'In the Troops’ Quarters outside Paris'

by Anton von Werner

This is actually a really beautiful picture.

We can see the lady and daughter of the house in the background, obviously and understandably concerned that their home (not to mention their country) has been invaded by German soldiers. And yet at the same time the artist gives us every reason to be optimistic. Though they are making a bit of a mess, as soldiers (and young men generally) tend to, and though they are apparently helping themselves to the firewood, the men here come across as cheerful, well-meaning fellows who have not smashed the place up. (The ornaments on the chimney-piece are still clearly intact.) A couple of soldiers are relaxing and having a drink, one is singing, one is making up the fire, and one is playing the piano. (”We are not all barbarians!”) And one, perhaps most “relaxed” of all, seems to have changed into the tunic and cap of his old university fraternity, as if in expectation of further singing and beer and fellowship - though for now he is content with a quiet smoke next to the fire.

Another soldier, in the background, seems to be apologetically explaining to their hostess that all this is only temporary, and things should be back to normal soon…

The Perfect (Gastro!) "Pub"... in London

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Times and Sunday Times (@thetimes)

I had been meaning for ages to look up all those famous pictures and pieces of old footage of the Nazis occult or "mediaeval" processions. It was this that eventually pushed me to find some.

The Day of German Art was held annually in Munich for about three years, from 1936 or so to about 1938. There are pictures here and here.

Jack in the Green

The "Folk Horror Revival": The Real Demons?

The "folk horror revival" looks very much as if it began with the Obama-Cameron era. Blair and Bush had failed. The future was no longer going to happen. The great unspoken fear was that we were going to be dragged back into a world of superstitious, violent Hwite People.

If my thesis is correct that the folk horror revival does indeed take for granted the demonisation of native north European folk culture (and, failing that, "European" culture generally), then it is hardly to be wondered at that it went into overdrive with the trans-Atlantic socio-political horror show (for the Left, at any rate!) that has come to be known as "Trump-Brexit".

This would have been what my question would have been about at Cecil Sharp House - had I been brave/foolish enough even to ask a question! If "folk horror" really is a "thing", what exactly is horrific about our folklore? Given that demonisation had very definitely been a "thing" since the early middle ages, who exactly is being demonised in folk horror today?

I suspect the answer deep down quite genuinely is very simply... us! We are the real demons - the real "horrors" behind the paganism, and the New Ageism!

And maybe... that's fair!

King William V of England?

The ridiculous and repulsive Simon Heffer presumably thought he was making a clever point when he defended primogeniture in his column in the Torygraph.

Kaiser Bill could have been the king of England
As if there aren’t bigger priorities, the Government is apparently planning to change the law so that the monarch’s daughter, if she is the eldest child, inherits the throne automatically. I know all about our great queens, not least Her present Majesty: but this would be a needless complication and could send the Royal house in all sorts of dangerous directions. The last time this would have been an issue was in 1901, when the Dowager Empress of Germany would have become queen of England for the seven months between the death of her mother, Queen Victoria, and her own demise. Her son, Kaiser Bill, would then have become king of England, which would have become part of the Second Reich. Just think how much fun that would have been.

Absolutely! And think how many thousands of English lives could have been saved, you fat little xenophobic fool.

Lady Hamilton

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, 'Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante' (c.1792)

What exactly did Lord Nelson see in her?

Germanic Tribes in the Southwest

Germanic Tribes in the Southwest: Where Did They Come From?

0:23

The Limes. The mighty, 550-kilometer-long border fortification of the Roman Empire against free Germania. It's burning. The defensive wall against the barbarians, as the Romans called the Germanic tribes, was vulnerable.

0:42

Despite walls and ditches, palisades and watchtowers, fires repeatedly broke out along the Germanic Limes from the 3rd century AD onward.

0:56

What had happened?

1:02

Germanic horsemen stormed the border in 233 AD. They had a relatively easy time of it, because the Romans had previously withdrawn many troops from the Limes, which they needed in the east of the empire for the fight against the Persians.

1:23

Who were these fierce warriors who overran the Roman palisades and rode like demons?

1:35

And where did they come from? Free Germania was vast and populated by many tribes.

1:47

The Tabula Peutingeriana, the medieval copy of a Roman map of land and roads, provides information. It notes two names on the edge of the empire: "Suebia" and…

2:03

… "Alamannia." These are the names of the peoples who harassed the Limes: the Suebi and the Alamanni.

