This is much more fun.
And really to take the whole reductio to its absurdum, how about a GoT version?
Neat!
Friday, 8 May 2026
Four Swords of Wayland
According to legend, the Great King and Emperor Charlemagne had four swords, each forged by Wayland the Smith.His own sword was called Joyeuse. He wielded it in battle against the Turk, and after his death it became the coronation sword of the Kings of France. After the Revolution it was moved to the Louvre museum, where it remains to this day.
A second sword, known as Durendal, Charlemagne gave to his most famous paladin Roland, who carried it at the battle of the Roncevaux Pass, where he died. With his last strength Roland cast Durendal away, rather than let it be captured by the Enemy, and there is to this day a sword protruding the living rock of a cliff-face in Rocamadour in south-western France. It can still be seen by visitors to the region, despite the local tourist board’s insistence that it is not original.
Also at the Battle of the Roncevaux Pass died Bishop Turpin of Rheims, another ally of Charlemagne, whose sword, though less well known than Durendal, was also forged by Wayland from the same steel. Its name was called Almace.
A fourth sword, also brother to Durendal, was given by Charlemagne to his former enemy Ogier the Dane, who thereafter became one of the Great King’s most loyal liegemen in the Turkish wars. Its name was Curtana, and it had long before been the sword of Sir Tristan of Lyonesse.
Ogier is the Danish equivalent of King Arthur, and according to one legend after his last battle he was taken to Avalon by Morgan le Fay. Also like Arthur, as well as like Frederick Barbarossa of Germany and Duke St Wenceslaus of Bohemia, he is thought to be not dead but sleeping under a mountain, waiting to return to his country’s aid in its darkest hour.
Ogier’s sword Curtana though was broken, much like Siegfried’s sword in The Nibelungenlied. It has since become one of the coronation swords of the Kings of England, where it is called the Sword of Mercy and is borne in the coronation ceremony as one of the three Swords of Justice. According to legend, it was broken by an angel when an attempt was made to use it to commit an unjust act. Some say that the sword that is used to this day was recreated for the coronation of Charles II. Others though maintain that the Swords of Justice were amongst the few royal relics that survived being melted down by Oliver Cromwell.
Heraldry is Cool
What is it about sigils and logos? My own feeling is that Game of Thrones finally made heraldry cool - in a geeky way, of course, but still. Previously, having a Homer Simpson mug or an Eric Cartman throw pillow was a way of demonstrating that you were in the in-crowd - provided, that is to say, your in-crowd was vaguely studenty. It showed that you were hip and with it (and studenty) and not afraid of your inner kid, whilst at the same time it showed that you were postmodern and trendy enough to know that even though The Simpsons was a kids' show it had lots of adult jokes in it too, and even though it was made by crazy far-out liberals it also supported old-fashioned family values, and so on. Meanwhile, having the White Tree of Númenor on a throw pillow was about as cool as having a crucifix on your wall. And having an Aslan throw pillow was tantamount to asking for a nonce-bashing.
So far, so uncool! Of course, context really was everything. Darth Vader mug? Not cool! Darth Vader toaster? Cool! Aliens t-shirt? Not at all cool! United States Colonial Marine Corps t-shirt? Very cool! A Homer Simpson bobblehead is not remotely cool unless somebody asks you about it and you say "Even Homer nods." Which would make it über-cool indeedy. A Simpsons hip-flask must obviously be used sparingly, but in the right setting one sees that it could have its uses. I'm skeptical about any sort of James Bond fragrance for men. The Pope's Cologne, on the other hand, is surely a must-have for even the most heterosexual fogey.
