Warning: Constant ABSPATH already defined in /home/wordsend/public_html/wp-config.php on line 29

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/wordsend/public_html/wp-config.php:29) in /home/wordsend/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mobile-pack/inc/class-wmp-cookie.php on line 50
vika – Page 36 – Words' End

Author: vika

Posted on

further

It’s unknown whether Hruodlandus, the captain of the Breton March who died in 778 according to Einhard, was Charlemagne’s nephew.

Based on my observations of people over the last couple of decades, it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which they were unrelated, but the story of Roland was made more compelling by the claim of royal familial connection. In other words, it’s possible that their blood relationship is a fabricated meme that has served to hook the reader (listener) in for over a thousand years.

Posted on

morality and historicity in Roland

History is one big soap opera. How’s this for a tangle:

In The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe, Pierre Riché writes about Carloman and Pippin III, the Short, two sons of Charles Martel, to both of whom he left the Frankish kingdom when he died. Carloman was Charlemagne’s grandfather. Page 51 provides quite the family tree. I’ll break down the paragraph and highlight the important bits, primarily because that makes the confusing passage easier to digest:

[Upon the death of Charles Martel] Carloman and Pippin found their first adversaries within the family.

– Their half-brother Grifo, the son of the Bavarian Sunnichild, reckoned on playing the part of an equal heir, as witnessed by a letter to him from [missionary, archbishop of Mainz] Boniface. He wanted to take possession of his due, but neither Pippin nor Carloman accepted this, and they imprisoned him in the bastion at Chèvremont, near Liège, while his mother was consigned to the guard of the nuns of Chelles.

– In another quarter, Chiltrude, the elder sister of the mayors of the palace, had secretly fled the kingdom with the help of friends and married Odilo, duke of Bavaria. This new relative of the Carolingian family hoped to play some political role; he enjoyed papal support and had also lately concluded a pact with Duke Hunald of Aquitaine. Upon the death of Charles Martel, Hunald had of course revolted against the heirs.

– Finally, Theutbald of Allemania, the brother of the Lantfrid subdued by Charles Martel, made a new grab for autonomy and a restored duchy.

Carloman and Pippin would thus be occupied for several years to the south and east of the kingdom.

OK, so: Charlemagne is linked to his grandfather Carloman by virtue of having more or less the same name. Charlemagne’s grandfather’s sister, from the royal standpoint, betrayed Charlemagne’s grandfather by marrying his adversary-by-proxy. This is presumably a source of shame for the family. [If I put this in my dissertation, is the evidence for that last sentence common knowledge? Do I have to explicitly present it?]

In the Song of Roland (France, 1095-1099), Roland is Charlemagne’s nephew.

In the Karlamagnús Saga (Norway, 13th century), Roland is both Charlemagne’s nephew and his son by his sister named Gilem. When Karlamagnus finds out Gilem is pregnant, he “[gives] his sister to Milon, and [makes] him duke of Brettania. The boy [is] born seven months later.”

Italians make yet another case. From Italo Calvino’s preface to Orlando Furioso di Ludovico Ariosto raccontato da Italo Calvino (Milano: Mondadori 1995, sadly only available in Italian, it’s a brilliant book):

Di Roland la tradizione francese non dice se non l’ultima battaglia e la morte. Tutto il resto della sua vita, nascita, albero genealogico, infanzia giovinezza avventure prima di Roncisvalle, egli le troverà, sotto il nome di Orlando, in Italia. Viene così stabilito che suo padre è Milone di Clermont (o Chiaromonte) alfiere di re Carlo, e sua madre è Berta, la sorella del sovrano. Avendo Milone sedotto la fanciulla, per sfuggire alle ire del regale cognato, la rapisce e fugge in Italia. Secondo alcune fonti Orlando nasce in Romagna, a Imola, secondo altre a Sutri, nel Lazio: che sia italiano non c’è dubbio. (11-12)

