Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (LotR), etc. Historical_General • 6 months ago • 89%

www.hellomagazine.com

>"I have the map and the key to the mountain that was used in the film in a frame," he notes. "And I have Thorin's sword and his oaken shield. It's on my bookshelf!" Eleven years ago, Tolkienites rejoiced as The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey landed in UK cinemas. With Lord of the Rings director, Peter Jackson, at the helm, a legion of actors including Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, and Orlando Bloom signed on to star. Joining them, British actor Richard Armitage won the role of Thorin Oakenshield – the legendary King of Durin's folk. Determined to reclaim the Lonely Mountain from Smaug, and secure the coveted Arkenstone, Thorin's redemptive story of greed made him one of the most interesting characters in the trilogy. Reflecting on The Hobbit's enduring legacy and the profound effect that the franchise had on him, Richard, 52, spoke exclusively to HELLO! about his time on set. On why the role of Thorin was so special to him, Richard explained: "It had an impact on me because I think The Hobbit was one of the first books I ever read where I really allowed my imagination to engage. "I was completely absorbed by Tolkien. Then I found Lord of the Rings and I think it was where my early feelers were going towards being an actor, but I didn't realise it at the time," he continued. "So, when I came to playing Thorin Oakenshield as a 40-year-old, I was retracing my steps right back to being an eight-year-old in school and finding that book for the first time. So, it was just such a massive thing for me." As for his time on set, Richard revealed a particularly poignant memory from day one of production. "One of the fondest memories I had was on the very first day of shooting when Peter Jackson blessed his new sound stage with a Māori Haka. I had to speak Māori to the crew because they saw my character as the King of the Dwarves," he tells HELLO!. "And so they asked me to make this speech in Māori and the door was lifted and the sun was rising across the floor and it was incredibly moving. It was a really special moment." After wrapping the trilogy with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), Richard was able to take home a number of his most treasured possessions from the set, which he continues to cherish. "I have the map and the key to the mountain that was used in the film in a frame," he notes. "And I have Thorin's sword and his oaken shield. It's on my bookshelf!" After the success of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Tolkeinites have since entered the Rings of Power era, following the release of Amazon Prime's high fantasy series in 2022. With the show renewed for a second season, naturally, we had to ask if Richard would be interested in a role of some sort. "I mean, I would love to, but I think it's very hard to do that. I'd have to be a different character because you couldn't bring Peter Jackson's version of Thorin Oakenshield into somebody else's. But I love the story," he said.

Harry Potter Historical_General • 7 months ago • 81%

www.wizardingworld.com

"From a first-time appearance of the Divination classroom to surprise Boggarts and the Monster Book of Monsters, the Studio Tour is celebrating 20 years of Prisoner of Azkaban in the most fantastic of ways this summer - with plenty of new additions to look forward to. Warner Bros. Studio Tour London is inviting us all to "Return to Azkaban" from 1st May, promising a fresh selection of props, costumes and sets all dedicated to the beloved third instalment of the Harry Potter series. The biggest addition will be a first-time instalment of Professor Trelawney's Divination classroom, complete with velvet pouffes, patterned rugs and a tower made of 500 vintage teacups. (Well, we know Sybill loves her tea leaves!) Beyond the Divination classroom, fans will be able to discover the interior of the famous triple-decker Knight Bus, as a full cross-section of the set will be displayed. Be amazed at the Knight Bus in action as the set rattles the beds, just as they did when bus driver Ernie made his bumpy ride with Harry through London. Of course, the third Harry Potter story also gave us our favourite Defence Against the Dark Arts professor (not that it was a tough contest) in Professor Lupin. To pay homage, the Studio Tour will reveal a new section of the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom on display, complete with the Art Nouveau-style Boggart wardrobe and that sinister Boggart jack-in-the-box. We hope you've been practising "Riddikulus"! WBSTL-return-to-azkaban-2024-key-art-landscape Other highlights of Return to Azkaban include stepping foot into the magnificent Great Hall under an enchanted ceiling filled with over 100 floating candles, before being regaled by the Hogwarts Frog Choir and seeing The Monster Book of Monsters go on a rampage in Harry’s room at the Leaky Cauldron. Sounds like a perfect day out! New for 2024, Return to Azkaban will run from 1st May – 4th September and all new features are included in the ticket price. Check the official website for all the details you need and to book your tickets. *** It looks fun. PoA is my favourite film of the lot.

Harry Potter Historical_General • 9 months ago • 92%

www.gamespot.com

Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman starred in the Harry Potter movie series as Sirius Black, and the actor credits the role with making him a better father. But Oldman didn't love everything about the Harry Potter series. On the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Oldman said his performance in the films was "mediocre." "I think my work is mediocre in it," Oldman said. "No, I do. Maybe if I had read the books like Alan [Rickman], if I had got ahead of the curve, if I had known what's coming, I honestly think I would have played it differently." "It's like anything, if I sat and watched myself in something and said, 'My god, I'm amazing,' that would be a very sad day, because you want to make the next thing better," he said. Also during the interview, Oldman revealed what he thought was the hardest scene to film in the Harry Potter series. He said this was the scene in Prisoner of Azkaban when he's lying by a frozen lake, with his soul leaving his body. Oldman said this took about a week to film, and all the time, he was just lying down and getting very cold and uncomfortable. "The hardest thing I had to do was lie next to a frozen lake," he said. Interview on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAO2y3kqkl0

Harry Potter Historical_General • 9 months ago • 92%

www.mugglenet.com

I've never seen these before or perhaps my eyes glossed over the 'notice me not' charms on them, but they look amazing.

Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (LotR), etc. Historical_General • 10 months ago • 100%

> I was binge-watching the DVDs with my wife, Sarah, when it hit me: Middle-earth does exist, and I don’t need a portal. I can fly there in 23 hours. I turned to Sarah and said, “Shall we move to New Zealand?” One of the many things I love about my wife is that she listens to my madder ideas with a careful seriousness. Six months later we were in Auckland. This has strong Bilbo Baggins vibes lol.

Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (LotR), etc. Historical_General • 10 months ago • 90%

www.denofgeek.com

# What The Hobbit Animated Movie Did Better Than the Peter Jackson Trilogy The animated adaptations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings from the 1970s and 1980s have a bit of a bad reputation these days, but these are not entirely deserved. In particular, Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass’ 1977 TV movie of The Hobbit, with a screenplay by Romeo Miller, gets a lot of things right that Peter Jackson’s three-part live-action film adaptation did not. The most obvious advantage that the animated version has over the live-action films is its length. The fact that the live-action movies are too long is pretty well-established, but by way of a reminder, the book of The Hobbit is about 300 pages long, with slight variations in each edition. Other books of similar length that have been adapted into films include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Emma Donoghue’s Room, John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. One thing all of these have in common, is that they were adapted into one single film, two to three hours long. Pride and Prejudice has also been adapted into a six-hour miniseries by the BBC, but none of them have been stretched out to just under eight hours, which is the combined length of the theatrical cuts of the three live-action Hobbit movies. (They’re just under nine hours if you are watching the extended editions though.) The Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit, on the other hand, is a mere one hour and 17 minutes, which you could almost argue is actually too short. The introductions of Elrond—who has an inexplicable crown of stars around his head for no apparent reason—and Beorn, for example, could have done with a little more room to breathe. But for a fairly slight story, a runtime that is a little too short feels like an improvement on a runtime that is far too long. One thing both versions “get right,” that is, they do it really well, is the music, but the Rankin/Bass film uses music in a different way to the live-action movies. In Jackson’s 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Howard Shore’s “Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold,” performed by Richard Armitage and the other dwarves in an incredibly evocative basso profundo voice, is a thing of beauty. The Rankin/Bass The Hobbit also features a musical setting for the same song from the book, and although it lacks the power of that incredible bass voice, it’s a good piece of music in its own right. But the Rankin/Bass movie doesn’t stop there; it’s actually a musical with relatively short songs being peppered throughout the story. This is a completely valid choice too. Author J.R.R. Tolkien’s books are full of songs, and nearly all of the songs that appear in the film are samplings of Tolkien’s own songs from the book using his lyrics. The only exception is the theme song, “The Greatest Adventure,” which is a complete original. Making the film as a musical also fits with the overall tone viewers would have expected from Rankin/Bass. The studio was known for its holiday specials—made-for-television, animated or stop-motion films that usually aired around Christmas time. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and Frosty the Snowman (1969) had already become holiday staples by the time of The Hobbit. Both heavily featured music and songs, and Rudolph was a musical feature with several different songs included throughout the story. A musical with short songs appearing frequently is something audiences would expect from the Rankin and Bass studio. And they also expected the studio to produce animations aimed at a “family” audience, primarily children. This is the biggest thing Rankin and Bass got right and that the Jackson movies get wrong: The Hobbit is a story for children. When Tolkien originally imagined The Hobbit in the 1930s, it was as a story for his own children, and was not originally connected to the wider mythology of Middle-earth. It was only as time went on that the story got drawn into his bigger mythmaking project. And while The Lord of the Rings is clearly a novel aimed at an adult readership, The Hobbit is equally clearly intended for a younger audience. Bookshops these days generally shelve it with Middle Grade fiction aimed at children aged roughly eight to 12, not far from Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis and his Narnia books (which Tolkien did not like, and probably would not appreciate seeing next to his own work!). In fairness to Peter Jackson, Tolkien did come to regret the tone and style of The Hobbit. This was partly because it made it stick out like a sore thumb next to his other writing about Middle-earth, but also because Tolkien came to believe passionately that children should not be talked (or written) down to, and that children’s literature did not require some kind of special, slightly silly tone. In a letter to W. H. Auden in 1955, Tolkien said of The Hobbit: “It was unhappily really meant, as far as I was conscious, as a ‘children’s story’, and as I had not learned sense then… it has some of the sillinesses of manner caught unthinkingly from the kind of stuff I had had served to me… I deeply regret them. So do intelligent children.” There’s an argument to be made, therefore, that The Hobbit should be transformed into something with a darker, more adult tone in an adaptation. Jackson probably felt he had little choice in the matter anyway since his live-action Hobbit movies were prequels to his live-action The Lord of the Rings movies—and those, as is appropriate to The Lord of the Rings, have a tone of high epic fantasy with an intended audience of adults and older teenagers. But Tolkien regretted the tone and style of The Hobbit, not because he regretted writing it for children, but because he felt that writing for children should not engage in “sillinesses of manner.” It is still a story intended primarily for children, and while of course film adaptations have to make changes, the Rankin and Bass film feels more like it captures the spirit of The Hobbit because it is aimed primarily at children. There are no lewd jokes, the scary sequences are kept at an appropriate level, and of course, the runtime will not test the patience of elementary school aged children too much. One of the main ways Rankin and Bass make it clear that this is a film intended for children and their families is by deliberately echoing aspects of Disney’s animated films. The decision to make the film a musical is one obvious similarity with Disney’s animated fairy tales, but there are others as well. The similarity in the character design of the dwarves in The Hobbit to the dwarfs from Disney’s 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is not a coincidence. (By the way, if anyone is wondering, Tolkien was quite particular about the fact that his imaginary creatures were dwarves, as opposed to dwarfs. In his Author’s Note at the beginning of The Hobbit, Tolkien explained that “in English the only correct plural of dwarf is dwarfs, and the adjective is dwarfish. In this story dwarves and dwarvish are used, but only when speaking of the ancient people to whom Thorin Oakenshield and his companions belonged.”) Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! To cement the Disney-like feel, the film opens on an image of a big, hard-bound and illustrated book, just like Disney’s Snow White, Pinocchio (1940), Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Sword in the Stone (1963), The Jungle Book (1967), and Robin Hood (1973). Interestingly, Rankin/Bass’ The Hobbit opens on an image of the book, by J.R.R. Tolkien, with the author and the famous first line (“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”) clearly visible. The end of the movie, on the other hand, shows Bilbo’s in-universe Red Book, titled There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Holiday, before finishing on an image of the One Ring, glinting in a glass case on Bilbo’s mantelpiece. Both clearly parallel the Disney trope, especially the opening, which places the story firmly in a fictional, “fairtytale” universe. There are of course some things the Jackson movies got right that the Rankin/Bass version did not. One of the more inexplicable decisions made for the animated movie was to increase the body count of named characters in the climactic Battle of the Five Armies. In Tolkien’s novel, and in Jackson’s film, the only three members of the Company to die are Thorin, Kili, and Fili. Rankin and Bass, however, kill off seven of the Dwarves, only even naming Thorin and Bombur, both of whom die on screen. We can assume that Kili and Fili were among the seven killed and that Balin survived (since he has to go and die in Moria sometime between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), but it is a mystifying decision, especially since films aimed at children do not usually increase the body count. The Jackson movies also include some fantastic sequences that, taken on their own, are perfect screen adaptations of scenes from the book. Bilbo’s riddle-game in the dark with Gollum under the Misty Mountains in An Unexpected Journey and his verbal sparring with Smaug in The Desolation of Smaug are near perfect, helped by fantastic performances from Martin Freeman as Bilbo, Andy Serkis as Gollum, and Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug. The casting is all around pretty perfect, especially Freeman, and while Legolas’ added storyline was controversial, the character really is supposed to be the son of Thranduil, the King of Mirkwood, and it’s rather nice to see him slotted in there, even if the role he is given is not to everyone’s taste. Overall though, the Rankin/Bass animated adaptation of The Hobbit, whatever its flaws, feels like it captures a bit more of the feel of the book, even if it leans quite heavily toward a more Disney-like tone. And if you have young children, you are almost certainly better off trying to show them this version instead of the live-action films. That is if you are too impatient to wait until they are old enough to read the book!

Harry Potter Historical_General • 10 months ago • 84%

I've heard some people place a lot of the responsibility for Harry Potter becoming popular at the altar of the US Christian Right. Considering their wealth, reach and influence it seems plausible to me! What's your recollection of that era?

Harry Potter Historical_General • 10 months ago • 57%

I haven't even watched the extended US versions of PS (SS) and CoS yet. I'll have to remember to acquire them. I always catch one or two on TV.

