A paper published on Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical Physical & Engineering Sciences may offer the explanation of how Viking mariners a thousand years ago were able to navigate the North Atlantic between Europe and the Old World, traveling great distances by sea in high latitudes in which cloudy weather frequently denied visibility of the sun.
Before the invention of the magnetic compass, navigating with a sundial would have been difficult, particularly on overcast days. Ancient Viking lore suggests that they had a magical tool to find the sun, even when the star was hidden.
Researchers have now discovered the crystal that would have made such a magical apparatus possible. The Vikings could have used a common calcite crystal, called an Icelandic spar, to find the sun in the high latitudes where they would have had to battle long twilights and cloudy skies to navigate. This special “sunstone” could find the direction of the sun even when it was out of view because it plays a trick with the light.
“The Vikings could have discovered this, simply by choosing a transparent crystal and looking through it through a small hole in a screen,” study researcher Guy Ropars wrote in an email to LiveScience. “The understanding of the complete mechanism and the knowledge of the polarization of light is not necessary.”
To use the crystal, the Vikings would have held the stone up to the center of the sky (from their perspective). When sunlight hits the crystal, that light gets polarized and broken into an “ordinary” and an “extraordinary” beam.
On a clear day, the Vikings would have rotated the crystal until the two beams lined up. Since these two beams line up and have the same brightness at only one angle, by noting where the sun is when this happens the Vikings could establish a reference point that could be used even when the sun wasn’t visible.
There are several other types of crystal that have this same property, but they wouldn’t have been too useful because they aren’t as clear or as common, the researchers said. The Icelandic spar that the researchers analyzed is very common along the coasts of Iceland, and is also common today in Brazil and Mexico.
While none of these Icelandic spar crystals has been found in a Viking settlement, one was recently discovered in an Elizabethan shipwreck from 1592 in the English Channel.
Viking navigation from Norway to America in the northern latitudes remains a mystery for physicists, historians and archaeologists. Polarimetric methods using absorbing dichroic crystals as polarizers to detect a hidden Sun direction using the polarized skylight have led to controversies. Indeed, these techniques may lack in sensitivity, especially when the degree of polarization is low. Here, we demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that using the transparent common Iceland spar as a depolarizer, the Vikings could have performed a precise navigation under different conditions. Indeed, when simply rotated, such a birefringent crystal can completely depolarize, at the so-called isotropy point, any partially polarized state of light, allowing us to guess the direction of the Sun. By equalizing the intensities of the ordinary and extraordinary beams at the isotropy point, we show that the Sun direction can be determined easily, thanks to a simple sensitive differential two-image observation. A precision of a few degrees could be reached even under dark crepuscular conditions. The exciting recent discovery of such an Iceland spar in the Alderney Elizabethan ship that sank two centuries before the introduction of the polarization of light in optics may support the use of the calcite crystal for navigation purposes.
The LA Times reported recently that a pair of sharp-eyed brothers apparently discovered two previously unknown photographs of Old West legend Wyatt Earp, one as a small boy, in a family photo album that they purchased in an antique shop in San Bernadino County for $50.
They could make a lot of money selling the photos at auction (if experts agree on the identification), but they have expressed the intention of keeping and licensing the images.
Gramarrian Henry Hitchings, in the Wall Street Journal, takes an interesting look at the history (and future) of punctuation marks.
Early manuscripts had no punctuation at all, and those from the medieval period suggest haphazard innovation, with more than 30 different marks. The modern repertoire of punctuation emerged as printers in the 15th and 16th centuries strove to limit this miscellany.
Many punctuation marks are less venerable than we might imagine. Parentheses were first used around 1500, having been observed by English writers and printers in Italian books. Commas were not employed until the 16th century; in early printed books in English one sees a virgule (a slash like this /), which the comma replaced around 1520.
