Hal Johnson's Blog, page 39

How Big Was Fafnir?

Sigurd complains to Regin, when he sees the dragons footprints, that old Fafnir must be bigger than Regin has let on. But how big is that?

Well, every day Fafnir would shuffle to a nearby cliff and a stretch his neck down from it to drink the water below. The cliff was thirty fathoms (about 180 feet) high, so Fafnirs neck must have been at least 180 feet long. Dragons have disproportionately long necks, but thats still going to be a big footprint.

Washington Irving Names New York

In 1809 Washington Irving got people to refer to New Yorkers as Knickerbockersthe New York Knicks continue this traditionwhen he pulled his Diedrich Knickerbocker stunt.

Washington Irving also coined the nickname Gotham for New York CityGotham was a place in England famous for breeding fools, and Irving started comparing New York to Gotham in a humor magazine in 1807.

They Keep Coming Back!

Mary Shelleys mother (Mary Wollstonecraft, a famous writer in her own right) once tried to commit suicide by jumping in a river. She was saved, and resuscitated by the relatively new method (this is the 1790s) of artificial respiration.

Is this why Mary Shelley was obsessed with reanimating corpses? A decade after Frankenstein, Shelley wrote a story about a seventeenth-century Englishman who was frozen in ice for two centuries and then revivedRoger Dodsworth, the Reanimated Englishman,...

Special for April Fool’s: What Makes Something Scary?

There are a lot of answers to that question, of course: like big teeth and claws; but Julia Kristeva, in her book Powers of Horror, has a novel suggestion.

It goes like this: We all know what a subject isa person is a subject.

And we know what an object isan object is a thing, like a chair; or maybe a dumb brute.

You have no problem sitting on a chair. Its just an object!

You have no problem shaking someones hand. A hand is just part of a subject!

If I shake your hand, maybe my fingernails...

Gyres

Humpty Dumpty says, To gyre is to go round and round like a gyroscope, and unlike most of the things he claimsthis time hes almost right. Gyre is an old term (from the Greek word for circle) that means a spiral or circular motion. Most people today would never have heard of it, except that it happens to be a favorite word of the poet William Butler Yeats, who features it in some of his most famous poems. For example The Second Coming (1919), which depicts the collapse of civilization, starts...

Honorable Mentions VIII

Mermaids from The Mermaidens Vesper Hymn by George Darley (1837): These fish-tailed women are often depicted singing in the sea, luring sailors to their doom. In Darleys short poem, they complain instead about their lack of aquatic boyfriends.

Mesmer

Guy de Maupassant compares the mind-controlling powers of the Horla to those of the eighteenth-century physician Franz Mesmer. Mesmer used techniques such as hypnosis to treat patients. He attributed his hypnotic abilities to something he called animal magnetism. Charles Mackay, who wrote an essay on Mesmer in his volume Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1841), notes that Mesmer would not allow facts to interfere with his theory. Mesmer spent most of his career conning people, including...

The Sublime and the Beautiful

It was the philosopher Edmund Burke who first proposed a difference between the sublime and the beautiful (in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, of course; 1757) We all know about beautiful things: a garden of flowers in the spring sunshine is beautiful. But other things are sublime: volcanos and thunderstorms and waves crashing against a cliff. And monsters.

If you want to spot a Romantic (like John Keats) heres a quick rule of thumb: the...

Wait—What’s a Volsung, Anyway?

Volsung is the name of Sigurds grandfather. All his descendants are called the Volsungs. So the Volsung Saga is the saga of the Volsung family.

Just dont ask me what a Nibelung is.

Can William Morris Count?

I know I just said that William Morris wrote a poem with fourteen-syllable lines (ostentatiously designated as fourteeners), and then I quoted the poem, anddid you notice something about that first line?

Woe, woe! in the days passed over I bore the Helm of Dread

Thats right: It only has thirteen syllables. Whats going on?

In order to make the line work, you the reader need to pause after the word over. A pause like this in a poem is called a caesura. Fourteeners are very similar to ballad...