Harry Potter Historical_General • 10 months ago • 92%

The routine had already been rehearsed. A fight with the snake Nagini was supposed to send Harry Potter flying. And it certainly did that. David Holmes, Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double, felt the impact, and it hurt. But that was the nature of stunt work. He was always taking a knock, and showing off another bruise. The next day the team came back to perfect the routine. It still wasn’t quite as spectacular as hoped. So they did what they’d done hundreds of times before: added more weight to the pulley system that would launch Harry so that he would fly through the air faster. “I knew straight away,” Holmes says today, 14 years later. “I knew I’d broken my neck. I was fully conscious.” He had hit the wall at pace and with such brutality that he was left flopping, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. His boss, the stunt coordinator Greg Powell, asked if he could feel his legs. He couldn’t. That day not only changed Holmes’s life for ever, it changed the lives of so many people on the set of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. Powell, who had to live with getting it wrong; best friend Marc Mailley, who had to take over from Holmes as the stunt double; actor Daniel Radcliffe, who had been coached in gymnastics by Holmes and adored him. And on it went. Later that day, it was reported that there had been an accident in pre-production on the set of Harry Potter. “I remember seeing the news report on TV,” says Dan Hartley, then a junior member of the crew working as the video playback operator. “I got on the phone to one of the crew and he told me he’d heard it was Dave and something bad happened. For the next few days we were trading messages and we learned that Dave was paralysed.” Hartley had worked with the team for almost a decade. “Within a month we were meeting on the set and adjusting to this new norm, and it was horrific. I’d known Dave for almost 10 years and we were a very tight crew, and now he wasn’t there. Yet the team was still on the production. We’d lost one.” *** I meet Holmes at his home in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. The house would make the perfect setting for a futuristic sci-fi movie. Doors open and shut, lights switch on and off, a lift rises and descends at his command. “I designed the house in my head when I was on the spinal ward,” he says. “The technology I’ve put in place gives me as much independence as possible.” Holmes grew up in Essex, the middle of three boys. His father is a deacon at the local Baptist church, his mother worked with disabled children for decades. He smiles. “Then her son goes and breaks his neck!” All three boys were super energetic – great fun, but hard work. At the age of five, an outreach team from British Gymnastics visited his school to check out the children’s potential. The three Holmes boys were supple and capable. “My mum took us to Havering Gymnastics Club and she discovered that not only was it the world’s best babysitter, it got rid of the excess energy we had.” in 2000, he had turned professional and was working as Radcliffe’s stunt double in Harry Potter. For Holmes, it even beat Radcliffe’s job. “You get to be a character without the pressures the actors have. I get to inhabit that character and use my skills as a gymnast to enhance the story.” He was well paid for a glamorous job he loved, a star in his own field, yet he could retain his anonymity. Win-win. Then there was the Potter family. “Greg was my film father from when I was 14. I was a member of his extended family.” Holmes and Mailley were inseparable, and he soon became close to Radcliffe “Initially, I was Dan’s PE coach. He’d come into the stunt office, we’d shut the door, and I’d let him be a kid. He’d be jumping off Portakabins on to trampolines. We’d do judo, boxing, sword fighting, anything he wanted to do that day. On the first two films he was like my little brother, and by the third film he’d grown into one of my best friends and still is to this day.” Then it all came crashing down. Holmes knew there hadn’t been something quite right about the rehearsal the day before. Mailley suggested he should take Holmes’s place the following day. Holmes wouldn’t hear of it – it was his stunt and he would be doing it even if it meant taking another whack. At least it shouldn’t be as bad as yesterday, Mailley told him. “It was an old way of doing flight on a wire with weights that is not done any more. It’s banned in the film industry as a result of his accident across all major studios,” Holmes says. “The rehearsal the day before was violent and fast, but we went for something a bit faster and a bit more violent the second day. In stunt rehearsals we were constantly trying to push the boundaries of what stunt action could be, whether that is flying through the air or a 15-minute fight routine.” So stunt coordinators just added weights on the pulley system to enhance the action? “Yes. I’m not going to go into any more detail. The repercussions from my accident mean nobody will be put in that situation again. And that’s enough for me. It’s much more sophisticated and controlled now.” Did he sense it was dangerous at the time? “I hope you don’t mind, but I don’t want to relive the most horrific day of my life again. Is that all right?” he says gently. “Listen, thankfully for me, because of this film, my legacy on camera is not now me just hitting that wall 14 years ago. Maybe people will take some positives from the way I handled it, hopefully with a bit of dignity – even though all the dignity is taken away.” Among other things, the accident left him with terrible PTSD. “I’d hear the noise in my head of the crunching of my spinal cord. That would happen as I was falling asleep.” When things get too upsetting, Holmes seeks refuge in humour. “There’s a lot of jokes I want to tell you, but I won’t.” Go on, I say. “Voldemort hit me with a spell –Wingardiumquadriplegia.” He laughs. “That’s a cracking joke. Part of me would love to do the Edinburgh festival.” Look, he says, he was a stuntman – of course, he knew he was being paid to take chances. In hospital, despite being paralysed, he again began to feel he was lucky. “I was a stuntman, I did a risky job, and I was put in a ward with two boys who were there because of hate. One was caught up in the Mumbai terrorist attack – he’s now one of my best friends, Will Pike. The other boy, Oliver Hemsley, was walking on the road in Whitechapel and he was stabbed in the neck and the chest because he’s gay. Then they kicked a bottle of gin into his chest and he had to have his heart taken out [temporarily, and massaged]. They urinated on him as well. So I met real victims. Granted, it was not my fault, but it was a stunt accident and I did that job and I had to accept the risks. No stuntman should ever be doing that job unless you fully accept the risks.” ... In one way, Holmes adapted astonishingly well to his disability – designing his new home from the hospital bed, comforting loved ones, telling his mother there was no point in being angry or bitter. He says Warner Bros, the studio that made the Potter films, acted admirably. “Roy Button, who was head of physical production and had given me many bollockings before, came to my bedside and said, ‘Don’t worry, there’s going to be a process, you’re going to be all right.’ I needed that voice of authority and they’ve always been supportive.” Was he already worrying about the future financially? “Well, I’d just signed the mortgage. I was starting to own a home. Life was happening.” He had moved into the house with his then girlfriend. But the relationship did not last. “Everything changed. There is not one aspect of your life that is not affected by spinal injury. Nothing is the same.” He pauses. “Apart from one thing – watching a film. That’s the same, so I watch films.” What was hardest to accept? “It’s all hard. It killed me that I couldn’t go back to work on Harry Potter. I wanted to see Harry through to the end. I’d read all of those books, picturing those action sequences. It killed me. The book behind you has even got my Post-it notes from where I read it and went, ‘There’s a stunt I might be doing.’ I could read the character and picture the stunts I was going to do. No one in the world had that, except me. Honestly, all I wanted to do was go back to work.” Even though he knew he couldn’t return to work, he refused to accept that he had to change his lifestyle after the accident. He talks about a lost decade, then decides “lost” isn’t quite the right word. “It was a decade of decadence and fun. I’d say I wasn’t grown up enough. The thrills I used to get setting myself on fire and jumping off buildings, I was just trying to find that in the way I could.” Such as? “I’d take groups of people to Ibiza and blow thousands of pounds.” He travelled the world, drove ridiculously fast customised cars he could control with his hands, partied, drank and took drugs. “I was fortunate to have those experiences, but I wasn’t really dealing with this. I was putting it on the back burner and not accepting my disability for what it is, which is a life-changing thing.” The Boy Who Lived is not just a moving examination of the devastation wreaked on Holmes’s life, but also the profound impact the accident had on others. Greg Powell was at the top of his game when it happened. He is a tough, charismatic, cigar-chomping man who comes from a line of boxers and stuntmen (his father and uncle were Nosher and Dinny Powell respectively). In one of the film’s most powerful moments, he breaks down. “I was the last one to touch him, when he could walk, and the first one to touch him when he couldn’t walk, and that’s an awful feeling. I feel choked up there proper. It hurts, cos I fucked his life right up. He’d have been doing anything he liked now,” he tells Hartley in the film. Had Holmes been aware of the effect the accident had on Powell? “Yeah, he carries that scar on him every day.” He talks of his mentor with affection. “Greg’s legacy should not just be the stunt accident he was connected to through me. The legacy should be every working-class stuntman he opened the door for, all the action sequences he’s brought to the world, whether that’s Tom Cruise floating with the sweat dripping in the first Mission: Impossible or us making the first broomstick flight.” And has he become known for the accident? “Of course. Death by association. But you know he still goes to work, he takes great precautions with safety – double, triple, quadruple checking, not over-rehearsing stunts any more, not letting the director do too many takes when someone’s taking a whack.” ... Is there anything he gained from the accident? “Yeah, hugely. I will always say breaking my neck made a man of me. For sure, 100%.” But he believes it’s only over the past few years that he has truly accepted his disability. There have been terrible lows along the way. In 2019, when he had four spinal surgeries and a brain drain, his mother thought she was going to lose him. He says he was in such pain, he no longer cared. “I asked not to be resuscitated. I told my surgeon: if you get into complications, let me go. The mix of medication, pain and irritability all kicked into a state of hopelessness.” Did he actively want to die? “No, but I thought if it happens, I’ll be happy to. I’m cool. I’ve had a good crack.” How long did the hopelessness last? He grins. “Not long.” He came back fighting harder than ever. Now, he says, there is so much he is doing and still wants to do. He has recorded 41 episodes of a podcast series called Cunning Stunts, in which he interviewed stunt performers with the help of his old friend Radcliffe. There is a lovely generosity to Holmes. As with Mailley, he tells me how happy he is to have seen Radcliffe, who is one of the producers on The Boy Who Lived, evolve and grow. “He’s my boy, isn’t he? I love him. I love him. I’m so proud of him. You think of how many child stars don’t make it through that pressure, that whirlwind. Every time I see his physicality, to know I had just a little input into that brings me joy.” What does he mean? “Look at him, he’s ripped!” ... Then there’s his plan to launch a stunt studio to enable working-class kids to get a foothold in the industry. He was lucky, he says – Powell gave him his start. To become a professional stunt performer in Britain you have to sign up to the British Stunt Register. To do that, you need exceptional skills in at least six sporting disciplines. And it is almost impossible to acquire those skills without private coaching. Holmes was one of the few exceptions because he earned enough money as a teenager on the Harry Potter films to pay for his own coaching. “Right now we can only have posh boys training for the stunts register. Scamps like me who were born in Romford could not afford to train for the stunt register. We shouldn’t be in the situation where Marc can’t find black boys to double black actors because the socioeconomic background doesn’t allow for it. So that’s my big dream.” Another grin. “It would cost 35 million quid. But I’ve got some connections.” One reason Holmes has renewed hope is that a year ago he began a relationship with Rosie, a woman who was left even more severely disabled than him after a car crash at the age of 19. “At the moment she has a team of 14 looking after her – her needs are more complex than mine. She’s beautiful. She’s all woman. I fell in love with her over words on email. The greatest way. I didn’t even see her face. It was so natural,” he says. “It took four people to get us close enough for our first kiss, but it was worthwhile.” Despite his positivity, Holmes’s long-term prognosis is poor. His life expectancy is 65. “My dad’s 65 now. That’s a lot taken off. My surgeon said to me, ‘Breathing, speech and swallowing independently, you’ll be lucky to keep all three.’ That ain’t easy to face.” As for the pain, he says, it’s constant. “It feels like I’ve got 10 elephants standing on top of my head. I’ve got so little muscle structure holding its weight. I’d do 30 years in prison if I could do a handstand again. There’s no amount of fuckery compared to what I have to live with. This is hard. This is the biggest test I can think of, particularly for someone who needed to move as much as I did.” He hopes the film will give people an accurate sense of his life, for good and bad. Is he pleased with it? “I haven’t watched it. I’m just not ready yet. I live it every day, I don’t need to see it. I know there will be a time in my life when I get in bed and won’t get out of it, and that’s when I’ll watch the film.” For now, he says, there’s no need to think about that time. “Why look death in the face? Push him down the road. Kick him up his arse.” \- David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived is on Sky Documentaries and Now from 18 November in the UK and on HBO on 15 November in the US. *** *article cut down to around half of original wordcount.*

Harry Potter Historical_General • 11 months ago • 50%

Harry Potter star Miriam Margolyes has given a rare glimpse into her relationship with partner Heather Sutherland. Appearing on The Graham Norton Show on Friday night (November 3) to promote her new book, Oh Miriam!, the actress commented on her 54-year relationship, revealing that the couple live apart but now have plans to live together. "We are together, but we live apart. She is in Amsterdam, and I am in London but now we want to live together," she said. "I really do want to live with her because we are old, and we haven't got much time left. It is silly to live apart." Margolyes appeared on the sixth episode of the late-night chat show's latest series, alongside Succession star Sarah Snook, The Morning Show's Greta Lee and pop legend Boy George. Margolyes will be on our screens again soon as she is set to join David Tennant in the upcoming 60th-anniversary specials of Doctor Who, which premiere on Saturday, November 25. [https://www.digitalspy.com/showbiz/a45743787/harry-potter-miriam-margolyes-relationship-update/](https://www.digitalspy.com/showbiz/a45743787/harry-potter-miriam-margolyes-relationship-update/) *** Trainee train drivers have been sought for one of the world's most scenic rail routes. ScotRail said the new personnel would be based in Fort William and were likely to regularly travel the West Highland Line. The line connects Glasgow with Oban and also Fort William and Mallaig, taking passengers through places that have featured in films and on TV. The locations include Glenfinnan, which has appeared in the Harry Potter films. The West Highland Line was voted the top rail journey in the world by readers of independent travel magazine, Wanderlust, in 2009. The route's stations include Corrour, dubbed the highest at 408m (1,339ft) above sea level and most remote station in the UK. It appeared in the 1996 film Trainspotting, which starred Ewan McGregor. Scenes for Harry Potter and the Chambers of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban were shot at the Glenfinnan Viaduct. The privately-run Jacobite steam locomotive also featured in the films. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-67337137](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-67337137) *** Harry Potter star Matthew Lewis has joined the cast for the second series of Avoidance, the BBC series from Romesh Ranganathan. In addition to Harry Potter, Lewis has had roles on All Creatures Great and Small, Happy Valley and Ripper Street, with the star also appearing in the Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts special last year. [https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a45778870/harry-potter-matthew-lewis-bbc-avoidance/](https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a45778870/harry-potter-matthew-lewis-bbc-avoidance/) *** Now, as the wait continues for updates on the Harry Potter TV show, Yates shares his thoughts on Radcliffe's post-Wizarding World career in a recent interview with Looper. The actor has since focused mostly on smaller projects, and Yates has nothing but praise for his former collaborator. Check out the director's full comment below: > "Dan is fearless, and I've admired what he's been doing. He'll dive into any number of different roles to redefine himself. It's admirable that he keeps trucking, and he's done particularly well recently. So all strength to Dan, and I hope he keeps going. I'm sure he will." [https://screenrant.com/daniel-radcliffe-post-harry-potter-career-yates-response/](https://screenrant.com/daniel-radcliffe-post-harry-potter-career-yates-response/)

Harry Potter Historical_General • 11 months ago • 93%

www.ign.com

# Harry Potter Director Says Fantastic Beasts Is ‘Parked’ For Now *Arresto Momentum.* Harry Potter director David Yates has confirmed that Fantastic Beasts is on hold, for now. During an interview with Total Film, the filmmaker offered an update on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. “With Beasts, it's all just parked,” he said. “We made those three movies, the last one through a pandemic, and it was enormous fun, but it was tough.” Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore was the last to film, and while fans originally thought Beasts would be a trilogy, J.K. Rowling confirmed there were actually five films planned. "We knew that from the start, and we set a trilogy as a kind of placeholder,” she said. “But we've now done the plotting, so we're pretty sure there's going to be five movies.” However, making the sequel wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. “We were actually filming when there wasn't a vaccine,” said Yates. “Thankfully, no one got sick, but we did have the most detailed protocols in place.” On top of difficulties with filming, the film just didn’t do very well. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore earned just $407.2 million at the global box office, based on a $200 million budget. “We're all so proud of [Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore],” added Yates. “When it went out into the world, we just needed to sort of stop and pause, and take it easy.” When it comes to box office performance, 2016's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was a commercial success, grossing more than $800 million worldwide, even though its opening weekend numbers fell short compared to the rest of the franchise. However, The Crimes of Grindelwald suffered a 20% decline, earning $650 million globally, with The Secrets of Dumbledore only dwindling further. Crucially, it was critically panned, with IGN giving it just 4/10. Our Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore review said: “While Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore finally makes Dumbledore canonically gay, it does little else of note, remaining scattered across half a dozen inconsequential subplots for most of its runtime. It looks drab and feels like it was made by people who want to leave its magical premise behind, even though the series refuses to have anything resembling grown-up politics or perspectives.” Unfortunately, the future of the franchise reportedly rested on the fate of The Secret of Dumbledore, so it’s unsurprising to see Warner Bros. shelve Fantastic Beasts, at least for the time being. Want to read more about Harry Potter? Check out Daniel Radcliffe’s documentary about his Harry Potter stunt double as well as how to watch the Harry Potter movies in chronological order.

Harry Potter Historical_General • 11 months ago • 98%

# Daniel Radcliffe produces film about his paralysed Harry Potter stunt double *Documentary tells story of David Holmes who sustained a spinal injury during filming of The Deathly Hallows: Part 1*  *** Daniel Radcliffe has teamed up with his Harry Potter stunt double, who became paralysed after an on-set accident, for an HBO documentary. David Holmes worked closely with Radcliffe on the Harry Potter films until he sustained a spinal injury during filming for The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 in January 2009. The gymnast from Essex, who was selected to play Radcliffe’s double in the first film, broke his neck and was paralysed from the chest down. The forthcoming documentary, titled David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived, is executive produced by Radcliffe and debuts in November. It will feature candid personal footage shot over the last decade, behind-the-scenes material from Holmes’s stunt work, scenes of his current life and intimate interviews with Holmes, Radcliffe, and others. “The film is a coming-of-age story of stuntman David Holmes, a prodigious teenage gymnast from Essex, England, who is selected to play Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double in the first ‘Harry Potter’ film, when Daniel is just 11,” the official synopsis from HBO said. “Over the next 10 years, the two form an inextricable bond, but on the penultimate film a tragic accident on set leaves David paralysed with a debilitating spinal injury, turning his world upside down. As Daniel and his closest stunt colleagues rally to support David and his family in their moment of need, it is David’s extraordinary spirit of resilience that becomes their greatest source of strength and inspiration.” HBO said the film, which is directed by British filmmaker Dan Hartley, reflects universal themes of living with adversity, growing up and forging identities in an uncertain world. Holmes, who is now 42, has previously revealed details of his tragic accident, which occurred during a flying scene at Warner Bros Studios in Leavesden. In an interview with the Mirror in 2014, he said he was pulled backwards “at speed” by a high-strength wire in a “jerk back” stunt that replicates the effects of an explosion. However, Holmes was launched into a wall and immediately broke his neck. He has said the new HBO documentary tells the story of not just his achievements in front of the camera, “but also the challenges I face every day, and my overall attitude to life after suffering a broken neck. “In the turbulent world we find ourselves living in right now, I would like to quote Harry: ‘We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.’” Holmes also thanked medical staff, Radcliffe and the Harry Potter author, JK Rowling, for their support. Writing about Radcliffe, he said they were both “immensely proud of our time on the Harry Potter films, and the joy and comfort it brings to audiences around the world on a daily basis.”. It is not the first time Radcliffe and Holmes have collaborated since the Harry Potter films – in 2020 the pair joined forces to launch Holmes’ Cunning Stunts podcast, which features interviews with other stunt performers across Hollywood. “I think there’s a myth around stuntmen that they are just superhuman in some way,” Radcliffe said of the podcast at the time. “When the public see something really painful or horrible, they think it was a visual effect or that there’s some clever, safe way of doing it. Often that’s not the case. “There’s no way of faking, for example, falling down stairs. When you get hit by a car, you’re still getting hit by a car, even if it’s going slower than it would. They find the safest way of doing it, but it can still hurt.”

