science is all about. They persuaded people to build the most amazing astronomical machine in history, and then pointed it towards places where nothing is. No stars in our galaxy, no clouds of dust that will one day coalesce into solar systems. And they found that even the emptiest part of the sky is filled with thousands of entire galaxies. Not just there, of course. Behind every star we can see, there’s a similar multitude of island universes, drowned out by the closer light sources.

The Silmarillion came out before the Hubble, so I didn’t have this in my mind when the Elves first awoke and saw the stars and said “Behold!” by the shores of Cuiviénen. But now I know what they meant.

This particular image was taken in the near infrared, not visible light, because these galaxies are too old to be seen in visible light. They upshifted the light to what it must have looked like when it left the sources. These galaxies are so old that many of them do not yet contain stars. We’re ahead of the Elves now. Pace Mithrandir, this is wizardry indeed!

Michael Drout: The Decline and Hoped Rebirth of Germanic Philology

By Joe

On June 9, 2017

In Academy and Society, mythgard academy, scholarship

Michael Drout gave a fascinating keynote address at Mythmoot IV. Honestly, the last thing I expected to hear was a call to action.

Edited to add: A video recording of the talk is now online.

We 120 were a big audience, by Germanic-philology standards, but it was not always so. In 1848, Jakob Grimm was Guest of Honor at the Frankfurter Nationalversammlung where they wrote the Constitution. “Who is a German?” was the defining question for 150 years of European history. Philology was a tool in this nationalistic task, and Jakob Grimm was the master philologist.

Grimm’s work wasn’t confined to an ivory tower. His methods made it possible to read long-dead languages, and thereby investigate cultural history in words. Success in application makes something important. Because it had real-world effects, philology dominated scholarship before WWII the way physics did afterwards. But philology was basically wiped out, between 1945 and 1951, an effort that was enthusiastically supported by literary scholars who wanted to erase their Nazi-sympathizing pasts. It doesn’t exist any more as a requirement for an English degree.

Apart from institutional antipathy, another problem that bedevils philology is the absence of good textbooks. You can’t learn it without a good teacher. It’s taught by the apprentice method, which is unsurpassable for quality of education, but, being highly susceptible to Baumol’s disease, isn’t a good way to rebuild an entire field of study. Professor Drout stated ex cathedra that current philologists are fewer and less capable than their predecessors. He bolstered the assertion with examples of archaeological discoveries that were more-or-less predicted by philological analyses of ancient texts, and said that such skill has vanished, now. (I’ll take his word for it; but some day I’d like to see all the predictions that didn’t come true.) “How do we know that?” asked Timdalf, which was a very good question. Drout’s answer is that he sees signs of it all through the old literature — many parts of reviews and commentary aren’t explained because everybody knew them. There are traces all through the journals of vanished networks of communication and understanding. We have no referents for them.

Professor Drout next developed his story with a diatribe against Literary Theory. He’s not so well educated as his predecessors because he had to learn Theory to get a job. Even from my brief incursion into the field, I know what he’s talking about. “The theorists tried to destroy philology, which cursed them as it died.”

The general decay of literary studies is a consequence of losing the academic rigor that philology brought. Literary Theory doesn’t have much of it. Here is Professor Drout’s call to arms: let us, Signum University faculty, students, and scholars in its orbit, restore philology to its proper place. The old philologists didn’t completely understand this a hundred years ago, but now we know philology is grounded in neuroscience. Philology is a way for literary studies to catch up with the rest of the academy in rigor. Without a philological foundation, no theoretical treatment should be taken too seriously. In conclusion, he suggested that we, the Tolkien fans who have become philology fans, are like gardeners who are watering the seeds, against the day when philology sprouts again.

The conclusion was inspiring. The last thing we expected from a plenary talk was to be charged with a mission. (It wouldn’t be the last of the weekend!). Not all the eyes in the audience were dry when Professor Drout finished.

I was left with two questions to ponder.

Professor Drout is one of the best at speaking Anglo-Saxon that I’ve ever heard. He’s so good at it that he can sell recordings. Seth Lerer is the other; both are philologists, not just literary critics. It seems likely that studying philology is necessary to pronounce an ancient language well. Is it sufficient? Or are other skills needed, too?
The knowledge that philologists used to have isn’t well-represented by a chain of facts. It’s a network. This seems like the sort of thing Google Scholar was invented for. Might it be possible to program a neural net with the corpus of the technical literature, which can then serve as an assistant to someone who wants to reproduce and extend the old discipline?

