carolus simplex ou roman-savon

Meanwhile back in France, the hopes pinned to Charlemagne soon faded as his children and his children’s children began to squabble over the right to rule and supremacy.
The Carolingian dynasty, named not for Charlemagne but his line’s founder majordomo and usurper Charles Martel (Karl der Hammer) who persuaded the Pope in Rome, wrestled his blessing away from the Merovingians by primarily sending in an army to liberate Rome from the Lombards—and secondarily, rebuffing the advance of the Islamic Caliphate in the year 732 after the Sack of Bordeaux in the Battle of Tours, but I believe Charles the Great (Karl der Grosse) was an honorific earned by this descendant rather than just another choice epithet to distinguish him from a number of similarly named male heirs, whom by all accounts lived up to their sobriquets.
Though called the Father of Europe, as emperor of much of France, Germany and Italy and instituting many social and educational reforms, his offspring could not live up to those high standards, and regressing towards the old Gallic custom of dividing up a land among the children, the kingdoms soon splintered among the slow and doltish with no allegiance on the part of the aristocracy—returning the lands of the Franks to the fractured environment it had under the impotent Merovingian kings. Charles the Fat, Louis the Stammerer, Charles the Bald, Louis the Pious and Louis the Blind vied over successive generations over control of a divided western France, the Middle Kingdom of Lorraine and eastern German lands—the region still called Franconia.
The parallels to the Roman problems with succession and stability are interesting, and there be an opposite antagonizing principle at work here: the Romans restored to adult-adoption to pick their beneficiary—not out of noble illusions of meritocracy over family, but rather, for those hundreds of years, incredibly none fathered a son that survived to rule, and contrarily, it seemed that the Franks were too prolific and produced sons that divided and sub-divided the realms.  It was not until the summer of the year 911 that events started to coalesce and reunited the lands of Western Europe. After having paid-off the Viking raiders to leave Frankish cities and ports alone and take their pillaging elsewhere, they stuck to the English coasts for a time until Alfred’s fortified cities and policies that led to cultural inclusion again made France the more attractive target. This beggar-thy-neighbour and bribery exacerbated the situation and the Vikings became bolder and more demanding.
This was another worse-practise tactic that the Franks took from the Roman playbook. Desperate and bankrupt, the French watched in horror as a raiding party made its way down the Seine to sack Paris with their monarch unable to raise an army. The city, however, mounted its own defenses and eventually, miraculously beat back the invaders. The monarch nearly snatched defeat from the clutches of a hard-won and tense victory by refusing to negotiate with the Vikings and just offering some more silver to make themselves scarce. Outraged, the aristocracy deposed the monarch, electing to install the hero of the Siege of Paris, Odo, who made a truce with the Viking commander Rollo (Hrólfr) and allowed his tribe to settle (in exchange for fending off attacks by any Norse brethren) in the area that would be called Normandy. Rollo, converting, to Christianity, was styled Robert I, Duke of Normandy. After the nobles grew weary with the worshipful Odo, they elevated another Carolingian to the throne, a son of the previous monarch called Charles the Simple. In this context, simple meant guileless and a straight-shooter but the elite soon tired of this frankness as well.