Other marks enjoyed briefer success. There used to be a clunky paragraph sign known as a pilcrow ; initially it was a C with a slash drawn through it. Similar in its effect was one of the oldest punctuation symbols, a horizontal ivy leaf called a hedera . It appears in 8th-century manuscripts, separating text from commentary, and after a period out of fashion it made an unexpected return in early printed books. Then it faded from view.
Another mark, now obscure, is the point d’ironie, sometimes known as a “snark.” A back-to-front question mark, it was deployed by the 16th-century printer Henry Denham to signal rhetorical questions, and in 1899 the French poet Alcanter de Brahm suggested reviving it. More recently, the difficulty of detecting irony and sarcasm in electronic communication has prompted fresh calls for a revival of the point d’ironie. But the chances are slim that it will make a comeback. ...
How might punctuation now evolve? The dystopian view is that it will vanish. I find this conceivable, though not likely.
A rare original draft printing, one of one hundred printed in 1861, and one of only four copies known to have survived of the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, presented to the Convention in Montgomery, Alabama on February 28, 1861 is to be sold by Heritage Auctions at a sale to be held at the Ukrainian Institute of America at The Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion, 2 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075 on December 8-9, 2011.
This copy must have belonged originally to one of the delegates from Louisiana, Alexandre de Clouet, Charles M. Conrad, Duncan F. Kenner, or Henry Marshall. It is most likely the Kenner copy, as Kenner’s home was confiscated and his personal effects looted when New Orleans was captured May 1, 1862.
This copy descends from the estate of one Albert Gaius Hills, a Boston Journal correspondent, who was present during the capture and subsequent occupation of New Orleans.
Heritage is not posting an estimate of the sales price at the present time, but it will probably command an impressive price.
Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.
In his magisterial Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison writes:
(Christopher Columbus did) more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. Yet the life of the Admiral closed on a note of frustration. He had not found the Strait, or met the Grand Khan, or converted any great number of heathen, or regained Jerusalem. He had not even secured the future of his family. And the significance of what he had accomplished was only slightly less obscure to him than to the chroniclers who neglected to record his death, or to the courtiers who failed to attend his modest funeral at Valladolid. The vast extent and immense resources of the Americas were but dimly seen; the mighty ocean that laved their western shores had not yet yielded her secret.
America would eventually have been discovered if the Great Enterprise of Columbus had been rejected; yet who can predict what hat would have been the outcome? The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration. And if Columbus was a failure as a colonial administrator, it was partly because his conception of a colony transcended the desire of his followers to impart, and the capacity of natives to receive, the institutions and culture of Renaissance Europe. ...
One only wishes that the Admiral might have been afforded the sense of fulfillment that would have come from foreseeing all that flowed from his discoveries; that would have turned all the sorrows of his last years to joy. The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.
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James Carroll, in the Boston Globe, explains why Columbus ought to be understood both as a crusader by means of exploration and as the first proponent of a theory of New World exceptionalism.
Columbus wanted to circumvent the Muslim chokehold on European trade with the East, the glories of which had been sung by Marco Polo. And he wanted to enrich his sponsors with gold and spices. But picking up the thread of Crusader attempts to retake Jerusalem was even more to the point.
In his “Journals,’’ Columbus’s report to his royal sponsors, he declares; “Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians and Princes devoted to the Holy Christian Faith and the propagation thereof, and enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, resolved to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of India, to see the said princes and peoples and lands and the disposition of them and of all, and the manner in which may be undertaken their conversion to our Holy Faith, and ordained that I should not go by land (the usual way) to the Orient, but by the route of the Occident, by which no one to this day knows for sure that anyone has gone.’’
As for the gold that Columbus hoped to find for his sponsors, he knew that it was not merely for their enrichment. He wrote, “I declared to Your Highnesses that all the gain of this my Enterprise should be spent in the conquest of Jerusalem; and Your Highnesses smiled and said that it pleased you.’’