On one level then, the appeal of drinking your tea (or your beer) out of a mug (or a stein) with a direwolf on it is quite straightforward. But the fact that it's merchandising for a cable-TV spin-off of a popular series of fantasy novels makes it qualitatively different to drinking one's tea out of a mug with Brian Griffin on it. (OTOH a martini glass with Brian Griffin on it clearly is acceptable, provided you're drinking martinis. Ditto a coffee mug with Garfield on it, provided it's a picture of Garfield actually drinking coffee. Out of a mug.) The point simply is that the House of Stark is cool in a way that UNIT and SHIELD (with apologies) simply aren't, direwolves are cool in way that patronuses aren't and dæmons certainly aren't, and knowing what 'Winter is coming' means is much, much cooler (Ahem!) than knowing not to titillare the old dormientem draconem.
But then there's also another point to do with the nature of Game of Thrones itself. Because of its imaginary military, faux mediaeval setting, the heraldry of Game of Thrones actually really matters in a way that the emblems on the sides of star-ships and space-helmets in Star Wars and/or Trek frankly don't. In fact the direwolves and the lions rampant and the crowned stags and so on are as important in Westeros as Quenya and Sindarin are in Middle-earth. And so of course they're a marketeer's dream, just as (and let's be honest) heraldry has always been in real life. Slap the Royal Arms on a mug and it automatically becomes a "collectors' item" jubilee mug. Ditto the Union Flag (which, unlike official Olympics and FIFA World Cup logos, is very much out of copyright).* And what works in "real life" works just as well in the Forbidden Planet.
*And, to be fair, 'twas ever thus. In the 18th century, during the Seven Years War, when Frederick the Great was at the height of his popularity in England, there was a positive boom in tobacco jars inscribed with the royal arms of Prussia. (One can't exactly imagine Old Fritz made much off the back of them either.)
'The King's Ankus'
It's my favourite of the stories in the two Jungle Books. I recently re-watched 'Rumpole and the Judge's Elbow' again on DVD with Richard. Rumpole quotes from the poem.
The illustrations are of course by the excellent Pierre Joubert.
THE SONG OF THE LITTLE HUNTER
Ere Mor the Peacock flutters, ere the Monkey People cry,
Ere Chil the Kite swoops down a furlong sheer,
Through the Jungle very softly Hits a shadow and a sigh —
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear!
Very softly down the glade runs a waiting, watching shade,
And the whisper spreads and widens far and near;
And the sweat is on thy brow, for he passes even now —
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear!
Ere the moon has climbed the mountain, ere the rocks are ribbed with light,
When the downward-dipping trails are dank and drear,
Comes a breathing hard behind thee — snuffle-snuffle through the night —
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!
On thy knees and draw the bow; bid the shrilling arrow go;
In the empty, mocking thicket plunge the spear;
But thy hands are loosed and weak, and the blood has left thy cheek —
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!
When the heat-cloud sucks the tempest, when the slivered pine-trees fall,
When the blinding, blaring rain-squalls lash and veer
Through the war-gongs of the thunder rings a voice more loud than all —
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!
Now the spates are banked and deep; now the footless boulders leap —
Now the lightning shows each littlest leaf-rib clear —
But thy throat is shut and dried, and thy heart against thy side Hammers:
Fear, O Little Hunter — this is Fear!
The Legend of Ar
Our divine ancestors, the Aryans, came to Earth from outer space.
Forged in a matrix of ice and war, Ar became the first divine artist warrior.
But then... the Aryan was lead into temptation by soft swarthy people from bountiful lands.
And Ar's blood is polluted. And Ar grows weak.
And Ar becomes the slave of the Jews.
Grail Knights! Yes, because you are Grail Knights. lf we guard the purity of our blood, we have it in our power to again straddle the Earth like supermen.
Forged in a matrix of ice and war, Ar became the first divine artist warrior.
But then... the Aryan was lead into temptation by soft swarthy people from bountiful lands.
And Ar's blood is polluted. And Ar grows weak.
And Ar becomes the slave of the Jews.
Grail Knights! Yes, because you are Grail Knights. lf we guard the purity of our blood, we have it in our power to again straddle the Earth like supermen.