alfred the great or yakety sax

Recently, I learnt about a seminal character of British history who was quite enlightened for living in the Dark Ages. King of Wessex, Alfred the Great, during the latter half of the ninth century, instituted many calculated reforms—only in part driven by the incursions of the Anglo-Saxons’ former neighbours, the Danes, drawn by the outrageous fortune of this island—which elevated his character to legendary proportions through his very real measures, ensuring the English identity at a time when it was buffeted by many outside threats.
Although a late-learner himself, like his more famous precedent influence to the south, Charlemagne, after negotiating an uneasy peace with the Nordic raiders that were given domain over the east of England in the Danelaw (Danelag) and persuading those tribes to embrace Christianity, Alfred lamented his ignorance and the general decay in scholarship in his land. There were no more experts in classical Latin, the language of the Church, left in England—in part because Charlemagne had prosecuted such a talent-drain by luring literacy to his court in order to evangelise to the continental Saxons. Absent classic academics, Alfred undertook to learn Latin and decreed that the native language, Old English, become the primary language of erudition. Wessex and Mercia, the formerly antagonising western kingdom won over by a clever union by Alfred’s daughter Æthelfæld—who got to rule the kingdom in her own right, cohabited with the raiders—just as they had done themselves some centuries before. Subsequently, there was a veritable explosion in literacy and a sizable body of literature, including the Chronicles of the Anglo-Saxons, an invaluable extant historic resource which first sought to document the people’s past and then faithfully maintained as a yearbook for the next four centuries. What is truly amazing is that Alfred accomplished all these reforms while on the run from the Danes.
Instead of retreating to the mainland as many of his fellow English regents had done, Alfred remained in Wessex and set up camp deep in the marshes of Somerset on the island of Athelny. Although there are some parallels to the capital of Rome repairing to the swampy protection of Ravenna, I can imagine, comically, Alfred staying one step ahead of the “Heathen Armies” and rushing here and there. After cleaning up the classroom, Alfred undertook the task of ensuring that the English identity would not just survive in letters but also thrive militarily. Ordering the fortification of key cities, the king ensured that no settlement was isolated and vulnerable to attack. Alfred established the English armada to counter Viking incursions—though with mixed success as Alfred insisted on designing the warships himself. Because the vast majority of conscripts were farmers with crops to look after, the season for waging battle was formerly a designated time of the year. As the invaders, however, did not respect these constraints, the peasantry was at a marked disadvantage, facing either poverty and starvation or being pillaged and massacred.

To remedy this situation, a rotating cycle of deployments was instituted so duty to family and duty to country imposed less of an egregious choice and a standing-army was ready at all times.  Alfred’s greatest coup was a diplomatic one, allowing the Danes to enjoy an independent society, cleaving to the east but slowly accepted into the fold, both sides exchanging cultural memes and vows that blended the two peoples and became an integral component of an English identity.

tatort

Using Bavaria as a pilot-site, German police forces are gauging whether adopt a software platform, with a virtual nod, wink, bow and kow-tow to the dystopia concept of pre-crime, as first suggested by writer Philip K. Dick and adapted into the disturbing film Minority Report.

Rather than directly profiling would-be criminals for a self-fulfilling recidivism, the algorithm triangulates trends in crime and crime-scene location and aims to plot the ideal beat for law enforcement to stick in order to optimise their efforts and maybe stand in between criminal and victim. An allusion to the precogs, the platform is called the Precobs, “the Pre-Crime Observation System.” Niedlich—I do hope that the authorities salivating over this new wonder realise that such big data and likelihood flow in both directions. What do you think? Other police forces have already deployed such programming but with little to show for it, yet, and field-tested I’m sure on protesters and rangy mobs, it does not seem like a particularly better kettler yet either. I am sure a few defacers of public property might be netted, though.  We’ll see how this turns out.

pilaster or ozymandias

BLDGBlog reveals an amazing resource under the guise of Archi/Maps that features designs and blueprints for familiar landmarks, alternative proposals that were ultimately abandoned (like the pyramid pictured conceived for Trafalgar Square) and many shires that were never built.