2:16

Until the 3rd century, they lived far from the Limes in the region between the Oder and Elbe rivers. From there, the Suebi and Alamanni launched raids that penetrated deep into the Roman Empire, into rich Gaul, into the Roman heartland south of the Alps, and into the hinterland near the Limes.

2:41

These campaigns were facilitated by internal unrest within the Roman Empire. These were times of crisis when the Germanic tribes began to move.

2:52

The remnants of the Limes, still visible today, marked a boundary of prosperity at that time. Life was generally good on the Roman side, including here around Trier.

3:05

This made the city attractive to the Alamannic warriors.

3:10

Soundbite from Prof. Christoph Schäfer

"For the population of the Trier region, these Alamannic incursions must have been a real shock, because for over 200 years they had been able to cultivate the land here relatively peacefully; it was a prosperous, flourishing region, and now suddenly this drastic change, extreme plundering, violence everywhere, both outside and inside the city."

3:32

In 275 AD, the city, with its famous Porta Nigra, was particularly hard hit by the Alamannic cavalry. They rode into battle without stirrups. But how does that even work? We want to find out just how difficult it is at a riding stable.

3:50

Riding instructor Peter Frey initiates his student into the secrets. First, it's about the correct seat, the connection between rider and horse. Because almost without aids, the rider now has to make it clear to her horse what it should do.

4:07

What is the main difficulty?

4:11

Soundbite from the riding instructor

"If the horse picks up speed or goes into a turn, the rider can lose their balance much more easily without stirrups than with them. The stirrup acts like a support, essentially replacing the ground. The rider then has to balance much more freely from their center of gravity, from their torso."

4:35

That's already working surprisingly well. Peter Frey's tips are helpful in this unfamiliar situation.

5:46

Most Alamanni grew up with horses. That was their secret to success. And today?