Bullet Lists from Mythmoot

By Joe

On June 6, 2017

In mythgard academy, scholarship

Mythmoot IV is over and done, and it was a blast. I heard a lot of good scholarship, met a lot of interesting people, bought some books, and was stalked by Tevildo, Prince of Cats. (Starsha tried to get photographic proof, but taking a picture of a black cat in the middle of the night is among the most difficult tasks in the visual arts.)

Things I have never done before:

Pronounced “oidhche” (even if I didn’t do it right)
Drawn up a tax code for Gondor
Danced the Virginia Reel with a priest

Observations:

Sørina Higgins is so good at asking questions of panelists that I frequently find myself noting her questions rather than the answers.
Verlyn Flieger is not only extraordinary at delivering the punch line to a lecture; she can even improvise them.
Michael Drout can read an audience as well as the best stand-up comics.

I’ll have more detailed notes on some highlights coming up, though not a full “proceedings” like I did last year.

Latin Verse for hoi Polloi

By Joe

On May 31, 2017

In Failed Classical Education, mythgard academy

Tom Hillman seems to have invented a way to be a visiting professor at an online university. Since the beginning of the Boëthius class, Corey Olsen has held forth on numerous occasions about the impossibility of translating poetry into another language. Tom has taken up the cudgel, and is inserting real Latin into the lectures. Cool! This time it needed a visual aid. I listen to Academy lectures in my car, so I fired this one up in a browser when I got home to figure out where the colors were. Voilà:

This was a very clear explanation of what was going on, understandable even by your Idiosopher, who learned Latin and Greek from dinosaur names. [1] In response to Jennifer’s question, you can find Boethius’s original Latin at the Perseus Project.

Since I don’t have any contributions to make to the study of classical poetry, I’ll take this opportunity to tell a story of the time I used Latin in public. I had gone to the doctor about a rash beside my right eye. The doctor said, “I think it’s periorbital dermatitis, but I’d better ask my partner.” The partner came in, swear-to-god wearing one of those mirrors on a headband that you see in old movies, inspected me, and declared, “Yes, it’s periorbital dermatitis.” Well, by that point I’d had a minute to work it out so I asked them, “Did you just say I have ‘skin-around-the-eye disease’?” They both stood there looking sheepish. I decided to call that a standing ovation.

[1] “Latin and Greek” is one language to scientists. We assume the words with an “h” after a consonant like “autochthonous” or “phthalate” are Greek, and all the rest aren’t.

Boëthius goes to Science Class

By Joe

On May 27, 2017

In Failed Classical Education, mythgard academy

In his Mythgard Academy class, Corey Olsen pointed out that The Consolation of Philosophy contains a reference to how small the Earth is compared to the cosmos. This comes from Ptolemy in the 2nd Century CE, and is qualitatively correct.[1] By that point in the text, I had noticed that Boëthius argues frequently from scientific evidence, and I’d been highlighting the various claims he makes. Suppose he were being graded by a modern science teacher – here’s how he might come out.

Physics

“Sound fills the ears of many at the same time without being broken into parts.” This sentence was the thing that set me to high-lighting. I had no idea that they knew that much wave theory in Late Antiquity. Nowadays, we call this Huygens’ Principle. Huygens gets the credit, not Boëthius, because his formulation allows it to be used for experiments and theoretical advancements. 10/10.

Mathematics

“Then, for the same reasons, this also is necessary—that independence, power, renown, reverence, and sweetness of delight, are different only in name, but in substance differ no wise one from the other.” (Bk. 3, P10.) “Either there is no single end to which all things are relative, or else the end to which all things universally hasten must be the highest good of all”. (Bk. 3, P11)

These two are pretty much the same claim, that all good things are unified. Boëthius wants to define a highest good, so he needs good things to be a well-ordered set, or different people might have different ideas about what constitutes the “highest”. This proposition is essential to his entire argument, and it’s a theorem of mathematics: you can’t have a well-ordered set made of multiplets of numbers. Whether this is logically equivalent to monotheism, I leave to theologians, who by both nature and training are more subtle than Idiosophers. 10/10.