finding krampus oder knecht ruprecht

In a delightful little holiday safari called Searching for Krampus, one of Boing Boing’s happy mutants covers the slow and careful cultivation of an old Germanic tradition transported to Hollywood.
The old masters from Austria (though similar devils haunt a broad swath of Europe) that ultimately helped realise a Krampus festival were skeptical at first, worried that without proper guidance that the custom would become mere cos-play and horror-camp but there seems to be a genuine fascination for this demonic foil—that’s maybe reflective of broader laments over the over-commercialisation of the season. This is always a sore topic and all chime-in when it comes to Christmas-Creep, but I can imagine that the Celts, the ancient Germanic tribes, and the ancient Roman were feeling pretty much the same way when they saw their mistletoe, Yuletide and Saturnalia taken over by Christian rites. Knecht Ruprecht is a related but non-demonic companion of Saint Nicholas, meaning Farmhand Rupert, who threatens disobedient children and hashes out appropriately wretched presents—and although maybe not enjoying the same seasonal celebrity as the monstrous Krampus, Knecht Ruprecht is pretty famous in the Deutsche Sprachraum as the name of the Simpson family pet greyhound, Santa’s Little Helper, in the German version of the series.

double the pleasure, double the fun

Collectors’ Weekly features an engrossing profile on the rediscovery of one of the advertising world’s most influential but unknown duos, whose iconic output from the 1930s to the 1960s was the defining style and technique for airbrush art. Dorothy and Otis ‘Shep’ Shepard collaborated on a lot of marketing campaigns and employed a hallmark design that really captured that era of Americana, fusing memorable visual elements and jingles. Ann Harnett, who founded the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League as portrayed in A League of their Own, commissioned the Shepards to design the team’s new uniforms.

troll the ancient yuletide carol

Mental Floss has an excellent, brief grammar lesson about the finer and arcane points of English syntax frozen as it were in the lines of traditional Christmas songs. It was certainly a fun and lively read and causes one to think of other examples, quirky little conventions that reveal how language evolves.

The etymological curiosity in the word troll, sometimes sung as toll or trawl, is especially interesting, as it reflects both Anglo-Saxon roots and the more familiar mage in later Norse influences. In the sense of the carol, it reflects Old English origins, prior to the arrival of the Vikings, to go about or to stroll. The connection with fishing, a drag-net, also extends from this source. The sense of a monstrous creature has old Germanic roots and though the English had their own words for native orcs and demons, they borrowed the word of the newcomer. Perhaps the two meanings again converge in the ultimate sense of a horrid individual who is trawling for attention with nasty comments. English did borrow a lot of basic vocabulary from the Scandinavian languages, and interestingly what’s been retained of—or edged out by—Norse terminology are words with an overwhelmingly negative connotations, which probably bespeaks their uneasy cohabitation: anger, awkward, blunder, bug, crook, cur, death, dirt, dregs, gawk, heathen, Hell, irk, mire, muck, muggy, odd, outlaw, rotten, skull, slaughter, thwart, ugly, weak and wrong—to name a few. Of course, there are numerous exceptions, too—like that word Yule, for the midwinter months and associated festivities, which was later appropriated by the Christians.

lykkefølelse

The Norwegian edition of The Local features an interview with a publishing-professor from the University of Tromsø whose latest project is assaying the notion of happiness. Of course, happiness is more than just an emotional response and an outlook and code of behaviour, but not necessarily a dogmatic one, as the author suggests, insofar as permanence and aversion to change are not the metrics that happiness for most people are measured by.
Rather than the hedonistic notion of becoming the perpetually punch-drunk gadfly that first got the author interested in the question, happiness is also to be found in change and challenge—exemplified by the Scandinavian double-barreled question how are you doing/how are you coping, “Hvordan du hard et/hvordan du tar det?” That’s a very provoking parallel construction that is not just limited to these icy climes and six months of no sun—the campus being above the Arctic Circle. On the media’s role in shaping our feelings and stance, the author also makes a very poignant observation that sensational, responsible, impassioned or neutral alike, the news and the broader entertainment industry is propelled by sponsorship, whose purpose is either to validate and reinforce opinions, loyalties that one already shares or to make one feel inadequate and uncertain about present allegiances. Sometimes that may be a good thing but I don’t think most marketers are concerned about the examined life. While this manipulation and patronage is no doubt true and important—and the author does not pose a problem without offering at least the glimmer of a solution—that pronouncement does strike me as typical Norse.