For Columbus, achieving Jerusalem was not merely a matter of releasing the Holy Sepulcher from the age-old Muslim bondage. Like millennialists before and after him, he seems to have believed that the final restoration of the Holy Land to Christian dominion would usher in the Messianic Age. “God made me the messenger of the New Heaven and the New Earth,’’ he wrote in about 1500, “of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John . . . and he showed me the spot where to find it.’’ An apocalyptic impulse informed the New World project at its birth; the project assumed hostility to Islam; and its ultimate purpose involved Jerusalem. Those three facts remain pillars of the American problem today.
Captain Rescorla in action at Ia Drang, Republic of Vietnam, 15 November 1965. photograph: Peter Arnett/AP.
Born in Hayle, Cornwall, May 27, 1939, to a working-class family, Rescorla joined the British Army in 1957, serving three years in Cypress. Still eager for adventure, after army service, Rescorla enlisted in the Northern Rhodesia Police.
Ultimately finding few prospects for advancement in Britain or her few remaining colonies, Rescorla moved to the United States, and joined the US Army in 1963. After graduating from Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1964, he was assigned as a platoon leader to Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, Third Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Rescorla’s serious approach to training and his commitment to excellence led to his men to apply to him the nickname “Hard Corps.”
The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry was sent to Vietnam in 1965, where it soon engaged in the first major battle between American forces and the North Vietnamese Army at Ia Drang.
The photograph above was used on the cover of Colonel Harold Moore’s 1992 memoir We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, made into a film starring Mel Gibson in 2002. Rescorla was omitted from the cast of characters in the film, which nonetheless made prominent use of his actual exploits, including the capture of the French bugle and the elimination of a North Vietnamese machine gun using a grenade.
For his actions in Vietnam, Rescorla was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star (twice), the Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. After Vietnam, he continued to serve in the Army Reserve, rising to the rank of Colonel by the time of his retirement in 1990.
Rick Rescorla became a US citizen in 1967. He subsequently earned bachelor’s, master’s, and law degrees from the University of Oklahoma, and proceeded to teach criminal law at the University of South Carolina from 1972-1976, before he moved to Chicago to become Director of Security for Continental Illinois Bank and Trust.
In 1985, Rescorla moved to New York to become Director of Security for Dean Witter, supervising a staff of 200 protecting 40 floors in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. (Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter merged in 1997.) Rescorla produced a report addressed to New York’s Port Authority identifying the vulnerability of the Tower’s central load-bearing columns to attacks from the complex’s insecure underground levels, used for parking and deliveries. It was ignored.
On February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a car bomb in the underground garage located below the North Tower. Six people were killed, and over a thousand injured. Rescorla took personal charge of the evacuation, and got everyone out of the building. After a final sweep to make certain that no one was left behind, Rick Rescorla was the last to step outside.
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Directing the evacuation on September 11th.
Security Guards Jorge Velasquez and Godwin Forde are on the right. photograph: Eileen Mayer Hillock.
Rescorla was 62 years old, and suffering from prostate cancer on September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, he successfully evacuated all but 6 of Morgan Stanley’s 2800 employees. (Four of the six lost included Rescorla himself and three members of his own security staff, including both the two security guards who appear in the above photo and Vice President of Corporate Security Wesley Mercer, Rescorla’s deputy.) Rescorla travelled personally, bullhorn in hand, as low as the 10th floor and as high as the 78th floor, encouraging people to stay calm and make their way down the stairs in an orderly fashion. He is reported by many witnesses to have sung “God Bless America,” “Men of Harlech, ” and favorites from Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. “Today is a day to be proud to be an American,” he told evacuees.
A substantial portion of the South Tower’s workforce had already gotten out, thanks to Rescorla’s efforts, by the time the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, struck the South Tower at 9:02:59 AM. Just under an hour later, as the stream of evacuees came to an end, Rescorla called his best friend Daniel Hill on his cell phone, and told him that he was going to make a final sweep. Then the South Tower collapsed.
Rescorla had observed a few months earlier to Hill, “Men like us shouldn’t go out like this.” (Referring to his cancer.) “We’re supposed to die in some desperate battle performing great deeds.” And he did.