Economics

“nothing can be better in nature than the source from which it has come;” (Bk. 3, P 10.)
Incorrect. The whole purpose of human labor is to add value to raw materials. The Winged Victory of Samothrace is much “better in nature” than a block of marble in a quarry. 0/10.

“How poor and cramped a thing, then, is riches, which more than one cannot possess as an unbroken whole, which falls not to any one man’s lot without the impoverishment of everyone else!”
Boëthius does not know about economies of scale. Division of labor and cooperation via markets have brought prosperity to our world that would be unimaginable in his. While it is true that the principle is frequently abused and greedy rich men enjoy impoverishing those around them, nevertheless the foundation of the global capitalist economy encourages entrepreneurs to find ways to produce goods en masse, which thereafter make entrepreneurs fabulously wealthy while improving the lot of their customers. Boëthius sees only the down side and misses the positive. 5/10.

Biology

“[If satisfying bodily desires] can make happiness, there is no reason why the beasts also should not be happy, since all their efforts are eagerly set upon satisfying the bodily wants.”
Your Idiosopher infers that Boëthius did not have pet dogs. I have fed Labrador Retrievers — if there is any creature on Earth that has ever attained a more perfect happiness than those dogs at dinner time, I have not seen it. 3/10; maybe he had a cat.

“[W]ould not that body of Alcibiades, so gloriously fair in outward seeming, appear altogether loathsome when all its inward parts lay open to the view?” (Bk. 3, P8)
Never having met Alcibiades, your Idiosopher can not talk about the condition of his specific innards. But inward parts in general can be fascinating. The human brain is a supercomputer that runs on 50 W of power and fits in a hat.[2] Kidneys are marvelously effective filtration systems for their size. And if you gave me a handful of jelly and told me to build two cameras out of it, I feel sure that the result would be much less effective than eyes. This is an attitude that derives from disgust, not science. 0/10.

“Nature is content with few things, and with a very little of these. If thou art minded to force superfluities upon her when she is satisfied, that which thou addest will prove either unpleasant or harmful.” (Bk. 2, P 5.)
Anyone who has ever kept a vegetable garden knows this is not the case. Nature is all about superfluity. Bacteria, plants, fungi, and animals all reproduce to the maximum extent that resources will allow, because that’s the best way to guarantee survival when they are surrounded by predators. The story of nature is the contest for resources among a multitude of over-procreative species. Vegetable gardens produce food because gardeners intervene in the process, warding off predations so the surplus production of the plants is not consumed by competitors, but rather by the gardeners themselves. As James Lawson describes it in his First Steps to Botany (1826): “No species, perhaps, either of plant or animal is made for itself alone ; and hence, as vegetables produce a superabundance of seeds for the nourishment of certain races of animals….” 0/10.

“Looking to living creatures, which have some faults of choice, I find none that, without external compulsion, forego the will to live, and of their own accord hasten to destruction. For every creature diligently pursues the end of self-preservation.” (Bk.3, P11)
There are many creatures that devote themselves to a higher end than their self-preservation. Bees will unthinkingly sting anyone who threatens their hive, though they die in the process. Ants will drown so their hill-mates can cross a stream. Human soldiers give their lives for their countries. 0/10.

“‘Now, dost thou know,’ said she, ‘that all which is abides and subsists so long as it continues one, but so soon as it ceases to be one it perishes and falls to pieces?” (Bk.3, P11)
“Now, that which seeks to subsist and continue desires to be one; for if its oneness be gone, its very existence cannot continue.” (ibid.)
This is incorrect. Bacteria, amoebae, and many other micro-organisms die unless they split themselves into parts. Mitosis in the higher animals works the same way. I wonder how Boëthius would have reacted, had he known that for most living creatures, remaining unified means extinction. It seems to tie into the monotheistic foundation of his philosophy, but in a contrary sense. 0/10.

Conclusion

Our good Anicius Manlius recapitulates the phylogeny of science fairly well. The older the science, the better he understands it. He’s an “A” student in math and physics, but the newer sciences contradict his evidence at every turn.

[1] Richard Fitzgerald, in the physics department at UT-Austin, has translated the Almagest of Ptolemy, not only into English, but into modern mathematical notation as well. I love the Internet.

[2] Your move, Apple!