History Historical_General • 11 months ago • 96%

www.scotsman.com

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/12865151 # Witch-hunting in 17th-century Scotland was so well paid that it attracted some blatant fakers – Susan Morrison > A witch-hunter nicknamed ‘The Bloody Juglar’ appears to have used a retractable needle to prick his victims without drawing blood, while another responsible for the deaths of many innocent women turned out to be a woman herself *** At Spynie Palace in 1662, John Innes of Leuchars had a serious problem on his hands. Local people were complaining to him about milkless cows, shrivelling crops and dying children. Pretty obvious that a witch was on the loose. As the local law enforcement thereabouts, John was expected to do something, but witch-hunting was not in Mr Innes’s skill set. It must have been a relief when a slight young man almost magically appeared in front of him: John Dickson’s the name, and witch-hunting’s the game. Bags of experience. Happy to sort the problem out. Possibly dropped the name of superstar witch-hunter John Kincaid into the conversation, a Tranent man with a fearsome reputation as Scotland's most fearsome witch pricker or ‘brodder’. The Scots didn't do witch-ducking. We went for the needle. The Devil gave his followers marks somewhere on their bodies. Where the Devil left his mark, there would be no blood, and no pain. Kincaid and his like would use the needle to ‘prick’ the accused. The words prick and needle are misleading. This needle was no dainty thing to be lost easily in a haystack. These were more like hefty great crochet hooks. The ‘pricking’ was more of a violent slam into the body. The mark could be anywhere. The accused were stripped and shaved, and the needle plunged in. Some victims didn’t move, scream or bleed – the mark had been found. Possibly they couldn’t move. They may have been in deep shock. These were pious times. Women rarely left home without covering their heads, now they stood publicly naked, shaved and exhausted. There may well have been little or no bleeding, if the needle hit a part of the body with a poor blood supply. Or perhaps the needle was retractable. There are clues to such trickery. In the late 17th century, a witch-hunter nicknamed “The Bloody Juglar” turned up in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Pretty quickly his trusty needle pricked a victim and drew no blood. A witch, ready for trial and execution. Hold up, said Colonel Fenwick, the town’s military governor. He called in the mayor and the magistrates. He was worried that this evidence was falsely procured. He had his suspicions about that needle. Why not get The Bloody Juglar to do the pricking again, but with a council-provided needle? Our boy baulked – “by no means would he be induced unto”. To the good people of Berwick, this “was a sufficient Discovery of Knavery”. The Juglar was busted. John Kincaid may have been a knave, but between 1649 and 1662 he rampaged freely. It was lucrative. He pocketed £6 for a discovery of a witch at Burntcastle estate. They chucked in another £3 to cover the booze bill for him and his manservant. The year 1659 was a busy one. Kincaid seems to have pricked profitably in East Lothian, where 18 accused witches were executed. In 1661, Forfar was so chuffed with his efforts that they gave him the freedom of the burgh. Perhaps young John Dickson was inspired by Kincaid. Seemed a good trade for a lad, finding God's enemies and being very well paid for it, too. John headed north, fetched up at Spynie Palace and appeared before the harassed Innes, who wasted no time in signing up his new witch-hunter to an exclusive contract. John was on a good retainer with performance-related bonuses, six shillings a day expenses plus £6 per witch caught. In no time at all, our man on the make had two servants and a very fancy horse. He was on-call and carried out witch-pricking in Elgin, Forres, Inverness and Tain. He possibly pricked Isobel Goudie, Scotland’s most famous witch. He had a particular take on the procedure. Folk called him the Pricker “because of his use of a long brasse pin”. He had his victims stripped naked, then the “spell spot was seen and discovered. After rubbing over the whole body with his palms.” In a vicious witch-hunt/clan war in Wardlaw on the banks of Loch Ness, 14 women and one man were treated so savagely under John’s direct supervision that some of them died. Our boy was on a roll, until he did something stupid. He pricked a man named John Hay, a former messenger to the Privy Council. Now, this was not a man to mess with. He had connections. He wrote to Edinburgh complaining in an incredibly civil servant manner, denouncing the witch-pricker who worked on his case as a “cheating fellow” who carried out the torture without a licence. Even witch-hunters need the correct paperwork. The Privy Council in Edinburgh agreed. They called the maverick Mr Dickson in for a word. And they made a terrible discovery: John Dickson was a woman. Her name was Christian Caddell, and she came from Fife. Oh, she could tell a witch, no doubt about it. She claimed she spotted them by looking into their eyes and seeing an upside-down cross. Of course, this was not the scientifically accepted manner of witch-finding. A needle must be used. And, obviously, you needed to be a man. Christian stood trial, not for fake witch hunting, torturing or even for those murderous deaths, but for wearing men’s clothing. She was sentenced to transportation, and on May 6 she sailed from the port of Leith on the ship Mary, bound for Barbados. On the day she left Scotland, Isobel Elder and Isabel Simson, pricked by John Dickson, aka Christian Caddel, were burned in Forres. Just because you were discovered to be a witch in the wrong way didn’t mean to say you were innocent. They were the last two victims of the cross-dressing counterfeit witch-pricker.

www.scotsman.com

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/12865151 # Witch-hunting in 17th-century Scotland was so well paid that it attracted some blatant fakers – Susan Morrison > A witch-hunter nicknamed ‘The Bloody Juglar’ appears to have used a retractable needle to prick his victims without drawing blood, while another responsible for the deaths of many innocent women turned out to be a woman herself *** At Spynie Palace in 1662, John Innes of Leuchars had a serious problem on his hands. Local people were complaining to him about milkless cows, shrivelling crops and dying children. Pretty obvious that a witch was on the loose. As the local law enforcement thereabouts, John was expected to do something, but witch-hunting was not in Mr Innes’s skill set. It must have been a relief when a slight young man almost magically appeared in front of him: John Dickson’s the name, and witch-hunting’s the game. Bags of experience. Happy to sort the problem out. Possibly dropped the name of superstar witch-hunter John Kincaid into the conversation, a Tranent man with a fearsome reputation as Scotland's most fearsome witch pricker or ‘brodder’. The Scots didn't do witch-ducking. We went for the needle. The Devil gave his followers marks somewhere on their bodies. Where the Devil left his mark, there would be no blood, and no pain. Kincaid and his like would use the needle to ‘prick’ the accused. The words prick and needle are misleading. This needle was no dainty thing to be lost easily in a haystack. These were more like hefty great crochet hooks. The ‘pricking’ was more of a violent slam into the body. The mark could be anywhere. The accused were stripped and shaved, and the needle plunged in. Some victims didn’t move, scream or bleed – the mark had been found. Possibly they couldn’t move. They may have been in deep shock. These were pious times. Women rarely left home without covering their heads, now they stood publicly naked, shaved and exhausted. There may well have been little or no bleeding, if the needle hit a part of the body with a poor blood supply. Or perhaps the needle was retractable. There are clues to such trickery. In the late 17th century, a witch-hunter nicknamed “The Bloody Juglar” turned up in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Pretty quickly his trusty needle pricked a victim and drew no blood. A witch, ready for trial and execution. Hold up, said Colonel Fenwick, the town’s military governor. He called in the mayor and the magistrates. He was worried that this evidence was falsely procured. He had his suspicions about that needle. Why not get The Bloody Juglar to do the pricking again, but with a council-provided needle? Our boy baulked – “by no means would he be induced unto”. To the good people of Berwick, this “was a sufficient Discovery of Knavery”. The Juglar was busted. John Kincaid may have been a knave, but between 1649 and 1662 he rampaged freely. It was lucrative. He pocketed £6 for a discovery of a witch at Burntcastle estate. They chucked in another £3 to cover the booze bill for him and his manservant. The year 1659 was a busy one. Kincaid seems to have pricked profitably in East Lothian, where 18 accused witches were executed. In 1661, Forfar was so chuffed with his efforts that they gave him the freedom of the burgh. Perhaps young John Dickson was inspired by Kincaid. Seemed a good trade for a lad, finding God's enemies and being very well paid for it, too. John headed north, fetched up at Spynie Palace and appeared before the harassed Innes, who wasted no time in signing up his new witch-hunter to an exclusive contract. John was on a good retainer with performance-related bonuses, six shillings a day expenses plus £6 per witch caught. In no time at all, our man on the make had two servants and a very fancy horse. He was on-call and carried out witch-pricking in Elgin, Forres, Inverness and Tain. He possibly pricked Isobel Goudie, Scotland’s most famous witch. He had a particular take on the procedure. Folk called him the Pricker “because of his use of a long brasse pin”. He had his victims stripped naked, then the “spell spot was seen and discovered. After rubbing over the whole body with his palms.” In a vicious witch-hunt/clan war in Wardlaw on the banks of Loch Ness, 14 women and one man were treated so savagely under John’s direct supervision that some of them died. Our boy was on a roll, until he did something stupid. He pricked a man named John Hay, a former messenger to the Privy Council. Now, this was not a man to mess with. He had connections. He wrote to Edinburgh complaining in an incredibly civil servant manner, denouncing the witch-pricker who worked on his case as a “cheating fellow” who carried out the torture without a licence. Even witch-hunters need the correct paperwork. The Privy Council in Edinburgh agreed. They called the maverick Mr Dickson in for a word. And they made a terrible discovery: John Dickson was a woman. Her name was Christian Caddell, and she came from Fife. Oh, she could tell a witch, no doubt about it. She claimed she spotted them by looking into their eyes and seeing an upside-down cross. Of course, this was not the scientifically accepted manner of witch-finding. A needle must be used. And, obviously, you needed to be a man. Christian stood trial, not for fake witch hunting, torturing or even for those murderous deaths, but for wearing men’s clothing. She was sentenced to transportation, and on May 6 she sailed from the port of Leith on the ship Mary, bound for Barbados. On the day she left Scotland, Isobel Elder and Isabel Simson, pricked by John Dickson, aka Christian Caddel, were burned in Forres. Just because you were discovered to be a witch in the wrong way didn’t mean to say you were innocent. They were the last two victims of the cross-dressing counterfeit witch-pricker.

www.scotsman.com

# Witch-hunting in 17th-century Scotland was so well paid that it attracted some blatant fakers – Susan Morrison > A witch-hunter nicknamed ‘The Bloody Juglar’ appears to have used a retractable needle to prick his victims without drawing blood, while another responsible for the deaths of many innocent women turned out to be a woman herself *** At Spynie Palace in 1662, John Innes of Leuchars had a serious problem on his hands. Local people were complaining to him about milkless cows, shrivelling crops and dying children. Pretty obvious that a witch was on the loose. As the local law enforcement thereabouts, John was expected to do something, but witch-hunting was not in Mr Innes’s skill set. It must have been a relief when a slight young man almost magically appeared in front of him: John Dickson’s the name, and witch-hunting’s the game. Bags of experience. Happy to sort the problem out. Possibly dropped the name of superstar witch-hunter John Kincaid into the conversation, a Tranent man with a fearsome reputation as Scotland's most fearsome witch pricker or ‘brodder’. The Scots didn't do witch-ducking. We went for the needle. The Devil gave his followers marks somewhere on their bodies. Where the Devil left his mark, there would be no blood, and no pain. Kincaid and his like would use the needle to ‘prick’ the accused. The words prick and needle are misleading. This needle was no dainty thing to be lost easily in a haystack. These were more like hefty great crochet hooks. The ‘pricking’ was more of a violent slam into the body. The mark could be anywhere. The accused were stripped and shaved, and the needle plunged in. Some victims didn’t move, scream or bleed – the mark had been found. Possibly they couldn’t move. They may have been in deep shock. These were pious times. Women rarely left home without covering their heads, now they stood publicly naked, shaved and exhausted. There may well have been little or no bleeding, if the needle hit a part of the body with a poor blood supply. Or perhaps the needle was retractable. There are clues to such trickery. In the late 17th century, a witch-hunter nicknamed “The Bloody Juglar” turned up in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Pretty quickly his trusty needle pricked a victim and drew no blood. A witch, ready for trial and execution. Hold up, said Colonel Fenwick, the town’s military governor. He called in the mayor and the magistrates. He was worried that this evidence was falsely procured. He had his suspicions about that needle. Why not get The Bloody Juglar to do the pricking again, but with a council-provided needle? Our boy baulked – “by no means would he be induced unto”. To the good people of Berwick, this “was a sufficient Discovery of Knavery”. The Juglar was busted. John Kincaid may have been a knave, but between 1649 and 1662 he rampaged freely. It was lucrative. He pocketed £6 for a discovery of a witch at Burntcastle estate. They chucked in another £3 to cover the booze bill for him and his manservant. The year 1659 was a busy one. Kincaid seems to have pricked profitably in East Lothian, where 18 accused witches were executed. In 1661, Forfar was so chuffed with his efforts that they gave him the freedom of the burgh. Perhaps young John Dickson was inspired by Kincaid. Seemed a good trade for a lad, finding God's enemies and being very well paid for it, too. John headed north, fetched up at Spynie Palace and appeared before the harassed Innes, who wasted no time in signing up his new witch-hunter to an exclusive contract. John was on a good retainer with performance-related bonuses, six shillings a day expenses plus £6 per witch caught. In no time at all, our man on the make had two servants and a very fancy horse. He was on-call and carried out witch-pricking in Elgin, Forres, Inverness and Tain. He possibly pricked Isobel Goudie, Scotland’s most famous witch. He had a particular take on the procedure. Folk called him the Pricker “because of his use of a long brasse pin”. He had his victims stripped naked, then the “spell spot was seen and discovered. After rubbing over the whole body with his palms.” In a vicious witch-hunt/clan war in Wardlaw on the banks of Loch Ness, 14 women and one man were treated so savagely under John’s direct supervision that some of them died. Our boy was on a roll, until he did something stupid. He pricked a man named John Hay, a former messenger to the Privy Council. Now, this was not a man to mess with. He had connections. He wrote to Edinburgh complaining in an incredibly civil servant manner, denouncing the witch-pricker who worked on his case as a “cheating fellow” who carried out the torture without a licence. Even witch-hunters need the correct paperwork. The Privy Council in Edinburgh agreed. They called the maverick Mr Dickson in for a word. And they made a terrible discovery: John Dickson was a woman. Her name was Christian Caddell, and she came from Fife. Oh, she could tell a witch, no doubt about it. She claimed she spotted them by looking into their eyes and seeing an upside-down cross. Of course, this was not the scientifically accepted manner of witch-finding. A needle must be used. And, obviously, you needed to be a man. Christian stood trial, not for fake witch hunting, torturing or even for those murderous deaths, but for wearing men’s clothing. She was sentenced to transportation, and on May 6 she sailed from the port of Leith on the ship Mary, bound for Barbados. On the day she left Scotland, Isobel Elder and Isabel Simson, pricked by John Dickson, aka Christian Caddel, were burned in Forres. Just because you were discovered to be a witch in the wrong way didn’t mean to say you were innocent. They were the last two victims of the cross-dressing counterfeit witch-pricker.

Mythology Historical_General • 11 months ago • 100%

daily.jstor.org

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/12600657 *** Seventeenth-century English antiquarians thought that Stonehenge was built by Celtic Druids. They were relying on the earliest written history they had: Julius Caesar’s narrative of his two unsuccessful invasions of Britain in 54 and 55 BC. Caesar had said the local priests were called Druids. [John Aubrey](https://daily.jstor.org/archiving-the-inventor-of-the-archive/) (1626–1697) and William Stukeley (1687–1765) cemented the Stonehenge/Druid connection, while self-styled bard Edward Williams (1747–1826), who changed his name to Iolo Morganwg, invented “authentic” Druidic rituals. Druidism has come a long way since. In 2010, The Druid Network was listed as a charity in England and Wales, essentially marking the official recognition of Druidism as a religion. ([74,000 called themselves Druids](https://isismagazine.org.uk/2023/04/invisible-by-design-druidism-in-modern-britain/) in a recent census.) Historian Carole M. Cusack positions Druidism as one of the branches of the tree of [Paganism and/or New Age-ism(s)](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23244956?mag=stonehenge-before-the-druids-long-long-before-the-druids), which burst into all sorts of growth during the twentieth century. Modern Druidism fits into the smorgasbord of what Cusack calls the “deregulated spiritual marketplace” of our times. But there’s a disconnect here. In the popular imagination, Stonehenge and Druidism now go together like tea and crumpets. Historically, Stonehenge, a product of Neolithic Britain, predates Caesar by thousands of years. It had nothing to do with Druids and certainly nothing to do with modern Druidism. “The false association of [Stonehenge] with the Druids has persisted to the present day,” Cusak writes, “and has become a form of folklore or folk-memory that has enabled modern Druids to obtain access and a degree of respect in their interactions with Stonehenge and other megalithic sites.” Meanwhile, archaeologists continue to explore the centuries of construction at Stonehenge and related sites like Durrington Walls and the Avenue that connects Stonehenge to the River Avon. Neolithic Britons seem to have come together to transform Stonehenge into the ring of giant stones—some from 180 miles away—we know today. Questions about construction and chronology continue, but current archeological thinking is dominated by findings and analyses of the Stonehenge Riverside Project of 2004–2009. The Stonehenge Riverside Project’s surveys and excavations made up the first major archeological explorations of Stonehenge and surroundings since the 1980s. The project archaeologists postulate that Stonehenge was a long-term cemetery for cremated remains, with Durrington Walls serving as the residencies and feasting center for its builders. The hippie-turned-New Age movements birthed in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a surge of interest in Stonehenge. Tens of thousands, not all of them Druids, attended the Stonehenge Free People’s Festival starting in 1974. In 1985, the festival was halted by English Heritage, the organization that maintains Stonehenge today, because of the crowds, disorder, and vandalism. Druids were also banned from performing rituals on site. However, English Heritage and the Druids soon came to an understanding: Druids could use the site as long as there was no associated festival. So the clash of academic archaeology and what might be called folk archaeology comes into stark focus at Stonehenge. Modern paganism is not without interest, of course, but continuing revelations about prehistory—whether of neolithic Britain or elsewhere—should be a lot more interesting. As are the techniques used to extract data from the past: an example used to telling effect by the Stonehenge Riverside Project is the analysis of lipid remains on pottery: we can tell if the pot held dairy products or the fat of ruminants or pigs, giving insights into the diet four thousand years ago. Another example: strontium isotope in bovine molars show that beef consumed at Durrington Walls was raised at least thirty miles away. Of course, all this is not as photogenically mysterious/magical as robed Druids in the long shadows of a midwinter sunset. Academic archaeology, which suffers from charges of “elitism” in the reactionary populist politics of anti-intellectualism and anti-science, has a hard time competing with the popular irrationality of mysticism. Maybe the real Stonehenge needs more publicists. *** Subscribe to !history@lemm.ee and !history@lemmy.ml