(The only things that the French tradition tells about Roland are his last battle and his death. The rest of his life, birth, family tree, childhood youth adventures before Roncesvalles, the character acquires under the name Orlando, in Italy. Thus, his father is established as Milon of Clermont (or Chiaromonte), Charlemagne’s standard bearer, and his mother is Berta, the king’s sister. Having seduced the girl, in order to escape his sovereign brother-in-law’s wrath, Milon kidnaps her and flees to Italy. According to some sources Orlando is born in Romagna, in the town of Imola; according to others, in Sutri, Lazio: of his Italian origin there is no doubt.)

OK, so:

1. Historian Riché claims, presumably based on good evidence, that the Carolingians had a shameful episode a couple of generations previous to Charlemagne’s. This was during the 700s, A.D.

2. The French write down The Song of Roland at the end of the 11th century. Roland is established as Charlemagne’s nephew; there is no further discussion about the dynasty. There is no historical evidence for or against kinship between Charlemagne and the Count Hruodlandus mentioned by Einhard’s account of a battle with the Basques, the only historical mention of a Roland.

3. I would speculate that plenty of gossip about the Carolingian propagated amongst their subjects: it seems to be just the way people react to celebrities, no? Or do I need to substantiate this?

4. The Norse give their tale an incestuous twist: Roland’s father is Charlemagne, and his mother Charlemagne’s sister Berta. The cover-up husband, married into the incest, is named Milon. It would be important, however, to know whether they combined the two stories about Charlemagne’s family, fabricated juicy gossip about Charlemagne, or uncovered yet another shameful secret.

5. The Italians keep Berta, but buy the story: Roland’s mother is Berta and his father is Milon. If there was incest involved in real life, then the Italians become complicit in covering it up; but then, they may have done so in ignorance of the real events.

It just seems to me that there’s a possibility that the Frankish storytellers (who were, in some cases, the king’s unofficial biographers) deliberately covered up for their sovereign, that Norwegians ran a gossip column exposing the secret, but that the Italians never got the memo encoded into the Norse saga and bought the lie, but were vain enough to appropriate the credit for Roland’s survival.

I’m not sure this is provable, though. But one thing that thinking about this has already taught me is: reading relevant histories is not merely “an OK expenditure of dissertation-researching time for my general education.” It may prove to be an absolutely necessary tool that points me more precisely about why stories were told in these particular ways, at these particular historical points.

Posted on

dream fragment. [geek]

I dreamt that I was working with a computer, one that was presumably mine, and a PowerBook too (that’s the one I have in the waking world). Only the one in my dream had a [C|DV]D-ROM drive – the boxy affair with an open/close button right on it – on the front. Confused checking of the laptop’s side revealed a normal (for this type of computer) drive as well.

I wear the geek tag with an odd sort of pride, a self-identification. Same with “humanist,” really, and “computing humanist.” Not sure how I feel about that.

current mood: rainy

Posted on

advantages of falling asleep early.

Woke up a few times in the night (our own fault, starving the poor kitty of both food and attention for hours!), then definitively at 5am – which was fine, since I’d fallen asleep before 9pm.

Had a beautiful, lazy morning in bed with my love.

Drank coffee, also in bed.

Took a shower.

Took him to the bus that goes down to Kingston, RI where the main URI campus is.

Came back, had breakfast. Cottage cheese is a superb carrier for nutritional yeast, if you’re into savory breakfasts.

And now it’s 8:15 and I’m about to sit down working. It’s quiet and light. Bliss!

Re-reading my previous long post about Burning Man is strange. I feel like I’ve lost my facility with language, especially as compared to a couple of years ago when I took that nonfiction writing workshop. Time to find a writing voice again.

As part of getting back into Roland, I’m reading about Pierre Riché’s The Carolingians (Michael Idomir Allen, trans.). Very well written, one of those academic books that read more novelistic. And oh, this is why his name was familiar! He also wrote Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, translated by Jo Ann McNamara, which I came to own by a fluke (probably the booksellers at the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress) and loved as well.