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His hometown of Hayle in Cornwall has erected a memorial.
———————————————————— 2,996 was a project put together by blogger Dale Roe to honor each victim of the September 11, 2001 attacks. 3,061 blogs committed to posting tributes to each victim. Never Yet Melted’s tribute was to Rick Rescorla, and is republished annually.
The most recent issue of the Wall Street Journal’s monthly answer to the New York Times Sunday Magazine, WSJ, came out last Saturday, a week ago today, and featured a fascinating article on the Russian government’s painstaking restoration of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater.
Next month the red and gold curtain goes up for the first time in six years at Moscow’s legendary Bolshoi Theater, revealing a restoration that is the biggest, most meticulous overhaul the landmark building has received since it opened in 1856. Costing more than $720 million and directly supervised by the nearby Kremlin (even the deadline for the October 28 opening was set by presidential order), the project has spared no expense—from chandeliers to artisanal gold leaf and embroidered silks—in restoring the Bolshoi’s grand public spaces to their original 19th-century design. Backstage has also been upgraded with sophisticated lighting and hydraulics equipment, transforming the storied cultural institution into Russia’s most modern venue for opera and ballet.
Paramount to the project was that the theater be re-created in the original vision of the czars—ornately beautiful and handcrafted—so no detail was considered too expensive or painstaking. Hundreds of spruce wall panels were imported from the Austrian Alps to replace those ripped out by the Bolsheviks to make room for party congresses; decorative silk coverings were remade from scratch in a special workshop within a Moscow monastery; artisans shipped in from across Russia spent months with agate styluses rubbing more than 3,000 square feet of gold leaf onto the six tiers of seats, and tens of thousands of crystal pendants were removed, catalogued and then either restored or replaced on the dozens of chandeliers throughout the building. It’s a feat that few capitals have attempted, preferring to keep historic theater buildings mainly for smaller performances while constructing new, modern houses for the full company repertoire. But when the current Bolshoi hall opened in 1856 for the coronation of Czar Alexander II, it was bigger and grander than nearly all its European contemporaries (bolshoi means “grand” in Russian), and that’s how Moscow would like it to remain. ...
The current overhaul is the Bolshoi’s third reincarnation. First built in 1780, the theater burned to the ground twice in the 1800s. After a three-day conflagration in 1853 razed its relatively modest predecessor, the czar demanded a grander replacement. Albert Cavos, the Italian-trained architect who won the commission, designed the Bolshoi to mimic a musical instrument, with wood panels in the floors, ceiling and walls that would resonate and carry the sound, along with a vaguely violin-shaped main auditorium. “I tried to decorate the main hall as magnificently as possible but also lightly, in the style of the Renaissance, mixed with the Byzantine,” Cavos later wrote. Restoring that glory turned out to be a titanic task, however, because the Bolshoi’s disrepair dated back decades. In his rush to finish the project in time for the coronation, Cavos appears to have cut corners and the Bolshoi’s structural problems began within just a few years. In 1902, a sudden shift in the foundation jammed the doors of most of the boxes during a matinee, forcing terrified spectators to clamber along the balconies to escape.
The Bolshoi barely survived the early Bolsheviks, some of whom argued for shuttering what they saw as a symbol of aristocratic excess. Vladimir Lenin saved it, and Communist officials ordered that extra seats be stuffed into the main auditorium for party congresses. The theater also endured Soviet-era renovations—concrete was poured under the floor and into a special resonant chamber below the orchestra pit, dulling the sound—and a Nazi bombing in 1941, when an 1,100-pound bomb badly damaged the lobby.