daily.jstor.org

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/12600657 *** Seventeenth-century English antiquarians thought that Stonehenge was built by Celtic Druids. They were relying on the earliest written history they had: Julius Caesar’s narrative of his two unsuccessful invasions of Britain in 54 and 55 BC. Caesar had said the local priests were called Druids. [John Aubrey](https://daily.jstor.org/archiving-the-inventor-of-the-archive/) (1626–1697) and William Stukeley (1687–1765) cemented the Stonehenge/Druid connection, while self-styled bard Edward Williams (1747–1826), who changed his name to Iolo Morganwg, invented “authentic” Druidic rituals. Druidism has come a long way since. In 2010, The Druid Network was listed as a charity in England and Wales, essentially marking the official recognition of Druidism as a religion. ([74,000 called themselves Druids](https://isismagazine.org.uk/2023/04/invisible-by-design-druidism-in-modern-britain/) in a recent census.) Historian Carole M. Cusack positions Druidism as one of the branches of the tree of [Paganism and/or New Age-ism(s)](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23244956?mag=stonehenge-before-the-druids-long-long-before-the-druids), which burst into all sorts of growth during the twentieth century. Modern Druidism fits into the smorgasbord of what Cusack calls the “deregulated spiritual marketplace” of our times. But there’s a disconnect here. In the popular imagination, Stonehenge and Druidism now go together like tea and crumpets. Historically, Stonehenge, a product of Neolithic Britain, predates Caesar by thousands of years. It had nothing to do with Druids and certainly nothing to do with modern Druidism. “The false association of [Stonehenge] with the Druids has persisted to the present day,” Cusak writes, “and has become a form of folklore or folk-memory that has enabled modern Druids to obtain access and a degree of respect in their interactions with Stonehenge and other megalithic sites.” Meanwhile, archaeologists continue to explore the centuries of construction at Stonehenge and related sites like Durrington Walls and the Avenue that connects Stonehenge to the River Avon. Neolithic Britons seem to have come together to transform Stonehenge into the ring of giant stones—some from 180 miles away—we know today. Questions about construction and chronology continue, but current archeological thinking is dominated by findings and analyses of the Stonehenge Riverside Project of 2004–2009. The Stonehenge Riverside Project’s surveys and excavations made up the first major archeological explorations of Stonehenge and surroundings since the 1980s. The project archaeologists postulate that Stonehenge was a long-term cemetery for cremated remains, with Durrington Walls serving as the residencies and feasting center for its builders. The hippie-turned-New Age movements birthed in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a surge of interest in Stonehenge. Tens of thousands, not all of them Druids, attended the Stonehenge Free People’s Festival starting in 1974. In 1985, the festival was halted by English Heritage, the organization that maintains Stonehenge today, because of the crowds, disorder, and vandalism. Druids were also banned from performing rituals on site. However, English Heritage and the Druids soon came to an understanding: Druids could use the site as long as there was no associated festival. So the clash of academic archaeology and what might be called folk archaeology comes into stark focus at Stonehenge. Modern paganism is not without interest, of course, but continuing revelations about prehistory—whether of neolithic Britain or elsewhere—should be a lot more interesting. As are the techniques used to extract data from the past: an example used to telling effect by the Stonehenge Riverside Project is the analysis of lipid remains on pottery: we can tell if the pot held dairy products or the fat of ruminants or pigs, giving insights into the diet four thousand years ago. Another example: strontium isotope in bovine molars show that beef consumed at Durrington Walls was raised at least thirty miles away. Of course, all this is not as photogenically mysterious/magical as robed Druids in the long shadows of a midwinter sunset. Academic archaeology, which suffers from charges of “elitism” in the reactionary populist politics of anti-intellectualism and anti-science, has a hard time competing with the popular irrationality of mysticism. Maybe the real Stonehenge needs more publicists. *** Subscribe to !history@lemm.ee and !history@lemmy.ml

History Historical_General • 11 months ago • 100%

daily.jstor.org

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/12600657 *** Seventeenth-century English antiquarians thought that Stonehenge was built by Celtic Druids. They were relying on the earliest written history they had: Julius Caesar’s narrative of his two unsuccessful invasions of Britain in 54 and 55 BC. Caesar had said the local priests were called Druids. [John Aubrey](https://daily.jstor.org/archiving-the-inventor-of-the-archive/) (1626–1697) and William Stukeley (1687–1765) cemented the Stonehenge/Druid connection, while self-styled bard Edward Williams (1747–1826), who changed his name to Iolo Morganwg, invented “authentic” Druidic rituals. Druidism has come a long way since. In 2010, The Druid Network was listed as a charity in England and Wales, essentially marking the official recognition of Druidism as a religion. ([74,000 called themselves Druids](https://isismagazine.org.uk/2023/04/invisible-by-design-druidism-in-modern-britain/) in a recent census.) Historian Carole M. Cusack positions Druidism as one of the branches of the tree of [Paganism and/or New Age-ism(s)](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23244956?mag=stonehenge-before-the-druids-long-long-before-the-druids), which burst into all sorts of growth during the twentieth century. Modern Druidism fits into the smorgasbord of what Cusack calls the “deregulated spiritual marketplace” of our times. But there’s a disconnect here. In the popular imagination, Stonehenge and Druidism now go together like tea and crumpets. Historically, Stonehenge, a product of Neolithic Britain, predates Caesar by thousands of years. It had nothing to do with Druids and certainly nothing to do with modern Druidism. “The false association of [Stonehenge] with the Druids has persisted to the present day,” Cusak writes, “and has become a form of folklore or folk-memory that has enabled modern Druids to obtain access and a degree of respect in their interactions with Stonehenge and other megalithic sites.” Meanwhile, archaeologists continue to explore the centuries of construction at Stonehenge and related sites like Durrington Walls and the Avenue that connects Stonehenge to the River Avon. Neolithic Britons seem to have come together to transform Stonehenge into the ring of giant stones—some from 180 miles away—we know today. Questions about construction and chronology continue, but current archeological thinking is dominated by findings and analyses of the Stonehenge Riverside Project of 2004–2009. The Stonehenge Riverside Project’s surveys and excavations made up the first major archeological explorations of Stonehenge and surroundings since the 1980s. The project archaeologists postulate that Stonehenge was a long-term cemetery for cremated remains, with Durrington Walls serving as the residencies and feasting center for its builders. The hippie-turned-New Age movements birthed in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a surge of interest in Stonehenge. Tens of thousands, not all of them Druids, attended the Stonehenge Free People’s Festival starting in 1974. In 1985, the festival was halted by English Heritage, the organization that maintains Stonehenge today, because of the crowds, disorder, and vandalism. Druids were also banned from performing rituals on site. However, English Heritage and the Druids soon came to an understanding: Druids could use the site as long as there was no associated festival. So the clash of academic archaeology and what might be called folk archaeology comes into stark focus at Stonehenge. Modern paganism is not without interest, of course, but continuing revelations about prehistory—whether of neolithic Britain or elsewhere—should be a lot more interesting. As are the techniques used to extract data from the past: an example used to telling effect by the Stonehenge Riverside Project is the analysis of lipid remains on pottery: we can tell if the pot held dairy products or the fat of ruminants or pigs, giving insights into the diet four thousand years ago. Another example: strontium isotope in bovine molars show that beef consumed at Durrington Walls was raised at least thirty miles away. Of course, all this is not as photogenically mysterious/magical as robed Druids in the long shadows of a midwinter sunset. Academic archaeology, which suffers from charges of “elitism” in the reactionary populist politics of anti-intellectualism and anti-science, has a hard time competing with the popular irrationality of mysticism. Maybe the real Stonehenge needs more publicists. *** Subscribe to !history@lemm.ee and !history@lemmy.ml

daily.jstor.org

Seventeenth-century English antiquarians thought that Stonehenge was built by Celtic Druids. They were relying on the earliest written history they had: Julius Caesar’s narrative of his two unsuccessful invasions of Britain in 54 and 55 BC. Caesar had said the local priests were called Druids. [John Aubrey](https://daily.jstor.org/archiving-the-inventor-of-the-archive/) (1626–1697) and William Stukeley (1687–1765) cemented the Stonehenge/Druid connection, while self-styled bard Edward Williams (1747–1826), who changed his name to Iolo Morganwg, invented “authentic” Druidic rituals. Druidism has come a long way since. In 2010, The Druid Network was listed as a charity in England and Wales, essentially marking the official recognition of Druidism as a religion. ([74,000 called themselves Druids](https://isismagazine.org.uk/2023/04/invisible-by-design-druidism-in-modern-britain/) in a recent census.) Historian Carole M. Cusack positions Druidism as one of the branches of the tree of [Paganism and/or New Age-ism(s)](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23244956?mag=stonehenge-before-the-druids-long-long-before-the-druids), which burst into all sorts of growth during the twentieth century. Modern Druidism fits into the smorgasbord of what Cusack calls the “deregulated spiritual marketplace” of our times. But there’s a disconnect here. In the popular imagination, Stonehenge and Druidism now go together like tea and crumpets. Historically, Stonehenge, a product of Neolithic Britain, predates Caesar by thousands of years. It had nothing to do with Druids and certainly nothing to do with modern Druidism. “The false association of [Stonehenge] with the Druids has persisted to the present day,” Cusak writes, “and has become a form of folklore or folk-memory that has enabled modern Druids to obtain access and a degree of respect in their interactions with Stonehenge and other megalithic sites.” Meanwhile, archaeologists continue to explore the centuries of construction at Stonehenge and related sites like Durrington Walls and the Avenue that connects Stonehenge to the River Avon. Neolithic Britons seem to have come together to transform Stonehenge into the ring of giant stones—some from 180 miles away—we know today. Questions about construction and chronology continue, but current archeological thinking is dominated by findings and analyses of the Stonehenge Riverside Project of 2004–2009. The Stonehenge Riverside Project’s surveys and excavations made up the first major archeological explorations of Stonehenge and surroundings since the 1980s. The project archaeologists postulate that Stonehenge was a long-term cemetery for cremated remains, with Durrington Walls serving as the residencies and feasting center for its builders. The hippie-turned-New Age movements birthed in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a surge of interest in Stonehenge. Tens of thousands, not all of them Druids, attended the Stonehenge Free People’s Festival starting in 1974. In 1985, the festival was halted by English Heritage, the organization that maintains Stonehenge today, because of the crowds, disorder, and vandalism. Druids were also banned from performing rituals on site. However, English Heritage and the Druids soon came to an understanding: Druids could use the site as long as there was no associated festival. So the clash of academic archaeology and what might be called folk archaeology comes into stark focus at Stonehenge. Modern paganism is not without interest, of course, but continuing revelations about prehistory—whether of neolithic Britain or elsewhere—should be a lot more interesting. As are the techniques used to extract data from the past: an example used to telling effect by the Stonehenge Riverside Project is the analysis of lipid remains on pottery: we can tell if the pot held dairy products or the fat of ruminants or pigs, giving insights into the diet four thousand years ago. Another example: strontium isotope in bovine molars show that beef consumed at Durrington Walls was raised at least thirty miles away. Of course, all this is not as photogenically mysterious/magical as robed Druids in the long shadows of a midwinter sunset. Academic archaeology, which suffers from charges of “elitism” in the reactionary populist politics of anti-intellectualism and anti-science, has a hard time competing with the popular irrationality of mysticism. Maybe the real Stonehenge needs more publicists.

Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (LotR), etc. Historical_General • 11 months ago • 100%

bigthink.com

# “Eucatastrophe”: Tolkien on the secret to a good fairy tale * For J.R.R. Tolkien, the single most important element of a fairy tale was the dramatic reversal of misfortune in the story's ending. * ## Key Takeaways - In Greek mythology, the story of Pandora's box comes in (at least) two versions. In one, hope is released as the final evil in the world. In another, hope is the only consolation and weapon we have. - J.R.R. Tolkien coined the word “eucatastrophe” to describe a hallmark of good fairy tales: Good people win out despite the odds. Hope, in other words, is a vital story component. - For Tolkien and the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, hope is the most important disposition we can possess. Without it, the darkness of the world will win out. There are at least two versions of the story of Pandora’s box. In the classic version from the Greek poet Hesiod, when Pandora’s curiosity got the better of her, she unleashed into the world all sorts of evils: sickness, famine, death, and people who ask questions at the end of a meeting. When Pandora finally closed the jar, she left only one “evil” inside: hope. For Hesiod, there’s nothing so cruel as hope. Hope is what forces us to carry on building, fixing, and loving when the world offers only destruction, chaos, and heartbreak. It’s what gets us off the ground only to be punched back down. Hope is the naivety of a fool. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” Another variation of the Pandora’s box story is a Greek fable called “Zeus and the Jar of Good Things.” In this account, everything is inverted. The jar does not contain misery but good things. When “mankind” (there’s no Pandora in this version) opened the jar, they let out and lost all these good things: the things that would have made life a paradise. When the lid was closed, there was only one divine blessing left: “Hope alone is still found among the people.” The author J.R.R. Tolkien and the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel would likely prefer the second version. After all, they considered hope to be perhaps the most important part of being human. ## The eucatastrophe Kurt Vonnegut is famous for writing novels like Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. In storytelling circles, he’s famous for his “shapes of stories.” These were eight diagrams that define the traditional arcs of common stories, like “Boy Meets Girl” or “From Bad to Worse.” His arc about fairy tales goes like this: Things start badly and then get a bit better. But then there’s a catastrophe that brings everything to ruin. The story ends with a drastic upheaval in fortunes — a transformation and magical finale — and everyone lives happily ever after. Tolkien, were he alive, would agree. For him, the single most important element of a fairy tale is this final dramatic reversal of misfortune. He coined the word “eucatastrophe” to describe it. “The consolation of fairy-stories [is] the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn,'” Tolkien wrote. The Lord of the Rings does not end with the hobbits dead and Sauron cackling over his orcish, industrial empire. It ends with light beating dark — with simple kindness, love, and companionship winning out over evil. ## Lifting the heart Tolkien is very careful to make the point that this is not some form of escapism. It’s not quixotic wish fulfillment. It does not pretend the world is an endlessly happy idyll of singing dwarves and affable wizards. The world has great suffering and misery, and there are plenty of nightmares to be found. The eucatastrophe, though, is “the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat.” The purpose of a good fairy story is not to hide the shadows of the world. The original Grimms’ Fairy Tales (not the sanitized Disney versions) were full of infanticide, cannibalism, and horror. The mark of a good fairy story, Tolkien wrote, “…[is that] however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears.” ## Hope is all we have The religious undertones here are not accidental. Tolkien was a Catholic who was fond of the redemption and grace found in the narratives of the Bible. Marcel did not, as far as we know, read Tolkien, but his own philosophy of hope bears striking similarities. What Tolkien describes as the eucatastrophe, or final deliverance, Marcel called hope. For Marcel, “Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories, and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me.” Hope is the belief in an order to the Universe — an order where everything will turn out well enough. It is a kind of faith that simply refuses to accept that things are broken, or that misery, suffering, and death are all that exist. Marcel was a Christian, but his account of hope can apply to anyone. The hopeful of the world are those who see the Universe as being on their side. Set against “all experience, all probability, all statistics,” they see that a “given order shall be re-established.” Hope is not a wish. It is not optimism or naivety. It is an assertion. It is telling the world, “No, this is not the way things will be; things will be better.” For both Marcel and Tolkien, it is only with hope that we banish despair. You do not haggle with or beg the darkness. Like a blazing torch, you must shine hope brightly and fiercely. *** But some people don't have the privilege of having hope. Some sit in the dark waiting for bombs and white phosphorus to fall on them, burn them and die as the world watches a genocide occur on live television. I pray for the people of Gaza, none of whom are human animals, for their existence.