Posted on

a burning in the soul.

It’s getting cooler in Providence, where we returned from a three-week road trip this past Friday. The ostensible reason for the journey out west was Burning Man; a couple of family visits all over the country (Saint Louis and somewhere near Grass Valley, California) and a visit to friends in Santa Rosa were in order as well, so renting a car made sense. It turned out to be convenient and fun; Ethan and I both enjoyed our second road trip as a couple, counting the honeymoon a few months ago.

Burning Man was… well, most of all it was satisfying. Even though I didn’t get to see nearly as much of the city as I’d wanted, nor participate in as many events: all of the good intentions of starting each day with yoga somewhere on the playa kind of went to hell. But being part of Foodlab, a camp that made a hot sunset meal for about 130 people every day for the week, was solidly rewarding as a community-building exercise.

At least, it was rewarding until the end, when only 8 or so of the 37 people in the camp ended up breaking it down, a long and often tedious and unpleasant process rife with snarky comments from exhausted burners feeling a bit bitter at having been left all alone to deal with the final mess. Still, given the kind of camp we were (much trash to truck out, many supplies to account for), we only left about 4 hours later than intended. It could’ve been worse, and I’m glad we stayed and thankful for the work and ultimate mutual support of the breakdown crew.

It’s been a little unsettling to get anonymous and not-so-anonymous snide comments about what went wrong in Foodlab this year. My impression remains that Foodlab had a good year, and this is corroborated by the glowing thanks we’ve received from several people who ate with us but weren’t privy to the inner workings. *shrugs* I just hope that discussion of what to do better next time doesn’t occlude the warmth and laughter we gathered and fed every evening.

When we weren’t busy at Foodlab or hanging out with friends, Ethan and I carved out a few times to be together. The first of those was on Thursday, as we attended our friends Bucky and Emily’s colorful wedding at the clockworks. The afternoon was filled with gorgeous clothes, scorching sun and not one but four ice cream cakes, rock-hard from the flash freezing and being stored in dry ice! Talk about a treat, in the desert.

We puttered about the city a couple of times, returning to the Center Camp Café on Tuesday to revisit the morningtime conversations and coffee that kept us in thrall of each other at the 2003 Burning Man, where we met. On Sunday, we went to the temple burn together, intending to make a late night of it; but a convoluted set of events left us looking for my bike in a nascent dust storm, in which I ended up losing Ethan and never finding the bike. A couple of solid hours of wandering the playa left me exhausted and so covered in pale-brown alkali dust that my campmates didn’t recognize me when I walked into camp looking for my husband who of course wasn’t there. We finally reunited, fell into a deep sleep and broke down the camp the following morning. An anticlimactic ending to our burn, perhaps, but an adventure that now provokes more smiles than rue.

And so, after all the busy-ness and bonding time with Ethan, after the freedom of merely existing in Black Rock City, I kind of felt that I hadn’t emotionally connected with anyone new, not deeply or satisfyingly. There’d been a few meaningful conversations, a couple of great first meetings, one entire night spent talking with some campmates, but in all of that was this insidious distance. By the end of the week my haptic interface was twitching all through my muscles – I hadn’t had prolonged tactile contact with anyone besides Ethan in many days, and in an intensely emotionally open environment at that. This made for an unsettled and thoughtful state, which wasn’t unpleasant but was a bit isolating, [because it|and] took up many thought cycles.

So it was surprising and very cool to find myself having revelatory conversations with N., a longtime friend of Ethan’s from back in Colorado, who has been studying Tibetan Buddhism for several years now and was on his way to New York. I haven’t processed all of what we talked about yet, but the introspectiveness triggered by Burning Man and the desire to once again hermit myself and do a few things well this coming year were kindled by the talks, which took place at all hours (we did the trip straight through, with two stops for sleep and a few more for rest and breakfast and what not).