4:54

Soundbite from a riding instructor

"The secret is, on the one hand, good body awareness, good balance, and then sensing the horse's movement so that the rider flows into it without resistance."

``` 5:14

This "natural" riding is obviously fun. For the Alamanni, it was everyday life. They had a very special relationship with their horses. Some were even sacred to them.

5:32

The experiment worked. Rider and horse are happy.

5:41

But now Peter Frey wants to know for sure. The Alamanni were heavily armed on horseback. He tries it first with a shield and lance.

5:52

His stallion doesn't like it at all. Frey loses his balance; now he's missing the artificial ground, the stirrups.

6:01

The experiment at the Red Stone Ranch in Unterrotenstein in the Swabian Alps has shown: Riding without stirrups is possible. But with both hands on weapons—that was more something for the Alamannic warrior elite.

6:20

In the 3rd century, they were the terror of the Roman population behind the Limes. They robbed people, as well as livestock and Jewelry. Nothing was safe from the Alamannic warriors…

6:36

They usually carried out their raids in small groups. The younger men sought adventure abroad, while their families waited for a safe return to their Germanic homeland.

6:49

Soundbite: Prof. Christoph Schäfer

“These Alamannic raids were clearly aimed at plunder. The goal wasn't to establish a permanent presence in this region, as happened later, for example…”

[Germanic Tribes in the Southwest: Where did they come from? | Film - planet schoo!]

On this day...

The unification of Germany into a politically and administratively integrated nation state officially occurred on 18 January 1871 at the Versailles Palace'sHall of Mirrors in France. Princes of the German states gathered there to proclaim Wilhelm of Prussia as Emperor Wilhelm of the German Empire after the French capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War. Unofficially, the transition of most of the German-speaking populations into a federated organization of states occurred over nearly a century of experimentation. Unification exposed several glaring religious, linguistic, and cultural differences between and among the inhabitants of the new nation, suggesting that 1871 really only represents one moment in a continuum of the larger unification processes. Historians debate whether or not Otto von Bismarck, the Minister President of Prussia, had a master-plan to expand the North German Confederation of 1866 to include the remaining independent German states into a single entity, or whether he simply sought to expand the power of the Kingdom of Prussia. They conclude that factors in addition to the strength of Bismarck's Realpolitik led a collection of early modern polities to reorganize political, economic, military and diplomatic relationships in the 19th century. By establishing a Germany without Austria, the political and administrative unification in 1871 at least temporarily solved the problem of German dualism. (more...)

[Wikipedia]

W. G. Collingwood, The Northern Gods Descending (1890)

The Original Scout Salute

Actually even though I think this picture was taken in Lithuania, the salute was clearly virtually the same as the salute ("raised hand", at any rate) for making the Pledge of Allegiance in America. This old way of doing things I believe pertained in America up until the 1930s, when it suddenly became politically incorrect - for some reason.

In 1939 Lord Baden-Powell noted in his diary:

Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf. A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organization etc.—and ideals which Hitler does not practice himself.

He also admired Mussolini, and some early Scouting badges had a swastika symbol on them. He maintained that his use of the symbol related to its earlier, original meaning of "good luck" in Sanskrit, for which purpose the symbol had been used for centuries prior to the rise of fascism.

Baden-Powell was a target of the Nazi regime in the Black Book, which listed individuals which were to be arrested during and after an invasion of Great Britain as part of Operation Sea Lion. Scouting was regarded as a dangerous spy organisation by the Nazis.

The Boorman Kids

The other thing about Excalibur is the Uther-Igrayne shagging scene at the beginning. What with the grinding and tit-sucking and all, as a kid it used to turn me on and freak me out in equal measure. (Dude, this is King Arthur. But I shouldn't be watching this! Etc.) Uther, it just so happens, was played by the aforementioned Gabriel Byrne. But it's only when one bears in mind that the Igrayne in question was actually Boorman's daughter that the real freakiness of the scene starts to emerge.

And just to, er, top that, here's beautiful Charley Boorman (who appears in Excalibur in his undies, being oiled up by Helen Mirren) in The Emerald Forest.

It's a fairly recognisable syndrome - doting dad decides that his kid (female or male) is the most gorgeous thing in the world and gets her or him a plum part in some little remembered movie (or, in the case of Excalibur, in a well remembered one). Danny the Champion of the World, for example, is actually a sweet enough film, but it's still little more than an Irons family home movie.

Boorman's home movies would presumably have been along the lines of not just Hope and Glory (which really is glorious) but also I Dreamt I Woke Up (which is weird and interesting, but not quite so interesting as I wanted it to be). Taken together though, Excalibur and The Emerald Forest make Robby seem positively normal.

Tea and Death

Does David Blair really think that Iran is becoming more pro-western simply because Iranian young people are adopting western fashions, drinking Coca-Cola and ignoring the Koran?

Any visitor to Tehran is struck by how young Iranians have embraced Western – and specifically American – popular culture. This does not simply extend to fashion, films, music and the regime's famously futile attempts to ban satellite dishes. What struck me on my last visit was how the bookshops outside Tehran University sell dictionaries of American idiom and helpful guides on how to adopt an American accent.