History Historical_General • 12 months ago • 96%

blogs.lse.ac.uk

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/10945207 ### Long Read Review: Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman *In Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, legal scholar James Q. Whitman examines how Nazi Germany looked to the model of the Jim Crow laws in the USA when formulating the Nuremberg Laws in the 1930s. This is a carefully researched and timely analysis of how racist ideology can penetrate the political and institutional fabric of societies, furthermore underscoring its continued impact in the USA today, writes Thomas Christie Williams. * After the full horrors of Nazism were exposed at the end of World War II, eugenics – in Francis Galton’s words, the ‘science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race’ – as a social and scientific movement slowly faded from public view. The fact that Ronald Fisher, the founder of the modern discipline of genetics, and John Maynard Keynes, the economist whose ideas underpinned the New Deal, were active members of the Eugenics Society is now rarely discussed at Cambridge University, where they spent much of their academic careers. In 1954, the name of scientific journal the Annals of Eugenics was changed to the Annals of Human Genetics, and in 1965 the incoming recipient of the Chair of Eugenics at UCL, Harry Harris, became instead the Galton Professor of Human Genetics. However, two groups of people have worked hard to keep memories of this great enthusiasm for a ‘scientific’ approach to institutionalised racism alive. The first are those who see understanding the history of the twentieth century as important, in order that we do not make the same mistakes again. They argue that whilst Nazism was the extreme end of the spectrum, it espoused views on nationality and race that were, if not mainstream, definitely recognised as acceptable by many sectors of society in Europe and the Americas. James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, falls into this camp. A legal scholar, Whitman identifies many commonalities between Nazi legislation in the early 1930s, which sought to exclude Jews from German public life, and the ‘Jim Crow’ laws enacted to exclude African Americans in the United States. Moving beyond commonalities, he argues that Nazi lawyers and the German public had a keen interest in US race law. As an example, he cites a 1936 article on racial policy in Neues Volk (New Volk), a propaganda newsletter from the National Socialist Office, which included a US map labelled ‘Statutory Restrictions on Negro Rights’, detailing disenfranchisement and anti-miscegenation laws in the 48 mainland US states. The second group is the far-right movements arguably edging into the mainstream in the United States and Europe (in Hungary or Holland, for example). The chants of ‘Blood and Soil’ from the recent white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia were an explicit reference to the Nazi ideal of ‘Blut und Boden’, and those gathered there are united by their fascination with fascist ideology and rhetoric. Vanguard America argues in its manifesto for an economy ‘free from the influence of international corporations, led by a rootless group of international Jews, which place profit beyond the interests of our people’. Membership of the Nationalist Socialist Movement (described on their website as ‘America’s Premier White Civil Rights Organization’) is ‘open to non-Semitic heterosexuals of European descent’, and a popular blogger for the alt-right, Mike Peinovich, who spoke at Charlottesville, hosts a chatshow entitled ‘The Daily Shoah’. Hitler’s American Model is therefore a timely and sobering outline of how racist ideology can make its way into the political fabric of a country. It focuses on the changes introduced by Nazi lawyers post-1933, but we also learn much about how this developed in the United States. Whilst in the latter the case law excluding non-whites from public life developed over decades, in Nazi Germany the Nuremberg Laws were drafted and introduced in 1935, just two years after Hitler became Chancellor. Whitman’s main premise is that in this accelerated process, German lawyers and officials took inspiration and concrete guidance from legal practice across the Atlantic. Reading the book, two sets of records stand out, one for their presence, and the other for their absence. The first is the stenographic report of a 5 June 1934 meeting of the Commission on Criminal Law Reform. Whitman’s twenty-page description of this transcript makes for gripping reading, and is the highlight of the book (94-113). The second is the lack of documentation regarding a September 1935 US study tour by 45 German lawyers (132). The trip was apparently a reward for their success in finalising the Nuremberg Race Laws, laid out by Hermann Göring at a rally only a few weeks earlier. As Dr. Heubner, chief of the Nazi Jurists’ Association, told the tour group before they left: ‘through this study trip the upholder of German law [will] gain the necessary compensation for an entire year of work’ (133). According to Whitman, historical record tells us that on arrival in New York at a reception organised by the New York City Bar Association, the group were met by a noisy demonstration lasting six hours and requiring police presence. However, in Whitman’s words: ‘sadly it does not seem possible to learn more about how […] the group fared on their study trip’. From the first set of records we learn much about how German lawyers saw their American counterparts; from the second (missing) set, we might have learnt more about how the American establishment viewed legal developments in the Third Reich. Assembled at the 1934 meeting were seventeen lawyers and officials, and their brief was to respond to the demands of the Prussian Memorandum of September 1933. This document argued that the ‘task of the National Socialist State is to check the race-mixing that has been underway in Germany over the course of the centuries, and strive towards the goal of guaranteeing that Nordic blood, which is still determinative in the German people, should put its distinctive stamp on our life again’ (85). The final outcome of such meetings was the Nuremberg Laws, which consisted of three parts. The first, the Flag Law for the Reich, declared the swastika to be the only German national flag. The second, the Citizenship Laws, created a difference between German nationals – ‘any person who belongs to the mutual protection association of the German Reich’ – and the citizen – ‘a national of German blood’ who was the ‘sole bearer of full political rights’ (29). The third, the Nuremberg Blood Laws, made a criminal offence of marriage or extramarital sex between ‘Jews and nationals of German blood’ (31). Whitman’s description of the 1934 meeting is gripping for a number of reasons. Firstly, it allows the opportunity to witness the mechanics of discrimination at work. We learn how a group of highly educated professionals – civil servants, legal academics, medical doctors – came together to formulate a set of profoundly exclusionary and undemocratic laws. The committee was faced with a number of questions. How could one define race in legal terms? Could it be possible to criminalise an act (in this case, sexual relations between a German and a Jew) to which two competent parties had consented? Secondly, as a non-American, it further underscores the deeply institutionalised discrimination within US law at this time, belying the idea that a supposedly independent judiciary can act to protect the rights of all citizens. In Whitman’s interpretation, two groups were pitted against each other at the 1934 meeting. The first were juristic moderates, who felt that a policy of criminalising German and Jewish sexual relations was not in keeping with the German legal tradition. German criminal law, they argued, was based on clear and unambiguous concepts (105). Race, and in particular Jewishness, was difficult to ‘scientifically’ define (105); judges could not be expected to convict on the basis of vague concepts. Their adversaries were Nazi radicals, who argued that a new Criminal Code should be drawn up using the ‘fundamental principles of National Socialism’ (96). According to Whitman, it was these radicals who championed American law, already touched on in the Prussian Memorandum. As it turns out, the American approach to defining race was not greatly troubled by the absence of a scientific conceptualisation. For the Nazi radicals, this was a heartening example. Roland Freisler, a State Secretary attached to the Ministry of Justice, pointed out: ‘How have they gone about doing this [defining race]? They have used different means. Several states have simply employed geographical concepts […] others have conflated matters, combining geographical origin with their conception of a particular circle of blood relatedness’ (107). Freisler continued: > they name the races in some more primitive way […] and therefore I am of the opinion that we can proceed with the same primitivity that is used by these American states (109). Contrary to established German tradition, Nazi radicals believed that judges should be given freedom to institute racist legislation, without the need to come up with a scientifically satisfactory definition of race. It is hard to argue with Whitman’s assertion that Nazi jurists and policymakers took a sustained interest in American race law, and that this helped shape the legal and political climate that led to the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws. What Whitman moves on to in his conclusion is the extent to which the American legal and political system as a whole, beyond Jim Crow, was permeated with racism: laws related to race-based immigration, race-based citizenship and race-based anti-miscegenation. He makes the unsettling argument that America and Nazi Germany were united by a strong egalitarian, if not libertarian (in the Nazi case), ethos. This ethos, he argues, is that of all white men being equal, and thus it was not surprising that Nazism – in Whitman’s view an egalitarian social revolution for those self-defining as of German origin – turned to America for inspiration. As Whitman points out, white supremacy has a long history in the US, from 1691 when Virginia adopted the first anti-miscegenation statute, to 1790, when the First Congress opened naturalisation to ‘any alien, being a free white person’ (145), to the anti-immigration laws that followed the San Francisco Gold Rush and the segregation laws that followed the Civil War. In the wake of the Charlottesville protests, he would probably argue against Senator John McCain’s assertionthat ‘white supremacists and neo-Nazis are, by definition, opposed to American patriotism and the ideals that define us as a people and make our nation special’. Whitman also questions whether the US common law system really serves to protect the freedom of individuals against an over-reaching state. He points out that the Nazis, rather than taking over the pre-existing German civil law system, reformed it according to a common law model. Nazi officials were given discretion to act in what they believed to be the ‘spirit of Hitler’ (149), brushing aside the legal scientific tradition of the moderates of the 1934 meeting. He argues that when it came to race, American ‘legal science’ tended to yield to American politics and left much racist legislation untouched. So where does that leave the ‘science’ of eugenics, and the ‘legal science’ of the jurists working in a civil code system? Does a logically consistent approach of any kind protect individual liberties, or rather open up a way to discriminate based on supposedly objective measures? An important point, not explicitly made by Whitman but implicit throughout the book, is that the supposed objectivity of a scientific approach (whether in biology or the law) can easily be misused by those whose aims are clearly undemocratic and unegalitarian. On ‘The Daily Shoah’ and other racist websites, substantial discussion is devoted to ‘metrics’ related to, for example, race and IQ or sexual orientation and the chance of conviction for paedophile offences. The Charlottesville protests were sparked by the decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate General in the Civil War: proponents of the removal argued that it served as a monument to white supremacy. Conversely, in the United Kingdom, a similar controversy surrounding a petition to remove Cecil Rhodes’s statue in Oriel College Oxford failed to lead to its removal, and the Galton Institute in London (which acknowledges its founding as the Eugenics Education Society in 1907, but disassociates itself from any interest in the theory and practice of eugenics) continues to fund research and award essay prizes on genetics for A Level students. Clearly retaining the material legacy of historical figures runs the risk of allowing their glorification (as in Charlottesville), whitewashing or suggesting implicit sanction of their actions. However, in Whitman’s view, to try to forget or ignore these figures and their ongoing influence on society today is the more dangerous option. Hitler’s American Model is a thoughtful and carefully researched account of how the legal community in the US and Germany proved ‘incapable of staving off the dangers of the politicization of criminal law’ (159). He worries that: > the story in this book […] is not done yet […] what Roland Freisler saw, and admired, in American race law eighty years ago is still with us in the politics of American criminal justice (160). Given recent developments in American politics, this should perhaps give us all pause for thought. *** Subscribe to !history@lemm.ee :)

blogs.lse.ac.uk

### Long Read Review: Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman *In Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, legal scholar James Q. Whitman examines how Nazi Germany looked to the model of the Jim Crow laws in the USA when formulating the Nuremberg Laws in the 1930s. This is a carefully researched and timely analysis of how racist ideology can penetrate the political and institutional fabric of societies, furthermore underscoring its continued impact in the USA today, writes Thomas Christie Williams. * After the full horrors of Nazism were exposed at the end of World War II, eugenics – in Francis Galton’s words, the ‘science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race’ – as a social and scientific movement slowly faded from public view. The fact that Ronald Fisher, the founder of the modern discipline of genetics, and John Maynard Keynes, the economist whose ideas underpinned the New Deal, were active members of the Eugenics Society is now rarely discussed at Cambridge University, where they spent much of their academic careers. In 1954, the name of scientific journal the Annals of Eugenics was changed to the Annals of Human Genetics, and in 1965 the incoming recipient of the Chair of Eugenics at UCL, Harry Harris, became instead the Galton Professor of Human Genetics. However, two groups of people have worked hard to keep memories of this great enthusiasm for a ‘scientific’ approach to institutionalised racism alive. The first are those who see understanding the history of the twentieth century as important, in order that we do not make the same mistakes again. They argue that whilst Nazism was the extreme end of the spectrum, it espoused views on nationality and race that were, if not mainstream, definitely recognised as acceptable by many sectors of society in Europe and the Americas. James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, falls into this camp. A legal scholar, Whitman identifies many commonalities between Nazi legislation in the early 1930s, which sought to exclude Jews from German public life, and the ‘Jim Crow’ laws enacted to exclude African Americans in the United States. Moving beyond commonalities, he argues that Nazi lawyers and the German public had a keen interest in US race law. As an example, he cites a 1936 article on racial policy in Neues Volk (New Volk), a propaganda newsletter from the National Socialist Office, which included a US map labelled ‘Statutory Restrictions on Negro Rights’, detailing disenfranchisement and anti-miscegenation laws in the 48 mainland US states. The second group is the far-right movements arguably edging into the mainstream in the United States and Europe (in Hungary or Holland, for example). The chants of ‘Blood and Soil’ from the recent white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia were an explicit reference to the Nazi ideal of ‘Blut und Boden’, and those gathered there are united by their fascination with fascist ideology and rhetoric. Vanguard America argues in its manifesto for an economy ‘free from the influence of international corporations, led by a rootless group of international Jews, which place profit beyond the interests of our people’. Membership of the Nationalist Socialist Movement (described on their website as ‘America’s Premier White Civil Rights Organization’) is ‘open to non-Semitic heterosexuals of European descent’, and a popular blogger for the alt-right, Mike Peinovich, who spoke at Charlottesville, hosts a chatshow entitled ‘The Daily Shoah’. Hitler’s American Model is therefore a timely and sobering outline of how racist ideology can make its way into the political fabric of a country. It focuses on the changes introduced by Nazi lawyers post-1933, but we also learn much about how this developed in the United States. Whilst in the latter the case law excluding non-whites from public life developed over decades, in Nazi Germany the Nuremberg Laws were drafted and introduced in 1935, just two years after Hitler became Chancellor. Whitman’s main premise is that in this accelerated process, German lawyers and officials took inspiration and concrete guidance from legal practice across the Atlantic. Reading the book, two sets of records stand out, one for their presence, and the other for their absence. The first is the stenographic report of a 5 June 1934 meeting of the Commission on Criminal Law Reform. Whitman’s twenty-page description of this transcript makes for gripping reading, and is the highlight of the book (94-113). The second is the lack of documentation regarding a September 1935 US study tour by 45 German lawyers (132). The trip was apparently a reward for their success in finalising the Nuremberg Race Laws, laid out by Hermann Göring at a rally only a few weeks earlier. As Dr. Heubner, chief of the Nazi Jurists’ Association, told the tour group before they left: ‘through this study trip the upholder of German law [will] gain the necessary compensation for an entire year of work’ (133). According to Whitman, historical record tells us that on arrival in New York at a reception organised by the New York City Bar Association, the group were met by a noisy demonstration lasting six hours and requiring police presence. However, in Whitman’s words: ‘sadly it does not seem possible to learn more about how […] the group fared on their study trip’. From the first set of records we learn much about how German lawyers saw their American counterparts; from the second (missing) set, we might have learnt more about how the American establishment viewed legal developments in the Third Reich. Assembled at the 1934 meeting were seventeen lawyers and officials, and their brief was to respond to the demands of the Prussian Memorandum of September 1933. This document argued that the ‘task of the National Socialist State is to check the race-mixing that has been underway in Germany over the course of the centuries, and strive towards the goal of guaranteeing that Nordic blood, which is still determinative in the German people, should put its distinctive stamp on our life again’ (85). The final outcome of such meetings was the Nuremberg Laws, which consisted of three parts. The first, the Flag Law for the Reich, declared the swastika to be the only German national flag. The second, the Citizenship Laws, created a difference between German nationals – ‘any person who belongs to the mutual protection association of the German Reich’ – and the citizen – ‘a national of German blood’ who was the ‘sole bearer of full political rights’ (29). The third, the Nuremberg Blood Laws, made a criminal offence of marriage or extramarital sex between ‘Jews and nationals of German blood’ (31). Whitman’s description of the 1934 meeting is gripping for a number of reasons. Firstly, it allows the opportunity to witness the mechanics of discrimination at work. We learn how a group of highly educated professionals – civil servants, legal academics, medical doctors – came together to formulate a set of profoundly exclusionary and undemocratic laws. The committee was faced with a number of questions. How could one define race in legal terms? Could it be possible to criminalise an act (in this case, sexual relations between a German and a Jew) to which two competent parties had consented? Secondly, as a non-American, it further underscores the deeply institutionalised discrimination within US law at this time, belying the idea that a supposedly independent judiciary can act to protect the rights of all citizens. In Whitman’s interpretation, two groups were pitted against each other at the 1934 meeting. The first were juristic moderates, who felt that a policy of criminalising German and Jewish sexual relations was not in keeping with the German legal tradition. German criminal law, they argued, was based on clear and unambiguous concepts (105). Race, and in particular Jewishness, was difficult to ‘scientifically’ define (105); judges could not be expected to convict on the basis of vague concepts. Their adversaries were Nazi radicals, who argued that a new Criminal Code should be drawn up using the ‘fundamental principles of National Socialism’ (96). According to Whitman, it was these radicals who championed American law, already touched on in the Prussian Memorandum. As it turns out, the American approach to defining race was not greatly troubled by the absence of a scientific conceptualisation. For the Nazi radicals, this was a heartening example. Roland Freisler, a State Secretary attached to the Ministry of Justice, pointed out: ‘How have they gone about doing this [defining race]? They have used different means. Several states have simply employed geographical concepts […] others have conflated matters, combining geographical origin with their conception of a particular circle of blood relatedness’ (107). Freisler continued: > they name the races in some more primitive way […] and therefore I am of the opinion that we can proceed with the same primitivity that is used by these American states (109). Contrary to established German tradition, Nazi radicals believed that judges should be given freedom to institute racist legislation, without the need to come up with a scientifically satisfactory definition of race. It is hard to argue with Whitman’s assertion that Nazi jurists and policymakers took a sustained interest in American race law, and that this helped shape the legal and political climate that led to the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws. What Whitman moves on to in his conclusion is the extent to which the American legal and political system as a whole, beyond Jim Crow, was permeated with racism: laws related to race-based immigration, race-based citizenship and race-based anti-miscegenation. He makes the unsettling argument that America and Nazi Germany were united by a strong egalitarian, if not libertarian (in the Nazi case), ethos. This ethos, he argues, is that of all white men being equal, and thus it was not surprising that Nazism – in Whitman’s view an egalitarian social revolution for those self-defining as of German origin – turned to America for inspiration. As Whitman points out, white supremacy has a long history in the US, from 1691 when Virginia adopted the first anti-miscegenation statute, to 1790, when the First Congress opened naturalisation to ‘any alien, being a free white person’ (145), to the anti-immigration laws that followed the San Francisco Gold Rush and the segregation laws that followed the Civil War. In the wake of the Charlottesville protests, he would probably argue against Senator John McCain’s assertionthat ‘white supremacists and neo-Nazis are, by definition, opposed to American patriotism and the ideals that define us as a people and make our nation special’. Whitman also questions whether the US common law system really serves to protect the freedom of individuals against an over-reaching state. He points out that the Nazis, rather than taking over the pre-existing German civil law system, reformed it according to a common law model. Nazi officials were given discretion to act in what they believed to be the ‘spirit of Hitler’ (149), brushing aside the legal scientific tradition of the moderates of the 1934 meeting. He argues that when it came to race, American ‘legal science’ tended to yield to American politics and left much racist legislation untouched. So where does that leave the ‘science’ of eugenics, and the ‘legal science’ of the jurists working in a civil code system? Does a logically consistent approach of any kind protect individual liberties, or rather open up a way to discriminate based on supposedly objective measures? An important point, not explicitly made by Whitman but implicit throughout the book, is that the supposed objectivity of a scientific approach (whether in biology or the law) can easily be misused by those whose aims are clearly undemocratic and unegalitarian. On ‘The Daily Shoah’ and other racist websites, substantial discussion is devoted to ‘metrics’ related to, for example, race and IQ or sexual orientation and the chance of conviction for paedophile offences. The Charlottesville protests were sparked by the decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate General in the Civil War: proponents of the removal argued that it served as a monument to white supremacy. Conversely, in the United Kingdom, a similar controversy surrounding a petition to remove Cecil Rhodes’s statue in Oriel College Oxford failed to lead to its removal, and the Galton Institute in London (which acknowledges its founding as the Eugenics Education Society in 1907, but disassociates itself from any interest in the theory and practice of eugenics) continues to fund research and award essay prizes on genetics for A Level students. Clearly retaining the material legacy of historical figures runs the risk of allowing their glorification (as in Charlottesville), whitewashing or suggesting implicit sanction of their actions. However, in Whitman’s view, to try to forget or ignore these figures and their ongoing influence on society today is the more dangerous option. Hitler’s American Model is a thoughtful and carefully researched account of how the legal community in the US and Germany proved ‘incapable of staving off the dangers of the politicization of criminal law’ (159). He worries that: > the story in this book […] is not done yet […] what Roland Freisler saw, and admired, in American race law eighty years ago is still with us in the politics of American criminal justice (160). Given recent developments in American politics, this should perhaps give us all pause for thought.