Ethan and I dropped N. off on Friday morning and headed to Providence, physically tired but agian deep in conversation. Somewhat unexpectedly, we turned to topics that ended up solidifying and concretizing our relationship, even more so than it had been already – a sort of culmination of the two years during which we’ve come to know each other and see a future together.

So the unsettled feeling that I had previously been baffled by, the one that felt like loneliness in the midst of a full life happily building a family, probably wasn’t loneliness after all. It now feels like a restlessness, a desire to move forward and again to deepen my relationship to my love and to my world. Suddenly we’ve seen the path we both want to take in developing our selves together. If the past two years are any indication, the next few will be distilled eye-opening joy.

Tomorrow I go to work. Can’t wait, actually. There’s a lot to do, and I finally feel rested enough to do it well. Welcome home.

Posted on

WordPress 1.5!

It is pretty. I’ve little time to play with layouts and themes now, so the site might look different at any point. It’ll likely be up at any given time, though. :)

So much to write. At least there’s like a whole week and a half at home. Maybe I’ll get to it. Geez, busy summer.

Posted on

reflections on nature

Victoria, BC, 5pm on Wednesday June 15th

(that’s yesterday)

I am jet lagged all to hell. First we went two (one?) hours back, from Denmark to Iceland. Then we (I) realized that it just wasn’t going to get dark in Reykjavik at all; it’s close to summer solstice, and we were after all in the land of the midnight sun.

Then we flew from Iceland back five hours to Boston, from whence to Providence by bus in the evening. One full day and two nights at home, and off to Seattle – another three hours back.

So, all in all, nine time zones broken up over several days. My body has stopped trying to figure out what time it is and sort of floats through time and space, alternating between running on fumes, perking right up at random intervals, and threatening to shut down completely with distressing frequency.

In the course of all these travels, nature has been gloriously varied.

Denmark is lush and green, punctuated by vast fields of blinding yellow rape plants, purple and pink and white flowers by random bodies of water, and sky-high sky. Sometimes it’s grey, other times pale blue and whispy white, but it’s always high up above you. Denmark has space and rolling shallow hills and wide wide bike lanes, as wide as for cars! It rained more than I would’ve liked, but such is spring in that part of the world.

Iceland is… like nothing I’ve ever seen. Its volcanic soil clumps up softly. Get out of Reykjavik, and all you see is this clumpy fuzzy rug and a few long narrow highways. Misty geyser steam in the distance, and mountains, volcanoes. SUVs everywhere, but they’re actually useful there, necessary even. Reykjavik is a mish-mash of funky architectural styles, some older, some with a decidedly modern aesthetic, none of them simple copies of mainland-European styles. Public art in the form of swoopy steel statues, as well as courageous men (on horseback or not), proudly green with bronze oxidation.

Boston, oof. Coming back to Boston was like getting into a steam bath against your will and clothed, and not being allowed to come back out. Muggy, oppressive. We spent half an hour or so waiting for the bus underneath a raised road, concrete all around us, beyond it grey pillows of sky so close you almost think you can touch them. Thank the technology gods for air conditioning at home and at work!

Seattle greeted us with mild-mannered evening sun, and for the rest of the evening proceeded to live up to its perpetual “60s, partly cloudy, chance of rain” weather forcast. This morning the sun didn’t wake and show his face until I was on the ferry to

Victoria, which is surprisingly like Denmark in its lush greenness. But it’s also sunny and mild, gorgeous in its pacific-northwest way. The bay where our ferry arrived turned out to be located near beautiful museum buildings and downtown. Lovely walk into town, a bit of shopping, some free wireless net time at the coffee shop where I had lunch but not coffee (see jet lag above), uneventful bus ride to the UVic campus, which is hyoooge and has many,

many

bunnies. ALL OVER. *dies of cute*

(The morning session is about to start. Hooray! I always get so… giddy at ACH/ALLC conferences. Skipped almost all the way to the room.)