So what, I say? Even if you approve of American culture - and I don't - it won't stop the Iranians from hating us (whether or not you even believe there is a meaningful "us" left for them to hate).

Why? Because this sort of "culture" has very little to do with anything! The worst wars ever fought have been between enemies that were culturally almost indistinguishable. For me the most startling pictures from modern histories of the Second World War aren’t the shots of death-camps and mass graves. They're the photos and bits of film footage of Hitler and his cabinet at the Berghof, dressed up in tweeds with their hair neatly parted, having afternoon tea. One can almost hear Gilbert & Sullivan playing on the gramophone. A year or so later Hitler was ordering the bombing of Britain – which, after Germany, was his favourite country. “Culture” had absolutely nothing to do with it, and trying to pretend that the current “Long War” is about culture (rather than about what every war is about – i.e. politics) is seriously to misapprehend our enemies.

Some Thoughts on Episode 1 of American Gods

• The look is quite different from what I'd imagined. Gaiman's book was marketed as "better than Stephen King or your money back" and that was more or less how I'd pictured the visuals. For that matter, Stephen King is more or less the only popular author nowadays who still writes about an America that Hillary Clinton (to her cost) refused to believe still existed. What better place for the Old Gods to carry on existing, where people believe (albeit less and less as time goes by), than flyover country? Only outsiders like Gaiman still dare to venture to such a place - which is genuinely sad, because the people who live there are (in their own way) genuinely splendid.
• Shadow in the book is "mixed race". In the series he appears to be just a stereotypical whining black man, which is unfortunate. By making him mixed race Gaiman both held up to scrutiny a Marxist vision of America the "melting-pot" and implicitly queried its validity in a stubbornly multicultural world. (This was before 9/11!) What gods, indeed, does a "mixed race" man worship? At the same time, he gleefully subverted the standard "magic negro" trope so familiar from King's prison drama The Green Mile (for example). Shadow is a "black" man, but he's almost the only character in the story who doesn't have magic powers.
• Obviously it's always difficult to transfer a cerebral type of hero, with internal monologues and long descriptive observations and angst, from the page to the screen, but even so, Shadow in the book is much more likeable than he is in the TV-version.
• The idea that female flight attendants are like völvas or Valkyries actually played out clearer and funnier in the TV-series than it did in the book, though arguably that was just a function of the executive producer source material-author (i.e. Gaiman himself) seeing that the more "important" jokes from his work got transferred over to the screen version properly.
• In the late '80s Ian McShane was Lovejoy, a smug wide-boy antiques dealer who ran rings round the yuppy denizens of London's home counties whilst getting off with the daughters of the minor aristocracy. The last time I saw him he was a special guest star (one episode only) playing a smug fantasy trendy vicar in Game of Thrones. And instead of playing Prof Merriman Lyon from The Dark is Rising Sequence (the tall, ancient, kindly, otherworldly Great Uncle Merry character from the books), in the film version of The Dark is Rising he played a smug and wonderfully violent butler. And now here he is playing a smug conman version of Mr Wednesday that is nothing like the Creepy Col Sanders character from the book. But that is perhaps permissible and (more to the point) more enjoyable on telly. And an Englishman playing an American character for once works rather well, given that Mr Wednesday is, of course, not "really" American. 
• The mindless violence is surprisingly unnecessary, as are the four-letter words. Some things have been unnecessarily coarsened, others surprisingly bowdlerised. Making Bilquis into an internet date rather than a hooker was a disappointing example of the latter. Americans even after Game of Thrones still seemingly can't deal with a character who practices the world's oldest profession.
• And on the subject of Bilquis, was she supposed to be beautiful? Was the point that she isn't but men still desire her? Or was she supposed to look younger and more beautiful at the end of her scene than she did at the beginning? In the book Bilquis had brown hands, and even in the script she has a cherry red mouth. But in our modern Marxist dualist (or post-modern) western culture, where it doesn't matter what things look like (q.v. Lily Potter's eyes in the final Harry Potter film!), and, more to the point, in an American popular culture that currently only recognises two races as authentically "American", she has to be played by a black actress.
• On the one hand it feels hammy, over the top, shiny and slightly gaudy. On the other, it feels low budget, much like Auntie's revival Doctor Who series (or their dreary version of SS-GB, come to that). Miscasting can make a show feel just as cheap as shabby sets and poor dialogue can, and more specifically the problem with racial miscasting (so far Shadow and Bilquis are the most obvious, though of course McShane too is an odd racial fit, given that he doesn't look particularly Nordic) is that American Gods implicitly is all about characters from different races and cultures who, having come to America, are trying to reconcile what they are and where they're from with the world of today. With a casting director who doesn't care where people are from, either ethnically or (implicitly) geographically and "religiously", the show has arguably got off on the wrong foot.
• All-in-all though, the whole thing is watchable, nay enjoyable. Early episode weirdness can be quickly ironed out, and provided it can carry on being fresh and inventive it should be able to keep its audience until the end.

Could it all come back?

The above is from a stunning collection of colour photos, apparently from Life magazine.