[From Menno Meyjes's 2002 film Max]
Robert Manson, circa 1950
Dark Towers
For what it's worth, my feeling at the moment is that the Dark Tower itself was not originally part of the story of Childe Roland. Jacobs seems to have introduced the Dark Tower into his more famous version almost solely on the questionable evidence of Shakespeare, and it is wholly absent from Robert Jamieson's older version, of which its recorder noted
It was recited in a sort of formal, drowsy, measured, monotonous recitative, mixing prose and verse, in the manner of the Icelandic Sagas, and as is still the manner of reciting tales and fabulas aniles in the winter evenings, not only among the Islanders, Norwegians, and Swedes, but also among the Lowlanders in the north of Scotland, and among the Highlanders and Irish.
More troubling of course is the origin of Old Tom's 'Fie, foh, and fum'.
Child Rowland to the dark tower came,His word was still,--Fie, foh, and fum,I smell the blood of a British man.
[King Lear, Act III, Scene iv]
It sounds like it's found its way into Roland from Jack the Giantkiller, but Jamieson vowed it was authentic.
What saves us of course is the 'still'. The joke, such as it is, is presumably that Child Rowland - he of the quest to rescue his sister from elfland - has later on turned up in the middle of the night at a little fort where everyone has gone to bed. And still he hears the dreaded bogle's voice pursuing him. Are we to imagine some Orestes-type version of Roland, perhaps driven made by the sound of the pursuing vengeance of elfland? In the context of the play, of course, this is Edgar as Poor Tom voicing his scepticism about entering Gloucester's hovel - not necessarily fearing betrayal, but at least staying in character as a wandering vagrant and perhaps fearing that at close quarters his ruse will be discovered and he'll be identified. (In the end it isn't.)
So what then was the 'dark tower'? Even without capitalisation, the definite article suggests is has independent existence if not of Child Roland then at least of Shakespeare. It is of course possible that, as well as the still extant story of Child Rowland's going off to rescue his siblings, that was another that did indeed feature just such an un-illuminated building. One might bear in mind, after all, that as well as the story of Jack and his beanstalk and his ending up being the bane of the Giant there are various other stories about what Jack got up to with the Giant's daughters. At any rate, we can feel certain that Shakespeare's audience would have got the reference.
Since it is quite possible that the Arthurian elements that Jamieson himself introduced to his version of the tale were not wholly incongruous, to my mind it is just possible that such a Dark Tower could have had an Arthurian or quasi-Arthurian origin in Caer Wydyr, the silent tower. Silence is of course associated with the dead not just in Celtic literature but also in Nineteenth-Century romanticism - quite possibly on the basis of the simple etymological principle that the infernal is literally that which cannot speak.
On the subject of Arthuriana, Shakespeare himself even introduces Merlin into King Lear (and quite randomly, at that), not to mention other extraneous matter (including Lear himself!) that he would have picked up, whether directly or indirectly, from Geoffrey of Monmouth. It's worth asking what it says about England's greatest playwright that none of his plays actually feature the greatest hero of English literature, but one must perhaps assume that since the death of Elizabeth Tudor's uncle the whole Matter of Britain had become deeply unfashionable.
And if Childe Roland without the Dark Tower sounds a lot like Parsifal without the Holy Grail, it is worth reflecting that the (original?) Welsh version of Parsifal, 'Peredur ap Evrawc', contains various objects that later turn up in Grail-lore in one form or another, but doesn't actually contain the cup itself.
Then again, after all, who was Roland meant to be? It feels instinctively de trop to imagine that he could actually have been Charlemagne's famous Paladin. It's slightly more appealing a thought though that he may have a been a genuine fairy-tale character, somewhere between Sir Percival and Jack the Giantkiller, but perhaps with elements of both.
