Bryn Hammond
It's Temujin who intrigued me; I wouldn't write about the others, much as they have their qualities and historical predicaments. With Temujin, it's the way the personal and the political merge and are seen as one story in the Mongols' own account of his rise on the steppe. Then, in the conquests, nobody matches him for the cultural ground he crossed. Steppe peoples themselves saw the Mongols as the least sophisticated of them; so that the collision, in his lifetime, with the civilizational centres of China and Iran has nothing to equal it. Another answer is his personality, and the fundamental question: how does a man whom enemies describe as just, generous, equable, end up the perpetrator of one of the worst wars in history?
Cheers for the question.
Cheers for the question.
More Answered Questions
James
asked
Bryn Hammond:
Bryn, i briefly remember reading a large amount of Algernon Charles Swinburne, but i can't for the life of me remember the very long poem he wrote about, i want to say a lesbian lover killing her female lover? it was written, i believe as the Anti-In Memorium, in Response to Tennyson? Do you know the work?
Julie Bozza
asked
Bryn Hammond:
I understand that The Secret History of the Mongols, while written in the 13th century, was only finally made available in English in the latter quarter of the 20th century. Is that so? How and when did you discover it? And do you think its relative newness (unfamiliarity) to us has an effect on how we interpret it?
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