Could it all come back? Up to a point one would have to say certainly not. For one thing we simply no longer have a culture of militarism, either in this country or in any other (and certainly not in Germany). And nor is there even any fondness for order and discipline generally, in private life or in public. People nowadays are in love with slovenliness and degradation, and their children are always inevitably worse.

Again though, I say only up to a point. The greatest pity is that much that was wicked and evil about National Socialism (e.g. the nationalism, not to mention the socialism) is still very much alive today. For example, I'm not really into physical fitness, and whenever I've taken myself down to the gym most of the other boys and girls there have been reasonably civilised. But now it would seem that if the balding old coot on the treadmill next to yours turns out to be a ranting fascist nutter then it's not impossible that he'll be a senior civil servant at the FCO as well.

Similarly, I suspect (or is it just the usual gut instinct?) that Gerard Warner is wrong when he says that fascism is ideologically 'exhausted and discredited'. Morally, of course, fascism always was discredited. But ideologically it would seem to be very much alive. Ideologically it is, after all, merely a "scientific" approach to human existence, based on the theories (now elevated to the level of revealed truths) of Charles Darwin - who is still very much a celebrity du jour. It dismisses rationality and spirituality as mere sentimentality and weakness, prizing the will above human reason and "reality" above religion. Modern science and modern politics, which set no store by the mere humanity of their victims (whether old or unborn - to which latter extent modern doctors are a good deal worse than their Nazi forebears), simply take these principles to their logical extremes.

The Once and Future Ring King

The real genius of Excalibur, as with any proper modern rendering of a classic work, is that John Boorman picked up Malory's dog-eared, 500-year-old blockbuster and steadfastly refused to admit that it was boring. Yes, there are lots of boring bits in it. Yes there are hundreds of footling minor characters, the plot goes hither and yon, and the author probably didn't know very much about ancient British mysteries or Jungian mythic archetypes. But hey! It's got wizards, magic swords, magic forests, magic caves, magic castles, handsome knights galloping to battle in shining armour, damsels in distress (and various states of undress), lots of violence... and lots and lots of SEX. Throw in a bit of mumbo-jumbo about the King and the Land being one, and with a pinch of Carl Orff and lashings of Wagner you've got yourself a pretty sharp movie.

Yes, arguably Excalibur only really wins because the overwhelming majority of King Arthur films have been rubbish. Hollywood, sadly, tends to be scared of things they think people won't know about. So re-packaging Arthur, Merlin and Guinevere and the rest as a sub-sci-fi genre piece was a smart move. It wasn't even meant to be King Arthur in the first place. It was meant to be Tolkien (according to Boorman himself in a recent Indie interview). And of course Tolkien was another one of those things that Hollywood used to be scared of.

But then the lesson of every superhero movie made in the last three decades is that a pop cultural phenomenon (such as Superman or Spider-Man) really has to have been around for forty years or more before Hollywood is comfortable enough with it to allow a "proper" film to be made. Why else did we have to wait until the late '70s for the Man of Steel? Why did we spend the '80s enduring drivel like Legend and Willow and Krull and Dragonslayer and God-only-knows-what, when what everyone really wanted were hobbits and High Elves and Mordor and the One Ring? (To be fair, Conan was a pretty good film-version of Conan, who by then had more than done his pre-Hollywood four decades: famously poorly reviewed by Time with a single line - 'Star Wars... as done by a psychopath!' - it's hard to imagine that the original psychopath Robert E Howard himself would have disapproved.)

Well, for better or for worse, the Jackson films (as I feel compelled to refer to them) have most likely burst Hollywood's fantasy dam once and for all. In the long term Middle-earth itself seems likely to become one of those gifts that just keeps giving. (Personally in my lifetime I'm predicting Turin and Lúthien and bloody Gondolin. But never mind!)

Fabian Hambüchen

 Preparing

Celebrating

At London 2012

A hug for the coach

 And a very brotherly hug for Dutch rival and gold medalist Epke Zonderland. (Hambüchen won silver.)

Lust and Love in Wagner

The first scene of Das Rheingold is simply glorious. It's a very neat little parable in an of itself, about sexuality, virginity and the foolishness of inexperience, and the desire that old age and ugliness has for youth, beauty and sex.

Crucially, the Rhinemaidens - being maidens - confuse love and lust. They imagine that the Rhine gold is perfectly safe because they cannot imagine that Alberich, a creature of such dark and potent sexuality, could ever renounce love, which he must do if he is to unlock the gold's power and wield the Ring. It is their encouragement and then rejection of Alberich, and his subsequent renunciation of love, enabling him to steal the gold and forge the Ring, that sets the tragedy of the whole cycle in motion.

Thematically it's actually a remarkably subtle start for a story whose overriding theme is the conflict between love and freedom (i.e. "free love", incest not excluded!) and authority and duty (albeit the essentially arbitrary authority of Wotan, whose laws are burdensome even to himself).

The piccie above is one of Arthur Rackham's. Obviously the Rhinemaidens are not normally naked on stage, and to date no one's actually found a way to make them actually swim either. But that doesn't mean the audience will necessarily be spared silliness of other kinds.

Un, deux, trois...

This pic from the Scout Fraternity site is apparently a Pierre Joubert-esque depiction of the three main sorts of Scout in France - one from the "mainstream" Scouts of France on the left, one from the Scouts of Europe on the right, and in the middle a representative of one of the "traditionalist" Scout organisations - probably the Unitary Scouts. The website's stated aim is to encourage bonds of brotherhood between the three "branches".

(Bon chance with that!)