As for the Dark Tower, it has changed a great deal. For Shakespeare, the "joke" implicitly is simply that a tower where there aren't any lights on ought be silent, not echoing with the blood-curdling cries of bogles. For Robert Browning, similarly, the tower is simply a place of failure and disappointment - empty, by inference, and utterly inhospitable, a 'round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart, / Built of brown stone, without a counter-part / In the whole world.' And yet even just to have reached it and to wind the "slughorn" before it is an achievement of sorts! In many ways, as it happens, Roland in 1855 is a forerunner of Walter de la Mare's famous 'Traveller' of 1912. (Did he take a way through the woods to get there, or even stop by them on a snowy evening? We shall, of course, never know!)
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| Thomas Moran, 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came' (1859) |
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| Alexander Woollcott and George S. Kaufman, The Dark Tower (1933) |
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| Totleigh Towers in The Code of the Woosters (1938) - in real life Highclere Castle, long before it was the (far more sinister!) Downton Abbey |
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| And Deverill Hall (aka Joyce Grove, Nettlebed), from The Mating Season (1949) |
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(1943) |
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| (1946) |
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| (1946) |
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| Tolkien's Barad-dûr |
The painting by J.R.R. Tolkien shows a door on the eastern side of the fortress with Mount Doom to the westward. It was published in The J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar 1973 and 1974, and again in The Lord of the Rings 1977 Calendar in a slightly enlarged and truncated reproduction together with the sketch of Orodruin as an inset.
Then at last his gaze was held: wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement, black, immeasurably strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel, tower of adamant, he saw it: Barad-dûr, Fortress of Sauron. All hope left him.
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| C S Lewis's version |
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| (1969) |
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| Dungeons & Dragons module 'The Dark Tower' (1980) |
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| 'Dark Tower' the game (1981) |
The ad with Orson Welles is here. There's a man showing how to play the actual game here.
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| (1981) |
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| The Fortress of Ultimate Darkness from Time Bandits (1981) |
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The Dark Fortress from Krull (1983) |
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| (1987) |
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| Evelyn Coleman, Mystery of the Dark Tower: a Bessie Mystery, from the series AmericanGirl History Mysteries (2000) |
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| The Almoayyed Tower, Bahrain (2003) |
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| 'The Dark Tower - Volume One: Dark Tower Dreams', from Atlantean Publishing's The Dark Tower Series (2006-) |
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| Nox Arcana's album 'The Dark Tower' (2011) |
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| Finally, this (2013) looks weird. It's based on Browning, but it's a sort of 'Choose Your Own Adventure' computer game. |
Gay Nazis
I was half amused and half disappointed to find one of dear old Peter Tatchell's ageing hobby-horses apparently still doing the rounds on Raybeard's fine blog. The line, that William L Shirer's pop-history version of Nazi Germany* is defective because there aren't enough gays in it, is one that Peter was in fact peddling in the mid to late 1990s, when he was slightly less respectable and pro-Establishment than he is now. In fact he actually used to defend Holocaust denial on the back of it.The reality, of course, is slightly more complicated. For Hitler the embarrassing truth was that there were plenty of gay Nazis. Some, such as Ernst Röhm and his followers (whom Hitler had disposed of at the Night of the Long Knives), were quite open about it. Others, such as Baldur von Schirach, were closeted. Hitler himself, indeed, was not above suspicion.
The reason this was embarrassing for the more mainstream Nazis though was that homosexuality was already illegal before the NSDAP came to power - and indeed it carried on being illegal after the War, right up until the 1960s. The reason gays were sent to the concentration camps was because the ordinary prisons were full. Gays were not political prisoners as such.
*To be fair, Shirer's so-called 'Luther to Hitler' thesis - that Martin Luther was the Third Reich's true spiritual ancestor - no doubt has some merit. It is at any rate more convincing than the standard anti-Catholic interpretation of the likes of Avro Manhattan (and, no doubt, Peter Tatchell himself!).