Posted on

Best. honeymoon. evar.

It’s 2am in Bergen, Norway. It didn’t really get all the way dark until about midnight.

I meant to blog more extensively while visiting Jill and her mum, since net access from your own laptop is a beautiful thing. But somehow I got sucked into catching up on all my net-reading instead, and… there’s just so much.

Norway has great seafood. Bergen is mountainous and half-hidden in rolling fog, it’s as though they’re living in a cloud. I’ve never been so bruised in my life (biking + sleeping on hard ground afterwards, for days on end), and am loving it. Having a bed to sleep in for the past two nights has been an insane luxury. Jill’s daughter Aurora is the sweetest kid since my nephew. Denmark seems Very Hilly when you’re lugging a heavy trailer behind your bicycle, but is actually Rather Flat. Fjords are gorgeous and unexpectedly (for us and for the locals) windy just when you dedicate an entire day to biking around one. The Danish campsite network is impressive and convenient, but morning pastries overshadow all of that by a mile. Camp stove was superfluous, since most campsites have kitchens. We’ve only actually cooked once, but ate out (including Copenhagen) for about five meals out of more than a week, covering the rest with energy bars and remarkably satisfying supermarket food. Snails and slugs abound and are cute; spiders are not cute but luckily don’t abound either. Cows prance and frolic, I kid you not. The last campsite we stayed at had goats that talked to you, and not one but three of those huge inflatable bouncy trampoline-like pillows that you can flop and bounce on (and we did). Ferries rock, and – Molly and David, I feel like a traitor – Clif Shot energy packets are much tastier than Gu. Or perhaps it’s the texture.

I can feel myself getting stronger. Some biking-relevant muscle groups have gained a surprising amount of definition already.

It’s like a dream. Still a bit surreal, although we’ve been traveling for ten days now. To have and to hold such a brilliant mind and generous, patient, kind heart is a privilege, and isn’t lost on me. We’ve spent more time than I’d expected in companionable silence. At first this felt odd, since usually we can’t stop conversing, but it feels good, so to hell with the usual.

Tomorrow, ferry back to Denmark and ten more days of traveling. Net access from the campsites is spotty, and when it is available, it’s on the camp’s computer, not a wireless connection. (But it blows my mind that it exists in such boonies at all!) I’m internalizing much more than I’m able… well, willing to write. It’s too much effort to write. I’m retreating into my own head again, thoughts of family and humanity and my place in the world whirling like tiny mosquitoes all around me. How do you write about all of this when increasingly your MO is to live fully, day by day?

You don’t, is how. Especially not at 2:30am. Definitely time for sleep. I’ll leave you with a post I wrote on the plane over, many days ago.

—

Wed 18 May 11:01 Copenhagen time

I haven’t blogged much about personal life in a while, mostly due to time constraints. So much to do before honeymoon! I’m happy to say that, for the most part, the sudden rush of work in the last few weeks resulted in some happy developments. Now I just have to remember to pitch VHL’s new toys to some lists, and hopefully gather some interest.

Today is my mom’s 65th birthday. For her, it’s still yesterday: she’s in Hawaii with a friend. Happy birthday, mom! We’re thinking of you.

I’m writing this on a plane from Reykjavik to Copenhagen. We left home at 4:30pm yesterday, and at 4 I was still doing the dishes. A bit of a rushed feeling persisted, but I noticed an undercurrent of that state whee you just can’t be bothered to do things any quicker, you know? It all worked out, in any case. Taxi to Kennedy Plaza in downtown Providence, on to a bus to Boston’s Logan airport, timed so that we would arrive three hours before our flight left. We figured, we had two heavy and very carefully packed suitcases with bicycles in them. If TSA wanted to check that stuff by hand, there might’ve been trouble: they’re notorious for, well, repacking things in such a way that they get damaged. In an attempt to avoid this, we even taped love letters to TSA agents to the inside of the bike cases, explaining that if they break, our honeymoon will be VERY VERY SAD.