When the theater was closed for renovation in 2005, engineers were shocked by what they found. Foot-wide cracks ran through the walls, and foundations had been reduced largely to dust. The stout columns on the front of the building were treated like arthritic joints, rubbed with special salves and wrapped in plastic for weeks to leach decades of pollution from the limestone. After removing the Soviet-era concrete from under the floor, restorers considered replacing the original mechanism of large stone balls that allowed the auditorium floor to tilt for performances but quickly become flat for grand imperial balls. That update proved too complex, but designers did steepen the angle to improve sight lines and house a larger orchestra pit—big enough for Wagner. “You will feel the fortissimo in your body,” says one engineer. ...
The Soviet hammer and sickle… [has] been replaced with the original double-headed eagle, the emblem of the Romanov dynasty that had pride of place over the Czar’s Box.
Mailbox in Bullio, Southern Highlands, Australia, in the form of Ned Kelly’s armor
After he was hanged in 1880, the body of famous Australian bushranger Ned Kelly was vivisected, his skull was used as a paperweight by police for years before being lost, and his bones were consigned to a unmarked grave along with those of 30-odd other executed criminals.
The legend of the plucky outlaw remains popular in Australia and archaeologists recently searched for Kelly’s bones and used DNA supplied by relatives to confirm that they found the right ones.
Sach’s suicide note: “The loss of mental control over my life was an undignified condition, which I decided to counter decisively.”
A nice tribute to twelve handsome, rich and well-born male practitioners of the art of living for pleasure, from Kempt.
When 78-year-old Gunter Sachs killed himself with a single gun shot to the head in May of this year, the world not only lost an accomplished marksman, but also a fine bobsledder, photographer, and manufacturer of ball-bearings. Of greater concern, though, was the fact that Gunter was widely considered to be the world’s last remaining “Original Playboy,” of which there were twelve.
“Twelve, and no more,” Gunter said of his bronzed, international jet-setting comrades. “The golden age when an elite breed of professional pleasure seekers fascinated the world is over. We were charming and spoke languages and behaved well with women. To go with a girl to Tahiti was incredible. Now everybody goes to Tahiti.”
Tribute to the 1957 demise of Fon Portago, which accident also ended the famous Mille Miglia.
Do not miss Prince Dado Ruspoli’s talk on the correct manner of smoking opium and tobacco.
Border Guard Conrad Schumann defects August 15, 1961
Germans today observed a minute of silence on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Soviet’s construction of the Berlin Wall in honor of its victims. The Guardian reports on some representatives of the German left who refused to participate.
A group of leftwing politicians in Germany have been criticised for refusing to observe a minute’s silence on Saturday to commemorate the 136-plus people who died trying to breach the Berlin Wall.
A far-left newspaper added to the controversy by printing a front page saying “thank you” to the wall for “28 years of keeping the peace in Europe” and “28 years of plentiful crèche and kindergarten places”.
The timing of both stunts was provocative: Saturday marked 50 years since the East German government built what it euphemistically described as “an anti-fascist protection measure”. To mark the date, a minute’s silence was held across Germany at noon, with Angela Merkel attending an event on the former death strip in east Berlin.
But at a political conference in Rostock, in the former East Germany, three delegates from Die Linke party refused to join in when 100 colleagues stood up to observe the silence.
“[Camus’] death in 1960 was felt as a personal loss by the whole literate world.” — Susan Sontag
Did the KGB arrange the death of Nobel Prize winning writer Albert Camus in a car accident in 1960?
An article which appeared in the Italian paper Corriere della Sera on August 1 quotes Eastern European scholar Giovanni Catelli, who discovered that the complete version of the Diary of Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana contained a reference to the death of Albert Camus omitted from abridged French and Italian translations.
The Diary account (translated from the Corriere della Sera article by JDZ)
From a man who knows many things and is in contact with informed sources, I heard something very strange. He said the accident in which Camus died in 1960 was arranged by Soviet intelligence. They produced a blow-out, using a technical device which cut or punctured the car’s tire at high speed. The order for the action was given personally by the [Soviet Foreign] Minister [Dmitri] Shepilov, as “payback” for the article published in “Franc-tireur” in March 1957, in which Camus, in connection with events in Hungary, had attacked the minister explicitly by name.