'Tohyrder'
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| Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, The Two Shepherds (1813) |
Thursday, 7 May 2026
The King in Thule
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| Pierre Jean Van der Ouderaa, The King of Thule (1896) |
Es war ein König in Thule,Gar treu bis an das Grab,Dem sterbend seine Buhleeinen goldnen Becher gab.
Es ging ihm nichts darüber,Er leert' ihn jeden Schmaus;Die Augen gingen ihm über,So oft er trank daraus.
Und als er kam zu sterben,Zählt' er seine Städt' im Reich,Gönnt' alles seinen Erben,Den Becher nicht zugleich.
Er saß beim Königsmahle,Die Ritter um ihn her,Auf hohem Vätersaale,Dort auf dem Schloß am Meer.
Dort stand der alte Zecher,Trank letzte Lebensglut,Und warf den heiligen BecherHinunter in die Flut.
Er sah ihn stürzen, trinkenUnd sinken tief ins Meer,die Augen täten ihm sinken,Trank nie einen Tropfen mehr.
There was a king in Thule,Was faithful till the grave,To whom his mistress, dying,A golden goblet gave.
Nought was to him more precious;He drained it at every bout;His eyes with tears ran over,As oft as he drank thereout.
When came his time of dying,The towns in his land he told,Nought else to his heir denyingExcept the goblet of gold.
He sat at the royal banquetWith his knights of high degree,In the lofty hall of his fathersIn the castle by the sea.
There stood the old carouser,And drank the last life-glow;And hurled the hallowed gobletInto the tide below.
He saw it plunging and filling,And sinking deep in the sea:Then fell his eyelids for ever,And never more drank he!
The poem was later set to music by Franz Schubert. (The visuals in the video are from Fritz Lang’s 1924 film Die Nibelungen: Siegfried, and are not directly related to the poem.)
Blots, Plots, and Blessings
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| Michal Zebrowski in the film Army of Valhalla (2003) |
Where does the expression 'to blot out one's sins' come from?
The word 'blot' is probably Old Norse. Wiktionary invites us to imagine it's from *blettr, a word reconstructed from Icelandic blettur, meaning 'stain, blot, patch', but also 'a plot of land'.
One cannot help but wonder though if there isn't a more interesting etymology lurking just out of sight. The English word 'bless' after all originally mean 'to consecrate with blood'.
John William Waterhouse, The Crystal Ball (1902)
Timeless Beauty
I think what makes this picture so haunting is that it could have been taken at almost any time in the last four thousand years - and yet for how much longer will we be able to see scenes like this one in our European homelands?
Monday, 4 May 2026
Negroes in Nazi Germany
In Nazi Germany, negroes were employed in various parts of the entertainment industry, such as film studios and touring ethnic shows like the Hillerkus Afrikaschau circuses. By 1940 these operations had been taken over by the SS, who converted them to serve propaganda purposes.
For instance, Propaganda minister Josef Goebbels realized that in order to spread the Nazi Gospel of white Aryan supremacy, he needed to exploit the most popular entertainment medium of the time — German feature films. Propaganda pictures such as Kongo Express, Quax in Africa, and Auntie Wanda from Uganda were made to present Germany as an enlightened, benevolent colonial power. Thus under Nazi control the film industry provided employment for Black Germans.
As Black actor Werner Egoimue explains, “We had an agent then, who had all the addresses of Black people in Berlin. The Reich's Chamber of Commerce was in touch with him, and when they were casting a film, it was fun—inside the studio ... you were as safe as in a bank.”
See: World History Archives
"Rightwing" Gays: The French Exception?
As I say, what the authors have to say about Nazism wears somewhat thin at times. The National Socialist German Workers Party did indeed have it roots in the barmier imaginings of a group of shell-shocked Bavarian veterans of the Great War. And apart from the fact that they were all ex-soldiers there was nothing particularly "rightwing" about them - at least until they were infiltrated by the security forces (in the person of a former Austrian corporal by the name of Adolf Heidler) and had their ideology re-modelled along the lines of Prussian Imperialism. But the presence of the notorious pervert Ernst Röhm amongst the luminaries of the early Nazi Party does not imply that the Party was a "gay" political movement, nor do its early meetings in gay nightclubs. Nor, for that matter, does Heidler's (a.k.a. Hitler's) former sideline career as a Viennese rentboy!