Harry Potter Historical_General • 12 months ago • 78%

venturebeat.com

In a new paper published on the open access and non-peer reviewed site arXiv.org, co-authors Ronen Eldan of Microsoft Research and Mark Russinovich of Microsoft Azure propose a new way of editing or removing knowledge of copyrighted works by erasing specific information from a sample LLM — namely, all knowledge of the existence of the Harry Potter books (including characters and plots) from Meta’s open source Llama 2-7B. As the Microsoft researchers write: “While the model took over 184K GPU-hours to pretrain, we show that in about 1 GPU hour of finetuning, we effectively erase the model’s ability to generate or recall Harry Potter-related content.” ## The magic formula First, they trained a model on the target data (Harry Potter books) to identify tokens most related to it by comparing predictions to a baseline model. Then, they replaced unique Harry Potter expressions with generic counterparts and generated alternative predictions approximating a model without that training. Third, they fine-tuned the baseline model on these alternative predictions, effectively erasing the original text from its memory when prompted with the context. To evaluate, they tested the model’s ability to generate or discuss Harry Potter content using 300 automatically generated prompts, as well as by inspecting token probabilities. As Eldan and Russinovich state, “to the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to present an effective technique for unlearning in generative language models.” They found that while the original model could easily discuss intricate Harry Potter plot details, after only an hour of finetuning their technique, “it’s possible for the model to essentially ‘forget’ the intricate narratives of the Harry Potter series.” Performance on standard benchmarks like ARC, BoolQ and Winogrande “remains almost unaffected.” ## Expelliarmus-ing expectations As the authors note, more testing is still needed given limitations of their evaluation approach. Their technique may also be more effective for fictional texts than non-fiction, since fictional worlds contain more unique references. In summarizing their findings, the authors state: “Our technique offers a promising start, but its applicability across various content types remains to be thoroughly tested. The presented approach offers a foundation, but further research is needed to refine and extend the methodology for broader unlearning tasks in LLMs.”

Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (LotR), etc. Historical_General • 12 months ago • 94%

gamerant.com

*A new report claims the apology posted for Lord of the Rings: Gollum was written using ChatGPT without the dev team's consent.* - **The Lord of the Rings: Gollum game received a negative response due to technical problems, derivative gameplay, uninteresting narrative, and poor graphics.** - **The apology posted by Nacon was generated by an AI-powered text generator, ChatGPT, without the knowledge of the developer, Daedalic Entertainment.** - **The game's troubled development was attributed to a lack of funds and time, leading to downscaled features and a rushed release.** *** According to a recent report, Daedalic Entertainment, the developer behind the infamous The Lord of the Rings: Gollum game, has claimed that the apology was generated by the AI-powered text generator, ChatGPT. This report also states the developers had no knowledge of this apology being written and that it was a decision from its publisher, Nacon. Alongside that, Daedelic Entertainment employees also went into detail about what had gone wrong with Lord of the Rings: Gollum during development. Earlier this year, the licensed game had launched to a rather overwhelming negative response, evident with how Lord of the Rings: Gollum became one of the lowest-rated games of 2023. Several critics and fans have cited the game's technical problems being the biggest factors to this negative reception, compounded by the gameplay that many found to be derivative and uninteresting. The graphics weren't a big selling point either, nor was its narrative compelling to many. As such, the game failed to deliver on all fronts to many people, with gamers walking away unimpressed with the big licensed game. The developers have recently spoken up about its troubled development and the source of the struggles the team faced. Anonymous employees from Daedalic Entertainment were interviewed by German gaming outlet GameTwo, with some discussing the relationship between the developers and its publisher, Nacon. One thing that was brought up was the apology regarding Gollum's troubled launch that was posted to the game's official Twitter account. According to Daedalic, this apology was written using the ChatGPT software, to which the developer had no knowledge of it being written or its content prior to its publication, claiming it was all handled by Nacon. > *My favorit part. This nonpology from Nacon was written with ChatGPT. pic.twitter.com/N0ZtX2I6WZ — Knoebel (@Knoebelbroet) October 7, 2023* Regarding the apology made for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, many gamers stated that the revelation of Nacon having used ChatGPT to generate it was the reason why it had seemed noncommittal and disingenuous. The biggest indicator in hindsight of how this apology was written without any oversight was the misspelling of the game's title, addressing it as "The Lord of the Ring: Gollum" in the post. The average development budget of a AAA game in 2023 is usually around $50-$300 million dollars, with Gollum's budget being a more modest 15 million Euros. This lack of funds and time was a big contributing factor to why the game was released in the state it was, according to a former senior designer. The developers went into how a lot of features had to be downscaled due to this, such as one scene having to be restricted to only seeing Gollum eavesdrop on two major characters since they had no time to animate the characters. With this report, it's possible that more blame could fall on the game's publisher, Nacon, rather than the developers. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, with a Switch version to come at a later date. Links: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/chatgpt-was-used-to-write-gollum-game-apology-its-claimed/ https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/lord-of-the-rings-gollum-apology-reportedly-written-by-chat-gpt-2327768/

Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (LotR), etc. Historical_General • 12 months ago • 100%

www.independent.co.uk

# How Moomin creator Tove Jansson found her dark side illustrating Tolkien and Carroll *She thought Lewis Carroll was ‘pathological’. Her Gollum was so monstrous that JRR Tolkien amended his book’s text – but copies of Tove Jansson’s illustrated edition of ‘The Hobbit’ fly off shelves even though they remain in the original Finnish. Susie Mesure visits a new exhibition that shows how the brain behind the Moomins turned her vividly macabre eye to transform other classic books* In November 1960, Astrid Lindgren got in touch with Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins. Lindgren, who wrote the Swedish children’s classic Pippi Longstocking, was also a publisher – and she begged Jansson to turn her imagination to the works of JRR Tolkien. “Who will comfort Astrid if you don’t agree to the proposal I’m now going to make to you?” Lindgren wrote in a letter, riffing on the title of another of Jansson’s recent picture books, Who Will Comfort Toffle? In the UK, as in her native Finland, Tove Jansson is, of course, best known for the Moomins, an adventurous family of fantastical creatures who live in a magical valley on the edge of a Finnish archipelago. A Moomin comic strip ran in London’s Evening News from 1954 until 1975, reaching millions of readers across the Commonwealth, and, more recently, the first new animation series about the Moomins for nearly three decades – Moominvalley – brought the white trolls to life for a new, younger generation. Fans range from devotees who grew up on books such as Finn Family Moomintroll or Comet in Moominland, to those with a penchant for collecting Moomin mugs, which Moomin Characters, the family-owned company that looks after Jansson’s legacy, still churns out year after year. Less is known, however, about the success Jansson, a Finnish icon who died in 2001 aged 86, had illustrating the work of other writers, something a new exhibition in Paris is putting under the spotlight. Houses of Tove explores how Jansson was so much more than a comic strip creator, a job she came to loathe because it kept her from her true passions: painting and writing. The show includes a first edition of The Hobbit, or Bilbo – en hobbits äventyr, as it is known in Swedish, which Jansson jumped at the chance to illustrate for Lindgren. It also features a number of preparatory sketches she made for the commission, which were used in a 1973 Finnish translation: the first edition, featuring a wonderful red dragon hovering above a tiny army scaling jagged peaks, is on display. **Images** ::: spoiler spoiler     :::

Cozy Fantasy Historical_General • 12 months ago • 100%

www.bbc.com

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/10662845 *"Fairycore" may be trending on social media today but 100 years ago supernatural sprites were a national obsession. Holly Williams explores fairy fever.* Imagine a fairy. Is the picture that appears in your mind's eye a tiny, pretty, magical figure – a childish wisp with insect-like wings and a dress made of petals? If so, it's likely you've been influenced by Cicely Mary Barker, the British illustrator who created the Flower Fairies. 2023 marks 100 years since the publication of her first book of poems and pictures, Flower Fairies of the Spring – an anniversary currently being celebrated in an exhibition at the Lady Lever Gallery in Merseyside, UK. The Flower Fairies' influence has endured: they have never been out of print, and continue to be popular around the world – big in Japan and in Italy, where Gucci released a children's range featuring Barker's prints in 2022. Billie Eilish recently had Flower Fairies tattooed on her hand, while their whimsical, floral aesthetic can be seen in the TikTok "fairycore" trend.  (*An exhibition at the Lady Lever Art Gallery explores the Flower Fairies phenomenon, and features pantomime costumes (Credit: Pete Carr)*) Barker's delicate watercolours certainly helped cement several tropes we now consider classic – almost essential, in fact – in the iconography of the fairy: they are miniature, sweet and youthful, they are intertwined with plants and the natural world, and they are distinctly twee. Yet her drawings were also "firmly footed in realism" points out Fiona Slattery Clark, curator of the show. "The children were all painted from life [and] her plants and flowers are as realistic as possible." Barker drew children from the nursery school her sister ran in their house in Croydon near London; each was assigned a flower or tree, and Barker's detailed illustrations were botanically accurate – she would source samples from Kew Gardens, says Slattery Clark. Even the petal-like wings and fairy outfits were closely based on plants: an acorn cup becoming a jaunty cap, a harebell becoming a prettily scalloped skirt. > For many hundreds of years, fairies were not necessarily tiny and fey, but grotesque or fierce elemental forces The Flower Fairies were an immediate hit – but Barker was far from the only artist of her era to find success with fairies. In fact, fairy fever swelled within the United Kingdom for over half a century, reaching something of a peak around the time the Flower Fairies emerged in 1923. Over 350 fairy books were published in the UK between 1920 and 1925, including in Enid Blyton's first fairy foray, a collection of poems called Real Fairies in 1923. Fairy art even had the stamp of royal approval: Queen Mary was a fan of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite's ethereal drawings, and helped popularise them by sending them in postcard form. Fairies have long been with us – in our imaginations, at least. But for many hundreds of years, they were not necessarily tiny and fey, but grotesque or fierce elemental forces, capable of great darkness. "In 1800, if you thought your child was a fairy it would have been like demonic possession – you would have put that child in the fire to drive out the fairy," points out Alice Sage, a curator and historian.  (*Each of Barker's fairies corresponded to a plant, tree or flower – pictured, the Silver Birch Fairy (Credit: Estate of Cicely Mary Barker 1934 Flower Fairies)*) Yet within 100 years, the whole conception of fairies completely changed. "Throughout the 19th Century, fairies became increasingly miniaturised, sapped of their power – trapped in the nursery," says Sage. As the Victorian era progressed, they are increasingly associated with childhood; as their popularity grew, they shrank. But first, fairies became a fashionable subject for Victorian artists, often taking inspiration from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. John Anster Fitzgerald, Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais, Joseph Noel Paton, Arthur Rackham and even JMW Turner – among many others – painted supernatural sprites from the 1840s onwards. But there was still a sense of otherworldly strangeness in many of their depictions – as seen in the work of Richard Dadd, who made his hyper-intricate fairy paintings while living in a Victorian asylum after killing his father. Then two wider cultural developments came along that changed fairy reputations forever. One was that "children's literature happened", says Sage. The Victorians promoted the idea of childhood as a time of innocence, requiring its own entertainment. Illustrated children's books really took off from the 1870s, with fairies a staple, and increasingly cutesy, feature. The second was pantomime. "Every Victorian pantomime would have this big spectacle of transformation at the end, where children dressed as fairies filled the stage," says Sage. The standard fairy fancy dress outfit today is basically the same as what these Victorian children would have worn: think tinsel, sparkly sequins, and translucent, gauzy wings. ### Huge popularity Moving into the 20th Century, fairies showed few signs of buzzing off – if anything, they cemented their place. "In the Edwardian era, Peter Pan started to be performed [in 1904], and that carried on for the next 25 years," points out Slattery Clark – enough time for several generations of children to learn to clap their hands to show they believe in fairies. And as the new century lurched through global upheaval via World War One, fairy mania continued – if anything, widening and deepening. "That golden age of children's literature is really an upper middle-class phenomenon," points out Sage. "What happened from World War One onwards is it explodes beyond that, and becomes an adult concern."  (*The costumes displayed in the exhibition are based on the Flower Fairies illustrations (Credit: Pete Carr)*) Having been whisked from the woods into the nursery, fairies then made their way to troubled adults on the battlefield or waiting at home. Consider the huge popularity of a print, Piper of Dreams by Estella Canziani, during World War One: a wispy image of a man playing a pipe and surrounded by tiny fairies, it sold a staggering quarter of a million copies in just 1916. "It's about belief and it's about hope – that's what fairies represent in that time," says Sage. "The supernatural becomes a way of finding some luck and brightness, [when] people don't have control over their lives, their future, their families." > For Conan Doyle, it was all about a search for another realm of being that related to life after death, vibrations, telepathy, telekinesis – Alice Sage Today, we associate fairies with little girls – but this was an era when fairy art was popular with grown men, too. And technology helped spread it: there was an explosion in sending postcards around this time. They were cheap to buy, and free to post to a serving soldier abroad. "Suddenly everyone can send fairies, and they're flying through the air and across the seas. You can’t underestimate the practical aspect of it," says Sage. Indeed, Barker herself cut her teeth illustrating such postcards: she produced a patriotic series showing "Children of the Allies", in different forms of national dress, in 1915, followed by a series of characters from Shakespeare, before teasing the Flower Fairies with a set of "Fairies and Elves" postcards in 1918. Barker never made any claims for fairies being real – "I have never seen a fairy", she wrote in a foreword to Flower Fairies of the Wayside. But it is worth noting that she first published the Flower Fairies at a moment when the desire to believe in magical beings was at a rare high. In 1920, Britain was gripped by the story of the Cottingley Fairies, after two girls claimed to have photographed fairies at the bottom of their garden in West Yorkshire – and were widely believed. Their beautiful photographs were created by paper cut-outs, floating on hat pins. Although many were sceptical, they nonetheless also fooled many of the great and the good – the photographs were brought to prominence by no less than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, who wrote a whole book about it, The Coming of the Fairies, in 1922.  (*The Crocus Fairies from Flower Fairies of the Spring – the watercolours are still popular today with “fairycore” fans (Credit: Estate of Cicely Mary Barker 1934 Flower Fairies)*) Cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths were aged 16 and nine when they took the first photos. Many years later, in the 1980s, they admitted it was a hoax, explaining that they kept up the pretence that the fairies were real a because they felt sorry for the middle-aged men, like Conan Doyle, that so wanted to believe. There was, at the time, a serious resurgence in spiritualism in the UK, with seances and attempts to contact the dead proving understandably tempting for the bereaved. Conan Doyle himself became interested in a spirit world after his son died in the war. And for believers, this wasn't "woo-woo" nonsense – it was supposedly based in science. After all, scientific advances were genuinely explaining hitherto unknown and invisible aspects of our world. "For Conan Doyle, it was all about a search for another realm of being that related to life after death, vibrations, telepathy, telekinesis – this fascinating world on the edge of the limits of human perception," says Sage. "And obviously that's connected to the loss of his son in World War One." Like the Flower Fairies, the Cottingley photographs further reinforced the association between children and fairies, as well as cementing what a fairy looked like in the public consciousness. Yet aside from Tinkerbell, Flower Fairies are probably the only image from the fairy-fever era still instantly recognisable today. Why, of all the fairy content out there, have Barker's images endured so strongly over the past 100 years? "They were [originally published] in full colour, and a lot of books were published in black and white," begins Sage. What looked novel at the time, now seems charmingly period – but the delicacy, intricacy, and imagination of Barker's pictures can still cast a spell. "It's like dolls houses – things that are very miniaturised, but very detailed and realistic, scratch a certain itch," suggests Sage. "They are absolutely beautiful, which helps." "It's a real celebration of nature – there is a strong educational aspect to her work," puts forward Slattery Clark, emphasising the botanical accuracy of Barker’s drawings. The educational argument might sound absurd given we're discussing fairy art, but as a child who was obsessed with Flower Fairies, I can attest to the truth of it: all the wildflowers I know the names of I learned from these books.  (*Cicely Mary Barker's exquisite illustrations were hugely popular in the 1920s (Credit: Estate of Cicely Mary Barker)*) Having each fairy very specifically related to a particular plant was also commercially canny – whether Barker intended this or not, it created space for identification, for collectability, for a kind of innate brand franchising. "In children's culture, we create series that are collectable, that you identify with… It's like Pokemon or something!" laughs Sage. "When I speak to people about the Flower Fairies, especially groups of sisters, it's always 'which one were you?'" Still, Sage is pleased to see the Flower Fairies exhibited in a fine art context at the Lady Lever gallery. For a long time, men painting fairies has been considered art – but when women do it, it's just silly flowery stuff for children. "This is fine art – it's mass, popular fine art," insists Sage. "I think a lot of the diminishment of fairies and children's illustration is from a misogynist, snobbish and elitist art historical tradition. I'm so excited to see this kind of exhibition, that reclaims this history." Consider this a beating of wings, then, that takes fairies back out of the nursery – and into the gallery. Flower Fairies is at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight Village, UK until 5 November. Holly Williams' novel What Time is Love? is out in paperback now.*___*