Jan Zábrana’s contact with “informed sources” was speculated by Corriere to have been either of two relatively litle-known academics: George Gibian or Jiri Zuzanek.
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The Accident (translated from the Corriere della Sera article by JDZ)
On the morning of January 4, 1960, a cold and foggy Monday, the asphalt around the village of Thoissey in central France was covered with frost. The car, being driven by Michel Gallimard (Camus’s publisher), had left the day before from the Riviera and was now four hours from Paris. In the car, besides Camus, seated in the rear were Janine, wife of the publisher, and Anne, his daughter. The previous evening, the party had celebrated Anne’s 18th birthday with toasts and good wishes at the inn Chapon Fin. They left after breakfast, between nine and ten in the morning, proceeding calmly, at moderate speed, on a straight road, nine meters wide, with almost no traffic and good visibility. They were joking about the writer’s latest romance and trying to guess the identity of the person waiting for him in Paris. Just before Petit-Villeblevin, Janine Gallimard suddenly heard her husband cry: Merde! And then the vehicle’s steering suddenly unaccountably went out of control, followed by a shock strong enough to make it seem as if “something had collapsed under the car.” Experts say that probably the seizure of wheel bearing or the rupture of a tire caused Gallimard to lose control, sending him crashing into one of the plane trees that lined the road. Camus was extracted from the wreckage already dying, his skull fractured and his neck broken.
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There are chronological problems with all this.
Dmitri Shepilov was replaced as Soviet Foreign Minister 15 February 1957 by Andrei Gromyko. The article identified as offending Shepilov appeared in March. Shepilov, however, moved from the Foreign Ministry to the post of Secretary of the Central Committee, which he held until 29 June 1957 when he was removed and demoted for being part of a group which attempted to oust Nikita Krushchev from power.
It is not impossible to imagine that a Secretary of the Central Committee would be no less able than a Foreign Minister to order a KGB hit, but Shepilov was out of favor completely and in the process of descending to the level of an ordinary clerk in the State archives when Camus died in 1960.
Still, Albert Camus was an extremely prominent and widely respected and admired intellectual figure, whose prestige was particularly potent in international left-wing intellectual circles. His criticism of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and of subsequent brutalities and oppression was unquestionably particularly damaging to the Soviet Union’s prestige and reputation.
Camus subsequently offended the Soviet Union significantly again, when he championed Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr. Zhivago at the time of its publication in the West. Pasternak’s book, which rapidly acquired a major readership and became an established classic, described the violence and inhumanity of the Revolution and the Russian Civil War and its publication in Russia had been banned by Stalin.
It is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility, nor would the murder of Albert Camus have been out of character for the KGB. The Russian intelligence service has always been renowned for the assassination of prominent opponents of the Soviet regime, and has demonstrated a particular penchant for using ingenious devices.
The Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov, for instance, was assassinated using an umbrella capable of pneumatically firing a tiny projectile embedded with ricin in the victim’s body.
If the little-known Markov was worth killing in 1978, when the Cold War was simmering quietly at a low ebb late in the game, one must reflect just how much more valuable a target Camus would have been, and how much more bloodthirsty the Soviets would have been in 1960, just a few years after the revolt in Hungary, when the Soviet Union was winning the Space Race, Castro had just seized power in Cuba, and Krushchev was promising “We will bury you!”
The Czech diary account is just a thinly-sourced story, and is completely unproven, but it could be true.
The British Province of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) is clearly determined to raise a great deal of money. The Jesuits have arranged to sell to the British Library for £9m ($14.3m) the oldest surviving European book, the Stonyhurst Gospel, St. Cuthbert’s own copy of the Gospel of St. John, a 7th century manuscript originally buried with the saint on the island of Lindisfarne in 687.
Lindisfarne was depopulated of its monks when the Danes sacked the island in 875. The saint’s relics were carried away and moved from one location in the north of England to another over the course of the next century. St. Cuthbert was finally reburied in the “White Church” built in 995 as the predecessor to Durham Cathedral.