Where the authors are on more solid ground is with the modern "Far Right", not to mention the modern "gay rights" movement. Although the "Gay Movement" has clearly drifted towards the Left in recent years, it has in its time had a significant following on the Far Right - and conversely there is hardly a single Far Right political party in Europe today that has not had more than its fair share of gay sex scandals.
Where the really funny stuff happens, apparently, is on the Nouvelle Droit. David Irving, who is always good for a laugh, has an old news story about a young French student called Michael Caignet in his archive.
ON January 29, 1981, Michel (Miguel) Caignet, a 26 year old doctoral candidate in English-German linguistics, was just leaving his residence in Courbevoie to attend the university when he was accosted by four individuals in the vicinity of his apartment. He was at once knocked to the ground and held down while one of his four assailants poured sulphuric acid over his face and his right hand.OK, most of those Jewish names don't mean much to me. But Michel Caignet was to go on to further notoriety by becoming the founder-editor of Gaie France - which, as the title perhaps suggests, was a rightwing French nationalist gay magazine. Which promoted pederasty!
Mr. Caignet had once belonged to FANE (the Fédération d'action nationale et européene) and been a revisionist. He had been denounced by the daily VSD.
As a result of the acid attack his facial features were so hideously disfigured that only two newspapers dared to publish a photograph. The identity of the main participant in the attack, Yves Aziza, a medical student and son of Charles Aziza (a pharmaceutical company employee at Montreuil) was known to police within one hour of the assault. But the French police, and French justice, allowed Y. Aziza, in circumstances of which the outrageous details are well-known, sufficient time to flee to Germany and then Israel.
At the Justice Ministry, a Mr. Main, (a director attached to the Office of Criminal Investigations headed by Raoul Béteille), adopted a sarcastic tone as he explained why it took all of 14 days before a criminal investigation into the matter finally began. ... Among Y. Aziza's accomplices one noted the name of Daniel Ziskind, son of Michèle Ziskind and sister of Jean-Pierre Pierre-Bloch, and the son of Jean Pierre-Bloch himself.
Last spring the case against French publisher Michel Caignet was finally brought to a close. A Paris court barred him for life from ever publishing again, and sentenced him to serve two-and-a-half years in prison for his role in selling gay videos that allegedly showed actors under the age of eighteen, but over the age of fifteen having sex. Caignet's license to distribute his magazine Gaie France was already revoked in 1993, but Caignet ignored the censors' warnings and continued publishing under new titles. The convictions brought to a close an investigation that began with nation-wide raids in April 1996 against people on Caignet's mailing list. The day the trials opened there were more raids, this time involving some 2500 French police, who conducted 710 searches around the country. Of the 673 persons whose home were searched, 210 were charged with a crime, and 20 were kept in jail. The involvement of Caignet with porn with minors doesn't surprise someone who's familiar with the history of Gaie France. The magazine has always been controversial because the editors used the philosophy of right-wing authors as Hans Blüher to sanction their own interest in very young boys.
So what's the connexion? Alisdair Clarke on his Aryan Futurism blog explains:
The [Euro New Right]’s “paganism” entails a naturalism towards mores and sexuality. Unlike still traditionalists, ENR members have a relatively liberated attitude towards sexuality. Thus [Alain de] Benoist had no qualms about giving an interview to Gaie France, which features homoerotic images as well as cultural commentary. ENR members have no desire to impose what they consider the patently unnatural moralism of Judeo-Christianity on sexual relations.Ummm, Okaaay! It's interesting to read that Judeo-Christian "moralism" is "unnatural" - whereas having it off with little boys is apparently just fine.
Who are we to disagree?
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