Mythology Historical_General • 12 months ago • 100%

www.bbc.com

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/10662845# When Britain was gripped by 'fairy mania' *"Fairycore" may be trending on social media today but 100 years ago supernatural sprites were a national obsession. Holly Williams explores fairy fever.* Imagine a fairy. Is the picture that appears in your mind's eye a tiny, pretty, magical figure – a childish wisp with insect-like wings and a dress made of petals? If so, it's likely you've been influenced by Cicely Mary Barker, the British illustrator who created the Flower Fairies. 2023 marks 100 years since the publication of her first book of poems and pictures, Flower Fairies of the Spring – an anniversary currently being celebrated in an exhibition at the Lady Lever Gallery in Merseyside, UK. The Flower Fairies' influence has endured: they have never been out of print, and continue to be popular around the world – big in Japan and in Italy, where Gucci released a children's range featuring Barker's prints in 2022. Billie Eilish recently had Flower Fairies tattooed on her hand, while their whimsical, floral aesthetic can be seen in the TikTok "fairycore" trend.  (*An exhibition at the Lady Lever Art Gallery explores the Flower Fairies phenomenon, and features pantomime costumes (Credit: Pete Carr)*) Barker's delicate watercolours certainly helped cement several tropes we now consider classic – almost essential, in fact – in the iconography of the fairy: they are miniature, sweet and youthful, they are intertwined with plants and the natural world, and they are distinctly twee. Yet her drawings were also "firmly footed in realism" points out Fiona Slattery Clark, curator of the show. "The children were all painted from life [and] her plants and flowers are as realistic as possible." Barker drew children from the nursery school her sister ran in their house in Croydon near London; each was assigned a flower or tree, and Barker's detailed illustrations were botanically accurate – she would source samples from Kew Gardens, says Slattery Clark. Even the petal-like wings and fairy outfits were closely based on plants: an acorn cup becoming a jaunty cap, a harebell becoming a prettily scalloped skirt. > For many hundreds of years, fairies were not necessarily tiny and fey, but grotesque or fierce elemental forces The Flower Fairies were an immediate hit – but Barker was far from the only artist of her era to find success with fairies. In fact, fairy fever swelled within the United Kingdom for over half a century, reaching something of a peak around the time the Flower Fairies emerged in 1923. Over 350 fairy books were published in the UK between 1920 and 1925, including in Enid Blyton's first fairy foray, a collection of poems called Real Fairies in 1923. Fairy art even had the stamp of royal approval: Queen Mary was a fan of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite's ethereal drawings, and helped popularise them by sending them in postcard form. Fairies have long been with us – in our imaginations, at least. But for many hundreds of years, they were not necessarily tiny and fey, but grotesque or fierce elemental forces, capable of great darkness. "In 1800, if you thought your child was a fairy it would have been like demonic possession – you would have put that child in the fire to drive out the fairy," points out Alice Sage, a curator and historian.  (*Each of Barker's fairies corresponded to a plant, tree or flower – pictured, the Silver Birch Fairy (Credit: Estate of Cicely Mary Barker 1934 Flower Fairies)*) Yet within 100 years, the whole conception of fairies completely changed. "Throughout the 19th Century, fairies became increasingly miniaturised, sapped of their power – trapped in the nursery," says Sage. As the Victorian era progressed, they are increasingly associated with childhood; as their popularity grew, they shrank. But first, fairies became a fashionable subject for Victorian artists, often taking inspiration from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. John Anster Fitzgerald, Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais, Joseph Noel Paton, Arthur Rackham and even JMW Turner – among many others – painted supernatural sprites from the 1840s onwards. But there was still a sense of otherworldly strangeness in many of their depictions – as seen in the work of Richard Dadd, who made his hyper-intricate fairy paintings while living in a Victorian asylum after killing his father. Then two wider cultural developments came along that changed fairy reputations forever. One was that "children's literature happened", says Sage. The Victorians promoted the idea of childhood as a time of innocence, requiring its own entertainment. Illustrated children's books really took off from the 1870s, with fairies a staple, and increasingly cutesy, feature. The second was pantomime. "Every Victorian pantomime would have this big spectacle of transformation at the end, where children dressed as fairies filled the stage," says Sage. The standard fairy fancy dress outfit today is basically the same as what these Victorian children would have worn: think tinsel, sparkly sequins, and translucent, gauzy wings. ### Huge popularity Moving into the 20th Century, fairies showed few signs of buzzing off – if anything, they cemented their place. "In the Edwardian era, Peter Pan started to be performed [in 1904], and that carried on for the next 25 years," points out Slattery Clark – enough time for several generations of children to learn to clap their hands to show they believe in fairies. And as the new century lurched through global upheaval via World War One, fairy mania continued – if anything, widening and deepening. "That golden age of children's literature is really an upper middle-class phenomenon," points out Sage. "What happened from World War One onwards is it explodes beyond that, and becomes an adult concern."  (*The costumes displayed in the exhibition are based on the Flower Fairies illustrations (Credit: Pete Carr)*) Having been whisked from the woods into the nursery, fairies then made their way to troubled adults on the battlefield or waiting at home. Consider the huge popularity of a print, Piper of Dreams by Estella Canziani, during World War One: a wispy image of a man playing a pipe and surrounded by tiny fairies, it sold a staggering quarter of a million copies in just 1916. "It's about belief and it's about hope – that's what fairies represent in that time," says Sage. "The supernatural becomes a way of finding some luck and brightness, [when] people don't have control over their lives, their future, their families." > For Conan Doyle, it was all about a search for another realm of being that related to life after death, vibrations, telepathy, telekinesis – Alice Sage Today, we associate fairies with little girls – but this was an era when fairy art was popular with grown men, too. And technology helped spread it: there was an explosion in sending postcards around this time. They were cheap to buy, and free to post to a serving soldier abroad. "Suddenly everyone can send fairies, and they're flying through the air and across the seas. You can’t underestimate the practical aspect of it," says Sage. Indeed, Barker herself cut her teeth illustrating such postcards: she produced a patriotic series showing "Children of the Allies", in different forms of national dress, in 1915, followed by a series of characters from Shakespeare, before teasing the Flower Fairies with a set of "Fairies and Elves" postcards in 1918. Barker never made any claims for fairies being real – "I have never seen a fairy", she wrote in a foreword to Flower Fairies of the Wayside. But it is worth noting that she first published the Flower Fairies at a moment when the desire to believe in magical beings was at a rare high. In 1920, Britain was gripped by the story of the Cottingley Fairies, after two girls claimed to have photographed fairies at the bottom of their garden in West Yorkshire – and were widely believed. Their beautiful photographs were created by paper cut-outs, floating on hat pins. Although many were sceptical, they nonetheless also fooled many of the great and the good – the photographs were brought to prominence by no less than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, who wrote a whole book about it, The Coming of the Fairies, in 1922.  (*The Crocus Fairies from Flower Fairies of the Spring – the watercolours are still popular today with “fairycore” fans (Credit: Estate of Cicely Mary Barker 1934 Flower Fairies)*) Cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths were aged 16 and nine when they took the first photos. Many years later, in the 1980s, they admitted it was a hoax, explaining that they kept up the pretence that the fairies were real a because they felt sorry for the middle-aged men, like Conan Doyle, that so wanted to believe. There was, at the time, a serious resurgence in spiritualism in the UK, with seances and attempts to contact the dead proving understandably tempting for the bereaved. Conan Doyle himself became interested in a spirit world after his son died in the war. And for believers, this wasn't "woo-woo" nonsense – it was supposedly based in science. After all, scientific advances were genuinely explaining hitherto unknown and invisible aspects of our world. "For Conan Doyle, it was all about a search for another realm of being that related to life after death, vibrations, telepathy, telekinesis – this fascinating world on the edge of the limits of human perception," says Sage. "And obviously that's connected to the loss of his son in World War One." Like the Flower Fairies, the Cottingley photographs further reinforced the association between children and fairies, as well as cementing what a fairy looked like in the public consciousness. Yet aside from Tinkerbell, Flower Fairies are probably the only image from the fairy-fever era still instantly recognisable today. Why, of all the fairy content out there, have Barker's images endured so strongly over the past 100 years? "They were [originally published] in full colour, and a lot of books were published in black and white," begins Sage. What looked novel at the time, now seems charmingly period – but the delicacy, intricacy, and imagination of Barker's pictures can still cast a spell. "It's like dolls houses – things that are very miniaturised, but very detailed and realistic, scratch a certain itch," suggests Sage. "They are absolutely beautiful, which helps." "It's a real celebration of nature – there is a strong educational aspect to her work," puts forward Slattery Clark, emphasising the botanical accuracy of Barker’s drawings. The educational argument might sound absurd given we're discussing fairy art, but as a child who was obsessed with Flower Fairies, I can attest to the truth of it: all the wildflowers I know the names of I learned from these books.  (*Cicely Mary Barker's exquisite illustrations were hugely popular in the 1920s (Credit: Estate of Cicely Mary Barker)*) Having each fairy very specifically related to a particular plant was also commercially canny – whether Barker intended this or not, it created space for identification, for collectability, for a kind of innate brand franchising. "In children's culture, we create series that are collectable, that you identify with… It's like Pokemon or something!" laughs Sage. "When I speak to people about the Flower Fairies, especially groups of sisters, it's always 'which one were you?'" Still, Sage is pleased to see the Flower Fairies exhibited in a fine art context at the Lady Lever gallery. For a long time, men painting fairies has been considered art – but when women do it, it's just silly flowery stuff for children. "This is fine art – it's mass, popular fine art," insists Sage. "I think a lot of the diminishment of fairies and children's illustration is from a misogynist, snobbish and elitist art historical tradition. I'm so excited to see this kind of exhibition, that reclaims this history." Consider this a beating of wings, then, that takes fairies back out of the nursery – and into the gallery. Flower Fairies is at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight Village, UK until 5 November. Holly Williams' novel What Time is Love? is out in paperback now.*___* *** Join !fantasy@lemm.ml

Fantasy books, stories, ＆c Historical_General • 12 months ago • 100%

www.bbc.com

# When Britain was gripped by 'fairy mania' *"Fairycore" may be trending on social media today but 100 years ago supernatural sprites were a national obsession. Holly Williams explores fairy fever.* Imagine a fairy. Is the picture that appears in your mind's eye a tiny, pretty, magical figure – a childish wisp with insect-like wings and a dress made of petals? If so, it's likely you've been influenced by Cicely Mary Barker, the British illustrator who created the Flower Fairies. 2023 marks 100 years since the publication of her first book of poems and pictures, Flower Fairies of the Spring – an anniversary currently being celebrated in an exhibition at the Lady Lever Gallery in Merseyside, UK. The Flower Fairies' influence has endured: they have never been out of print, and continue to be popular around the world – big in Japan and in Italy, where Gucci released a children's range featuring Barker's prints in 2022. Billie Eilish recently had Flower Fairies tattooed on her hand, while their whimsical, floral aesthetic can be seen in the TikTok "fairycore" trend.  (*An exhibition at the Lady Lever Art Gallery explores the Flower Fairies phenomenon, and features pantomime costumes (Credit: Pete Carr)*) Barker's delicate watercolours certainly helped cement several tropes we now consider classic – almost essential, in fact – in the iconography of the fairy: they are miniature, sweet and youthful, they are intertwined with plants and the natural world, and they are distinctly twee. Yet her drawings were also "firmly footed in realism" points out Fiona Slattery Clark, curator of the show. "The children were all painted from life [and] her plants and flowers are as realistic as possible." Barker drew children from the nursery school her sister ran in their house in Croydon near London; each was assigned a flower or tree, and Barker's detailed illustrations were botanically accurate – she would source samples from Kew Gardens, says Slattery Clark. Even the petal-like wings and fairy outfits were closely based on plants: an acorn cup becoming a jaunty cap, a harebell becoming a prettily scalloped skirt. > For many hundreds of years, fairies were not necessarily tiny and fey, but grotesque or fierce elemental forces The Flower Fairies were an immediate hit – but Barker was far from the only artist of her era to find success with fairies. In fact, fairy fever swelled within the United Kingdom for over half a century, reaching something of a peak around the time the Flower Fairies emerged in 1923. Over 350 fairy books were published in the UK between 1920 and 1925, including in Enid Blyton's first fairy foray, a collection of poems called Real Fairies in 1923. Fairy art even had the stamp of royal approval: Queen Mary was a fan of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite's ethereal drawings, and helped popularise them by sending them in postcard form. Fairies have long been with us – in our imaginations, at least. But for many hundreds of years, they were not necessarily tiny and fey, but grotesque or fierce elemental forces, capable of great darkness. "In 1800, if you thought your child was a fairy it would have been like demonic possession – you would have put that child in the fire to drive out the fairy," points out Alice Sage, a curator and historian.  (*Each of Barker's fairies corresponded to a plant, tree or flower – pictured, the Silver Birch Fairy (Credit: Estate of Cicely Mary Barker 1934 Flower Fairies)*) Yet within 100 years, the whole conception of fairies completely changed. "Throughout the 19th Century, fairies became increasingly miniaturised, sapped of their power – trapped in the nursery," says Sage. As the Victorian era progressed, they are increasingly associated with childhood; as their popularity grew, they shrank. But first, fairies became a fashionable subject for Victorian artists, often taking inspiration from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. John Anster Fitzgerald, Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais, Joseph Noel Paton, Arthur Rackham and even JMW Turner – among many others – painted supernatural sprites from the 1840s onwards. But there was still a sense of otherworldly strangeness in many of their depictions – as seen in the work of Richard Dadd, who made his hyper-intricate fairy paintings while living in a Victorian asylum after killing his father. Then two wider cultural developments came along that changed fairy reputations forever. One was that "children's literature happened", says Sage. The Victorians promoted the idea of childhood as a time of innocence, requiring its own entertainment. Illustrated children's books really took off from the 1870s, with fairies a staple, and increasingly cutesy, feature. The second was pantomime. "Every Victorian pantomime would have this big spectacle of transformation at the end, where children dressed as fairies filled the stage," says Sage. The standard fairy fancy dress outfit today is basically the same as what these Victorian children would have worn: think tinsel, sparkly sequins, and translucent, gauzy wings. ### Huge popularity Moving into the 20th Century, fairies showed few signs of buzzing off – if anything, they cemented their place. "In the Edwardian era, Peter Pan started to be performed [in 1904], and that carried on for the next 25 years," points out Slattery Clark – enough time for several generations of children to learn to clap their hands to show they believe in fairies. And as the new century lurched through global upheaval via World War One, fairy mania continued – if anything, widening and deepening. "That golden age of children's literature is really an upper middle-class phenomenon," points out Sage. "What happened from World War One onwards is it explodes beyond that, and becomes an adult concern."  (*The costumes displayed in the exhibition are based on the Flower Fairies illustrations (Credit: Pete Carr)*) Having been whisked from the woods into the nursery, fairies then made their way to troubled adults on the battlefield or waiting at home. Consider the huge popularity of a print, Piper of Dreams by Estella Canziani, during World War One: a wispy image of a man playing a pipe and surrounded by tiny fairies, it sold a staggering quarter of a million copies in just 1916. "It's about belief and it's about hope – that's what fairies represent in that time," says Sage. "The supernatural becomes a way of finding some luck and brightness, [when] people don't have control over their lives, their future, their families." > For Conan Doyle, it was all about a search for another realm of being that related to life after death, vibrations, telepathy, telekinesis – Alice Sage Today, we associate fairies with little girls – but this was an era when fairy art was popular with grown men, too. And technology helped spread it: there was an explosion in sending postcards around this time. They were cheap to buy, and free to post to a serving soldier abroad. "Suddenly everyone can send fairies, and they're flying through the air and across the seas. You can’t underestimate the practical aspect of it," says Sage. Indeed, Barker herself cut her teeth illustrating such postcards: she produced a patriotic series showing "Children of the Allies", in different forms of national dress, in 1915, followed by a series of characters from Shakespeare, before teasing the Flower Fairies with a set of "Fairies and Elves" postcards in 1918. Barker never made any claims for fairies being real – "I have never seen a fairy", she wrote in a foreword to Flower Fairies of the Wayside. But it is worth noting that she first published the Flower Fairies at a moment when the desire to believe in magical beings was at a rare high. In 1920, Britain was gripped by the story of the Cottingley Fairies, after two girls claimed to have photographed fairies at the bottom of their garden in West Yorkshire – and were widely believed. Their beautiful photographs were created by paper cut-outs, floating on hat pins. Although many were sceptical, they nonetheless also fooled many of the great and the good – the photographs were brought to prominence by no less than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, who wrote a whole book about it, The Coming of the Fairies, in 1922.  (*The Crocus Fairies from Flower Fairies of the Spring – the watercolours are still popular today with “fairycore” fans (Credit: Estate of Cicely Mary Barker 1934 Flower Fairies)*) Cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths were aged 16 and nine when they took the first photos. Many years later, in the 1980s, they admitted it was a hoax, explaining that they kept up the pretence that the fairies were real a because they felt sorry for the middle-aged men, like Conan Doyle, that so wanted to believe. There was, at the time, a serious resurgence in spiritualism in the UK, with seances and attempts to contact the dead proving understandably tempting for the bereaved. Conan Doyle himself became interested in a spirit world after his son died in the war. And for believers, this wasn't "woo-woo" nonsense – it was supposedly based in science. After all, scientific advances were genuinely explaining hitherto unknown and invisible aspects of our world. "For Conan Doyle, it was all about a search for another realm of being that related to life after death, vibrations, telepathy, telekinesis – this fascinating world on the edge of the limits of human perception," says Sage. "And obviously that's connected to the loss of his son in World War One." Like the Flower Fairies, the Cottingley photographs further reinforced the association between children and fairies, as well as cementing what a fairy looked like in the public consciousness. Yet aside from Tinkerbell, Flower Fairies are probably the only image from the fairy-fever era still instantly recognisable today. Why, of all the fairy content out there, have Barker's images endured so strongly over the past 100 years? "They were [originally published] in full colour, and a lot of books were published in black and white," begins Sage. What looked novel at the time, now seems charmingly period – but the delicacy, intricacy, and imagination of Barker's pictures can still cast a spell. "It's like dolls houses – things that are very miniaturised, but very detailed and realistic, scratch a certain itch," suggests Sage. "They are absolutely beautiful, which helps." "It's a real celebration of nature – there is a strong educational aspect to her work," puts forward Slattery Clark, emphasising the botanical accuracy of Barker’s drawings. The educational argument might sound absurd given we're discussing fairy art, but as a child who was obsessed with Flower Fairies, I can attest to the truth of it: all the wildflowers I know the names of I learned from these books.  (*Cicely Mary Barker's exquisite illustrations were hugely popular in the 1920s (Credit: Estate of Cicely Mary Barker)*) Having each fairy very specifically related to a particular plant was also commercially canny – whether Barker intended this or not, it created space for identification, for collectability, for a kind of innate brand franchising. "In children's culture, we create series that are collectable, that you identify with… It's like Pokemon or something!" laughs Sage. "When I speak to people about the Flower Fairies, especially groups of sisters, it's always 'which one were you?'" Still, Sage is pleased to see the Flower Fairies exhibited in a fine art context at the Lady Lever gallery. For a long time, men painting fairies has been considered art – but when women do it, it's just silly flowery stuff for children. "This is fine art – it's mass, popular fine art," insists Sage. "I think a lot of the diminishment of fairies and children's illustration is from a misogynist, snobbish and elitist art historical tradition. I'm so excited to see this kind of exhibition, that reclaims this history." Consider this a beating of wings, then, that takes fairies back out of the nursery – and into the gallery. Flower Fairies is at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight Village, UK until 5 November. Holly Williams' novel What Time is Love? is out in paperback now.*___*