The manuscript was discovered in 1104 when St. Cuthbert’s coffin was opened in the course of transporting his remains to a shrine behind the altar of the newly built cathedral.
St. Cuthbert’s shrine was destroyed in the time of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, and the gospel manuscript at that point passed into private hands. George Lee, the third Earl of Lichfield (d. 1772) is the first recorded modern owner. Lichfield gave the manuscript to Reverend Thomas Phillips (d. 1774) who donated it to the English Jesuit College at Liège on 20 June 1769. The manuscript has been owned since 1769 by the Society of Jesus (British Province) and was formerly in the library of Stonyhurst College. The manuscript has been on loan to the British Library since the 1970s.
Christie’s negotiated the sale, as a result of which the manuscript will continue to be displayed half the time at the British Library and the other half at Durham Cathedral, referred to in the news articles as (God help us!) a UNESCO world heritage site in Durham.
Twelfth century painting of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral.
St. Cuthbert (feast day: March 20) is the patron saint of the North of England and was England’s most popular saint in the period before the martyrdom of Thomas Becket in 1170. His banner was carried into battle against the Scots up to the time of the Reformation, and in the Middle Ages the inhabitants of the Palatinate of Durham were referred to as haliwerfolc “the saint’s people.”
Gold earrings depicting the goddess Nike [Victory]. Hellenistic (Late 4th Century B.C), Varna Archaeological Museum, Varna, Bulgaria
Yesterday, a Facebook friend Ekaterina Ilieva Ilieva posted a photograph of these extraordinary Hellenistic portraits of the Greek goddess Nike in the form of earrings.
(The earrings can be seen worn today in a 0:26 video here.)
I wanted to quote a favorite passage of mine from Xenophon illustrating the importance of Nike to Greek soldiers in the same period, but Facebook’s programmed formatting truncated the quotation, so I’m making my intended comment into a blog post.
Xenophon’s Anabasis is an account of the Middle Eastern campaign of ten thousand Greek mercenaries employed by Cyrus the Younger in an attempt to wrest the throne of Persia from his brother Artaxerxes II in 401 B.C.
Xenophon’s account of the Battle of Cunaxa, which took place 70 km. north of Baghdad on the left bank of the Euphrates, contains reference to the Greeks invoking Nike in the watchwords selected before the battle.
Cyrus was with his bodyguard of cavalry about six hundred strong, all armed with corselets like Cyrus, and cuirasses and helmets; but not so Cyrus: he went into battle with head unhelmeted. ...
At this time the barbarian army was evenly advancing, and the Hellenic division was still riveted to the spot, completing its formation as the various contingents came up. Cyrus, riding past at some distance from the lines, glanced his eye first in one direction and then in the other, so as to take a complete survey of friends and foes;
when Xenophon the Athenian, seeing him, rode up from the Hellenic quarter to meet him, asking him whether he had any orders to give. Cyrus, pulling up his horse, begged him to make the announcement generally known that the omens from the victims, internal and external alike, were good.
While he was still speaking, he heard a confused murmur passing through the ranks, and asked what it meant. The other replied that it was the watchword being passed down for the second time. Cyrus wondered who had given the order, and asked what the watchword was. On being told it was “Zeus the Saviour and Victory,” he replied,
“I accept it; so let it be,” and with that remark rode away to his own position. And now the two battle lines were no more than three or four furlongs apart, when the Hellenes began chanting the paean, and at the same time advanced against the enemy.
It was not very old, having been built in 1599 by Shakespeare’s acting company, known at the time as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.
Shakespeare himself started out owning a single share amounting to 1/8th of the theater, but his percentage of ownership was diluted over time. He wound up owning only 7%.
The Globe was reconstructed in 1997, only 200 yards away from the location of the original theater, but new theories have grown up over the succeeding years, and there is a school of opinion that wishes the reconstruction to be torn down and rebuilt in accordance with the latest scholarship.