I don’t think they checked us, unless it was behind the scenes. The entire check-in process for Icelandair took about 10 minutes, including standing in line (of which there was none). Perhaps there’s more havoc when it comes closer to a flight, but it was just… so… pleasant. I don’t think there’s an elevated terrorist alert in the northern countries.

And so we left! Zooommm, off on a 9:40pm airplane. Dinner was bad food, but I didn’t care, as I spent most of that flight asleep. Now, post-nap and Reykjavik airport Earl Grey tea ($4.50 a cup) and airline coffee (surprisingly full-bodied and tasty!), I’m wide awake and bouncy. In a couple of hours we’ll be in Copenhagen.

What we saw of Iceland on the descent, and then on take-off, was pretty amazing. Pretty snow-covered mountains, steaming geysers, water so blue. We’ll be there for about a day and a half on the way back, staying in an actual hotel – the only hotel reservation we’ve made the entire trip.

That’s right, no hotel reservations at all in Denmark. We have all the camping gear we need, including over a dozen different spices for cooking: is anyone really surprised? Didn’t think so). The the suitcases in which our bikes are packed turn into trailers (have I mentioned how much Bike Friday rocks? Because they do), and Denmark is flat. It also boasts fifteen or so national bike routes, and a large number of regional ones. Some farmers will let you stay on their land for stupidly low prices. Plus, there are reasonably-equipped camping sites all over. From what we saw, most come with things like showers and electricity, I’m happy to pay a bit more to recharge the laptop. Reportedly, some sites even have wireless access: a geek’s wet dream vacation.

We have… what is it, 24? 28? rechargeable batteries. And the charger, and a laptop, and a digital camera, and Very Bright LED lights for our bikes, and an iPod and an iTrip, and two sets of cheapo radio headphones so that we can listen to the iPod broadcast. [Note at time of posting: this failed to work. Ah well.] And probably other stuff I’m forgetting. (There’ll be photos on flickr, that’s for sure. Watch that space.)

Yeah. Low-tech this trip ain’t. And while we’re on the subject of tech: about a week ago I bought a new battery for my PowerBook, as the old one was dying slowly but surely. Power saving technology sure has come a long way: on the dimmest monitor setting (before it goes totally blank), with the battery settings optimized, we should get something like 5 hours of text editing. Probably less for movie watching and photo handling, but damn. Hoo-ray.

Tomorrow I go to visit Espen Aarseth and his department. Should be fun! [It was! We nattered about the state of humanities computing, games research in Denmark, working and living in Europe, and weather. Which was beautiful.] At the end of the month we’ll take a ferry from Hanstholm, in the northwest of Denmark, to Bergen, Norway and visit with Jill for a while. That, I know, will be awesome. Other than that, we have no set plans, except for a vague itinerary that hits most of the places we would theoretically like to see. But first we have to get used to biking with trailers and panniers full of Stuff. It’s a good thing Denmark is flat.

I’m glad to be out of USA&tm; for a while. There has been a subtle but insidious change in the air over the past several years; the political strife both national and international is taking its toll on the daily lives of everyone around us. Perhaps this has always been the case, and I’m just more sensitive to it now because I’m deeply distressed about the direction the U.S. has taken under Bush Junior. Right now, though, it feels as though with every passing minute I’m shedding another layer of weight I didn’t quite know I was carrying. And it’s not just the feeling you get when you go on vacation after a busy time at work. My soul is more at peace; I feel as though we’re flying toward sanity.

—

Life will take over in quite a hectic and unceremonious manner pretty much the minute we get back. And yet, I feel like this intense traveling experience is about all I can take right now, so I watch the storm of activity rage all around me but keep it at arm’s length, the eye of the storm suspended somewhere in the middle of my ribcage.

css.php