History Historical_General • 12 months ago • 96%

aeon.co

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/10358195 > # The road from Rome > > > *The fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t a tragedy for civilisation. It was a lucky break for humanity as a whole* > > For an empire that collapsed more than 1,500 years ago, ancient Rome maintains a powerful presence. About 1 billion people speak languages derived from Latin; Roman law shapes modern norms; and Roman architecture has been widely imitated. Christianity, which the empire embraced in its sunset years, remains the world’s largest religion. Yet all these enduring influences pale against Rome’s most important legacy: its fall. Had its empire not unravelled, or had it been replaced by a similarly overpowering successor, the world wouldn’t have become modern. > > This isn’t the way that we ordinarily think about an event that has been lamented pretty much ever since it happened. In the late 18th century, in his monumental work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788), the British historian Edward Gibbon called it ‘the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind’. Tankloads of ink have been expended on explaining it. Back in 1984, the German historian Alexander Demandt patiently compiled no fewer than 210 different reasons for Rome’s demise that had been put forward over time. And the flood of books and papers shows no sign of abating: most recently, disease and climate change have been pressed into service. Wouldn’t only a calamity of the first order warrant this kind of attention? > > It’s true that Rome’s collapse reverberated widely, at least in the western – mostly European – half of its empire. (A shrinking portion of the eastern half, later known as Byzantium, survived for another millennium.) Although some regions were harder hit than others, none escaped unscathed. Monumental structures fell into disrepair; previously thriving cities emptied out; Rome itself turned into a shadow of its former grand self, with shepherds tending their flocks among the ruins. Trade and coin use thinned out, and the art of writing retreated. Population numbers plummeted. > > But a few benefits were already being felt at the time. Roman power had fostered immense inequality: its collapse brought down the plutocratic ruling class, releasing the labouring masses from oppressive exploitation. The new Germanic rulers operated with lower overheads and proved less adept at collecting rents and taxes. Forensic archaeology reveals that people grew to be taller, likely thanks to reduced inequality, a better diet and lower disease loads. Yet these changes didn’t last. > > The real payoff of Rome’s demise took much longer to emerge. When Goths, Vandals, Franks, Lombards and Anglo-Saxons carved up the empire, they broke the imperial order so thoroughly that it never returned. Their 5th-century takeover was only the beginning: in a very real sense, Rome’s decline continued well after its fall – turning Gibbon’s title on its head. When the Germans took charge, they initially relied on Roman institutions of governance to run their new kingdoms. But they did a poor job of maintaining that vital infrastructure. Before long, nobles and warriors made themselves at home on the lands whose yield kings had assigned to them. While this relieved rulers of the onerous need to count and tax the peasantry, it also starved them of revenue and made it harder for them to control their supporters. > > When, in the year 800, the Frankish king Charlemagne decided that he was a new Roman emperor, it was already too late. In the following centuries, royal power declined as aristocrats asserted ever greater autonomy and knights set up their own castles. The Holy Roman Empire, established in Germany and northern Italy in 962, never properly functioned as a unified state. For much of the Middle Ages, power was widely dispersed among different groups. Kings claimed political supremacy but often found it hard to exercise control beyond their own domains. Nobles and their armed vassals wielded the bulk of military power. The Catholic Church, increasingly centralised under an ascendant papacy, had a lock on the dominant belief system. Bishops and abbots cooperated with secular authorities, but carefully guarded their prerogatives. Economic power was concentrated among feudal lords and in autonomous cities dominated by assertive associations of artisans and merchants. > > *** > > *Read more through the link. And join lemm.ee/c/history*

aeon.co

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/10358195 # The road from Rome > *The fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t a tragedy for civilisation. It was a lucky break for humanity as a whole* For an empire that collapsed more than 1,500 years ago, ancient Rome maintains a powerful presence. About 1 billion people speak languages derived from Latin; Roman law shapes modern norms; and Roman architecture has been widely imitated. Christianity, which the empire embraced in its sunset years, remains the world’s largest religion. Yet all these enduring influences pale against Rome’s most important legacy: its fall. Had its empire not unravelled, or had it been replaced by a similarly overpowering successor, the world wouldn’t have become modern. This isn’t the way that we ordinarily think about an event that has been lamented pretty much ever since it happened. In the late 18th century, in his monumental work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788), the British historian Edward Gibbon called it ‘the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind’. Tankloads of ink have been expended on explaining it. Back in 1984, the German historian Alexander Demandt patiently compiled no fewer than 210 different reasons for Rome’s demise that had been put forward over time. And the flood of books and papers shows no sign of abating: most recently, disease and climate change have been pressed into service. Wouldn’t only a calamity of the first order warrant this kind of attention? It’s true that Rome’s collapse reverberated widely, at least in the western – mostly European – half of its empire. (A shrinking portion of the eastern half, later known as Byzantium, survived for another millennium.) Although some regions were harder hit than others, none escaped unscathed. Monumental structures fell into disrepair; previously thriving cities emptied out; Rome itself turned into a shadow of its former grand self, with shepherds tending their flocks among the ruins. Trade and coin use thinned out, and the art of writing retreated. Population numbers plummeted. But a few benefits were already being felt at the time. Roman power had fostered immense inequality: its collapse brought down the plutocratic ruling class, releasing the labouring masses from oppressive exploitation. The new Germanic rulers operated with lower overheads and proved less adept at collecting rents and taxes. Forensic archaeology reveals that people grew to be taller, likely thanks to reduced inequality, a better diet and lower disease loads. Yet these changes didn’t last. The real payoff of Rome’s demise took much longer to emerge. When Goths, Vandals, Franks, Lombards and Anglo-Saxons carved up the empire, they broke the imperial order so thoroughly that it never returned. Their 5th-century takeover was only the beginning: in a very real sense, Rome’s decline continued well after its fall – turning Gibbon’s title on its head. When the Germans took charge, they initially relied on Roman institutions of governance to run their new kingdoms. But they did a poor job of maintaining that vital infrastructure. Before long, nobles and warriors made themselves at home on the lands whose yield kings had assigned to them. While this relieved rulers of the onerous need to count and tax the peasantry, it also starved them of revenue and made it harder for them to control their supporters. When, in the year 800, the Frankish king Charlemagne decided that he was a new Roman emperor, it was already too late. In the following centuries, royal power declined as aristocrats asserted ever greater autonomy and knights set up their own castles. The Holy Roman Empire, established in Germany and northern Italy in 962, never properly functioned as a unified state. For much of the Middle Ages, power was widely dispersed among different groups. Kings claimed political supremacy but often found it hard to exercise control beyond their own domains. Nobles and their armed vassals wielded the bulk of military power. The Catholic Church, increasingly centralised under an ascendant papacy, had a lock on the dominant belief system. Bishops and abbots cooperated with secular authorities, but carefully guarded their prerogatives. Economic power was concentrated among feudal lords and in autonomous cities dominated by assertive associations of artisans and merchants. *** *Read more through the link. And join lemm.ee/c/history*

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# The road from Rome > *The fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t a tragedy for civilisation. It was a lucky break for humanity as a whole* For an empire that collapsed more than 1,500 years ago, ancient Rome maintains a powerful presence. About 1 billion people speak languages derived from Latin; Roman law shapes modern norms; and Roman architecture has been widely imitated. Christianity, which the empire embraced in its sunset years, remains the world’s largest religion. Yet all these enduring influences pale against Rome’s most important legacy: its fall. Had its empire not unravelled, or had it been replaced by a similarly overpowering successor, the world wouldn’t have become modern. This isn’t the way that we ordinarily think about an event that has been lamented pretty much ever since it happened. In the late 18th century, in his monumental work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788), the British historian Edward Gibbon called it ‘the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind’. Tankloads of ink have been expended on explaining it. Back in 1984, the German historian Alexander Demandt patiently compiled no fewer than 210 different reasons for Rome’s demise that had been put forward over time. And the flood of books and papers shows no sign of abating: most recently, disease and climate change have been pressed into service. Wouldn’t only a calamity of the first order warrant this kind of attention? It’s true that Rome’s collapse reverberated widely, at least in the western – mostly European – half of its empire. (A shrinking portion of the eastern half, later known as Byzantium, survived for another millennium.) Although some regions were harder hit than others, none escaped unscathed. Monumental structures fell into disrepair; previously thriving cities emptied out; Rome itself turned into a shadow of its former grand self, with shepherds tending their flocks among the ruins. Trade and coin use thinned out, and the art of writing retreated. Population numbers plummeted. But a few benefits were already being felt at the time. Roman power had fostered immense inequality: its collapse brought down the plutocratic ruling class, releasing the labouring masses from oppressive exploitation. The new Germanic rulers operated with lower overheads and proved less adept at collecting rents and taxes. Forensic archaeology reveals that people grew to be taller, likely thanks to reduced inequality, a better diet and lower disease loads. Yet these changes didn’t last. The real payoff of Rome’s demise took much longer to emerge. When Goths, Vandals, Franks, Lombards and Anglo-Saxons carved up the empire, they broke the imperial order so thoroughly that it never returned. Their 5th-century takeover was only the beginning: in a very real sense, Rome’s decline continued well after its fall – turning Gibbon’s title on its head. When the Germans took charge, they initially relied on Roman institutions of governance to run their new kingdoms. But they did a poor job of maintaining that vital infrastructure. Before long, nobles and warriors made themselves at home on the lands whose yield kings had assigned to them. While this relieved rulers of the onerous need to count and tax the peasantry, it also starved them of revenue and made it harder for them to control their supporters. When, in the year 800, the Frankish king Charlemagne decided that he was a new Roman emperor, it was already too late. In the following centuries, royal power declined as aristocrats asserted ever greater autonomy and knights set up their own castles. The Holy Roman Empire, established in Germany and northern Italy in 962, never properly functioned as a unified state. For much of the Middle Ages, power was widely dispersed among different groups. Kings claimed political supremacy but often found it hard to exercise control beyond their own domains. Nobles and their armed vassals wielded the bulk of military power. The Catholic Church, increasingly centralised under an ascendant papacy, had a lock on the dominant belief system. Bishops and abbots cooperated with secular authorities, but carefully guarded their prerogatives. Economic power was concentrated among feudal lords and in autonomous cities dominated by assertive associations of artisans and merchants. *** *Read more through the link. And join lemm.ee/c/history*

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# Do not forget them > *Thousands of Indigenous children suffered and died in residential ‘schools’ around the world. Their stories must be heard* Between 1890 and 1978, at Kamloops Indian Residential School in the Canadian province of British Columbia, thousands of Indigenous children were taught to ‘forget’. Separated from their families, these children were compelled to forget their languages, their identities and their cultures. Through separation and forgetting, settler governments and teachers believed they were not only helping Indigenous children, but the nation itself. Canada would make progress, settlers hoped, if Indigenous children could just be made more like white people. In 1890, this curriculum of forgetting was forcibly taught in the few wooden classrooms and living quarters that comprised Kamloops Indian Residential School. But in the early 20th century, the institution expanded, and a complex of redbrick buildings was constructed to accommodate an increase in students. In every year of the 1950s, the total enrolment at the ‘school’ exceeded 500 Indigenous children, making this the largest institution of its kind in Canada. Today, the redbrick buildings are still standing on the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation’s land. You can still look through the glass windows and see the old classrooms and halls. You can walk the grounds, toward the site of the former orchard or the banks of the nearby river. And you can stand over the graves of 215 children who died right here, at Kamloops Indian Residential School. Some never saw their fourth birthday. You might think the Kamloops ‘school’ and its unmarked graves are an isolated and regrettable part of Canadian history, which we have now moved beyond. But that is a lie. Those 215 graves are part of a much larger political project that continues to this day. When the burial sites at Kamloops were identified in May 2021 using ground-penetrating radar, news of the ‘discovery’ spread through international media. First-hand accounts of former students and Indigenous community members began to spread, too, and it soon became clear to the wider world that the ‘discovery’ was really a confirmation of what Indigenous peoples in Canada had known for generations. As Rosanne Casimir, the current Kúkpi7 (chief) of Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, explains it, the search for bodies was a deliberate attempt to verify a knowing: > We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths … Some were as young as three years old. We sought out a way to confirm that knowing out of deepest respect and love for those lost children and their families, understanding that Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc is the final resting place of these children. The testimonies from survivors and their descendants were met with expressions of shock and disbelief from settler Canadians: how could this have happened? Why didn’t we know anything about this? But the knowledge was no secret. It was publicly available in institutional records; it was in the testimonies of Indigenous peoples; and it was in 20th-century reports made by government officials. We didn’t just choose to forget, we participated in a grand project of forgetting. During the past decade or so, I have been finding out what I can – as a white British psychologist with longstanding interests in education and social justice – about this forgetting and the attempts made to forcibly assimilate Indigenous peoples through residential ‘schooling’. I am grateful beyond measure to the Indigenous peoples from Canada and elsewhere who have generously shared their experiences and stories with me over the years. Very often, their parting advice to me has been something along the lines of: ‘You should educate your own people about this.’ This essay is my most recent attempt to do so. Abuses didn’t take place only in the dim and distant past Yes, I’ve been honoured and privileged to have had Indigenous survivors of ‘educational’ systems, and their descendants, share their experiences and perspectives with me. But hearing the truth directly isn’t the only way for settlers and Europeans to learn and remember. The records are there, filled with the stories of those left to drown in the wake of settler colonisation. So, what does that say for our apparent ‘shock’? What does our ‘surprise’ really mean? These questions become more confronting when we accept that abuses didn’t take place only in the dim and distant past. Consider this testimony from 1998 of Willie Sport who was a student, in the 1930s, of Alberni Indian Residential School in British Columbia: > I spoke Indian in front of Reverend Pitts, the principal of the Alberni school. He said: ‘Were you speaking Indian?’ Before I could answer, he pulled down my pants and whipped my behind until he got tired. When I moved, he put my head between his knees and hit me harder. He used a thick conveyor belt, from a machine, to whip me. > > That Principal Pitts was trying to kill us. He wouldn’t tell parents about their kids being sick and those kids would die, right there in the school. The plan was to kill all the Indians they could, so Pitts never told the families that their kids had tuberculosis. > > I got sick with TB and Pitts never told anyone. I was getting weaker each day, and I would have died there with all those others but my Dad found out and took me away from that school. I would be dead today if he hadn’t come. Abuses took place well into the 20th century. The revelation of the burial sites at Kamloops and the ensuing ‘shock’ of settler Canadians shows that forgetting – in the form of unlearning, concealment, or deception – is an integral part of the very system that killed those children and erased them from settler memories. *Read the rest through the link. * *** The previous spammer on this community would post gory stories from history, for sensationalist clickbait, to push malware onto them using enthralling stories of horror. But it is a different experience to realise that the horrors are not past and dead, but present and pervasive as you read this.

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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/10323811 > Frickles talks Harry Potter fanfiction, writing it, and more! > > (Author of A Malignant Ruse Harry/Daphne, A Discordant Pattern, etc)

Fan Fiction Historical_General • 12 months ago • 80%

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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/10323811 > Frickles talks Harry Potter fanfiction, writing it, and more! > > (Author of A Malignant Ruse Harry/Daphne, A Discordant Pattern, etc)